I have just started playing with PowerShell few days back....after initial issues like:
What should i use:
1. PowerShell Console
2. PowerShell ISE
3. PowerGUI AdminConsole
4. PowerGUI Script Editor
5. PowerWF
6. PowerShell Plus
So no worries guys....you can just start with PowerShell ISE....don't download any other tool....till you understand basics of PowerShell for SharePoint 2010.
Below is the script for begineers: Just copy and paste this in to ISE window, make sure you have executed
get-pssnapin :). If you see some red lines in display
So here we are all set:
$sitename = Read-Host "Please Enter Site Name"
Write-Host "Site Name Entered is" $sitename
if($sitename -eq "")
{"Please enter a value"}
else
{"You entered "+ $sitename}
Read-Host: Reads data from user, You can take as many as input parameters from users. Like backup farm or backup site collection or backup a single list.
Lets say: backup a single list, ask the sitename and show all the lists inside it. Tell him to put any name and you can do backup.
Write-Host - Write to window.
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Claims-Based Security in SharePoint 2010
The introduction of claims-based security support in SharePoint 2010 opens up several new doors with respect to managing the user accounts required to establish user identity. User identity is crucial in SharePoint Foundation and SharePoint Server 2010 because it provides the underlying infrastructure for essential services such as security, access control, auditing, and personalization and user profiles.
In SharePoint Portal Server 2003, user identity could only be established using a Windows identity, which forced companies to maintain an Active Directory (AD) account for each individual user. While this constraint was fine for intranet environments where all the users are employees of the same company, it was a painful fit for extranet environments and publicly-facing web sites.
SharePoint 2007 broke the dependency on AD for establishing user identity by integrating ASP.NET support for forms-based authentication (FBA). Today, many companies with SharePoint 2007 environments use FBA and an ASP.NET authentication provider to establish the identity of external users such as partners, vendors and customers. This approach typically involves creating user accounts and managing their credentials in a SQL Server database and removes the requirement to create a new AD account for each user.
Although the new FBA support in SharePoint 2007 was a step in the right direction, it did create a few new problems of its own. First, companies using FBA were forced to either build or purchase a user account management application in order to create new user accounts and to reset user passwords. That’s because the SharePoint platform never has and never will supply a UI or any of the code required to manage FBA user accounts.
A second problem is that companies usually create a separate implementation of FBA support behind each SharePoint farm and each ASP.NET application. This leads to scenarios in larger environments in which there are several redundant FBA databases that all track the exact same set of users. This causes extra work and potential confusion for users as well as the IT department.
SharePoint 2010 provides solutions to these problems with the introduction of claims-based security. The central concept is that a SharePoint 2010 farm isn’t hard-coded to a specific set of identity providers such as AD and ASP.NET authentication providers. Instead, you can configure trusts in a SharePoint 2010 farm and use any identity provider that you’d like. That is, as long as the identity provider has been designed and implemented in accordance with emerging Internet security standards that are collectively known as the WS-* Security Standards. The actual names of these standards include WS-Security, WS-Security Policy, WS-Trust and WS-Federation.
The good news is that there are already quite a few existing identity providers you can use to establish user identity in SharePoint 2010. For example, your company can outsource its identity management requirements to an identity service publicly available on the Internet such as Microsoft’s LiveID or Google’s OpenID.
This gives you the ability to track who your users are for the purposes of security, auditing, and personalization. This approach also lets you avoid the hassles of setting up a user database, storing credentials, and all of the associated password management headaches.
Let’s say you need to create and configure a SharePoint 2010 web application for your company’s public-facing web site. You are required to make this web site accessible using anonymous access, but you also need to make it possible for customers to log into the site to establish user identity. You can configure a trust within this SharePoint 2010 farm to the LiveID service and the OpenID service, then configure the web application to trust both of these identity providers.
When customers attempt to log into your web site, they will be redirected to the site for either LiveID or OpenID and prompted to enter their credentials. After they authenticate against the external identity provider, they will then be redirected back to your web site with an established identity. The best part about this approach is that it can be entirely accomplished through configuration, without having to write a single line of custom code.
Let’s say you work in an enterprise environment which suffers from the problem of redundant FBA databases containing the same set of users. You can leverage Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 (ADFS 2.0) to stand up your own custom identity provider that can be used across many different SharePoint farms and ASP.NET applications. This can provide a strategic approach in enterprise environments to create a centralized repository of user accounts for employees, partners, vendors and customers. In some scenarios this can be done without writing any custom code. In other scenarios, you can quickly adapt the FBA user management code you wrote for SharePoint 2007 with ADFS 2.0 in order to create and manage the user accounts in a far more reusable way.
In SharePoint Portal Server 2003, user identity could only be established using a Windows identity, which forced companies to maintain an Active Directory (AD) account for each individual user. While this constraint was fine for intranet environments where all the users are employees of the same company, it was a painful fit for extranet environments and publicly-facing web sites.
SharePoint 2007 broke the dependency on AD for establishing user identity by integrating ASP.NET support for forms-based authentication (FBA). Today, many companies with SharePoint 2007 environments use FBA and an ASP.NET authentication provider to establish the identity of external users such as partners, vendors and customers. This approach typically involves creating user accounts and managing their credentials in a SQL Server database and removes the requirement to create a new AD account for each user.
Although the new FBA support in SharePoint 2007 was a step in the right direction, it did create a few new problems of its own. First, companies using FBA were forced to either build or purchase a user account management application in order to create new user accounts and to reset user passwords. That’s because the SharePoint platform never has and never will supply a UI or any of the code required to manage FBA user accounts.
A second problem is that companies usually create a separate implementation of FBA support behind each SharePoint farm and each ASP.NET application. This leads to scenarios in larger environments in which there are several redundant FBA databases that all track the exact same set of users. This causes extra work and potential confusion for users as well as the IT department.
SharePoint 2010 provides solutions to these problems with the introduction of claims-based security. The central concept is that a SharePoint 2010 farm isn’t hard-coded to a specific set of identity providers such as AD and ASP.NET authentication providers. Instead, you can configure trusts in a SharePoint 2010 farm and use any identity provider that you’d like. That is, as long as the identity provider has been designed and implemented in accordance with emerging Internet security standards that are collectively known as the WS-* Security Standards. The actual names of these standards include WS-Security, WS-Security Policy, WS-Trust and WS-Federation.
The good news is that there are already quite a few existing identity providers you can use to establish user identity in SharePoint 2010. For example, your company can outsource its identity management requirements to an identity service publicly available on the Internet such as Microsoft’s LiveID or Google’s OpenID.
This gives you the ability to track who your users are for the purposes of security, auditing, and personalization. This approach also lets you avoid the hassles of setting up a user database, storing credentials, and all of the associated password management headaches.
Let’s say you need to create and configure a SharePoint 2010 web application for your company’s public-facing web site. You are required to make this web site accessible using anonymous access, but you also need to make it possible for customers to log into the site to establish user identity. You can configure a trust within this SharePoint 2010 farm to the LiveID service and the OpenID service, then configure the web application to trust both of these identity providers.
