6/28/2009Although no beta code has been released to the public, and I personally have had no access to it via other channels, we know or can make some intelligent guesses about a few things. First, what we know: - 64 Bit! SharePoint Server 2010 will be 64 bit only. That means that the web front ends and application servers will run best on the x64 versions of Windows Server 2008 or 2008 R2 (due out this October). Note that it WILL NOT run on Windows Server 2003, x64. SQL Server has to be 64 bit as well, but either 2005 or 2008.
- Source: Announcing SharePoint Server 2010 Preliminary System Requirements [MSFT SharePoint Product Team Blog]
- Todd Klindt and Shane Young, on Episode 18 of the SharePoint Pod Show, advise (and it seems like common sense) that if you are only familiar with Windows Server 2003, now is the time to learn Windows Server 2008. You want to avoid having to learn both Windows Server 2008 AND SharePoint Server 2010 at the same time.
- Windows Server 2008 is different enough from Windows Server 2003 that you should not underestimate this. In particular, the IIS Admin UI (the IIS 7 MMC) is very different than it was in IIS 6/ Win 2003.
- For your production farms on physical hardware, your vendor should be telling you what hardware is supported for Windows Server 2008 and providing updated drivers. If you need to buy new hardware because it’s not supported by Windows Server 2008, start making your business case for the expense now…
- For your virtual environments (my guess is this means some production environments, many staging, and most development environments), if you are using Virtual PC or Virtual Server, which today do NOT support 64 bit environments, only 32, then you should start looking at Hyper-V.
- I’m running Windows Server 2008 x64 Enterprise and Hyper-V on my Dell Laptop D620, and there are a few driver issues and quirks. Dell does not support Windows Server 2008 on the D620. If I try to use the highlighter when doing a PowerPoint 2007 presentation, my mouse locks up.
- Running a VHD from a recent version of Virtual PC under Hyper-V is easy – Open it under Hyper-V, uninstall the VPC Virtual Machine Additions and install the Hyper-V Integration Services. Several Reboots may be required. Note that the machine might want you to go through Windows Activation again.
- Therefore, the latest & Greatest stack for your 2010 server farm will be SharePoint 2010 servers on Windows 2008 R2 x64 and SQL Servers running SQL 2008 x64 also on Windows 2008 R2 x64.
- We also know several things from looking at the output of the Pre Upgrade Check report that can be produced by STSADM if you have MOSS 2007 SP2 installed. Joel ran this recently and put the output in his blog.
- Microsoft is switching from CAML to XSLT for some part of how List Views work.
- “A list view using custom Collaborative Application Markup Language (CAML), a list view not associated with a Feature, or a list view associated with a custom Feature, will not be upgraded to the new XSLT-based list view. A list view that is not upgraded will still render properly in Windows SharePoint Services 4.0, but it will not inherit any benefits of the new XSLT-based list view, such as SharePoint Designer customization support, conditional formatting and improved developer experience with XSLT standard-based language support.” and “It is highly recommended that you manually upgrade all custom list views to the new XSLT-based list views. The new XSLT-based list view is going to be the default view used in Windows SharePoint Services 4.0, replacing the existing list view in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. For more information about this rule, see KB article 956450”. Note however, that KB article 956450 IS NOT LIVE AS OF NOW. (You get the page not found message when you go to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956450/)
- Likewise, Microsoft is using XSLT instead of CAML for how parts of Fields work.
- “A field type using custom Collaborative Application Markup Language (CAML) in its RenderPattern element will not be upgraded as an XSLT-based field type. Fields based on this custom field type will be rendered without any custom formatting in Windows SharePoint Services 4.0.” and “It is highly recommended that you manually upgrade all custom field types to the new XSLT-based field types in order to have full rendering and customization support. For more information about this rule, see KB article 956451”
- This KB article is not live yet either.
- Furthermore, the fields listed [quoted from the output in Joel’s blog post] look like out of the box fields:
- HoldsField(Hold Status)
- HoldStatusField(Hold Status)
- HTML(Publishing HTML)
- Image(Publishing Image)
- Link(Publishing Hyperlink)
- SummaryLinks(SummaryLinks)
- LayoutVariationsField(Variations)
- ContentTypeIdFieldType(Content Type ID)
- BusinessData(Business data)
- TargetTo(Audience Targeting)
- One wonders what will happen to these fields!
