SharePoint WCM
I’ll be participating in a few SharePoint Community Events over the next few weeks, for those interested the details are below. Wednesday 28th April (5pm – 6pm GMT) Online SharePoint MVP Expert MSDN Chat This is a new idea, and will be interesting to see how it goes. The general idea is for you to fling your questions about SharePoint 2010 at the panel of SharePoint MVP “experts”. A free online event via MSDN. Wednesday 5th May (5.30pm till whenever) Microsoft, Waverly Gate Edinburgh SUGUK...
For those that attended a couple of my presentations earlier in the week at the Evolution conference I hit a couple issues, both of which are pretty lame and embarrassing. At the time I promised to post an update here once I'd had the chance to look at the boxes again. FBA login issue. this was purely a problem between keyboard and the stage. I was entering the passwords: Password1 and password. The correct password for John Coltrane was P@ssword1 – due to the complexity requirements of the ASPNETDB. I don’t actually use FBA against ASPNETDB that...
No disrespect to the SharePoint Team at Microsoft. They put on a *great* show. But well, ya know, it’s an official Microsoft conference, and some things are just done better by the community. Last year in April I flew into London exhausted after a crazy six weeks in Redmond for the SharePoint Best Practices Conference. Despite really needing a months holiday, it was simply the best conference experience I’ve had in over 15 years. A *great* show, great content, great people, great organisation and great fun. By a country mile, the best SharePoint related conference ever. And it’s back,...
Over on the rather natty looking new blog from PFE extraordinaire Todd Carter, there are details of a serious issue with SharePoint that everyone should be familiar with. Check it out. Todd's Blog | SharePoint’s Sasquatch Memory Leak
Whilst I was one of the most vocal advocates for the ability to run SharePoint Server on the client OS, it wasn’t really something I ever thought I’d want to run myself. I understood why it was of critical importance to enable this scenario, but I’m a farm guy, topologies are my bag. When the beta release came about I slapped it on a old machine just to see it working and left it at that. I also checked out the quality documentation over on MSDN which provides the convoluted steps to get it singing. Such steps are a good...
As I’ve previously detailed there is a significant oddity with how SharePoint 2010 Beta creates Application Pools in IIS for the hosting of Service Applications and especially the two most important services in your farm, the STS and Topology. As mentioned these application pools are named with GUIDs.
Unfortunately when creating a Web Application, SharePoint 2010 uses the SharePoint only property Display Name for the STS application. The STS application is required as part of every SharePoint 2010 Web Application and lives at /_vti_bin/sts.
As the Web Application is being provisioned SharePoint uses the display name, SecurityTokenServiceApplicationPool. This of course doesn’t exist...
We are pleased to announce a new release of the popular Application Pool Manager. This version (v3) has been produced to support SharePoint 2010. We don’t have much in the way of fancy new features in this release, but we do have some good ideas for a future release around April and are always keen on other ideas we could incorporate. The most important thing about this release is that it is targeted at SharePoint 2010 only. As such it only supports IIS7. This has allowed us to remove all of the legacy IIS6 code and the shims necessary...
Blimey! My recent post about worker processes generated a large number of follow up questions. Instead of answering all of these individually, this post will cover the details and perhaps be useful as a reference in the future. Before I get started there is one thing which perhaps is obvious, but needs to be made clear: SharePoint 2010 is a beta release. It is always possible that things change come the final RTM release. That’s the point of a beta really!:) I am going to assume the same setup characteristics from the example in the previous post. ...
I’m honoured to be one of the speakers at the upcoming SharePoint Connections 2010 event in Amsterdam, The Netherlands on the 18th and 19th January. It promises to be a great show with lots of great 2010 content and speakers. The general goal of the event is to deliver highlights from the SharePoint Conference earlier this year in Las Vegas to the European audience as well as offering significant networking opportunities. Its all going down at the RAI conference centre just outside Amsterdam city. The RAI isn’t a casino, but it is an excellent conference facility! I will presenting...
Recently a number of people have asked about the number of worker processes which are alive on a new install of SharePoint Server 2010 and the associated other processes which amongst other things increase the resource requirements (primarily RAM) for running SharePoint 2010 over SharePoint 2007. This post will explain the core changes here and what you can expect to see following the installation and farm configuration. As with SharePoint 2007, or any other .NET based web application for that matter, your implementation specifics will determine the number of and isolation and security characteristics of the processes running including...
Small things can make a big difference. But what seems small and simple often isn’t. I personally wouldn’t want to be the guy who looks after the myriad pre-requisites for SharePoint Server 2010. :) But SharePoint 2010 has a pre-requisite installer, just like SQL Server, and it’s good. In addition there are numerous other setup refinements which are a testament to a key drive of the latest version, enterprise readiness. It was promised and it’s been delivered. Sure, some improvement is always possible. The default name of a content database could use some work!:) Add that to a more...
