Collabshow.com

Since before 2007 shipped, I was encouraging people to use SharePoint master pages as a means for deploying a custom look and feel.  It’s tons better than using a site template, and if you used themes, you’ll find Themes did NOT upgrade to SharePoint 2010.  Not a huge deal, since they are TONS better including way easier and way more flexible.  Not sure it’s true, but many will find the truly simple way of saving your PowerPoint template as a theme and using it is a viable way of “skinning” your new SharePoint 2010 site.

Creating a SharePoint 2010 Theme from PowerPoint.

1. Open up your favorite PowerPoint with the cool theme you like or create your own.

2. Click the “Design” tab in the ribbon (circled below)

3. Then click the little triangle in the corner of the themes to display more. (See arrow in snip above)

4. Click “Save Current Theme”

5. Choose a location and click save and now you’ve got a .THMX file!

Great, now you’re thinking… this has got to either be CSS or XML and I can easily edit this.  Sorry I tried to open it in Notepad and got gibberish with a few file references at the bottom.

Now you can apply this on the SharePoint 2010 side.

1. Just go into Site Actions, click Site Settings

2. In the Look and Feel section, click Site theme

3. In the Select a Theme section select the theme you uploaded. 

How are 2010 Themes way better?

1. I just told you about the ability to create them in PowerPoint isn’t that cool enough

2. Extensible, export and import

3. Easily modify existing 2010 themes

4. Applies to both System (Layouts) and Application pages for better consistency across more of your pages including your web part pages and yes you can add custom CSS as well.

5. Designed for end users to be able to easily create and modify right through the browser

2007 or 2010 Masterpages

My strong encouragement is people shouldn’t stick too long with their 2007 master pages on SharePoint 2010.  After visual upgrade, I’d like to see people migrating their styles into the SharePoint 2010 master pages.  Sure they should be ok for a while, but you’re not going to get all the goodness.  Remember you want cross browser, compliant XHTML code, less tables (something like from 16 to 8!), and WCAG 2.0 accessibility.  You don’t want to be missing out on all that!  SharePoint 2010 master pages are not table based and designs apply across the _layouts folders.  The corev4.css still has a lot of lines of code, but there are huge improvements.

Understanding the SharePoint 2010 Master Pages

SharePoint 2010 ships with both SharePoint 2007 master pages and page layouts as well as the new SharePoint 2010 master pages.  One of the major things to be aware of is the build in minimalist masterpage a concept that grew up from the community in SharePoint 2010 with Heather Solomon.  In the box you’ll find v4.master, default.master, and minimal.master.  Default.master is the old masterpage if you just upgraded.  v4.master is the new SharePoint 2010 master page with the ribbon and other visuals.  The new minimal.master is as it self describes.  It is has a minimal set of controls and no navigation.  Developers especially those working with a complete custom design will be pleased with this design. 

Before you start saying… Man, Joel is really knows this branding stuff.  Sorry I’m not the master when it comes to branding.  Themes are about as far as I go.  I’ll get someone with style to build a master page.  Applying it is where my expertise lies.

Heather Solomon has put together a post on creating a custom SharePoint 2010 master page.  She does a great job of stepping you through the elements.

So for those of you looking to upgrade or migrate your style from your 2007 master pages to the new improved 2010 master pages, here’s some of the best resources.

Starter Master Pages

Starter Master Pages for SharePoint 2010 Codeplex Project by Randy Drisgill

http://startermasterpages.codeplex.com/

Description: Starter Master Pages for SharePoint 2010 are a clean, commented starting point for creating your own SharePoint 2010 branding. Starter Master Pages were known previously as Minimal Master Pages in SharePoint 2007.
Details: In the tradition of those SharePoint branding folks that came before me, I have put together two minimal master pages that can be used to start a SharePoint 2010 Branding project. They contain only very minimal HTML styling in order to accommodate some of the specific needs of SharePoint 2010 and are commented throughout. I hope you find them useful as a good starting point for creating branded SharePoint sites.”

