SharePoint world of ECM and Information Management

“SharePoint Solution Design” document template

I published several posts regarding document templates for the SharePoint projects previously, but they were related to the specific sections of the projects.

Recently I had discussion with colleagues about the structure of “Solution Design” document and logical inconsistency we have seen all time.

Almost each project you are starting should be based on the “Solution Design” that describes and justifies what is going to be implemented. I've seen tons of documents for C++, and .NET projects in the Financing, Marketing, Industrial and others areas, that were organized quite good logically. By “quite good” I mean that you structure the document from the broad and general terms, introducing what do we have, moving toward the specialization and physical artefacts. In two words it should be “out-in” approach.

SharePoint brings a lot of new conceptions and artefacts that either don’t exist or are not taken into account for the Solution Design that came from other areas.  For example, “content types”, “capacity planning”, “farm architecture”. Reviewing several “Solution Design” documents for SharePoint projects last 6 months I saw a lot of inconsistency of how information is addressed and structured – people mess up the physical artefacts with logical ones, structure flows without any logic and smooth transitions. For example, in section of “Solution architecture” they put together logical design and network infrastructure. It’s ok for a Web application where all servers have almost the same role, but in SharePoint the logical and physical design are two different things and they don’t match each other 1-to-1. Logical designs is based on metadata and taxonomies, when physical design is dictated by “usage patterns” and data volumes. You will have absolutely two different physical designs creating system for enterprise to manage documents online and for the digital agency with the terabytes of media files – conceptually you have the same metadata but physical organization will be different due to usage approach.

I have some thought for a while about creating the “SharePoint Solution Design” template that is properly aligned - starting from the broad terms, which describe what the system is about, specializing the taxonomies and content prior to the physical organization.  Such document should aim to targets:

• Lead the reader logically to the physical design, describing what artefacts the system manipulates and how they are used. So, when we come to the physical organization the reader will have their own vision of system in mind.
• No hops between unrelated sections (like logical and physical architecture), because physical design should be justified previously.

After more that hour of analysis, brainstorming a discussion we came out with the following structure that I want to publish here and hear your feedbacks.

1. OVERVIEW
   1. Background
   2. Document Purpose
2. INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
   1. Site Structure
      1. Site Maps
   2. User Interface and Branding
      1. Wireframes
      2. Navigation
      3. Branding
   3. Content Types, Columns and Lists
      1. Content Types
      2. Columns
      3. List
3. LOGICAL ARCHITECTURE
   1. Farm Logical Architecture
   2. Web Applications
      1. Zones
      2. Managed Paths
   3. Site Collections and Content Databases
   4. Shared Services
   5. User Profile and Properties
   6. Search
   7. Audiences
   8. Service Accounts
4. CAPACITY PLANNING
5. PHYSICAL ARCHITECTURE
   1. Server Topology
   2. Network Infrastructure
   3. Storage Requirements
      1. Web Front-End Servers
      2. Application Server
      3. SQL Server

Custom 403 Error Handing for SharePoint

Yesterday I was working on the custom error handing for the SharePoint. They wanted to provide the consistent look and feel for all errors that you can expect – from 301 to 500. It’s quite simple task and what you just need is to turn off custom errors in web.config and set customized error pages in IIS.

The reason we customized error pages via IIS is that we didn’t want to mess up with customization of OOTB pages, and our pages have several pictures. Rendering pictures for “unauthorized” and “forbidden” errors under SharePoint in problematic. That’s why we just redirect user to another site with custom error pages.

The only issue we experienced is customizing 403 page, when SharePoint handled it gracefully redirecting us to \_layouts\AccessDenied.aspx page. To avoid such behavior I end up with URL parsing and status code analysis via custom HTTPModule.

I published this solution as SharePoint feature on the CodePlex site http://sharepoint403page.codeplex.com/

How SharePoint manages web.config via SPWebConfigModification

You probably will be very surprised to know that SharePoint 2007 doesn’t manage web.config via direct access to the actual file. The reason for this is that updating the web.config directly may not always work – you don’t have permissions, or file is locked, or context is not ready yet and etc.