When customers attempt to log into your web site, they will be redirected to the site for either LiveID or OpenID and prompted to enter their credentials. After they authenticate against the external identity provider, they will then be redirected back to your web site with an established identity. The best part about this approach is that it can be entirely accomplished through configuration, without having to write a single line of custom code.
Let’s say you work in an enterprise environment which suffers from the problem of redundant FBA databases containing the same set of users. You can leverage Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 (ADFS 2.0) to stand up your own custom identity provider that can be used across many different SharePoint farms and ASP.NET applications. This can provide a strategic approach in enterprise environments to create a centralized repository of user accounts for employees, partners, vendors and customers. In some scenarios this can be done without writing any custom code. In other scenarios, you can quickly adapt the FBA user management code you wrote for SharePoint 2007 with ADFS 2.0 in order to create and manage the user accounts in a far more reusable way.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Forrester: SharePoint, On Its Own, Isn't Cut Out for BPM
SharePoint as a Platform
Yes, we know that SharePoint (news, site) is a platform. And we know that the key use for it is business collaboration. But being a platform typically means you can extend and/or build onto it to do many different things.
One of those other things appears to be business process management. In a recent report, entitled SharePoint and BPM — Finding The Sweet Spot, Forrester (news, site) dives into how SharePoint has been extended to support BPM and where it has fallen short of being the solution most organizations typically need.
While SharePoint makes simple workflows easy to create, on its own it is not suitable for business process applications. A rich BPM experience is available using the SharePoint platform, but this will require the use of partner products to achieve optimum results.
And that is the gist of this research paper. Yes, you can try to build business process applications on top of SharePoint. No, you will probably not be satisfied with the results, unless you have integrated a third party BPM product.
Why Not SharePoint for BPM?
Forrester offers several reasons why SharePoint offers limited features for BPM, including:
Out of the box, SharePoint processes are simple, so you can't create seamless business processes without a lot of custom coding.
Yes, to build a real business process application, there's a lot of custom coding you will have to do and that of course takes time, costs money and introduces a number of problems related to the flexibility of the application.
Site collections, while great for helping organize content and information, can be a major problem when developing business processes that cross organizational boundaries.
Governance issues rear their ugly head in this instance as well. A well-governed SharePoint implementation will go a long way towards supporting effective business process apps. Unfortunately Forrester tell us that organizations still have a ways to go in this area.
The big culprit that limits SharePoint for BPM solutions is its underlying architecture. SharePoint uses Windows Workflow Foundation (WP), which supports only two process patterns: sequence and machine state. This results in SharePoint working best on the procedural end of the process spectrum, while most SharePoint deployments are focused on on the opposite end — as practices:
SharePoint and Business Processes
Partners Can Provide Added Capabilities
Forrester points out that because SharePoint can only offer procedural-based processes without a ton of complex coding, it can't easily offer the ability to adapt processes to handle the exceptions that would be required in typical SharePoint implementations.
Most people new to BPM tend to think that standardization of all work and activities is the end goal. However, depending on the type of process, more and more exceptions emerge, with process developers building in workarounds and redeploying models. After a while, one discovers that longterm TCO is closely related to the ability to elegantly handle exceptions.
And this why even Microsoft encourages finding an integrated partner application to fulfill the BPM requirement. Some of the vendors that offer solutions include AgilePoint, Global 360, K2 and Nintex. All offer different ways to resolve the challenges that SharePoint offers out of the box. Some are better than others.
A Platform Must be Leveraged Properly
What this all boils down to is the reality that platforms can't do everything, and that includes SharePoint. Yes we understand that certain amount of customization doesn't hurt, otherwise what's the point of a platform really — just build it as an application.
But, SharePoint was not built to provide business process management on its own. So check out the available third party tools if you want to add some business process capabilities to your SharePoint implementation and spend your SharePoint development effort on something it does do well.
SharePoint as a Platform
Yes, we know that SharePoint (news, site) is a platform. And we know that the key use for it is business collaboration. But being a platform typically means you can extend and/or build onto it to do many different things.
One of those other things appears to be business process management. In a recent report, entitled SharePoint and BPM — Finding The Sweet Spot, Forrester (news, site) dives into how SharePoint has been extended to support BPM and where it has fallen short of being the solution most organizations typically need.
While SharePoint makes simple workflows easy to create, on its own it is not suitable for business process applications. A rich BPM experience is available using the SharePoint platform, but this will require the use of partner products to achieve optimum results.
And that is the gist of this research paper. Yes, you can try to build business process applications on top of SharePoint. No, you will probably not be satisfied with the results, unless you have integrated a third party BPM product.
Why Not SharePoint for BPM?
Forrester offers several reasons why SharePoint offers limited features for BPM, including:
Out of the box, SharePoint processes are simple, so you can't create seamless business processes without a lot of custom coding.
Yes, to build a real business process application, there's a lot of custom coding you will have to do and that of course takes time, costs money and introduces a number of problems related to the flexibility of the application.
Site collections, while great for helping organize content and information, can be a major problem when developing business processes that cross organizational boundaries.
Governance issues rear their ugly head in this instance as well. A well-governed SharePoint implementation will go a long way towards supporting effective business process apps. Unfortunately Forrester tell us that organizations still have a ways to go in this area.
The big culprit that limits SharePoint for BPM solutions is its underlying architecture. SharePoint uses Windows Workflow Foundation (WP), which supports only two process patterns: sequence and machine state. This results in SharePoint working best on the procedural end of the process spectrum, while most SharePoint deployments are focused on on the opposite end — as practices:
SharePoint and Business Processes
Partners Can Provide Added Capabilities
Forrester points out that because SharePoint can only offer procedural-based processes without a ton of complex coding, it can't easily offer the ability to adapt processes to handle the exceptions that would be required in typical SharePoint implementations.
Most people new to BPM tend to think that standardization of all work and activities is the end goal. However, depending on the type of process, more and more exceptions emerge, with process developers building in workarounds and redeploying models. After a while, one discovers that longterm TCO is closely related to the ability to elegantly handle exceptions.
And this why even Microsoft encourages finding an integrated partner application to fulfill the BPM requirement. Some of the vendors that offer solutions include AgilePoint, Global 360, K2 and Nintex. All offer different ways to resolve the challenges that SharePoint offers out of the box. Some are better than others.
A Platform Must be Leveraged Properly
What this all boils down to is the reality that platforms can't do everything, and that includes SharePoint. Yes we understand that certain amount of customization doesn't hurt, otherwise what's the point of a platform really — just build it as an application.
But, SharePoint was not built to provide business process management on its own. So check out the available third party tools if you want to add some business process capabilities to your SharePoint implementation and spend your SharePoint development effort on something it does do well.
Top 6 New Features for SharePoint Designer 2010 Workflows
What are my favorite new features for SharePoint Designer workflows?
