April 2010 - Posts

• The SharePoint Ironman

  Nope no Robert Downey Jnr in this one you’ll have to wait until April 30th for that (in the UK at least). This was Mike Watson (a man who used to play with tanks on a professional basis) taking the SharePoint Evolution attendees through the major enhancements to SharePoint which will make high availability solutions a little easier to architect and deploy. Mike started with a rundown of the major issues with SharePoint 2007: Granular Recovery – ah that look on a client’s face when you tell them just exactly what  they will have to go through now that 1k text document they deleted has exited the recycle bin (cue exasperated sighs stage left). Just a simple matter of recovering that backed up database to a web app and then finding the document concerned – a doddle Disaster Recovery – a small list of laundry for this one that can only truly be satisfied by a sub list: No native support for mirroring – let’s do the swap over by hand or rely on some cludgy scripts Everything can be made redundant, apart from that indexy bit and if that goes and you’re reliant on search apps? Just how many documents do you have to crawl? You weren’t planning on doing anything over the next couple of days/weeks/months were you? Robust backup – let’s back up everything. Yip content, config… you want to restore config? Ok but that’s you unsupported as far as Microsoft is concerned. They didn’t mention that? Ok various vendors have spent millions and made millions producing tools to sort these issues out. But does SharePoint 2010 handle them in anyway? Mike Watson seems to believe… sometimes. Here is what I gleaned concerning these issues. Granular Recovery – well the good news is you won’t have to restore the content DB backup to a SharePoint Farm, Hidden in the depths of 2010 Central Administration is a command called Granular Recovery from unattached database. And backup now goes down to the list level. Certainly an improvement but I doubt the likes of Quest and AvePoint will be packing up their tools and leaving the SharePoint scene anytime soon. Anybody who has used one of these tools to search and retrieve an item from a backup file (no restoring to SQL) will know why. Native support for mirroring – Now you can tell your SharePoint sites where the failover database is. If SharePoint cannot contact the principal node (I think it’s in 10 seconds) then it will attempt to contact the failover. This in my humble (well not so I am blogging after all) is brilliant. Unfortunately you still need to set up the SQL side from SQL but when combined with a witness server this could be a very useful addition. Index Server – this is now the Crawl Server, I know you just get used to one set of names and acronyms and then they change (wait until you find out about BDC, still a SharePointy acronym but doesn’t quite mean what it used to). Anyway, with the brand new service architecture the single point of failure is gone in 2010. It’ll even support mirroring if you really want to (more redundancy and you know what redundancy makes? Yep license sales). Robust backup – the reason  Microsoft didn’t support mirroring and restore for the config database in 2007 was the sheer volatility of the data. In 2010 they do support backup and restore. The config backup saves settings to an XML file which could even be restored to a completely separate farm, in theory. Mr Watson was quick to point out that he hadn’t seen it done. So some great improvements, especially around redundancy and mirroring. Should make complying to those SLAs a little easier. Del.icio.us Digg It Share on Facebook Stumble It! Posted Apr 21 2010, 02:11 PM by colinn with no comments

• Some SharePoint 2010 Limits

  In Mike Watson’s talk on SQL planning he highlighted some recently published numbers for SharePoint 2010 capacity: Category 2007 Capacity 2010 Capacity Content Database 100 GB 200 GB File Size* 2 GB 2 GB Databases per web app 100 300 Site Collection Size 100 GB 100 GB List Items per view 2000 5000 * This is a boundary limit dictated by the SQL field. Larger files require another solution such as Remote Blob Storage (RBS). As with 2007, apart from the file size limit, a lot is going to depend on the structure of your data and the size of the files saved. Only the File Size is a ‘hard’ limit the rest is the point where Microsoft would expect a degradation of performance. Del.icio.us Digg It Share on Facebook Stumble It! Posted Apr 20 2010, 08:55 AM by colinn with no comments

