and starting to really like SharePoint 2007 (SP2 onwards), excellent .NET application container that allows you to define your cache policies and expiry periods(BLOB, Output and Object Caching) and fine tune expiry periods.
a Nice feature is when you really need to go spatial (GIS queries and mapping UI) you can use native SQL Server as your data store and still have content and media resources caching managed by IIS/Load-balancer.
When dealing with Australian and New Zealand mash-ups I believe the best way is maintaining a data store with well defined expiry periods (e.g. traffic vs. weather vs. external providers cached content) and later distributing its static elements into the cloud.
I have been experimenting with Amazons EC2 services for a real estate related research project (heat mapping commercial property stats) and Amazon has excellent .NET hooks allowing you to push content out to the cloud and later reference it within .net applications (or any other content blocks), this methods significantly reduce bandwidth costs/server maintenance overhead and improves response and serving time by reducing latency.
The architecture illustrated below will provide a SharePoint managed CDN for $0.15 USD per GB of traffic (based on Amazon’s current data transfer price plan):
This page has been constructed out of content distributed from three different continents, so the bottom line is:
“use out of the box content management tools and distribute its product using cloud services”.
Late last year Google announced that the next major update to the Page Rank Algorithm (search result indexing) will start taking into account the pages load (response time) see below:
This is introduce a major challenge while developing and hosting NZ/AU based web application, which many believe could be addressed using the following delivery techniques:
1) Identify your main landing pages for your primary key terms and define the most frequently managed content (banners, specials, news etc.) and push the container HTML out to the cloud managing the content using iframes or content deployment technologies (such as SharePoint).
2) Using more frequently updated pages with heavier functionality as link juice back into those primary fast loading landings pages.
3) Its been confirmed that both Bing and Google will not penalize on repeating content within sub domains (e.g. nz.mysite.com and au.mysite.com) allowing regional content and location related functionality to exist closer to its potential audience while containing similar data and templates.
4) Following the Latency Recommendations for AU/NZ based web pages for minimising the response time only to the one introduced as a result of router hops and distance.
2010 will be a good year for optimising South Pacific content, ensuring high ranking on future mobile device based search results(these will have only five relevant winners on the first page ;o)
Microsoft has released some new documentation for a very efficient way of swapping to a mirrored cluster (SQL level mirroring of the content DB) while taking the primary cluster down for maintenance.
This could be particularly handy when you have a DR instance of MOSS 2007 which you want to serve your content of while upgrading/maintaining your production environment.
I have used SharePoint for storing and managing GIS content together with the Google maps API presentation layer and it works great, allowing a full blown content management environment with Google’s front-end scalability.
image source: technet.microsoft.com
this functionality is supported from SP2 onwards and requires a separate route for each web farm(prod/DR)
I am currently performing some research on introducing ServicePack 2 on top of a running installation of MS Office SharePoint Server, I have decided to collect the relevant Dlls updated by MS within the packaged service pack (coreserverwwsp2.msp), this will allow identifying existing custom site functionality that may be affected by introducing those change.I will concentrate in known issues and possible solution for Content Migration and Web Delivery Caching issues which could effect web faced implementations and could introduceLatencyeffects issues (note: this list will not include InfoPath, Excel Services and BDC related fixes).
Fixes sorted by dlls below:Microsoft.SharePoint.dll (12.0.6421.1000)
1) Migrating data may encounter errors when uniquely secured folders contain draft items.2) You cannot use SOAP calls to restore a site that is two levels deep (/1/2/) if the first level does not exist (/1/).
3) Calling the WebUrlFromPageUrl SOAP method may not work correctly on Web applications that have certain explicit inclusions.
4) SharePoint does not allow some field names to be changed to their original values.
5) No Try-Catch errors may be displayed after a database is marked as read-only.
6) Pages may display errors when served from 64-bit servers.
7) After a site reaches its quota, the site becomes inaccessible.
List views fail when they are grouped by calculated fields or by lookups to calculated fields.
9) Alerts may not be sent correctly on certain installation languages.
10) Breaking permission inheritance may take a long time.
11) Importing a site fails when the site that is being imported contains a subsite that has features that are activated.
12) Indexed columns may not be indexed after a view is deleted.
13) The SharePoint timer service may stop working on 64-bit servers.
14) SharePoint uses more memory than necessary for some operations.
15) 32-bit systems may perform badly in low memory conditions.
16) Import fails on a site that has a workflow that is running on uniquely secured items.
17) Invitation e-mail messages have broken links.
18) Changing the usage log directory may prevent additional logs from being created.
19) List view Web parts that use groups do not page correctly when they are filtered by another Web part.
1) Fix the failure that occurs when you reopen an Audience field in the Content Editor Web part.
2) Fix the failures that occur when you try to add a link by using the local file system naming format (for example, “file://c:/folder”) in myquicklinks.aspx.
3) Fix an issue in which the redirection from Windows SharePoint Services UserInfo to MySite User Profile does not work across farms.
4) Fix creation a document with an illegal file name (such as one containing an ampersand) and attempts to programmatically save it to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 using the Object Model’s FileDialog.Execute() command, the operation may fail without informing the user.
5) Site administrators can create policies on their site content types and can expire items using that content type. If a policy was set on any content type in a site, that policy can no longer be set on content types in the subsites of that site.
6) A comment field is not available for posts on new sites that were created from a saved Blog site template.
7) Users are not warned when their files exceed the maximum path.
Large files may be changed unexpectedly after the files are checked out and then checked in.
9) Sending e-mail for blog posts might not work correctly.
10) When a user selects [today] from the Modified field in a document library view, the following error message is displayed: “Filter value is not in a supported date format.”
11) When a user selects [today] or [me] from the Modified field in a document library view, the following error message is displayed: “Filter value is not in a supported date format.”
Microsoft.Office.Server.dll (12.0.6413.1000)
1) Fixes the occasional issue in which files that are opened for EDIT in Office 2003 or on operating system versions earlier than Windows Vista may be incorrectly opened for READ.
2) Fix an issue in which PSConfig fails while upgrading farms with a pre-created Search database.
3) Instead of reading the required registry keys every 15 minutes while Microsoft Office Outlook is open, the colleague import engine will now read the keys only when Outlook starts. This results in less activity/impact on client systems from Outlook. However, updates to suggested colleagues in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server will now only be calculated when Outlook is started, not every 15 minutes.
Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.dll (12.0.6420.1000)
1) Fix the issue with a gradual upgrade from a non-English version of SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and the English language pack to a non-English version of SharePoint Server 2007 and the English language pack.
2) Fix a failure of redirection when the redirect URL contains a space.
3) Add support for upgrading from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008 with SharePoint Portal Server 2003 installed.
4) Fix the PSConfig failure issue that occurs when you apply a patch and trigger an upgrade db access in different versions (2-3).
5) Fix an issue in which the “Scan for Broken Links” functionality is not available after you change the user permissions.
6) Fix an issue in which a full farm restore operation under a new server’s host name still has the fully qualified URLs to the old server’s host name.
7) Survey summaries might not be displayed correctly (line breaks etc.)
Stsadm.exe
1) Fix an issue in which running a command of the form “STSADM -o deletessp -title <SSPName> -force” incorrectly deletes the Shared Service Provider (SSP) databases, even though the -deletedatabases option is not present.
2) Fix an issue in which the stsadm command to display information about an SSP (stsadm -o enumssp) fails if an account that has been granted access to the SSP no longer exists.
3) The mergecontentdbs command for STSAdm.exe will not work if the command is executed by a user who is not a site collection administrator.
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List views fail when they are grouped by calculated fields or by lookups to calculated fields.