So, what SharePoint does is manage web.Config via …. Content DB. Yep, right via Content DB, it’s not a joke :) The actual records of web.config are stored in [SharePoint_Config].[dbo].[Objects] as XML entries.  You can query them easily via the following script

SELECT    Id, ClassId, ParentId, Name, Status, Version, Properties
FROM        Objects
WHERE    (Name LIKE '%WebConfig%')

To modify web.config programmatically you need to use SPWebConfigModification, what updates the columns in the Object table with your values and SharePoint modify web.config itself. Unfortunately, this method is really poor documented, so you need to google for the samples.

But that’s not an end of the story. I wouldn’t write this post if the situation won’t be so tricky. Because web.config records are XML entries it doesn’t provide us bullet-proof storage. Your can put unnecessary stoke (‘) or other symbols that will break the XML. SharePoint doesn’t provide good validation and you end up with broken SPWebConfigModification :) Whatever you do it throws exceptions and you can’t rollback your changes :(

There is a solution what to do – manually update the XML records in [SharePoint_Config].[dbo].[Objects] :) .Some SharePoint people will have the heart attack at this place :) The solution is described there http://blog.thekid.me.uk/archive/2007/03/23/corrupt-webconfigmodifications-in-sharepoint.aspx. What you actually do is just finding the XML nodes with your web.config changes and delete them.

It’s absolutely unsupported and not recommended solution, but sometimes your need “to cutt off the corners” :)

However, it may not help you :) You need to update the [Title] row where column “[Name]  = SharePoint - <yourSite>” as well, because web.config settings are stored in two places.

Additional story is how to update the XML rows. SQL Server Management Studio doesn’t allow you to update XML entries in editor, and UPDATE SET doesn’t work for XML as well. The only tool I know for such operations is Altova DatabaseSpy that provides you all functionality to update the XML

PS: to find the second location I spend about 2 hours, wearing a “bloodhound” hat, scrutinizing DB with profiler and other diagnostic tools, because SPWebConfigModification thrown exception all time. After I removed all custom entries everything started to work really smoothly.

Taxonomy Types

Organizing documents in taxonomy is not an easy task, because there is no a “silver” bullet and “best practices” for such task – everything depends on the usage patterns. “Discovery, contribution and collaborations” are the key priorities you should manage first, and then build your design upon.

There are several types of taxonomies you have to consider in your design: Subject, Unit Based and Functional (thanks to Barb Blackburn to his description of the types)

Subject type is based on “subject terms” when you arrange you subjects in alphabetical order. This type works for well established terms that are unique in defined context and have no shared information – like family names, countries and etc. In case of terms ambiguity the thesaurus is used

Business-unit type is used to reflects the organization structures like departments/divisions and etc. The advantage is that such structure minimize number of documents, because they can be inherited, but disadvantage in duplicated information that have to be shared across structured elements.

Functional type is based on the produced activities, when you build taxonomy on the top of business process. The issue of such type is in the project files support that relate to the particular person/project. In such situation metadata is used to address this issue.

The summary of those types are incorporated in the following table

Sample of SharePoint Upgrade Action Plan

Today I was reviewing some of SharePoint Upgrade documents and researched this subject browsing for the available resources, when I found one quite interesting document that describes the installation and configuration steps.

It was posted by Yasir Attiq originally (you can find the actual MPP file there) Posting the content here, because people are asking me about such plan time to time. The most interesting part is that those guys are planning 8-12 hours on all tasks :)

ECM Discovery Costs

Cascaded Master-Details lookup that just WORKS!

Last several days I tried to find the solution that allows me to use “master-detail” field relationship based on the lookups. There are ton’s of controls for this, but I hardly found one that works for the lookup fields in the master list.

Scenario:

You have the master list of company’s projects and master list [Projects] of all possible projects’ stages [Stages]. For each new project you create the [Team Project] list where you JOIN the project with the stages from master lists, using lookup column.

Now, you need to create the [Team Staff] list, where you want to assign users to the different sections of your team projects in [Team Projects] list.

For example, we have the following structure of [Team Project] list

You want to assign users to the specific sections, so, for example “John” is responsible for the “Deploy Farm” only in the “Build SharePoint site” project and “Mary” is responsible for “test feature” stuff in another project.

It’s easy to achieve if you use master lists, but not the parent list with lookups that aggregates all values for you and you need assign users for the subset only.

After inspecting number of commercial and free tools the only working component I found is “SharePoint Cascading Drop Down List”. It’s very amazing how it works. Check the following blog, describing how to configure the list correctly http://sharepointsircar.blogspot.com/2009/02/cascading-dropdownlist-custom-field.html. Take into account that their sample is based on several master lists, but you can achieve the same for the aggregated list, as I described before ([Team Projects]), where you use “ProjectName” as parent field, and “Sections” for the child.

