SharePoint

March 19th: Posts I liked

Manish Agrawal — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 20:16:39 GMT

Inspired by Scott Gu, I also felt the need of blogging the Links/BlogPosts I liked:

** March 19th is the date in "my" context and not that of posts I refer.

Build & Release Automation (it is on top priorities in my list of personal project development)

CI Server: Redefine Your Build Process with Continous Integration: Jay Flowers has written an excellent article on CI and about his tool CI Factory. I think Jay Flower has some similar thinking process I do, CI Factory has almost the same features and has been built upon using CruiseControl.Net as base reference, which even I was doing. The way he has written the title of the article with use of many Upper Case words, also seems to be a matching pattern.

SharePoint (MOSS)

Selling MOSS (The moral of the story): Paul has written an excellent post, he has covered many aspects of proposing a technology and its implementation...

Silverlight

Microsoft Silverlight Streaming Service
IIS 7.0 Bit Rate Throttling Module Released: by Scott Guthrie

.Net

Mono project releases first IDE, Mono 2.0 into beta: by Dana Blankenhorn & Paula Rooney
MonoDevelop Documentation

--Manish

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) Licensing and Configuration Scenarios

Manish Agrawal — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 06:18:47 GMT

John Stover has written an excellent post on MOSS 2007 Licensing and Configuration Scenarios.

Some other important links related to this are as under:

Windows Server 2003 R2 Pricing

MSSQL Server 2005 Editions & Pricing

Cornelius also has posted an excellent post on Complete MOSS Licensing info

Developer Map for SharePoint Products and Technologies

Manish Agrawal — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 12:02:04 GMT

MS Office & SharePoint integration - Fair, Good, Better, Best..

Manish Agrawal — Tue, 22 May 2007 13:16:40 GMT

Microsoft has released a white paper on Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Document: Microsoft Office Programs and SharePoint Products and Technologies Integration – Fair, Good, Better, Best.

This white paper describes how different versions of Office programs work together with the 2003 and 2007 versions of SharePoint technologies. Although an overview of the integration features of Microsoft Office 2000 versus Microsoft Office XP with Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is provided, the paper’s focus is on the integration features of the Office 2003 Editions versions the 2007 Office Suites with the 2007 SharePoint Products and Technologies.

The increasing levels of functional capabilities have been deemed “fair” for Office 2000, “good” for Office XP, “better” for the Office 2003 Editions, and “best” for the 2007 Office Suites in terms of how they work together with SharePoint.

A detailed comparison of how the Office 2003 Editions versus the 2007 Office Suites, namely, Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007 and Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007, work with Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 will be provided.

The paper concludes that in order to realize the best user experience with Office and SharePoint integration features, the client programs must be upgraded to a 2007 Microsoft Office Suite, namely, Office Professional Plus 2007 or Office Enterprise 2007 and the server technologies must be upgraded to either Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or Office SharePoint Server 2007.

You can download it from here.

How To: Calculate the number of SharePoint Web Front End servers needed.

Manish Agrawal — Tue, 22 May 2007 12:58:30 GMT

Cornelius J. van Dyk's has written an excellent article on how to calculate the needed number of SharePoint Web Front End Servers, from expected click fall (aka foot fall) on your Web Front End.

You can check the article here.

He has also created a quick web application (called SPCAP – SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool) that prompts you for the input and then determines the final farm configuration for you.

For this, Capacity Planning Guide on TechNet has been recommended, you can find it here:
http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/eb2493e8-e498-462a-ab5d-1b779529dc471033.mspx?mfr=true

Thanks Cornelius for sharing this!!

I hope Cornelius will not mind this, as I am copying his blog post content on my post, as I want to save this formula in my blog also.

