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!

SharePoint 2007 Search Quirk–Hit Highlighting on Integers

While working on a SharePoint 2007 custom search project we found an interesting little quirk in the search engine.

We were using the XML iFilter rather than the regular html iFilter due to a requirement to tightly constrain some date metadata as type datetime (with the OOTB filter SharePoint was returning these as text and not allowing proper date range filtering).

While searching for numbers contained within text, if the number was on its own line of text and not preceded by anything else, the result would return correctly but hit-highlighting was not applied.

However, if we put any text at all in front of the numbers, the hit-highlighting applies perfectly.

Therefore the workaround was simply to alter the text that was being displayed to include at least one letter or word before the integers in the line.

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!

There is a great SharePoint maturity model created by Sadie Van Buren we use to help educate our clients and anticipate their growing use of our products and solutions.

It's easy to use - just examine the particular section you are considering, and depending on the answers to the statements in the section you can determined where the organization fits. Generally organizations have different maturity in different areas of SharePoint.

SharePoint Maturity Model

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!

MOSS 2007 Service Pack 2 Backup May Lock and Remove Site Actions Options

We had a very strange error suddenly appear on a client’s site last week – we got the following email:

Anyone know what's happening with site actions menu on the top level site of [the website]? I have limited menu options - i.e. there is no site actions, edit page, create page, create site, etc.

Our support team looked into this and figured out the following:

The issue appeared on the top-level site collection due it being set to “Read-Only” after a backup locked the site and then failed to release it. Changing it to “Not locked” immediately restored the menus.

This is what our guys had to say:

In SP2, Microsoft added a feature to STSADM to automatically lock the site collection during a backup:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287967(office.12).aspx

“In Service Pack 2 for SharePoint Products and Technologies, site collections are automatically locked as read-only before a backup process occurs. Therefore, there is no need to use the Setsitelock: Stsadm operation (Windows SharePoint Services) operation. If you do not want site collections to be locked as read-only, you must specify the nositelock parameter that is available in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with Service Pack 2 (SP2).”

It is likely that some kind of error or exception interrupted the scheduled backup, and as a result the lock was not removed.

Here is the page link: http://[your address]/_admin/sitequota.aspx.

Hope that helps others out!

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”.

Hosting Clockwork Web Framework With Amazon

I’ve blogged a lot about my admiration for Amazon’s web services stack. I think they understand the web as well as any company in the world. It’s always been my intention to investigate Amazon’s Electronic Compute Cloud (EC2) and since I needed hosting for my new Clockwork Web Framework, I decided to give it a try.

The reason I went with Amazon rather than a traditional hoster is that I have no idea what kind of interest there will be in the framework, and therefore cannot predict what the load on a web server will be. Amazon EC2 is designed for this kind of flexibility, and you pay per hour.

The Platform

I am running a small Windows Server 2003 32x server instance to begin with. It only has 1.7 gb of RAM. I can scale this up if I need to, or more likely I will run up another small instance and load balancing the two using Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancer technology.

On this, I am using IIS 6, .NET 3.5, SQL Server 2005 Express, and Powershell. Most of my files are kept on a permanent storage drive (more on this below) and served by IIS. In order to maximize the speed and lower the CPU burden on the server, I have decided to use another Amazon technology, CloudFront.

CloudFront Content Delivery Network

CloudFront is a Content Delivery Network (CDN), like Akamai or Limelight. I use it to serve my images and resource files. Basically Amazon has edge servers all over the world with a copy of my images and resource files, and when users request them from my website, CloudFront automatically sends them a copy from the nearest location to them, making for some very fast download times.

To make this work, you have to use Amazon Simple Storage System, or S3. This is a virtual file system. Basically you have “buckets” of files that are served up when requests come in from the CloudFront “distributions”.

I’ve optimized it a bit by having two distributions; one for images and one for resources. This means that a page which requires both things will load even faster since two parallel CDN distributions are processing the files at the same time.

You can create CloudFront distributions through code, or through Amazon’s web management portal.

  Since you can control the public URL of the distributions, you will notice if you view the properties of my website that my images are handled by the path “http://images.clockworkwf.com” and my resource files are handled by the path “http://resources.clockworkwf.com” . In other words, I have full control over what path I give them. Most people will never know these picture are being served from Amazon.

I notice the website loads really quickly, so the CloudFront makes a big difference.

EC2 Hosting Challenges

So that’s the high level architecture. There are a number of impacts when using Amazon as a hoster I’d like to talk about.

Server Goes Up, Server Goes Down

To begin with, you have to assume that at any moment your server will go down. If your server dies, it vanishes, and you have to “spin up” another one, using the web interface or code. It’s very easy to do from the web console, just click “Launch Instance” and you can pick any server ranging from Ubuntu Linux to Windows 2003 Server 64x Enterprise R2.

Although the server instances you can use have their own hard drive space on C: and D: drives, you have to treat that as transitory storage.

I’ve setup my system in such a way that I can use an Elastic Block Storage (EBS) hard drive volume, provided by Amazon.This is a more permanent drive space that you pay for, but can be attached to any server instance. Think of it as a SAN (that’s probably what it is).

So I’ve got my database and web files on this EBS block, which I then mount to any server instance I’m currently running.

On the server instance, I simply point IIS web server to the EBS block files, and away we go.

The EBS can be any size you like, and you pay per GB per month. Right now I’m using 10GB since my log files and database don’t take up much room. I can add more space later if I need to.

Here’s a screenshot of that EBS volume, in the Amazon web console.

