A Marvellous Point

My new blog location ... Introducing ‘UK SharePoint Team’ blog

Martin.Kearn@Microsoft.com — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:16:34 GMT

After careful thought, I have decided to join forces with the rest of the SharePoint team in UK Microsoft Consulting Services to work collectively on a new team blog called UK SharePoint Team (http://blogs.msdn.com/uksharepoint). With many people contributing...(read more)

Manually configuring Search Propagation Location using STSADM

Martin.Kearn@Microsoft.com — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 02:29:28 GMT

As part of a SharePoint farm configuration, you will need to setup a share on your Query servers in order for the Index Server to propagate (i.e. copy) the search indexes to the Query Servers. In Central Administration (Services on Server > Office...(read more)

SharePoint Object Hierarchy: How it all fits together

Martin.Kearn@Microsoft.com — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 13:15:00 GMT

I often get asked to clarify how all of the objects in SharePoint relate to each. For example, people do not always understanding the differnence between a site collection and a site or how a web application and content database relate to each other....(read more)

Useful facts about SharePoint farms

Martin.Kearn@Microsoft.com — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 19:39:00 GMT

I recently presented a talk at the Office Developer Conference in San Jose and I was surprised about the amount of questions we got around SharePoint server farms and topologies. Having a good understanding of what a farm is and some of the best practices...(read more)

How to create a ‘Slipstream’ installation for MOSS with SP1

Martin.Kearn@Microsoft.com — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 20:18:00 GMT

Update (8th March): The product team have now released a MOSS with SP1 download. Read all about it here: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/03/07/moss-2007-with-sp1-slipstream-officeserverwithsp1-exe-released.aspx In order to install MOSS 2007...(read more)

Code Callout Features: How to make automated modifications to sites after they have been deployed

Martin.Kearn@Microsoft.com — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 14:18:00 GMT

Ok, I'll admit that this is not the most snappily-named blog title; however it will address a specific problem that I've hit a few times at different customers; which is how to make automated modifications to sites after they have been deployed and used....(read more)

Configuring Kerberos for SharePoint 2007: Part 2 - Excel Services and SQL Analysis Services

Martin.Kearn@Microsoft.com — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 17:58:00 GMT

This is the second of my several-part series on how to configure Kerberos for MOSS 2007. In the first article , I outlined the steps that are required in order to get Kerberos working for a basic MOSS installation. In this article I am going to address...(read more)

Configuring Kerberos for SharePoint 2007: Part 1 - Base Configuration for SharePoint

Martin.Kearn@Microsoft.com — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 11:59:00 GMT

(UPDATED on 04/06/07 as per feedback from two different subscribers (thank-you). Updates in Italic) (UPDATED on 20/08/07: My colleauge James World has just published an excellent article which is a kind of follow-up to this one. It goes a bit deeper on...(read more)

How to install SharePoint Server 2007 on a single machine

Martin.Kearn@Microsoft.com — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 10:48:00 GMT

One of my first ever blog articles (and by far most popular to date) was a set of instructions on how to install Beta1 of SharePoint Server 2007 on a single machine. I removed this article because it was too much of an overhead updating it with the various Betas and the official guides were being developed. Now that SharePoint is RTM, I do still get a lot of questions from customers on how to do a simple installation of SharePoint (with SQL 2005) on a single machine to be used for a stand-alone development, demonstration or simple 'play-pen' server (normally on a virtual machine). This guide will outline all of the main steps to setup such an environment.

Please bear in mind that this is just an unofficial guide to getting SharePoint 2007 installed quickly and easily in a demo / test environment. This guide will not necessarily observe best practices with regard to security etc. For production setups, you should seek guidance from the official documentation which is available on TechNet (http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/3e3b8737-c6a3-4e2c-a35f-f0095d952b781033.mspx?mfr=true).

Pre-Install

There are several things that you must do before you even insert the SharePoint 2007 CD they are:

Install Windows 2003 R2 with the latest service pack (2 at time of writing) and all of the latest Windows Updates.

NOTE: Please do not use NewSID to change the SID of the machine if you are using a copy of another VM, this breaks things in SharePoint. My advice is to build Windows from fresh or to use Sysprep if you are using a copy of a VM.

Join your machine to a domain or create a domain by running DCPromo.exe from the Start > Run dialog.
Install the .net frameworks v3.0 and v2.0 from Windows Update. You can also download the full redistributable packages if your server is not online.
Install Windows 'Application Server' from Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel with default settings
Prepare a service account in your active directory domain to use for all Sharepoint services.

