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1/25/2010Register today to download SharePoint 2010 Beta. Find out how this integrated suite of server capabilities can help your organization by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight.
Please review the preliminary system requirements to prepare for the beta release. For a comprehensive list of readiness resources and the right steps to take today, check out the SharePoint 2010 Beta Resource Center.
Download SharePoint 2010 Beta
References
11/22/2009Today, Microsoft announces an exciting new addition to the upcoming Microsoft Office 2010 – the Outlook Social Connector. The Outlook Social Connector is designed to seamlessly bring communications history as well as business and social networking feeds into your Outlook experience.
LinkedIn will be the first networking site to support the Outlook Social Connector. The LinkedIn functionality will be available in early 2010. Our big belief is that you can be much more effective if you have your professional network close at hand, and you can leverage your online identity in the work you do on a daily basis. The Outlook Social Connector will bring your LinkedIn Professional Network to where you work – right within your e-mail inbox.
Here are three key benefits you get from this integration:
1. Keep up with LinkedIn connections right from your e-mail inbox
One of the great things about LinkedIn is being able to learn what your professional connections are working on and thinking about. Just glance at the Network Updates on your LinkedIn homepage and you’ll be able to learn what articles & books your connections are reading, what conferences they are attending, and what questions they are asking and answering on LinkedIn. Many use this information to keep current with their industry and profession, as well as to learn new things and expand their horizons.
The Outlooks Social Connector makes this even easier – by automatically showing the latest activity (i.e. Network Updates) from any LinkedIn connection that sends you an e-mail. So now you can get the latest information from your LinkedIn network even without having to leave your inbox.
What’s more, for any connection with a public LinkedIn profile photo, you’ll even get to see their picture as you communicate.
2. E-mail your LinkedIn connections directly from Outlook
Know that perfect LinkedIn connection to help you with a business task or question but don’t remember their current email address? No longer do you have to go to the LinkedIn website to find their contact information before sending them a message, as your LinkedIn network is now available right within your inbox. Just start typing the name of a LinkedIn connection in the “To:” field of an Outlook message and the connections’ e-mail address from LinkedIn will automatically appear as if they are an existing Outlook contact. In fact, the Outlook Social Connector will create an Outlook Contacts folder for all of your LinkedIn connections and bring down their contact information, professional details, and picture from LinkedIn into Outlook.
3. Keep building your professional network from Outlook
Working with someone new but haven’t had a chance to connect with them on LinkedIn? By bringing professional networking to where you work, the Outlook Social Connector again makes it easy. Just click a button next to any e-mail you receive and instantly send an invitation to connect to the e-mail’s sender. It’s that easy.
We hope that these functions start bringing some of the key elements of your LinkedIn professional network to where you work – your Outlook e-mail inbox, sometime early next year. But these are certainly just the first steps. Let us know what else you’d like to see by leaving a comment below
The beta versions of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 are now available, Microsoft announced Wednesday at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC).
The 2010 versions of Visio, Project, and Office Web Apps for business customers are also now live at www.microsoft.com/2010. Windows mobile clients are also available in beta via the Windows Marketplace.
The products are due to ship next year.
Kurt DelBene, Microsoft senior vice president, discussed the company's plans for a "unified business platform" connecting productivity experiences on multiple devices on-site or as online services. He said the company already had 1 million paying users of its business productivity online service (BPOS), the Microsoft-hosted versions of Exchange and SharePoint.
One new feature in Office 2010 is the Outlook Social Connector, which brings communications history, business collaboration, and social network feeds into Outlook, with support for Windows Live and SharePoint Server.
Microsoft also released the Outlook Social Connector SDK so developers can build connectors to third-party social networks. LinkedIn will be the first social network to participate.
"Our big belief is that you can be much more effective if you have your professional network close at hand, and you can leverage your online identity in the work you do on a daily basis," Elliot Shmukler, director of product management for LinkedIn, wrote in a blog post. "The Outlook Social Connector will bring your LinkedIn Professional Network to where you work – right within your e-mail inbox."
DelBene said there is now much tighter integration between SharePoint 2010 and Visual Studio 2010, so developers can publish their projects much easier.
