harbar.net component based software & platform hygiene
SharePoint

Adding the Office 365 “stubs” to your VS Code profile

Quite some time ago I posted about the SharePoint “stubs” – a PowerShell module that allows for remote authoring with intellisense within your favourite PowerShell editor (i.e. VS Code!) on a machine that does not have the SharePoint bits installed. This was put together by the SharePointDSC folks ostensibly to help them with unit testing, but it’s much wider use was around being able to create scripts properly and easily on a remote machine. Well, now the OfficeDSC project has done the same thing creating a gargantuan “stub” for the cmdlets available in the following services and frameworks: ...

Adding the SharePoint “stubs” to your VS Code PowerShell profile

[update] if you use OneDrive to store your Documents – the default on a new install of Windows 10 - you must ensure the WindowsPowerShell folder exists and is set to be “always on this device”. Ahh, SharePoint. Ahh, SnapIns. Yeah. 2009 faxed and before the ink faded, told us the old crap is hanging around like a bad hangover. I hate SnapIns more than most, but that’s a story for another day. For the time being we are stuck with them when working with our “built from the cloud up” versions of SharePoint Server. One of...

European Collaboration Summit follow up: Tutorial Scripts and Identity Manager Demos

Many thanks to everyone who attended the European Collaboration Summit in Mainz, Germany, last month. It’s safe to say that the event overall was a runaway success and yes, we have already started planning for the 2019 edition! At the event, I promised to publish some additional resources. These are a little later than I had hoped but with a new job and a variety of “more important” things on a rather large to-do list, the delay was inevitable. At any rate, this post serves as a landing page for these resources....

RPC Server Unavailable when creating a SharePoint Farm… the curse of dodgy legacy NetDOM!

Every so often a real blast from the past comes back to haunt me. Usually it’s some obscure “infrastructure” gubbins – you know, the sort of thing that 80% of so called IT Pros knew in 1999. These days thou. Not so much. With SharePoint in particular there is a whole boat load of legacy. Not that legacy is bad. Lot’s of it is awesome. That’s why the product remains so successful. On the other hand some of it is real, real, real nasty!  :) It always seems to come in waves. Over the last two weeks...

Welcome to our family!

The building block of every community is a family. Welcome to our family. See you in Mainz! Your browser does not support the video tag.

Resolving Catastrophic Distributed Cache Failures on VMWare vSphere or ESX guest virtual machines

Ahh, Distributed Cache, everybody’s favourite SharePoint service instance, the most reliable and trouble-free implementation since User Profile Synchronization. I jest of course, it’s the most temperamental element of the current shipping release, not to mention the most ridiculous false dependency ever introduced into the product and should be killed as soon as possible. However, it is extremely important to a SharePoint Farm in terms of both functionality and ensuring maximum performance. Even in simple deployments the impact of the Search and LogonToken related caches can provide ~20% performance and throughput improvements. But what to do when it’s busted? Once...

Using PowerShell to import Profile Photos when using Active Directory Import and SharePoint Server 2013/2016/2019

One of the most common requests I have received over the last couple years has been how to leverage PowerShell to get User Photos from Active Directory (or any other location really) into the SharePoint User Profile Store. With the removal of User Profile Synchronization (UPS) in SharePoint 2016 this need has increased significantly. For most mid market customers this is a key requirement, and implementing Microsoft Identity Manager (MIM) for this purpose is not practical. I did spend a whole bunch of time before the release of SharePoint 2016 attempting to convince the powers that be, that Active...

Configuring a Partitioned UPA in SharePoint 2016 with Active Directory Import

Introduction For about a year now I’ve been plagued by people asking me how to configure a partitioned User Profile Application (UPA) in SharePoint Server 2016, and perform successful profile import using Active Directory Import (ADI). Every few weeks someone asks for the configuration, and it basically got to the point where it made sense to post this article to which I can refer folks. Now, I am not going to provide all up coverage here. I expect you to be familiar with the fundamental concepts of SharePoint Multi-Tenancy. You can head over to my other articles here...

User Profile Photo Import from thumbnailPhoto using MIM and the SharePoint Connector

When leveraging Microsoft Identity Manager (MIM) and the SharePoint Connector for User Profile Synchronization, some customers have a requirement to import profile pictures from the thumbnailPhoto attribute in Active Directory. This post details the correct way of dealing with this scenario, whilst retaining the principle of least privilege. The configuration that follows is appropriate for all of the following deployments: SharePoint 2016, MIM 2016, and the MIM 2016 SharePoint Connector SharePoint 2013, MIM 2016, and the MIM 2016 SharePoint Connector SharePoint 2013, FIM 2010 R2 SP1 and...

Important Update for SharePoint folks: Hotfix Rollup for Microsoft Identity Manager 2016

Back in the middle of March, Microsoft released a Hotfix Rollup for Microsoft Identity Manager 2016 (MIM). This hotfix rollup is version 4.3.2195.0. This is an extremely important build for those leveraging MIM for profile synchronization with SharePoint Server 2016. You can get the bits over at KB313475. There are numerous articles out there suggesting that you should install build 4.3.2064.0. Don’t! 4.3.2195 is the fix package you need. Make this part of your base build of the MIM Sync server. However, if you already have MIM Sync setup and you want to apply this patch, make sure...

Zero Down Time Patching in SharePoint Server 2016

Zero Downtime Patching (ZDP) in SharePoint Server 2016 has a marketing heavy silly name, but it's actually sweetness on a stick. Whilst I hate the name, it is accurate in respect to the basics of the new patching process and the changes made in 2016 to support it. Now as to whether a customer would actually perform real world patching operations with such an expectation is another matter entirely. Here's a hint: they wouldn't. There's a lot more to patching an environment than updating the bits of the software. Or there should be, otherwise you shouldn't be running the environment....

SharePoint 2016 Nugget #1: Topology Service in MinRole Farms

Whilst I have some much more in depth coverage of SharePoint 2016 coming soon, this is the first in a mini series of “nuggets” – tidbits of information on the new release. Unlike with previous releases I decided against publishing a lot of material whilst the product was in public preview and to wait until the RTM. This decision was driven by a number of factors I won’t bore you with. Many will be of the opinion that not a great deal has changed in SharePoint 2016. That is somewhat true, especially in respect to visible end user...

The Playbook Imperative and Changing the Distributed Cache Service Identity

Introduction One of the most common challenges facing those operating production SharePoint environments is the “missing playbook”. Even for deployments where operational service management (OSM) skills are strong it is impossible to deliver quality operational service without the playbook. It’s generally pretty uncommon for practitioners to factor OSM considerations into the design, or at least to do it well. Indeed, in many cases it is also impossible to do so completely as so much about the environment will not be known or understood prior to broad platform adoption. Whilst the playbook is imperative for any system, there is...

Configuring Kerberos Constrained Delegation with Protocol Transition and the Claims to Windows Token Service using Windows PowerShell

Recently I’ve done a few pieces of work with SharePoint 2013 Business Intelligence and I have also delivered the “legendary”* Kerberos and Claims to Windows Service talk a few times this year. This reminded me to post my Windows PowerShell snippets for the required Active Directory configuration. This topic area is perhaps one of the most misunderstood areas of SharePoint Server, and there is an utterly staggering amount of misinformation, out of date information, single server documentation and good old fashioned 100% bullshit out there. That’s a surprise with SharePoint stuff, huh? Every guide or document out there...

Insight to what’s going on, information keeps us strong

…what you don’t know can hurt you bad, take it from me you’ll be walkin’ around sad. Great tune, but Terry Lewis’ bass can’t help you or your customers when Office 365 hits the skids. Most of you will now be familiar with the common valid arguments against “cloud” services such as Office 365, particularly those from the enterprise. However one of the common invalid arguments is around service availability and reliability. I can’t count the number of times I have had this conversation with customers over the last two years or so. In almost all cases it’s a...

Updated ULS Viewer

If you haven’t already grabbed it, just a quick note to let you know that Microsoft put an update of the ULS Viewer tool out recently. For quite a while the tool had been removed from code.msdn.microsoft.com and those who had “lost” a copy had to resort to annoying others to get it. ULS Viewer, as I’ve written previously is an essential tool for working with SharePoint.  The new version has a number of tweaks including viewing across a farm, rather than manually having to configure that up. Go get it! ULS Viewer download Bill’s post...

Support for SQL Server Always On Async Replication with SharePoint 2013

One of the most significant “IT Pro” or infrastructure related announcements at the recent SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas was related to a change in supportability for using SQL Server Always On for SharePoint databases, and in particular the use of Asynchronous replication in Business Continuity Management (BCM) scenarios. This is a HUGE deal. Of course, it’s not sexy, it doesn’t directly provide SharePoint IT Pros with a new tool in their belt, and it doesn’t expand deployment scenarios like the announcement relating to 1TB site collections in Office 365. However it is perhaps the single most important piece...

Online Workshop: SharePoint Advanced Infrastructure: Distributed Cache

Audience: SharePoint Administrators, Infrastructure Architects and Support Professionals. The esteemed Microsoft Certified Master certification is no longer obtainable... but you can still get master-class mentoring through our collection of Advanced Workshops. Delivered by one of the world's foremost SharePoint authorities, this workshop is a rare opportunity to learn from a recognised master in the field. This module provides 360 coverage of Distributed Cache, the new foundational and pre-requisite service instance in SharePoint 2013 which is an implementation of Windows Server AppFabric Caching, and provides in memory caching across a farm. Understand the background of this service, its...

