Deployment Architecture - RealSharePoint.com

6/4/2009

Sometimes life doesn't have to be difficult. If you've ever found yourself wondering how to efficiently move from one stage in the product lifecycle to another in your Sharepoint environment, then consider this:

Hector Ruiz, a consultant on the London Tideway SharePoint Migration project, writes in his blog about his success with DocAve's content management capabilities. Hector got the job done using DocAve's ability to set backup schedules and out of place restore capabilities.

Posted at 2:35 PM by AVEPOINT\Jack.Kuo | Category: Migration; Backup and Recovery; Deployment Architecture | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

3/18/2009

Managing User Permissions in SharePoint

A few days ago I attended a talk on SharePoint best practices, given by Joel Oleson at the Chicago MTC. Joel definitely knows his SharePoint! (He was the first SharePoint admin when Microsoft first released the product internally for development & testing.)

One of the topics of the discussion was "best practices for SharePoint scalability", an important concept considering the adoption rate of a new SharePoint deployment at most companies. Joel mentioned that the most scalable objects in SharePoint are site collections. You can have in excess of 150,000 site collections, while the recommended limit for top-level sites is only 125! The downside to having hundreds of thousands of site collections is that users are managed at a site collection level. So what happens when you need to add a user to a bunch of your site collections at once? Without a third-party management tool for SharePoint, you'd have to log-in to each site collection and add the user manually. Joel recommended the use of third party tools (such as DocAve) to overcome the limitations of the native SharePoint administrative interface. Using DocAve's central admin interface, you can add or remove a user or group of users from multiple site collections at the same time, saving lots of time! Check out this TechNet article to learn more about planning for SharePoint scalability. And be sure to keep tabs on Joel's blog, where insights and info can always be found.

Posted at 6:29 PM by AVEPOINT\Michael.Shine | Category: Administration; Deployment Architecture; SharePoint Tips and Tricks; Events and Happenings | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (1)

3/4/2009

New White Paper: Optimizing SharePoint Data Access using Intelligent Replication

For those of you managing SharePoint deployments that serve a geographically-distributed pool of knowledge workers, AvePoint just published an informative white paper that discusses how to make sure geo-dispersed end users can collaborate at optimal levels.

The paper first defines the objectives any successful data-access optimization strategy must meet.

Then it analayzes the various deployment architectures an organization can implemenent, highlighting the common pitfalls and barriers associated with each. (Stuff like limited or intermittent network connectivity, event conflicts, and so on.) Finally, it reviews "best practice" approaches for delivering continuous SharePoint data access. It's a great read for anyone trying to develop a system by which their geographically distributed end-users can collaborate unfettered.

If this is you, be sure to read AvePoint's newest white paper: Optimizing Data Access with Intelligent SharePoint Replication.

Posted at 5:29 PM by Tucker Hall | Category: SharePoint Tips and Tricks; Deployment Architecture | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

2/19/2009

How Granularity can Further Optimize Data Replication

So I have a distributed farm topology, spread out across various different locations around the globe. I’m replicating content across the pipe, so that each farm receives a copy of the most updated content, and local users can simply access their local farms to retrieve this content. All is fine and dandy, but how can I further optimize this process? Even if replication processes are executed incrementally, do I still want to propagate over everything? What if only access permissions were changed? For example, our employee manuals are not frequently update on our HR site, yet they are replicated to the respective local farms. However, with multiple changes in HR personnel, the securities and access permissions are updated more frequently than the largely static content.

This is where granularity plays a big part when designing an optimal replication plan. You would want to take into consideration the frequency of change of the content, the access permissions, and the associated configurations. What if you only wanted to replicated over updated content types? With an appropriate replication solution that allows you to granularly AND independently select what needs to be replicated over, you will have full control. Not only will this further minimize your bandwidth consumption, but you will be streamlining your replication process to only propagate the assets that need to be moved over.

