Ian's SharePoint Blog

New SharePoint 2010 content for download

Ian Morrish — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 08:01:00 GMT

New SharePoint 2010 content on the Microsoft download site.

SharePoint 2010: Developer Platform White Paper

This white paper provides an overview of the SharePoint 2010 Developer Platform for ASP.NET developers.

SharePoint 2010: SharePoint Developer Platform Wall Poster

The SharePoint 2010 Developer Platform wall poster (PDF format) shows a view of the SharePoint 2010 developer tools, community ecosystem, execution environment, Sharepoint Server 2010 workloads, and target application types. The poster is intended to be printed at 24 inches x 36 inches (61 centimeters x 91 centimeters).

SharePoint 2010: Getting Started with Development on SharePoint 2010: Hands on Labs in C# and Visual Basic

Use these 10 hands-on lab manuals for SharePoint 2010 to get started learning SharePoint 2010 development.

SharePoint 2010: Developer and IT Professional Learning Plan

This document provides information to help developers and IT professionals learn Microsoft SharePoint 2010.

SharePoint 2010: Professional Developer Evaluation Guide and Walkthroughs

The SharePoint 2010 developer evaluation guide describes the SharePoint 2010 developer platform, including walkthroughs of some of the new capabilities for developers.

Enterprise Search Planning for SharePoint Server 2010

This model describes primary architecture design decisions for search environments.

Design Search for SharePoint Server 2010

This model describes the steps to determine a basic design for a SharePoint Server 2010 search architecture.

SharePoint Server 2010 Search Architecture

This model describes the physical and logical architecture components of the search system.

Getting started with BI in SharePoint Server 2010

Discusses the business intelligence tools available in SharePoint Server 2010

SharePoint Server 2010 Evaluation Guide

Introduction and overview of SharePoint Server 2010 for IT pros.

SharePoint Enterprise Search

Compares and contrasts search technologies in SharePoint 2010 Products

Topologies for SharePoint Server 2010

Describes common ways to build and scale farm topologies, including planning which servers to start services on.

Hosting Environments for SharePoint 2010 Products

Summarizes the support for hosting environments and illustrates common hosting architectures.

Services in SharePoint Products 2010

Describes and illustrates the services architecture, including and common ways to deploy services in your overall solution design.

Cross-farm Services in SharePoint 2010 Products

Illustrates how to deploy services across farms to provide centralized administration of services.

Business Connectivity Services poster

Microsoft Business Connectivity Services enable users to interact with external data by using SharePoint lists and Microsoft Office 2010.

Upgrade planning poster

Describes requirements and considerations for planning to upgrade to SharePoint Server 2010

Upgrading services poster

You need to give special consideration to the issues involved when you upgrade services from the previous version of SharePoint Server.

Upgrade testing poster

To help ensure a smooth transition to SharePoint Server 2010, perform a trial upgrade to find issues likely to surface during the actual process.

Upgrade approaches poster

This model describes the three basic approaches to upgrading to SharePoint Server 2010: in-place, database attach, or a hybrid of the two.

Forefront Protection 2010 for SharePoint Beta 2

Microsoft Forefront Protection 2010 for SharePoint prevents users from uploading or downloading documents containing malware, out-policy content, or sensitive information to SharePoint libraries.

Microsoft Forefront Server Security 2010 Privacy Statement

This document describes the privacy policy for Microsoft Forefront Security 2010 for Exchange and Microsoft Forefront Security 2010 for SharePoint.

Microsoft Online Services 2010 CTP Help

Microsoft Online Services 2010 CTP Help is a small set of documents that provide basic "Get Started" information for the July 2009 Community Technology Preview of Microsoft Online Services 2010.

SharePoint Products and Technologies: 2010 (Technical Preview) Developer Documentation

This download provides an early technical preview of the SharePoint Products and Technologies: 2010 developer documentation.

Using jQuery or Ajax on SharePoint Internet Site?

Ian Morrish — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 07:42:00 GMT

Microsoft has added jQuery and Ajax javascript files to its global content delivery network (CDN). Because the files cached on servers located around the world, browsers download the content from the nearest location, saving you bandwidth. This also allows browsers to reuse cached JavaScript files for Web sites that are located in different domains.

