Time for an ‘infrastructure musling’…

Consider that if you have an environment which is low on resources, you may find that through creating web applications in the SharePoint 2010 farm that further attempts to create a new web application through Central Administration could result in the following:

• The creation process results in a ‘Page cannot be displayed’ message.
• The web application is only provisioned on the Central Administration server.

The reasoning is that as more web applications are created the more work is required and therefore the time in which it takes to create a web application increases exponentially. Also, due to the additional work is IIS reset and further updates, the default timing required to complete is beyond the 90 seconds set by the Central Admin application pool. Hence, the provisioning time may not simply be high enough.

To resolve, try the following:

• Delete the web application that did not provision to the Web Front End.
• On the server hosting Central Admin, open IIS manager.
• In the tree view, expand the server name and click on Application Pools.
• Locate the SharePoint Central Administration v4 application pool. Right click on it and choose Advanced Settings.
• In the Process Model section, set the Shutdown Time Limit to a greater value. I set mine to 300.
• Restart IIS.
• Try creating the web application again – note that you must be patient! On my environment (and it’s a TEST one) I had to wait for 5 minutes to provision.

Final note.

You should also check the number of cores that are available to the Central Admin server. Remember that the recommended core level is 4. I noticed that during the creation the CPU usage hit and stayed at 100% (and that was at 2 cores). Upping to 4 seemed to correct the issue where I did not have to alter the Shutdown Time Limit; that said, am still investigating what causes the slowdown in creating Web Applications (but that’s for another musling)…

Hope this helps you out there!

Whilst I was at the London SharePoint Conference 2012 I was rapidly taking notes on the sessions I managed to get to. Whilst doing notes on the  talk by Rob Foster titled ‘Facebook in your Comnpany – You can forget it!’ I thought ‘Hey I should definately share some key points’. Additionally, the cartoons were done by Chris Shipton and during Robs talk (and many others) – I took pics of them, and used snippets of them in my ‘key points’ presentation I’d like to share.

Note – click the big arrow to start the presentation, and then click FULLSCREEN in the bottom right to get full benefit. Press ESCAPE to come out of FULLSCREEN at the end.

Hi, booked way back to go to the London SharePoint conference taking place next week – going to be exciting to meet up with friends and make plenty of new ones, and learn learn learn!

Was really hoping to speak at the conference, but alas, a little too late for my submission, nevertheless, it still its going to be great fun and will let you know how it all goes and the highlights!

More information about the conference is on this link:

www.internationalsharepointconference.com/

From a planning perspective, what are the very basic areas that one needs to think of when going down the route of creating a SharePoint solution, whether its a site, or farm, or even a workflow solution. I have attempted to answer this by building a presentation key covering planning, adoption, supporting, delivery from a high level.

Note – click the big arrow to start the presentation, and then click FULLSCREEN in the bottom right to get full benefit. Press ESCAPE to come out of FULLSCREEN at the end.

Located some great guides whose goal is to assist the reader through the process of planning a SharePoint Server 2010 infrastructure by addressing the following:

Step 1: Identify the Requirements

Step 2: Apply the IT Policies

Step 3: Define the High-Level Architecture

Step 4: Design the Web Server Infrastructure

Step 5: Design the Application Server Infrastructure

Step 6: Design the SQL Server® Infrastructure

Step 7: Identify the Optimization Opportunities

These guides are available for download. The first guide takes the architect through an easy-to-follow planning and design process to successfully create a SharePoint Server infrastructure that is appropriately placed, sized, and designed to deliver the desired business benefits, while also considering the performance, capacity, and fault tolerance of the system.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/B/C/5BC966BC-47D8-41DF-95F2-FA9A2D816258/SharePoint%20Server.zip

For more information go here: http://technet.microsoft.com/library/gg581794.aspx

This guide provides a clear comparison of SharePoint collaboration technologies across on-premises, standard hosting, and dedicated hosting scenarios. The guide can be used as a framework for evaluating the technical feasibility of Microsoft SharePoint Online and determining which SharePoint delivery model best suits the organization’s needs.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/B/C/5BC966BC-47D8-41DF-95F2-FA9A2D816258/SharePoint%20Online%20-%20Evaluating%20Software-plus-Services.zip

For more information go here: http://technet.microsoft.com/library/ee354215.aspx

Am building a presentation summarising these guides for a future blog coming soon!

To give this more of a scenario, here goes. The client is using SharePoint in-premise with Microsoft Office tools. Being a research body they write lots of papers and publish these on their in-premise SharePoint. They now need to make some of the documents public and wish to maintain them on their Office365 site. They are ultra-keen on ensuring that the key features of Microsoft Office are available to their SharePoint online site. One of those is the Research option.