1. Reusable workflow
This new feature allows you to create a workflow that can be applied to as many lists or libraries on the site as you need. The reusable workflow can be attached to a list or library using both SharePoint Designer or using the workflow settings page in the UI. In addition, the reusable workflow can be associated with a particular site content type. The workflow can then only be activated only on lists or libraries containing that content type, which eliminates the need to build a check content type action into the workflow itself.
2. SharePoint Designer ribbon allows easy access to workflow building blocks
The SharePoint Designer ribbon is your one-stop-shop for all the tools and parts you need to create your workflows.
3. Workflow action prompt
You can now type your workflow logic directly into the workflow. SharePoint Designer will prompt you with the possible actions that match what you are typing. This makes creating each step in your workflow much more efficient.
4. Customize out of the box workflows
Using SharePoint Designer, you can now customize the out-of-the-box workflows that come with every SharePoint site. This means that you can make small tweaks and adjustments to the pre-configured workflows without having to create your own custom workflow from scratch.
5. Impersonation step
The impersonation step allows the workflow to perform all actions within that step with the permissions of the author of the workflow, not the person who initiates the workflow. This means that the workflow can perform actions the user would otherwise be restricted from doing on the site – for example copying an item or document to another library to which the user has only visitor access.
6. Two-way import/export between SharePoint Designer and Microsoft Visio Premium 2010
This new feature allows SharePoint workflows to be built visually using tools in Visio 2010 and exported directly into SharePoint Designer. Using the Microsoft SharePoint Workflow template in Visio (found in the “Flowcharts” template section), you will get access to all the actions and conditions available within SharePoint Designer. The screenshot above is only a small sample of those available. In addition, workflows already created within SharePoint Designer can be imported into Visio for visual representation.
Bonus! Workflows no longer have to be tied to a list item
Although not specifically a feature of SharePoint Designer, there is a new feature for 2010 and I believe it is worth mentioning: Workflows in 2010 do not have to run on a single list item or document. The new Document Set feature of SharePoint Server 2010 allows you to bundle together different types of documents into groupings that make sense for your business. Rather than having to run a workflow on each individual document within the set, you can now run a single workflow on the entire Document Set.
What are my favorite new features for SharePoint Designer workflows?
1. Reusable workflow
This new feature allows you to create a workflow that can be applied to as many lists or libraries on the site as you need. The reusable workflow can be attached to a list or library using both SharePoint Designer or using the workflow settings page in the UI. In addition, the reusable workflow can be associated with a particular site content type. The workflow can then only be activated only on lists or libraries containing that content type, which eliminates the need to build a check content type action into the workflow itself.
2. SharePoint Designer ribbon allows easy access to workflow building blocks
The SharePoint Designer ribbon is your one-stop-shop for all the tools and parts you need to create your workflows.
3. Workflow action prompt
You can now type your workflow logic directly into the workflow. SharePoint Designer will prompt you with the possible actions that match what you are typing. This makes creating each step in your workflow much more efficient.
4. Customize out of the box workflows
Using SharePoint Designer, you can now customize the out-of-the-box workflows that come with every SharePoint site. This means that you can make small tweaks and adjustments to the pre-configured workflows without having to create your own custom workflow from scratch.
5. Impersonation step
The impersonation step allows the workflow to perform all actions within that step with the permissions of the author of the workflow, not the person who initiates the workflow. This means that the workflow can perform actions the user would otherwise be restricted from doing on the site – for example copying an item or document to another library to which the user has only visitor access.
6. Two-way import/export between SharePoint Designer and Microsoft Visio Premium 2010
This new feature allows SharePoint workflows to be built visually using tools in Visio 2010 and exported directly into SharePoint Designer. Using the Microsoft SharePoint Workflow template in Visio (found in the “Flowcharts” template section), you will get access to all the actions and conditions available within SharePoint Designer. The screenshot above is only a small sample of those available. In addition, workflows already created within SharePoint Designer can be imported into Visio for visual representation.
Bonus! Workflows no longer have to be tied to a list item
Although not specifically a feature of SharePoint Designer, there is a new feature for 2010 and I believe it is worth mentioning: Workflows in 2010 do not have to run on a single list item or document. The new Document Set feature of SharePoint Server 2010 allows you to bundle together different types of documents into groupings that make sense for your business. Rather than having to run a workflow on each individual document within the set, you can now run a single workflow on the entire Document Set.
Sunday, July 4, 2010
Technical Problems Solved by FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint
Every organization has unique search requirements. FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint has the capability to customize the search experience so that it fits how your business and your people work. Specifically, with FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint, you can:
• Deliver results that are contextually relevant.
• Search in the language of your business.
• Tune relevancy to improve accuracy.
• Customize the search platform to meet your specific indexing and search requirements.
• Configure the user interface to customize the search experience for information workers.
Enterprise search solutions from Microsoft enable you to:
Provide users with results that are meaningful and dynamically tailored to their jobs, roles, and functions within the organization. This means that your sales teams will be quickly able to find product information, collateral, and answers to RFP questions, while your engineering teams will see specifications and requirements documents at the top of their results sets. Site administrators can tailor search quickly and easily to deliver contextually relevant results the first time.
Give users the ability to use terms and languages that are unique to your business. Most organizations frequently use a set of internal names, acronyms, or code words. These words can be confusing to different groups, outsiders, or new members of your organization. Users will be able to use their own terminology to sort, refine, and query your content. Furthermore, advanced language support provides your employees the ability to find content written in its native language.
Ensure that searches provide accurate ranking for relevant results. The major reason that a user continues to use a search engine is if it returns relevant information near the top of the search results. Microsoft search gets better with social ranking capabilities by promoting popular documents. Site administrators will quickly and easily be able to create and deploy new custom ranking algorithms that are tuned meet multiple business demands simultaneously.
Provide a great out-of-the-box experience to get search up and running quickly. Additionally, provide a platform that grows with your business needs so that you can:
o Quickly access and crawl new content repositories.
o Add your users and business partners to the lists of extracted entities.
o Perform custom content processing such as sentiment analysis or machine translation.
o Tailor the user interface with custom SharePoint Web Parts or extend the ones that are available out of the box.
FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint provides an enterprise search platform for fulfilling these aims. As a brief overview, FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint includes a connector framework that enables the crawler to index files and metadata from various types of content repositories. It also provides an indexing engine that stores the crawled data in an efficient manner in index files, and it provides query servers, query object models, and user interfaces for performing searches on the indexed data.
You will learn more about each of these components later in this guide, but for now be aware that these components all work together to fulfill the aims and meet the requirements of enterprise search solutions.
This section provides a summary of the new and enhanced capabilities that FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint provides compared to the other search products from Microsoft. You can use this section to gain an overview of the value of implementing enterprise search solutions based on FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint.
Visual Search Capabilities
The visual search capabilities provide an engaging, useful, and efficient way for information workers to interact with search results.
Document Thumbnails
Word documents and PowerPoint presentations can be previewed directly in search results. A thumbnail image is displayed along with the search results to provide rapid recognition of information. This feature is part of the Search Core Results Web Part for FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint, and the feature can be configured in that Web Part.