Da Big Daddy: SharePoint Conference 2014

[Updated 19/02 with session timeslots and an additional session] Vegas, March, 10,000 SharePoint people. What could possibly go wrong?! The big daddy is back, SharePoint Conference 2014 promises to be another great event, and I am once again happy to be speaking at the biggest SharePoint conference on the planet. I get asked a lot about which conferences are worth the money and so on, and of course being the official show, and with the associated travel and accommodation expenses SPC is often in the “requires justification” bucket. Seriously there is no debate, it’s worth it. If you...

Updated Antivirus for SharePoint 2013 options

Just a quick note to let you know I’ve updated my Antivirus and SharePoint 2013 post, with the details of all the current available options. Instead of the *single* option we had shortly after RTM, there are now four options with hopefully another one in the near future.   s.

SharePoint & Exchange Forum: somewhere in the Baltic Sea!

I’m delighted to announce that I will again be speaking at the excellent SharePoint and Exchange Forum (SEF), coming up September 30th through October 2nd. This year, the 10th anniversary, will be a little bit extra special as it’s taking place on board Silja Symphony – a (rather large) cruise ship running between Stockholm and Helsinki. SEF is always an excellent event, with a great crowd, top quality speakers, great networking and superb evening entertainment. Head on over to the SEF website to find out more, I look forward to seeing you at the event!   ...

Article: Workflow Manager Farms for SharePoint 2013 Part Four: End to End Configuration using Domain CA issued Certificates

In the previous parts of this article we covered the core concepts and critical considerations, creating a Workflow Manager Farm using Auto Generated Certificates and converting that farm to use Domain CA issued certificates. This part will cover the end to end configuration of a Workflow Manager Farm using Domain CA issued certificates. This is of particular importance to those who have an organisational policy in force which prohibits the use of self signed or auto generated certificates. Whilst we can change an existing farm which uses auto generated certificates to use Domain CA issued certificates, it is NOT...

Article: Workflow Manager Farms for SharePoint 2013 Part Three: Switching an existing farm to use Domain CA issued certificates

In the previous parts of this article we covered the core concepts along with high availability, certificate and SharePoint considerations for Workflow Manager Farms, and the end to end configuration using Auto Generated Certificates. If you are not familiar with this material, make sure to read it before continuing as I assume you have done so! This part will cover switching the existing Workflow Manager farm to using Domain CA issued certificates. Whilst this part is intended as primarily step by step configuration guidance, I will take the opportunity to also explain a few things which didn’t make...

Article: Workflow Manager Farms for SharePoint 2013 Part Two: End to End Configuration using Auto Generated Certificates and NLB

This second part will cover the deployment of a highly available, SSL, Workflow Manager Farm for SharePoint 2013 using auto generated certificates and Network Load Balancing. As discussed in part one, this is the most suitable deployment model for the majority of SharePoint On-premises customers. In addition it is also the easiest way to deploy for production. Whilst this part is intended as primarily step by step configuration guidance, I will take the opportunity to also explain a few things which didn’t make sense to cover in part one. Workflow Manager Farms for SharePoint...

Article: Workflow Manager Farms for SharePoint 2013 Part One: Core Concepts, High Availability, Certificate and SharePoint considerations

There’s not a lot of high quality documentation for Workflow Manager 1.0. What exists is generally accurate, however it’s the key missing information and lack of detail which presents challenges in the field. During the initial content development work for the MCSM: SharePoint it became clear there is a very large gap with respect to actually implementing the high level deployment guidance provided by the vendor. Following recent discussions in the MCSM: SharePoint community more generally, the topic again raised its head and led to the publication of this article. This guide is an attempt to help address that...

Configuring a Dedicated “Crawl Front End” with Request Management

I keep getting asked about how to use Request Management in SharePoint 2013 to configure a dedicated “crawl front end”. In other words how to use RM to ensure that your search crawl traffic gets sent to a specific machine or machines in the farm, which do not serve end user requests. Hopefully you already know that by simply turning on RM on your Web Servers in your farm and with no additional configuration, you get health based routing for free. And this is health based routing that actually works, unlike the default configuration of the most popular “intelligent”...

SharePoint Evolution Conference 2013

In just over two weeks time we are back in London, for the fifth year, with the SharePoint Evolution Conference 2013. Simply the best SharePoint event outside of North America, with the best speakers, the best content, and the best entertainment, this year’s conference promises to live up to past events. It will be a little less stressful this year, returning to a regular content schedule with a few surprises thrown in! Aside from mature content on both SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint 2010, the conference features four of the five MCAs, twelve MCMs and a boatload of MVPs. It...

Antivirus and SharePoint 2013

With the discontinuation of Forefront Protection for SharePoint, Microsoft no longer provides a streaming antivirus solution for SharePoint. This has lead to an ever increasingly common customer question, “what do I use for SharePoint antivirus?”. This post aims to detail the options (right now there is only one) as opposed to answering the question repeatedly. It is NOT intended to be a discussion on why you need a streaming antivirus solution for SharePoint, which is potentially a post for another day. For now, assume you have that requirement, so what are the options? SharePoint 2013 introduces NO CHANGES to...

Default Active Directory Import User Profile Property Mappings in SharePoint Server 2013

When using the Active Directory Import (ADI) mode of the SharePoint 2013 User Profile Service, you may be wondering what the default Profile Property Mappings are. Whilst the capability is neat, the use of a shared UI with User Profile Synchronization (UPS) leaves a *lot* to be desired. Manage User Properties won’t display the mapped attributes, as you can see from the example below. The highlighted rows are some of the properties which are mapped by default. Similarly when we edit a property, the Edit User Profile Property page does not display the mapped attribute: ...

Quick and dirty test results: Active Directory Import versus User Profile Synchronization

One of the most common questions I get regarding the Active Directory Import mode in the SharePoint 2013 User Profile Service is "just how quick is it?" As previously detailed Active Directory Import (ADI) is very fast, especially in comparison to User Profile Synchronization (UPS). But saying it is quick doesn't really mean anything. Each time I present on the topic, the question comes up, "do you have any numbers". Sadly it's still early, too early, to provide real, solid proven numbers across a range of deployments. In lieu of such appropriate data I put together a very quick and...

Using SSL for Central Administration with SharePoint 2013

One of the most common requests I get is for an update to my article SharePoint Central Administration: High Availability, Load Balancing, Security & General Recommendations to cover SharePoint 2010 and 2013. Most folks are interested in the SSL parts, which has changed a little bit mainly due to the introduction of Windows PowerShell management in SharePoint 2010. This reasonably short post will walkthrough the configuration steps necessary. It’s all very straightforward, however there are a couple of critical considerations which I will point out as we go through the steps. Updated 14/02/2013 to include Windows PowerShell for...

Article: Request Management in SharePoint Server 2013

SharePoint Server 2013 introduces a new capability called Request Management. Request Management allows SharePoint to understand more about, and control the handling of, incoming requests. Request Management employs a rules based approach, which enables SharePoint to take the appropriate action for a given request based upon administrator supplied configuration. This new article series will provide comprehensive coverage of the new Request Management capability in three parts: Feature Capability and Architecture Overview Example Scenario and Configuration Step by Step Deployment Considerations and Recommendations Please...

Speaking Engagements – Autumn 2012

It’s once again silly season with SharePoint conferences (when isn’t it? :)) but this autumn it’s a bit more fun as we are able to discuss SharePoint 2013. I’ll be doing a few events over the next couple months. SharePoint and Exchange Forum 2012 – Stockholm, Sweden. October 22-23. This is a great event in a very cool place. Looking forward to going back to Stockholm for a few days and catching up again with some good friends and meeting some new ones. I’ll be presenting a couple of breakouts: Host Named...

What's new in SharePoint 2013 for IT Professionals: Critical Path SharePoint 2013 Office Hours

Critical Path Training have been running a series of SharePoint 2013 Office Hours, where you get a chance to ask your burning questions regarding the new version. I’m happy to be doing one of these along with my good friend Andrew Connell on September 18th at 2pm Eastern – that’s 7pm GMT or 8pm CET. The subject is What’s new in SharePoint 2013 for IT Professionals. Ask your infrastructure and operations questions about the new version of SharePoint here! We'll look at the highlights for IT Pros in the 2013 release along with coverage of...

Seventh edition of the free DIWUG SharePoint Magazine

The best free SharePoint magazine published online, the DIWUG SharePoint e-Magazine, have released their seventh edition. As usual this is a great edition with a mix of articles written by SharePoint community members. I contributed a two part article series, of which part two is featured in this magazine: Real World Service Application federation with SharePoint 2010 Part Two In the 6th edition of DIWUG eMagazine (#6) Part One of this article covered the basic capability of Service Application Federation along with the required configuration. Following on from part one,...

Article: Request Management in SharePoint Server 2013 Part Two: Example Scenario and Configuration Step by Step

In the first part of this article series I covered the feature capability and provided an architecture overview of Request Management, a new capability introduced with SharePoint Server 2013. Request Management allows SharePoint to understand more about, and control the handling of incoming requests. This second part details an example scenario and provides a step by step of the necessary configuration. Please note that this article applies to SharePoint Server 2013 RTM. Feature Capability and Architecture Overview Example Scenario and Configuration Step by Step (this article) Deployment...

Request Management in SharePoint Server 2013, Part Two: Example Scenario and Configuration Step by Step

  Introduction In the first part of this article series I covered the feature capability and provided an architecture overview of Request Management, a new capability introduced with SharePoint Server 2013. Request Management allows SharePoint to understand more about, and control the handling of incoming requests. This second part details an example scenario and provides a step by step of the necessary configuration. Before we get started, I’d urge you to review Part One. The concepts are very important to grasp before diving in and provisioning stuff. I assume you have read Part One! Please note...