For those who wish to know more about the Research feature, go to this link:

http://www.sharepointgeoff.com/how-to-search-sharepoint-using-research-options-in-microsoft-word/

Now to the problem. The mail from the client stated:

“One of the key features we use is Research from Microsoft Office. We connect this into our in-premise SharePoint so we can search for related material when writing our papers. We need to connect the Research option from Microsoft Office to our SharePoint public site. We know how to do this on our in-premise. But when we try to connect to our SharePoint public site we get this error:

no services were added because the service provider did not provide any valid information”…

Hrm… That looks like the site does not support or provide search services. Now am pretty keen with Microsoft Word so I knew that to test whether any search services are available on a SharePoint site I could try entering this:

http://www.nameofthesharepointpublicsite.com/_vti_bin/search.asmx

I tried that, and got the same error – strange. So I tried this on several copies of Word to the same site, and to other SharePoint public test sites I have, same situation.

From discussion with MS Support, it seems that in able for the search connectivity to work between the Word client and Office 365 SharePoint site, that:

1: You need to be logged into the site in question first

2: The search entry is https://www.nameofthesharepointpublicsite.com/_vti_bin/search.asmx NOT http://

So, tried those two steps and voila! After being presented with an warning dialog, clicking OK, Success! I was able to connect Office Research to 365Office!

Now this presents an interesting scenario where the client needs to be informed that in some cases one must use https to connect Office to their SharePoint sites – which is going to be interesting if they are used to using http!!

Anyway, case closed on this one, hope it helps you!

There’s plenty of technical articles discussing what tool to use, what commands to use, what products to use and more in the face of migrating one or more SharePoint environments from 2007 to 2010. However, this article describes the process that a SharePoint Architect would need to define with the SharePoint Administrator to ensure there is a plan which covers:

• What will be migrated
• What environments will need to be in place
• What Risks have been investigated
• What teams are involved
• What Third Party systems have been investigated

Note that this document as said is not a click here click there guide (there’s a huge amount of excellent resources out there) – neither does it advocate any particular tool to use (I have used content db shift as an example).  What this articles is here to do is to help you focus on the areas that the stakeholders will need to know – and provide key benefits to things that your peers would want to know – e.g. ‘When does this take place’, ‘What features for my web application will be available’, ‘How will the backup work’, ‘Is DR going to be in place’ and many more.

Go here to Read the Guide

Go here to see the Mind Map

Also, for those who use Mind Manager 2012 I have included the Mind Map minus all the text – this is so you can use the same method as I have to gather your thoughts and present to the client.

Happy Reading!

I have been asked by quite a few people on listing documents from document libraries that include sub-folders; so I’d like to share with you a poor-man method of listing all files and folders in a document library in SharePoint with hundreds of files and folders, and displaying the contents of this in NotePad.

Now, I know there are probably lots of nice little apps out there, and I must admit writing one myself called GEGETDOCCONFIG (which does a whole lot more). There’s also information on how to use Powershell to enumerate document libraries here – but you can very quickly list all files and folders from a DIRectory assuming you can get its UNC (Universal Naming Convention) path and you can access the entire document library. All you will need to do is to use the famous DIR command from the command prompt, and you can do this without having to log onto any of the servers in your SharePoint farm.

If you’ve spent much time working in a DOS-based environment, chances are that you’re very familiar with the DIR command. When used in its most basic form, the DIR command simply displays a list of all the files and subdirectories contained within a particular directory. However, the DIR command has access to a fleet of special command line parameters that allow it to perform a host of very specific file listing and sorting operations. While you can perform many of these operations in Windows Explorer, the speed and accuracy with which you can perform them with the DIR command is astounding. Furthermore, you can easily combine these command line parameters to create unique directory listings on the fly.
You will need access to the COMMAND PROMPT, so you can use it against the UNC. A UNC is a naming convention used primarily to specify and map network drives in Microsoft Windows. Support for UNC also appears in other operating systems via technologies. UNC names are most commonly used to reach file servers or printers on a LAN. UNC names identify network resources using a specific notation. UNC names consist of three parts – a server name, a share name, and an optional file path. We will need the UNC of the relevant SharePoint location and then use DIR against it.

Follow these steps:

Step 1: Get the UNC

Take for example, a document library whose contents you would like to list:

http://documents/Products/Forms/AllItems.aspx

Its UNC from Windows Explorer would be:

\\documents\products

Make a note of the UNC path you will need it in the next step.

