Microknowledge

So long, thank you, farewell...

It’s with a blend of excitement and sadness that I make my last post to Microknowledge under the KMA banner.

During the past several years, I’ve been honored to be associated with KMA.  KMA has grown into a team focused on a broadening horizon of Microsoft solutions, beyond New England to reach clients throughout the US.  I’ve been extremely well supported by KMA, including our partners, David Goldstein, Jorge Rodriquez, Mike Gilronan and Jean Tufts.   KMA has always had a great culture that includes collaboration, consensus and, of course, Friday bagel days. 

Ultimately, it’s been about the people.   I’ve been privileged to help design and deliver client solutions to some extremely warm and wonderful folks.   Our clients and consultants have pushed the boundaries of what we know, and helped me, in particular, learn new capabilities.

I’ve also had a great opportunity to speak and write about SharePoint in the larger national community – TechEd, SharePoint Saturday, Office 2010 Launch, user groups, SPTechCon and more.  For me, I’ve been rewarded with a great group of   friends among the clients, consultants and ISVs of the SharePoint world.

Highlights?  Officially, I’d have to include our Microsoft Partner Excellence Awards in 2010 and 2011, our ongoing Gold and Silver certifications with Microsoft, and our successful projects for upgrades, partner extranets, metadata-enhanced infrastructures, professional project sites and Project Server.  Plus some EXTREMELY large server farms.

At some of my presentations last year, I often introduced SharePoint 2010 as the “bright frontier”.  I took this photo a few years ago on eastern Long Island in New York, where I grew up.  This is a sunrise.  I love the few minutes before dawn, when everything is new, filled with the promise of rushing forward into new lands, glowing in light, where everything is new and everything is possible.

So I’m also looking forward to the next sunrise.  I know that KMA is in capable hands moving forward, and I look ahead to watching its success in the years to come.  Derek Cash-Peterson is going to do amazing things as the SharePoint practice lead.  I’m grateful for everything KMA has done for me.

And I’m doubly honored to be asked to take on a new role.    I will be joining Quest Software as SharePoint Strategic Product Manager and Evangelist.  In my new role, I’ll continue reaching out to share and learn from the SharePoint community.  Plus, I’ll help bring your guidance back into Quest to help shape the future of their SharePoint solutions.  I’ll have more to say about my role at Quest soon.   But I’d like to acknowledge my predecessor at Quest, Joel Oleson.  Joel’s been an absolutely vital leader in the SharePoint community, as well as a friend.  Joel remains a key leader in the worldwide community.  I promise to do my best to emulate the quality of his commitment.   Thanks to Joel, Bill Evans, and the rest of the Quest team.

You’ll still be able to find me.  I’ve setup www.chrismcnulty.net to share information about SharePoint technologies.  This blog, Microknowledge, is moving there too – www.chrismcnulty.net/blog  I’ll continue to post tips, advice, version numbers and best practices on SharePoint, SQL and Project Server there, as well as my schedule of upcoming speaking events (Next up – KMWorld in Washington DC on SharePoint Admin 101 on October 31 – www.kmworld.com ).  Plus, you can always find me on Twitter @cmcnulty2000.

That’s it.  Again, I’m extremely grateful to everyone – past and present – in the KMA world.  Of course, none of this would be possible without the ongoing love and support of my wife Hayley and my family.  And I look forward to tomorrow and continuing my role in the SharePoint world.  Thanks again, and see you soon.

Using FSUtil to fix a failed SharePoint 2010 upgrade – Windows Process Activation Service Error – and the Blue Comet

We recently had to rescue a stalled SharePoint upgrade that went awry after a partial disk rebuild.  During the upgrade, Central Administration refused to start, reporting the error:

Windows could not start the Windows Process Activation Service - Error 6801: Transaction support within the specified resource manager is not started or was shut down due to an error.

We traced this to the local file system journals being out of sync due to the partial restore.  As result, IIS itself refused to start after reboot because the WAS wouldn’t start – and the WAS acts as the ignition for other processes, like IIS.  In part, this is done to protect the data in case the file system has become corrupted.  However, there’s also a simple fix.  At a command line, run:

fsutil resource setautoreset true c:\

assuming the system drive is C.  After a reboot, you will able to start IIS and continue with the upgrade.

