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Effective SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Q&A

Joel Oleson — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:02:52 GMT

Webcast: Get to SharePoint 2010 - Strategies for Effective Upgrades and Migrations

Question and Answer Log:

I like to capture the questions from a good webcast.� Got a bunch of good ones today.
If you missed the presentation you can get a recording and the slides here.

Paul Asked: Are there major downsides to using SQL 2005 with SharePoint 2010?

The downsides are the features in SQL 2008 that SharePoint 2010 takes advantage of.� Starting with Mirroring, Remote Blob Storage, Backup Compression, Transparent Database Encryption, PowerPivot (see more below), Optimized Engine for performance, SQL Governor, etc...

Dutch McGehee Asked: Can I get a copy of the powerpoint slides?

Sure. http://www.quest.com/events/ListDetails.aspx?ContentID=12156

Question: What is the best non-destructive (to existing MOSS environment)
way to do upgrade if I'm upgrading to a new environment, but using the existing
production SQL?

Non Destructive?� Need to drill into that.� I'm guessing setting the current 2007 databases to read only as you migrate the databases with database attach to a new environment would be most non destructive.

Question: When will your book be available?

It's available now in Rough Cuts on Safari. The other physical publish date is up to the publisher.

�

Travis Asked: Does PowerPivot require SQL 2008 R2? or will it work on 2008 and
2005 SQL?

It requires SQL 2008 R2.

"PowerPivot is essentially a way of making an analysis services cube using excel as the design tool.� When you use the PowerPivot for Excel add-in, then there no backend dependency, but if you want to save a PowerPivot to SharePoint 2010, there has to be a special installation of SQL Server 2008 R2 analysis services associated with the SharePoint farm." Andrew Fryer in PowerPivot is Analysis Services sort of.

�

Question: Missed beginning...Is SQL 2008 required for SP 2010?

No, you can run SQL 2005 x64 with SP3 CU5 and later.

�

Jose Asked: can you use this method from 32bit to 64 bit?

Yes, you can use database attach to move from 32bit to 64bit SharePoint Servers, or you can upgrade the SQL environment first with In-Place Upgrade.

�

Steve Asked: Does Add Solutions include InfoPath forms in forms
services that have code-behind?

Some InfoPath forms will need to be redeployed especially in cases where these are server solutions with database attach.� In place upgrade would keep your solutions in place.� Some code behind may need to be tested and redeployed.� In all these cases I highly recommend testing.� Workflow is one area where I've found visual studio solutions do need to be updated.

�

Question: does the visual upgrade upgrades all sites in site collection or can it be done by each site?

It can be done granularly or the entire site collection.� You can also hide the preview option or upgrade it all at once.

�

Kyle Asked: Any experience or recommendations in using the AAM URL Redirection as part of the upgrade process

I recommend against using it if you don't need it.� It is complex and adds an unnecessary complexity in most upgrades.� Some may think they need it if the upgrade will be over weeks and read only isn't good enough.

�

Michael Asked: When should MySites/Profiles be migrated - before other site types? after?

You'll want to make sure that your profiles and my site host is in place first.� I recommend getting the services in place, especially dependent services. before you start migrating content.

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Question: Does Quest Migration Manager support migration of SP 2007/MOSS environment from on-premise to BPOS-D (SharePoint Online 2010)?

It's in development.� Also note that SharePoint Online 2010 isn't yet available for the general public.

�

Jeremy Asked: Does Migration manager work with WSS 3.0

Yes.� WSS 2.0, WSS 3.0 to SharePoint Foundation

or WSS 2.0, WSS 3.0 MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010

�

Question: In the Fab 40 page, you had mentioned http://bit.ly/dhQUjd . Is
this a valid site? I just checked and it showed error.

The link works for me.� It should redirect to: http://www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=374 which has links to the blog post from the technical documentation team and links to Khalil's upgraded SharePoint 2010 Fab 40.

�

Don Bruce Asked: Throughout the presentation you have mentioned a lot of things
done through PowerShell. We have typically thought of PowerShell as a
Developer-lite tool. How important is it that a SharePoint Administrator have
PowerShell skills?

Great question.� For SharePoint Administrators there are a lot of commandlets that act similar to STSADM and are very similar in their construction, but they give you the power of a scripting language.� I recommend reading my post on Powershell and SharePoint.

Practical Windows PowerShell for SharePoint 2010 - SharePoint Joel

Upgrading to SharePoint 2010 with Powershell

�

Sudip Shrestha Asked: I have a custom top navigation bar based on a xml datasource in a 2007 farm.. Does 2010 support 2007 type of navigation bar? How will 2010 handle this custom navigation bar?

I can't answer specifically.� I do recommend testing.� I think you'll find most things do upgrade quiet nicely.� Backward compatibility is quite good.� You will notice that binary upgrade will leave your nav bars, and visual upgrade will replace them.� You'll need to add them back in after visual upgrade or add them to your masterpage.

�

Grace Sigal Asked: Very slow... i can't see the demo

http://www.quest.com/events/ListDetails.aspx?ContentID=7836

Tim Chilva Asked: Does the "migration Manager handle placing "Content Type" into the "Master" META database, when a SP '07 site is migrated?

This is a great feature request.

�

Pat Breitenbeck Asked: does quest have a doc that tells what Migration Manager
can do that PowerShell or Stsadm commands cannot do?

�

Mark Mascolino Asked: We have a large number of site collections in a single web
application. We expect that the upgrade timelline to require having two farms
2007 & 2010 in parallel for a few months. How can we use the db attach upgrade
approach to a new farm while maintaining a single hostname in both farms?
(sites.company.com) e.g. we need redirector from 2007 upgrade process

If you can do it a web application at a time over a weekend or use readonly mode for the source you should be ok.� If not you should look at the AAM Redirection or third party like Migration manager for post migration sync.� Alex has some good info on it.

�

Question: Will Migration Manager convert the links within content to the destination?

SharePoint Designer or STSADM -o import/export or powershell import/export will try to do link fixup, but only in lists, not within documents.�

�

Gerald Asked: can multiple 2007 publishing web applications be re-structured
under a single new 2010 web application

Yes with Migration manager you can consolidate sites during the migration.� With normal upgrade you'd need to either use import/export while on 2007 or while on 2010, not during the upgrade.

�

Archana Mordekar Asked: What needs to be done to move a SharePoint application
(site Structure, features, backend code) from one box to another? The
configuration on both boxes is the same - the app needs to be brought up on
another box

Backup/restore, and redeploy the solutions/features.

�

Question: If I'm running Quest WebParts for Sharepoint on a Sharepoint 2007 environment, will I have to upgrade to Quest WebParts for Sharepoint 2010, or the 2007 version of the Webparts work on 2010?

You can install the 2010 Quest webparts on a new farm with database attach.� With in-place you can upgrade the webparts after the upgrade.� I think you'll find this consistent with most customizations.� They need to be in place on the source before the migration, or they need to be upgraded after, in the case of in-place upgrade.

�

Question To: Joel, what is your blog URL address?

http://www.sharepointjoel.com

How Microsoft Is Doing Records Management

Joel Oleson — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 07:52:37 GMT

SHAREPOINT 2010 WEBINAR

How Microsoft Is Using SharePoint & Colligo for ECM & Records Management

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

8:00 AM Pacific / 11:00 AM Eastern

4:00 PM London / 5:00 PM Paris

Join Microsoft guest speaker Nishan DeSilva on September 21st for the webinar: "How Microsoft Is Using SharePoint 2010 & Colligo for ECM & Records Management." Nishan DeSilva is the Director of Information Management & Corporate Records Compliance at Microsoft. He will provide an inside look at how Microsoft's Legal and Corporate Affairs Department (LCA) is leveraging SharePoint 2010 and Colligo Contributor to address compliance while empowering users to get their work done.
In this webinar, you'll learn:

Microsoft's strategy in LCA for information & records management
How to effectively move unstructured content & email into SharePoint
How to apply consistent classification & compliant retention policies
How Colligo Contributor facilitates email management in SharePoint
How to improve the user experience to drive adoption & compliance

Nishan DeSilva will provide insights into Microsoft's strategy for SharePoint 2010 and how SharePoint along with Colligo Contributor enables organizations to take ownership of their information assets. Barry Jinks, Founder and CEO of Colligo, will discuss how client solutions add value to SharePoint 2010 and provide important functionality for seamlessly integrating Microsoft Outlook and SharePoint.
For new strategies to improve ECM and records management in your organization with SharePoint 2010, register for this webinar below!

--> Register for this Free Webcast!

SharePoint Document Libraries and Horrors Oh My

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 21:33:30 GMT

I thought I would capture a few ideas around document libraries and share with the rest of the class. These are not "best practices" as I don't want to sound too preachy so let's call them "pretty good practices that you might want to consider if you have some time" (which is far too long for a blog title, hence the one I came up with is going to have to do).

SharePoint Fight Club

The first rule of SharePoint. I want you to repeat after me.

"SharePoint Document Libraries are not file shares."

Good.

Now say it again.

Good.

Remember this, above all other things we're going to talk about here, and you'll be golden.

Document Libraries are not File Shares

I have to repeat this here because it is key. If your users are asking you to put a file share into SharePoint then you need to beat them upside the head when they talk about "replicating the folder structure" or "like for like" or "make it just like *that* (and points to file share)".

If you really must make some kind of analogy and your audience knows something about databases (even Access), rather than saying document libraries are like file shares say "document libraries are like databases". While SharePoint sits on top of a database it's kind of irrelevant what the backing store is (side note, Dear Microsoft, please make a pluggable store for SharePoint in the next version) a list or document library is pretty much like a database. A document library may "look" like a file share just because it lists documents (which originated as files) and contains folders (assuming you left this feature on, more on that later) but it's more like a database than a file share. Each document is just a blob associated with metadata (title, size, date, author, etc.).

A team once built a "document management system" in Oracle using. wait for it, blobs associated with tables with columns to hold the metadata for the blob. I laughed when they couldn't store certain types of blobs and spent a ton of time trying to index the system and build a web UI on front of it (and yes, SharePoint was in the environment, that team chose to talk to me after they built it in isolation). True story.

Would you create a folder in a database? No. Great, let's move on.

Working Online

Something that is going to be a big hurdle for your users (and yourself if you haven't got into the mindset) is that you do not need to create new documents on your hard drive. Ever. I see this behavior all of the time:

Start Word/Excel/PowerPoint
Create content
Save file to "My Documents" or some such silly place
Start browser
Navigate to SharePoint site and document library
Click on Upload
Navigate to find document on local drive

Really. Drives. Me. Nuts.

With the Office integration with SharePoint 2007 or SharePoint 2010, you're able to fully integrate your editing experience with SharePoint. If you know your document is going to go into SharePoint then either a) save it to SharePoint when you're done or b) launch a New document from the document library (which in turn will open the client app and save back to the SharePoint library by default).

It's really simple to show users but will take some coaxing to get them to do this. Of course not everything belongs in SharePoint but it drives this SharePoint guy batshit crazy when I see documents in My Documents, a USB drive, a network share *and* SharePoint (of course every location has a different version).

Start using the tools as Microsoft intended you to and you'll be in a better place.

Do_x0020_not_x0020_use_x0020_spaces_x0020_in_x0020_names

When you first create a new document library please don't name it "Project Documents" or "Expense Reports - March 2010" or "Famous kittens I would like to juggle". Instead name it "ProjectDocuments" *then* go back and change the name in the library settings. The reason why is when you create a new document library and call it "Project Documents" it takes on an internal name of "Project_x0020_Documents" and accessing that library in the browser will result in a url of "Project%20Documents". That's fugly not to mention a PITA to deal with.

Make everyone happy by crunching the name then going back to rename it to something more human friendly. Frankly I wish SharePoint did this automatically (like it does for publishing pages) but until that happens, we should make a mental note to do it ourselves and be good SharePoint citizens.

Hint: This is my golden rule for lists, columns, and views too!

Don't Get So Attached

The worst sin (well, one of many) is some guy sending me an email with a document attached to it, usually about a minute after I get the alert the document was added to the library. Better yet, the document copied to a dozen people on my team. I can see the need for this if you have external users who don't have access to your SharePoint site so that's perfectly acceptable but you should really compose an email to them with the attachment and send the link to your internal team (I know, two emails are better than one? Your internal team doesn't need the attachment).

It's really simple to get a link to the document. Right click, copy shortcut, paste. Another tip when pasting the url into an email is to write a word to describe the document (or even "Document is here" is fine too) and highlight the word or phrase and hit Ctrl+K to create a shortcut. SharePoint links can get somewhat long and ugly so pasting that directly into an email can break up the readability. It's an extra keystroke but worth the effort IMHO.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

If you do live in the world where you are interested in versioning is important then go over the draft/publish model with your users. Draft versions have two attributes. First they're minor versions (0.1, 12.3, 8,348,23.58,328). They're incremented each time you check a draft version in (and have major/minor versioning turned on). Second, they're only visible to people that have edit capability on the document library.

