SharePoint Joel's SharePoint Land

Joel and Mo at SharePint (ok Ben is taking a peak too) [Flickr]

sharepointjoel — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:54:16 -0500

sharepointjoel posted a photo:

Brett Campbell's mustard for his steak [Flickr]

sharepointjoel — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:54:15 -0500

sharepointjoel posted a photo:

Joel Oleson and Bob Fox Advanced Water Ballet [Flickr]

sharepointjoel — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:54:13 -0500

sharepointjoel posted a photo:

Mike Watson and Ben Curry [Flickr]

sharepointjoel — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:54:11 -0500

sharepointjoel posted a photo:

These boys just got out of the fountain outside of Opa, the Greek Table Dancing place at TechEd 2008.

Bob Fox and the SharePoint Cowboy (Erick Shupps) [Flickr]

sharepointjoel — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:54:09 -0500

sharepointjoel posted a photo:

These guys love to have fun.

Public Folders and SharePoint Revisited

Joel Oleson — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 23:56:43 GMT

Body:

I expect most of you have seen the Exchange and SharePoint Team blogs both referring to Exchanges updated details.

I put my PF thoughts after the first set of guidance in a post titled "What about Public Folders vs. email enabled Lists in WSS?"

The most important detail is this new information from the Exchange team:

1) The Exchange team is going to support PF in the next version

2) Support is now going to be based on the 10 year support for the next version of Exchange

The table that was put together (which is most easily viewed on the SharePoint Team blog) is some decent guidance. What is unfortunate is I see a few comments that say they are no longer planning on migrating their PFs as a result. This is a bit confusing to me. Sure the Exchange team isn't pushing to kill PFs as fast as it had hoped, but it sure seems clear that the demise is still imminent and that they hope to transition these scenarios to SharePoint as customers can. Notice that the table clearly has all new scenarios being built on SharePoint rather than saying use PFs on certain scenarios. It's true you really can find some strong reasons to use PFs today, but no one is encouraging you to buy Exchange for the PFs and to build custom solutions on them. I think that's quite clear.

Migration is tough, I do encourage if you can do it successfully and have the budget, otherwise if you can at least stop the obvious file sharing that happens on PFs and limit the usage to archiving of distribution lists or other such scenarios that limit the scenarios where PFs shine.

If you were to ask me, I'd say the guidance hasn't really changed, the mercy of the Exchange team has simply been extended to help the large enterprise customers who haven't been able to map their scenarios to SharePoint. Most of them now do have SharePoint, and whether the migration happens in WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 or in SharePoint 14 is yet to be seen for some customers.

It's culture and adoption that will drive it, but by having two solutions for the same scenarios can add confusion. Some overlap is understandable, but my guidance would be to limit the scenarios so you can be clear with your users what PFs are for and what the SharePoint platform is for. Today I personally wouldn't be encouraging more proliferation of PFs, I'd be limiting the scenarios and seriously considering charge back and business justification so I knew how they are being used, so I could track the scenarios with SharePoint 14 and making sure MS knew exactly what my PFs were being used for.

Category: Governance

Published: 4/15/2008 4:37 PM

BlogTitleForUrl: Public Folder and SharePoint Guidance Revisited

Categories: Governance

Browse Strategies and Site Directory

Joel Oleson — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 18:45:17 GMT

Body:

Now that I'm not at MS I can be a bit more candid about things I like and don't like, I hope some of that came through in my previous blogs anyway, but want to let you know I have been honest, but maybe not brutally honest unless you were in my Good Bad Ugly sessions at TechReady5 and TechReady6 (internal technical readiness conferences).

The site directory out of the box is cute. It fits the really small environments out of the box, but for even some medium environments a company needs to really think about a browse strategy for getting people to their sites.

What doesn't work with Site Directory

I. All sites are added automatically generating at least a few problems.

1. Sites that are empty are added

2. Users that add their own descriptions can put some sites over the top in terms of scope. Data may not be relevant.

3. If you click on a site you more than half the time will not have access. How many times does it take to make you not want to use the site directory? Sites are not security trimmed.