So, why the Blue Comet?  As you might recall, the penultimate episode of the Sopranos was The Blue Comet.  And this will be my next to last post for Microknowledge under the KMA banner. 

 

The Blue Comet, from http://forum.atlasrr.com/forum/topic.asp?ARCHIVE=true&TOPIC_ID=53193

There will be more to come later today – but I promise neither a bloody confrontation nor a sudden cut to black.  Stay tuned – there’s still one more.

SharePoint Conference 2011 – Day Four Wrap-up

And we’re back!  Welcome to Day Four of the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011. 

I wanted to be sure to complete my session highlight notes.  But after a short time to reflect, we can discuss the “big picture”.  There was no single unifying theme, but the three biggest messages:

• SQL 2012 “Denali” adds some great BI functions when integrated into SharePoint – especially PowerView, the self-service function, PowerPivot, and SSRS Alerts.  It also makes great strides in foundational architecture with “Always On” mode.
• Project Server 2010 has never been stronger, and will only get closer to SharePoint as it matures.  If you already know SharePoint, why not use the best-of-breed EPM solution that you already know.
• You can expect a public preview of the next version of SharePoint late next year, around the November 2012 SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas.  Message – get ready now. We can make lots of predictions about the upgrade paths, but here’s what to do now.  Get upgraded, get your good content into SharePoint, and get the bad, old stuff out to archive.  Now.  You have a long runway to prepare, and will be well positioned for a simple upgrade in the next 12-18 months.  It’s always easier moving from SharePoint “Now” to SharePoint “Next”.

You’ll be hearing more about the conference at KMA’s two live events in Waltham and Boston, November 18 & 29, 2011.  More details at http://www.kma-llc.net

The biggest of big pictures was clearly  FPWeb.net and their two story booth (no I don’t have a photo!). There were great stories on a smaller scale  – Owen Allen and his on-the-fly promotion for SharePoint Directions (below).

 

Game show time at the Quest booth.

The freeze mob - (Yes, I’m in it.)  

Disneyland. 

Hanging out with the SharePoint Ninja.

Joey Patterson and his amazing haul of 15+ free autographed books. In short, a great chance to catch up with new technologies, new solutions, new friends and old ones.

Session Highlights

Here are highlights from a few sessions I visited:

Cloud Packing – Preparing for Migration to the Cloud

James Petrosky & Kimmo Forss, Microsoft

• Prune what you don’t need, keep “cassette tapes” but you don’t need them on your trip to cloud. When you pack to move, don't just take everything "in case we need it". Not everything belongs in SharePoint.
• Remove all rights from the file. If no one screams within 15 days, you can probably get rid of it.  But there’s no substitute for human judgment in pruning content to prepare a move to Office365.
• Finding the owner is always a challenge for older content
• Jim showed a really interesting content analysis tool for #SharePointOnline migrations being developed by Microsoft.- it allows you to pull the data into PerformancePoint for more analysis.
• Make sure the processes you implement match *today's* processes - not what was implemented the last time\
• Office 365 migrations – remember, tools (alone) don’t build houses.  It’s best to get the metadata onto the documents or into a manifest in advance of a cloud move – you can’t run server based auto-classifier on Office 365.

Upgrading Custom Code

Becky Isserman guided a large crowd festooned with free mustachesthrough upgrade tips for custom code.

• Content Editor Web Part upgrades remove all embedded code during upgrade to SP1.
• Conversion to client object model code is a manual process – tip, the Silverlight Client Object Model lives in 14 Hive TEMPLATE\Layouts\ClientBin. 
• For sandbox solutions , Visual Studio Power Tools have a virtual visual web part for sandbox solutions – you can download it from http://t.co/9uWktkp7   
• Don’t upgrade branding – redo to take advantage of the new master pages and renderers.
• Web parts and workflows (if you change two DLLs) upgrade well

See you next year in Las Vegas (Or in DC, Denver, Florida, Seattle, San Francisco, Phoenix, Atlanta, San Diego, Boston, Orlando, or  NY before that!)