I’ll be in Amsterdam as one of the instructors of the SharePoint 2010 Ignite program next week. The Dutch Information Worker Group are hosting a evening event on the 4th November to coincide with Ignite. Come along and join some SharePoint Experts for a Ask the Experts panel, and probably some drinks afterwards. DIWUG - Dutch Information Worker User Group
The new Service Applications model in SharePoint 2010 presents significant improvements to the scalability of the SharePoint platform and offers tremendously exciting opportunities for developers and ISVs. This article delves into the the Service Applications model and architecture, providing developers and IT Pros essential information on the new foundation of shared services in SharePoint 2010. SharePoint 2010: Service Applications Part One: Model Overview|
SharePoint 2010 has made huge investments in enterprise readiness, from core architecture to the deployment experience, to runtime diagnostics and operational service management. Along with significant investments in tooling, and field readiness, SharePoint 2010 delivers the promise of enterprise readiness. This article highlights key feature areas and their impact on your deployments. SharePoint 2010: Enterprise Readiness
SharePoint 2010 ups the ante with it's developer tool integration, providing developers with rich development time, testing and application lifecycle support. This article provides an overview of the new features and improvements along with powerful out of the box capabilities for improving the developer experience with SharePoint 2010. SharePoint 2010: Developer Tools Overview
Last April the first European SharePoint Best Practices conference was a stunning success. Feedback from those “working” the show and attendees alike was fantastic. Not only were the technical breakout sessions first rate, featuring unique content and some of the best names in the SharePoint world, but the conference had a real community buzz.
The SharePoint 2010 Evolution Conference promises to be the premier SharePoint event outside the United States. We are back in London, 19th – 21st April. Three days of SharePoint goodness. Check out the web site as more details will be added as we ramp up over...
In just about two weeks, the SharePoint Community is descending upon Las Vegas for the 2009 SharePoint Conference. This will be the big coming out party for SharePoint Server 2010 and along with the conference itself promises to be a ton of fun. If you work with SharePoint this is a must attend event and it will be very interesting to see the continued growth of this event from it’s humble beginnings in Bellevue a few years back. I’ll be presenting a couple of sessions. Unfortunately I can’t provide the full abstracts as yet, but my schedule is as...
An article I worked on recently has just been published to MSDN. The article walks developers through the basics of getting started with building solutions on the powerful Records Management platform available in Office SharePoint Server 2007. Learn records management features and concepts, such as Records Center configuration, and records series planning and routing, and explore the Official File Web service and a sample client application to create and deploy a custom router with a routing type. (13 printed pages) Many thanks to Randall Isenhour and the MSDN crew for their help in producing...
Marc has a good post detailing his experiences when attempting to validate “performance myths” out there on the interweb. It’s good stuff. He doesn’t talk about the default behaviour in Windows Server 2008, however it’s very valuable. It’s also refreshing to see someone actually test stuff related to SharePoint in his environment, rather than just gobbling up crappy recommendations and “best practices” from the blogosphere. Full Metal Architect | Disabling PAC Validation: More than meets the eyes
Earlier today a Twitter conversation amongst some SharePoint people including my good buddies Todd Klindt and Rick Taylor took place on the subject of the infamous “loopback fix”. I promised to do a follow up post here to clear up some misconceptions about this subject with respect to SharePoint. What is the issue? Windows Server 2003 SP1 introduced a loopback security check. This feature is obviously also present in Windows Server 2008. The feature prevents access to a web application using a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) if an attempt to access it takes...
I greatly enjoyed my recent trip to Houten, Netherlands to present at the SDN event. Many thanks to the SDN crowd and those that attended my sessions and of course the SharePint event afterwards. It was a very impressive event in terms of organisation and the other great speakers and content. Here are the slide decks from my three sessions as promised. Mythbusters: debunking common SharePoint Farm Misconceptions. Kerberos Part 1: No ticket touting here, does SharePoint add another head. Kerberos Part 2: “Advanced” Scenarios and additional considerations. ...
One of the most interesting areas of late in the SharePoint world has been the rapid explosion in it’s adoption within the Education sector here in the UK. Accordingly, the fine folks over at the Learning Gateway User Group are holding a one day Conference on July 15 in Birmingham. The event takes place at the stunning Belfry – near where I used to live many moons ago, and features some top notch speakers and SMEs. If you are working in the education space, this is a must attend event. In addition, even if you are not...
I will be speaking at the Software Development Network event in Houten, Netherlands on June 26th. SDN is a really strong community in the Netherlands and it is a great privilege to be selected as a speaker there amongst some other great talent. I will be presenting the following sessions: Mythbusters – debunking common SharePoint Farm Misconceptions. For admins and devs alike this popular session has once again been updated with brand new content around Agile Farms and planning for SharePoint 2010, especially for the SDN...
You simply must read this Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog : Attention: Important Information on Service Pack 2
For those that have attended any of my recent sessions on SharePoint Web Content Management you will have already seen the Adventure Works Travel (AWT) sample site. This sample has now (finally) been released into the wild, and you can grab it at www.mssharepointdeveloper.com. Also available are a number of training modules which I contributed towards. On the right hand side, swivel the navigation to the SharePoint on the Web section to access the training and the sample.
The AWT sample provides excellent guidance on building publishing sites using Office SharePoint Server’s WCM features. I know a few folks won’t thank...
