SharePoint Backup Demystified
On April 3rd I attended the SharePoint Day with the Experts in Amstelveen, hosted by Quest Software and Microsoft. There were some great sessions by Joel Oleson, Daniel McPherson, Robin Meure and Mike Watson.
Mike Watson did a very interesting session on SharePoint backup strategies, Backup Demystified:
Does SharePoint backup and restore mystify you? Does your current backup solution seem inadequate? Want to learn how to put it all together and build the perfect solution but don’t know where to begin? In this session, Mike Watson, former architect for Microsoft Online, will help you put backup/restore in perspective. Mike will give you the information you need to understand your options and formulate the perfect backup and recovery strategy.
Download Mike’s presentation on his blog The SharePoint Mad Scientist.
‘Read-Only’ when opening documents in Office 2003 from SharePoint 2007
Via Andy Burns I came across a solution for a very annoying issue in SharePoint 2007 when using an Office 2003 client: When a user wants to edit an Office document directly from the document library in SharePoint 2007 and Office 2003 is installed on the client, they need to open the context menu and select “Edit in …”. If they just click on the name in view instead, the document is opened as Read-Only.If the user then wants to save his edits and presses save, the “Save as” dialog is presented. And if “Require checkout” is enabled the uses has to save the document with a new name because overwriting the old version isn’t allowed.
Ton Stegeman came up with a solution for this last year by creating a custom document library schema that has two extra view fields:
These fields, when clicked make the Office applications behave just like when users click the link “Edit in Microsoft Word” for a Word document. After you installed the template and you open a Word document in Word 2003, Words asks if you want to check-out the document (if this is enabled, otherwise it just opens the document in edit mode).
Download Ton’s solution from CodePlex.
SharePoint and Office Client integration
A question that I get asked a lot is which version of the Microsoft Office client offers the best integration with SharePoint 2007. Already in April 2007 Microsoft published a whitepaper that describes how different versions of Office programs work together with the 2003 and 2007 versions of SharePoint technologies: Microsoft Office Programs and SharePoint Products and Technologies Integration – Fair, Good, Better, Best.
Although an overview of the integration features of Microsoft Office 2000 versus Microsoft Office XP with Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is provided, the paper’s focus is on the integration features of the Office 2003 Editions versions the 2007 Office Suites with the 2007 SharePoint Products and Technologies.
The increasing levels of functional capabilities have been deemed “fair” for Office 2000, “good” for Office XP, “better” for the Office 2003 Editions, and “best” for the 2007 Office Suites in terms of how they work together with SharePoint.
A detailed comparison of how the Office 2003 Editions versus the 2007 Office Suites, namely, Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007 and Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007, work with Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 will be provided.
The paper concludes that in order to realize the best user experience with Office and SharePoint integration features, the client programs must be upgraded to a 2007 Microsoft Office Suite, namely, Office Professional Plus 2007 or Office Enterprise 2007 and the server technologies must be upgraded to either Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or Office SharePoint Server 2007.
SharePoint content migration solutions
For a project I’m working on, I’m looking for a solution to migrate content from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2007. The complexity of the migration is caused by a corrupted content database and instable SharePoint installation in the source farm. Furthermore audit trails, security, metadata etc. need to be preserved.
Installing stuff on the source farm is out of the question, as are all sort of standard scenario’s supported out of the box (such as working with content migration packages). We’ll probably have to turn a 3rd party solution, I’ve listed some of the solutions I found below:
- The Migration Manager for SharePoint by Quest Software doesn’t seem to be the right solution for the project since it requires installing Migration Manager for SharePoint locally on the front-end servers in each SharePoint 2007 server farm involved;
- The SharePoint Site Migration Manager by Metalogix doesn’t require an installation on the source farm unless you have some specific requirements for your migration. Only if your situation requires the following features you need to install a service on the source farm: Browsing site collections, creating site collections, copying site collections, copying MySites, migrating all user information from MOSS 2007 to MOSS 2007, copying alerts and preserving metadata on folders (e.g., Modified By). Furthermore there’s an interesting whitepaper on the Metalogix website describing several migration scenario’s.
- AvePoint’s DocAve Content Manager for SharePoint has the same disadvantage as the Quest solution: It requires installation on all web front-ends in both the target and the source farm.
