BronteCube (Steve Young)

In the last blog post I mentioned a number of links to use when looking for training content.  There are 2 links missing that I find are invaluable.

Both links are from Andrew Connell's blog.  A must see, and a must read is his book "SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Development"  Available here..

The first link is to his Web Content Management Resources (WCM) page.  http://andrewconnell.com/blog/articles/mosswcmresources.aspx

And a second link to his 10 Essential Resources for SharePoint Developers available at http://blogs.msdn.com/randalli/archive/2007/01/08/10-essential-resources-for-sharepoint-developers.aspx

I will be an internal conference in a few weeks and he is teaching a one day WCM boot camp.  Looks like a great time  :)

These resource are 2 must have links if you are doing any WCM work with SharePoint.

Steve Young.

SharePoint 2007 or MOSS can be an intimidating product when you see all that it can do.  I was asked to put together a list of resources that someone could use to get up to speed on the product.

The first location should be the Series of Microsoft Downloadable books for Office SharePoint Server 2007 located on TechNet.  These books cover a great deal of information regarding planning your SharePoint / Moss infrastructure.  

The following links are divided up by the role that the links pertain to most.  This is not to say that these links are only meant for that role. Each role should have an understanding of what the others in the SharePoint team are responsible for.

1. Role:Database Administrator

SharePoint is a Database application.  All of the data for the application lives in a SQL server database.  How performance the application becomes is really a factor of the Database Settings.

       Planning the Database

A great blog post by Joel Olesen provides some resources on SharePoint backup Restore, High Availability, and Disaster Recovery 

A White Paper Using database mirroring with Windows SharePoint Services that goes into detail on using Microsoft SQL Server 2005 database mirroring to provide Disaster recovery options.

Bill Baer's article on Database Management Concepts for Large and Growing Content Databases that shows a number of options on how to handle growth.

       Database Operations

Database Maintenance for Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies by Bill Bear is a great place to start.

Defrag and Moss Databases. explains how to defragment your content databases

Planning and Monitoring SQL Server Storage for SharePoint: Performance Recommendations and Best Practices

2. Role: Security team

       Running an Extranet.

Planning an Extranet Environment for Office SharePoint Server 2007 gives an overview of what is involved and an introduction to security.

       Security - A Must Read

This Downloadable paper goes into great deal on securing SharePoint. 

Review the secure topology design checklists (Office SharePoint Server)

Plan for secure communication within a server farm (Office SharePoint Server)

3. Role: The Infrastructure Team

       Installation

In addition to all of the planning books listed above, a good place to start is the Installing SharePoint book.

Installing SharePoint - New June 2008 reviews installation of SharePoint / Moss on a single server to a multi-server farm.

4. Role: SharePoint administrators

       Content / Document management

Web Publishing and Planning Guide with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

Records Management Guide for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Document Management with Office SharePoint Server 2007

5. Role: SharePoint Developer

       Development

There is a MSDN entry for SharePoint Products and Technologies Customization Best Practices.  This goes into a great amount of detail on various elements of customizations.

There is an important article for those developing in a 64 bit environment.  The blog titles Why do Visual Studio Extensions for WSS 3.0 not support 64-Bit Platforms?

Quoting from the article..

"First, having your dev environment on a 32-bit platform and your production environment on a 64-bit platform should not cause issues. The artifacts in MOSS/WSS dev are .NET assemblies and thus the JIT compiler in the CLR handles the architectural differences. This is why the product group does not see a conflict in our prescribed guidance of having your farm on a 64-bit platform and your dev environment on a 32-bit platform. That said, we do recommend you test your artifacts on a 64-bit platform before deploying to production."

       Other development resources

Best Practices: Common Coding Issues When Using the SharePoint Object Model

Team-Based Development in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

New Dev-Centric Features In Office SharePoint Server Keep Your Apps Rolling

Tying to find a work life balance can be so difficult giving the pace of change in the technology world these days.  My expertise is based in the Microsoft Business intelligence product set.  I have clients working in SQL 2000 and moving to SQL 2005.  Now I am ramping up in SQL 2008.

Seeing how this is a great touch stone point with my BI technology set, I thought it would be a great opportunity to add another item to my work/live balance and start blogging again.  I say again because like all things in live priorities change and blogging would always be the first out of the list.

What is Different now? I have the great sense of having to 'Give Back' to the community that has given so much to me.  There are a great many resources online that I have utilized to enhance my skill set and get me to where I am today.

I have spent the last year and a half working with the SharePoint / MOSS technology stack and kept pace with the SQL world, but now have taken back focus and am going head long back into the BI world where I have been for the last 15 years. 

I plan to log.. or Blog .. my experiences with coming up to speed in the SQL 2008 BI technology stack over the next few months.  If I find a great resource I want to share it with, or put that information online so others can benefit. 

Please feel free to comment on the blog posts and let me know what you think.  The greatest benefit with blogging is the feedback and interaction with others that share the same interests as I do.

I hope to keep to topic, but may wander if I find something of interest.

Thanks for looking in....

Steve

This is the video that was played at the last Bill Gates CES in January.   Must have taken alot of effort to get this one done.

Am I liking You Tube more? 

Microsoft will live or die based on their user community.  Microsoft relays on partners to extend the software offerings to provide solutions for the end user community.  The new release wave that includes Visual Studio 2008 are arriving with a wealth of free and downloadable training content.

The Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Training Kit contains over 50 Labs, Demos and power point presentations that will help you get up to speed on the new technology.

The 128mb training kit is available at the following link.  Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Training Kit  Links are also available for a 90 day free trial that will allow you to complete the labs.

Overview

The Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Training Kit includes presentations, hands-on labs, and demos. This content is designed to help you learn how to utilize the Visual Studio 2008 features and a variety of framework technologies including: LINQ, C# 3.0, Visual Basic 9, WCF, WF, WPF, ASP.NET AJAX, VSTO, CardSpace, SilverLight, Mobile and Application Lifecycle Management.

Try it out, it is free and good developing.

Steve Young