SharePoint 2007/WSS 3.0 SP2 was release today

Posted on 04/29/2009 by Jason Sherry
Microsoft SharePoint\MOSS 2007 & Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) SP2 was released today.  I just got done upgrade my (this) server to it and all went well.

Overview of Service Pack 2 improvements

Some big areas of the improvements that the Windows SharePoint Services team wanted to highlight:
  • Faster, more reliable content migration and data backup and restore
  • Reduced memory consumption
  • Smoother upgrade experience
  • Significant database performance adjustments
  • Updated integration for forms authentication
  • Advanced permission management
  • Helpful administrative tools
  • Expanded browser compatibility
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What’s New and Cool in Exchange 2010 (E14)

Posted on 04/15/2009 by Jason Sherry

Quick post on my current (it will be updated as Exchange 2010 gets closer to RTM) list of New & Cool Features in Exchange 2010 aka E14 aka “twenty ten”. As of 4/15/09 this information has final become pubic, see my previous post Exchange 2010 – It’s official! More details to come as I get time to create the blog posts and articles, so stay tuned…

What’s New and Cool in Exchange 2010 Article

More Information

Posted in Archiving, Exchange, Microsoft | Tagged | 1 Comment

Exchange 2010 – It’s official!

Posted on 04/15/2009 by Jason Sherry

Well it’s official as of today: The next version of Exchange will be called Exchange 2010! Today is the 1st day that those of us who have been in the know (Microsoft employees, Microsoft MVPs, and Microsoft TAP/RDP members) can start talking publicly about E14/Exchange 2010. It’s been VERY hard not to talk about all of the GREAT new features coming out, especially to those organizations who have just started migrating or planning to migrate to Exchange 2007.

Today Microsoft released the first public beta of Exchange 2010 (download here) and information on it. See my next blog post on “What’s New and Cool in Exchange 2010” for more details but here’s my top 10 new features\changes in E14/2010 that should make you start researching and reevaluating how you know about some core parts of Exchange:

1)   Reduced cost: Storage & Data Managment
2)   Reduced cost: Productivity Loss
3)   Reduced cost: Administration
4)   Database Availability Groups (DAGs)!
5)   Storage requirements (see #1-2)
6)   Support for huge mailboxes and SGs (See #1-5)
7)   Fully OWA functionality on IE, Firefox, and Safari (post from Paul Robichaux on this topic)
8)   Better management
9)   Easy co-existence between on-site and hosted mailboxes
10) Simple cross org calendar sharing

I know it might seem silly to list “Reduced cost” three times but it’s that big of a change in Exchange 2010. Microsoft estimates that 80% of the (capital expense) cost of Exchange is storage and trust me they have eliminated most of this cost. Here’s the best way I can sum it up: A single 2TB database on a single 2TB 7.2K SATA drive (no RAID) is just fine! (with three DB replicas in the DAG).

So what’s the ETA for Exchange 2010? Well I can’t say for sure but per this post it should be out this YEAR!

Related Links

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Google Earth, MapSource, and a GPS

Posted on 04/05/2009 by Jason Sherry

Update 5/24/09: Created this GPS Wiki page with more info

Original post 4/5/09:
I just recently got a new GPS, Garmin eTrex Vista HCx, while there is nothing too spectacular about this GPS it met my criteria. The criteria were mainly based on my plans to use this GPS for off-road (4x4ing, dirt biking, hiking, and skiing): rugged, water proof/resistant, memory slot, color, high sensitivity, good ratings, and around $200. The primary purpose of this GPS was to track where I have been, where to go, and if needed find the best way back out quickly J


This weekend I gave my new GPS its first real test while skiing at Copper Mountain and Beaver Creek. What I found out the 1st evening was that the integration between MapSource and Google Earth was the thing that would amaze me. I’m not sure when Garmin added "View in Google Earth" but I LOVE IT! With a couple of clicks you can go from the boring 2D MapSource view to the rich 3D Google Earth view of your tracks, way points, routes, and lots of meta data from others. Using the mouse button and the SHIFT key you can zoom, spin, and fly though (using the "Flight Simulator" mode) the trails/runs you’ve been on. The great thing is that I have lots of previous tracks\routes saves from my earlier GPS and now I can view and shows others the great places I have been with the real 3D terrain, mountains, and lakes all in view!


I know I have several friends who have GPS, ride, ski, hike, etc and would love to know about this too. So I will be sending this post to many of them. I’m really looking forward to this year’s riding season and tracking some of the amazing trailing and places in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming.


Here’s some of my data: (I’ll be keeping this files updates moving forward)

Related Info:
SPOT – GPS Tracking, messaging, and 911 service and locater: http://www.findmespot.com/ – $99/year

Garmin eTrex Vista HCx

Google Earth

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A few sexy things to an Uber Geek

Posted on 04/04/2009 by Jason Sherry

Super computer capiable of 10 petaflops with 1.6 million processing cores, 1.6 petabytes of memory, 96 racks and 98,304 computing nodes.

 

The Model S will have a list price of $57,400, but the $7,500 federal tax credit for EVs and plug-in hybrids will bring that down to $49,900.

 
100% electric
0 to 60 in 3.9 seconds
244 miles per change
1,001 HP

0 to 60 in 2.5

253 MPH!
$2.1 Million
 
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Mimosa releases SharePoint archiving solution

Posted on 03/17/2009 by Jason Sherry
Yesterday Mimosa Systems, the company I work for, released their SharePoint\MOSS Archiving module for NearPoint.
 
NearPoint now has archiving support for Exchange, File Systems, and SharePoint.  All of these modules use a common architecture to provide global single instancing, searching, browsing, recovery, eDiscovery, and more.
 
Besides just "archiving" content (of all content types\items) in SharePoint, NearPoint provides item to server level recovery, viewing/searching of archiving data, stubbing of files based on policies, delta (diff) based file versioning, eDiscovery workflow, and legal hold on items.
 
Check out the Key Benefits and Features page for this module for more information.
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Data management challenges with SharePoint

Posted on 03/13/2009 by Jason Sherry

Cross-posted with my company’s blog:
http://www.mimosasystems.com/blog/archiving/data-management-challenges-with-sharepoint/

As a veteran Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint expert I have witnessed the exponential growth of SharePoint over the last few years.  As a consultant, before I joined Mimosa, I strongly encouraged my clients to stop using file shares and to stop emailing out 20 MB PowerPoint attachments that are going to be out of date within a few moments.  SharePoint is a great collaboration product and I’ve seen some amazing solutions built around it. 
 
Microsoft did an excellent job with WSS 3.0 & MOSS 2007, but they missed a few key things from a data management standpoint.  We finally got a Recycle Bin in the 2007 version to help on “oops, I didn’t mean to delete that” issues.  However, if you’re a SharePoint site admin and you delete a site or items have been purged from the Recycle Bin, then they are gone.  Once a site is gone you could recover it from a site level export (kind of like brick level backup with Exchange), but in most cases one is not going to exist.  So in those cases, someone in IT is going to have to restore the entire SharePoint farm and then export the site or individual item.  This is not an easy process; first an entire sever must be built, then the IIS settings must all be recovered, then the SharePoint database, and finally SharePoint must be re-installed and configured before any of the data can be accessed.  Lastly, the only built-in option to recover list items is to copy and paste their contents. 
 
SharePoint also has great versioning, but we all know people don’t clean-up their digital data well.  While SharePoint does have the ability to configure a document library to only save X versions, this requires the person who created the document library to first know to set this option.  So if you were a good e-mail citizen and saved that 20MB PPT to SharePoint and then 10 people made minor edits, that “one” PPT is now taking up 200MB in SharePoint.  This is because SharePoint doesn’t save the deltas of the versions.  In addition, SharePoint doesn’t have single instancing support, so if 10 people were to save the same 20MB document to 10 different document libraries, sites, or even folders in the same library, 200MB would be used up.  As well, files in document libraries may be attached to list items and this is another situation that causes duplication.  To make this storage challenge an even a bigger issue, files are stored in the SQL database, with all of the other metadata for SharePoint.  So as more files and versions get created you can certainly expect your backup and recovery times to increase.  Adding to the issue, SharePoint does not provide a way to easily clean-up old/retired data or a way to remove rarely used files from SQL without removing all traces of them.  So those 10 versions of the PPT will continue to take up space in SQL well after the project they were created for is finished and forgotten.
 