Randy has outdone himself with his series on branding tips:

• SP2010 Branding Tip Series
• SP2010 Branding Tip #1 – Applying Custom Master Pages to _layouts Pages
• SP2010 Branding Tip #2 – Custom Master Pages and Dialog Boxes
• SP2010 Branding Tip #3 – Getting your CSS to be the last to load
• SP2010 Branding Tip #4 – Easily show a Favicon in SharePoint 2010
• SP2010 Branding Tip #5 – Handling unsupported browsers
• SP2010 Branding Tip #6 – Mobile Browsers
• SP2010 Branding Tip #7 – Using Simple Rendering in SharePoint Navigation
• SP2010 Branding Tip #8 – Alternate CSS can crash your site (until its fixed)
• SP2010 Branding Tip #9 – Turn on Anonymous Access
• SP2010 Branding Tip #10 Starter Master Pages for SharePoint 2010 (Formerly Known as Minimal Master Pages)
• SP2010 Branding Tip #11 – Un-Floating the Ribbon in custom Master Pages

The best resource for upgrading your Master Page

MSDN: Upgrading an Existing Master Page to the SharePoint Foundation Master Page

• Controls on the Server Ribbon
• Add Content Placeholders
• Add the Server Ribbon
• Maintain the Server Ribbon Position while Scrolling
• Add Controls to the Master Page

As well as good resources on the SharePoint Team blog.

Customizing Ribbon Positioning in SharePoint 2010 Master Pages
SharePoint Dialog Auto-Sizing and Master Page Customization

Other Community Resources:

Michael Hacker speaks to the naming of the new masterpage in his blog post don’t forget official.master.

Mirjam Van Olst speaks to visual studio 2010’s new modules for Deploying a custom masterpage in SharePoint 2010 in her blog Adventures in SharePoint.

Don’t forget with broader browser support to build for diverse devices including mobile

The way things are going with design and the excitement around iPads, you may want to check out Dux’s video on SharePoint 2010 on the iPad.  Hey it’s worth a shot to at least make sure it does what you want.  I was impressed how good it looks.

Why use a tool when you can upgrade using the built in upgrade methods?

• Maybe you want to skip 2007 going from 2003 to 2010…
• Maybe you want to get out of your MOSS enterprise and move into Standard or even WSS…
• Maybe you want to get out of a site definition or template or from one language template to another… 
• You’re finding that moving data on your own with the import or export is changing dates and making you own everything…
• Already built a rock solid 2010 deployment and just want to get the data moved in.
• Using the knife or using the precision scalpel tool… Upgrade is designed to get from A to B without transformation.  Transformation may be your goal.

That’s just a start.  I’m sure you’ll find even more reasons, like co-existence, control, more management interfaces, and flexibility.

The upgrade and migration space seems like it’s getting crowded, I say it’s great to have options.  How does one navigate this space?  First let me say that despite what I say, it will appear I’m biased due to my affiliation with Quest software as a paid employee, no I don’t have a quota or get paid any extra for this post.  If anything there’s more risk than reward for a post like this.  In the past when I’m asked specific requirements I try to push the vendor with the best solution.  Here I will list the various Upgrade and Migration vendors.  Many will be releasing their solutions RTM +60 including many making their announcements in June 2010 for their 2010 Solutions.  I highly encourage you to explore their solutions with them.  Special thanks to Owen Allen, Inna Gordin, and a great post by Deepak Bhat “10 Content Migration Tools to SharePoint Platform” which inspired me to not just include the traditional SharePoint vendors, but others that aren’t so traditional and dig even deeper for new ones.  I hope you don’t get lost in this list.  I hope you find the sorting by the source to be useful.

Note: If I’m missing tools, it’s my mistake, please contact me, tweet me @joeloleson or include in the comments and I’ll attempt to add them to this list.  Note this is the last chapter in my 2010 upgrade and migration book, so I am anxious to get this right for everyone. I’ve updated the tools a few times to make them more accurate.

New SharePoint 2010 Migration Tools!

Metalogix SharePoint Site Migration Manager 2010

“Whether you are migrating between SharePoint servers, upgrading from SharePoint 2003 or 2007 to SharePoint 2010, or re-organizing your SharePoint content, SharePoint Site Migration Manager is an easy-to-use and convenient way of moving your SharePoint data. With its familiar copy-and-paste-style user interface, you can quickly migrate all SharePoint sites, libraries, lists, web parts and permissions between servers. Migrate to the cloud or hosted SharePoint environments and reduce infrastructure costs.”

