Michael O'Donovan's SharePoint and Stuff : WSS 3.0

Buy SharePoint Themes from SharePointShop.co.za

modonovan — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 06:29:03 GMT

Proudly South African SharePoint theme store http://www.sharepointshop.co.za/ has just launched with some great looking themes for your SharePoint sites. Check them out here

These are delivered by local partner, bSolve.

Michael

Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) proposed standard announced

modonovan — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 19:29:22 GMT

Today, EMC, IBM and Microsoft (along with other leading ECM industry vendors Alfresco, Open Text, Oracle and SAP) announced a jointly developed specification called the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification. CMIS uses Web Services and Web 2.0 interfaces to enable applications to interoperate with multiple Enterprise Content Management (ECM) repositories by different vendors. The companies intend to submit the CMIS specification to OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) for advancement through its rigorous standards development process.

For more information, and to download a preview copy of the CMIS technical specification draft, please see the website of any of the contributing companies: EMC Corporation (www.emc.com/about/news/press/2008/091008-smr-content-management-interoperability-services.htm); IBM (www.ibm.com/software/data/content-management/cm-interoperablity-services.html); and Microsoft (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=127855).

The SharePoint team have recently posted about this here:

View Video Interview of Jeff Teper Corp VP, Office SharePoint Server Group.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/cmis/default.mspx

Updates for SharePoint Released

modonovan — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 11:01:00 GMT

Yesterday, the SharePoint product team announced the release of important rollup updates for SharePoint Server 2007, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Project Server 2007, Search Server 2008, Search Server 2008 Express and Project Professional 2007.

I strongly recommend reading their release announcements, and start planning for the implementation of these ASAP.

Technorati Profile

SharePoint under Hyper-V versus Virtual Server 2005 R2

modonovan — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 13:48:33 GMT

I have done a fair amount of SharePoint demos and developement over the past few years, and have always done this on my laptop using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 or Microsoft Virtual PC, to host and run a SharePoint environment. Last year at Tech-Ed, while I was doing a demo, I had a comment from someone in the audience "Why is SharePoint so slow?" To some degree it makes sense, the specific SharePoint virtual environment which I was using at the time had almost every product known to man installed (the virtual hard drive size was 40GB), as well as being a domain controller and running on a laptop which only had 1GB ram assigned to the virtual machine. However, with the RTM release of Hyper-V (on Windows Server 2008), I wanted to see if performance was better now.

In other words, if I take the exact same virtual machine running on the exact same hardware, but running under Hyper-V as apposed to Virtual Server 2005, would I have a bettter experience? I have therefore taken some time to execute some simple (but in most cases scientific) tests to determine the difference.

the environment:

Dell D620 laptop with 4GB of RAM and virtual machine on external hard drive (connected via USB)
Dual boot; Windows Vista 32bit with SP1 and Virtual Server 2005 R2 on one partition, and Windows Server 2008 64bit with RTM version of Hyper-V on other partition
Exact same virtual machine and exact same SharePoint application was used in both tests. Obviously in each scenario I had to make sure the appropriate VM additions were installed and running correctly
In each case I assigned the virtual machine 2GB of RAM
The VM disk is 43GB in size, runs Windows Server 2003, SQL Server 2005, MOSS 2007, Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Testers, is a domain controller and has various other products installed (which are not relevant for now)
Used Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Testers to perform web load tests, the exact same script was run in each scenario

Important: before digesting the results, it is very important to understand that these results are not intended to give you any idea of what you will expect from a production environment! You would probably never have this configuration in production i.e. so many products on one VM, and running on a laptop. Rather use these figures to give an indication as to the difference between Virtual Server 2005 R2 and Hyper-V, especially in development and demonstration scenarios.

Okay, now for some results. The web test results are based on the standard collaboration portal with a custom master page (just branding changes). The site consists of a wiki, blog, document center, records center (populated with some Excel services based reports), a search center and some team sites. These were populated with about 50mb of data (documents and list items) across the sites. The results are also based on integrated NTLM authentication with no output caching enabled.

Average requests per second

Wow, in most case around 100% improved performance when using Hyper-V. This result is a summary of all page / document requests across the test script, which was executed for 5, 10 and 20 concurrent users with no think time.

Average page (and document get) response time

Yeah baby, once again around 100% faster, and even better than that, 100% faster while serving double the amount of requests!

Specific task response times

Better than 100% improvement in performance when downloading a PowerPoint document (the document is around 1mb in size). And once again, while serving double the amount of requests.

Yikes, executing a search (in search center) is generally around 200% faster under Hyper-V. And once again, while serving double the amount of requests.

Boot-up, save state, restore from saved state response times

Here I just wanted to measure some of my time wasting activities i.e. booting up the virtual machine (boot up time from switching it on until logon screen shows), saving state and restoring from saved state. In each of these scenarios, you can see that Hyper-V will save you time, a couple of minutes in each of my cases.