Works as a charm! Really amazing work.

First five SharePoint 2010 Tips and Tricks

Published first 5 SharePoint 2010 Tips and Tricks

Tip #65: How to install SharePoint 2010 using local account
Tip #64: How to restore Site Directory template in SharePoint 2010
Tip #63:How to print SharePoint 2010 page without header and navigation
Tip #62: SharePoint 2010 supports folders for KPI values
Tip #61: SharePoint 2010 keeps copy of modified theme

Have something interesting regarding SharePoint 2010 - submit your Trick here

Block diagram - how to choose the SharePoint 2007 topology

I found a really good description of how to choose the SharePoint 2007 topology that is vizualized in block diagram. The full description is in this post "Inside SharePoint Securing External SharePoint Communications"

SharePoint 2007 Farm ports – configuring firewall

Introduction

Depending on the environment you are configuring you might need not only open ports between client and your Web Front End(WFE) servers, but you might have internal topology where your SharePoint servers are separated by layers and are isolated by firewalls. In such situation you need to know the inner-process communication ports and direction, to open the ports on firewall.

The following table describes all ports SharePoint 2007 uses for the communications. Take into account that only 2 posts are used between client PC and WFE (the indenting line). All other ports are for internal and external communications between SharePoint servers.

The advantage of this document is that I summarized all ports together that are described in different documents, and included directions. Microsoft doesn’t provide you the summary info for ports and directions.

SharePoint 2007 Ports

Inter-server communications of SharePoint 2007

Extra -server communications of SharePoint 2007

Firewalls

Depending on you farm design you might require firewall between your farm’s servers. In case of separate networks you should know that one-way trust relationship is required between WFE and  Applications Servers, Application Servers and Database, if they are separated by network.

You need to configure firewall properly for domains and trusts http://support.microsoft.com/kb/179442/

Sources:

• http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=85533&clcid=0x409 (Visio diagram with ports for the inner-server communications)
• http://blogs.msdn.com/uksharepoint/archive/2009/01/05/sharepoint-ports-proxies-and-protocols-an-overview-of-farm-communications.aspx
• http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/02/13/protocols-ports-and-firewall-rules.aspx
• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287966.aspx
• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepointserver/cc979168.aspx

SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 Farm Migration. Phase 2 – Security Analysis

Introduction

In the current series I’d like to describe how to analyse the SharePoint Farm and prepare it for the SharePoint 2010 migration. We will review the following 3 sections:

1. Farm Architecture and Configuration Analysis
2. User and Group Analysis (current)
3. Farm Migration

This section describes the user analysis and permission analysis. But first of all – why do we need to analyze users and permissions when we only migrating data?! Can’t our users be migrated automatically?!

The answer is yes and no - users will be migrated automatically, but migration is hardly planning for the sake of migration and usually you are building a new application and trying to fix existing issues. Users, Groups and Permissions are needed to be reorganized and to be fixed before moving content to new environment.

The areas we need to look at are the following:

• number of users and group
• how users are organized in groups
• permissions – users, groups, broken inheritance
• dead users

SharePoint OOTB functionality doesn’t cover all our needs, so we are going to use several 3rd partly tools to gather the necessary information.

Tools

• [free] SharePoint Administration Toolkit (you need to install and to activate “Permission Report” feature manually)
• [free] SharePoint Access Checker
• [free] Bamboo SharePoint Analyzer
• [free] Xavor SharePoint Admin Tool
• [free] SharePoint Work Accelerator Toolkit 2007
• (optional) [commercial] ARK for SharePoint 2007

Additionally, you need to use the following STSADM commands

• enumuser/enumgroups/enumroles
• unlockfgpreport (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee449564.aspx) to unlock how much list items can be enumerated for the Permission Report

There are two approaches to collect required information – using commercial “ARK for SharePoint 2007” reporting tool that covers almost all our needs  or using several free tools to get the same information. We can achieve almost the same via “enumuser/enumgroups/enumroles” command of STSADM, but we need to count the items manually.

The limitation of the majority of free tools is that they don’t provide web-application level information across all site collections. The advantage of “ARK for SharePoint” is that it generates reports for all web applications in our farm.