- Unfortunately I wasn’t able yet do determine whether the Tzunami Deployer for SharePoint 2007 Migration requires an installation on the source and/or target farm, although the FAQ-section on their website seems to say it does: “Tzunami Deployer requires a Windows Service component to be installed on the SharePoint server.” It’s unclear which one “the” server is…
Case: SharePoint Enterprise Search at Twynstra Gudde
A great case showing the potential of SharePoint as an enterprise search solution is Abel at Twynstra Gudde, a Dutch business consulting firm. With their search engine called Abel all TG’s professionals can search through relevant company sources: Colleagues (in Peoplesoft), projects & contracts (in CODA), opportunities, CRM, document management (in Open Text DocsOpen) and collaboration or team sites.
Because the it’s a really successful implementation of SharePoint, Tam Tam – my former employer – won the Microsoft Search Partner of 2008 award for this project.
There are some more screenshots at Paul van Brenk’s blog.
Case: Business School Netherlands
Filed under: Case studies, SharePoint, Web Content Management |
Leave a Comment Another nice website using SharePoint for web content management is Business School Netherlands:
Great resource: SharePointReviews.com
SharePointReviews.com is a great resource for all sorts of SharePoint products:
SharePointReviews.com is an independent product directory that provides SharePoint power users, developers and administrators with objective reviews and opinions on SharePoint Web parts, applications and development platforms. With searchable product listings and ratings, it will help you find the most suitable product within the shortest time. You can browse by categories, vendors, platforms and other parameters.
Site collections vs sub sites
Filed under: Enterprise Content Management, Governance, SharePoint |
Leave a Comment Last week I blogged about site collection sizing. I found some additional an valuable resources to help decide whether to use a site collection or a sub site and in what combination. Jeff has a useful list of questions to help you:
Yes answers imply you should create a new site collection, No answers imply you should use an existing site collection:
Does this site request…
…potentially contain more than 5 GB of data (5 GB is my default site quota size)?
…potentially require more than 20 SharePoint security groups (or contain > 200 unique users or AD groups).
…have an owner who is capable of becoming a site administrator but does not already own other sites?
…exist as part of a business structure that might get re-organized in the forseeable future?
…require custom workflows, web parts, content types, list or site definitions, or other deployed features that are not part of your standard site package? (exclude SharePoint Designer workflows since they are no-code)
…represent a function that crosses organization boundaries?
…not logically fit into an existing site collection?
Furthermore I came across a great presentation on this topic by MVP’s Gary Lapointe and Jason Medero from their session at the SharePoint Best Practices conference in San Diego.
This session will cover the pros and cons of using site collections and the best practices that affect the decisions to use them. We will look at the various ways in which a logical, hierarchical, taxonomy can be met using site collections and how to keep various assets synchronized between related site collections. Also, because sometimes even the best laid plans can’t account for the unforeseen we will delve into the various approaches available to change the site collection architecture post implementation (how and why you might need to convert sub-sites to site collections and site collections to sub-sites).
Download the slides of their presentation Sub-site or Site Collection?.
Case: Dutch Radiocommunications Agency
Filed under: Case studies, SharePoint, Web Content Management |
Leave a Comment Often I’m asked for all kinds of SharePoint cases. A great resource for SharePoint web content management cases is Public Web Sites hosted on SharePoint by Ian Morrish. Also check out this selection of Ian’s list by Joel Oleson.
Inspired by Ian and Joel I’m starting a collection of cases as well. The first one is the public website of the Dutch Radiocommunications Agency.
SharePoint branding components
Earlier this week someone asked me to explain the different components involved in branding or customizing the user interface in SharePoint. While searching for some explanatory diagrams I came across a presentation on the website of the Minnesota SharePoint User Group by Lori Neff on Branding SharePoint 2007.
Furthermore I remembered a great article by Heather Solomon that does a great job explaining SharePoint 2007 design component relationships:
One of the MOSS 2007 buzzwords is master pages. But what all does that entail? How does the master page work with the content in the site and how do we do things like add web part zones and field controls? To aid and benefit SharePoint designers and those of us assigned to user interface customization, here is a break down of the relationships between master pages, page layouts, controls and content types. This is not a technical breakdown with sample code, this is just to explain the relationships between these core concepts in MOSS 2007.