Fixing ‘required feature is not enabled for this column type’ errors with the SharePoint 2010 Managed Metadata Service

I’m back from Anaheim and the SharePoint  Conference 2011.  I have one final post to make about the conference.  But first, a brief technical post about the Managed Metadata Service.

This was an interesting problem.   As you may know, SharePoint 2010 allows you to create a central hub of content type and publish, or syndicate those content types to multiple sites or even cross farm.  One of our usual architecture recommendations is to avoid using a primary content web application as the “hub”, since changing the source hub is difficult if not impossible later on.  We’ve already seen web application named “mytestsite” live on because they became the hub for content types that were reused throughout other SharePoint sites.  It’s a good practice to dedicate a single web application to it, since that can be sustained without tying down other content application.  Ok, enough on syndication theory.

So a client followed our guidance, and in setting up the new content type hub they used the “blank” site template.  That makes sense, right, since no one’s planning to put any other content there – it’s just the syndication hub.  Then they activated the Site Collection Feature for Content Type Syndication Hub.

 

Their term store was already built, so the next step was to start creating Site Columns to use in custom Content Types.   But as soon as they specified a Managed Metadata column type, they saw the lovely error in Term Set Settings shown below – “The required feature is not enabled for this column type.”

Easy enough – must have missed a feature under Site Features – maybe Site Collection Features? Standard Features?  Enterprise Features?  Wait – which feature do they need to activate?  Is it an SSA Proxy issue?

Stop looking – it's not a UI-based feature.  It’s a feature that is disabled by default on the Blank Site template.  So, as always, PowerShell rides to the rescue!  First, although there are utilities you can use to get this information, one single command line in PowerShell will list all the features installed on your farm:

Get-SPFeature | Sort -Property DisplayName

Review this output – your looking to find the GUID of a feature named TaxonomyFieldAdded. 

Then, also  at the PowerShell command line, you can activate that feature by GUID:

Enable-SPFeature -id "[GUID-From-Prior-Step]" -url  [http://your-content-type-hub]

That’s it!  No IISReset required.  Good luck!

Impressions of the 2011 SharePoint Conference, Part 1 (Monday Keynotes)

This week, I was fortunate to attend Microsoft's SharePoint Conference (SPC) in Anaheim, CA, and to meet and learn from some of the most talented SharePoint people in the world.  I’m summarizing some key take-aways from the conference via a series of blog articles.

via kmamikegil-blog.kma-llc.net

Great recap of the conference from KMA's own Mike Gilronan!

SharePoint Conference 2011 – Day Three Wrapup

Welcome to Day Three of the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011.   This continues to be a “stealth” Project and SQL conference – there’s been a lot of attention to Project Server, and to the new functions of the “Denali” 2011 release (self-service BI with Crescent, etc.)  For more on Project Server, stay tuned to Microsoft’s Project Conference in March 2012 - http://www.msprojectconference.com/Pages/default.aspx

Here’s a public domain picture of Denali, in Alaska, just to give you something to see.

• My favorite question of the day was to Christophe Fiessinger from Microsoft.  When asked to comment on the timing of Project Server 2010 support for SQL 2011 Denali -- "You know I'm being recorded?"

(Full disclosure, this is being posted from 35,000 feet.  Today’s soundtrack – Cliff Martinez and the Drive soundtrack.)

The Disneyland Park was a great treat for conference attendees, but on to a few session highlights. 

