SharePoint. Open Source Tools Level SharePoint 2010 Collaboration Playing Field. Well-Planted SharePoint 2010 Backup Strategy Could Help Save the Farm

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M

SharePoInt

IMPleMentatIon

Open Source Tools Level SharePoint 2010

Collaboration Playing Field

These add-ons can offer organizations with tight budgets a leg up in addressing

the shortcomings of SharePoint’s built-in capabilities. BY SHAWN SHELL

Strategy

Well-Planted SharePoint 2010 Backup

Strategy Could Help Save the Farm

A farm backup is a good first step, but it should be accompanied by other

important moves as part of a larger enterprise backup strategy. BY BRIEN M. POSEY

ManageMent

SharePoint Performance Sinks,

Swims With SQL Server Throughput

To help ensure that collaboration environments don’t get bogged down, organizations need to build and maintain a scalable back-end database

system that can eliminate SQL Server disk I/O issues. BY DON JONES

Open Source Add-Ons

Offer Budget Relief

for SharePoint Users

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

EvEn AS MiCROSOFT prepares to release an update to SharePoint, organizations continue to adopt the current version as they strive to become more collabora-tive enterprises. But in many cases, companies need to improve on SharePoint’s built-in capabilities to fully meet their collaboration needs. There’s no lack of SharePoint add-on products available for purchase from independent software vendors—but what can you do when money is an object?

In this edition of SharePoint, consultant Shawn Shell presents an overview of

some of the most visible open source options. Shell says these technologies

of-fer alternatives to commercial products for companies with limited or nonexis-tent budgets for expanding the functionality of SharePoint systems.

Next, Brien M. Posey explains that while setting up SharePoint server farm backups is a simple process, farm backups on their own might not be enough to protect your data in case disaster strikes. He points out other important consid-erations and shares some strategies for backing up SharePoint installations.

Finally, Don Jones describes how to identify potential SharePoint performance

bottlenecks and develop a plan to make sure that the collaboration platform

runs quickly and effectively. The trick, he says, is deploying a scalable back-end system that can eliminate SQL Server disk I/O issues.

If there’s a SharePoint topic you’d like to learn about, send me an email.n

JOnATHAn GOURLAy

Site and News Editor, SearchContentManagement.com

Editor’s Note I Open Source Tools Level SharePoint 2010 Collaboration Playing Field I S Well-Planted SharePoint 2010 Backup Strategy Could Help Save the Farm SI M SharePoint Performance Sinks, Swims With SQL Server Throughput

Open Source Tools Level

SharePoint 2010

Collaboration Playing Field

These add-ons can offer organizations with tight budgets a leg up

in addressing the shortcomings of SharePoint’s built-in capabilities.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

AS THE MARkET LEAdER in enterprise collaboration technology, SharePoint gets lots of attention. That speaks not only to the place it holds in the enterprise, but also to the size of the independent software vendor (ISV)

community that designs, sells and

supports an overwhelming number of add-ons for SharePoint.

But while there are many available tools that can expand SharePoint’s collaboration capabilities and fill the gaps in its out-of-the-box functional-ity, some organizations simply can’t afford them because of budget con-straints. As a result, many often find themselves at a competitive disad-vantage.

The good news is that one of the strongest dimensions of the

Share-Point universe is a surprisingly ro-bust open source community. It com-prises individuals, user organizations and even ISVs that provide tools and utilities that are reasonable alterna-tives to commercially licensed add-on products. What follows are descrip-tions of some of those technologies— to serve as an introduction to the market for open source add-ons that can aid SharePoint 2010 collaboration initiatives.

AdMiniSTRATiOn CAn BE A STRUGGLE

SharePoint administrators often grap-ple with administration tasks. One of the most important factors to keep in mind is that Microsoft’s Central

Editor’s Note I Open Source Tools Level SharePoint 2010 Collaboration Playing Field I S Well-Planted SharePoint 2010 Backup Strategy Could Help Save the Farm SI M SharePoint Performance Sinks, Swims With SQL Server Throughput

Administration tool set is not truly central. Administrators are faced with a myriad of places where they can manipulate everything from security settings to search visibility. While a number of companies sell tools de-signed to help reduce the burden, there are a few open source tools that can help as well.

For example, for administrators who have pulled their hair out over a bad “feature”—for example, custom-ized code installed on a SharePoint server—or tried to figure out where a specific feature might be active, the Feature Administration and Clean Up utility might answer their problems. Like a lot of open source projects, this one was born of administration frus-trations and focuses exclusively on features in SharePoint farms. If you’re

trying to figure out where a feature is deployed or attempting to correct a problem with a feature that has been partially uninstalled or deactivated, or you need to activate a feature across a large number of sites, this tool could come in handy.

