SharePoint Config

Last month I took all four of the beta SharePoint 2010 exams and I’m pleased to announce I received notification this week that I passed the lot. With the new certifications this means as well as gathering two more Technology Specialist certifications I’m a Microsoft Certified Professional Developer in SharePoint 2010 as well as a Microsoft Certified IT Professional in SharePoint 2010.

The format has changed since 2007 where the exams were split by SKU/license type and now have a more Developer vs. IT Pro split, and within that a Technology Specialist (TS) and PRO exam. So there are no specific SharePoint Foundation exams – they all cover the full feature set but the PRO exams are targeted at a higher level than the TS e.g. PRO is aimed at dev team leads/senior administrators. The exams have now been fully released and are available for booking via Prometric but there still isn’t a huge amount of material out there so here are some pointers to get you started (with some tips from the Microsoft Learning exam webcasts). Continue reading Study resources for SharePoint 2010 exams »

The official SharePoint site contains a comparison of the features in each SharePoint 2010 edition but does not include specific details on what web parts are available for each SKU/license type. This is useful to know when choosing between Foundation vs Standard vs Enterprise, as this additional functionality may be a good reason to upgrade (or turn on these features for specific users). It is also useful to know these as a developer or solution architect so you don’t custom develop something that has already been built and tested by Microsoft – something that I often see happen.

SharePoint licensing is a complex subject. As well as there being multiple product configuration options, license prices often depend on a number of factors such as the type of organisation, the relationship with Microsoft and/or licensing retailer etc. It is useful, however, to have a rough indication of how much a product will cost when planning a project. For example if you are interested in giving all internal users access to FAST search you are looking at roughly twice the licensing costs of an installation using the standard features.

The Born to Learn Blog just announced that registration is now open for the SharePoint 2010 beta exams. Head over to their blog to get the registration codes as these let you take the test for free and if you pass you get the full certification. The idea is you do the TS one first and the PRO one is a bit more tech lead/architect based.

I think the exams are a great way to learn about more than what you focus on day-to-day as they cover a wide range of features included in the SharePoint platform. So if you have been working with SharePoint for a while now is a great chance to have a shot as there is nothing to lose (apart from a bit… Continue reading SharePoint 2010 Beta Exams Available »

Last week I presented at the SharePoint Evolution Conference in London. I’ve put my slides on slideshare for my session on ‘creating a tag driven information architecture using SharePoint 2007’. In the session I focused on making things findable, both in SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010.

Findability is one of the most important factors in the success of a SharePoint site. If users cannot find what they are looking they will quickly use alternate methods to get results. Employees that cannot find information are less productive and less likely to use the system in general. Likewise users that cannot find information on an internet site will look elsewhere for products and services losing the company revenue.

SharePoint 2007 introduced some powerful tools for improving findability but fell short when it compared to larger Enterprise Content Management systems. SharePoint 2010 takes this a huge step forward with cutting edge enterprise ready findability features. Here are 10 new features SharePoint 2010 brings to the table in addition to the features available in SharePoint 2007.

This is the fifth in a series of posts detailing how to configure a partially SSL secured SharePoint site. This post will cover what is involved in ensuring the authentication cookie is only sent via a secure channel (i.e. SSL/HTTPS). This is best practice for securing forms based authentication but has several impacts that can require some fundamental changes to the site so are worth considering early in the development process.

This is the fourth in a series of posts detailing how to configure a partially SSL secured SharePoint site. In the previous post we covered how to secure the login page so it is always delivered via SSL. This is fine for some pages but a common requirement for many public facing SharePoint sites is to have a login form that allows users to log in from any page. By default this is not secure as HTTP pages will send these details back via HTTP (i.e. in clear text), unless we configure the page to do otherwise. This post will cover how we can cater for this scenario without having to use SSL for the entire site.

This is the third in a series of posts detailing how to configure a partially SSL secured SharePoint site. In the previous post we covered how to enable SSL for the site. In this post we will cover how to force connections to use the correct protocol (HTTPS for sensitive data, HTTP otherwise). This is required so that if a user tries to browse to page that sends or displays sensitive data via HTTP (e.g. http://www.company.com/pages/login.aspx) they will be redirected to the HTTPS version of the page (e.g. https://www.company.com/pages/login.aspx – so they can login securely) and vice versa for pages like the homepage that should be delivered via HTTP so they do not incur the performance hit of encrypting and decrypting the page.

This is the second in a series of posts on securing mixed SSL sites in SharePoint. This post will cover how to configure a SharePoint forms based web application to allow SSL/HTTPS connections. The process involves setting up an SSL certificate and configuring IIS and SharePoint to allow requests over HTTPS.

The following steps assume that you have a SharePoint web application already set up using forms based authentication. If you need details on how to do this see the article on Technet titled “Forms Authentication in SharePoint Products and Technologies”. We will be using IIS 7 in this example but a similar process can be followed using IIS 6 using the SelfSSL utility.