SharePoint Server 2010 Search Scopes and Pre-Windows 2000 Compatibility Access

Back in the pre-release days of SharePoint 2010, one of the most reliable sources of information on infrastructure issues was Russ Maxwell’s SharePoint Brew blog. It’s still a great resource, although he’s posting less frequently now than he was during the beta. In this post I want to share my findings regarding Pre-Windows 2000 Compatibility Access group rights in Active Directory. Everything I have to say is supplementary to Russ’s foundational explanation of Why the tokenGroupsGlobalAndUniversal (TGGAU) attribute matters in SharePoint 2010. I’m picking the discussion up from his closing comment, “At a minimum, certain service accounts like the search service account need to be a member of this group.”

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Bit Rate Throttling Fix Released

A couple of weeks ago I posted information about a Fix For Bit Rate Throttling W3WP Crashes in SharePoint 2010. A few hours ago, Jack Freelander from IIS.NET announced that IIS Media Services 4.0 has been released, including this fix. This is just a quick post to update that the fix has passed Beta, in case anyone was waiting on the final release before diving in.

I still have yet to find the time to test this myself, but I’d be very keen to hear about your experiences – good or bad. Failing that, I hope to get back to this in the next couple of weeks.

Fix For Bit Rate Throttling W3WP Crashes

Over the Summer, we dove deep in to SharePoint 2010 for WCM when we re-launched our corporate website. As I mentioned the other day, I spent a decent amount of time looking at caching and some of the new supporting technologies, like Bit Rate Throttling, an IIS.NET extension to IIS 7.x – part of the IIS Media Services 3.0. package that also includes Smooth Streaming. Bit Rate Throttling is like when you watch a YouTube clip and it only buffers a short time in advance of what you’re watching, also known as Progressive Download. In Microsoft’s words, Bit Rate Throttling is…

“…an IIS 7.0 extension that meters the download speeds of media file types and data between a server and a client computer. The encoded bit rates of media file types such as Windows Media Video (WMV), MPEG-4 (MP4), and Adobe Flash Video, are automatically detected, and the rate at which those files are delivered to the client over HTTP are controlled according to the Bit Rate Throttling configuration.”

It basically saves you bandwidth by only transferring what you’ve watched plus a small, configurable buffer. Think about each user that starts watching a ten minute video but only watches one minute. In that time, they may have downloaded five minutes of content – quadrupling the bandwidth consumption unnecessarily. Bit Rate Throttling shares some user experience characteristics with Streaming Media, but it works on a normal web server over HTTP. It’s really quite a simple tool and I won’t devote space here to explaining it when the IIS.NET site already has some great content, including a brief introductory video. Definitely check it out.

So why am I writing about it?

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