Continue reading »]]>
I just realized that I haven’t posted about the fact that I’ll be in Denver this weekend speaking at the SharePoint Saturday event. I’ll be delivering a reprise of “Scaling SharePoint Archives to Terabytes and Beyond”, similar content to what I delivered at the SharePoint Conference in Anaheim.

In my opinion, Denver puts on one of the best SharePoint Saturday events in the country! In addition to a powerhouse roundup of high quality speakers, sponsorship is top notch. This year we can expect a great SharePint event on Saturday night and then wait for it… A ShareSki event! I can’t wait to carve up some powder at Loveland on Sunday!

So I look forward to seeing all of you as well as some of my speaker buddies that I only manage to run into at these SharePoint conferences!

Kudos to Planet Technologies and any other conference organizers for what will no doubt be a fantastic SharePoint weekend!

Continue reading »]]> I recently presented a session at SharePoint Conference 2011 titled “Scaling SharePoint Document and Records Centers to Terabytes and Beyond”.  I was quite happy with how the session played out and I wanted to thank those of you who attended for the many kind tweets regarding my session.

I had hoped that the “collateral” links inside of MySPC would allow us speaker types to post zip files with supporting content (scripts, code, etc) for use by attendees.  Unfortunately, the collateral links only allow slide decks and PDF files.

So… as promised, here are the related demo resources that many of you asked for:

SPC382_Demo_Resources.zip

Continue reading »]]>

Wow… It’s been a crazy summer.  The chaos started back in May when I began hardcore preparations for the SP2010 Upgrade rotation. This was followed by the actual rotation itself in early June.  Shout out to my U2 buddies out here!

So the rotation training was fantastic but the testing didn’t work out as well as I had hoped.  I made a critical mistake on my Qual Lab that cost me almost an hour to recover from.  It was enough to tank my effort.  Total bummer.  Kind of ruined my summer knowing I would have to go through the preparation process all over again.

After a nice summer vacation with the family plus a few weekend excursions (and several baseball tournaments) we’re now into late July.  Time to work through some more hard core Qual Lab preparation.  Good news, I passed on the second effort!  I also managed to get my other pre-requisite test out of the way.

All leading to the fact that as of September 21st, I’ve officially earned the SharePoint 2010 MCM certification!  Soooooo glad to have that off my plate before the SPC 2011 conference!

I added in some embarrassing detail here because I want folks to know that this just isn’t an easy process.  Yup.  I FAILed the qual lab the first time around.  I also missed the upgrade knowledge exam by a couple points the first time around because I spent all my study time preparing for the Qual Lab!  The fact is, I don’t have an opportunity to practice my Dev skills as frequently as I would like in my daily job.  So I have to study REALLY hard and practice executing configurations and deployments that I don’t regularly encounter to overcome that lack of regular practical experience.

It’s a funny thing really.  One of the instructors asked “How many DEV Pros do we have in the class?” followed by “How many ITPROs do we have in the class?”.  It was a fascinating question.  When I started my SharePoint career back in the early SPS 2003 days, I was definitely a DEV Pro.  But over the years my skills and experience have gradually shifted to the ITPRo side of the SharePoint house.  For the first time, I realized, that while I can still develop any component necessary to meet a customer requirement, I no longer consider it to be my strongest asset.  Just an interesting observation.

The difficulty of the SharePoint MCM certification is intentional and absolutely necessary.  It’s not impossible but it will always be REALLY hard.  Broad practical experience is absolutely required for success.  This accomplishes two things.  First, it ensures that those who acquire the certification really do know their stuff.  Second, it preserves the integrity of the certification for those who went through the process before us!

I also have to say that while my initial experience with the SP2007 MCM certification process was very positive a couple years ago, the program has made significant progress!  Brett Geoffroy has done a fantastic job moving this program forward.  I’m amazed at how smoothly the process flows given the logistical complexity that is SharePoint MCM.  Props to Brett, the MCM instructor team, Microsoft for the investment in time and money, and all of those behind the scenes folks that I’ve never met but who contribute quietly in the background to make this program the success that it is!

Also… I’m not sure if the names are public yet so I won’t mention them specifically.  But I also wanted to congratulate my SharePoint MCA friends who recently passed their boards.  Great job guys!

Anyway, it’s all over and I’m the proud holder of the SharePoint 2010 MCM certification.  I look forward to another couple of years of not having to go through this process…. until the NEXT upgrade cycle begins and I start all over again!

Continue reading »]]> I am proud to announce the release SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Content Management published by Wrox (Wiley)!

This book is the combined effort of 4 authors, myself included.  As my first venture into the world of book writing, I didn’t want to tackle an entire book.  As it turns out writing 4 chapters was quite a lot of work that represented an extensive time commitment.  I can only imagine what writing an entire book is like!  Kudos to those guys who can find time to write a whole book, get their 40 hours+ per week in and still remember the names of their wife and children!

