SharePoint 2007 Publishing Site Defects

• Whenever you use publishing start date and publishing end date site columns, you will get two options 1) you can select any date or 2) you can select immediate option. But whenever you select immediate option and want to pick that in the web part and wont show the time i.e. in the backend and you can't see the time that the user selected for immediate option.

• Some of the publishing features doesn't work properly in internet explorer 6. For e.g. the pages gets locked and unable to edit the page.

• If you create a new default page in a publishing site, change the welcome page to point to this site, delete the original default.aspx and then rename your page to default.aspx, when you try to deploy it will fail, stating that a file with the same name already exists. This is due to the underlying GUID of the page being changed.

• If you have created and configured a staging site to use your own master pages, when you first deploy to a blank site collection, The Master page settings and alternate CSS URL settings are not applied. The BlueTabs Master becomes the default.

• SharePoint Designer often gets confused, thinking that you have items checked out when you haven't. Often you have to delete the file and recreate it to get around the problem.

• When in daylight savings mode, you need to set the time 1 hour earlier in both the staging environment and the destination server in order for deployment to work properly.

• If News articles are displayed on the home page with an RSS subscription link, clicking on it effectively subscribes you to everything on the portal site. As the default setting for lists in MOSS is RSS enable, people get items they never even asked for.
  

SharePoint NTLM versus Kerberos (Authentication Providers)

NTLM: Authentication is the well-known and loved challenge-response authentication mechanism. For SharePoint developers, using NTLM means that you really have no special configuration issues. As Microsoft likes to say, “It just works.”


Kerberos: It's complex ticket-based authentication mechanism that authenticates the client to the server and authenticates the server to the client. While Kerberos is more secure, it can be a bit challenging to set up properly.
SharePoint 2007 (and even 2003 with the latest SP) can be configured to use either NTLM or Kerberos. So which do you choose? Well, besides being more secure, Kerberos has two key advantages that make it worth consideration.

1. Performance - Kerberos caches information about the client after authentication. This means that it can perform better than NTLM particularly in large farm environments.

2. Delegation - Kerberos can delegate the client credentials from the SharePoint front-end web server to other back-end servers like SQL Server. As an example, consider a web part that access a SQL Server database and uses a connection string that relies on the end-user credentials (i. e., “Integrated Security=SSPI”). If the targeted SQL Server is not on the same physical server as SharePoint, the database log in will fail under NTLM authentication. This is the dreaded “double-hop” scenario that affects not only SharePoint, but ASP.NET applications as well. Under Kerberos, however, the log in will succeed.

All-in-all, Kerberos is a superior authentication mechanism and should be your first choice when deploying SharePoint 2007.

SharePoint Migration Tools

The following are the different out of box free migration options in SharePoint:

1. Backup and Restore a site or Import/Export 2. SharePoint Designer
3. Create a Web package4. Save a site as a site template using browser
5. Features & Solutions
6. Content Deployment

The following are the different third party migration options in SharePoint:

1. Ave Point's Doc Ave
2. SharePoint Site Migration Manager by Metalogix
3. Migration Manager for SharePoint by Quest
4. SharePoint Migration Framework by codeplex

1.Back up and Restore a site (.cmp) or import/export : we can move an entire site or subsite from test to prod, but they can't move alerts, Recycle Bin state.

2.SharePoint Designer : we can move an entire site/ subsite/list/images/web parts etc., from test to prod and it needs designer access on respective environments.

3.Create a Web package (.fwp): Web packages are a great way to duplicate site structure, but they cannot include list data, subsites, or security and permissions settings.

4. Save a site as a site template using browser (.stp): When we want Subsites created on a site to have a similar site structure, look and feel, and even content. we can do this by saving a site as a site template and adding it to the Site Template Gallery so that anyone can use the site as a template, but they can't include list data.

5.Features and Solutions: A Feature is a package composed of a set of XML files and it works fine for artifacts, but for a entire project we need to create feature for each site columns, content types, web parts, master pages, layout pages, images and other contents and its lengthy and time consuming process.
A Solution is a deployable and reusable package that can contain a set of Features.

6. Content Deployment: It can be a good solution, but it has some limitations: unless if we are deploying a whole site collection, we need to make sure all the assemblies, web.config modifications, and file system changes are present in the destination environment before we restore the backup. Content deployment is targeted at "contents" and not at "structure", although some of the SharePoint structures are migrated with the contents. Also, both environments must be connected for automatic content deployment to work.

7. AvePoint's Doc Ave Pricing: DocAve Backup and Recovery is $3,495 per server; DocAve High Availability is $2,395 per server (bundled at $3,995 per server); DocAve SharePoint Discovery is free; and DocAve SharePoint Administrator is $3,995 per WFE. Other prices vary depending on configuration.

Difference between Features, Feature Deffinition and Solutions

Using Features and Solutions will help customize sites and site templates.

Features: It helps sites to reuse functionality from one site to other sites without requiring to copy and paste XML. It is also an instance of Feature Definition.

Solutions: It helps to package Features in a cabinet (.cab) file along with meta data.

Feature Definition: It hides feature manifest contained in a feature directory and are installed at farm level.

SharePoint Evolution Past, Present and Furture

Easy way to remember the past, present and furture of Sharepoint

CMS: Content Management Server
SPS: SharePoint Portal Server
STS: SharePoint Team Services
MOSS2007: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Ent: Enterprise Edition
Std: Standard Edition
WSS: Windows SharePoint Server
MSS2010: Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010


2001 ---------->2002--------> 2003 ------->2006----------------> 2009

CMS 2001 ----->CMS2002------------------> MOSS 2007 Ent.-----> MSS 2010 Ent.