Posted at 9:26 PM by Andrew Yeung | Category: Administration; Deployment Architecture; SharePoint Tips and Tricks | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

2/18/2009

Got Bandwidth? Controlling the Network Pipe While Optimizing Data Access

I presented a session on SharePoint replication at the SharePoint Technology Conference in Burlingame, CA a few weeks back. Why replication, you ask? After all, SharePoint works fine as a centralized deployment – or so you thought. Just like any “high touch interaction” platform, reliable access is necessary to enhance the overall experience of end users as they collaborate amongst each other. After all, SharePoint is not like any other application. It’s not as heavyweight as SAP or Oracle and is meant to empower all knowledge workers – not just superusers. And because SharePoint is an online platform, end users expect response times to be similar to other common online sites, such as google, Amazon.com, or even facebook. The problem, however, is that most usage of SharePoint is content heavy, and hence reliability is heavily dependent on the network pipe. Whenever your platform is dependent on your network, you must pay attention to: latency, contention, and congestion.

A lady who attended my session had the perfect, and most common scenario. Her SharePoint farm is based out of the continental U.S. (I don’t completely recall where – I think it was New Mexico). While most of her users are local, she has a research team out in Afghanistan that needs to access SharePoint and collaborate with the rest of the group. Not surprising, she’s got some really frustrated users out there in Afghanistan because of the poor reliability when trying to access SharePoint. To make matters worse, there is no local administrator or IT staff that will be able to better manage a localized platform out there. One option that she’s considering is to physically go out there to set up and manage a SharePoint environment, but for obvious reasons, that’s not real high on her checklist.

A more effective, and simpler solution would be to replicate content over to a small SharePoint deployment out there. By replicating content over, these remote sites will have the reliable access that they need when they access their own local farm. However, the question still remains – how can you more optimally manage the bandwidth you are consuming while replicating the content over? The answer is to leverage replication technology at the byte level, and to properly throttle the network bandwidth when needed. With byte level differencing, only content updates at the byte level are replicated over, so the minimum amount of bandwidth is used. With network throttling, depending on congestion on the network, administrators can determine how much bandwidth to set aside during certain hours of the day for replication. With these options, and many others, a properly managed replication solution will allow even the most distributed SharePoint audience to access information more effectively.

Posted at 9:33 PM by Andrew Yeung | Category: Administration; Deployment Architecture; SharePoint Tips and Tricks | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

2/17/2009

Streamlined Deployment of Master Pages

On Thursday I attended a SusQTech training session on MOSS 2007, with the morning session focusing on how to develop master pages. Master pages are templates that other pages can inherit from to keep a consistent look and feel across sites. We were using SharePoint designer for the customization, which meant that our changes were made directly against a SharePoint site collection. This makes it hard to move these customizations through a Dev -> QA -> Prod development cycle. Also, the customized master page cannot be used against multiple site collections at once. If you want to deploy a master page to multiple site collections, you need to package the master page as a feature, which can be difficult. Among other things, this involves packaging together all your customizations, copying files to the 12 hive, then running multiple STSADM commands to install and activate the feature on each site collection. DocAve's Deployment Manager can do this easily! To deploy a master page from one server to another involves three or four mouse clicks in the DocAve Deployment Manger GUI. Just select the master page you wish to deploy, choose one or multiple site collections for the destination, and you're done!

Posted at 12:31 AM by AVEPOINT\Michael.Shine | Category: Deployment Architecture | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

2/4/2009

Staying SharePoint-Focused in Sunny La Jolla, CA

It’s the final day of the Best Practices SharePoint Conference in La Jolla, CA. As expected, the early morning sessions were less crowded, or even sparse. Many attendees are walking around in their casual attire, hoping to make a last minute trip to the beach or the golf course before heading home. I’ll have to hand it to MindSharp – they organized one helluva event. Great sessions, great sponsors, great food, and very eager attendees hungry for classes to better their SharePoint-related skillsets. And mind you, this was all held at a location where the view of the Pacific Ocean, the sprawling golf course, and of course, the perfect weather could’ve easily distracted all of us from paying attention to the speakers. The only complaint I had was that I had to stay at the other end of town and it took forever to make it there.

