Jose Barreto's Blog

Windows Storage Server 2008 and iSCSI Software Target 3.2 documentation on TechNet

josebda — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 21:02:00 GMT

I was glad to see that tje TechNet public site was recently updated to include detailed documentation on Windows Storage Server 2008 and iSCSI Software Target 3.2.

See below the main two top items that were posted, along with the topics covered under each one:

Windows Storage Server 2008

Windows Storage Server 2008 Getting Started Guide

Windows Server 2008 Administration Tools

Initial Configuration Tasks
Remote Desktop for Administration
Share and Storage Management
DFS Management
Microsoft Services for Network File System

Single Instance Storage

Enabling or Disabling SIS on a Volume
Uninstalling SIS
Managing SIS Using SisAdmin.exe

Additional Features
Appendix A: Configuring IP Addresses and DNS

Known Issues and Updates

Microsoft iSCSI Software Target

Microsoft iSCSI Software Target Getting Started Guide

Configuring Windows Firewall for iSCSI Software Target
Installing the Microsoft iSCSI Software Target
Installing the Microsoft iSCSI Software Target Hardware Providers
Virtual Disks and Snapshots
Cluster Support (Enterprise Edition Only)

Interoperability with Third-Party iSCSI Initiators
Known Issues and Update

Always nice to have documentation readily available on the web.

FAST'10 Technical Sessions

josebda — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:17:00 GMT

If you work with File and Storage, you probably heard of the annual FAST conference. The most recent one was FAST’10 (8th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies), which happened in San Jose, CA on February 23-26.

The content from the FAST'10 Technical Sessions was recently published, including presentations, papers and recordings. Please find below a list of the Technical Sessions, grouped by theme:

Opening Remarks and Keynotes
Technology for Developing Regions	Eric Brewer, University of California, Berkeley
Enterprise Analytics on Demand	Oliver Ratzesberger, eBay, Inc.
Build a Better File System and the World Will Beat a Path to Your Door
quFiles: The Right File at the Right Time	Ric Wheeler, Red Hat
Tracking Back References in a Write-Anywhere File System	Peter Macko and Margo Seltzer, Harvard University; Keith A. Smith, NetApp, Inc.
End-to-end Data Integrity for File Systems: A ZFS Case Study	Yupu Zhang, Abhishek Rajimwale, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau, University of Wisconsin—Madison
Looking for Trouble
Black-Box Problem Diagnosis in Parallel File Systems	Michael P. Kasick, Carnegie Mellon University; Jiaqi Tan, DSO National Labs, Singapore; Rajeev Gandhi and Priya Narasimhan, Carnegie Mellon University
A Clean-Slate Look at Disk Scrubbing	Alina Oprea and Ari Juels, RSA Laboratories
Understanding Latent Sector Errors and How to Protect Against Them	Bianca Schroeder, Sotirios Damouras, and Phillipa Gill, University of Toronto
Flash: Savior of the Universe?
DFS: A File System for Virtualized Flash Storage	William K. Josephson and Lars A. Bongo, Princeton University; David Flynn, Fusion-io; Kai Li, Princeton University
Extending SSD Lifetimes with Disk-Based Write Caches	Gokul Soundararajan, University of Toronto; Vijayan Prabhakaran, Mahesh Balakrishnan, and Ted Wobber, Microsoft Research Silicon Valley
Write Endurance in Flash Drives: Measurements and Analysis	Simona Boboila and Peter Desnoyers, Northeastern University
I/O, I/O, to Parallel I/O We Go
Accelerating Parallel Analysis of Scientific Simulation Data via Zazen	Tiankai Tu, Charles A. Rendleman, Patrick J. Miller, Federico Sacerdoti, and Ron O. Dror, D.E. Shaw Research; David E. Shaw, D.E. Shaw Research and Columbia University
Efficient Object Storage Journaling in a Distributed Parallel File System	Sarp Oral, Feiyi Wang, David Dillow, Galen Shipman, and Ross Miller, National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Oleg Drokin, Lustre Center of Excellence at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Sun Microsystems Inc.
Panache: A Parallel File System Cache for Global File Access	Marc Eshel, Roger Haskin, Dean Hildebrand, Manoj Naik, Frank Schmuck, and Renu Tewari, IBM Almaden Research
Making Management More Manageable
BASIL: Automated IO Load Balancing Across Storage Devices	Ajay Gulati, Chethan Kumar, and Irfan Ahmad, VMware, Inc.; Karan Kumar, Carnegie Mellon University
Discovery of Application Workloads from Network File Traces	Neeraja J. Yadwadkar, Chiranjib Bhattacharyya, and K. Gopinath, Indian Institute of Science; Thirumale Niranjan and Sai Susarla, NetApp Advanced Technology Group
Provenance for the Cloud	Kiran-Kumar Muniswamy-Reddy, Peter Macko, and Margo Seltzer, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Concentration: The Deduplication Game
I/O Deduplication: Utilizing Content Similarity to Improve I/O Performance	Ricardo Koller and Raju Rangaswami, Florida International University
HydraFS: A High-Throughput File System for the HYDRAstor Content-Addressable Storage System	Cristian Ungureanu, NEC Laboratories America; Benjamin Atkin, Google; Akshat Aranya, Salil Gokhale, and Stephen Rago, NEC Laboratories America; Grzegorz Całkowski, VMware; Cezary Dubnicki, 9LivesData, LLC; Aniruddha Bohra, Akamai
Bimodal Content Defined Chunking for Backup Streams	Erik Kruus and Cristian Ungureanu, NEC Laboratories America; Cezary Dubnicki, 9LivesData, LLC
The Power Button
Evaluating Performance and Energy in File System Server Workloads	Priya Sehgal, Vasily Tarasov, and Erez Zadok, Stony Brook University
SRCMap: Energy Proportional Storage Using Dynamic Consolidation	Akshat Verma, IBM Research, India; Ricardo Koller, Luis Useche, and Raju Rangaswami, Florida International University
Membrane: Operating System Support for Restartable File Systems	Swaminathan Sundararaman, Sriram Subramanian, Abhishek Rajimwale, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Michael M. Swift, University of Wisconsin—Madison