Enabling Office Web Apps Preview editing with SharePoint 2013 Preview Licensing

As you maybe aware there are a veritable ton of cool new capabilities in the latest release of Office Web Apps Preview. It really is a killer piece of tech. This post walks you through how to configure Office Web Apps editing in your SharePoint farm, which is not as “automatic” as you may imagine. We’ll also take a look at an interesting new capability in SharePoint 2013 Preview for license enforcement. Please note that this article applies to the Office Web Apps Server and SharePoint 2013 Preview release. Things are likely to change between now and the final...

Article: Multi Tenancy with SharePoint 2013: What’s new and changed

SharePoint 2013 Preview introduces a number of new elements and considerations for multi tenancy deployments. This article is intended as a companion to my Rational Guide to Multi Tenancy with SharePoint 2010 article series and will cover what’s new and changed in this release with respect to configuration and functionality. It is assumed you are familiar with the material in the article series. This article is verified against SharePoint 2013 RTM. Multi Tenancy with SharePoint 2013: What’s new and changed     s.

Multi Tenancy with SharePoint 2013: What’s new and changed

  Introduction SharePoint 2013 Preview introduces a number of new elements and additional considerations for multi tenancy deployments. This article is intended as a companion to my Rational Guide to Multi Tenancy with SharePoint 2010 article series and will cover what’s new and changed in this release with respect to configuration and functionality. It is assumed you are familiar with the material in the article series. Please note that this article applies to the SharePoint 2013 Preview release. Things are likely to change between now and the final release of SharePoint 2013. I will update this article...

Request Management in SharePoint Server 2013 Preview, Part One: Feature Capability and Architecture Overview

  Introduction SharePoint Server 2013 introduces a new capability called Request Management. Request Management allows SharePoint to understand more about, and control the handling of, incoming requests. Request Management employs a rules based approach, which enables SharePoint to take the appropriate action for a given request based upon administrator supplied configuration. This article series will provide comprehensive coverage of the new Request Management capability in three parts: Feature Capability and Architecture Overview (this article) Example Scenario and Configuration Step by Step Deployment Considerations and Recommendations ...

A quick note on User Profile Synchronization in SharePoint Server 2013 Preview

I will be posting an update to my UPS guide for SharePoint Server 2013 Preview in the near future. I had long planned to update it with better writing and more up to date details anyway. However as I’ve already received a bucket load of questions on this already I wanted to post a quick note to hopefully stem the flow a little bit. When I say UPS, I mean the User Profile Synchronization service instance. The wrapper for FIM along with it’s configuration UI in Central Administration (which is part of the UPA). This is distinct from the...

First Look: SharePoint Server 2013 Active Directory Import

SharePoint Server 2013’s User Profile Service Application includes a “new” method for performing an import of user attributes from Active Directory into the SharePoint Profile store called Active Directory Import. You may also hear or see this referred to as “AD Direct Mode” in pre-release materials. This method provides numerous advantages over the Forefront Identity Manager based approach (which is still available, more on that at a later date) for certain common scenarios. This article provides an introductory overview of the feature and why it might be useful in your deployments. Please note that this article applies to...

The SharePoint Evolution Conference returns to London in April 2013

Phew! Is it really two months since we wrapped up the International SharePoint Conference back in April? It was a great privilege to work with Combined Knowledge, Steve Smith and the world class speaker team. The fantastic response we received from attendees, sponsors and the wider community makes the hard work and long hours justified. Overall the new event format worked very well, and there were no logistical or technical disasters. Of course there is significant room for improvement in the future and community feedback has been greatly received. Additional follow up materials from the conference are forthcoming and you...

User Profile Service Application Sync Database Maintenance with the February 2012 Cumulative Update

Since the release of SharePoint Server 2010, the maintenance of the User Profile Service Application (UPA) Sync DB has been extremely problematic. I’m not talking about “standard” database maintenance tasks here, you know those routine tasks you should be performing on your environment but that seldom are implemented by those running operational service :). This is all about the Sync DB retaining data that it shouldn’t. There is quite a lot of confusion out there surrounding this topic in general and it has certainly hit a lot of customers, hard. The fundamental issue stems from the choice of the...

What Every SharePoint Admin Needs to Know About Host Named Site Collections

My buddy and all round decent bloke, Kirk Evans, a PFE from Texas way has put together a great blog post on Host Named Site Collections (HNSC) in SharePoint 2010. This should be considered essential reading for SharePoint infrastructure types (IT Pros as Microsoft so offensively buckets them :)). HNSC are often referred to as Host header site collections, and are greatly misunderstood by the field at large. Indeed some SharePoint “experts” have recently made some rather silly statements about them, suggesting they should be avoided. Admittedly many moons ago there were statements about that from Microsoft...

Sixth edition of the free DIWUG SharePoint Magazine

The best free SharePoint magazine published online, the DIWUG SharePoint e-Magazine, have released their sixth edition. As usual this is a great edition with a mix of articles written by SharePoint community members. I contributed a two part article series, of which part one is featured in this magazine: Real World Service Application federation with SharePoint 2010 Part One One of the most powerful new infrastructure capabilities in SharePoint Server 2010 is that of Service Application Federation. Enabled by the new Service Application ...

The iPad Invasion: Leveraging SharePoint for Mobile Enterprise Security

iThings – they are everywhere, you know it and I know it! There’s not been a enterprise SharePoint deployment I’ve been involved with over the last 18 months where the topic hasn’t reared it’s head. Finally someone has a decent toolset that actually considers business requirements rather than just hype. Check out this upcoming webcast around the area for more details: The iPad invasion is here, ready or not. Used for an increasingly wide range of business applications, iPads can be found at every level, from executives to assistants, board members to sales teams. ...

Mirroring the Profile and Social databases *IS* 100% supported

As a small but significant follow up to my UPA session at the SharePoint Conference in Anaheim last month, is that yesterday we pushed out an update to the Database types and descriptions article on TechNet to finally detail that synchronous mirroring of the Social database IS 100% supported. As already detailed in this document, the Profile database already supported synchronous mirroring. That leaves the Sync database, which if you were paying attention in the session we really don’t care about in terms of “HA” or “DR”. Not perfect by a long shot but you can now officially...

Scripts from my SharePoint Conference Sessions

As promised during my sessions at the SharePoint Conference in Anaheim last week, here are the Windows PowerShell scripts demonstrated. Please note that these scripts are direct copies of those on my Virtual Machines. You *will* need to tweak them for use on your environments, and remember they are authored for the purposes of demonstration! If you wish to take pieces of them to use in a real deployment, they will need some work. The scripts are provided as is, without any warranties! You know the score. SPC407: Enterprise Deployment Considerations for the User Profile Service Application. ...

Simply must have IT Pro Resources for SharePoint Server 2010

SharePoint Conference 2011 is in full effect here in sunny Anaheim, CA. Following this morning’s keynote it is worth pointing you in the direction of a couple absolute must haves which were released today as part of the overall festivities. First up is the Scale Test Report for Very Large Scale Document Repositories white paper which describes the design and implementation of a 120 million (count em) item, 30Tb farm – the same farm that was used in the keynote HA demo. The number of times I’ve had to discuss “scalability limits” of SharePoint with customers is frightening, and...

Announcing the Microsoft Certified Architect: SharePoint Server 2010

This morning at the sold out SharePoint Conference 2011 we officially announced the new premier certification for SharePoint practitioners, the Microsoft Certified Architect (MCA) for SharePoint Server 2010. During his keynote address, Jeff Teper, Corporate Vice President of the SharePoint Product Group discussed the key role the SharePoint eco system has and will continue to play in the run away success of Microsoft’s platform without peers in the marketplace. The MCA program helps the highest-achieving IT architecture professionals distinguish their expertise with Microsoft server technologies, including SharePoint solutions for enterprise customers. MCA will recognise the best of the best...

SharePoint Pod Show: MCM, Top 3 mistakes, and User Profile Sync discussion

Was chatting to my buddy Rob Foster recently and he was slagging me off for not pointing to the SharePoint Pod Show we recently recorded. So here for you listening pleasure (ahem!) is a discussion about the MCM program, some classic mistakes for SharePoint deployments and even a little bit of cricket! SharePoint MCM, Top 3 mistakes, and User Profile Sync discussion with Spencer Harbar-Episode 63   .

SharePoint 2010 Advanced Infrastructure Administrator - 29th August–2nd September, Auckland, NZ

After Tech Ed New Zealand, I’ll be hanging back in Auckland with my good buddy Steve Smith to deliver the Combined Knowledge SharePoint 2010 Advanced Infrastructure Administrator course. This is by no means your regular SharePoint admin training. According to the blurb, “This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to learn from two of the most experienced SharePoint experts in the World today and take your SharePoint knowledge to the next level!” It’s always great fun to work with Steve, and I’m looking forward to delivering this material, which steps away from the usual SharePoint featurisms and...

Summer and Autumn Speaking Engagements

It’s that time again folks, Conference craziness season is back with a vengeance after the summer. When is it *not* conference season I hear you chuckle! Anyways, I have the privilege of speaking at a number of events between now and the end of the year. It’s always a great deal of fun to meet folks at conferences and hear about their SharePoint experiences. I look forward to seeing you one of the following events.   TechReady 13 25-29 July - Seattle, WA http://www.mytechready.com/ This event is for Microsoft employees only....

Managing Sync Connections with *-SPProfileSyncConnection cmdlets in Service Pack 1

One of the most common conversations I have with customers, partners and random SharePoint consultants is around the creation of SharePoint Server 2010 User Profile Synchronization Connections. These guys are the key link, or connection string if you will between the User Profile Service Application (UPA) and the connected directory services. A very common complaint is the inability to automate their creation using Windows PowerShell. The good news is that Service Pack 1 (SP1) introduces a couple of new cmdlets which help in this regard. This post looks at these cmdlets and also details why they might not be all...

