SharePoint Shepherd Updates

Robert Bogue March 11, 2009 2 Comments

I’m getting a ton of email about where things are with The SharePoint Shepherd’s Video Academy for Planning and Governance. I’m also getting folks asking me about The SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide for End Users, so I wanted to take a quick minute to provide some updates.

On the Video Academy, I’m having some major issues with HP desktop computers which have delayed the completion until at least April 1st, if not longer. The short of the issues are that I bought two refurbished HP Pavilion m9350f machines to repack and prepare the video. In the last month I’ve essentially not had either of these two machines working. I’ve had just about every issue known to man with HP’s processes including the fact that it took them 3 days to correct a problem with my warranty (they said it wasn’t valid). I’ve also had a hard drive replaced with bad partitioning. (The first machine failure was a hard drive failure.) The second system has random lockups that haven’t been diagnosed — despite the fact they sent the unit back to me. Now, I’m waiting on the escalation support representative to fulfill the promises he made two days ago to ship me a new hard drive and a box to ship the second computer back again. I’ll provide a more detailed post later — but to all of you who I know are anxiously awaiting the video please accept my apologies. If you know anyone at HP — you might point them to this blog post.

On The SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide for End Users, there’s great news. I’ve posted pages on the web site where you can buy the book directly from me. Why is this a good thing? Well, first, I’ll sell you the book for $30 including shipping and handling to the United States. That’s a few dollars savings over folks like Amazon.com especially if you are paying for shipping. That’s not all, I’ll give you the opportunity to buy a personally signed copy of the book. The payments are handled by PayPal and the book will ship out within 2 business days of the order.

We’re also working on a deal that may allow you to take a class based on the book, but I can’t quite announce that yet. I continue to be pleased with the book’s progress both on the retail front as well as on the number of organizations and consulting companies that are realizing that the book’s corporate editions can improve end user satisfaction and reduce helpdesk calls. I’m still working on some hard statistics from a few client on how much their end user satisfaction went up and how much their helpdesk calls went down but we know it can make a significant impact.

Where’s Rob — Oops Missed One

Robert Bogue March 5, 2009 No Comments

In my last post I missed one of the users group talks I’m going to be doing. I’m going to be speaking at the Evansville SharePoint Users Group on May 14th. It will be another one of those governance talks. I’m not sure exactly which spin we’ll put on the topic, but I know it will be fun. Evansville, though in the same state (Indiana) is about as far away as it gets to stay in the state. It’s over a 4 hour drive. I’ve not been to Evansville for years — so I’m looking forward to going back.

Where’s Rob – Spring 2009 Edition

Robert Bogue March 4, 2009 No Comments

It’s been a while since I’ve sat down with a calendar to see where I’m going to be. So I wanted to let folks know where I’m going to be and we can play our own form of Where’s Waldo. In fact, the first two people at each event to walk up to me and call me Waldo will get a free copy of the SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide for End Users — mailed to their house so they don’t have to carry it. (Except for the users groups, I’ll hand them to you there.)

So where am I going to be? My next public event is SharePoint Connections in Orlando March 22nd-March 25th I love this event because it’s big enough to give the attendees the content they need — while keeping that laid back and casual feel. This is my 3rd or 4th year presenting at the conference (I forget.)

I get to do my “All About SharePoint Workflows” all day pre-conference again. Basically, it’s the core stuff you need to know about writing workflows in SharePoint — in a day. Generally you’re taking a several day class to get this much content. If you don’t believe me that there’s a ton of content here, you should ask someone from last year. There’s a workshop fee for this session.

In the main content I’m talking about “Getting Your SharePoint Project Started Right”, “SharePoint Workflow Forms”, and “Custom Authentication for SharePoint”.

Getting Your SharePoint Project Started Right is a getting started spin on the governance and planning aspects of a SharePoint project. You’ll learn the things that tend to make SharePoint projects spin out of control and what you can do about them.