For example you have some requirement document that's going to evolve and perhaps go through a few public versions (say one version for each phase; architecture, design, construction, etc.). The team agrees to use versioning and you twist their arm into a using draft/publish model. It's really simple. Every time they have a minor edit, they check it in (leaving it in draft). The team juggles around reading it, making comments, pontificating, whatever until they're in agreement of the contents. Then the custodian of the document checks the last version in and chooses to publish it. It becomes the next major version up and visible to readers of the site.

This works well because all of your minor edits are behind the scenes (and the number of them can be limited if you choose) and people get to see the polished product. Then it's back to draft modes and "dot" versions, the cycle repeats itself, until the next major change. Treat documents as living entities that grow up (like an application, or a kid but without the mess) and maybe apply Semantic Versioning to them (publishing a major version when there's something useful to communicate rather than bumping up the major version on every check in). This will cut down on the chatter between the team and readers don't have to keep asking what the big change from 1.0 to 2.0 was (remember to add comments when you check in a major version).

Document1-draft.doc

How many times have you seen a document named this in a document library? True, you might not have versioning turned on but c'mon people. Really? That's like using zip files for version control when you have a perfectly good SCM system in-house. The best part is that you look in the doclib and see Document1-draft.doc, Document1-final.doc, Document1-final.docx, etc.

Sit down with your users and explain the virtues of versioning. Maybe it's not for them and maybe they don't need full blown major/minor, draft, publish versioning. That's fine. However if they're going to be working on documents that evolve and need to be reviewed it's probably time to show them a draft/publish model.

Bottom line, if you see the -draft, -final behavior then nip it in the bud before it becomes a problem. You don't have to call your user out in the daily stand up and berate them in front of the team, but be supportive and helpful. Not everyone is a SharePoint Guru like you (and for good reason).

SharePoint Inception

There are some people that have done some nice things with folders (Laura aka "@wonderlaura" Rogers has a great article on Per Location Views). I feel these are exceptions to the rule. Systemically it probably stems from the file share stigma. People organize information using folders so it's natural to them. The problem is that (remember?) document libraries are *not* file shares. Stop treating them like that.

Folders are like IFRAMEs. They were a great idea but as time went on, without people knowing any better or good ways to use them, they became ugly and nowadays IFRAMEs are pretty evil and frustrating and we don't have a lot of them around. We've grown past them. Now let's move on from folders.

A few things about folders that make them different from nuclear reactors:

Document libraries have a path limitation (actually I think the limitation is on IE or maybe even HTTP) so nesting lots of folders inside of folders chews this up real quick. Trust me when you exceed the path. The error message you sometimes get is a blank screen.
You generally have to know where something lives in order to find it. This can lead to dozens of clicks on folders depending on how great your folders are named.
Folders are neither discoverable (other than the top level ones) nor searchable. Metadata is.

Folders don't help organize information. Yes, I create a folder named "Expense Reports" but that doesn't mean my smart users are going to put expense reports in them. Or a folder named "Architecture". I guess I'm going to expect Visio drawings or stickmen or something in here but what happens when I start seeing server inventories in spreadsheets. Is it architecture or detailed design (or a document misfiled from some other project). Metadata and Content Types help you organize information.

Folders attach a fixed path to a document. If you drop something in a folder that's how you retrieve it. If you decide one day to simply move it up or down the folder hierarchy, guess what? All those links are now broken. Using metadata to organize information means "I don't care where this is but I know what it's about". Get into the habit sooner rather than later.

Where Am I?

Just a bit of a follow-up to using folders. One of the worst things you can do is drop a document library onto the home page of a site. Your site is for information. Try putting announcements, tasks, or pictures of kittens on your team/project home page. Not documents.

If you put a document library on the home page and have folders-from-hell enabled have you noticed the evil that is unleashed? No. Take a look again. Click on a folder. Now another one. Now another. Keep going until you've descended into the 9th level of Hell. Now take a good look at that url in your address bar. Go ahead. Click it. Now send it to someone with a note "I left your termination notice here" and paste in the link. When your unsuspecting suspect clicks on said link, nine times out of ten, he or she will be taken to. THE HOME PAGE of your site. Cool beans. Note that I said "maybe" so it's not a guarantee but it's also not very pretty. Like any Jessica Simpson movie pretty. And your users will grumble and gripe and blame SharePoint, not Jessica Simpson.

The other pro (or con depending on how full or empty your glass is) you get from dropping that beloved document library on your home page is the all important bread crumb trail. Pro or con, the breadcrumb trail that you see above a document library when you're navigating through it is gone. It only exists when you send your users to the doclib itself so forget any navigation up the levels of Hell (or even knowing where you are if you care).

Metadata, metadata, metadata

Oh but Bil, I can't find my documents without putting them in a folder called "My Documents". Now after you noodle on that statement for a minute think about it. You unleash the fury of SharePoint on your team spouting commandments like "THOU SHALT PUT DOCUMENTS INTO THY DOCUMENT LIBRARY" and your team has no clue how to organize documents in a document library (let alone their own desktop) and you yell at them for not "categorizing" or "classifying" them properly.

Give yer head a shake.

You can't bash people for playing the game incorrectly if you don't give them the rules to the game.

Metadata is king in the SharePoint world. If you need to organize your documents dump them into a doclib and stick a column on said doclib called "Category" (or "LOLCATegory" if that turns your crank). Make it a choice field and let users add their own or make it a lookup into a list (or better yet use the metadata feature in 2010 but if you're on 2007 we live in simpler times). Then create a view grouped by category. Create some searches on the category column. Create some views for categories the team feels important like "Important Architecture Documents" or "Things I would like to do to Bil if I could". Pretty soon the team will be happy because they don't have to spend 3 hours looking for a document that's in front of their face.

Note that the space-in-names rule doesn't apply to choices in a choice field. It doesn't form a url and SharePoint doesn't go tossing in its "_x0020_" macro on you. Be wild.

Breaking Boundaries

One final question about document libraries is how much is enough? How many document libraries do I need to store my documents. The answer my friend is "it depends" (oh you knew I was going to say that). Only you or your team or the collective wisdom of whomever is using the library knows what the right division is.

There are a few factors you can use to decide where to draw the line. Size might matter (although less so in SharePoint 2010). You might want to break up document libraries based on security. While you can apply security to (gasp) folders or items in SharePoint, it might make more sense to just seclude off a library for privacy. Remember when you created the first team site and got a "Shared Documents" library for free? There's nothing but fear and common sense preventing you from creating a "Team Documents" and only allow members of the team to have read access ("Unshared Documents" just sounds a little badly in the grammar department).

I can tell you I don't know what the right division of document libraries is but I can tell you what the wrong one is. One document library per document. Yeah, I've seen it. It's evil.

Christmas Time

Okay, to wrap up let's just remember two key things:

Document libraries are not file shares
Dumping files into folders is not organization

I'm sure there are more than two key things you can take away from this, but I had to end this post or else face eviction from my home.

Enjoy!

Free Webcast: Get to SharePoint 2010 - Strategies for Effective Upgrades and Migrations

Joel Oleson — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 07:57:43 GMT

Wednesday, September 1 at 11:00 a.m. ET / 8:00 a.m. PT

Did you know there are really at least 3 options for visual upgrade?� Did you know there are some good scenarios for In-Place upgrade? Why is hybrid upgrade recommended for many deployments? This information and more on including guidance on why some may choose third party tools for upgrade and a demo from Ghazwan Kahari on the brand new 2010 Migration Manager tool.

During this live webcast, Joel will explore the different steps you can take to get to SharePoint 2010, and share tips, tricks and best practices to save you time and money.

�

Register now

SharePoint 2010 and SQL Hotfix Dependencies

Joel Oleson — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:03:25 GMT

Body:

I did a webcast about a week ago about upgrading to SharePoint 2010.� In it someone wrote on the chatboard that I had my SQL CU's dependencies wrong.� Rechecking my slides and the dependencies page for SharePoint 2010 with the July update.� I'm finding it is a bit difficult to navigate for customers where the SQL person is not the same as the SharePoint person.

The individual on the webcast was was on the right track that I should clarify this wild area of what do you really need to be running for SQL. The source for the info is on TechNet in the article on Hardware and Software Requirements for SharePoint 2010.

I recently found that not only that preupgradecheck does not check the version of SQL, in many cases neither does it check the version of SQL in the prerequiste installer in the cases of some of the in-place upgrades.� In some cases a new install will catch it during the provisioning of the farm.� Due to lack of rollback you're now scrambling to patch your SQL.

�

Option 1: 64bit SQL 2008 R2 or later

SQL Server 2008 R2

Option 2: SQL 2008 SP1 + Updates

SQL 2008 Sp1 with CU2 or CU5 or later

Cumulative Update Package 5 for SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 1

Note: You may get a warning if installed on Windows Server 2008 R2 (disregard)

DO NOT USE: CU3 or CU4

Option 3: SQL 2005 SP3 + Updates

SQL 2005 SP3 CU2, CU5 or later is recommended

Cumulative update package 5 for SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3

Cumulative update package 6 for SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3

�

Also note: Microsoft SQL Server hotfixes and cumulative updates are created for specific SQL Server service packs. You must apply a SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3 hotfix or cumulative update to an installation of SQL Server Service Pack. By default, any hotfix that is provided in a SQL Server service pack is included in the next SQL Server service pack.

�

For more information about choosing a version of SQL Server, see SQL Server 2008 R2 and SharePoint 2010 Products: Better Together (white paper) (SharePoint Server 2010).

�

Why are people confused?� Note this contradiction on the software and hardware requirements page.� First they are NOT recommending CU3 then they include a link to it.� Hope this is corrected soon.� I'll give the TechNet folks a heads up. Here's a quote from the page on 8/26/10.

"Note:

We do not recommend that you use CU3 or CU4, but instead CU2, CU5, or a later CU than CU5. For more information, see Cumulative update package 5 for SQL Server 2008 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=196928). Download the SQL_Server_2008_RTM_CU5_SNAC file.

The 64-bit edition of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 with Service Pack 3 (SP3). From the Cumulative update package 3 for SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=165748) page, click the View and request hotfix downloads link and follow the instructions. On the Hotfix Request page, download the SQL_Server_2005_SP3_Cumulative_Update_3 file."

Attachments: http://www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Attachments/377/image_2_653BE60D.png
http://www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Attachments/377/image_thumb_653BE60D.png

Aptillon SharePoint Consulting Genius

Joel Oleson — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 11:41:08 GMT

Today in SharePoint News. Something huge happened.

In the past you'd be impressed with a couple of MVPs/Experts putting their minds together and coming up with a product or a couple joining forces to write a book or get together to do some training or what have you.

The brain power in this group Todd Baginski, Darrin Bishop, Dan Holme, Gary Lapointe, David Mann, Matt McDermott, and Maurice Prather is extreme.� What they all have in common is they are really nice guys, who are not afraid of hard work.� All are and have been consultants in the SharePoint world for many years. They all are very senior consultants working in SharePoint a total of over 50 years combined.

The design is they are the principal consultants and now they are open for business.� They've already got consultants and the work has already begun.� With Dan in Hawaii, Maurice in the West, Darrin and Gary in the Midwest, and Matt down south, then David Man on the East coast of the US, they've really done a great job of getting coverage across the US and all times zones!

I want to wish them the best of luck.� They've all been MVP and I know a couple are MCM and many would qualify at that level if they went through the hoops.� With Dan's connections with Penton and expertise in PR, and Todd's connections with Microsoft, heck all of their connections with Microsoft. Gary's focus, determination and spirit and Matt's connections with the big dogs, don't forget David's east coast enterprise customer connections they'll do very well.

I'd be proud to work with any of them.

Getting Started with PowerConsole

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 18:39:42 GMT

Visual Studio 2010 is quite an improvement over it's predecessors in many areas. Extensions for Visual Studio is a big thing and gives you the ability to install simple add-ons that interact and work with your solutions and projects, right from within the IDE. If you're a tool author and haven't looked into creating your own extensions you should check out this link to get started.

Here's a funky little extension called PowerConsole that was written by Jianchun Xu at Microsoft. It's a PowerShell console window that lives inside of the Visual Studio. Rather than just being a dumb shell, it actually ties into the Visual Studio DTE [explain]. This allows you to access parts of Visual Studio itself like your solution, project, files and even code.

