The second* session I attended today was a lively Q&A with an all-star roster of SharePoint experts in front of a capacity (plus standing room) crowd. Included on the panel were some familiar faces from panels I'd caught previously (Joel Oleson, Doron Bar-Caspi, Todd Klindt, and Shane Young), along with some new faces, albeit with names which should be familiar to anyone active in the SharePoint space. These new faces included Andrew Connell, Ben Curry, and Dan Holme.
This was another session that lends itself to a bulleted presentation of my takeaways and, since it was briskly paced (at just 45-minutes), I wasn't able to catch everything, but here are the nuggets that I'm able to share:
- Introducing himself, consultant Dan Holme shared the exciting news that in two weeks he's going to begin providing SharePoint support for the Olympics. As it turns out, every time you see a prepared-in-advance video during the Games this summer, SharePoint (and Holme) will have been involved in delivering that content. Pretty cool, huh? So, as Holme suggested, "think of SharePoint every time you turn on the Games this August."
- Per Microsoft's Bar-Caspi, In a 64-bit environment, you don't need to set anything regarding sizes for Application Pool recycling, "provided you have enough horsepower."
- Encryption for SharePoint is available out-of-the-box if SQL 2008 is running and enabled.
- There is a fixed Kerberos-over-HTTP limit, and this is not a limitation of SharePoint as is mistakenly assumed. The fix involves the UDP packet size, and requires changes to server- and client-side, but it can be fixed.
- Regarding server namespaces, host names, domain names, and names of your portals don't have to be the same ... and, in fact, shouldn't be the same, per Oleson.
- Choosing his words carefully, Connell said, "in my opinion, the content type inheritance is a little flaky" in response to a code-related question.
- If I understood correctly, it's possible to script a config database which will allow you to install SharePoint across a farm via a one-word (!) command. That scripting information is available on Ben Curry's blog.
- Curry has a new book, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Best Practices, co-authored with Bill English (and with input from several of Curry's co-panelists on today's Ask the Experts session) due out next week.
* If you're wondering why I'm kicking off today's panel bloggin with the second panel I attended, well, therein lies a tale. The first session I attended this morning proved to be the first one of the week to present an all-but impossible challenge for me to blog. Or at least to blog and also do any sort of justice to the content. This was the Extending Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer with Custom Controls, Web Parts, and Workflow Activities breakout session. Not surprisingly, it was the Web Parts component that was the hook for me to attend, but the Web Part portion was over in the blink of an eye amidst what was otherwise a pretty hard core code-centric demo with lots of talk of arrays, divs, assemblies, and the like. I'm going to have to cry "uncle" on this one, sorry.
Posted
Jun 12 2008, 03:13 PM
by
John Anderson
John Anderson is new to both Bamboo Solutions and to SharePoint, but he isn't new to online community. Having recently departed AOL, where he was a Programming Manager for that company's social media team, John is thrilled to have joined the Bamboo family as Manager of Content & Syndication. As a member of the Online Operations team, John takes great pride in helping shape the creation and direction of Bamboo Nation, our nascent SharePoint community. Within Bamboo Nation, John writes the blog SharePoint Blank, in which he (always candidly, sometimes humorously, and even occasionally informatively) documents his daily progress in learning SharePoint. John is also profoundly uncomfortable writing about himself in the third person and is going to stop now.