This is a quick post to let you know about a new resource, it’s called “SharePoint in the Cloud“. Over at Rackspace we have created a Linkedin Group to have a discussion around all things “SharePoint in the Cloud“.
While this is a new group, I’d encourage you to go over and subscribe – we’ve got some very interesting things planned for the group and the discussions we’d like to have. But first…it takes group members – so if you find this topic interesting – go sign-up and we can get the conversation started!
Tags: Cloud, Cloud SharePoint, Linked-In, Linkedin, Rackspace, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010, SharePoint in the Cloud
Content Delivery Networks and SharePoint
- Shorten the distance by using a more efficient network (CDN)
- Shorten the distance by staging SharePoint servers closer to the users
- Shorten the distance for some of the content by putting some of the larger content closer to the users
- Increase the efficiency of delivering the content from SharePoint by combing the many packets into a few packets – and compressing as much as possible
- Shorten the distance between the servers and the users by utilizing a more efficient network
- Stage content from your sites in regional points of presence (POP) in the CDN
Tags: Akamai, CDN, Content Delivery Network, Gartner, NTLM, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010, SharePoint Architecture, SharePoint Authentication, SharePoint Content Delivery Network
Alright – Let’s talk “Global SharePoint Deployments”. When setting out to create a global SharePoint deployment it’s important to understand what the drivers that push an organization to do this.
The symptom they are either trying to fix or prevent is a slow user experience within SharePoint. This begs the question, “why does distance impact the viewing of WEB Sites – more specifically, SharePoint Sites?“ The answer is one word: Physics. It takes time and effort to travel thousands of miles even when you are just a stream of electrons. This is compounded by the number of routers that the data needs to pass though. Think of each router as a stop light on a road which helps to keep people safe, but adds time to your trip. We call this latency when we talk about the addition of time to a trip with a packet of data. The routing protocols used on the Internet do a pretty good job of choosing the shortest path for your data to travel – but routers still exist along the way.
The last variable that adds time to the trip is “size of the road” or network path along the way to the destination. This is compounded by the amount of traffic in those pipes at the time your data is passing through them. For instance, Los Angeles has a massive highway system – but traffic still moves slowly at rush hour.
- Distance to be traveled
- Number of routers along the way
- Size and congestion of the pipes
- Shorten the distance by using a more efficient network (CDN)
- Shorten the distance by staging SharePoint servers closer to the users
- Shorten the distance for some of the content by putting some of the larger content closer to the users
- Increase the efficiency of delivering the content from SharePoint by combing the many packets into a few packets – and compressing as much as possible
Tags: Geographic SharePoint, Geography, Latency, Network Congestion, OSPF, Routing, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010
Working for Rackspace I have had the ability to architect some truly BIG SharePoint farms. One thing to realize along the way is that a lot of people lead with the need for very large, very geographically dispersed farms – but the reality is that not many companies have the appetite for the financial and complexity bill that comes with such a farm. So I thought I start a series on “Geographically Dispersed SharePoint Farms” to help demystify when such a farm is warranted and the options that exist along the way.
Why Geographically Dispersed Farms:
There are two primary reasons companies come to me
- A Company perceives this as the only way to achieve Disaster Recovery (DR) capabilities.
- Their users are located in more than one central location far away from the SharePoint Datacenter.
Let’s first take on DR. In order for a company to attempt to solve for DR they first have to define what DR means to them. Should DR mean “No single point of failure in the SharePoint Farm”, then we can easily solve for that by making sure that every role in the SharePoint farm is duplicated. I would consider this a minimum shopping list for a truly redundant farm:
- 2 Routers
- 2 Load Balancers
- 2 Web Front End Servers (WFE’s)
- Clustered SQL
- Shared Storage
One thing to note is that if you are using visualization technology like Hyper-V or VMware, the roles of the Hypervisor need to be redundant as well.
Now if the customer needs to plan for situation where the Datacenter becomes unavailable, then it is time to plan for at least one more DC with a SharePoint farm inside to be able to pick up the traffic. You must realize though, that anytime you want to replicate SharePoint content and services to another DC, you are adding an exponential level of complexity and cost. The question I ask my customers is this:
“Do you need SharePoint back up and available in 3 hours, 30 minutes, or 30 seconds”. Invariably, they say: “oh not that fast, inside of 24 hours is fine”. (Here is where Rackspace often wins – they have some amazing SLA’s). Also, if time is not a requirement – but recovery is the requirement – then what you need is a solid backup/recovery strategy mixed with some off-site storage.
Not many companies have the appetite for the work or the bill that comes with multiple farms for the purpose of DR. In light of that – they build a farm with plenty of redundancy and in the end – are always on. Now should they chose multiple DC’s – specialized software is required. here are some good choices:
Now the second half of the conversation is dealing with the scenario where the company has users who are geographically far away from the SharePoint server. What I’ll be answering in tomorrow’s post is these questions:
- Why does distance matter?
- At what distance does it start to matter?
- What are the techniques available to increase user experience when the users are far away.
Tags: AvePoint, Disaster Recovery, Geo SharePoint, Idera, Quest Software, SharePoing DR, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010, SharePoint Recovery, Slow SharePoint
Well the SharePoint Conference 2011 is over and everyone is either home or on their way home. I’ve debated on what content should go in this post and have come to the conclusion that I’d like to take a little different path. I’d like to say “So WHAT!”.
I’m not trying to be rude – but simply asking the question – “What will be different now that I’ve been to this conference?”. My accomplishements were as follows:
- Fantastic strategic meetings with Microsoft on how our company interfaces with them in the future. The result of these meetings will have long reaching “product decisions” at Rackspace.