First you'll need to install the console into Visual Sudio. To do this, select Tools > Extension Manager. from the main menu:

Once the Extension Manager dialog appears, select Online Gallery from the left hand navigation:

Enter "powerconsole" in the search box and select PowerConsole from the search results:

Click on the Download button then click Install when the dialog appears:

Some extensions need you to restart Visual Studio after they're installed. This is one of them. Click on Restart and Visual Studio will shut down and start up again:

Once Visual Studio is restarted you'll have a new window you can open. A PowerConsole window! Click on View > Other Windows > Power Console (or press Ctrl+W then Ctrl+V) to open it:

Now the fun begins!

With PowerConsole you have access to some of the Visual Studio parts. There's a built-in variable created for you when PowerConsole loads. Type "$dte" in the PowerConsole and press enter and you'll see something like this.

$dte is the Microsoft Visual Studio object that will give you access to parts of the system, including your own solutions and files.

Now lets load up a solution to play around with. Here's a blank ASP.NET MVC 2 app. There are a lot of great things you can do with the $dte variable.

$dte.Solution gives you access to the current solution itself:

Which you can then parse out and extract say the name of each project and it's type:

The PowerShell Get-Member cmdlet will list all the methods and properties you can access in the $dte object:

How about displaying what edition of Visual Studio you're running?

This is just a sliver of what this add-on can do. You also get full Intellisense to your files and any cmdlets you install and there's extensibility too. There are a ton of things you can do with this and all it takes is a little scripting and some imagination!

Check out the PowerConsole site here and give it a try today.

Really, A SharePoint Training Cruise?

Joel Oleson — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 15:56:23 GMT

When Peter Abreu was asking me whether I'd be interested in presenting on a SharePoint Cruise I said.. Of Course!!!

What we didn't know was if people would want to receive their training on a cruise.� I think it's a very clever idea.� I think others would want to provide training in this way as well.

So now we need the proof.� Here's a survey to gather interest.� I personally would love to get training in this way as well.� If MCM was on a 2-3 week cruise, I can't imagine it being delivered in a better atmosphere.� Food is close.� Company is accessible, and sleep is not far away either.

Let us know what you think.

SharePoint Tech Cruise Survey

Updated Guidance on SharePoint 2010 Upgrade and the FAB 40 application templates

Joel Oleson — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 20:28:58 GMT

I've been telling people that Microsoft would be providing some guidance, and some of that guidance has come. Samantha Robertson a technical writer on the SharePoint team who is the author for much of the upgrade content on 2007 and 2010 on TechNet often without credit has posted some guidance.

Her post is titled "SharePoint 2010 Products: Upgrade and the Fabulous 40 Application Templates"

It's broken down into a couple of categories.� The information on.

Upgrade Guidance

1. What to do with the .stp files - STP is no longer an supported extension for template files.� The new format is the .wsp which is the same as it was for the solutions.� Now we have client solutions, and even saving a site as a template in SharePoint will generate a .wsp file.� Samantha includes the steps for recreating your upgraded site as a 2010 wsp site template.

2. What to do with the .wsp (solutions) - The server solutions in an in place upgrade if they are there should upgrade as is.� Some have issues, Samantha has explained these and points to the SharePoint setup forum (Absence Request and Vacation Schedule Management, Call Center, Help Desk, IT Team Workspace, Knowledge Base, and Physical Asset Tracking and Management)

Removing the Template Dependency

While it sounds like .stp files are the harder ones to deal with in reading her post, the opposite is true.� The .wsp files are the ones that contain custom site definitions.� Sure these can be recompiled and redeployed, but if you don't care to create new sites based on those templates you can simply remove the template file, the stp and move on.

In a previous post "Remove/Deactivate a missing feature for a cleaner upgrade" I address how to detract a feature if you are no longer using them, such as may be the case where a sample site was created using the template, but no longer needs it.

To Remove a Template

This will enumerate the custom templates in a farm

stsadm.exe -o enumtemplates

To remove a template you'll need the template title, I encourage quotes.

stsadm.exe -o deletetemplate -title "template title"

If you have multiple languages installed you may need to specifiy the language id such as 1033 for English.

stsadm.exe -o deletetemplate -title <template title> -lcid <language>

�

She also links to a great resource put together by Khalil who has recompiled the Fabulous 40 2007 app templates into updated solutions for 2010.� While not yet complete he's still working.� This is a key resource for people trying to maintain sites for people that are looking to do a database attach.� If you're building clean 2010 farms, this is truly a blessing.� Thanks Khalil.

3. Fab 40 Templates [upgraded by Khalil] for MOSS 2010

While I was hoping to see more guidance from Microsoft at least we've got something to work with.� Thanks Samantha and Khalil!

SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Decision Tree

Joel Oleson — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 14:24:37 GMT

Body:

I love it when the community comes together.� You can see the twitter discussion with Todd Klindt, Rick Taylor and Benjamin Athawes (on his blog) that resulted in a few different decision trees to help us better discuss the recommendations of In Place Upgrade vs. Database attach and really one of my favorites, the hybrid.� In this recommendation decision tree, you'll I rarely recommend in place without combining with database attach to mitigate the risks of full disk and other issues not captured by preupgrade check or in the prerequiste assessments such as SQL related patching issues.� The only case is in the smallest of deployments where people are using the basic install which I don't recommend anyway.

Love to get your feedback on this.� I threw in the Third party migration & tools as a bonus.� Some people wonder how it fits in.

You can grab the PDF: SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Decision Tree

If you want to discuss the Visio then you can find me on twitter @joeloleson

�

Attachments: http://www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Attachments/373/image_4_46CF8844.png
http://www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Attachments/373/image_thumb_1_46CF8844.png

Remove/Deactivate a missing feature for a cleaner upgrade

Joel Oleson — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 14:25:55 GMT

If you're running across this blog it's possible you're missing a feature or working on upgrade.

There are multiple ways to detect missing features including the WssAnalyzeFeatures tool from MSDN and PreUpgradeCheck.� Check out Gilham's blog on removing missing features for more detail and tools.

Stsadm -o Preupgradecheck (Installed with SharePoint 2007 SP2)

In Features you'll find the ID (GUID) and the word "missing"

Snippet from preupgrade check .htm report:

Name = [Unknown], Feature id = [bbe9def7-2fe9-a0b1-d712-aa128c837ebe], Reference count = [1], Scope = [Web], Status = [Missing]

�

If the site is still working as it should and you just want to clean things up you can remove the feature.

First you can uninstall the feature (it has to be there to uninstall it, we'll see that in a second.)

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>stsadm -help uninstallfeature

stsadm.exe -o uninstallfeature
�� {-filename <relative path to Feature.xml> |
�� -name <feature folder> |
�� -id <feature Id>}
�� [-force]

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>stsadm -o uninstallfeature -id bbe9def7-2fe9-a0b1-d712-aa128c837ebe

Feature with Id 'bbe9def7-2fe9-a0b1-d712-aa128c837ebe' is not installed in this farm. The feature was not uninstalled. Looks like by doing a search, this feature is related to the community kit blog.

�

If the feature is not installed on the farm, and you want to force remove the feature you can run stsadm to deactivate the feature.� More context to this error on William Wolfe's blog.

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>stsadm -help deactivatefeature

stsadm.exe -o deactivatefeature
�� {-filename <relative path to Feature.xml> |
�� -name <feature folder> |
�� -id <feature Id>}
�� [-url <url>]
�� [-force]

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>STSADM -o deactivatefeature -id bbe9def7-2fe9-a0b1-d712-aa128c837ebe

The feature with Id 'bbe9def7-2fe9-a0b1-d712-aa128c837ebe' is not currently installed. Use 'force' to deactivate it at this scope.

�

Let's add the force parameter:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>STSADM -o deactivatefeature -id bbe9def7-2fe9-a0b1-d712-aa128c837ebe -force

Operation completed successfully.

�

Deactiviting this feature bbe9def7-2fe9-a0b1-d712-aa128c837ebe across all the web apps cleaned it up:��

Now I'll rerun preupgradecheck and see that features are now all installed.� Our missing feature has been removed/deactivated (Dependency removed!).

FeatureInfo... Information Only - Now passed!

�

On an unrelated but related note, I'm seeing another missing feature of a different type. This one needs to be handled in a different way.

�

Re-running the upgrade I can still see it is missing a feature that's not showing in preupgradecheck.� The scope is on a specific web.� I could pass in that web and try to deactivate it, so I'll jump in the log to determine which database to look at.�

[FeatureInfo] [DEBUG] [8/12/2010 1:31:07 PM]: Searching for features in content database wss_content_joel...
[FeatureInfo] [DEBUG] [8/12/2010 1:31:07 PM]: Found 2 webs using feature definition 00bfea71-c796-4402-9f2f-0eb9a6e71b18 in content database wss_content_joel.
[FeatureInfo] [DEBUG] [8/12/2010 1:31:07 PM]: Found 2 webs using feature definition 00bfea71-5932-4f9c-ad71-1557e5751100 in content database wss_content_joel.
[FeatureInfo] [DEBUG] [8/12/2010 1:31:07 PM]: Found 2 webs using feature definition 00bfea71-a83e-497e-9ba0-7a5c597d0107 in content database wss_content_joel.
[FeatureInfo] [DEBUG] [8/12/2010 1:31:07 PM]: Found 2 webs using feature definition 00bfea71-4ea5-48d4-a4ad-7ea5c011abe5 in content database wss_content_joel.
[FeatureInfo] [DEBUG] [8/12/2010 1:31:08 PM]: Found 1 webs using feature definition fde5d850-671e-4143-950a-87b473922dc7 in content database wss_content_joel.
[FeatureInfo] [DEBUG] [8/12/2010 1:31:08 PM]: Found 2 webs using feature definition 00bfea71-d1ce-42de-9c63-a44004ce0104 in content database wss_content_joel.
[FeatureInfo] [DEBUG] [8/12/2010 1:31:08 PM]: Found 1 webs using missing feature definition bbe9def7-2fe9-a0b1-d712-aa128c837ebe in content database wss_content_joel.

�

Forcing the upgrade for SP2 still resulted in this error in the error log:

[SPManager] [ERROR] [8/12/2010 1:47:53 PM]: ReflexiveUpgrade [SPWebService Parent=SPFarm Name=SharePoint_Config] failed.
[SPManager] [ERROR] [8/12/2010 1:47:53 PM]: Feature '20477d83-8bdb-414e-964b-080637f7d99b' is not installed in this farm, and can not be added to this scope.

This feature is a feature that should be on the farm and may have resulted from a WSS to MOSS conversion or db attach.

Total number of configuration settings run: 3
Total number of successful configuration settings: 2
Total number of unsuccessful configuration settings: 1
Successfully stopped the configuration of SharePoint Products and Technologies.
Configuration of SharePoint Products and Technologies failed.� Configuration must be performed before you use SharePoint Products and Technologies.� For further details, see the diagnostic log located at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\LOGS\PSCDiagnostics_8_12
_2010_13_56_13_669_1368454839.log and the application event log.

If you see this feature 20477d83-8bdb-414e-964b-080637f7d99b is missing and preventing your upgrade to SP2 or otherwise run the following:

First:

stsadm -o installfeature -name PublishingTimerJobs

Second:

stsadm.exe -o execadmsvcjobs

Finally:

psconfig -cmd upgrade -wait -inplace b2b

Total number of configuration settings run: 4
Total number of successful configuration settings: 4
Total number of unsuccessful configuration settings: 0
Successfully stopped the configuration of SharePoint Products and Technologies.
Configuration of the SharePoint Products and Technologies has succeeded.

We're Serious - Don't Modify Your Database or Face Consequences

Joel Oleson — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 15:03:27 GMT

Today in SharePoint land there was a forum post about what's ok and not ok around modifying the database.� It's been a long standing position by the SharePoint team to keep your paws out of the database, but recent rules added into the preupgradecheck go further to make sure the schema is in the expected state.

Trevor states:

Can you upgrade to SharePoint 2007 SP2?� The database timer job includes an index defrag in it.� Also, reading or writing to SharePoint databases will throw you into an unsupported state. > Please see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb861829%28office.12%29.aspx

Benjamin explains:

I wrote a blog post a while back which details some information regarded supported operations on MOSS databases at http://mossblogger.blogspot.com/2010/06/administration-supported-database.html

Microsoft published a very useful white paper back in November 2009 called "Database Maintenance for Office SharePoint Server 2007" which on the whole is still relevant.

I went on to explain the fragile nature of vendors working with Microsoft's help to build tools which Microsoft SharePoint clients may use or recommend to clients.� Some of which may use backend protocol changes with microsoft's protocol documentation to do things not readily exposed in the object model.� Migration and recovery tools may fall into this category.� As is suggested in the modified database error for preupgrade check.� "User modifications to the SharePoint content database, including but not limited to table schemas, index, stored procedures, are not supported and will cause upgrade[.] to fail."� Obviously if you're having problems with a tool you should go to the vendor of the tool.� It's the same if you've been using a tool which might have changed the schema.� You should find out what might have caused the database to be modified.

