Tristan Watkins on IT Infrastructure
Technical guidance for Microsoft security technologies, Windows, SharePoint, and other generally useful findings
My RSS Reader was clogged with new SharePoint 2010 stuff this morning from the conference:
You can track my colleagues’ posts from the conference on our corporate blog (where some of this content is cross-posted).
Federated Search is one of the most useful and interesting additions to MOSS 2007 since it was launched. It’s now been announced for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.
Federated Search was integrated into MOSS 2007 with the post-SP1 Infrastructure Update, which effectively brought the Search Server 2008 product to the MOSS 2007 platform. Federated Search will pass a query from a single interface to multiple OpenSearch-compatible indices. It will then render matching results from these indices asynchronously as they return. In MOSS 2007 a federated search web part is added to a search results page and each web part renders only if results are found through that Search Connector. This works brilliantly, as local results will typically return first, then remote sources will render in due course.
This functionality has now been added to Windows Search. I think this is a fantastic move, as these choices will often be very preferential. I may want Wikipedia while you will want Britannica. I may roam among three branch offices and need to query each of the regional SharePoint portals. It’s very powerful stuff – especially when it moves to the client and can be configured to individual needs.
Find more Search Connectors on the Enterprise Search site. Read the Windows 7 Federated Search Provider Implementer’s Guide.
This is the third post in a six-part series on SharePoint 2007 administrative commands. The first part was an overview and the second covered Farm administration. This part covers web application administration, which is carried out in SharePoint Central Administration. These administrative functions are carried out by farm administrators, but scoped at the application level rather than across the entire farm. Continue reading “SharePoint 2007 administration part III: web application administration”
This post is part two of a six part series on SharePoint 2007 administrative commands. The first post is an overview of the effort. This section identifies what farm administrators can do at the farm level. Farm administrators also administer SharePoint web applications, but I will be covering that functionality in the next post.
Note: farm administrators can take ownership of any site collections or deny access to entire web applications, so the people filling this role must be trusted. Auditing can identify and alert the Site Collection Owners to the act of taking ownership, but damage can be done in the intervening period.
As mentioned in the first post, this is a brief command reference organised by administrative scope. Continue reading “SharePoint 2007 administration part II: Farm administration”
Last night I remembered that after I read the SharePoint Administrator’s Companion I put together my own administrative guide. I needed something much shorter that would take the SharePoint administrative interfaces as a starting point. This was effectively a click-by-click administrative reference. In fact, I assembled it by going through each button click available. Continue reading “SharePoint 2007 administration part I: Overview”
Jeff Teper, the Microsoft SharePoint Corporate Vice President has posted a history of SharePoint on the team blog. Note: it could use a proofread, but I think it’s worth sticking with it if you’re not intimately familiar with the product already.
I found a couple of thing particularly interesting:
The public beta of DPM 2010 is now available, with major improvements to virtualisation support and agents for other beta technologies like SharePoint 2010 and Exchange 2010. I hope to test drive it soon. These are two features that are particularly appealing:
Item Level Recovery from host level backup: DPM 2010 Beta supports item level recovery (ILR) which allows you to do granular recovery of files and folders, volumes and virtual hard disks (VHD) from a host level backup of Hyper-V VMs to a network share or a volume on a DPM protected server.
Alternate Host Recovery: DPM 2010 Beta supports alternate location recovery (ALR) which allows you to recover a Hyper-V VM to an alternate stand-alone or clustered Hyper-V host.
And this general improvement:
You will see far fewer “Replica Inconsistent” errors and many of them will automatically get fixed by Auto-Rerun, Auto-CC (Consistency Check).
Gary Lapointe recently released a custom STSADM command for setting the BackConnectionHostNames registry key. The relevant Microsoft KB article recommends specifying each host header with the BackConnectionHostNames key rather than disabling the loopback check, as this check is a valuable security fix. As Gary Lapointe mentions, Spencer Harbar put together some thorough background information on the roots of the fix. Without this command, setup and maintenance can be a bit of a hassle if you have lots of SharePoint applications or lots of Alternate Access Mappings (or if any of this information changes with any regularity). These registry changes need to be made on each web server for any sites with host headers. This includes Central Administration if it’s not configured on <servername:port>. So this could get quite laborious if the farm is fairly large. The UpdateFarm parameter may be particularly helpful in this regard.
I’ve mentioned a couple of times that I’ve built a Windows Server 2008 R2 (with Hyper-V) laptop for SharePoint development but I haven’t mentioned one of the only major gripes that I’ve not been able to solve – namely that graphics-intensive operations bring the system to a halt. This is particularly noticeable when audio is playing and you launch a new program while Hyper-V is exporting (as if you have a sonic performance metric), or (to use the Microsoft example) when pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL.
Until the other day I had always chalked this up to something about this driver (an NVIDIA GeForce 8400 M GS on a Dell XPS M1330) and the Hyper-V role or Server 2008 R2 itself (since we didn’t have this problem with the same driver on Windows 7). However, one of our technical architects got a bit more annoyed by this than me and identified that it’s a known issue for almost every graphics driver on 64-bit-capable laptops. Continue reading “Hyper-V graphics performance and SharePoint 2010 development”
…or so it’s billed. In fact it’s more of an overview of SharePoint’s place in the market and a sumary of its successes, but it’s interesting to see it get this sort of coverage/reception in a major daily newspaper. I certainly would find it surprising if Oracle’s UCM got this treatment!