On a number of occasions I’ve been asked for my “cheat sheet” for setting up multiple SharePoint Web Applications using SSL and listening on Port 443. Whilst this might seem a straightforward task there are a few key things about SSL which are not well enough known, and surprise surprise, SharePoint makes life a little more difficult due to it’s total ignorance of correct addressing. This article is basically a tidied up version of the cheat sheet, along with a little bit of further explanation. This is primarily so I have something to point people to when asked about the...
Recently a bunch of people have asked me about the supportability of the approaches to providing “high availability” for SharePoint Central Administration I detailed in my article SharePoint Central Administration: High Availability, Load Balancing, Security & General Recommendations. This short update is to clarify the situation following discussions with Microsoft Premier Field Engineers on the matter. Running Central Administration on more than one server in the farm is 100% supported, and indeed a recommended best practice. Load Balancing Central Administration is 100% supported. And even if it wasn’t it wouldn’t matter as you can simply take load...
At the end of last month, James Petrosky the acting Program Manager of the SharePoint Certified Master program introduced the first SharePoint MCMs over on the Master Blog, which was reposted by Dave Pae over on the SharePoint Team Blog. Since then the MCM has come up in a number of conversations on various blogs, in their comments and elsewhere. It is apparent from these that there remains some unfortunate misconceptions about the MCM and this post is an attempt to address them. For whatever reason many assumptions about the program have been made, which are just plain wrong....
As you’ve probably noticed it’s been a little quiet here of late. Sorry about that. I’ve been pretty busy with various things. One of those things was undertaking the beta rotation (R2) of the Microsoft Certified Master for SharePoint 2007 out in Redmond WA. Many people have asked me about the experience and so this post is an attempt to distill my impressions on the program. Please note that at the time of writing I do not know if I have passed – more on that later.
[Update] Shortly after writing this post (I keep things in the hopper for a...
I spend *way* too much time talking to customers about Web Parts versus Field Controls. Especially on migration projects when folks are doing feature comparison matrix type work to define how to implement what they used to have in other products before moving into the 2000s with SharePoint. My good buddy, AC has just announced the availability of his excellent white paper on the topic – hopefully this will help reduce the time suck on this important, but fundamental topic. It’s on MSDN, but IT Pros also absolutely must know this stuff. ***NOW AVAILABLE*** MSDN: Understanding Field Controls...
During the MVP Summit in Seattle a couple weeks back down I sat down with Rob Foster and Nick Swan for an interview on the SharePoint Pod Show. I waffled about various topics, some of which you may find interesting. Challenges in Enterprise SharePoint Deployments-Episode 20
I’m often asked for book recommendations. One of the good and bad things about the popularity of SharePoint 2007 is there are now gazillions of titles to choose from. Back in the day you’d struggle to find any SharePoint material on the shelves and in 2001 there was only one decent book at all. Today it’s a different story. Trouble is with quantity comes an inevitable decrease in quality. Of late however there has been a number of excellent books published. I’m not saying these are the ones you should get, but rather that the ones listed below are ones...
If you have been in any of my SharePoint admin classes or worked with me on deployments you will be familiar with one of my favorite topics, the ‘hidden cost’ of SharePoint. I’m not talking about scary topics like ‘governance’, ‘best practices’, culture change, end user training, or Enterprise CALs, but rather all the other things you absolutely must have when operating SharePoint in the enterprise. It’s long overdue that I post a summary here for all those who want the key takeaway information. This is not a criticism of the SharePoint stack. None of these things are really...
SharePoint MVPs had a great week in Seattle and Redmond last week and the annual MVP Summit. One of the common discussion topics during the evenings was that of Test Driven SharePoint Development, its pros and cons and so forth, following on from the debate in the blogosphere. Indeed we got so deep and technical a small group of us decided to record some videos to push out to the community. In the videos we interview Andrew Woodward, one of the leading experts on using TDD with SharePoint. Check them out: Video: Test Driven Development - Part1 Video: Test...
Next month, April 6th thru 8th, the SharePoint Best Practices Conference comes to Europe. London is the place to be, specifically the QEII Conference Center. You can register for the event here. I’ve had the privilege to present at the first event in Washington DC, and more recently the second in San Diego,CA. This conference is a great show with superb speakers and the low down dirty what you need to know to be successful with SharePoint. No fluff. No marketing. Find out more about the agenda and speakers at http://www.sharepointbestpractices.co.uk. This time around we have a great...
SharePoint Joel has some good points over on his recent post regarding the waste of space that most documents are. Certainly I can agree with this – I’ve seen and produced enough of these things over the years – a few unfortunate souls have even read the ones with my name on the front! I guess apologies are in order to you all at this point :)
However, such a generalization is extremely dangerous albeit it a good controversy for debate. (Darn, now I’m humming that guitar lick).
The bottom line here is it depends upon the content. All this social computing...
Thanks to all who attended my sessions at the Best Practices SharePoint Conference earlier this month in San Diego. As promised, here are the presentations from these sessions. Apologies for the delay in posting these – I have been under the weather since returning from the US. A quick note on the Kerberos Config Wizard, which as I mentioned during the session, is unfortunately delayed due to legal issues. This is still the case and I am trying to progress as quickly as possible. Stay tuned for the release. DEV435: Go Live! Launching your MOSS...