Derek Burney, general manager of SharePoint, showed how Visual Studio can now directly create a SharePoint package, and import a "SharePoint solution package," a file with all the basic outlines of a SharePoint site. He also showed how SharePoint can now be part of the managed code selection, and how Sharepoint sites can now be created on client OSes (Vista and Windows 7) in addition to on the server.
Burney also demoed the integration with VS21010, producing Silverlight applications that run on top of SharePoint; and connecting information from SQL Azure to Sharepoint and then into Excel.
11/5/2009
Join us online for free
SharePoint 2010 Virtual Conference & Expo
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Yes, we're coming to a desktop near you! We've heard from you that it's hard to get out of the office these days and training dollars are limited, so we're bringing you a FREE virtual event on one of the most anticipated software releases - SharePoint 2010 - live from the convenience of your office.
We're kicking off the SharePoint Live conference with a keynote address by Arpan Shah, Director, SharePoint Product Management team, Microsoft. Then, we're straight into sessions on:
- The SharePoint 2010 Roadmap
- Your first look at the new SharePoint tools
- Integrating Silverlight with SharePoint 2010
This FREE event requires no travel, no conference fees and no time away from work. You and your team can listen to the industry's most respected speakers on topics you must know, and solutions that make it all happen. You can also network directly one-on-one through the Virtual Expo Hall.
SharePoint 2010 Live's revolutionary Virtual Expo Hall gives you the full-fidelity experience of a real conference, without all the travel. Interact directly with real people in each virtual expo booth. Learn about their products, ask questions, and get the answers you need. Along with our live presentations, our Virtual Expo hall puts the "Live" in SharePoint 2010 Live.
Learn about the improvements Microsoft has made to the SharePoint platform and how the new features can be implemented to add value to your organization. This virtual conference will feature tracks delivered by members of Microsoft's SharePoint product team, well known instructors from Critical Path Training and trusted partners from the SharePoint industry.
http://www.sharepointvcx.com/ 11/4/2009Join Google and DLT for a webinar on Wednesday, November 12 at 2:00pm ET to learn how the Google Search Appliance can index and search your SharePoint content, improving search ability and efficiency across your organization. The Google Search Appliance provides an easy way to find documents in SharePoint, without any additional hardware, software or connectors.
Register here: www.dlt.com/google-sharepoint
Date: November 12, 2009
Time: 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm, ET
Information overload is a growing problem for many organizations. In a recent survey, 58% of US government workers said they spend nearly half their average workday filing, deleting or sorting paper or digital information. (source: Government Technology, 2/23/2009)
The Google Search Appliance offers simple, high-value search solutions to help employees find the information they need, while letting your organization maximize its existing technology investments. A single Google Search Appliance can index millions of documents from a wide-range of existing sources, including Microsoft SharePoint and other document management systems. Providing a single search box to access your organization's content helps users navigate information that might otherwise be difficult -- and time-consuming -- to find. Helping your employees find the information they need as easily as searching the internet can be a real productivity boost.
Don't miss this unique opportunity to be among the first to experience next-generation search!
10/20/2009All of our free 2010 videos are listed here. Free videos are rotated weekly.
9/10/2009
Developing SharePoint Applications
Guidance for building collaborative applications that extend your LOB systems
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patterns & practices Developer Center
August 2009
Summary
The Developing SharePoint Applications guidance helps architects and developers design and build applications that are both flexible and scaleable. It shows developers how to provide IT professionals with the information they need to maintain those applications and diagnose problems when they arise. The two reference implementations illustrate how to solve many of the common challenges developers encounter. One reference implementation addresses basic issues such as creating lists and content types. The other addresses more advanced problems such as how to integrate line of business services, how to create collaboration sites programmatically, and how to customize aspects of publishing and navigation. A library of reusable components helps you adopt techniques used in the reference implementations. The guidance discusses approaches for testing SharePoint applications, such as how to create unit tests, and documents experiences with stress and scale testing one of the reference implementations.
