Speaking at the Dallas/Fort Worth SharePoint User’s Group in February

I will be speaking at the Dallas Fort Worth SharePoint User’s Group on Tuesday, February 19th.  The meeting will be from 6:30-8:00pm.  My topic will be "Upgrading WSS and Office Server 2007 to Service Pack 1”.  Here’s a brief description of the talk:

In mid-December of 2007, Microsoft released the first service pack for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS). These service packs are filled with hot fixes and important upgrades to WSS and MOSS.  These service packs add support for the upcoming release of Windows Server 2008, Web Parts that use ASP.NET AJAX, new STSADM operations, and much more.  But installing them requires more planning than just running SETUP.exe.  In this talk we’ll examine the points below and follow them up with a live demonstration:

    1. What common problems are fixed by the SP1
    2. What should I consider BEFORE installing SP1
    3. How do I slipstream the installations for use in Server 2008
    4. What are some of the common problems encountered when trying to install SP1
    5. What other service packs will I need to install

The User Group meets at the local Microsoft Offices in Irving, TX.  You can find the office at 7000 State Highway 16, Irving, TX 75039.  The meeting will be in the LC1 Building (Right Tower) on the 1st Floor in Room 1200 (Left of the main security desk).  The DFW SharePoint Community is the only dedicated North Texas SharePoint
forum to promote:

  • Sharing of SharePoint "Best Practices" and Successes.
  • Exchange for Issues and Work Arounds.
  • Exposure to Certified 3rd party add on products.
  • Connection Point for market and Microsoft SharePoint resources

Meetings are free and open to the public, but registration is required.  You can register for the February meeting here.

64-bit only is coming….

I’ve been working on a talk that I’ll be giving to the Dallas next month to the Dallas/Fort Worth User’s group (more on that in another post) and I ran across confirmation of something I’ve been telling students for over a year now. When you are buying new hardware for a SharePoint installation, you should ALWAYS buy 64-bit hardware.  Yes, I know mixing and matching 64 and 32 bit servers in a SharePoint role isn’t recommended, but you should still try to make all new purchases 64-bit.  Why?  Because SharePoint makes extensive use of RAM for almost everything it does.  The minimum SharePoint server I recommend anymore has 4GB RAM in it, and that’s the maximum for 32-bit hardware.  But more importantly take a look at the following quote from the White Paper that Microsoft recommends everyone read BEFORE installing either SharePoint SP1 package.

“Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 are the last SharePoint Products and Technologies versions able to run on 32-bit hardware and operating systems.”

It’s now official.  The next version of SharePoint will be 64-bit only.  We’ve already seen this happen to Exchange and many have been predicting it would happen to SharePoint soon, but this is the first time I’ve seen it in print from an official Microsoft source.  You can find the full white paper here:  http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=105704&clcid=0x409