Step 2: Generate the List

So, to list all the files and the folders, off to DOS we go:

Click Start -> Accessories -> Command Prompt

Then, enter this command:

DIR /d /s (name of the above UNC path) > (name of the file you want to pipe the list to)

For example:

DIR /d /s \\documents\products > c:\productfilelist.txt

This will list all the files and folders from the UNC path into productfilelist.txt. Then, all you need to do is open this in notepad or clean it up in Excel.

That’s all there is to it.

Note that I used various switches, /d and /s in my DIR command – check out some other switches below.

/A:attributes

Only the files whose attributes match the ones you specify will be displayed. You can enter a sequence of attributes after the colon. It is not necessary to enter spaces between entries.

The possible attributes are:

• H|-H – Hidden (or not hidden) files.
• S|-S – System (or non system) files.
• D|-D – DIRectories (or files only).
• R|-R – Read-only (or read/write) files.
• A|-A – Archivable (or already archived) files.

/O:order

Allows you to specify the order in which the entries will be displayed.

The possible options are:

• N|-N – By name (alphabetical or reverse alphabetical).
• E|-E – By extension ( alphabetical or reverse alphabetical).
• D|-D – By date and time (chronologically or reverse).
• S|-S – By size (increasing or decreasing).
• C|-C – Sorts by DoubleSpace compression ratio lowest to highest or highest to lowest.
• G|-G – Group directory (before, or after) other files.

Other Switches

• /B – (Bare format) – Displays only file names.
• /L Information is displayed in lowercase letters.
• /S Displays file entries in the specified directory and all subdirectories located below it hierarchically.
• /P Pauses when the screen is full. Press any key to display another screen full of data.
• /W Displays only filenames and directory names (without the added information about each file) in a five-wide display format.

Also, note that you can use speech-marks to surround the UNC path if there are spaces in it. For example:

http://myportal/mysubsite/shared documents

would read as:

“\\myportal\mysubsite\shared documents”

Two final TechNet references for you if you need to get further information on DIR and UNC are below:

DIR COMMAND: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc755121(v=ws.10).aspx

UNC: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc939978.aspx

If you have just jumped into this article, without reading the first two I urge you to go back and read the first two articles – here are the links:

Value Management in SharePoint – Part 1 of 3

http://www.sharepointgeoff.com/managing-value-for-sharepoint-solutions/

Value Management in SharePoint – Part 2 of 3

http://www.sharepointgeoff.com/value-management-in-sharepoint-part-2-2/

In this final article, we’ll take a look at how Value Engineering methods can be used to help make decisions in crafting a SharePoint solution to the business.

Demonstrating HOW something will be achieved and WHY it is going to be achieved is one of the most compelling ways in which as a SharePoint specialist can convince the client to understand why a decision to apply a feature, component or set of processes will help solve a business requirement. Particularly, it will also show where it will save capital, improve ROI and act as a measurement to demonstrate where decisions have been successful (or even unsuccessful) in the long run.

What is the objective of Value Engineering in SharePoint

Value Engineering is all about how the decisions we make are based on meeting objectives and how they can be structured in a easily understood fashion.

Typically, the decisions we make to meet any SharePoint objective can be boiled down to a number of situations.

• The business requires SharePoint to meet a specific business objective which in turn will make their staff more productive in managing and creating content.
  
• The business has a large number of requirements using SharePoint, but it’s difficult to see the wood for the trees in determining what should be done first.
  
• The business has a clear set of requirements using SharePoint, but it’s difficult to see what feature will provide the best functionality.
  

For each of these scenarios, you could apply Value Engineering to help analyse, record and prioritise requirements.

The objective of Value Engineering is to refine a selected solution to optimise the value for money. This can be achieved by:

• Removing unnecessary functionality and cost
  
• Increasing functionality at no extra cost
  
• Maintaining functionality at lower cost
  

If you work in delivering SharePoint solutions, whether you are an analyst, administrator, architect or project/programme manager you will continually have to make decisions user experience, adoption, sustainability, availability and configuration management of the platform.

Value Engineering helps by providing a method to structure these decisions, to plant priorities and thereby determine which alternatives and solutions best optimises the decisions you take. As said earlier, the client gains from this since there is a historical, audited approach and knows that the cost (and benefits) associated with each solutions agreed upon can be measured.

FAST Value Engineering Methods

No, we are not talking about FAST search service functionality in SharePoint!

