SPSFAQ

Requirements for SharePoint 2010

2009-05-13T11:16:00.002+01:00

Better to know the requirements for sharePoint 2010 now guys!

SharePoint Server 2010 will be 64-bit only.
SharePoint Server 2010 will require 64-bit Windows Server 2008 or 64-bit Windows Server 2008 R2.
SharePoint Server 2010 will require 64-bit SQL Server 2008 or 64-bit SQL Server 2005.

Browsers:

Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.x. running on Windows Operating Systems.�
In addition we�re planning on an increased level of compatibility with Firefox 3.x and Safari 3.x on non-Windows Operating Systems.
Due to this focus Internet Explorer 6 will not be a supported browser for SharePoint Server 2010.

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/07/announcing-sharepoint-server-2010-preliminary-system-requirements.aspx

The question is, how will people build their dev/test environments? These are high specs for those!

Office SP2 including SharePoint Service Pack out 28th April

2009-04-23T16:10:00.004+01:00

Details of the Office Service Pack 2 are here:

http://blogs.technet.com/office_sustained_engineering/archive/2009/04/16/service-pack-2-for-the-2007-microsoft-office-system-due-to-ship-april-28th.aspx

Download links:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=b7816d90-5fc6-4347-89b0-a80deb27a082

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=79bada82-c13f-44c1-bdc1-d0447337051b

Here's the SharePoint related bits:

"Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP2 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server SP2 include fixes and enhancements designed to improve performance, availability, and stability in your server farms. SP2 provides the groundwork for future major releases of SharePoint Products and Technologies.

An STSADM command line that scans your server farm to establish whether it is ready for upgrade to the next version of SharePoint and provides feedback and best practice recommendations on your current environment.
SP2 offers support for a broader range of Web browsers."

More here:

http://gcn.com/articles/2009/04/21/service-pack-office-2007.aspx

Note the mention of the next version of SharePoint 2010, a scan to see if you will be compatable with the next version. Not long now folks, 2009 is going fast!

Welcome Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.

2009-04-15T18:47:00.003+01:00

The new name for the next version of SharePoint is oficially Microsoft SharePoint 2010, details here http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/Apr09/04-15Office2010.mspx

SharePoint Designer 2007 now Free!

2009-04-02T08:14:00.002+01:00

SharePoint Designer 2007 is now free, here is the download link:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=baa3ad86-bfc1-4bd4-9812-d9e710d44f42

On one hand this is great, since is shows MS wants to invest more in giving users more power on the SharePoint platform. But this putting more power in the hands of users takes it away from us specialists and developers. But that is something we will have to accept.

SharePoint is a success because it gives users so much more freedom to share and create their own structures and content via the web, now they will have the freedom to extend and develop their sites. If they mess things up, there is still the wonderful "reset to site definition" button :-) And you still need admin rights to install it, so not everyone in your organisation will be able to download it and start hacking away at your lovely "Out of the Box" SharePoint Farm.

10 New SharePoint Themes.

2009-03-21T02:08:00.003Z

You can get the ten new SharePoint themes here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=0a87658f-20b8-4dcc-ad7a-09ad22641f3a

Keep your SharePoint up to date!

2009-03-10T17:49:00.001Z

There are a ton of new updates here for SharePoint:

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/03/09/uber-packages-of-february-cumulative-update-are-ready.aspx

I am a Twit(erer)

2009-03-04T14:16:00.001Z

I resisted as long as I could, but now I see the charm of Twitter, so quick and easy! http://twitter.com/stephencummins The only thing I worry about is I am already tracking so many people (about 50) that I barely get to read about 10 a day. But this may kill off my blogging after 8 years. Time will tell I guess.

SharePoint Online and jQuery

2009-02-24T07:39:00.002Z

SharePoint going online is, I think a great idea. There are cost savings of course, and it makes capacity planning easier, and working out licencing, but there is also the fact that more companies need to access their SharePoint from all over the world, and distributed architectures can be complex and costly. Latency can mess up the user experience and make updating the search index slow. But with a web-based model, those issues shrink because everything is on the internet.

The problem with SharePoint Online is what do you do if you want more than the plain vanilla SharePoint? If someone else owns the hardware and software, they do not want to give you permission to install your own code on their machines. So what is the middle ground? I think the potential of client-side scripting is the answer. jQuery is a javascript platform that allows for a range of cool things to be done that are easy to add, update, version control, test and deploy. Here is some more detail: http://www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=178

So in the future, SharePoint will be out-of-the-box, but companies will be able to change the look and functionality completely without ever making a change on the server, and this will make a world where all our software is "in the cloud" one step closer.

You can have it all!

2009-02-04T12:59:00.002Z

OK, you can't really have it all, but you can have SharePoint as your front end and 3rd party repositores as the back end like Documentum and Interwoven, in other words, the content in the other systems, but all the benefits of SharePoint too like workflows, task lists, and extensible metadata.