Scrolling PowerPoint previews
The PowerPoint document preview enables an information worker to browse the actual slides in the presentation.
Visual Best Bets
SharePoint Server 2010 Search keywords can have definitions, synonyms, and Best Bets associated with them. FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint adds the ability for you to define Visual Best Bets for keywords.
These visual search elements are unique to FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint.
Conversational Search Capabilities
The conversational search capabilities provide ways for information workers to interact with and refine their search results, so that they can quickly find the information they require.
Sort Results on Managed Properties
With FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint, users can sort results on any managed properties, such as sorting by Author, Document Size, or Title. Relevance ranking profiles can also be surfaced as sorting criteria, allowing end users to pick a different relevance ranking as desired.
This sorting is considerably more powerful than sorting in SharePoint Server 2010 search. By default, SharePoint Server 2010 sorts results on each document's relevance rank. Information workers can re-sort the results by date modified, but these are the only two sort options in SharePoint Server 2010.
Deep Results Refinement
Refinement with FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint is considerably more powerful than refinement in SharePoint Server 2010.
SharePoint Server 2010 automatically generates 'shallow' refinement for search results that enable a user to apply additional filters to their search results based on the values returned by the query. 'Shallow' refinement is based on the managed properties returned from the first 50 results by the original query.
FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint enables you to specify whether a managed property can be used in a 'shallow' or 'deep' refinement. 'Deep' refinement is based on statistical aggregation of managed property values within the entire result set; ‘shallow’ refinement is just based on, by default, the first 50 results returned by the query. Using 'deep' refinement, you can find exactly what you are looking for, such as a person who has written a document about a subject, even if this document would otherwise appear down the result list. 'Deep' refinement can also display counts, and lets the user see the number of results in each refinement category.
You can also use the statistical data returned for numeric refinements in other types of analysis.
Similar Results
With FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint, results returned by a query include links to 'Similar Results'. When a user clicks on the link, the search is re-defined and re-run to include documents that are similar to the result in question.
Result Collapsing
FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint documents that have the same checksum stored in the index will be collapsed as one document in the search result. This means that documents stored in multiple locations in a source system would only be displayed once during search with usage of the collapse search parameter. Collapsed results include links to 'Duplicates'. When a user clicks on the link, the search result displays all versions of this document.
Similar results and result collapsing are unique to FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint and are not provided in SharePoint Server 2010 search.
Contextual Search Capabilities
FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint allows you to associate Best Bets, Visual Best Bets, document promotions, document demotions, site promotions, and site demotions with defined user contexts in order to personalize the experience for information workers. You can use the FAST Search User Context link in the Site Collection Settings pages to define user contexts for these associations.
Relevancy Tuning by Document or Site Promotions
SharePoint Server 2010 enables you to identify varying levels of authoritative pages that help you tune relevancy ranking by site. FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint adds the ability for you to specify individual documents within a site for promotion, and furthermore enables you to associate each promotion with user contexts.
Synonyms
SharePoint Server 2010 keywords can have one-way synonyms associated with them. With one-way synonyms when a query includes a synonymous term for a keyword, items that contain the keyword are returned. However, if a query includes the keyword, then items that contain the synonymous terms are not returned (unless they also contain the keyword).
FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint extends synonyms by enabling you to implement both two-way and one-way synonyms. With two-way synonyms, when a query includes a synonymous term for a keyword, items that contain the keyword are returned (just as for one-way synonyms). Furthermore, if a search expression includes the keyword, then items that contain the synonymous terms are returned, regardless of whether they also contain the keyword.
Managed Properties and Metadata creation
SharePoint Server 2010 enables you to create metadata property mappings (known as managed properties). FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint adds the ability for you to:
Enable stemming support and word forms for managed property values, when they are used by an information worker in a query.
Choose between static and dynamic summaries for display in search results. A dynamic summary will only display a hit-highlighted summary of the specific managed property in the result.
Define whether information workers can sort results on the managed property in question.
Define whether information workers can use the managed property in query operators or filters.
Define whether search results page can use the managed property as a query refiner or deep query refiner in results pages.
Define the priority associated with the managed property. The priority is one of the inputs into the ranking algorithm, and defines how documents with the search term in this property should be ranked against other documents that may have the search term in other properties.
Define how managed properties can be grouped into one or more full-text search-enabled indexes.
Property Extraction
Property extraction identifies key information such as people, companies, and locations in documents. The properties can then be used to enhance the search experience, for instance by providing search result refinement based on the properties. You can improve the precision of the property extraction by editing the include lists and exclude lists for each property extractor. Excluded items are removed immediately, while included items take effect the next time the content is indexed. You can also create custom property extractors based on your organization's specific content using Windows PowerShell and SharePoint administration. Dictionary or Taxonomy based extractors, also called verbatim extractors, will allow you to extract managed properties based on a fixed list of known terms. Developers will also be able to create more dynamic extractors based on the FAST matcher framework and will be able to extend the document pipeline with specialized classifiers, entity extractors, or other processing can be used to support specialized scenarios.
Rank Profiles
The index schema in FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint includes rank profiles, which control how relevancy ranking is calculated for each item in search results.
A rank profile defines how relevancy calculations are performed when you search a full-text index. A rank profile consists of several components which are weighted when calculating an item's relevance. You can adjust the weights of a profile’s components to improve search result relevance. Rank profile components include the following:
Freshness. This component manages how the age of an item affects rank.
Proximity. This component manages how the distance between query terms affects rank.
Authority. This component manages how links between Web documents affect rank.
Query authority. This component manages how user selections in previous query results affect rank.
Context. This component manages how different managed properties within the associated full-text indexes contribute to the rank.
Managed properties directly impacting the rank. You can specify that the value of a numeric managed property is added to the rank, or you can specify that certain values of a managed property impact the rank. In the latter case you can, for example, define that documents of a given type (as defined by a specific managed property) will get a relevancy boost in the results.
You can tailor different rank profiles to different use cases, or you can enable advanced information workers to select different rank profiles for different queries.
• Deliver results that are contextually relevant.
• Search in the language of your business.
• Tune relevancy to improve accuracy.
• Customize the search platform to meet your specific indexing and search requirements.
• Configure the user interface to customize the search experience for information workers.
Enterprise search solutions from Microsoft enable you to:
Provide users with results that are meaningful and dynamically tailored to their jobs, roles, and functions within the organization. This means that your sales teams will be quickly able to find product information, collateral, and answers to RFP questions, while your engineering teams will see specifications and requirements documents at the top of their results sets. Site administrators can tailor search quickly and easily to deliver contextually relevant results the first time.
Give users the ability to use terms and languages that are unique to your business. Most organizations frequently use a set of internal names, acronyms, or code words. These words can be confusing to different groups, outsiders, or new members of your organization. Users will be able to use their own terminology to sort, refine, and query your content. Furthermore, advanced language support provides your employees the ability to find content written in its native language.