NOTE: Do not use the main domain\administrator account. This causes a problem if ever you wish to install Project Server 2007 on the same machine.

Give your service account local administrator rights and logon as this account throughout the entire installation process.
Install SQL 2005 (and latest service pack) with typical settings.
Assign your service account to the 'Security Administrators' and 'Database Creators' server roles in SQL server (You will need to use SQL Server Management Studio).

Base SharePoint Server Install

You are now ready to install SharePoint 2007 itself, follow these steps:

Login as your service account
Insert your CD (or attach your ISO image) and run setup.exe if it does not autorun.

NOTE: If you get an error about web service extensions here, ensure that 'ASP.net V2.0.50727' web service extension is allowed in IIS. If it is not in the list, perform a 'repair' on .net 3.0 framework using add/remove programs and then the web service extension will appear in the list. This is caused when IIS is installed after the .net framework

Enter your CD key and accept the license agreement.
Choose 'Advanced' on the installation type dialog.

NOTE: The definition of 'Advanced' means that you are using full SQL server (which may or may not be on the same machine). If you had selected 'Basic' then it would have installed the cut down version of SQL (MSDE).

Select 'Complete' on the Server Type screen and click 'Install Now'. The setup will now commence and you'll get a blue progress bar.
Once installed you will get a screen with a check box that reads "Run the SharePoint products and Technologies Wizard now". Ensure this is ticked and click 'Close'.
After a short pause, you'll get a 'Welcome' screen. Click 'Next'.
You will get a warning that the wizard is about to reset several services, click 'Yes'.
You'll be asked about the farm configuration, select to 'No, I want to create a new server farm'.
Provide the database server (your server name) and your account details (account in the domain\user format). Leave the database name as the default. Click 'Next'.
Leave the authentication mode as 'NTLM', set a specific port number is desired (not required) and click 'Next'.

NOTE: In a production environment, you would most likely use Kerberos where possible (if your infrastructure supports it).

You'll get a summary screen; click 'Next' to kick-off the process.

NOTE: If it fails here, it is most likely that you do not SQL setup correctly. Ensure your service account is in the right groups. Please also note that this section can take a very long time, especially step 2 (up to 45 minutes).

You'll get a success screen at the end, click 'Finish'.
The wizard will attempt to load the central administration window. You may need to login here, use your service account. You may also get prompted to add the site to your trusted sites; go ahead and do that.

NOTE: This authentication prompt is caused by the secure version of IE on Windows 2003 Server. You can turn if off by modifying the security settings in IE.

Services on Server Configuration

The first bit of configuration to do is set your server to host all services. You do not strictly have to enable all of these services, but I find it helps if you are using the machine to test / investigate functionality.

When the Central Administration screen appears, go to 'Operations' tab, then 'Services on Server'.
Start the 'Document Conversions Load Balancer Service'.
Start the 'Document Conversions Launcher Service', you'll have to choose the 'Load Balancer Server'; there should only be one option. If there are no options, ensure that the 'Document Conversions Load Balancer Service' has been started.
Start the 'Excel Calculation Services'.
Start the 'Office SharePoint Servers Search' service, observing the following guidelines:
- Tick both Query and Indexing check boxes
- Specify a contact email address (this can be any address)
- Enter your service account in the 'Farm Search Service Account' section
- Accept all other defaults and click 'Start'
Leave all remaining services in their default configuration

Web Application Setup

The next stage is to create the 3 web applications that will be required to host the basic set of sites for a typical deployment, these are:

Shared Service Provider Administration Site (Recommended to be called 'SSPAdmin')
My Site Host (Recommended to be called 'MySite')
The Main Intranet (or 'Portal') Site (Recommended to be called 'Intranet')

It is much simpler if all of these sites are on port 80 in IIS; this means that you do not have to remember to enter the ports all of the time. However having all three sites on port 80 means that each needs their own Host Header (required by IIS to differentiate between sites on the same port). The simplest way to do this is to create new 'Host (A)' records in DNS for each of your three sites. These should point to the IP address of your server; to do this follows these steps:

Open the DNS Management tool from Administration Tools on your domain controller
Navigate to your DNS zone
Create new 'Host (A)' record
Enter the Host header (i.e. 'SSPAdmin', 'MySite' or 'Intranet') for the site and the IP address of your server
Click 'Add Host' and repeat for each of the three sites

Now the DNS entries are configured, we can create the three web applications in SharePoint; follow these steps for all three of your web applications (i.e. 'SSPAdmin', 'MySite' or 'Intranet'):

