Windows update KB938444 & "Cannot connect to the configuration database"

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sharepoint/archive/2010/06/22/installing-kb938444.aspx?_sm_au_=iVV6RRM2W4q7rWZS

User Profile Synchronization & Standalone installation of Sharepoint 2010

If you want to configure User Profile Import from Active directory or any other secondary source please install SharePoint 2010 in “Farm Mode”.

The User Profile Synchronization service does not work with the Stand Alone installation mode of SharePoint.

Quoting a reference from technet :

“The farm is running either the Standard or Enterprise version of SharePoint Server 2010 and you have run the farm configuration wizard. Profile Synchronization does not work on a stand-alone installation for SharePoint Server 2010.”

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee721049(office.14).aspx

SharePoint 2010 Capacity boundry limits

Microsoft have released a white paper on SharePoint 2010 Capacity management: Software boundaries and limits.The white paper can be downloaded here

On a high level:

	Moss 2007	SharePoint 2010
Content DB Size	100 GB	200 GB
File Size	2 GB	2 GB
DB’s per webapp	100	300
Site collection size	100 GB	100 GB
List items per view	2000	5000

SharePoint Visio Stencils for solution packages and Features

Maxime Bombardier has posted some Visio stencils and templates for designing SharePoint solution packages and Features :). This would be a lot of help in documenting solution packages & features visually.

The stencils are available for download here

Deleting(Unextending) Extended web applications

When we extend a web application, the extended web application will not appear in the Web Application list. Hence we cannot delete the Extended site through the "Delete Web Application" section of Application Management.

Use this approach to delete the extended web apps:

1. Start Central Administration
2. Go to Application Management
3. Click Remove SharePoint from IIS Web Site
4. Select the web application that the extended web app was extended from
5. Select which extension/zone to delete
6. Keep or delete the IIS Web site
7. Finally click OK

If you look closely the page is named "unextendvs.aspx" :)

Bye Bye stsadm hello PowerShell

Stsadm was one of the primary tools available for deployment operations in MOSS 2007. However, We all have been through a lot of scenarios that stsadm simply did not cover.

The resolution to this was to write a piece of code or develop a custom stsadm extension and deploy it to accomplishing a simple task

SharePoint 2010 has moved to PowerShell which means that you know have full access to the SharePoint API from the command line.

For example : Suppose I want to get a list of features for a specific site collection, we can simply type the following from the PowerShell prompt

$s = Get-SPSite http://siteurl

S$.Features | out-gridview

We would get the list of features in a grid view with filtering & sorting options.

Find a list of all the SharePoint 2010 PowerShell cmdlets reference here

http://dmitrysotnikov.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/sharepoint-2010-cmdlet-reference/

and the Help file for PowerShell here

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=045F7AF5-B226-4A05-8ACE-4E17CFDEF856&displaylang=en&displaylang=en

Microsoft claim to introduce around 1000 build in cmdlets :)

You can use PowerShell with the MOSS 2007 object model and its web services. More on that here

http://www.u2u.info/Blogs/karine/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=9

Page Layouts & Site Templates

Probably all of you would have used this setting at some point in your projects, this is for those who haven’t.

As most of you would know in MOSS 2007 Publishing sites, each site supports only one Pages Library. As a direct consequence of this the content author/editor would have to navigate to the desired site(For example- if you have a Latest News functionality in your WCM site and as part of your information architecture you would decide to have a sub site called News, so to add a News article, the content author would have to navigate to the News site.) to create/edit a particular publishing page.

When he tries to create a page, he would be presented with a list of page layouts to choose from. If you want to restrict the list of page layouts you can:

Go into any Publishing site's Site Settings page and look under the Look & Feel column for the Page Layouts & Site Templates link. From this page you'll be able to do the following:

• Inherit the parent site's settings for site templates & page layouts.

• Turn off all filtering for the site templates & page layouts that are available to content

• Turn on filtering and customize the site templates & page layouts that are available to content owners and hierarchy managers.

This you allow you to limit the page layouts/site templates available.

This feature also allows you to enable the creation of other “types”(Blog, Wiki, Team Sites, etc.) of sites under a Publishing site which is not available as a default setting.

SharePoint 2010 provides a Content Organizer through which you can organize content based on a rules engine.