Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Evaluation Guide 1 www.microsoft.
Copyright This is a preliminary document and may be changed substantially prior to final commercial release of the software described herein. The information contained in this document represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation on the issues discussed as of the date of publication.
Contents Abstract............................................................................................................................................................. 1 Introduction .................................................................................................................................................... 1 Summary of What’s New ............................................................................................................................ 3 Governance ...........
External Content Types .................................................................................................................... 22 SharePoint Server and Office Integration ................................................................................. 22 Managed Metadata Service ................................................................................................................ 23 Managed Metadata Service Application .................................................................
Farm Backup and Restore .................................................................................................................... 45 Read-Only Databases ............................................................................................................................ 45 SQL Mirroring ........................................................................................................................................... 46 SQL Snapshots .................................................
Abstract This evaluation guide is designed to give the IT pro an introduction and overview of the features in Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2010 Beta that are most pertinent to installing, managing, and configuring the SharePoint farm. It begins with a brief introduction and a summary of what’s new, followed by a more in-depth discussion of the most relevant features.
facilitated by a new, streamlined Central Administration Web site, new capabilities to manage and monitor the SharePoint farm, and Windows PowerShell™ support, just to name a few features. • Scalable unified infrastructure that includes better control over server resources (for example, to improve the performance and management of large lists) and data management and protection by using high availability.
Summary of What’s New Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2010 includes numerous new capabilities and features only some of which are highlighted in this guide. Here is a brief summary of what’s new.
Governance Governance in Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2010 is the set of roles, responsibilities, and processes that you put in place in an enterprise to guide the development and use of a solution based on SharePoint Server. There are several new features in SharePoint Server that help the IT pro deliver governance: metadata creation and management, shared service applications, taxonomy, multi-tenancy, sandbox solutions, content type syndication, and policy.
• Microsoft Windows Server® 2008 64-bit operating system with Service Pack 2 (SP2) or later OR Windows Server 2008 R2 • Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 64-bit with SP2 or later or SQL Server 2008 64-bit • Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 with SP1 installed Level 1 Internet browser options running on the Windows® operating system: • Windows Internet Explorer® 7 32-bit • Internet Explorer 8 32-bit • Firefox 3.
better choice. By scripting the installation, you can ensure that all of your servers running SharePoint Server have identical configurations. Scripted installations are also advantageous from a disaster recovery perspective. If a server goes down, you can reinstall SharePoint Server quickly by using a previously created script. Both methods are fully supported. Another new aspect of the installation process is the addition of a farm passphrase.
• Features • Site definitions • Language packs It will also expose potential issues, including: • Large lists • Data orphans • CAML views and CAML content types • Modified content databases that have improper schemas • Missing upgrade dependencies All of this information will be collected and then output into an .htm file you can view from your browser. This process is read-only.
method would allow you to backup a Office SharePoint Server 2007 database and attach it to your SharePoint Server 2010 Web application, SharePoint Server would then upgrade this database and make it available through the Web application. Additionally there is support for single click installations to be upgraded by using in-place upgrade, and then migrated from a Windows Internal Database deployment to take advantage of remote BLOB storage (RBS, covered later in this guide).
administrator to preview how the site looks with the SharePoint Server 2010 user interface before committing to it. This setting is at the site level, allowing for a very granular, flexible experience. Figure 1: Visual Upgrade Options Upgrade Logging The logging capabilities have been expanded and standardized, allowing for easier, more consistent reporting on the upgrade process. This includes the creation of a unique log for each upgrade.
is ready to be upgraded. He does discover some issues where he is not following SharePoint best practices around large lists, and is able to examine the list and find solutions. Because preupgradecheck is a read-only tool, it is safe for him to run it often, confirming his progress as he works to mitigate the issues that have been raised. Now that Randy has his databases in good shape, he begins building SharePoint Server 2010 on his new hardware.
Server 2007 farm and set all of the content database to read-only from within SQL Server. Not only will this set the data to read-only, preventing any data inconsistency during the upgrade window, it will trim the user interface by taking away New or Edit functionality for all users, which helps avoid confusion. After all databases are read-only, Randy will perform a backup of the databases and restore them to his new computer running SQL Server.
mitigation technique of using a read-only database to avoid an outage while rolling in updates. SharePoint Central Administration Web Site The Central Administration Web site has been redesigned in Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2010 to provide a more familiar experience and make it easier for users to find what they are looking for. The home page for Central Administration groups major functional areas together and lists many of the most common tasks.
each time. Now, users simply select the Web application and then all of the options for managing the Web application can be accessed by a single click. Figure 3: Ribbon Interface In addition to the more obvious changes to the user interface, there are several new pieces of functionality hiding among the menus. As you can see in the screenshot of the Central Administration home page, a new page named Configuration Wizards has been added.
