In case you want to Restrict the use of SharePoint designer in SharePoint 2010

SharePoint Designer 2010 has been significantly improved and we all use it,
however, there are still scenarios where you, as an administrator, will want to disable or restrict the use of SharePoint designer in your farm.
In SharePoint 2010, you are able to disable or restrict some of the features provided by SharePoint Designer on a Web Application basis.

Go to Central Administration -> General Application settings -> Configure SharePoint Designer settings. You can also configure these settings from the Application management in Central administration

Office 2010 with MOSS 2007

In case upgrade to Office 2010 and still working with MOSS 2007, you face this problem, that I have just faced, all clients PCs can't open or save Office 2010 docuemnts to the portal, in my case the following step was the solution:

1. Open up Internet Explorer
2. Click Tools –> Internet Options
3. Click the Connections tab
4. Click LAN settings
5. Check “Use a proxy server for your LAN enter the IP address
6. Click Advanced
7. In the Exceptions type: *.*
8. Click OK, OK and OK

Index and search for PDF documents with SharePoint 2010

SharePoint Server 2010, like its predecessors, includes indexing and search capabilities. But what doesn’t come out of the box is the ability to index and search for PDF documents.

PDF is a format owned by Adobe, not Microsoft. If you want to be able to find Adobe PDF documents, or have the PDF icon appear when viewing PDF files in a SharePoint document library , you will need to set it up for yourself,

1. Download and install Adobe’s 64-bit PDF iFilter http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4025

2. Download the Adobe PDF icon (select Small 17 x 17)

http://www.adobe.com/misc/linking.html

3. Give the icon a name or accept the default: ‘pdficon_small.gif’

4. Save the icon (or copy to) C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server
Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\IMAGES

5. Edit the DOCICON.XML file to include the PDF icon

6. In Windows Explorer, navigate to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft
Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\XML

7. Edit the DOCICON.XML file (I open it in Notepad, you can also use the built-in XML
Editor)

8. Ignore the section and scroll down to the section of the file

9. Within the section, insert attribute. The easiest way is to copy an existing one

10. Save and close the file

11. Add PDF to the list of supported file types within SharePoint

12. In the web browser, open SharePoint Central Administration

13. Under Application Management, click on Manage service applications

14. Scroll down the list of service apps and click on Search Service Application

15. Within the Search Administration dashboard, in the sidebar on the left, click File Types

16. Click ‘New File Type’ and enter PDF in the File extension box. Click OK

17. Scroll down the list of file types and check that PDF is now listed and displaying the pdf icon.

18. Close the web browser

19. Stop and restart Internet Information Server (IIS) Note: this will temporarily take SharePoint offline. Open a command line (Start – Run – enter ‘cmd’) and type ‘iisreset’

20. Perform a full crawl of your index. Note: An incremental crawl is not sufficient when you have added a new file type. SharePoint only indexes file names with the extensions listed under File Types and ignore everything else. When you add a new file type, you then have to perform a full crawl to forcibly identify all files with the now relevant file extension.

If you now perform a search, PDF files should be displayed in results where they match the search query, along with the PDF icon on display in results. The icon should also be visible in any document libraries that contain PDF files.

Good Luck

What's new in SharePoint 2010 Databases

There are three areas of changes - architecutre changes, new databases and new tables.
Architecture Changes
SharePoint 2007 stored all content in large tables (for example lists, site collects end etc were represented as a huge table), and the performance were affected by SQL Server locks, especially in the large collaborative projects, when a lot of people use the same content and SQL Server locked the table, so no one can work till person generated the lock release the content (SQL Server 2005 suffered from this very much, because its internal behavior tends to lock table when 2000+ items are selected). I posted several tips, explaining such behavior
Thus, you were limited with 2000 items in List and should use several Site Collections in case of large collaborative community.
SharePoint 2010 changes solved those issue - moving content from the singe tables into different tables. Such changes allows you to store million items in the lists
100 GB "recommendation" on the Content Database size is not an issue any longer.
New Databases
SharePoint Shared Services became deprecated in SharePoint 2010, and instead we have new Services architecture, where all services are independent from each other. Such architecture affected the way information and configuration are stored and each services has it's own database.
Previously, with SharePoint 2007 we had at least 6 databases for each installation

