Last week, Microsoft bi-annual biggest technical internal event took place at Seattle: TechReady.

It was 7^th edition of this incredible technical readiness opportunity where products groups and field people meet.

This one was my 4^th TechReady, but it was the first on 2 aspects :

• attending during summer,
• being a speaker.

I suggested content on MOSS scripting months ago, and the subject was selected to become OFC302 session.

The Breakout session happened on Friday august 1^st afternoon, 1pm. It’s a hard timeslot as a part of the attendees are off the event. Especially this friday, because it was the only real sunny day of the week.

With these circumstances, presentation went well, having 71 attendees in the audience + LiveMeeting listeners. The session received good feedback finishing with applauses. Thanks to the attendees, and thanks also to the posted feedbacks I’ll improve the content.

As indicated in the presentation, here are the follow-up and feedback information for the session:

• The scripts are available, with the slide deck, on my internal “MySite”. They can be found here http://myemea/sites/emberger/default.aspx in the “Shared Documents” DocLib, Folder TechReady7 (you need to be connected in the Corp LAN)

• The ASP.Net v2.0.50727 can be enabled directly during its setup. Just add “-enable” to the setup instruction (beginning by aspnet_regiis). More info here : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/k6h9cz8h(VS.80).aspx
• To adapt the demonstration to Full Best Practices:
• during the session was pointed that the demonstration run was not fully compliant with all MOSS Best Practices. It's true.
• In fact, few items/actions have to be adapted to fully comply with Best Practices. Here they are:
• Use 3 disc partitions on Servers : System, Data, Logs 
• REMOVE passwords from the service accounts description ;-) 
• Use AD Global Groups to host Service Accounts
• Grant rights to AD Global groups, not to AD accounts
• Set policy to manage Service Accounts passwords
• Pre build your SQL databases to insure adapted options you want, before using them with SharePoint
• Plan and use the MOSS Service Accounts according your need (minimum 3, up to ….). More information here :
• Plan for administrative and service accounts (Office SharePoint Server) (TechNet link : http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263445.aspx )
• Plan for administrative and service accounts (Office SharePoint Server) (TechNet link : http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263445.aspx )
• Follow prescriptions regarding which AD group hosting the right service accounts MUST NOT be “Farm administrator” members
• Follow your customer needs and rules - they sometimes differ from Best Practices ... 

• Build every scripts step-by-steps, test them, and adapt the to the platform need you build. Scripting is a very iterative process

• This presentation should be renamed: Yes, the initial aim was to cover the full scripting aspects of SharePoint. But, building the content & demo, I realized that the time will miss.  1 hour is needed to cover the full “operations” range by scripting, and one additional hour is needed to cover the “PowerShell” SharePoint scripting.

The OFC302 presentation should be renamed as “SharePoint automated setup”

This subject will grow in the nextt weeks. Keep connected and I’ll update the topic.

Best Regards,

Enjoy August break

Emmanuel.