Figure 5: Backup and Restore Page A complete disaster recovery plan not only includes the ability to restore servers and databases but also how to recover smaller units of data like a single document. In the past, this scenario proved problematic — recovering a single file often required an administrator to restore an entire content database to a separate SharePoint farm. Moving whole databases around and restoring them to new farms was a lot of work to recover a small amount of data.
Figure 6: Connect to a content database The security model in SharePoint Server 2010 has been expanded to allow administrators more control over the management of service applications. In Office SharePoint Server 2007, farm administrators had the ability to manage services on the server. Farm administrators can now click a service application and be presented with several options for managing the service, including specifying administrators for the service and setting permissions.
Figure 8: Application Management The key limitation of the SSP architecture was that it was configured by using a set of services, and all Web applications associated with the SSP bore the overhead of all the services even if they weren’t being used. To change the service configuration for a particular Web application, a new SSP would have to be created.
By publishing a service application, you can share it across server farms. This capability does not apply to all service applications, and some services can be shared only within a single server farm. Services that support sharing across farms can be run in a central farm and consumed from regional locations. From the ribbon, you can also see that a service application can connect to other service applications published by other server farms.
Search Service Search uses the new services architecture described earlier. This new architecture allows farms to connect to multiple farms to consume cross-farm services. In large environments, an entire enterprise services farm — which is a farm that hosts the most commonly used cross-farm services, including search — can be deployed. A dedicated search farm, which is a farm that is optimized to provide search, can also be implemented.
present, and it is the responsibility of each crawler to crawl content. Each crawler is associated with a crawl database, and the crawled content and history are stored in the crawl database. Multiple crawlers can be used to crawl different content simultaneously. This improves performance and can also provide redundancy. Crawlers reside on crawl servers, populate index partitions, and propagate the partitions to query servers. Property information is stored in the property database.
Improving Search Performance Many times the administrator is tasked with improving different aspects of the overall search process. The following table highlights some options available to the administrator based on the new search architecture. Aspect to improve Action Full crawl time and result Add crawl servers, crawlers, and crawl databases. freshness Each crawl database can contain content from independent sources.
Preview; it will be available with the public Beta. The FAST Search Site template is included with the Technical Preview. However, it will not function without FAST Search servers, so it should not be used with the Technical Preview. Business Connectivity Services Microsoft Business Connectivity Services (BCS) provide the capability to connect SharePoint Server 2010 and Office 2010 client applications to external data sources (such as SQL, Oracle, SAP Web services, or custom applications).
• Adding the Business Data Connectivity service application by using the New button on the Manage Service Applications Web page ribbon in the Central Administration site as illustrated earlier. • Using Windows PowerShell. After the application has been created, the administrator will associate the application with a database and a service account. The application can also be partitioned for multitenancy if necessary.
2010, and other Office applications via custom code. SharePoint search can also use the BCS to index external data; therefore, Office applications and SharePoint Server use the BCS to access external data by using external content types. Managed Metadata Service The managed metadata service is a service application that enables the use of managed metadata and allows you to share content types across site collections and across Web applications.
Figure 11: Manage Terms Managed Metadata Service Connection The connection provides access to the service. When you create a managed metadata service, a connection to the service is automatically created in the same Web application as the service. Web applications can have connections to multiple services. Several properties are specified as part of the connection. Values for each of these properties must be specified as part of configuring the service connection.
Push-down content type publishing updates from the content type gallery to subsites and lists by using the content type Whether to update existing instances of the changed content types in subsites and libraries. Example Scenario Consider a company that has four departments: IT, HR, Products, and Legal. IT, HR, and Legal each have their own site collection that serves as each department’s portal, while there are several product team site collections, one for each product team.
Cardspace Geneva), and Windows Identity Foundation (formerly known as the Geneva Framework). Why use this new system? Identity drives very important aspects of an application such as identifying who the user is (authentication), what permissions the user is granted (authorization), and how the application interacts with the user (personalization). All applications work with identity today, but usually in their own way. Often, integrating these applications can be a very difficult process.
Category Functionality Diagnostics Unified Logging Service (ULS) Usage database Developer dashboard Reliability and Monitoring SharePoint Maintenance Engine (SPME) Rules System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) monitoring Reporting Out-of-box usage reports SCOM reports Figure 12: Diagnostic Logging 27 www.microsoft.
