www.johntimney.com

The Sharepoint team have released some interesting public information about the pending 2010 release, specifically relating to system requirements.

So a confirmation, its 64bit only across the board.  So throw away your old kit and embrace the new world.

• SharePoint Server 2010 will be 64-bit only.
• SharePoint Server 2010 will require 64-bit Windows Server 2008 or 64-bit Windows Server 2008 R2.
• SharePoint Server 2010 will require 64-bit SQL Server 2008 or 64-bit SQL Server 2005.

They are aiming for xhtml compliance - that will be something to see.

Service pack 2 on MOSS 2007 comes with an upgrade checker to prepare you for a move to 2010.  In a nutshell, if you have customised the life out of your 2007 instance then you may want to prepare for some pain if it tells you your not in a good state.

The intial blog posting can be found here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/07/announcing-sharepoint-server-2010-preliminary-system-requirements.aspx

I came across another blog posting recently that I just had to point you at by a very credible chap called Ian McNeice, written around the issue of recruitiers not understandign the demanding range of roles a MOSS project might require.

The author had clearly thought very well about the roles a company might need when tackling a MOSS instance, and its amazing how varied they are! 

The job boards will list a SharePoint technical architect or a SharePoint developer and occasionally a SharePoint administrator but you will rarely see anyhting else listed as demanded and essential skills.

This kind of problem was very apparent at the recent European MOSS Best Practices Conference where a lack of knowledge around the complexity of Sharepoint was discussed many times over.  There are occasional roles for SharePoint project managers and SharePoint business analysts advertised, but very rarely are roles advertised for SharePoint information architects, and almost never for SharePoint strategists and SharePoint programme managers or SharePoint integration specialists. These are very in demand skills and also very hard to find and without the correct skill mix, many MOSS projects go off the rails.

Its an excellent write up and I would suggest you go and read it.  The site also has some other excellent postings on it.

http://www.sharepointblog.mclin.co.uk/blog/_archives/2009/3/25/4132262.html

You might be suffering from something called a Security only Crawl.

http://blogs.msdn.com/russmax/archive/2009/02/09/troubleshooting-security-only-crawl.aspx

One possible fix for this is to install the Feb 2009 MOSS Hotfix cummulative package.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/967209/

Although, I've not suffered from this specific problem it can be a bit difficult to identify a root cause. Generally, security only crawls impact MOSS farms that make heavy reliance on Sharepoint groups and don't use AD groups, causing a ripple of unapplied ACL changes that Index has to force apply as it indexes.

As with any hotfix, especailly a cummulative one - test, test and then test again before you install this to live!

If you are running MOSS on Windows 2008 you can get an error whenever any file over 28MB is uploaded. This happens regardless of what the max upload size is set to for the web application and the usual error is a 404 File Not Found, somewhat confusing really!

When you make a change to the web app settings from Central Admin they do not get transfered to the web.config. So you must manully update the web.config for all web apps and all Web Front End servers needing this change.

You need to add add the following settings under the section of the Web.config file found in Inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\VirtualDirectoryFolder:

This solved the issue for me.

Ok, this is a beauty! Deep searches, like advanced search queries or adding codeplex components like faceted search that make use of ordered search results between web front end servers and offset query servers appear to grind to a halt, deadlock the web app and force a recycle. The recycle may be an automatic one, or may have to be forced to get IIS to recover. However, this wasn't easily seen as the system was live and the users were just using the soltuion, when it would suddenly grind to halt. It was not something you could predict and we first thought it might be down to excessive load although the system was configured far in excess of the NFR requirements for transaction per second.

It took an age to track this one down and we were simply lucky that one of the chaps in the team spotted a slow down when another team member did something related to faceted searching, and data sorting. This only actually led us to realise it was connected to search somehow, but it at least allowed us to reproduce the problem and we could now regularly bring the platform to its knees. So, it was likely to be Query server related.

