Remote Program Delivery through SharePoint; the Front End.

16 03 2010

In Dave’s previous post he talked about the back-end for our delivery of remote programs. I’m going to explain how we then surfaced this through SharePoint.

For those of you that have set up remote programs you will probably be aware of the web part for it, we found that using this didn’t give us very much flexibility in which programs are surfaced. So we came up with a couple of other methods.

The first is by far the simplest; the good old content editor web part! Just put your .rdp files in an accessable location along with some icons. Add the content editor part to the page and add the images, hyperlinked to the rdp file. Simple.

The way we now deliver remote programs is to store the rdp file, the icon and any description or meta data in a sharepoint list. We give them categories to enable us to group them and just render the list with xslt. Again very simple but very effective.

Of course all this transfers to SharePoint 2010 without issue.


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Categories : SharePoint, SharePoint 2007, Sharepoint 2010, WebApps

Remote Program Delivery through SharePoint

14 03 2010

Mike Herrity recently did a post on delivering programs to all of our users through SharePoint 2007 so I thought I would do a quick follow up post with a bit more technical detail on how we achieved this.

  We have been using terminal services for about 9 years giving students and staff the ability to logon to our servers remotely and still get the same desktop experience as though they had logged on to a workstation at Twynham. So with the release of Server 2008 for me one of the best new features was remote programmes now I know that Citrix had been delivering remote apps for many years but this was beyond our pocket. After creating an RDP file it soon became very obvious that this was very easily delivered through our SharePoint Gateways.

 Below you can see the final RDP file when opened with notepad, this was very much an OOTB solution just requiring a document library to store the RDP files and a page setup up for users to find the programmes that we offered.

redirectclipboard:i:1

redirectposdevices:i:0

redirectprinters:i:1

redirectcomports:i:1

redirectsmartcards:i:0

devicestoredirect:s:*

drivestoredirect:s:*

redirectdrives:i:1

session bpp:i:32

span monitors:i:1

prompt for credentials on client:i:1

remoteapplicationmode:i:1

server port:i:3389

allow font smoothing:i:1

promptcredentialonce:i:1

authentication level:i:0

gatewayusagemethod:i:2

gatewayprofileusagemethod:i:0

gatewaycredentialssource:i:0

full address:s:XXX.XXXXXXXXXXXXX.XXX

alternate shell:s:||ProD

remoteapplicationprogram:s:||ProD

gatewayhostname:s:

remoteapplicationname:s:PTC ProDESKTOP 8.0

remoteapplicationcmdline:s:
 

 

The situation we suffered before was that students who did not have access to Microsoft Office used to bring work in in varies formats that office could not open which meant the coursework deadlines where missed simply because they did not have Office installed at home. This situation no longer exists as if students do not have office they now know to logon to the gateway and use remote programmes. The spin off was that we can now offer faculty specific software a good example is the technology department who use 2D Design and Pro desktop two technical drawing packages that no students would have installed on their PC’s at home enabling staff to set homework tasks using this software.

 Delivering programmes through our SharePoint gateway will also enable us to deploy Office 2010 when it becomes available just by uninstalling Office 2007 and installing Office 2010 giving students access to the latest version of as soon as this appears on our licence site.


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Categories : SharePoint, SharePoint 2007

Out of the Box Web Analytics Web Part

12 03 2010

One of the most popular post I have written recently is the Web Analytics Reports in SharePoint 2010 so I thought I would just write a quick follow up on another component to the built web analytics side of SharePoint 2010, and that is the OOTB (out of the box) web part for displaying the results on a dashboard page.

This webpart is quite limited as compared to the full reports you can only see 3 sections of the reports that is:-

Most Viewed Content, Most Frequent Site Search Queries or Most Frequent Search Centre Queries

You can also choose from this site collection, this site and subsite or this site only. The only other filtering you can do with the webpart is the time period to display ranging from 24 hours up to 180 days and also the amount of items to display in the results up to a maximum of 100. The best thing I found with this webpart is the RSS feature which will enable me to monitor basic usage information from within Outlook.


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Categories : Sharepoint 2010, WebParts

Easy Access To STSADM

11 03 2010

 Hands up who is fed up with navigating to “c:\program files\common files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\bin\” just to use the STSADM tool?

 Well there is an easier way. Back in the day I used to use DOS “yes I am that old” Well I used to use Path statements in my autoexec.bat files which meant that I could run command line tools from anywhere in the file system. Now you can also do this in modern server systems by going to System properties – Environment Variables and then edit the path statement in system variables if you then add the path to STSADM in the Variable value and reboot your server you can then run the STSADM tool from a command prompt from any location in the file system. Easy to do and makes life so much easier.


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Categories : SharePoint, SharePoint 2007, Sharepoint 2010

SharePoint 2010 with a virtual SQL 2008 database. Will it perform?

10 03 2010

Many people have many different opinions on this subject. Is it wise to virtualise SQL? I think it is fine. I was once not so sure but visiting SharePoint best practices conference last year as well as a data management event I now feel pretty confident. Also with our beast of a hyper-v setup I can have more RAM in a virtual SQL box than I could ever dream of in a physical server!

