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6/13/2010

SharePoint Server 2010 Step by Step Small Farm 3-tier Architecture Installation Guide – Instructions

Click here to go the previous part of this article – Prerequisites

I apologize in advance for the length of this post but I think it makes it much easier for everyone to read by having this on one web page.

SharePoint 2010 Installation Instructions

Let’s start with the installation on the Application Server. This is where I would normally want my Central Administration to be accessible from, especially if my web server is publically accessible.

Application Server Install

1. Ensure all prerequisites from Hardware, Software, Miscellaneous and Service Accounts above

2. Make sure your media is available in the DVD drive of the server or accessible locally or a network share

3. Under Administrative Tools à Server Manager à Configure IE ESC, I normally turn it off for Administrators

4. Under Control Panel à User Accounts à User Accounts à Change User Account Control settings, I normally set it to Never notify

5. Run the splash page

6. Click on and Install software prerequisites

7. Click on Install SharePoint Server from the splash page

8. Enter your Product Key and hit Continue

9. Choose a Server Farm installation

10. Choose a Complete Server Type and specify the File Location if applicable

11. Once installed, Run the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard now

12. Click Yes to reset services

13. Create a new server farm

14. Enter the configuration database settings along with your username/password for your Farm Administration service account defined above in the prerequisites

15. Enter a Passphrase (this is used to add servers to the farm at a later point) – don’t forget to log this somewhere!

16. Specify a Port Number you would like to use (or use the default) for Central Administration and choose the authentication provider

17. Once you hit Finish, it will automatically open the Central Administration website; click No to not participate in the Customer Experience Improvement program (unless you really want to!)

18. You can configure the farm using the Wizard or manually, I would recommend using the Wizard (and disable the services you want after the install) but if you are confident you can just install the services you need manually

19. The first part of the configuration wizard is to select the services to run on the farm. As of SharePoint 2010 beta, there was a problem getting user profiles working without using the Farm Administration account, so I would advise using this account for now, I think it can be changed later without much work.

20. Select the farm administration service account from the dropdown and select the services you want to run on the farm and press ok

21. If you now look at your SQL Server, you will notice a whole wack of new databases have been created

22. At this point it will ask you to create your first SharePoint site configured at the port 80 web application. I usually skip this step because I want my own custom web applications to be created. Go ahead and create your own Web Application & Site Collection at this point if you like

23. At the end it will give you a completion screen notifying you of all the services that have been installed

24. The next step is to change the SharePoint Web Services Root application pool to run as the Farm Administrator account by changing it in advanced settings and starting it (note: I’m not sure if this is a bug or not as you would think this would be automatically done for you)

25. Next start the Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Sandboxed Code Service (if you are allowing Sandboxed solutions on your farm). This can be found under Central Administration à Manage Services on server

26. Next configure the Search Service Application under Central Administration à Manage Services on server à Search Service Application à Search Service Applications

i. Change the Default content access account to the domain service account that was created (optional) as well as the Contact e-mail address to the SharePoint Administrator defined in the prerequisites

ii. Create a crawl schedule under Search Service Application à Content Sources à Local SharePoint Sites. I usually do a full crawl every day at midnight and incremental crawls every hour after that.

27. Next step is configuring the User Profiles. This is probably the trickiest part of the configuration. If something goes wrong here, there are many resources out there in the www to help you track down your issue and if needed, the best resource that I have found is by Spencer Harbar and outlined here: http://www.harbar.net/articles/sp2010ups.aspx

***Note make sure “replicate directory changes” is set for the farm administrator service account as defined above in the prerequisites.

a. To start this user profile synchronization service, it seems that the farm administrator account needs to be a member of the local administrator group on the application server (Needs verification). Note: If you are just adding this account to the admin group now, you should restart the SharePoint Timer Service under startàrun àservices.msc before continuing

b. Under Central Administration à Manage Services on Server à start the User Profile Synchronization Service

c. Enter the credentials of the Farm Administrator Service Account defined in the prerequisites above and press Ok

d. Run IISReset from the run menu or command prompt

e. At this point, a timer job called ProfileSynchronizationSetupJob will run for a while which you can see at Central Administration à Monitoring à Check Job status

f. You should wait until the service is completely started before proceeding

g. At this point, you should have the Forefront Identify Manager Service and the Forefront Identity Manager Synchronization Service running in your services.msc as your farm administrator account