Ensure that searches provide accurate ranking for relevant results. The major reason that a user continues to use a search engine is if it returns relevant information near the top of the search results. Microsoft search gets better with social ranking capabilities by promoting popular documents. Site administrators will quickly and easily be able to create and deploy new custom ranking algorithms that are tuned meet multiple business demands simultaneously.
Provide a great out-of-the-box experience to get search up and running quickly. Additionally, provide a platform that grows with your business needs so that you can:
o Quickly access and crawl new content repositories.
o Add your users and business partners to the lists of extracted entities.
o Perform custom content processing such as sentiment analysis or machine translation.
o Tailor the user interface with custom SharePoint Web Parts or extend the ones that are available out of the box.
FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint provides an enterprise search platform for fulfilling these aims. As a brief overview, FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint includes a connector framework that enables the crawler to index files and metadata from various types of content repositories. It also provides an indexing engine that stores the crawled data in an efficient manner in index files, and it provides query servers, query object models, and user interfaces for performing searches on the indexed data.
You will learn more about each of these components later in this guide, but for now be aware that these components all work together to fulfill the aims and meet the requirements of enterprise search solutions.
This section provides a summary of the new and enhanced capabilities that FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint provides compared to the other search products from Microsoft. You can use this section to gain an overview of the value of implementing enterprise search solutions based on FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint.
Visual Search Capabilities
The visual search capabilities provide an engaging, useful, and efficient way for information workers to interact with search results.
Document Thumbnails
Word documents and PowerPoint presentations can be previewed directly in search results. A thumbnail image is displayed along with the search results to provide rapid recognition of information. This feature is part of the Search Core Results Web Part for FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint, and the feature can be configured in that Web Part.
Scrolling PowerPoint previews
The PowerPoint document preview enables an information worker to browse the actual slides in the presentation.
Visual Best Bets
SharePoint Server 2010 Search keywords can have definitions, synonyms, and Best Bets associated with them. FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint adds the ability for you to define Visual Best Bets for keywords.
These visual search elements are unique to FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint.
Conversational Search Capabilities
The conversational search capabilities provide ways for information workers to interact with and refine their search results, so that they can quickly find the information they require.
Sort Results on Managed Properties
With FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint, users can sort results on any managed properties, such as sorting by Author, Document Size, or Title. Relevance ranking profiles can also be surfaced as sorting criteria, allowing end users to pick a different relevance ranking as desired.
This sorting is considerably more powerful than sorting in SharePoint Server 2010 search. By default, SharePoint Server 2010 sorts results on each document's relevance rank. Information workers can re-sort the results by date modified, but these are the only two sort options in SharePoint Server 2010.
Deep Results Refinement
Refinement with FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint is considerably more powerful than refinement in SharePoint Server 2010.
SharePoint Server 2010 automatically generates 'shallow' refinement for search results that enable a user to apply additional filters to their search results based on the values returned by the query. 'Shallow' refinement is based on the managed properties returned from the first 50 results by the original query.
FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint enables you to specify whether a managed property can be used in a 'shallow' or 'deep' refinement. 'Deep' refinement is based on statistical aggregation of managed property values within the entire result set; ‘shallow’ refinement is just based on, by default, the first 50 results returned by the query. Using 'deep' refinement, you can find exactly what you are looking for, such as a person who has written a document about a subject, even if this document would otherwise appear down the result list. 'Deep' refinement can also display counts, and lets the user see the number of results in each refinement category.
You can also use the statistical data returned for numeric refinements in other types of analysis.
Similar Results
With FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint, results returned by a query include links to 'Similar Results'. When a user clicks on the link, the search is re-defined and re-run to include documents that are similar to the result in question.
Result Collapsing
FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint documents that have the same checksum stored in the index will be collapsed as one document in the search result. This means that documents stored in multiple locations in a source system would only be displayed once during search with usage of the collapse search parameter. Collapsed results include links to 'Duplicates'. When a user clicks on the link, the search result displays all versions of this document.
Similar results and result collapsing are unique to FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint and are not provided in SharePoint Server 2010 search.
Contextual Search Capabilities
FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint allows you to associate Best Bets, Visual Best Bets, document promotions, document demotions, site promotions, and site demotions with defined user contexts in order to personalize the experience for information workers. You can use the FAST Search User Context link in the Site Collection Settings pages to define user contexts for these associations.
Relevancy Tuning by Document or Site Promotions
SharePoint Server 2010 enables you to identify varying levels of authoritative pages that help you tune relevancy ranking by site. FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint adds the ability for you to specify individual documents within a site for promotion, and furthermore enables you to associate each promotion with user contexts.
Synonyms
SharePoint Server 2010 keywords can have one-way synonyms associated with them. With one-way synonyms when a query includes a synonymous term for a keyword, items that contain the keyword are returned. However, if a query includes the keyword, then items that contain the synonymous terms are not returned (unless they also contain the keyword).
FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint extends synonyms by enabling you to implement both two-way and one-way synonyms. With two-way synonyms, when a query includes a synonymous term for a keyword, items that contain the keyword are returned (just as for one-way synonyms). Furthermore, if a search expression includes the keyword, then items that contain the synonymous terms are returned, regardless of whether they also contain the keyword.
Managed Properties and Metadata creation
SharePoint Server 2010 enables you to create metadata property mappings (known as managed properties). FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint adds the ability for you to:
Enable stemming support and word forms for managed property values, when they are used by an information worker in a query.
Choose between static and dynamic summaries for display in search results. A dynamic summary will only display a hit-highlighted summary of the specific managed property in the result.
Define whether information workers can sort results on the managed property in question.
Define whether information workers can use the managed property in query operators or filters.
Define whether search results page can use the managed property as a query refiner or deep query refiner in results pages.
Define the priority associated with the managed property. The priority is one of the inputs into the ranking algorithm, and defines how documents with the search term in this property should be ranked against other documents that may have the search term in other properties.
Define how managed properties can be grouped into one or more full-text search-enabled indexes.
Property Extraction
Property extraction identifies key information such as people, companies, and locations in documents. The properties can then be used to enhance the search experience, for instance by providing search result refinement based on the properties. You can improve the precision of the property extraction by editing the include lists and exclude lists for each property extractor. Excluded items are removed immediately, while included items take effect the next time the content is indexed. You can also create custom property extractors based on your organization's specific content using Windows PowerShell and SharePoint administration. Dictionary or Taxonomy based extractors, also called verbatim extractors, will allow you to extract managed properties based on a fixed list of known terms. Developers will also be able to create more dynamic extractors based on the FAST matcher framework and will be able to extend the document pipeline with specialized classifiers, entity extractors, or other processing can be used to support specialized scenarios.
Rank Profiles
The index schema in FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint includes rank profiles, which control how relevancy ranking is calculated for each item in search results.
A rank profile defines how relevancy calculations are performed when you search a full-text index. A rank profile consists of several components which are weighted when calculating an item's relevance. You can adjust the weights of a profile’s components to improve search result relevance. Rank profile components include the following:
Freshness. This component manages how the age of an item affects rank.
Proximity. This component manages how the distance between query terms affects rank.
Authority. This component manages how links between Web documents affect rank.