The details are here:�http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd440954.aspx

There is also a Code Gallery project on how to do it:�http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/spextcontent

Adjusting the maximum file upload size in MOSS

2009-02-02T09:36:00.006Z

The default maximum file upload size for MOSS is 50MB, with 2GB being the limit imposed by SQL Server. In some cases, like with AutoCAD because of the fact that files are associated with each other, or with large graphic files, I would say stick to a file share, it will be faster and cheaper, but if you do need to store everything in MOSS, here are the settings you need to change:
Changing the maximum file upload size seem simply a matter of changing the following setting in central admin: Central Administration > Application Management > Web Application General Settings

However, this only applied to files uploaded to Libraries, not to attachments to List items, this has to be edited in the web.config

Details of why here:
http://www.synergyonline.com/blog/blog-moss/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=8
Via STSADM, you can also change the value:
stsadm -o setproperty -propertyname max-file-post-size -propertyvalue 2000 -url http://your_moss_server/
Finally, there is the issue for search crawling larger files, this is adjusted via Central Admin and the registry, (I assume) on the indexing server:
http://admincompanion.mindsharp.com/SharePoint%20Server%202007%20Administrators%20Companion%20Wi/Crawling%20Details.aspx

Then, IIS may need adjustment:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;925083

In the end, I would say test and test again, but this information should help.

A great free tool for modeling your SharePoint environment.

2009-01-30T15:34:00.004Z

This free tool from Microsoft is for modeling your SharePoint hardware architecture, it is really useful as it gives you some ideas as what to look for when designing this, I'm even running it on Vista, so there is no need to have SharePoint installed somewhere to use it:

http://www.chandima.net/Blog/archive/2008/02/12/capacity-planning-tool-for-sharepoint-and-platform-hygiene.aspx

Central Admin on mre than one server in your farm.

2009-01-14T09:12:00.003Z

There is a great post on Spence Harbar's blog on how to deal with the problem that the SharePoint Central Administration Site only exists on one server, so if that server goes down, you have no way to administer your MOSS farm. The solution is to have it on more than one, and this post explains how, thanks Spence! http://www.harbar.net/articles/spca.aspx

64bit ifilter for PDFs from Adobe released.

2008-12-11T19:34:00.002Z

Here is the link to the 64bit ifilter for PDFs from Adobe. I've heard of others who have tested it and it works, and it is free so many will choose it over the foxit option even if Adobe's is slower.

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4025

Keeping up with the SharePoint world

2008-11-26T10:20:00.002Z

There is so much new information out there, it is hard to keep up and keep focused on what is important, but podcasts offer a new way to get information when you're driving, on the bus or whatever. So take a look at http://sharepointpodshow.com/ They are on itunes too, so you can subscribe that way if you so choose.

SharePoint: Know the limits.

2008-10-13T10:40:00.005+01:00

Here are a few limits you should know about when planning your SharePoint deployment:

The 2,000 rule: because stored procedure calls to SQL Server slow down as you reach 2,000 items, have less than that in a view on a List. Less than 200 ideally to have optimum performance.

Have less than 2000 AD users or groups in a SharePoint Group for the same reason. An AD group in a SharePoint group counts as one item, but the first time a user edits content in a site collection, they are added to the user list for that site collection. The best way to avoid this problem is to have lots of site collections so the users and groups are more spread out.

Indexing an item with about 1,000 entries on it's ACL (access control list) will fail. The limit is 64k for the ACL of any item being crawled, on the file system or in SharePoint. Avoid this by assigning access via AD groups rather than directly.

Any user can only be in 1024 AD groups. To avoid this, you could put the users in SharePoint groups if you think this limit might be reached.

The bottom line is you can have as many readers as you like on SharePoint site collections as you like, but if you get to between 1,500 and 2,000 contributors (to reach that 64k limit) you will get errors. Note these are Windows limits that SharePoint is dependent on since it is built on Windows. SQL adds the performance limits for views on lists.

These points are examined in more detail here as well as linking to details of the issues in MS KB articles: http://weblogs.asp.net/erobillard/archive/2008/09/11/sharepoint-security-hard-limits-and-recommended-practices.aspx thanks Eli!

Goodbye Patrick

2008-10-06T13:19:00.002+01:00

Patrick Tessighem, a fellow SharePoint MVP, died at the beginning of September. It has been hardest for his family, but the SharePoint community is small and his loss has affected us all. Goodbye Patrick, rest in peace.

Desiging a SharePoint Information Architecture

2008-10-06T13:15:00.002+01:00

Here's a good post on the SharePoint team blog that helps give a template and set of principles for designing a SharePoint taxonomy:�http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/04/09/investing-in-logical-architecture-design-samples.aspx

Want a quick try of MOSS?

2008-10-06T10:53:00.002+01:00

You can download a VPC here:�http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=67f93dcb-ada8-4db5-a47b-df17e14b2c74&displaylang=en&tm

It'll work for 30 days, needs 10Gb of space, 1Gb of RAM and Virtual server 2005 R2 to run.

