SPC

SharePoint Conference 2009 Highlights

Shikhar Thapa — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 02:37:00 GMT

Here are my highlights from SPC 2009. I have listed vary broad topics. Details on some topics can be found in my previous posts + my colleague’s posts.

Product Highlights:

Public beta first half of November\
RTM first quarter (April) 2010)
6 SKUs.
New SKUs for the Internet and FAST
Better integration between the server products and the client products.

Search:

OOB web parts are all public
Search API identical for SharePoint 2010 and FAST.
Custom rank model for boosting and ranking.

SharePoint Search 2010:

- Scales better for the enterprise. e.g. can have multiple index.
- Introduction of partial index for better fault tolerance and improved query time.
- Enormous improvements and focus in Social Search.
- Crawling infrastructure vastly improved. e.g. content source priority, better logging and more control
- Introduction of BCS Services for search.
- Improvements in the BDC infrastructure. e.g. item level security, crawl by association
- Shallow navigators.
- Introduction of PowerShell for all admin functionality.

FAST Search for SharePoint: (all the above and)

- Better visual and dynamic experience
- Sorting of managed property supproted
- Thumbnails and native support for application viewers
- User Context to enable result differentiation by the user’s context
- language coverage is much better.
- Automatic entity extractions.
- Deep navigators

Developer:

Not sure where to start. There are so many new concepts and technologies in play it is overwhelming. Lots to learn and keep up with.

Native support for SharePoint development in Visual Studio 2010. They have yet to make some inroads but this is a good start.
The new SharePoint Designer 2010. Haven’t played with this too much.
Support for SharePoint installation on Windows 7 and Vista. Huge win for developers.
Client object model for JavaScript, WCF and Silverlight and the RESTFul API’s.
Switch from SSP to Services. This has huge impact in planning, development, extension and services.
Believe it or not “Access Services”. You have to get your hands on it to know what i mean.
Visio Services.
Business Data Connectivity services for full fidelity data with complete CRUD.
Managed Enterprise Metadata framework.
New capabilities in Floksonomy and Taxonomy.
Sandbox Solutions.
Developer Dashboard

Few last thoughts. There are architectural differences between the new version vs. any previous versions of SharePoint. Consultants and partners have to make a conscious effort to consider these new architecture when deploying and developing new solutions. The conference was a great spring board to look at all the features in the new version. Thanks to all that have kept up with our blogs.

SharePoint Conference 2009 – Profile Database/Store in SharePoint 2010

Shikhar Thapa — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:42:00 GMT

The first session wasn’t really worth blogging about but there are many enhancements and new capabilities in the User Profile space. It sure seems like MS has listened to the users and customers regarding the Profile Stores.

Profile Store:

There are now hierarchies in the user profile such as sub type for profile and organization. What does this mean?

Now you can have different profile properties for different sub-type. this gives you more control over property hierarchy.
there is a new concept of organization. you can use these groups as any other group in SharePoint and create your organizational hierarchy. I am not sure how useful this will be as you have to manually keep track of the owners, site urls and owners.
Profiles are not taxonomic and tied to the Enterprise Metadata.

Profile Sync: (READ on you will like what you read here)

Sync story is a good story for all of us. There are a lot of enhancements and new capabilities with profile syncing. Some highlights below.

Now the sync engine supports not just Active Directory but FBA and Claims authority.
It uses Forefront and ILM technologies to sync vs. using search in MOSS 2007.
You can also use the BCS infrastructure and BDC connectors to sync external users. this brings tremendous capability in terms of being able to use anything provided by the Connector Framework OOB or custom BDC connection. You can even do a duplicate collapse of user that exist in two systems but represents the same user.

Migration Disclaimer:

For migration the old 2007 sync configuration is not brought in. The profile database is migrated but you have to manually re-create the sync configuration. We can’t always expect backward compatibility and exponential enhancements. I would go with enhancements for a little trouble when it is of this magnitude.

More to come.

User Profile Service and Management

Brian Caauwe — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:41:51 GMT

MOSS 2007 brought user profile management to the table where an individual was able to manage information about themselves, but more importantly helped others find a person that had a specific skill set, spoke a language, or was part of the organizational hierarchy to make strategic decisions. The user profile information makes up not only properties about that individual, but also their roles throughout the organization as well as personalized settings that are managed through their MySite.

In the new User Profile store, you have the ability to define types of users that will be accessing your system. Different types may have different user profile properties. This may be very useful when you have different types of people accessing the same environment, but you wish to track different types of information on each type of individual. There is also the concept of Organizations that will be able to show up in the People Picker. An organization can have a parent, leaders and members as well as properties such as a team site URL.