User Profile Synchronization Service changes in the June 2011 Cumulative Updates

One of the most common complaints about the User Profile Synchronization service in SharePoint Server 2010 is the time it takes to perform synchronization runs or “sync” for short. This is due to a number of factors not least of which is that by leveraging Forefront Identity Manager (FIM) SharePoint now effectively includes a metadirectory. This is a good thing. However if you are just doing import then there is a huge increase in the time it takes over previous versions which were simply performing an ADSI query and inserting the results into a database. It’s very important to...

Changes to Social Computing features in SharePoint Server 2010 Service Pack 1

One of the best new feature areas of SharePoint Server 2010 was the social computing capabilities delivered by the User Profile Service (UPA). Tags, Ratings, Activities as well as enhancements to the My Sites infrastructure allow enterprises to deliver rich “social” applications with the out of the box capabilities. Furthermore by using these features as building blocks a new class of composite social applications have become possible, enabling the enterprise to leverage social computing for both business benefit and end user happiness. Of course, as with many aspects of SharePoint 2010, with great power comes the need for responsibility...

Upcoming Speaking Events

I have the privilege of speaking at the following SharePoint events over the next couple of months. Looking forward to meeting everyone, if you are attending, drop by and say hello!   SharePoint Saturday Holland 26th March 2011, Utrecht, Netherlands I’ve done a couple of SharePoint Saturday events before, but only as a “virtual” presenter, this will be the first time I’ll actually be at the event. I’ll be presenting my increasingly popular Rational Guide to User Profile Synchronization session. More details.   European SharePoint Best Practices Conference 11th –...

Decent SharePoint Books!!!!

I’m frequently asked for SharePoint book recommendations. This is tricky because from my point of view most of them are rubbish. The publisher driven gold rush to get titles on the shelf on or around the release of a product really is very bad from a quality perspective. The amount of misinformation in SharePoint 2010 books in particular is outstanding. The good news is that things are beginning to get back on kilter and there have recently been some excellent books released. Here’s a very mini review of some quality titles recently published.   Professional Business...

Creating User Profile Synchronization Exclusion Filters using the userAccountControl attribute

Planning and implementing Exclusion Filters for SharePoint Server 2010 User Profile Synchronization (UPS) is without doubt one of the most important aspects of any UPS deployment. By making use of Exclusion Filters we can narrow down the objects we sync with. Exclusion Filters reduce the amount of “junk” in the Profile database and can significantly decrease the time taken to perform synchronization runs. I will be posting more about Exclusion Filters in general soon, but for this post I will concentrate on the most commonly used filter – that of the userAccountControl attribute in Active Directory. This is by...

Article: SharePoint Server 2010 User Profile Synchronization with Novell eDirectory 8.8 SP6

It’s been brought to my attention recently that you all love the User Profile Synchronization service instance in SharePoint Server 2010! :). So much so in fact, that one of the most common requests I get is for more articles on this topic, and in particular details on syncing with directory systems other than Active Directory. There is very little documentation about syncing with Novell eDirectory. Unfortunately at present TechNet only provides cursory information regarding permissions, and the early White Paper is extremely weak. Neither provide the necessary details to get it running. This article will walk through the steps needed to...

Account Deletion and SharePoint 2010 User Profile Synchronization

Recently I’ve been asked a number of times about what happens to accounts deleted from Active Directory with respect to SharePoint 2010 User Profiles, and the User Profile Synchronization service instance. Unfortunately this pretty much isn’t documented at all, and furthermore there is quite a lot of incorrect information and assumptions about this area. There is plenty on how SharePoint 2007 handled things of course, but as regular readers (all two of them) will know, things are mighty different in 2010. The good news is that things are pretty straightforward and this post will walk through the important details. Let’s take...

Announcing SharePoint Easy Setup for Developers

Chris Johnson has put together some natty tooling to help aspiring SharePoint developers get up and running with SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7. Even better, the full source is provided in case you may wish to tweak it some to suit specific needs. Go check it out! Announcing SharePoint Easy Setup for Developers .

Avoiding the Default Schema issue when creating the User Profile Service Application using Windows PowerShell

As you may already be aware there is a bug when creating the User Profile Service Application (UPA) using Windows PowerShell. This bug prevents the provisioning of the User Profile Synchronization service instance (UPS). In a nutshell, when using Windows PowerShell to create a UPA the Default Schema of the Farm Account on the Sync DB is set incorrectly, and this will lead to an error during provisioning of the UPS later. The following error will be logged to the Application Event Log: “IF EXISTS (SELECT * FROM sys.xml_schema_collections c, sys.schemas s WHERE c.schema_id =...

ULSViewer – the tool that NO SharePoint practitioner should be without

I am frequently surprised (I know, I shouldn’t be really) just how few SharePoint people know about ULSViewer. Often times someone will be complaining about an error they are experiencing, the conversation goes something like this: SPDude, “Hey man, I’ve got a problem with my SharePoint” Me, “Don’t we all buddy,  it’s installed isn’t it… but what’s your problem exactly?” SPDude, “Well when I click on the widget and attempt to configure the coolness, I get ‘an unexpected error has a occurred’” Me, “OK, widget coolness can...

Article: “Stuck on Starting”: Common Issues with SharePoint Server 2010 User Profile Synchronization

Back about a week after RTM of SharePoint 2010 I published my Rational Guide to implementing SharePoint Server 2010 User Profile Synchronization. This was actually written up long before RTM and was doing the rounds among a circle of SharePoint “insiders”. I then tweaked it for RTM and pushed it out immediately after the SharePoint Evolutions Conference, where I had demoed live the steps. Amazingly, this article has already been viewed over 260,000 times! An incredible response. Of course the Microsoft documentation in this area is weak at present, and UPS is what you could call a “rough edge” of...

Rational Guide to Multi Tenancy with SharePoint 2010, Part Six: Provisioning Tenants

This, the sixth part of the Rational Guide article on multi tenancy, will walk through the creation of feature packs and the provisioning of Tenants for the sample scenario detailed in part three. Provisioning Tenants If you haven’t checked out the previous parts, I strongly encourage you to review them. I won’t repeat information and I assume you have read the previous parts, which are: Feature and Capability Overview Planning your Deployment Example Scenario and what Multi Tenancy brings to the party Configuring...

SharePoint Connections, The Hague, 28 & 29th September

I have the privilege of speaking at the upcoming SharePoint Connections conference in the very pleasant indeed city of Den Haag (The Hague). The event is being held on 28th and 29th September, and you can find out full details and register at http://www.devconnections.com/speurope/. I will be delivering the following breakouts: MIT03: Lessons Learned and Best Practices from Enterprise Deployments of SharePoint This session covers the lessons learnt by early enterprise deployments of SharePoint Server 2010. Focusing on SharePoint 2010 specifics, the session will detail these lessons along with...

Rational Guide to Multi Tenancy with SharePoint 2010, Part Five: Creating Partitioned Service Applications

This, the fifth part of the Rational Guide article on multi tenancy will walk through the creation of the partitioned service applications and the starting of their related service instances for the sample scenario detailed in part three. 5. Creating Partitioned Service Applications If you haven’t checked out the previous parts, I strongly encourage you to review them. I won’t repeat information and I assume you have read the previous parts, which are: Feature and Capability Overview Planning your Deployment Example Scenario and what Multi Tenancy...

Rational Guide to Multi Tenancy with SharePoint 2010, Part Four: Configuring the base infrastructure

This, the fourth part of the Rational Guide article on multi tenancy will start to walk through the configuration of the sample scenario detailed in the previous part. This is where we get into the meat of things. 4. Configuring the base Infrastructure If you haven’t checked out the previous parts, I strongly encourage you to review them. I won’t repeat information and I assume you have read the previous parts, which are: Feature and Capability Overview Planning your Deployment Example Scenario and what Multi Tenancy...

SharePoint Best Practices Conference, Washington DC, August 24-27

I’m honoured once again to be speaking at the Best Practices Conference, which is taking place in Washington D.C. August 24th thru 27th. The Best Practices Conference is easily the best non Microsoft SharePoint event, and the speaker line up is excellent. If you are implementing SharePoint 2010, you don’t want to miss this show. This year, I’m leading up the Keynote: What the Masters think About SharePoint 2010, which will feature five fellow MCMs all of whom do not work for Microsoft. I will also be presenting the following breakouts, all with updated new content specifically for...

Thoughts on the Microsoft Certified Master for SharePoint 2010

It’s been a bit quiet here recently, one of the reasons for that is I recently attended the first rotation of the Microsoft Certified Master for SharePoint 2010. A number of people have requested that I post my thoughts on this and address some common questions about the certification. Before I get started, I must include another Thrilleresque disclaimer. I am part of the team that produced the MCM for SharePoint 2010. I am an instructor and content owner for six modules. Therefore I have an obvious vested interest in the program. However, this doesn’t change the fact that...

Article: Rational Guide to Multi Tenancy with SharePoint 2010, Part Three: Example Scenario and what Multi Tenancy brings to the party

This, the third part of the Rational Guide article on multi tenancy walks through the example scenario which future articles use to show how to build out the multi tenant capabilities of SharePoint Server 2010. I will also highlight the key features in action, providing an overview of what multi tenancy brings to a SharePoint 2010 deployment. If you haven’t checked out the previous parts, I strongly encourage you to review them. I won’t repeat information and I assume you have read the previous parts, which are: Feature and Capability Overview Planning...

