PDC Presentation at Karachi

Finally the 5th Pakistan Developer Conference ended with a great closing ceremony and a lavish dinner to PDC speakers at Lal Qila. It was good and everybody learned and gained a lot including the speakers, the attendees, the students, MS guys, MVPs and all. Specially the ones who won laptops, digital cameras and XBOX enjoyed the closing ceremony:). Bravo to the volunteers who made this once again a great success. It was pleasure and a very good experience meeting all the geeks, the Microsoft guys, all my colleagues and long lost friends.

I delivered two sessions, one on workflow foundation and the other on Business Data Catalog features in MOSS. Most of the attendees requested to share the presentation which I could not at that time, so  here it goes.

Hope to see you all again in the next PDC. Cheers

PDC Presentation

I will be speaking at Pakistan Developer Conference  -PDC 2007 on MOSS and Windows Workflow Foundation. If any of you get a chance, do get in touch

Management Pack for MOSS 2007

The management pack for Office SharePoint Server 2007 is now available which will help administrators and consultants gather precious operational data and enable them in responding to critical events. This will result in better reporting of failures so that configuration problems and service outages are handled in time by the administrators.

MOM 2005
The management pack for MOM 2005 can be downloaded here

System Center Operations Manager 2007
For the new SCOM 2007, MOSS management pack can be downloaded here

Features

The following alerts have been made available through this management pack
• Shared Services Provider (SSP) provisioning failed
• Site Directory scan job failed
• Enabling features failed on some sites
• Administration site for the SSP is missing
• Enabling features on existing sites failed
• The Office SharePoint Server Search service is not running
• The Microsoft Single Sign-On service is not running
• The Office Document Conversions Launcher service is not running
• Failed to connect to parent server farm
• SSP synchronization failed
• The Office Document Conversions Load Balancer service is not running
• Failures in content deployment jobs
• Poor cache performance
• Error during document copy or move operations
• Errors with the Information Rights Management (IRM) features
• Failures in the Document Conversion feature
• Out of Memory exceptions coming from form business logic
• Denial of Service scenarios
• Failures during form processing or while loading business logic assemblies

Policy Management for User Profiles and MySite

A frequently asked question in discussion groups is “How can we hide/ unhide the links on MySite for specific users?”. “How can user profile page be customized to make some properties available to only limited users”.

The answer is policy management in Shared Services Administration.

Go to Central Admin ->Shared Services Administration->SharedServices1 ->Profile Services Policies

MOSS Multilingual site configuration

My article on MOSS multilingual features and concepts. A detailed guide on how to create multilingual websites in MOSS

http://www.codeproject.com/spoint/MOSS_multilingual.asp

Role based templates for MySites

Every job role is unique and demanding. As people work to drive business outcomes, they have to balance the complexities of interacting with multiple systems, tracking goals, and relating to surrounding processes. IT organizations have been seeking role-based solutions that can provide information workers with common interfaces to access priority information.

Role-Based Templates for SharePoint My Sites are custom templates, designed for Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the My Site functionality, and tailored to address the unique needs and requirements of specific roles within an organization.

For more details visit here

Office SharePoint Server Administration model

The administration model is very much enhanced in MOSS as compared to that in SPS 2003. We have a clear isolation of administrative tasks and multi-tier administration model. This allows delegation of different administrative tasks.The three layers of Office SharePoint Server administration model are:

• SharePoint Central Administration
• Shared Services Provider Administration
• Site Collection Administration and Site Settings 

Let’s look at each of them one by one

SharePoint Central Administration 

SharePoint Central Administration comes as a web application which provides administrative features for the contextual MOSS solution. The major administrative tasks that can be performed are:

• Managing the Server Farm Topology
• Creating new web applications
• Creating new site collections
• Managing Email settings

The administrative tasks at this level are typically performed by IT administrators

Shared Services Administration  

This level of administration allows configuration and settings for different shared services and components that apply to the server farm. The services and settings that can be configured include but are not limited to:

• Search
•  User Profiles and audiences
• Personal Site Settings
• Audiences
• Usage reports 

These tasks are normally performed by a business unit IT administrator. 

Site Collection Administration and Site Settings

The third level of administrative configuration applies to the site collections and sites in context. Most of the tasks in this level of administration can be applied to a site level and some can be applied to a site collection level. The administrative options include:

• Creating content and list
• Applying security to site and content
• Changing Site Navigation
• Changing the look and feel of site
• Changing site columns, content types and master pages
• Adding web parts and site features

These tasks are typically performed by a site administrator for a particular site

64 bit PDF IFilter for MOSS now available

I was searching long for 64 bit PDF IFilter for MOSS and here it comes now from a company named Foxit.
Download it here
Besides MOSS, this filter can be used for Windows Indexing Service, MSN Desktop Search, IIS, WSS, Exchange Server and SQL Server
The installation instructions are as follows
• Download PDF IFilter
• Stop all appropriate clients
• Uninstall any previous version of Foxit PDF IFilter
• Double-click the downloaded file and follow the on-screen instructions
• After the installation completes, start all appropriate clients
• (SharePoint only) Add PDF as a file type to be included in the content index
• Re-index your system with the appropriate clients.
Foxit has already provided the 32-bit filter for MOSS.

Vista, Office, MOSS Launch at NED

I recently was invited to NED as a speaker for the VISTA, Office, MOSS and .NET 3.0 Launch Event. The event went excellent with a lot of students attending the events and asking questions about the new features in MOSS, Office and Vista. The event was organized collectively by NED INETA user group and MSServerSide.NET user group. It all ended with goodies distributed to students.

Licensing Options in MOSS

Office SharePoint Server 2007 licensing has changed from previous versions in that now you don’t have to worry about the Enterprise or Standard version of the server. The server is available in two flavors.

·         Office SharePoint Server 2007, Server License

o   If you are going for intranet enabled SharePoint and you don’t have any plans to make it available over the internet

 

·         Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet Sites

o   If the intention is to develop internet-facing sites and allow anonymous users to connect and access information over the portal.

If you go for the second option i.e. internet license, no CALs are needed as anonymous users are also allowed to connect. In fact, there is a huge addition in the cost of Internet License itself as compared to the Intranet License.  In case of the first option, i.e. intranet license, you will have to buy CALs for the number of users you want to connect to the server. Two types of CALs are available

·         Standard CALs

o   The Standard CALs are needed to access information available on your intranet server. You can access the features like portal, collaboration, search, ECM, document management etc. However, you cannot use things like BDC, Electronic Forms, Excel Services, Business Intelligence and LOB search features.

 

·         Enterprise CALs

o   If you need to remove limitations as discussed in the Standard CALS, Enterprise CALs need to be purchased. Here again, you will find a catch, as Enterprise CALs cannot work alone. Enterprise CALs are always deployed on top of Standard CALs. So for any user, if you need the provision of Enterprise features (mentioned above), you will need 1 Standard CAL and 1 Enterprise CAL per user.  

It should be noted that Office SharePoint Server Internet License gives you the Enterprise Functionality that you can have with the Enterprise CALs in case of intranet server.