I still have yet to find the time to test this myself, but I’d be very keen to hear about your experiences – good or bad. Failing that, I hope to get back to this in the next couple of weeks.

“…an IIS 7.0 extension that meters the download speeds of media file types and data between a server and a client computer. The encoded bit rates of media file types such as Windows Media Video (WMV), MPEG-4 (MP4), and Adobe Flash Video, are automatically detected, and the rate at which those files are delivered to the client over HTTP are controlled according to the Bit Rate Throttling configuration.”

It basically saves you bandwidth by only transferring what you’ve watched plus a small, configurable buffer. Think about each user that starts watching a ten minute video but only watches one minute. In that time, they may have downloaded five minutes of content – quadrupling the bandwidth consumption unnecessarily. Bit Rate Throttling shares some user experience characteristics with Streaming Media, but it works on a normal web server over HTTP. It’s really quite a simple tool and I won’t devote space here to explaining it when the IIS.NET site already has some great content, including a brief introductory video. Definitely check it out.

So why am I writing about it?

• It’s cool! We wanted to turn it on to better manage bandwidth while delivering video with SharePoint 2010′s Silverlight Media Web Part.
• Unfortunately it didn’t work when we turned it on. In fact, it crashed our w3wp.exe for the web application where it was enabled.

At the time, I reported the issue on the SharePoint 2010 TechNet forums and IIS.NET, but didn’t get very far. We eventually decided to live with it, leaving BLOB Caching on, even if the bandwidth was left unoptimised.  To summarise the fault, when Bit Rate Throttling was enabled, my web application would load a page or two, then that application’s w3wp.exe would (apparently) leak memory until it crashed. Repeat. The issue and my troubleshooting is explained in more detail on those two threads. These are the key error messages:

Faulting application name: w3wp.exe, version: 7.5.7600.16385, time stamp: 0x4a5bd0eb
Faulting module name: bitratemodule.dll, version: 7.1.625.10, time stamp: 0x4aca8535
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0×0000000000007669
Faulting process id: 0×2140
Faulting application start time: 0x01cb2cd16410dafa
Faulting application path: c:\windows\system32\inetsrv\w3wp.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Program Files\IIS\Media\bitratemodule.dll
Report Id: e3004397-98c4-11df-91ae-00155d06ab22

Fault bucket , type 0
Event Name: APPCRASH
Response: Not available
Cab Id: 0

Problem signature:
P1: w3wp.exe
P2: 7.5.7600.16385
P3: 4a5bd0eb
P4: bitratemodule.dll
P5: 7.1.625.10
P6: 4aca8535
P7: c0000005
P8: 0000000000007669
P9:
P10:

Attached files:

These files may be available here:

Analysis symbol:
Rechecking for solution: 0
Report Id: e3004397-98c4-11df-91ae-00155d06ab22
Report Status: 0

Luckily, I noticed that Jack over at IIS.NET recently posted:

I believe we have identified the problem and have a fix for the issue.  The fix will be available as part of IIS Media Services 4.0 which will be released in the very near future.

Good news! I see that a release is now available for IIS Media Services 4.0 Beta (second down in the right-hand column on the Bit Rate Throttling site). Unfortunately I haven’t had a chance to test this yet and I’m not sure when I’ll get the time. For now, I’m posting this incomplete, as it would be great if many people tested this and the IIS team got as much feedback on this technology as possible while it’s in a Beta release. Obviously, I’d caution against installing either version in production for now. 3.0 doesn’t work and 4.0 is very new.

A few related notes:

• BLOB Caching is not a requirement for Bit Rate Throttling in general, but it is a requirement for Bit Rate Throttling SharePoint 2010 web applications. The Plan for caching and performance document notes, “Bit rate throttling will not work correctly if you do not first enable the BLOB cache and configure it to cache the files types that you want to throttle.”
• We didn’t look at Smooth Streaming for very long, because the Silverlight Media Web Part hasn’t been built to adapt content in that manner.