As previously detailed we have been busy working on a public (version 2) release of the SharePoint Kerberos Configuration Utility which has been used successfully on a number of customer engagements. We are aiming for a release the first week in February at the SharePoint Best Practices Conference. Configuring a SharePoint Farm for Kerberos is very easy however there are a large number of variables which depend upon the farm characteristics and more importantly the business requirements. In addition there is a staggering amount of misinformation (such as needing delegation for simple authentication scenarios!!!) out there on blogs and...
Thanks to all those who attended yesterday’s webcast. A few folk asked about the download, which is now available at: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mseventsbmo/view?id=1032396926&role=attend&pw=2E178E33 Enjoy! Some of the questions during the webcast related to disconnected deployment and also additional scenarios which cannot be achieved by using the Central Administration UI alone. I also promised to post some additional resources, here they are! We may also cover these in a future webcast: How to: Customize Deployment for Disconnected Scenarios Walk through of creating and running a job in order to save the CABs to...
On Tuesday, January 06 I will be presenting a MSDN Webcast as part of the SharePoint for Internet Site Development series. This will take place at 11:00 AM Pacific Time, which is 19.00 PM GMT. I get all the fun topics, and I will be covering Content Deployment and even doing Content Deployment against a real site live during the Web Cast! :) The sign up page is: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032396926&Culture=en-US Content deployment enables you to run an Internet-facing site that contains content authored by people on your internal network. This capability enables network...
I keep getting sandbagged by folks on the topic of the SharePoint Central Administration (SPCA) application, and there is still considerable confusion about how SPCA should be best deployed within a farm topology, how to make it “Highly Available” and “Secure”. Most of the queries are around what I do in my deployments and what recommendations I have for SPCA. Therefore this article covers these topics along with some additional discussion and general recommendations.
Running Central Administration on more than one server in the farm.
...
Adam Buenz over on SharePoint Shelter has a nice post titled When Best Practices Aren’t Best Practices. It’s a good read, and pretty much all he says I agree with. There are a few things he doesn’t touch on that I feel like highlighting however, so here goes… The key problem is the term itself. “Best Practices”. I’ve always hated it. “Best Practices”, says who? :) There’s nothing funnier than someone who has been practicing a particular technology for six months spouting off about them. Well actually there is, and that’s the vendor spouting off about them, especially when...
By now you should definitely have your nuggin’ around SharePoint updates, and be on a decent build. A decent build like the Infrastructure Updates, or better yet the October Cumulative Updates. Of course there are some more coming in a couple weeks. Keep up to date with my Post SP1 hot fixes article here.
The trouble is lots of folk don’t bother and are still running RTM. Oh dear! However this is understandable, a lot of customers are running quite happily (don’t laugh, there are some, really!!) and don’t like the idea of installing patches and (shudder) bouncing boxes.
Trouble is, if...
I am delighted to be speaking again at the second Best Practices™ SharePoint Conference in San Diego, CA, February 2nd thru 4th 2009. The first Best Practices™ SharePoint Conference in Washington, D.C., was a great success with awesome speakers, community events and a fantastic turnout of knowledgeable attendees. What really set this conference apart was it’s independent nature and it’s focus on real world, best practices from field deployments. This conference is not Tech Ed where a bunch of marketing folks talk up their features. This is all about the down and dirty how to make it work, the...
Many thanks to all those who attended yesterday evening’s SharePoint User Group UK Meeting at the Scottish Parliament. Big shout to Steven Hynds once again for organizing the excellent venue. As promised, the slide deck for my presentation is now available. For Andrew’s TDD whitepaper, please head on over to his site at www.21apps.com. If you have feedback on the event, or other suggestions for future topics please post them to the SUGUK forums. We look forward to future SUGUK events in Scotland. Technorati Tags: sharepoint,sharepoint farms
It took a while but the Using scripts to automate SharePoint Server 2007 installation guidance has finally been published. Chris Smith details the release over on ToTheSharePoint. The best thing about this release are the examples and sample code, however I caution you to test appropriately and don’t be fooled into believing the premise that it’s just better. That my friends, isn’t true. Unfortunately the vendor has a nasty habit of arrogantly saying “you should be doing it like this… [link]” when they took over 18 months to produce and publish the material when others have been doing...
Finally got around to uploading an update to my fixes article. Apologies for the delay, my excuse is my hosting “provider”, and I’m sticking to it :) SharePoint 2007 Post SP1 Hotfixes
Those crazy kids at Typemock have announced Isolator for sharepoint: It is almost the same as Typemock Isolator, but will only work on APIs that are directly connected with sharepoint’s API. That means that if you only need to test sharepoint stuff, you can get a powerful product, for a much cheaper price than the full Isolator (you can always upgrade later if you need to isolate more APIs). Info for masses, how to get free licence: Typemock are offering their new product for unit testing SharePoint...