Lastly, SharePoint does not support replication.  Until Microsoft adds this support I think it’s going to be very hard to completely replace Public Folders in Exchange, which do support replication.  This is a major challenge for those geographically dispersed organizations with limited bandwidth at some locations.  In order to address this issue today those organizations are forced to keep using Exchange, file shares, or local SharePoint servers to share this data.  This of course added to the duplication of data and the challenges of managing distributed data.
 
Today Mimosa can help address some of those data duplication challenges with our Exchange Archiving and File System Archiving solutions built around Mimosa NearPoint.  Both of these solutions support data de-duplication via global single instancing in the archiving and stubbing of attachments and files.
 
For organizations that really invest in SharePoint, these data management challenges will normally be an unexpected cost.  But even with those costs it’s still much better than using file shares and sending large attachments in email.
 
What other data management challenges in relation to SharePoint are out there?  Add a comment and let us know your thoughts

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OWA coming to most browsers soon fully decked out

Posted on 03/10/2009 by Jason Sherry

On February 12th the Exchange product team released a bit more info on Exchange 2010, check out the blog post & video here. Got to love KC and the Exchange Team for sharing J

Here’s a summary:

  • OWA in Exchange "14" will support a "full" experience in Firefox, Safari, and IE
  • E14 will offer a MUCH better "conversation view" to help mange or ignore those long e-mail threads
  • OWA will include IM integration

I can’t wait for the conversation view, there are lots of mailing lists with lots of threads I’m on and I get 1,000s of e-mails a month. So anything that can help manage those e-mails more efficiently is desperately wanted!

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MVP Summit 2009

Posted on 03/10/2009 by Jason Sherry

This year was another GREAT MVP Summit. Microsoft really goes all out for the MVPs to make this event one of the most content filled events in their areas of expertise. Now my experience might be a little different than others since I’m in one of the best MVP groups, Exchange J The Exchange product group dedicated four full days of deep technical content with senior members of the group, who gave great sessions and did a lot of Q&A. I went to all of the Exchange sessions, over 10 total, and the amount of detail that is shared about the upcoming release, Exchange "14", (which is almost "old news" to Microsoft) and some ideas\concepts for future release was outstanding. You can tell Microsoft really values our input "from the field" and our honest (sometimes brutally) responses we provide.

I know all of the Exchange MVPs who made it to the Summit cannot say Thank You enough to Microsoft! There were 700 sessions, a great party at the EMP, hotels were covered, breakfast & lunch, dinner one night, and free beer. What else could a geek want! It’s a real honor be one of the ~4,000 MVP worldwide and one of the 124 Exchange MVPs.

Microsoft covered a lot of info at the keynotes about Windows 7 (I’ve been running it for about a month), Windows 2008 R2 (did you know it was only going to be x64?), Window Azure (Windows in the "cloud"), and some forward think was provided by Steve Ballmer (if you’re a geek and haven’t seen Steve speak your missing out).

The only negative… well the 1st rule of MVP club is you can’t talk about MVP club… Almost all of the info is under very strict NDA. I’ve started posting what little public info I can on my blog, Exchange posts. So check back or get an RSS feed of it.

Post from MVP Summit 2008

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Sirius Playlist search and more!

Posted on 01/17/2009 by Jason Sherry
For those that have satellite radio I know you love it as much as I do.  But it bugged I could not more info or lookup who played something since I was in the car.
 
Well know, not sure how long it’s been up, there is a website that gives you search, scheduled/guild of what’s playing.  It also integrates with the Sirius Radio web player.  From the Guide you can choose which station you want to listen to and it will change the player for you.  Finally it has several saved searches, like most played song per channel.  Jethro Tull owns Classic Vinyl this week, 693 spins/plays verses Beatles with only 78 spins this week 🙂
 
On the negative side the web design is pretty poor and they are funded by Ads.
 
Check out DogStarRadio.com: http://www.dogstarradio.com/sirius.php
 
You can even filter out what channels you don’t like, something I wish I could do on my radio.
 
Bonus:
Curious which direction the satellite are in or where the closes radio repeater is, go here: http://www.dogstarradio.com/sirius_map.php
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