SharePoint Workflow Forms is a conversation and demos around building forms for Workflow. We’ll talk about Association, Instantiation, task forms, etc. — if we have time we’ll even talk about routing forms as the payload of workflows.

The Custom Authentication for SharePoint talk has me rebooting my virtual machine in the middle of it (because you pretty much have to do that to get FBA to work) — so it’s always great fun to see my say a little prayer on stage. I’ll be showing you how to write your own membership provider for ASP.NET + what you need to make it work with SharePoint.

Next up for me will be TechEd NA 2009 May 11th-15th in Los Angeles. I get to do a slightly different edition of workflow “SharePoint Workflow in a Day”. I also get to do “Patterns with Microsoft SharePoint” — that’s a session based on the work I’ve been honored to do with The Microsoft Patterns and Practices team on the SharePoint Guidance. If you made it to the talk I did at the SharePoint Best Practices Conference you’ll know I get just a tad bit excited while delivering this content. It’s good stuff.

The next public sessions after that are at SPTechCon in Boston June 22nd-24th. I get to deliver a “Tour of Development Governance” and “Getting Just Enough Governance”. Both talks are about how you can get governance in your organization without destroying adoption or engagement. One is more developer/development lead/architect focused (guess which one) and the other is more about the business of governance for business analysts, project managers, managers, and business leaders. (Remember, I define governance as “risk management” — so it’s all about managing risks to your SharePoint implementation and your business.)

On a more regional level, I’m also doing a SharePoint Governance event in central Illinois April 8th. This is a half day session on what you need to know to keep your SharePoint deployment out of trouble. It’s an invitation only event, but send me an email if you need an invitation.

I’m also going to be speaking at the Kentucky SharePoint Group on April 16th. I’ll be talking about Governance there as well, although I don’t remember nailing down exactly what specific aspect we’ll be discussing. At any rate, we’ll make it interesting.

SharePoint Best Practices Conference Decks now available

Robert Bogue February 28, 2009 No Comments

At the SharePoint Best Practices Conference in San Diego, I did three sessions. I just mentioned in my last post the one I did from a MS P&P deck. The other two, which were presented from my decks are available too. The sessions were:

I hope that you find them useful.

Rob

Upgrading Your SharePoint Applications

Robert Bogue February 28, 2009 3 Comments

One of the decks that I presented at the SharePoint Best Practices Conference was a deck titled “Upgrading Your SharePoint Applications.” One of the requests was for me to post the deck — which I wanted to check with the Microsoft P&P group on first. You see they created the deck, I did a few minor tweaks, and then presented it. So it’s really their handy work. Anyway, I forgot to ask them about it until yesterday when I saw the rest of the team working on the SharePoint Guidance again face-to-face. So, the deck is available now.

One note, the Microsoft official answer on upgrading content types is to do it programmatically once the initial XML for the content type has been laid down. I disagree with this because it makes it harder to manage the content type. My recommendation is to use a feature receiver to synchronize child content types with the content type in the XML. I’ve used this and it works fine. The push back from MS was that there may be issue. (i.e. they’ve not tested it.) Because this isn’t my deck, the deck still says to use code. Other than that I agree with what’s in the deck.

Public Service Announcement: Many Technical Problems are Caused by Bad Power

Robert Bogue February 22, 2009 No Comments

There are a ton of electronics today that use wall wart power supplies. These power supplies are really bad at holding their voltage output correct. The issue with this is that electronics start to do funny things when they get bad power into them. Over the years I’ve seen routers, switches, phones (the latest), and a whole host of other electronics develop strange behavior (packet loss, dialing failure, lockups, etc.) when the voltage creeps up (as they tend to do.)

Before you go replace your expensive piece of equipment grab a volt meter and verify that the output voltage matches what the power supply says it should be outputting. If it’s not within 10-20% of the output voltage get a universal power supply (like this one) with at least as much amperage as the original unit. Set the output voltage on the universal power supply at or slightly (10%) above the stated output of the original power supply. Find a tip that fits (most ship with a variety of tips). Make sure you get the polarity on the tip correct (match the original power supply.) The easiest way to tell polarity is to look at the old adapter. It will generally have a line figure that has + or – pointing to the center and the other sign pointing to the outside. Test and see if the power problems go away.