What I'm finding is the preupgradecheck tool has some false positives with the modified databases rule particular.� Some who have installed Project Server or in this case below by simply upgrade not finishing it is reporting the database as modified.� Just because it is being reported as such does not mean that is the case. apparently.

One recent Q&A included someone who had possibly run the graual upgrade and another who simply needed to migrate the databases to avoid missing setup files reported by the preupgrade check.

As is the case with Quest software, most migration vendors and backup/restore vendors were given early access to the bits and many including quest participated in upgrade workshops to help ensure that the tools are compatible with the processes that Microsoft and it's partners will go through in an upgrade. such that by upgrade time for the customer, the vendor is more aware of what might happen and how to help the customer overcome these challenges.

Earlier today I had finished an WSS 3.0 SP2 and MOSS 2007 SP2 install and fixed issues related to missing features and was getting a clean bill of health with the preupgradecheck.� After getting this I was curious what was fixed in the latest cumulative update currently the June 2010 CU.

Now I'm seeing

InvalidDatabaseSchema... Failed
ContentOrphan... Passed
SiteOrphan... Passed
PendingUpgrade... Failed

�

Failed : Content database with modified database schemas

User modifications to the SharePoint content database, including but not limited to table schemas, index, stored procedures, are not supported and will cause upgrade to future versions of SharePoint to fail.The databases in the following list seem to have been modified from the original schema:

Data Source=moss2007ug;Initial Catalog=WSS_Content_c510ece1c03d4ec1875c4569e125f96b;Integrated Security=True;Enlist=False;Connect Timeout=15
Data Source=moss2007ug;Initial Catalog=SharePoint_AdminContent_2da7a517-e7e7-431a-a279-0722750e2fff;Integrated Security=True;Enlist=False;Connect Timeout=15

Please revert the modified database schema to the original state. If necessary, contact any software vendors who might have made this change because reversing the database schema could cause data loss. For more information about this rule, see KB article 954772 in the rule article list at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=120257.

�

Before you freak out, run in the 121\bin directory> psconfig -cmd -upgrade -force

After the upgrade completed, I'm now again getting a clean bill of health.

Free Webcast: Best Practices for Upgrading and Migrating to SharePoint 2010

Joel Oleson — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 10:50:31 GMT

Dux Raymond Sy and Joel Oleson are teaming up for a webcast you shouldn't miss.

Friday, August 20, 2010

Presented by: Joel Oleson, Dux Raymond Sy

Duration: Approximately 60 minutes.

Cost: Free

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is touted as the business collaboration platform for the enterprise and the web. It's a big leap from previous versions with its wide array of new features and capabilities.

To make the most out of SharePoint 2010, join SharePoint experts and O'Reilly authors Joel Oleson and Dux Raymond Sy as they share their experiences and unique insights into best practices in upgrading and migrating to SharePoint 2010. In this presentation, you'll gain a useful overview of how to:

Properly plan, budget, manage and control the SharePoint 2010 migration project
Prepare yourself for SharePoint and Office 2010 by archiving, cleaning up, and considering the move to 64-bit
Evaluate which upgrade method that's appropriate for your environment
Consider upgrade development and customization options
Determine what not to migrate to SharePoint 2010
Upgrade from SharePoint 2003

Register

ShowMe for SharePoint 2010

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 11:43:37 GMT

How We Did It: ShowMe for SharePoint 2010

Not surprisingly, one of the most frequent requests from SharePoint customers is for information worker training and more comprehensive help for end users. This issue cuts across the rich, diverse, and powerful capabilities of SharePoint; it applies regardless of whether information workers use the platform for collaboration, insights, search, content publishing, community building, or assembling their own composite solutions. Given the successful release of SharePoint 2010, with its completely new user interfaces and its impressive array of new features, almost every organization that implements SharePoint will encounter this request for more comprehensive help and training. At Point8020 Limited, we have worked with the SharePoint team at Microsoft for many years to create official training courses, videos, evaluation guides, and other educational material. It seemed only natural, then, for us to provide an answer to this most common of requests from SharePoint customers and partners.

Some might say we got carried away, seeing that we took this issue to the extreme and built a rich, engaging, video-based solution that provides on-demand, 'how-to' videos to SharePoint users. We're glad we did though, as we ended up integrating our solution right into the SharePoint user interface where it is most useful!

Our solution is called ShowMe for SharePoint 2010, and I'd like to take this opportunity to describe the benefits of our solution and also to describe how we developed it.

Overcoming the biggest barriers to returns on investment in SharePoint 2010

Organizations can be somewhat reluctant to roll out SharePoint 2010, even though they know that the new platform can introduce many efficiencies into how their employees work. The problem lies not with what SharePoint 2010 is capable of, but rather with the daunting task of ensuring that your information workers can adapt to some of the new ways of working.

To paraphrase one of the most important questions: 'What's the point of a new, improved version of SharePoint if our employees don't know how to use it?'

Perhaps an even trickier concern is 'We know that SharePoint 2010 will eventually introduce new efficiencies, but won't our current productivity levels diminish while everyone gets up to speed?'

In short, you want to know that what you spend on deploying SharePoint 2010 will quickly show a return on investment and increased business value for your organization. This applies whether you are implementing an upgrade from WSS 3.0/MOSS 2007 or whether this is your first time deploying SharePoint. And you know that the biggest, most pervasive barrier to such deployments is adoption of the new platform by your information workers.

That's exactly what ShowMe for SharePoint 2010 provides: It helps your users get up to speed in an incredibly short time.

Why users need help with SharePoint 2010

One of the most common reasons why your users need help and training in using SharePoint 2010 is that it provides a completely new user interface. So much so that even actions with which your users are familiar from previous versions are now performed in new ways. Providing help and training ensures that current productivity levels for upgrade scenarios do not diminish.

Another reason why your users need help and training is that SharePoint 2010 provides much more efficient ways of working, compared to previous versions of the platform. And, of course, you want your users to start working more efficiently, otherwise why upgrade? So showing them quickly how to achieve specific tasks efficiently must be one your goals.

Taking these concepts further, SharePoint 2010 provides completely new capabilities with which even the most experienced of your users will initially be unfamiliar. You need to raise awareness of these new capabilities and show your information workers how to use them, or the huge value that your organization can derive from SharePoint 2010 will remain unrealized.

What is our solution?

The main driver for our efforts was to develop a solution that provides video-based, on-demand help that can show information workers how to perform many tasks in SharePoint 2010. In fact, specific words in what I've just stated are key:

§ Video-based. Our approach has always been that the best way to teach a complex product is to break it down into bite-size chunks and show people how that specific bit can be used. Our solution includes 101 videos, all of which are focused on one specific task and almost all of which are less than two minutes long. (Many are less than one minute in length!) In brief, our videos are consumable and useful and don't take valuable time away from the user performing their tasks!

§ On-demand. We provide help and training to users when and where they need it. Our solution is integrated into the SharePoint user interface, so information workers can get help and learn while actually performing the tasks they need to fulfil their role in your organization.

§ In SharePoint. The key with integration into the SharePoint user interface is to make use of the amazing new (and not-so-new) features of SharePoint to deliver our solutions. For example, we provide access to our solution from the standard Site Actions menu, from the new context-sensitive ribbon, and through search results.

What does the solution look like?

The following screenshots show the key integration points of ShowMe for SharePoint 2010 with the new user interface of SharePoint.

Figure 1 shows how our solution adds a context-sensitive ribbon tab called 'ShowMe'. This ribbon tab appears when users need it, in 50 different contexts. You can see the controls on the ribbon tab - each control leads to multiple videos in that specific category.

Figure 1. The ShowMe for SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Tab

Figure 2 shows the engaging Silverlight-based help and training system that appears when a user clicks a control on the ribbon. Users can watch videos right here. They can also navigate through the other categories, all of which is provided in an iTunes-style, engaging user interface. (Well, we had to make it look good, didn't we?)

Figure 1. The ShowMe for SharePoint 2010 User Experience.

There are 101 short, bite-size videos that your users can learn from. We have assessed the core tasks that are undertaken by users and ensured that ShowMe for SharePoint 2010 covers those core tasks. We will be creating even more videos over the next few months and these will become available to our customers and partners free of charge! For the current list of videos, refer to our FAQ. (This FAQ topic has a link to the list of videos that we keep up to date.)

Figure 3 shows how the solution is accessible through the Site Actions menu. This ensures that regardless of context, the solution is 'always available' to your users.

Figure 3. The ShowMe for SharePoint 2010 Site Actions Menu.

One other integration point is extremely important: Search! Your information workers use the built-in search features as part of their daily tasks, so we ensured that the words spoken in our videos are indexed and that relevant videos appear in normal search results. This is a 'first' for SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Search in the entire world!

To see all of these features in action, you can view our demo.

How did we build it?

The key development efforts for our solution were:

§ Building a rich, engaging user interface. More development effort was required for this part of our solution than for the rest of the product put together, but Silverlight proved to be the ideal development platform. We made extensive use of the new SharePoint 2010 Client Object Model for Silverlight which now makes building rich interactive applications on SharePoint a reality. In short, Silverlight provides the slick user interface components (such as navigation and being able to play videos) while SharePoint provides storage for the videos, images and configuration files. The client object model bridges the gap between these two different environments, so we are eternally grateful to the SharePoint team for providing this key bridging technology! Without the client object model, our development would have taken much more time and effort.

§ Integration with the ribbon and Site Actions menu. The good news is that this bit turned out to be relatively easy. We created ribbon controls by using what's called the 'declarative' model. Truth be told, this took some getting used to, but the documentation for ribbon control development is getting better and better as time goes by!

§ Integration with the SharePoint client-side dialog platform. As you can see from the screenshots, our solution is typically displayed in dialogs that are similar to the built-in ones provided by SharePoint. This development was pretty straightforward and turned out to be one of the joys of SharePoint user interface development. Who knew it could be so easy? Well, we did as it happens, because we wrote the official developer Getting Started course for Microsoft! You can learn more about dialog development in Module 10 of the Getting Started course.

Next Steps:

For more information about ShowMe for SharePoint, you can refer to the FAQ page.

If you want to evaluate and play with ShowMe for SharePoint 2010, you can download the fully-featured evaluation version.

If you are a Microsoft Partner and want to learn how you can use our learning solutions to drive SharePoint adoption and create business value for you and your customers, you can refer to our partner program.

If you want more information or insight into our learning solutions, feel free to contact us!

About the Blogger

Martin Harwar is Chief Solution Architect for Point8020 Limited. He develops content for the SharePoint team at Microsoft as well as developing learning solutions based on Silverlight and SharePoint.

I'm in Utah today at the MOSSPit (SLC UG)

Joel Oleson — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 11:15:47 GMT

Title
MOSS Pit Monthly Meeting - Special Date�

Location

Intermountain Medical Center in Murray��

Start Time
8/4/2010 3:00 PM�

WHO and WHAT

Joel Oleson from Quest Software, also known as SharePoint Joel, will be dropping by this month to share some great information about Upgrading to SharePoint 2010.� This meeting takes the place of the normal End-of-July meeting, and their will still be a normal Aug meeting on the 31st.� We will be starting promptly at 3PM, so join us for some fun and SharePoint!

WHERE

Doty Education Center
Intermountain Medical Center
5121 South Cottonwood St.
Murray, UT� 84157

Enter to the North of the Patient Tower.� See Map: http://intermountainhealthcare.org/hospitals/imed/maps/Documents/IMCcampusMap79958.pdf

Wish you had free end user training incorporated into your SharePoint environment?

Joel Oleson — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 09:48:44 GMT

You need to start with the Productivity Hub. There's now one for 2007 and 2010!

A lot of effort has gone into end user training materials that can be easily incorporated into your existing deployment.� The iteration of this is called the productivity hub.� Whether you are running SharePoint 2007 or SharePoint 2010 you definitely need to get this content.� It lives as a site collection and serves as a little community for delivering training content on Office 2007/2010 & SharePoint 2007/2010.

Here's more info gleaned from the download page on download center:

The Productivity Hub consists of.

Pre-loaded SharePoint site collection, optimized for community functionality and easily deployed within SharePoint Server 2007 or SharePoint 2010 environment
Convenient end user productivity training in various formats (documents, videos, podcasts, etc.). Includes updates on a quarterly basis.
Train the trainer: Includes IT/Manager section to aid with deployment of the site collection, and guidance to develop the Coach program

<Get the New Productivity Hub>

SharePoint Virtual Expo Networking Event

Joel Oleson — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 09:08:00 GMT

On Demand Virtual Expo for SharePoint 2010
Wednesday, August 11 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. ET

If you have questions about migrating or upgrading to SharePoint 2010 or managing your new environment, don't miss this opportunity to get answers from our experts at the On Demand Virtual Expo for SharePoint 2010.

We'll be discussing things like.

