Via the team @knowledgecue and @ckukltd you can get hold of this step by step guide. This is a collaborative effort with Steve Smith of Combined Knowledge (UK). Steve runs a unique training class aimed for Infrastructure administrators who want to know about SharePoint in depth and this is one of the many module from that class. Remote Blob Storage (RBS) is a capability of SQL server 2008 and 2008R2 that can be used to offload content stored in databases to the file system. The guide covers the following three scenarios. Setup and configure FILESTREAM and RBS for a new content database. Configure RBS for an existing content database and site collection. Disable RBS from a content database. Download the guide from the Knowledge Cue team site - Configuring Remote Blob Storage for SharePoint ...[Read More]

If you’ve followed some of my previous posts and presentations on SharePoint upgrade or are about to plan an Upgrade the following Video (link below) would be of interest. The video is from the Microsoft IT team who conducted the internal Microsoft SharePoint upgrade. Some of the key points for any successful upgrade are discussed in the video: detect issues early by learning about the deployment communications with site owners/administrators no data loss minimal downtime Initial Best Practices and Lessons Learned from Microsoft IT SharePoint 2010 Upgrade (Video) Managing a Parallel Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 (Video) Upgrade Planning and Best Practices - TechNet Upgrade Resource Centre – TechNet Remember the more you know about the deployment the better the upgrade experience is. I’ve done many upgrades and it’s unique in e ...[Read More]

Since the release of SharePoint Server 2010 (RTM) in April 2010 the following Cumulative Updates have been released. Current SharePoint Server updates - latest to oldest highlighted. December 2010 – SharePoint Server KB 2459257 - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2459257/ December 2010 – SharePoint Foundation KB - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2459125/en-us October 2010 – SharePoint Server KB 2394320 - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2394320/ August 2010 – SharePoint Server KB 2352342 - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2352342 (Note that with this release there are additional updates for Project Server and FAST Search Server). June 2010 – SharePoint Server KB 983497 - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/983497 (Multiple) For most deployments which are operational these updates should (is recommended to) be applied on a regular ...[Read More]

Previously on my blog i posted how to get the most out of working with the branding aspects of SharePoint in 2007. Now with SharePoint 2010 the story has vastly improved and you CSS and web designer types has really nothing to complain about. Furthermore my good buddy AC (Andrew Connell) has done a great job by working with the good folks at Microsoft to create this awesome MSDN article with guidelines on how to “skin” the heck out of SharePoint. So next time before you complain about how hard it is (it’s really not that hard) to brand SharePoint suggest you go over to “Real World Branding with SharePoint 2010 Publishing Sites” and get yourself familiar with how SharePoint masterpages and page layouts are constructed and how you can abstract your design implementation. Let’s face it gone are the days of hand crafting web sites and cre ...[Read More]

If you are installing and or configuring SharePoint 2010 and want to make sure that the people Search capability in SP2010 is enabled make sure to check the following settings. Have provisioned the User Profile Service application and started the User Profile Synchronisation service and done a full sync – Follow the article “Rational Guide to User Profile Service” from Spencer Harbar @harbars Have provisioned the Enterprise Search service application and verified that normal crawls are working (i.e: SharePoint sites and file system) Provision a “Enterprise Search” center with tabs in a SharePoint web application and verify that Search results are displaying Have added the line “sps3://mysites.knowledgecue.com” in the Start Addresses field > i.e: The sps3:// is the protocol handler reference for profile indexing. In this case I ...[Read More]

In some cases where SharePoint deployments that have been carried out by resorting to the “Wizard” you’ll most likely end up with service and content databases that are GUID based. Also no matter what method you use the PerformancePoint service application when initially provisioned will contain a GUID as there is no option to specify the databasename paramter via PowerShell. However you can get rid of these GUIDs and set the database names to be human readable. The correct ay to do this is by first talking with your DBA’s or if you have full access to your SQL deployment you’d be able to run the following SQL script(s) to rename the database correctly. So the high level process as follows. In this example I am going to highlight the provisioning of the PerformancePoint service application and how to rename the DB and then reset the s ...[Read More]

Wow! TechEd is over and demo gods were kind and I actually was able to run two complete demos of In-Place upgrade and a Database attach upgrade on stage! As promised to all those who were at my session here are the links and the session slides from “OFS308 SharePoint Upgrade Deep Dive”. Download the session slides for OFS 308 Resources for upgrading. Upgrade Planning Center – IT Professionals > http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/ee517214.aspx Developer Resource Center for upgrading SharePoint 2007 solutions to SharePoint 2010 > http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/ee514557.aspx Upgrading from SharePoint 2003 to 2010 > http://technet.microsoft.com/library/ee947141(office.14).aspx Download of the SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Hyper-V Virtual Machine (Upgrading from 2003 to 2010) > http://www.microsoft.com/d ...[Read More]

Some eons ago.. I wrote a blog post about the same topic on SharePoint 2007 which still gets a fair few hits and one of the comments on that post recently was asking about SharePoint 2010 databases and why there was so many of them. And incidentally  I was preparing for a talk  on the same topic at the Wellington SQL Server user group so that comment couldn’t have come at a better time. If you are just starting out with learning SharePoint the chances are you will not need to know about SharePoint 2007. So I am going to *try* and not mention anything about 2007 but keep this post only on the topic of SharePoint 2010 and why SP2010 has so many databases. The new and improved architecture of SharePoint 2010 uses a concept called Service Applications. If you are struggling to understand this fundamental concept in SharePoint I suggest y ...[Read More]