Monthly Archives April 2013

The new site policy options in SharePoint 2013 ar a vast step towards better and enforcable governance.by allowing retention policies to be applied, or even retrospectively applied to sites and site collections.  This means automatic site deletion or closure (technically read only mode) on a defined retention schedule similar to what you can usually do with a document or record.

This is going to become one of my favourite blog posting to refer to about this subject and I love the positive way it’s written:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/tothesharepoint/archive/2013/03/28/site-policy-in-sharepoint.aspx

Remember, it doesn’t excuse you from having to formalise this policy opportunity as part of a wider governance requirement with the business and ensure it is what you want to see happening autom...

A new set of conceptual videos that describe SharePoint 2013 authentication processes are now available:

• Windows claims authentication in SharePoint 2013
• Forms-based claims authentication in SharePoint 2013
• SAML-based claims authentication in SharePoint 2013

These videos step you through the details of claims-based authentication for user access to a secure SharePoint resource.

Got to be worth a watch given how darned confusing this space can be!

The entire blog post about them and a whole set of test guides is here:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/tothesharepoint/archive/2013/04/16/new-sharepoint-2013-authentication-process-and-test-lab-guide-overview-videos.aspx

At the preview release of SharePoint, stretched farms were not supported.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262485(v=office.15).aspx#hwLocServers

This is set to change with recent announcements from MS at least allowing limited support for a stretched farm.  MS it would seem have been doing some testing on performance and capacity boundaries and will support a limited set of stretch farm topologies under the definition of distributed topologies. All of these topologies are based on a prerequisite of minimal (< 1ms) latency between components of the farm.

This is important, as it means:

• No support for geographical stetched farms, so you cannot span cities and geographies with single farm topology elements
• Recognition of Support if the logical data center is comprised of one or ...

If you do not  have access to an account manager at MS, then you have to best guess licensing for SharePoint 2013.  If you do that, then you need to base your guesstimates on the Microsoft Open License without software assurance.

http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/software-assurance/

It is usually more cost effective to have software assurance but only if you want to maximise all the benefits of the Assurance programme.

So, for on-premise SharePoint 2013 without assurance, you need to start by considering what your user base looks like and consider a few standard architecture questions?

• How many users will you have?
• What does their profile look like (heavy search, light collaboration for example)?
• How many are internal?
• How many are external?
• What features do I need to exploit?

This is...