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  • SharePoint Service Pack 2 (SP2) & Supported Technologies With the release today of Service Pack (sp2) updates for SharePoint, I had to review what new technologies are now "natively" supported by SharePoint - WSS 3.0 & MOSS 2007.

    The sp2 updates come with lots of improvements and bug fixes, but they all come with support for some new technologies. Here's a list of technologies now supported in SharePoint as a result of the sp2 updates:

    Full support for Windows Internet Explorer 8.
    Level 2 browser support for Mozilla Firefox (versions 2 and 3).
    Support for Windows Server 2008.

    Support in SharePoint for these technologies are welcomed but, personally, I'd also hoped to see native SharePoint support for custom field types in desktop Office clients. Currently, custom field types that inherit from some base field types like the Lookup field are not rendered in the DIP in Office clients; this means that values in such fields can only be modified directly via the SharePoint UI. The other option would be to create yet a custom DIP in InfoPath.

    Having said all that, I would strongly recommend that you consider deploying these updates in your SharePoint farm(s) as there are many significant updates, fixes and performance improvements that these updates bring with them.

    If you need to present an RFC for these updates to be deployed in your environment and wondering what business case to put forward, you may want to look at this document, it provides a very high-level business justifications for the updates.

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  • SharePoint Best Practices - Pre-grow or Auto-grow Database File Size? One of the many good and highly recommended SharePoint best practices is that you should pre-grow your SQL data file to its planned and expected maximum size.

    This recommendation, however, laudable has caused some confusions amongst SharePoint technology specialists. Does pre-grow mean determining and deciding the database file size during planning and setting same during deployment and configuration? The answer, by no means no. Pre-growing your database does not equate to pre-determining and setting a fixed file size for your database.

    Pre-growing your database helps reduce the impact of fragmentation on performance. It also helps reduce the number of IOPM, and resource contentions associated with auto-growing database. However, using fixed sizes for your databases and logs files could quite easily violate the SharePoint Health model, thereby causing one of the error events; specifically Event ID 3758; to occur.

    My Recommendations
    Pre-grow does not negate auto-grow rather it is complimented by it. You should analyse and determine your database potential file size during planning. Set the initial size of your database file accordingly. Your database is now said to be pre-grown. You do not need to disable Autogrowth. The key to using autogrowth correctly and efficiently is to avoid changing the database size rather frequently. If you have correctly planned and estimated the potential growth rate of your database over a specific interval; say bi-monthly, quarterly, yearly, etc; you can reasonably grow your database by the determined size to accommodate the growing data.

    Resource(s)
    Event ID 3758 (Windows SharePoint Services health model)
    Patterns & Practices: Chapter 14 — Improving SQL Server Performance

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  • Microsoft Formally Names the Next SharePoint Release Microsoft yesterday formally made known the official name of the next release of SharePoint.

    Popularly called the Office 14 "stack" amongst technology experts, Microsoft announced that the next release of SharePoint will be called Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. This is yet another change in the name of the product, once known as SharePoint Portal Server (versions 2001 & 2003), then Microsoft Office SharePoint Server -MOSS - (version 2007) and now Microsoft SharePoint Server (version 2010).

    According to the SharePoint product team at Microsoft, the need to drop the word "Office" from the name of the product is simply to avoid any further confusion of this server product for other products from the Microsoft stable as most people (customers/businesses/end-users) associate the word "Office" with the office client applications (Office Word, Office Excel, etc.).

    According to Chris Capossela, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Information Worker Product Management Group, "Office 2010 — including Office Web applications, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010 — will enter a technical preview in the third quarter of 2009 and will release to manufacturing in the first half of 2010."

    The product team has also indicated that Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 will be generally also known as SharePoint; not MSS, not MiSS and not MSPS; just SharePoint. Hopefully the name will stick this time around, at least for a bit longer than just a couple of years :)

    This, of course, does not affect the great features and improved seamless enterprise integration capabilities to be delivered in the next version. We are eagerly waiting...