In summary

When I do demonstrations or development in SharePoint, I will now use Hyper-V. It's one thing having a gut feel that it is faster, but actually getting statistics is really helpful. I could possibly get more performance out of the Hyper-V scenario by assigning the Hyper-V virtual machine more than 2GB of RAM. If I compare each of the scenarios, I can assign more of my laptops 4GB of RAM to the virtual machine using Hyper-V on Windows 2008 over Virtual Server on Vista i.e. Hyper-V on Windows 2008 just gives me more available memory because it doesn't have as many services started by default.

I guess the next step, is to see what the difference is between running MOSS 2007 on Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008...perhaps a future post.

Hope you enjoyed this,

Michael

New SharePoint Developer Portal for ASP .Net Developers

modonovan — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 11:58:37 GMT

Are you an ASP .Net developer, who is interested in developing on SharePoint (WSS or MOSS), but not sure where to start? Microsoft has just released materials targeted at you, which can be found on the new Developer Portal for SharePoint. It focuses on the top 10 developer "things" you would need to know i.e:

Web Parts
Data Lists
Event Handlers
Workflows
Silverlight Web Parts
Page Navigation
Page Branding
Web Services
Content Types
User Management

More items will be added over time, so keep visiting the portal for more information.

SharePoint Introduction for .NET developers webcast series

modonovan — Wed, 21 May 2008 18:23:20 GMT

New to SharePoint development or want to brush up? Check out this free webcast series targeted at YOU!

In this 10-part series, you will receive practical technical information from Robert Bogue and Andrew Connell, Microsoft SharePoint Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs), covering 10 fundamental developer topics on SharePoint Products and Technologies via Live Meeting Webcast

About the series:

Every Tuesday and Wednesday from May 20 to June 18
Starts at 9:00 AM Pacific Standard Time (12:00 PM Eastern Standard Time)
60 minutes long

Click on the Register Today! links to learn more about the specifics covered in each webcast

20-May-08 ... Introduction to SharePoint for .NET Developers: Web Parts. Register
21-May-08 ... Introduction to SharePoint for .NET Developers: Data Lists. Register
27-May-08 ... Introduction to SharePoint for .NET Developers: Silverlight and SharePoint. Register
28-May-08 ... Introduction to SharePoint for .NET Developers: Using Event Handlers. Register
03-Jun-08 ... Introduction to SharePoint for .NET Developers: Page Branding. Register
04-Jun-08 ... Introduction to SharePoint for .NET Developers: Workflows. Register
10-Jun-08 ... Introduction to SharePoint for .NET Developers: Web Services. Register
11-Jun-08 ... Introduction to SharePoint for .NET Developers: Page Navigation. Register
17-Jun-08 ... Introduction to SharePoint for .NET Developers: User Management. Register
18-Jun-08 ... Introduction to SharePoint for .NET Developers: Custom Content Types. Register

Download SP1 for MOSS, WSS 3.0 and Office 2007 Now

modonovan — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 23:21:26 GMT

Office 2007 SP1

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=9EC51594-992C-4165-A997-25DA01F388F5&displaylang=en

SharePoint Designer SP1

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=B57C805D-2821-4625-A6F1-80725267F887&displaylang=en

WSS 3.0 SP1

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4191A531-A2E9-45E4-B71E-5B0B17108BD2&displaylang=en

MOSS 2007 SP1

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=AD59175C-AD6A-4027-8C2F-DB25322F791B&displaylang=en

Great SharePoint Designer Workflow How To's, Tips and Tricks

modonovan — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 17:25:40 GMT

There are some great new articles on the SharePoint Designer team blog which are really useful if you are new to SharePoint Designer workflows, or are looking for some cool workflow tips and tricks.

Check it out

SharePoint Pedia has Gone Live

modonovan — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 17:57:58 GMT

Check it out at http://sharepointpedia.com, looks pretty cool. Another awesome example of a solution built on MOSS.

Use Windows Live Writer to create blog posts ... for MOSS

modonovan — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 14:54:33 GMT

I have just recently downloaded Windows Liver Writer Beta (http://get.live.com/betas/home), and have used it to create my previous blog post. The tool is very simple to use, and the best part about it is that it can be used to post entries to a MOSS hosted Blog site. And it Just Works, with proper in context previous, categories, uploading of images in the post and more!!! The screen shots below how simple it is to setup:

Step 1: Choose SharePoint as the blog destination (other than Windows Live Space or Other)

Step 2: Specify the path the SharePoint Blog site where blog posts should be created

Step 3: Configure the authentication mechanism

Step 4: Create your blog post, preview it (this is really cool, check the image below of this blog post) and then hit "Publish"

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Visual Studio 2005 Extensions - Released

modonovan — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 18:15:00 GMT

This should make your WSS development a whole bunch better. Enjoy.

Download here

SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services Add-in for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 Released

modonovan — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 16:19:00 GMT

Yes, this is what we have been asking for!

The Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services Add-in for Microsoft SharePoint Technologies is a Web download that provides features for running a report server within a larger deployment of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. You can download it here

Best Practice Analyzer for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 Released

modonovan — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 16:13:00 GMT

Just in case you missed it. The BPA for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 has been released

The Microsoft Best Practices Analyzer for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and the 2007 Microsoft Office System creates detailed reports to help administrators achieve greater performance, scalability, and uptime. Download it here