Wow. Has anyone explored the depths of Office 2007 administration?

As much as people complained about the administration of the SPS 2003 server [which was quite justified], there will be different types of complaints for the Office 2007 administration.

Whereas in the past [or currently] the admin pages were thrown around all over the place, and some pages were hard to navigate to, the current set of admin pages is laid out much much better, but unfortunately, the new Office 2007 product has about 10x more features packed in. As I have been observing many skilled people in action get lost in simple security assignment, I believe it may be a hard transition to some people. Luckily, for those who are independently wealthy, or have wealthy companies, there is Admin 2007 Training available from Mindsharp guys. I've met them a couple of times at MS events in the past, and they were all quite talented. As I haven't quite seen a lot of other Admin training [including from Microsoft], I recommend you, or someone you know attends. One of my colleagues will be attending the December class in DC [sold out], I'll update with his experience.

Well, speaking of administration of SharePoint 2007. There is a quick and simple rule to follow. Learn the "logical" hierarchy:

• Farm
• Application
• Site Collection
• Site

After that, you'll need to figure out what features are available at each level, and viola, you are an admin. You'll also have to learn about special things like Shared Services and parts of the application services. Shared Services are kind of a SOA implementation that is consumed by other applications in the farm.

Most people forget about this hierarchy when setting the admin security. Generally, you have to figure out what part you are currently trying to administer. People forget that just because you are an app admin, it does not mean you can manage a site collection. You can "add yourself" to the site collection admin [role?], but you can't manage the site before that happens [and if you do add yourself to the site collection admin, the operation will get logged in the system log!]. I'll do another entry on planning infrastructure and administration operations for a MOSS 2007 farm.

Ah I forgot about the infrastructure part. The infrastructure is a bit easier to remember, as the infrastructure is probably infinitely more flexible than in SPS 2003. Just keep the front end servers separate from app servers, and you're on the way to achieve a good balance. Next, just monitor the performance, and some other counters, and add servers where it is most necessary.

Next post should be on some development.. how about the admin APIs?

Some time ago, we decided to optimize server settings, as recommended by MVPs and other industry gurus. Basically, if it was in a Power Point slide deck, or in someone's blog, we tried it out. Unfortunately, we didn't quite see The Old New Thing blog entry which set things straight.

Unfortunately, the "/3GB" caused more grief than we anticipated... What happened [even MS Premiere seemed to be dumbfounded for a month] is that after some times we'd get crazy calls from people complaining that they cannot open "large office documents", with "Internet Explorer cannot download ... from ..." error. Sometimes it would be a 1 MB file, sometimes it would be 512 KB.. we'd scratch our heads, observe it only happens on 1 of 2 front-end servers, reboot the machine [after office hours] and try to provide access via alternative means. All for naught, any browser, any protocol, any machine [remote or localhost], same error [except it all worked with the other FE server!]. We called for support, nothing happened. We broke up few portals between another set of servers [new farm], and our problems went away... but only for a while. The traffic picked up, and once again, the problems started appearing.

Luckily, with proper documentation of all symptoms, settings and the hardware, and probably a different MS Support engineer, when we called again, the problem was solved in less than 30 minutes [including wait time]. Bottom line is.. as soon as the memory consumption on the system would exceed 3 GB, the problems would start. Removing the /3GB switch, which we carefully placed there 6 months earlier, was quite embarrassing.

The wait is over, the Office 2007 has been released [although there are only the desktop apps available from MSDN at this time]...