SharePoint SUSHI is an open source utility that enables users to report on various dimensions of the Share-Point environment. Anyone who has worked with SharePoint for a while knows that it offers a dearth of ad-ministrative reporting. This is espe-cially true for tracking which users have access to what in a system and getting an accurate picture of content “ROT”—that is, finding content that is redundant, outdated or trivial. While SharePoint SUSHI might not solve all of those administrative challenges, it

p

p_{Figure 1. Security reports list views enabled by SharePoint SUSHI.} Editor’s Note I Open Source Tools Level SharePoint 2010 Collaboration Playing Field I S Well-Planted SharePoint 2010 Backup Strategy Could Help Save the Farm SI M SharePoint Performance Sinks, Swims With SQL Server Throughput

will help in some areas, like bulk cre-ation of sites and reporting on secu-rity configurations (see Figure 1).

Because SharePoint SUSHI is a con-sole application that must be installed alongside SharePoint, it will only be useful if you have root access to your SharePoint farm. It’s also designed to be used with on-premises farms, not with SharePoint Online sites in Mi-crosoft’s cloud-based Office 365 en-vironment or other setups in which administrators don’t have direct ac-cess to SharePoint farms. But once it’s installed, you can run a myriad of reports, upload profile photos of us-ers and create new views of lists. It also enables administrators to test el-ements of SharePoint farms, such as support for sending email.

COnTEnT MAnAGEMEnT BEyOnd THE BOx

SharePoint is unequivocally an enter-prise content management (ECM) platform, but it does not provide the underlying framework for all ECM use cases. While it includes docu-ment managedocu-ment and Web content management capabilities as native features, SharePoint does not include other ECM capabilities, like learning management or blogging. As a result, organizations that want to use Share-Point for those purposes might want to investigate the following two open source add-ons.

Many organizations have or are considering implementing a learning management system (LMS) to cre-ate learning curricula for employees

p

p_{Figure 2. The SharePoint Learning Kit offers a simple way to set up learning management environments.} Editor’s Note I Open Source Tools Level SharePoint 2010 Collaboration Playing Field I S Well-Planted SharePoint 2010 Backup Strategy Could Help Save the Farm SI M SharePoint Performance Sinks, Swims With SQL Server Throughput

and track their progress. But an LMS can be an expensive proposition that is often disconnected from enterprise content. The SharePoint Learning Kit offers an alternative to commercial systems using a basic tool built on top of SharePoint (see Figure 2, page 5).

The tool can be useful in small and medium-sized organizations or de-partments in larger firms that want to create a formalized learning

environ-ment. Again, if you have SharePoint 2010 in-house, this application might be the right choice. It appears to have all of the “bones” of its commercial cousins without the cost and potential complexity. Furthermore, since it was built with SharePoint as the underly-ing platform, it should help keep both the module content and the delivery process in the same environment, po-tentially reducing disconnects.

p

p_{Figure 3. Managing authentication is possible using the SharePoint 2010 FBA Pack from Visigo Consulting.} Editor’s Note I Open Source Tools Level SharePoint 2010 Collaboration Playing Field I S Well-Planted SharePoint 2010 Backup Strategy Could Help Save the Farm SI M SharePoint Performance Sinks, Swims With SQL Server Throughput

SharePoint Learning Kit also claims to comply with the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM), which is an important hurdle to clear among those looking for an LMS product that adheres to industry standards.

The Community Kit for SharePoint (CKS) is really not just a single ap-plication or product but represents a collection of functional additions to the SharePoint platform. CKS is an ongoing open source project aimed at extending the functionality of Share-Point through sample applications, best practices and reusable modules.

Because CKS is not a singular prod-uct, it’s tough to pigeonhole. How-ever, it can be helpful to organizations looking to use SharePoint for public or internal blogs, seeking to enhance SharePoint 2007’s social networking capabilities or needing help with de-velopment beyond what’s supported in Visual Studio 2010 for SharePoint. It is important to carefully read the documentation included with each of

these project aspects because they are handled by separate teams. That means the various additions to the project might not be current with a specific version of SharePoint.

HELP WAnTEd

WiTH SHAREPOinT SECURiTy

SharePoint development scenarios have become more complex as the collaboration platform has evolved. Developers are learning new ways of creating and deploying custom ap-plications, and business users are de-manding more accessibility to data using extranets or semi-private col-laborative spaces. As a result, many SharePoint administrators and devel-opers are looking at ways to better manage user authentication and se-curity in their environments.