Don’t know how to use a volt meter? Simple. Get one cheap (like this one). Set it for DC Volts. Connect one lead to one side of the connector (generally inside) and the other lead to the other side. The display should show you how many volts are being output. Don’t worry about positive/negative — that’s just whether you have the leads reversed or not.

Good Customer Service – An Example

Robert Bogue February 22, 2009 2 Comments

I’ve already spoken once about bad customer service — the worst I’ve ever seen. However, good customer service is so hard to find I’ve not had an opportunity to talk about it. I alluded to some good customer service in that article, but while finishing Groundswell, I realized that institutionalizing good customer service isn’t as easy as it might appear — or is it. Lilly Tomlin did a Saturday Night Live skit some time ago (Season 2, Episode 1) where she said in part “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the Phone Company.” Honestly, I feel like a lot of companies have this attitude. Whether they’re the phone company or not.

So lately, I’ve been having some conversations with AT&T’s U-Verse service. I was having some problems with my phone lines after switching to their voice over IP phone service from Vonage. (Honestly, Vonage’s service was good, I just wanted fewer devices in my environment — fewer things for the wife to have to worry about when I travel.)

The thing that’s startling is nearly every customer service or technical service person I spoke to asked me the same question “How can I provide you with excellent service today?” Wow. I guess it is easy to institutionalize good customer service. Put in the script a question that the agent must ask for which there is no escape from providing good service. How hard would it be for someone to treat you poorly after they’ve asked how they can provide excellent service?

Similarly, I have a gentleman who is cleaning my office for me. Every time I talk to him, after we get through the hellos he asks “How can I serve you today?” Wow. For him, it’s not lip service. He actually does care. While I’m not personally the most observant when it comes to leaning in my office, I appreciate his attention to service.

Apparently, it’s simple to get good customer service. Oh, as a sidebar to this story, the AT&T U-Verse thing that I was calling for wasn’t their problem. It turns out I have a cordless phone that’s going out. The last agent that I spoke with took the time to help me troubleshoot the problem step-by-step. It helps that I have a Butt Set and a completely modular wiring closet in my house. However, that’s not the point — she was more concerned with helping identify and resolve the problem than getting me off the phone. She called the lines for me so we could see if they were ringing correctly. It was truly great customer service.

I’m not saying that AT&T U-Verse service has been perfect. The first technician they sent did more harm than good trying to diagnose the problem the first time he showed up. (It took me a day to realize what he had done.) They claimed to have resolved a cross-talk issue which, well, they didn’t. However, I can deal with technicians who are in front of me. Knowing that they really do care about customer service is a big deal.

On an less happy note, I’m preparing a blog post about my experience with HP — and the two desktop machines that have died on me in the last two weeks. Their situation has been a disaster. I’ll provide all the details when the situation has been resolved. I’m hoping at the end of the day I at least feel neutral about the situation.

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies

Book Review-Groundswell

Robert Bogue February 22, 2009 9 Comments

I realize I’ve not posted a book review on my blog since October of 2007. Ouch. I guess I’ve been busy. One of the two reviews that I did back then was for a book called The Wisdom of Crowds, Back in August of 2007 I reviewed The Long Tail. In July of 2007, I reviewed Wikinomics: How mass Collaboration Changes Everything. In April of 2007 I reviewed Linked. You may be sensing a bit of a theme. I’ve been watching the topic of the influence of the Internet and more specifically its ability to empower people — all people — to participate.

Groundswell is a book about this influence and how it’s changing things. It’s about how you can leverage this transformation to your benefit. It’s written by some Forrester analysts. They’ve worked with large organizations, they’ve run surveys, and they’ve provided their thoughts on how to support your organization with social media.