Article: Rational Guide to Multi Tenancy with SharePoint 2010, Part Two: Planning your Deployment

In the first part of my Rational Guide to Multi Tenancy with SharePoint 2010 article, I walked through the problem space and discussed the features of SharePoint 2010 that enable multi tenant environments. This can be seen as the “overview” (or perhaps “marketing” :)). As promised this is part two, the idea of which is to walk through how to set it all up along with some general recommendations. Now, as much as I wanted to post this as a single article, it’s just too big. There’s too much to discuss and there’s way too much script. I’m not...

Create your own SharePoint Server 2010 RTM Virtual Machine - The Complete Guide

Since the release of SharePoint 2010, one of the most common questions I get is “what is the best way to get up and running to be able to play around”. Microsoft of course offer a pre-canned VM which is an excellent resource for partners for sales purposes. But if you are a little more technical, you probably want to set it up yourself. Here is THE GUIDE for doing this, hot off the press from the folks at Critical Path: ***NOW AVAILABLE*** Create your own SharePoint Server 2010 RTM Virtual Machine - The Complete Guide Enjoy!

SharePoint 2010 User Profile Sync & Reboots

Since I published my article, Rational Guide to implementing SharePoint Server 2010 User Profile Synchronization, I’ve been deluged with email on the topic. All good, it shows me that I chose the right content to post, and that the content has relevance. However one key aspect keeps coming up over and over again both in these emails and on IM etc. Lots of people after attempting to provision the UPS Service from Services on Server, need to reboot the server before the service is provisioned correctly. If you are running the UPS Service instance on the machine hosting Central Administration, you MUST...

Article: Rational Guide to Multi Tenancy with SharePoint 2010

This second article in my Rational Guide series focuses on the capabilities in SharePoint 2010 which enable the delivery of hosting environments. Hosting is finally a first class citizen in SharePoint 2010, however there isn’t a great deal of material out there on this subject. This article will: walk through the problem space discuss the features of SharePoint 2010 that enable multi-tenant environments provide a step by step guide to setting it all up give general recommendations for those looking to deliver hosting platforms...

Adding SharePoint 2010 PoweShell cmdlets to your PowerShell ISE

PowerShell for SharePoint 2010 rocks. No, really it does. You hate it at first, but then it’s all pure goodness. But boy, does the UI SUCK! Crap for productivity, crap for demos, just about crap for anything other than lame jokes about old skool shell scripting. Sure, there are funky PowerShell GUIs out there, but they appear to cost money. The good news is Windows ships with it’s own IDE. This thing is called an ISE – prey how much do marketing people get paid? Anyway – that’s what I’ve been using for all my demos to show the PowerShell stuff that...

Service Application Federation with SharePoint 2010

Yalls may be playing around with Service Application Federation with SharePoint 2010 with the shiny new SharePoint Server 2010 bits. This federation is also called publishing and consuming service applications, but as I’m spending a lot of my time of late in PowerPoint, I’m using the buzzword for the time being. However, with the RTM bits there is a fundamental missing piece that is not currently documented on Tech Net. Of course you need to exchange and install the necessary certificates as detailed here. However in order to make it work the consuming farm must have permissions to...

Article: In a Nutshell: SharePoint 2010 Service Applications

SharePoint 2010 includes a fundamental architectural change from the previous version with the introduction of “Service Applications”. This new architecture has extremely broad and deep consequences for SharePoint practitioners. Unfortunately Service Applications thus far have been poorly explained and documented, and already there are many myths surrounding them. This “In a Nutshell” article is an attempt to distil the core elements down to brass tacks. It is intended primarily for architects and administrators planning their farm topologies, but will also be useful for anyone working with SharePoint 2010. http://www.harbar.net/articles/sp2010sa2.aspx

Upcoming SharePoint Community Events

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...

Article: Rational Guide to Implementing SharePoint Server 2010 User Profile Synchronization

There's a ton of stuff out there on User Profile Sync in SharePoint Server 2010. Some of it’s good, some of it’s frankly terrible. TechNet has some of the best material, but unfortunately TechNet’s format restrictions are counter-intuitive. Therefore this article presents an end to end, “rational guide” to setting this up. There are a couple of contentious setup requirements in here. I may discuss those in more depth later. For now, the following steps are required. Don’t try and work around them, UPS will break. The following is the least privilege you can get away with. This article will also be...

SharePoint 2010 Evolution demos update

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...

SharePoint 2010 Evolution Conference Slide Decks

Here are the slides from my presentations at the SharePoint 2010 Evolutions Conference this week in London. I will be updating this page as we get through each day of the show. Monday IT101: Overview of what’s new in SharePoint 2010 for IT Pros (with Neil Hodgkinson). DD105: Multi-Tenancy in SharePoint 2010. Tuesday DD108: Claims based Authentication in SharePoint 2010. IT109: Configuring Managed Metadata Service (with Steve Smith). DEV111: Multilingual solutions with SharePoint 2010. Wednesday IT112: SharePoint 2010 Mythbusters. IT114: Configuring and managing User Profile Synchronization. ...

Crawling Kerberos Web Applications on non-default ports

Quite a long time ago there was a comedy to and fro regarding the non-ability of SharePoint Server 2007 to crawl (or index) Web Applications on non-default ports which had been configured to use Kerberos Authentication. The upshot was that you needed to have a non Kerberos site in the default zone for the purposes of crawling. The full details of this are posted over at TechNet: Configure Kerberos-authenticated sites for crawling. Now of course using non default ports is really rather silly, but it happens a lot. There was also some misinformation posted over on the To...

SharePoint 2010 and Kerberos

This is the first in a series of posts about using Kerberos with SharePoint 2010. This one is an easy introduction to using Kerberos for authentication in Classic Mode. My good buddy Ted Pattison likes to joke around with me that Kerberos is dead, thanks to the “new” world of claims based identity. But it is a joke! :) Kerberos is far from dead, and in many scenarios it is still the best choice for Authentication, if not Authorization within SharePoint 2010. For those of you who are fellow security geeks, you will know of course, that Kerberos is indeed...

Forefront Protection for SharePoint

Friends over on the Forefront Server Protection team are conducting research to understand what applications you would like to protect, and how you would like them protected. One of the applications they are soliciting feedback on is SharePoint. The survey shouldn't take more than 5-10 minutes, and your feedback directly impacts product decisions. Please head over to http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/forefrontsurvey to take the survey. 

SUGUK Manchester: Information Architecture for SharePoint Server

Earlier this week I presented a session at the SharePoint User Group UK Manchester event. Shout out to Mark Stokes for organising yet another great SUGUK event. This session was an introduction/overview of IA for SharePoint, and also highlighted the key new features in this realm within SharePoint Server 2010. For those interested you can download the slide deck below. Information Architecture for SharePoint Server

Groundhog Day: Configuring Back Connection Host Names using Group Policy

Quite some time ago I posted coverage of the DisableLoopbackCheck registry key and how it impacts SharePoint. It’s amazing just how often this comes up on the Interwebz. Scarily the common advice given is to turn this feature off. And that’s bad advice. In my original post I detailed why. In a nutshell: OK in test/dev, NOT OK in Production.  Yesterday my buddy Bob Fox posted a follow up, DisableLoopBackCheck? Let’s do it the right way. His post details how to configure a list of names which won’t be checked. This is all good, but what if you...

Now Available: Interacting with the Excel Web Services API for SharePoint Server 2007

An article I worked on recently has just been published to MSDN. The article walks developers through the basics of getting started with the powerful Excel Web Services API for building BI and Calculation based services on SharePoint Server 2007. Get a quick start with the Excel Web Services API, which enables interaction with published Microsoft Office Excel 2007 workbooks in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 from a remote application. Learn considerations around session state, security, and performance. (6 printed pages) Many thanks to Randall Isenhour, Kimberly Hope and the MSDN crew for their...

The best SharePoint Conference ever is back, with a vengeance!

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,...

MUST READ: SharePoint’s Sasquatch Memory Leak

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

Tips and tricks for running SharePoint Server 2010 on Windows 7

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...

TechNet Misinformation: How NOT to use Kerberos for SharePoint Authentication

I’m somewhat aggrieved this morning, as I found a new article from TechNet entitled “Using Kerberos for SharePoint Authentication”. Now while this article is not supposed to be the be all and end all it is very depressing that still now, in 2010, such inaccurate and in some cases 100% wrong information is being put out there by the vendor. This is especially true given the work I have done in this space over the last 18 months. So what’s wrong with it? Well one of the reasons people find this area difficult is nobody seems willing to...

Application Pool mis-configuration in SharePoint 2010

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...

Application Pool Manager v3 (for SharePoint 2010)

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...

More on SharePoint 2010 Application Pools

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. ...

Microsoft SharePoint Connections 2010, Amsterdam

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...

SharePoint Server 2010 Worker Processes

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...

SharePoint 2010 pre-requisites installer and other setup refinements point the way to more consistent deployments

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...

DIWUG - Dutch Information Worker User Group: November 4th, Amsterdam

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

Single Server Complete Install of SharePoint 2010 using local accounts - From The Field

My good buddy and fellow SharePoint Certified Master, Neil ‘The Doc’ Hodgkinson has an excellent little post over on the From the Field blog on setting up SharePoint 2010 the way you want to for the purposes of running a farm on a single machine. Check it out! Single Server Complete Install of SharePoint 2010 using local accounts - From The Field

SharePoint 2010: Service Applications Part One: Model Overview

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: Enterprise Readiness

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: Developer Tools Overview

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

SharePoint 2010 Evolution Conference

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...

SharePoint Conference: Vegas!

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...

Now Available – MSDN: Building Records Management Solutions with SharePoint Server 2007

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...