Quest Software Migration Manager (2003 to 2010)

“Quest Migration Manager for SharePoint enables direct migration of SharePoint 2003 content to SharePoint 2010 through a web console, avoiding a complex “two-hop” upgrade. With Quest Migration Manager for SharePoint, you can:

    * Migrate SharePoint 2003 sites, including content and security settings, to SharePoint Server 2010 or SharePoint Foundation 2010
    * Reorganize and rationalize existing SharePoint 2003 site structure during migration
    * Synchronize post-migration changes of the source SharePoint 2003 site content to the target sites to make sure no data is lost
    * Schedule resource-intensive migration operations for off-peak hours

Migration Manager for SharePoint also helps you consolidate and reorganize SharePoint 2007 environments before upgrading to SharePoint 2010.”

Tzunami Deployer for SharePoint 2010 migration

“The latest version of Tzunami Deployer for SharePoint Migration supports the migration of content into Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and includes numerous new features that enhance migration automation capabilities, and facilitate the entire migration process. The release enables seamless migration from SharePoint 2003 directly to SharePoint 2010, eliminating the previous requirement to initially migrate to SharePoint 2007 and only then to SharePoint 2010. It builds on its solid track record of comprehensive metadata mapping to enable complete preservation of business critical content properties, and eliminates the risk of data loss without disturbing business continuity.”

AvePoint DocAve SharePoint Migration Manager for 2001/2003/2007 to 2003/2007/2010

“DocAve SharePoint Migrator automatically moves content from source SharePoint 2001/2003/2007 instances to their mapped elements in SharePoint 2003/2007/2010. Information critical to the business in previous versions of SharePoint are kept intact, assuring users that no data will be lost during the transfer. All folder structures, document properties and associated metadata, as well as permissions and access control are all retained with full-fidelity. End-users can confidently continue to access their content without interruption”

MetaVis Migrator for SharePoint

“MetaVis Migrator is a simple tool for migrating content and objects between SharePoint sites, site collection or servers. Whether you are consolidating, upgrading or simply re-organizing your SharePoint 2010, 2007 or 2003 environment, Migrator provides a convenient and familiar way of moving your SharePoint data. Users can also easily load files from network drives and classify legacy or imported content to unlock the full potential of SharePoint search and navigation.”

Xavor SharePoint 2010 Migration Tool

Xavor announces the launch of its free SharePoint 2010 Migration Tool. Download our new Xavor SharePoint 2010 Migration Tool. Xavor has been working tirelessly with SharePoint Consultants to provide you with a timely release of Free and handy tools for SharePoint 2010. Reliability, convenience, ease of use, flexibility and free support are among the top features of our tools. If you face any problem with the use of our tool, please don’t hesitate to contact us and we will try our best to solve your query in due time without any charges. Xavor SharePoint 2010 Migration Tool is not a trial version. This tool will not expire and you can use it for as long as you want. Our SharePoint Migration Tool and Admin Tool give you the flexibility to migrate and administrate your SharePoint data easily.”

Migration Tools by Source

The list above is organized by the source system.  Beyond the source, it’s important to track down a few things about your migration vendor.  Here are a few suggestions…

Questions to help with Vendor Selection

1. What version is the tool?  Many SharePoint tools are on their third and fourth versions moving into a very mature system

2. Maturity in the field – Seasoned?  What is the usage experience with your favorite systems Integrators/consultants? with an ecosystem that includes full fledged support and deployment services.  More mature tools may have agreements with partners as resellers or even provide motivation.  I encourage you to try to understand if it’s a certification or if it’s a reseller program.  Some tools are easier than others, and you don’t want to get stuck trying to run a complex tool by yourself if you’ve got a day job.  Migration is very common outsourced project they can be expensive not just for the tool but for the services, so spending time may pay off.  That said, cheaper doesn’t mean better.

3. Microsoft Gold Certified? When I first started drilling into the migration tools I found there are really 4-5 common tools used for SharePoint migrations, but both new vendors and traditional ECM vendors have been moving into the space putting everyone into a position where it’s time to look again.  Even your mature vendors are revisiting their tools with SharePoint 2010.  Even if they aren’t listed here as having a SharePoint migration tool, they are likely waiting on the launch wave and testing to make their announcements.  Microsoft itself

4. Time to Migrate/Reliability – One consideration your firm should think about is the time it can take to migrate.  Some content will be easier than others, but throughput for large migrations like a SharePoint to SharePoint or a FileShares to SharePoint, the time to accomplish your migration can become critical and a major factor in your requirements.

