Michael Noel's blog

I'll be speaking at the SharePoint Connections conference this week (April 21-24th 2008) in Orlando, Florida, and will lead sessions on the following topics:

• Architecting a Highly Available SharePoint Farm
• Forms-Based Authentication and Extranet Deployment Options for SharePoint 2007
• Exploring the New Microsoft Forefront Security for SharePoint

The Connections conferences (two a year, one in Orlando and one in Las Vegas) are the industry's largest third-party run conferences that primarily deal with Microsoft technologies.  I've found them to be a great venue for getting real world information on SharePoint and other technologies out to the masses.

Cheers,

Michael

One widely held misconception about SharePoint 2007 is that a Web Application can only span a single Content Database.  The truth is that a Web Application can span multiple Content Databases, the limitation is at the Site Collection level.  Why this is an important concept is because of the fact that a single Content Database for a SharePoint Solution is not ideal, as the size can get very large quickly, and there is no easy way to move content out of a Content Database.

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Microsoft’s 2007 line of SharePoint Products and Technologies, including Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 includes multiple document management (DM) capabilities that are often overlooked and underutilized.  These features include such things as document versioning, approval workflows, content deployment, records management, and superb Office client integration (they are Microsoft products after all.)

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SharePoint servers, along with all other HTTP based web servers, can be vulnerable to attack if directly accessible from the Internet.  SharePoint itself can pose particular security challenges as it is often a mission-critical application for organizations and may contain proprietary or confidential information.  SharePoint web front-end servers have no built-in intrusion detection, HTTP inspection, or Denial of Service attack prevention capabilities, so it is subsequently recommended to deploy a method of ‘reverse proxy’ for SharePoint sites connected to the Internet.  A surprisingly good reverse proxy solution for SharePoint happens to be

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One of the more useful features in SharePoint 2007 from an extranet perspective is the ability to use an alternate authentication provider other than Active Directory to authenticate users.  This allows organizations to use ADAM, other AD Forests, LDAP providers, and even a simple SQL table for authentication.  Often this is the scenario desired when SharePoint is opened up to external access by extranet partners or other non-employees.

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I just finished a short stint in Gold Coast, Australia, to catch the tail end of TechEd Australia 2007. TechEd here was sold out completely, and there is definitely strong interest in Microsoft technologies in this country. The conference was organized like TechEd 2007 US in Orlando, but on a smaller scale. Since some of the technologies have evolved between April and August, however, there were some additional breakout sessions on topics such as OCS 2007, Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1, and SharePoint 2007. Of course, the most popular spot to be was still the Xbox 360 gaming stations.

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One of the most popular chapters in our SharePoint 2007 Unleashed book has been the Backup and Restore chapter. I believe that this is mainly due to the fact that I've included code for a script that automates the backup of site collections in a SharePoint Site. This script has always been available on the SAMSPublishing website, but I've had so many requests for it recently that I felt the need to make it more broadly available in this blog. You can freely download the script here. Right-click and select 'Save Target As' to download the file. If you follow the link and try cutting/pasting the page into notepad, the script won't work as your browser will attempt to translate it into XML. After downloading the file, be sure to remove the .txt extension (it should be named SPSiteBackup.wsf).

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Greetings from Sydney, Australia! OK, so I'm not normally 'down under', but I'm working on a Global SharePoint 2007 project for a large corporation and I just happen to be in Sydney for the next two weeks. What's good about it from a blogging perspective is that I'll be swinging over to TechEd Australia later this week to present on SharePoint, so I'll be sure to blog about what's going on there as well.

A little bit more about my background and what I intend to cover in this blog. I'm a partner at Convergent Computing (CCO), a consulting company in the San Francisco Bay Area that does infrastructure/security/migration type projects for clients around the world. I've been with CCO for quite some time now, but have been working in the industry for nearly two decades, previously based in Minneapolis, MN.

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