So the book theme is obviously centered around how SharePoint 2010 can be leveraged as a powerful ECM platform.  The chapter list is included below.  If you’re curious, I highlighted the chapters that I wrote:

• Chapter 1: What is Enterprise Content Management?
• Chapter 2: The SharePoint 2010 Platform
• Chapter 3: Document Management
• Chapter 4: Workflow
• Chapter 5: Collaboration
• Chapter 6: Search
• Chapter 7: Web Content Management
• Chapter 8: Records Management
• Chapter 9: Digital Asset Management
• Chapter 10: Document Imaging
• Chapter 11: Electronic Forms with InfoPath
• Chapter 12: Scalable ECM Architecture
• Chapter 13: ECM File Formats
• Chapter 14: The SharePoint ECM Ecosystem
• Chapter 15: Guidance for Successful ECM Projects

So if you happen to give it a read and you find the book useful, PLEASE go to amazon.com and let the world know what you thought of it!  We could use some positive reviews!  It would be bad form for us to review our own book so we need you!

I’m very proud of how the book turned out!

Cheers.

Continue reading »]]>

I’m looking forward to October 3-6 in Anaheim, CA where I’ve been accepted to speak at SharePoint Conference 2011!  I’ll be presenting a session titled “Scaling SharePoint Records Centers to Terabytes and Beyond – Part 1”.

In this session, I’ll be taking you through architecture guidance for scaling record centers to incredible sizes from the ground up.  After a little bit of background on Records Centers and Document Centers and how they lend themselves to very large content archives, I will describe how they fit into an architecture that will scale to multiple terabytes.  I’ll be discussing architecture from the ground up starting with storage concepts with respect to new guidance from Microsoft, continuing with scalable taxonomy, and finishing up with tuning and monitoring.

Hope to see you at my session in Anaheim!

Continue reading »]]> I was eagerly awaiting some new content database and RBS storage guidance that I had heard was coming from Microsoft.  Of course, they managed to release the new info when I was out on vacation.  Then I had planned on transferring my blog to a new hosting provider and didn’t want to put out any new posts using the old system.

So yes, this post is a little late and I’m sure half of the planet has already blogged about this, but since storage and RBS are something that I’ve talked a lot about, I feel like I need to add my 2 cents to this one.  What am I talking about?  I’m glad you asked…

The Microsoft SharePoint Team blog has published some new guidance regarding supported content database sizes.  The provide a summary of the changes and some nice background info in this blog post where they did a VERY good job highlighting the changes and pointing you to the new supported limit statements referenced in TechNet.  So in the sections below, I want to just mention a couple of things related to the new guidance.

New RBS Storage Clarification

According to the new guidance, the storage consumed in a particular BLOB store by a related content database must be included in the overall content database storage size when considering content database size supported limits.  I have to come clean RIGHT NOW and say that I’ve been a proponent of using RBS to skirt content database size limits in order to facilitate a more flexible taxonomy for large scale content databases.  Unfortunately, I heard this concept long ago and latched onto it as a solution for an issue that I regularly encountered.  So I’ve been shouting this misinformation from the rooftops for a long time.  Turns out that TechNet never explicitly said we could ignore RBS BLOB store storage requirements in the content database size limit.  So for the record, please include BLOB store storage sizing in your content database size number.  I’ll be passing this along in future speaking engagements as well.

So where does that put us?  Are we hosed if we deployed RBS?  In many cases, the answer is no.  I found that we typically wanted to use RBS for large scale document archive site collections based on either the Document Center or Records Center site template.  Since the new supported limits allow for larger content databases, in many cases we’re still within the limits.  If you’re not inside the limits but your system is functioning normally, Microsoft has given us the option of opening a paid supportability ticket so that their support team can “certify” systems that are beyond the limits.

Is RBS Still a Useful Technology?

Yep.  But the new guidance ensures that it won’t be overused and abused.  Ok, so we’ve got 1 less use case.  But RBS is still very beneficial in several solutions:

• Content Addressable Storage (CAS) Solutions – If your organization operates in a heavily regulated industry, it’s possible that you’re not allowed to delete documents.  Write Once Read Many (WORM) mode CAS storage devices such as Hitachi HCAP and EMC Centera are excellent solutions for ensuring that binaries live forever.  An RBS provider can take advantage of these CAS storage devices to ensure that binaries are never deleted.
• Digital Asset Management Solutions – If you need to deploy a DAM site collection that will be used to host 700mb training videos for your organization, then RBS may again be a good fit.  Nobody wants to shove 700mb files into a content database.  But with RBS enabled and our new 4TB storage limit in place, it’s possible to store over 5,000 of those 700mb training videos OUTSIDE of SQL Server (using RBS) instead of less than 300 with the old 200GB limit.  Sure, it’s an edge case, but there are many other similar solutions that might involve CAD files, large graphic assets, or huge 1,000 page PDF reports that need to be archived.
• Compression, De-duplication and Encryption Solutions – Looking for an extra layer of binary security for your files?  RBS can encrypt binary streams on the way to the BLOB store.  How about saving on some storage cost by enabling compression?  RBS can help you there too.  Also, a real sophisticated RBS provider can employ a de-duplication engine in the BLOB store to ensure that a given document is only stored once on the file system.

