Preparing for SharePoint 2010 today (in Singapore)

There was a Microsoft event on 16 September 2009 where Joel Oleson (MVP) and Jean (MVP) give some information about SharePoint 2010 and discussed what's new in this version. Here are my following my notes:

There were two presentations.

1) SharePoint Workspace 2010 (by: Jean, MVP )

>> Microsoft is renaming "Groove 2007" to SharePoint Workspace 2010.
>> SharePoint Workspace 2010 provides a very easy access to the SharePoint content and giving a seamless online/offline kind of experience.
>> SharePoint Workspace 2010 is extremely easy to manage and deploy the content. Thereby, making SharePoint users more productive.
>> Users can go to SharePoint Workspace 2010, make a local copy of the content, make changes and sync content to SharePoint Workspace.
>> No need of VPN.

There few videos for the demo, but there in French.

2) Preparing for SharePoint 2010 today (by: Joel Oleson, MVP)

i) System Requirements
The following are the system requirements for SharePoint Server 2010.

SharePoint Server
64-bit Windows Server 2008 or 64-bit Windows Server 2008 R2

SQL Server
64-bit SQL Server 2005 or SQL Server 2008

Client Desktop Requirements
Internet Explorer (IE) 7 or higher, or Firefox 3.x for Editing and Design
Safari - better browsing experience
No support for IE 6

Surprisingly, Visual Studio .net 2010 is 32-bit but Microsoft provides 64 bin components for SharePoint.

Office 2010 provides the greatest innovations for editing Office clients since 2007, as well as the richest SharePoint integration ever.
For improved user experience, we (audience) should also seriously consider SharePoint Workspace.

ii) Developer Desktop Considerations

The ultimate SharePoint developer desktop is 64-bit with 8 GB of RAM running Visual Studio 2010 with SSD disks. While it may take some serious planning to get your (audience) developers running with the latest and greatest technologies, SharePoint 2010's 64-bit requirements can help you justify this expenditure when planning your development budget. In addition, if corporate remote development includes virtual environments, then be sure to look at Windows Server 2008 and Hyper V. Make sure that the host will support 64 bit.

iii) Running the STSADM command PREUPGRADECHECK

Its provided on SharePoint Server SP2. Its an awesome tool and also a health check for our farms. These are 5 main reasons to run this command:

>> 1. PreUpgradeCheck is has a better engine, it's based on a best practices analyze.
>> 2. PreUpgradeCheck is read-only
>> 3. PreUpgradeCheck Reporting Rocks!
Gives you not just a log and screen output, but an XML report and HTM report, and verbose log of all of the rules with a again verbose database and site collection detail that goes way beyond. Excellent was of comparing the Local vs. Farm reports and comparing server to server reports.
>> 4. PreUpgradeCheck tells you about the state of your farm
>> 5. PreUpgradeCheck is a native STSADM command


Joel, showed a demo on this farm and ran that command.

iv) Identifying Customizations

The PreUpgradeCheck tool can give you (audience) a lot of insight into your environment, but you shouldn't stop there in your efforts to identify development assets, customizations, and configurations in your SharePoint farm. This could be lot of customizations:

>>Binaries and Dev Assets, which are often found in _layouts, features, and 12 hive
>>Installation directories
>>GAC or Bin
>>IIS Home directory or virtual directories
>>Features
>>Solutions
>>Timer jobs
>>Event receivers

v) Tools to find the customizations

There are lot of tools to the customizations such as:

>> SPDiag
>> Windiff - comparing folders/files (Joel prefers this tool) etc.

vi) INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE AND DATA CLEANUP

The more optimized the environment, the smoother and faster the upgrade will be. Creating an initiative to encourage users to delete unused sites and identify ones that are no longer in use can trim a lot of content that is simply taking up space; this clutter can slow down the upgrade process. You can do all of the following today:

>>Remove unused sites and site collections
>>Remove orphaned sites, lists, and objects identified in the PreUpgradeCheck
>>Remove locks and increase the quotas of sites that are at or near max capacity
>>Remove or add missing features and web part assemblies (check dependencies) identified in PreUpgradeCheck
>>Cleanup can also involve working through and resetting pages and sites back to site definition or finalizing previous upgrades:
>>Finalize any 2003 or WSS 2.0 gradual upgrades that have not been finalized
>>Return pages to the layout in site definition, reset all pages using the reset to site definition found in site settings on the site collection