In Central Administration, go to the 'Application Management' tab
Click 'Create or Extend Web Application' and then click 'Create a new Web Application'
Fill out the new web application screen observing the following points:
- Change the New IIS Site description to read something like 'SharePoint – 80 - <Host header name>' where <Host header name> is the name of the web application your are creating (i.e. 'SSPAdmin', 'MySite' or 'Intranet')
- Ensure the 'Port' is set to 80
- Set the 'Host Header' to match the DNS record you created (i.e. 'SSPAdmin', 'MySite' or 'Intranet')
- Change the 'Application Pool Name' to match the 'New IIS Site Description'
- Enter your service account for the Application Pool account settings
- Change the 'Database Name' to read something like 'WSS_Content_<Host header name>' where <Host header name> is the name of the web application your are creating (i.e. 'SSPAdmin', 'MySite' or 'Intranet')
- Leave all other settings on default and click 'OK'
Repeat for all three web applications (i.e. 'SSPAdmin', 'MySite' or 'Intranet')

Shared Service Provider Setup

The next stage is to create the Shared Service Provider (SSP). The SSP is required in order to provide several key services such as Search or My Site. You can read more about SSP on my blog article about it here. To configure the SSP, follow these steps:

In Central Administration, go to the 'Application Management' tab
In the 'Office SharePoint Server Shared Services' section, click 'Create or Configure This Farms' Shared Services'
Click 'New SSP'
Fill out the 'New Shared Services Provider' screen observing the following guidelines:
- For the 'SSP Administration Site' web application (the first one you get asked for), choose the web application that you created earlier (suggested name was 'SharePoint – 80 - SSPAdmin')
- For the 'My Site Location' web application (the second one you get asked for), choose the web application you created earlier (suggested name was 'SharePoint – 80 - MySite')
- Enter your service account for the 'SSP Service Credentials'
- Leave all other settings on default and click 'OK'
The creation of an SSP can take some time (up to 1 hour on a virtual machine). When it is finished you will see a 'Success!' screen, Click OK.

Collaboration Portal Site Collection Setup

The next stage is to create a collaboration portal which is one of the more feature-filled site types and represents a typical intranet environment. To do this, follow these steps:

In Central Administration, go to the 'Application Management' tab
In the 'SharePoint Site Management' section, choose 'Create Site Collection'
Fill out the 'Create Site Collection' observing the following guidelines:
- Ensure you have selected the 'Intranet' web application you created earlier (suggested name was 'Intranet')
- Give your site a title ('Intranet' is suggested)
- In the 'Template Selection' section, choose 'Collaboration Portal' from 'Publishing' tab
- Enter you service account for the 'Primary Site Collection Administrator'
- Leave all other settings on default and click 'OK'
When the 'Top-Level Site Successfully Created' message appears you have created the site, simply click the link that is provided (something like http://intranet)

Configure Indexing

The final step of the process is to configure indexing so that you have some search results. Though this step is optional, it is recommended as it will enable you to use the powerful search capabilities of SharePoint. To configure the index, follow these steps:

In Central Administration, click the 'SharedServices1' link on the left-side navigation (or whatever you name your SSP)
When the SSP Administration site appears, click on 'Search Settings' in the 'Search' section
On the 'Configure Search Settings' page, click 'Content Sources and Crawl Schedules'
Edit the 'Local office SharePoint Server Sites' content source by hovering your mouse over it and choosing 'Edit'
Fill out the 'Edit Content Source' observing the following guidelines:
- Set a full crawl schedule to be at least once a day
- Set a incremental crawl schedule for every 10 minutes
- Tick the 'Start Full Crawl of this Content Source' tick-box
- Click 'OK'
A crawl will now start. Initial crawls normally take up to 10 minutes.

The process is now complete. User should be able to access the main collaboration portal from http://intranet (or whatever you called the DNS record).

I hope this was useful, please comment with any errors or amendments

How Groovy is Groove?

Martin.Kearn@Microsoft.com — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 11:51:00 GMT

As some of you may have noticed from my lack of recent posts, I’m working on a fairly intense MOSS deployment project right now (apologies, will blog as much as I can). We are using Groove 2007 as our primary collaboration tool within the project and I thought I’d share my thoughts on exactly how Groovy we have found Groove to be......

So what is Groove?

OK, so I could spend a whole article explaining what Groove is (and is not), but that is not my intention here. Therefore if you have never ‘got Groovy’ before, you might want to find an article that gives you the high level view like this one from Mark Wilson or you could try Mark Olson's blog (Groove product team) or grab the trial version from here.