SharePoint Performance Tuning

Eric Shupps – the SharePoint cowboy – led a large group through his favorite tips and tricks, including:

• Page customization takes the whole page out of the faster file system and puts it into the database, including CSS, master page, etc.  So, turn off Designer for at least 30% performance boost! [APPLAUSE!]
• Branding – suggestions include start with minimal master page, minimize linked files, and use image stitching of small elements to reduce request counts,
• Put files in physical system, get resources in physical system (/_layouts) not virtual (libraries, etc.),   [Ed note = layouts – GOOD, libraries = BAD.]
• CSS files are usually too big.  Clean them up by removing redundant styles.
• For lists, just because you can doesn’t mean you should put millions of items in them.  Folders improve view performance but not query performance – ALL CONTENT IN ALL LISTS IN A SITE COLLECTION IS IN A SINGLE TABLE. 
• RBS doesn’t increase query performance.  Nope.
• Use Developer Dashboard by putting code in SPMonitoredScope code block (OK, that’s my note on HOW to do it, but Eric did mention its importance as a diagnostic!)  Wictor Wilen published a feature to enable and configure Developer Dashboard in Central Admin - http://www.wictorwilen.se/Post/SharePoint-2010-Developer-Dashboard-configuration-feature.aspx

PowerPivot v2 Engineering

Dave Wickert, Microsoft, ran through scaling and engineering for PowerPivot v2.  PowerPivot is the tool that adds the ability to work with huge and/or external datasets, through Excel, and in SharePoint.  PowerPivot v2 is shipping as part of “Denali” – SQL Server 2011.  The big server changes are in administration and installation support.  Key talking points:

• Claims to Windows Token Service (CWTS) is the MOST important component of PowerPivot communications.
• $Embedded$ is the magic data source connection to point to the workbook itself for the AS cube
• PowerPivot itself doesn’t need Kerberos, since PowerPivot & Cat’s live on the same machine in same farm – no hop
• Microsoft ships an HP jointly developed,  1U preconfigured BI appliance, 8X300GB disk, etc. SQL onboard
• V2 adds support for minidump files of the database cube,  logs, state snapshot in PPDP files for troubleshooting.
• New PowerPivot Configuration Tool Wizard builds installation PowerShell scripts
• SharePoint SP1 is REQUIRED for CTP3 and RTM of Denali PowerPivot – upgrade is blocked without SP1
• Denali engine will support v1 and v2 workbooks, and there is a direct server in pace upgrade path
• Most functional changes are on Excel user side

SQL Denali Alerting

Lukasz Pawlowski walked through a deep overview on SSRS Alerts in Denali. 

Simply, this adds a rules engine to SharePoint integrated reports based on live reports – so the user can set up a SharePoint alert is the sales figure in a report ever drops below a threshold, etc.  This is conceived as a daily process – not a real-time minute by minute check.

These changes  mean SSRS is, at long last, ,installed directly into SharePoint as a Shared Service Application, using configuration databases as part of the SharePoint farm.  At last!

Reporting Services isn’t cross farm, puts GUIDs in the database names (God kills TWO kittens, according to Todd Klindt), so it has some tradeoffs on the server architecture. But it’s the right direction.

SharePoint Project Server Best Practices Deployment

Christophe Fiessinger from Microsoft ran users through best pradtices in server design and deployment for Project Server integrated into SharePoint.  More fun facts:

• There are a lot of Project Server 2007 users still around!
• You can use the super fun Pivot Viewer to browse technical documents on Project and Project Server  at http://t.co/kb1iWDHw
• The size of the pool of managed resources is probably the biggest factor to integrate or split Project Server PWA instances
• Project Server doesn’t support multitenancy.  The Project SSA can’t be run cross farm – you need to install Project Server on all web and app servers in the farm.
• As of Service Pack 1,  Project Server 2010 SP1 supports IE7/8/9 Firefox Chrome and Safari, in case you hadn’t heard the worldwide applause in June 2012.

Content Query Web Part

Noted community speaker Christina Wheeler ran through the CQWP.  One quick tip - CQWP requires the publishing features activated (site collection and site feature level).

Day Four is soon to come!

SharePoint Conference 2011 – Day Two Wrapup

Welcome to Day Two of the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011.   Tons of content yesterday, and there are two emergent themes here – the pervasive importance of Project Server 2010, and all the amazing core and business intelligence functions in SQL Server 2001 “Denali”. 

