SharePoint Search+ Webinar

I’ve been having some fun working with the good folks at Surfray, who make Ontolica search engine, on a webinar concept I call Search Plus. The idea behind it is to take SharePoint search to the next level using a series of dynamic user experiences.

The webinar is today at 2 pm EDT, and the webinar will be posted online. http://www.surfray.com/resources/events/556-webcast-usa-search-plus-friday-april-13th-.html

Here’s the deck I will be discussing – hope it gets some good creative ideas going!

SharePoint Search + Plus

View more presentations from SurfRay

StoneShare is a Bootstrap Awards Finalist

I’m proud that my company StoneShare has been nominated as a finalist in Ottawa’s Bootstrap Awards as one of the fastest-growing self-funded startups in the last three years. Here’s the press release:

OTTAWA (January 31, 2012) – Following a record number of nominations, Exploriem today announces the finalists of the 2012 Bootstrap Awards. Finalists in the 12 categories were narrowed down from a pool of 97 nominations received in the last six weeks.

“This year we see a 45 per cent increase in nominations which is testament to the self capitalized talent and growing entrepreneurial culture in Ottawa” says Dr Bruce Firestone, Executive Director of Exploriem and mentor to many local businesses.

Winners will be announced at the awards event and tradeshow from 10.30am to 2pm at the Centurion Conference Centre on the 23rd of February, 2012. Ottawa based Liverpool Court – who manage all of the audio visual for Bluesfest – have stepped in to help winners maximize their post event publicity. After the awards, each winner will receive a vignette showing an overview of their company including footage of their win and acceptance speech. Mayor Jim Watson has also confirmed his attendance at the awards.

The 2012 Bootstrap Awards finalists are:

Fastest Growing Start-Up (Last 3 years)

1. Capital Home and Staging

2. Gazaro Inc.

3. Renaissance Repair and Supply

4. StoneShare

5. YOUiLabs

 

Wish us luck!

SharePoint Bug: 2010 Menus Not Working in IE9

I setup a new laptop on the weekend and this morning found a crazy bug – my SharePoint 2010 and Project Server 2010 menus and ribbon would not work at all, basically rendering my laptop useless unless I could figure this out.

After much poking around in F12 Developer Tools and searching around the web, I finally figured out the solution myself.

I had dragged the IE icon to my taskbar and for some reason it was loading the 32 bit version of IE instead of 64 bit. After starting IE using the 64 bit version all was well.

I’m not sure what the exact issue was – I have used both 32bit and 64 bit IE 8 and 9 browsers on other computers and never had any issues loading SharePoint 2010 menu items.

Anyway hope that helps someone else.

SharePoint Conference 2011: How eBay Successfully Upgraded their Intranet to SharePoint 2010

These are my rough notes of the presentation by Ramin Mobasseri and Chris Givens of eBay. The Hub is pretty impressive for the way it organizes information for its users and the lengths it goes to in order to default metadata for improved searching.

Agenda

• Why upgrade?
• Methodology
• About the Upgrade (Technical)
• About the Upgrade (Tactical)
• About the Upgrade (Functional)
• Q&A

Why Upgrade

On MOSS 2007.

Got more complex requirements from business users who didn’t want to write code.

Better search.

Enterprise Social Networking

Better device and browser compatibility.

Demo: The Hub – the core eBay site. ESN is Enterprise Social Networking. Proud of combining managed metadata store with FAST search.

Extensively branded (yellow, large icons for the main menu items.

Global Nav

• Who We Are
• News
• My HR
• Teams
• Workplace
• Our Businesses

Have people search and all sites search at the top of each master page.1 click people search using FAST and typeahead

People results

Contact Info, Department info

Search Best Bets

People look for 3 scopes of things at eBay

1. Business Unit

2. Location.

3. Organization

Managed Metadata filters on the left to allow those scopes. DIfficult to tag pre-existing sites with managed metadata

Upon creation of a site you get Best Bets added automatically

Visio Services

Used by IT Tools team – wanted way to watch health of their servers at all times. Didn’t want to spend money. Took 45 minutes to draw visio diagram and connect to backend systems. Can filter by Production and DR environments or by Dev environments.