For those that require a refresher, Groove is a peer-to-peer client-side collaboration application that enables network and organisation independent collaboration. In a nutshell, Groove allows you to share files and other bits with people from different organisations across whichever network you like (Inc public internet). Groove does have a server aspect, but you can work perfectly well just using the client.

Project background

We are deploying MOSS to a large customer and therefore, we have about 10 full-time team members working on the design and planning for the project. 5 of the team members are from Microsoft, 3 from 3 different partners and 2 from the customer (which makes 5 different organisations in total)

In terms of network, we were all connected by a very un-reliable wireless LAN (up and down throughout the day) or public internet via home, hotels or MS offices.

What has worked well?

This is what has worked really well:

· Using Groove has really cut down on all the inter-team emailing we did. Everyone knows that the latest copy of something is in Groove and that is all there is to it. We spent much less time chasing and waiting for documents that if we’d used a file system.

· The IM and presence capabilities were really useful. Although all the Microsoft guys have communicator, being able to IM the partner/customer team members and see if they are online or actively using the workspace has been very useful indeed.

· We’ve made use of the ‘notes’ tool to store contact information. It would have been nice to be able to sync this with Outlook, but the plain text notes served their purpose.

· By everyone having Groove, it serves as an unofficial backup repository because essentially every user has a copy of all document on their local machine

· The peer-to-peer nature of Groove means that physical location really is not important, so long as you have at least an internet connection (which is great for me because I live about 80 miles from the customer office J )

· We have had lots of ‘new starters’ on the project and it is very good to be able to say “everything is in Groove” in terms of giving them project documentation

· We were able to store remote desktop connection files to all our dev servers (13 of them). By having the RDP files in Groove with passwords embedded. No-one needs to worry about server names or passwords; they just double-click the RDP file.

· Other people from within Microsoft have wanted to take a look at our designs on several occasions. Being about 50Mb in total, email has been out of the question, but the capability to add them as a temporary Groove user and allow them to browse the workspace has been really useful.

Not so good

There have been a few areas where the experience has been slightly lacking. They are generally quite minor, but here goes...

· There is a feeling that the capabilities and Office integration could be better. Don't get me wrong .. there are lots of things in Groove that do integrate well with Office and lots of good collaboration tools, but there are areas that are lacking a bit. For example, it would have been great to have the calendar and contacts capabilities linked directly into Outlook. I have also missed the document check-out & version history features that SharePoint provides and the more advanced real-time collaboration features in Office Communicator or Vista Meeting Space.

· We use a WSS 2.0 site as our official deliverable repository and Groove has no direct integration which means we have to manually copy everything up there on a weekly basis. Groove 2007 does have very good integration with WSS 3.0, but not WSS 2.0 so for our puposes we had a gap here. Clearly, as WSS 3.0 becomes more popular, this problem will go away, but for now it is one extra task.

· If you are using Groove directly (i.e. opening and editing directly out of Groove), you have to confirm each time you save a document and everyone else gets a notification – this can get very annoying.

What I’d do different next time

Lessons learnt and things that I’d do differently on the next project:

· Out of the team, I think that I’ve been the only person brave enough to work directly from Groove. I.e. I have not maintained a local copy of my documents, but have opened and edited directly out of Groove. This ensures that the latest copy of all my content is always in Groove. Some of the other guys have not taken this approach and have tended to work locally and then do a manual upload once they have reached a certain milestone. The down side to this is that a) they have to remember to upload and b) The latest content is not always in Groove. Next time round, I’d probably try to enforce a practice where everyone works directly from Groove rather than maintaining local copies and uploading.

· By using Groove, we’ve put together a structure that probably reflects an average MOSS project. Next time round, I’d probably save this as a template and start the workspace based on that template.

· I work harder on encouraging all users to use Groove. In my case, this would include the staff from the customer who could not easily install Groove on their production machines (had to rely on using their home PCs and copying every night).

· I’d probably look to establish a collection of links to key documents for the purpose of on-boarding

Conclusion

Groove does feel like a young product and lacks some of the key features that you take for granted with other Office products and especially SharePoint. There are lots of great collaboration features and ideas in the product and good integration with WSS 3.0, but you are often left thinking “if only it did X, Y or Z”.

Having said that, the fact that Groove is peer-to-peer and has no network dependencies has really paid dividends on this project as it has enabled cross-organisation collaboration for the whole team. This feature alone more than makes-up for Groove’s short-comings around collaboration features and Office integration. I really feel that collaboration would not have been anywhere near as straight forward without it.

Added to the above, Groove has given the whole team collaboration tools that have been invaluable (such as chat, IM, presence, calendaring etc) and whilst they do not match the might of SharePoint & co, they have been useful on the project and we’d have been that little bit less-collaborative without them.