Check out my good friend Arpan Shah, waxing lyrical on the SharePoint Pod Show! SharePoint in the Cloud, SharePoint and Azure, and Questions on SharePoint 14 and Office 14-Episode 11
We are pleased to be back again at the Scottish Parliament for another evening of SharePoint at 6.30pm, November 27th. Many thanks to Stephen Hynds for facilitating the event.
If you want to come along, please go here and register your name, otherwise the security peeps won’t let you in the building, this is after all the seat of the Scottish Government. There will doubtless be a few sherberts following the event.
Spencer Harbar SharePoint MVP - MythBusters – debunking common SharePoint Farm Misconceptions
This interactive, whiteboard session will dive into common SharePoint Farm Myths and discuss common misconceptions around Global Deployments, Farm...
During TechEd ITForum a couple weeks ago, Microsoft announced the Microsoft Certified Master (MCM) for Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the Microsoft Certified Architect (MCA) for Office SharePoint Server 2007.
Pretty quickly a micro-debate started on this and a few people posted their thoughts on blogs. I promised at the time to do a post that detailed out the salient points, which unfortunately have been missed thus far. There has also been a lot of complaints regarding the associated cost. So here goes.
Forget about the SharePoint Technical Specialist Exams
Firstly, there is no relationship between the current four MSTS exams for SharePoint,...
Server Explorer for SharePoint viewing Lists and other artifacts in SharePoint directly inside of Visual Studio Windows SharePoint Services Project (WSP file) Import to create a new solution Added a new web part project item and showed the Visual web part designer which loads a user control as a web part for SharePoint Showed adding an event receiver for...
We're exporting SharePoint by Day, SharePint by night, the social event for SharePoint professionals! SharePint will be on Sunday night, November 9, 2008 @ 8p at Sala Monasterio. Please leave a comment on Andrew Connell’s post to give us an idea how many people we're looking at. For those of you who've never attended a SharePint, it's pretty simple: consider it a birds-of-a-feather social event for SharePoint folks that's very lose and unstructured.
Joel has just posted a killer entry on his blog:
Best Practices for Enterprise User Scalability in SharePoint
Best Practices for Overcoming the 64K ACL, Security Principal Limits, and Future of Identity Management
If you are a SharePoint "Architect", or at least belive you are :) you must read this material. Don't believe the hype or waffle about ACL limits, DIP sizes or any other rambling of the sort - head over right now to Joel's blog and get the real skinny.
I've had a bunch of requests to start talking more about IIS7 development and whilst I've covered some examples of this previously in my SharePoint and Windows 2008 presentations I thought I'd start by providing a very simple example from APM. This is also to answer (bizarrely) the same question from two readers of this blog. This example shows how to retrieve a list of Application Pools on the box. You'd think this would be straightforward and efficient right? and easy to do in managed code without any nastiness? right? :) wrong. On IIS6 this is what you need...
Yesterday during the opening PDC keynote I did the final release build of APM v2 and posted it for download. Unfortunately due to a combination of sucky wireless and power "issues" I have only now got around to posting an announcement here.
Since the initial release of APM it's grown many arms and legs and it has been amazingly popular. By version 1.2 the code had become pretty disgusting and hard to maintain (even for something which does very little). Therefore this release is a complete from the ground re-write. It's actually been ready for quite a while but I was...
Blimey, it's almost time for another PDC. This will be my fourth PDC event and I'm looking forward to it. This year it's again in LA, and this year it hasn't been cancelled :)
There's not much SharePoint at the event. And that's OK - indeed it's one of the reasons I'm going :) There is however some interesting introductory material - check out the details over on Paul Andrew's blog of the SharePoint related sessions.
A small group of SharePoint MVPs will be in town along with some blue badge types and we are doing another SharePoint by Day, SharePoint...
I'm often asked for "best practices" for developing Web Content Management (aka Publishing) sites with MOSS 2007. "Best Practices" is dodgy ground, as the best practice for one given project could very possibly be the worst practice for another. Prescriptive guidance on the other hand is much more useful, MSDN has just published an excellent article in this space authored by my buddy Andrew Connell: Publishing sites adhere to most, if not all, of the prescriptive guidance and generally accepted best practices for SharePoint sites. However, because of the noncollaborative nature of publishing sites and their...
I finally got around to updating my list of post SP1 fixes, which is now fully up to date. Well until they make some more that is! SharePoint 2007 Post SP1 Hotfixes
Thanks to all those who attended my session this morning at the Best Practices Conference on Global Taxonomies. As promised, below is a link to the logical architecture design samples, of which I showed a couple. From here you can get the Visio diagrams and also read an in depth article on the design trade offs which led to the example Logical Architecture. Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog : Investing in Logical Architecture Design Samples Also, more recently a variation on the above theme has been produced for Twynham School’s solution architecture see the following technical case...
I've done a bunch of geo-dispersed SharePoint deployments recently, and most of them make use of the Global My Sites capability. This works very well, basically by redirecting users to the correct Web Application based on Audiences. Sure there are some limitations within the My Sites, but none that make the geo-distribution of them a poor compromise. However the problem with any solution in this space is the need to manage multiple Farms, and more importantly multiple SSPs. For the My Sites scenario you need a profile import at each SSP, or make use of a "hard to get" tool....
FINALLY, a decent solution for SharePoint Reporting - for free! Check it out: FREE SharePoint Reporting - CardioLog Lite The visitor segmentation and light javascript implementation are perfect for small to medium size environments, looking to improve the OOTB reporting. Intlock also provide a bunch of other report bundles and paid for versions for more demanding situations. I definitely encourage you to evaluate this edition, which you can download and install on your test machines quickly and painlessly.
My buddy and fellow SharePoint Junkie/MVP, Andrew Woodward, has put together a nice white paper which walks you through the steps necessary to get started with Test Driven SharePoint Development. This is a really good 101 for those who don't know what TDD is all about, or for those that do but are struggling with using it within SharePoint development projects. This paper is the first in a series that he is putting together, so keep an eye on his blog or better yet, subscribe. Beginners Guide to Test Driven Web Part Development
I'm pleased to announce I have joined the board of the International SharePoint Professionals Association (“ISPA”). ISPA is a professional association dedicated to the promotion and global adoption of Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies. The Association provides support and guidance to the community by establishing connections between SharePoint professionals and groups, resources, education and information. I'm very excited to be working with a great team to drive this much needed community initiative, we have lots of great things planned for the near future. We recently put out a FAQ page that we hope answers some of the...
...and little if any vendor involvement - just the way it's supposed to be.
Today, well yesterday actually, the International SharePoint Professionals Association officially launched. The Association provides support and guidance to the community by establishing connections between SharePoint professionals and groups, resources, education and information. For more information, visit their web site and be sure to join right away. I'm pleased to be one of the regional leads for EMEA, and want to take this opportunity to thank Bob, Natalya , Darrin and Chris for their efforts getting things off the ground.
http://www.sharepointpros.org/
Announcing the International SharePoint Professionals Association (Bob Fox)
What's the best thing about the recently released Infrastructure Updates for SharePoint 2007? The super cool new search functionality? Content Deployment fixes? Improvements in performance and security? Nope, none of those me ole china, it's the new support for Kerberos Authentication for the SSP Web Services. This was only previously possible with a heinous hack that I promised I would never detail publicly due to it's nastiness. The problem was that the SSP Web Services run under a IIS Virtual Web Site with a high port. It's client (the .NET Framework) along with SharePoint was unable to construct...
The Infrastructure Updates for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 are now available. I've also updated my Post SP1 Hotfixes article.
Key updates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 include:
Platform performance improvements and fixes.
Several backup and restore fixes.
Several core Workflow fixes.
Key updates for SharePoint Server 2007 include:
New Search features such as federated search and a unified search administration dashboard.
Several core fixes to Search to improve performance and scale.
Platform performance improvements and fixes....
[UPDATE] Don't be deploying these fixes, go get the Infrastructure Updates instead (which include these fixes).
Finally the KB articles detailing the Content Migration and Content Deployment fixes are live on support.microsoft.com. I've also update my Post SP1 Hotfixes article with these links.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/952698 (WSS)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952704 (MOSS)
Thanks to all who attended the Edinburgh SUGUK meeting last week for a great event. A big shout out to Steven Hynds and crew for facilitating the venue. The slide deck for my talk can be found here. Hope to see you again soon (probably towards the back of August) for more SUGUK events north of the border!
Just a quick reminder, if you are planning on attending the SUGUK Meeting at the Parliament building in Edinburgh this Thursday, please sign up over at the SUGUK Forms.
Check it: This page provides resources for IT pros to help you plan and implement a Web Content Management (WCM) solution using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Web Content Management Resource Center for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Late Friday afternoon/evening I had an interesting call with a customer who was experiencing severe perceived poor performance on their SharePoint 2007 WCM application. The problem was resolved simply by implementing OOTB functionality - namely Caching, in particular the disk-based caching, and they agreed it was appropriate to post here.
Basically the site is a regular Publishing site albeit used for the most part internally. The site does feature however a significant amount of "binary content" which is linked to from the pages. It had been running fine for quite a while, but not in volume. They hadn't planned for or...
This is a list of the post Service Pack 1 hotfix packages for SharePoint 2007, primarily for my own reference. This is not a list of fixes, but rather the update packages.
[[UPDATE]] Updated and moved to: www.harbar.net/articles/postsp1.aspx.
Consistently and by a considerable margin, the most popular search terms that lead people to this site are around MOSS Licensing and the For Internet Sites (MOSS FIS) edition. This is also a hot topic in customer engagements, in classrroms, at conferences such as TechEd and in general conversations about using SharePoint 2007 for Internet sites. This is not all that surprising given the amount of misinformation out there. In addition Microsoft obfuscate the topic with many layers of misdirection. I know for a fact that this isn't deliberate on the part of the vendor, but one could be forgiven...
Finally managed to finish up a new version of the Application Pool Recycle Utility for SharePoint Developers! This release features many enhancements and a couple new features based on feedback. You can download the new release and view more information here. [Update 26/05/2008] Please note this is the last major release of the original codebase. Whilst minor fixes will continue to be made, future major releases will target Windows Server 2008 only.
Here's an *unsupported* way to get WSS SP1 up and running on Vista. Like I say *unsupported*!!! How to install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP1 on Vista x64/x86 - The Bamboo Team Blog
While the book will be available shortly after this TechEd, we will have the first 1400 copies of the book at TechEd that we'll be giving away. So keep your eyes open when the book releases! If you're coming to TechEd, swing by the SharePoint booth for a chance to get a copy and have Andrew to sign it for you! Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog : Announcing: SharePoint WCM book available at TechEd 2008
[UPDATE] Don't be deploying these fixes, go get the Infrastructure Updates instead (which include these fixes).
Whilst assisting customers recently who are experiencing issues with Content Deployment (CD) in MOSS 2007, it appears CSS now has a huge QFE that addresses a ton of known issues (60+) specific to (CD). For now it looks like you can only get it via Microsoft Customer Support Services (CSS). Like other hotfixes, it's likely this QFE pack will be included in a future MOSS update roll up but there are no details or confirmation on this at present.
The QFE pack helps address some...
We are pleased to announce the first SUGUK meeting in Edinburgh. The event will take place at the stunning Scottish Parliament (no snide remarks about using it for something useful please!) on Thursday June 19th. A special shout out to Stephen Hynds for organising the venue. If you get there early you'll be able to take a wee tour. The event will include two sessions by Steve Smith and myself: MOSS 2007 on Windows Server 2008 - Spencer Harbar Learn how to leverage the...
[UPDATE] Please note that SharePoint 2010 does not support Kernel Mode Authentication, and disables this by default when Web Applications are created. Please see this post for more details.
As I demonstrated during the Kerberos session at the Manchester SUGUK meeting last month, there is an extra step required to enable Kerberos Authentication for SharePoint when using Windows Server 2008.
One of the security changes in IIS 7.0 is that Windows Authentication is performed by default in the kernel. This is a good thing! It eases the configuration required for Kerberos and improves performance significantly.
Because HTTP.sys is handling the authentication, it is...
Wondered what happened to app center?
Want to sync your IIS (and remain supported) Want that sync to include SSL Certs? GAC? Regkeys? DSNs? - well apart from the last two (for which you should be shot) :)
Check out the Web Deployment Tool which has reached Beta 1 and for which there is a Go Live licence.
Sweet article on how to create a MOSS Document Convertor for DOC to PDF utilising thier components and minimal code - which is always a good thing :)
The article also so provides good guidance and examples for creating your own Document Convertors, a very useful but under utilised capability of the Content Management features of MOSS.
Add DOC to PDF and Other Conversions to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 with Aspose Components
One of the most common conversation points during SharePoint presales is the double barreled desire from potential clients to have an Information Architecture that reflects the organisation's policies and/or process while at the same time "fixing" the UI. Now ignoring the fact that most cannot articulate what that means in tangible terms, the two are joined at the hip. Over on the SharePoint Team blog, the folks from Provoke have posted a must read "How we did it" entry on the implementation for the New Zealand Ministry of Transport. Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog ...
Like the Content Query Web Part? ...but don't wanna buy a MOSS licence so you can use it? ...and think it's a bit sucky it doesn't do rollups across Site Collections? ...and you need a web part you can trust doesn't tank your boxes or open up gaping security loopholes? Go buy the Lightning Conductor Web Part. It's really rather good.
For all you Publishing Sites nuts - AC pulled a blinder and got the book done. Go check out the TOC on his site, and then pre-order from Amazon... WROX Pro MOSS WCM 2007 Book: It's Finally Finished! (available June 2008)
"Sneaked out" on to the 'net over on Mike Watson's blog - the latest and greatest version of the SharePoint DB Mirroring White paper has must read information on topology support and SQL connection aliasing (intra-farm failover). Async isn't yet included, but nethertheless, this is an essential read. SharePoint Hosting and Development : The Newest Version of the Database Mirroring Whitepaper for SharePoint has been released
I'll be Seattle next week for the second US SharePoint Conference. This year it's a lot bigger (hence the move to Seattle) and will be a lot of fun. I'm sure there'll also be plenty of evening "entertainment" including the SharePint by Night event. Mine's a Guinness. I'm also on the hunt for a decent Indian restaurant somewhere downtown-ish, if you have any recommendations let me know (but it has to be decent, you dig?).
For those planning on attending my Tech Ed session, Building High Performance .com Sites on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, it has been rescheduled for 13.30 on Wednesday, Nov. 7th. I will also be available at the ATE booths on Wednesday and Thursday. If you want to catch up regarding WCM, or any other MOSS topics drop me a line via this site.
There's been a lot of posts recently about "SharePoint as a Development Platform". These posts have generated considerable feedback and the whole area is certainly an interesting conversation. Of course, the signal to noise ratio has been pretty low with the usual emotional blather and plenty of "SharePoint just sucks".
However irritating and inane many snippets are it is a good thing that the volume is being turned up on this particular discussion. The more noise, the more likely the vendor are to listen. Sad, but true nevertheless. Some of the noise is entertaining and after all these things can be...