Why Upgrade

Social Media at work – did pilots – decided on Yammer, Chatter, Newsgator, and other social networkings. Decision to not dictate technologies on end users, but recommend tools they feel are best.

1st Attempt – try to integrate these tools. If it doesn’t succeed, we aggregate.

List of social networking services under My Social link

End users can make a post and it sends to multiple networks.

Expertise locator tag cloud

Expertise Search

Better Browser and Device Compatibility

Built feature grid – against all browsers. And put a level of support from 0 to 4.

Better performance: Increased performance by 29% (for global users) since servers are based in Denver.

Upgrade Methodology

Upgrade took 3 months.

Agilistic Scrum over the Spiral Waterfalls!

Blend of project methodologies. Started in Agile mode. Had MS Architects vet the scrums to make sure everything was in place. Meanwhile business analysts could create waterfall project plan.

Communication Plan: Write to end users, team site owners, don’t surprise them. They used a grid:

Subject | Type | Target Users | Description | Date Sent.

Governance Plan: Your blueprint. Over 345 new features – yes or no answers with each team and work with IT Operations to get their blessing. If “Yes” how is it configured and who can do what?

Feature Matrix for each set of features.

About the Upgrade (Technical)

Had access to MS Architects to ensure everything was possible.

Project Requirements:

• 3 month timeline, multiple solutions to be upgraded.
• Data  Mining/ Farm Documentation
• Detailed Analysis of existing farm
• 3rd party solutions audit.

Ran a source code comparer to diff the SharePoint files in 12 hive against the OOTB files.

Biggest challenge was 3rd party solutions. Had to build whole mockup of 2007 environment and then try migrations into 2010 to see what broke.

You need business users who can test this to see if it works or not.

Environment:

Large server farm. 14 servers, 20,000 users world-wide, 12,000 sites and 33,000 My Sites. 20+ content databases.

Disaster Recovery. Redundant Data Centers for failover.

eBay has full failover – 4 hour failover time window.

$1.5 M of hardware.

Hardware and Performance Topics

Farm Configuration: Had to figure out capacity planning, how many servers, what the SLA’s are and tolerance for risk. For Disaster Recovery you might have to double the costs.

Microsoft offered access to MS Data Centers to test performance. Problem: eBay required other systems to be connected so that didn’t really work. Microsoft provided Architecture review.

IOPS are VERY important – FAST requires high Input Output for disks

SANs – very expensive, work with SQL Server. Everything else is Direct Attached drives for WFE and App servers.

Capacity Planning -  how many users concurrently – what will the transaction mix be? Plan for growth.

VS Ultimate Test Tools – allows for performance testing of your applications.

Performance Optimizations: Page weights, global network.

High latency network can cause end user dis-satisfaction. Top 3 HTTP request types tend to be: CSS, Images, JS

How to minimize the page weights?

• Minimize the CSS (remove un-used CSS classes)
• Compress the CSS
• Make images 1px wide
• Minify the JS files

Got page weights down to 67k. Users were happier in global locations

Caching:

• IIS Output Cache – causes weird page weight issue with browser
• ASP.NET Caching
• BlobCache -
• ProxyServers
• CDNs

About the Upgrade: Tactical

Provisioning a site – a  custom form. Long running process within a webpart. Anyone can create a site, IT gets a notification.

You specify a Business Unit, Organization, and Office Location default values using Managed Metadata. So when they search it will automatically filter from those sites with those values, they don’t have to do anything. They can find their site using their keywords. This took the longest time.

Rich Proifles: Encourage the end users to modify their user profiles

Offer them incentives.

Get rid of unwanted unused sites (clean your house)

Start your brownbag series early

Build an Upgrade Community to get feedback

Have weekly status meetings with the stakeholders

Make sure you have a Technical PM on the team

Watch out for the phrases: “That’s taken care of” or “That’s finished” – you have to test.

