Friday, April 16, 2010

Familiar Faces at the SharePoint Summit 2010

Just got back from attending the SharePoint Summit 2010 in Montreal with my business partner Keith Carter.

One of the nice things about the summit (apart from being in Montreal, which is always fun – awful traffic excepted) was that I saw a lot of familiar faces.

There were a lot of vendors I knew from my days on the SharePoint trade show floors – folks like Gail Shlansky, Yancy Lent, and Ken Allen from Axceler, Dave Seaman from Syntergy, Michael Potter from Nintex, and Tony Lanni from AvePoint.

Other familiar faces included speakers like Ruven Gotz and Wouter van Vugt.

This year, I had a happy surprise - a lot of my former colleagues from Parks Canada were present. We had worked together in the Office 12 TAP days when SharePoint 2007 was about to release and it was  a nice reunion.

Like any summit, it was also a chance to meet new folks. Before the summit kicked off, there was a dinner for all the speakers at the Greek restaurant Restaurant Ilios, organized by Danny Boulanger and Alain Lord. We had some nice chats about SharePoint, Holland, and Canadian culture (it turns out we do have one!).

There were a lot of Canadian government folks at the conference – it seemed like a majority of the participants in fact were public servants. There were some interesting chats about the challenges of buying and deploying SharePoint in the government.

On Wednesday I presented on migrating to SharePoint 2010.The interest in upgrading to SharePoint 2010 was high, so the room was full. I’m embedding my slide presentation below:

It was a good conference and I look forward to the next one!

Saturday, April 03, 2010

SharePoint 2010 Beta Migration Gotcha – SSP Errors

One of the big changes to SharePoint 2010 is the replacement of the Shared Service Provider concept with a series of application services.

Essentially instead of a central managed “pool” or bundle of application services such as Excel, User Profile, Search, and BDC, the new model allows farm administrators to turn on or off (and separately configure) an infinite variety of services that can add extra functionality to their farm.

This is a much more flexible model.

This new model does cause one problem if you are doing “in-place” migrations of existing 2007 portals to 2010 using the beta bits. For some reason, the Shared Service Provider database does get upgraded to 2010 but it causes a number of portal errors while it does so.

You’ll find these in your upgrade log file, in the 14 hive. These vary from User Profile errors to “certificate” errors. One common error looks like this:

[OWSTIMER] [UserProfileSharedResourceProvider12Sequence] [ERROR] [1/8/2010 9:23:42 AM]: Action 14.0.1.0 of Microsoft.Office.Server.Upgrade.UserProfileSharedResourceProvider12Sequence failed.

[OWSTIMER] [UserProfileSharedResourceProvider12Sequence] [ERROR] [1/8/2010 9:23:42 AM]: Inner Exception: There are no online service instances for this application.

The “fix” is to delete all Shared Service Providers from your 2007 farm BEFORE doing the in place upgrade. The sts command to do this is:

stsadm -o deletessp -title SSP -force

This isn’t a big deal - this is only a beta problem.I very much doubt this will be the case in RTM which is due next month.

Hope that helps.