For more information see http://www.asp.net/ajax/CDN/

Display Related items in Display Form Page

Ian Morrish — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 13:59:00 GMT

With over 1,000 Internet sites running on SharePoint listed on my site, I have been looking at ways to better present the list of sites. One scenario is to show similar sites based on the country and industry classification of the current site being viewed.
E.g. http://www.wssdemo.com/Lists/Resources/Web%20Site/websitedetails.aspx?ID=2850

This is the page people go to as a result of finding a site in the search results or from the home page summary of new content.

To enable this capability, I used SharePoint Designer (SPD) to create a new list view page and added 2 data views (DVWP's) for the list that contains web site details. If you are new to SPD and the DVWP the check out Laura Rogers article on EndUserSharePoint.com

The first DVWP is a single item view which is filtered on the URL Parameter value ID.

The 2^nd DVWP has several parameters defined so that it can receive web part connection values from the first web part and use them in the data source query. This is much more efficient that just filtering the results.

I then create a Web Part Connection from the single item DVWP to the Similar Items web part.
Note: set the Target Action: = "Get Parameters From" rather than "Get Filter Values From"

After the connection is created, add one filter criteria at a time to the 2^nd DVWP and confirm that it works.

You can specify default values in the parameters so that SPD still shows results in the 2^nd DVWP after the filter is applied.

Solve SharePoint Performance Problems in SQL Server

Ian Morrish — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 22:17:43 GMT

Most poorly performing SharePoint sites are caused by underlying SQL server configuration, or lack there off, settings.

One of the big impacts of using SharePoint Central Admin to create content databases is that they will be based on the Model DB template.

This results in the following:

Data File = 10Mb with auto grow = 1Mb
Log File = 1Mg with auto grow = 10%

This means that almost every time a user saves an office document, SQL will have to "auto grow" the database files and there is an overhead to this operation. The SQL Disk Usage report will give you an indication of this impact on existing content databases that started with the default size.

This is a relatively small content database but has already been extended many hundreds of times with 45ms per second in this case.

Extending the Database (data and log files) manually to a size that would provide for 6/12 months projected storage requirements results in a noticeable improvement in end user response times not only for saving documents but in overall responsiveness of all sites in the database.

There is much more to designing a good SQL platform for SharePoint, this is just some evidence in case you didn't believe it...

SharePoint and SSRS Integration at TechED NZ

Ian Morrish — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 15:50:00 GMT

I was preparing my TechED NZ presentation last Saturday (apparently it was a sunny day) and thought I would share a sneak peek at some of the things you will see in the demo.

Clicking on the graph takes you to a full report

It is session OFC307 on Wednesday @ 2:20pm

Note: This is a Technical SharePoint presentation on how to integrate SSRS, I will not be teaching you how to create reports.

A new spin on the SharePoint Value Proposition

Ian Morrish — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 08:05:00 GMT

My attempt at humour in a SharePoint 2010 presentation I did at TR9

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZZLwAikdhA

The largest list of SharePoint Internet Sites

Ian Morrish — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 21:48:00 GMT

It may not be the only list of Internet sites using SharePoint on the internet, in fact there are now several other sites providing similar lists, and mine is certainly not the prettiest bit it is the largest (933 sites as of today). It is also based on a storage platform that provides a standards based API to access the list data (SharePoint OOTB web services) so anyone can extract the list of sites.

SharePoint allows me to restrict access to these open, standards based API's but I choose to allow people to fully interact with all that SharePoint has to offer unlike other open source blog or wiki platforms that do not provide such an extensive platform as SharePoint.

The problem is that every time I sit down to work on the look and feel of the site, I find a large list of new site to add to the list. I have a view of the sites which is grouped by month but I have recently been discovering more than 100 sites per month so this is not the most optimal view. http://www.wssdemo.com/Lists/Resources/WebSites.aspx

When I started the list I expected to maybe have 100 sites in the list and I had 14 categories. As the quantity of sites is almost 5 times greater than I planed I have found how hard it is to re-categorize the existing items. The current number of sites per category is:

I have experimented with a Silverlight Deep Zoom view of the site images but this is a manual compilation which takes too much time. I'm still looking for the best way to present this information. If anyone has any suggestions, please comment.

Microsoft Productivity Hub Training Site installed on WSSDemo

Ian Morrish — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 14:01:00 GMT

Microsoft has developed the Productivity Hub http://bit.ly/1dYUE1 to help support your ongoing end user training efforts.