Query authority. This component manages how user selections in previous query results affect rank.
Context. This component manages how different managed properties within the associated full-text indexes contribute to the rank.
Managed properties directly impacting the rank. You can specify that the value of a numeric managed property is added to the rank, or you can specify that certain values of a managed property impact the rank. In the latter case you can, for example, define that documents of a given type (as defined by a specific managed property) will get a relevancy boost in the results.
You can tailor different rank profiles to different use cases, or you can enable advanced information workers to select different rank profiles for different queries.
Sunday, June 6, 2010
What's New In SharePoint Server 2010
Changes from Office SharePoint Server 2007 to SharePoint Server 2010
This article describes the features that have been deprecated or removed from Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. Deprecated features are shipped in SharePoint Server 2010 for compatibility with previous product versions. These features will be removed in subsequent versions.
In this article:
Deprecated features: Features removed from SharePoint Server 2010
Deprecated features: The following features are shipped with SharePoint Server 2010 but will be removed from subsequent versions.
Stsadm command-line tool
Description: The Stsadm command-line tool has been deprecated.
Reason for change: The Stsadm command-line tool will be superseded by Windows PowerShell 2.0.
Migration path: The Stsadm command-line tool is included to support compatibility with previous product versions. You should use Windows PowerShell 2.0 when performing command-line administrative tasks.
Site Directory feature
Description: The Site Directory provides a list of links to all sites within a site collection.
Reason for change: This functionality will be replaced by the social features of the User Profile service.
Migration path: Use the Tags and Notes feature to search on any tag that has been entered into the system and see the sites associated with it, as well as other tags and notes that are associated with that site. For a more structured approach to lists of links, every site collection comes with the ability to create lists of links, and workflows so that editorial control can be defined. A script or timer job can create and update a custom links list, or you can staple a feature to the Create Site Collection page in Central Administration.
Scorecard export to Reporting Services
Description: SharePoint Server 2010 no longer supports exporting a scorecard to SQL Server Reporting Services.
Reason for change: This functionality had a low adoption rate.
Business Data Catalog
Description: In Office SharePoint Server 2007, external data was integrated into solutions by using the Business Data Catalog, which was a shared service in the context of the Shared Service Provider framework.
Reason for change: In SharePoint Server 2010, external data is integrated into solutions using the new Business Data Connectivity service, which no longer runs in the context of the Shared Service Provider framework and instead fits into the new shared services framework of SharePoint Server 2010.
Migration path: The Business Data Connectivity service object model is not backward compatible with the object model used in the Business Data Catalog. To support the upward compatibility of Office SharePoint Server 2007 Business Data Catalog solutions with SharePoint Server 2010, an additional service, the Application Registry Service, is available in SharePoint Server 2010 that supports the object model used in the Business Data Catalog. We recommend that new solution development not be done on the Application Registry Service, which is provided only to guarantee upward compatibility of 2007 Microsoft Office system solutions.
Features removed from SharePoint Server 2010
The following features and functionality are no longer available in SharePoint Server 2010.
32-bit operating systems
Description: SharePoint Server 2010 requires a 64-bit operating system. Running SharePoint Server 2010 on 32-bit operating systems is no longer supported.
Reason for change: SharePoint Server 2010 has numerous features that benefit from the performance provided by 64-bit operating systems.
Migration path: Install SharePoint Server 2010 on 64-bit operating systems.
Side-by-side installation
Description: The ability to perform side-by-side installation of Office SharePoint Server 2007 and SharePoint Server 2010 on the same server is being removed. This change is related to the removal of support for Gradual upgrade.
Reason for change: Compatibility and performance issues prevent side-by-side installation.
Migration path: Perform upgrade-in-place installation on the same hardware, or perform database attach to a new farm. Use new hardware if both Office SharePoint Server 2007 and SharePoint Server 2010 versions of a farm must exist at the same time.
For more information, see Perform a database attach upgrade to SharePoint Server 2010.
Gradual upgradeDescription: Support for the gradual upgrade feature is being removed as part of the removal of Side-by-side installation.
Reason for change: Compatibility and performance issues prevent side-by-side installation.
Migration path: Use the read-only database capability of Office SharePoint Server 2007 with the database attach upgrade capability of SharePoint Server 2010 to minimize downtime.
For more information, see Using AAM URL redirection as part of the upgrade process (SharePoint Server 2010) (white paper).
For long upgrade periods where you must maintain both Office SharePoint Server 2007 and SharePoint Server 2010 versions of a farm, you can use the alternate access mapping (AAM) URL redirection capability provided in SharePoint Server 2010. Upgrades that use AAM URL redirection are performed by using database attach upgrade command-line operations instead of timer job-based events that are scheduled from the user interface (UI).
For more information, see Using AAM URL redirection as part of the upgrade process (SharePoint Server 2010) (white paper).
Office Web ComponentsDescription: SharePoint Server 2010 no longer supports Office Web Components (OWC). The PivotChart, PivotTable, and Trend Chart report types are no longer available as options in the SharePoint Dashboard Designer.
Reason for change: This is a 2007 Microsoft Office system feature that is now replaced by the features available in Excel Services in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 in SharePoint Server 2010.
Migration path: In SharePoint Server 2010, use Excel Services instead of Office Web Components.
Web discussionsDescription: Web discussions enable users to add comments about documents and pages without modifying their actual content. SharePoint Server 2010 does not support Web discussions.
Reason for change: This feature was deprecated in Office SharePoint Server 2007 because of its low adoption rate. The feature has now been removed from the product.
Migration path: The Note Board feature in SharePoint Server 2010 now provides this functionality.
SQL Server 2000 data sourcesDescription: SQL Server 2000 data sources are no longer supported in SharePoint Server 2010.
Reason for change: SQL Server 2000 does not fully support many of the newer data features available in SharePoint Server 2010.
Migration path: Use data sources that are on Microsoft SQL Server 2005 or Microsoft SQL Server 2008.
ODBC data sourcesDescription: ODBC data sources are no longer supported in SharePoint Server 2010.
Reason for change: Newer and more versatile database connection options have replaced the functionality of ODBC.
Migration path: ODBC is no longer listed as an option for connecting to a data source. Use another data connection type.
Version 3 themesDescription: A theme is a set of colors, fonts, and decorative elements that enable you to quickly change the appearance of a site. The functionality provided in the version 3 themes is not available in the newly designed version 4 themes.
Reason for change: Version 4 themes are redesigned to simplify the process of generating themes. The new architecture is not compatible with the architecture of version 3 themes.
Migration path: Version 3 themes are still supported if the UI mode is kept at version 3. Version 3 themes are not supported in version 4 UI mode.
Storage Management pageDescription: The Storage Management (storman.aspx) page is now removed from the Central Administration Web site.
Reason for change: This feature can cause dramatic performance issues in a SharePoint farm. Site administrators who use this feature were often unaware of the performance slowdown that it was imposing on users.
Migration path: Site administrators can no longer use this feature.
