Best Practices in Developing Requirements for SharePoint Projects
This is one of my favorites blog posts from SharePoint Project Management Guru-Dux Raymond Sy.
I had the great opportunity to facilitate "Best Practices in Developing Requirements for SharePoint Projects" webcast for O'Reilly Media last July 28, 2010.
You can download the PPT presentation at: http://bit.ly/d1xbLN
Click the image below to watch the recorded presentation:
As promised, you can download the templates I showed at: http://www.meetdux.com/dl/req4sp.zip
In addition, I have compiled a list of valuable SharePoint resources related to the webcast:
- PM Resources for SharePoint 2010 Projects
- How SharePoint Can Deliver Project Transparency
- 5 Reasons Why SharePoint Ignorance is not Bliss
- Are you doing what it takes to Success at Implementing SharePoint?
- SharePoint Worst Practices: 5 Common Mistakes to Avoid
Lastly, if you want to join this session live, make sure you attend Best Practices Conference in DC from Aug 24-27, 2010
SharePoint 2010 Virtual Labs
Microsoft has published a number of Virtual Labs on MSDN and TechNet, simplifying a range of testing scenarios focused on SharePoint 2010. Customers already familiar with Microsoft’s Virtual Labs know that the resources are offered free of charge, and are available to all, not just MSDN and TechNet subscribers
“Microsoft SharePoint 2010 makes it easier for people to work together. Using SharePoint 2010, your people can set up Web sites to share information with others, manage documents from start to finish, and publish reports to help everyone make better decisions,” Microsoft revealed.
At the bottom of this article, you will be able to find a list of links pointing you to the TechNet and MSDN Virtual Labs for SharePoint Server 2010. Obviously, the TechNet Virtual Labs are focused on IT pros, while the MSDN resources are designed for developers. SharePoint Server 2010 RTM’d in mid-April 2010, along with additional products including Office 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010. As of May 12, 2010, SharePoint Server 2010 along with all the solutions enumerated above became available for purchase to business customers worldwide.
SharePoint Server 2010 Virtual Labs are essentially virtualized instances of the product running in Hyper-V on a Microsoft Server. Customers that want to access the resources will need to be running Windows and use Internet Explorer 8, IE7, or IE6. Since the virtual machines with SharePoint 2010 are running on Microsoft servers, customers don’t need to worry about details such as downloading, deploying or configuring the product. For each Virtual Lab, IT pros and devs get a 90-minute block of time per module, but they can also sign up for more
From TechNet:
TechNet Virtual Lab: Backup and Restore in SharePoint Server 2010
TechNet Virtual Lab: Business Continuity Management in SharePoint Server 2010
TechNet Virtual Lab: Configuring Remote Blob Storage FILESTREAM Provider for SharePoint Server 2010
TechNet Virtual Lab: Configuring Tenant Administration on SharePoint Server 2010
TechNet Virtual Lab: Configuring User Profile Synchronization in SharePoint Server 2010
TechNet Virtual Lab: Introduction to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Upgrade
TechNet Virtual Lab: New IT Pro Features in SharePoint Server 2010
TechNet Virtual Lab: Windows PowerShell in SharePoint Server 2010
From MSDN:
MSDN Virtual Lab: Developing a BCS External Content Type with Visual Studio 2010
MSDN Virtual Lab: Developing a Visual Web Part in Visual Studio 2010
MSDN Virtual Lab: Developing SharePoint 2010 User Interface with Silverlight in Visual Studio 2010
Sharepoint Administrative Tasks
I have been asked many a times what is the role of Sharepoint Administrator. In my opinion the Sharepoint Administrator primary job would be to monitor and check the Sharepoint Servers and Sharepoint Access, Build up the Physical Architecture, Logical Architecture and creation of SIte Collections and Sites and Management of Content Databases as per the best practices suggested by Microsoft.
- Some of the Routine SharePoint administrative tasks would be:
- Daily checks to test and monitor the SharePoint Status, health, and the Performance (SharePoint sites Response time, status of host server, SharePoint Server and the IIS Server)
- Daily check of Front-end and Back-end backups for business continuity.(Check the last date of your backups)
- Daily Check of the profile import.
- Daily check of the Search and Indexing features.
- Daily check and installation of Security Updates.
- Daily check the SharePoint Site Access
- Daily Monitoring and Reporting of SharePoint Sites.
- Daily Monitor and analyze SharePoint usage and activity.
- Daily Monitor and analyze SharePoint content and storage.
- Daily Monitor SharePoint Trends and Governance Violations.
- Daily monitor event logs for any errors or warnings. Make sure the number of warnings and errors were minimum and health check of the Sharepoint environment.
Issues after restoring MOSS to a previous VM snapshot
We restored our VM MOSS farm this morning from a snapshot taken a couple of months ago. Various issues occurred. Please note i am still working through some of the errors and will update this post as i find the answers.
- I could no longer login to the server because the snapshot was older than 30 days - the computer account for the server had expired and so needed to be reset and reconnected to the domain. See this blog for steps to fix this.
- The MOSS environment although appearing correct in Central Administration was not configured in IIS. The Central Administration site was the only site appearing in IIS even though all the web applications were still there.To fix this:
- Delete the old web application using Central Administration.
- Delete all the SSP web apps & DBs, apart from the default SSP which cannot be deleted.
- Recreate the web applications with Temp DB names.
- Recreate the SSPs with new DBs.
- Change the default SSP to one of the newly created SSPs, then delete the original default SSP inc DB, then recreate it's web app and set back to the default updating any associations as required.At this point I ran in to some issues recreating the SSP with the following errors. First of all the SSP failed to provision with the error:
Provisioning failed: A transport-level error has occurred when sending the request to the server.
SharePoint 2010 Demo Virtual Machine
The SharePoint 2010 virtual machine image is now available for customers and partners to download here:
http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9728417
This virtual machine image also include some demo content!
There are also handy bundled Akamai links for speedy global delivery and pausable/resumable downloads.
Some of the other Sharepoint 2010 RTM-downloads you may be interested with:
- Getting started with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010
- 2010 Information Worker Demonstration Virtual Machine (Beta)
- Getting started with Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010
- SharePoint Server 2010 performance and capacity test results and recommendations
- Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Evaluation Guide
Case Study : Coca Cola Enterprises on SharePoint Online!
Message from Cory:
Its only been about 25 months since I posted. Lets just say business is good and it keeps me busy 
A quick update - I am now Senior Escalation Engineer for SharePoint Online in the Online Services Division at Microsoft. Here is recently released case study on one of our customers Coca Cola Enterprises and their success with our service
Coca-Cola Enterprise migrates to Microsoft Online Services
http://www.microsoft.com/showcase/en/US/details/470b9f4c-bac8-4be9-b22a-d1a6953ef6a7