| By Joel Oleson In the Upgrade to SharePoint 2007 there were 3 popular methods. In Place, Gradual, and Database Attach. In place was a scenario that many of us took as a no starter and many of us even went so far as to say NEVER do it. Now the message is there are two methods for upgrade. In place and Database attach. Despite the fact that gradual upgrade as we knew it is dead, what we got from gradual upgrade we still have. What do I mean? There is NO supported method to run both the 2007 and 2010 bits side by side. That’s true. So definitely not side by side installations. There is also no Central Admin UI for upgrade groups of sites with gradual method. So why would I say, it really has just taken a new form. Essentially the new gradual upgrade is visual upgrade. The mistake that was being made was people were not comfortable with the upgrade process so they would lay down the new bits on the box and then not upgrade the sites immediately, they would determine which web applications they would first start with and run some concurrency with an old and new web application and do a few sites at a time. With the major two step punch of Binary upgrade completely out of band with Visual Upgrade, being not mutually exclusive, also meaning that we can run the binary upgrade and then run visual upgrade on two different time lines. We now still have a very similar path. Essentially you’ll do the binary upgrade using one or the other method above. Once complete you’ll run the visual upgrade a few site collections at a time. So hence the process really hasn’t changed much if you were doing gradual before. How is SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Better? At least three things around control have gotten better: - You use to have to have both products installed to have the option to upgrade a few sites at a time. Now you can do it by simply upgrading the binaries due to the site structure and features of SharePoint 2007 being included/shipped with SharePoint 2010.
- The redirector stuff was a mess. Users were always confused “Which URL, which one gets updated.” “Is it read only or are the sites being synchronized.” Attempt to trying to maintain 2 different web applications was messy. Some of us figured out how to lock read only, but a few really struggled with upgrade. With the visual upgrade you don’t need to maintain 2 different web apps, they use the same one.
- Do No Harm – the binary upgrade which is essentially what most IT folks think of as the real upgrade, is designed to take a No harm no Foul mantra. If the binary upgrade breaks anything that is in the known world of the SharePoint binaries that’s a bug. If it’s outside of the products own features, solutions, and site definitions, then the PreUpgradeCheck should identify those issues.
I’ll be putting out a few articles on upgrade so watch for more in this series… More articles and posts on SharePoint 2010 Upgrade: 5 Reasons PreUpgradeCheck is better than Prescan Details on PreUpgradeCheck Whitepaper: Preparing for SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Today Archived Webcast and Deck: Preparing for SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Today Q&A for the Webcast |
| By Joel OlesonOne thing I *really* like about blogging is the debates that go on in the blogosphere. I love a good debate, as long as it doesn’t get personal. I mean come on. Your blog is your own, say what you want… we all live in the land of freedom of speech of the provided by the Internet. Does SharePoint Suck or does it rock?? Should we be comparing the product written 5 years ago to the latest open source or google sites? I don’t think it’s fair, but the comparisons will continue. I do hope to have some of these open debates after SPC, when my tongue gets loosed. Bil Simser “SharePoint FUD is spreading far wide and fast” and his arch nemesis Bjorn Furuknap “SharePoint sucks and here’s why (part 1 in a continued series)” are at it again with some great mud slinging, but not at each other. It’s a debate about SharePoint. Rackley helps push forward the debate with “SharePoint Haters just don’t understand.” Paul Culmsee defends Infopath from Bil as the greatest product in his post “Why Infopath Rocks” I think this actually might have begun after the post from the SharePoint Developer that uses Drupal. I think there’s some decent content, but most of it doesn’t apply when you look at the new stuff. So it’s just poor timing. It’s also written as Drupal rocks, what sucks about SharePoint. The real challenge I see is the 3 year release cycle for SharePoint. It’s much more regular from the release cycle of SQL or Windows, you can almost set your yearly watch to it. Some of these scrappy open source products have figured a few things out. They’ve got something in wikis, blogs, and other social networking features. 3 years is more than a decade in our current rate of growth. So yeah, it feels like you’re running ancient technology to deploy a SharePoint wiki, really the first productized over the counter wiki on the market. I hope to see MS address this beyond what happens in the community with CKS (Community Kits). The tools teams can do a better job of putting out decent updates and I expect the threats to be decent enough that we’ll see some serious moves especially in Online services. The DANCE. The SharePoint dance is understanding what can be changed in a SharePoint environment without making it tough to support, or making it difficult to upgrade or worse. It’s not like a new .NET project. There’s already something there, and you need to learn how it behaves and moves. As developers get experience and as the tools get better this dance is a lot smoother and lady SharePoint won’t do those hard core gyrations so much. When you learn this dance, and by the way it’s not a 2 step or a waltz, you’ll come to find the rhythm of the product and overcome the hater mentality and actually come to fully embrace the product and the richest community in existence. There’s no community around a product tighter and closer than the SharePoint community. We are all in this dance together, so crank up the music and enjoy what we’ve got and yes this new dance partner rocks, let me be the first to tell you. |
