September 2009 - Quest SharePoint Experts Mirror

What is a best practice? Ben Curry definitely one who has popularized and even trademarked the concepts around SharePoint Best Practices through the book and conference has decent explanations of best practices… “ Best Practices is about doing things the right way : the most efficient, effective ways to achieve goals, distilled into adaptable, repeatable procedures you can use.” Blogs are great for sharing your version of the truth and what you’ve learned about the product, but my concern lately is those who read one blog and get one version of “truth” they get one “best practice” and consider it golden. There’s a real problem these days of looking at a problem with only one pair of rose colored glasses. Consider these “Standards” from SharePoint Hillbilly, one with a unique perspective, but...

Body: I’ve mentioned more than a few times publically that one of the many benefits of using database mirroring with SharePoint was that mirroring allowed for some efficiencies around patching and maintenance, but in many cases, I’ve been vague on the details. This is mainly because the SharePoint product group was a bit hesitant about supporting these scenarios. Well, no more. Microsoft just published a succinct article on how to use database mirroring to patch a farm with little actual downtime. Some things to note about this process: The farm will be read-only for the duration of content upgrade. Read-only may still be perceived as downtime. Users can still access most content, but a lot of things will be broken. In my experience synchronizing databases after an operation like this can be...

I was a huge fan of Prescan back in the early betas of SharePoint 2007 ( Prescan is your friend and Don’t be Afraid of Prescan ) and would preach and preach people to run the tool (it’s all still true and much applies even more with PreUpgradeCheck). Here’s 5 clear and solid reasons why you have to cozy up with PreUpgradeCheck. The PreUpgradeCheck for preparing for SharePoint 2010 shipped with SP2, so if you have that or any of the cumulative updates you’ve got the goodness. There is syntax and detail on the PreUpgradeCheck STSADM command on TechNet . I’ve written about the PreUpgradeCheck in more detail in a previous post, as did our good buddies Bob Fox “PreUpgradeCheck in SP2” and Wictor Wilen in “Say Hello to STSADM preupgradecheck command.” 1. PreUpgradeCheck is has a better engine, it...

Body: The Joel world tour continues to Asia from Africa. Teched Africa was a blast. I hope you enjoyed the pictures. There’s a lot of energy and passion as seen from Teched Africa in Durban to the SharePoint Saturday in Capetown, to our shark diving experience with Zlatan Dzinic SharePoint MVP. I hear he had a great time at the recent best practices conference in DC. It’s great to see many of the SharePoint people able to get out of their local region and connect with others. Here’s my whirl wind tour: JAPAN Sep 14: I’ll spend a day in Japan in the heart of Tokyo meeting with Microsoft and partners on “Preparing Today for Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 as well as 10 Steps to a Successful Deployment.” My decks are currently being translated into Japanese. SINGAPORE Sep 16: Then I’ll head over to...