Taking a look at the even logs on the query servers, it was apparent one of them had dropped out of the MOSS farm. The error was "Source: Office Server Search EventID: 10038 Level: Error Query machine 'machinename' has been taken out of rotation due to this error. We had three of them and one missing from the rotation cycle was a clear indicator it was strugglng with something, although as the error was only on 1 server, it was not symptomatic of the problems we were having as it was the only one of the three query servers to be showing any event log errors. It merited further investigation however now we had some correlating evidence of root cause.

The rotation cycle error led me to a recently released KB description which had something in it that was very interesting: "the client computer stops responding for about two minutes". Our very symptom, as the WFE servers are clients to the offset role Query Servers! Even though it doesn't mention it could occur in this type of transaction scenario between a WFE server and a Query server.

Applying the hotfix solved this issue, and we suddenly stopped having server restarts due to deep search queries.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946487

Do you have children who want to learn how to write applications, or use Microsoft developer tools? If you do then Microsoft Dreamspark is something you should take a look at.

Microsoft DreamSpark enables students to download Microsoft developer and design tools at no charge. What a fantastic offer from Microsoft.

Link to Dreamspark

If your looking to use Microsoft Data Protection Manager for MOSS, beware of a little gotcha. 

In WSS or MOSS a specified file or folder name has some limits.  The URL path for all files and folders must be 260 characters or less (and no more than 128 characters for any single file or folder name in the URL).

Typically you need to think out a folder and file naming convention that suits, and helps stop you falling foul of this.  If for example you try to index a file server with longer file names and paths, you'll find your indexer starts to struggle as it cannot actually handle long names.

This also surfaces in DPM which also enforces this rule, so if your trying to protect your data and you have folders that are just a bit too long the DPM sync job will fail.

You can't do it without some third party assistance.

Freeware tools such as Flashget will allow you to select all the links within a page and download the files.

http://www.flashget.com

This is going to be very useful if you have a legal requirement for example to obtain and store the results of a search without formal archiving, all documents at a point in time containing the filename case2 for example. As a tool it can download all links in a page with a single click, and it can apparently filter the downloaded items by extension names so you only get the PDF files, or DOC files.

I've not actually tried it myself so usual caveat to make sure it satisfies your actual business requirements and don't just take my word for it

This will be my first book recommendation on my Blog which I should really have done a lot sooner as there are some very good publications out there and as I read a silly amount of them I should probably do this a bit more often.  However, I wanted to throw my weight behind one specific title by MVP Mike Walsh, who happens to know quite a lot about the MOSS and WSS space and is the author of Sams Teach Yourself Sharepoint 2007 in 24 Hours.

The 24 Hour series is a great starter kit for anyone looking at a technology and this one is no exception.  I've recommended it numerous times as a great real world starter tool and superb for those not looking at Enterprise MOSS.

For me, it carries a lot of personal style and real expertise based on having done the job, rather than having researched about the products.  It focusses on some very real world business use and offers a fine balance between administration and end user scenarios.  I especially like the criminal case it contains as a learning tool on how to structure a document library and the problems and issues you might have.  This can easily be transposed to any type of business requiring documentation and accompanying artefacts, I can see this being easily moved across to law, government, business and office scenarios etc.. and consequently used as the basis for many document library shapes.

What I thought was particularly strong was the link between Office client tools and WSS/MOSS, this is very neat as this type of stuff is missing from 90% of the books I read on MOSS.  To admins it should be a good reminder that you actually have real users to consider, so its not just aimed at beginners.  It was also rare to see such a comprehensive section on Search Server Express as a complementary tool, and a good section on taking advantage of Sharepoint Designer, how to get started with it and even compares its differences to Frontpage.

Its not an expensive book, and I hope you'll go and buy a copy.
http://www.amazon.com/Sams-Teach-Yourself-SharePoint-Hours/dp/0672330008/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228727035&sr=8-3