| By Joel OlesonAs the dates near, the largest SharePoint Conference of any type in history approaches. The largest vendor hall, the largest amount of attendees 6000+ and growing. This might be the largest Microsoft Conference of the year, definitely approaching the mammoth sizes of even WPC, Teched and PDC. The unique thing about the SharePoint Conference is the sense of community. We all have something in common. SharePoint Geeks! We LOVE SharePoint. We also have a tight sense of community where we get to know each other and we get a little crazy when we get together. Attempts in the past to describe what this odd sense of community that’s special with the SharePoint people is tough to describe. How do you prepare for this incredible global communal event??? These 10 Steps to Prepare for the SharePoint Conference should help!! 1. Get plenty of sleep!!! I’m totally serious. If you come tired you will regret it! 2. Twitter will be abuzz, so TAP IN. If you’re a newbie: Create a http://www.twitter.com account if you haven’t, and setup a search for SPC09 and post updates with the hashtag #SPC09. If you’ve got a twitter account get the latest updates for your mobile device. You will feel lost if you aren’t connected. Use topsy.com to sort out the noise for the best daily SPC09 links. 3. Live Blog If you’ve a twitter & pro blogger and want to really get involved, Register! for the SPC09 Live Blogging through EndUserSharePoint.com. Beyond twitter, you’ll find the richest pictures, video, and blogging stream coming through on Mark’s Community driven EndUserSharePoint.com which according to Planet SharePoint is currently the most popular SharePoint blog. Not only will it help socially, you’ll get the real content for what’s going on. If you’re not at the event, you’ll feel like you are by simply following the various streams. Currenly over 150 people have registered to live blog. Here’s the SPC09 Live Blog Stream Twitter Tracker… 4. Get involved in the Social Activities, Parties and Dynamic #SHARE events, beyond the structured events to which there will be many various vendor dinners and appreciation dinners and so on. Let alone what’s going on at the conference itself with Welcome Game night. #Share… is the keyword for the various social events that are dynamically coming together. @JThake has created a page to track social events (currently the best tracking link for these social events) going on at SPC. He’s even put together his own post of how to manage the noise at SPC. He’s very correct about http://www.topsy.com It’s awesome for being able to make sense out of the noise. Try it out search on SPC09 and SharePoint will result in the top daily blog posts as well as links to the best resources of the daily events, don’t rely on search. Unfortunately SPC also means specialist, and Storm Prediction Center, so you can’t rely on a search of simply SPC. Here’s the Events Schedule of the ones I’m aware of… Reordered & Updated Oct 7, 2009 2:05 Pacific (see EndUserSharePoint.com’s EventBrite for additional details) Sunday – Oct 18 - Official Welcome Reception Game Night, 6-9PM, Mandalay Bay
- #ShareIndian Indian Food details still coming together - @michaeltnoel @alpesh @meetdux @joeloleson @einaros #SPC09 #ShareIndian Sun, @ 7.30pm => then #SharePint (Spicier the better!!!) Signup for ShareIndian on eventbrite. 7.30pm #shareindia venue confirmed at Origin India, 4480 Paradise Rd. reservation for 150 people - details: http://post.ly/7OAl @eusp @joeloleson @alpesh @michaeltnoel #sharepoint (Don’t forget to Share Mints after this event!)
- #SharePint Andrew Connell has announced on his blog what will likely be the biggest #SharePint ever at Eye Candy, Mandalay Bay. Just look at the ever growing comments, and I’m sure this post will help. (SharePint is a social SharePoint gathering. If you haven’t done one… I highly recommend it. I’ll be there. I expect through the course of that evening we could see 200 people. (Wouldn’t miss it!) Sign up by leaving a response on his blog.
Monday - Oct 19 - Sponsored Drinks / Mixer: The Mix @ The Hotel @ Mandalay Bay – Soiree by Rightpoint, K2, Knowledge Lake, Hi Software - Please RSVP (Details in *OPEN* Invitation)
- Various Invitation only - customer/partner drinks and dinners on Monday ask around the vendor hall. (If you’re at the Quest Customer dinner, I’ll see you there)
- #ShareLove @Mosslover is gathering interest for the Cirque Beatles “Love” show for Monday (UPDATED), October 19 at the 9:30 pm show. Current plan is to get your own tickets. Signup http://bit.ly/Iye1y
- #ShareMNF is Monday night Football with @MattGowin and @mikecferrara at HardRock Casino
- #SharePhantom attendance at the Phantom Las Vegas on Monday October 19, 2009, 9:30p show – @SPKevin Kevin Hughes
Tuesday – Oct 20 Wednesday Oct 21 - Official SPC ATE: Ask the Experts and Exhibit Hall Reception 5:45-7PM (Mandalay Bay)
