July 21st, 2011
by Tristan Watkins
Like a lot of people in the Microsoft partner community, I’ve been catching up with Lync this year and digging in to the finer details with a few of my colleagues. One thing we wanted to understand better was the routing between two users over a LAN, a private WAN, or some other connection where all the necessary network ports would be open. Would these clients communicate peer-to-peer? If so, does it always behave the same way, how is it accomplished and what might go wrong?
First, consider an organisation with offices across multiple floors or buildings. Lync may be a very effective means of connecting these employees despite their relatively close proximity. If this traffic can route locally it can be a big plus – especially if there’s lots of media traffic. Second, consider an organisation with multiple branches. They invested in private WAN links to connect these branches and don’t necessarily want to route Lync traffic over their internet connections if they can avoid it. For some organisations these will be non-issues, since Lync traffic is optimised for the WAN, but for other organisations this may be important – particularly if they’re in a part of the world where internet connections are slow or expensive (or both). So we went about testing this with the Lync 2010 client and Office 365 users (the behaviour is the same with Microsoft Online IDs or federated users).
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Client applications, Networking, Office 365 Grid, Unified Communications | 
1 Comment »
December 23rd, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
When I’m not wearing my SharePoint hat, I try to find the time to make electronic music. Over the last few years I’ve invested a great deal of time and effort moving from a PC-based Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) to an entirely outboard setup, with a large mixing console and various synths, drum machines, sequencers, samplers and dynamics processors. All of this suits me greatly, as it means I’m doing one less thing in front of the computer screen.
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Client applications, Mobile | 5 Comments »
December 6th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
I’ve recently been involved in a somewhat unusual client engagement, in that I was designing and delivering the infrastructure without knowing the shape of the IA or solution architecture. Obviously, this imposed some restrictions on what we could define, but it also meant that I had to handle some aspects of the engagement that would normally be taken care of by other colleagues. To that end, I suppose some of these considerations aren’t purely infrastructure-specific, but they could be in an engagement like this one and they’re things that infrastructure people should understand. Hopefully it’ll be useful for solutions people as well.
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Client applications, Consultancy and Design, Performance, Security, SharePoint | No Comments »
November 4th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
I’m presently running some quite methodical SharePoint 2010 development environment performance tests, as we’re finding that the Dell XPS M1330 we’ve been using for the last few years doesn’t really cut it in some scenarios. This has been an on-going issue for some time where I work, but it’s only recently been prioritised at the top of my workload. That it is now my top priority should give some indication how important these issues are for any company that spends significant time customising SharePoint. I’ll be discussing this wider project in more detail once I’ve finished my testing in the next couple of weeks, but for now I wanted to share a provisional finding about connecting Web Applications to the User Profile Service Application.
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Client applications, Performance, SharePoint | 4 Comments »
September 30th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
Being the good SharePoint advocate that I am, I recently tried out the Office Web Apps in SkyDrive (Windows Live) for collaboration with my wife (primarily expenses spread sheets, etc). I’ve always found Google Docs to be lacking in many ways and I wanted to get more experience with the Office Web Apps since I typically use the full Office 2010 client at work. Despite a few annoyances, we were getting on reasonably well, especially since it’s free. I needed to crack a document open in the full version of Excel 2010 to format in anger once, but this is an acceptable compromise for a free, web-based document store.
Fast-forward to the other day and my wife decided to use the Office Web Apps to draft a document rather than using Microsoft Works or Open Office (the other options on her home laptop). Despite some slow responses periodically, all seemed to work well, or so she thought until she got in to work the next day and opened up a blank document.
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Client applications, SharePoint | No Comments »
September 15th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
A few months ago we launched a new website on SharePoint 2010. One of my main foci on the project was performance and caching is one of the most effective ways to achieve that for a WCM solution. We enabled Output, Object and BLOB caching, configured exclusions as necessary and were quite pleased with the results, especially since issues with BLOB Caching in 2007 have been resolved in 2010.
A few weeks later I was demonstrating these approaches when it was pointed out that we were getting lots of 304 responses. They occurred with each request for a previously-downloaded BLOB Cached asset (more detail added below). Basically, I overlooked the max-age attribute in the BLOB Cache web.config settings. By default, this attribute isn’t present in the web.config file and I simply missed it. Adding this attribute eliminated the 304 results and the caching configuration was complete. Or so we thought.
Edit to provide more detail on the 304 status and Max-Age
A 304 response is a File Not Modified status (not an error), in this case indicating that the browser is making (potentially) surplus checks for each previously-downloaded BLOB Cached file. The max-age attribute gives the file a lifetime in the client’s browser cache in order to reduce these update checks. To be clear, the BLOB Cache stores large objects on web servers to reduce database traffic, but those objects can be served with a max-age attribute that will determine the object’s lifetime in the client’s browser cache. A max-age value of “14400″ means that browsers will cache the file for four hours before checking for an update. This means that updates to BLOB Cached content may become stale if this value is set too high. A common value would be “86400″ (24 hours) but we were satisfied with the balance at four hours. In our case, making this update has not yielded a perceptible increase in performance with the current levels of traffic, but it’s the sort of thing you want to set appropriately in order to optimise things and to allow the environment to scale.
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Client applications, Performance, SharePoint | 1 Comment »
July 7th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
The IIS.NET Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit provides a powerful analysis tool that can generate reports for web editors and can automatically generate sitemaps and robots.txt files as well. These reports not only provide insight in to page rank improvements but also help content editors identify missing/duplicate content and find broken links. This post provides an overview of how the tools can be used by content editors or web managers who do not have access to the server infrastructure and what you can expect to see when running an SEO Analysis against an out of the box SharePoint 2010 Publishing site. I will also review the server tools that generate sitemaps and robots.txt files.
Installing the SEO Toolkit
Although Remote Server Administration Tools can be installed on Windows Vista and Windows 7, I have produced the directions below on my Windows Server 2008 R2 desktop. The instructions should be fundamentally the same for any OS once IIS Manager is available locally, however it is installed. To be crystal clear, the SEO Toolkit can be used by anyone with Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2. It is not a requirement to have access to the web server and it is not necessary to install IIS locally.
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Client applications, Performance, SharePoint | 4 Comments »
March 8th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
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?
Client applications, Mobile, SharePoint | No Comments »
December 1st, 2009
by Tristan Watkins
In the first five parts of this series I covered the project objectives and the system design, then turned my attention to the Hyper-V host image build, automated deployment and the guest virtual machine build. In this post I review some of the questions and issues we’ve encountered after a few months of working this way and some overall reflections on the approach. read more »
Client applications, Consultancy and Design, Networking, Performance, SharePoint, Virtualisation, Windows | 1 Comment »
November 25th, 2009
by Tristan Watkins
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.
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Client applications, SharePoint, Virtualisation, Windows | 6 Comments »
