SharePoint 2010 Best Practices Webinar Q & A


This webinar included several live demonstrations and discussed:

  • The pros and cons of the different approaches to installing and configuring SharePoint 2010
  • Configuration Best Practices for SharePoint 2010 farms
  • The Services Architecture; dependencies, licensing and topologies
  • Information Architecture guidance for sizing, multilingual support, multi-tenancy, etc.
  • Using tools such as SharePoint Composer & SharePoint Maestro to plan, document, install and configure a SharePoint 2010 deployment
  • Avoiding common pitfalls

Whether you are new to SharePoint or upgrading from a previous version, you will gain an understanding of how to effectively implement SharePoint 2010 in accordance with best practices and gain insights into techniques and tools that mitigate the effort and risk associated with implementation.
Webinar presented by:

SharePoint MVP Gary Lapointe
and
SharePoint MVP Paul P. Stork

  • Question: Will a recorded version of the webinar be made available?

Answer: Yes, it is available here
Note, if you experience issues with the low-res recording, please try the hi-res version for best viewing.

  • Question: Will the presentation slides be made available?

Answer: Yes, they are available here

  • Question: Where can I find the charts about Service Applications that were mentioned during the webinar?

Answer: They are available on Gary's blog

  • Question: Is there a reference that details psconfig command line commands (e.g. to create a farm)?

Answer: As mentioned in the webinar, the preferred method for doing this is using Powershell. You can find a detailed reference on how to use Powershell to create a farm on the Microsoft Technet Site. There is a detailed list of options for psconfig for SharePoint 2007. Most of the options are the same for SharePoint 2010. In the Webinar demo, all but one of the command line switches are the same as 2007 and are also documented on the Microsoft Technet Site.

  • Question: What steps are necessary in converting SharePoint 2007 sites?

Answer: For a detailed answer to this question, please see the Q&A and recorded version of our SharePoint 2010 Readiness Webinar.

  • Question: The "Sizing Considerations" slide spoke to the best practice of "avoiding" the storage of content within the SharePoint database. Is this best practice indicating that a content repository outside of SharePoint is desired?

Answer: The Best Practice mentioned suggested an evaluation of Remote Blob Storage (RBS) as a way to keep the size of Content databases in SharePoint more manageable. As we pointed out, highly collaborative environments should limit maximum database size to about 200 GB to avoid locking and contention issues. Moving BLOB storage to a dedicated database may be desirable in heavy ECM environments to facilitate smaller content databases. However, we should point out that RBS storage is still under the control of SharePoint.

  • Question: Are SharePoint Composer and SharePoint Maestro free? Do they both require that Mind Manager be purchased? Are these products from ShareSquared?

Answer: There will be a free community version that is limited to SharePoint Foundation Server, no import or build. You can register for the free community version or purchase the full version on the SharePoint Composer site. Composer (only) does require a license of Mind Manager 8 and yes, Composer & Maestro were developed by ShareSquared.

  • Question: Question: Does this create Power Shell scripts in order to build out the farm and components?

Answer: SharePoint Composer creates an XML file that captures all of the configuration information provided. SharePoint Maestro uses this output file to build the configuration as specified.

  • Question: What are the best practices related to migrating from MOSS 2007 to 2010? How are SSP migrations handled in any upgrade scenario?

Answer: For a detailed answer to this question, please see the Q&A and recorded version of our SharePoint 2010 Readiness Webinar.

  • Question: How easy is it to integrate a different authentication/authorization engine into SPS2010? We use Netegrity SiteMinder for all of our web applications and we would like to know how easily it will connect into SP2010.

Answer: One of the new features in SharePoint 2010 is support for Claims based authentication. Claims based authentication in SharePoint enables the use of a variety of systems for authenticating users in SharePoint, including Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) tokens. Since SiteMinder has support for SAML tokens, you should be able to register SiteMinder as a Trusted Identity provider in SharePoint and use it for authentication. Some minimal custom coding will probably be required, but SharePoint Claims based authentication provides all the base classes that you will need. You’ll simply need to build a custom class that matches your specific SAML tokens.

  • Question: Are Composer and Maestro two separate products or is Maestro part of or a component of Composer?

Answer: Maestro is a separate product that is licensed on a per server basis.

  • Question: What resources exist for SharePoint governance? Particularly if you have intranet and extranet or public site?

Answer: This TechNet article is a good place to start. You also may want to consider talking to us about conducting a SharePoint GamePlan for your company.