- #ShareSushi ShareSushi at Sushi Roku in Caesar’s Palace at 7:00pm Wednesday @Mrackley (I’ll be there!) More details on ShareSushi including venue on Mrackley’s blog http://bit.ly/Iye1y
- #ShareHoldem Caesar’s place contact @mrackley (Few seats available) $25 buy-in with up to two $25 re-buys starting at 9:30PM in an undisclosed THE HOTEL suite
Thursday #ShareHofbrau Dinner - Location: Hofbrauhaus 4510 Paradise Road near the Hard Rock Hotel, Organizer: Corey Roth, @CoreyRoth, More Info: http://bit.ly/19ILe4 POST SPC #SharePoint360, U2's 10/23 post-conference concert @ #SPC09 contact @joeypatterson Ticket ideas for the sold out show (Stub Hub tickets starting at $120) and more on: http://sharepoint360.eventbrite.com As I find out open invitation I’ll list them… if you have info send them my way… @joeloleson Many of these #Share Vegas Activities now have an open registration form for counts and amounts and contact info. 5. Update your Profiles & plan to Connect with people that are connected through facebook, twitter, and clean up your profiles so people can get a hold of you. Is your phone or email still correct if we’re trying to get a hold of you? I’ve sometimes lost people and the only way I had to get a hold of them was a DM on twitter or contacting the phone number on facebook or linkedin. 6. Be sure to pack your business cards. You’re going to want to leave these with vendors for giveaways and also friends and potential partners you meet. My newest cards have my twitter id on them. Do yours? 7. Plan your sessions and come see me… Here are the currently posted Official Agenda and sessions. This is currently the hardest thing to do with the lack of the sessions being posted, but here’s help for Monday for IT folks. First there’s the Keynote, then there’s my session: Joel Oleson and Mike Watson "The New World of SharePoint 2010 - A Day in the Life of a SharePoint Administrator" Mon, October 19 from 1:15 p.m.- 2:30 p.m. (The VERY First Break Out) Then Todd and Shane have Part 1 and Part 2 2010 Admin sessions following our session. • Book signing - Tuesday, October 20 at 12:15 p.m. - Meet Joel and get a free autographed copy of SharePoint Roadmap for Collaboration by Michael Sampson. • Quick sessions in the theatre near booth 221 – Preparing for 2010 with Joel Oleson, Wed & Thurs at 1 p.m. (lunch time session) 8. Bring some space in your bags for SWAG! Plan you time at the SharePoint Vendor hall. There are going to be a a lot of giveaways… Here are some I’m aware of… – Money booth (Booth 221) on game night (Sunday night; Individuals can win up to $300) – Quest “wear it and win” giveaway; wear your Quest t-shirt and win cash (up to $3000; drawing on Wed at 4 p.m.) Booth 221 – “Joel for a Day” – 8-hour on-site engagement (drawing on Wed at 4 p.m.)--- Yep, win me and I can help you for a day on your 2010 SharePoint deployment or upgrade strategy or whatever… I hear AvePoint is giving away a Harley motorcycle, and I know Shane and Todd are signing books at Idera booth see Todd’s blog for more info. It’s going to be a fun conference! In the conference bag you'll find a slick from KnowledgeLake, it has a hidden code for a cash prize of up too $1000, in fact there are over 100 winning forms. Stop by the booth to scan and decrypt code to see if you're a winner.
There will also be a magician at the Knowledge Lake booth presenting SharePoint 2010, the new Connect 4 product and our Silverlight Document Viewer in a very entertaining format. I've heard there's a cash prize during every presentation! 9. Extra Batteries for your mobile, camera or mobile power packs! With all the twittering and calls youre phone will run out of juice. Ben Curry showed me the ropes with mobile power! You can get these tiny pocket sized power things that you can plug into your device. If your phone lasts a full day try staying up for 2 days and you’ll loose your phone. Maybe pack external hard drives for your video and the PPTs you’re going to be getting. Make sure your laptop has power too! That power cord always seems to get lost. Adapters for you international folks!!! 10. Pack your camera, FlipHD, dust off your blog, and get ready for the most incredible experience of your life. You’re going to want to document the crazy experiences. This is the Woodstock of our Geek Generation, sure we’re in hotels, but this is the biggest world wide geek reunion. It will feel more like a reunion than a conference. I’m telling you. |
| By Joel OlesonMichael Noel and I recently finished a 3 city SharePoint day tour across India reaching over 600 passionate SharePoint people. We started by flying into Mumbai and driving to Pune. Originally when I started planning this trip with Michael Noel, we were planning on visiting Persia where one of my contacts Neo Farvashan, now good friend Neo was going to give us a tour of Tehran and the sites of Iran. With the more recent political activity we decided to focus on India and Nepal, and Neo decided to join us in our tour. We did a call with Mark Miller over Skype while we were in Kathmandu Nepal on a recap of our India & Nepal trip in Today in SharePoint. The Pune SharePoint day was with the Pune User Group (PUG) http://www.punetech.com and http://www.puneusergroup.org a Microsoft technologies special interest group with over 1000 members. We had around 300 register and 200+ attendees in a huge auditorium. The amount of SharePoint experience in the crowd was much, much more than either of us expected. More than 75% of the room had working with SharePoint. Our Q&A was quite intense with great questions that kept the crowd going on technical questions alone for more than an hour. 