Are Sandbox/User Solutions going to change the way IT hosts code?
Is SharePoint Designer up to snuff? Will it eliminate the need for Visual Studio for most dev projects?
What is the reality of the Memory and performance?
How is backup and restore better in 2010?� Do you still need to use a third party tool and why?
Should you plan on using my sites?� Why are they so important in 2010.

Join us at:

10:00 a.m. - 11:30 a.m. ET and 12:30� - 1:00 p.m. ET
Join Joel Oleson, Paul Swider of OnClick Solutions and Rick Taylor of Perficient in the Networking Lounge for one-on-one chats
11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. ET
Live Panel - Ask the Experts: Joel, Paul and Rick will answer your toughest SharePoint questions live in the Conference Hall

You can also get additional expert guidance to help you more easily manage, customize, and migrate to SharePoint 2010 by reviewing one of the many on-demand webcasts available during the show. And be sure and visit the resource center and virtual booths for insightful white papers, tech briefs, product information and much more.

Register Now

Creating a "New" Gem for "Nu" - From 0 to 100 in 24 Hours

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 08:56:00 GMT

Has it really been 24 hours since I jumped on the nu project bandwagon? Sure has. Let's take a step back first.

Where Have We Been?

For months now (or maybe it's been years) the .NET community has been talking about some kind of third party dependency package system. The much heralded RubyGems has always been brought up as the model. It was a bold and noble idea. Being able to package up .NET third party assemblies so new projects can hit the ground running.

Rob Reynolds (aka The Fervent Coder) has a great post explaining the hoopla we go through today to try to find a site, download a tools, unzip, reference, lather, rinse, repeat on every single project we do. He goes on to explain there are too many decisions in this process, it's fragile, hard to manage, etc. Basically being able to pull down all my dependencies that I'm going to use at the start of a project (and add new ones as I go along) by issuing a single command excites the hell out of me.

Getting Ruby with It

I've been a long fan of Ruby, getting into it last year as I tried to find a better way to express automated testing via BDD specifications in a natural language and always finding myself turn to Ruby as a language to help with this. Dynamic languages and duck typing is the cat's meow and I'm glad to see splinters of the DLR getting better and better in the .NET world every day.

There's been many attempts and even full blown packaging systems built for .NET but nothing has really picked up any traction. Then about 2 weeks ago the "nu" project was born out of the efforts of people like Roby Reynolds and Dru Sellers got down and put something together. Rather than continuing the efforts of trying to build a native .NET "gem" packager, why not just use gems?

RubyGems is a package management system that provides the ability to download a package (or library) and all it's related dependencies through a simple command. Check out Rob's post here on some background on Gems and how it relates to .NET.

So they created Nu (which started as ngems but quickly became Nu after the suggestion of "nubular" by Dave Laribee). "Nu" stuck because it was short and sweet (and we're all about minimalism). It does require Ruby (version 1.8.6 or high or IronRuby) and RubyGems installed but you know, that's a small price to pay for such a powerful back-end system. I remember I had a discussion with Scott Bellware last year or so about having to "drag in" an entire programming language just to run a tool (at the time, rake) for .NET projects. He made me see the light that it really wasn't a bad thing (although dragging in Java is a bit of a different feeling, but that's another post).

Diving In

After getting familiar with what was going on it was time to dive in. Seriously, it's dead simple.

Install Ruby. I know, you're going to get all ansy about installing Ruby on your precious .NET development system. Get over it. Download the click-click-done installer from here and stop whining.
Open a command prompt
Make a new directory somewhere for your test project (md c:\projects\nutest)
Change to that directory (cd c:\projects\nutest)
Make sure you have the latest update to gems (gem update --system)
Install nu (gem install nu)
Get a copy of one of the current packages available (nu install nhibernate)
Take a look at your project tree to see nhibernate and all it's dependencies installed

C:.
????.nu
????lib
    ????castle.core
    ?   ????mono-26
    ?   ????net-20
    ?   ????net-35
    ?   ????sl-30
    ????castle.dynamicproxy2
    ?   ????net-20
    ?   ????net-35
    ?   ????sl-30
    ????log4net
    ????nhibernate
    ?   ????Required_Bins
    ?   ????Required_For_LazyLoading
    ?       ????Castle
    ?       ????LinFu
    ?       ????Spring
    ????nlog
        ????Mono 1.0
        ????Mono 2.0

Did I mention how easy this was? No I can create my project and just add a reference to the assembly I need in my project. Want to add say NUnit and Rhino Mocks to the mix?

C:\projects\nutest>nu install nunit rhino.mocks
Found Gem
Copy From: C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/nunit-2.5.5.10112/lib
Copy To: C:/projects/nutest/lib/nunit
Found Gem
Copy From: C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/rhino.mocks-3.6.0.0/lib
Copy To: C:/projects/nutest/lib/rhino.mocks

Done. Yeah, really.

Note: If you're behind a proxy, just set an environmental variable called HTTP_POST to your proxy server and port and Bob's Yer Uncle.

Autofac Meets Nu

My next challenge was creating a new package. I'm a big fanboy of the IoC container Autofac and found it wasn't created as a RubyGem yet so I thought I would spend some time before my coffee this morning to package it up and see how easy this all was. And it was. Really.

Head over to Fervent Coder and read up on Robs walkthrough to create a new gem for Nu. It's basically what I followed (although with Autofac there are no dependencies except the binaries itself).

For Autofac, I downloaded all the releases that are current (version 2.2.4) from the download page here. Autofac comes with 4 main versions: Silverlight 3, Silverlight 4, .NET 3.5, and .NET 4.0. Note that I left out the Autofac contrib release. After taking a look at it, there were all kinds of dependencies in there and I didn't want to overly complicate things (or my first Gem). Sorry about that.

Once I had the files I extracted them all to a single folder (using their zip names) then did two things: a) rename the folders so it didn't include the version number and b) bring everything up into the root of that folder. Here's the structure when I first extracted the files:

C:.
????Autofac-2.2.4.900-NET35
?   ????Library
?   ????License
????Autofac-2.2.4.900-NET40
?   ????Library
?   ????License
????Autofac-2.2.4.900-SL3
?   ????Library
?   ????License
????Autofac-2.2.4.900-SL4
    ????Library
    ????License

And here's the simplified structure after I renamed each folder and moved the contents of Library up to that folder:

C:.
????NET35
????NET40
????SL3
????SL4

Another note is that I ditched the License directories and contents. Each folder had the various license files for Autofac and a few depencies (like Moq, NUnit, etc.) but Autofac doesn't actually reference any of these files. It only references itself so I just dropped the extra files. If I'm really peeving anyone off with this, please let me know and I'll update the gem.

Now that I had all my files in place I was ready to follow Rob's example to create the gemspec file and VERSION file. Here's the gemspec file for autofac:

   1: version = File.read(File.expand_path("../VERSION", __FILE__)).strip

2:

   3: Gem::Specification.new do |spec|

   4:     spec.platform    = Gem::Platform::RUBY

   5:     spec.name        = 'autofac'

   6:     spec.version     = version

   7:     spec.files = Dir['lib/**/*'] + Dir['docs/**/*']

   8:     spec.summary     = 'Autofac - An addictive .NET IoC container'

   9:     spec.description = 'Autofac is an IoC container for Microsoft .NET. It manages the dependencies between classes so that applications stay easy to change as they grow in size and complexity. This is achieved by treating regular .NET classes as components.'

  10:     spec.authors           = ['Nicholas Blumhardt','Rinat Abdulin']

  11:     spec.email             = 'emailme@bilsimser.com'

  12:     spec.homepage          = 'http://code.google.com/p/autofac/'

  13:     spec.rubyforge_project = 'autofac'

  14: end

I just grabbed the info from the website. Note that the spec.authors property should be the name of the authors of the library, not your name (unless of course you're building a gem for your own project). I'm not sure if the spec.email should be theirs or mine but it didn't manifest itself on the RubyGems site as such. Again, I can update the package if need be.

I did create a docs directory and dropped the Autofac.chm file (available from the site) into it. As for the VERSION file I just took a look at the properties of the assembly and noticed it was 2.2.4.900 (the website only shows it as 2.2.4) so I put that into the VERSION file.

After everything was done, you'll need to create an account on RubyGems.org then you can build the project with the command "gem build project.gemspec". In a minute you get a generated .gem file:

C:\projects\autofac\gems>gem build autofac.gemspec
Successfully built RubyGem
Name: autofac
Version: 2.2.4.900
File: autofac-2.2.4.900.gem

C:\projects\autofac\gems>dir
Volume in drive C is OSDisk
Volume Serial Number is B6FC-4710

Directory of C:\projects\autofac\gems

07/30/2010 09:43 AM    <DIR>          .
07/30/2010 09:43 AM    <DIR>          ..
07/30/2010 09:43 AM         1,053,184 autofac-2.2.4.900.gem
07/30/2010 07:03 AM               801 autofac.gemspec
07/30/2010 06:49 AM    <DIR>          docs
07/30/2010 06:51 AM    <DIR>          lib
07/30/2010 06:48 AM                 9 VERSION

Once the .gem file was built I pushed it up to RubyGems ("gem push autofac-2.2.4.900.gem") and it was done. I headed over to the autofac page on RubyGems.org and everything was golden. Version number correct, author names corect, etc.

One thing I did to polish it off was to click on the Edit link once your gem is produced and put in links to Source Code, Documentation, Wiki, Mailing list (autofac didn't have one), and bug tracker. It's just a simple step that you can't set in the .gemspec file (or can you?) but gives people some links if they're interested in looking for more info about the original library.

Roll Your Own

Like I said, this was easy. 24 hours ago I was looking at Nu; 12 hours ago I installed Ruby, created an account on RubyGems; 2 hours ago I downloaded Autofac, built my first gem, and uploaded it. There's no reason why you can't do the same.

Setting up your project is a breeze and it only takes 10 minutes at most to get it packaged and uploaded. Having to deal with dependencies automatically is a little more involved so check out Rob's post here on dealing with that. It's still neither rocket science or brain surgery (or rocket surgery) so anyone can do it and it helps the Nu community in these early days to get some momentum.

What are you Waiting for?

Drop by the nu-net Google group, join in the discussion, and get started using Nu!

And remember. Nice package!

SharePoint 2010 Site Templates - A Detailed Journey (Part 1)

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 22:59:34 GMT

A tweet came up tonight that I thought I would get my lazy butt doing something about:

I pointed @tareqsartawi to @toddbaginski's post Which SharePoint 2010 Site Template Is Right For Me? and while Todd does go over the templates and gives a brief rundown of them, there's not a lot of meat to what you get with each template.

So for Tareq (and anyone else who's out there) here's a more detailed breakdown of the site templates in SharePoint 2010.

This is part 1 of a four-part post as I got past the 2 hour mark and decided I would call it quits with the initial templates. I'll follow it up with additional posts to complete all of the template descriptions and notes (and link everything together to make it a happy-happy-joy-joy world we live in).

Note, this is a list of the templates you get with SharePoint Server 2010. For SharePoint Foundation 2010, you'll only find a subset of what you see here (but there's nothing Foundation has that Server doesn't). Also there are some templates that will only appear after activating certain site or site collection features. I'll cover some of those in a bonus post later. Clear as mud?

Creating Sites

When you create a new site you'll see the new create dialog like the one below (there's a regular HTML version but you really want to install Silverlight on your client to get the rich UI experience).

Each category along the site lets you filter down the template selections and selecting any template gives a brief description to give you an idea of what the template is about.

Here's the rundown on what's available out of the box (and what is covered in what blog post):

Blank & Custom

Blank Site (This Post)
Personalization Site (Part II)

Collaboration

Team Site (This Post)
Document Workspace (This Post)
Group Work Site (This Post)
Enterprise Wiki (This Post)

Content

Document Workspace (This Post)
Blog (This Post)
Document Center (Part II)
Publishing Site (Part II)
Publishing Site with Workflow (Part II)
Enterprise Wiki (This Post)
Visio Process Repository (Part II)

Data

Records Center (Part II)

Meetings

Basic Meeting Workspace (Part IV)
Blank Meeting Workspace (Part IV)
Decision Workspace (Part IV)
Social Meeting Workspace (Part IV)
Multipage Meeting Workspace (Part IV)

Basic Search Center (Part II)

Web Databases

Assets Web Database (Part III)
Charitable Contributions Web (Part III)
Contacts Web Database (Part III)
Issues Web Database (Part III)
Projects Web Database (Part III)

There's some duplication above in the categories but out-of-the-box you get 23 templates (3 new site templates, 5 new site templates based on Access databases). For more details about what's been added, removed, and updated as far as templates go please see Todd's original post.

