Underscores and hostnames

As you can read from the following post Underscores are evil: IE may block SP from using session cookies by Sean, it's not recommended to use underscores in your hostnames / urls together with SharePoint (or any other webapp that depends on cookies). And here is why plus how you can fix it if you used an underscore :

_DISCUSSION_
Historically, the underscore character has been allowable for NetBIOS names but not allowable as host names according to RFC 1132 [ http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1123.txt ] except as the *first* character in certain circumstances. Over the years as Microsoft has taken various positions toward standards compliancy there has been inconsistency across MS implimentations. Additionally, the underscore has widely and popularly used in DNS hostnames in spite of the RFC restrictions.

_SOLUTION_

DON'T just rename your machine. The machine name is hard-coded throughout the SharePoint config files and database and throughout the registry for various applications.

 DO set up an Alternate Access Mapping so that users can interact with the site using a different URL. Go to Central Administration > Operations > Alternate Access Mappings and use the Add Internal URLs option. For a quick fix, i just added a new hostname to our internal DNS and then added the FQDN as an Internal URL for the "Intranet" zone.

So thanks Sean! :)

 

Technorati tags: SharePoint, MOSS, WSS, Support

More and more articles about capacity planning and performance

From the godfather and guru of SharePoint (aka Joel Oleson) comes this nice post about articles that are released about perfomance and capacity planning

A number of new articles around performance have been published rounding out some great content on capacity planning, so rather than update those old posts where people have marked them as read, I've put together a more complete list of links to performance content and grouped it by product and scenario.  In addition I'd like to announce a paper we've been working on which will help you better plan for scalable lists and libraries with best practices on what methods to use for the best performance.  Note, some of the links are listed 2-3 times as they relate cross category.

By Product

WSS 3.0

• About performance and capacity planning (Windows SharePoint Services)
• Estimate performance and capacity requirements for Windows SharePoint Services collaboration environments (Office SharePoint Server)
• Intel Partner Whitepaper: White paper: Intel Performance Testing of Windows SharePoint Services (New! Great info on CPUs... single vs. dual core, etc...)
• Plan for availability (Windows SharePoint Services)

MOSS 2007

• Plan for server farms  (determining # of farms, org requirements and licensing)
• Plan for availability (Office SharePoint Server) & Database Mirroring
• Plan for performance and capacity (Office SharePoint Server)
• About performance and capacity planning (Office SharePoint Server)
• Additional performance and capacity planning factors (Office SharePoint Server)
• Tools for performance and capacity planning (Office SharePoint Server)
• Performance Test Scripts and Data population for VSTT: SPDataPop WSSDW.exe
• Logical architecture model: Corporate deployment
• Performance Counters
• HP Partner Whitepaper: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 on HP ProLiant Servers - Performance Summary

By Scenario

Portal & Collaboration

• Estimate performance and capacity requirements for portal collaboration environments
• Estimate performance and capacity requirements for Windows SharePoint Services collaboration environments (Office SharePoint Server)  (cross listed in WSS)
• Additional performance and capacity planning factors (Office SharePoint Server) (cross listed in Internet)
• HP Partner Whitepaper: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 on HP ProLiant Servers - Performance Summary

ECM: Records Repositories and Document Management Repositories

• Plan for software boundaries (Office SharePoint Server)
• Plan enterprise content storage

ECM: Internet/Web Content Management

• Estimate performance and capacity requirements for Internet Sites (New!)
• Additional performance and capacity planning factors (Office SharePoint Server)

Search

• Estimate performance and capacity requirements for search environments

Excel Services

• Determine resource requirements to support Excel Services

Technorati tags: SharePoint, MOSS, WSS, Planning, Support, Blog

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail!

Nice oneliner eh? Well it ain't mine though (or Steven Segal's).. it's from Joel Oleson who posted some governance posts on the SharePoint Product Group blog:

• Windows SharePoint Services Manageability Controls (Governance Series Part 1 of 5)
  This article, authored by Dan Holme with some help from myself, give you some background and lay the groundwork for what the nobs and controls are in a deployment.  I've recently been saying, Exchange is about hosting Mailboxes and SharePoint is about hosting Site Collections, but that statement might be 90% true.  For you the answer actually might be it's about hosting Web Applications or Sites.  For example... the question do I use a web application or a site collection or a site collection vs. a site is explored here.  This paper lays the framework for the other papers that use the terminology in this paper.  If you prefer to read ahead the links to the other papers are included.  I do recommend reading the actual whitepapers for the best readability and to view the applicable images.
• Information Architecture and Management Controls in WSS 3.0 (Governance 2 of 5)
  This paper by Dan Holme will explore four common usage scenarios such as Light Document/Content Management, Collaboration, Meetings/Workspaces and Individual expression. He explains the management/governance controls around each of these scenarios.  I hope you find it insightful.  There's a lot of good guidance based on the experience of MS IT and you'll see some of my recommendations and experience coming out in this paper as well. 