Test test test test

Productivity Hub

Power User Training

About the Upgrade: Functional

Master Pages – colliding requirements between functional groups

Editorial Issues: Did you use Word to edit in MOSS

Watch out for DIV and SPAN tags

Rich Text Editors and Content Editor webparts

The Ribbon: You will see some resistance. Users will settle after training

3 sets of users: Pioneers, Settlers, Stay-Behinds

Managed Metadata Services - Brilliant for search. Allow time for Information Taxanomy, do not rush! Planning to add them to lists and libraries (auto-tagging)? Watch out for Datasheet views.

Service Packs – don’t do SP for 6 months. But plan for it early

Questions

How many people were on the project? 3 devs, 3 IT Pros, 2 PMs (9 or 10 people for 3 months)

Physical or virtual? FAST and Admin was virtual, otherwise it was all physical (due to internal eBay policies)

Training: 20,000 user base – have trained 150 users so far. Train the trainer – Productivity Hub is 3rd most visited hub in the last few months so this is helping with training

Methodology – what do they recommend? Use whatever works. eBay recommends Scrum in Dev and get branding requirements via traditional models. Dev moved ahead while waiting for requirements (had a general idea)

Did you have to change any functionality? Had to rename thousands of host header name changes. InfoPath data connections were statically set – big issue.

Did you have constructive feedback on the intranet? Yes – put up a blog on the issues – have weekly call with Microsoft on post-upgrade lessons learned keeping Microsoft informed

Migration Approach? Was Database Attach in new farm. All database fail – that’s a given. The amount of time it takes to upgrade is directly related to the number of sites – so delete all the empty ones.

SharePoint Data Governance: Achieve Consistent & Automated Security Webinar Invite

Next Friday September 30 I will be co-presenting a live webinar on SharePoint Data Governance with Microsoft and our partners Titus. I will be speaking to some real world examples of handling SharePoint security and regulatory compliance challenges using SharePoint and Titus Metadata Security.

The amount of data - and sensitive data - is growing within SharePoint environments every day, but is your organization set up to keep it all secure?

Date: September 30, 2011
Time: 12:00pm EST
Speakers:
Dr. Soheil Saadat
Principal Program Manager
Microsoft

Nick Kellett
Microsoft MVP & CTO
StoneShare

Antonio Maio
Senior Product Manager
TITUS

Register Now!

You can find out more information on our StoneShare.com website here:

http://www.stoneshare.com/news/Pages/TitusLabsWebinar.aspx

Microsoft: Submit your story on SharePoint and Get Showcased!

Microsoft has posted the following contest – a great way of sharing SharePoint success stories with the world. Read on for details:

There are so many fantastic success stories on SharePoint 2010 that are just waiting to be told and shared. Now’s your chance to get your story heard!
You’re invited to share your unique story on SharePoint 2010 to win the chance of being professionally filmed and showcased on the Canadian site for Microsoft SharePoint. Winners also get a complimentary conference pass to attend the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011 in Anaheim, California from October 3-6 2011 (a $1,199 value.)

1st prize	Your story professional filmed, plus a pass to the Microsoft SharePoint conference 2011
2nd prize	One pass to the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011

Contest Categories
SharePoint 2010 is a versatile solution and can address many different business challenges. Choose a submission category from the following list on how you used SharePoint to address the following business priorities:

• Increase productivity
• Reduce cost
• Rapidly respond to business needs

Please note that you can submit to multiple categories, provided each submission is a unique and different SharePoint 2010 solution (i.e., one solution per category).

Don’t miss this great chance to be rewarded for all your hard work. Your journey with SharePoint is important and it needs to be heard!
All submissions must be received by August 22nd, 2011.
Good luck!

SEO Tool for SharePoint 2010 WCM Sites

There is a great tool from Mavention called Meta Fields that allows SharePoint 2010 administrators to add metadata properties to the source code of their pages. This makes it easier for a search engine to crawl and rank the content and so is helpful for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

To use this you just have to download (for free as far as I can tell) and install Mavention Meta Fields which is a SharePoint solution. After activating the feature and adding metadata columns to your page content type, you can now edit the properties and the source code spits out metadata such as (for example) keywords, subject, DC.title and DC.keywords.

Anyone with a public website SharePoint 2010 web site should consider using this. Complete instructions are on creator Waldek Mastykarz’s blog:

http://blog.mastykarz.nl/easy-editing-meta-tags-publishing-pages-mavention-meta-fields/

Great solution Waldek!

