Wahid's Blog

1. SharePoint 2010 Top 10 Features and Resources by Joel Oleson
2. SharePoint 2010 Top Features (New and upgraded) by Jason Givens
3. SharePoint 2010 Top 5 List by Mike Ferrera

It’s day 4 of SharePoint Conference 2009. My legs are sore, I’m sleep deprived but there’s still so much more to look at and so many more people to meet. It’s been a busy week so far but I’m taking a break to post some highlights.

Yesterday, Mike Ganotti and Mark Miller live streamed a special webcast with attendee comments and some Q&A. I was taking some pictures of the crew and some attendees, including a few Live Bloggers. Also, check out the stream to hear my comments on the new ribbon and UI enhancements in SharePoint 2010.

One of the attendees, Jay Simcox (who couldn’t attend, sorry) put together a nice list of links for more information on SharePoint 2010.

Finally, check out EndUserSharePoint.com Digital Swag series. The series has links to free software, posters, and other goodies that were highlighted during the conference.

I attended a session on SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Fundamentals given by Sean Livingston (Program Manager, Microsoft). Sean talked about the feedback the group received an said that they implemented some things from customer feedback and internal testing.

The upgrade methods that will be supported are “in-place,” “Single-click install, (which is a SQL migration)” and database attach. You’ll need at least MOSS 2007 SP2 (or WSS v3 SP2). There’s no support for direct upgrade from SPS 2003, no side by side installation or gradual upgrades.

What if you’re still using SPS 2003? Upgrade now, or when you do upgrade to 2010 you’ll have to upgrade to 2007 first.

Tools

Upgrade preparation tools from WSS v3/MOSS 2007 SP2 include the pre-upgrade checker, stsadm –o EnumAllWebs and SPDiag version 2. For customizations, we’ll have stsadm –o ExportIPFSAdminObjects. For MOSS 2010, there’s a new SPDiag 2010 tool that is being developed. These tools will give insight into the Farm, content database and customizations.

Pre-Upgrade Checker

The pre-upgrade checker is an STSADM command option (stsadm –o preupgradecheck). Some features of Pre-Upgrade checker include reports for farm information, current or potential issues. The checker makes no changes to the environment and you don’t have to run it, but it’s definitely recommended to run it. The October Cumulative Update improves the checker.

By default it runs on the entire farm, however you can use the –localonly switch to limit it to the local server.

What does it look for? Farm Servers, databases, AAM configurations, site definitions, features, web parts, installed language packs and CAML views/content types are all reported on. It also identifies issues with data orphans, modified content databases, missing site definition or missing features.

What do you get? A report in HTML format with links to KB articles and a lot of detailed information. The report will also identify any upgrade “blocking” issues and highlight them for you.

PowerShell cmdlets

For various upgrade routines, Microsoft has supplied some neat cmdlets. The most common will be the “Upgrade-SPContentDatabase” to do a B2B (build to build) or V2V (version to version) upgrade. This command will resume upgrades but it’s NOT used when connecting database content initially.

There are several more, including Upgrade-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceAppliction and Upgrade-SPSingleSignOnDatabase for specific scenarios.

Feature Upgrades

Feature Upgrades is an optional capability that can perform B2B and/or V2V upgrades. It includes upgrade activities such as ApplyElementManifests, AddContentTypeField, and MapFile. There’s a capability to upgrade custom code as well but Sean warns that this shouldn’t be done if it’s not really necessary.

Visual Upgrade

Visual Upgrade allows you to stay on MOSS 2007 user interface or move to the new interface. MOSS 2010 ships with all the existing Master pages and CSS from MOSS 2007. The farm administrator or site collection administrator can control the upgrade. You can get a preview of the site using the Site Actions menu and checking the site settings (site title & description). The option to upgrade to the new UI will be the last field.

Some items are not MOSS 2007 UI compatible. These are My Site host, Project Web Access site collection and Report Server web parts.

Patch Management

Patch Management gets a re-haul in MOSS 2010. Administrators will gain insight via a patch management UI or by using PowerShell cmdlets. Rules can be setup to show patch status and there’s built-in backwards compatibility. Although not intended for long durations, you can defer upgrades and binaries can be patched ahead of databases.

Downtime Mitigation

In SharePoint 2010, you’ll be able to have multiple upgrade sessions and use content database attach with AAM redirection. This adds to features that were included in MOSS 2007, such as the parallel upgrade of farms and read-only databases.

Upgrade Logging

Logging has changed in SharePoint 2010. There’s now only one upgrade log per session and only logs errors. This will greatly reduce the size of log files. The upgrade log schema has been fixed as well.

For reporting, the upgrade status page has been improved and includes an upgrade status history and command line progress bar.

SSP Upgrade

SharePoint 2010 replaces the SSP concept and instead uses “service applications.” So, each SSP upgrades into the following service applications:

• Search Service application
• User Profiles Service application
• Excel Service application
• App Registry (for backwards compatibility)
• Managed Metadata Service application

I just finished attending the SharePoint Administration 2010 (Part I and II) and wanted to share some quick notes. Here are some highlights of things we learned!