The new User Profile Architecture contains not only a profile database but also a social data and sync database. The social database contains all of the social tagging, rating, comments, keywords and colleagues that users can select within SharePoint. The sync database allows SharePoint to synchronize back to Active Directory on properties that have been flagged for synchronization. The profile database contains the properties for user profiles along with the activity feed for users.

As I said before the new user profile database has the ability to sync back to SharePoint. Because of the synchronization, the managed account that is running the synchronization service needs to have special permissions in Active Directory for this to work properly. That account needs “directory get changes” or dir-sync rights to read information for the incremental sync, and needs write permissions to changes back to Active Directory.

[“Brian”]

PowerShell and SharePoint

Brian Caauwe — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:09:39 GMT

Much like the rest of the new server platforms for Microsoft (Exchange, SQL, etc) PowerShell is the new command shell that will providing administrators the ability to perform functions throughout their SharePoint farm. In SharePoint 2010, there will be over 500+ Cmdlets that will ship out of the box for administrators to use.

PowerShell has the ability to use .NET API’s to look at and use information much like developers access objects in SharePoint. Using these objects administrators can verify how information is stored in the system as well as dumping out reports on things like, how many sites do I have and who are the administrators of those sties.

Unlike in the PowerShell v1, where you needed to run all of your PowerShell commands on the server itself, there is a new remote interface in PowerShell v2, which SharePoint 2010 uses, that allows administrators to run these commands from their own desk without the requirement of remoting into each server. PowerShell can also live alongside of STSADM which was the primary command administration for SharePoint 2007, but using PowerShell provides large performance increases as each command doesn’t have to load into RAM to run.

SharePoint 2010 has a new SharePoint Administration console which adds all 500+ Cmdlets to the shell, but if you already have a preferred shell that you may be using Exchange or SQL Cmdlets, you are able to add the SharePoint PowerShell snap-in objects to that same shell.

To assist with memory leaks that can happen if objects are not disposed of properly, there are a new set of commands called Start-SPAssignment and Stop-SPAssignment that acts as a garbage collector for your objects that will dispose of them properly.

There is also a nice –whatif command that let’s you test out a script before you run it by having PowerShell tell you what actions that it would have taken if the –whatif command wasn’t used

[“Brian”]

Patching SharePoint 2010

Brian Caauwe — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:04:06 GMT

In SharePoint 2007, the patching scenario was confusing at best when starting to deal with MOSS with all of the different types of updates out there. Now because SharePoint 2010 will be x64 only, that will help a little with patching and upgrades, so administrators won’t be downloading the incorrect install, but along with that Microsoft has made strides to help with some of the other pain points during the patching sequence.

SharePoint 2010 has a new function for it’s databases called compatibility mode, which allows administrators the flexibility to upgrade the bits on the SharePoint servers without requiring to update all the content databases in the farm. Upgrading all content databases in a farm, at times, took the majority of time during patching and required long maintenance windows for the entire operation to complete successfully. Now with compatibility mode, administrators have the flexibility to choose when to upgrade individual databases up to the new schema, but allowing the patched bits on the servers.

The main issue that this will bring into play with the majority of SharePoint administrators is to verify the patch level of each individual database and server level. In Central Administration there is a new upgrade and migration screen which has different pages to show each server and database along with information on the individual update status of each (require upgrade, no action, etc). These pages also provide direct links to the upgrade downloads to help administrators get the correct install.

Even though Microsoft says that the new upgrade mechanism is safe to deploy through Microsoft update and WSUS, it is still recommended to patch and update your SharePoint Servers and databases by hand to make sure the process is completed successfully. The new Best Practices Analyzer also has built in rules to check for servers, services and databases that are not up to the recent patch level, and will assist administrators by warning them that an action is required.

SharePoint 2010 will require you to still run the Technology and Configuration Wizard, but now in SharePoint 2010, you will not have to do the patching dance if you have multiple servers like you needed to in SharePoint 2007. In 2007, you needed to get all servers up to a specific point and then only let each server, one by one, run the upgrade process. Now in SharePoint 2010, the Technology and Configuration Wizard handles the dance for you, so you can start the wizard on all of the boxes at the same time, and they will handle the locks on the farm by itself, allowing a quicker upgrade.

