Here is a great list SharePoint 2010 site templates and their associated name (so you can use them in your wonderful PowerShell cmdlts…
http://www.markus-alt.de/blog/?p=118
BTW: if you wanted to get this list yourself, you just need to use the following PowerShell:
Get-SPWebTemplate | select Name, Title
SharePoint 2010 has had some major feature investments around the concept of “multi-tenancy”. What does this mean? In short – it provides the ability to keep data from one customer (or group) separate from one another. Part of the features for managing this is a new site type called a “Tenant Administration Site”.
The Tenant Administration (or TA) Site gives the tenant administrator the ability to create new site collections and manage all features that have been assigned to that site subscription.
A Site Subscription is comprised of a unique ID that is used to associate the TA Site, Site Collections, Feature Sets, and Service Applications. There is a lot there that we will dig into in future posts. But for now I want to give you a quick tour of the TA Site (site collection – to be specific).
First of all – how do you get one? This can only be done via PowerShell because of a few of the switches you have to throw at creation time. Here is the basic syntax:
new-spsite -url http://intranet/sites/CloudAdmin -AdministrationSiteType tenantAdministration -template “tenantadmin#0″ -owneralias {domain user}
-SiteSubscription {SiteSubsciptionID}
There are 3 Key switches you need to pay attention to:
-AdministrationSiteType : When you set this at site collection creation time it sets a flag that this site collection is used to managed tenant site collections. The site will still create if you don’t set the switch – but many of the features inside of the site collection will not work.
-Template “tenantadmin#0” : This is a new site template in SharePoint 2010 that provides the appropriate abilities to manage tenant site collections.
-SiteSubscription : This is how you associate the tenant administration site with a SiteSubscription. Note: This is a one-to-many relationship. A site collection can only be associated with one Tenant Administration Site while a Tenant Administration Site can be associated with may site collections.
Lets take a look at the site:
The beauty of this site is it delegates many of the activities that the IT Pro had to do for all customers like:
- Creating new Site Collections
- Managing InfoPath Forms Services
- Configuring Send-To Connections
- Managing Profile Services
And many more. So as you can see – this new feature creates a new level of administration for you to plan for in your Governance plan for your company. Many people have been slow to come to the table on this “tenant” concept because they think it’s just for Hosting companies. The reality is I believe it is equally as important in the enterprise for managing site collections and ultimately, keeping sensitive internal content out of the hands of those who shouldn’t see it (HR, General Council…)
Here you can see items that you can manage for Site Collections:
This is a lot of power to delegate out to your user base – so you’ll definitely want to plan for that education and oversight. One thing I want to point out here – notice that you can create new Site Collections from the Tenant Administration site – this will fail if you don’t have Self-Service Site Creation enabled. To enable this, go to Central Admin > Application Management > Configure self-service site creation.
Much more to come on tenant administration!
One of my favorite new features out of the box when pairing Office 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 (with Office WEB Apps) is the ability to broadcast a PowerPoint presentation. Lets start by defining broadcast. Simply put – I am able to stream my presentation (effects and all) to multiple people while maintaining full security on the experience.
So what do you need to do all of this:
- Office 2010 running on a PC (sorry MacFanBoy – Office for MAC doesn’t have the feature to broadcast.
- SharePoint 2010 (Foundation or Server)
- Office WEB Apps installed and running correctly (is that too much to ask?)
When the Office WEB Apps are installed you get a brand new Site Collection template called “PowerPoint Broadcast Site”. This site collection is never intended to hold any content but to be a “broadcast point” for your presentations and to maintain security of the attendees.
Open you PPTX in PowerPoint 2010 and select File > Save and Send > Broadcast Slide Show.
The next window that comes up will ask you to select or add a Broadcast server. Add the URL to the Broadcast site collection you created on your server. You will then be provided with a link to the Broadcast site which will include a custom GUID that will only be used once.
