SharePoint Hosting and Development : SharePoint Hosting

SharePoint Customization Best Practices

Michael Watson — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 23:54:00 GMT

At the SharePoint Best Practices Conference, there was quite a bit of interest in customization, specifically best practices for customization in SharePoint. The current bible on that topic was written by my buddy, Sean Livingston, a PM in the SharePoint...(read more)

SharePoint and Virtualization - Better Together!

Michael Watson — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 22:50:00 GMT

I'm really excited about virtualization and think it's the best way to streamline deployments and get the most bang for buck out of your hardware. However, there are some important differences between virtual and physical environments that you need to...(read more)

Improving SharePoint with SQL Server 2008

Michael Watson — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 22:00:00 GMT

You might have noticed that SharePoint SP1 now supports SQL Server 2008 :-) http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/08/15/sql-server-2008-support-for-sharepoint-products-and-technologies.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/mikewat/archive/2008/08/19/sql-server-2008-is-now-officially-supported.aspx...(read more)

I’m Speaking at the SharePoint Best Practices Conference

Michael Watson — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 20:19:00 GMT

It’s official. I’ll be at the SharePoint Best Practices Conference September 15 th – 17 th in Washington DC. This will be a great conference. There are a lot of great speakers and sessions and the focus on best practices will cut out all the fluff. If...(read more)

SharePoint Reporting - What's Up?

Michael Watson — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 01:36:00 GMT

Joel and I had a lot of fun doing this video for TechEd Online about the state of SharePoint reporting. SharePoint Reporting—What's Up? Key Points about SharePoint 2007 reporting. Project and team based site collection administrators will find out of...(read more)

Web Stress Test White Paper Published

Michael Watson — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 19:43:00 GMT

Steve Smith, the MVP extraordinaire from the UK and part owner of Combined Knowledge along with Penny Coventry, MVP extraordinaire from PPP Consulting just released a white paper showing how to configure a load test end to end using VSTS 2008. This is...(read more)

More Clarification Needed? Geographic Separation of SharePoint Farm Components.

Michael Watson — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:03:00 GMT

I continue to hear questions and debate over how to build local or regional immunity into a single SharePoint farm. Enterprising SharePoint folks want to make sure that their SharePoint service remains online even if Dr. Evil fires the “laser” at their...(read more)

Yank a Server from NLB when it fails?

Michael Watson — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 02:36:08 GMT

It's about 30 minutes from the start of my session on H/A at the SPC. One of the things I talk about in the session is how easy it is to monitor your web servers for failure and yank them from NLB when they do. I've posted the example code below....(read more)

The Newest Version of the Database Mirroring Whitepaper for SharePoint has been released

Michael Watson — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 21:08:00 GMT

Using Database Mirroring with Office SharePoint Server and Windows SharePoint Services Wow! This one took a while to update. We added more prescriptive information on the type of supported topologies. It also recommends SQL connection aliasing for failover...(read more)

Database Maintenance Whitepaper just published.

Michael Watson — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 09:36:00 GMT

A very proactive Bill Baer has released his database maintenance whitepaper. There's some great stuff in here straight from MSIT best practices. {updated link - Thanks Shane!} http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=111531&clcid=0x409...(read more)

THE Storage WhitePaper is Available.

Michael Watson — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 02:08:00 GMT

Update: seems the link changed: New link is http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263261.aspx Make sure to read this one....(read more)

SharePoint and Storage

Michael Watson — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 23:39:00 GMT

There is lots of good information on how to optimize storage for SQL, perhaps too much. Some great articles to read for those interested: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/physdbstor.mspx http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/workingwithtempdb.mspx...(read more)

Mirroring and Bandwidth

Michael Watson — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 03:15:00 GMT

I just completed some testing to see how much network bandwidth between SQL nodes affects synchronous mirroring performance. The SQL mirroring white paper indicates that bandwidth does not matter much above 10Mbps, but that may lead you to the wrong conclusion...(read more)

BDC Performance Over the WAN

Michael Watson — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 05:08:00 GMT

Are you centralizing your SharePoint deployment? Do you want to integrate backend data sources located in distant lands with SharePoint using the BDC? Here's something to think about. BDC does no caching of data sources. So what does that mean? If you...(read more)

SQL Aliasing Pros and Cons

Michael Watson — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 22:14:00 GMT

I wanted to write a quick note on the good and bad of using SQL aliasing for redirecting SharePoint between mirrored SQL nodes. Good - It's a very simple solution. Each application server in the farm simply needs to be configured with the alias information....(read more)