Select a template, enter a title and a url, and click Create and you're off to the races. If that's all you need you can be creating sites in no time. Each template has it's share of not only a look and feel, but also what content is pre-loaded on the site and in some cases, what features are activated as a result of creating that site which light up the site and offer the user some options. For the most part any feature on the system can be applied to any site so it almost doesn't matter what template you start with, but there are some exceptions and we'll note them as we go along.

If you want a little more control when you create your site, clicking on More Options brings up a second dialog that lets you enter, well, more options:

The options are the same no matter what template you choose and I couldn't find any way to build something that would you let amend options here. Would be nice in the future. The only real advantage here is that you can break permissions on the site before it gets created and use the top link bar from the parent site (which is turned off by default for new sites). Any of these can be done after the site is created anyways.

Note that these dialogs appear in a popup when you select Create Site from the Site Actions menu. If you go the route of Site Settings > Site Administration > Sites and Workspaces then click Create you'll see this screen in the browser (not a popup):

This is the more traditional screen you might be used to from 2007. The templates and choices are all the same and this screen offers changing all options, much like the More Options dialog from above. How you create your sites is up to you, typical SharePoint there are just several routes to get to the same path.

Alright, let's get down and dirty with each template.

Blank Site

"A blank site for you to customize based on your requirements."

The core of any SharePoint site, the blank site. So simple and elegant yet devoid of any content. Basically a site you can turn into anything by lighting it up with features. Personally when we build "applications" in SharePoint this is the template we start with. The big difference from the "Blank" site template you got in 2007 is that this one really is blank and doesn't come pre-loaded with a SharePoint logo dropped on your "blank" site like 2007 did.

Team Site

"A site for teams to quickly organize, author, and share information. It provides a document library, and lists for managing announcements, calendar items, tasks, and discussions."

This template is perhaps one of the most used since SharePoint started using templates. Most everyone uses SharePoint for collaboration so this is one of the original collaboration tools out there. In 2010 many things are the same as they were in the 2007 Team Site template. You still have a Shared Documents library, a Calendar has been created, a Task list and a Team Discussion discussion board is here. With 2010 there are some major changes though that make it arguably a better collaborative environment it ever was.

First off everything is a wiki. Keep remembering that. Everything is editable. Remember when you created that first Team Site in 2007 and you wanted to start editing the page but found out you had to drop a content editor web part on the page, open up the right text editor, type something in, then click a few buttons to see what it all looked like? That's not collaboration. That's just plain painful.

The Team Site template, along with others, treats any page as a content page. Just click edit and start typing content. Want a picture on your site? Drop a media web part on it and upload it to the automatically created Site Assets library while you edit. Collaboration has never been as simple as this.

Getting back to the template itself, you'll notice a few new libraries created. There's a new Site Assets library which allows you to upload media (pictures, video, audio) to the site and use it on pages via the Media Web Part. There's a Site Pages library that contains all your pages (including the home page) so as you create new content, just drop it in here. The Announcements, Calendar, Links, Tasks, and Discussions you got in 2007 are still created, they're just not visible on any page so you'll have to either add them yourself or use the Quick Launch to access them.

Note that the Getting Started section that's added to the site is just content. It's not a list behind it, it's just HTML content that you can edit, delete, or use.

Document Workspace

"A site for colleagues to work together on a document. It provides a document library for storing the primary document and supporting files, a tasks list for assigning to-do items, and a links list for resources related to the document."

The document workspace is pretty cheesy and basically a carry-over from 2007. It was always intended to be a site where you would collaborate around a single document (aggressively) and I always thought it would well in a publishing environment. Create the document, everyone works on it, there are discussions around it and tasks assigned to take care of parts of it.

There were even facilities in Word to attach the document to a workspace (or create the workspace) when you saved the document. However say in the last 5 years I have yet to create a site with this template, other than demos (and this blog post). Perhaps it could still work for say a manuscript with multiple authors or a manual or training guide but I think 2010 has more to offer with Document Sets than to use this aging template.

At least they got the Announcements web part on the home page.

Group Work Site

"This template provides a groupware solution that enables teams to create, organize, and share information quickly and easily. It includes Group Calendar, Circulation, Phone-Call Memo, the Document Library and the other basic lists."

If you remember 2007, there was an after-market release called Group Workspace Board. It was a Microsoft template and offered the ability to essentially create an in/out board site. Trouble is that it didn't work very well, service packs sometimes broke it (or the server) and it was never upgraded. Well, it's back (although I'm sure they rebuilt it from scratch so pay no attention to the comments above). Basically the Group Work Site is a uber-enhanced blank site with some content added (after all, isn't that what *all* sites are?).

The Group Board is a pretty slick template and centers around a group calendar, which is really just a normal calendar but the regular Event content type has been removed and replaced with two new content types for 2010, Schedule and Reservations and Reservations. Basically if you're looking to use SharePoint for a reservation system (reserving fleet vehicles, meeting rooms, books, or anything you want to track) then this template might work for you. At the very least, create one to see how the Group Calendar is setup and you can rebuild your own in your own site. It's a nice Content Type that probably deserves its own post as there are a lot of great features you can get out of it.

Note that because the Group Calendar is really just a Calendar, you can connect it to Outlook but if you're looking to use SharePoint as a meeting reservation system tied into the resources available in Outlook (like you might today) you'll be out of luck. The two are not connected but they use the same terms so you might get confused over using them for the same purpose.

Enterprise Wiki

"A site for publishing knowledge that you capture and want to share across the enterprise. It provides an easy content editing experience in a single location for co-authoring content, discussions, and project management"

Remember everything is a wiki? Good. You're still reading. Well, everything is a wiki but there's still a template with the name Enterprise Wiki. I guess sticking "Enterprise" in front of something makes it that much more important?

The Enterprise Wiki is pretty much what you got in 2007 when you created a Wiki site. The old Wiki site template is gone and this stands in it's place. Even though you can edit any page on a site, this template is specifically setup for building a wiki. While it can't compete with Wikipedia, Confluence, or any of the *real* enterprise wiki's out there it's a nice place for putting together group notes about a subject. You could put together a blank site and just keep creating pages but then there's the navigation element and having to deal with inserting hyperlinks onto pages, etc. The Wiki template stays true to the (albeit weird non-standard) Wiki mark-up SharePoint established in 2007 and lets you cheerfully link pages together with a simple [[My New Page]] mark-up.

In addition to what we already had in 2007, there are some new features that light up the Enterprise Wiki template. Namely ratings and categories. The rating system is the same that's built into 2010 but it's embedded on each page template along with a category picker. This allows you, after adding content to a larger site, be able to navigate content by popularity or categories (configured through the managed metadata services).

While the mark-up hasn't changed much, a wiki page is just like any other page in SharePoint so you can embed pictures, video, tables, web parts, and SharePoint lists right onto the page. This makes the experience of building out a knowledge base using the Enterprise Wiki a more palatable experience and lets you be a little more creative without being overly constrained.

Blog

"A site for a person or team to post ideas, observations, and expertise that site visitors can comment on."

Blogs are like wikis in SharePoint. They're just OK and better than editing content editor web parts, but still fall short of a full blown blogging engine like dasBlog or WordPress. However in 2010 things have got a little better (don't get too excited, I said a "little" better).

Overall the presentation is cleaner, looking more like a blog like we traditionally know it. Permalinks are native now and overall the blog template sucks a little less than 2007. Instead of editing the blog page right on the site, you're forced to edit in a popup window with a diminished rich text editor. You can still insert images and video but it's a little less seamless when you edit blog posts this way. Still the basics are there, categories and comments, RSS feeds and the ability to edit your blog from a blogging tool like Windows Live Writer or even Microsoft Word (and publishing from Word while giving an uneasy odd feeling, sucks a little less than it did).

While things are better than their 2007 counterparts you might still want to look at the Community Kit for SharePoint - Enhanced Blog Edition or customize the existing blog template if you want to focus on blogs in your organization. There are a lot of features in SharePoint 2010 that are native that really should be stock with the blog template. Why can't I rate blog entries? Where are the tagging features? These things can all be done relatively easy even from the browser with no coding required. Just remember to save the template and make it available to your users (time for an Enterprise Blog template anyone?).

Wrap-up

Well, that's it for now to get the ball rolling. Let me know your thoughts. Hope that gets things going and helps out. More templates to come later! Enjoy.

Coming Soon. The .NET Outlaws Tour!

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 12:05:19 GMT

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to a conference.

Click on the image to see the full sized version.

My wife, @PrincessJenn, rocks the house. I bow down to her uber-PhotoShopping skillz and the fact she actually did this without me asking her.

Announcing the release of the SharePoint 2010 Administration Toolkit V1

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 15:00:00 GMT

I am pleased to announce the availability of the first version of the SharePoint 2010 Administration Toolkit. In this toolkit we’ve included a couple of tools that were shipped releases and are now adapted to SharePoint 2010, along with two new tools.

· User Profile Replication Engine 2010 (UPRE2010): this tool got a complete overhaul and was converted to PowerShell. It now allows you to replicate Profile and Social data between SharePoint 2010’s User Profile Application (UPA), as well as backward compatibility with SharePoint 2007’s SSP. You can replicate between SSP’s or UPA services, as well as across versions. (Note that only Profile data can be replicated across versions, as SSP contains no Social activity tracking).

· The Security Configuration (SCW) Manifest: SCW is an attack surface reduction feature in Windows Server. This manifest adds roles for SharePoint 2010 Products to Windows Server 2008 with SP2 or Windows Server 2008 R2.

· The Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Connector: enables SharePoint users to interact with content stored in any repository that has implemented the CMIS standard, as well as making SharePoint 2010 content available to any application that has implemented the CMIS standard.

· The Load Testing Kit (LTK): LTK generates a Visual Studio Team System 2008 (VSTS) load test based on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 IIS logs. The VSTS load test can be used to generate synthetic load against Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 as part of a capacity planning exercise or a pre-upgrade stress test.

The toolkit can be downloaded from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=718447d8-0814-427a-81c3-c9c3d84c456e&displaylang=en

The toolkit documentation can be found here:

SharePoint Foundation 2010: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc508986.aspx

SharePoint Server 2010: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc508851.aspx

Doron Bar-Caspi

Sr. Program Manager, SharePoint

WordPress versus SharePoint, another big smackdown

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 13:50:00 GMT

Previously I did a compare and contrast entry about DotNetNuke versus SharePoint. Now its time for WordPress to have a turn. Don't worry, there's more to come (Drupal, Joomla, Central Desktop, Box.net, etc.) but I've been working with WordPress for a few years now in personal blogs and sites and frankly I'm really, really impressed at the software. Architecturally it's no SharePoint and isn't the silver bullet that everyone touts SharePoint as, but for what it can do it does a good job. So here we go.

There seems to be a plethora of choices when you venture into standing up web sites where the content isn't completely created by a developer in Visual Studio. Call it content management, call it dynamic web delivery, call it modules and web parts and user centric assembly. Call it whatever you will, it's the the ability to empower people to contribute content (files, articles, etc.) to a website without the need for an "IT guy" to be the one doing all the work. Recently we just moved away from using CMS 2001 where (for whatever reason) all content was done by a guy in our department. Someone would send him an article, call him, or direct him to a website and he would create the content in CMS and publish it. As you can imagine having a single resource doing this all the time is pretty taxing and basically ignores the fact that users have been able to do this for hundreds of years themselves. No software in the world is going to fix a process where you rely on someone to do this for you, but these packages help you empower users to do it without having a lot of technical knowledge (the desire to create it still needs to be there, or a pointy haired manager with an equally pointy stick).

Introduction

WordPress is (IMHO) primarily a blog tool, however it does offer the ability to upload and serve up media (photos, videos), author pages of content, and with the vast number of 3rd party add-ins available the ability to hook into other resources (Twitter, Flickr, RSS, Paypal, etc.) and create a dynamic site that can no only serve up content but help you run a business. For this reason it seems appropriate to compare it to SharePoint. While the two are somewhat different in principle (and vastly different in architecture and infrastructure) they share the notion of delivering a user driven content site. You can just as easily accomplish most of what you can do in WordPress using SharePoint and vice versa.

Looking at some showcase sites you can see that both tools can deliver content in a similar fashion. Best Buy is hosted on WordPress (a surprise to me as I write this article) while Ferrari.com recently launched on the SharePoint 2007 platform. One thing to note about Best Buy. I went to the "showcase" site which is the WordPress driven site and essentially a store blog. I also launched the link to one of my own local stores. The local store site seems to be driven by ASP. When you visit the "store blog" site, the front page is fine but when you say select an item from the menu you're whisked away to http://www.bestbuy.com/ and in JSP land. Do they use ASP in Canada but JSP in the States? In any case, the WordPress site is really just a nice place to visit but isn't actually powering the entire site (including purchasing or reservations). In contrast, the entire Ferrari.com site and other SharePoint sites are 100% SharePoint and don't "shell" out to a "real" website to handle eCommerce. So as you're looking through the WordPress showcase sites understand that some sites are just window dressing for the real non-WordPress site.