Full Metal Architect | Disabling PAC Validation: More than meets the eyes

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

DisableLoopbackCheck & SharePoint: What every admin and developer should know.

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...

SDN Session Recap: SharePoint Architecture, Myths & Kerberos

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. ...

Learning Gateway Conference, Birmingham, July 15th

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...

SDN Event June 26th, Houten, Netherlands

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...

Configure disaster recovery across SharePoint farms by using SQL Server log shipping

The excellent guidance over on TechNet regarding DR farms using Log Shipping has been updated with additional details for SP2 and some excellent coverage of pre-requisites, fundamental planning considerations and performance. Essential reading for SharePoint administrators (even if you haven’t implemented Log Shipping in your solution). Configure disaster recovery across SharePoint farms by using SQL Server log shipping

Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog : Attention: Important Information on Service Pack 2

You simply must read this Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog : Attention: Important Information on Service Pack 2

Adventure Works Travel finally hits the web

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...

Multiple SharePoint SSL Web Applications on Port 443

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...

Supportability of my Central Admin article approaches

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...

Reality check: Microsoft Certified Master for SharePoint 2007

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....

Certified Master for SharePoint 2007 “R2”

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...

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers

[Via Mirjam] This has been around for ages, but I never saw it originally. It includes tenants of the right approach to blogging. Some of my favorites include: Blogs that are purely self-promotional can quickly fizzle out. Be outwardly focused, rather than self-focused. Find other bloggers in your niche that you respect and work with them rather than against them. Get away from the computer once in a while and do something recreational or creative. Essential reading for the SharePoint blogosphere, which of late has been loosing the...

Understanding Field Controls and Web Parts in SharePoint Server 2007 Publishing Sites

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...

SharePoint Pod Show: Challenges in Enterprise SharePoint Deployments

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

Quality SharePoint books

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...

The ‘hidden cost’ of SharePoint in the enterprise

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...

Test Driven Development with SharePoint

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...

European SharePoint Best Practices Conference

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...

The days of documents are *not* numbered

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...

SharePoint Best Practices Presentations

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...

Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog : Microsoft Business Intelligence strategy update and SharePoint

Pej has done the deed and announced this over on the SharePoint Team Blog: PerformancePoint scorecarding and dashboarding capabilities will now become part of SharePoint Enterprise CAL and available to customers who are on SharePoint SA. This means that customers who want to deploy PerformancePoint can do so today at no additional cost. Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog : Microsoft Business Intelligence strategy update and SharePoint

BDC Meta Man Web Edition

If you are making use of the very cool Business Data Catalog in MOSS Enterprise you are doubtless aware that the hands down best tool to accelerate your projects is BDC Meta Man from Lightning Tools. They’ve been busy beavering away on a new tool which addresses a key problem in many projects which utilize the BDC, the requirement to be able to access the Shared Services Administration Web Site in order to fiddle about with Application Definitions and so forth. Whilst it is possible to delegate permissions to the SSP Admin site, it isn’t anywhere near granular enough,...

SharePoint Kerberos Configuration Utility: Last call for feedback and suggestions

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...

Content Deployment Webcast now available on demand

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...

SharePoint by Day, SharePint by Night

SharePoint by Day, SharePint by Night will be making a welcome return during the SharePoint Best Practices Conference early February in San Diego. This casual event will take place on Tuesday 3rd February at La Jolla Brew House at around 7pm. If you are coming along please sign up over here to give us an idea of numbers.

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...

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...

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...

SUGUK Edinburgh Meeting - Mythbusters

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

Scripted Farm Deployments

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...

SharePoint 2007 Post SP1 Hotfixes Updated

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

Typemock Isolator for SharePoint

  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...

Arpan Shah on the SharePoint Pod Show

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

SUGUK Edinburgh Meeting, November 27th

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...

Microsoft Certified Master for SharePoint

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,...

Visual Studio 2010 Tools for SharePoint Announced at TechEd EMEA Developers 2008

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...

SharePoint by Day, SharePint by night – TechEd EMEA

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.

Best Practices for Enterprise User Scalability in SharePoint

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.

Simple example of why Microsoft.Web.Administration rocks

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...

Application Pool Manager v2 (finally)

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...

SharePoint by Day, SharePint by Night - PDC2008 Edition

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...

Prescriptive Guidance for SharePoint Server 2007 Web Content Management Sites

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...

Estimate performance and capacity requirements for InfoPath Forms Services environments (Office SharePoint Server)

For along time there's been a significant gap in the perf and cap planning guides around the InfoPath Forms Services features of MOSS. I'm very pleased to see this gap now filled with the below recent publication. Essential for those architect-ing MOSS Enterprise deployments: This performance and capacity planning scenario incorporates a single Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 farm that is running InfoPath Forms Services Estimate performance and capacity requirements for InfoPath Forms Services environments (Office SharePoint Server)

SharePoint 2007 Post SP1 Hotfixes

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

Investing in Logical Architecture Design Samples

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...

SharePoint Administration Toolkit 2.0 is Now Available!

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....

FREE SharePoint Reporting - CardioLog Lite

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.

Beginners Guide to Test Driven Web Part Development

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

International SharePoint Professionals Association (“ISPA”)

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...

SharePoint Best Practices Conference

September 15th - 17th, Washington, DC. I'm pleased to be presenting a couple sessions at the SharePoint Best Practices Conference this September in Washington, DC. I hope to see some of you there. For more information, please check out the conference web site at http://www.sharepointbestpractices.com/. It promises to be a great event with some great speakers and excellent material from the real world of SharePoint deployments - not much marketing spin here is what I'm saying :). If you register before August 1st, you'll also get a copy of the recently released MS Press book, SharePoint Best Practices....

By the community, for the community - ISPA

...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)

More on the Infrastructure Updates: Kerberos and SSP Web Services

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...

Infrastructure Updates Available

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....

Content Deployment QFE KB Articles now live

[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)

SUGUK Edinburgh: Slide Deck

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!

Reminder: SUGUK Edinburgh Meeting on Thursday

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.

Web Content Management Resource Center for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

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

Even easier way to obtain MSFT hotfixes

For a while now Microsoft have been offering online hotfix requests which minimise the need to call CSS and raise an incident to get your hands on a hotfix. However the link to the request form was hidden in the "hotfix information" section of the KB and often missed by customers. Today support.microsoft.com have improved things significantly with the following graphic at the very top of each KB article for which a download is available: This takes you to an improved hotfix request form allowing you to select language, OS etc and then send a...

Leveraging the platform - Caching in SharePoint WCM scenarios

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...

SharePoint 2007 Post SP1 Fixes

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.

Office SharePoint Server for Internet Sites Licensing

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...

New version of Application Pool Manager

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.

How to install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP1 on Vista x64/x86 - The Bamboo Team Blog

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

Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog : Announcing: SharePoint WCM book available at TechEd 2008

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

MOSS 2007 Content Deployment QFE Pack Now Available via MSFT CSS

[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...

SUGUK hits Edinburgh in June

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...

Using Kerberos with SharePoint on Windows Server 2008

[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...

Web Deployment Tool Beta 1 (Go Live) just released

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.

DOC to PDF Document Convertor for MOSS

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

Tag Driven Information Architecture

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 ...

Manchester SUGUK Meeting: 24th April

Due to popular demand, SUGUK and the Manchester .NET User group are hosting Andrew Woodward and I with a couple of popular SharePoint sessions: An introduction to the Silverlight blueprint for SharePoint During the first part of the event Andrew will Walk us through configuring SharePoint and the creation of your first Silverlight application followed by a Q&A session on what this means for you and some of the challenges you are likely to face introducing Silverlight into your SharePoint applications. Kerberos...

Lightning Conductor Web Part - roll up your SharePoint content

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.

WROX Pro MOSS WCM 2007 Book: It's Finally Finished! (available June 2008)

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)

SharePoint Hosting and Development : The Newest Version of the Database Mirroring Whitepaper for SharePoint has been released

"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

SharePoint Conference

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?).

London SUGUK meeting: Kerberos and what not

Many thanks to all those who attended the SUGUK meeting in London on Wednesday evening. Another excellent SUGUK event thanks to the great work by Nick Swan and Steve Smith. It's fantastic to see a consistently high turn out and this is a great sign that SharePoint continues on it's rightful path to world domination. Ben Robb's talk on managing deployment was superb and must see material for those working on medium and large scale development projects. My talk wasn't as good - but it was on a boring infrastructure topic - so I have an excuse (kind of!). Apologies for overrunning...

TechEd Europe Session Update

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.

SharePoint 2007 as an Enterprise Application Platform

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 on RunAs Radio

Joel Oleson is over at RunAs Radio talking sense about SharePoint.  RunAs Radio

U know U want some.

http://geekswithblogs.net/coredump/archive/2007/09/26/115656.aspx Intellisense for PowerShell. Wubba!

Go subscribe to Ted's blog. NOW!

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...

Newcastle VBUG/SUGUK Meeting presentation materials

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...

Yup, we're doing a SharePoint WCM book!

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....

Wicked Cool: AC's VS CodeRush/Refactor Tools for SharePoint heads.

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...

Dustin Miller Kicks ASS!

Dustin, a fellow SharePoint dude, and impresario of SharePoint Experts, is an excellent presenter. I know all about the sleep inducing nature of some TechEd sessions (some even when you're working the show) but this is not one of them. Not only are his presentation skills excellent - with a strong, clear and articulate voice to prevent you from nodding off, he can actually use his computer. For real! So there's no mishaps during the demos and what not to make you cringe or otherwise search for rotten fruit. "But wait, there's more"... Imagine if you will a list of the most popular TechEd sessions....