I would certainly look to use Groove again on future projects and if the “What I’d do different next time” learning’s are observed, it makes for a great tool to help run small project teams and I’d recommend it without hesitating.

I hope this was useful.

What is the Business Data Catalogue?

Martin.Kearn@Microsoft.com — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 16:36:00 GMT

..... In short, the Business Data Catalogue (BDC) is without doubt the most powerful feature in MOSS 2007! (In my opinion)..... I know this is a rather bold statement and hopefully this article will go some way to convincing you of the same!

So what does BDC actually do?

The BDC is a feature of MOSS that allows you to connect your business data systems to MOSS and use data from those systems in one of 4 main presentation methods. When I say 'Business Data System' what I'm referring to there is basically anything you can get to via ADO.net (SQL, Oracle, ODBC, and OLEDB) or web services. Throughout this article, we'll use the Adventure Works sample database in SQL 2005 as our 'Business Data System'.

BDC Webparts

The easiest presentation method to understand is the BDC webparts. There are several webparts provided out-of-the-box with MOSS which work together to provide various views on your BDC data.

The first one is the BDC List webpart. This webpart will simply display your data in a list form with all of the filtering and sorting capabilities that you'd expect in a list view webpart. It even has a built-in search interface which allows users to perform mini searches on the contents of the list. The scenario here is that you may have a list of 'resellers', including some of the key information that you might have about those resellers such as geography, address phone etc.

The BDC List is nicely complimented by the BDC List Item webpart which, when connected (using standard MOSS webpart connections) to the BDC List will display further details for the item that is selected. The idea is that you click a 'reseller' out of the BDC List of resellers and the BDC List Item webpart displays that reseller's full profile.

Other webparts include related list, which is useful for showing sub-lists of information. In the Adventure Works system, this can be used by having a BDC List displaying all of the product categories and the BDC Related List showing the sub-categories of the category that is selected in the BDC List webpart. Again, this works via webpart connections.

BDC Search

BDC applications can be 'indexed' by the standard MOSS index service. This means that users can search across the business systems amongst all of the other data in the MOSS index. Results are presented in the same way as other documents and when the users click on a result, them get sent to an out-of-the-box ASPX page that shows all of the data that is available for that item. The BDC applications are treated as normal content sources and can be managed in exactly the same way (schedules, scopes etc).

This feature is great for integrating CRM systems into SharePoint and allowing users to search across customers and partners and get phone numbers etc. This also has applications if you have products in your BDC system; users could search for the product name and return things like financial data from the BDC system amongst document-based results from elsewhere in MOSS.

BDC Columns

One of the new column types in MOSS is 'Business Data'. If you select a business data column, users will be able to choose an entity from the BDC to store as the value of a column (metadata).

Once chosen, the column will then pull other fields that are related to the chosen BDC entity and display them in your document library or list as normal (read-only) columns. For example, if you have a document that you are writing for a customer, you might select the customer name for the business data column and the system will then display the phone number, address, website, key contact etc for that customer as part of the document metadata.

Having these details displayed in your list views and webparts is great, but like all columns, this data also gets stored in the document itself and if you have Office 2007 professional, you can edit and view this data directly from within office.

BDC Profiles

Like BDC columns, you can also create 'business data' properties in the MOSS user profile database. This means that the user profile can now be a mixture of MOSS-based, Active Directory and business data information.

The scenario here is that you might hook the BDC up to your HR system and have key fields from the HR system imported into the BDC and displayed as part of the standard user profile. This solves the "where do I store my personnel data" problem that many organisations face; it does not matter where the data is stored ... simply have BDC pull it in from whatever systems it is in today.

What can I do with my data once I have it in MOSS?

All of the things I have discussed so far have been about reading the data from your business system and displaying it in various formats. You can also perform actions on this data and use bits of the data as parameters to a URL.

One scenario where Actions are used is performing internet searches on customers or resellers from your BDC system. If users clicked on the 'internet search' action, the system would pass the reseller name into the URL of an internet search engine such as Windows Live Search.

This works by admins configuring markers in the URL that are replaced by BDC properties, for example if you did want to perform an internet search, you'd configure an action that used this URL http://beta.search.live.com/results.aspx?q={0} where {0} is replaced by the 'reseller name' of the BDC entity that is action is based on. This works with any URL, for example if (for some weird reason), Windows Live is not your favoured search engine, you could use Google as follows: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q={0}

The same principle can also be applied to passing an address into Windows Live Local and displaying a map of your customer's office. For this, you would use this URL http://local.live.com/default.aspx?where1={0}%20{1}&v=2 where {0} is the postal code and {1} is the country name of your customer.