In the screenshot below you can see the presentation being shown on my desktop – while I am receiving the presentation via a FireFox browser:
To take things a step farther and really scramble you eggs – here is a picture of my “presenter” screen in the background with an iPad and an iPhone both receiving the presentation.
This feature is going to make it so much easier for employees to work together or with their business partners and customers.
Enjoy!
Rackspace, a platinum sponsor of SharePoint Saturday DC (and my personal sponsor) is giving away an iPad! Winning will be easy and fun – with only 2 requirements:
- You must attend SharePoint Saturday DC – a free, community driven SharePoint event.
- You must play our game of “Twitter Scavenger Hunt”
![ipad[1]](http://www.social-point.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/ipad1.jpg "ipad[1]")
How do you play, you ask? Easy.
To start – you must follow me, Jeff DeVerter (www.twitter.com/jdeverter). Sometime within an hour of the event starting I will introduce you to a subject-matter expert at Rackspace (we call them “Rackers”) – you need to follow this person because sometime in the next hour he will introduce you to another Racker who you will need to follow. This will continue throughout the day as you learn about and follow some of the smartest – and most helpful – people in the IT industry.
The last of these tweets will direct you to a URL which will reveal the secret location of a Racker at SPSDC. You will need to go find that Racker and get a ticket to win the iPad. The iPad will be given away at the end of the day by a random drawing of only those who complete the quest – and are still at the event (that’s right – must be present to win).
So what are you waiting for? If you don’t already have a twitter account – get one before next week and follow me: twitter.com/jdeverter
Here are some links that might help:
Need to set up an account – Click Here
Need some help getting started with twitter – Click Here
List of “SharePoint” related tweets – Click Here
I am not the world’s biggest traveler. By saying that I’m not stating that I don’t enjoy traveling – I’d just rather do my work from my desk and go home to my family.
So when I do have to travel I try to get as much done along the way as possible. I think I may have over-done it. Here is what I face next week:
5/12 – Travel from San Antonio to Seattle for a (the) SharePoint 2010 launch event. Rackspace is sponsoring the event and a few of us are going up there to attend. We were invited by Joel Oleson – so why not go?
5/13 – Travel to San Francisco from Seattle to present to a group at the Microsoft office on SharePoint 2010 migration strategies.
5/13 – Hop on my first red-eye from San Fran to Richmond, VA to meet with a Rackspace partner, IronWorks.
5/14 – Drive to Sterling, VA to meet with another Rackspace partner.
5/14 – Drive to Fairfax, VA for the SharePoint Saturday DC Speaker Dinner.
5/15 – Present at the SharePoint Saturday, DC.
5/16 – Travel from DC to home sweet home.
So if you are going to be at one of those locations along the way – please make a point of visiting with me, buy me a coffee, or just wake
me up if I appear to be snoozing!
One aspect that will make the travel more enjoyable is that Rackspace is giving away an iPad at SPSDC which I will get to enjoy in my travels leading up to giving it away. Stay tuned to this blog as we will be conducting a “Twitter Scavenger Hunt” to give the iPad away!
Like many of you, I was (and in some cases) was very confused about how SharePoint 2010 Search and the new FAST Search for SharePoint worked when the FAST product was installed in a SharePoint environment. My understanding was that when FAST was installed, SharePoint Search ceased to exist. Turns out – that was wrong. Let’s first take a look at a SharePoint Search only scenario:
So as you can see SharePoint Search indexed the content sources and the “people” directory to create a rich index and property database to be able to provide a rich Search experience. All of the goodness that has been added to Search in SharePoint 2010 is now available to the end user. While there has been a lot of enhancements to the new version of search, there still are some limitations that would drive someone to want to use FAST Search for SharePoint (more on that in another post).
So when FAST is added to the configuration, SharePoint Search is not removed from the configuration – they are actually sharing some of the roles. Take a look at this diagram:
Here you can see that SharePoint Search stays around to handle all search aspects of the People directory. FAST Search for SharePoint take point on indexing all all content. The secret sauce of providing a unified experience to the end user happens at the Query Object Model. It’s at this location where the 2 result sets are brought back together and ultimately delivered to the WFE and ultimately to the end user.
