Mart Muller's Weblog

Via Mark, I ran into RAPID for SharePoint, a tool to add taxonomies functionality to SharePoint 2007. We've been talking about this kind of feature a lot here and implemented in some 2003 project already. RAPID has made a great implementation for 2007 which is certainly worth while looking at!

 

"'RAPID for SharePoint' builds upon the success of it's predecessor (CMS.RAPID) by providing a comprehesive classification solution for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. As well as providing this significant new functionality to the product 'RAPID for SharePoint' also features a number of useful editing, administration and useability enhancements for SharePoint 2007.
The 'RAPID for SharePoint' Classification system will be available in a range of versions towards the end of March 2007. It enables SharePoint 2007 to meet current Public Sector compliance requirements by supporting a range of Taxonomies including IPSV."

Seems like most of the "TBD" chapters in the sharepoint admin guides about performance planning, one of the hardest MOSS infrastructure questions, are filled! Check out the chapters:

• Overview: Estimate performance and capacity requirements (Office SharePoint Server)
• Estimate performance and capacity requirements for Windows SharePoint Services collaboration environments (Office SharePoint Server)
• Estimate performance and capacity requirements for portal collaboration environments
• Estimate performance and capacity requirements for search environments
• Estimate performance and capacity requirements for Excel Services environments

Also a very usefull article is about additional performance and capacity planning factors for MOSS.

Check out some of the virtual labs for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007:

• What's New in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Feature Walkthrough Virtual Lab - Learn about the new and enhanced features in Windows SharePoint Services (version 3) such as site creation, site administration, adding Web Parts, the permissions trimmed UI, list settings, navigation, list and library security, notifications, and email integration.
• What's New in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Feature Walkthrough Virtual Lab - Learn about the new features in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 including integration points with Microsoft Office 2007 programs.
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise Features Administration Virtual Lab - Learn about the administration of InfoPath Forms Services and Excel Services, components of the Enterprise edition of Office SharePoint Server 2007.
• Introducing Content Types for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Virtual Lab - The objective of this lab is to provide a walkthrough of content types and new property editing functionality in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Records Management Deployment and Configuration Virtual Lab - Learn about the Record Management capabilities included in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Topics include creating content types for categorizing documents, configuring a central records repository, setting up records management policies, and available options for automation.

There is a lot of discussion going on about MOSS 2007 licencing, not only the costs, but also what can be done and not, regarding to licencing. Example: you cannot share servers for both intranet and internet sites, because intranet licence is based on CAL's, and internet on an internet licence, which cannot be combined. A staging enviroment however, is possible to share with an intranet environment. So, not that easy and hard to sell.

For a good overview there comes more and more information available:

• Plan for server farms: http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/b28ba53d-a3e8-440f-9fcb-f592d858894a1033.mspx?mfr=true
• Costs: http://blogs.tamtam.nl/mart/MOSS2007AndRelatedTechnologiesPricing.aspx

Some more interesting facts about licensing requirements form Technet:

"Consider licensing requirements to determine the minimum number of server farms that you need to plan for. There are two server licenses available for Office SharePoint Server 2007. These licenses cannot be combined on the same server computer or on the same server farm. The following lists and describes each license offering.

• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Server License: This license is required to run Office SharePoint Server 2007 in client/server mode. You should use this license with the requisite number of Client Access Licenses (CALs) appropriate for your organizational needs.
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet sites: You may use the software for Internet-facing Web sites only. All content, information, and applications must be accessible to non-employees. This license has all the features of the Enterprise Edition of Office SharePoint Server. This is a per server license that does not require the purchase of Client Access Licenses.

If you plan to deploy internal content for your organization and Internet-facing content for non-employees, you must deploy at least two server farms to meet licensing requirements."

SharePoint Solutions Software has released 'Extranet Collaboration Manager' for SharePOint 2007, a product for administrating extranet users in SharePoint. They have two versions:

ExCM - Standard Edition provides you with a suite of tools to Simplify SharePoint 2007 extranet user access and management. See the ExCM product page for more details.

ExCM - Enterprise Edition allows your users to submit a request when he or she would like to have a new SharePoint 2007 site provisioned. You can easily associate custom workflows with the new site requests, asking for approval prior to site creation. Once a site request is approved, ExCM - EE will automatically provision the site for you using any SharePoint 2007 site definition you have specified."