h. Run iisreset in startàrun or from the command prompt (if you don’t do this you will get an error when you perform the next step that I outline here: http://www.khamis.net/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=6c8a23d1%2D47ea%2D47e5%2Db56f%2D2bc57cb95b93&ID=28 )

i. Next step is to actually configure the User Profile Service Application under Central Administration à Manage service applications (click on the User Profile Service Application link)

j. Click on the Configure Synchronization Connections link under Synchronization

k. Create a New Connection

l. Enter the appropriate settings for the synchronization connection:

i. Give the connection a name

ii. Enter the domain controller name as per the prerequisites defined earlier (e.g. type nslookup from a computer on the domain) or enter the forest name (i.e. mydomain.com) and leave it on Auto discover domain controller (I would advise specifying the domain controller as I have had problems with auto-discover mode).

iii. Under account name/password use the farm administration account that has replicate directory rights as per the prerequisites defined earlier

iv. Press the Populate Containers button, select the containers you want synchronized and press ok. Be careful that the farm administration service account you specified as having replicating directory changes is applicable to the domain containers you select. Ensure that you only select the OU (i.e. SharePoint Users) that you want synched or else it will take a long time to complete the synch.

v. Iisreset at this point (might not be needed)

m. Next we want to start a full profile synchronization under Central administration à Manage Services on Server à User Profile Service Application à Start Profile Synchronization

n. At this point, it will do a bunch of stuff in user profile synchronization, a little known fact is that you can actually see the progress via a shell that Microsoft has created located here: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\14.0\Synchronization Service\UIShell\MSIISClient.exe. It has to go through a lot of successful steps before it completes:

o. To see that the user profile synchronization actually worked go to Central Administration à Manage Service Applications à User Profile Service Application à Manage User Profiles and put your domain in the find box and it should show you a bunch of the user profiles that have been synched

p. By default the user profile synchronization occurs every day at 1am but this can be changed under Central Administration à Manage Service Applications à User Profile Service Application à Configure Synchronization Timer Job

28. Set up outgoing email, under Central Administration à System Settings, Note: You need the Outbound SMTP server and from/to SharePoint administrator email address as defined in the prerequisites

29. Optional - Set up incoming email, under Central Administration à System Settings, Note: You need the SMTP service setup locally on the Windows Server OS before this is done as defined in the prerequisites

30. Setup My Sites under Central administration à Manage Services on Server à User Profile Service Application à Setup My Sites. Fill in all the properties according to your farm requirements.

a. What you can do here at this point is create a new web application to host your My Sites before configuring My Sites and point to it here

b. Also, create a web application/site collection that will host your preferred Search Center and point to it here

c. Under Site Naming Format, I always to be on the safe side, set it to use Domain and user name

Web Server Install

Now that we have the main Application server up and running, the next step is to add the web server and in fact any other server to the farm

1. Ensure all prerequisites from Hardware, Software, Miscellaneous and Service Accounts above

2. Make sure your media is available in the DVD drive of the server or accessible locally or a network share

3. Under Administrative Tools à Server Manager à Configure IE ESC, I normally turn it off for Administrators

4. Under Control Panel à User Accounts à User Accounts à Change User Account Control settings, I normally set it to Never notify

5. Run the splash page

6. Click on and Install software prerequisites

7. Click on Install SharePoint Server from the splash page

8. Enter your Product Key and hit Continue

9. Choose a Server Farm installation

10. Choose a Complete Server Type and specify the File Location if applicable

11. Once installed, Run the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard now

12. Click Yes to reset services

13. Connect to an existing server farm

14. Enter the name of the Database Server and the Configuration Database name

15. Enter the same Passphrase that was used when setting up the Application server

16. If you want to host the Central Administration web site on this web server, you can do this under Advanced Settings, otherwise hit next

17. When you hit Finish, it will open the Central Administration, again, I would advise using the Wizard

18. The next step is to change the SharePoint Web Services Root application pool to run as the Farm Administrator account by changing it in advanced settings and starting it

19. Once all your servers have been added to the farm, you should now select and deselect the services you would like to run on each web/application server under Central Administration à Manage Services on Server. This should clearly be thought out and planned beforehand as to which services should reside on which server based on their roles and perceived load. Notice the Server drop down from where you can select the server at the top right [12].