After the event we rode on motorcycles with a couple of people from the User Group leadership. Even getting the chance to drive for a few blocks. The Chennai SharePoint day, started with a visit to the beach where we got hit with a wave. Great attendance with over 100 attendees. Apparently they’d only notified the attendees five days earlier to the Chennai .NET and IT Pro chapters in Chennai http://www.cnug.co.in . The lead there has been running the group for 9 years! We had a chance to sit down with the user group lead for lunch afterward. The community was very developer heavy and hadn’t had much experience with SharePoint while a handful were currently working on SharePoint projects. We met a number of MVPs across a number of technologies in the group leadership. The Bangalore SharePoint day had an amazing 300 show up for the user group meeting http://www.bdotnet.in. This would be the largest user group meeting I’d ever been to, if I was there. Unfortunately I had to leave, but Michael Noel presented my deck along with his. Michael told me it went extremely well and got a number of contacts that we both plan to follow up with to help foster community in one of the largest centers of IT focused people in the world! It’s exciting to meet Our Decks from the event can be found here: Q&A about our experience in India: Did you do your sessions in English? If so, did anyone have any problems understanding? Yes, we did our sessions in English. All attendees in all our sessions were very well versed in English and were quite comfortable in asking questions. We didn’t have any problem understanding them either, beyond a bit of getting past the accent in some cases. Very intelligent and smart people with a deep development focus from what I saw. Is Microsoft Technologies well understood in India? Microsoft has been investing in India a lot in the past decade. I remember about 8 years ago when Microsoft really started moving a lot of it’s operations to Bangalore. It also started investing a lot more in schools and colleges. The number of MVPs and community leadership that showed a deep technical knowledge was impressive for any country. I understand the number of development centers that are now in India. It was interesting to see the Who’s Who of American Silicon Valley by simply driving around and seeing various in sourced companies not just with call centers, but development centers and even operations centers for follow the sun scenarios. At 5 in the morning we ran into a couple of IT guys that were getting off their American shift. .NET and C# are well versed in the communities that we visited. The wave of SharePoint experience and training appears to be on the cusp. We found deep developers, but our experience varied when it came to pure SharePoint development. In fact when we asked for business cards with the words SharePoint, we didn’t find any, but some development experience with SharePoint we found 30% in the more purist .NET community and 50-60% when mixing IT Pro and Devs. In these cities did you find it hard to get a good hotel? Nope. Hotels were great. How was the transportation? Getting a car from the hotel to pick us up at the airport was easy, as is getting a prepaid car from the airport or hotel. While you won’t see much traffic lights, transportation does flow. I find it kind of flows like a river and the collective consience of the drivers keep the traffic moving with little interruption, assuming that horns don’t bother you. Most Americans would have a problem driving here, not just because it’s the other side of the road, but because of the importance of the honking and lack of ‘rules and assumptions. What else did you see? After the SharePoint meetings we flew to Delhi and got a visited some amazing locations across India Our favorites were in the Rajasthan area: Karni Mata Rat Temple – looking for a culture shock this is the place to visit. This Hindu temple has hundreds if not thousands of rats that scurry around waiting to be reincarnated into human form. It was a wild experience to have the rats scurry over our feet and see a young girl studying without barely even noticing the rats around her. Read more about it on National Geographic. Jodhpur, the Mehrangarh Fort & Blue City – We thought the fort on the top of this mountain overlooking the blue city should be in the current 7 Wonders of the world. I personally think it’s the name of the place and possibly it’s obscurity that kept it under the radar. It truly was amazing and I hope anyone who goes to India is able to see the fort along with the view. 
Jaipur, the Amber fort and Pink city – in such a small area with such grand palaces, and multiple forts in such a small area complete with floating palaces, and elephants to take you around. The mystery and magic of this place was incredible. I found the women very beautiful with their silk and amazing lace and bead work. It was different in Rajastan, being so close to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Felt like a different world. A few of the kids had these piercing green eyes. It was suggested that it might be from Alexander the Great’s army. The maharajas of the past had really built some amazing places. 
Pictured: Amber Fort in Amer just outside of Jairpur. L-R: Michael Noel, Neo Farvashan, Joel Oleson - (me) Outside of Rajasthan, the Taj Mahal was incredible. Highly recommended, amazing this thing was built so long ago with LOVE as the driver. 
The actual city of Varanasi was quite chaotic, but the river and the gattes was an incredible experience. Known as the most holy city for Hindu’s you could actually feel the importance of it by spending time along the river. The holy river itself has is refreshing after a hot and humid day. On the steps of the river you can see the faithful washing and swimming, enjoying the effects. Not far you can also see fires burning the dead. If that’s not enough culture shock, jump in and join the water buffalo and other followers in a dip. The water has amazing soothing affect. More Pictures of our trip… From My Profile: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=148753&id=613898782&l=94cc5fa769 From Michael’s Profile: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=111858&id=719377913 http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=111928&id=719377913 |