In this post I’d like to describe the steps of how to get all information without using commercial tools.

Number of Users & Groups

1. Users & Groups number – “Bamboo SharePoint Analyser" –> Farm->Servers->Web Applications->Site Collections –> Web sites and the values are in parentheses for “Users”, “Groups” and “Administrators”
2. Site Administrators – use “Bamboo SharePoint Analyzer” of Central Administration
3. Groups across site collections - use “Xavor SharePoint Admin tool” –> Show Group Security

Users & Groups Association

1. Farm Administrators – Use Central Administration –>Operations-> Update Farm Administrators Group or  “Bamboo SharePoint Analyzer” 
2. Users by Group – ARK for SharePoint provides full info across all web applications. Alternative free solution is to use “Permission Report” tool functionality (Site Settings -> “Broken Inheritance Reports Jobs”) that generates Excel spreadsheet for the Site with the user’s and its groups. 

Permissions

1. Broken inheritance can be found via “Access Checked” tool that shows SharePoint items where permission is broken, but tool doesn’t show what exactly is broken and list of changes. Reports are supported.
2. Broken inheritance Diff can be viewed with “SharePoint Administration Toolkit” and its “Compare Permissions Sets” report that shows the permissions difference between the current and root items, and also the details about permission changes . Reports are supported.
3. User rights – “Check User Access” report of “Access Checker” show the rights for the users across SharePoint elements, including the items where user don’t have access
4. Group rights - “Check Effective Permissions” of “SharePoint Administration Toolkit” shows the items accessible by this group

Unfortunately, all previous tools don’t provide web-applications scope reports and item-level reports. It means that you can’t iterate through all site collections and find the List items or specific pages where user has no access. To get such information use “Xavor SharePoint Admit Tool” that provides reports across web application (but no functionality to save them)

(red – user has no permissions)

Dead Users

When you install and configure the new farm you probably create several test users and groups that should be deleted in the end. Sometimes administrators create such users and then forget to delete them. So, “dead” accounts is a quite common scenario. When you start a new migration you don’t want such users/groups in your new farm and you need to find all of them and delete.

I don’t know any free tools that provide such functionality. And there are only a couple of the commercial tools that allow to do this: DeliverPoint and ControlPoint

Creating the report

The logical outcome of the Security Analysis is the Word document that highlights the security issues, but unfortunately this is not always feasible. Consider the medium farm with 5000 users 300 groups and 400 sites with 30% of broken inheritance. You can physically create the word document but how are you going to analyse the 200 pages document?!

The real Analysis is usually a “multithreaded” task, when you check users’ rights, discuss the grouping with DC admins, fix the broken permissions and etc.

Depending on the content size documenting the following quantative information is recommended:

• Farm Administrators
• Number of users
• Number of groups across web application and per site collection
• Broken inheritance report per site collections and items (depends how much broken items you have)
• Users/AD per Groups (definitely for AD, but depends on number of users)

Unfortunately, it’s hard to define the template for this step, because security analysis is very individual for the farm, and usually you end up with several files – documents describing quantative info, excel spreadsheets with users, groups and permissions, html files describing the broken permission inheritance.

Resume

Security analysis might be a daunting task depending on the level of your permissions customization and user’s assignment to groups. The recommendation is to perform the draft analysis on backup instance where you can experiment with different tools and find all security breaches, and after that fix issues on production.

SharePoint 2010 stuff on SharePoint-Sandbox.com

I finally published my SharePoint 2010 content I discovered for the last 5 months.

Welcome to www.sharepoint-sandbox.com to share and to contribute! New articles and tips are coming

SharePoint 2007 “Meeting Workspace” template limitations

On one of the recent projects we built the monthly based reporting system. We provided users the freedom of choice of the reporting indicators, from the predefined list, and allowed them changing values of selected indicators.

From the very beginning we couldn’t decide which template to use as a baseline for our project and considered using “Meeting Workspaces” (MW). The advantages of them were that you can create number of calendar-driven Workspace sites with custom recurrence. It fitted our conceptual model ideally – you create the content ones and it’s available across all months + you can add custom content for the specific month.

But the reality of Meeting Workspaces is too far from grace, limiting its usage.