Figure 13: Crawl Activity Report Diagnostics The Unified Logging Service (ULS) includes improvements to manageability, log file improvements, correlation ID tracing, and Windows PowerShell™ scripting. Event throttling is one of the enhancements to manageability. It is configured on the Diagnostics Logging page illustrated earlier. Event throttling controls the severity of events that are captured in the Windows® event log and the trace logs.
troubleshooting. SharePoint Server 2010 includes several Windows PowerShell cmdlets for retrieving information and configuring the ULS. SharePoint Server 2010 logs feature usage and performance information into the usage database. This logging is done by the usage service application, and is enabled by default. Administrators can read, query, and build reports directly from the usage database because the schema is public. As such, third-party applications can also write their data to the usage database.
performance issues. This dashboard is disabled by default and can be enabled for each Web application independently through the use of Windows PowerShell. Reliability and Monitoring A new addition includes the SharePoint Maintenance Engine (SPME). The SPME is a new and improved version of the Best Practices Analyzer. It periodically, or on an on-demand basis, checks the administrative configuration, performance, best practices, and security issues, and makes recommendations to resolve potential issues.
grabs events from ULS, the Windows Event Log, usage database, and SPME; and is integrated with ULS. Remote BLOB Storage For farms with large storage needs Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2010 has implemented remote BLOB storage (RBS). With RBS, it is possible to have BLOBs from the all_docs table and customized pages in the database stored in a location outside of the database, such as on file system, allowing for a reduction in the amount of Microsoft SQL Server™ database storage.
any current work when the server begins to throttle requests. Any new HTTP GET and Search Robot requests will generate a 503 error message and will be logged in the event viewer. While the server is in a throttling period, no new timer jobs will be started. Throttling can be configured per Web application and is enabled through the Central Administration user interface or through a Windows PowerShell™ command.
• The warning level for site administrators that their list is close to the threshold limit. This warning is displayed on the list settings page. The default value is 3,000 items. • The number of query results that can be displayed for a site administrator. This allows site administrators to access a larger data set than other site users. The default value is 20,000 items. • The maximum number of unique scopes in a list. The default value is 50,000 items.
• Allowing object model override will allow for a query to be programmatically written against a list where the query threshold is not applied. • Enabling a daily time window for large queries will provide a way for administrators to configure a specific window of time where the query thresholds are not applied.
A cmdlet is a simple command used for interaction with any managed application, including the operating system. It is analogous to such shell commands as Cmd.exe, but the processing of Windows PowerShell commands is very different. The traditional shell generally processes commands as separate executable programs. Each program has to parse the input, distinguish between positional and named parameters, bind values to the correct parameters, format the output, and display the output.
Figure 18: Windows PowerShell command As you can see, Windows PowerShell is not just a new command shell. It is also, and perhaps more importantly, a new scripting language. Windows PowerShell is installed natively with over 100 core Windows cmdlets. The library of SharePoint Server 2010 cmdlets, which presently number over 300, will be installed on top of these core cmdlets.
Figure 19: Show Help Content for Windows PowerShell Cmdlets Scenario: Provisioning of Managed Accounts Steve has just completed the installation of SharePoint Server 2010 and is preparing to configure the farm. He has put in a request to the Active Directory administrators to have all necessary service accounts provisioned. All of these accounts were created by using the same password.
dollar sign ($) denotes a variable in Windows PowerShell. The semicolon (;) means "You are done running this cmdlet, process the next cmdlet." This is the same as starting a new line in Windows PowerShell. Get-Content usernames.txt This cmdlet reads each line of the file Usernames.txt and stores them as objects. | The pipe symbol means "Send the output of the preceding cmdlet to the next cmdlet.
foreach ($site in (get-spsite -limit 5000000 -Webapplication $WebApp)) { Write-Host "Activating feature " $solutionName "on" $site.url "..."; Write-Host stsadm "-o activatefeature -url" $site.url "-filename" $featureFileName; stsadm -o activatefeature -url $site.url -filename $featureFileName if( $lastexitcode -ne 0 ) { Write-Host "Something went wrong activating the site feature. Exit code: " $lastexitcode "`n" -ForegroundColor Red; $failure = $true; $error.
you to make the change yourself. This functionality will greatly reduce the burden on the SharePoint farm administrator who is responsible for maintaining these various accounts and should prevent unnecessary downtime due to expired accounts. Backup and Restore Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2010 provides a broad range of levels for performing backups, including the entire farm, farm configuration information, site collections, subsites, or lists.
