Thursday, December 11, 2008

Presentations BIWUG december 2008

The last BIWUG session was a success with over 60 persons present. Unfortunately I had to send out a mail to some people to tell them that we were overbooked.

I just uploaded the presentations on our BIWUG site:

If you are interested in presenting a session just leave a comment.

Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Installing Expression Encoder 2.0 on Windows Server 2003 SP1

I had some problems when installing Expression Encoder 2.0 (Available through MSDN or download Expression Encoder 2.0 Trial) on my Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1. It kept on nagging about an incorrect version of Windows Installer.

Setup requires a minimum Windows Installer version 3.1.4000.2435 and detected version 3.1.4000.1830. Please update your system and run Setup again.

But when you look for the latest version of Windows Installer you will find this one - Windows Installer 3.1 Redistributable (v2) which will not install on Windows Server 2003 SP1. Instead use this one - Update for Windows Server 2003 SP1 Service Pack 1 (KB898715). Restart your server and continue installing Expression Encoder.

Tuesday, December 02, 2008

SharePoint Governance Presentation

Thursday I will be doing a session at the CM Innovation Event about SharePoint Governance.

Session abstract: Because of the viral nature of SharePoint -  without effective governance - SharePoint will only replicate your business’ existing problems at a faster rate and on a larger scale than you thought possible! In this session we will focus on some key principles for developing a SharePoint Governance plan and show you how you can manage risks when deploying or running a SharePoint environment.

Registration is free.

Monday, December 01, 2008

SharePoint - It's all about making the right choices and decisions - Part II - One or multiple site decisions

Part 1 - It's all about making the right choices and decisions: Visual Studio Workflow Extensions vs SharePoint Designer

Site collections allow for your intranet to scale as well as provide for a model where it is easier to delegate control to power users for specific subsets of your portal.

Most people will tell you that you will need to have multiple site collections because of the database size restrictions but this is just a myth. There is no physical restriction on your database size, there's only the constraint of how long your backup/restore might take. For some background info - How large for a single SharePoint database as well as Tips on site collection sizing and How many databases for my x TBs of data? and SharePoint deployment capacity & performance planning 2003 & 2007 - what you need to know

There are however some other reasons for using multiple site collections  - one of the main reasons being a controllable management of security. Security groups are shared at the site collection level so you will have one specific group of owners,members and readers for each division. When you use multiple site collections it will be easier to delegate security settings to the site collection administrator. 

Some more background information: