harbar.net component based software & platform hygiene
December 2008 Blog Posts

MSDN Webcast: SharePoint Products and Technologies for Internet Site Development: Content Deployment

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...

Issues with harbar.net

Apologies to all of you who tried to submit comments or contact me through harbar.net over the last couple of weeks. Unfortunately for me this was down to an assortment of issues with my hosting provider, who were unable to offer any reasonable assistance whatsoever. I thought things were a bit quiet and I have been suffering all manner of problems with the hoster since their “platform upgrade”. On my return to work after Christmas I did a bunch of tests and after yet more ineptitude on the hoster’s part I gave up and switched the site to someone decent....

SharePoint Central Administration: High Availability, Load Balancing, Security & General Recommendations

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. ...

To “Best Practice” or not to “Best Practice”

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...

Things I want in Windows 7

There’s a bunch of cool stuff coming in Windows 7 if the things they showed and talked about at PDC make it into the final release. But there’s plenty of things which are reasonably basic which I believe would make things much better, especially on a laptop. I no longer have a desktop running Vista. My laptop is my desktop (and my laptop when on the road) and this is increasingly common. Don’t get me wrong there’s plenty of things I like about Vista and I’m not one of these XP is better fan boy freaks who hated XP...

Sony eBook Library 2.5 now installs on x64!!!!! :)

I am happy! The excellent Sony Reader comes with a bit of software – the eBook Library – think of it like iTunes for books. It’s nowhere near as evil as iTunes, but not exactly the greatest bit of software ever built. Anyways it let’s you buy books from Sony and stick them on the Reader. Note you don’t need this – there are two other programs for transferring books. However if you wish to purchase books from Sony (which I do) then you need it. Trouble is previous versions didn’t install on x64. Yet another example of...

Platform Hygiene: Get your SharePoint updated. Now!

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...

Speaking at the Best Practices™ SharePoint Conference

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...