Session Highlights

We’re off to Disneyland now, but here’s today’s quick recap:

FAST Search Sizing

Barry Waldbaum and Steve Fowle led us through an overview of Microsoft; own experience engineering a huge Shared Services farm for their in house FAST implementation, published to many consuming farms internally at Microsoft.  Here’s a picture:

Some quick scaling rules

• Run SQLIO to test hardware, NAS is usually too slow for optimal performance
• For database sizing:

o   Web needs 4.5GB per million docs

o   Crawl needs 3GB doc per million

o   Indexers need 120GB per million docs

o   Rule of thumb 10 million Office docs equal about 1.5TB of search database usage in FAST

Deploy multiple server rows to ensure high availability.  The Admin component is not fault tolerant, automatically, and when it goes down new content isn’t added to the index, but the role can easily be manually failed over with PowerShell.  Most roles are stateless and failover automatically – except indexing, which requires Manual failover.

Document processing, Indexing and Link Analysis are hardware intensive and good candidates for dedicated HW in big enviroemnets.

There are backup tools “in the box” – they use  PowerShell remoting and SQL 2008 Management Object package.  But practically, SAN tools are more manageable, since you need to suspend search during a backup!!!!!

SQL Denali 2011 Reporting Services (SSRS)

Carolyn Chau, Microsoft SQL Prgraom Manager, led us through SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) enhancements in Denali.

Microsoft understands that self service functions were dropped from SQL Server 2008 R2 to ensure an on time release.  However, user self-service reporting is back and completely revamped as the “Crescent” project to be release as part of Denali.  Denali enhances Excel BI and delivers:

• Better SharePoint integration by rearchitecting integrated mode as a SharePoint 2010 Shared Services Application (SSA).  Reporting Services admin happens in SharePoint Central Administration.
• Making use of Denali’s new “Always On” Failover mode
• Integrating report-based data aware alerts via the SharePoint integration
•  Business Inteligence Developer Studio “BIDS” is brought up to date with the Visual Studio 2010/2011 Dev10/11 updates (no more reliance on VS2008.  This got an ovation.

Performance – SSRS SharePoint integrated mode is now as fast as native mode, and30-60% faster than R2. 

User alerts – but I’ll have more to say on this tomorrow!

Crescent, the new self-service BI interface, is a jaw dropper – live timeline slider animated bubble charts, etc. 

 

Some key points:

 

o   It requires Silverlight 5

o   Tightly integrated with PowerPivot data sources

o   Presentation ready at all times

o   No out of box PivotViewer integration in Crescent

o   Web part integration to SharePoint isn’t ready yet in CTP3 but will ship later

o   No direct access to SharePoint lists but those can be integrated into a PowerPivot model and then accessed via PowerPivot

 

JQuery to Enhance SharePoint without Code on the Server

Eric Harlan & Mark Rackley  were a knowledgeable and entertaining duo.  Quick summary about the reasons for and against jQuery as a tool on SharePoint:

Pros

o   Quick solutions

o   Powerful satisfied users

o   Rapid prototyping

Cons

o   A lot of easily found untested code in the wild

o   Debugging hard at best

o   Performance degradation

o   Inconsistent compatibility

SharePoint Conference 2011 – Day One Wrapup

Welcome to Day One of the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011. 

It’s already been a fantastic conference. I arrived here yesterday morning.  I got to spend a little time with family here in LA during the day yesterday – I was lucky enough to get a ride on my brother’s neighbor’s personally owned fire truck on my way down here.  (A long story.)  Hey, I got to SPC11 (in part) on a firetruck!

 

This is an interesting event – there’s no new release of SharePoint, so we expect a deep review of how SharePoint usage and enhancements.  Also, a lot of tablets here – iPads, and a few lucky Slate Windows 8 tablets. 