5. Unique features such as Coexistence – You may or may not find features like coexistence where both can exist in production for some period of time.  Flushing out these types of requirements can definitely help you better decide what is important.

6. API Compliance – On the source there’s an API (the Application Programmability Interface) and the destination.  The more you work with the SharePoint API the more you’ll understand it’s got it’s quirks.  If you’re migrating applications and state into SharePoint you’ll find limitations in the API.  How does the vendor come up with creative solutions to overcome these?  Ever run an export and import and wondered why you lost your alerts, workflows, recycle bin, last modified date, and more.  So what is the vendor doing to overcome these limitations?  You’d be surprised to know if they are using FrontPage RPC or pushing the data into the database with some level of their own support.  The more you know…  If you care these are the questions you should ask.

7. Exception Handling – What is your tool doing to allow you to see what it’s dropping and to handle exceptions?  One of my favorites for testing a tool is to add common file names that SharePoint hates.  Add an ampersand & in your file name, add something in parentheses, add a few dots and then try to migrate.  You get the idea.  Does it crash, does it fail, does it allow you to change the & to and?  Can you say, yes forever?  That’s serious usability.  Also dig into the interfaces. 

8. For Whom is the UI Design – Definitely not all of these tools are created equally.  Some are designed for developers, some for engineers, some for end users.  Huge differences.  In the case of Notes for example, you may be looking to take an application and move it to a simple template or to simply mirror the functionality.  How does the tool help you analyze your needs and map them.  How much intelligence and how much does it require you to do the heavy lifting vs. trying to encourage the right thing? You should also ask if you as a customer can run this tool or will it require a trained expert or certified consultant?

9. Involvement in Technology Adoption Program and Partner Council – while not every company can be in the SharePoint 2010 TAP program, it does give them a pretty good head start on working with the new technologies.  It also frequently reflects the relationship with Microsoft.  Microsoft does have it’s favorites.  In the case of things like Notes, Microsoft can be very motivated.  Explore that motivation, they may be interested in helping you in more ways than one including some services.

10. More than Migration: It’s not about Point A to Point B – You might be surprised when you analyze it, but the best tools provide the best options for what you can do between the source and destination from sites and site templates, to content types, and meta data.  Even more.  Migration time is the best time to reconsider your information architecture, your security structure and inheritance, and to simplify or to even go more structured.  You know your better than the tool, so how does it expose the right features for you?

11. How complex is the installation and dependencies – Is this tool run on both sides, on a third party client?  How much hand holding does it need?  If it’s hard to install and you need a big book to run it, you’re likely going to wish you had a consultant helping you.

12. Does it support automation?  Has it been updated with powershell or at least have a way to batch script automate?  Sometimes it’s nice to have UI, and other times it’s nice to jump to the command shell.

13. Some tools are built with Java, others with older versions of .NET.  Do you care?  You may have data center standards or require special requirements around ensuring security requirements being met.  Something to consider.

14. Migration to and from Hosted – Understand your destination.  You may be looking at your source and miss the point about getting it into the source.  If it’s a site in the cloud how are you going to get the data there?  SharePoint Designer?  BPOS D may have you run the tool on your side and have you give them a database.  This may mess with your coexistence plans.

15. Who else is using the tool? Be sure to get customer references and if you’re putting some money into the tool, you may want to actually talk to them.  Don’t buy a tool based on the cool website.  You have to at least make sure it works.  Buying tools on sites happens these days, but often you’re laying down some serious cash, so do your due diligence and read a case study or two.

Migration Tools by Vendor

Whether you are upgrading or deploying a new SharePoint 2010 farm, the capacity boundaries are one of the the most important thing you need to understand to have a successful deployment. 

When designing a farm, people need to be educated about how best to scale.  These links below contain a lot of word docs, essentially you may find it more difficult to find the guidance you’re looking for, but there is actually already way more information published at release than in the earlier version.