As far as SharePoint goes, head on over to Top SharePoint Sites which showcases the best of the best and over 1200 internet facing sites running SharePoint. Ian Morrish also has a (bigger) list of about 1500 sites using Live Labs Pivot. It's very cool and can be found here. Of course it would be highly entertaining to have a window dressing site hosted on WordPress that backs onto a SharePoint site.

A Fair Comparison?

For the record, we're talking about the current version of WordPress 3.0 against SharePoint 2010. They're pretty similar in the grand scheme of things. You might think it would be fair to compare WordPress to SharePoint Foundation 2010 but WordPress is a CMS as much as any so IMHO it better compares against SharePoint Server than it does against Foundation (or WSS if you're looking at 2007). Feel free to debate what versions should be measured here and write your own damn review.

Architecture

These two ducks couldn't be so vastly different in architecture and infrastructure than Michael Jackson and Fidel Castro are. SharePoint is an ASP.NET application using a MS-SQL backend while WordPress is written using PHP and a MySQL backend. While WordPress sites can be snappy in terms of performance, it still is running on an interpreted language vs. a compiled one like ASP.NET.

SharePoint is designed to run either on a standalone server (up to 1,000 users comfortably on typical hardware) or scale out almost indefinitely. I know personally of SharePoint deployments housing millions of sites across multiple data centers with many web front ends, dedicated index servers, etc. Microsoft itself hosts SharePoint team sites internally which at last count was around 50,000 sites. It's unclear how scalable WordPress is. It is a web app and basically any kind of load-balancing scheme to serve up multiple web servers will work. The MySQL backend database can scale out in a cluster scenario just like MS-SQL and with WordPress there's no intermediate app server so really it's just web and database servers all talking to each other. From what I can find out there I don't know of WordPress limits in this regard (there's a 32,000 blog limit in WordPress itself, much like the limits on SharePoint sites, subsites, etc.). Even wp.com, the WordPress blog hosting site (in addition to Wordpress.org, see here for a comparison of the two) doesn't talk much about it's architecture but it does run on hundreds of servers with "several separate data centers" spread throughout the U.S.

Another clear winner here is the setup. SharePoint in a stand-alone scenario still requires you to remote into a server, run a setup program and create your site, then shuffler over to Central Admin to do a fairly lengthy setup. On a good day I can maybe get a new system up and running (so that it doesn't fall over in a week) in a few hours. Compared with WordPress this is a lifetime of despair. Time to create a new WordPress site (including creation of the database and website). 10 minutes. WordPress offers the "5 minute installation" (which frankly has *never* taken me more than 2).

SharePoint still tried to compete in the hobby hosting scenarios and there are plenty of knowledgeable sites out there offering hosting (pretty cheap too) but even in that scenario you're still at the mercy of the host and their ability to setup (or not setup) SharePoint properly. WordPress on the other hand simply requires a server that supports PHP and MySQL. Create a website, FTP up the files and you're pretty much 90% of the way to your new site. Perhaps someday WSS is going to be packaged in such a way where you can upload it to a shared host via FTP and as long as the site supports MS-SQL and .NET you're golden. Until then, turn to your hosting people to provide a SharePoint site.

Core Functionality

At it's core both products are web content delivery tools. If you look at MOSS, we're talking about content authoring and something more aligned with WordPresses page authoring model. WSS is much more static in terms of page design (for example if you don't like the layout of the default home page of a WSS site it's not that easy to change it) whereas WP can pretty much be anything you want to be. While the flexibility of WP outshines SharePoint's more rigid constraints, SharePoint blows the doors off of content collaboration. I'm sure there are some plugins for WordPress to upload documents and potentially rate them but it's going to be pale comparison to SharePoint lists and collaboration features.

WordPress is primarily a blog engine although it supports "Pages" which can contain any content. Like SharePoint's publishing pages you can create the content just as easily in both tools. Creating custom layouts in WordPress requires a little bit of knowledge of PHP and some HTML skills. With WordPress you can just upload a layout page and create pages using it. With SharePoint pretty much the same except you'll need a few skills in understanding ASP.NET Master Page markup and a copy of SharePoint Designer to get your page into the system.

Other than posts and pages and some admin functionality, WordPress really doesn't have much in the function category. There are no built-in polls or discussion boards. It does have a userid/password registration/login system which is basic. On the flipside you could argue that SharePoint doesn't have these things either as they're really a bunch of Features that you just activate (most are already activated by default) and light your site up. With a few (free) plugins you could easily bring WordPress up to snuff with *most* of what SharePoint can do (sans the document stuff).

WordPress works off of PHP template pages, themes, and widgets. Basically the entire site can instantly transform with a new theme (which are a mixture of PHP pages, CSS, images and whatever other assets you need like JavaScript, etc.). SharePoint combines ASP.NET Master Pages with Layout pages with CSS. Pretty much the same. The pain and suffering (described below) in creating SharePoint Themes is similar to the pain and suffering in creating WordPress themes but there are tools out there like Artisteer that will get you most of the way with WordPress. Widgets in WordPress, Web Parts in SharePoint. Same diff.

Look and Feel

By design, WordPress was built with a "Web 2.0" look and feel in mind (I know, I hate that word). SharePoint 2007 has made some advancement in getting more towards the Web 2.0 world but progress is slow and steady with SP while WP themes continue to re-invent ways how information can be presented and served up. SP suffers from some very hard constraints. Some of the OOTB master pages provided with SharePoint don't have a DOCTYPE specified so adding things like jQuery plugins fail miserably. Even adding a DOCTYPE to SharePoint sometimes causes problems with some of the other functionality (specifically the DataSheet view has been known to break). While there are work-arounds, basically SharePoint sites are stuck in IE 5.5 "quirks" mode. In 2010 at least we have some "proper" master pages and some of the quirks are gone. The OOTB master pages in SharePoint at least are "modern".

I mentioned themes. WordPress has a design for themes around a template system which physically separates components of the theme, making it fairly easy to "skin" your website. There's a fairly extensive set of resources to create themes (including a countless number of pre-created themes spread all over the Internet) but you can get started building themes for WordPress here. SharePoint has similar things called Themes for WSS sites which are defined by resources (image files, CSS, etc.) and some XML glue to define the theme itself. There are several articles by MVPs and the community on how to create themes for SharePoint. The MSDN documentation in the SharePoint SDK also has the steps involved.

Themes are a thing of the past in SharePoint 2010 (they exist but only for color and fonts) so basically ignore them. Your main way to theme/skin SharePoint is master pages and/or custom CSS files to override the base styles. There are still over a billion (yes, I've counted) CSS classes with SharePoint so good luck with that. In my UI presentations I basically tell anyone who's even remotely thinking about doing SharePoint UI customization to a) always start with a 2007 minimal.master (or Randy Drisgill's Starter Master Pages for SharePoint 2010), a copy of FireFox, Firebug, and the Web Developer Toolbar. Don't waste your time with IE and the "developer toolbar" (that doesn't even let you modify things at runtime). And really, do this for any web development, WordPress included.

As for delivery of the theme, that's another story. With WordPress you simply upload a zip file of the theme you want and activate it (with the option to preview it using your site data so you can see what it's going to look like). Don't like downloading a zip file only to upload it again to your server? Then just browse the themes available and install them. With SharePoint once you have a theme you want to install, it's a matter of adding it to the 12 hive folder structure, modifying an xml file on the file server, and then doing an IISRESET on the entire server (yes, an Application Pool recyle won't suffice so if there's anything else on that server it's gone for 15 seconds during the reset). Basically the stone age compared to the modern age.

For SharePoint 2010, you can create themes in PowerPoint and upload the result to SharePoint to use as a basis for your theme, or just customize it in the browser. In 2007 you have to sacrifice a small virgin and give up your first born to deploy a theme. Don't bother, it's not worth it. Just upgrade to 2010 and don't bother with themes. Master pages and CSS files can just be uploaded to the site but for editing Master Pages you *must* use SharePoint Designer. While you can get away with opening it up in something like Visual Studio, it won't resolve a lot of the server side tags and frankly, it's a lessening experience. SharePoint Designer isn't a joy to work with on HTML editing (why can't they just provide a collapsible DOM tree like every other editor on the planet) but it gets the job done and helps with visualization.

Themes (and website skinning) is an interesting beast as far as availability and abundance goes. On the WordPress side, you basically can't go anywhere on the Internet without falling over a new WP theme. There are without a doubt literally thousands of themes out there and we're not just talking about the "10 variations on a colour" themes. Just look at Free WP Themes (one of my personal favs) offering 200 designs, all mostly unique and interesting. Even the WordPress.org site itself has over 900 themes available (also available through your admin dashboard). Where are the SharePoint themes? Does Microsoft host a site to house them for you to preview and download them? Sadly no, but for some reason when Microsoft releases 10 new themes, the entire planet gets up and dances for joy. Hmmm. Okay, sure.

WordPress slips into a dangerous area with authoring themes or even page layouts. Template tags are PHP code and this can drive web designers or site admins away at the very mention of "code" (just ask Bob Fox to code you up a page layout to see what I mean). HTML-like tags (similar to DotNetNuke tokens) might be easier to figure out rather than WP's PHP syntax. SharePoint layout pages (MOSS) or master pages or themes are more standards web based (yeah, it's a bit of a stretch) so web designers are more familiar with these and might be able to get up to speed on creating new layouts faster than they would with PHP. However my motto is usually don't send in a mouse to do a man's work and template/theme creation is something better left to web designers and programmers no matter what the platform.

Community

There are few open source projects in the world that have as strong a following as the very active WordPress does. SharePoint comprises of a lot of users that are very passionate about the product, but the community is highly fragmented. Is there a single place people go to (besides Google) to find SharePoint information? Wordpress.org is the community site for WordPress users and is easily accessible, especially since just going into your WP dashboard presents you with news from the community (as well as your stats being tracked at wordpress.com). SharePoint information is out there and can be found, but it's hit and miss. SharePoint does have the advantage of the Microsoft Forums where you have MVPs, Technical Staff, and End Users all helping out. There are online forums for WordPress but it's hard to find things and there's so many posts it's hard to keep up.

Extensibility

This is where WordPress kicks the llamas butt with SharePoint. Just go to the WordPress Plugin Directory and you'll be able to access over 10,000 plugins instantly. Where are the 10,000 Web Parts for SharePoint? Scattered to Hell's Acres and back. What's even cooler is the knock-down, drop-dead easy way it is to extend your WordPress site. Go to yoursite/wp-admin -> plugins -> add. Type in some search criteria (or browse popular or featured ones). Click install and activate. Bob's yer uncle.

With SharePoint 2007 you'll need a properly packaged solution (in a WSP file or MSI or something) or else you'll be hand bombing things on the server. Oh, did I mention the remote desktop to the server in order to get the freakin file into the solution store. Then there's deployment and finally activation. So that's one command line, one central admin website, one site collection and you're off to the races. Lather, rinse, repeat for each solution you want to add.

At least in SharePoint 2010 we're getting better. The deployment story is pretty good with Sandboxed Solutions and while they have some disadvantages, there's plenty of advantages over WordPress like resource throttling and process isolation that will make up for it.

Still, the number of pickings for what is out there in SharePoint land is pretty slim but then quantity != quality. And frankly if you look at the types of WordPress plugins, they're mostly geared to internet sites with pretty specialized functionality. Hard to say if there's any winner in this section but you have to admin, if you can't find a plugin to do it in WordPress you probably shouldn't be doing it. There's something for everyone and everything.

Development and Documentation

Both products are pretty mature. The WordPress site has a pretty impressive documentation landing page that has pretty much everything you can think of on WordPress online for free. There are over a dozen WordPress books so there is a lot of momentum behind it and no shortage of knowledge. WordPress has a nice thing called the Codex which is their way of saying Wiki. Anyone can contribute to it and you can consider it a Wikipedia for WordPress. It's nice to have all this information centralized, easily searchable and discoverable all in one place.

SharePoint offers up MSDN documentation which, in my experience, is a nightmare to navigate, many times completely incorrect or misleading, and sometimes fixed (content where you cannot even leave just a comment). The MSDN documentation for the most part offers asinine descriptions of methods. For example the description and documentation around the SPRole.PermissionMask is "Gets or sets the rights used for the permission mask of the site group". Riiiight. So *what* is a permission mask? *what* is valid? *what* is the value I should use to set full permissions? Eventually you can weed your way through to the content that makes sense but it's a long trip.

MSDN has changed. For awhile, they adopted the comment model. This was great, you could enter comments that corrected things in the documentation around a class or method or property. It was very much like the PHP documentation model. For example here's the PHP documentation on the Static Keyword. Basic docs but a whack of comments from the community in the form of threads. Corrections to the documentation, examples of use, gotchas, etc. *THIS* is what MSDN Documentation needs for the SharePoint API. It's just that since the last look and feel change, that ability is now gone.