[“Brian”]

SharePoint and Commerce Server

Brian Caauwe — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 22:21:00 GMT

The SharePoint and Commerce Server session really started by talking about what Commerce Server brings to the table with it’s integration capabilities for SharePoint. They stressed the fact that with the two products Commerce Server is really setting a platform where SharePoint hosts the presentation of the structured e-commerce data with the Web Content Management functionality that SharePoint offers.

Today, Commerce Server bring an out-of-the box shopping experience that also empowers marketers and merchandisers to manage the commerce functionality. The out-of-the box web parts that Commerce server brings to the table enables you to get ready to process transactions quickly during your deployment. Commerce Server has strong integrations not only with SharePoint but also BizTalk and the Windows Live! service.

Commerce Server has unified the API’s that are used between managing the e-commerce data and ordering information. With these new unified API’s allow Commerce Server to use any front-end service to present their information. With this being the SharePoint Conference, of course the integration with the current version were highlighted. Out-of-the Box Commerce Server brings a contemporary site definition that is used by the SharePoint Commerce Services which includes all of the needed web parts, branding and controls for e-commerce.

SharePoint Commerce Services brings over 30+ web parts to the SharePoint interface to work with the e-commerce data. Some of these web parts allow user self service management, Commerce Server search web parts, ordering and cart functionality and marketing tools.

[“Brian”]

SharePoint Conference 2009 – Content Acquisition

Shikhar Thapa — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 21:59:00 GMT

Content crawling and acquisition is an art within itself. Here are some of the highlights of the session. BDC Connector Framework for BCS services are very powerful technologies to surface data and makes data available for search.

Indexing Connectors

Steps to accomplish crawling and indexing are Connect, determine structure, decide and have mechanisms for full vs. incremental, and how to capture ACLs (index time vs. query time)
OOB connectors are SharePoint content (protocol handler
File shares (Protocol handler)
Websites
People profiles
Lotus notes (connect framework)
Exchange public folders(CF)
External systems(CF)
Documentum content(CF)
Enterprise crawler (FAST only)
- supports dynamic content such as JavaScript which SharePoint doesn’t.
JDBC connector(FAST only)

Telemetry for crawl activities are vastly improved with things suck as stats and numbers for deletes, security update counts, incremental count etc.

Connector Framework:

Don’t need to use the Protocol Handler API.
The Framework is shared by FAST and SharePoint so create once and works for both
No code solutions for Databases and Web services using SharePoint Designer.

SharePoint Designer seems to be the tool of the trade for the OOB connector framework. It’s a editing and creating experience all SharePoint Designer user are familiar with. The wizard is self explanatory just don’t forget to Right Click on nodes and items to see all the options.

Since this is technically a BCS application you can use this as a BCS source for list, libraries too. That is my assumption that I need to validate.

More to come later.

Deploying SharePoint 2010 Extranet

Brian Caauwe — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 21:17:58 GMT

Attending my second extranet session for the conference they first reminded people of the design considerations that need to be addressed before an extranet development. Things like account management, single sign-on, network access and anti-virus.

When defining an extranet there are three main types of users that will access an extranet; remote employees, partners, customers and vendors. Currently in SharePoint 2007 if you require different authentication methods for the different types of users, you needed to deal with separate URL’s. Now in SharePoint 2010, you have the ability to use a new multi-authentication mode which lets you use a single URL for multiple types of authentication. The extranet session also re-emphasized the new claims based authentication model that is available in SharePoint 2010 that will help SharePoint administrators combine authentication types to improve end user experience.

When using claims, you now have a friendly FBA login screen where the user is able to choose the type of authentication and then will log them into the correct authentication provider.

Moving towards the extranet architectures that are common, there are three primary types of architecture deployments:

Edge Firewall: allow external users access into existing corporate environment
Back-to-Back Perimeter: have an extranet DMZ where all SharePoint servers and other associated resources live (SQL, AD, etc)
Split Back-to-Back: have servers both internal and external based on the types of roles they provide

After the architecture discussions they talked about the Forefront stack as they relate to extranet. Products like the Unified Access Gateway (formerly IAG) which allows users to authenticate to multiple sources, but also allows security administrators to define policies for access to information, anti-virus levels needed before access is granted and much much more. Identity Manager (formerly ILM 2) enables user self-service for functions such as password reset, user account provisioning and synchronization of identities. Finally they discussed how Protection manager can assist SharePoint administrators by scanning content before it gets placed into SharePoint along with automatically disallowing inappropriate content based on administrator define rules.