One of the advantages of Share-Point is that it is a proper .NET citizen. That means that virtually anything you can accomplish in a typical ASP.NET Web application is possible in SharePoint, including managing au-thentication tasks. When using Active Directory is not an option, many or-ganizations leverage Microsoft’s SQL Membership Provider technology for forms-based authentication (FBA). But configuring an FBA environment and contending with the other admin-istrative consequences, such as

man-SharePoint development

scenarios have become

more complex as the

collaboration platform

has evolved.

aging users and resetting passwords, is not included in the basic SQL Mem-bership Provider setup.

While there was an open source FBA development kit add-on for SharePoint 2007, it had only basic interfaces for existing SQL Member-ship Provider functions: It supported adding new users, resetting pass-words and logging in to SharePoint. In addition, it isn’t compatible with SharePoint 2010. But Visigo Software Consulting Inc. has created an open source tool set called SharePoint 2010 FBA Pack (see Figure 3, page 6). The basic functionality is similar to the original, with features such as a “change password” function in the Site Actions menu, search function-ality for user management and more flexible features configuration.

For application developers, jQuery is a popular JavaScript library that helps simplify the ability to manipu-late HTML code in Web browsers. It’s, therefore, natural to want to le-verage that power to exchange data with SharePoint and create highly responsive, client-side functional-ity even in older SharePoint deploy-ments. SPServices is an open source tool that uses the jQuery framework and Microsoft’s SharePoint Web Ser-vices technology so developers can create interactive Web elements.

This extension of the jQuery library

can benefit both on-premises instal-lations and Office 365 deployments. It enables data exchange and ad-vanced operations that are not pos-sible with server-side code—for ex-ample, connections to and exchanges of data with the user profile service in a SharePoint Site Collection.

While the technologies highlighted in this article certainly do not repre-sent an exhaustive list of the available alternatives to commercial applica-tions, they do provide organizations with a basis for getting started on evaluating possible open source fixes to SharePoint’s capability gaps. There’s a vast universe of ISVs, us-ers and consultants working to come up with open source tools and utili-ties that can help level the SharePoint 2010 collaboration playing field for organizations that are operating un-der tight budgets. The open source options are well worth exploring. n

For application

developers, jQuery

is a popular JavaScript

library that helps

simplify the ability

to manipulate HTML

code in Web browsers.

Well-Planted SharePoint 2010

Backup Strategy Could Help

Save the Farm

A farm backup is a good first step, but it should be accompanied by

other important moves as part of a larger enterprise backup strategy.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

SHAREPOinT inCLUdES so many differ-ent compondiffer-ents that it is sometimes difficult to determine what needs to be incorporated in a SharePoint 2010 backup strategy. Part of the reason for this is that many different types of backups can be done for the en-terprise collaboration platform. For

example, SharePoint 2010 can be

backed up at the server farm, appli-cation and database levels. There are also numerous other categories of backup procedures intended to dupli-cate individual aspects of SharePoint such as searches or customizations.

Of all the individual backup tech-niques that can be used when plan-ning for the worst, one of the easier ones to tackle is that of backing up a

SharePoint farm. Such a farm backup

is a simple process that can, in fact, be completed using a single Power-Shell command:

Backup-SPFarm –Directory

<Backup folder> -BackupMethod {Full | Differential}

The basic farm backup, as you can see, involves nothing more than spec-ifying a backup destination and deter-mining whether you want to create a full or a differential backup. You can either run this command manually or build a script around the command to schedule backups as part of your SharePoint 2010 backup strategy. Us-ing it essentially saves the configu-ration and the Central Administra-tion databases. It is worth noting that

Editor’s Note I Open Source Tools Level SharePoint 2010 Collaboration Playing Field I S Well-Planted SharePoint 2010 Backup Strategy Could Help Save the Farm SI M SharePoint Performance Sinks, Swims With SQL Server Throughput

recovering these databases from a backup is anything but intuitive, but the process is laid out in detail on the Microsoft TechNet website.

In addition, a farm backup pre-serves the following elements:

p pWeb applications p pService applications p pSearch p

pSecure Store Service user creden-tialing system (Note, though, that

the Secure Store Service is only included in a farm backup when you perform a full backup.) p pContent databases p pDatabase snapshots p pSite collections p pTrusted programs p

pSandboxed packages (Though technically included in a farm backup, such programs are not visible to the rest of the farm since they are associated with specific site collections.)