So on to SharePoint 2010.  I wrote a couple of simle SQL scripts just to make the database server do some work and then I used SharePoint to see how it was afected. (I’m a Firefox user so all the SharePoint stuff was done using that) The SQL server was SQL 2008 with 10Gb RAM, with the data going to a normal vhd (our production environment will be virtual failover cluster with data over iSCSI). SharePoint is sitting on a virtual machine with 8GB of RAM.

I did the following actions and timed how long each step took. Then I did them twice more; once with the SQL CPU running at 100% and then again with the disk being very busy writing rows to a database and also sharepoint performing a full crawl.

The tasks were:

Create a Team Site

Upload a docx (this was a sample made using the great “=rand(10,10)” feature of Word)

Open the document using Web Apps

Save the document after editing it within the browser

And finally deleting the site

I selected these actions as they are the kind of things people will be doing everyday with sharepoint. I didnt inclide page loading times as there was no noticble difference between browsing the site when SQL was under load and when it was not.

And the results are in:

  Control (No Load) [seconds] 100% CPU [seconds] Disk load /full crawl [seconds]
Create Site 2.3 39.0 15.2
Upload Docx < 1 3.3 1.5
Open with Web App 1.5 6 6.8
Save Docx 2.3 13.0 1.8
Delete Site < 1 2.3 1.2

Pretty good really. Even with the SQL server sweating away at the backend your dear SharePoint end users will be uploading and viewing documents with minimal fustration!

If anyone else has any numbers or tests they have performed (or want to question mine) then please leave a comment!

Chris


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Categories : HyperV, SQL, Sharepoint 2010

Migrating from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010

10 03 2010

   Last week the twitter community and blogosphere came alive with the news of the release dates of SharePoint 2010 (April RTM and June general release) so I thought that I would share with you our migration strategy from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010. The foundation for all of our new builds will be a HyperV virtualized environment the server specification we have chosen for our hosts is as follows

5 x Dell PowerEdge R710 with 72 GB Ram also 2 x Intel XeonX55702.93Ghz Processors

Storage for this and our other virtual servers will be with on a Nexsan SAN solution with 2.5 TB of SAS drives for our SQL databases and 7TB of SATA drives for general storage.

 For our Guest VHD’s for SharePoint we will give each virtual server 8GB Ram each with 64bit Server 2008 R2 installed we will also split the server roles over the 3 virtual SharePoint servers. Chris McKinley will follow up this post with a more detailed look at running SQL 2008 in a failover cluster in HyperV.

 We have already tried moving our 2007 content database over to SharePoint 2010 in our development setup with very good results but I will talk more about that after Chris has posted details of the virtualized SQL setup.


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Categories : Sharepoint 2010

HyperV Cluster Setup Part 5

7 03 2010

This is the fifth and final part of the HyperV cluster setup series of video tutorials with the help of Alan Richards in this video Alan gives a demo of live migration in a HyperV setup no sound in this video but a picture (Or video) paints a thousand words. I hope you have enjoyed and can reuse the info in these videos later this week I will start a blog post on our SharePoint 2010 architecture based solely in HyperV including our SQL 2008 virtual failover cluster.


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Categories : HyperV, Server 2008 R2

Finding Stale Accounts in Active Directory

7 03 2010

 I have been having a Twitter conversation with Martin Byford-Rew the IT Manager at Thomas Deacon Academy in Peterborough and others about finding stale accounts in active directory, now I do not have that concern as I use an AD tools which runs overnight and creates or archives accounts as pupils, staff and parents arrive at or leave Twynham, but more of that in a later post.

 Before we used the current AD tools I also had the same problem with keeping Active Directory tidy and up to date the only way I found before reaching for scripting tools was to use the query tools available in Active Directory so I hope this post helps Martin.

  1. Open Active Directory users and computers at the top you will see “saved queries”
  2. Right click Saved Queries and choose new query
  3. Put a name in the name field I chose “Not Logged On For 30 Days”
  4. You can choose to query the whole of your directory or just one OU
  5. Click Define Query
  6. If you are only interested in finding accounts that have not logged on for a while you get the choice between 30,60,90,120 or 180 days since last logon

We only use these queries now to check out parental accounts for inactivity but a tool that is built in but rarely used. Below you can see the results of the query that we created.


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Categories : Active Directory

HyperV Cluster Setup Part 4

7 03 2010

This is the fourth part of the HyperV cluster setup with the help of Alan Richards in this video Alan shows how to install the HyperV role and also how he set up the network for the HyperCluster and finally we see how to make a virtual server highly available through HyperV.

Dave


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Categories : HyperV, Server 2008 R2

SharePoint 2010 Web Apps, Where’s the Save Button

6 03 2010

 I have been using SharePoint 2010 for quite a while now but it was only yesterday that I tried the Excel, PowerPoint and Onenote web apps having limited myself to using the Word web apps all throughout our testing phase of our SharePoint 2010 deployment.

 So it was only when I was using these apps that I noticed that there is no save button but they save dynamically as you use them. So for anyone else that cannot find the save button please see the images below.


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Categories : Sharepoint 2010, WebApps

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