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.

On Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 the IIS Manager Feature can be added through Server Manager, even if the IIS Server Role is not installed.

Expand the Remote Server Administration Tools node and select the Web Server (IIS) Tools node.

Click Next and Install. Wait for the Add Features Wizard to complete and then download and install the SEO Toolkit. IIS Manager is available in the Administrative Tools menu and should look something like this when you click on your local machine’s connection in the left-hand pane.

The SEO Toolkit home page looks like this.

I shan’t go over everything here because there is an excellent three minute video on the SEO Toolkit home page (linked above), which details the basic functionality of the tool.

Analysing a SharePoint 2010 Publishing site

Click the first link on the SEO Toolkit landing page and Create a new analysis of your site.

The analysis takes you directly to the Site Analysis Report.

Clearly, the Violations are of interest. What sort of things do they tell us? I’ll look at the errors first.

Drilling in to The title is missing, we find that the five pages are links to authenticated content on the out of the box Publishing site template’s home page, which are 401 unauthenticated errors in this case, since this is an anonymous access zone.

The Publishing Portal home page, which includes links to authenticated content

The individual violations

So these errors are unsurprising, now that we know what they are. If this were real content, ideally we would modify it to remove these links to authenticated pages.

So what about that Canonical Formats message?

This violation tells us that a single object can be accessed using two different links. In this case we have two sets of duplicated images. The first two .png files are transparent spacers and the second two are orange.

That’s precisely the sort of thing we would hope to find out about and correct. So what about “The page contains broken hyperlinks”?

Again, all of these links are broken because they point to authenticated content. It’s the same story for “The URL for the hyperlink is broken”, except for the five .gif files that appear there.

In this case the images are actually missing. Again, this is exactly the sort of thing we want to know.

Unsurprisingly all of these errors point out fundamental problems in the site which content owners would want to correct even if they were unconcerned with page rank. The warnings, which I skipped over earlier, provide supplementary insight in to changes that can improve page rank in an otherwise functionally-correct website. Rather than discussing those individually, I’ll just include a screen shot of the Violations tab in the bottom half of the details pane. This tab summarises all of the violations on a selected page, which will improve the editor’s experience when making these changes.

What’s particularly useful about this view is that it is now enumerating each page that violates the specified rule in the top pane, but the Violations tab enumerates all of the violations for the selected object in the top pane (the default home page in this instance).

Some of the other dashboards reveal slow-performing pages, most linked pages, redirects, pages blocked by robots.txt, a status code summary, a list of external links and more. It’s a very useful set of tools. If this has been at all interesting, it’s definitely worth reviewing the video and other resources up at IIS.NET.

Server tools

Everything that I’ve discussed so far can be run against any site that the SEO Toolkit user can browse to. Server access is completely unnecessary. However, there are two added tools that have to be run on the server. This should not be hugely problematic for the content owner, as these tools need to be updated relatively infrequently once they’ve been set up initially.

Creating a Sitemap

Hopping on to my server, I click the Create a new sitemap link and specify the Sitemap file name.

This is my favourite bit. When the Add URLs dialogue first launches, it displays the IIS site files in inetpub.

Not very useful for a SharePoint site, is it? But if we Run new Site Analysis from the URL structure drop-down…

The New Analysis box pops up.

After about 40 seconds of analysis (in my environment) we get the SharePoint site map!

At the bottom of the dialogue the Change Frequency tells search engines how often pages are likely to change. The priority details how important we consider our site to be relative to other URLs on our site (I must confess I don’t fully understand how this works, but I’m not responsible for content. ). You can also tell Search Engines how to identify the Last Modified Date. More information on all of this can be found on TechNet.

One last thing before moving on. We need to add the Sitemap to our robots.txt file. There’s a handy link in the Actions pane to do so.

Also note, in the Related Features on the Actions pane, there’s a link to Robots Exclusion, which brings us to the final tool.