I already posted a summary of this morning’s keynote address, led by Jared Spataro with Jeff Teper and Kurt Delbene.  Here are some highlights:

• Expect a public preview of the next version of SharePoint at the SharePoint Conference 2012, November 12-15, at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, Nevada.
• 125 million SharePoint Users worldwide currently.
• The next version of SharePoint has the largest development history in SharePoint history to support v15 (the next release) and a new prelease of Office 365. Expect a lot in user interface enhancements and branding.
• Microsoft is launching the Microsoft Certified Architect (MCA) program for SharePoint
• Office 265 will support full two way Business Connectivity Services (BCS) connections to web-service based data by year end
• New Microsoft Visio server architectures visualization tools to be available this week for download from Microsoft.com
• New scaling and architecture whitepapers were used to support 14TB content databases with full failover of a live 15 server farm under load running on SQL Denali CTP

Session Highlights

Here are highlights from a few sessions I visited:

SharePoint for Knowledge Communities

The best take away from this is to organize your intranet around functional “communities” rather than traditional department sub sites.  Jim Kane from Paragon Consulting highlighted the following:

• Knowledge communities have to breakdown challenges of wikis and folders – they are repositories, not communities
• Knowledge hoarding – people pull in far more information than they push back
• Tacit information = information that is needed but not actively sought
• Tacit information is the core problem – how do you get information into the right hands without someone having to search for it.
• Organize your taxonomy around content repositories by project, practice, or topic centric
• Don't create department sites and throw a template at it - create a community
• Don't make it an -IT project
• Use a community to introduce mysites

Always On in SQL 2011 “Denali”

Bill Baer from Microsoft did a fantastic job showing how simply live failover is configured in SQL 2011 "Denali”  The best part isn’t just “disaster” failover, but graceful failover to smoothly transition between servers from planned maintenance, etc. “Always On” mode is setup via easy wizard.

But wait, there-s more – on October 6, Microsoft will release a new PowerShell command line builder – the PowerShell Design Surface.  It looks like Windows 8/Metro, and will be available from the Windows PowerShell Resource Center soon.

 

Developing and Extending Enterprise Content Management Features

Paul Swider led this session – and it was great to see such a big crowd for a great friend to the SharePoint community.

 Paul led through a series of practical tips and demos:

• You can easily customize a site and save the template to the SharePoint solution Gallery – then the template can be exported as a WSP and imported into Visual Studio 2010 for further enhancement
• The DocumentID function provides a static URL that can always reference a document by ID regardless of its physical position.  It is coded by referencing the Office.DocumentManagement library in the ISAPI folder of the SharePoint root/14 Hive.  It uses the server object model.  Paul showed a great implementation trick – implement GetDocumentURLs by ID to return the documents URL reference. 
• In addition, the end user web part that allows user to type in a document ID directly for retrieval can itself be overridden.

Other Stuff

A final note – I saw in the tweet stream that the Productivity Hub – a series of free end user training tools for SharePoint that can be added directly to your farm – is available for download now, and will be available for SharePoint 2010 SP1 in November from  http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=7122

Thanks! 

Welcome to Day One of the SharePoint Conference 2011 – Fantastic Keynote Summary

Executive Highlights

• Expect a public preview of the next version of SharePoint at the SharePoint Conference 2012, November 12-15, at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, Nevada.
• 125 million SharePoint Users worldwide currently.
• The next version of SharePoint has the largest development history in SharePoint history to support v15 (the next release) and a new prelease of Office 365. Expect a lot in user interface enhancements and branding.
• Microsoft is launching the Microsoft Certified Architect (MCA) program for SharePoint
• Office3265 will support full two way Business Connectivity Services (BCS) connections to web-service based data by year end
• New Microsoft Visio server architecture visualization tools to be available this week for download from Microsoft.com
• New scaling and architecture whitepapers were used to support 14TB content databases with full failover of a live 15 server farm under load running on SQL Denali CTP

(Word meme of the day – “fantastic”. Expect that word throughout the week.)

It’s already been quite a conference – maybe even fantastic! I arrived here yesterday morning.  I got to spend a little time with family here in LA during the day yesterday – I was lucky enough to get a ride on my brother’s neighbor’s personally owned fire truck on my way down here.  (A long story.) 

 

This is an interesting event – there’s no new release of SharePoint, so we expect a deep review of how Microsoft and the community have SharePoint 2010’s capabilities into practice.   And in addition to fantastic, the other new thing here is tablets – a decent number of iPads, and a lucky few attendees carrying Slate Windows 8 tablets. 