SPS 2001---------------------->SPS 2003---> MOSS 2007 Std. ----->MSS 2010 Std.

STS --------------------------->WSS 2.0-----> WSS 3.0
-------------------------------->(ASP.NET) -->(ASP.NET2.0)

Sharepoint Packaging and Migration Features

There are three different features for packaging Web sites in Office SharePoint:
1.Back up and Restore a site (.cmp)
2.Create a Web package(.fwp)
3. Save a site as a site template using browser (.stp)

.cmp file : stands for content migration packages
.fwp file : stands for feature web packages
.stp file : stands for site template file

1.Back up and Restore a site (.cmp): when you want to move an entire site or subsite to another server or location use back up and restore, but they can't move customizations, settings,workflows, alerts, Recycle Bin state and objects inside.

2.Create a Web package (.fwp): Web packages are a great way to duplicate site structure, but they cannot include list data, subsites, or security and permissions settings.

3. Save a site as a site template using browser (.stp): When you want Subsites created on a site to have a similar site structure, look and feel, and even content. You can do this by saving a site as a site template and adding it to the Site Template Gallery so that anyone can use the site as a template, but they can't include list data.

Things to know about Master Pages in Sharepoint World

Master Pages play an important role in the sharepoint world similar to the human beings who plays an imporant role in the real world. Like every human being by default has 32 teeths and master page also has 32 different content tages. Sharepoint master pages are based on ASP.NET 2.0

Default Eight different master pages:

· BlueBand.master
· BlackBand.master
· BlackSingleLevel.master
· BlackVertical.master
· BlueGlassBand.master
· BlueTabs.master
· BlueVertical.master
· OrangeSingleLevel.master

Content Tags:
Placeholders ID Content

PlaceHolderPageTitle: The site title that is displayed in the browser title bar.
PlaceHolderAdditionalPageHead: Any additional content that must go in the HTML HEAD tag, such as style sheet references.
PlaceHolderGlobalNavigation: The bar at the very top of the page that contains the global breadcrumb trail, login controls, and the Help button.
PlaceHolderGlobalNavigationSiteMap: The breadcrumb trail within the bar at the very top of the page.
PlaceHolderSiteName: The site name that appears immediately below the top navigation bar.
PlaceHolderSearchArea: The search controls that appear to the right of the site name.
PlaceHolderTopNavBar: The navigation bar that appears immediately below the site name. This is known as the top navigation bar.
PlaceHolderHorizontalNav: The tabs within the top navigation bar.
WSSDesignConsole: The Page Editing toolbar that appears directly beneath the top navigation bar when you are editing a page.
SPNavigation: An empty placeholder immediately below the top navigation bar.
PlaceHolderPageImage: A page image below the top navigation bar, in the left margin of the page, and to the left of the page title.
PlaceHolderTitleLeftBorder: A border between the page image and the page title.
PlaceHolderTitleBreadcrumb: The breadcrumb trail that appears immediately above the page title.
PlaceHolderPageTitleInTitleArea: The page title.
PlaceHolderMiniConsole: Page-level commands, such as Edit Page on a wiki site.
PlaceHolderTitleRightMargin: A margin to the right of the page title block.
PlaceHolderTitleAreaSeparator: A separator between the page title block and the main page content.
PlaceHolderLeftNavBarDataSource: The data source for the navigation menu in the left navigation area.
PlaceHolderCalendarNavigator: A date picker for calendar lists. When the page displays a calendar list, the date picker appears at the top of the left navigation area.
PlaceHolderLeftNavBarTop: An empty placeholder at the top of the left navigation area.
PlaceHolderLeftNavBar: The navigation menu in the left navigation area.
PlaceHolderLeftActions: An empty placeholder below the navigation menu in the left navigation area.
PlaceHolderNavSpacer: A graphic that defines the width of the left navigation area.
PlaceHolderLeftNavBarBorder: The right border of the left navigation area.
PlaceHolderBodyLeftBorder: The left border of the main page content area.
PlaceHolderPageDescription: The text description for the page, underneath the page title.
PlaceHolderMain: The main page content.
PlaceHolderBodyRightMargin: A margin to the right of the main page content.
PlaceHolderFormDigest: The Form Digest time-out control.
PlaceHolderUtilityContent: Any content that must be added below the page content, such as footnotes.
PlaceHolderBodyAreaClass: Any content that must be added below the page content, such as footnotes.
PlaceHolderTitleAreaClass: Additional title styles for the page header.

Difference between Site Master and System Master

Site Master: The site master page will be used by all publishing pages.

System Master: The changes that are not reflected by Site Master will be covered by System Master.

How Does SharePoint work?

The browser sends a DAV packet to IIS asking to perform a document check in. PKMDASL.DLL, an ISAPI DLL, parses the packet and sees that it has the proprietary INVOKE command. Because of the existence of this command, the packet is passed off to msdmserv.exe, who in turn processes the packet and uses EXOLEDB to access the WSS, perform the operation and send the results back to the user in the form of XML.

Top 10 Best Practices for Sharepoint Project Implementation

The following are some of the most important considerations for SharePoint Projects.

1. All the WFE’s should be either 32 bit or 64 bit, recommended 64 bit across the farm.
2. Proper Backup/Recovery process in place.
3. Enable Blob Caching on the web servers.
4. Limiting Content Database size to enhance manageability, i.e., content database should not exceed 100 GB.
5. Enforce site and content size limits.
6. If the environment serves more than 5000 users, then deploying a minimum of three front-end web servers.
7. Make sure to set all the web servers in the farm to recycle
8. Regularly clean up the recyle bins.
9. Make sure that list should not exceed more than 2,000 items.
10. Use DNS on your virtual server.