So there your go – when you use FAST Search for SharePoint – you are actually using 2 different search technologies.
I work at Rackspace on the Dedicated SharePoint team – which means that we create a new SharePoint farm on dedicated hardware for every customer who comes online with us. This translates to only ever needing to create a few WEB Apps and Site Collections per customer. With this in mind – it’s usually easier to just do this via the GUI than to break out Power Shell.
From time to time – we need to create an abundance of sites which makes the argument for “typing” stronger. The command its self is:
New-spsite
Below I have listed the help which is available for any PowerShell function via the command: GET-HELP
NAME
New-SPSite
SYNOPSIS
Creates a new site collection at the specified URL.
SYNTAX
New-SPSite [-Url] <String> -OwnerAlias <SPUserPipeBind> [-AdministrationSiteType <None | TenantAdministration>] [-AssignmentCollection <SPAssignmentCollection>] [-Confirm [<SwitchParameter>]] [-ContentDatabase <SPContentDatabasePipeBind>] [-Description <String>] [-HostHeaderWebApplication <SPWebApplicationPipeBind>] [-Language <UInt32>] [-Name <String>] [-OwnerEmail <String>] [-QuotaTemplate <SPQuotaTemplatePipeBind>] [-SecondaryEmail <String>] [-SecondaryOwnerAlias <SPUserPipeBind>] [-SiteSubscription <SPSiteSubscriptionPipeBind>] [-Template <SPWebTemplatePipeBind>] [-WhatIf [<SwitchParameter>]] [<CommonParameters>]
DESCRIPTION
The New-SPSite cmdlet creates a new site collection with the URL and owner specified by the Url and OwnerAlias parameters.
For permissions and the most current information about Windows PowerShell for SharePoint Products, see the online documentation (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=163185).
RELATED LINKS
Get-SPSite
Set-SPSite
Backup-SPSite
Move-SPSite
Restore-SPSite
REMARKS
To see the examples, type: “get-help New-SPSite -examples”.
For more information, type: “get-help New-SPSite -detailed”.
For technical information, type: “get-help New-SPSite -full”.
I was asked yesterday by the marketing department here at Rackspace to compile a list of the events where I spoke last year. I was surprised at the list:
MS Impact Event in NYC February 2009
SharePoint TechFest Dallas May 2009
SharePoint Chicago July 2009
SharePoint Conference 2009 October 2009
SharePoint San Antonio November 2009
SharePoint 2010 RoadShow in Chicago November 2009
Then I put together a list of upcoming speaking events:
TEC in Las Angeles April 25-28
SharePoint Saturday – Houston May 1 (Matthew Lathrop is covering this one.)
San Jose w/ Avepoint May 6
SharePoint Saturday -D C May 15
SharePoint Saturday Tampa June 26
SharePoint Saturday Chicago July 24
SharePoint Saturday New York July 31
I enjoy getting out and speaking about SharePoint, but it makes you wonder when I’m going to get my job done. If you are attending any of these event – please make a point of coming up and saying “hello”.
So I have been working with a company for a little over a year named “Aptimize” whose mission in life is to make SharePoint sites render faster especially when there is sizable distance between the SharePoint servers and the end user. I’ve seen the effects that their software has had on some global deployments of SharePoint for both large and small companies and have to say that the results are nothing short of impressive. Joel Oleson and the Microsoft SharePoint site even use the software. Here is some information from Aptimize on the Microsoft deployment:
Microsoft and Aptimize have made SharePoint 2010 faster. By reducing page load times more than 40%, Microsoft’s website http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com feels more “snappy”, has faster load times, and consumes half the bandwidth
What we did:
- Added Aptimize Website Accelerator (WAX) to the site
- Hand-optimized the Silverlight controls
This is a standard Aptimize offering, and the same benefits are available to every Aptimize customer
The results
Before optimization, the website load times were:
- 10.5 seconds for domestic visitors
- 13.3 seconds for international visitors
- 1.7 MB in page size
After optimization, the load times:
- Reduced 43% to 5.9 seconds for domestic visitors
- Reduced 54% to 6.1 seconds for international visitors
- Reduced page size 49% to 0.9 MB
- The “start render” (time people see a blank page before it draws) was reduced by half
PageTest results are here:
Original: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/100329_7690d16f562a8416aa7532262c6f2fe7/
Aptimized: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/100329_ef769ed36dddf0e7801627e4ac44dd6c/
This is a great result for Microsoft, giving powerful business benefits very quickly
If you get some time, give their software a test drive. Don’t forget to say that Jeff sent you 
This post is a continuation to the series I started HERE.