To view more details about the conference and download the content (including the complete proceedings in different formats), visit their web site at http://www.usenix.org/events/fast10/tech/.

Unique Document URLs in MOSS 2007 and the new Document ID feature in SharePoint 2010

josebda — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 06:05:00 GMT

A few years ago, I was working with a Microsoft customer to deploy a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS 2007) solution. SharePoint 2007 had just been released at the time. The customer needed document URLs stored in SharePoint to continued to work even after the document was renamed or moved. I blogged about the issue and a potential solution at http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2006/12/23/unique-document-urls-in-moss-2007.aspx

I was glad to learn recently that, in the upcoming release of SharePoint (MOSS 2010), this is going to be part of the product. This is described at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee559302(office.14).aspx and also at this great blog post at http://blogs.technet.com/blairb/archive/2009/10/20/new-document-id-feature-in-sharepoint-2010.aspx.

My old blog post was actually something that got over 12,000 hits over the years and I got a few e-mails about this specific blog post asking for details. I guess that was my own "that was totally my idea" moment :-). I did relay that feedback to the product team then. But, to be honest, I can imagine that this was probably something they heard from a number of people...

Random thoughts and links on Storage

josebda — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 00:55:00 GMT

If there was ever a post true to the part of the tagline of my blog that mentions random thoughts, this is it. :-)
This post is a compilation of my tweets from today, which cover several different topics related to Storage.