 

Technorati tags: SharePointharePoint, MOSS, WSS, Steven Segal, Blog, Support

(Approval) workflow thingies

This has been on my mind for a couple of months and now I have the time to write a proper post about it. It's about the user-friendliness of using custom workflows (or the default out-of-the-box even) on documents or in my case particularly: InfoPath Forms. The problem I am facing is that the customer finds it weird (and it is believe me) that approving a document or form requires a lot of steps that are not linked to each other.

1. A task is created for the designated user.
2. An email is sent to the user regarding the task
3. The user clicks on the link in the email to open the task in the browser
4. If you use the out-of-the-box workflows you get a nice InfoPath form where you can approve/reject the document and if you turned the option on, you can also reassign the task. If you didn't use the out-of-the-box workflows and opted for the 'create task' option in Sharepoint Designer when you designed the workflow, you only get a simple 'Ok' and 'Cancel' dialog.
5. Up until here the user has no clue what the document is all about, so he needs to click on the document link to open the document . Then he needs to close the document, go back to the task and approve/reject/reassign the task.

So if you catch my drift, the user must two separate things :
- Open the task and complete it
- Open the document and review it

Now wouldn't be nice if the user gets an overview (and here is why my rant is about InfoPath forms) of all the information in the task itself. Therefore gaining a huge amount of efficiency because the user would not have open the document to review it and it's just 'one' step to accomplish the task. Also the user is presented with this information already in the email that is sent by the tasklist. In order to accomplish this, you should the following :

1. Promote the fields in your infopath form to list columns (remember you can't promote repeating tables (well at least you can promote the first row :)) 
2. Publish your InfoPath form as a content type and use this content type in the task list
3. In Sharepoint Designer for each new task you wan to create, don't (!!) choose the 'create new task' option but rather choose 'create new listitem' and choose the tasklist
4. Set the values of the columns from the tasklist the same as the 'current' columns from the form (basically you are copying the values from the form to the taskitem)
5. You're done.. now the user gets information about the document/form when he or she receives the email that a task is awaiting for them.

Now to make it even more prettier you can also extend the toolbar of the taskitem to include an 'approve/reject' button in which you redirect the user to a similar form like the one that comes out-of-the-box. I will post a code example of this later on .. I promise.. heck maybe I will do a screencast about this as well! ;)

Technorati tags: SharePoint, MOSS, WSS, Workflow, InfoPath

Book reviews

What's better than coming home from a (well-deserved) vacation and getting two additional free books to review eh? :)

The first book is called "Essential SharePoint 2007, Delivering High-Impact Collaboration" and is about the functional capabilities that SharePoint 2007 has to offer. So instead of going deep into the technical stuff, this book covers several scenarios in what are the best ways of getting the most out of SharePoint 2007. For example it covers the discussion, as seen on the SharePoint blog, about using SharePoint 2007 to replace fileshares. In addition (and this is why I love this book already) it gives you some examples on how to setup and write plans to cover the gaps to get from high business level right down to implementation.
This book is aimed at architects, (functional/business) consultants and in a smaller sense developers.

So coming right down from a 10.000ft view of the product, the next book is about programming in SharePoint.

This second book is called "Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Development Unleashed". In the first chapter you are taught using CAML and then from there the book is divided in the following main chapters:

• programming using the object model
• programming the enterprise content, this goes into creating Business Data Catalog
• programming using Web Parts
• programming using the webservices

I think the book is aimed too high when it says it's useful for the current generation of SharePoint developers because the difficulty level is way to low and most of the things you should have done in 2003 and/or you can find in the SDK. As I Googled on the book I came across another book review just posted 2 days ago by Edhild: Book Review- Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Development Unleashed and somehow he has the same feeling about is as I do.

Conclusion:

Get the book about the functional capabilities and leave the programming book on the shelf :)

 

Links:

	Essential SharePoint® 2007: Delivering High-Impact Collaboration by Scott Jamison, Mauro Cardarelli, Susan Hanley
	Microsoft® SharePoint® 2007 Development Unleashed by Kevin Hoffman, Robert Foster

 

Technorati tags: SharePoint Books