And there you have it, a small 3-tier server farm using SharePoint 2010!

References

[1] http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263199.aspx

[2] http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262485.aspx

[3] http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=66ab3dbb-bf3e-4f46-9559-ccc6a4f9dc19&displaylang=en

[4] http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=165962

[5] http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ae7387c3-348c-4faa-8ae5-949fdfbe59c4&displaylang=en

[6] http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=165748

[7] http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=656C9D4A-55EC-4972-A0D7-B1A6FEDF51A7&displaylang=en

[8] http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkID=160770

[9] http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=166231

[10] http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee662513.aspx

[11] http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee721049.aspx and

http://sharepointdevwiki.com/display/spadmin2010/10+-+Creating+the+delegate+user+for+farm+account

[12] http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee794878.aspx

Technorati Tags: SharePoint 2010,Installation,Build,Architecture,Guide,Farm

Posted at 10:26 PM by Noorez Khamis | Category: SharePoint | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (6)

SharePoint Server 2010 Step by Step Small Farm 3-tier Architecture Installation Guide – Prerequisites

Click here to go the previous part of this article – Introduction

Prerequisites (important – have the prerequisites ready before you start the SharePoint 2010 install!)

i. Hardware

Verify that you have the following server virtual or physical hardware architecture available to you [2]:

1. Application Server

a. Processor 64-bit, four cores (*64 bit is the key, it won’t run on 32 bit architectures)

b. Recommend 16 GB or Higher RAM

c. 80 GB Hard drive for main system drive

2. Web Server (s)

a. Processor 64-bit, four cores (*64 bit is the key, it won’t run on 32 bit architectures)

b. Recommend 16 GB or Higher RAM

c. 80 GB Hard drive for main system drive

3. Database Server(s)

a. Processor 64-bit, four cores (*64 bit is the key, it won’t run on 32 bit architectures)

b. Recommend 16 GB (at a minimum) or Higher RAM

c. Preferably a cluster

d. Dependent on your usage type - a very large hard drive or the databases (recommend 1 TB on a SAN)

ii. Software

Verify that you have the following software installed or available to you. Please visit the Microsoft website for more complete descriptions but below is a summary [2]:

1. Application Server

a. One of the following OS’s

i. 64-bit edition of Windows Server 2008 Standard, Enterprise, Data Center, or Web Server with SP2 [7] Operating system

1. You also need a hotfix [8]

ii. 64-bit edition of Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard, Enterprise, Data Center, or Web Server

1. You also need a hotfix [9]

b. All Windows Updates

c. If you would like to have the SharePoint server take in incoming email into lists, you should have SMTP service installed on your Windows Server OS

d. Optional - The following prerequisites are automatically installed with the SharePoint 2010 media, however, you can install them yourself if you like beforehand:

i. Web Server (IIS) role

ii. Application Server role

iii. Microsoft .NET Framework version 3.5 SP1

iv. SQL Server 2008 Express with SP1

v. Microsoft Sync Framework Runtime v1.0 (x64)

vi. Microsoft Filter Pack 2.0

vii. Microsoft Chart Controls for the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5

viii. Windows PowerShell 2.0

ix. SQL Server 2008 Native Client

x. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services ADOMD.NET

xi. ADO.NET Data Services Update for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1

xii. Windows Identity Foundation (WIF)

2. Web Server (s)

a. One of the following OS’s

i. 64-bit edition of Windows Server 2008 Standard, Enterprise, Data Center, or Web Server with SP2 [7] Operating system

1. You also need a hotfix [8]

ii. 64-bit edition of Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard, Enterprise, Data Center, or Web Server

1. You also need a hotfix [9]

b. All Windows Updates

c. If you would like to have the SharePoint server take in incoming email into lists, you should have SMTP service installed on your Windows Server OS

d. Optional - The following prerequisites are automatically installed with the SharePoint 2010 media, however, you can install them yourself if you like beforehand:

i. Web Server (IIS) role

ii. Application Server role

iii. Microsoft .NET Framework version 3.5 SP1

iv. SQL Server 2008 Express with SP1

v. Microsoft Sync Framework Runtime v1.0 (x64)

vi. Microsoft Filter Pack 2.0

vii. Microsoft Chart Controls for the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5

viii. Windows PowerShell 2.0

ix. SQL Server 2008 Native Client

x. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services ADOMD.NET

xi. ADO.NET Data Services Update for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1

xii. Windows Identity Foundation (WIF)