Robots.txt file management

If we click the Robots Exclusion link or the View existing rules link from the SEO Toolkit landing page, we can see that our sitemap.xml file is being referenced, as added above.

This is confirmed if I click the Open Robots.txt link in the Actions pane.

If we click Add Disallow Rules or Add Allow Rules we get a similar dialogue, and in both cases we will want to specify our previous Site Analysis for the URL structure.

Now if I want to exclude all of the content that I don’t want to index I can just tick the appropriate boxes from my last analysis (note that this looks different than the selectable options from the Sitemap dialogue).

Voila! Paths are excluded and the robots.txt file is updated.

One thing to note is that the robots.txt file did not appear for me during testing until after I stopped and started the website in IIS. This is only an issue when it’s created for the first time, but worth noting. I believe this is also true for the sitemap.xml. file.

So… these are good tools! Once configured, the robots.txt shouldn’t need to be updated often and the web managers should become aware of any problems soon after they occur through their own use of the reporting tool. In short, these tools devolve a great deal of control and insight and there seems to be very little reason not to use them.

We have also experimented with generating the server side outputs using PowerShell, which a colleague of mine will detail soon and I will post here when ready. If there is any reluctance to use this IIS.NET extension in production infrastructure, a combination of PowerShell for file generation/management and the SEO Toolkit for reporting may be a sensible solution.

• SharePoint automatically (temporarily) redirects from the root of a path to the default page for that path.
• Using the IIS URL Rewrite tool to rewrite SharePoint URLs is not supported.
• Using the IIS URL Rewrite tool to redirect SharePoint URLs is supported. In this scenario you write regular expressions that will capture the default 302 redirections and override them with 301s.
• Using the URL Rewrite tool to redirect your way out of the default page redirection (in order to render pages at the root) will not work.

I’ve seen these second and third points discussed before, but I decided to delve in to the final scenario, because I didn’t understand why this wouldn’t work at a glance, nobody seemed to be talking about it and it didn’t seem to be unsupported. In this case I inverted Jie Li’s approach from the third scenario. I configured the Rewrite module to permanently redirect (301) from */Pages/default.aspx to the root of the path.

I cracked open Fiddler and browsed to the root of my test site, http://published/. The page never loaded and Fiddler clearly explains why:

I’d effectively created an endless loop. SharePoint temporarily redirects to the default page and the default page is permanently redirected back to the root by IIS (which is thankfully smart enough to kill the loop after a few attempts). So this will never work. This is one aspect of SEO where we will struggle to optimise SharePoint by removing the extra depth of the path and the file name, but there are enough other options available to optimise ranking that we won’t be losing any sleep over this behaviour.

Application Creation/Extension

Set up a new site/application in IIS or configure a new zone for an existing application

Remove SharePoint from IIS Web Site/Delete Web Application

The opposite of above

Define Managed Paths

Add/Delete explicit paths. Define Wildcards.

New Site Collections can only be created at available unused explicitly defined paths, or beneath wildcards. If new Site Collection creation will require approval  by Central Administrators, explicit paths will need to be created for new Site Collections. If Site Collection creation is delegated, wildcards will need to be provided in order for Site Collection creators to have a location to create their new sites

General Settings

Default Time Zone

Select a default time zone

Default Quota template

Select a default storage quota template for new site collection creation. See part II of this series for more information on storage quota template creation. Note: storage templates can still be specified during Site Collection creation – this merely sets the default quota template

Person Name Smart Tag and Presence Settings

Enable: yes/no

Maximum Upload Size

Define the maximum upload size in megabytes, up to two gigabytes

Alerts

Enable/disable alerts for the web application. Specify a maximum number of alerts per/user, if desired

RSS Settings

Enabled/disable RSS feeds for the web application

Blog API Settings

Turns On/Off the API, which allows blog posts from client tools, like Word 2007. Also configure acceptance of user name and password from the API