Microsoft Research: Dryad Project: Writing parallel and distributed programs to scale from a small cluster to a large data-center http://bit.ly/cbFrJw
Microsoft Research: SCOPE: Easy and Efficient Parallel Processing of Massive Data Sets http://bit.ly/16tivz
Windows Azure Storage presentation (video recording) by Brad Calder delivered during the MIX conference. http://bit.ly/JPJM3
Understanding Block Blobs and Page Blobs - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee691964.aspx
Beta Release of Windows Azure Drive (announced as XDrive at PDC 2009) - http://bit.ly/b1kUy0
Windows Azure drive acts as a local NTFS volume that is mounted and cached on the local file system - http://bit.ly/aKWsix
Exchange Server Protocol Documents - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc425499(EXCHG.80).aspx
Exchange Server 2010 Database and Log I/O Performance Factors - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee832791.aspx
Uncovering Exchange 2010 Database Availability Groups (DAGs) - Three-part article - http://bit.ly/7K6IlH
SMART dealing with HDD unreliability (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.
Migrating server storage to SSDs: analysis of tradeoffs - http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Paper/5872181.aspx
Adaptec MaxIQ - SSD Cache Performance Solution with hybrid arrays - http://bit.ly/dd4iJY
The following lists identify, characterize and link to more thorough information on computer file systems - http://bit.ly/auaM6y
In computer systems, a snapshot is a copy of the state of a system at a particular point in the past. http://bit.ly/bSVuEr)
How NTFS works - Details on NTFS Architecture http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc781134(WS.10).aspx
Basic Disks vs. Dynamic Disks - MBR vs. GPT - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa363785(VS.85).aspx
File Systems in Windows: FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS - http://bit.ly/dvSvS6 (old article, but still nice to understand NTFS basics)
Checklist: Create a Clustered File Server in Windows Server 2008 R2 - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753969.aspx
Failover Cluster Step-by-Step Guide: Configuring a Two-Node File Server Failover Cluster - http://bit.ly/bFNSMO
1998: SQL Server 7.0 releases, supporting 1TB of storage. Terraserver was the poster-child DB back then http://bit.ly/apigSi
Details on how SQL Server stores the actual data (pages) in its files - http://bit.ly/9amObf
Column stores: databases that store content by column rather than by row. http://bit.ly/2nh4TC
SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse (aka "Madison"): DW performance at low cost via MPP http://bit.ly/1aWTox
Fusion-io and SQL Server 2008 - http://bit.ly/8ZhF1V
Deploying SQL Server 2008 with PS6000S array with SSD - http://bit.ly/aozwOV
A Case for Flash Memory SSD in Enterprise Database Applications - http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1376616.1376723
Unbundling Transaction Services in the Cloud - http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=81294
H-Store: A Next Generation OLTP DBMS - http://db.cs.yale.edu/hstore/
Microsoft Sync Framework enables collaboration and offline access for applications, services and devices. http://bit.ly/cFP4s8
SQL Azure - A SQL relational database in the cloud, which you use just like an on-premise SQL Server. http://bit.ly/COx8T
SQL Azure offers - prices and sizes (up to 10GB per DB you can have multiple DBs) - http://bit.ly/cWLpvb
SQL Azure Database became generally available this month: http://bit.ly/bxXZmc - SLAs in effect: http://bit.ly/bFFFfp

If you have some free time to read white papers or review presentations (new and old) on Storage, have fun with them...

Presentations from Storage Developer Conference 2009 (SDC 2009) are now available for download

josebda — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 22:19:00 GMT

The presentations from SNIA's SDC 2009 are now publicly available for download. This SNIA event happened in Santa Clara, CA last September and the decks are now publicly available, after being restricted to conference attendees for a few months.

Out of the dozens of presentations, I wanted to highlight a few that were delivered by people from Microsoft:

ATA Trim/Delete Notification Support in Windows 7
Neal Christiansen
http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2009/presentations/thursday/NealChristiansen_ATA_TrimDeleteNotification_Windows7.pdf

BranchCache: Next Generation Branch Office Optimizations
Ravi Rao, Molly Brown
http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2009/presentations/monday/RaviRao-MollyBrown_BranchCache.pdf

Caching SMB Data for Offline Access and an Improved Online Experience
Molly Brown
http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2009/presentations/monday/RaviRao-MollyBrown_BranchCache.pdf

DFS-N Overview and Scalability
Marcello Hasegawa, Saad Ansari, Jose Barreto
http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2009/presentations/wednesday/SaadAnsari-Hasegawa_Barreto_DFS-N_Overview-rev.pdf

File Server Capacity Tool (FSCT) for CIFS/SMB/SMB2
Jose Barreto, Bartosz Nyczkowski, Jian Yan
http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2009/presentations/tuesday/BartoszNyczkowski-JianYan_FileServerCapacityTool.pdf

Green Storage in the Data Center
SW Worth
http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2009/presentations/monday/SWorth-GreenStorage_SDC_2009_2.pdf