First of all, you can’t save Meeting Workspace as  template including the content. As I understand it’s “behaviour-by-design”, because the MW is based on the single huge list, where content is splitted by “InstanceID”. You can’t just save the template for the specific month - SharePoint can’t save only part of your list. Secondly, you can’t set different permissions for the lists per month, due to the same behaviour – it’s the same list not different once. Third, calendar URLs are not “InstanceID” driven and Meeting workspaces don’t provide collaboration behaviour, because when you open the new month the list content is based on active month selection (see this post)

Such limitation changed our decision towards using the Blank site and customized list, saving the site as template to be used for the new period.

I really wonder to know the usage of Meeting Workspace when you can ignore such limitations.

SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 Farm Migration. Phase 1 – Configuration Analysis

Introduction

In the current series I’d like to describe how to analyse the SharePoint Farm and prepare it for the SharePoint 2010 migration. We will review the following 3 sections:

1. Farm Architecture and Configuration Analysis (current)
2. User and Group Analysis
3. Farm Migration

The first and the most important step in SharePoint 2007 –>SharePoint 2010 migration is the understanding of existing SharePoint environment to get enough information to design the new Farm. 

Let’s review in details the following template that I’m using to document the farm settings and tools that allow to gather all necessary information (we don't describe search, excel and other services settings here)

1. Farm Information
   1. Farm Servers and Services
   2. Web Applications
   3. Content Database and Site Collections
   4. Alternative Access Mapping
   5. Farm Solutions
   6. Enabled Farm Features
   7. Search Settings
2. Site Information
   1. Web Parts
   2. Web.config changes
   3. Site Definitions
   4. Customized & Checked-out Items
3. Sites Topology
   1. Sites
   2. Sites Structure Diagram
   3. Site Collections with Diagrams
4. Issues

1. Farm Information

Content: This section enlists farm servers, components from the farm and general information about farm configuration (email settings)
Tools: STSADM –o “preupgradecheck” (Upgrade Planning Information section for servers and components) & Central Administration to get the mail settings

a) Farm Servers and Services

Content: table with the farm servers and assigned roles
Tool: Use the Central Administration & SharePoint Manager 2007 to get this information

b) Web Applications

Content: List of web applications and its URS
Tool: Central Administration

c) Content Database and Site Collections

Content: Table with the following info – content database name, number of sites, size, list of site collections
Tool: SharePoint Diagnostic tool for the Content DB size; Central Administration and SharePoint Administration Toolkit (Batch Site Manager Solution)

d) Alternative Access Mapping

Content: Table with AAM Internal/External URLs and Zones
Tool: “preupgradecheck” log & SharePoint Diagnostic

e) Farm Solutions

Content: Table with the installed solutions and sites where they are active
Tool: SharePoint Manager 2007 / Bamboo SharePoint Analyser

1.f) Enabled Farm Features

Content: List of enabled features on the farm level
Tool: Central Administration 

1.f) Search settings

Content: SSP settings (servers, databases name, crawling settings)
Tool: Central Administration & SharePoint Diagnostic

2. Site Information

a) Web Parts

Content: list of installed web parts
Tool: Bamboo SharePoint Analyzer

b) Web.config changes

Content: list what was changed in web.config for SharePoint sites
Tool: SharePoint Diagnostic shows web.config for each web application, but developer/admins own the knowledge about the changes

c) Customized & Checked-out Items

Content: list of customized & checked-out items
Tool: SharePoint Designer, choose Sites menu –> Reports –> Shared Content –> Customized Pages / Checked-out items

d) Used Site Templates across sites

Tool: "preupgradecheck" gives you a list where site templates are used

3. Sites Topology

a) Sites

Content: list of sites
Tool: Site Settings of the root site –> “Site hierarchy” item

a) Site Structure Diagram

Content: diagram of the root site
Tool: SWAT tool –> right mouse click on the site name and Show Site Diagram

4. Sites Topology

• Use “preupgradecheck” log to document all found issues
• use SharePoint Designer Diagnostic tab, to discover the potential issues

Tools

To get the necessary information I recommend to use the following tools:

• Bamboo SharePoint Analyser
• SharePoint Manager 2007
• STSADM –o “preupgradecheck”
• SWAT
• SharePoint Administration Toolkit - SharePoint Diagnostic tool & “Batch Site Manager Solution” feature 
• SharePoint Designer

Resources: http://www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=245

SharePoint 2010 Timer Jobs changes

SharePoint 2010 Timer Jobs undergo changes are in the management and in configuration.