Web Page Security Validation

Turns validation on/off and sets validation expiration in minutes, or to, “never”. Note: this is not the same as the SSP “Session State”, which is used in some MOSS applications, and is reviewed in more detail in part II of this series

Send User Name and Password in E-Mail

Specifies whether to send users their user name and password by e-mail. This may be convenient, but may breach security policy

Backward-Compatible Event Handlers

Turns on/off backward-compatible event handlers, which will only be applicable to WSS 2/SPS 2003 event handlers in the transition period following an upgrade

Change Log

Specifies change log event retention in days

Recycle Bin

• Turns the recycle bin on/off for all sites within a web application
• Specifies first-stage deleted item retention in days
• Specifies the second stage recycle bin at 1-500% of storage quota

Note: site collections are created with a storage quota template, which specifies maximum storage available, so site second stage recycle bin retention is controlled by a combination of the storage quota applied to the site collection and the percentage of live site storage allocated to the secondary recycle bin

Manage Content Databases

Add new content databases to an application. Take content databases on/off-line (which controls new site creation within the databases, rather than taking the database offline as one would do in SQL server). It is sometimes preferable to create new site collections in their own (or new) content databases. This on/off-line functionality can aid that process, although there are better ways to manage this from the command line

Web Application Features

Activate/Deactivate features scoped at the web application level. Features can also be scoped at the farm, site collection or site level

Blocked File Types

Manage blocked file extensions per application

Information Management Policy Usage Reports

Moss-only.

• Enable/Disable Information Management Policy Usage reporting for the web application
• Schedule recurrence
• Specify report location
• Specify default or custom report template

Alternate Access Mappings

Assign up to five distinct zones, each consisting of one or more “internal URLs” per-Load Balanced, or “Public URL”. The public URL is the address which links on pages and in address bars are rendered in. Note: there can also be multiple host-named site collections created within the default zone (with STSADM only) and the default zone must be the most secure, as users who cannot be associated with a zone are automatically authenticated with Default zone policies

Application Security

Security for Web Part Pages

Allow/prevent users to create connections between web parts. Allow/prevent users to access the online web part gallery

Self-Service Site Management

Enable/Disable self-service site creation at the top-level web site. Specify requirement for secondary contact

User Permissions

Specifies which list, site and personal permission settings are available for selection within a web application. This is not an assignment of permissions to users or group, but management of the availability of permission settings to the web application

Web Application Policy

Assign Full Control, Full Read, Deny Write or Deny All permissions, per zone, to users or groups. This can be particularly useful if exposing read-only content to an extranet site, for instance

Authentication Providers

• Specify Authentication providers
  • Basic Authentication
  • Integrated Windows Authentication (NTLM or Kerberos)
  • Forms Based Authentication (FBA)
    • LDAP
    • ADAM
    • SQL Membership Provider
    • Any other ASP.NET 2.0 Authentication Providers
    • Note: no FBA authentication providers are provided with WSS out of the box. These need to be sourced/written independently
  • Web Single Sign-On (SSO)
    • MOSS-only
• Enable/Disable anonymous access (this setting allows site administrators to allow anonymous access, it does not automatically enable it where authorisation has already been configured). Disabling anonymous access removes this option
• Enable/Disable client integration features (FBA does not support client integration features until WSS v3/MOSS 2007 SP2, so this setting can be used to prevent unexpected behaviour in earlier versions)

Workflow Settings

Enable/disable user-defined workflows. Manage Workflow task notifications for internal and external users

Site Use Confirmation and Deletion

Enable e-mail notifications to owners of disused site collections or set automatic deletion after a number of unanswered confirmations

Document Conversions

MOSS-only.

• Enable document conversions for a web application
• Specify a document conversion load balancer
• Schedule conversion timer jobs
• Manage availability to document libraries, time-out, retry and file size settings for installed converters, including the following by default:
  • InfoPath to Web Page
  • Word to Web Page
  • Word with Macros to Web Page
  • XML to Web Page