How Azure improved Groove -> Microsoft Sync Framework
This Microsoft case study reveals how Microsoft's SharePoint WorkSpace revamps Groove for 2010 using the Microsoft Sync Framework, an Azure technology that can also be used for systems integration - not just off-line synchronisation. This should yield a more reliable synchronisation experience, improve scalability and customisation. It's worth a quick read. Oh, and did you know SharePoint WorkSpace is also a part of Office 2010 Mobile?
Superflows are here, with authoring in due course
Tony Soper, a Senior Technical Writer for Microsoft, has been revealing some interesting new content recently. Both System Center Configuration Manager and Forefront Threat Management Gateway (the successor to ISA) have, "Superflows", which are described as, "a new Content Type". After poking around for a bit I found this 8 minute podcast from 2008, where Tony interviews Doug Eby from the SCCM team about Superflows in more detail. They're, "an interactive flowchart". A Superflow can ask questions (about an environment, for instance) and a resulting flow will be targeted based on those answers. In the podcast they say this will be extensible in future and that there will be authoring support of some sort, so it will be interesting to see how this sits beside Visio, Visual Studio and InfoPath as a form/flow technology. I've asked Tony for more information about that on his blog and was told to watch that space for an eventual release date. I'd recommend this anyway, as his blog is a trove of good information, particularly around Virtualisation.
PDF iFilter performance benchmarks, in which FoxIt performs nearly 40x better than Adobe
I'm not usually keen on re-posting other blog entries here, but I think this is quite important. Jie Li from Microsoft has been releasing some good guidance on SharePoint 2010 recently. In his most recent posts he's been looking at FoxIt's PDF iFilter 2.0 and comparing performance against TET and Adobe. Both TET and FoxIt are optimised for multicore processors while Adobe will only use a single CPU. This has massive performance implications. In his tests a full crawl too 13 minutes with FoxIt versus 8 hours+ with Adobe. http://blogs.msdn.com/opal/archive/2010/02/09/pdf-ifilter-test-with-sharepoint-2010.aspx
SharePoint 2010 IT-Pro Ignite Training
I've been meaning to post this for a while. Sorry about the long delay. The holidays kind of took over for a bit and I lost track of this mostly-completed post in my drafts.
Anyway... In early December I attended a virtual SharePoint 2010 IT-Pro Ignite training that coincided with a physical session in Bangalore. For those who aren’t aware, Microsoft offered a limited number of these slots to select partners, with IT Pro and Developer tracks. This is approximately 40 hours of training provided by Microsoft free of charge (for the physical sessions, travel and accommodation need to be provided by the student). Note: none of this is under NDA. There were additional Virtual Ignite slots made available to a wider audience in early 2010, but I'm not certain what availability of those slots is looking like now. We were told in the training that all of the collateral (or similar) will be made public by RTM.
SharePoint Server 2007 cross-domain farm topologies
I’ve recently been involved in MOSS 2007 farm topology discussions with a client that was interested in using the Split back-to-back topology. After a lengthy troubleshooting and escalation process we’ve identified some problems with this TechNet extranet farm topology guidance in conjunction with Microsoft Tier 2 support. In short, the TechNet document identifies some supported topologies that span domains, but this incident has raised questions about:
- The acceptable placement of server roles in those topologies.
- Supported domain trust directions.
- Alternate Access Mappings requirements.
- Picking people from other domains.
This is an account of the relevant issues and the steps that we took to reach our conclusions.
Building a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment – Part V: Guest Build
In the first four parts of this series I covered the project objectives and the system design, then turned my attention to the Hyper-V host image build and automated deployment. In this post I describe a SharePoint 2007 virtual machine build.
Where’s the SharePoint 2010 build?
In short, we're working on it. I've produced a new SharePoint 2010 beta virtual machine for this environment but we're not yet ready to publish build guidance. Stay tuned. Additionally...
Can a hardened server play a SharePoint 2010 Silverlight Media Web Part?
The answer, obviously enough, is that it can if it has Silverlight installed. Read on if you're interested in how the web part will behave in its absence.
The definitive word on Hyper-V high-end graphics performance
- It's not an issue on processors with SLAT, but these are only just hitting the market in laptops in the near future
- It's not an issue with the SVGA driver
- I've asked if the SVGA driver might ever offer multi-monitor support. He's looking in to it. This might be a great compromise until processors with SLAT become ubiquitous
- This same problem occurs in all native Hypervisors
- Virtual PC and VMWare Workstation do not have the same problem but they are Type 2 hypervisors and do not offer the same performance as Hyper-V
So... there's still no conclusive solution but it's good to have the full context of the problem. For more background on why this matters for SharePoint see my previous post on the matter.
Building a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment – Part IV: Automated deployment
In the first three parts of this series I covered the project objectives and the system design, then turned my attention to the Hyper-V host image build. In this section I will look at automating deployment of that host operating system. This is lengthy, but there's a lot to cover.
Troubleshooting SharePoint 2010 and ULS log changes
SharePoint 2010 ULS logging adds a very useful new column called the Correlation ID. The ID tracks a request and greatly simplifies finding detailed error logging in SharePoint trace logs. Additionally, Mattias Karlson points out that there's a new CodePlex project called ULSViewer which parses SharePoint 2010 logs in a friendly view.
The correlation ID in a SharePoint 2010 error message:
The Trace logs in ULS Viewer, filtered by the Correlation ID:
NewSID myth implications for SharePoint development
It's now a week on from Mark Russinovich's NewSID retirement announcement and I've been watching the feedback since. To give a brief overview, it's long been a tenant of machine cloning processes that a new machine SID should be generated for each clone in order to prevent conflicts. Mark Russinovich wrote the original NewSID tool for Windows NT and as a Microsoft Technical Fellow today, he supposed that it might not be needed anymore and investigated the implications of retiring it. Obviously, if you haven't read it yet and you work with machine cloning, you should read the article, but if you haven't found the time to sift through the 168 comments (and counting), this summary might help clarify things:
DCOM IIS WAMREG error 10016 with SharePoint 2010 on Windows Server 2008 R2
Taking a quick break from the SharePoint development series (I hope to finish part IV tonight), Matt Groves has a fix for a slightly more perturbing version of the DCOM IIS WAMREG 10016 error with SharePoint 2010 on Windows Server 2008 R2. His fix works a treat, but I'd recommend granting rights to the WSS_WPG and WSS_ADMIN_WPG local groups in order to make this a permanent fix.
Building a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment – Part III: Host image build and performance benchmarks
Having agreed the project objectives and designed the system, I turned my attention to the Hyper-V host image build. This is a high-level build guide with start-up time and baseline memory consumption benchmarks at key milestones. These benchmark figures were taken from the Windows Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate build and are admittedly a bit imprecise. However, they do provide an overall indication of system performance as things were added to and removed from the installation. Although I do not have precise figures on RTM improvements, I spot-checked a few of these benchmarks when I rebuilt the system on RTM. Start-up times improved slightly at each milestone. In fact, the final benchmarks came in at 100MB less idle memory used in the RTM release.
