Yaseen Rahhal - Blog

Planning for Upgrade MOSS 2007 To SharePoint 2010

2010-01-11T23:56:00.014+03:00

I Would like to highlight some points related to the SharePoint 2010 upgrade process:

Hardware Compatibility, which means that your SharePoint & SQL Server hardware should be 64bit

SQL Server version and hardware, SQL Server 2000 is no longer supported with SharePoint 2010 so you should have SQL server 2005/ 2008/ 2008 R2 with the latest available service packs. And you should note that the 32bit of SQL server is no longer supported with SharePoint 2010.

Out of the box customization, SharePoint 2010 has the same folder structure of MOSS 2007 so if you follow the best practices of MOSS customization the upgrade will go smooth with you, but customizations that been made by using SharePoint Designer 2007 is not fully guaranteed for upgrade as you may have so hiccups here and there.

SharePoint Development Customization, supposed to go smooth if you follow the customization best practices, but if you have web parts out of web part zone that will cause upgrade problems.

SharePoint Content Database Modification, if you have made any modification on the WSS_Contnet database or any other SharePoint database, that will cause upgrade problems as you should not touch the SharePoint databases, and you should have separate external database for your customizations.

Look & feel branding it’s not 100% guaranteed, the SharePoint branding has many changes between 2007 and 2010, so you may need to have some manual touches based on look and feel customization weight and the way you did that customization.

License, you need to check if your organization is covered by software assurance agreement with Microsoft then you can upgrade to 2010 without any extra cost.

Yaseen Rahhal

Problem in installing SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7

2009-11-20T16:02:00.002+03:00

Finally the public Beta of SharePoint 2010 is available for download and the good news that we are able to make our SharePoint 2010 Development Environment by using Windows 7 or Windows Vista SP1.

i was setting up my environment and i did all steps and the best practices mention in the MSDN article about setting up SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7 for development, and when i reached the point of running the SharePoint configuration wizard or PSConfig i had an exception in step 8 "Creating Sample Data", this error is very common and its related to a bug in WCF so you must download and install the hotfix before installing SharePoint 2010 and running the configuration wizard

Upgrade MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010

2009-07-26T12:23:00.012+03:00

It tooks me long time to Select My topic for this post, as I got confused between the 2010 and 2007 versions of MOSS, I know it's too early to blog about the SharePoint 2010, but I have enough motivation to search and give few recommendations.

This post will focus on some recommendations should be taken in considerations that could guarantee smooth migration of your MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010.

Upgrade Your Hardware: SharePoint 2010 will no longer support Win 32bit so you need to think about having 64 environments, this is not only limited to SharePoint Server but also to SQL Server.
Upgrade Your SQL Server: SharePoint 2010 Supports only SQL Server 2005 & 2008, and I recommend having the latest Service Pack for SQL Server for smooth upgrade, and make sure its 64 bit.
Install SharePoint 2007 SP2, the upgrade is not possible without having WSS SP2, MOSS SP2 and MOSS Language Pack SP2.
Build all your SharePoint Development projects as WSP (Solution Packages) as SharePoint 2010 will have native support to migrate solution packages.
DONT Change any Content of Config Databases, keep it for SharePoint and the configuration wizards, if you need any custom database just create your own without changing the SharePoint Databases.

Note that the smooth upgrade is not limited to the above recommendations, as new things will appear when we move forward with Betas and CTPs.

Salam;

My Recommendation To Microsoft SharePoint 2010

2009-06-19T23:39:00.006+03:00

It's More than 2 years for MOSS in Production, and the product map guides us to reach SharePoint 2010, so it’s the time to dream about some enhancements in the next release for SharePoint:

· Enable Anonymous access to MySite with Publishing Features.
· Get rid of the NLB and having native load balancing technique
· Easy tools for design selection in anonymous access mode.
· True integration With AJAX.
· Make Real SSO at least across different Web applications at the same farm.
· Enable document reader, like Google feature for Doc and Pdf to View in browser.
· Having Real Business intelligence.
· Easy to configure activity tracking.
· Building more Out of the box Ifilters.
· Enhance the Arabic spell checker.
· Enhance search server in Arabic.
· Enhance the Physical Security architecture and having GUI support SQL authentication.

I know its not possible to achive all of that but let’s share our ideas, we may deliver these recommendations to the product group, and some of these ideas become true one day.

Waiting your feedback and commints...

Disable Personalization "MySite" in SharePoint 2007

2008-11-26T11:49:00.001+03:00

In the default installation of MOSS 2007 the personalization engine is running, so any authenticated user in your system could start building his own personal site simply by clicking the My Site link which is placed in top of your page (This is by default). But in many cases you need to disable users from using the personalization engine of MOSS 2007, especially when you have internet facing websites.

Remember: When you built the shared service provider at your farm the SSP asked you about the Web application where this personal websites will be stored.

In order to disable the personalization (MySite):
1. Log in to You SharePoint Central Admin site.
2. Go to s you Shared Service Provider (SSP).
3. Click the "Personalization Users Permissions" link under "Users Profiles & My Sites".
4. Click NT Authority\authenticated Users.
5. Clear the Check of Create Personal Site.
6. Click Save to save changes.

Add New Server to your existing SharePoint 2007 Server Farm While Users connected with zero downtime

2008-11-15T00:18:00.000+03:00

Is happens many times that you find you need to scale your environment out, by extending the number of servers of your server farm, or just adding new services to the existing farm like running Excel services on a dedicated servers.

i) You need to make sure that all MS SharePoint Server 2007 prerequisites are installed:
- IIS
- MS .NET Framework 2.0.
- MS .NET framework 3.0.
- ASP.NET.
- Additional language (if any).

Note: If the new server is an additional Web Front-end then you need to coordinate with your network team to guarantee the correct configuration of Network load balance either by Windows NLB or hardware load balancer.

ii)Install the SharePoint Binaries and all required service packs
- Run the Installation package of SharePoint 2007.
- Run the installation package of the SharePoint 2007 Language Pack (if any).

Note: if you install any of the SharePoint service pack on any server in your server farm then you should repeat the same installation on every server in the farm.

iii) Run the SharePoint Configuration Wizard on the new server, and select Add to existing server farm, you need to use select the database server hosting your SharePoint Config database and supply sufficient Username/Password to connect to that server Farm.

iv) Deploy all Strong Named assemblies to the new Server GAC on (c:\Windows\Assembly). (If you have Custom Development).

v) Deploy User Controls (if any) to the Control templates directory under the SharePoint Installation path.

vi) Modify the Web.config of every web application (If Needed), commonly you will have to add the Connection Strings, AppSettings, Register some safe controls.

Important Note: Once you enabled the Network load balance the NLB service will start forward requests to that new server, so if the server farm is in production this will cause a lot of errors to the connected user because they will be forwarded a vacant server, so I recommend to do all configuration and test the server locally before enabling NLB and after making sure that everything is ok then add it to NLB.