Firstly, the most significant change you will see is that the number of Timer Jobs – new 21 jobs been added. If for an ordinary SharePoint 2007 application we had 39 Timer’s Job, then we have 60 Jobs for SharePoint 2010

Secondly, you are able to edit job properties - setting when the jobs starts via interface (not STSADM) and start job immediately.

Thirdly, UI interaction of Timer Jobs management are improved – jobs are sorted by status, able to modify the definitions from any screen.

You can read detailed overview of Timer Job changes on our www.SharePoint-SandBox.com portal.

SharePoint Tips #50-#60

Finally reached the 60th SharePoint Tip. I wish I published 120th :) but quite busy in these days and publishin new SharePoint 2010 matherials takes a lot of time.

Tip #60: How to change the Spell Checker Language        
Tip #59: How to set the default duration for the new Calendar event      
Tip #58: How to open a list in Edit Mode       
Tip #57: Don't use Farm Admin users for testing       
Tip #56: Don't upload the same file multiple times for testing purposes
Tip #55: Disabled "Require Checkout" impacts on Content DB growth       
Tip #54: Use Web Garden to add resilience and enhance performance       
Tip #53: Don't rely on default settings to crawl a particular WFE        
Tip #52: STSADM doesn't support import subsite as root site
Tip #51: Do you know that "read-only" Database feature is trimming UI edit functionality?!
Tip #50: FBA crawling doesn't support Wizard-based and Dynamic Pages with AJAX 

SharePoint 2010 official resources

In these days SharePoint 2010 is announcing at SharePoint Conference 2009. There are a lot of materials being prepared by MVPs and others,who had access to the Tech Preview of the SharePoint 2010 last 5 months and we will start releasing new info after conference finishes. But for now, I’d like to summarize the info officially published by MS

1. SP2010 TechNet Center http://technet.microsoft.com/en-au/sharepoint/ee263917.aspx
2. SP2010 MSDN Center http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-au/sharepoint/ee514561.aspx
3. Posters http://bink.nu/news/sharepoint-2010-documentation.aspx
4. SharePoint 2010 Forum http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/sharepoint2010

And follow us in tweeter via #spc09 hashtag (I’m using http://twitterfall.com/ to monitor twitter events)

SharePoint 2007 on Windows Server 2008 R2

When you consider using Windows Server 2008 R2 for your SharePoint 2007 platform you need to put additional effort to configure and install SharePoint properly.

There are a few actions you need to undertake for the successful deployment of SharePoint on R2.

1) You can only install SharePoint 2007 SP2 on R2 version. Unfortunately, MS doesn’t provide SharePoint 2007 SP2 slipstream package, so you need to create one by yourself (Take into account, that you need to delete everything from the “\Updates” folder in case of using SP1 slipstream)

2) After you complete installation you will find that whenever you are trying to open the Central Administration the login and password are requested, regardless of your efforts to add Central Administration to the Trust Zone and set the option to logon automatically with the user’s name/password. This is a new change in security of Vista and Windows 7. To remove the login prompt you need to add a key “AuthForwardServerList” to the windows registry. Read the following guidelines.

3) When you create a new site and try to open it you can find the situation when login dialog box is prompted, but you end up with the white screen after you entering credentials three times. Usually, you navigate to c:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\ folder, open the “hosts” file and add an alias for your site to solve this problem. But, under some circumstances this wont help you in R2, and moreover, your can’t open the site via “localhost” name. The solution is to add the alias not only to host file, but in “lmhosts.sam” as well

SharePoint 2007 32bit->64bit migration Strategy

As you know, Microsoft will release SharePoint 2010 public version soon, and there is no space for 32bit versions anymore. All server stuff come in 64bits only – Windows Server 2008 R2, SharePoint 2010 and etc, so, we need to be ready for this.

I recommend to watch New Zealand TechEd session “Upgrade Planning and Guidance OFC306” that describes how to plan you 32bit –> 63 bit migration for SharePoint Farm

Top Content Management sites

Found a nice description of top Content Management Sites http://aiim.typepad.com/aiim_blog/2009/03/just-the-facts-please-top-content-management-sites.html

All are really good, except … where I can’t find the way to subscribe on RSS updates. It’s a bit awkward – the site is about Information Management and e-Discovery, but no way to find the connections to the information.

Some sites publish information in the aspects of SharePoint.