Meet the Authors!

FREE COCKTAILS AND FINGER FOODS!

BOOK AND SOFTWARE GIVEAWAYS!

I'll be there along with Microsoft’s own Steve Resnick, Richard Crane, Chris Bowen, and Rob Walters, along with Vitale Caturano’s Mauro Cardarelli, will be on-hand to meet, chat, and sign their books.

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

Microsoft Technology Center

890 Winter Street, Waltham MA

4:00 – 7:00 PM

FEATURED BOOKS:

·         Essential SharePoint 2007 by Scott Jamison, Mauro Cardarelli, and  Susan Hanley

·         Essential Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) For .NET Framework 3.5 by Steve Resnick, Richard Crane, Chris Bowen, and Rob Walters

·         Accelerated SQL Server 2008 by Rob Walters, Michael Coles, Robin Dewson, Donald Farmer, Fabio Claudio Ferracchiati, and Robert Rae

Click Here to Register

Check out this great site that is designed to help .NET Developers to learn to build solutions with SharePoint: http://MSSharePointDeveloper.com

·         User Management

The site includes some great info, such as:

·         An Introductory Whitepaper

·         Benefits of SharePoint for Developers

·         A SharePoint VPC

·         Hosted MSDN Virtual Labs in C# and VB.NET

·         Video Interview with SharePoint MVPs

·         Screencasts

·         Web Casts with SharePoint MVPs

·         Quickstarts

·         Labcasts

·         Presentation Download

·         Hands on Labs Download

·         Additional Resource Links

Check it out!  http://MSSharePointDeveloper.com

I get a lot of questions regarding the use of SharePoint as a solutions platform. I personally think it's a great tool for many (but not all) applications. The reason?  SharePoint lends something that we like to call the "productivity tier," which is missing from most platform architecture stacks.  We're all used to the UI tier, application tier, and data tier.  Those three, however, fail to address a common requirement, which is being able to accomodate things like frequent changes to business processes, human workflows, tie-in with unstructured information, and data or visualization mashups that an end-user might want to create.  SharePoint can help with all of those scenarios.

So let's say you're going to use SharePoint as your platform. Then the main question I get is "give me a methodology for team-based SharePoint development that combines custom code that I write and content that will be managed inside of SharePoint".

To that end, here's a great doc:  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=65F21935-CBC0-4178-8C08-4C56F721C87D&displaylang=en

The document suggests implementation scenarios, tools, and development environments for SharePoint-based solutions.  It's quite handy.

Take a look and let me know what you think.

The SharePoint team has released post-SP1 hot-fix rollups for both WSS and MOSS. If you haven't installed SP1 yet, be sure to take some time to plan your deployment. And then review and install these rollups:

WSS Post-SP1 Rollup:  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941422
MOSS Post-SP1 Rollup: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941274

One of the most popular requests I see from customers regarding enterprise search is to be able to refine search results by category with a simple click.

The best free way to enhance MOSS 2007 search with this type of feature is via the free faceted search web parts out on codeplex: http://www.codeplex.com/FacetedSearch

Want to check it out?  Here's a live demo: http://www.wssdemo.com/Search/Pages/results.aspx?k=search. Check out the "Search Facets" section on the right.

The new 2.0 release encapsulates foundation changes in the design and code, that provides perfect balance between accuracy and performance.

Highlights:

• Multi-thread processing. 1st thread runs for up to 500 facets synchronously, while the 2nd thread is running asynchronously against up to ~30,000 facets
• Client side refresh (not AJAX) that updates only Facets web part w/o page refresh
• Web part connections to pass Facet settings to the Bread Crumbs
• Extended facet schema now supports:
• Facet icons. Default icon per Facet name complimented by an icon per Facet value
• Friendly names for facet values
• Exclusions. Allow exclude facet when values match pattern
• Built-in wild-card match, especially useful for exclusions
• Improved search syntax, added supports for sentences and quoted phrases

This release includes numerous fixes and complemented by extended documentation.

I just wanted to take a moment to remind everyone about the SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool.

Official description:  The SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool comprises models of both Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS) that allow you to explore the necessary infrastructure for either deployment based on usage requirements. This tool uses the System Center Capacity Planner 2007 (SCCP) as an engine to provide for data collection, visualization, simulation, and report writing. The tool can be used in pre-sales and feasibility studies of a deployment project to give you a rough estimate of hardware requirements.

The tool is able to consider variations in usage, size of installation, networking technology, scale, and availability.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb961988.aspx

According to Forrester, 2008 will be the year that Web 2.0 will make it big in the enterprise, with SharePoint being a huge part of it.

