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.
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A few observations after downloading the Power Point presentations from last week’s SharePoint Conference 2011
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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.
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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).
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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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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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Today I had the great privilege of speaking at the Dallas SharePoint TechFest which was held this year in the new Irving Convention Center. I did an hour long talk on SharePoint 2010 Health and Monitoring and I was asked by several folks afterwards to share out my deck. So here it is. Thanks all for a great time. Presentation Download: SharePoint 2010 Health and Monitoring.pdf (3,331 kb)
This is the 4th article and last article in a series where I have been discussing the extensibility offered with the SharePoint 2010 Usage and Health services. If you have read all the prior articles to this point then bravo for you! I really hope this last article was worth the wait. At this point I have provided an overview of the Health and Usage Service, discussed the development of a Custom Usage Provider and showed you how to create custom Health reports and host those within Central Administration. This last article covers my favorite Health and Usage extensibility; “Usage Receivers”. In fact, here is a little secret I will let you in on, to build its analytic reports the SharePoint Web Analytics Service application uses a Usage Receiver to grab all its data from the OOB Request Usage Provider. So take a look at the SharePoint 2010 Web Analytics with all its data and rich reporting and know that all came from a Usage Receiver. If you missed the prior articles the list below is for you, otherwise lets jump into the article… Feature and Capability Overview Writing a Custom Usage Provider Writing Custom Reports Writing a Custom Usage Receiver (this article)
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