Question: What “Web 2.0″ capabilities do you see becoming more prevalent inside the enterprise?
The enterprise is really getting behind Blogs, Wiki’s, and social networking. The challenge is that enterprise generally doesn’t have a great understanding of these tools or how they should be implemented in the business. Remember, tools don’t solve problems – they only help implement a thought out business plan. Figure out what business problem you are trying to solve – what success would look like – then apply SharePoint IF it make sense.
Question: The more you build in SharePoint, the greater the maintenance, but is there a general rule of thumb as to how much support is required?
This is tough one – mainly because there are several different areas that require support. Users need help with access and basic questions. Developers need code deployed, and System Admins don’t want things to change (because change breaks things).
I usually advocate for a grass-roots end user training program (I have a presentation on this called “Building a SharePoint Tribe”). It will take a few “paid” champions – but the rest need to have a day job but be very competent with SharePoint. The Development community will get run over by request from the end users and power users. Make sure that effective governance is in plan to know what is “allowed” to run in SharePoint before the developer’s mutiny over too much work. With appropriate governance – then if a business unit want to push those boundaries then they will need the business justification to spend more (following good business rules – who knew). Don’t let the techie tail wag the corporate dog.
Question: Can SP in a SAAS environment integrate with an in-house Outlook…?
You get about 90% integration. Where it falls apart is having full “active directory” integration in place so that one user account drives access to everything. When SharePoint is in a shared environment then the AD integration will be a challenge.
If the hosted SharePoint is in a dedicated footprint (like at Rackspace) then this would not be an issue.
Question: Social/Community-like uses of Sharepoint… rating people, projects, documents, etc…
This is not available without some duct-tape in SharePoint 2007 – but is easily accomplished with SharePoint 2010. It is actually baked into the fabric of SharePoint 2010 that ratings of documents and assets can even be configured to influence how those assets are resolved in Search results.
Question: global implementation – is it possible to spread the server load around the globe for local performance
This is not easily accomplished with “out of the box” SharePoint but is possible with some 3rd party tools. AvePoint (www.avepoint.com) has a very good solution here. It is possible to get “read only” farms in place without additional software – but who wants a “read only” SharePoint farm?
Question: Advantages of Enterprise CAL SharePoint options?
Enterprise features include:
- Business intelligent capabilities (KPI’s, data connection libraries…)
- Excel Services (display an excel doc as a web page – read only)
- Content Query Web Part
- InfoPath Forms Server
These are features with Enterprise MOSS – for a detailed description of Enterprise features in SharePoint 2010, review this blog post: http://ow.ly/1q3pq.
Question: Seems like lots of people are using MOSS for .com – thoughts?
MOSS is a very solid solution for .com sites. We manage several high profile sites running on MOSS and it is a solid experience. That being said – there are some challenges that sometimes requires some 3rd party software. There is a very good list of public facing MOSS sites here: http://www.wssdemo.com/SitePages/New%20Sharepoint%20Websites.aspx?. (Many thanks to Ian Morrish for your work on that list)
Question: Any recommendations for workflow tools for SharePoint?
There are 3 key players here:
1. Develop your own based on the Windows Workflow Foundation which is part of SharePoint.
2. K2 (www.k2.com)
3. Nintex (www.nintex.com)
