Claim Based Authentication Process

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SharePoint 2010 Architecture Drawing

SharePoint 2010 Architecture Drawing

I've recently been working on an architecture drawing for our SharePoint 2010 environment and I thought I'd post it here. The drawing covers all aspects of our environment from development to our internal environment (intranet) to our external facing public website. Take a look and feel free to post your comments.

Business Intelligence Indexing Connector architecture

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Performance Point

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This article provides a detailed look at how users and security are managed and configured within SharePoint


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SharePoint 2007 vs SharePoint 2010

http://www.rharbridge.com/?page_id=103

SharePoint 2010 Architectures Overview

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How To Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 using Database Attach method: - Part 2

Step 2: Backup the content database of the Web Application from SQL Server. Copy it to the machine where SharePoint 2010 is installed and restore the backup of database in SQL Server using SQL Server Management Studio. To restore the backup you will first have to create an empty database in SQL Server and the restore your database one top of this new Database. While restoring make sure that the Overwrite the Existing Database option is checked (In the Options section....See image below)

 

At this point your database is checked for upgradation and transfered to the SharePoint 2010 farm. Now in the next steps we will start the Upgrade process on the SharePoint 2010 farm.

How To Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 using Database Attach method: Part 2

This is a Continuation of my previous post How To Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 using Database Attach method: Part 1 of my 2 Post series on How to Upgrade MOSS 2007 farm to SharePoint 2010 farm using Database attach method

In my previous post we covered all the steps which were to be performed on MOSS 2007 server. In this post we will cover the steps which are to be performed on SharePoint 2010 site.

The two steps which we covered in my previous post were
Step 1: Running Pre-Upgrade check command on the MOSS 2007 server, reviewing the report generated by it and fixing any issues which might be there in the farm
Step 2: Copying the Content database from MOSS 2007 server to SharePoint 2010 server.

Now we move to the 3rd Step..

Step 3: Create a new Web Application in SharePoint 2010. Once you will create a web application a content database will be attached to it, remove the database attached to the web application via Central Administration -> Application Management -> Manage Content Databases.
Make sure that no database is attached to the Web Application which you have just created.

Step 4: Run the Test-SPContentDatabase cmdlet (PowerShell). 
Running this command will check if the database is ready for upgrade or not. This will tell you about the things which are missing in this farm (E.g. Any setup files, web parts etc.). You can either attend to these missing features pre or post-upgrade but this depends on whether there are any items that will block the upgrade from proceeding.

Syntax: Test-SPContentDatabase -Name -WebApplication 

Step 5: Run the stsadm addcontentdb command to add the content Database to the web application which you created. This will initiate the upgrade process as shown in the screen below
Syntax: stsadm -o addcontentdb -url -databasename 

Step 6: Review the Upgrade Log file and fix the errors.
The upgrade process generates two log files. (Under 14/LOGS)
The upgrade log file which contains all the information about the upgrade
The error log file which gives you the error which occurred during the upgrade
You can review the log files and fix the errors by manually upgrading the Customizations which were there in your site

 

Step 7: Upgrade Customizations
You have to manually upgrade the customizations. I decided to copy the customization after doing the upgrade as none of it was blocking the upgrade. If any of your customization is blocking the upgrade you will have to upgrade the customization first and then do the upgrade.
 The customizations in this upgrade included the following things 
–A custom Solution (wsp)
–2 custom Web Parts
–Custom Images (/_layouts/Images)
I added the solution to the farm solution store by using stsadm and then deployed it to my web application then I copied the Web Part assemblies to the GAC and added the Safe Control entries in the web.config file of my Web Application then I copied all the images used in my Web Application to appropriate places (like /14/TEMPLATE/IMAGES)

Once you have upgraded all the customizations your upgrade is complete.

There is one more Feature about which i would like to tell you is the Visual Upgradefeature. This feature gives you an option to switch between  MOSS 2007 view of your Site and SharePoint 2010 view of your site after it has been upgraded.
Since your custom themes will not be upgraded Visual upgrade gives you an option to keep the MOSS 2007 view after you have upgraded the site to buy you some time to create new themes for your SharePoint 2010 site and once you are done creating the new theme you can switch to the new SharePoint 2010 view.
Following images show how the site looked after upgrade in MOSs 2007 view and SharePoint 2010 view.

How To Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 using Database Attach method: - Part 1

Part 1

Hi.. Once SharePoint 2010 is launched one of the first things that people would want to know is how to upgrade their existing sites (on MOSS 2007) to SharePoint 2010. In my previous blog post i had shown the various methods which one can use to upgrade a MOSS 2007 farm to SharePoint 2010 farm. In this Blog post i am going to show you a step by step guide to upgrade your MOSS 2007 Web Application to SharePoint 2010 using the Database Attach approach.
I will explain this method in 2 Blog posts.
In Part 1 I am going to show you the steps which you need to perform before you start the upgrade like the pre upgrade check and reviwing the pre upgrade check report to make sure that your content database is ready for upgrade. In Part 2 i am going to show you the actual upgrade process.
Ok..so without any further delay....lets start!!