OK, the stage is set, the backdrop looks like a Mango-colored Windows 8 screen, and here we go!

 

Jared Spataro, Director SharePoint Product Management

Jared just took the stage dressed casually to host the keynote.  The theme of this year’s conference is Productivity Delivered.    He reflected on the history of SharePoint 2010 and revisited his three hour demo of SharePoint 2010 at the 2009 SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas.  (Remember Huey Lewis and the SharePoint wedding?)

 

Here are some highlights of the last few years:

• SharePoint is the fastest product to reach the billion dollar level at Microsoft, and grows continues at double digit rates
• 125MM licenses to 65,000 customers
• As a standalone business, SharePoint would be one of the top 50 software firms in the world
• Enterprise deployment has reached 67%, and is #1 in satisfaction awareness, recommendations and market share.
• Office 365 was launched

Wow, he just mentioned SharePoint Saturday and SharePint – is that the first ever official acknowledgement of those community events?

Anyway, he’s showing a short film about finding a celebrity and auditioning celebrities

• Luke Perry struggles with the name
• Carmen Electra tried to invent a tag line, and Jared just rejected her.
• Alan Thicke doesn’t know what an API is, or the Interweb!
• Arpan Shah (product manager for MS Project)
• Florence Henderson just was escorted from the audition while singing the Brady Bunch theme

Jeff Teper, Corporate BP Office Business Systems

And our celebrity keynote is Jeff Peper!  He’s retelling the history of a SharePoint presentation in Redmond to a huge enterprise client, and the rise of the phrase “I didn’t know SharePoint could do that!”

 

Redefine collaboration

Self service is key – IT deploys SharePoint as a utility so users can create their own sites.  Need to balance user empowerment and technical governance. 

Self-service BI is a key differentiator for SharePoint 2010 – especially with PowerPivot.  He also talked about a large bank that makes tremendous use of Access Services, which, to be fair, is somewhat neglected in the SharePoint functional space lately. 

Social fabric began with MySite, as an alternative to personalizing the home page.  He’s really excited about the Outlook Social Connector, which brings collaboration that may start in Outlook into the SharePoint sphere.

Also, part of the vision should extend collaboration outside the firewall to clients and partners.  In this realm, SharePoint for Internet Sites (FIS) has been a great takeoff success.

Now we’re reviewing SpaceX – the private rocket company – and how they use SharePoint for marketing and collaboration.  Interesting screen shots – SpaceX uses Document Sets, manual KPIs for tracing project milestones, and ratings on all project documents.  They also use partner sites to collaborate outside the firewall.

Here comes the big bet for the future!  Microsoft currently has the largest development history in SharePoint history to support v15 (the next release) and a new prelease of Office 365. Expect a lot in user interface enhancements and branding.

Unleash the ecosystem

There are 750,000 SharePoint developers active in the ecosystem.  He’s announcing BCS connectivity from the cloud to Web-based services for data access as part of the Office 365 release later this year.

Integrators and clients want to know who the deepest black belts are to design SharePoint so9lutions.  To support this, Microsoft is launching the Microsoft Certified Architect (MCA) program.

The next version of SharePoint will run all code developed for SharePoint 2010 seamlessly.

Build a world class platform

Currently, there are 1000 people in SharePoint R&D while the engineering has grown from single server to huge farms.  Spotlights have included the acquisition of Groove Networks and FAST to enhance synchronization and search.  But the support for tuning and administering the system has also grown.  Jeff introduced Richard Riley, Director of SharePoint to demo scaling, performance and high availability.

Richard’s demo environment:

• Content for the demos was taken from Wikipedia --  14.5TB in 108MM items retrieved from Wikipedia in two document centers
• Two SQL clusters running Denali CTP3 in Always On mode, VM Host with 80 cores and 1TB RAM
• 5 web front ends
• 5 FAST Search Servers
• 2 Admin/FAST Servers
• 2 Application servers
• All running on a big EMC SAN and NEC servers

 

 

Richard showed this using a new Visio SharePoint visualization template (not yet available from Microsoft.com at press time!)