4. Sites may no longer exist (some features in MOSS 2007 can help you take care of this one at least.)

What you need...

1. Sites that are useful and interesting... not old, not crusty, not empty, not shallow...

2. Sites that are security trimmed or are open

3. Categorizations need to be useful and easy to navigate and not empty nodes (not too deep)

MSWeb is one example of an interesting evolution of a site directory and browse strategy for the Intranet.

1. First before it was even SharePoint there was a list of sites that was very groomed and managed. People were able to find the sites that were approved, but you couldn't find data that wasn't exposed. Even search was only of the known universe.

Result... a site directory of the known sites that was easy to use, but was not automatic and was managed.

2. Then there was SharePoint 2003, I was anxious to see a site directory of all the sites at Microsoft. An all inclusive directory of all sites allowing it to expose all those hidden gems of data across the company. Search as well, was looking at true enterprise search or search of data across the company in all web based repositories including some limited file shares and public folders. A site creation UI was designed to dump all sites into the site directory and search would be based on a dump of all of these sites and the site directory.

Result: A huge site directory that would make you proud, except in SPS 2003 we had all sorts of empty sites, deleted sites, and irrelevant sites. Really you couldn't find anything you were looking for, but the categories looked very impressive.

3. The next generation site directory would be scrubbed the hundreds of thousands of sites would be seen as irrelevant for the average person. If they needed something out of an obscure site, then they would either know the URL or they could search for it. This new directory would go back to the roots and start with the known universe. If you're looking for the SharePoint Team, there's one public facing SharePoint site for that team and so on. This more static, but managed list would be the stategy. No more would it be a full list of all sites. It would be open and official sites... not really a lot of collab sites, but more portal or WCM type sites.

Result: People started returning to using the site directory, but search really took over as the standard for finding data. Browse took a back seat. Browse still isn't very big at MS, but there is some promise that these issues of manually managing such a list could provide promise for the future.

Category: Governance

Published: 4/18/2008 11:25 AM

BlogTitleForUrl: Browse_Strategy_Site_Directory

Categories: Deployment;Design

New SharePoint Admin and Management Tools

Joel Oleson — Thu, 01 May 2008 17:16:13 GMT

Body:

I hope you saw the posting on the SharePoint Team blog, or Zach's post on the SharePoint Admin Toolkit.

This is one of a few Admin Tools that really help you batch changes. This one appears to really be focused on batch changing site collections. LOVE IT. Thanks Zach, it's about time :) Just kidding. I'm sure we'll see more out of this Admin toolkit and we love what you're doing so keep it up.

SharePoint Admin Toolkit

Batch Site Manager - Batch Locks, Moves, and Deletes for site collections in a nice GUI (100 at a time).

UpdateAlert - (STSADM extension) allows you to update alerts when your AAMs change (alternate access mappings or zones).

I looked at the white paper and highly recommend it for IT Pros. Even if you don't use the tool or don't plan to, I was impressed by some good info on reference information on related STSADM commands with good resources related to the topics of Site Deletes, Moves, and Locks. Move is very misunderstood. This move is all about safely moving site collections between databases using timer jobs. Very cool. Don't forget the commands that came in SP1 related to the STSADM command mergecontentdbs. Good info there as well. If you aren't at that stage, it's still a good reference... if you're large you will eventually need to know this info.

Microsoft SAT SharePoint Cross Site Configurator 1.0 - For standardization and consistency of master pages, auditing, content types and more. What else do you want to use it for?

I love free tools, but sometimes you need to look for tools where you can even do more and get support. Here's some suggestions MOST of which are very NEW. Even if you've looked, I suggest you look again at these released/supported tools.