Managing Storage of Virtual Machines with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SC-VMM)
Madhu Jujare
http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2009/presentations/tuesday/MadhuJujare_ManagingStorage_Virtual_Machines.pdf

Microsoft Network Monitor 3 (NM3)
Paul Long
http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2009/presentations/wednesday/PaulLong_TShootSMBwithNM3-rev.pdf

Microsoft Storage Management Update
Mohamed Lawindi, Michael Brasher
http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2009/presentations/wednesday/Mlawindi_MikeBrasher_Microsoft_StorMgmt_v1.pdf

SMB v2.1
David Kruse
http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2009/presentations/tuesday/DavidKruse_SMBv21.pdf

SMB2 Model Based Testing
Nico Kicillof, Albert Lee
http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2009/presentations/tuesday/NicoKicillof-AlbertLee_SMB2ModelBasedYesting.pdf

Understanding Windows File System Transactions
Christian Allred
http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2009/presentations/tuesday/ChristianAllred_UnderstandingWindowsFileSystemTransactions.pdf

Using Data Classification to Manage File Servers
Adi Oltean
http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2009/presentations/tuesday/AdiOltean_UsingDataClassificationToManageFileServers.pdf

I would also encourage you to check the full list of presentations from SDC 2009, visiting the site at
http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2009/presentations/

Windows Server DFS Namespaces (DFS-N) Reference

josebda — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 18:13:00 GMT

I get a number of questions regarding reference information for DFS Namespaces (also known as DFS-N). I gathered here the main links that can get you started on the subject:

Here are my own blog posts on DFS Namespaces (all updated for Windows Server 2008 R2 and including domain V2 namespaces):

Next, here are a couple of public DFS Namespaces Presentations by Microsoft:

Also, here are the main TechNet Reference links on DFS Namespaces for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 (includes domain V2 namespaces):

Namespaces

Deploying DFS Namespaces

Tuning DFS Namespaces

Last, here are some TechNet Reference on DFS Namespaces for Windows Server 2003 (does not include domain V2 namespaces):

Planning

High Availability

Reference

I hope those help you with your DFS Namespaces projects.

Configuring Failover Clusters with Windows Storage Server 2008

josebda — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 04:40:00 GMT

The Windows Storage Server Team just released a new 30-page white paper on "Configuring Failover Clusters with Windows Storage Server 2008".

This paper will guide you through the process of configuring the networks, domains and clustering features, including performance recommendations for a pair of Windows Storage Server 2008 appliances hosting a File Server or a Microsoft iSCSI Software Target in a high availability failover cluster.

The table of contents for this new white paper shows:

Failover Cluster Prerequisites

Establish a Network Naming Convention
TCP/IP Network Configuration
Public Network
Storage Network
Heartbeat Network

Procedures

Prepare the Failover Cluster
Create a Domain User Account
Add Nodes to an Active Directory Domain
Expose Storage to Cluster Nodes
Install the Failover Cluster Feature
Run Cluster Validation
Create and Configure the Failover Cluster
Create a Cluster
Set Cluster Network Properties and Apply Naming Convention

Create a Highly Available File Server

Mapping User Folders to the Highly Available File Server Share

Create a Highly Available iSCSI Target

Configuring Windows Firewall for Microsoft iSCSI Software Target
Installing the Microsoft iSCSI Software Target
Create the Failover iSCSI Target Resource Group
Create an iSCSI Target in the Microsoft iSCSI Target MMC
Create and Configure Virtual Disks
Connect Initiators

Microsoft iSCSI Software Target Performance Recommendations
Testing Your Failover Cluster Configuration

Download it from
http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/B/5/3B5632C8-7A04-44A6-8ED2-A122C2D6DDB1/ConfigureFailover.docx

Automatically uploading files from File Server to SharePoint using the File Classification Infrastructure (FCI)

josebda — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 23:28:00 GMT

Windows Server 2008 R2 introduced a new File Classification Infrastructure (FCI) and the team has been sharing different ways to put it to good use.

The latest one comes as a blog post that describes how to use the FCI SharePoint Upload PowerShell script in conjunction with the FCI File Management Tasks to automatically upload files from a File Server (running Windows Server 2008 R2) to SharePoint (both SharePoint Server 2007 and SharePoint Server 2010 Beta) based on a specific condition.