 

On his test bed, he has 7500 live simulated users, to represent a user installed base of about 150,000 given average concurrency.

(Quick side note ‘#” in FAST search returns all results in the index!)  A ’#’ search in FAST retrieved all 108 million items in about .02 seconds.  Wow.  Or should we say, fantastic!

And it’s time for a high availability demo of fully replicated failover  of all databases and the server farms…under load, 14TB, full farm replicas.  And the volunteer has pulled the primary network cable… disconnected and fully reloaded inn less than 60 seconds.  Again, fantastic!

Kurt Delbene, President, MS Office Division

Social collaboration and remote work have become mission critical business requirements.  80% of enterprises users are engaging or planning for the cloud.

His major themes for future products will address these concepts:

• Best productivity across PC phone and browser
• Cloud services should be always available
• Deliver a unified client and server platform

Kurt closed by introducing Bill Bridley, the CEO of NetHope, a global umbrella social services provider.  NetHope uses Office 365 to unify response teams for disasters like the Haitian earthquake.  And Microsoft is distributing $50,000 to distribute via NetHope to user-sourced charitable organizations.  There’s a live HTML WebPart Office265 applkicvation to supply the user voting interface on the MySPC conference user portal, and we got a peek under the hood of the SharePoint app integrated from Azure with JavaScript and HTML5.

Finales

Jared’s back.  One last thing - the next SharePoint Conference will be next year, 2012, back in Lax Vegas at Mandalay Bay November 12-15, 2012.  If the past is any guide, expect the SharePoint v5/2012/Wave 15 public preview to debut there.

My Timer Jobs Won’t Run and the Cache Won’t Refresh – Totally Rebuilding the SharePoint 2010 Timer Service Cache

Very esoteric SharePoint engineering note today.    We recently had to rebuild a SharePoint 2010 server that had had some security changes in its domain environment.  These changes led to the dreaded “Cannot connect to the configuration database” error screens. 

During the recovery, we manually rebuilt the local WSS_ADMIN_WPG, WSS_RESTRICTED_WPG_V4 and WSS_WPG groups.  After these groups were redefined and service accounts assigned to the proper groups, the SharePoint Farm and Configuration Wizard (“the grey wizard”) was able to complete successfully.  One of the things the Wizard does is reset the permissions to the appropriate points in the file system, registry, databases, etc.  All set, and the site was accessible to the browser.

Except for one snagging detail.  Farm solution deployment for new solutions was hanging without ever completing.  This is usually a Timer Service problem – you need to make sure the Windows SharePoint Timer Service is running and assigned to the right account (usually the farm account).  That was already set.  Stopping and restarting the Timer service had no impact – no timer jobs were running anywhere in the environment.

No problem, we thought.  If you run any kind of Bing (or Google search) you’ll find no shortage of other posts on rebuilding the local cache.   These can be good techniques, and I won’t reprint them here.

• http://blogs.msdn.com/b/josrod/archive/2007/12/12/clear-the-sharepoint-configuration-cache-for-timer-job-and-psconfig-errors.aspx
• http://wingleungchan.blogspot.com/2011/01/user-profile-service-application-stuck.html

However, this still didn’t work.  Once the cache was cleared, no new jobs showed up in the cache, and nothing executed.  Why not?

Well, let’s talk about the local cache.  The local cache directory contains XML job descriptions to be executed by the local server that are dynamically pulled down from the farm configuration database.    In normal production, it looks like this:

 

This one stayed blank.  Why?  Take a look at that ugly GUID based file path.  Turns out that directory GUID no longer matched the farm GUID.  What’s the farm GUID?  Well, take a look at the registry key:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\14.0\Secure\ConfigDB

You will see a key value there called ID.  Copy the GUID value of this key and make sure you have, or create a directory with the same name at C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\SharePoint\Config

This directory should also have permissions, at a minimum, of Full Control for WSS_ADMIN_WPG and Read/Execute for WSS_WPG.  Once this is set, the cache rebuild will work, and your timer jobs will start to flow again…

I’ll be at SharePoint Conference 2011 in Anaheim next week – hope to see you there!