3. Database Server(s)

a. One of the following OS’s

i. 64-bit edition of Windows Server 2008 Standard, Enterprise, Data Center, or Web Server with SP2 [7] Operating system (I think that Windows 2003 64 bit might work for ONLY the SQL Server as well but I’m not sure)

1. You also need a hotfix [8]

ii. 64-bit edition of Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard, Enterprise, Data Center, or Web Server

1. You also need a hotfix [9]

b. All Windows Updates

c. One of the following version of SQL Server

i. 64-bit edition of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 with Service Pack 1 (SP1) [3] and Cumulative Update 2 [4] or

ii. 64-bit edition of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 with Service Pack 3 (SP3) [5] and Cumulative update package 3 for SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3 [6] or

iii. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2

iii. Service Accounts

Verify that you have the following service accounts created and their usernames and passwords available to you. Please visit the Microsoft website for more complete descriptions but below is a summary [10]:

1. SQL Server service account (account that SQL Server runs as)

a. Domain account

b. i.e. domain\svc-SQL2008Prod

2. Setup user account (account used for the install and configuration)

a. Domain user account

b. Member of the Administrators group on each server on which Setup is run (this is key!!) or Domain Administrator

c. SQL Server login on the computer that runs SQL Server

d. Member of the following SQL Server security roles:

i. securityadmin fixed server role

ii. dbcreator fixed server role

e. If you run Windows PowerShell cmdlets that affect a database, this account must be a member of the db_owner fixed database role for the database.

f. i.e. domain\sp2010Admin

3. Content Access account (account used to crawl and build indexes)

a. Domain user account

b. i.e. domain\svc-SP2010Crawl

4. Server farm administrator account or database access account (account used to configure farm, timer service and Central Admin app pool identity)

a. Domain user account

b. i.e. domain\svc-SP2010Farm

c. On the main application server where you are installing SharePoint Central Admin, you should have this account set as a local administrator (*this is the only way I can get User Profile Synchronization to work – need to validate correct way to do this)

d. Ensure this account has Replicate Directory Changes on the Active Directory by performing the following – Great article on how to do this on sharepointdevwiki [11]

i. Login as a domain administrator on the AD Controller go to Active Directory Users and Computers, right click on the domain and Delegate Control to the farm service account to be able to replicate directory changes

iv. Miscellaneous Information

You should also have the following information on hand in order to be prepared for the configuration:

1. SMTP Server name (for outgoing email configuration)

2. SharePoint Administrator Email Address (for outgoing email configuration)

3. AD forest name (i.e. mydomain.com) and Domain Server DNS name (for setting up the user profile synchronization service). You can get this by typing in “nslookup” in command prompt from a computer on the domain

4. SQL Server Cluster DNS name. You should use a SQL Server cluster (active-passive or active-active) for your SQL Server and always reference this cluster name when configuring SharePoint

5. Load balanced DNS name(s). If you are for example adding two web servers to the farm that are load balanced (either through hardware or software), ensure that you have the DNS name for this load balanced url ready and configured to use (http://intranet.mydomain.com points to http://webserver1.mydomain.com and http://webserver2.mydomain.com with affinity off or on).

Click here to go the next part of this article – Installation Instructions

Technorati Tags: SharePoint 2010,Installation,Build,Architecture,Guide,Farm

Posted at 9:33 PM by Noorez Khamis | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

SharePoint Server 2010 Step by Step Small Farm 3-tier Architecture Installation Guide – Introduction

By: Noorez Khamis (http://www.khamis.net)

Introduction

I decided to write my own installation instruction guide that will guide you through the creation of a small farm on 3-tier server architecture on the SharePoint 2010 platform within a domain. Hopefully this will be of help to some of you.

This guide makes complete uses of the user interfaces supplied by Microsoft for the installation and configuration of SharePoint 2010. I personally like PowerShell scripts that do it all automatically, but I haven’t found good ones that do everything I outline below.

Disclaimer: This is not a perfect guide, I’m sure I have made some errors and omissions but it is a combination of my learning’s and resources that have been published. If you find some errors and/or things that I am missing, please give me a comment and I’ll update the blog.

