I am at the SharePoint Saturday event in Baltimore. It is being held at the Sheraton Inner Harbor. May be we should rename it Shareaton for the day?
The first series of sessions are all focused on Sharepoint 2010 - except for a stand-in session by Mark Rackley . Since we are unlikely to upgrade to SharePoint 2010 for 12 months or more this seemed like the best session to attend. I didn't want to get too envious of all the new features that seem to be in the new version.
Wrapping Your Head Around the SharePoint Beast
This is a Solutions Architect and Developer oriented session.
5 stages of learning SharePoint Development:
1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance
What is it?
Fileshare?
Content Management?
Workflow Engine?
Collaboration Portal?
Silver Bullet?
SharePoint is a PLATFORM
The Stack:
1. Windows Server 2003
2. IIS 6.0
3. .Net
4. WSS
5. MOSS
Terminology:
Server Farm:- Web Front Ends, Application Servers, Database (SQL Server)
Site collections sit in Content Databases.
Lists in those sites sit in the same TABLE.
Logical Architecture and Taxonomy:
Check out the Microsoft Logical Corporate Deployment model recommendations.
Plan ahead (2 years). Think about licensing costs.
Governance:
- Executive buy-in
- A committee with very few IT people. but led by IT
- Document the policies.
- Set the correct level of control.
- Enforce the policies.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Information Architecture Document is a great resource.
To be a SharePoint Developer - you have to understand it. You need to be a user.
Then you can be an Admin
Admin and Developers must work together to be effective.
The 12 Hive is the root of SharePoint.
SharePoint Designer: Be careful.
Solution Architects: a hybrid Admin or Developer.
jQuery - runs on the client.
SPServices check this out on codeplex (great tool - we use it)
SharePoint Designer:
Good things:
- Don't have to develop on the server
- Workflows
- Develop Branding
- Data View Web Parts
Bad Things:
- Workflows
- Un-ghosting
Ugly:
- can break a site collection
- Disconnect workflows for a restore
- Maintenance be careful with working in a QA and Production environment.
In 2010 the workflows can be designed in Visio, import in to Designer then port to Visual Studio to make them portable. This is a huge improvement.
With Visual Studio - you can download a development VM from Microsoft.
If you build your own server don't do a Basic Install of MOSS 2007. It sets some defaults you don't want.
STSDev (on CodePlex) or WSPBuilder
can be used to create Web Parts.
If you haven't picked one yet then WSPBuilder may be a better choice since it appears to have an easier transition to SP2010.
Don't copy anything to your 12 Hive (SharePoint Root) manually. Create a package. This makes it portable and will deal with replication across your farm.
Best practice is to move log files off the system drive. Place on a data drive and that can be shared with developers more easily.
Solution Packages is a best practice for developers. Create deployment scripts for Admins.
Soem useful free tools:
SQL to CAML converter: http://www.spsprofessional.com/sqlcaml.aspx
Fiddler - Web Debugging Proxy for performance tuning, inspect session data, etc.
check out Mark Rackley's blog for the slides from this session: http://www.sharepointhillbilly.com
