Infrastructure Update Issues Informal Interview with Troy

I ran into Troy Star my favorite SharePoint tester yesterday in Friday Harbor, Washington.  You have to appreciate the size of the SharePoint world and the randomness.

 

So with my 5 minutes with Troy, what did I do?  I drilled him on the Infrastructure update and O14.

 

He first mentioned the AAM (alterate access mapping) regression.  Regression meaning a bug that was actually unfortunately introduced and not caught before the release of the rich pack.  The regression only appears to impact environments that use AAMs and not ISA.  (ISA apparently can transparently work around the issue.)  Not all the details have been released on this yet.

 

So I asked him who was affected and he said a basically anyone who was using internal and external alterate access mappings.  It was defaulting to internal mappings.  Didn’t get the full explanation, but basically it was messing up the AAMs.

 

So I asked him if people should hold off, he said no not everyone, that people should test it first.  I explained that many customers don’t have AAMs that would replicate their production environments that would make the regression apparent.

 

There’s so much goodness packed in that update it’s unfortunate, but I would have to say that if you have an internet or extranet environment that even has basic AAMs I’d suggest waiting until this is fully vetted and we have post update rollups.

 

Dan Winter’s (of product support) Blog has infrastructure update info on this.  I expect him to have updates as we find out more.  Of course the WSS Infrastucture Update KB itself should keep us up to date as well. 

 

What did Troy say about O14?  What can he say?  He said they hadn’t forgotten about it, but a lot of time was spent on the update.  I totally understand, it’s something I’ve been anticipating for over 7 months.  Unfortunately many will see this regression as a temporary delay, for Internet and Extranet sites that use AAMs I’d have to agree.

 

In the meantime there is some functionality testing that can and should go on.  Did you see Brenda Carter’s search federation post?  It’s very thorough and even if you don’t have "geo-distributed" environments it’s relevant for pulling in search results from Live.com or other search federation scenarios.  It also gives you an idea of the richness of the update.

 

There are quite a few posts on the Infrastructure update these days:

 

The SharePoint ITPro documentation team blog – Infrastructure Updates

Office Sustained Engineering blog – Announcing Availability of Infrastructure Updates

Get the Point, Microsoft Office SharePoint Blog – What’s new in the MOSS 2007 Infrastructure Update? 

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