I upgraded a sample Web Application which i had created on MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010. So i will explain the steps using that Scenario.
But First let us take a look at the Pre-Requisites for Upgradation
Pre-Requisites

·                     MOSS 2007 should have SP2 Installed. You should have SP2 installed on your MOSS 2007 machine. The preupgrade check command was added only in SP2. So if you do not have SP2 installed you will not have the preupgrade check command in stsadm.

·                     SharePoint 2010 should be set up on a different Server machine. This blog post will not show you how to set up SharePoint 2010 so you should have it installed and configured on a Machine. However if you want a guide on how to install SharePoint 2010 then you can refer to the following Blog PostSharePoint 2010 Installation Whole 9 yards!!! 

So let us now take a look at the Farm Structure which i am going to Upgrade
The Farm had One Web Application. A root Level Site Collection with around 10 sub sites and one of those subsites had 15 more subsites. Folloing diagram shows the structure of the Web Application.

Following were the customizations in the Portal
34 Custom Site Columns 27 Custom Content Types
2 Custom Web Parts
1 Custom 3rd Party Rating Solution

·                     1 Custom Field Type (Rating Field Type)

·                     6 Custom Content Types

·                     1 Custom Web Part

Custom Master page and Page Layout.

The following image shows how the Site looked before the Upgrade. As you can see there were a lot of customizations on to the site master page.

So let us now start with the upgrade process

Step 1: We have to run the Pre-Upgrade check command on the MOSS 2007 server to find out if there are any issues in the SharePoint 2007 farm (like missing site definitions, features etc.). Running the command will generate an html report for you. This report will not only notify you of any issues regarding your SharePoint farm such as missing Site Definition Information or missing Feature Information, but it also provides you with a blueprint of your SharePoint Farm setup
Some of the details that are provided by this report are
–Search content sources and start addresses
–Office Server Search topology
–Servers in the current farm
–SharePoint version and list of components
running in the farm
–Supported upgrade types
(Inplace Upgrade and Content Database Attach)
–Site Definition and Feature Information
–Language pack information
–Alternate Access Mappings (AAM)
that will need to be recreated
–Customized List views (these will not be upgraded)
–Customized field types (these will not be upgraded)
–WSS Search topology
-List of Content Databases and SQL server location

Syntax: stsadm –o preupgradecheck

 

After you have reviewed the report and fixed any issues which might be there in your farm you can move to the next step.

Configuring Enterprise Search in SharePoint 2010 - Part 3

Part - 3

Creating a “Basic Search Center” Site

If you haven’t done so already, from your top level site, click on Site Actions / New Site.

Select “Basic Search Center”

Enter a Name and URL and click on Create.

This will provision the Search Center similar to the below.

Creating an “Enterprise Search Center” Site

Let’s also create an Enterprise Search Center for comparison.  The key difference here is that we are provided with two tabs for searching, one for Sites and the other for People.  The “Enterprise Search Center” will be the search site of choice for most organizations running SharePoint Server.

From Central Administration / Application Management / Site Collections, click on Create site collections.   Ensure you are creating the Site Collection below the relevant Web Application.

Enter your Title, Description etc and select the Enterprise Tab under Template selection.  Select the Enterprise Search Center, specify your site collection administrators and click OK.

This will provision the Enterprise Search Center similar to the below.

As we have already completed an initial Full crawl earlier, I can now test my new search centers by performing a couple of searches.

Searching Content

Searching People

Now I ran into an issue when trying to search for content located in My Sites.  The crawl log displayed the following warning;

“This item and all items under it will not be crawled because the owner has set the NoCrawl flag to prevent it from being searchable”

In order to fix this issue (and this is true for any Site Collection), is to navigate to your My Site host and click on Site Actions / Site Settings.

Click on “Search and offline availability” under Site Administration, and ensure that you have Indexing Site Content, Allow this site to appear in search results? set to “Yes”.

After enabling the indexing of My Sites, I was able to successfully perform My Site Content searches and the warning disappeared from the Crawl Log.

That’s all that is to it in setting up a search center in its most basic form.  From here you can expand your service applications over multiple servers providing you with redundancy, scalability and increased performance .  Until next time, happy searching

Configuring Enterprise Search in SharePoint 2010 - Part 2

Part - 2

Our Default content access account should be set to the account that we had specified at the time of provisioning the Search Service Application; i.e. DOMAIN\sp_search

Confirming Permissions

There are a couple of areas to note that we should check to ensure that our Default content access acount (sp_search) has been provided with the appropriate access permissions.  Let’s first begin by checking our User Profile Service Application by Navigating to Service Applications / User Profiles.  Just highlight the User Profiles and select Administrators from the ribbon.

