I have been working with SharePoint 2010 since the early BETA bits, so I thought this might be a good time to list off some of my favorite features. The following represents some of the biggest enhancements in comparison to MOSS 2007, and some of what I consider to be the most compelling new features.

The presentation focused on the new Visual UI upgrade options, and changes to Master Pages and Themes.

SharePoint 2007 themes are no longer supported in the new V4 User Interface for SharePoint 2010, and have been replaced with Theme support for the Office Open Xml Themes. You can read more on this change in my post How Themes work in SharePoint 2010.

The user group is a great forum for interacting with other people passionate about SharePoint. The Seattle group is very well organized, and has a large membership, and some great sponsors. If you have not attended I highly recommend you give it a try.

Download: SPBITS – SharePoint 2010 Branding.pptx

The user group is a great forum for interacting with other people passionate about SharePoint, so if you are in the Seattle area and have not attended, I  highly recommend it.

It was a great group as always, with some good questions that I will be answering as updates in this post shortly:

• How do you rename the SharePoint farm configuration database?
• What is the upgrade impact on databases from SharePoint 2007 to 2010?

Download: SPBITS - SharePoint Database Provisioning.pptx

http://intranet
http://mysites

In this case, the fully-qualified domain name might be “intranet.company.com”, but DNS would resolve the name correctly by assuming a DNS suffix related to the current Active Directory domain. It was assumed that employees would be accessing the Intranet on the company network. For organizations that did support remote access using VPN strategies, this also worked fine.

When SharePoint 2007 was released, it became easier to support additional variations in the site address to accommodate more sophisticated scenarios by using Zones. It would be common to configure sites to use Zones to support short names for the “Default” zone for internal company users, and fully-qualified domain names for corporate WANs and/or secure Internet access.

Originally, there were some technical constraints influencing this design. SharePoint Search could not crawl sites that used Kerberos or were secured by SSL on the default zone.

Fast forward to the beginning of 2010, and the technical constraints are now mostly gone through the release of Service Packs and Hotfixes, and I have been discovering some issues with this strategy:

• Desktop tools that integrate with SharePoint often require the fully-qualified domain name (ex. Colligo Desktop). Users often cut and paste these URLs from the browser, so displaying the fully qualified domain name for the site is becoming more of a necessity.
• In response to a more mobile workflow, organizations are increasing exposing SharePoint sites to the Internet for direct access. Users now have to contend with bookmarked and embedded document hyperlinks that are a mish-mash of unqualified and qualified domain names.

My recommendation to clients now is to standardize on fully-qualified domain names, and restrict the use of alternate Zones to the specific purpose it was designed for – supporting alternate authentication providers.

Thankfully, we can still take advantage of some tricks with Zones to continue to support the user-friendly unqualified domain names by having SharePoint re-write the unqualified names to the fully qualified names when a user browses to the site.

1. Create your SharePoint web application using the fully-qualified domain name for the Public URL. SharePoint will automatically add the appropriate IIS host header. If you have an existing site you want to convert to a fully-qualified URL, then edit the Public URL under Alternate Access Mappings.
2. Open IIS Manager and edit the bindings on the web application you created. Ensure that both the unqualified and fully qualified domain names are included on the web application.
3. Open Alternate Access Mappings and add a new Internet URL to the default zone for the unqualified domain name. The Public URL will remain the fully qualified domain name.

The final configuration in SharePoint will look like this:

Now when the user enters “http://intranet” into their browser, SharePoint will accept the unqualified domain name, but re-write the URL to the fully-qualified Public URL ensuring standardization and consistency.

One of the problems with how themes worked in SharePoint 2007, was that to customize them required a web designer or developer to create custom CSS, image and supporting theme registration files, and deploy them to the file system on the SharePoint Web Frontend Servers. This restriction required technical knowledge and access to physical servers, and thereby restricted non-technical users from being able to customize the SharePoint visual design of their sites.

Themes are also supported in SharePoint 2010, but how they work has changed considerably. One of the goals stated by Microsoft is that they wanted to provide the ability for non-technical users to have ease of use and control over the visual design of their sites, and the ability to customize themes through the SharePoint UI.

• SharePoint_ConfigN
• SharePoint_AdminContent_<Guid>
• SharedServicesN_DB
• SharedServicesN_Search_DB
• WSS_Content
• WSS_Search_<ComputerName>

There are a few of problems with this approach that become even more obvious when you install SharePoint on a database server that hosts more than one SharePoint Farm, and mix SharePoint databases with other application databases.

The standard approach to installing a new SharePoint Farm involves running the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard at the completion of a WSS or MOSS 2007 setup program. Among other things, the configuration wizard creates the farm configuration database , and the content database for the Central Administration web application.

Unfortunately, the default names are not very user-friendly, and this can cause problems with managing our SharePoint databases. Where these problems become most relevant is when hosting multiple SharePoint farms within a single instance of SQL Server, and when mixing SharePoint databases with other applications within the same instance. It can be difficult to differentiate the SharePoint databases between the various farm instances.

The solution to this problem is to use a command-line utility included with SharePoint called PSCONFIG.EXE to provision the initial farm configuration and administrative content databases manually.

…when you open a Microsoft Office file from a Microsoft Office SharePoint site by using 2007 Microsoft Office on a Windows Vista-based client computer that has no proxy configured, you are prompted for authentication.

Although the original Microsoft KB #943280 references Vista, this problem continues to demonstrate itself with Windows 7.

To resolve the issue requires editing the local Windows Registry on every computer in your organization. To fix the issue on a single PC:

1. Run “RegEdit.exe”
2. Locate the registry sub-key:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WebClient\Parameters
3. Add a new Multi-String Value named “AuthForwardServerList”
4. Edit the value and add one or more safe URL entries (e.g. *.domain.com)
5. Exit the Registry Editor

For organizations that need to get this change out to a lot of desktops you will probably want to utilize Active Directory Group Policy. The Directory Services Team has a good article on Deploying Custom Registry Changes through Group Policy that demonstrates how to do this.

When developing advanced workflows for SharePoint 2007, I definitely prefer Nintex Workflow, and the 1.10 release is an exceptional upgrade to previous versions that introduced some exciting and very useful features.

Overall, the experience was very positive. The level of commitment and enthusiasm that exists in the SharePoint community never ceases to amaze me. My classmates in the Beta program were some exceptional people, and I hope that I have started some lasting relationships.

The commitment required to complete the program was pretty heavy. In addition to the program fee,  and the 3 full-time, 7-day weeks to complete the training, the outside preparation and study time easily added up to 500-600 hundred hours spread across evenings and weekends, all while I juggled a full-time consulting schedule.