Bill Baer /bɛːr/

A e-mail dialogue came up with a colleague surrounding Profiles and Properties in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, with the questions specific to profile cleanup and management of changes in profile properties. How are inactive user profiles managed… How do I manage Active Directory property changes in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007’s profile database… After I sent my reply, I realized this was not the first time the question arrived in my inbox so I’ve decided to include the explanations here:

I was recently asked to deploy the ProClarity Viewer 6.3 for SharePoint Web Part - after downloading the package I realized that it was not offered in a deployable package, but rather a compressed archive of the .dwp, assembly, and resource files. The challenge became offering a user experience similar to the previous ProClarity Viewer version so I decided to package the Web Part into a reusable solution. For those interested or looking to create a deployable Web Part package I’ve documented the steps below:

I was just looking at the new Halo 3 skin recently applied to Tafiti and was very impressed. For those who’ve never heard of or much less used Tafiti. Tafiti is an experimental Microsoft search front-end designed primarily for research projects spanning multiple queries and sessions through a variety of visualization, storage, and collaboration/sharing presentation and management layers. Tafiti uses a combination of Live Search and Silverlight to both power and render results.

How to Create a SharePoint Server 2007 Custom Master Page and Page Layouts for a Web Content Management Site http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb727372.aspx How to Optimize a SharePoint Server 2007 Web Content Management Site for Performance http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb727371.aspx

A coworker recently came to me asking how to change the SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration URL where two or more Web front-end servers host the Central Administration Web application, for example, where two WFEs are deployed, both will leverage the URL of the first server provisioned with the Central Administration Web application. As many may have noticed, the path cannot be changed via the shortcut properties on the server, the reason is because the URL is Registry-based.

The Solution Accelerator SharePoint Manageability Toolkit (Beta) includes two new System Center Operations Manager 2007 Management Packs for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and Windows SharePoint Services providing new features to include new tasks for Internet Information Services, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Search monitoring, discovery of Single Sign-on server(s), and additional Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 performance data monitoring. Register and download the Solution Accelerator SharePoint Manageability Toolkit (Beta) https://connect.microsoft.com/programdetails.aspx?ProgramDetailsID=1601&wa=wsignin1.0 Learn more about the Solution Accelerator SharePoint Manageability Toolkit (Beta)

C# has long been the developers preference when working with Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies; however, since the release of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007/Windows SharePoint Server 3.0 Powershell has become more widely used to support the automation of common administrative tasks - though C# is and will long be integral in application development, Powershell provides both simplicity and flexibility for the automation of routine tasks. For example, let’s assume an administrator would like to programmatically provision a Web application outside of the SharePoint administration tool and/or the SharePoint 3.

As some of you may have noticed many of the images no longer render within a limited set of posts within my blog; rest assured I am working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. Prior to about June 2007 I used an ISA published Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 server farm running in Active Directory account creation mode offering host header-based site collections - by enabling Anonymous Access on a Document Library within my personal site collection I was able to both host and manage images consumed by this blog.

Should I cluster or mirror? A few short months ago, the answer to that question would have been easy, now with the increasing popularity of database mirroring to achieve redundancy and geographic replication the answer is split…while each solution provides its own unique benefits, those benefits can be distributed across the answer to what are trying to achieve? Database mirroring replays transaction log records on a standby server and as a result can failover more rapidly in most cases than a traditional SQL cluster with no loss of committed data; however, as a relatively new solution available to SharePoint Products and Technologies database mirroring has the highest operational costs when considering the learning curve required for the server support staff and database administrators.

Ghosted and unghosted pages are references not new to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, but have received increased interest as a result of their impact on upgrading from previous versions and more recently, the ability to manage pages in an unghosted state. Introduction Ghosted is the preferred state of pages in a site collection, ghosted pages refer to site definition files cached in memory on the server at process startup of IIS.