DeliverPoint: Permissions is a new tool focused on user security and permissions in SharePoint. It's also a batch focused tool for making changes very pinpointed or in larger groups. Moving, Deleting, Searching for User or Object permissions, and Cleanup/Dead Account Removal. There's a 14 day trial download.

AvePoint DocAve 4.5 SharePoint Administrator - Centralized multi farm administration of configuration. "propagate configuration and security permissions to web applications, sites, folders, and lists in bulk, resulting in quicker time-to-value of each update." I got a demo of this from TJ in Dubai. It was very impressive and I'd take a second look if you have or haven't seen it. There's an eval copy on their site.

Quest Site Administrator - reporting on storage, usage, manage quotas and locks and enforce configuration and settings in "policies" in a centralized UI. (Poorly named, it isn't just site level managment it's more farm wide management of sites.)

iDevFactory Universal SharePoint Manager - Centralized management UI exposing permissions, security, and easy console for managing settings and configuration.

Category: Management

Published: 5/1/2008 9:44 AM

BlogTitleForUrl: new-sharepoint-admin-and-management-tools

Categories: SharePoint;Security;Governance;Management

Register for SharePoint Summer Camp

Joel Oleson — Thu, 15 May 2008 22:20:20 GMT

Body:

A special once in a lifetime event is happening this summer. Shane Young and I are joining forces to bring you a special variation of SharePoint Professional Administration 401 we're currently calling "The SharePoint Administrators Survival Camp" with much more depth and much more detail. We've revamped the agenda and added a day. We're hoping to attract the real die hard SharePoint Admins that want to come and rub shoulders with us, and have real meaty conversations around disaster recovery, authentication, and share real world troubleshooting horror and success stories with us around the camp fire. Ok, maybe no campfire, just the fire from the Mirage. Yes, we're going to do this amazing event in Las Vegas, July 14-18, 2008.

I wanted you to hear it here first. I am partnering up with the Ted Pattison Group to develop and deliver some training. The TPG website hasn't yet been updated with this info, but I'll add the link here when it does become available. I'm sure it will fill fast.

I bet they'd let you get on a pre-sales list... (In addition, I noticed coupons on the home page for $400 discounts, not sure how long those will be there.)

1(866) 475-4440

Registration Now Open for SharePoint Survival Camp for Admins.

info@TedPattison.net

I'll ask for forgiveness later. More details to come.

Joel

Category: Training

Published: 5/15/2008 3:20 PM

BlogTitleForUrl: register-for-sharepoint-summer-camp-1

Categories: SharePoint

Microsoft Operations Framework 4.0 (MOF v4) is important to SharePoint

Joel Oleson — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 06:42:08 GMT

Body:

I don't know how many of you have followed the exciting world of Operations Frameworks from ITIL to MOF to MSF and even ISO 20000. When I found the forums I searched for SharePoint and came up with no results. Not a lot of content on operations content for SharePoint unfortunately. A lot of people focused on the PLAN portion, but not a lot on Manage and Operate.

So, one thing I wanted to gauge interest in is Operations Frameworks, specifically MOF v4 and SharePoint. Now that I'm working on doing product management for Nintex Reporting, I was thinking... a cool topic would be how to manage your Operations with various reporting needs with an obvious focus on both what you get with SharePoint reports, the Assessment tool (more below), PerformancePoint (or the old Business Score Card Manager) and with Nintex Reporting 2008.

As I look around the wheel there are obviously a lot of processes and policies that simply need to be put into place, but some examples of real world uses of reporting for example are around "Reliability, Operational Health, and Compliance." Taking each of these individually when you look at reliability there are performance counters that capture system uptime. Those perf counters could be gathered with the performance collector, or captured and viewed in perfmon. The Operational Health could be a special dashboard that lists various things like Consumption of the following... % disk, % CPU, Memory Available and so on. Compliance is something that would also need either a custom dashboard or web parts assembled to track specific document consumption or tracking policies.

What you'll notice in the diagram below with MOF v4 they have combined MSF with MOF 3.0. They've also simplified some of the service management functions.