| By Joel OlesonWhat is a best practice? Ben Curry definitely one who has popularized and even trademarked the concepts around SharePoint Best Practices through the book and conference has decent explanations of best practices… “Best Practices is about doing things the right way: the most efficient, effective ways to achieve goals, distilled into adaptable, repeatable procedures you can use.” Blogs are great for sharing your version of the truth and what you’ve learned about the product, but my concern lately is those who read one blog and get one version of “truth” they get one “best practice” and consider it golden. There’s a real problem these days of looking at a problem with only one pair of rose colored glasses. Consider these “Standards” from SharePoint Hillbilly, one with a unique perspective, but not complete perspective. He makes some decent points in his recent post “10 SharePoint Deployment Standards,” but at the same time with only one perspective, I want to show you how this list of best practices apply in certain situations and and illustrate there is no one size fits all with SharePoint. After getting back from the land of rat temples, and goats on top of busses, I see there are more ways than one to get things done… it is said there is more than one way to skin a cat. Not sure where that came from, (maybe a hillbilly?) but the principle is once applied to SharePoint is real. I hope people have found in my posts despite when it sounds like I’m saying there’s only one way to go there are exceptions. It’s these exceptions… why the consultants get paid the big bucks! (I know @Mrackley rocks and won’t take this personally. He uses google ads a poor practice, so this makes him an easy target. :) ) He makes some statements, this isn’t to discredit him, but more to provide some insights and create an antithesis… I hope he understands the use of these as an example and continues to provide his great insights. Let’s look at a few of these examples of his deployment standards and under each of these I’ll explain how these wouldn’t apply in some deployments. You’ve wondered why Microsoft’s TechNet documentation has challenges and it feels like they should be be providing more guidance, seems very rare that you get the… it depends on X, Y, and Z… you should. There really are a lot of scenarios where one set of guidance is based on assumptions, and this is where SDPS and consulting comes into practice. Just make sure that guidance you are getting comes from solid experience and is based on the right assumptions. Excerpts from the SharePoint Hillbilly’s 10 SharePoint Deployment Standards HB 1) SharePoint Designer must not be required to update any portion of a SharePoint Site For WCM, I can understand some of this, but for a collaboration environment, and one where people have been trained… SharePoint designer has a place. Note the word training, and I’d add qualified. HB 2) No SharePoint Designer WorkFlows The SPD workflows do have portability issues, but again if you aren’t using SharePoint for records management or have invested in a crack dev team using visual studio workflows, or have the ability to purchase a third party workflow system, (which I do find pays off) the SPD workflows can fit minimal requirements for many collaboration and non complex scenarios. HB 3) All sites must be created using Site Definitions or Site Templates This sounds like a tough requirement designed for serious WCM. I’m not a fan of custom Site Definitions, I have grown to accept a minimal site definition that essentially uses the blank template and then uses feature stapling, but custom site definitions and custom site templates really aren’t required for most collaboration environments which I personally find are the most common deployments. HB 5) Large libraries (>2000 items) should be divided across multiple libraries. Large libraries should definitely be optimized, but you shouldn’t split them by 2000 items per library that’s going to cause an explosion in a DM or ECM environment and render the SharePoint navigation difficult. Folders are better than more libraries, and I know folders are used in a different standard. I’m not a fan of folders either. Meta data should be used, and so should limited filtered views that return less than 2000, but ultimately 100 or so in any given query. HB 7) Team Site Collections should not have more than 1 level of subwebs. (Subwebs should not have sub-subwebs.) There’s a place for nested site collections. One example is with portals. An Intranet portal could have the Intranet portal at the top, then a set of site collections for the divisions, then groups or lines of businesses, and then products, and so on building a heirarchy. I wouldn’t say that’s where you then do collaboration… that’s where you should then have links to the projects, or documentation and so on in separate site collections. There is a place for nested webs, but super deep nested obviously should be avoided with URL restrictions. HB 8) Content databases should have no more than 5 site collections (some larger ones should be the only site collection in the content db.) The best example where content databases should have more than 5 site collections is my sites. Especially when you limit the size of your site collections with quotas such as 100MB or 1GB you could fit hundreds into a database, and save on database management. For division portals, document management systems, and ECM this does make sense to go with dedicated databases, but you don’t want to blow out tons of databases in the collab and my site space with a few exceptions. When I first read the post, I was anxious to hear some new deployment insights, but it was what he wasn’t saying about his standards that I was thinking about as I read it. It’s great to be able to disagree. There are a couple of things I do agree with him 100%… HB 9) All images for a site must be stored in image libraries and not on the file system. Totally agree. Developers do need to learn to dance with SharePoint and not fight it. In his concluding paragraph he sums it up quite well… “The more consistent your SharePoint environment is, the more maintainable it will be, your admins will be happier, your users will smile…” Standards within an environment are great. It’s so important to have rules to avoid chaos. |
| By Joel Oleson There seems to be an assumption by some that Basic install is “Good enough.” Some have followed guidance and “best practices” to avoid the basic install. I know Shane Young (“a puppy dies every time a Basic install is done”), Todd Klindt (Just say no to Basic install), and I have all continued to preach that basic install on both WSS and SharePoint Server continues to be a poor decision. Todd’s article goes into the step by step in avoiding that install type. I say that basic install was written for the analyst, easy with few clicks, but those who fall in the trap of basic, will have a nightmare deployment when they find they need to troubleshoot or later move into a larger farm. Recently I was in South Africa at Teched Africa and polled the audience of 200 SharePoint Admins to discover how many are using Basic install or SQL express for SharePoint. No hands. As well in Penang, yesterday I polled the Tech Insights audience of 90 how many of those with deployments which was more than half, how many were using SQL express or the basic install. The answer again. None. Despite this, I was in Rochester Ny earlier in the year, and was sitting in a session by a consultant who was saying the basic install was good enough for small deployments and it would be easy to later upgrade to SQL standard edition. I was floored. This is false. Here’s 5 reasons Basic install is the wrong decision. For clarification today in WSS 3.0 the basic install with give you Windows Internal Database engine, a locked down enforced schema run with a command line interface to manage with no limits, but also no real effective solutions for backup and manageability. The SharePoint Server 2007 installs SQL Express with a 2GB limit and really no effect management interface as well. I do find if people are simply looking at the interface, it’s an easy proof of concept, but how many proof of concepts turn into production environments??? 