To start out: a description of small farm architecture:

Small farm architectures serve a larger number of users and scale out based on how heavily services are used. Due to the greater number of services, including client Web applications, more requests per user are expected in the new version compared with the old version. [1]

These farms normally have one dedicated application server and one or two web servers:

Click here to go the next part of this article - Prerequisites

Technorati Tags: SharePoint 2010,Installation,Build,Architecture,Guide,Farm

Posted at 9:00 PM by Noorez Khamis | Category: SharePoint | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (1)

6/6/2010

Records Management features in SharePoint 2010: Part 11 - Virtual folders, Folder inheritance and metadata based navigation

Overview

Metadata Inheritance
- In previous versions of SharePoint, folders had no function other than to act as containers.
  - You couldn’t pass values to their contents or add any help to browsing and searching other than their names
- In SharePoint 2010, Documents and subfolders inherit metadata from their parent folder making it easier to find documents when metadata is automatically added, instead of forcing users to add the same value over and over to the documents or list items they just uploaded
Virtual Folders

Instead of navigating by traditional folders, a user can filter the library to the virtual folder that contains just the metadata for which certain person is searching for
There is no need to navigate from folder into folder to find records, you can navigate by metadata instead
Virtual folder based navigation can be used instead of using views (as in SP 2007), however, views are still available in SharePoint 2010
When activated and configured, SharePoint 2010 adds a menu to the left hand navigation and user does not have to click multiple times to get to the relevant data and the user can easily find the information they are looking for using this Tree view navigation that is presented to them and browsing by using the virtual folder navigation.
This can be configured using the following steps:

Activated by default as a Site Feature via PowerShell or the GUI:

Enable-SPFeature -id MetaDataNav -url “<site url>”

To configure go to the library or list settings and click on Metadata navigation settings
- You can configure virtual folder settings using available options on the screen
- Once you enable metadata navigation (i.e. 'Person Responsible' Column in the screenshot below), a new entry is added to the left navigation of the site which allows you to navigate based on the values in that column.

References

http://www.iotap.com/sp2010/Blogs/tabid/470/EntryId/163/Metadata-based-Navigation-in-Sharepoint-2010.aspx

Technorati Tags: SharePoint 2010,Records Management,Virtual Folders,Metadata

Posted at 6:20 AM by Noorez Khamis | Category: SharePoint | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

6/2/2010

Can’t uninstall SharePoint 2007, Setup just quits

Today I ran into an issue where I had SharePoint 2007 installed on one of my Windows 2008 R2 application servers and I had deleted the SharePoint Central Administration content database without disconnecting it from the farm (using the SharePoint Configuration Wizard).

I tried to disconnect from the farm but each time I ran the configuration wizard, it gave me a security issue saying that it couldn’t access the central admin content database. When I ran the uninstall, it just quit in the midst of uninstall, without any error message or anything.

I then tried to manually clean it up by deleting all the SharePoint web applications and detaching all the SharePoint databases, no dice.

I finally turned off the timer service (net stop sptimerv3) and ran the SharePoint Configuration Wizard and it worked! The wizard gave me a bunch of errors saying that it couldn’t find the central admin database but ended up disconnecting and ended up letting me perform the uninstall.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,Timer job,Uninstall,Central Administration,Database

Posted at 8:49 PM by Noorez Khamis | Category: SharePoint | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

5/19/2010

SharePoint 2010 for Records Management: Strategies and Considerations Webinar

For all of you who missed my last presentation on SharePoint 2010 and Records Management, I am doing another webinar arranged by Burntsand on Wednesday, May 26, 2010 1:30 pm ET. This webinar will be more focused on the business side of RM and will not cover specific technical details. Here is the information if you would like to attend:

In this 45-minute webinar, Burntsand reviews strategies for maximizing SharePoint 2010 and other Microsoft technologies to achieve records excellence in your organization. Many new out-of-the-box features have been released that can help enterprise organizations manage their information and compliance. The new records management functionality available in SharePoint 2010 improves usability, automates records declaration and extends meta management and policy administration.

This SharePoint for Records Management webinar is presented by Burntsand, a leader in Integrated Information Management Solutions. Our many years of real-world experience developing strategies for Microsoft investments at leading mid-market and Fortune 500 companies provide fresh insights and pragmatic advice to help you achieve your company's vision.