Web bot software agentsDescription: A Web bot software agent is a dynamic object on a Web page that is evaluated when the page is saved or, in some cases, when the page is opened in a Web browser. Search crawlers and indexers are examples of Web bots. Developers can no longer use Web bot entry points and users cannot add Web bots to SharePoint Server 2010 sites.
Reason for change: This functionality is replaced by Web Parts.
Migration path: Use Web Parts instead of Web bots.
E-mail enabled groups and Microsoft SharePoint Directory Management service (DMS)Description: The Microsoft SharePoint Directory Management service (DMS) connects SharePoint sites to an organization's user directory to provide enhanced e-mail features. If a SharePoint farm is using DMS, users cannot enable SharePoint groups to use e-mail.
Reason for change: The type of authentication used in DMS is being replaced with claims authentication.
Migration path: This feature is not available in SharePoint Server 2010. Use claims authentication instead.
For more information, see Plan authentication methods (SharePoint Server 2010).
Permissions for sub-websDescription: When you assign a permission level to a parent site, that permission level is inherited by all sub-webs of the parent site by default. In Office SharePoint Server 2007, if you wanted a sub-web to have different permissions from its parent, you could edit the inherited permission level definition at the sub-web scope. The result was that you would have two permission levels with the same name but different permissions, depending on their scope. For example, suppose you assigned the Design permission level to a parent site, but you want to change the permissions on a sub-web so that users will not be able to apply style sheets to pages in that sub-web. In Office SharePoint Server 2007, you could edit the Design permission level on the sub-web itself, remove the Apply Style Sheets permission, and save the permission level as Design. It would not be possible, just by looking at permission levels, to determine that the sub-web actually had a different set of permissions than its parent site.
Migration path: In SharePoint Server 2010, if you want to give different permissions to a sub-web, you must assign a separate permission level to the sub-web. Site collections that are upgraded from Office SharePoint Server 2007 and have these unique permission level structures will continue to work. However, the user interface in SharePoint Server 2010 does not have a way to edit an inherited permission level at the sub-web scope, so you cannot change them or create new permission level definitions of this type. If you have a specific business need for continuing to use the Office SharePoint Server 2007 process, use the SharePoint Server 2010 object model.
Shared Services Provider (SSP)Description: Shared Services Providers (SSPs) do not exist in SharePoint Server 2010.
Reason for change: Service applications replace this functionality.
Migration path: Use service applications for many of the features that were supported and configured in SSPs.
Internationalized domain namesDescription: Although Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 supported internationalized domain names (IDNs), SharePoint Server 2010 does not.
Reason for change: Support of internationalized domain names (IDNs) has been deprecated.
Migration path: If you currently use IDNs with Office SharePoint Server 2007 and you plan to upgrade or migrate to SharePoint Server 2010, you must stop using IDNs, delete all IDN settings, and then set up an environment that does not use IDN before doing so.
Site directory templateDescription: This site template is not available as an option in SharePoint Server 2010.
Reason for change: The functionality provided in this template is now replaced by Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions.
Migration path: Use the social tagging features in SharePoint Server 2010 to get much of the functionality provided by the site directory template. For more information, see Social tagging overview (SharePoint Server 2010) and Privacy and security implications of social tagging (SharePoint Server 2010).
News portal templateDescription: This site template is not available as an option in SharePoint Server 2010.
Reason for change: The functionality provided in this template is now replaced by Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions.
Migration path: This template can still be accessed and used programmatically by developers. It is also still available as options in the UI if the SharePoint Server 2010 farm is upgraded from Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Use the publishing sites template to replace this template.
Collaboration portal templateDescription: This site template is not available as an option in SharePoint Server 2010.
Reason for change: The functionality provided in this template is now replaced by Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions.
Migration path: This template can still be accessed and used programmatically by developers. It is also still available in the UI if the SharePoint Server 2010 farm is upgraded from Office SharePoint Server 2007. Use the publishing sites template to replace this template.
This article describes the features that have been deprecated or removed from Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. Deprecated features are shipped in SharePoint Server 2010 for compatibility with previous product versions. These features will be removed in subsequent versions.
In this article:
Deprecated features: Features removed from SharePoint Server 2010
Deprecated features: The following features are shipped with SharePoint Server 2010 but will be removed from subsequent versions.
Stsadm command-line tool
Description: The Stsadm command-line tool has been deprecated.
Reason for change: The Stsadm command-line tool will be superseded by Windows PowerShell 2.0.
Migration path: The Stsadm command-line tool is included to support compatibility with previous product versions. You should use Windows PowerShell 2.0 when performing command-line administrative tasks.
Site Directory feature
Description: The Site Directory provides a list of links to all sites within a site collection.
Reason for change: This functionality will be replaced by the social features of the User Profile service.
Migration path: Use the Tags and Notes feature to search on any tag that has been entered into the system and see the sites associated with it, as well as other tags and notes that are associated with that site. For a more structured approach to lists of links, every site collection comes with the ability to create lists of links, and workflows so that editorial control can be defined. A script or timer job can create and update a custom links list, or you can staple a feature to the Create Site Collection page in Central Administration.
Scorecard export to Reporting Services
Description: SharePoint Server 2010 no longer supports exporting a scorecard to SQL Server Reporting Services.
Reason for change: This functionality had a low adoption rate.
Business Data Catalog
Description: In Office SharePoint Server 2007, external data was integrated into solutions by using the Business Data Catalog, which was a shared service in the context of the Shared Service Provider framework.
Reason for change: In SharePoint Server 2010, external data is integrated into solutions using the new Business Data Connectivity service, which no longer runs in the context of the Shared Service Provider framework and instead fits into the new shared services framework of SharePoint Server 2010.
Migration path: The Business Data Connectivity service object model is not backward compatible with the object model used in the Business Data Catalog. To support the upward compatibility of Office SharePoint Server 2007 Business Data Catalog solutions with SharePoint Server 2010, an additional service, the Application Registry Service, is available in SharePoint Server 2010 that supports the object model used in the Business Data Catalog. We recommend that new solution development not be done on the Application Registry Service, which is provided only to guarantee upward compatibility of 2007 Microsoft Office system solutions.
Features removed from SharePoint Server 2010
The following features and functionality are no longer available in SharePoint Server 2010.
32-bit operating systems
Description: SharePoint Server 2010 requires a 64-bit operating system. Running SharePoint Server 2010 on 32-bit operating systems is no longer supported.
Reason for change: SharePoint Server 2010 has numerous features that benefit from the performance provided by 64-bit operating systems.
Migration path: Install SharePoint Server 2010 on 64-bit operating systems.
Side-by-side installation
Description: The ability to perform side-by-side installation of Office SharePoint Server 2007 and SharePoint Server 2010 on the same server is being removed. This change is related to the removal of support for Gradual upgrade.
Reason for change: Compatibility and performance issues prevent side-by-side installation.
Migration path: Perform upgrade-in-place installation on the same hardware, or perform database attach to a new farm. Use new hardware if both Office SharePoint Server 2007 and SharePoint Server 2010 versions of a farm must exist at the same time.