1. Lack of Manageability – the most difficult installs are those with a single server, with virtually no management tools. (See reference to SQL express below for recommendations on SQL Express Express) If you’re trying to make SharePoint easy to administer because you don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to it, don’t install a basic install. You’ll find it’s extremely difficult to manage. The SQL management UI is that good. It gives you a bunch of tools for scheduling, running tasks, and real visibility for managing your databases. This is only going to be more important as we move forward. 2. Authentication is a half baked Kerberos install – If you install the basic install you’ll find your deployment is kerberos, but not really. The SPNs aren’t setup. It feels and behaves a lot like NTLM, but it’s kerberos, but you don’t get all the advantages of kerberos, because without the service principal names, you’re not getting the benefits of what Kerberos would provide for you. Again difficult to troubleshoot or to understand what’s been done. Essentially the product team prefers to see kerberos installs, and with the basic install it doesn’t need to talk to other servers so they can do the install without needing to setup the AD settings around the accounts. It’s a mess, and this is the insight for you if you’re ever trying to figure out what’s gone wrong. 3. Service accounts – There are none and the setup is wacky. With the basic install there’s no opportunity to provide service accounts. It’s all about speed. You’ll end up with Network service and Local Service with funky permissions that are very difficult to later replace. 4. Moving from a single server to a farm is a nightmare – Refer to 2 and 3. Your auth is messed up, and your accounts are not domain compatible and neither is setup for server to server communication. I know this is high level, but it’s a fun one to test your consultants on. Ask them what the steps are to move from a basic install to an advanced install going from a single server to 2 or more. If they don’t say backup your databases, and wipe and reload, you’ll know they are either going to give you a mess or they are an expert at replacing the accounts in the local groups and various places on the file system… don’t believe it. Wipe, reload, new config db with a database attach into a clean advanced deployment is the right answer. It does mean downtime, but it will pay off. 5. SQL Express has serious limitations – you don’t want to wake up and find out that your SharePoint farm is down because it ran out of space. Moving drives is very difficult using the osql interface, not intuitive. Sure it’s free, but not what you really need. Todd in his post “Just say no, to basic install” says you can install SQL express first and then install SharePoint in advanced install. That might be true, but when are you going to hit the SQL Express limits? Like it limits to 1 CPU, 1 GB of RAM max, 4GB storage limit. If you’re going to go with Express for whatever reason, maybe it’s a 2-5 user deployment use SQL Express 2008 which is free and has some management UI not the one in the SharePoint basic install. If you’re hobbling along on the WSS Windows Internal Database engine, you should seriously consider an upgrade to SQL Server Standard or Enteprise based on your needs. |
| By Joel OlesonI was a huge fan of Prescan back in the early betas of SharePoint 2007 (Prescan is your friend and Don’t be Afraid of Prescan) and would preach and preach people to run the tool (it’s all still true and much applies even more with PreUpgradeCheck). Here’s 5 clear and solid reasons why you have to cozy up with PreUpgradeCheck. The PreUpgradeCheck for preparing for SharePoint 2010 shipped with SP2, so if you have that or any of the cumulative updates you’ve got the goodness. There is syntax and detail on the PreUpgradeCheck STSADM command on TechNet. I’ve written about the PreUpgradeCheck in more detail in a previous post, as did our good buddies Bob Fox “PreUpgradeCheck in SP2” and Wictor Wilen in “Say Hello to STSADM preupgradecheck command.” 1. PreUpgradeCheck is has a better engine, it’s based on a best practices analyzer – Prescan had the job of making sure the database was consistent and wouldn’t fail when you upgraded. It did a decent job of finding really bad things, but commonly would miss things that would matter. Ask people why they hated in place upgrade in going from 2003 to 2007. Why? Cause it would fail for a ton of reasons that weren’t included in the prescan. PreUpgradeCheck has an extensible rule base and can get better by simply adding rules. The rules themselves are easily influenced. You also have tons more detail and insight around your configuration and insight. We also didn’t have workflows and content types and features to worry about in 2003 upgrade to 2007. 2. PreUpgradeCheck is read-only – For many this will be the number one reason they favor the likes of PreUpgradeCheck. Prescan would “Prep” your database or even think about fixing things with your environment. Really it simpy flipped a bit, but when the bit didn’t get flipped the upgrade would fail. Now there’s no bit to flip. BUT, if you forget to run the PreUpgradeCheck, you’ll find it’s not the end of the world. Being read only most people will feel much more comfortable about running it in production. YES! Run it in production. You need the data that it provides. Sure you don’t have to start there, in fact I agree don’t start there, but get comfortable with the tool and run it not once but OFTEN! 3. PreUpgradeCheck Reporting Rocks! Gives you not just a log and screen output, but an XML report and HTM report, and verbose log of all of the rules with a again verbose database and site collection detail that goes way beyond. I love the idea of comparing the Local vs. Farm reports and comparing server to server reports. I hope to hear how from small to large people are really leveraging this tool to keep things more synchronized than ever. You’ll see there’s even more reason to leverage this reporting. If you’re running PreUpgradeCheck once you’ve missed the point. Even MS IT runs PreUpgradeCheck way before the upgrade, the hours or days before, and uses it as a cross check against any changes that may have happened. Serious checks and balances. 4. PreUpgradeCheck tells you about the state of your farm – You did get some insight into your site collections in Prescan don’t get me wrong… from ghosting to site definitions, but you’ll see 10X the detail in PreUpgradeCheck. I hope people realize the sweetness and insight. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if people hit their last PreUpgradeCheck report after a disaster. What else do you have that has all of your SharePoint webapps, your databases, your SSP config, and your AAMs, (seriously where do you have your AAMs written) Why isn’t PreUpgradeCheck report part of your DR Plan???? IT SHOULD BE! 5. PreUpgradeCheck is a native STSADM command and just as risky or unrisky as any other stsadm command - Presan was an insane install. You had to download the bits and install them somewhere or find a 2007 install to grab the prescan executable. It took about a year to even get it as a download center package. Sad. What a mess! Some customers were very scared of the tool. Don’t let that fear from prescan carry over. The mantra of the upgrade team… *DO NO HARM.* With PreUpgradeCheck it’s on every farm that is running SP2 update or later. Great stuff! As a consultant you aren’t adding bits to run the check, it’s all native. As you can tell, there are a ton of reasons you should be running PreUpgradeCheck. I don’t need to dis the PRESCAN to convince you, but those having any hesitation, this may help. |
| By Joel OlesonWith my recent travel, I was interested to analyze what cities and what countries were best represented. The best tool I have for analyzing where SharePoint users are, is my blog :). Here’s some recent analysis of a drill down by region. Just by looking at this first chart you can see how well SharePoint is being distributed around the globe based on visits to my blog. Sub Continent Region by Visits 
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| By Joel OlesonThe Joel world tour continues to Asia from Africa. Teched Africa was a blast. I hope you enjoyed the pictures. There’s a lot of energy and passion as seen from Teched Africa in Durban to the SharePoint Saturday in Capetown, to our shark diving experience with Zlatan Dzinic SharePoint MVP. I hear he had a great time at the recent best practices conference in DC. It’s great to see many of the SharePoint people able to get out of their local region and connect with others. Here’s my whirl wind tour: JAPAN Sep 14: I’ll spend a day in Japan in the heart of Tokyo meeting with Microsoft and partners on “Preparing Today for Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 as well as 10 Steps to a Successful Deployment.” My decks are currently being translated into Japanese. SINGAPORE Sep 16: Then I’ll head over to Singapore, spend some time with Singapore Quest customers and partners at a lunch event at Marina Mandarin Hotel on 10 Steps of Successful SharePoint Deployment and spend the evening with the Singapore SharePoint Users Group 6:45 – 9:00 PM SINGAPORE SharePoint USER GROUP 
Looking forward to seeing the SharePoint MVPs Steve Sofian, Patrick Yong, Sarbjit Singh Gill, Kit Kai and new ones I haven’t met... Those I don’t see at the user group I’ll hope to see at Tech Insights, in Penang Malaysia more info below. Among a bunch of other SharePoint friends in the region from past Teched South East Asias. Unfortunately Teched South East Asia was cancelled this year, but Patrick and others have put together an MVP speaker event called Tech Insights. Great venue for a technical conference and awesome speaker lineup. MALAYSIA Tech Insights – Penang, Malaysia 
Quoted from the site “As a treasured member of Microsoft's technical communities, you are invited to join us in this unique 2-day intensive conference, Tech Insights 2009 Penang. The event is a dedicated platform for like minded folks in the IT and technology industry to come together and help to drive community awareness and event and as a social media portal for all technology inspiring lovers to network, collaborate and build personal connections with Microsoft experts and peers.” “First time in Penang! Take your technical knowledge to the next level.
You are invited to join us in this 2-day technical education & networking conference, Tech Insights 2009 Penang. Here's what you will get.
1. More than 20 in-depth breakout sessions for both software developers and IT professionals
2. Opportunities to interact one-on-one with Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs)
3. Networking with hundreds of technology inspiring lovers from various communities
4. Delivered by field experts, there are sessions from Intermediate to Expert (200-300) Level.” I’ll be speaking with Sarbjit Singh Gill (MVP: Sharepoint Server), Patrick Yong (MVP: Sharepoint Server) and another 17 or so, MVP and expert speakers. Sponsored by the Malaysia SharePoint User Group, join the group for a discount. (User Group members use SPUGPromo for discount) Also connect with the group on Facebook  Then I head off to India where I’ll meet up with Michael Noel @michaeltnoel the famed SharePoint Author of SharePoint Server 2007 Unleashed and a slew of other books. He’s one of the foremost on SharePoint Virtualization, as well as Security including SharePoint, ISA and IAG. We’ll also be meeting up with the CEO of SharePoint Solutions of Persia – Neo Farvashan. He’s the one of took head on creating a new language pack without the support of Microsoft, but not without asking them a ton of times if they were interested. His Farsi language pack is used on hundreds of environments in the middle east, Persia region including some large deployments in Dubai. I was hoping to make it to Persia, but the current climate isn’t conducive. Sorry Tehran SPUG, I did get this close. INDIA Our first stop is Pune for the Pune SharePoint Users Group "PUG" - “A great place to start learning, Pune User Group (aka PUG) is a Pune (India) based not-for-profit organization, an association of professionals and students interested in Microsoft technology” Announcing PUG SharePoint Day 2009 on 19th September,2009 Here’s the agenda: Keynote “SharePoint: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow”,Michael Noel and Joel Oleson Session 1: “Building the Perfect SharePoint Farm” By Michael Noel 10:30 AM Session 2: “Preparing for Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 Today" By Joel Oleson 11:45 AM and Q&A 12:45 PM 19th September, 2009 – Pune 20th September, 2009 – Chennai We will be in Delhi and Udaipur and that Rajathan region, I really want to see the Rat temple and Taj Mahal so if there’s any SharePoint experts that wants to be our guide, please reach out… :) NEPAL Couldn’t find a user group, so I spend a personal vacation day or 2. If there are any SharePoint people that want to meet us in Kathmandu… click the contact me or send me a message on twitter. I’ll be flying out, but Michael Noel will continue on to: 26th September, 2009 – Bangalore and maybe day before or after, Sri Lanka |
| By Joel OlesonOne of the most fascinating things from my recent webcast was the interactive real time survey in the preparing for upgrade session. With over 1000 registered and around 450 online at peak we had an incredible sampling. I had a chance to digest these results and wanted to share this information. It’s amazing how much you’d have to pay to get this kind of data. 