- We know SharePoint workflows are going to be very different because Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0 is significantly different – there was an article in … I think it was Redmond Magazine … saying so. Further evidence is the next item in the log:
- “Web.config file(s) on this server contain modified authorized types for workflow. Upgrade will replace these file with new versions, and all modifications will be lost. Declarative workflows that use added authorized types will fail. Authorized types that were manually disabled will be enabled. The following files will be replaced:
C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\8080\web.config” and “It is highly recommended that you track modifications in these files and reapply them after upgrade. For more information about this rule, see KB article 965449” - No KB article live for this either…
If you hear anything else about 2010 that you can share, please post a comment here or someplace else (twitter or Linked In) that everyone can find. Michael 6/3/2009You’ve already installed SharePoint. You want to use SSL to secure Central Admin because it is the Right Thing To Do and it makes those annoying warnings go away. Note that you could not do this during installation because psconfig does not provide a command line option for creating Central Admin with SSL. See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263093.aspx#section2. You need a certificate, but you don’t need to buy an official one – after all, the only people using the Central Admin site are the Farm Admin(s), and they can set their web browsers to trust a self signed certificate. In fact, if they always remote desktop into the web front end that runs Central Admin, they only have to set the web browser there to trust the self signed certificate issuer. IIS 7 can make a self signed certificate, but will use the server’s full name (FQDN) instead of just the hostname. The url for Central Admin generally just uses the hostname however. That’s where SelfSSL comes in handy. SelfSSL is an IIS 6 resource kit tool. You get it here: details.aspx-FamilyID=56fc92ee-a71a-4c73-b628-ade629c89499&displaylang=en. You MUST run SelfSSL from an ELEVATED command prompt (in other words, RUN AS ADMIN!). Then you can use a command like this: SelfSSL /T /N:CN=MOSSCA1 /V:3650 /S:697346987 /P:21121 It may as you “Do you want to replace the SSL settings for site 697346987? (Y/N). If you are not running an elevated command prompt, even if you answer yes, nothing will happen though the program will exit without error. When it works (and again, you must be running as admin), it will say “The self signed certificate was successfully assigned to site 697346987.” This assumes your Central Admin server is named MOSSCA1, you want the cert to be good for 10 years (3650 days) , the IIS site ID of the CA site is 697346987 and Central Admin is on port 21121. You can find the IIS Site ID by clicking on the Sites folder in the IIS 7 IIS Manager MMC. Once you run SelfSSL, then you need to update the binding for the CA website, in IIS. Select the site, click Bindings in the task pane, and update the port number for HTTP to an unused port. Then add an HTTPS binding and pick the certificate you created. Once you have the HTTPS binding defined, you can then go to the Features view of the Central Admin site and click on the SSL Settings (the lock icon) to specify that SSL is required, not optional, and that it should use 128 bit SSL. 
Once you have that done, you can browse to Central Admin on the new port, and then you need to update the Alternate Access Mappings for the Central Admin web application to specify HTTPS instead of HTTP. For more details on this step, see step #5 of this blog post: http://blogs.msdn.com/bgeoffro/archive/2008/02/11/adding-kerberos-ssl-to-central-administration.aspx I think that about covers it. --Michael I recently upgraded my laptop OS from WinXP x86 to Windows Server 2008 x64. My laptop is a Dell D620, and is a dual core 64bit machine, and since we’ve been told that SharePoint 2010 will be 64 bit only, I figured now was as good a time as any to make the jump to 64 bit and get familiar with HyperV rather than Virtual PC or Virtual Server.. So I am now in the process of building a 64 bit MOSS VM. I did an install of Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition as the guest OS, installed the Hyper V integration services, and had to force the guest OS to detect the Hardware Abstraction Layer by using msconfig’s advanced options. I then ran Microsoft Update to pull down a large volume of updates. Next, I gave it a static IP address and made it use itself for DNS lookup even though it was not yet a DNS server. Then I used a simple answer file to turn it into a domain controller in its own isolated forest. The answer file: [DCINSTALL]
InstallDNS=yes
NewDomain=forest
NewDomainDNSName=demo.local
DomainNetBiosName=demo
ReplicaOrNewDomain=domain
ForestLevel=3
DomainLevel=3
DatabasePath="C:\Program Files\ActiveDirectory\DB"
LogPath="C:\Program Files\ActiveDirectory\Log"
RebootOnCompletion=yes
SafeModeAdminPassword=YourPasswordHere! The command to use it: dcpromo /unattend:"C:\spinmoss\dcpromo.answers.txt" I install IIS with these three commands wrapped in a batch file: servermanagercmd -i Web-Server -allsubfeatures
IF ERRORLEVEL 0 servermanagercmd -remove Web-Mgmt-Compat
IF ERRORLEVEL 0 shutdown /r /t 5 /d p:2:4 /c "Removal of unneeded IIS bits"
Next I began to download all the MOSS install bits. Since SP2 has been released, this is actually a shorter list than it was just prior to SP2’s release.