Registration link: http://www.burntsand.com/WebinarRegLive.asp?media=webinar_052610

Posted at 10:59 AM by Noorez Khamis | Category: SharePoint | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

5/17/2010

Records Management features in SharePoint 2010: Part 10 – Multi Level Retention

Overview

Multiple stage retention policies allow specification of the entire lifecycle of a document as one policy (e.g. review Contracts every year, and delete after 7 years)
Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 requiring records to be kept for a certain amount of time
and you can set review periods for records in between the time they are declared and when they are destroyed
SharePoint 2010 has the ability to create hierarchal folder structures and manage retention at each folder within the hierarchy (while providing the ability to inherit retention settings from parent folders)
Retention policies can be set up by content type, library or folder
By default, retention is enabled within a SharePoint site collection but there is a feature that can allow override of retention schedules on folders or libraries which is activated as a Site Collection Feature:
- Enable-SPFeature -id LocationBasedPolicy -url “<site collection url>”

Retention policies are created in Site Settings --> Site Collection policies or Content Type Settings/List Settings --> Information management policy settings
The OOTB Actions when a stage occurs include:
- Moving the item to the Recycle Bin
- Permanently Delete the item
- Transfer to another location
- Invoke a workflow
- Skip to the next stage in the policy
- Declare the item as a record
- Delete all previous drafts of the items
- Delete all previous versions
The settings also allow a user to schedule recurrence on retention stages

API Reference – (Microsoft.Office.RecordsManagement. InformationPolicy Namespace)

using (SPSite site = new SPSite("http://devsp2010:1000")){    using (SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb())    {        SPList list = web.Lists["Shared Documents"];        SPContentType ctype = list.ContentTypes["RezDocument"];        if (Policy.CanHavePolicy(ctype))        {            PolicyCatalog pc = new PolicyCatalog(site);            var policy = (from p in pc.PolicyList.OfType<Policy>()                           where p.Name == "expireme" select p).First();            Policy.CreatePolicy(ctype, policy);            Policy.ProcessChanges(site);        }    }}

References

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263464(office.14).aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.office.recordsmanagement.informationpolicy(office.14).aspx
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sharepointdevelopment/thread/36e1b9cb-ed80-428a-8bba-9c8c939d176d

Technorati Tags: Records Management,SharePoint 2010,Retention

Posted at 8:15 PM by Noorez Khamis | Category: SharePoint | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

5/12/2010

Records Management features in SharePoint 2010: Part 9 – Content Type Publishing Hubs

Content Type Publishing Hub is a new feature in SharePoint 2010 whereby it allows a SharePoint administrator to have a central location where they can manage and publish content types from across all their SharePoint web applications
Other web applications can subscribe to the content type publishing hub and pull down published content types from the hub and receive updates on the published content types
Activated as a Site Collection Feature:

Enable-SPFeature -id ContentTypeHub -url “<site collection url>”

Notice how it is called the Content Type Syndication Hub in the feature?

Just like RSS, Microsoft wants to give a feel of subscribing, pulling and pushing of content types

Content type hub is available to SharePoint web applications via the Metadata Service Application
As long as the web applications use same Metadata Service Application, the content types will be pushed to those web applications that are subscribed to it

Configuring the Content Type Hub
Configuring the content hub is a little tricky and not very intuitive. Here are some steps on how to do it.

Create the web application and the root site which you want it to be the Hub
Enable content type syndication feature
In the Managed Metadata Service Application (Central Admin --> Application Settings --> Service Applications) properties (IN THE RIBBON), you can set the Content Type Hub URL
In the Managed Metadata Service Connection (Central Admin --> Application Settings --> Service Applications) properties (IN THE RIBBON), we explicitly tell to consume content types from the hub

To Publish the Content Type to the Subscribers

Once the content type hub web application has been configured, you should see the “Manage publishing for this content type” option under each of the Site Content Type settings and have the ability to publish it.

SharePoint admins have the option to publish, unpublish or republish the content type they have selected.