The post outlines the motivations and the process to automate the move of certain files from a file share to a document library. It also covers some more complex decisions you'll have to make in the process, like whether to delete the file from the file share or how the classification atributes can be preserved after the upload to SharePoint. This is guaranteed to get you thinking about a whole new set of scenarios that involve both File Servers and SharePoint Servers.

Read the full post at http://blogs.technet.com/filecab/archive/2009/12/14/automatically-upload-files-from-file-server-to-sharepoint-using-the-file-classification-infrastructure-fci.aspx

Six Uses for the Microsoft iSCSI Software Target

josebda — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 23:25:00 GMT

Scott M. Johnson, a Program Manager in the Windows Storage Server team, has just published a new blog post that might give you some ideas on different ways to use the Microsoft iSCSI Software Target. He outlines six different uses for it:

1) Consolidate storage for multiple application servers.
2) Test and Development scenarios are endless, especially for Clustering, Live Migration, SAN transfer and Storage Manager for SANs.
3) Setup an iSCSI SAN for a Windows cluster.
4) Consolidate servers into Hyper-V VMs and migrate the data to a Windows Storage Server.
5) Diskless SAN boot over iSCSI!
6) “Bonus storage” for people in your organization. Storage Administrators can be a hero! (for once).

See the full post (with lots of details and diagrams) at:
http://blogs.technet.com/storageserver/archive/2009/12/11/six-uses-for-the-microsoft-iscsi-software-target.aspx

Download for Powershell v2 for Windows 7? No need... It's already there!

josebda — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 21:19:00 GMT

A while back, Microsoft announced the release of PowerShell v2 for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 (see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=151321).

However, it is not clear to everyone that Powershell v2 is already part of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

I have seen people still asking for the link for PowerShell v2 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Such download does not exist, since the PowerShell included in the OS is already v2.

Part of this confusion may be due to the fact that the folder in Windows 7 is still called "C:\windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0". Maybe it's the fact that we still use the "PS1" file extension. Maybe it's the fact that the file version number for PowerShell.exe is actually "6.1.7600".

Just believe that v2 is already there... OK, maybe you don't believe me. Here's a little cmdlet to confirm it for you. You can launch PowerShell and use "get-host".

That should make it perfectly clear :-)

SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Evaluation November CTP available for MSDN/TechNet Subscribers

josebda — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:07:00 GMT

Great news following a very busy week for SQL Server with the PASS Community Summit: The new SQL Server 2008 R2 November CTP is now available for MSDN and TechNet subscribers.This download is expected to be available as a general download in a couple of days.

Title: SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Evaluation November CTP (x86, x64, ia64) - DVD (English)
Size: 4,011.88 (MB)
File Name: en_sql_server_2008_r2_enterprise_evaluation_november_ctp_x86_x64_ia64_dvd_455348.iso
Date Posted: 11/9/2009

I'm already downloading... :-)

Additional details at
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/nov09/11-03pass09pr.mspx

Mistakes when configuring your Hyper-V environment

josebda — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:02:00 GMT

I came across some interesting tips on things to consider in a virtualized environment by Greg Shields (Consultant and Microsoft MVP).
They are non-issues (or settled issues) on physical environments and you might overlook them when making the transition to virtual machines.

Here's a summary to get you interested:

Screensavers
Managing from the console
AV on VM disk files
Power options
Cluster Failback
RAM availability
Backup for CSV
Number of processors

Here are the links to the actual articles:

Scary SQL Server stuff: tombstones, phantoms, blobs, ghosts and zombies

josebda — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 22:10:00 GMT

This post mixes the spirit of Halloween and the passion for SQL Server :-)

Have you noticed how SQL Server has a number of things that seem right out of a horror movie?

As a test of your SQL Server expertise and for a fun Halloween trivia game, try to describe the items in the list below in the context of SQL Server.