If you’re in a large organization and you’re struggling to understand the social media sites you’ve seen. If you’re trying to figure out how blogs are helping — and hurting your organization — then you’ll want to pick it up and read it. Unlike any of the other books that I’ve mentioned above, Groundswell is a manual for how to implement social media in your organization. I’m not saying that it’s a literal prescription for you. However, it does layout for you the kinds of things that you want to think about to get a successful project.

There are two key things — from my perspective — that you can take from the book. First, the idea of psychic currency — a non-monetary compensation that drives people to participate in the groundswell. Here’s the incomplete list presented (without the details the book provides):

Keeping Friendships
Making new friends
Succumbing to Social Pressure for Existing Friends
Paying it Forward
The altruistic impulse
The prurient impulse
The creative impulse
The validation impulse
The affinity impulse

The second thing is their four step planning process abbreviated as POST:

People
Objectives
Strategy
Technology

If you’re trying to figure out how these social events can impact your organization, Groundswell may help.

Abort, Retry, or Fail

Robert Bogue February 17, 2009 No Comments

I’ve had numerous technical support issues in the last few weeks. Everything from some phone line challenges to having issues with two HP desktop machines. (More on that in a future blog post.) However, through all of this, I realized that we’ve not really progressed from the DOS days in the late 80s where it was common to have the system come back with a prompt that notified you of some error and then asked you whether you wanted to “Abort, Retry, or Fail” the operation. I even remember that some inventive folks created a TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) program that would automatically select retry for you.

I realized that somehow this got woven into the way that we do business in IT. When my hard drive started failing, it started retrying the reads automatically, without telling me. Suddenly performance of a hard drive dropped to 2MB/ (less than 1/10th of the performance it should have). I’m happy it was retrying rather than having me loose all my data, however, by the same token, I wish I would have gotten a notification that there was a problem. There is SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) technology that’s supposed to do this but as it happens there was an issue with the motherboard BIOS version that I was using so that SMART tests weren’t really performed. So I got automatic retry — without any control of it. It’s better than automatic failure, but still not real helpful.

On my Internet connection issues, I realized there was a relatively small amount of Internet packet loss. This is normal, TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) is actually specifically designed to automatically retransmit packets that are lost. That’s why I’ve had switches that were dropping packets for a long time before I realized it. It took really digging into performance issues before I realized what was going on. The lost packets would simply be retransmitted. In small quantities, not a big deal. In larger quantities, it creates a real performance issue. One that can be difficult to find.

Complicating this is that even if we could see the retries, most folks don’t know what to do about them. The AT&T UVerse issue I was having showed up as an outbound dialing issue. This lead to a series of tests, including one that identified crosstalk on the line. There’s a ton of different answers I got about what was received and what it meant. I got the answer that generally the UVerse service doesn’t run on the same POTS line as another number. Other technicians said that that was fine. The latest guy explained that the crosstalk they saw could have been in my house. (I don’t even want to touch the terminology and isolation issues here.) The short is that the whole system functions because it doesn’t have to actually make it work. It just has to be close enough that the retries don’t get noticeable.

So what’s wrong with this? Well, to some extent, nothing. It’s brilliant architecture. The architect figured out that the system could not work reliably so extra margin was built in for errors to happen. The problem isn’t that the architecture/design is bad for accepting faults. It’s bad because we don’t have any reporting on when a problem is occurring. It’s bad because it has caused the training to become so bad that no one really knows how things are supposed to work because observationally speaking they’ve made it “Work” several different ways. Which is right? Which is best? Who is to say, because there’s no way to really quantitatively say.

I’m not advocating that we don’t do the retries… it would just be nice to know when they’re happening so we can do something about them — or at least find someone who knows about it — if we can.

Fundamentals of SharePoint Performance – Disk, SQL, and Network

Robert Bogue February 11, 2009 3 Comments

I’ve run into a few customer environments of late where the performance of SharePoint was unacceptable, however, the real problem isn’t SharePoint. It’s been either disk performance or it has been network performance. So I wanted to lay out a few quick suggestions for high performance SharePoint implementations. The trick is, I’ll tell you they have nothing to do with SharePoint. It’s all about good general network performance and good SQL server performance.

