Wendy's Blog

It's been so long since I've posted I guess it took a big event for me to feel inspired. I recently had the distinct honor of presenting four sessions for the Tech Mentor Conference sponsored by Redmond Magazine at their Las Vegas show (Tech Mentor is partnered with the VSLive Conference which has mostly development topics centered on Visual Studio). The wide range of Microsoft topics offered on the Tech Mentor side of the show included SharePoint, SQL Server, IIS 7.0, Windows Server 2008, Exchange 2007, Active Directory 2008, Virtualization/Hyper-V, Windows Powershell and more. But the breadth of topics wasn't the most impressive characteristic of the conference for me. Instead, I was delighted by the way these topics were presented. Even though Microsoft was one of the sponsors of the show, Redmond Magazine prides itself on being the independent voice of IT (the slogan is printed right on the front of the magazine) and this conference was true to that calling. There were sessions that showcased third party utilities and add-ons for SharePoint and sessions that demonstrated field best practices you won't find anywhere on MSDN or Microsoft Technet. The speakers were brutally honest about the software's capabilities and shortcomings as well as about "undocumented features". If you were there, maybe I got the chance to meet you and say "Hi". If you didn't get to attend, check out a future conference date (http://techmentorevents.com) when you get the opportunity. While there are many conferences about SharePoint to choose from each year, some even delivered or heavily sanctioned by Microsoft itself, I think you'll find Tech Mentor a breath of fresh air or, if nothing else, a heavy dose of realism.

A question that came up during one of my sessions concerned recovering from erroneously installing SharePoint as a Stand-Alone Server. You may have noticed that both the WSS installation program and the MOSS installation program offer two setup modes: Basic or Advanced. These modes are reminiscent of other Microsoft application installation programs that offer Typical or Custom setup modes. The Basic setup mode of SharePoint installs all SharePoint components onto a single server, assuming many default configuration settings. However, the Advanced setup mode of SharePoint offers two configurations: WFe (web front end) or Stand-Alone Server. And while the AdvancedàStand-Alone Server choice may seem very similar to a Basic install (all SharePoint components end up getting installed on a single server), there is one major difference: the stand-alone server creates a single-server SharePoint Farm that can never be expanded to include additional SharePoint servers! This is the one time when going with the more simplistic Basic setup mode is preferable if you ever plan on expanding SharePoint in the future. But back to my audience member's question. He had already performed an AdvancedàStand-Alone Server installation and had the environment in production, populated with content. Now he needed a second SharePoint server to scale out into a small farm. Unfortunately, there is no Central Administration switch or easy radio button to convert a Stand-Alone Server into a Single-Server. Possible remedies include reinstallation or a pristine single-server installation followed by content migration, then decommissioning the original stand-alone server and installing SharePoint anew as a second SharePoint farm server. This question gave me the chance to showcase Metalogix, Quest, and AvePoint third party manufacturers of SharePoint migration tools.

Sometimes conferences can be more than just a chance to get away from the office! J