SharePoint’s Page Output Caching can offer a massive performance boost to publishing sites but only when its working and working correctly. One of the problems I have seen is when some administrators turn on Page Output Caching they just assume it works. While this may be the desire and in most cases it may just work for you I would suggest you verify; and I don’t mean hit the site with the browser to see if it speeds up.
This post is about troubleshooting SharePoint’s Page Output Caching. Now if you don’t use Page Output Caching or yours is working just fine you are the “Master of your Page Output Caching” – as for the rest of us we will likely need to put on our troubleshooting hat and dig a bit deeper. I find troubleshooting anything is allot easier if you know a little about how the component you are troubleshooting operates and how it is suppose to work. More...
This Friday, 11-11-11, will mark my last day at Microsoft. After 15 years of working for the best software company in the world I have decided to accept another challenge. I have so many great memories, experiences, and friends this move was not trivial but ultimately could not be passed. I owe so much to Microsoft and all of the co-workers I have ever worked with. When my kids were in the hospital I was worried sick but I did not have worry about any bills or costs for the visits -- Microsoft’s health benefits are the best around. Having the opportunity to work with the smartest folks around only made me want to work that much harder and made me a better engineer but more importantly a better person. I have so many friends I have worked with around the world whom have all contributed to my successes and my hope is one day I will have the opportunity to payback what they have so unselfishly provided me.
I am joining an Internet startup as a partner and will be leading the design and development of our new online business to be released right around one year from now (Nov 2012). I will also work part time as an independent SharePoint consultant and will continue my role as a SharePoint MCM instructor.
So yes, my involvement with SharePoint, Microsoft, and this blog will continue for the foreseeable future and going forward I hope to see you all at SharePoint conferences around the world.
PS - yea I chose a date which could be represented in binary because that is how a true geek rolls. 
Thanks
Todd Carter
A few observations after downloading the Power Point presentations from last week’s SharePoint Conference 2011 More...
In a previous post I spoke about how importance of pre-populating SharePoint’s Content Database’s UserInfo table with users for landing/root (and/or very popular) sites just before a large release of a new SharePoint web application. While I did mention the API you could call to make all this happen I did not provide any tooling. This post is about a small tool I wrote, which at this point has been used with a couple of customers, to pre-populate UserInfo tables.The tool itself comes in two flavors – one for MOSS 2007 and the other for SharePoint 2010 Server. Both flavors allow you to export users from the User Profile Store to a flat file which can then be imported in a manner which populates the UserInfo table. In addition, the SharePoint 2010 version supports both Windows and Claims users.More...
When an authenticated user, whom has never visited a site collection, first visits a site there are a number of tables within the Content database which must be updated. This activity can be expensive and performance can suffer when the site collection is the root of a web application which has just been announced or released for the first time into production. In fact, I have seen first hand this behavior take down a very large SQL server upon initial launch of a large intranet site to the point we had to roll back and I have teammates which have had the same experience (hence this post).More...
As most of you will know the SharePoint Product Group (PG) released a set of templates for WSS 3.0, known as the FAB40, to assist in addressing common business scenarios. These templates for WSS 3.0 can be downloaded in a single package here. But for those of us running SharePoint 2010 Microsoft is not planning to release new versions of these templates for SharePoint Server 2010 or SharePoint Foundation 2010.
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I have a Lenovo W510 and after reading Keith Combs’ review of the W520 I itching to get my hands on one. My new W520 arrived a couple of weeks ago – the part which I was most excited about was the new internal disk controller which moved from a SATA II to a SATA III. A long while back, just as they hit the market, I purchased a Crucial C300 which when I initially installed in my T61 cranked out some huge performance gains. I then moved it to a W510 and again saw another level of performance out of this drive. As with the other machines installing the C300 installing into the W520 I was not disappointed. More...
Over the last week my team has received reports from customers running both MOSS 2007 and SharePoint 2010 that Federated Search Results are no longer working. The Federated location in question seems to be centered around Bing/live.com.
I setup a test this morning in my SP2010 lab and I can confirm the out of the box (OOB) “Internet Search Results” Federated location is no longer working. In fact when you add the Federated Web Part on a Search Results page and choose this location a very long delay will occur when attempting to render the search results page. Doing a sniff I can see the original request for search.live.com gets redirected to bing.com which has been typical in the past however the difference is that instead of being an RSS response, as specified in the format query string parameter, the response is sent back in HTML which injects a delay as the results are processed. Eventually the results cannot be processed and the Search Federated Results Web Part does not render any output.
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Ran into an issue the other day on SharePoint 2010 Search when configuring Managed Properties, specifically I was setting the MaxCharactersInPropertyStoreIndex value on a Managed Property. This is an integer value and is documented here. The maximum value for this property is 450 however if you set this value to its maximum value you will start seeing errors with your crawls and in our case the crawls never would complete. Taking a look at the application event log we can see the following error logged:
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Just in time for summer break here in the US the SharePoint product team has released a good number of fixes for SharePoint 2010. Service Pack 1 and the June Cumulative Update (CU) is now available for download. These are fairly substantial updates when you consider the number of bugs that have been fixed and in the case of SP1 the new improvements which have been made. To put it another way, SharePoint Server 2010 is about 1.47 GB and the Uber Package for the June CU (Foundation+Server) has a size of just about 1 GB.
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