Bill Baer /bɛːr/

One of the most critical components of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to many businesses is search and often is a key component of business processes. To ensure consistent and recoverable content is available to end-users, it becomes necessary to periodically backup the search components in the event of a catastrophic failure or issues requiring the rebuilding of the search component. Since re-crawling all content sources may not be practical or efficient in many cases, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 has streamlined the search component backup and restore process.

In November 2006 I posted on the availability of Application Templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0; currently all 40 of the “Fastastic 40” Application Templates are available for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 in English including 20 English Site Admin templates and 20 Server Admin templates which are also available in multiple languages to include French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese (BR), Japanese, Korean, Hebrew, Chinese (simplified), and Chinese (traditional). Application Template Resource Center

People Picker works both cross-domain and cross-forest in one and two way trust environments. People Picker will issue queries to all two-way trusted domains and two-way trusted forests to search People & Groups out-of-the-box. *People Picker uses the Windows SharePoint Services Web Application logon identity to access the target domain/forest. If the Web Application pool does not have access to the target domain/forest, People Picker will need to be configured to use an account with access to the target domain/forest using the following STSADM operations:

One of the most common questions I receive is how to co-host traditional “team” and personal Site Collections (My Sites) within an individual Web Application in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. While possible, there are several important steps that you should be aware of. The public profile page is a document specific to the SPSMSITEHOST site template (My Site Host); unless a My Site Host is defined in the server farm, public profile pages will not be available to users.

The Microsoft Best Practices Analyzer for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and the 2007 Microsoft Office System is now available from the Microsoft Download Center! The Microsoft Best Practices Analyzer programmatically collects settings and values from data repositories including Microsoft SQL Server, Registry, and Performance Monitor. The data when collected is processed and a set of comprehensive best practice rules are applied to the topology. Server farm administrators benefit from a detailed report listing of recommendations that can be applied to the environment resulting in performance and scalability improvements in additon to optimizing uptime.

The following information is a reference guide to configuring Trusted File Locations for Excel Calculation Services in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Your configuration may vary due to performance and hardware considerations; you should test configuration parameters for performance and scale before application to a production environment. Open your Shared Services Administration site and select Trusted file locations under Excel Services Settings. Click Add Trusted File Location to add a new Excel workbook file location considered trustworthy.

Two (2) new articles have been published centered on Excel Services programmability with accompanying sample solutions available in the Microsoft Download Center. The first article demonstrates how to extend List and query tables on Excel Services and includes content detailing external workbook references, SQL write-back and user-defined functions. The second article provides a more in-depth approach to developing UDF’s for Excel Services. Article: Extending the Excel Services Programmability Framework Accompanying Solution:

When preparing to deploy an Internet accessible Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 web farm security is the forefront of discussion and planning. To provide a brief insight into securing SharePoint Products and Technologies, I’ve decided to finally consolidate, compile and make available some of my notes. Hopefully this will be of benefit in helping others understand the method by which SharePoint Products and Technologies communicate and a high-level security overview. Internet Information Services (IIS) is the obvious first candidate for preparation and discussion –we’ve concluded IIS will be configured to use both basic and Integrated Windows authentication methods, basic allows credentials to be transmitted unencrypted and secured by SSL.

Estimated release timelines for both Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 language packs has been posted the SharePoint Team Blog.

I’ve recently been asked whether Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 can be upgraded to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007; while this is possible, there are several important constraints that should be taken into consideration. Foremost, you should not upgrade Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 bypassing the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 upgrade - by attempting to upgrading Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 you are combining two upgrade methodologies; version to version (WSS 2.