These are just a few reasons why RBS is still an important technology.  But it’s important not to go to far into the other ditch and try to use RBS on every large scale solution.  If the requirements don’t dictate that RBS is necessary, then it is important to leave it on the shelf to avoid the additional complexity of backup/restore and upgrade.

General Usage Content Databases

For most content databases, Microsoft still wants us to hang out under that 200GB number that we all know and love.  Essentially, if you don’t need to push the boundary, then don’t!  By staying under 200GB you ensure that you’re always supported and you probably won’t have to deal with any of the performance optimizations that Microsoft requires in order to support larger content databases.  This is the 80% bracket that most solutions should fall into.  Performance, usability, database maintenance, backup/restore, and upgrade will all benefit if try to architect your content databases to stay under 200GB

4TB is the new 200GB

Wow 4TB.  That’s a fun number.  Makes you want to just go out and re-architect your whole SharePoint environment doesn’t it!  Um, please don’t.  There are reasons to push a content database to 4TB but there is also a mountain of additional requirements that need to be addressed before you can even think about a number like 4TB.

Managing Very Large Content Databases

They went the extra mile.  There are a few people that hold a wealth of knowledge regarding the planning, monitoring and maintenance of super gigantic content databases.  Bill Baer is one of those guys.  If you are entertaining the possibility of taking advantage of some of these new limits (or if you’re already there!), then you need to understand this whitepaper inside and out.  All of the juicy “how to” goodness is in there.

No Limits for Document Archive?

Personally speaking, this is really cool.  Professionally speaking, this scares the daylights out of me!  I’m guessing that about 18 months from now someone is going to ring up KnowledgeLake and ask for that MCM guy they’ve got who’s real good with storage and performance optimization.  It will take me about 30 seconds to look at their SQL Server and see that someone has jammed 5TB of content into a content database that is in no way optimized for it.  People, if you want to go larger than even 1TB you better have some ridiculously spec’d out storage!  Can it be done?  I think so.  Should it be done?  Depends on how big of a check you’re willing to write to make it happen.

In Conclusion…

I have to say that I’m really glad that Microsoft finally bit the bullet and gave us something we can work with.  For those of us who are willing to take the time and money to properly architect a large scale storage solution, this guidance really opens up a lot of doors.  But at the same time, I expect it to cause some issues as well.  Inevitably, systems will be targeted at these new numbers by people who don’t want to take the time to read ALL of the supporting guidance that enables these new boundaries.  Still, the guidance was sorely needed and at least now we have a stronger storage foundation to build upon.

Continue reading »]]> Blog Reader:  Hey Russ… What gives?  You haven’t written any blog entries lately?

Russ:  Yeah man.  I’ve been slammed with FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 install / configurations, baseball games for my boys, prepping for speaking engagements, and most of all, studying for my MCM 2010 upgrade which is coming up in June.

Blog Reader:  Well, I guess that’s OK.  But other than that MCM 2010 thing which is probably pretty rough, your other excuses are kind of weak.

Russ:  Yeah.  I know.  I promise I’ll get back in gear in July after I’ve had time to decompress from the MCM 2010 upgrade session in Redmond.

Yep.  That’s right folks.  I’ve been slackin’ on the blog thing.  Just not enough hours in the day to put the required thought into the posts that I want to do.  But that will change come July.  I’m planning another blog software refresh.  Something a bit more modern looking than what I’ve got going on right now.

I’m also planning a few blog posts on the topic of SharePoint 2010 storage best practices as well as at least one post (maybe a series) on Deploying FAST Search for SP2010.  The TechNet guidance isn’t real clear on the considerations that drive the all important deployment.xml file which basically controls the FAST farm topology.

Soooo… Hang with me just a bit longer.  I’ll be back soon…

Continue reading »]]> In my previous post, I suggested that I don’t like to plug KnowledgeLake on my personal blog because I want this blog to be neutral in order to best serve the SharePoint community.  In regard to my technical posts, I will always strive to maintain this neutrality.  But this is not a technical post!  So I’m going to make an exception because I think this information could really help a few people out there.