New TechNet documentation and Whitepapers have just became available:

• Capacity management and sizing for SharePoint Server 2010 – Kelley Vice (Thanks for gathering this, there’s guidance here that is applicable even to 2007)
• SharePoint Server 2010 performance and capacity technical case studies (Includes one example of Collab and one of Publishing)
• SharePoint Server 2010 performance and capacity test results and recommendations (Various documents including: Access Services, Large Lists max performance, Divisional Portal, Infopath, Performance Point, Search, Web Application Services, Web Content Management, Workflow)
  • Designing Large Lists and Maximizing Performance
  • Estimate performance and capacity requirements for Access Services
  • Provides guidance on how using Access Services impacts topologies running SharePoint Server 2010.
  • Capacity Planning and Sizing for SharePoint Server 2010-based Divisional Portal
  • Provides guidance on performance and capacity planning for a SharePoint 2010 based divisional portal.
  • Designing Large Lists and Maximizing List Performance
  • Provides guidance on performance of large document libraries and lists. This document is specific to SharePoint Server 2010, although the throttles and limits that are discussed also apply to Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010.
  • SharePoint Server 2010 Capacity Management for InfoPath Solutions
  • Provides guidance on the footprint that usage of InfoPath Forms Services has on topologies running SharePoint Server 2010.
  • Estimate performance and capacity requirements for PerformancePoint Services
  • Provides guidance on the footprint that usage of PerformancePoint Services has on topologies running SharePoint Server 2010.
  • Estimate performance and capacity requirements for Search in SharePoint Server 2010
  • Provides capacity planning information for different deployments of Search in SharePoint Server 2010, including small, medium, and large farms.
  • SharePoint Server 2010 Capacity Management for Web Content Management Deployments
  • Provides guidance on performance and capacity planning for a Web Content Management solution.
  • Word Automation Services 2010 Capacity Planning Guidance
  • Provides capacity planning guidance for Word Automation Services in SharePoint Server 2010.
  • Estimate Performance and Capacity Requirements for Workflow in SharePoint Server 2010
  • Provides guidance on the footprint that usage of Workflow has on topologies running SharePoint Server 2010.
• Databases That Support SharePoint 2010 Products
• Topologies for SharePoint Server 2010

Note: I highly recommend digging into these docs to better understand what these various “limits” are.  There is much more information on new types of limits.  Essentially there are now boundaries, thresholds, and supported limits.  Much of these limits come down to testing. “The capacity planning information in this document provides guidelines for you to use in your planning. It is based on testing performed at Microsoft, on live properties. However, your results are likely to vary based on the equipment you use and the features and functionality you implement for your sites.”  My personal recommendation is to be cautious.  There are very few of these limits I’d recommend passing or even getting close to passing.

I was interested in providing a comparison of how things have changed based on the SharePoint 2007 capacity boundaries and 2010 capacity boundaries document.  Here are some of my observations in differences that are worth noting. There is more the same than different when it comes to capacity planning.  Don’t throw out all of your knowledge of SharePoint with what you find that’s new.  A lot of the best practices are the same. Here’s my list of SharePoint 2007 key capacity planning blogs and articles.

The biggest key changes…

Items per view

If there was one thing that was a focus it was list scale.  Not only is the list itself much more scalable, and better designed, but also the actual rendering of the lists is more flexible and more manageable.  I’ve discussed the list threshold throttling limits where you can control how much is returned in a view.  In 2007 we had a recommended limit of 2000.  This 2000 number found itself as a key designing principal.  Now the default is 5000 and this is as well the recommended max for a view more than doubling the previous limit.  I’ve seen examples where this was increased and still the list rendering had much better performance than in 2007.  … “Maximum number of list or library items that a database operation, such as a query, can process at one time, outside of the daily time window set by the administrator during which queries are unrestricted.”

Documents per list

While you could put millions of items in lists in SharePoint 2007, due to various issues many were cautious to push the number of documents.  Both search depth issues, and rendering were a constant concern around scaling out large document repositories.  The limit was 5 million in a list, now we see 10 million item document libraries.  “You can create very large document libraries by nesting folders, using standard views and site hierarchy. This value may vary depending on how documents and folders are organized, and by the type and size of documents stored.” Personally I see the performance in lists more than double in performance and feel much better about the scalability as well due to a variety of things including the re-architecture of the content database.  As well the improved support for remote blob storage with SQL 2008 R2 can improve performance on large documents in large environments, while I still caution customers to be careful around these decisions for operations & supportability considerations.

