Bill Baer /bɛːr/

Working with Joel Oleson we’ve republished many of the tools commonly available through GotDotNet to CodePlex including the SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Recycle Bin, WSS Split, SP Reports, and the SharePoint Portal Server 2003 People Picker. Happy downloading! Read more here http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/06/27/ms-it-sharepoint-gotdotnet-tools-republished.aspx.

While on vacation, yes working ;-), I was asked to look into an issue where Excel Calculation Services was deployed in a cross-forest environment; specifically where Excel Services is deployed on server A residing in Forest 1 and the clients requesting workbooks reside in Forest 2. Forest 2 does not trust Forest 1; however, Forest 1 trusts Forest 2. The Excel Calculation Services topology in this scenario was fairly basic where Excel Web Access, Web Services, and the Calculation Services are distributed across two network load-balanced web front-end servers and Excel Calculation Services and any UDF assemblies are hosted on a separate application server also servicing the Office SharePoint Server Search indexing service.

Of the many benefits of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0/Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, often overlooked is the native support of mobile devices through embedded mobile site URLs and mobile views. Mobile views permit both viewing and updating Lists and Document Libraries from a mobile device. When considering leveraging mobile views, you should carefully consider the restrictions on length and size of some parts of a list or library. Limitations Rendering and performance are considered in mobile views, therefore it is important to understand the limitations imposed by these considerations when implementing Lists and/or Document Libraries, for instance many common fields should have a character limitation of no greater than 20 applied, these include List and Document Library titles and names, and List and column name titles.

Site collection sizing is an important consideration in an overall capacity planning and governance solution. This article details the considerations when planning for capacity and determining how site collections should be sized. SharePoint Administration Tool (STSADM) The SharePoint administration tool, STSADM is most commonly used by SharePoint Products and Technologies administrators to backup and restore site collections or perform a variety of administrative tasks. Typically as the site collection size grows, the ability to use STSADM to backup and restore the site collection diminishes.

I’m pleased to announce the availability of Microsoft IT Team Site Life Cycle Management (MSIT TSLCM) Beta 1.0 for SharePoint Products and Technologies. Microsoft IT Team Site Life Cycle Management is a custom solution that provides lifecycle management for Windows SharePoint Services site collections and webs through write locking, backing up and recovering site collections/webs and is based on the out-of-box Site Usage and Confirmation feature. Microsoft IT Team Site Life Cycle Management Beta 1.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 has received U.S. Department of Defense 5015.2 certification. The 5015.2 standard on which the Department of Defense certification is based serves as the benchmark for government and corporate organizations that manage records and documents and is endorsed by the National Archives and Records Administration. Read the entire article here.

This is the second part of a multi-part series on using SQL Server 2005 Database Mirroring with SharePoint Products and Technologies. This post will cover the basic configuration parameters required to enable the mirroring of content, configuration, and search databases. Part 3 of this series will cover SharePoint Products and Technologies failover automation scripts and considerations. Basic SQL Server 2005 Database Mirroring Implementation for SharePoint Products and Technologies The most common implementation of SQL Server 2005 Database Mirroring includes all databases being installed on a single mirror partnership and the implementation of a witness (polling) server that provides automatic database failover between the principal and mirror servers when necessary.

I’ve updated my post Understanding PRESCAN.EXE Errors to include new errors and solutions. Read more here: http://blogs.technet.com/wbaer/archive/2006/12/22/prescan-errors-what-they-mean.aspx. Excerpt: ““An outbound zone URL is configured for something other than the default zone on virtual server http://fabrikam/, and no default zone outbound URL is defined. This is not supported, and must be corrected before upgrading.””

Since the initial release of the Microsoft IT Site Delete Capture 1.0 Feature, one of the most commonly reported issues has been the inability to restore a site archive generated by the application. The Microsoft IT Site Delete Capture 1.0 Feature uses basic STSADM principals to both backup and restore site collections and sites; however, generates its archives using one unified file extension (.BAK) for both operations as opposed to manifest files commonly associated with site export operations and single file associated with site collection backups.

With the introduction of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 the desire to reduce the number of content databases supporting a Web application has become a growing requirement to leverage both technologies such as SQL Server 2005 Database Mirroring, log shipping, and reduce the operational requirements to manage a high-volume of content databases. As a general rule, reducing the number of content databases will most often result in overall larger content databases hosting more site collections.