Publishing Features for ALL Site Collections

Problem: The "SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure" is only available to Site collections on farms that run "SharePoint 2010 Enterprise or Standard" editions. The publishing feature (SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure) adds functionality such as menus for navigation, changing page layout, publishing web pages & swapping master pages.

Initial Hypothesis: If you have SharePoint 2010 Foundation or have not enabled the "SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure" you do not have the UI to work with key functionality for your site collection such as swapping the master page or editing the navigation.  Some of this functionality is available through the UI it is just hidden from the site settings page.
For example:
Master pages can be swapped at: http:///_layouts/ChangeSiteMasterPage.aspx
Navigation: http://www.demo.dev/sites/kb/_Layouts/AreaNavigationSettings.aspx
 
Resolution:  If you want some publishing features you could look at http://mundpublishingfeatur.codeplex.com/
 

Product Evaluation - Knowledge Base from Bamboo Solutions

Problem: I need a Knowledge Base (KB) solution and the OOTB tweeking is OK but needs improvement.  So my options are find a 3rd party product or build my own.

Initial Hypothesis: Using 3rd party solutions is my prefered approach, I don't want to recreate the wheel but the product need to add value and be configurable to meet my requirements.  I have used Bamboo web parts in the past and liek their web parts, so I found Knowledge Base Solution Accelerator.

My Resolution:
I have only tried this on a developer standalone VM but I'm hugely impressed, the UI is good, the functionality is what I'm looking for which makes sense as KB are pretty universal. 

The setup was easy and configuration is good for different requirements so it is a good start.  The cost is $4K per server so very reasonable for the functionality.  The webparts such as the Data View Web Part is usable in other sites.

Definately recommend this solution.

Web Templates and Site Provisioning

The age old debate on how to provision sites in SharePoint was well and truly answered in my mind, use Site Definitions with feature stapling to provision your sites.  In MOSS I even have xml driven config files to create sites using this technique en masse.  It just irritates me when people mention site templates (the old .stp files).  In SP2010 site templates are .wsp files and have improved from my minor experience however, due to the upgrade issues in MOSS and just how flaky I found site templates in MOSS I recommend avoiding them like the plague.  and I see no reason why Site Templates are better than Site Definitions, some guy always pops up with speed of creation and how flexible they are but I don't want the headaches all over the environment.

Note: Saving as a site template and including content has some restrictions, I believe 50MB of content is the max and I have had issues with content type columns being saved and restored.

Anders Rask did a session on Web Templates and I'm sold.  The question should now be Site Definitions or Web Templates?  Webv templates look great, fairly straight forward and reproducible as they are created in Visual Studio (VS).

These are you options for site provisioning as laid out by Anders as I scribbled them down:

• Site Templates
• Site Definition
• Feature Stapling
• Provisioning Providers (I've never used)
• Web Templates (I've never used)

Web Templates Summary:

1. VS created
2. Custom ONET is injected
3. Scoped at sandbox or farm level
4. Does not support site variations
5. No content publishing sites

And the answer is ....   read Vesa "vesku" Juvonen post on web templates well provisioning sites.  It's awesome and I have nothing more to add.

More info:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vesku/archive/2010/10/14/sharepoint-2010-and-web-templates.aspx
http://sharepointchick.com/archive/0001/01/01/site-definitions-vs.-webtemplates.aspx

SharePoint Saturday UK Summary

This was my 1st SharePoint Saturday UK, it was terrific.  If you are involved in SharePoint I can't recommend it highly enough.  I amazed more people don't go to it.  I believe there is a good chance the next 1 will be in London.  I think the take up will be huge, well huger!

Highlights: great sessions, meeting old friends, putting faces to people who help out the SharePoint community, the interest in our new community book (The SharePoint 2010 Handbook), talking SharePoint - people volunteer such great info that would take weeks to find o the Internet; they filter what they are amazed at and tell you in their own words.

Lowlights: 6 hours of driving & I did not prepare for the day, it's hard finding sessions with 2 minutes notice.

No lights:  I won a prize RRV £1500 for 25 user software.  Not sure what is does and what use it is, I could of used an iPad2 or a Idera duck.

Spot lights:  Todd Klindt (@ToddKlindt) nice fella and good in both sessions, presents the way it should be done, simple and to the point while being engaging.

Anders Rask session(@AndersRask) : Developing with Custom Web Templates was out the top draw. Definately for me thinking of using Web Templates instead of Site definitions with feature stapling.
Paul Grimley - Deploying SharePoint 2010 Globally – The options, good session relevant to me at the moment.
Brian Culver - Did FAST Search.  Brian did this over loud speaker.  I've done a FAST project so it was not to useful to me but it was a very good place to be if you don't know F4SP (FAST).

Got to mention the guys that setup SharePoint Saturday Nottingham: Mark Macrae (@m_macrae), Anthony Pounder (Tony) & Brett Lonsdale.

Other people thoughts (starlights is the best I can come up with)
Nigel Price
Giles Hamson (Contributor to The SharePoint 2010 Handbook)

Licencing for SharePoint Developers

I was looking at licencing around development machines.  I thought I was pretty comfortable in understanding it and then I saw this statement "Visual Studio 2010 Professional with MSDN does not include Exchange Server or SharePoint Server.".

Now it doesn't affect my client but I know it affects a lot of Microsoft partners.  I have been under the assumption that MSDN Professional included SharePoint Server standard and enterprise.  You have to have the premium or ultimate editions.

Each test that access your non-production (covered by MSDN) would need I guess the ultimate edition as well.  Perhaps the testing licence covers this.

But pretty expensive, as an example if you had 3 devs, 2 testers, 1 architect and 3 BA's and a PM (They all access the SharePoint test sites covered by MSDN).  This would require 10 premium or ultimate MSDN licences.  In the UK assuming these are new MSDN premium subscriptions (+- £3500 each) this comes in at a wopping £35K; for a small project and this is the dev licencing, it seems very high.   I really dislike the complexity in Microsoft licencing. 

It would actually be cheaper to by 6 MSDN licences for the devs, testers & architect and pay for the SharePoint 2010 standard server licences (£2000/VM), buy OS and buy a coupls of CAL's.

Honestly, why doesn't Microsoft make licencing simpler.  Additionally charging a Project Manager and end users for MSDN for looking at non-production sites £3500 is crazy.

John Stover has explained licencing for SharePoint pretty well in his series of posts on licencing SharePoint.

More info on SharePoint Licencing

Determining the Size of a Site Collection

Problem: You may need to determine the size of a site collection.  In my case I need to move a SP2007 site collection that is a content database with multiple other site collections.  I need to know where to put the site collection data on my SP2010 test environment. 

PowerShell for SP2010 sizing:
$used = (Get-SPSiteAdministration -Identity ).DiskUsed
Move the site collection using Move-SPSite -DestinationDatabase

Stsadm cmd for MOSS Site collection size:
stsadm -o enumsites -url http://url 
More Info:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc825328.aspx
http://www.toddklindt.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=270

The SharePoint 2010 Handbook - Proof copies arrived

Publishing a book has been a real learning experience.  It has been extremely intesting and a lot more work than we originally envisaged.  Below is a photo of the printed manual.  Hoping to publish in the next few days once the lastest proof has been accepted.

We are hoping to hand out a few copies from Suzanne George at the Austin User Group Meeting later this week.