[“Brian”]

SharePoint Conference 2009 – Multilingual Deployments

Shikhar Thapa — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:39:00 GMT

We have all wondered what is changing for multi lingual deployments for SharePoint 2010. The short answer is not much regarding the process but there has been tremendous effort put forth for improving the PRIME framework.

But wait there is a brand new capability MUI (Multi-lingual user interface) where it makes sense.

Things to consider

Get all the languages and the variations figured out up front.
Navigation is custom development activity
Redirect user to the right locale by default but might want locale selection. Need custom redirection logic.
Translation process.

Still uses combination of language packs and variations. Looks like the PRIME push has been significantly improved as it’s a timer job now vs. the w3wp process that it used to be.

Avoid IIS redirection , Reverse Proxy as it confuses variations redirection

Now to a brand new capability/feature in SharePoint 2010. Drum Roll not really. This feature is only available to change the chrome. You cannot actually manage content language using this feature. It’s more meant for sites such “Central Administration” where you would want the Chrome and the Links localized.

MUI Multi-lingual user interface
Sites can now have alternate languages
The language selection is from the “Action” at the top
The user can define a locale in their profile and the right locale would be displayed
More options in Site Settings for localized resources and resource modification for locales.

This was a very high level session but was a good overview. At least we know what’s changing and what’s not.

Capacity and Performance Planning for SharePoint 2010

Brian Caauwe — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:31:00 GMT

Much like SharePoint 2007, SharePoint 2010 has many challenges for performance planning because of the types of services that are provided as well as the multiple types of clients that are accessing content. With all of these services provided in SharePoint 2010, the web application and SQL layers of your environment will need to scale up for additional disk, RAM and CPU in order to be serve up these applications and services.

When starting to work on performance tuning we need to understand the layers of terms that need to be addressed. Latency, what is the perceived time that it takes once a user clicks on a page, to when it’s fully loaded. Throughput is how many concurrent users can access information at the same time. Capacity relates to how much information is saved into your environment, this is the majority of data that your end users will care about. Reliability,

Some improvements in SharePoint 2010 for latency are lighter and faster pages that are WAN optimized. Page load time has also been improved from navigating between pages. Of course, these improvements are also dependant of content and customizations in your environment.

The Office Document Cache (ODC) also will help client applications upload content behind the scenes. The ODC allows the system to only perform incremental changes as well as verifying that you are working on the most recent copy of your documents.

There are only a few hard limits, but more soft limits with SharePoint 2010. The only hard limit that Microsoft has let us know about are 100 million items per search index, and 1 billion items when using FAST. The other soft limits that you may come across in SharePoint 2010 are now lists and libraries support up to tens of millions of items per list, however they do have performance degradation if you try and retrieve more than 5000 items per view / query. Some administration soft limits are:

150,000 site collections per web application
50,000 site collection per content database
100 GB size per content database

With these soft limits, Microsoft has provided some safe-guards to help IT Pro’s keep end users from hurting themselves. The large list improvements allow administrators specify limits on how many items will be viewed from a view (both in the user interface, but also for developers and PowerShell scripters). There are also improvements when site administrators try to delete a large list, with the list throttling, it denies non-site collection administrators from deleting large lists (based on your configurations of what a large list is). However, you do have the ability to configure “happy-hour” times for when you want to script the deleting of this list when minimal users will be impacted.

There are new improvements in SharePoint 2010 to allow web front end servers to inform clients on it’s health condition. This new function allows the server to tell these clients that it is under a high load and the clients will start to tune down the amount of requests to the web server to let the server reduce the overloaded operations. SharePoint 2010 also gives administrators the ability to prioritize traffic that will allow information to be higher in the rendering queue and will actually block other HTTP traffic for lesser priority content until the server can get back to a healthy state.

The new Developer dashboard will allow SharePoint administrators to keep developers in check by enabling additional information for each page to determine what items may be causing load issues when end users report issues with specific sections of your deployment.

When starting to think about capacity planning, Microsoft will be providing a Load Testing kit for SharePoint 2010 as well as a tool called SPDiag 2010 for production monitoring that allows administrators to be proactive rather than reactive when dealing with server health. The new SQL Logging database allows administrators to report on health and usage data that is actually supported by Microsoft. This database schema will also be announced so that developers may extend the database to provide a deeper knowledge of these health and usage statistics.

Because SharePoint is so customizable there are many different ways on how to provide guidance on hardware, storage and throughput requirements. SharePoint can have an environment from a single server that provides all services from the web front end, search indexing, search querying, and SQL storage all the way to multiple servers for each type of server role to spread out the resource pain based on the services they serve.