Things just got better for apps like SharePoint

2008-09-03T10:53:00.004+01:00

Lots of companies have announced new browsers this week, Mozilla (info on Ubiquity), Google (link to the comic about Chrome) and Microsoft (info on accellerators and web slices).

They all reflect the fact that the browser needs to move with the times, the internet is not the same as it was 10 years ago, better browsers will mean all kinds of new alternatives for users of the SharePoint platform in the future. Better integration of data, better sharing of credentials, better search and navigation.

I've added a few more FAQs, and updated the install of a MOSS farm one:

SPSFAQ0303176 - How can I do realtime monitoring of diagnostic logging?
SPSFAQ020321 - How do I install a MOSS 2007 server farm?
SPSFAQ010359 - what Browsers is SharePoint compatable with and what features will work?

What's between Sex and Shopping? SharePoint!

2008-08-19T15:42:00.003+01:00

Yes, between Sex and Shopping is SharePoint.

Have a look if you don't believe me: http://alltop.com/

Another sign how how mainstream SharePoint has become. But what is interesting is it is now more than a technology, or platform, or application. It is a topic of interest, a pursuit, some thing that belongs in a list between Sex and Shopping. That's it, SharePoint has officially Made It.

Update to SharePoint

2008-07-16T09:34:00.003+01:00

The new update MS has posted here: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/07/15/announcing-availability-of-infrastructure-updates.aspx is designed to fix the may problems with Content Deployment, as well as adding the federated search functionality, and a few other bug fixes. It is recommended everyone install it, so go to it!

Actually, there's a new blog now that I suppose replaces what Joel used to do:http://blogs.technet.com/tothesharepoint/

Supporting SharePoint in your Org.

2008-06-11T16:28:00.002+01:00

Support in your organisation should have the following training or knowledge, I've divided support into three levels:

Level 1 Support
1. Understand the main content management concepts in SharePoint.
These are check in/out, version control (even though it is not enabled), approval/feedback workflows and how to recover deleted items from the recycle bin.
2. Understand the main structural terminology in SharePoint
These are Document Libraries, Lists, Columns and Views

There are relevant free online courses here like �SharePoint Document Libraries 1: Introduction to Sharing Files�

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/training/CR102146081033.aspx?stt=1

Level 2 Support
Understand the concepts of access management in SharePoint
These are SharePoint Groups and Roles, inheritance, item level permissions and the principle of least privilege.
Understand the broader structural concepts in SharePoint
These include Site Collections, Quotas, Subsites, the Site collection Recyle bin.

Training is available here, not free, but a good course: https://www.microsoftelearning.com/eLearning/courseDetail.aspx?courseId=74137

Level 3 Support
This level requires knowledge of the SharePoint platform as a whole:

Manage SharePoint operations in MOSS 2007 by configuring farm topology and services, global configuration options, and SSO.
Describe the global settings available for a Web application, considerations for managing the session state for SSPs, and the best practices for managing site collections.
Describe user profiles, user profile properties, profile policies, and global settings and solutions offered by a My Sites site in MOSS 2007.
Configure audiences to target content in MOSS 2007.
Configure search and indexing in MOSS 2007 by defining the search service settings and managing the search experience for end users.

The primary function will be installing patches and service packs, management of the database back end will be performed by the SQL Server Admin.

Third party companies should manage the code they developed and ensure it stays compatible with SharePoint as Microsoft adds patches.

There is some advanced training here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc299032.aspx

Free online training is available here for reference. This would have to be installed on a SharePoint server and requires SQL Server 2005, but it does provide a training portal in SharePoint for reference via SharePoint itself.: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=673DC932-626A-4E59-9DCA-16D685600A51&displaylang=en

Adding Podcasting functionality to SharePoint.

2008-06-11T13:54:00.004+01:00

Regarding adding podcasting functionality to SharePoint, I think this will happen more as people see the advantages. You can record meetings for people to play back in the car or the gym. I mean just audio here of course! It would also be useful to video meetings or presentations and then allow people to sync them via a device with podcasting functionality like my Zune.

http://blogs.tamtam.nl/mart/PodcastingKitForSharePointPKS.aspx

Quick updates, but useful.

2008-06-05T15:23:00.002+01:00

Here are two useful links I think for the start of a SharePoint implementation

SPSFAQ010358 - Where can I see some other sites using MOSS?

This gives you ideas about what kinds of designs are possible and what people are using MOSS for.

And how to install MOSS in a farm:

SPSFAQ020321 - How do I install a MOSS 2007 server farm?

Never mind SharePoint, this is Social Networking!

2008-06-02T20:58:00.002+01:00

You have to see this!

Hard not the think of the Jedi council when watching this, but in the end, seeing and hearing the person you are communicating is the essence of social networking. Metcalfe's Law was one I had not heard of, but very true of any network.

http://www.musion.co.uk/Cisco_TelePresence.html