How do I get started?

By far the easiest and most compelling way to get started with BDC is to install the SQL 2005 Adventure Works sample database, to do this you will need:

MOSS Beta2 TR Enterprise Edition (BDC is an enterprise edition only feature) installed
SQL 2005 installed with the Adventure Works DW database which you can get from Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs > Change SQL 2005 > Workstation Components > Sample Databases
The Adventure Works BDC application definition which is available here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms494876.aspx

Simply import the BDC application definition file (via Shared Services Admin interface) and away you go!

How do I use BDC anywhere other than demo-land?

If you want to use BDC with your own applications and systems (which hopefully, you will! J), you'll need to write an application definition file. This is basically a big XML file which sets out the metadata of the system you are connecting to. You can write it from scratch using the excellent SDK examples which are here http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms563661.aspx.

There are also two great tools for helping you created your own definition files:

Simple command-line tool on CodePlex: http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=DBMetadataGenerator
BDC Metaman: www.bdcmetaman.com

So is BDC the "most powerful feature in MOSS 2007"?

I think it is because when you sit back and think about all those webparts and custom applications we used to write for Sharepoint 2003, I'd say that BDC removes the need to write custom code (C#, VB etc) to achieve the same results in MOSS for most cases. In many cases, you get a much better result with features that would have taken eternity to try and code yourself (search, profiles etc). Added to that, we get all of the 'plumbing' work like security, performance, deployment etc managed for us.

On this basis, I think BDC will significantly reduce the custom code footprint on most MOSS deployments. Reducing the custom code footprint is one of the best ways of improving stability, performance and overall TCO for a MOSS deployment, which is why I feel BDC is the "most powerful feature in MOSS 2007" .... Discuss J

MOSS Architecture and Shared Services

Martin.Kearn@Microsoft.com — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 20:56:00 GMT

I have been doing some work recently on MOSS architecture for large deployments and thought that I’d share some of my findings. MOSS architecture is very similar to SharePoint 2003 in some ways but different in a few crucial areas.

So what is the same?

MOSS adopts a typical 3-tier model with web servers at the front, application servers in the middle and a database server at the back where all the data and config is stored.

The front-end web servers are simple web servers that can be network load balanced to achieve additional performance and fault tolerance (like 2003). The backend database is a typical SQL 2005 database service and can be clustered as you’d expect.

So what is different?

The interesting bit is what goes on in the middle. With MOSS, it is mandatory to have a Shared Service Provider. This is a collection of application servers that provide shared services out to any portals or sites that need them. These services include:

Search
Index
Audience compilation
User profiles database
My Sites
Business Data Catalogue
Excel Services

Any of the above services can exist on any number of servers within the SSP. For example, for a small-ish deployment you could have them all on one box, or you could scale them out onto different boxes as you see fit. There are no rules that govern where these services reside within the SSP or how many servers you have servicing them (with the exception of the Index server - only one per SSP). For example if you want 10 search servers – got for it ... “fill your boots” as we’d say here in England!

This model is very similar to the 2003 approach with one crucial difference, the SSP has no portal affiliation. This means that you are not forced to have a specific parent/child style portal topology in order to use Shared Services which was one of the big sticking points with Sharepoint 2003 shared services.

So what does the ‘Portal’ actually do now?

For starters, it is now called ‘Collaboration Portal', not ‘portal’ and it is just another type of site collection that is hosted on an IIS site (called web applications in MOSS). Portals no longer contain any application services such as search, my site etc – all these services now have to come from an SSP. This means that all you need to host a portal is a web server and a place to put the content database.

Different portals can live on their own hardware which is completely isolated from any other hardware other than the fact that it consumes services from a centrally managed SSP. Alternatively, you can put some of your portals on shared hardware and some on dedicated.

I always hear requirements around different business units wanting their own portal which has its own visual style, custom webparts, different SLAs etc . With this model, there does not have to be any affiliation between any portals or sites if it is not required.

This diagram outlines the logic of how SSP provide services that are consumed by several site collections:

So does this mean that ‘Supported Farm configurations’ have gone?

In short, yes!

This model means that you can scale any element of the system out as you see fit. However, there are several recommended server layouts that will meet most scenarios. These broadly follow the small, medium and large models of Sharepoint 2003, but should be considered as starting points only. You can easily deviate to a different setup depending on your requirements.

So how does all this map to physical servers?