Check it out:  http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/013008-forrester-predictions.html

Many of you are planning to deploy SharePoint SP1, which is a good idea.  There are many, many useful updates and fixes.

For a detailed rundown, make sure you take a peek at this spreadsheet, which lists all of the 2007 Office System SP1 details: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/942390.

I'd also like to give you a few additional tips:

• Install SP1 on a test server to make sure all of your 3rd party and custom web parts and features still work.
• You can't go back. There's no uninstall. Back up everything.
• The farm is down during the upgrade. Plan accordingly.
• For MOSS 2007 servers, you need to install WSS 3.0 SP1 and MOSS 2007 SP1, in that order. At the completion of the WSS 3.0 SP1 installation, you will be prompted to run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard. DO NOT RUN IT YET. Instead, cancel it and then run the MOSS 2007 SP1 install. Then, manually start the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard.
• If you're installing SP1 on multiple servers, make sure you complete SP1 on all servers in the farm. If some of the servers have SP1 and some don't, your farm won't work.
• After you install SP1, more disk space is required for your query server or index server. If adequate disk space is not available, your query servers will slow down or stop. This issue occurs because the method used to merge indexes has been modified to significantly improve performance and reduce server downtime. However, this change increases the disk space required to perform a master merge. Previously, a maximum of 2 times the physical size of the index was required. The new maximum disk space requirement on a query server or index server is increased to 2.85 times the physical size of the index.
• If you are using the Content Editor Web Part on a MOSS 2007 Web server that offers languages other than the installed language, users will receive a script error when they use the Web Part. You can prevent this issue by installing the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Service Pack 1 Language Template Pack.
• You may get an error related to orphaned objects in one of your content databases. SharePoint requires a clean environment going forward. Here's some information on orphans: http://blogs.technet.com/corybu/archive/2007/05/31/sharepoint-orphans-explained.aspx

Happy upgrading!

If you're considering attending the SharePoint Conference 2008 (March 3-6 in Seattle), be sure to register today, since the early bird discount is about to end.

Register here: http://www.mssharepointconference.com

What is SharePointPedia?  SharePointPedia.com is a public-facing social computing application built on top of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. It's designed to enable users on the Web to find and share content about SharePoint and related stuff.

Anyone with a Windows Live ID can register and submit content recommendations, leave comments, and vote for the best content.

Be sure to check it out!

SharePoint content databases can be any size. There are no hard limits.  There - I've said it.

I hear customers and partners still claiming that there's a 50GB size limit. There is NOT. It's a guideline, not a rule. Let's say you want to store 1TB of data in SharePoint...no problem. You could have 2-3 content databases with 400GB each. Or one very large content database. SQL 2005 and MOSS 2007 would handle that fine.

So why the limit?  Managability. It's simply faster to restore smaller databases.

The 50GB myth comes from a practical limitation that administrators put on themselves; it's simpler and easier to manage a SharePoint environment when databases are small. Many customers I work with still don't have the hardware, people, and time that they need to have a real recovery plan.  Why?  Because in many cases, SharePoint grew out of pure business need and caught on like wildfire. I know large customers who are still running SharePoint like a departmental application. Once they realize that it's a business critical application - at enterprise scale - governance (along with funding) is added to the master plan.  Do you want to convince your manager or business lead (i.e. the one with the budget) that you need more resources?  Shameless plug: get them a copy of my book.  They will understand SharePoint better and realize the need for governance, planning, and better resources for IT.

One more thing: If you're looking for a better way to backup and restore SharePoint, especially for large databases, check out Data Protection Manager 2007. Why? It supports change-only, agent-based backups and single site/single file restore in WSS 3.0 & MOSS 2007.  I'll be doing some testing with large content databases over the next couple of weeks and sharing my results.

In the meantime, here are some great posts by Joel Oleson on database and site collection sizes:

Content Database Size:  http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2006/08/01/684691.aspx, http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2006/08/03/687995.aspx

Site Collection Sizing: http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/01/31/tips-on-site-collection-sizing.aspx

WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 do not need a fix to work with this year's DST changes.

WSS v2 and SPS 2003 need to install the update, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/924881.  The update includes an updated timezone.xml file.

I've gotten a lot of questions about SharePoint limitations lately. SharePoint can scale to hundreds of millions of documents and items and host terabytes of data.

This article (Plan for software boundaries) provides recommendations for acceptable performance: http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/6a13cd9f-4b44-40d6-85aa-c70a8e5c34fe1033.mspx?mfr=true.