Commerce Server 2007 and SharePoint Server 2007

  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...

Application Pool Recycle Utility: Small Update and Roadmap

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...

Incorporating Telerik's RadMenu in a MOSS 2007 Publishing Site

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

How to configure Email Enabled Lists in MOSS 2007 RTM using Exchange 2007

Steve Smith over at Combined Knowledge has posted a new version of his excellent Email Enabled Lists white paper, this time for Exchange Server 2007. Go check it out. http://www.combined-knowledge.com/Downloads%202007.htm  

Developing Sharepoint Server 2007 Publishing Sites the Smart and Structured Way

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"  

SharePoint Farm Least Privilege and hotfix packages

As previously discussed, it is possible to configure your SharePoint Farm to abide by the principle of least privilege. However there are some additional steps required if you have deployed any of the SharePoint Server 2007 hotfix packages dated later than April 12th 2007. For the most part, the SharePoint Configuration Wizard (SCW) and Central Administration take care of assigning the necessary rights and group memberships. There are two exceptions with the RTM bits: IWAMRegService Activation (aka DCOM 10016 issue) %windir%/tasks Unfortunately, the hotfix packages add another manual configuration task. Whilst it is a...

Content Deployment: Ensure your platform hygiene before randomly abusing the product and calling support.

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...

SharePoint Egg Timer #1: "We want a SharePoint site that doesn't look like a SharePoint site"

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...

NO! Your SharePoint Farm Account does NOT need local admin privileges. So don't give it them!

Easily the most irritating element of mis-configuration in a SharePoint 2007 farm is the assignment of local admin privileges (for each box in the farm) to the account used for connections to the configuration database and as the identity of the application pool hosting Central Administration (commonly referred to as the 'farm account'. THIS IS NOT A REQUIREMENT!!  THIS IS NOT A REQUIREMENT!! Your farm account can be a regular domain user, no special requirements at all. The SharePoint Configuration Wizard will assign ALL the required privileges automatically (which the exception of DCOM activation as detailed here, and the issue with %windir%\Tasks). So...

Announcing three CodePlex projects for community WCM code samples

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...

Tech Ed - Orlando

It's that time already - another June - (yet) another Tech Ed. If you are attending and want to hook up regarding WCM or any other Office SharePoint Server topics, you will likely find me loitering around the Technical Learning Center and at the WCM sessions. Feel free to email me if you have a busy schedule and require more formality! If you are building WCM solutions be sure to attend the Birds of a Feather chaperoned by Andrew Connell and myself. I've just arrived at my hotel - which has a bizarre "hollywood" theme - go figure. Looking forward...

Upgrading an MCMS 2002 Application to SharePoint Server 2007

via Arpan: Upgrading an MCMS 2002 Application to SharePoint Server 2007 is now live in the MSDN Library. Note It is now a two-part article to meet ODC & MSDN length restrictions for readability. Title: Upgrading an MCMS 2002 Application to SharePoint Server 2007 (Part 1 of 2) URL: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb466172.aspx Title: Upgrading an MCMS 2002 Application to SharePoint Server 2007 (Part 2 of 2) URL: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb466171.aspx

WSS 3.0 for Hosters Solution Kit now available on CodePlex

Over on the SharePoint Team Blog, Lawrence has announced the availability of the WSS 3.0 for Hosters Solution Kit. Go check it out!

Right-click a .WSP to Add Solution

As I hope you are all aware, WSS Solution Packages (WSPs) are the solution to world hunger. Well not quite, but these CAB files on PCP are the way to package and install SharePoint custom code. If I was an American, I'd say that they "rock!". Despite the numerous benefits they offer, they are still a little esoteric in so much as a command line is needed to add them to the Solution Store. Once they are there, you can use Central Administration to deploy the solutions to your Web Applications. Lars has his Solution Installer, a very nifty solution (no pun intended) for...

Silverlight Field Control for Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Not unsurprisingly it is very straightforward to build an Office SharePoint Server Field Control for Silverlight (previously known as “WPF/E”) content, or so you would think…   We can simply take the same approach as detailed in the SDK article, How to: Create a Custom Field Control, which renders a Windows Media Player control during presentation, and makes use of the Asset Picker when in Edit mode.   For a Silverlight Field Control, we just need to alter the MediaPlayerHtmlMarkupFormat constant, to include the block of JavaScript needed to load Silverlight content, rather than the Object HTML element needed by Media Player:     However, for anything...

SharePoint Web Content Management at Tech·Ed 2007

Tech·Ed, this year, June 4th to 8th, is in Orlando and there will be a number of breakouts and labs of interest to those working with the Web Content Management features (a.k.a Publishing Sites) of Office SharePoint Server. Of course SharePoint in general will be all over Tech·Ed this year - with over 97 sessions, never mind all of the associated technology sessions, and a ton of community experts and events. This post simply highlights some pertinent to WCM professionals: First up, Arpan Shah will provide an overview of the core feature set, including details on the page processing model and...

App Pool Recycler Updated (again)

Blimey! I hacked out a little utility a week or so back and surprisingly it's turned out to be rather popular. According to my web trends, there's been over 600 downloads of the thing, now obviously I have no idea how many people immediately deleted it, but that's a pretty amazing number. Four individuals have shown significant interest and requested tweaks or new capabilities directly. In addition, I noticed a fundamental flaw in the the original "design" whereby the app pools were only enumerated on start-up. This was obviously rubbish - should you delete or create app pools either with inetmgr or SharePoint Central...

SharePoint Solutions Blog: Released: Free Utility Quickly and Easily Configures Forms Based Authentication for SharePoint

SharePoint Solutions are the first to hit the street with something many folk are building, tools for configuring Forms Based Auth for SharePoint 2007. I haven't tried this yet so I neither recommend this nor pour scorn upon it! Jeff Cate, however is a allround solid dude, so it surely must be decent. I will post back more once I've given it a go. Link to SharePoint Solutions Blog: Released: Free Utility Quickly and Easily Configures Forms Based Authentication for SharePoint

App Pool Recycler Updated

Due to popular demand (well AC anyways - that's popular in my book) I've updated my Application Pool Widget to include: IIS ResetPost Event "Warm Ups"Event Notifications These were pretty simple to implement, but I couldn't figure out an easy/quick way to make it work from a keyboard shortcut, if anyone knows how to do this (without using a third party control) please leave me a comment. Get it from here: Application Pool Recycle Utility for SharePoint Developers.

Operations Manager 2007 Management Packs for WSS v3 and MOSS 2007

System Center Operations Manager 2007 offers many new and significantly enhanced features for providing operational service management of your SharePoint farms. Of note are the vastly improved deployment, reporting enhancements and PowerShell integration. In addition Audit Collection Services has finally shipped in this release after nearly three years of promises. While Operations Manager 2007 is an essential part of your SharePoint infrastructure, it doesn't ship with Management Packs for SharePoint 2007 and this version also introduces a new Management Pack file format. This means the Management Packs for SharePoint 2007 (released in January) are not compatible and require conversion to the...

App Pool Recycler for SharePoint devs

[Update 9th April 2007] A new build with new features is available at Application Pool Recycle Utility for SharePoint Developers.   If you are doing any substantial SharePoint development, chances are you are using iisapp.vbs to recycle your application pools. This script, introduced with W2K3 SP1, does a bunch of useful stuff and you've probably got a shortcut to it configured with the name of your app pool. If you don't know about this, recycling the app pool, rather than doing an IISRESET is much quicker and often times is all you need. I'm not saying you don't sometimes...

Pesky DCOM 10016 Errors

The SharePoint Configuration Wizard (and Central Admin) does a decent job of ensuring the neccessary privileges are applied to various users and resources, but one slipped through the 'net. You know the one - it's that pesky DCOM 10016 which will fill up your System Log with noise everytime your application pool spins up. Now it just so happens that the error doesn't actually matter a stuff and won't break anything, other than your sysadmin's patience and respect for SharePoint! It's especially annoying if you are running Operations Manager or a Managed Security Auditing system which will bleet when this...

Office SharePoint Server Licensing

Licensing for Office SharePoint Server is widely seen as pretty confusing, especially when figuring the "for Internet Sites" edition into the equation. Now in general these things are best left to your Microsoft Account Manager or a Licensing Specialist - top tip - don't trust the "specialist" at the reseller if you are on a volume licence deal!! Anyways - the links that Cornelius (a SharePoint MVP) recently posted are considered the authorative info, check these before those random "let me explain MOSS licensing" posts you may find (like this one :)): http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/FX101865111033.aspx http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/FX102176831033.aspx (US List Prices) http://office.microsoft.com/search/redir.aspx?AssetID=XT102011901033&CTT=5&Origin=HA1019780331033 (an XLS which is handy) But wait,...

You know you want some

SharePoint developer extraordinaire, Andrew Connell is working on a monster custom command for SharePoint's STSADM utility. I've been beavering away trying to input something useful into AC's test phase and I am lost for words to describe it's uber-functionality. I have no idea how he'll finally decide on a name. If you are working with SharePoint you need this command, so head on over to his blog and keep your eyes peeled for his next post.  

Downloadable books for Office SharePoint Server 2007

These downloadable books are the reference for the infrastructure design of your SharePoint environment, and have not been getting anywhere near enough pimping. I guess the sheer weight of this material doesn't provide rapid enough assimilation in this world of instant knowledge, but that's exactly why they are essential for administrators and architects. Key topology designs, configuration specifics along with comprehensive check lists mean this is the PAG for SharePoint 2007. Also included is essential information architecture approaches which should be required reading for those implementing in large organizations. So go get them, print them and read them (downloadable CHMs would have been nicer):...

