It was great to be able to speak and to see the great turnout for the event this year. There were over 400 attendees this year and with speakers and volunteers over 500 people involved. As always, feel free to provide any feedback and ask questions in the comments.
My presentation on Best Practices for SharePoint Deployment and Management is available for download.
The last of the “uber packages” for the June 2009 cumulative update has been released. This means it is much easier to apply the June 2009 update so I will be recommending this update in my presentations/client interactions to be current.
Joerg Sinemus’ post has the latest information about what packages to install and their installation order to be current.
Also, note in his post that the “uber package” will be referred to as a “server-package” in the future.
It was great to be able to present at SharePoint Saturday Ozarks. Thanks to those who attended. Please feel free to post any comments if there are any questions or comments on Best Practices SharePoint Deployment and Management (presentation).
With the WSS/SharePoint April 2009 Cumulative Update, a new parameter was introduced for the “stsadm –o deletesite” and “stsadm –o mergecontentdbs” commands. I noticed it while reviewing some recently published/update TechNet articles and tweeted about it here, here, here and here. Because of that I wanted to summarize the content in one post, point out some other things I found while researching and point you to where you can get more detail. On The Sean Blog, Sean covers all the commands added in the April update.
Here are the things that jumped out at me:
2. To restore a large site collection (see the Note), you can use the gradualdelete parameter with deletesite and mergecontentdbs to help the process. This is the article that got me looking everything else up.
Also, a note I saw while doing this review…MS is recommending you install the April 2009 update before continuing to use the mergecontentdbs command (see the Important note).
To be the most current on your deployment, you will want to install Service Pack 2 and then the April 2009 Update.
This post was all over the place. I hope it was still helpful. Well…it has been a long time since I have posted so hopefully this post will get me back onto the blog wagon.
On Saturday, April 18, 2009, there will be an all-day MOSS Camp taking place in St. Louis, MO focusing on all things SharePoint and we are looking for speakers. The current plan is to have four tracks covering the following topics: Development, Infrastructure, Governance/Business, or End User. The session can contain 100, 200, or 300 level information.
Submissions for speakers are being accepted immediately.
Registration being open for attendees will be announced soon. More information will be posted on the St. Louis SharePoint Users Group site as it becomes available and you can follow the St. Louis MOSS Camp twitter account for updates as well.
Just a quick note to make sure everyone sees this item. As posted on the SharePoint blog, you do NOT need to apply the patch if you have already installed the SharePoint October Cumulative update. However, if you have not, go get that server patched with the December security patch!
In this post, I will do a brief review of the state of 64-bit PDF iFilters for the Microsoft platform (this effects SharePoint). There have been a couple things occur in the last few days that I just wanted to point out.
First, let me review the purpose of an ifilter briefly for those who may not be aware. For Microsoft search products, an ifilter allows the indexer to read different file formats. So a PDF ifilter allows a Microsoft search product to open Adobe PDF files so that can be indexed and searched. Also, if you are running the MS Search Product on 64-bit platform, you want to run a 64-bit ifilter for performance and supportability reasons.
Until this month, in my opinion, the only production ready option for a 64-bit ifilter was offered by FoxIt Software. There are two things that have happened that I wanted to point out for your review.
So if you are using FoxIt already, time to update your filter next patch cycle. If you need an ifilter, you may ask, “Why on earth would I use the FoxIt Software solution I have to buy now that Adobe has a free version?” There have been tests done to show that previously, the FoxIt ifilters (even 32-bit) performed better than the Adobe solution. I know the FoxIt version is multi-threaded. I do not know the capabilities of the free Adobe version yet.
So for Production environments, I would ask you to still consider the FoxIt solution. But if you can’t afford it, there is an alternative now. As more testing is done with these filter solutions, hopefully we will have more information to make a decision.
If you need help installing the ifilters, here are some links that will help:
For SPS 2003: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555209
For WSS 3.0: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927675
For MOSS 2007: http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/adir_ron/archive/2007/05/03/Just-Released-_2D00_-PDF-IFilter-for-x64-Bit_2100_.aspx
And if you install SharePoint updates/patches, remember that you need to reinstall the FoxIt PDF ifilter.