    Watch this space.

    Resource(s)
    Microsoft's Chris Capossela Q&A session on the subject
    SharePoint Product Team on the subject

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  • Microsoft’s Roadmap for SharePoint The first sets of “Ask the Experts” (Interactive Q&A) sessions took place today at the European SharePoint Best Practices Conference. There were 4 of these sessions running concurrently so, unless one’s the “Splitman”, one could only attend one of the sessions at a time.

    I attended the “IT PRO” session and one of my questions was around the future of SharePoint. This post attempts to put the question, the response received and my view in clearer context.

    Question:
    One of the questions I get from my customers is “what is Microsoft’s roadmap for SharePoint over the next 5-10 years?” I know I can get information on current (and immediate next) releases of SharePoint from blogs and stuff, but is there a single, definitive and official resource on Microsoft’s strategic roadmap for SharePoint over the next 5 to 10 years?

    Response (paraphrased):
    The product team blogs are good resources for such information. There are several team blogs including SharePoint team blogs and ECM team blogs. Also you can get similar information (and sometime better information) from the blogs of MVPs.

    My View:
    If I were the CTO of a multi-billion dollar multinational; looking to implement a strategic (5-10 year-plan) enterprise information management, collaboration and social networking platform for my company; would I make such important decisions based on comments, views and opinions of “MVPs” or expressions made on blogs, however objective these views or expressions may be? Honestly, I will not.

    Now, don’t get me wrong. I am NOT; in anyway; implying or suggesting that blog posts or views of MVPs or product teams are not reliable or dependable, nothing could be farther from the truth. I personally use and rely on information found on several websites and blogs owned by product teams and MVPs (SharePoint team, BizTalk team, Joel Oleson, Spencer Harbar, Stephen Thomas, Andrew Connell, etc.). These guys are great at what they do and provide some of the most invaluable contributions to the communities. I also participate in user group meetings, which are certainly very useful and great.

    What I’m saying, instead, is that these user-group meetings, blog posts, comments and views focus more around existing versions of the product and also provide insights into the next immediate release of the product. While all these are good and; without a doubt; very invaluable, they don’t provide businesses and corporations with sufficient information on which to base strategic, long-term technology adoption plans. Again, I’m not trying to play the pessimist here; I personally run lots of sales pitches and recommendations for SharePoint and my honest view is that SharePoint is probably the best collaboration and ECM platform; for businesses; available in the marketplace today. But businesses and key decisions makers need to know this will continue to be true for some time to come and they also need to understand how their technology adoption decisions will affect their TCO, revenues, business directions and risks over a reasonable period of time, after all, it’s all about the business, right?

    Just as Microsoft has roadmaps and future directions for .NET Framework, C#, SQL Server, etc; we need to see definitive and official roadmaps for SharePoint (and, in my view, BizTalk).

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  • European SharePoint Best Practices Conference The European SharePoint Best Practices Conference kicks off tomorrow in London, United Kingdom and I'll be attending.

    I'm quite excited about some of the sessions and speakers lined up for this inaugural event in Europe, and in keeping faith with Microsoft's event-organising traditions, the organisers of this 3-day event have cleverly arranged the sessions into tracks that match "best job role description". The event's agenda provides information on available sessions across all 4 tracks and, as always, I'm most likely to attend sessions cutting across several tracks, particularly "IT PRO", "DEV" and "Business Adoption" tracks.

    Hopefully, I'd be able to provide summaries and reviews of outcomes from these sessions right here on my blog; so watch this space.

    If you are unable to attend the conference but would love to meet the speakers (and attendees) and catch up on some techie conversations, there's an open, informal evening (aka SharePint By Night) open to everyone, see Andrew Connell's blog for details.

    Further information on the conference can be found at http://www.sharepointbestpractices.co.uk

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