It might at first seem as though farm backups are all one needs for

a SharePoint 2010 backup strategy. But while Microsoft recommends that you routinely back up farms, do-ing that alone might prove to be inad-equate.

One of the reasons for this is that farm backups are not completely in-clusive of all components. While it is true that they protect the majority of your SharePoint configurations and data, there are a few elements that are not included in farm backups and therefore must be backed up separately.

For example, a farm backup does not do anything to protect the digi-tal certificates used to form trust re-lationships between different Share-Point farms to enable systems on one to access applications on the other. In the event that you have to restore an entire SharePoint farm, you will have to manually deploy the certificates and establish any existing trust re-lationships. It is therefore critically important to make copies of any such certificates used by farms.

Another thing to take into consid- eration is Web applications. They are included in farm backups, but if an application has been configured to use forms-based authentication, the configuration process will alter the Web.config files. When that happens, those files will have to be backed up separately at the file level.

Editor’s Note I Open Source Tools Level SharePoint 2010 Collaboration Playing Field I S Well-Planted SharePoint 2010 Backup Strategy Could Help Save the Farm SI M SharePoint Performance Sinks, Swims With SQL Server Throughput

Yet another component that might have to be backed up separately from the farm is the Business Data Con-nectivity (BDC) service, which en-ables organizations to import data from business applications and other systems into SharePoint. Performing a farm backup will back up the BDC service itself as well as any existing external content type definitions. The problem is that the underlying data source is not backed up.

Normally, you won’t have to worry

about manually backing up your SQL

Server systems. The various

data-bases are typically backed up as a part of the farm backup process. However, if you have configured SQL Server to use the optional Transpar-ent Data Encryption (TDE) technol-ogy supported by Microsoft, then you will have to separately back up the TDE encryption keys. Neither the SharePoint tools nor the SQL Server tools will back up or restore these encryption keys. Protecting them is an entirely manual process for SQL Server backup.

Finally, it’s important to consider content databases as part of a Share-Point 2010 backup strategy, even though no special procedures are necessary since they are included in farm backups. However, there are a couple of points regarding content

databases that are worth weighing. First, content databases can expand in size to such degrees that it might be easier to back them up separately rather than as part of a farm backup procedure. Second, content kept in external blob (binary large objects) storage will be preserved in a farm backup, but only if SharePoint con-nects to the blob store by using the Filestream Remote BLOB Storage provider.

Farm-level backups can protect the majority of your SharePoint data, but there may be some components that need to be backed up separately. De-pending on your organization’s Share-Point configuration, it might be wise to explore other avenues and aspects of data and information safeguard-ing as part of an enterprise SharePoint backup strategy. n

It’s important to consider

content databases as

part of a SharePoint 2010

backup strategy, even

though no special

procedures are necessary

since they are included

in farm backups.

WHEn THinGS SLOW down in a Share-Point system, the initial fix is often to add more Web servers to better handle the load. But those front-end servers rely on the same back-end database server, and the back end is where SharePoint usually encoun-ters the most performance problems. That’s because it essentially relies on

SQL Server as both a database and a

file system. It’s not that SQL Server isn’t a speed demon; it can be. But SharePoint’s processing demands tend to highlight SQL Server’s most common bottleneck: disk I/O.

It’s important to keep that in mind when planning for long-term Share-Point performance management. So what can you do to mitigate, or even avoid, the logjams that can snarl SQL Server throughput?

Start by getting SharePoint’s binary

large objects, or blobs—typically file attachments if you’re a SharePoint

person—out of the SQL Server

data-base. Both SharePoint and SQL Server

support Microsoft’s Remote BLOB

Storage (RBS) technology, which

en-ables SQL Server to put all of those Word, Excel and other documents back on the NTFS file system where they belong.

NTFS, it turns out, reads and writes files quickly, whereas SQL Server has to manage them across its 8 KB

da-SharePoint Performance Sinks,

Swims With SQL Server Throughput

To help ensure that collaboration environments don’t get bogged down,

organizations need to build and maintain a scalable back-end database

system that can eliminate SQL Server disk I/O issues.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

SharePoint’s pro-

cessing demands

tend to highlight SQL

Server’s most common

bottleneck: disk I/O.

Editor’s Note I Open Source Tools Level SharePoint 2010 Collaboration Playing Field I S Well-Planted SharePoint 2010 Backup Strategy Could Help Save the Farm SI M SharePoint Performance Sinks, Swims With SQL Server Throughput

tabase pages, which can eat up a lot of disk space and server resources. To avoid that, RBS puts files in NTFS and provides pointers to them in SQL Server. That means you can write those file attachments to entirely dif-ferent disks than the one containing the main database, helping to reduce disk contention and keep SQL Server speedy.

