Enjoy!

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Where’s my Services on Server link in Central Administration?

I’m sure some have you have worked on SharePoint farms where you accessed Central Administration, attempting to get to the Services on Server page, just to find on the Operations page, that it wasn’t there.  And in response to this, you likely tried accessing Central Administration with a different account, and low & behold, the link is there.  What gives?

As it turns out, this link is only shown for accounts whom are within the Administrators group of the server.  So likely the 1st account used was not a local administrator, but the second one was.  Read more here.

FBA + Client Integration + SharePoint SP2 = :-)

In the past, for any SharePoint-based sites where forms-based authentication (FBA) was enabled, client-integration was a general no-no, due to the manner in which it uses session cookies, and if your session cookie expires while working on a document within a client application (e.g. MS Word, Excel, etc.), bad things happen when you try to save.  There were some kludgy workarounds for this in the past, but Microsoft has apparently nipped it in the bud with the release of SP2.  In a SharePoint environment where SP2 has been deployed, for web applications that use FBA that have client integration enabled, with the exception of Outlook integration, this is now fully supported.  Read more here.

Internet Explorer 8 + SharePoint

Did you realize that prior to SP2, SharePoint does not officially support Internet Explorer 8 as a Level 1 browser?  Read more here.

New Useful Reference Lists

MSDN/TechNet has recently been updated with a few useful reference lists for SharePoint:

Registry Key configuration values

Timer Service jobs

64-bit Hardware & SharePoint

Did you know that 64-bit hardware, for most SharePoint implementations, offers significant advantages over the 32-bit platform, although there are some caveats to be aware of.  Fortunately, to help make sense of it all, Microsoft has done a quality job on identifying the benefits that a 64-bit server platform offers for SharePoint, in a new TechNet article found here.

Additionally, for existing SharePoint 2007 farms that were built on a 32-bit platform, whose server hardware is being replaced, Microsoft has outlined migration steps for moving to a 64-bit platform, found here.

SharePoint Farm Topology & Scale-out

Does the idea of scaling out the services that SharePoint provides to additional servers added to a farm scare you?  If so, put your mind at ease – Microsoft has outlined the required steps needed for moving each of the possible SharePoint services between farms within a server topology.

Additionally, if you are faced with the challenge of taking a SharePoint environment that was originally installed in stand-alone mode and moving it to a true farm deployment, this article provides some guidance on the processes involved here.

STSADM –o enumallwebs

With the introduction of SP2, a new STSADM command is now available, that will list out all sites & sub-sites within a given content database.  Previously, the only commands available for enumerating sites where enumsites (provided a listing of site collections & their sizes) and enumsubwebs (provided a listing of each sub-site for a given site).  Neither of which provided an easy way to get a good picture of your entire site structure, and the site templates used for each site within it, but using enumallwebs, this is now possible.  Read all about the details of using it here.

More SharePoint Content Deployment Resources

The ever-elusive content deployment features of MOSS 2007 are getting some updates in the documentation department, both for planning purposes, as well as troubleshooting the many issues that can arise when it is being used.

Planning Content Deployment

Administering Content Deployment

Troubleshooting Common Content Deployment Issues

SharePoint Read-only Farms

With most SharePoint environments, any significant amount of downtime can be disruptive to end users.  Oftentimes however, being able to provide end users read-only access to a SharePoint environment in these scenarios, such as during a downtime window, can be an acceptable compromise.  To facilitate such a configuration, Microsoft has introduced the idea of a read-only farm, which is targeted for use during disaster recovery operations, or as a means for providing content access during a scheduled maintenance window.  Read more about this configuration, its caveats, & the end user experience it provides here.