Within Value Management, a technique called the Functional Analysis Systems Technique (FAST) can be used to define the basic functions that are required for the deliverables from the project as a whole or from any part of the project. You start by stating what you are trying to achieve and then, by asking a series of “how” questions, you decompose this into increasingly specific statements of functionality.

This method can be used for virtually any objective where there is the requirement to advise how an objective will be achieved. For example, if the objective is to increase user adoption in SharePoint a method in how to achieve this would be to provide a Proof of Concept / Sandbox environment where users could try out SharePoint out of the box features and, if necessary any third party solutions. Value Engineering can be used to not only decide on that approach, but also what should be used to ensure that approach is a success, by drilling further into that proposal and optimising it.

Additionally, the technique can be used in reverse where you have been given a set of discreet functions. You list them and against each ask the question “why have this element”. You can then derive the relevant diagram, eventually arriving at the basic objective. This technique helps you identify and filter out un-necessary functionality.

An example of the technique used in reverse with SharePoint is when needing to decide which Service Applications to use in a new SharePoint farm, which needs to provide lean services to ensure the performance and availability of the environment. For example, in a SharePoint farm where one application server is used with limited infrastructure performance on that server, one would not enable every service application unless that service application was required (that is, it has a premise). So, if one of the basic objectives was to provide the business with the ability to create dashboards using Microsoft PerformancePoint then the objective would be to enable the relevant service. However, by doing this one would then need to decide on the level of infrastructure required (for example, positioning on another server to provide services, increasing infrastructure capacity RAM, CPU etc, all to ensure availability and maintain performance).

To help explain and to provide a method of helping you build a decision matrix, I’ve provided three basic scenarios below, which show (without going into too much detail) the process of mapping out through brainstorming the basic objectives into sub-objectives. The basic objective can also be called the solution; the sub objectives are known as elements.

Scenario 1

The objective is to deliver a SharePoint farm which is subject to high impact usage and a medium level user count.

Scenario 2

The objective is to deliver a RFP (Request for Proposal) SharePoint site for the company to manage business cases.

Scenario 3

The objective is to deliver a user profile enhancement to an existing SharePoint platform.

Identifying Possible Cost Savings

Once you have a defined solution, you will need to identify and assess the whole life cost of each element in that solution. You should consider each of the elements in turn, starting with those with the highest cost and hence, greatest opportunity to make savings.

This stage is important to proving to the client that the cost burden is commensurate with the solution they are happy with, and forms the basis for further projects which are related. For example, in creating a SharePoint farm the whole life cost can be used to define the next level costs for specific elements that may need to be created, assuming that the engineering of that SharePoint farm includes the features that project may adopt.

Let us consider this scenario:

You have been asked to provide a SharePoint farm which requires custom development. This will cost an extra 10k including annual support costs of 2k. It is assumed the lifetime of the SharePoint requirement will be reviewed in 3 years; therefore, the life cost of the custom development (one element in the solution) will be 12 * 3 = 36k. Other elements include the Proof of Concept SharePoint environment which will cost 20k plus licensing costs of 4k and which will not be expected to be required after 2 years. As an alternative you could build a SharePoint farm without the custom element, using internal features which will fall short of the full client requirement, but is expected to save 20k (albeit that there will be costs bourne by the business to use other alternatives to address the shortfall of not having the custom element).

With the above scenario, let us record the custom development and Proof of Concept elements and assign costs to these. When doing this, be mindful that drill further to understand what functionality needs to be in each element. For example, a Proof of Concept element does not just mean ‘slap a server and put SharePoint on it’, there’s more work than that considering that users may need to be trained (for example), you will have to source the server, use resources outside of your direct remit (networking, SQL, security etc.).

Continue adding the core elements to the table, once done, identify where you can optimise the solution by streamlining elements, by either re-prioritisation, identifying alternatives (for example custom development could be offset by using out-of-the-box features), reducing infrastructure costs by confirming the licences required (for example).

When ‘Value Engineering’ a proposed solution use the following pointers:

Significant Element Decision Making

• Understand the current proposed solution – no guesswork – analyse the solution and remember no-one is a SharePoint superman – get help!
  
• Brainstorm alternative approaches – with the client and other technical teams use their combined knowledge to find alternative solutions that can enhance the solution and without increasing cost (or if the cost is going to increase ensure you can justify it!). For example, if you are going to build a farm and have separated technical teams use the knowledge of those teams to build various approaches.
  
• Assess the most promising options and discard unworkable solutions – don’t fall into the trap of scope-creep, and don’t assume you get better value for money if you start adding more solutions the client will ‘like’ – stick to the proposal.
  