Managed Metadata Term Set Tools

One of the great new features of SharePoint 2010 is the new Managed Metadata service, which allows you to centrally manage your metadata. You can setup hierarchical terms in a variety of languages, and delegate the administration responsibility to end users such as Information Management staff or Records Managers.

Although it is easy enough to add individual terms, there are a variety of great tools that make it easy to create and upload entire term sets (the largest we have migrated so far is Medical Subject or MeSH data with about 16,000 hierarchical medical terms).

Here are some of the tools we use at StoneShare:

Excel Template with Macro

Wictor Wilen has created an Excel Template with a Macro to make it easy to populate SharePoint 2010 Term Sets.

I have uploaded the file to the Agora Development site under Shared Documents > Development Tools: https://agora.stoneshare.com/dev/Shared%20Documents/Development%20Tools/TermStoreCreator.xltm

The instructions are located here:

http://www.wictorwilen.se/Post/Create-SharePoint-2010-Managed-Metadata-with-Excel-2010.aspx

Term Set Importer / Exporter

When uploading large term sets (such as the MeSH one we used for a client) you might get timeouts in Central Administration – this is because the out-of-the-box import tool uses a web interface). There is a great (FREE!) tool on CodePlex which uses a little desktop utility, and hence does not time out:

http://termsetimporter.codeplex.com/ 

Pre-Built Term Sets for Sale

Rather than going to the trouble of creating your own term sets, you can also purchase existing term sets from Data Facet. I haven’t yet used these so I can’t speak for them but this could be a good way to quick-start your managed metadata for a particular industry.

http://www.datafacet.com/sharepoint.aspx

One advantage of this approach (apart from the time saved recreating these) is that you will be using the identical term set as other organizations, which may help with data portability. Whether this is your business requirement or not is an open question.

I hope these tools help!

SharePoint 2010: People Search Results Not Showing on SSL secured portal

We started using SSL on our company portal at StoneShare and the people search results stopped showing up.

After checking the log files, we realized this was caused by a top level error where the sps3:// protocol handler could not browse to the my sites anymore. Essentially due to the new SSL address the default people search handler could not find the My Sites.

The fix is to modify the search content source crawl addresses to use change the following:

sps3://[root level address]

to this:

sps3s://[root level address]

The extra “s”in the address simply tells SharePoint to use the SSL protocol when the people search index is being built on that content source.

Hope that helps,

Nick

SharePoint 2010 Error: Document ID Not Set

Had an issue on a client machine where although Document IDs were enabled on the site collection, no IDs were being applied to the uploaded files.

SharePoint assigns these IDs as part of a timer job that runs in Central Administration. To fix this you will need to run the following two jobs:

Document ID enable/disable job

and

Document ID assignment job

for each site collection where this is not working. You can view the timer jobs in Central admin from this page:

/_admin/ScheduledTimerJobs.aspx

Hope that helps!

SharePoint 2010: Search Service is not able to connect to the machine that hosts the administration component

Had a strange Search error in a new SharePoint 2010 farm:

The search service is not able to connect to the machine that hosts the administration component. Verify that the administration component 'bae8d161-c132-4570-aa0d-57baf6cf9d9b' in search application 'Search Service Application 1' is in a good state and try again."

I was unable to start any crawls as a result.

The search services were all started correctly but in the Application Services window it showed “Error”. The fix for me was to click on the Search Service Application name in the list of Application Services, choose Properties on the ribbon above, and change the Application Pool to another one (in my case, from SharePoint Web Services Default app pool to SharePoint Web Services System).

Hope it helps someone.

SharePoint Workspace 2010 “exceeds the lookup column threshold”

While trying to sync to a SharePoint site using SharePoint Workspace 2010, you may bump into the following strange error: "The query cannot be completed because the number of lookup columns it contains exceeds the lookup column threshold"

This is due to SharePoint’s new resource throttling settings for managing large lists. There is an easy fix in Central Administration.

Go to Central Administration and then browse to Application Management > Manage Web Application.  Select the web application you need.