Column Limits

What seems like a decent investment is row wrapping.  SharePoint Server 2010 data is stored in SQL Server tables. To allow for the maximum number of possible columns in a SharePoint list, SharePoint Server will create several rows in the database when data will not fit on a single row. This is called row wrapping.  Six rows are recommended as a maximum.

Site Collection Sizing

25 to 100GB  “A site collection should not exceed 100 GB unless it is the only site collection in the database.  Certain site collection actions, such as site collection backup/restore or Move-SPSite, cause large Microsoft SQL Server® operations which can have performance impact or fail if other Site collections are active in the same database.”

Database

Published recommendations go from 2007 as 100GB content databases and in SharePoint 2010 looking at 200GB with possibilities of up to 1TB with careful non collaborative workloads like documents and records repositories. “We strongly recommended limiting the size of content databases to 200 GB to help ensure system performance.  Content database sizes up to 1 terabyte are supported only for large, single-site repositories and archives with non-collaborative I/O and usage patterns, such as Records Centers.”

Storage

While structurally the blobs are better managed and more scalable, the fundamental storage story has changed a bit.  We had EBS support with SharePoint 2007 SP1, but implementing anything was complex and many cautions against doing anything unless you had support with a vendor and even then, proceed with extreme caution.  With SharePoint 2010 and SQL 2008 R2 we have a better story with RBS (Remote Blob Storage) essentially handled transparently by SQL.  SharePoint 2010 is happy to have SQL store its blobs on external storage using a provider mechanism.

Databases per Web App & App Pools per Server

Knowing people are using 64 bit hardware you’ll see a few recommendations simply based on better scale with SQL and IIS.  Examples of this is the numbers of databases per web app and the number of app pools per server which totally depends on the RAM on the box.  SharePoint 2010 by default does not use less memory than SharePoint 2007. For example with App Pools, “This limit is dependent largely upon: 1) The amount of RAM allocated to the front end server 2) The workload that the farm is serving – the user base and the usage characteristics (the process of a single highly active application pools can reach 10 GB or more)”

Index Sizing

“SharePoint Search supports index partitions, which each contain a subset of the entire search index. The recommended maximum is 10 million items for a given partition. The overall recommended maximum number of items: e.g., people, list items, documents, Web pages, etc., is 100 million.”

All the excitement all the build up. 

April 16 Jeff Teper announced the RTM (Release to Manufacturing) of SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010

April 22 The SharePoint Foundation 2010 & SharePoint Server 2010 English bits went live on Download Center & MSDN

April 27 Volume Licensing and Customers with Software Assurance will have availability on the VL Servicing Center (looks like they beat their dates)

April 27 First tier first round of languages – English, French, Spanish, German, Russian, and Dutch available on Volume licensing (and I bet on MSDN)

May 12 Official Launch http://www.the2010event.com & Global Community Launch Parties including the party I’ll be hosting at Nectar in Seattle with Erica Toelle

June – General Availability – This is when you’ll see the trial bits.

The Free stuff with No Subscriber requirements:

SharePoint Foundation 2010 – Free Requires no subscription (x64)

Download details: Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010

• Supported Operating Systems: Windows 7 Enterprise; Windows 7 Professional; Windows 7 Ultimate; Windows Server 2008 R2; Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2; Windows Vista Service Pack 2
• Review the SharePoint Foundation 2010 system requirements
• Size 170 MB
• Note: Keep checking on the other languages they will follow…

SharePoint Designer 2010 –  Free Download (No MSDN Subscription Required)

#SharePoint Designer 2010 x86 (32 bit) http://bit.ly/9ly9d5 and then SharePoint Designer x64 http://bit.ly/dxxkAH

Microsoft releases Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 to TechNet, MSDN | Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report | ZDNet.com

MSDN Subscriber links for SharePoint 2010 (Currently in 14 languages (according to @resing tweet)

Who can download SharePoint 2010 and will have a key here’s the groups on MSDN:
BizSpark, BizSpark Admin, MSDN Universal (VL), VS Premium with MSDN (MPN), VS Premium with MSDN (Retail), VS Premium with MSDN (VL), VS Pro with MSDN Premium (Empower), VS Pro with MSDN Premium (MPN), VS Ultimate with MSDN (Retail), VS Ultimate with MSDN (VL)