Installation

Central Administration has been revamped with a focus on the UI and usability. There are more wizards and ISV’s will be able to create wizards that will be available from within Central Administration.

Managed Accounts

In SharePoint 2010, service accounts can be managed accord to Active Directory policies. Managed accounts will allow SharePoint to automatically change service account passwords automatically. Use PowerShell to manage them.

Farm Configuration Wizard

This wizard runs the first time you load Central Administration. You can specify the managed account to use and select which services you want the wizard to install. Looks like there are about 20 services.

Failover Database

A failover database can be specified in CA for mirrored databases once SQL mirroring has been configured.

PowerShell

In SharePoint 2010, PowerShell is the command line tool of choice and is fully supported as it does everything STSADM could do but does it better.

Todd Klindt reviewed some handy cmdlets useful for SharePoint IT Pros.

Get-command –noun SP*

• This will give you commands that have nouns that start with SP (for example Restore-SPSite).

Get-spsite | get-spweb | selec URL, webtemplate

• Returns all the Web Teamplates used by each site.

Backup and Restore

In SharePoint 2010, Farm backups are the same format as 2007 but now allow multiple threads. You can perform configuration only backups as well. Central Administration has granular backup, out of the box (Site Collection, Web or List). Additionally, it’ll backup unattached content databases. You could also use PowerShell to perform backups.

SharePoint 2010 will eliminate the “recovery farm” by allowing extraction of content from a unattached content database.

Throttling and Performance

In SharePoint 2010, the server monitors its own performance. The artificial limits used by administrators (such as 2000 list item limit) are no more. In his keynote, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer spoke about tens of millions of list items being handled easily with SharePoint. Large lists can support 50 million items per list.

Results are trimmed down so performance doesn’t suffer. Users and admins have different settings and admins can set time slots to change how many items are returned in results.

HTTP Request monitoring and Throttling protects the server during peak load. It checks RAM, CPU %, ASP.NET queue and wait time in queue every 5 seconds.

Dev Dashboard

Administrators can use this dashboard to troubleshoot pages, load time of pages and broken web parts. It will show you the call stack, times to render the components on the page, webb part processing time, critical events and database query information. It can be toggled on and off via STSADM.

Monitoring

The Universal Logging System (ULS) is compressed by default and includes correlation IDs to better find information. There’s less “noise” and has event log flood protection. Repetitive log events are suppressed so that logs are filled up by the same event. There’s log aggregation via SQL Logging database which will bring in all the ULS logs from all your farms.

Best Practice Analyzer

The BPA in SharePoint 2010 uses “Health Rules” to check the server. The rules are extensible meaning that ISV’s can add rules for their products and you can even write your own rules.

Timer Jobs

In SharePoint 2007, timer jobs ran on a server and it was hard or impossible to tell which specific server they were running on. That would make troubleshooting a nightmare. In 2010 there’s server affinity which means that not only can you tell which server a job is running on but you can specify which one you want it to run on.

Timer jobs have come a long way as far as flexibility and reporting. For example, you could run them on demand if you wanted and see a progress bar. There’s a history section that details when they ran and gives you more information to troubleshoot failed jobs.

Patching and Upgrades

Ever wanted to patch just your Web Front Ends to plug a security hole but didn’t care to take down the entire farm? SharePoint 2010 lets you run different patch levels so you can do just that. Save patching the database servers for later when you have a maintenance window. The one catch is you much maintain patches within a compatibility boundry. This flexibility will even allow you to bring in an unattached content database (say from a backup) at a lower patch level and restore it, or just extract a specific site or list.

Don’t forget to check out the Live Blogger stream for instant updates to the events at SharePoint Conference 2009.

Sorry for the lack of updates and posts. I have some ideas that I just haven’t been able to work on. Unfortunately, I’m a bit busy at work and I have been working on my virtual environment.

There’s tons of activity on the blogs and twitter, everyone is excited about the upcoming SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas! I just picked up my (electronic) badge as I will be “Live Blogging” from the conference next week.

Besides the conference, I’m hoping to have my virtual environment up to test some best practices, add-ons (from CodePlex), and 3rd party products. EndUserSharePoint.com has some really exciting workshops coming up as well that extend the functionality of SharePoint. I’ve used some of these techniques at previous work sites and user’s are always amazed! Check ‘em out at EUSP Online Workshops.

Every week I learn more about SharePoint, I’m getting closer to having my virtual environment built (on my laptop) so I can try some of these things. This week, I was focused on branding.

• BrandingSharePoint.com – This site has some samples, downloads, and good posts on customizing SharePoint’s look and feel.
• SharePoint Branding Tool - CodePlex tool that has several features, mostly it can re-theme all webs in a site collection.
• MakingSharePointLookGood.com – Site which has 5 photoshop sets for simple master page designs; also has a few icon sets.
• WSSDemo.com Top 100 WCM Sites – Thumbnail views of the top 100 public SharePoint sites organized by industry.
• Installing MOSS on Server 2008 R2 – Describes how to properly slipstream SharePoint 2007 so it will install on Windows Server 2008 R2. I’m going to attempt it this week