• Estimate the cost of any alternatives together with any pros and cons; for example, building physically separated farms may increase data integrity but also increase admin complexity and license costs.
  

Deciding Whether To

• Continue with the original proposal – SharePoint may be only limited by ones creativity but that doesn’t mean you force it to. For the proposals look to the bigger picture and think topology, structure, governance, support. Don’t be scared to indicate to the client that the proposal is untenable.
  
• Investigate one or more of the options further – as part of the decision process for the elements confirm the viability of the options. For example, if there is a need to build diagrams to show a business process and have that turned into a workflow in SharePoint there are at least four ways of doing this – Visio, SPD, Nintex, K2. However, for each there are further implications; some technical, some platform and each have different costs. At the same time, remember that you are not SharePoint superman and if one of the options does not fit discard it for the proposal; you can always pick up that discarded option for another proposal later.
  
• Adopt one of the alternative solutions -
  

Optimising the Solution

• Test any assumptions you have made
  
• Assess the implications of any relevant risks
  
• Consider delivery aspects
  
• Consider the quality criteria and testing
  
• Take account of corporate architectures – note this is not just technical they include system or process
  

Critical Success Factors

• Obtain input from all involved, don’t leave it to your technical team
  
• Ensure those participating have the authority to speak for their domains
  
• Use coaches in meetings; good facilitation pays dividends
  
• Have sufficient information to hand
  

End of this Article

In conclusion, Value Engineering is vitally important in aiding your decision making so that you can optimise the solution required and at the same time measure the cost and resources needed to deliver the solution.

As a SharePoint specialist, the key points to remember are:

• Check the proposed functionality is really needed
  
• Determine where the money is spent
  
• Identify alternative approaches for high cost aspects
  
• Test your assumptions
  

I hope these three articles have been useful and given you some insight into Value Management and Value Engineering in SharePoint. It has been an absolute pleasure writing this guide, and I’m sure there is so much more I can add – I’ll eventually turn it into a free e-book and add it for download.

To recap, there are three articles that make up this guide:

Value Management – Introduction

Value Management – The Process

Value Engineering – This Guide.

If you need further information, would like to comment or feel you have more information to offer, please feel free to contact me.

A great reference (if you are interested in the science of Value Engineering and F.A.S.T) is here: http://www.value-eng.org/pdf_docs/monographs/FAbasics.pdf

Time to tell a tale of a rather interesting scenario concerning deploying Office Web Applications to a SharePoint farm.

The installation of the product was intended to go directly after the initial deploy of SharePoint to the servers in the farm. Following the installation of the prerequisites for SharePoint 2010, then installing SharePoint 2010 and running through all the relevant configuration checks, security checks, then getting OAT (operational acceptance testing) signoff, it was time to deploy Office Web Applications.

A point to all – Office Web Applications needs to be installed to all the servers in the farm – don’t be fooled into thinking (hey it’s only going to be accessible from the application server) – wrong. The deployment needs to go on all servers which are joined to the farm – so if you have reporting servers or servers whose purpose is to manage specific service applications then yes, you must install Office Web Applications to those servers too.

So, we followed the instructions for installation from this link:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/ee815687 where there is a ton of information.

Then time to install the product. When trying to install, immediately a dialog was displayed with this message:

“Setup is unable to proceed due to the following error(s) Windows Server Features or Role Services required by this product are not enabled”

There was no display of what features or Role services was required. Very strange – surely the prerequisites were deployed when installing SharePoint 2010?

We ran the prerequisites installer again – all relevant products were installed and running. We ran the installer on all the servers in the farm – same message!

So, we quickly built a VM solely to test the installation – maybe there was something wrong with the farm? Built the VM, deployed SharePoint to it from scratch, then tried to install Office Web Applications again – same message!

In a final attempt at getting the installer to fire up, we decided to deploy the following using Server Manager to that VM:

Role Services:

• TCP Port Sharing
• Message Queuing Activation
• TCP Activation
• Named Pipes Activation

Features:

• Desktop Experience
• Ink and Handwriting Services
• Ink Support
• Windows Powershell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE)
• XPS Viewer

Had to restart the server a couple of times to complete the install of the components.

Tried the Office Web Applications installer again – success! So seemingly Office Web Applications requires additional services and features. Am still investigating, and notably there has been no discernible impact on server performance on having these extra components deployed.

Additionally, we then patched to the very latest version from downloading Service Pack 1 from this link:

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26639

So, the gotcha is the fact that you need to watch out for the prerequisites – potentially for additional server products do not be confused that the prerequisites required relate somehow to SharePoint 2010 prerequisites!

Hope this helps out