Here's a great summary of what MOF is from the IT library on TechNet referenced below... "The goal of MOF is to provide guidance to IT organizations to help them create, operate, and support IT services while ensuring that the investment in IT delivers expected business value at an acceptable level of risk.

MOF’s purpose is to create an environment where business and IT can work together toward operational maturity, using a proactive model that defines processes and standard procedures to gain efficiency and effectiveness. MOF promotes a logical approach to decision-making and communication and to the planning, deployment, and support of IT services."

MOF IT Library

Get the Microsoft Operations Framework 4.0

MOF Team Blog Announcement

MOF v4 Diagram by Microsoft (listed on blog and in MOF library)

I would like to give you some concrete examples of how MOF can be used with SharePoint.

From the Manage quadrant. Deliverables, purposes taken from MOF documentation.

Governance, Risk, and Compliance
Deliverable: IT objectives achieved, change and risk managed and documented
IT services are seamlessly matched to business strategy and objectives

Purpose: Support, sustain, and grow the organization while managing risks and constraints
Example: SharePoint policy for customization allows 10 people in the corporation to manage sites with SharePoint Designer thus mitigating IT risk and providing business strategy for designs and business objectives. Plan is support only those people trained to be allowed to use it for simple workflows and master page design which is managed centrally. More common workflows and business processes would use Nintex Workflow a tool which doesn't require any client side requirements or use of the all too powerful SharePoint Designer as it can manage it's workflows and reports in the web UI.

Change and Configuration
Deliverable: Known configurations and predictable adaptations
IT services are predictable, reliable, and trustworthy

Purpose: Ensure that changes are planned, that unplanned changes are minimal, and that IT services are robust
Example: SharePoint Deployment team decides they need a change advisory board for their change management process. Certain big changes including service packs would be required to go through proper testing and all custom code would be rolled into SharePoint solutions deployment packages and go through proper testing to ensure security trust levels (CAS) and GAC usage was set an appropriate level based on what was needed. Thus ensure predictable and tested results introduced during planned downtime with proper verification.

Team
Deliverable: Clear accountabilities, roles, and work assignments
IT solutions are delivered within specified constraints, with no unplanned service degradation

Purpose: Agile, flexible, and scalable teams doing required work
Service operation that is trusted by the business
Example: How do you have clear roles in SharePoint? You have separate Dev teams from Ops or production teams. These teams would have clear roles. Using RACI a simple spreadsheet is used to identify what actions are taken during deployment and a list of maintenance tasks in SharePoint to determine who needs to perform the work, who is responsible, accountable, consulted and informed... Obviously you need to have the right skin in the game with everyone agreeing to these responsibilities so you know who to talk to if there's a problem and to manage appropriate risk when something unexpected (like a required hotfix or something more odd like out of memory issues) is introduced.

Should I put together a whole whitepaper on the topic? I am working with Nicola Young and John Ross on a Planning and Governance Course and you'll definitely see this type of content plus exercises in this class.

Loved these examples and looking for some templates? I found some good starts...

IT pros can choose the Operations Framework tools and templates also referred to as MOF Job Aids that are likely to be most useful given the task at hand. Here is a list of what is available within each package:

Manage
- Change Management Forward Schedule Template
- Request for Change Template
- Risk Template Tool
Plan
- Operating Level Agreement Template
- Operations Level Agreement
- Privacy Policy Sample
- Service Level Agreement Template
- SIP Service Catalog Sample
Deliver
- Functional Specification
- Migration Plan
- Site Deployment Project Plan
- Test Cases Workbook
- Test Plan
- Test Specification
- Training Plan
- Vision Scope
Operate
- Incident Management Ticket Template
- Operations and Services Description Template

Look for the following packages

MOF Job Aids - Deliver.zip, MOF Job Aids - Manage.zip, MOF Job Aids - Operate.zip, MOF Job Aids - Plan.zip

I think we need to each send feedback to mof@microsoft.com to let them know we'd like SharePoint specific templates. Be sure to let this alias know if you like those job aids or if they don't work. Why is it all about desktop and Vista? Why not some Exchange or SharePoint?