As part of the WordPress Codex they have a Developer Documentation section. This is a nice, easily organized, list of programming topics including theme and plugin development, testing, widgets, and all the APIs in WordPress. It's very much like the MSDN content for SharePoint but a little easier to follow. The pages are static looking, but it's a wiki. Sign up for the codex, read the guidelines (very much like Wikipedia) and get editing. MSDN should re-instate this.

From the development perspective WordPress is pretty straight forward. Get a local copy of PHP (xampp is great for this) and a text editor or any of the numerous PHP IDEs out there, and get coding. Deployment is just saving a file.

For SharePoint you'll need Visual Studio 2008 (for SharePoint 2007) or Visual Studio 2010 (for SharePoint 2010). The SDK offers instructions on building web parts, event receivers, etc. For Master Pages, Layout Pages and other things you'll need a copy of SharePoint Designer (free) for each environment (or get crazy like me and have 2007 *and* 2010 installed). SharePoint deployment isn't as simple as "save file" but with WSPBuilder and the WSPBuilder extensions it can be pretty painless (at conferences I demo going from a blank Visual Studio to deployed Web Part with Feature Receiver in about 10 minutes). Other tools you can check out are STSDEV or just build the content yourself. There's nothing magical about SharePoint solutions, they're just .NET class libraries. Visual Studio 2010 has a better developer story with "F5" development and some simpler tools (including a Visual Web Part that gives you a design surface).

For me, there's the frustration of building code solutions in SharePoint and going through various hassles of packaging and deploying it properly but working in an uber cool language like C# vs. a not-so-cool language like PHP (I can tolerate it and it's not bad) but a simple deployment cycle that's low footprint and easy to spin up. Again, no clear winner here.

Wrap up

Overall SharePoint could learn and model a *lot* of features from the WordPress guys. Simple things like themes and look and feel should be a pleasant UX, not a complicated IT task. WordPress is all about dynamic look and feel and provides a lot of "previews" to what will happen before it's done. This is in stark comparison to SharePoint's "do it and we'll tell you if something broke" approach. The integrated administration the WordPress offers (the ability to download and install themes, widgets, and plugins right inside the dashboard) makes it an easy sell for the hobbyist and simple admin. SharePoint is getting there and the 2007 administration is an improvement over 2003 but it's still got a long way to go.

SharePoint could look at the community integration that WP offers. Imagine opening up your Central Admin and seeing news about patches, new web parts, and blogs from the community? Microsoft has taken the attitude that this information is best left to sites like SharePointPedia.com (which seems to be suffering from lack of anything) and it's own SharePoint.com for this type of aggregation. Perhaps this is the difference between a corporate system (that would potentially live behind firewalls and you don't want to be punching out to the big bad interweb from your server to get news) vs. the public hosting aspect of WordPress but I do feel a more community-driven dashboard built into SharePoint Administration would be more value-add for the SharePoint admin.

WordPress of course isn't the best thing since sliced bread and if you're going to go after that "Intranet Portal" crowd in the Enterprise it's going to be a hard sell to Corporate America, being open source, free, and built on PHP and MySQL. It also suffers from the stigma of being a "blog platform" and not something seen beyond that. I think showing WP as a corporate intranet isn't a far stretch, however it lacks SharePoint's seamless integration with the client and Information Worker tools so you have to pick what's best for your organization. Free (as in beer) can be a good thing or a bad thing for a company. While it's "free" as in download, setup, play. There's hidden costs associated with MySQL backends, backups, restores, IT people to keep the web servers burning, and all that jazz. Also if you start hooking up something like WordPress to a SQL backend to try to pull "corporate data" into the fold you start constructing a Frankenstein monster and we all know how costly that is in the end.

As a collaboration platform WordPress shines and is sexy provided that your idea of collaboration is online comments, forums, and rated content. Throw document versioning, approvals and workflow and business data on the pile and while SharePoint isn't as sexy looking as WP is, it gets the job done.

I don't think there's a right or wrong choice here but pick your tools as you see fit. As always, choose, but choose wisely.

Back by Popular Request - Live Chats with MVP Experts

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 15:23:51 GMT

Do you have questions about SharePoint? Want to learn more about the recently launched SharePoint 2010? By popular request, SharePoint MVPs from around the world are participating in a live chat event about SharePoint. These Q&A events are a great opportunity to tap into the vast knowledge of these industry professionals who are regarded as the best in their field.

Please join us on Wednesday July 21st at 9am PDT!

Learn more and add these chats to your calendar by visiting the MSDN event page http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/chats/default.aspx

Planning SharePoint Deployments with RACI

Joel Oleson — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 12:15:38 GMT

Body:

One of the first things I did when I sat down with the project manager and service managers on a SharePoint deployment is RACI charts.� I'm a big fan of them.� It gets a lot of the arguments flushed out for who is responsible.� More than that it shows accountability and who needs to be consulted and ultimately the informed.� Sure no one wants to be left out, but some times it just needs to be spelled out clearly, so the teams and parties involved can understand how this virtual team is being built.� I'm a huge fan of virtual teams and project plans that help illustrate these responsibilities across the virtual teams.� RACI charts are a convenient tool in the initial planning process.� I find it convenient for keeping everyone on the same page in the deployment and moving forward especially when it comes to required documentation since the ops teams hate doing documentation, and the project manager wants to have them all when anyone asks what's going on.

To fill out a RACI chart, first determine the documents, specs, projects, diagrams, outlines, functions, decisions, and/or activities that will make up your foundation for your deployment. Then, you decide who will be your project's participants using team names and then individual names as those teams provide input. The tasks will make up the rows and the columns are the teams or individuals assigned in the chart. To complete the chart, simply fill out the grid, identifying how each participant is involved with each. There you have the responsible, accountable, consulted, or informed. The convenient color coding makes it easy to identify.� The idea of these charts is for simplicity.� Live by the KISS Principle in planning as well.� Many of your docs are much easier to consume and will actually be consumed if you can keep them short (1 pagers with diagrams are much more frequently read than 40 pagers).

Responsible for completing that step in the process
Accountable for ensuring that step is completed
Consulted prior to the completion of that step
Informed of the results once that step is completed

�

You can even track RACI charts in your actual project plan.� The Project Team blog has a good example of using RACI charts in Project.

Download the SharePoint RACI Chart

I've uploaded this example RACI Chart for your use on slideshare.net.� You can download the FREE SharePoint RACI chart Excel template.� Note you should add the relevant documents and teams.� This will obviously vary based on the size and complexity of your company.

Download this FREE SharePoint RACI chart Excel template

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Setting up a Local Mail Server for a SharePoint Virtual Machine on Server 2008

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 21:12:08 GMT

The only way to do software development for SharePoint is really a Virtual Machine. Yes, with SharePoint 2010 you can install it on Windows 7 and Vista and with some hacking you can get SharePoint 2007 to run on Vista. However I'm talking about real development for real men (and women!). For that we setup virtual machines (VMs) and usually run the whole SharePoint stack on it (SharePoint, SQL Server, Visual Studio, SharePoint Designer, Office, etc.).

One of the key advantages of running in a VM is the ability to run your SharePoint server as a domain controller (or at least connected to one) where you have ultimate control over it. This allows you to practice safe installs, spin up an environment with exactly the same OUs as your production environment, use the same account names, etc. all without having to peeve off your friendly neighbourhood domain admin.

The last piece of the isolated puzzle is getting mail working. SharePoint supports both mail out (alerts, etc.) and mail in (email enabled document libraries). However for this trick you need a mail server, or an incredible simulation of one. Very often people go to the trouble of installing a copy of Microsoft Exchange which falls into the bazooka-to-swat-a-fly realm. Exchange is big and heavy and a bugger to configure and run, all for what? A few emails that trickle into your VM and to an administrators mailbox?

Here are two options that will prevent you from setting up an Exchange server, which should only be left for those with a desire to hurt themselves.

Server 2008 SMTP Server

First up is the Windows Server 2008 SMTP services. If you've installed Server 2003 you know that it came with a SMTP server and it was pretty easy to setup (here's a great walkthrough). With Windows Server 2008, there's no longer a Mail Server role but you can still install the SMTP services.

SMTP services are now a "Feature" (not to be confused with SharePoint Features). Open up Server Manager and under Features select Add Feature. Select the SMTP Server option, click Install and go have a short siesta.

Now what can you do with it? Not much but if you want to do anything, you have to install the IIS 6.0 Management tools (a disadvantage of one tool requiring legacy features, just one of the many with the SMTP service). Once you have the IIS 6.0 tools installed, you can cry a little. I did. Then launch the IIS 6.0 Manager, cry again, and you'll see the SMTP services in the tree. Right click on the menu to bring up the SMTP properties.

Select Relay under the Access tab:

Select "Only the list below" and click Add:

Enter 127.0.0.1 for your local address:

So now you have a local SMTP service that will relay messages from the local system. Splendid. However this is only for SMTP. What about POP3? That's where it gets tricky and frankly, this blog is not going to go to that bad place. I did manage to find a POP3 "extender" for Windows Server 2008 so you can explore that here and give it a shot. However that gets you part of the way there and there's still the issue of adding domains, only having unauthenticated users, and IMAP. well. All of these add up to a big headache to configure and while SMTP services is a far cry from the bloat that is Exchange, there are other sane options.

Sidebar: You might be wondering why I walked you through the setup of SMTP services only to direct you somewhere else. Hey, I'm all about free choice so if you're happy and you know it then clap your hands and stick with SMTP. If you want to live like the rest of us do, read on.

So Exchange is out (unless you really enjoy chewing up 4GB of your precious VM just to deliver mail) and SMTP services have left a bit of a bad taste in our mouths. What else is there?

hMailServer

I stumbled across this server tool accidently sometime in 2005 or something. I can't remember exactly but it was a pre-beta that worked well. It's a complete mail server for Windows and can run on XP, Server 2003, Server 2008, Vista and Windows 7. It supports all the basic protocols (IMAP, SMTP, POP3) and does what it should. Deliver email.

On top of delivering mail it supports mapping to domain accounts, having your own accounts (username/password), security, auto out-of-office messages, mailbox limits, customization out the ying-yang, and all sorts of options and gadgets. The brilliant part of the system is that it's easy to setup and get running (add your domain and you're done) but you can have your cake and eat it too. Run it stripped down and simple or load up all options to make it that much more filling.

Best of all, it's totally free (as in beer). And hey, if you want the source code is available up to version 4.x (the current version is 5.x and closed source).

You just download and run the installer. Takes about 1 minute (literally) and it's up and running. It comes with it's own embedded database (used to be an embedded version of MySQL but later versions now ship with SQL Server Compact Edition which is just a single DLL) to store the configuration and emails.

Don't get too choked up in all the options. There are many but it's the simplicity of this tool that makes it shine and since it supports POP3 and SMTP (along with IMAP) it's almost like having Exchange running. If you do decide to turn on logging, add multiple domains and security, forwarding, etc. it's all built in. Nothing to download or add-on. All the nice additional wrappers sent by SharePoint to Outlook are intact so you can still interact with your SharePoint system from your email client. The only drawback is there's no calendaring element so that's out, but otherwise it's all good to go for any budding SharePoint developer (or anyone that wants to debug emails going through a system).

So really. This is one of those things I have in my toolbelt when it comes to SharePoint and I don't setup a server without it. It's a breeze to setup, free, and does everything you need it to for your virtual environment except feed the cat and impregnate your daughters (or is that the other way around?). Check out hMailServer and give it a whirl.

Full disclosure: It's a free product and nobody coaxed me to write this. I get no kickback from the download of the product other than the credit card number you may accidently send me as you decide to fill me with praises and remarks, but I'm good with that.

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About the Blogger

I'm in Utah today at the MOSSPit (SLC UG)

TitleMOSS Pit Monthly Meeting - Special Date�

Location

Start Time8/4/2010 3:00 PM�

Wish you had free end user training incorporated into your SharePoint environment?

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SharePoint Virtual Expo Networking Event

Creating a "New" Gem for "Nu" - From 0 to 100 in 24 Hours

SharePoint 2010 Site Templates - A Detailed Journey (Part 1)

Coming Soon. The .NET Outlaws Tour!

Announcing the release of the SharePoint 2010 Administration Toolkit V1

WordPress versus SharePoint, another big smackdown

Back by Popular Request - Live Chats with MVP Experts

Planning SharePoint Deployments with RACI

Download the SharePoint RACI Chart

Setting up a Local Mail Server for a SharePoint Virtual Machine on Server 2008

Title
MOSS Pit Monthly Meeting - Special Date�

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8/4/2010 3:00 PM