SharePoint 2010 will be more resource intensive because of the amount of services that are involved, so the starting point with a production farm for RAM is bumping it up to 8GB. Because of the amount of information that needs to be shared with SQL and the intensive nature of resources at that layer, Microsoft recommends a minimum of 16GB of RAM on your SQL servers. Of course, SharePoint 2010 is x64 ONLY, so make sure to prepare for a 64-bit environment if you want to upgrade to SharePoint 2010, both from the SharePoint layer but also the SQL layer.

[“Brian”]

SharePoint Conference 2009 – Visio Services

Shikhar Thapa — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:15:00 GMT

Vision services is a brand new offering for eCal. So, what is it? There were a lot of demos and code snippets but here are the highlights of the session.

Share Diagrams in SP –> Build data driven visualization -->Integrated with SharePoint applications
Browser viewable diagrams that are driven from a data source
OOB supported data sources: SQL, Excel SPLists OLEDB ODBC. There is a Data Provider framework for other custom data sources. The interface signature can be found at IVisionDataProvider.
Create diagrams once and publish and that’s it
Puts structured data in visual context.
Browser –agnostic
Full fidelity rendering using SilverLight
Fall back to PNG if SliverLight not available
Authentication Kerberos, SSO and unattended auth
Deployment via. the SharePoint solution framework in Visual Studio 2010

For SharePoint

Visio web part for SharePoint
JavaScript mash-up API
supports web part connections
Requires SharePoint ECAL and Visio 2010 to create diagrams

Visio mash up API

Custom Data Providers

Custom Data Graphics

Visio 2010 is the editor for all the graphic components.
It’s all VBA script to create the shape etc. After the Shape is created you add the logic.
The process includes
Create the Geometry of the shape
Make the shape special by adding logic

Hope this peeks your interest on the technology. I am pretty excited about this new service. I am sure in the new future there will be lots more documentation on it as it’s BRAND NEW.

It was a good session to start the day.

SharePoint Geo-Distributed Deployments

Brian Caauwe — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:07:44 GMT

More and more companies are having to think how to push SharePoint across the physical boundaries that have, in the past, caused pain around latency. When looking at the different types of deployments for geographically distributed environments there are three types of scenario’s when dealing with geographically distributed deployments:

Uni-Centric Deployment: When you have a single datacenter, but users that span the globe.
Multi-Centric Deployment: When you have regional datacenters with end users in the same region accessing information from their local datacenter.
Hybrid Deployment: The hybrid model contains a mixture of having regional datacenters, but having users that span the globe access information from different regional datacenters depending on the information they require.

When talking about Geographically dispersed environment we need to define the different types of users that will be accessing the environment:

Broadband user: Has access to high bandwidth, or 1 MB/sec (DLS, cable, etc)
Low Bandwidth user: These users are accessing information through dial-up, cell phones, etc. The actual throughput varies depending on location and is hard to predict
LAN latency: End users that are experiencing LAN latency experience an average of 2 second page load. The majority of your users have this if the SharePoint environment is physically near their location.
Continental latency is defined as having less than 125ms latency (round-trip) where the SharePoint environment is not located in their local environment
Global latency is defined as having between 125 ms – 300 ms latency, mostly when accessing information spanning multiple continents

SharePoint is built so that a broadband user with continental latency would experience up to 2x – 4x response time compared to a LAN user. Along those same lines a broadband user with global latency would experience up 4x - 8x response time.

One of the new protocols that we can use is FSSHTTP (File Synchronization via Soap over HTTP). FSSHTTP is utilized when both the client and server are running 2010. When the Office 2010 client is installed a new Office Document Cache (Upload Center) will send differential information (or just the changes you have made for the documents) from documents between the client machine and the server. The Office Document cache lives in the user profile for an individual, however they aren’t the full documents, they are only binary representations of the documents so you don’t have to worry about end users accessing their documents outside of the Office Document Cache. The Office Document Cache also will check with the server every time that you open a document that lives in SharePoint to make sure you are working with the most recent copy.

SharePoint 2010 has invested in enhancements for mobile users that either access information from a mobile phone or low bandwidth links. These enhanced pages provide low overhead accessibility to information from either a text only perspective, or by an image view (thumbnail view of the page) if you need to view the formatting of the page.