If you are confused about MSF, MOF, and ITIL in continuous improvement there is a decent diagram from MOF solution accelerator article that shows the relationships and talks about how they come together.

When I was looking at the MOF v4 content I came across another tool that I worked on when I was at MS. The Asset inventory tool is about discovering what SharePoint Servers are out there. Looks like it is still in beta since February, which is when I think I saw it last. I mention this tool in this context 'cause I do think it's a very early step in MOF. You need to know what you have before you can start to optimize it or a late step if you're considering retiring the service or servers. Here's a bit of info from the TechNet resource on this solution accelerator:

The main purpose of the SharePoint Asset Inventory Tool is to give the IT administrator answers to a number of important questions through the generation of reports. These reports include information on:

The servers running some version of SharePoint.
The installed SharePoint features.
The total number of SharePoint sites on each server.
The total number of documents on each server.
The total number of documents grouped by extension on each server.
The time since the SharePoint assets in each server were last modified.
The customized SharePoint sites and items on each server.
The number of SharePoint lists on each server, grouped by the number of items on each list.

Finally, if you're in my TechEd Governance session next week, you'll see a slide on this with some more emphasis about how important operations frameworks are to deployment success.

Category: Governance

Published: 6/3/2008 11:42 PM

BlogTitleForUrl: microsoft-operations-framework-4-0-mof-v4-is-important-to-sharepoint

Categories: Governance;SharePoint;Management

SharePoint Reporting - What's Up!

Joel Oleson — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:36:34 GMT

Body:

Mike Watson (SharePoint Technology Architect at Microsoft) and I recently did a fun "TechEd Online" video recording on the current state of SharePoint Reporting. You can see his write up on SharePoint Reporting on his blog.

We started with a description and conversation of out of the box features. Then we moved to existing third party solutions and custom reporting and finally moved to Nintex Reporting 2008 which launched at TechEd.

We discussed the challenges as well as the opportunities and tried to approach it from an unbiased perspective on the current state. I personally enjoyed the conversation slash interview type conversation. Mike later said we should do this more often on various topics. You'll have to let me know if you like it and if you like the format. If the right kind interest was there, we could put together some type of show. That would be fun.

Well, check out the streaming video...

SharePoint Reporting - What's Up?!!!

Category: Reporting

Published: 7/3/2008 1:26 PM

Categories: Reporting;TechEd2008;Conference

Congrats to the kid for MVP and Top 10 Blog!

Joel Oleson — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 10:08:09 GMT

Body:

The Kid, Vincent Rothwell, a very respected developer/architect in the UK, was recently recognized for community involvement and giving back and awarded the highly respected SharePoint MVP award. Vincent quite a few weeks ago pinged me about http://blog.thekid.me.uk Technorati rating and WOW it's at #9 on my list, so I had to temporarily astrisk out the SPD one (so as not to penalize everyone else for now). I know I've been out to the blog a few times reading articles through search and will definitely have to add it to my RSS subscriptions.

That SharePoint Top 100 blogs list was designed to help people know what established SharePoint blogs were the best, and I happened to have left off a Top 10 blog, for this I appologize. It did pass the one week notification deadline, but I was notified quite a few weeks ago and just now had a chance to actually do it. Given it's 1am in Hawaii, and I'm kind of on vacation, so I hope Vincent will forgive me.

So many MVPs on that list, and so many developers. Interesting. More on what I learned from that list later. I'd be interested to hear what others think should happen with the future of SharePoint blogging. I do think that it's only going to get better and the technology will allow us to better take advantage of the content in blogs, so keep it up!

Joel

Category: Blog

Published: 7/3/2008 3:00 AM

Categories: Blog