New month - New Milestone

Today it is a new month, 1st of March, and new major milestone at work. Today I launched a new Intranet and Extranet to my company's organization.

The new solution is based on SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Edition. I started the the project in December 2011, and work part time on together with other tasks like a new corporate website plus multiple other projects.

To kick-start the project, I used AutoSPInstaller to install SharePoint. In previous SharePoint projects I have created the PowerShell scripts myself. Fun, to a point - but since I didn't want to spend time in developing and maintaining this now - I decided to go for AutoSPInstaller. A good choice.

The installation went quite smooth. After installation I needed to change the urls, in IIS host headers and SharePoint Central Admin's AAM.

Adding a application server, and moving services from WFE to APP server was more less only stop services on WFE and start them on the APP Server.

After this, it was more or less the standard SharePoint tasks like creating web application, site collections, adding permissions, etc....

My next task is now to configure SCOM, and tune that for SharePoint.


Experienced some problems:

• If Reinstalling, read: http://davidbajak.com/blog/post/2011/09/29/Fix-SharePoint-2010-Enterprise-Search-After-Using-AutoSPInstaller-Script-Installer.aspx
•  If Uninstall (there are some guides, e.g. http://autospinstaller.codeplex.com/discussions/263025)
•  Uninstall SharePoint 2010
•  Drop databases on sql server
•  Delete invalid IIS entry
• If you problem to run miisclient, you have to runAs uecc\spfarm.To be able to run "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\14.0\Synchronization Service\UIShell\miisclient.exe", you have to RunAs e.g. uecc\spfarm

Is backup and restore for wimps? Not in SharePoint.

Is backup and restore  for wimps? Yes and No.
It is often easy to configure backup, but mostly people doesn't test that it actually test the restore.

Some the day you will be happy that you configured backup and tested the restore. By using DPM in SharePoint this is really easy.

To configure it, use the Wizard in DPM. Be aware that it doesn't include all SharePoint databases, so you may want to include the following databases:
- master
- _MetaDataDB
- _ProfileDB
- _SocialDB
- _SyncDB

To restore items. Start DPM and select Recovery. Then you can browse through the item, and more or less Next -> Next ->..

And then you have it recovered.

References
-Sharepoint 2010 protection in DPM 2010: Part 3
-Data Protection Manager 2010 - Recovering Sharepoint 2010 Items without recovery farm  (YouTube) (skip to 4min 27sec)

 (I haven't misspelled SharePoint, it is the blog author)

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Publishing Multiple SharePoint SSL Applications on Port 443

I am running a SharePoint 2010 installation with two web application: onePortal..mydomain.com and one MySite.domain.com on the same IP. This works well on HTTP using host header and SharePoint alternate access mapping.

There are no way in standard user interface for IIS (7.5) to map two Virtual Web Sites to SSL. The user interface only support assigned one Web Site to SSL.

To fix this, short version:

1. Buy a wildcard certificate, *.mydomain.com
2. Install certificate on web server and UAG (in my case)
3. Assign one the SharePoint web site to https using the default user interface for IIS
4. For the other(s) start command line in %windir%\system32\inetserv\
5. appcmd list site (to list existing binding - for you information)
6. appcmd set site /site.name:"MySite Host" /+bindings.[protocol='https',bindingInformation='*:443:mysite.mydomain.com']
7. appcmd list site (to list existing binding - for you information)
8. publish urls in UAG

Launched new website - www.uecc.com

New uecc.com

1st of February 2012 we launched a new website for United European Car Carriers, www.uecc.com. 

The new website was designed to provide an enhanced viewing experience and easy access to updated key information about UECC – the company, our services and our fleet. The website has focused on clean and concise information, a fresh look-and-feel and easy navigation. 

Old uecc.com

I joined the company 1st of November 2011, and one of my tasks were to establish a new Internet site. We started the project in December, with a small team - working part time on this project. The intention was to have to new site launched by 1st of February 2012.

The old site was about 5-6 years; using flash, presenting content different in different browsers, hard to update for non technical (actually for IT Pro or developers as well)

Alternatives for new site
As technical architect (as well as project leader) for the project I looked into some alternatives for technical product to use. In the beginning of my career I worked as developer on different technologies (C, C++, C#, Java, Pascal, Delphi,Visual Basic, Perl, etc...) before I started as a technical architect focusing on the Microsoft platform - specializing the Enterprise Collaboration and Portals.

Before I started to evaluate the different alternatives, I was more or less decided on using Microsoft SharePoint 2010 - but needed to do some research before taking the final decision.

My initial research ended up with the following alternatives:

• Microsoft SharePoint 2010
• EPiServer
• DotNetNuke
• Umbraco
• WordPress

Based on the criteria give by our steering committee we ended up with choosing DotNetNuke. DotNetNuke is based on a Microsoft platform, have a community edition (for free) and also a standard and enterprise edition.

Project

To help us with the graphical layout and implementing this in DotNetNuke we choose a quite small local consulting company. They prepared some initial thoughts for the home page and sub pages for our first meeting, which we were very happy with. The end result is actually very similar to the initial design.

We were a small team working on this - and only had the opportunity to work on this part time, since we have a lot of other tasks and projects that we are involved in.

Launched

The last two weeks before the launch was a little bit more hectic than normal days, but still we had good control on both the content and technical.

The night before 1st of February we launched the site. The only unexpected, which I fixed immediately with installation a http direct module in IIS and add some .html pages, was that old links (Google, Favorites) were pointing to a virtual directory that didn't exist anymore (so some 404 pages)

Conclusion

After two days in production, using Google Analytics (great tool) to monitor the traffic, everything seems to works well. A lot of very positive feedback from employees and externals. 

In addition to Googly Analytics, we also use DNN Monitor, and it reports 100% uptime.