SharePointers

Taxonomies

tvolk@prinomic.com — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 20:49:00 GMT

The term “taxonomy” has a bad aftertaste for many business users. Endless meetings, complex implementation and the feeling that everything is already outdated the moment it was finally agreed upon, are only some of the reasons for many organizations’ taxonomy frustrations.

A successful taxonomy-building exercise does not start with technology. Instead, all of the various business stakeholders need to be included in a guided process of determining what metadata dimensions are required to best organize their content. For a taxonomy to be successful, the user has to clearly see the new structure’s ability to make herself, as well as the entire organization, more productive.

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SharePoint Service Accounts

tvolk@prinomic.com — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 00:56:00 GMT

It sounds like a boring topic, but talking about which accounts to use when setting up SharePoint Server or Foundation is truly essential for security and also for the manageability of your SharePoint environment.

Here are the accounts you should have set up before deploying SharePoint.

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How Healthy Is Your SharePoint?

tvolk@prinomic.com — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 01:53:00 GMT

You know the drill. One of your end-users calls up to complain about certain pages of his site working slowly. You crack open your own browser to get an idea of the issue and the pages load instantaneously. Now you can either wait for the next phone call and hope to be able to reproduce the issue then or you can start investigating. But when you start investigating, the problem becomes that your SharePoint farm consists of many components interacting with each another. For example, there are many potential causes for a slow loading page:

a. Authentication issues
b. Errors within a web part or custom code
c. Network congestion
d. SQL or SharePoint server running out of memory or CPU cycles
e. Disk performance issues on the SQL Server
f. Indexing jobs and other timer jobs

Wouldn't it be nice to have a monitoring tool that keeps track of all the dozens of individual farm parameters and delivers a historic analysis of potential errors and performance issues? The idea here is to be able to look at all these parameters from a specific point in time to identify the issue that was reported by the end user. The below image shows that the CPU Queue length is fine most of the time, but that there are occasional peaks that slow down the SharePoint site.

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SharePoint Storage and Your SAN

tvolk@prinomic.com — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 18:18:00 GMT

These days SANs are equipped with more and more intelligent control software that provides advanced features in terms of archiving, security, replication, storage tiering, self-auditing and application awareness. Recently, we have come across the same question more and more:

“Will my SAN work with Metalogix StoragePoint?”

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SharePoint Upgrade Strategies and Considerations

tvolk@prinomic.com — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 17:53:00 GMT

Upgrading SharePoint has never been pretty or fun. Most of us have just managed to chase away the grizzly memories of when we had to upgrade to SharePoint 2007, but now we are confronted with the same situation again.

This paper will take a look at how to best plan your SharePoint upgrade, avoiding the common pitfalls. We will dissect the individual SharePoint components and how they can be upgraded.

We will also include the option of using third-party software to eliminate some of the pain points within the upgrade process. Generally, third-party software is not required, but in many cases, the ROI of employing such solutions is simply too significant to ignore.

Our recommendations are based on hands-on experience, mostly following best practices suggested by Microsoft.

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Should You Really be Reading This?

tvolk@prinomic.com — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 18:47:00 GMT

Seriously, are you authorized to see the information I’m going to present? Is there private, personal data in this document? Are your actions today putting your organization out of compliance with legally binding standards? Do you know this document’s provenance, i.e., the sequence of ownership, or more simply, if was it stolen? Should you, the casual reader, have to know the answers to these questions every time you find an interesting document?

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Oh NO! It's All Gone!

tvolk@prinomic.com — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 20:00:00 GMT

Have you successfully test-restored your SharePoint farm from backup? Do you even complete quarterly disaster recovery (DR) drills? If yes, then please do not read on.

The rest of you have probably experienced that SharePoint backup and disaster recovery are not as straightforward as one would think. The problem here is that SharePoint disaster protection is often regarded as just another task for the IT department, like backing up Exchange, SQL Server or the corporate file shares.

Unfortunately, it is not that simple, as SharePoint consists of numerous components that are spread across multiple servers. Simply backing up the content databases can lead not only to the loss of important data, but also to very long RTOs (Restore Time Objectives). In the worst case, the backed up database will not re-attach to the disaster recovery farm and your stakeholders will breathe down your neck, as they scream for their documents back.

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An Instant Guide to IM

tvolk@prinomic.com — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 16:38:00 GMT

Instant messaging has come a long way since it started in the 1960s. Most IM clients today feature a standard set of tools, such as a contact list, file transfer across multiple protocols, Voice Over IP (mimicking what used to be known as a phone call) and chat logging. They can be a major boon to your business, but which system should you use?

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Search

tvolk@prinomic.com — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 02:24:00 GMT

Today, we will take a look at our top four search engines and how they present results in different ways. Please take a look, try them out and let us know what you think.

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These Tools Will Save You Time Each Day

tvolk@prinomic.com — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 23:18:00 GMT

Today we will take a look at four small but groundbreaking tools that help save significant time each day:

1. Xobni

This little Outlook plug-in resolves a number of common issues and inconveniences that cost time and cause daily frustration when dealing with your email. Initially, you might think “Why pay $30 for an Outlook plugin? Is there no freeware?” Sure there is, but only Xobni offers the following features that really do make your daily “email life” a lot easier. We have been using Xobni for over a year now and we can wholeheartedly recommend it. Here’s what it does:

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