Disks from the Ground Up

So if you want good performance from your system you have to get it right from the ground up. Here are some suggestions on the disk side:

Other than for a SQL Cluster … Use Direct Attached storage — All things being equal, you’re going to find that DAS is faster. I’ll point you to a SQL Team.com article “Which is Faster: SAN or Directly-Attached Storage” where they say that the generalization I’m making is bad so you can make your own decision, however, for equal performance drives, configured the same way DAS is faster. You’ll never get slowed down by anyone else and you have less infrastructure to push your way through. (But read the rest of the items for this to fit in.)
Buy smaller, faster drives — Typically we think of storage in terms of capacity. I bought 5 TB of disk or I need 10TB of disk. Rarely do we think of the number of IO operations we need to get from a disk. That’s a big mistake. For high performance systems we need to be thinking about how many operations each disk can produce. That means more, smaller, faster disks. By the way, SATA drives are MUCH slower than their SAS cousins. You’re looking for SAS drives with the fastest spin rate you can find, in sizes that are adequate for your needs.
RAID 10 is twice as good as RAID 5 (mathematically speaking) — OK, it’s hokey, but it’s true. When you’re looking for performance you want to make an array of drives with RAID10 not RAID5. RAID5 is still appropriate for long term storage. However, RAID10 is more appropriate for any system you want performance from. (No it’s not twice as good, I was playing on the 10 vs. 5)
Partition Alignment Counts — A good buddy of mine, Jimmy May has developed a reputation for being the man with the answers about partition alignment. If you’ve not seen him deliver one of his decks on partition alignment — make it a point to do that. Jimmy’s demonstrated over 30% performance improvements by just aligning the disk partition correctly. (Correctly being relative to how the controller and drives are setup.)

SQL Server is Your Friend

Once you get the disks right you’re on the right track. The next step is to configure SQL Server correctly. Here are a few helpful tips:

Memory is Good, More Memory is Better — SQL server has got to be the product at Microsoft which has got memory management right. If you feed SQL server memory it will feed you back better performance. Of course there’s the law of diminishing returns but with memory being cheap — go big.
TempDB is critical — The tempdb in SQL server is it’s workspace. If it doesn’t perform well, then the system doesn’t perform well. Look at KB 328551 about allocating many TempDB files across multiple LUNs to improve performance. Or the article Optimizing tempdb Performance.
[SharePoint Specific] Look at the Database Maintenance for Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies white paper
[SharePoint Specific] The search DB will be hot — The _SEARCH database for SharePoint will be VERY busy. It’s going to need some serious disk resources. Look at SQL File groups and Search for specifics on how file groups may help.

Network Smart

One of the other areas that tends to bite people is network performance. Whether it’s a 100MB hub in the server rack. (Meaning those 1GB NICs don’t get to go that fast) or silly requirements for switch diversity, you’ve got to be networking smart. Here’s a few tips:

All NICs in all SharePoint farm servers (SQL included) are locked at 1GB/Full. If you can’t network at 1GB per server don’t bother, you’re not going to have good performance.
Team or Link Aggregate multiple NICs in your servers — Every server should have at least 2 NICs. Those NICs should be link aggregated. For SharePoint Front End Web servers you can split them for web traffic and background traffic — but honestly, I’d link aggregate them too if you can.
Don’t do switch diversity — This is a hard one. Folks want to do switch diversity (one NIC on one switch and the other NIC on a different switch) so they can survive a switch failure. Observationally, something isn’t configured correctly and you still go down. Worse, the switches RARELY have enough bandwidth between them so all of your traffic slows down because the switches saturate their cross-connect link. It’s just not worth doing this unless you know for certain you can get it right.

I’m sure there are tons of other things to think about — these are just the ones that have bit clients in the last few months.

Public Speaking

Disks from the Ground Up

SQL Server is Your Friend

Network Smart

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