Extranet Collaboration Manager by SharePoint Solutions is a complete solution that will:

• Simplify the provisioning and maintenance of external resources for use with your business partners
• Enable you to automate site provisioning requests through workflows
• Delegate user management tasks to your business partners
• Provide you with the capability to audit the provisioning and user maintenance activities within your collaborative environment.

Today, Colligo 2.0 for SharePoint 2007 and Vista Support is released. Colligo is a client application for working with SharePoint, also offline. Form the press release:

"Organizations can extend the reach of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0) to users who need access both online and offline – enabling these businesses to effectively increase the adoption and utility of SharePoint with their workforce. The Colligo for SharePoint product family consists of Colligo Reader for SharePoint and Colligo Contributor for SharePoint. Colligo Reader provides offline read access to SharePoint sites and is free for individual users. Contributor is designed for businesses, and adds Microsoft Outlook integration, 2-way synchronization, and advanced security and deployment options."

Read the press release

Go to their website

The Microsoft Best Practices Analyzer for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and the 2007 Microsoft Office System Best Practices Analyzer programmatically collects settings and values from data repositories such as MS SQL, registry, metabase and performance monitor. Once collected, a set of comprehensive ‘best practice’ rules are applied to the topology.

Administrators running this tool will get a detailed report listing the recommendations that can be made to the environment to achieve greater performance, scalability and uptime.

Download here

Check out the licence pricing model for MOSS 2007 (finally). These are the US prices, but it gives a good impression.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/FX102176831033.aspx

 

Servers	Estimated Price
Office SharePoint Server 2007	$4424
Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search Standard	$8213
Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search Enterprise	$57,670
Office Forms Server 2007	$4424
Client Access Licenses	Estimated Price
Office SharePoint Server 2007 Standard CAL	$94
Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise CAL1	$75
Office Forms Server 2007 CAL	$54
Office SharePoint Designer 2007	$187

 

Internet Facing Sites	Estimated Price
Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet sites	$40,943
Office Forms Server 2007 for Internet sites	$22,118

¹To be licensed for the Enterprise Edition functionality of Office SharePoint Server 2007, both the Standard and Enterprise client access licenses are required.

Sometimes I get questions about how much time it takes to crawl a document. Joel posted an article about the crawl time factors in SharePoint, which can help you estimate this.

"So in a nutshell what are some broad estimates?

• If it’s 10s to hundreds of MBs – measure it in minutes
• If it’s 10s to hundreds of GBs – measure it in hours
• If it’s 1-10TB+ - measure it in days to a week
• 10-100TB – measure it in weeks"

Interesting figures especially when you want to set op the indexing schedules.

For the Dutch readers of my blog, I will do a session during the Software Developer Event (SDE) in March. The title of the session is 'ECM in MOSS 2007: Site Columns en Content Types' and will be part of the VB track.

The whole day will be about "Office Stuff", so a good reason to attend ;)

Also mention some of the Information worker session (in collaboration with DIWUG) which will be interesting:

• MOSS 2007 & features - Dirk Zekveld & Mirjam van Olst
• MOSS 2007 & Word 2007 - Rolf Eleveld & Marianne van Wanrooij

See the (almost) complete agenda here

With the different authentication provider support for MOSS, there are more and more free applications that will provide user management tools integrated in the SharePoint environment.

One very good example is the Forms Based User Administration Feature, which can be downloaded from codeplex.

Featurelist:

• The Feature includes an Administrator web part to view/edit/delete and add users to the data store by an administrator.
• Self registration page for users to request access to the site.
• New functionality for self registration
• Password retrieval via email
• CAPTCHA validation on self registration
• UI Enhancements

It seems like they have released a professional and developer version of the BDC metadata manager for MOSS 2007! Great work!

"BDC Meta Man makes generating Application Definitions easy due to the many features it offers.

• Easy to use Windows application
• Ability to connect to and browse multiple data sources
• No need to know how to write XML or SQL
• Integrated Shared Service Provider Administration Web Site
• Inspect your application definition and edit any part of it
• Saves enormous amounts of time and effort"

For a full overview of features per version, check out this document.