I have been proudly serving KnowledgeLake for more than 6 years and I have been a developer/consultant for over 15 years.  I can honestly say that I have never an experienced a company that values their employees more than KnowledgeLake.  They really do want their employees to succeed in their careers and they provide all of the tools to get this done.  They also do this while encouraging their employees to maintain a good work/life balance.  They have figured out that happy employees lead directly to happy customers which leads to a happy profit margin.  These are foundational philosophies that work their way UP from the incredible servant leadership group that drives KnowledgeLake.

KnowledgeLake is looking for a few seasoned developers that know SharePoint Workflow inside and out and also have InfoPath experience to join the Professional Services crew (where I work) at KnowledgeLake.  Your current geographical location doesn’t really matter.  We have PS folks that work in various cities around the US.

Do you have these skills or know someone who does?  Are you tired of grinding it out for some giant company with only the company benefiting from your hard work?  Are you tired of working on the same code project for years on end with the same company?  Are you tired of your employer abusing your skills and not properly compensating you for them?  Would you like to have a SharePoint MCM mentor you as you progress through a career in consulting? (Ok, maybe that last one was a little weak ;-)  )

Wow. I totally just sounded like a head hunter with those questions! 

Anyway, if you answered yes to ANY of these questions, do not pass GO, do not collect $200, proceed directly to the “Contact” link just to the right of this blog post and get in touch with me.  I would be happy to talk with you about my experiences at this impossibly amazing company.

How many people do you know who literally have nothing but praises to sing of their employer after 6+ years of service?

I’m off my shameless plug soapbox now.  Carry on!

Continue reading »]]> Last fall I was asked by the Microsoft SQL Server RBS Dev team to author a whitepaper on the topic of Remote BLOB Storage (RBS).  The whitepaper has now been published.

Here is a direct download link to the RBS Whitepaper.

The document reference was originally featured on this page. 

RBS is a powerful SQL Server 2008 R2 technology that helps to get binary content out of the database.  It is extremely beneficial to SharePoint 2010.  By keeping the file binaries out of the content databases, it becomes easily possible to store 10 or 20 million items without having to worry too much about database size.

Since SharePoint 2010 has been released, Microsft has done a good job updating TechNet with procedures for installing and configuring RBS for SharePoint content databases.  But the “why” behind the “how” was missing.  I wanted to know things like:

Before this whitepaper, I suspected that the lack of documentation meant that Microsoft wasn’t fully vested in the technology and they just put it out there to keep the vendors happy and maybe even the FILESTREAM RBS provider was just sort of an “example” provider.  One day I innocently expressed this opinion in a forum post.  This really got the attention of the RBS Dev Team.  They wanted me to clearly understand that not only was the FILESTREAM provider extensively tested for efficiency and reliability, but it was absolutely production ready.  I stand corrected!

I have since implemented the FILESTREAM provider many times and I’ve worked through most of the issues that you might encounter.  I can also say that if the TechNet procedures are followed closely, you shouldn’t have any trouble.

Anyway, after the dialog with the RBS Dev Team, we thought that perhaps a whitepaper was needed to get some additional information out there regarding how SQL Server 2008 R2 RBS really functions.  With this additional knowledge, perhaps SharePoint Architects and Administrators won’t fear deploying it.  This whitepaper is the result of that effort.

I also posted some additional thoughts regarding how RBS benefits ECM and KnowledgeLake based solutions at my company blog here.  I prefer to keep my personal BLOG a bit more neutral unless the subject matter absolutely lends itself to a comment about KnowledgeLake.  So I saved my KL specific comments for that blog post if you’re interested.

I hope this whitepaper helps out both SQL and SharePoint commmunities!

Continue reading »]]> I am honored to once again be invited to speak at the European SharePoint Best Practices Conference in London.  The conference is being held from April 11th to the 13th   Last year a pesky little volcano in Iceland completely wrecked international travel between the US and Europe for several week.

God willing, the volcano will remain at rest this year and I will be delivering an Information Worker session titled “The Content Organiser: A practical guide to distributing content in SharePoint 2010″.

This session will start with a brief overview of the Content Organizer, Content Type Syndication and “Send To Connections”. The remainder of the session will be an extended demonstration of a content distribution solution. The flavor of the demo is that an end user can send documents to a single known location while SharePoint dynamically routes them either to local libraries or to other site collections for long term storage, records management or workflow. I’ll be highlighting the ability of SharePoint to automatically create dynamic folder structures based on document counts in a folder or based on metadata property values. I’ll also discuss the scalability benefits of routing content to other content databases. The demo will include high speed loading of several hundred documents which SharePoint will then shuffle out to multiple site collections and libraries.

I look forward to seeing you at my session.  I’ve got some fun stuff to show off and I’m sure you won’t be disappointed!

Cheers.