Original post from Cornelius's blog
I am going to take you through my journey for Capacity Planning in this entry. Given the topic, this will be quite a lengthy post so if you're really in a big hurry and don't care to understand the intricate details of the capacity planning equation you could just skip this article and go directly to the link for SPCAP – SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool. Now as any seasoned SharePoint Architect would tell you, one of the key components to planning your SharePoint deployment, is Capacity Planning. Unfortunately, Capacity Planning is such a confusing topic and there's not a whole lot of really good documentation around it. What is available can be confusing to say the least. In addition, there are so many factors that affect your planning in this area that it is almost impossible for anyone to come up with a solid number. Your performance would be affected by the server hardware, the client hardware, the concurrency rate of your users, the throughput rate required, the response time your organization deems acceptable etc. These are just the factors that we actually CAN calculate into our formulae. Additionally, your general network load and other factors that could cause interference with your expected performance will from time to time wreck havoc with your stats, but for the most part we can make a good judgment call as to the type of farm setup that would be required in most cases. I STRONGLY recommend that you at least try and read the Capacity Planning Guide on TechNet, found here: http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/eb2493e8-e498-462a-ab5d-1b779529dc471033.mspx?mfr=true Now once you read this, you may come away with a clear understanding of your capacity needs, but if you're like most of us, me included, you'll come way from this even more confused than before. So why did I recommend you read it? Because I do not want you to blindly rely on my formulae as the golden rule for capacity planning. My formulae generally are on the conservative side. For example, instead of using the "Read" transaction numbers in my calculations, I use the "Mixed" numbers which is about half as much and as a result, my formulae would recommend you into a 2x1 farm long before a calculation done using the "Read" numbers. Of course, I believe that, especially on an Intranet scenario, transactions will in fact be "Mixed" rather than "Read". On an Internet scenario, the "Read" numbers would in most cases be accurate, but by playing it safe, the formulae would rather give you too much horsepower than too little. Now on to the guide… When you get to the "Estimate performance and capacity requirements…" section you'll note firstly the hardware recommendations. As you can see, the server setup that was used to provide us with actual transaction throughput benchmarks are all 64 bit servers. As a result, their performance is going to be far superior to 32 bit servers so if you're deploying 32 bit servers, be aware of this as everything is subject to the hardware specified in the guide. We find the recommended hardware being: WFE Server - 2 x Dual Core Intel Xeon 2.8 GHz CPU, 4 GB RAM, 64 bit SQL Server - 4 x Dual Core Intel Xeon 2.8 GHz CPU, 32 GB RAM, 64 bit Client PC - 1 x Pentium 3 1.2 GHz CPU, 1 GB RAM, 32 bit Note the massive amount of memory in the SQL Server. If you server has less memory, be aware that it will impact your performance. Next you'll find a section on "Usage profile" which is really not relevant to our calculations but is only intended to provide you some perspective on the test environment from which the statistics was drawn. Go ahead and skip by this section. Next you'll find a section on "Hardware recommendations". This is really confusing for many because we now have two sets of hardware specs on the same page. All this section is doing is to list the recommended specs for your SharePoint farm even though the test environment hardware was vastly superior. Go ahead and skip by this section. The "Estimating throughput targets" section provides you a description of how to estimate your required throughput. What makes this section confusing is the fact that it contains references to both Requests per Second as well as Requests per Hour. The important section here is the Analyzing Log Files (IIS 6.0) section which will help you analyze your current SharePoint 2003 traffic and determine the targets you need. The "Estimate throughput targets" section is an important section for us because it contains the performance matrix that we will use as the basis of our formulae in calculating our farm requirement. We're only really interested in the first two columns noting the farm configuration in the first and the Requests per Second in the second column. These are the base numbers we use in our formulae. Given the drop off in performance beyond a 5x1 configuration, we don't even consider anything beyond that. In the "Estimate user response time" section the important thing to note is the three levels of response time i.e. 3-5 seconds, 1-2 seconds and sub 1 second response time that are available. There's a grid that attempts to draw the throughput and response times together, but it just confuses most people. Just note the response time options for now. In the "Estimate concurrency rate" section, the really tricky question comes up. How many users are using the system at the same time? We have to estimate this unless you have some cool tools that does stats analysis that can actually give you the numbers, but generally using a 10% concurrency rate is a good rule of thumb. The subsequent sections talk about the indexing window, disk space requirements and performance monitoring. You can skip over this at this point. OK, so we've got all this data. Now how do we convert it into useful information i.e. a server farm requirement number? This is where I had to dust of the good old high school algebra. The first principle in calculating algebraic formulae is to get everything into a consistent unit of measure i.e. compare apples to apples not oranges. We begin with the Estimated Throughput Target (ETT) which is simply a question of how heavily your users use the environment. ETT is usually expressed in Requests per Hour (RPH) and is based on a Throughput Concurrency Rate (TCR). As we mentioned, a TCR of 10% is a good rule of thumb value to use. Based on a TCR of 10%, usage levels are defined as follows: Light usage = 20 RPH Typical usage = 36 RPH Heavy usage = 60 RPH Extreme usage = 120 RPH Taking the Farm Throughput Capacity (FTC) grid we have a RPS value for each farm configuration. Apples to apples remember? So we need to multiply that number by 3,600 to get it into a RPH number that we can use with our existing ETT values. Doing that we get: 1x1 = 180,000 RPH 2x1 = 356,400 RPH 3x1 = 414,000 RPH 4x1 = 432,000 RPH 5x1 = 489,600 RPH Now we take the Estimate Response Time (ERT) values grid. If we use the 1,000 user line as our benchmark we take the 0.7 RPS, multiply it by 3,600 seconds in an hour and divide it by 1,000 users and we'd get a RPH value per user. We do the same for all three response time levels and we get: Slow = 3-5 seconds, server target = 2.52 RPH per user Recommended = 1-2 seconds, server target = 3.6 RPH per user Fast = <1 second, server target = 4.32 RPH per user Lastly we are back to User Concurrency (UC) i.e. 1000 users with 100 actively using the system = 10% concurrency. Don't mistake this for the Throughput Concurrency Rate (TCR). They are not the same. Each will be represented in our formulae but they will each have the same value i.e. if you have a UC of 20%, then your TCR must also be adjusted to 20% in order to keep your statistics accurate. As the guide mentions, determine the volume of data that can be indexed during the off hours window when no users are on the system so as to avoid indexing affecting performance during the day. It is now time to put all this into an equation. We know that the Farm Throughput Capacity (FTC) divided by the number of concurrent users times the Estimated Throughput Target (ETT) times the User Concurrency (UC) proportionate to the Throughput Concurrency Rate (TCR) is equal to the Estimated Response Time (ERT). Since we have a stats matrix of Farm Throughput Capacity (FTC) values, all we need to do is determine our scenario's FTC value and match it up with the table to determine the farm we need. The equation translates thus: FTC/((UsersUC)ETT(UC/TCR))=ERT FTC ----------------------- = ERT (UsersUC)ETT(UC/TCR) FTC = ERT(UsersUC)ETT(UC/TCR) FTC ERTUsersUCETTUC --- = ------------------- 1 TCR In our example, we're trying to solve the question of a 2000 user count with 25% concurrency requiring Normal response times under Heavy usage would require what farm? So substituting the values into the equation we get FTC = (3.6(20000.25)600.25)/0.25 FTC = 270,000 which can be handled by a 2x1 farm. OK, so to make this whole thing easier and to save everyone else a whole lot of time, I created a quick web application that prompts you for the input and then determines the final farm configuration for you. I call it SPCAP. Try it and leave your feedback here. SPCAP – SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool Later C