SharePoint Server 2010

SharePoint Server 2010 (x64) – DVD (English)
Thursday, April 22, 2010 8:49 AM

File Name: en_sharepoint_server_2010_x64_dvd_518634.iso

Date Published (UTC): 4/22/2010 8:49:57 AM

Last Updated (UTC): 4/22/2010 8:57:09 AM

Other Useful Download Links:

• Office Professional Plus 2010 (x64) – (English)
  Thursday, April 22, 2010 8:45 AM
• Project Standard 2010 (x86) – (English)
  Thursday, April 22, 2010 8:56 AM
• Office Professional Plus 2010 (x86) – (English)
  Thursday, April 22, 2010 8:45 AM
• Visio 2010 (x86) – (English)
  Thursday, Apr 22
• Project Standard 2010 (x86) – (English)
  Thursday, Apr 22
• Project Professional 2010 (x86) – (English)
  Thursday, Apr 22
• Office Web Apps 2010 (x64) – DVD (English)
  Thursday, Apr 22
• SharePoint Server 2010 (x64) – DVD (English)
  Thursday, Apr 22
• Project Professional 2010 (x64) – (English)
  Thursday, Apr 22
• Project Standard 2010 (x64) – (English)
  Thursday, Apr 22
• Visio 2010 (x64) – (English)
  Thursday, Apr 22

Wow, what a crazy event that is.  Evolutions right?  Sounds like it’s been awesome.  I would totally be there and speaking today.  Wish I was there and had a way in, and way out. More on that.

Michael Noel, Me, Tony Frankola, Paul Swider in Sarajevo, Bosnia

My session is or was Making Your SharePoint Social in 10 Steps.  Not sure who is delivering it.  It’s about understanding that basically after you upgrade to SharePoint 2010 you’ve got some work to do to make sure you’ve activated the relevant services and so on to make sure you’re really not just in the same situation you were before.  It also points out that it takes proactive solutions to overcome Site Collection “silos” in SharePoint.  I really see SharePoint Social features as addressing common collaboration gaps that help unite and charge a SharePoint environment.

Here’s my deck on slideshare: Making SharePoint Social

1. Make it Accessible – (not just VPN) think about remote employees… mobile access and over the internet
2. Enable Good My Sites – There are bad deployments of mysites, there’s not explanation, no quota, and chaos.  Good My Site deployments have a clear vision and purpose… it’s not myspace.
3. Build Rich Profiles – Good mysites have good profiles and good adoption/training info and possibly even some branding and external HR sources.  User Hierarchy is pretty key in 2010.
4. Relevant Enterprise Search –
5. Use Blogs & Wikis
6. Integrate for Presence
7. Build Discovery Navigation including external sources
8. Archive the Old
9. Enable Enterprise Content Types & Tagging & Ratings (Service App)
10. Relevant Sticky Site Content

My flight to Europe started with a stopover in London, I’d love to know how many hours the airspace closed behind me on my flight to Zagreb Croatia for SharePoint Conf Croatia. 

Where I spoke at a sold out SharePoint event.  Tony Frankola organized an impressive 130 person conference focused on SharePoint 2010.  I did the kickoff keynote session on SharePoint SharePoint 2010 Upgrade. 

Here’s the deck: SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Best Practices

Michael Noel and Paul Swider (SharePoint Evolutions speakers and TEC2010 speakers) were my speaking companions along with our expert guide Tony, on a whirlwind tour of the Balkans or Adriatic Region which we had planned to do on the weekend before SharePoint evolutions.

London –> Croatia –> Serbia – Romania – Serbia – Croatia – Bosnia – Croatia – Bosnia – Croatia – Monte Negro – Croatia – Bosnia – Croatia – Italy – San Marino – Italy – … hope to get to Spain Home…

SharePoint Balkan Pictures

Coming Home Soon??? Hopefully

I’ll give you more details on what happened and why we are in Rome and What happened to the flights in Dubrovnik when I get more time.  Off to track down options… Rome to Barcelona at 6:45pm tonight and Barcelona to Seattle via Philly tomorrow… wish me luck or pray!