I have installed this on WSSDemo.com http://templates.wssdemo.com/sites/productivity for your viewing pleasure.

The Hub is a SharePoint Server 2007 site collection that serves as a learning community and is fully customizable. It provides a central place for your training efforts, and includes training content from Microsoft's core products. Microsoft also provides ongoing and updated content packs.

The Hub uses SharePoint Server's social networking capabilities, such as blogs and discussion groups. In addition, it offers the Coach program, a change management feature to help you train end users to self-help, reducing the burden on your training and IT staff. The Coach program impacts productivity in a collaborative and positive way.

It's not often that I see my SQL Server very busy but the install of Microsoft's Productivity Hub training solution for SharePoint required several full index crawls and this was the result

If you want reports like this on your SharePoint site then see my previous blog posting on SharePoint Reporting Services integration with SharePoint...
http://www.wssdemo.com/Blog/archive/2009/01/03/Reporting-on-the-performance-of-your-SharePoint-SQL-Server.aspx

Process to define personalization requirements

Ian Morrish — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 15:05:00 GMT

I'm often asked by customers how SharePoint can be used to personalize content for users. Although there are plenty of features in SharePoint to achieve personalization, you have to be able to come up with the rules that define an audience and then how you will identify the information that is relevant to each audience.

Wouldn't it be great if all information and content mapped to a comprehensive taxonomy and that we could automatically align the taxonomy with groups of people? Because this is not usually a simple thing to achieve, we need to prioritise the work required to start targeting information and content to users based on a number of factors.

Therefore, before we start talking about SharePoint personalization features, we need to identify the audiences, taxonomies, information /content sources, business priorities and the relationships between each of these.

You can start the process from an audience or content perspective (left vs. right). From an audience perspective, membership can be broken down into two types:

Optional (opt in/out)
Fixed (based on business rules)

Active Directory group membership or some other line of business application that manages access to information based on a user's role is a common way of defining audience membership but this often doesn't align to a taxonomy such as an EDRMS file plan.

Some audiences will be broad in scope while others will be very narrow.

There will be more than one taxonomy (internal and external), so look for areas of the taxonomy's that can be linked to audience properties.

Audiences will often not agree on which information is of most value. Prioritized personalization of information based on value to the business vs. level of complexity will help users understand the big picture.

Priority will be based on a number of factors:

Volume of content (architectural impact)
Value of content in helping make informed business decisions
Structure of content (formal taxonomy vs folksonomy or none)
Accessibility of the content (API's, iFilters, federated search etc)

Once all of these requirements have been identified, then we can architect a solution...

Do not interrupt stsadm deleteweb command

Ian Morrish — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 19:52:00 GMT

Today I was exporting a number of sub sites so that they could be imported as new site collections. After exporting the sites I used a batch file to delete them. For whatever reason (one that I'm not willing to admit to) I decided to <CTRL>C the batch file. This left the "Are you sure you want to quit?" message in the command window.

This resulted in a lock that prevented the web application from being able to render any sites in the content database. Given that this was a single site collection Intranet (this is why I have to move the non-publishing team sites into a managed path) it meant that nothing was working until I selectect "Y" to end the batch file!

Just as well I wasn't doing this on the production platform.

The other thing I wanted to confirm while testing this process was what areas would affect performance. Two key things I found were:

Export – default is to compress the files, this uses %temp% as a temporary location for the uncompressed files before creating the file you specify in the command. I will be setting this to something other than the c: drive as my servers currently have 16Gb ram disks (upgrade to 32Gb is part of the server rebuild process I'm working on) for the boot partition which are almost full and I have some 5Gb sub sites to export.
Deleteweb – requires SQL transaction log space = sub site size, even with simple recovery mode. Auto-grow for each document being deleted from a library was taking 300ms to 2 seconds each time (on a VMWare dev server with i-SCSI attached disk). Switching to simple recovery empties the log, then extend if required to match largest site being deleted.

Information Worker Competence Center

Ian Morrish — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 22:43:00 GMT

In the 1990's a lot of effort went into developing Office templates and macros. There was even a thriving partner business in providing these services but I don't see this activity any more.

Simon Ruppertz-Rausch, from Microsoft's Business Strategy Consulting group, has published a whitepaper on "Achieving Business Success with your Collaboration Infrastructure".