Visit Developing SharePoint Applications for more information. 8/27/2009There are many factors involved in the
SharePoint crawling process that can impact indexing performance. There are also some steps you can take to improve that. Here are the common causes and their resolution:
- Indexing Performace is set at reduced - common mistake on the configuration screen for the index service. See Central Administration > Operations > Services on Server > Office SharePoint Server Search Service Settings and set to Maximum.
- Number of Connections - by default the indexer will run a limited number of simultaneous threads (6 usually) per host. This can be increased manually by adding specific Crawler Impact Rules for each host. You can really improve speed by setting a large file server up to 64 connections. This number is just a suggestion btw to SharePoint, it also looks at other factors like the number of processors (8 * #procs). And also watch your network for bottlenecks and those pesky RPC errors you may get in your logs (dial it back of you see those)
- Crawled systems are slow or hosted on remote networks. - not a lot to be done here, except by moving those files closer.
- Overlapping Crawls - SharePoint gives priority to the first running crawl so that if you already are indexing one system it will hold up the indexing of a second and increase crawl times.
- Solution: Schedule your crawl times so there is no overlap. Full crawls will take the longest so run those exclusively.
- IFilter Issues - the Adobe PDF IFilter can only filter one file at a time and that will slow crawls down, and has a high reject rate for new PDFs
- Solution: Use a retail PDF filter from pdflib.com or Foxit
- Not enought Memory Allocated to Filter Process - an aspect of the crawling process is then the filtering deamons use up to much memory (mssdmn.exe) they get automatically terminated and restarted. There is of course a windup time when this happend and can slow down your crawling. The current default setting is pretty low (around 100M) so is easy to trip when filter large files. You can and should increase the memory allocation by adjusting the following registry keys
- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\Search\Global\Gathering Manager: set DedicatedFilterProcessMemoryQuota = 200000000 Decimal
- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\Search\Global\Gathering Manager: set FilterProcessMemoryQuota = 200000000 Decimal
- Bad File Retries - there is a setting in the registry that controls the number of times a file is retried on error. This will severly slow down incremental crawls as the default is 100. This retry count can be adjust by this key:
- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\Search\Global\Gathering Manager: set DeleteOnErrorInterval = 4 Decimal
- General Architecture Issues - Ensure that you have at least 2 Gig of free memory available before your crawl even starts and that you have at least 2 real processors available.
- Disk Health - the nature of the indexing process causes extensive fragmentation of the file system for both the index server and the database server. Schedule defrags routinely and after all full crawls. Ensure you have enough diskspace always.
- Run 64 bit OS - school is still out on this one, i personally haven't seen much difference as long as there is enough memory and the same processor types, but MS recommends this for large deployments.
- Proper SQL Server configuration (new) - For large (>5 Million) item indexing you will need to plan ahead for the correct SQL Server configuration in order to scale to these numbers. There is one table in particular that grows at 40x the number of items and can severely hinder peformance if you do not treat your SQL Environment like a very large data wharehouse. Here are my recommendations based on experience:
1. Raid 10 Direct Attached Storage Only – minimum 4 arrays – 16 disks
2. Multiple File Groups- pre-allocate all database files and partition on dedicated separate arrays and assign 1-1 for:
a. Indexes for SharedServices1_search db
b. Temp and system databases/tables
c. transaction log for SharedServices1_search db
d. Table content for SharedServices1_search
i. For every 5 million items have additional file from dedicated drive in dedicated file group. Content and load is spread across and will improve performance
3. When intially crawling, be sure to pause your crawls every day or so and rebuild/reorg the indexes on the SharedSevice1_search_db database (especially the indexes on MSSDocProps table)
NOTE: It is a good idea to open up perfmon and look at the gatherer stats while indexing. There is a statistic called Performance Level and this reflects the actual level that the indexer is running at where 5 is max and 3 is reduced. Even if you set everything to max the indexer may decide to run at reduced anyways based an some unknown factors.
This is a good read too: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262574.aspx (Estimate performance and capacity requirements for search environments)
Addendum (7/28/2009)
Here is another good read from MS (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc850696.aspx (Best practices for Search in Office SharePoint Server)
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