"Test Driven" SharePoint Development

Last month I posted an argument for a Developer Edition of Office SharePoint Server. By no means was this a wholly original or new idea, but some of the benefits of such a product were being poorly articulated and it needed some wider exposure. Anyways, the original post generated some good discussion both here and elsewhere and the general consensus is that people want it. Over the last few days the post has been re-invigorated, and Andrew Woodward commented about an associated topic, the lack of SDL approaches to SharePoint development in general. Andrew's point on testing and continuous integration actually...

MCMS Migration Resources

William Cornwill has published an article on how to modify my MCMSfaq.com MCMS AdRotator control to work with MOSS 2007. Via Stefan. Vivid Group White Paper: MCMS to MOSS upgrade - an excellent white paper. Via Angus. There much more stuff like this coming soon...

What every SharePoint administrator needs to know about Alternate Access Mappings (Part 1 of 3)

Troy Starr has started his series on Alternate Access Mappings. This is a must read, so go check it out. Hi folks, this is Troy Starr again from the Windows SharePoint Services Test team. Today I'd like to talk about one of the most powerful, but often one of the least understood, features in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. That feature is called Alternate Access Mappings. Around here, we just call it "AAM" for short. Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/03/06/what-every-sharepoint-administrator-needs-to-know-about-alternate-access-mappings-part-1.aspx

SharePoint 2007 as an enterprise application platform

Subscribers to this blog will by now know that in my view the greatest facet of SharePoint 2007 is that it offers a compelling development platform for enterprise applications by providing a rich set of infrastructure plumbing, provisioning capabilities and an application framework which embraces and extends ASP.NET. However that's all very nice coming from me, a certifiable SharePoint Kinda Guy. It's much better when those with a lot less exposure to the technology "get it". Jose Barreto, a Systems Architect, has seen the light and posted a great argument for SharePoint as an application platform. I have been spending some time...

MOSS 2007 and Microsoft Commerce Server 2007 White Paper Released

Via Max Akbar. This download provides setup and configuration information for solutions that are based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Commerce Server 2007. This download includes step-by-step configuration tasks and sample code. This document in this download does not provide prescriptive guidance or a recommended enterprise architecture for building solutions that are based on these technologies. It is assumed that the reader has basic knowledge about Office SharePoint Server 2007. Configuring and Integrating Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Commerce Server 2007

MIIS Provisioning with WSS 3.0

Via Craig Martin, aka Identity Hero. Alex Tcherniakhovski has posted an utterly awesome screencast on using WSS 3.0's workflow to help with your MIIS solution's provisioning. For those of you who have implemented MIIS solutions you will know that the provisioning side of things get a bit dicey, especially given the average Identity Management Kinda Guy tends not to know too much about code. This screencast shows how to merge the WSS 3 workflow capabilities into MIIS's provisioning and syncronisation bits.

Office SharePoint Server Developer Edition

This post has been a long time coming and a long time in draft. It all started about a year ago with an angry customer, some newsgroup queries and a discussion with a long time friend. Since then I've discused the "idea" with some Program Managers and MVPs on and off. At the SPC in Berlin earlier this month, Fitz also mentioned the topic, so it's now time to unleash the rant... No (unfortunately) this is not me letting the cat out of the bag on a as yet to be announced new product from Redmond, but simply a rambling discourse on...

ReadyBoost and VMs

Love it! Frank just posted the common sense view on ReadyBoost and Virtual Machines with a nice graphic demonstrating the, as we say here, 'bleedin' obvious' :) Of course the problem with "common sense" is that it's stated far too infrequently and therefore is not 'common' enough. Lot's of people have blogged about using ReadyBoost to "speed up" thier VM expierence. Yeah right!! It's of no help to ya whatsoever (when in the VM). Get yourself a nice fast hard disk and some real memory, oh and a few more cores or procs :) A trip back to the reality of...

SharePoint related books

I'm often asked about which books I'd recommend, especially when it comes to SharePoint development and the wide variance in quality of a lot of the web resources out there in this realm. To avoid repeating this stuff over and over again I'm going to post reasonably regularly here my thoughts - mini reviews if you like. Please bear in mind I will focus the reviews from a corporate development perspective - i.e. building for real solutions, deployed in real environments with proper topologies, security policies and so forth - rather than simply hacking things out that work, but could...

SharePoint Designer and Expression Web

Over the last month or so I've been asked numerous times by customers and partners about SharePoint Designer and Expression Web. These queries have mostly fallen into two buckets: 1. Isn't SharePoint Designer just FrontPage and therefore is it rubbish?Well, yes it is sort of the "new version" of FrontPage, but no it isn't rubbish. Really, it is rather good.Firstly, FrontPage got a bad rap for mangling your markup and inserting it's own stuff over the years - at one point that was very true and very annoying - but this wasn't true of the previous version (2003) and SharePoint...

Totally awesome

No more moaning regarding claims aware SharePoint please. What you need to know is right here. Configure Web SSO authentication by using ADFS (Office SharePoint Server). http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/61799f9a-da01-4c11-b930-52e5114324451033.mspx?mfr=true Oh and by the way, if you were considing a third party "SSO" solution for SharePoint.... ahh, no perhaps this is not the place for such a sentiment... :)

MOSS Navigation Deep Dive

Chris Richard has posted an excellent walk through of navigation in Office SharePoint Server, which is of particular interest to those building "publishing" sites, aka WCM sites. Chris covers the out of the box nav, and then goes into more detail on the Menu control, the PortalSiteMapDataSource and the PortalSiteMapProvider.

Download the MOSS SDK or the WSS SDK

Via Randall (http://blogs.msdn.com/randalli) We have officially made the released versions available (we refer to it internally as “RTM,” or released to manufacturing) of the MOSS SDK for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the WSS SDK for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0! · Download the MOSS SDK: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=6D94E307-67D9-41AC-B2D6-0074D6286FA9&displaylang=en · Download the WSS SDK: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=05e0dd12-8394-402b-8936-a07fe8afaffd&displaylang=en

Arpan on TechNet Radio

  Check out Arpan Shah (Group Product Manager) talking about SharePoint Technologies over on TechNet Radio:  http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/tnradio/archive/shah.mspx. He was also interviewed at TechNet NZ: http://www.techedlive.co.nz/upload/teched_angus_arpan.wma Source: What to look for in the next few months... Originally published on Sun, 07 Jan 2007 20:21:00 GMT by arpans

Is the file server dead?

It is a common misconception both among customers and those in the (ahem) consulting business that SharePoint Technologies can be deployed as a wholesale replacement for traditional file server based shares within an organization. Whilst moving to the new world of work can indeed dramatically reduce the amount of data stored (and used) in this manner (think personal drive or the common general dumping ground for all manner of tat) this perception is very dangerous and should be debunked at the earliest possible opportunity to save you from a world of hurt. So are SharePoint Technologies a suitable replacement for your existing File Shares?...

Global & Multi Farm SharePoint Deployments

Joel Oleson has a great entry on Global & Multi Farm deployments of SharePoint. He explains in simple terms the issues and in particular the details on SSPs over the WAN (a BIG customer issue) are essential to anyone looking at enterprise deployment planning of the 2007 products. http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2006/12/13/global-multi-farm-deployments.aspx  

SharePoint workflows in Visual Studio

Eilene Hao has posted an excellent series of articles over on the SharePoint Team Blog on building SharePoint workflows with Visual Studio. "So You Want to Develop Custom Workflows in Visual Studio..." - The Blog Series Developing Workflows in VS: Part 1 - Workflow Objects and A Crash Course on Mechanics Developing Workflows in VS: Part 2 - Planning Your Workflow: Two Things to Keep in Mind Developing Workflows in VS: Part 3 - Five Steps for Developing Your Workflow Developing Workflows...

What you need to know about enterprise deployment of SharePoint 2007

  Planning for Capacity Boundaries, Estimating Performance & Capacity Requirements, Additional Factors, and Tools  WSS: http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/library/0e13e879-0156-4e9f-b6d5-abddcf326d211033.mspx?mfr=true MOSS: http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/eb2493e8-e498-462a-ab5d-1b779529dc471033.mspx?mfr=true

How to configure Email Enabled Lists in MOSS 2007 RTM using Exchange 2003

Steve Smith has published a RTM update to his excellent white paper.

It's done!

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2006/11/16/announcing-the-rtw-of-wss-and-office-sharepoint-server-2007-standard-and-enterprise-evaluation.aspx

CMSWatch just don't get it.

So Tony and Janus over at cmswatch are hawking thier "report" on the upcoming Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, and once again bizarrely miss the point and are engaging in buzzword rubbish: "Microsoft has tried to go 'enterprise' in the impressive breadth of MOSS capabilities, but not necessarily in their depth and scalability" Yeah right - so MOSS doesn't have depth and can't scale - Oh well - perhaps these folks should maybe actually take the time to educate themselves on the product and hey even push the boat out - install it - to find out the truth.

Building tylerbutler.com, Part 1: Planning and Basic Branding

Tyler, a PM on the WCM team starts his excellent series on building his web site with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007's Web Content Management features. This excellent series follows his adventures porting his personal site onto MOSS. http://blogs.msdn.com/ecm/archive/2006/10/30/building-tylerbutler-com-part-1-planning-and-basic-branding.aspx  

Livin life... : Recycling Application Pools using WMI in IIS 6.0

It is very common for SharePoint developers to bounce IIS using the ubiquitous IISRESET command. However it is much quicker and more efficient to recycle the Application Pool hosting the application you are working on. Chris Adams has posted a a .js script to do this. Link to Livin life... : Recycling Application Pools using WMI in IIS 6.0 Of course some times, the whole of IIS needs bounced, :) but at least this make it less often.