All three tiers (web, application, database) of the SharePoint model can be hosted on a single machine or scaled out to a huge collection of servers to meet the requirements.

Most organisations will want some level of fault tolerance and separation between server roles. Typically these kind of organisations will have at least 2 web servers running your portals and sites, at least one application server hosting all services (maybe a second for fault tolerance) and one database cluster. This diagram shows this model:

Larger organisations may want to have separate web servers for each of their portals, sites and my sites. They may also have multiple application servers as part of the SSP. This diagram describes this model:

I hope this was usefull. There is an increasing amount of content on the public Microsoft sites now about this stuff, so be sure to have a dig around.

SharePoint on your Phone!

Martin.Kearn@Microsoft.com — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 20:32:00 GMT

One of the interesting new features in MOSS 2007 is the support around mobile devices. In this article, I’ll aim to give you a quick overview of how you can get the next version of SharePoint on your phone.

What are Mobile Views?

Every list and library in MOSS 2007 or WSSv3 is capable of hosting ‘Mobile Views’. These are standard views of lists or libraries that an administrator has defined as being mobile enabled. You can also view individual list items in mobile form.

This is a picture of the mobile view for a standard task item.

How do you navigate to these Mobile Views?

Every site has a mobile home. You can get to it by simply appending an ‘m’ on the end of the URL. For example the mobile view for the following URL http://<server>/TestSite can be accessed by http://<server>/TestSite/m.

From the mobile home you can navigate through the lists, libraries and list items in the site.

This picture shows the mobile home of a standard team site

How do I configure Mobile Views?

Each list has a default mobile view, but you can configure any normal view as being ‘mobile’. This is all done through the same interface that you’d use to modify view filters, sorts etc.

This picture shows the UI for enabling a normal view as being ‘mobile’

When you access a list using your device, you can use a drop-down to choose the most appropriate view. However, generally speaking the most sensible views for a mobile device are pre-configured as the default mobile view. For example, the default for a tasks list is ‘my tasks’.

How do I play with this more?

The easiest way to investigate this further is to get the Microsoft Windows Mobile emulator from http://msdn.microsoft.com/mobility/windowsmobile/downloads/emulatorpreview/default.aspx. Follow the instructions on the page for getting onto Betaplace and downloading the emulator.

Once you have the installation file, I suggest that you install it directly onto your SharePoint server. This way it is much easier to configure the networking between the server and the emulator.

The emulator will allow you to emulate a smart phone or PDA. I found that the PDA is easiest to work with. Follow these instructions to get a mobile view of SharePoint on your PDA emulator (you should be able to adapt them for SmartPhone if you are familiar with the SmartPhone interface)

- Install the emulator and start the ‘Emulate Pocket PC-WM 2003 SE(Cold Boot)’ from your start menu

- Map your real network card to the device by going to File > Configure > Network Tab > Enable ‘NE2000 PCMCIA adapter and bind to’ and click ‘OK’

Note: All of the following instructions are for the device interface itself, not the emulator application, unless otherwise stated.

- Go to ‘Settings’ from the start menu

- Click on ‘Network Cards’

- Choose ‘The Internet’ on the ‘My network card connects to’ drop-down

- Click on ‘NE2000 Compatible Adapter’

- Set your IP and Name Server settings in accordance with your environment (it needs to be in the same subnet as your server).

- Click ‘OK’ until you are back to your home screen

- On the emulator application, disable and re-enable the network card mapping from File > Configure > Network Tab > Enable ‘NE2000 PCMCIA adapter and bind to’ (this is the equivalent to unplugging the PCMCIA card, you’ll see the icon change on the device screen)

- On the device, wait for the network icon to show that it has re-connected.

- You will get a new icon at the top of the device screen. Click on it and choose ‘This network card connects me to the internet’

- Load Internet Explorer from the start menu and type your portal URL with an /m at the end

- Enter login credentials and the mobile home should appear

I hope this was interesting.

How to: Install Sharepoint 2007 Beta1TR on a single machine

Martin.Kearn@Microsoft.com — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 15:19:00 GMT

I have re-written this article for SharePoint Server 2007 RTM. You can see it here: http://blogs.msdn.com/martinkearn/archive/2007/03/28/how-to-install-sharepoint-server-2007-on-a-single-machine.aspx

What is new with Columns?

Martin.Kearn@Microsoft.com — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 12:50:00 GMT

Columns have always been one of the most powerful features in SharePoint as they allow you to slice and dice you data into different views that provide very compelling information to the end users. In MOSS 2007, columns have received a facelift and in this article I’ll aim to tell you what is new and how columns have been improved.