Dynamic DNS Entries

Next problem: Since the server can go down at any moment, DNS is a problem. If my server dies and I spin another one up, it will be given its own IP address, which my DNS entry for www.clockworkwf.com wouldn’t know about. So there might be a long delay while DNS changes to the new IP address.

So, I’m using a Dynamic DNS service called Nettica. They have a management console where I can enter my various domain records and assign a short Time To Live (TTL), which means the DNS entries update frequently. So if my server dies, I can change the entry in Nettica to point to the new server’s IP address, and within a few seconds requests are going back to the right place.

Nettica even allows me to control all of this through C# code. Going forward I plan to write powershell server management scripts that can automatically spin up a new server on Amazon, determine the IP, and register that with Nettica.

Incidentally, Amazon EC2 allows you to buy what are called “Static IP Addresses”. Essentially you can “rent” a fixed IP address which can by dynamically allocated to a server instance. So, in the short run this makes life easier for me as I have rented one, used that for my Nettica domain name record, and can assign this fixed IP to any new server instance.

Next problem: Disaster Recovery.

Disaster Recovery is even more important in Amazon EC2 world than elsewhere, since again your instances could die at any moment….Not that they will, but the point is, they are “virtual” and Amazon isn’t making any promises (unless you buy a Service Level Agreement from them).

However, Amazon’s EC2 provides a level of DR by its very nature – you can spin up another machine in a small amount of time. Estimates for new Windows instances are about 20 minutes.

There’s also something called an Availability Zone. Essentially it means “Data Centre” – Amazon has several of these and so you can spread your servers around between US – East, US-West, Europe, and so on. So when that Dinosaur-killing comet hits North America, the Europe Availability Zone keeps chugging.

Right now I’m not really doing much with my database, so DR isn’t such an issue. I have some security since my files are on an EBS block. However, eventually I’ll setup a second server in another availability zone and load balance the two.

Another Challenge: Price

Amazon Web Services are flexible, and you are charged per hour, for only what you use. This is an amazing model but it doesn’t work so well for website hosting, because of course your servers are supposed to be online 24/7, 365 days a year.

It’s hard to tell for sure what the annual bill will be, but for my small server instance (remember, only 1.7 Gb of RAM) it will cost well over $1,000. That’s a lot more than shared space on a regular hosting provider. However I’m willing to pay this, for the flexibility I get, and also because I think Amazon web services are a strategic advantage and so the earlier I learn about them, the more business opportunities I might unlock.

One good thing is that Amazon has been aggressively dropping its prices as it improves its services. Additionally, they have started offering “Registered Servers” – basically a pre-pay option for 1-year, 2-year, and 3-year terms. Unfortunately these are only for Linux servers at the moment but hopefully they will add them for Windows and then I can save money year on year.

CloudHost Monitoring

Amazon offers a web-based monitoring option for its server instances. I’ve started using it (for an additional fee) but I’m not sold on its utility yet. I don’t think I’m using it to its full potential yet – it is supposed to help you manage server issues by monitoring thresholds.

Managing S3 Files Using Cloudberry Explorer

I needed an easy way to create and manage my buckets, CloudFront distributions, and S3 files. I found Cloudberry Explorer, and downloaded the free version of it. I was able to drag and drop 1600 files from my Software Development Kit to the S3 bucket where I’m serving the resources. Super!

There’s a pro version I might purchase which would allow me to set the gzip encryption and other properties on the files. This would help lower my bandwidth costs and speed up the transfer a bit.

Here’s a screenshot of Cloudberry in action:

I love how easy it is to setup and use Amazon’s web services stack. I think they have a great business model for the Cloud, and they’re the company to beat. I’m willing to rely on them for the launch of Clockwork Web framework and so far I haven’t been disappointed.

Introducing Clockwork Web Framework for .NET

In 2003, I read a book, “Making Space Happen”, by Paula Berinstein. It’s about the efforts of entrepreneurs to open up space to the public. It’s the kind of thing that gets my propeller-head spinning, and after reading it I resolved to create the best website on space travel on the internet.

So, I sat down in a park and within two hours I had covered several sheets of paper with scribbles and scrawls of what my website needed. I had notes on authentication, web components, search boxes, themes, dynamic images, language toggles, and all kinds of stuff.

Being a good little programmer, the more I designed, the more intricate the design became, and pretty soon I was knee-deep in code. Flash forward six years later, and I have yet to write a single page of that space website!

But I do have a web framework :)

What It Is

Clockwork makes it easy to build powerful .NET web sites. It’s completely free, open source (under the Apache 2 license) and you can use it in proprietary or open source projects, as you like.

Some of the ways it makes web development easy:

• Database-agnostic data access
• Dynamically displays content in different languages
• Leverages the .NET 3.5 framework, including the Provider Model, generics, LINQ, automatic properties, and more
• Integrates with popular web services such as those provided by UserVoice, LinkedIn, Google and Yahoo!
• Makes it really easy to use object-oriented programming standards like Dependency Injection / Inversion of Control, Repositories, and Specifications

Under the hood I use many popular components, including NHibernate for database access, Castle Windsor for Dependency Injection, and log4Net for logging.

Although today marks the official public release, the framework is currently at version 3.x because I’ve been using earlier versions of it in production websites since 2004.

I’ve built Clockwork using as many web standards as I can find, as many of the latest .NET elements as possible, software best practices, and a lot of love and stubbornness.

What It Will Become

Well, it’s obviously too early to say. But I am committed to continuing to develop it, I have a long list of things I plan to add, and I’m hopeful a community of .NET developers will adopt it and push it into areas I can’t even imagine today.

Please take a minute to visit the website and learn more about it. I hope you find it helpful.

Many thanks,

Nick

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.