SharePoint BUZZ

TechNet has announced forget the "Super Bowl", Windows Server 2008 has RTM'd!!!  The features that I'm looking forward to in Windows Server 2008 are: Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0 – Modular architecture, high levels of administration Terminal Services Gateway – Allows access to apps without the need ...

There's an updated version of the Microsoft Best Practices Analyzer for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and the 2007 Microsoft Office System available for download. While speaking of Best Practices, check out ...

Mart Muller has a great summary post regarding Microsoft's recently released technical whitepaper Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Hosting. Check his post out then check out the technical whitepaper as he points out what is inside this 40+ page document.  He lists the best practices for: Initial activities Schedule part of ...

Defering content after users sees the page can be very beneficial. Why? Using this technique, the page is rendered much more quickly, while the user's experience of interacting with the site is not negatively impacted. If you’ve implemented or are planning to implement a Internet facing website, you are probably exploring all avenues to make it more responsive to users and visitors. For some users – particularly those with low-bandwidth or high-latency connections – the very first page load of a site can take a long time because of all the resources which need to be downloaded along with the page markup itself. Although these resources are often shared between pages and cached on the client, the first page load can be painfully slow. Having satisfied the above criteria, you can now be confident that the site is ready for this optimization. Create the page, which is not to reference core.js. We’ll call it NoCore.aspx, but in your case, default.aspx might be more appropriate since that’s the default Home Page for your site. In SharePoint Designer, navigate to NoCore.aspx in the tree hierarchy, right click, and select “Detach from Page Layout.” This will have the effect of converting NoCore.aspx to an “untemplatized page.” What this means is that while it is still subject to the site wide Master Page, its markup is no longer governed by the layout from which it was created, and you will be able to update the markup as you see fit. In SharePoint Designer, Edit NoCore.aspx.

Bob Fox has done a great job on providing screencasts for some administrative functions in SharePoint 2007 and we all hope he continues doing a great job. There are several screencasts that he has produced and today I'm going to focus on Working with Managed Paths [direct link to Managed Paths demo]. Why is this screencast important for a SharePoint 2007 administrator, simply because as a SharePoint 2007 administrator you need to managed paths. SharePoint needs to know which URLs it controls and which URL(s) can be used for Self Service Site creation. Managing paths can be an easy task but if its not planned then things can become daunting. Now lets get into what Bob Fox walks us through in his first screencast. Here's a brief textual walkthrough: By defining a managed path you specify which paths in the URL namespace in a web application are used for site collections. You can specify one or more than one site collection exists in a specified path. For example, using an explicit inclusion, you are saying that http://server_name/team is a site collection but not any possible site collections below it; however, using wildcard exclusion allows you to specify child URLs under http://server_name/sites/* are also site collections. We are going to look into two different types of inclusion: explicit and wildcard Explicit inclusions — Includes only the specific path you set. Use explicit inclusions, for example, if you want Windows SharePoint Services to manage a specific path, such as /portal, but not any possible sites below it, such as /portal/webapp. Wildcard inclusions — Includes any sites below the path you set, so you don't have to add them individually. This is the type of inclusion to use for Self-Service Site Creation, when you want users to be able to create top-level Web sites underneath a specific path, such as /sites. In an example environment, we have the following topology: Projects Sales Amer Emea Development Amer Emea Projects site will be a wildcard inclusion, sales and development sites both want to have their own paths and below each there will be Amer and Emea. Lets go through each of these guys so we can get a better understanding. Click on Application Management using SharePoint 2007 Central Administration screen. Under SharePoint Web Application Management, select Define managed paths...

This Management Pack quickly brings any failures or configuration problems to your attention, which increases the availability and performance of Office SharePoint Server 2007. This Management Pack also provides the knowledge and expertise you need to leverage Operations Manager 2007 and get an immediate return on your investment. This Management Pack alerts you about the following critical conditions:  Shared Services Provider (SSP) provisioning failed Site Directory scan job failed Enabling features failed on some sites Administration site for the SSP is missing Enabling features on existing sites failed The Office SharePoint Server Search service is not running The Microsoft Single Sign-On service is not running

For those that were looking forward to this, Microsoft has just released the Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Management Pack monitors the health and state of Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. The Management Pack does the following: Monitors events placed in the application event log Highlights events that might indicate possible service outages or configuration problems, so you can quickly take corrective or preventive actions Provides the knowledge and expertise you need to leverage System Center Operations Manger 2007 and get an immediate return on your investment Here is a summary of its feature set: Monitors whether the application pool account has insufficient permission to add or read users from the Active Directory Monitors for issues arising from improper configuration of the authentication provider Monitors backup failures and recycle bin quotas Monitors for connectivity problems with computers running SQL server