The event kicked off early Monday morning with a standing room only keynote headlined by the man himself – Joel Oleson. Even though Joel is part of Quest Software, he’s still playing the SharePoint evangelist role. When he speaks, we all listen. In fact, his followup session appropriately titled “Avoiding Failed SharePoint Deployments and Chaos” was one of the most popular ones of the show. You can find his looong slide deck on slideshare. I especially liked his one slide that outlined the 10 Steps to SharePoint Success (talk about alliteration). It was definitely the perfect recipe for ensuring a successful deployment. If I may shamelessly replicate it here, the 10 steps Joel mentioned are:

Confront reality
Create a governance plan
Get an executive sponsor
Create a dream team
Build services, not stuff
Define clear policies and standards
Invest in scalable information architecture
Don't forget change/risk management
Adoption is what counts
Keep it simple stupid

Yes, there were tons of other content – developer-oriented, admin-oriented, even information worker or end user-oriented. But alas, amidst all the great presentations, great food, great conversations, and exhibitors, I think those 10 prescriptive steps provided attendees with a great foundation they could walk away with. This was a great SharePoint event to start 2009, and just like everyone else, I can’t wait for the next one.

Posted at 2:41 PM by Andrew Yeung | Category: Administration; Deployment Architecture; SharePoint News; SharePoint Tips and Tricks | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

1/28/2009

A Simple Way to Add a Content Database

Microsoft has issued guidelines regarding content database sizes, warning that a single content DB should not exceed 100GB. Companies running SharePoint - whether they have deployed a small, medium, or large-scale farm - can take steps to ensure that their DB’s fall within these guidelines. It’s just a matter of proper planning.

An average SharePoint farm usually has about 2000 users. Each new user translates to an average of 2 additional MB's on the content database. It follows that – all things being equal – as your end-user base grows, your content database will eventually approach the upper limits of its stable capacity.

Many SharePoint administrators decide to add another content database to an existing web application, to relieve the existing database. Adding this content database directly through SharePoint can be quite a daunting task. You must log on to the central administration interface, navigate to the application management tab, select content database(s), then select the web application you wish to add. Once you have added the content database(s), you must take the following steps to move site collections to your new DB.

1. At a command prompt on the drive where SharePoint is installed, change to the following directory:

%COMMONPROGRAMFILES%\Microsoft shared\Web server extensions\12\Bin

2. Type the following command, and then press ENTER:
Stsadm -o enumsites -url <URL> > <path/file name>.xml

Where URL is the address of the Web application that contains the site collection that you want to move, and path/file name is the name of the XML file that you want to create with the site collection data.

The previous step creates an XML file that contains all of the site collection URLs in the current database.

3. Open the XML file that you created in a text editing application. If there are any URLs for site collections that you do not want to move, be sure to delete them from the file. The only URLs that should remain in the XML file should be for the site collections that you want to move.

4. Type the following command, and then press ENTER:
Stsadm -o mergecontentdbs -url <URL> -sourcedatabasename <database name> -destinationdatabasename <database name> -operation 3 -filename <file name>

Where url is the address of the Web application that contains the site collection that you want; sourcedatabasename is the name of the database that you want to move the site collection from; destinationdatabasename is the name of the database that you want to move the site collection to; operation 3 is the “Read from file” operation; and file name is the name of the file that contains the site collection URLs that you want to move.

5. Restart IIS by typing the following command, and then pressing ENTER:
iisreset /noforce

As I said….quite a daunting task!

Thankfully, DocAve has made is very simple to add a content database to an existing web application. Using the DocAve SharePoint Administrator module, you can quickly drill down to to the web application with the “overflowing database” problem, click on the option to “Add Content Database”. In two mouse clicks you can add the new content database to your selected web application. After the database has been added, you have the option to move site collections from DB to DB within the web app. Presto, you’re done!

Posted at 2:58 PM by Faraz Saiyed | Category: DocAve Tips and Tricks; Administration; Deployment Architecture; SharePoint Tips and Tricks | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

1/22/2009

AvePoint Releases DocAve v5.1.1

Holding true to its reputation for delivering pioneering solution enhancements before the competition has even caught up with its last round, AvePoint has released DocAve v5.1.1 - which includes some pretty amazing upgrades to the DocAve v5 platform released last fall. Here's a quick rundown of the cool new gadgets and features you'll find in this latest release...

Real-time Extranet Replication

DocAve Replicator provides for both live and scheduled extranet synchronization. By enabling one-way and two-way replication over HTTP/HTTPS internet protocols, DocAve Replicator unburdens administrators from having to open additional ports in their firewall, or ensure that all replication agents are within the same network.