Our newly provisioned sp_search account should have “Retrieve People Data for Search Crawlers” selected as a permission.

We will also confirm that our sp_search account has the necessary “Read” permissions against the Web Applications being crawled.

Navigate to Central Administration / Application Management / Manage Web Applications.  Again, highlight the Web Application in question and from the ribbon select User Policy.

Ensure that the Search Crawling Account is set to the sp_search domain account.

Content Sources

Let’s venture into our content sources listed in the Quick Launch navigation bar under Crawling.  You do so by first navigating to your Search Application Service and clicking on Manage.

As was the case with SharePoint 2007, our Local SharePoint sites will be detected by default, albeit without a crawl schedule.

Check to see that your Start Addresses are located within your content source via editing the content source from the drop down menu.  These includes all SharePoint Web Applications and the sps3 “User Profiles” address.

You can easily create your crawl schedule by clicking on Local SharePoint sites and scrolling down to Crawl Schedules.

Let’s initiate a Full Crawl by clicking on Start all Crawls from the Manage Content Sources page.

Once your crawl has completed, you should confirm that there were no errors encountered during the initial crawl.  Usually any errors noted are most likely due to incorrect permission assignments.

Configuring Enterprise Search in SharePoint 2010 - Part 1

We all have to agree that search plays an integral part of any successful SharePoint deployment and is an area that Microsoft continues to invest in with each new release of SharePoint. Microsoft went as far as acquiring FAST 2 years ago which it now offers as a separate add-on to SharePoint for those willing to invest in high end enterprise search.  In addition to FAST, SharePoint 2010 search comes in a number of flavors each offering their own feature set and capabilities which I have duplicated at the end of this article as an Appendix for convenience.

Today we will introduce SharePoint Server 2010 Search and eventually work our way up to Microsoft’s latest and greatest FAST Search Server in a near future article.  Before we deep dive into the step by step guide I will begin by listing some of the new features that you will come to expect from SharePoint Server 2010 Search.   These are as follows;

• Boolean query syntax has finally been introduced.  These include AND, OR and NOT operators in your search queries.
• Suggestions whilst typing and after running search queries, a feature that we have come to love with major search engines such as Google and Bing.
• Integrating SharePoint enterprise search with Windows 7, allowing end users to utilise the Windows 7 search box to locate SharePoint 2010 content.
• Results display has been refined to provide filters for search results such as document type, categories and managed properties.
• View in Browser capabilities, allows end users to view documents within their own browser utilising Office Web Apps and not having to rely on launching the necessary Microsoft OfficeApplication, or even the need of having it installed on their local machine.  This is handy when browsing your SharePoint site via Kiosks and Internet Cafes that may not be running the Microsoft Office Suite.
• Last but not least, there have been a number of improvements to People Search, including phonetic name and nickname matching, and improved relevance and self search.

Now that we have a taste for what’s to come, let’s begin our configuration.

SharePoint Server Search is a service application which we have come to learn about over the past few articles that it is independent of other services and is no longer tied to the Shared Services Provider (SSP) that was introduced in SharePoint 2007.

SharePoint 2010 search architecture is made up of the Crawler, Indexing Engine, Query Engine and the User Interface and Query Object Model.  We now have greater flexibility and expandability with our search design in 2010 and can setup not only multiple Query Servers but can now scale out our Index server and add multiple instances.

Below is a logical overview of the components that will make up our SharePoint 2010 search configuration.

Configuring the Service Application

As always we begin our journey in Central Administration / Application Management / Manage Service Applications.

Click New / Search Service Application.

Name: Enter a name for your Service Application.

FAST Service Application: Select “None” (we will leave the configuration of FAST for a future article)

Search Service Account: Click on Register new managed account and ensure your domain account has already been provisioned in Active Directory.  I have created a separate search account; e.g. DOMAIN\sp_search

Application Pool for Search Admin Web Service: Create a new application pool for your search admin web service application.

Application Pool for Search Query and Site Settings Web Service: Create a new application pool for your search query web service application.

Click Create

The search service application will begin its configuration process.

You will eventually be presented with confirmation that the search service application was created successfully.

If we now navigate back to Application Management / Manage Service Applications, you will notice that 2 additional services have been added to our list.  These are;

1. Search Service Application (Typical Search Administration page which is similar to that in SharePoint 2007. From here we can create content crawl rules, reset indexes, setup content sources etc).
2. WSS_UsageApplication (This is a new service in SharePoint 2010 that specifically handles our Usage and Health Data Collection Service Application.  This service application handles web analytics such as usage, search query usage, rating usage etc  More on this in a future article).

Let’s now launch the Search Administration page by clicking on our Search Service Application.