I'll be discussing the myth of the 50GB limit on content databases in my next post.

Ever wish you could get some help on SharePoint but don't know where to turn?  If so, be sure to check out the MSDN SharePoint Community Forums: http://mssharepointforums.com.

I will be monitoring the forums along with MVPs, SharePoint product team members, and the community at large.

I've gotten some questions about using Office SharePoint Server 2007 to crawl websites that use Forms-based Authentication (FBA) or Cookie-based Authentication (CBA). SharePoint Server 2007 supports this functionality with a hotfix. (If you don't have the hotfix installed, only the logon page will be crawled.)

You can download the hotfix here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=B3C932A5-B3C0-4473-8EA5-62AE44190878&displaylang=en

Before you install the hotfix, be sure to review this KB article:  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934577/en-us

I've had several customers upgrade from SPS 2003 to MOSS 2007. A popular question is "Where did the Listings functionality go?"

In short, Portal Listings are gone in MOSS. Since listings were just an SPS-centric way of creating a link to something, it didn't make sense to have a non-standard way of doing this.  In an upgrade, they are converted into a List and Content Type called "Listing". The Portal Listings Web Part is replaced with a Content Query Web Part, which is much more flexible.  So no functionality is lost; it's actually more functionality than SPS.

Likewise, Areas are also gone...everything is simply a site.  They have been replaced by various publishing templates.

These two items (listings and areas) were SPS-centric and didn't make sense to carry forward.

I get a lot of questions about how Office 2003 will integrate with SharePoint 2007.  Your best source for this kind of information is the Microsoft Office Programs and SharePoint Products and Technologies Integration – Fair, Good, Better, Best whitepaper.  You can get it here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E0D05A69-F67B-4D37-961E-2DB3C4065CB9&displaylang=en

Office 2007 is by far the best client to use with SharePoint 2007.  I plan to blog with some additional information that isn't in the whitepaper.  Stay tuned.

Whew!  Just five days after the official June 15 release date, Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, Borders.com, and Bookpool.com have all sold out of our new SharePoint book! 

The good news: they'll all be getting more in shortly.

I've gotten a number of questions recently about adding tag clouds to SharePoint. Tag clouds are handy for visualizing content tags in sites, wikis, and blogs.

The Community Kit for SharePoint contains a great Tag Cloud web part...available here: http://www.codeplex.com/CKS/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=4820

Check out the entire Community Kit for SharePoint here: http://www.codeplex.com/CKS/. It's a set of best practices, templates, Web Parts, tools, and source code that enables the creation of a community website based on SharePoint technology.

I just read the first review I've seen for Essential SharePoint 2007.  I was blown away.

http://www.chapmanconsulting.ca/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=144

I'm glad to see that the non-traditional approach we took for this book did not go unnoticed. Thanks for the great review, Chris!

If you are at TechEd this week, be sure to stop by the bookstore between 11:30 and noon. Immediately after my session, I will be signing copies of my book Essential SharePoint 2007: Delivering High-Impact Collaboration at the conference bookstore.

If you're not at TechEd, you can get a great deal on the book here:  http://www.bookpool.com/sm/0321421744

If you're in Orlando for TechEd, be sure to attend my session entitled Composite Application Architectures: Using the 2007 Microsoft Office System.  

We'll discuss how the 2007 Office System isn't just a great set of products; it's an application platform that supports industry standards and provides key application and integration services via composite application architectures. I'll show some features in Office Enterprise 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 that enable great solutions as part of an overall composite application architecture. This session covers common architectural patterns and the core services provided by Office and SharePoint with two fun examples.

It's all happening tomorrow (6/7) at 9:45AM in Room N310 A.

One of the most-requested features of SharePoint for the current release was the addition of the recycle bin. This is great for users who accidentally delete a file. But what if the user deletes a site?  SharePoint still does not have a native recycle bin for sites.

One option is the Microsoft IT Site Delete Capture 1.0 tool available at codeplex.com, which captures sites that are deleted by end users and backs them up to disk using the event model. The restore would take place by an administrator.

I sometimes get asked if it's possible to customzie the MySite templates in MOSS 2007.  The answer is yes!  In fact, there are now nine MySite templates available for free from Microsoft here:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA102147321033.aspx

The Role-Based Templates for SharePoint My Sites are custom templates designed for Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the My Site functionality. They are tailored to address the unique needs and requirements of specific roles within an organization. Here's an example of the "marketing manager" template:

I'm a big fan of utilities.  Here's one I like: http://www.sharepointblogs.com/keutmann/archive/2007/01/27/18652.aspx