Joel Oleson is over at RunAs Radio talking sense about SharePoint. RunAs Radio
Ted Pattison is blogging again. You may remember Ted - simply the man in the old world of VB COM, MTS, COM+ distributed app and just plain sense application development (I'm pretty sure he never touched VB6's WebClasses :)). He wrote books that clearly articulated MTS - even to VB types :) He is really an exceptionally articulate man. Ted was somewhat of a role model if you like WRT his training and writing. Not only were his books on the money technically - he could actually write - compelling - with a strong story to tell - and with proper English...
Here (finally) are the materials from my presentations at the VBUG/SUGUK meeting in Newcastle on the 10th September. Thanks very much for all that attended what was a great session with lots of interesting discussions and feedback.
For the first session, Office SharePoint Server Farm Architecture & Design Fundamentals, the slide deck itself is not of much use as it was purely to support the discussion of Server Roles, Design Goals and Farm Topology design. Nevertheless here they are.
For the second session, which appeared to generate much interest, 10 Essential SharePoint Developer Tips, I've modified the slide deck to include links...
As you've probably already seen (Amazon and Stefan let the cat out of the bag) I'm working on a SharePoint WCM book with my buddy and fellow WCM head, Andrew Connell. The book will be all about developing Publishing sites with MOSS. It's a developer book. It will be published by WROX. The response to this news has been numerous questions, so we decided to post some early clarification. We deliberately kept this under wraps, not because it's any big secret but because we are still writing it (!)and many things (such as the title and the content) may change....
Right, so I really am not turning my blog into a pimp vehicle for my friends stuff....
But (!)...
If you haven't seen this yet - you absolutely must check it out.
http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/archive/2007/08/21/6095.aspx
AC is a real super smart cookie - he's not just a smart developer - he *knows* how to articulate problems, tradeoffs, compromises and he knows how to use his keyboard for maximum effect.
If you know me, or have worked with/for me you know I don't tolerate lame developers, but when I come across a decent one I will make that very clear. After 15 years in the business I haven't...
From Ryan's In-Depth: Commerce Server Product Roadmap: Commerce Server 2007 Accelerators – Between now and “7” is a long time to wait, so we wanted to deliver more value to CS2007 customers by adding new capabilities a la carte that have minimal-to-no impact upon existing deployments to facilitate the most oft-requested technology integration or industry deployment scenarios for CS2007. This will be accomplished via accelerators – which will be shipped starting in the 2nd half of 2008 (with preview releases available beforehand) – that can be added to any existing CS2007 deployment. Technology Integration SharePoint...
I decided to release a minor update to the popular Application Pool Recycle Utility based on a number of requests to display the Process ID. It now does this using a tool tip via WMI.Click here to get the latest version. There were a number of new features originally planned for this release, such as Warm Up associations and a CLI with arguments for use in Post Build tasks. However based on some initial work and a frustration with the management APIs, I've decided to re-consider the future development of the tool. In a nutshell the multitude...
Via Andrew Connell. Check out how you can roll the supreme Telerik Navigation control into a SharePoint 2007 Publishing Site. Incorporating Telerik's RadMenu in a MOSS 2007 Publishing Site
Part of the excellent new book from Wrox, Real World SharePoint 2007: Indispensable Experiences from 16 MOSS & WSS MVPs, Andrew Connell details the alternative approach to developing SharePoint WCM solutions (aka Publishing Sites). This is related content to the BoF we co-presented at TechEd and essential reading for WCM developers. Get some. The rest of the book is pretty decent too!
WROX: Real World SharePoint 2007: Indispensable Experiences From 16 MOSS & WSS MVPs - "Developing Sharepoint Server 2007 Publishing Sites the Smart and Structured Way"
Yeah, I know what you're thinking, 'it's that Harbar again, ranting uncontrollably about some admin crap I don't care about'. Well that might well be the case, but the thing is you should care. Especially if you are building solutions based upon the Web Content Management (WCM) features of Office SharePoint Server 2007. See the important bit is the word 'solutions' - that means the entire thing, not just the funky recursive wrapped wrapper you got for dealing with '/pages/', your reflection bling and email address capture widget. One of the WCM features is that of Content Deployment. Content...
If there was a novelty egg timer for SharePoint consultants (a bit like a magic eight ball) without doubt it would feature questions such as "can I do that SSP stuff over the WAN?", "can I have sub-minute inter-data center failover?" and "does it work OK with Office 1974?". These are a few of the questions you just know are coming straight off the bat, most likely before the customer even has a comprehension of what WSS or SPS or MOSS can do for them.
However, if there was a "limited edition" SharePoint Egg Timer, say one which timed only one...
Cross posted on Andrew Connell's blog.
We (Spencer Harbar & Andrew Connell) would like to announce three new CodePlex projects created to enable the community to share examples of useful Publishing site elements built using the Web Content Management features of Office SharePoint Server 2007. Initially these projects contain a number of commonly used MCMS 2002 Placeholder controls converted for use within MOSS Publishing sites which have been graciously donated by Microsoft. Over time these samples will be augmented and enhanced. Future plans include the consolidation and alignment of deployment mechanisms of all code samples in all projects.
All the CodePlex projects...