SharePoint Config

A brief overview of the sessions I attended on the second day of the Asia Pacific SharePoint Conference (the first day was strategy day).

Securing SharePoint Technology

In this session Joel Oleson went through different levels of security starting at the site level, through to web application and farm level security. He discussed the different methods of authentication and gave tips on best practices for locking down a SharePoint environment.

Highlights:

• BDC search results are not security trimmed by default so care is needed when considering which BDC data you crawl.
• Self service site creation is off by default. Consider who will be creating sites (helpdesk, administrators) before enabling this.
• SharePoint integrates with Rights Management Services allowing you to restrict actions such as printing, editing, or emailing documents stored in document libraries. See also Information Rights Management in Windows SharePoint Services Overview.

Business Data Catalogue

In this session Mike Fitzmaurice went through some of the drivers for creating the BDC and then went into detail on how the BDC works.

Highlights:

• Requires SharePoint enterprise licence
• Authentication methods:
  Kerberos – recommended approach
  Single Sign On – SharePoint grabs users credentials and passes to other systems
  Stored account info – not recommended for most scenarios
• BDC Meta Man a useful tool for creating definition files

SharePoint mobile

In this session Dave Glover from Microsoft Australia showed how to create InfoPath forms for mobile devices and showed how Forms Services can be used to render these forms on mobile devices. Although the interface was by no means attractive I think this presents some interesting business opportunities, and definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Highlights:

• Creating Mobile enabled forms is easy with InfoPath 2007 – Simply select tools > form options > advanced > design a form that can be opened in a browser then tools > form options > browser > enable rendering on a mobile device and create a form.
• Seeing how the emulators available with Visual Studio 2005 can render these forms together with Forms Services

For more information see “Designing InfoPath 2007 Forms for Mobile Web Browsers” at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb251745.aspx.

Disaster Recovery

In this session Joel Oleson talked about different ways of recovering data, from using the recycle bins, to restoring farm backups.

Highlights:

• Default time items remain in the recycle bin is 30 days
• Backup and restore options:
  Export (stsams –o export) – allows backup and restore of individual sites within a site collection
  Site Collection Backup (stsadm –o backup) – backs up a site collection and all its content
  Farm backup (stsadm –o backup –backupmethod full)
  SQL backups – need to ensure config database and content databases are in sync with each other or orphaned sites may result. For example if the config database is backed up and before the content database is backed up a new site is created, if both are restored the config database will not know about the new (orphan) site so it will not be accessible.
• There are several third party tools that can be used to implement reliable disaster recovery strategies.
• High availability strategies for SharePoint (see Joel’s blog on Replication and High Availability)
  Mirroring – In this approach a copy of each database is maintained (via SQL log shipping) on a separate server. This technique usually requires a manual process to recover from a failure but because the mirror can be stored at a separate location it provides the most robust solution. One important point to note is that because the configuration database contains ‘hardcoded’ server names it should not be mirrored. This needs to be recreated on the mirror site so it has links to the mirrored databases.
  Clustering – In this approach one or more servers use two or more shared disks to support a SQL instance. This approach provides a ‘hot’ standby server which can provide uninterrupted failover but because the standby server must be at the same site this approach will not work if an entire data centre goes down.