12 Things to do over the Holidays
If you're in the office and finding there's all of a sudden a chance to read up and catch up on tools, here's 12 things to do over the holidays.
1. Read up on SP1 from TechNet and then the new SP1 information on MSDN Test and Deploy WSS SP1 and MOSS SP1 (What better time than when the volume of users is low?) I don't want to say you don't have a life, cause I know many of you are going down to the skeleton crew and don't plan to look at SP1 till you get back. I understand. Don't try to squeeze this the night before you leave, you'll regret it.
2. Evaluate the new beta System Center Capacity Planner models for WSS 3.0 and SharePoint Server. Don't over estimate the tool. We both know SharePoint deployments have thousands of nobs that all determine different performance. Some examples the tool wasn't able to incorporate... how heavy your navigation will be or what your average file size will be or hourly transfer rates and max payloads. You may know bandwidth, but I think you'll find latency is not static, neither is utilization.
3. Read the Performance Recommendations and Storage Planning and Monitoring paper. There is a lot you know, but there are some *real* nuggets. A few of those lines in the doc came from multiple meetings and conversations with support and various PMs. This paper comes from a new effort in the product team called the customer advisory team. This team was put together to help provide guidance and scale information. This first effort on storage is to help set some baselines.
4. Read the System Center Operations Manager 2007 WSS 3.0 and MOSS Monitoring Packs - these new packs each come with papers. If you have SCOM 2007 you're going to be pleased, they are straight forward and have suppressed a lot of the "noise" you'd see in previous packs. We are still open for feedback to improve monitoring in the future. The project manager Luis has taken my advice and put the monitoring guidance for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 with list of errors in a paper. These monitoring docs have a lot of good reference information even if you don't have the new System Center Operations Manager.
5. Verify that the hardware standards list in your company supports x64 servers as this is the last version on 32- bit. If this isn't something you've looked into. Research 64-bit architectures and how they contribute to performance and scale.
6. Seriously consider signing up to the SharePoint Conference 2008 or Office Dev Conference. Richard Riley says there are going to be over 120(!) breakout sessions all focused on SharePoint. The speakers are all going to be top speakers across the product team, IT, SharePoint MVPs, and lots of REAL large deployments of various types.
7. Evaluate and optimize your content databases and test/play (get comfortable) with the new mergecontentdbs command repartition as needed
8. Subscribe to the MSDN SharePoint Content RSS rollup (includes this blog and SharePoint Team blog)
9. Review the management tools on http://www.codeplex.com/governance, http://www.codeplex.com/sptoolbox, http://www.idevfactory.com (Universal SharePoint Manager), http://www.quest.com/sharepoint and AvePoint's SharePoint Administrator
10. Check out the STSADM extension on updating SharePoint Quota templates by Joe Shepherd. This is an issue we walked through in Shane Young's Admin class.
11. Download and evaluate the SharePoint IW End User Training on Office Online. Also good 30 minute training videos online.
12. Read up on alternate browser findings "from the field" a great reference table and review backup restore in Protecting and recovering content (Office SharePoint Server 2007) one of the most thorough backup restore papers.