Administration Security Trimming, Dead-Account Detection/Deletion, One-Step Permissions Transfer

DocAve SharePoint Administrator now empowers SharePoint administrators to delegate security management to site collection administrators – providing them trimmed views of, and control over, only content and users for which they have been given appropriate permissions. Additionally, SharePoint Administrator now includes an automated dead-account recognition, transfer, and deletion utility. This powerful tool compares discrete SharePoint accounts with those present in Active Directory, and provides administrators with flexible options to handle asynchronous account events, including account deletion and permissions transfer to new accounts.

End-User Archiving and Comprehensive Archive Reporting

DocAve Extension Archiver now lets administrators empower their end-users with the ability to archive content directly within the SharePoint interface. Via the Site Actions menu within SharePoint, end-users can archive content for which they have permissions, enabling business-apprpriate archiving levels and optimal platform performance. Additionally, DocAve’s administrative report now provides comprehensive archiving information, including archived site size, number of items archived, and SQl storage re-patriation statistics.

Total EMC Centera Integration

Now EMC Centera users can leverage the solution’s potent du-duplication capabilities fully when managing DocAve archive and backup data. DocAve Backup and Recovery and Extension Archiver empower EMC Centera users to enable integrated de-duping of their DocAve archive and backup stores, to ensure optimal storage resource utilization.

XML-Based Mapping Profile Integration for Migrations

DocAve Migrator Suite lets administrators import and export XML mapping profiles to further streamline migration jobs requiring extensive mapping. Now administrators can edit profiles in any XML editor, upload the file into DocAve, and both manage and track the authored files via the DocAve interface.

To learn more about the DocAve v5.1.1 release and to download a fully-enabled trial version of the platform, check out the AvePoint website.

Posted at 11:26 AM by Tucker Hall | Category: Archiving; Backup and Recovery; Compliance; Deployment Architecture; Events and Happenings; SharePoint News; Migration; Administration; DocAve Tips and Tricks | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

10/1/2008

Reporting from Disneyland - Deploying SharePoint Roadshow

Another week, another trip down to SoCal. This time I was on my way to Anaheim, CA - home of Mickey and Minnie. Right next door to the Disney funhouse was the 2nd stop of the Fall 2008 Deploying SharePoint Roadshow. Even though I wasn’t able to hang with Mickey, Minnie, Donald, or Daisy, with temperatures reaching over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, I was happy to spend the whole day indoors at our vendor booth.

Deploying SharePoint is all about helping administrators understand the basics and best practices of effective management of a SharePoint environment. The speaker for the day was Michael Noel, SharePoint Server MVP, and he walked through a number of sessions ranging from building out your SharePoint infrastructure, to implementing a highly redundant SharePoint farm, to leveraging SharePoint as an enterprise content management solution. All in all, it was a great event with a lot of educational material really geared towards getting organizations to really start thinking about SharePoint from an infrastructure perspective. A good portion of the audience had either just started deploying SharePoint or is still sponging up all the information that they can to ensure that SharePoint is the right solution for them.

I think a lot of the content was spot on. It’s great to see so many organizations realize the power of SharePoint, but at the same time, they are planning ahead on how best to deploy and manage this sprawling environment. After all, as representatives from Microsoft themselves have said, “Just because you can install SharePoint in 20 minutes, it doesn’t mean you should”. There needs to be the proper operational planning in place, a well thought out information architecture, and it really needs to be treated as a real IT platform. Among others, these infrastructure needs would include a business continuity plan, setting up appropriate roles and policies, determining needs for a geographically dispersed environment, and migration or interoperability with other heterogeneous platforms.

The day ended with a giveaway for a Bose Sound Dock. I had the privilege of drawing the winning raffle, and it belonged to –wait for it – Andy Gordon from Suzuki! Congratulations Andy! And so ended an eventful day. It was great to network with other members of the SharePoint community, but ultimately, all good things come to an end, and I once again had the unfortunate experience of steering my way back to the airport in the midst of the infamous SoCal rush hour traffic. For those of you who missed it, the Deploying SharePoint roadshow will be making additional stops in other cities. You can find an event near you here.

Posted at 9:06 PM by Andrew Yeung | Category: Administration; Deployment Architecture; Events and Happenings; SharePoint News | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

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