To do a clean install of MOSS, right now you need:
- The MOSS trial version – you can grab the smaller RTM install rather than the SP1 install because you will be installing SP2 that has all the intermediate bits as well. When I do the install, I use my MSDN license key rather than the one that is provided for the trial.
- SP2 for WSS 3
- SP2 for MOSS
The Update Resource Center on TechNet has links to all the above downloads.
Next you have to slipstream (TechNet article) them so you only do one install, not three. I’m still waiting for SP2 for MOSS to finish downloading, so that’s where i will end this for tonight.
--Michael 5/4/2009I passed 70-631 on Friday, 1 May 2009 and had passed 70-630 previously. The Install / Config side is done – now on to the app-dev side. Anyone recommend practice exams or other resources for 70-541, WSS Dev? I’m planning on reading the rest of Pattison & Larson’s Inside WSS 3.0 book. It’s frustrating that Transcender, MeasureUp, and SelfTest Software don’t have practice exams. Michael 4/21/2009
“Failed to start service SearchServiceInstance on this server after completing upgrade. Please start it manually.” The service it is talking about is Office SharePoint Search. PSConfig stays on the “task 8” screen for a while, though it does later complete “successfully”. Here’s the other symptoms: When I am logged in as MOSSsa, my Farm Admin account which is a member of Administrators, and I try to start the service I get: 
Let’s help the search engines: The error shown is “Error 183: Cannot create a file when that file already exists.” When I logged in as Administrator (my box/domain admin – this machine is a Domain Controller), I got a different message once (approximately: service started then stopped, which sometimes is OK), but on a subsequent attempt, got the same message as above. Resolution/Workaround: Add MOSSSearchSvc to the Administrators group, start the service. The service starts successfully. Stop the service, remove it from the group, then restart the service. No complaints. Apparently, it just needed extra permissions long enough to remove the offending file. My guess is that the file was created by MOSSsa since I was logged in as MOSSsa when I ran the Infrastructure Update. --Michael UPDATE 24 April 2009: The following day, SharePoint Search stopped again, with the same error. I added it permanently to the Administrators group. A friend of mine pointed out that TechNet does say that the Search Service should be in the Administrators group, so this is actually the recommended configuration. 4/20/2009So I decided that the best way for me to get some content into this new MOSS farm that I created was to attach a content database. I logged into my farm server (it’s a demo environment so it’s all on one box). I logged in as my Farm Admin account. I went into SQL Server Management Studio, right clicked the Databases folder, and then clicked Attach. Got this: 
That’s not what I was expecting. After asking one of our SQL gurus to take a look and having him tell me that he’d never seen this one before, I feared my install of SQL Server 2008 was broken and I’d have to reinstall…. But one last thing came to mind – I was logged in as my Farm Admin account, not the box admin/domain admin (machine is a Domain Controller so box admin is domain admin), so I only had Security Admin and DB Creator roles, not full control / system admin. Sure enough, when I logged into the machine as domain admin, the Attach dialog worked. Hopefully, the attach will achieve what I want as well… --Michael 4/19/2009Currently, I am setting up a single server MOSS virtual machine which will host a demo site that will be used by part of Magenic’s sales force. The demo site will represent a repeatable service offering. Additionally, another project team in my office is working on a MOSS and Commerce Server solution that will have multiple concurrent MOSS developers. We are planning to give each developer their own single server farm. I believe the best way to do this is through a scripted install. Because of these two projects, I have been building out a MOSS VM using command line scripts and answer files as much as I could. To this end, I have created an answer file for DCPROMO, a SQL Server 2008 answer file. a batch file that runs PSCONFIG, and batch files that run several STSADM commands. I also wrote a PowerShell script to create users, configure them, and put them in the right OrganizationalUnit. Plus I am documenting almost everything. I’ll do my best to share these later in the week. In the mean time, I wanted to cite a few resources: Alpesh Nakars on having good examples of these: http://www.alpesh.nakars.com/blog/stsadm-command-line Also http://www.powershellpro.com/powershell-tutorial-introduction/powershell-tutorial-active-directory/ This one showed me how to get the user to show up in the right OU. That’s enough for the moment. Michael |
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Recommended SharePoint Books
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