PREMiUM STORAGE

And REGULAR MAinTEnAnCE

One of the best SharePoint perfor-mance management investments is buying fast storage—and lots of it.

Organizations should focus first on speed in planning their purchases be-cause it’s often one of the most ex-pensive aspects of storage. If you can afford them, ultra-fast storage area networks fronted by solid-state drive caches can provide high-end storage performance, which SharePoint often needs. Of course, it is also wise to en-sure that there’s enough storage ca-pacity available for all the data being created in a SharePoint installation.

Regular maintenance is also crucial to ongoing SQL Server efficiency. The SharePoint collaboration platform can generate a lot of data, especially in heavily used document stores where

Performance Metrics Need

to Be Defined, Tracked

iT’S ALSO iMPORTAnT that you develop some reasonable, and measurable,

performance expectations for your SharePoint environment. The key is to try and base them on the end-user experience. In other words, acceptable performance might be defined by the maximum amount of time a user can expect to wait when checking out a document, accessing a blog or accom-plishing another SharePoint task. Such metrics can then be broken down into many potential back-end performance metrics so you and your users can assess how well SQL Server is holding up.

Once user-experience metrics are defined, they need to be measured regularly, with the results graphed so that trends can be identified. That will make it easy to detect if a SharePoint system starts failing to meet the organization’s expectations. n

Editor’s Note I Open Source Tools Level SharePoint 2010 Collaboration Playing Field I S Well-Planted SharePoint 2010 Backup Strategy Could Help Save the Farm SI M SharePoint Performance Sinks, Swims With SQL Server Throughput

versioning occurs to track changes in documents and maintain multiple versions of them for reference pur-poses. And masses of new data can leave SQL Server confused about the best way to execute queries. Proper database maintenance, including re-building or reorganizing indexes and updating SQL Server’s statistics, helps SQL Server remain trim and fit for the best performance. Also, it makes sense to defragment database files when the fragmentation level begins to exceed 7% or 8%.

BREAk iT UP

Although SharePoint itself scales without major issues because of the Web’s inherent scalability, SQL Server doesn’t do so quite as easily. That’s why managers of many large SharePoint environments build mul-tiple server farms, each with a dedi-cated back-end system. For example, an organization can have one set of SharePoint servers and an associated SQL Server database for the com-pany-wide document library, another for users’ blogs, another for special projects and so forth. That’s likely to be more fruitful than trying to dump everything into a single SQL Server database.

SharePoint administrators should

also plan to acquire a few extra tools —SharePoint’s native backup rou-tines, for example, aren’t the speedi-est in the world. In addition, admin-istrators should visit Microsoft’s TechNet website, which details po-tential resolutions to specific per-formance problems as well as best practices designed to help keep SharePoint environments from slow-ing to a crawl.

In the end, though, many Share-Point performance problems end up being traced back to SQL Server disk throughput issues. By focusing on building a robust, scalable and man-ageable storage back end from the outset, organizations should be able to benefit from a longer-lasting Share-Point investment that offers greater efficiency and fewer performance bottlenecks. n

Proper database

maintenance, including

rebuilding or

reorganiz-ing indexes and updatreorganiz-ing

SQL Server’s statistics,

helps SQL Server

remain trim and fit for

the best performance.

Editor’s Note I Open Source Tools Level SharePoint 2010 Collaboration Playing Field I S Well-Planted SharePoint 2010 Backup Strategy Could Help Save the Farm SI M SharePoint Performance Sinks, Swims With SQL Server Throughput

SharePoint is a

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Shawn Shell is the founder of

Con-sejo Inc., a consultancy based in Chi-cago that specializes in Web-based applications, employee and partner portals and enterprise content man-agement.

Brien M. Posey is a Microsoft MVP

with two decades of IT experience. Before becoming a freelance techni-cal writer, Posey was chief informa-tion officer for a nainforma-tional chain of hospitals and health care facilities and a network administrator for in-surance companies and U.S. Depart-ment of Defense.

don Jones is a senior partner and

principal technologist at strategic IT consulting firm Concentrated Tech-nology LLC. Editor’s Note I Open Source Tools Level SharePoint 2010 Collaboration Playing Field I S Well-Planted SharePoint 2010 Backup Strategy Could Help Save the Farm SI M SharePoint Performance Sinks, Swims With SQL Server Throughput