Because of the new services architecture built into SharePoint 2010, you are able to share specific services across multiple farms, especially across high latency links that cross continents. The main services that Microsoft is projecting will be federated the most are: People/Profile information, Search, Managed Metadata. By being able to have specific shared services that can be globally managed, you can push the same information down to the globally distributed farms, but also allow those farms to utilize their own local services for their content. In SharePoint 2007, the services that were available in the Shared Services Provider handcuffed you by forcing you to make the decision of either consuming ALL the services or None of the services from a parent farm. Now we have the ala-cart capability to pick and choose the services that we want to manage globally along with consuming local services as well.

SQL server has a function called log-shipping that will pushed changes between a source database to a destination database. The main issue with log shipping is that the destination database needs to be in read-only mode. SharePoint 2010 now has some built in capabilities to quickly move between SQL servers by using PowerShell. When using PowerShell we not only have the ability to use the scripts for managing the content, but also a PowerShell command to refresh the site configuration database.

Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 has a new function called BranchCache with provides local caching of information from SharePoint. This works by having a user download content, let’s say a document from a library, from SharePoint. Once that information is downloaded, the next user that requests the same document, they will actually retrieve the information from the local cache instead of over the wire from the centralized SharePoint environment.

[“Brian”]

MNSPUG at SPC09

wpreston — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:00:31 GMT

Minnesota SharePoint User Group members at the SharePoint Conference 2009 – A bunch of us were able to get together for a few minutes at the end of Day 1, take pictures and distribute our cool new MNSPUG shirts. :) If you weren’t able to join us, try to find Raymond or I so we can get a shirt to you – we’ll try to keep a few on hand as we’re walking around.

SPC ‘09 Day 2 Recap

Phil Jirsa — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:19:12 GMT

Day 2 did not have quite as much hype for me. Coming down off of day one with the big keynote and all the new feature announcements, day 2 was a little more humdrum. I did see some good use of the new client object model using Silverlight, jQuery, and even WPF. The new Business Connectivity Services also seems like the new de facto method for using data in SharePoint. My best session of the day was probably the InfoPath and SharePoint Designer session I went to. There have been some nice improvements in InfoPath 2010 including some long awaited changes to feature support in browser-based forms. SharePoint Designer workflows are improved with the ability to reuse workflows created in SPD. Also, the process of creating workflow and customizing the workflow forms seems much improved and more streamlined.

I’m looking forward to day 3. It still seems like the time is just flying by way to fast to take everything in.

SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Scenarios

Brian Caauwe — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:41:52 GMT

When you start to think about upgrading to SharePoint 2010, the first thing you can do to help the success rate of your migration is to start testing early from both the administration point of view, but also content owners and end users. We have learned from our pains when upgrading SharePoint v2 to SharePoint v3, that the majority of issues were around customizations (Web Parts, Site Definitions, Custom Files, etc).

The current version of SharePoint shipped with a very useful utility called “preupgradecheck” that will help you plan for any items may cause you issues for your migration (this was included in Service Pack 2). This tool is MUCH different than the prescan utility that was used when migrating from v2 to v3 because it does NOT touch your content databases

The upgrade process that has been put in place is less likely to stop because of an individual failure. There are new checks in place to let the upgrade continue to other sites if a failure happens in a site collection or sub site, to let the other sites complete the upgrade.

On a version to version upgrade you should set all Databases to a simple recovery model as the database logs will grow exponentially because of all the changes that happen on all types of objects in the database. Another thing to keep in mind is you may wish to shrink your databases after an upgrade because with all the changes that happen, most of the changes will be coming in and out and not needing permanent storage needs but will bloat the database sizes because of auto growth.

A new scenario for upgrades is using Read-Only content databases which is used as a downtime mitigation process. What this does for you is locks the database at the SQL level but promotes the locks to SharePoint so that the user interface does not show any options that would allow users to change content. After the read-only lock is in place, you can then grab a copy of that database and upgrade it on a separate farm while your end users can see their existing content.

Because of the new support for claims authentication, if you are currently using Forms Based authentication as a method, when you process your upgrade, there will be a step that you will manually have to complete in order to move the classic FBA login over to the new claims authentication using the new STS service (documentation on this step has still yet to be published).

When looking at the different steps that are involved in upgrading to SharePoint 2010, one things screams out loudly… TEST, TEST, TEST. For your testing, do customer survey’s on what they are using, what’s high priority, and what they need right away after migration to help you know where to look. Think about using a preview environment so that you can take the “shock and awe” away from the upgrade procedures so that end users can see what the new environment will look like before they are forced to use it. If you need to know how long the upgrade process will take, use your existing data to benchmark the steps for your upgrade (and use similar hardware for your test environment, if you can, to help you determine your downtime length.

[“Brian”]