For more information, see Perform a database attach upgrade to SharePoint Server 2010.
Gradual upgradeDescription: Support for the gradual upgrade feature is being removed as part of the removal of Side-by-side installation.
Reason for change: Compatibility and performance issues prevent side-by-side installation.
Migration path: Use the read-only database capability of Office SharePoint Server 2007 with the database attach upgrade capability of SharePoint Server 2010 to minimize downtime.
For more information, see Using AAM URL redirection as part of the upgrade process (SharePoint Server 2010) (white paper).
For long upgrade periods where you must maintain both Office SharePoint Server 2007 and SharePoint Server 2010 versions of a farm, you can use the alternate access mapping (AAM) URL redirection capability provided in SharePoint Server 2010. Upgrades that use AAM URL redirection are performed by using database attach upgrade command-line operations instead of timer job-based events that are scheduled from the user interface (UI).
For more information, see Using AAM URL redirection as part of the upgrade process (SharePoint Server 2010) (white paper).
Office Web ComponentsDescription: SharePoint Server 2010 no longer supports Office Web Components (OWC). The PivotChart, PivotTable, and Trend Chart report types are no longer available as options in the SharePoint Dashboard Designer.
Reason for change: This is a 2007 Microsoft Office system feature that is now replaced by the features available in Excel Services in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 in SharePoint Server 2010.
Migration path: In SharePoint Server 2010, use Excel Services instead of Office Web Components.
Web discussionsDescription: Web discussions enable users to add comments about documents and pages without modifying their actual content. SharePoint Server 2010 does not support Web discussions.
Reason for change: This feature was deprecated in Office SharePoint Server 2007 because of its low adoption rate. The feature has now been removed from the product.
Migration path: The Note Board feature in SharePoint Server 2010 now provides this functionality.
SQL Server 2000 data sourcesDescription: SQL Server 2000 data sources are no longer supported in SharePoint Server 2010.
Reason for change: SQL Server 2000 does not fully support many of the newer data features available in SharePoint Server 2010.
Migration path: Use data sources that are on Microsoft SQL Server 2005 or Microsoft SQL Server 2008.
ODBC data sourcesDescription: ODBC data sources are no longer supported in SharePoint Server 2010.
Reason for change: Newer and more versatile database connection options have replaced the functionality of ODBC.
Migration path: ODBC is no longer listed as an option for connecting to a data source. Use another data connection type.
Version 3 themesDescription: A theme is a set of colors, fonts, and decorative elements that enable you to quickly change the appearance of a site. The functionality provided in the version 3 themes is not available in the newly designed version 4 themes.
Reason for change: Version 4 themes are redesigned to simplify the process of generating themes. The new architecture is not compatible with the architecture of version 3 themes.
Migration path: Version 3 themes are still supported if the UI mode is kept at version 3. Version 3 themes are not supported in version 4 UI mode.
Storage Management pageDescription: The Storage Management (storman.aspx) page is now removed from the Central Administration Web site.
Reason for change: This feature can cause dramatic performance issues in a SharePoint farm. Site administrators who use this feature were often unaware of the performance slowdown that it was imposing on users.
Migration path: Site administrators can no longer use this feature.
Web bot software agentsDescription: A Web bot software agent is a dynamic object on a Web page that is evaluated when the page is saved or, in some cases, when the page is opened in a Web browser. Search crawlers and indexers are examples of Web bots. Developers can no longer use Web bot entry points and users cannot add Web bots to SharePoint Server 2010 sites.
Reason for change: This functionality is replaced by Web Parts.
Migration path: Use Web Parts instead of Web bots.
E-mail enabled groups and Microsoft SharePoint Directory Management service (DMS)Description: The Microsoft SharePoint Directory Management service (DMS) connects SharePoint sites to an organization's user directory to provide enhanced e-mail features. If a SharePoint farm is using DMS, users cannot enable SharePoint groups to use e-mail.
Reason for change: The type of authentication used in DMS is being replaced with claims authentication.
Migration path: This feature is not available in SharePoint Server 2010. Use claims authentication instead.
For more information, see Plan authentication methods (SharePoint Server 2010).
Permissions for sub-websDescription: When you assign a permission level to a parent site, that permission level is inherited by all sub-webs of the parent site by default. In Office SharePoint Server 2007, if you wanted a sub-web to have different permissions from its parent, you could edit the inherited permission level definition at the sub-web scope. The result was that you would have two permission levels with the same name but different permissions, depending on their scope. For example, suppose you assigned the Design permission level to a parent site, but you want to change the permissions on a sub-web so that users will not be able to apply style sheets to pages in that sub-web. In Office SharePoint Server 2007, you could edit the Design permission level on the sub-web itself, remove the Apply Style Sheets permission, and save the permission level as Design. It would not be possible, just by looking at permission levels, to determine that the sub-web actually had a different set of permissions than its parent site.
Migration path: In SharePoint Server 2010, if you want to give different permissions to a sub-web, you must assign a separate permission level to the sub-web. Site collections that are upgraded from Office SharePoint Server 2007 and have these unique permission level structures will continue to work. However, the user interface in SharePoint Server 2010 does not have a way to edit an inherited permission level at the sub-web scope, so you cannot change them or create new permission level definitions of this type. If you have a specific business need for continuing to use the Office SharePoint Server 2007 process, use the SharePoint Server 2010 object model.
Shared Services Provider (SSP)Description: Shared Services Providers (SSPs) do not exist in SharePoint Server 2010.
Reason for change: Service applications replace this functionality.
Migration path: Use service applications for many of the features that were supported and configured in SSPs.
Internationalized domain namesDescription: Although Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 supported internationalized domain names (IDNs), SharePoint Server 2010 does not.
Reason for change: Support of internationalized domain names (IDNs) has been deprecated.
Migration path: If you currently use IDNs with Office SharePoint Server 2007 and you plan to upgrade or migrate to SharePoint Server 2010, you must stop using IDNs, delete all IDN settings, and then set up an environment that does not use IDN before doing so.
Site directory templateDescription: This site template is not available as an option in SharePoint Server 2010.
Reason for change: The functionality provided in this template is now replaced by Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions.
Migration path: Use the social tagging features in SharePoint Server 2010 to get much of the functionality provided by the site directory template. For more information, see Social tagging overview (SharePoint Server 2010) and Privacy and security implications of social tagging (SharePoint Server 2010).
News portal templateDescription: This site template is not available as an option in SharePoint Server 2010.
Reason for change: The functionality provided in this template is now replaced by Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions.
Migration path: This template can still be accessed and used programmatically by developers. It is also still available as options in the UI if the SharePoint Server 2010 farm is upgraded from Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Use the publishing sites template to replace this template.
Collaboration portal templateDescription: This site template is not available as an option in SharePoint Server 2010.
Reason for change: The functionality provided in this template is now replaced by Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions.
Migration path: This template can still be accessed and used programmatically by developers. It is also still available in the UI if the SharePoint Server 2010 farm is upgraded from Office SharePoint Server 2007. Use the publishing sites template to replace this template.
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