For the sake of clarity, when I’m referring to a column, I am talking about the columns that you would add to a list or library and use to define metadata for a document or list items that are contained within. I’ll also refer to libraries and documents exclusively throughout this article, but that also include lists and list items (just too lazy to write ‘library/list’ or ‘list item/document’ every time!).

What has not changed?
Columns in MOSS 2007 still adopt the same basic principles as in the 2003 suite. A column is still part of a library and when you add a document to that library you have to provide values for the columns. The data you provide acts as the metadata for that document and can be used for many things including:

Views on the library
Webparts
Search queries
Workflow

Columns still have a variety of types. All of the old types are still there (single line of text, number, date etc) but a few new ones have been added (which I’ll discuss later)
Columns are still the main data source for webparts and views.

What were the main issues with 2003 columns?
In the 2003 suite, columns were very useful and were enthusiastically used to build applications and tools based on SharePoint data. However, in my opinion they had several key draw-backs, which were:

1. No central management
Columns we not centrally managed across the portal, instead they were managed at the library level. This meant that you never had central control over your corporate metadata taxonomy which is an issue for most organisations, especially those that are concerned with compliance issues such as FOI or SOX.

For example, if you had a company-wide column called ‘Offices’ which you applied to every document library and you suddenly find yourself with new offices; there was no real way of retrospectively adding the new column values to the existing libraries. In practice if you needed to update all of your columns, you either had to manually visit every document library, or write some kind of script that used the object model to update the libraries. Both methods were time consuming and expensive.

2. Limited range of types
In 2003, you only had a limited range of types for each column. The types on offer did the job for most scenarios, but not all. You’ll see later in this article how several new types are now available.

3. Only defined at the list/library level
In 2003, the columns were defined at the library level which meant that every item in that library had to have the same metadata. This dictated the whole approach around how the lists and libraries were designed.

If you had a document that needed a different set of metadata, you had to have a whole new library just for that document, which clearly does not make sense.
Because of this restrictive approach, it became impossible to build a library structure based on corporate taxonomies; instead they were based on document types.

So what is new?
OK, so here is the interesting bit…. Unsurprisingly, my take on what is new directly maps to the weak areas in the 2003 platform, here goes:

1. Column templates: portal-wide management of column definitions
In MOSS 2007, when you add a column to a library, you now have two choices:

Create a new Colum directly on that library (2003 style)
Add a column template

This picture shows the interface for adding a column to a library

Column templates are centrally controlled columns that are created by Admins at the portal level. Site owners can simply add a column template to his library and it maintains a connection back to the central column template. This means that when the column template is changed in any way, it also changes on any libraries that have used it.

This addresses the scenario around “what happens when I get extra offices”.

2. New Types
In MOSS 2007, there are several interesting new types in additional to the 2003 types. The new types are:

Business Data: Allows you to include data from the Business Data Catalogue (BDC). The BDC is a whole new feature which I’ll probably blog about some time soon. It is basically a way of including business data from external applications in your portal.
Audience Targeting: A way of choosing a specific audience, distribution list or sharepoint group to target the document to. Adding this column gives you an audience picker control that you can use to browse the audience, distribution list or sharepoint groups and choose which ones to target the item to.

This picture shows the different types that are available

3. Content Types
Content Types are a whole new feature that allows the behaviour of a piece of content (including templates, columns workflow etc) to be centrally defined and applied to any library in the portal.
This means that libraries can now contain multiple content types and therefore the columns are defined by the content type itself, not the library in which it is placed.

For example, you can have you expense reports in the same library as your reports and they can each have different sets of columns that are driven by the Content Type, not the library (though you can still have library based columns).

This picture shows how columns can be included in Content Types

This is a huge step forward because it means that we can now design library structures based on organisational rules rather than content-driven rules. I’ve written a whole article explaining Content Types in general, check it out here.

But wasn’t all this in SharePoint 2001?
A few people have commented on my last post about Content Types and have drawn the obvious comparisons about this stuff in MOSS 2007 going back to some of the functionality on SharePoint 2001. These comments made me chuckle and it is true that we have come ‘full circle’ (thanks for the comments by the way ;) ).

I think the reason that much of this stuff was removed in SharePoint 2003 was because of the changes in the underlying architecture (WebStore to SQL) and there simply not being enough time to develop these features.

It is good for all of us that they are now here in MOSS 2007!

Cheers

PS: I am never quite sure where my audience is at with these articles. If you do not understand anything, please do not hesitate to comment on the blog or ping me at Martin.Kearn@Microsoft.com and I’ll do my best to answer your question