When do you plan to upgrade to SharePoint 2010? Let’s take this first question… An impressive 65% plan to upgrade in the first year! I know the focus of my efforts around SharePoint and the community is around planning and upgrade. You’ll see me and my efforts with Quest and the community on upgrade. I want to make sure people are taking advantage of the technology. The other parts that are impressive about this is most have NOT seen much of it beyond a video or two. Lots of good buzz and a cutting edge group. 
What is the size of your SharePoint Environment (in GB)? This was a question I came up with. I’m always curious to find the distribution of sizes of environments. Very interesting to see the nearly equal distribution. The important thing as well is most do know, or think that know. That’s great. Couple of good one’s here. Nearly 22% of environments are less than 50GB and 16% more than a TB. I think most Microsoft estimates are there are a TON of small environments. When you look at environments at this scale, you can see at least those who would attend a preparing for 2010 talk would represent all sizes of environments with an emphasis on the larger ones, but definitely a wake up call that scale is important and it is definitely a reality. Everyone is challenged with disk storage and scaling their environments from the person managing a single SharePoint box to the multi mega farms with TBs and TBs of info where SANs can’t provide storage fast enough and you find fabric managers. Pretty cool to see the largest group at 250-1TB. There are a ton of lessons to learn and to experience at the more than 100GB size of environment and the majority here definitely represents *REAL* SharePoint deployments. No cracker jacks. The other thing I find when walking through this list, the consultants are listing themselves with the 0-50GB bucket as well, so this represents some real experience as well. Their day job isn’t with that small environment. I hope people who build tools do read this, hey real environments are of all sizes, so make sure you test the really big ones, cause they are well represented. A large sample data size needs to be more than 100GB. 
Do you plan to move to SharePoint Server in SharePoint 2010? What does this tell us? Do WSS people not attend webcasts? Is WSS overshadowed by MOSS/SharePoint Server. Are people embarrassed to say they do WSS? 80+% Say they are already using SharePoint Server, MOSS, ala the Portal technology. Amazing! The answer to this question surprised me. I was really interested in making sure the wording wasn’t confusing, and revised this question a couple of times to make sure those on previous versions understood the question. Not that many PLAN to use WSS. For partners building product this is an important answer, it tells us to focus on the enterprise deployments. It tells us that people are paying for SharePoint and it really is Core Infrastructure and everyone needs to get use to it. How many corporations or organizations were represented in this poll? While this wasn’t a question, I sorted those that responded to the questions with the most responses copied the email addresses into their own worksheet, did a text to columns with the @ being a delimiter and then sorted the domains alphabetically, then ran a subtotals, copied visible cells and got a count. I’m sure that little exercise is one of the most common functions in excel :) (Still works in Excel 2010, but I did have to re-add the select visible cells buttons, one of my favorites.) Enough of that. The totals were at 287 unique domains from the 355 responses. So that gives you an idea of how many unique organizations were represented. To make this even more credible, 12 responses were from hotmail, 5 from yahoo.com and 6 from gmail. So realistically there were very close to ~300 organizations represented in this poll. Thomas Resing have recently been working on a SharePoint 2010 Adoption Survey… I encourage you to take the poll to increase the relevancy… (Used with permission… results so far with 32 respondents) 
So nearly half of those who answered the question have run the preupgradecheck, that’s pretty good. When I first looked at this a few weeks ago it was at 30%. As well the 64 bit question was much lower, so I’m glad to see we are in better shape. The survey itself isn’t for financial gain. This one gives the consultants insight into the challenges their customers will be facing and as we all try to anticipate the issues and adoption. Jeremy Thake expert SharePoint Dev from Perth did an extensive survey to try to understand the tools that developers use. You can see the results from his SharePoint implementation approach survey and results from the SharePointDevWiki.com. While I wish I could have fixed up his admin toolset choices, the results are still quite interesting with a few aha moments. Very useful information. Thanks for sharing Jeremy, and thanks for lunch after the user group in Perth. You guys are amazing. I’ll host this time, my treat! He’s currently looking for people to fill out his latest survey “SharePoint Application/Content Lifecycle Management.” One of my favorites from his results is the RAM question for the dev environments. I tell people you gotta have 4, and things won’t even start appropriately if you don’t give it 2GB. My preference these days is 8GB which is impressive to see at 20%. 
Surveys and Polls are great. Thanks for contributing… These wouldn’t be worth anything if no one contributed. |
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