SharePoint 2010 Stretched Farm

Very good information.

 

Killing two birds with one stone: SharePoint HA and DR with stretch farm, and everything you want to know about it

Setting-up SharePoint 2010 stretched farm

It looks like that SharePoint 2013 does not support stretched farm, see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262485%28v=office.15%29.aspx#hwLocServers

All servers that belong to a server farm, including database servers, must physically reside in the same datacenter. Redundancy and failover between closely located data centers that are configured as a single farm ("stretched farm”) is not supported in SharePoint 2013. 

But as this the comments from this blog shows, it depends and it is often case by case.

 

 

SharePoint 2010 boundaries, thresholds and supported limits

From Jeremy Taylor's Blog:

http://www.jeremytaylor.net/2010/10/03/sharepoint-2010-boundaries-thresholds-and-supported-limits/

SharePoint 2010 Location Based Views (Per-Location View)

In SharePoint 2007, location based views (different views for different folders) can be achieved by using content types, such as creating sub content types from the folder content type.

SharePoint 2010 makes location based views a lot easier. Once the Metadata Navigation and Filtering feature (site feature instead of site collection feature) is enabled at the Site Actions -> Site Settings -> Manage site features under Site Actions heading,  the Per-location view settings is available for use under the General Settings heading of the settings page of document library and list. Per-location View Settings page allows you to configure available views for specific folder, content type, managed metadata, etc.

SharePoint Configuration Database Too Big

Ever wondering why is the SharePoint configuration database so large?  The database is over 35 GB and its transaction log file grows up to 90 GB. There are potentially 2 issues.

1. the log file is too big: the log file can be shrank easily by using Management Studio, for example. Setting the database to simple mode can help too, but evaluate the pros and cons before making the change.
2. the database is still too big after shrinking the log file. After some research, I found out that there is a TimerJobHistory table in the configuration database and this table uses huge amount of space. There is a job "Delete jobs history" under Central Administration->Monitoring->Timer Jobs, which runs weekly by default, and that job is supposed to delete old entries from the timer job history table. In my situation, the table has entries more than one month old and default number of days to keep is 7, I believe. The timer job is enabled and there is no error messages. So what happened?

Long story short, the timer job runs weekly as expected, but it fails because during the execution, the transaction log runs out of space. To fix the problem, I need to reduce the amount of data being deleted by the timer job during each run, so I need to modify the daystokeephistory value of the timer job. However, there is no UI to modify the retention days, the only way is to use PowerShell. See below:

$test = Get-SPTimerJob | Where-Object {$_.name -eq "job-delete-job-history"}
$test.daystokeephistory

Above would display the current value.You can set the proper value for daystokeephistory then use either Central Administration or Power Shell to kick off the timer job, see below.

$test.daystokeephistory = 25
$test.update()
$test.runnow()

After multiple runs, at the end I set the timer job schedule to daily and daystokeephistory to 2 days.

So far so good.

SharePoint 2010: Clicking the icon in Type column is highlighting the item instead of launching the document

Symptom:

In a list view of a document library in SharePoint 2010, when the document icon for an item in the Type column is clicked, the document is not offered for opening. Instead, the row for the item is selected. This behavior is different from SharePoint 2007 where clicking on the document icon opens the document itself.

Fix: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-US;2457975

How to make custom user profile properties searchable in SharePoint 2010?

Not as simple as in MOSS, please see the post by Steve McDonnell

Making Custom User Profile Properties Searchable in SharePoint 2010

Service Account Suggestions for SharePoint 2010 from Todd Klindt

Service Account Suggestions for SharePoint 2010

Including additional assemblies in the WSP with Visual Studio SharePoint development tools

Including additional assemblies in the WSP with Visual Studio SharePoint development tools

Specifically, Visual Studio 2010. I still miss wsp builder, much better than Visual Studio SharePoint Development Tools. It seems like that the wspbuilder tool for SharePoint 2010 beta is coming in Nov. of 2010.

Getting the GUID out of the AdminContent database in SharePoint 2010

Another fine blog post from Todd Klindt. Thanks for sharing.

SharePoint 2010 Application Development Resources

Developing Applications for SharePoint 2010

SharePoint 2010 Walkthrough Guide

SharePoint 2010 Developer Training Kit

 

URL path length restrictions (SharePoint Server 2010)

URL path length restrictions (SharePoint Server 2010)

Guide on resolving url length problem from the article:

• Upgrade all the end-user browsers to Internet Explorer 8, which has a longer URL length limit.
  
  
• Use shorter names for sites, folders, and documents and control the depth of the site and folder structures to reduce the lengths of URLs.
  
  
• If possible or allowed, use ASCII names for sites, folders, and documents. This will avoid situations where the URL will be lengthened by being encoded.
  
  
• To reduce the risk that the SharePoint Server 2010 end-users will encounter problems because of URL length limitations, we recommend that you apply the following effective limits in the deployment:
  
  
  • 256 Unicode (UTF-16) Code units - the effective file path length limitation, including a domain/server name
    
    
  • 128 Unicode (UTF-16) Code units - the path component length limitation

FAST Query and FAST Content Search Service Applications in a SharePoint 2010 deployment Explained

After FAST for SharePoint 2010 (FAST4SP) is installed and configured, there are 2 search service applications associated with FAST4SP: FAST Query Search Service Application and FAST Content Search Service Application (Your search service application name could be different). It took me a while to realize the differences between those 2 service applications. The following blog entry helped me a lot learning those 2 service applications.