For many years I have been advising customers that, to get the most out of their investment in Office and SharePoint, they should invest in a Productivity Advisor role but this is a much more comprehensive program to address this gap in current IT/IM thinking.

Figure 1: Governance structure & disciplines covered by an Information Worker Competency Center

Download the whitepaper from here http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=157169

I am not a developer

Ian Morrish — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 21:21:00 GMT

But, like me, you probably know a developer and they probably laugh at you when you say "you should develop on SharePoint".

Having trouble convincing developers to take you seriously?

I don't normally blog about other people's content but you need to check out this web cast by Jeremy Thake...

WSSDemo.com in need of a facelift and SharePoint Gives Back

Ian Morrish — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 20:31:00 GMT

WSSDemo first went live on a beta of WSS 3.0 on 20/05/2006 (based on this resource entry ) and has pretty much looked the same for the last 3 years. The only thing that has really changed is the amount of content on the site. One area in particular that has grown is the list of public web sites that are built on the Office SharePoint Server 2007 platform. This list has grown to over 640 sites and I have included a highlight of 100 sites that I thought were the top ones that people might want to check out.

I see that someone has copied my idea (who knows what their source was;-) and, although I could be annoyed by this, it has instead spurred me into action. Rather than filling my pages with Google adds to make money from other peoples content, I have decided to start a SharePoint Gives Back donation scheme (corny, I know, but here is my plan).

I will let partners who have built sites on SharePoint for customers have:

Their logo (160*160 px max) and hyperlink to any page, in the site list for each site they created.
A link to any case study they may have for a site in the list.
Listing in a new page showing donating partners who have built SharePoint sites with a preview of their created sites

All this in exchange for a US$100 or greater donation to https://donate.worldvision.org/.

The listing will be valid for 12 months from date of donation (email proof required). Partners can also be listed for Intranet sites so long as they can provide at least 1 screen shot of the Intranet (preferably 2 so that we can see some variety & MySite implementations) with the customers' permission for it to be used on WSSDemo.com (this will be another category in the site list).

If I get positive feedback from at least 10 partners then I will go ahead with this so please let me know via this form (no commitment at this stage but valid email address and partner name required) and lets raise some money for a good cause.

I hope to work on a graphical facelift for the site based on the VSeWSS 10 demo themes. I have used one of these themes on my NZ Community SharePoint Conference demo site http://templates.wssdemo.com/sites/community so anyone with some creative ability who can help would be much appreciated (content is king but if it don't look cool, someone else will make it look cooler).

Finally, thank you to everyone who keeps encouraging me that WSSDemo is a valuable resource.

Demo site for NZ Community SharePoint Conference

Ian Morrish — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:04:00 GMT

This is the demo site I built during my presentation on the Data View aka Data Form web part presentation at the New Zealand Community SharePoint Conference today. The PowerPoint deck is also on this site.
http://templates.wssdemo.com/sites/community/

Thanks to everyone who gave me feedback and the problem with one of the web parts in my demo was that I had select the wrong parameter value in the connection. That's what happens when you try and cram a 75 minute session into 45 minutes...

Reporting Services 2008 in SharePoint Integrated Mode

Ian Morrish — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 18:31:00 GMT

It seems that I have a different experience every time I install this configuration.

A few key points if you are thinking of doing this:

Integrated mode only works for SharePoint Web Applications on the Default Zone
Integrated mode will not work on a Web Application that has Anonymous access enabled

If you have a multiple SharePoint Server Farm:

Install the SSRS SharePoint Add-in on the server hosting Central Admin first
Instruction say that you only require a "Files Only" install of the add-in on the other WFE's but this is not enough.
copyappbincontent stsadm command must also be executed on each WFE
If using Kerberos and NLB, the DNS entry for the Web Application URL must be an A record, not CNAME
Even if you have configured Kerberos on your MOSS farm, clients might still be authenticating using NTLM if this is not an A record
(KerbTray and http://www.wssdemo.com/Blog/archive/2009/06/12/Testing-SharePoint-Kerberos-Configuration.aspx will help confirm/debug this)

I struck all of these problems across 2 customers in the last 2 days...
This is probably a session I should have submitted for the NZ Community SharePoint Conference 2009. Maybe I will change one of my TechED NZ sessions to this. Would anyone attending NZ TechED be interested in this?