If you can’t, follow the links to figure them out:

Tombstones. Marking the burial places of your deceased data. If you don't keep them, you might end up meeting the undead. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms186771.aspx
Phantoms. Seeing things that are not there? These haunted queries can only be avoided with proper isolation. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa259216.aspx
Deadlocks. Weird things happens when hairy transactions collide. If one of those wraps around you, you might end up as the victim. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178104.aspx
Blobs. Oh, the nightmares from these huge things sucking the air out of your database. Your only way out may be pushing them down a stream. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/3517w44b.aspx
Kill. Why would a database need such a command? Well, make sure you're well behaved it might never be needed. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms173730.aspx
Crypt properties. Tales from a database that implemented additional security. Just make sure you don't misplace your keys. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms189536.aspx
Hash Match. It's not a competition to see who's the fastest slasher. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa237090.aspx
Drop user. Users don't really live forever, after all. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms189438.aspx
Ghost rows. An army of ghosts, all perfectly lined up? Not really. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188436.aspx
Zombie rowsets. What's Halloween without zombies, even if they only show up in small places. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa258325.aspx
Execute reader. Sounds like a curse on whoever reads your data. But it's actually quite useful and fast. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/9kcbe65k.aspx
Shadow Copies. Not as scary as it sounds. It's much scarier when your data goes bad and you don't have them. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc966520.aspx
Nested Triggers. It could be a code for snipers waiting to hit you from the rooftops. But it's much harder to explain than that. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms190739.aspx
RIP. No, it's not an epitaph. It's a way to help you clear your tracks and achieve compliance. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb326650.aspx

And, of course, there’s a number of Wizards all over the place.

If you know any other good ones, please do share in the post comments.

P.S.: I was also reminded by Kalen Delaney of the classic "Halloween Problem" which can cause pretty scary results, as described at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_Problem. Not specific to SQL Server, but there was a related issue with SQL Server 7 : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/248441.

Happy Halloween!

Implementing an End-User Data Centralization Solution with Folder Redirection and Offlines Files

josebda — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 05:00:00 GMT

There's a new 77-page white paper covering the use of Folder Redirection and Offline Files in a very practical way.

Here's an excerpt:

"The objective of this white paper is to show through a case study how to use different Microsoft products and technologies to put in place a comprehensive solution satisfying the needs of a mid-sized organization around users’ file data management. The study was conducted by the Quality Assurance group of the Storage Solutions Division (SSD) at Microsoft, a division that focuses on enabling customers of all sizes to store, manage, and reliably access their file data."

Download from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=d8541618-5c63-4c4d-a0fd-d942cd3d2ec6

SharePoint 2010 beta in November. Details and documentation right now!

josebda — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 05:28:00 GMT

Jeff Teper (Corporate Vice President, SharePoint Server) and Steve Ballmer (CEO) shared SharePoint Server 2010 feature details and announced the November beta during the SharePoint Conference today in Las Vegas.

Jeff also posted a long and revealing blog, outlining 8 categories and 40 feature areas:

Sites

SharePoint Web Experience
Office Client
SharePoint Workspace
Office Web Apps
SharePoint Mobile Access

Communities

Collaborative Content
Social Feedback and Organization
User Profiles
MySites
People Connections

Content

Large Lists and Libraries
Enterprise Metadata
Document Sets
Web Publishing including Digital Asset Management
Governance and Records Management

Interactive Search Experience
Relevance
People Search
Connectivity
Scale and Platform Flexibility

Insights

Excel Services
Performance Point Services
SQL Server
“Gemini”
Visio Services

Composites

SharePoint Designer
InfoPath Forms Service
Access Services
Sandbox Solutions
Business Connectivity Services

Administration

Improved Upgrade
Throttling, Health Monitoring, Analytics
Web and PowerShell Admin
Scalability and Availability
Identity Management and Security

Development

New SharePoint APIs
Application Lifecycle
Visual Studio 2010 Support
Developer Dashboard View
Development on Windows 7

Jeff did an amazing job summarizing the upcoming SharePoint Server 2010 in a single blog post that includes additional information on each of the 48 bullets above, plus 8 screenshots (one per category). Absolute must read!!!

Check the blog post at

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/10/19/sharepoint-2010.aspx

Recorded keynote from the SharePoint Conference available from

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/sharepoint/videoGallery.aspx

Also, documentation and learning resources on SharePoint 2010 are available starting today for both Developers and IT Professionals:

SharePoint Developer Center on MSDN
SharePoint Products TechCenter on TechNet