**Note: By default, the hub is controlled by 2 timer jobs. In order to receive published content types immediately, run the following two timer jobs:

1) Content Type Hub
2) Content Type Subscriber (of web application which is going to receive the content types updates)

After running these two timer jobs, the content types should be published and available to the subscribing sites

Published content types can be checked by going to Site Settings --> Site Collection Administration --> Content Type Publishing, here you have the option to refresh all content types, view any errors with content publishing and view the subscribed content types.

So what are some reasons for content type publishing hubs for Records Management?

Globally used content types that are controlled in one location.
This removes duplicate tagged documents and ensures consistent meta-data
Company has two web applications that have a set of content types that are the same (could be employee profile, real estate listing etc)
Company would like to have a central location where the content types can be created and pushed out to the above two site collections seamlessly and without having to make any modifications to separate site collection content types

References

http://www.chakkaradeep.com/post/SharePoint-2010-Content-Type-Hubs-e28093-Publish-and-Subscribe-to-Content-Types.aspx
http://www.whatsthepointofsharing.com/2009/11/28/how-to-publish-and-subscribe-to-content-types-in-sharepoint-2010/
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.spcontenttype(office.14).aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.spcontenttypecollection(office.14).aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.spcontenttypeusage(office.14).aspx

Technorati Tags: Records Management,Content Type Publishing Hubs,SharePoint 2010,Managed Metadata Services

Posted at 9:57 PM by Noorez Khamis | Category: SharePoint | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

5/9/2010

Records Management features in SharePoint 2010: Part 8 – Hold and eDiscovery

New feature in SharePoint 2010 whereby the use of electronic discovery allows records managers to find and lock down content related to tracking external actions like litigation, investigation or audit

For example, if a company is sued about how they use the word “eDiscovery”, the Records Manager needs to find and process all content that contains the words “eDiscovery” or “electronic discovery”
Allows discovery of documents by all metadata associated with the document and automatically places them “on hold” and/or copies the results to a specific location
In the US, "Federal Rules of Civil Procedure" governs the request of information in litigation, so it is now easy to be able to produce electronic data when requested in a court
It is activated as a Site Feature:

Enable-SPFeature -id hold -url “<site url>”

Processing holds is done by a timer job called “Hold Processing and Reporting” on the web application

Manually run this job to accelerate (it is run on a daily basis by default)

Holds can be set manually as well via the Compliance Details dialog invoked from the ECB menu

Pad lock added to list item when on hold

Holds are found using the search index and you have the ability to preview results as well as choose the site you would like to search for the relevant documents

Records Management applications

Used in scenarios involving law suits and litigation

In the US, corporations have Civil Rule requirements for providing records.
Failure to produce documents in legal cases results in stiff penalties.
There is still a lot of confusion on how these rules are applied and it depends on what policies are in place and how much risk your exposed to.
What it means is that you need to be able to find the records in a set period of time, place a hold on them and not allow them to be deleted.
Audit makes sure you can check if they are edited or deleted.

In the process of electronic discovery, data of all types can serve as evidence.

This can include text, images, calendar files, databases, spreadsheets, audio files, animation, Web sites and computer programs.

Holds and eDiscovery features of SharePoint can be used to prevent spoliation of data and compliance with various laws (for example, holding financial records for 7 years or putting a hold on a document because of a litigation).
Important because you can now search & place holds across farms, whereas before you could have only 1 records center in a farm. Not very useful.

References

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee557329%28office.14%29.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554902(office.14).aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee557262(office.14).aspx

Technorati Tags: Records Management,SharePoint 2010,Holds,eDiscovery,Compliance Details,Litigation

Posted at 8:00 PM by Noorez Khamis | Category: SharePoint | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

5/8/2010

Records Management features in SharePoint 2010: Part 7 – Compliance Details

A new feature in SharePoint 2010 is that all SharePoint list items and library items now have Compliance Details settings which indicate all the important business information about the document
They are located in the ECB drop down menu (Edit Control Block)

These settings allow SharePoint administrators to ensure all information about the record in one place including:

Viewing name, content type and folder path of document
Viewing any retention policies on the document (and their recurrence)
Exempting documents from policies
Holding documents
Declaring documents as records
Generating audit log reports

Reference

http://www.cmswire.com/cms/document-management/the-scoop-sharepoint-2010-records-management-005948.php

Technorati Tags: Compliance Details,SharePoint 2010,Records Management,ECB

Posted at 6:33 AM by Noorez Khamis | Category: SharePoint | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

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