SpinPlate

Here’s a case study that describes an architecture firm who used MOSS to provide search for it’s 10 TB of data. That’s a freaky huge amount of data to crawl and I’m here to tell you that it’s no small thing to manage that kind of search repository.

I’m working with a farm right now that can crawl around 1,000,000 items in 24 hours. We’re working on increasing that right now by getting a faster PDF ifilter and tuning some things up but it’s only going to take us so far.

At some point soon we’re going to have to start considering some of the SSP and search wizardry mentioned in this awesome whitepaper from Microsoft IT, “SharePoint Performance Optimization”

This is a great chance to clean up all of those annoying bugs and errors that you have in your SharePoint deployment.

You can get the packs here:

• SP2 for WSS v3
• SP2 for MOSS 2007

What’s really important is that this is a great chance for you to work some bugs out of your SharePoint deployment. SP2 combines all of the previous CU cumulative patches and adds improvement to:

• performance
• reliability
• search and crawling
• alternative browser support

Don’t forget to do regression testing with any existing custom code or 3rd party solutions before you commit to deploying into production.  Plan a relatively large maintenance window because you must deploy the pack for WSS first and then MOSS and each time you must run them in succession one after another.  For more direction on deploying SharePoint updates, see the TechNet article here.  Although it’s not updated quite yet, there will be more information about it posted soon on the "Updates Resource Center for SharePoint Products and Technologies" also found on TechNet.  And, as you might have guessed, Joel Oleson has a very useful and comprehensive post about the goodies that are baked into SP2.

Like any good writer would, Joss Whedon got a little bored and frustrated during the writers strike.  So, intentionally relying on the Internet as it’s medium and conduit, he has created a supervillain musical called “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog“  With Neil Patrick Harris as “Dr. Horrible” and Nathan Fillion as “Captain Hammer”

I’ve already watched Act I and am about to watch Act II.  Act III will be released on 7/19.  In case you weren’t already convinced, I will tell you.  NPH is hysterical in this.

After reading the plan, I’m pretty intrigued by this and can’t wait to see if it takes off.  You’d better watch them all now because they will no longer be free after Sunday, 7/20.  After that it will be available for a “nominal fee”.

Also, the little comic (a prequel of sorts) is pretty funny too. 

Check it out..

Yesterday, Microsoft published an “Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297)“.  As I look through the list of fixes and read the post from the SharePoint Team Blog, I’m pretty psyched to see what they’ve put in this update.

New Search features such as federated search and a unified search administration dashboard.

This seems to be coming up a lot with larger companies and a few Govt. agencies.  The ability to easily join searches from multiple farms with multiple content.

Several core fixes to Search to improve performance and scale.

Platform performance improvements and fixes.

Both of these could be a very big deal as we are seeing companies and agencies that are really testing the “recommended” boundaries of architecture in things like document libraries, custom lists, and amount of site collections in a web application.  I have seen a document library with 1,000,000+ pdf’s in it.  And it was completely indexed.

Don’t forget to RTFM when installing patches to SharePoint, kiddies.

UPDATE: Browse here for very important installation instructions.

Let’s say you’re using a virtual machine to develop SharePoint on and you need to test some mail alerts.  These instructions will show you how to set up the built-in SMTP on Windows Server 2003 so that it will accept mail and forward it to a production mail server such as a home ISP mail server or your company’s Exchange server for delivery to either another mailbox account or any other e-mail address.  This would allow a developer to enable and test e-mail notifications from SharePoint or any other application.

Follow these instructions to turn on SMTP and set it to use your current mail server as a Smart Host e-mail relay with authentication:

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Use this procedure to completely blow away a MOSS (or WSS 3.0) farm in 4 easy steps.

Purpose:

The reason this is important is that some people are convinced that they have to uninstall SharePoint or even completely rebuild their box in order to start from scratch.  This is not so.

NOTE: 

• This assumes you’ve backed up and kept everything you want to keep.
• The psconfig.exe command is located in the “%WINDIR%\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\bin” folder.
• this does not remove any custom code or other types of files from the 12 hive
• this procedure will keep the SharePoint patch and service pack level of the host so there’s no need to rerun hotfixes or anything

Procedure:

1. From the host that runs Central Admionistration, run this command “psconfig.exe -cmd configdb -disconnect” to disconnect Central Admin from your database.
2. Run this command “psconfig.exe -cmd adminvs -unprovision” to unprovision the Central Administration site.
3. Delete all application pools and web sites from affected IIS servers.
4. Delete any SQL user databases related to SharePoint e.g. SharedServices*,SharePoint_AdminContent*,SharePoint_Config,WSS_Search

Now you’re ready to run the Configuration Wizard just as if you had never set up a farm.

TechNet info on psconfig.exe

“Take off and nuke the site from orbit…  It’s the only way to be sure.“  – Aliens

Well I hope everyone had a nice Microsoft Tuesday…

As noted in Mike Watson’s blog, Microsoft has released a rollup of fixes for Content Deployment in the form of the May 2008 package.  I’m going to say this is pretty significant since I’m pretty sure I’ve seen some of the errors fixed by it at client sites.  (Does “Object reference not set to an instance” sound familiar to anyone?)

For WSS:  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952698

For MOSS:  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952704/

This is so win I can’t even describe.  Bruce’s ability to make fun of himself is unsurpassed.  And Ted Raimi is there… but what about Sam?  Will there be a cameo from Sam Raimi?

One thing is for sure.  I’ll be in the theater to see it.

I’m a big fan of the changes to the Windows Mobile OS from version 5 to 6.  But 6.1 has got some very compelling stuff added to it.  It looks like the biggest additions are stuff involved with enterprise support.  Obviously they’re going after Blackberry and Blackberry Enterprise Server for corporate use.

Going by history, it may be a very very looong time before AT&T Wireless lets HTC create a distribution for the 8525 (AKA HTC TyTN) seeing as they only released a 6.0 version on Halloween this past year.

Get a look at the feature comparison of the different versions from the Windows Mobile 6.1 site after the jump.

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Microsoft just released an update to the whitepaper “Data protection and recovery for Office SharePoint Server” on TechNet.

(direct link to the doc download)

The original version was geared for small or medium farms but the update includes information that is good for and intended for enterprise deployments.

• More info and explanation of using Central Administration (GUI) backups
• More info about stsadm backups
• Included information about using Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2007
• Added a section about using a recovery farm (yay!) as part of your recovery plan