In General Settings choose Resource Throttling. Set the value in the List View Lookup Threshold textbox to a higher value (equal to or greater than the number of site columns you are using on the list where you saw the error).

I bumped into this with Workspace but this error may appear for other client applications / systems that use SharePoint 2010 as a platform, and are trying to lookup lists that have more site columns than the throttle setting.

How To: In Place Record Views in SharePoint 2010

One of the great new features in SharePoint 2010 is the In Place Record declaration. This allows a user to apply Records management to any file in a document library.

To enable this feature, you must first activate the In Place Records feature in your site collection. Next, for a given library, go to its settings and choose “Record Declaration Settings”. Choose “Always allow the manual declaration of records”.

 

This will allow the Declare Record button to appear in the ribbon.

Now that you have a collection of records and documents in the library, you will probably wish to sort them using views. I like to create two extra views: Active (which means all active documents or “non-records” and All Records (which means anything declared as a record).

It is easy to create the views once you know the steps. The following steps come from my colleague Hoking:

To make the views, you need to first enable in-place records management in the library settings.  Then you need to actually declare 1 document as a record manually - this is in order to get the "Declared Record" field visible in the create/modify view pages.  For the Active view, filter on Declared Record equal to [blank], as in don't enter a value for the field.  For the All Records view, set the filter on Declared Record not equal to [blank].

Hope that helps!

SharePoint 2010 Bug: Cannot Rename Title On Validated List

My colleague David has noticed what seems to be a bug in SharePoint 2010 on lists that have validation applied to them. If you try to rename the title, it will cause an error. The "fix" is to remove the validation and then the renaming can occur as normal. We're doing some more testing to see if there is a workaround. It would be a shame as we are already using and enjoying the list validation functionality.

I'll update if we find a workaround.

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:

SharePoint Summit 2010 - Stress Free Migration

View more presentations from Nick Kellett.

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

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.

SharePoint 2010 Migration – Stress Free!

SharePoint 2010 Migration Seminar

In my new role as Chief Technical Officer at StoneShare Inc., a Canadian SharePoint solutions firm, I am currently working on SharePoint 2010 migration options, and will be presenting a seminar on migration at several different events over the next month.

This topic will be focused on administrators and business users who want to understand migration paths and how best to prepare for a 2010 move.

I will do a live demo of an in-place SharePoint 2010 Upgrade - not for the faint of heart :) - and discuss the various options, useful tools, what sort of planning is required, and actual technical steps to get a great migration result.

I’ll be publishing my slides once the seminar is complete. Here’s an overview of the demonstration:

Migrate to SharePoint 2010 - Stress Free!

Considering migrating your current SharePoint environment to SharePoint 2010?  Worried about what’s involved and how to manage it?  Don’t let it become a headache!  This presentation will discuss some common sense business and technical approaches to take away the pain, and help you deliver your SharePoint 2010 migration project on time and on budget.

Topics Covered:

• A little history: The SharePoint 2003 to 2007 Migration experience
• Common Migration Pains
• SharePoint 2010 Technical Changes
• Governance
• Migration Options
• Migration tools and utilities
• The Migration Process
• Recommendations

I will be presenting at the following events:

SetFocus SharePoint 2010 Seminar

This is part of a four-part series of seminars on SharePoint 2010 that SetFocus is putting on.

When: Thursday, March 18 at 1 – 4 PM PST

Where: Online webinar. You can register for free here:http://www.setfocus.net/marketing/spseminarseries.aspx 

 

Microsoft Ottawa Federal SharePoint User’s Group

This is the monthly SharePoint user group – it is definitely open for more than just Federal SharePoint Users to attend!

When: Tuesday, March 30 at 5 – 7 PM PST

Where: Ottawa at the Microsoft Office on 100 Queen Street

SharePoint 2010 Summit

When: April 12 to 14

Where: Centre Mont-Royale, Montreal

Register online now for this great SharePoint conference in one of the world’s great cities.

http://www.sharepointsummit2010.com/index_e.htm

 

There’s really a lot to discuss and I’m looking forward to the seminars. I’m also crossing my fingers the live upgrade goes as planned each time :)

SharePoint 2010 Likely To Offer App Store

This just in from ReadWriteWeb:

Microsoft will offer an application marketplace within Sharepoint 2010 that will integrate with third-party applications from its partner network. No date has been set for the marketplace lauch but it will evolve from "The Gallery" a feature that provides Sharepoint 2010 users access to templates…

Details are few about the application marketplace that will be offered through Sharepoint. But it does point to the increasing significance of third-party applications for the Sharepoint platform and how the service may evolve as cloud computing becomes more prevalent.