The two types of Search Service Applications (in a SharePoint 2010 deployment with FAST Search Server) - On The Search - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

In summary, FAST Query is used to service all search queries and crawl People content, i.e., User Profiles. So under the Search Administration page for FAST Query, there should be one and only one Content Source defined, with Start Addresses with only one entry, like sps3://hostname. Also search scopes should be defined under FAST Query service application. This blog entry demonstrates how to create a search scope in FAST Query from content source defined in FAST Content.

FAST Content is used to crawl all other content sources other than People. Out of the box under the Search Administration page of FAST Content, we should remove the entry of sps3:// from the content source's start addresses text box. Also note there is no search service application proxy for FAST Content.

Customizing My Sites in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 - Microsoft SharePoint Social Computing Team Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Customizing My Sites in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 - Microsoft SharePoint Social Computing Team Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

It answers the following questions:

• How do I change the top navigation on My Sites to include other links?
• How do I brand My Sites?
• How to add a customization to all existing personal sites?
• How do I use personalization sites?

Must read before doing any customization with My Site.

Add custom refiners to SharePoint 2010 Search Result

In Expanding the Refiners

By Todd Carter, he explains the basics of the refiner and how to add a new refiner based on file size to the search result page.

Uploading files using the Client Object Model in SharePoint 2010

In the article Uploading files using the Client OM in SharePoint 2010 by Tobias Zimmergren,

he guides us through the process of uploading a document to any chosen document library in SharePoint 2010 through the Client Object Model, with sample project for download.

Thanks for sharing this.

Adding Custom Action to SharePoint 2010 Central Administration

The information on MSDN is not correct. The following blog

Custom Action Definitions in SharePoint 2010

By Arjen Bloemsma

lists some custom actions, and their locations and group ids. 

For example, the following custom action is placed on Central Administration ->System Settings ->Farm Management

        Id="C98CC48A-6F60-48CF-BC4E-94C998A921EC"
        GroupId="FarmManagement"
        Location="Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SystemSettings"
        Sequence="100"
        Title="the title here"
        Description="the description.">
   
 

Note the aspx page is in the _admin directory, instead of the _layouts, since it is a page used in Central Administration.

One take-away is if you have solutions which add custom actions to SharePoint 2007 Central Administration, then you need to make sure the custom actions show up at the right location, if showing up, under SharePoint 2010 Central Administration. As you probably know, MSFT has done a lot of re-organization in SharePoint 2010 Central Administration, not to mention the introduction of Ribbon.

 

Chris O'Brien: Customizing the ribbon (part 1) – creating tabs, groups and controls

Chris O'Brien: Customizing the ribbon (part 1) – creating tabs, groups and controls

Fast Search Server 2010 for SharePoint Installation and Configuration

The home page of Fast Search Server 2010 for SharePoint: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/enterprisesearch/ee441234.aspx is a must read in order to get started on this.

I won't bore you with detailed steps setting up FAST on SharePoint for a development environment since above link has many pages of detailed instructions, I will just point out some issues I ran into and the resolutions of those.

First, you can install FAST on SharePoint server. For my development environment, I have SharePoint 2010 and FAST on the same server, and databases are on a separate SQL server.

After the installation, during the configuration, If you run into error about "Username or domain is incorrect", please use full domain name, please see this post on TechNet. You can use "ping -a servername" to find out the FQDN.

After I have setup everything, I got the error message "The search request was unable to connect to the Search Service". After ensuring that the SharePoint certificate is copied to the FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint query processing node, the search works like a charm.


Also I created a new site based on FAST Search Center template and made necessary changes to My Site and the Portal to ensure that SharePoint uses FAST as the search provider. Please see the bottom of this post for directions on this.

Good luck with your FAST installation and configuration.

 

External Content Types Error Message

Using SharePoint Designer 2010, whiling trying to create a new External Content Types, I got the following error message while trying to expand the Tables/Views under the database:

"Can't complete refresh"
"Skipping the following table because it is not configured for use"
"Line 1: Incorrect syntax near '('".

The Routines folder expands fine.

The data source type is SQL Server,  For SQL Server Connection, I have "Connect with User's Identity"
What could be wrong? Is there a minimum SQL Server version requirement? The version for this SQL Server is 8.0.2050, SQL Server 2000 SP4. I can connect to another sql server with version "9.0.3054", SQL Server 2005 SP2.

I unerstand that there is a minimum requirement for SQL Server for SharePoint. SharePoint Server 2010 requires that its database server must be a 64-bit version of one of the following: Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 with Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Cumulative Update 2, or SQL Server 2005 with SP3 and Cumulative Update 3.

It does look like the minimum requirement for SQL Server for BCS purpose is SQL 2005 or higher, according to this post. Also you  can work around this problem by using stored procedure or web services wrapper.

Or maybe it is time to upgrade that sql server.

Using SharePoint 2010 Developer Dashboard for Debugging and Performance Monitoring

Basically, we can use the following code pattern:

    using (new SPMonitoredScope("My code block (WebPart1)"))
    {
        // the code to be monitored here
    }

Please see the blog from Waldek Mastykarz for detail.