Integrating ASP.NET AJAX with SharePoint..

Manish Agrawal — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 17:50:00 GMT

Mike Ammerlaan has written an excellent article on Integrating ASP.NET AJAX with SharePoint.

Thanks to Mike for sharing the information and to Narendra Tiwari for bringing it to my notice.

Three Great Books !!! on Office SharePoint Server 2007

Manish Agrawal — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 07:15:00 GMT

Downloadable books:

Planning and architecture for Office SharePoint Server 2007

This book provides information and guidelines to lead a team through the steps of planning the deployment of a solution based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. The audiences for this book are business application specialists, line-of-business specialists, information architects, IT generalists, program managers, and infrastructure specialists who are planning a solution based on Office SharePoint Server 2007. This book also includes links to planning worksheets for recording information related to your planning and deployment activities.

Click the following link to open a Microsoft Word .doc file that you download to your computer and print. This document contains the same information as the "Planning and architecture for Office SharePoint Server 2007" section of this TechNet Web site. The size of this document is approximately 7 MB.

Planning and architecture for Office SharePoint Server 2007 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=79552&clcid=0x409)

Deployment for Office SharePoint Server 2007

This book provides information and guidelines to lead a team through the steps of deploying a solution based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. The audiences for this book are business application specialists, line-of-business specialists, information architects, IT generalists, program managers, and infrastructure specialists who are deploying a solution based on Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Click the following link to open a Microsoft Word .doc file that you download to your computer and print. This document contains the same information as the "Deployment for Office SharePoint Server 2007" section of this TechNet Web site. The size of this document is approximately 2.6 MB.

Deployment for Office SharePoint Server 2007 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=79589&clcid=0x409)

Evaluation guide for search in Office SharePoint Server 2007

This evaluation guide is designed to present a solid understanding of the search capabilities in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. It provides an overview of search solutions from Microsoft, gives a hands-on tour of the product, and concludes with useful information for administrators and developers. IT professionals should use this guide to perform a thorough and effective evaluation of Microsoft search functionality in Office SharePoint Server 2007. The size of this document is approximately 8.3 MB.

Evaluation guide for search in Office SharePoint Serve (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=79614&clcid=0x409)

HOWTO: Configuring Dual Authentication Providers (AD & Forms) and Anonymous Access for WSS v3 / MOSS 2007 Publishing Site

Manish Agrawal — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 06:52:00 GMT

Andrew Connel has written a very detailed and excellent article on HOWTO: Configuring Dual Authentication Providers (AD & Forms) and Anonymous Access for WSS v3 / MOSS 2007 Publishing Site

In one go, I was able to configure everything.

Over and above this, there is an excellent post by Chandima on How to setup and Configure Forms Based User Administration Feature (Alpha Release) in which he has demonstrated usage of his Custom User Administration Web Part having the following Forms Authentication Feature:

Add/Edit/Delete Users from Datastore (User Administration Web Part)
Self registration page for web users
CAPTCHA validation on self registration
Password retrieval via email

Overall both the things combined results into a great addon to your SharePoint site.

Enjoy SharePoint !!

Application Templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Manish Agrawal — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 06:20:00 GMT

For last so many days, I was thinking of downloading new WSS 3.0 Application Templates to explore the template applications and application features.

Today I came accross SharePoint Community Portal, where 20 templates (which are complete as of now out of 40) are available not only for download but also to showcase available Features, Lists, WebParts etc.

Link:

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/sharepoint/templates

Good links for SharePoint developers.

Manish Agrawal — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 23:10:00 GMT

Sharepoint Server 2007 Development Portal (MSDN)

Planning & Architecture for Office SharePoint Server 2007 (Technet2)

How Do I... in Office SharePoint Server 2007

Customizing and Branding Web Content Management-Enabled SharePoint Sites (Part 1 of 3): Understanding Web Content Management and the Default Features

Web Content Management Overview

Web Development

more such links are welcome as comments!!

Enjoy SharePoint!!!