I was predicting this a few weeks ago on my “Things To Get Excited About in SharePoint 2010” post. Here’s what I had to say:

Service Application Architecture – the Shared Service Provider was a good idea but it was a bit hard to use in practice. Under the new architecture, you can create Service Applications for things like Excel Services, Forms Services, Business Connectivity Services, and other services that you build or buy, and you can mix and match these in your farms as you like. The services get consumed by web front ends via a standard interface.

This should allow a lot of plug-and-play customization of farms. I’m even wondering if there is an opportunity for vendors here…create some services and expose them to clients from the cloud.

There are some other big changes like Claims Based Authentication and Solution sandboxing which are intriguing to me. The Solution sandboxing feature gives me this sneaking suspicion we will one day soon see a Microsoft SharePoint App Store where we can buy, download and run SharePoint solutions in our farms.

Magic Eight-ball now says: “You may rely on it”.

Central Administration in SharePoint 2010

Here’s a quick lap around the new Central Administration console in SharePoint 2010.

New Central Administration Layout

The navigation structure is broken down a little more than in 2007. There is no more “Operation” and “Application Management” divide; instead the new console is divided into the following sections:

• Application Management: Manage site collections, web applications, content databases, and the new service applications
• System Settings: Manage servers, features, solutions, and farm-wide settings
• Monitoring: Track, view and report the health and status of your SharePoint farms
• Backup and Restore: Performs backup or restores
• Security: Manage settings for users, policy, and global security
• Upgrade and Migration: Upgrade SharePoint, add licenses, enable Enterprise Features
• General Application Settings: Anything that doesn’t fit into one of the other sections
• Configuration Wizards: These are nice wizards to help setup or modify the farm

This is new layout is an advantage – the “Operations” and “Application Management” tabs in 2007 always felt a bit arbitrary and it wasn’t always clear which tasks went where.

Monitoring

This is quite useful – basically you can take the heartbeat of SharePoint and its services via reports, and view problems and solutions. Here’s a screenshot of the interface:

There are only a couple of reports right now, which tell you which pages loaded the slowest, and which users are the most active. I imagine for release there will be many more.

The problem and solution report is very helpful in identifying which services are failing on which servers, and why. Notice in in this report there is detailed information about one of the failing services, in this case Visio, and links to remedy it.

Surfacing common errors in this way will go a long way to reducing the IT administrative burden of SharePoint. I hope Microsoft is active in populating this report engine (or provides a way for the community to modify it).

Usage logging settings are in here as well.

Service Applications

These new plug-and-play replacements for the Shared Service Provider are major wins for the new SharePoint version. They allow an organization to really customize its farm based on its needs and even usage patterns. Services that needs lots of performance and support can get it, while services that are less useful can have reduced resources or even be turned off altogether. Everybody’s SharePoint 2007 farm looked alike, but going forward it is likely that no two farms will be alike.

Of course to manage this Microsoft has to surface the available services and their settings in the Central Admin. This screenshot gives an indication of just how many services can be used.

Export Sites and Lists

Now you can export site and list data right from SharePoint! It’s straightforward with the new Backup and Restore section, which allows full Farm Backups and Restores along with far more granular backup. The backup can include full security including site users, as well as version history information for each item in the list.

I doubt this will replace the need for 3rd party backup software but it’s another tool for IT Admins.

Here I am backing up a Calendar from a site to file.

The new service architecture of SharePoint is one of the most exciting things about it, and obviously required a bit of a Central Administration retooling. That provided an opportunity for some other quick wins, including a much more intuitive navigation structure and some neat monitoring tasks. More evidence that SharePoint 2010 is building on, but not replacing, the core strengths of 2007.