- I met some great people who have the potential to be “Great Rackers” (that’s what we call Rackspace employees). So I had some great interviews that will ultimately enable us to build out an even better team to serve our customers. You probably already realized that I work for Rackspace Hosting. What you may not have realized is that our core product is “Customer Service” – which is enabled via our Hosting business.
- We met several pre-customers who see the value in what Rackspace can bring to their company. I love helping people.
- I reconnected with some good friends and made some new ones. This is what “moves the needle” for me. At then end of the day (or even farther off from that) it’s the people and the relationships we build along the way. SharePoint will someday fade away (shocker)… but I’ll still be friends with Shane, Nicola, Laura, Heather, Eric, John, Randy, Katy, Scott, Matthew, Ted, Andrew, Chris, Larry, Jeneen, Susan, Rob, Fitz, Rick, Marcy, Erica, Per, and many more.
So – Take what you’ve learned and the relationships you made/deepened… and make a difference!
Tags: Rackspace, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010, SPC11
SharePoint MVP Randy Drisgill (@Drisgill) of SharePoint911 talks briefly about 2 of his sessions coming up this week here at the SharePoint Conference 2011.
Tags: Branding, Design, Office365, Randy Drisgill, SharePoint, SharePoint Online, SharePoint911
Michelle had me take this pic as we walked home tonight from The Prince Arthur – our neighborhood Pub.
That’s right – after six weeks living and working in England we can say we have a neighborhood pub that we call our own.
We’ve gotten to know Windsor as “locals” while I have worked here. We have our grocery, our Larder, our cleaners, our Church and our pub. I have never lived 6 weeks that have evaporated as quickly as these have. What a wonderful time we have had. My mind and my camera are full of fantastic memories and the satisfaction of a job well done.
The bitter sweet part is – tomorrow we leave. We are already shadows here.
What I keep telling Michelle and the boys is though it is sad to leave – we get to leave together.
Don’t get me wrong – We are all excited to get home and back to our life in San Antonio – it just feels – bitter sweet.
I wonder if this is what it will feel like when we go home after this life is finished – or – will we just be glad to be home.
Peace.
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[This is a post I published at work today...]
I have been over here in the UK launching Rackspace’s SharePoint support for the past 6 weeks and today is my last day here in the office. As a token of the team’s appreciation they bestowed upon me today a very nice engraved pewter cup:
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Working with the Rackers here in the UK has been an honor and a pleasure. It was great to see some familiar faces (Taylor Rhodes) and some that I didn’t expect to see (Jeff Adams). It is with mixed emotions that I leave here today but I am very anxious to get back to my San Antonio Racker team (and my family, house, dogs, fish, grill…) and re-engage there.
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The SharePoint product Rackspace is a new product now – a truly global product – and the team will have to go through an adjustment period as we all adjust to the new demands that places on us. Suffice it to say – we will strive to ensure we maintain our high NPS, love for the product, love for the customers, and love of the Rack.
So tonight I will raise a cup (the very cup you see in this picture) filled with an English Bitter and toast the team (both US and UK) who made this trip a success…
Cheers ya’ll!
I was asked the question recently as to what was the behavior of the Managed Metadata Service when you wanted to change a term. I started to answer and realized I’d never completely tested the scenario. So here goes!
The Answer:
If you don’t want to read through the details of how to remove/replace all terms in your farm, should your business request a term change – here’s how to achieve this:
- Navigate to the Term Store Manager
- In the appropriate Term Set, create a new term that matches what the business is requesting
- On the term that needs to be changed, click the down-arrow and select “Merge Terms”
- Select the term to be merged with
- Select “OK” on the warning dialog (if you really do want this done)
- Finished!
The Details:
I have a Managed Metadata Service that has a Term Group called “Business Terms” which contains a Term Set called “Project Status”. The intent of that group is to consistently report the status of any project in my organization.
I created a new Project List and added this Term Set as a Managed Metadata lookup field:
Next, I created a few test projects and gave them each a status from the Project Status term set:
Now my fictitious business has decided to change the Term “Cancelled” to “Terminated”. The first, most obvious was to just change the “name” of the term to what we wanted:
The result of this change was as follows:
That’s right – though I had made the change in the Term Store Admin page – there was no resulting change in the list even after refreshing the page (multiple times). When you open a task it does show that it has been changed:
So I created a new task (Task 6) – during which I selected “Terminated” as the status. The result of this activity was that it still showed as “Cancelled” in the list view:
So it’s apparent that regardless of what the “label” is – the actual term never changes. My next attempt to get the label to change was to restore the “Cancelled Term” back to its original state and then create a “synonym” with the term “Terminated” and then create a new project with this status. You can see I had to type the term in as it wasn’t shown in the Status list:
The result still showed all status’ as “cancelled”.
My last attempt was to create a new term called “Terminated” and then “Merge” the two terms together.
To execute the merge, I first clicked on the term “Cancelled” as that was the term I wanted to go away. I was presented with the dialog before it was completed:
This is what was presented in the Term Store Manager once it was completed:
Now when I went back to view the list (after a refresh) it still appeared the same showing “Cancelled”. I decided to add one last project to the list.
I liked that “Terminated” was the only status listed. I selected it (though not represented in the screenshot –sorry) and clicked “OK” on the task. Check out the result:
Achieved! It was a long road to get here – but now we know how to remove a term in the Term Store Manager and replace all other terms in your site.
Tags: Managed Metadata, SharePoint, Terms
I love this tool – the ULSViewer:
http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/ULSViewer
If you spend any amount of time digging into SharePoint farm issues – this tool makes it so much easier to filter and find what you need.
Here is a screenshot of the app:
Tags: 2010, SharePoint, Troubleshooting, ULS