• SharePoint Governance 101at Evolution 2010

  Was sat in a talk by Paul Turner of HP Software (he’s their World Wide Services Competency leader for SharePoint). The subject was Designing Information Management for the Masses but as you can probably guess what it boiled down to was a matter of governance and Paul reminded me of the four main tenets of any good SharePoint Governance Plan: People – clear vision and defined roles and responsibilities Technology – service level agreements Policy – design and usage principles Process – common tasks that need to performed And why do you need governance? Well top of the list for me is ‘SharePoint sprawl’. Giving those users the ability to create content, sometimes hideously complex content and solutions, can result in an explosive growth of sites, sub sites and even site collections. Even I with my simple dev background can understand the potential impact of allowing users to add content ungoverned. From a usability perspective there is the inability to find useful content and if users can’t find what their looking for the system will soon fall into disrepute and alternatives will be found (watch them mail boxes grow once more) From an infrastructure view unchecked content can lead to a strain on network and database resources. Content quality will be hit too if there are no policy on metadata or the location certain assets should be saved to. It can also impair decision making if the data is difficult to find and assimilate then the business leaders are going to be unable to make informed, timely decisions. Finally – ok finally for this simplistic article, there’s plenty out there on the subject – without proper governance from the outset there is a risk that the SharePoint implementation will never be fully aligned with the business and thus the business will never get full value from it. Naturally, this then runs the risk of the business never valuing the platform and the implementation and indeed product forging a reputation of failure. Del.icio.us Digg It Share on Facebook Stumble It! Posted Apr 19 2010, 03:14 PM by colinn with no comments

• SharePoint Evolution 2010 Keynote

  The Icelandic fire gods have taken their toll on the conference with much reorganisation of the agenda to give those speakers who haven’t made it the chance of getting here by Wednesday. Still, as Steve Smith pointed out in the keynote there were cons and pros to the situation, some folks couldn’t make it to the UK but then others couldn’t leave and they have been enlisted to ensure the conference goes on. The mystery keynote speakers were revealed, as well as Mr Smith, Eric Shupps, Spencer Harbar and Brett Lonsdale took to the stage to give attendees a good dose of nostalgia. Whether the audience wanted to be reminded of the “quirky charm” of 2001, 2003 and 2007 versions of SharePoint I’m not sure but there were a few of us older types with tears in our eyes (some may have been joyful most I suspect not, one chap beside me started to shake and mutter) as we were taken through the delights of SharePoint’s growth from small web based storage app to all conquering integration and application platform. From the basic document management available in 2001 (though allegedly not a recognised member of the family) through the introduction of SQL in 2003 and finally to the feature/solution package deployment framework. Of course nobody could answer the question, why did Microsoft stick with that blue?  Del.icio.us Digg It Share on Facebook Stumble It! Posted Apr 19 2010, 01:18 PM by colinn with no comments

• SharePoint Evolution Conference 2010

  Tomorrow is the first day of the SharePoint Evolution Conference in London. The conference is going ahead despite the best efforts of Icelandic volcanoes; planes may be grounded, the sky may be awash with ash but SharePoint carries on regardless! With the RTM released this month and the official launch only a few weeks away the conference has a very 2010 feel to it, there’s not too much for those interested in 2007. I guess this is understandable, it’s a technology conference and if there’s one thing that technologists like it's something that can have the adjectives ‘new’, ‘shiny’ and ‘improved’ placed in front of them (unless it’s washing powder – not really too excited by that). The speakers have a familiar feel Spencer Harbar, Eric Shupps, Mike Watson, Steve Smith, Joel Oleson, Andrew Connell, Bill English to name but a few. All of these guys will have by now had extensive exposure to the supposed wonder that is SharePoint 2010 (supposed? no,truly it is wonderful!) and it’ll be interesting to hear what they have learned since Vegas’ conference. One mystery remains. Who will deliver the keynote? Having spent literally seconds exploring the Evolution Conference site I can find no clues… Del.icio.us Digg It Share on Facebook Stumble It! Posted Apr 18 2010, 07:46 PM by colinn with no comments