Windows PowerShell is a command line tool that provides SharePoint administrators a way to perform backup and recovery with additional options such as file compression or working with SQL snapshots. Listed below are a few of the benefits available when working with Windows PowerShell: • Windows PowerShell scripts can be developed and scheduled (with Windows Task Scheduler), whereas Central Administration is used for single-use backups and restores.
Figure 21: Back up a site collection The same operation can be completed by using the Backup-SPSite Windows PowerShell command. Note that additional parameters are available, including using a SQL snapshot. Figure 22: Windows PowerShell command for backing up a site To restore the site collection, the Restore-SPSite Windows PowerShell command is used. Export a Site or List Through Central Administration a SharePoint Administrator can configure a backup of a subsite or list.
Figure 23: Export a site or list in the user interface Similar to the site collection backup, Windows PowerShell provides some additional parameters, including the use of SQL snapshots, compression, and logging. Figure 24: Export a site or list in Windows PowerShell To restore the site or list, the Import-SPWeb Windows PowerShell command is used.
or export is finished, they can the restore that content to the appropriate place in their SharePoint site and delete the restored database. Figure 25: Recover data from an unattached database After you point to the unattached content database you will be able to browse, back up, or export the content. The same level of backup granularity is available for both attached and unattached content databases.
Scenario: Using Windows PowerShell to Script Backing Up All Site Collections Individually Jennifer is an overly cautious SharePoint administrator who doesn’t have complete faith in the database backups that are being performed each night by her database administrators. She would prefer that she had her own backups, just in case. Looking at her options, she can do a full farm backup by using the user interface, but she doesn’t want to VPN in every night at midnight to start the job — so that is out.
administrators. This feature will provide the tools to help mitigate downtime during upgrades and server maintenance. For example, a secondary farm can be created and log shipping can be used to keep it current with the production environment. DNS can then be updated to point to the secondary environment, where all content databases are set to read-only. The production farm can be upgraded or updated without users accessing it.
SQL Snapshots SharePoint Server 2010 backup and export take advantage of SQL snapshots. When a Windows PowerShell command is run by using a SQL snapshot the first thing that happens is that a snapshot of the database is created and then the remaining command is executed against the SQL snapshot. This provides a method that will reduce the load on the production databases. For more information about SQL snapshots, refer to the following link: Database Snapshots (http://go.microsoft.
• All site collections for a single site subscription must reside in the same Web application. • Multiple site subscriptions can be hosted in a single Web application. Multiple site subscriptions can share the same database. • Administrators define which services are available and activated for each tenant. The subscription ID for a tenant is used to map the service to the site collections. • Multiple tenants can share service data.
Installs or removes features and solutions Configures features and services Reviews usage statistics Tenants administer their sites by using a site template titled Tenant Administration, which is associated with a subscription ID. This site template is hidden and can be granted to tenants only by a farm administrator. Branding There have been a number of changes related to branding the user interface added to Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2010.
Figure 28: Theme in SharePoint Server 2010 SharePoint Designer SharePoint Designer is a powerful tool for customizing SharePoint sites and adding functionality. With any tool deployed in an organization, applying an effective governance plan is key to ensuring responsible use of the tool. SharePoint Server 2010 gives administrators added control over how SharePoint Designer is used in each Web application.
• Enable Managing of the Web Site URL Structure: Specifies whether site administrators can manage the URL structure of their site. Figure 29: SharePoint Designer Settings Master Pages While SharePoint Server 2010 still relies on master pages for implementing a custom look and feel to sites, there have been some enhancements made. Through the Web interface or by using SharePoint Designer, a site owner will be able to apply branding to their site, independent of other sites.
style the page by using a custom theme. It should be noted that customizing application.master was not recommended because in the event that something unfortunate happened to this master page, none of the system settings for a site could be accessed. Not only does SharePoint Server 2010 add greater flexibility for how to apply branding to these system pages, it also provides a fail-safe mechanism. If there is an error in the master page used for pages in the _Layouts, SharePoint will reference the default.
connect to existing sources of information. With the multi-tenancy feature, organizations have more control with hosted environments (from the hosting side of things in addition to the client side). For an administrator, this release has made drastic improvements toward a solution that is not only manageable, but is easy to maintain. The integration with Windows PowerShell™ allows for more administrative control, a more efficient command line, and improves productivity.