1. Central Administration - [SharePoint_AdminContent]
2. Configuration - [SharePoint_Config]
3. SSP - 3 databases for SSP settings, MySites, and Search
4. Web Application - custom database

With SharePoint 2010 model we still have Central Administration and other databases, but instead of point 3 we end up with the separate database for each Service, for example [AccessServices], [MetadataServices], [WebAnalyticsReporting] and etc. So, we can easity have 15 databases only for the simple SharePoint 2010 solution.
User Profiles use 3 databases: [Profiles] - for the actual profile content, [Syncronization] to keep configurations of the extenal data and [Social Tagging] to store tags and noted created by users
SharePoint Configuration Database Changes
There are several changes of the tables in the SharePoint Configuration database. The following tables have been added:

1.  AllFileFragments
2. AllListAux
3. AllListPlus
4. AllListUniqueFields
5. AllLookupRelationships
6. AllWebParts (Renamed from WebParts)
7. CustomActions
8. Resources
9. SharedAccessRequest
10. SiteDeletion
11. SolutionResourceUsageDaily
12. SolutionResourceUsageDailyOriginal
13. SolutionResourceUsageLog
14. SolutionResourceUsageLogWindowed
15. Solutions
16. WebsPlus

Removed Tables:

1. Categories
2. Image0x
3. WebCat

What's new in SharePoint 2010 Maintenance

1. New upgrade scenarios - SharePoint Server 2010 has several features that have been introduced that allow for upgrade scenarios to occur with little to no outages and at the same time allow for quicker upgrade windows. 
   The first feature is the use of read-only databases which was made available starting with Office SharePoint Server 2007 service pack 2. SharePoint Server 2010 now recognizes a content database has been made read-only from with-in SQL Server and will trim the UI as if all site collections were marked read-only. This allows users read access to the content while the upgrade takes place.
2. Patching improvements. The patch management UI and patch reporting cmdlet allow for the monitoring of patches throughout the farm. There are also patch status health rules that will alert an administrator to inconsistencies
3. Granular Backup/Restore from Central Administration (not only vis STSADM) – including recovery single document
4. Recover data from unattached content database - you don't need to attach content database backup to the SQL Server to recover data from there
5. Browse the content of a content database that is attached to a SQL server but not associated with SharePoint Server
6. Automatic Failover
7. Workflows are not Imported/Exported - when you export/import your Site  WorkFlows won't be included, you need to move them manually

21 new timer jobs in SharePoint 2010

New 21 jobs have been added. Now we have 60 Jobs for SharePoint 2010, it was 39 in MOSS 2007
So, those 21 new timer jobs are:

1. Application Addresses Refresh Job
2. Audit Log Trimming
3. Delete Job History
4. Document ID enable/disable job
5. Document ID assignment job
6. Enterprise Server Search Master Job
7. Health Analysis Job
8. InfoPath Forms Services Maintenance
9. Password Management
10. Prepare query suggestions
11. Product Version Job
12. Query Logging
13. Secure Store Service Timer
14. Solution Daily Resource Usage Update
15. State Service Delete Expired Sessions
16. Timer Service Recycle
17. Web Analytics Trigger Workflows Timer Job
18. Windows SharePoint Services Usage Data Import
19. Windows SharePoint Services Usage Data Processing
20. Word Conversion Timer Job
21. Workflow

What's new in Sharepoint 2010 User Interface.

Those who were familiar with the previous version of SharePoint will notice some major changes to the user interface in SharePoint 2010,
for me the following are list will tell you some or may all of these changes:

1. Ribbon UI – all managements and changes are done via the new Rubbon UI interface that we know by Office 2007 that is called Fluent UI now. This user interface concept has been adopted by SharePoint 2010 to provide a seamless, familiar and responsive user experience across the entire Office suite
2. Multilingual UI – SharePoint 2010 provides different localization of the interfaces. Compating to SharePoint 2007 when you can localize only content, SharePoint 2010 provides you multilingual support for Ribbon, menus and site navigation. Moreover, site owners can configure fields within lists to support multiple languages
3. Compliance and Accessibility – app pages are XHTML, WCAG 2.0 AA complaint. Unfortunately, SharePoint still categorize browsers on two levels. - Level 1 and 2 browser support. Level 1 browsers are: IE7, IE8, FF – all 32bit browsers where 100% of functionality is guarantee; Level 2 browsers are IE7-IE8 x64, Safari, FF on other platforms, with some limitations in rendering and behaviour.  IE6 is not supported
4. Validation of List and Libraries – each item in a list or library now supports item-level and list-level validation. For instance, a list owner can configure a validation to disallow the start date of an event item, stored in one column, to be after the end date of the event, stored in another column
5. Office Web Services - SharePoint 2010 features rich out of the box integration with Web versions of the most popular Office client applications so people can access documents, spreadsheets, presentations and notes without worrying the machine they are on has the latest Office client installed
6. Themes no longer exist in Windows SharePoint Services "14" and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, so any customizations and design work that you have done with themes will not be imported into the new interface
7. 10 New and 4 removed Templates - the following templates have been added to SharePoint 2010:  GroupBoard, Visio Process, Bugs, Charitable Contributions, Projects, Enterprise Seach Center, Basic Search Center, FAST Search Center, Enterprise Wike . The next ones have been removed: Site Directory, Search Center with Tabs, Search Center, Collaboration Portal
8. Configuration Wizards in Central Administration simplify the most popular command actions, for example – Farm Configuration Wizard
9. Old Look and Feel - the stadard 2007 theme is supported, and is defaul when you perform migration from SharePoint 2007
10. Office Web Services is a replacement for the Office client and installing on the top of SharePoint 2010 to provide all functionality of the Office 2010 over the Web, thus allowing users to collaborate and edit documents interactively together

What's new in SharePoint 2010 Lists

SharePoint 2010 introduces the following changes to the List:

• New events - WebAdding, WebProvisioning, ListAdding, ListAdded, ListDeleting, ListDeleted
• Site Collection events
• Synchronous "after" events to perform post-processing
• Custom error pages
• New property PSEventPropertiesBase to store the user name and token of the person who triggered the effective action
• New integrity constraints based on the lookup
• Projected Fields - fields from the parent which are referenced and displayed in the child list
• Max 50M items under the read scenario
• List query size threshold - return warning or exception of query result exceeds threshold number of records
• Threshold pre-set is 5000 items for the normal user and 20000 items for the Super User
• List Administrators are notified when lists exceed threshold
• List constraints - max 8kb of data per list item (excluding attachments), 6 projected fields on joins (except using the view fields)
• Columns can be flagged as UNIQUE (must be indexed)
• Columns can be validated using custom field or by other fields

MS3Arab Community Launch

I was honored to host the Ms3arab community at my company, the Egyptian Banking Institute, the launch was on 4th November at Microsoft Egypt, and the second gathering was at EBI yesterday, around 40 participants has attended this second gathering,

MS3Arab Co-Founders are:

· Dr.Ahmed Bahaa, Ph.D, MVP, and RD

· Mohamed Rafaat Samy, MVP.

· AymanEL-Hattab, MVP.

· Mohamed Bahaa, M.Sc.

· Mahmoud Ghoz.

· Shady Naguib

The coming sessions will be as follows:

• Sherief Talaat, MVP 24th November 2010 Windows PowerShell
• Ayman El-Hattab, MVP 29th December 2010 SharePoint2010, ECM
• Ahmed Bahaa, PH.D, MVP and RD Mohamed Samy, MVP 29th December 2010 Visual Studio Team System, AX Integration
• Mohamed Bahaa 26th January 2011 Microsoft Business Intelligence

What's new in SharePoint 2010 Sites

1. Role/Rule based Audience Targeting – added rules-based audiences, WSS groups and distribution list membership.
2. Sites are collection of pages - SharePoint 2010 sites became more page-focused rather than a collection a lists. Sites still contain the same list and libraries as previous versions of SharePoint, but the site is now a collection of pages.
3. Pages are optimized for Reading – all WCM pages are optimized for the reading, rather than for the writing, thus performance is increased significantly
4. Status updates and activity feeds of My Sites – SharePoint 2010 changes of My Site enhanced dramatically to be the social networking hub. One of such changes is ability to update your status, similar to Facebook. See the following screenshot
5. Social tagging - assignment of descriptor words or categories to that content.  There are two types of tagging, social tagging and expertise tagging.  Social tagging refers to content and adds metadata to content to describe what it is, what it contains, or what it does.  Expertise tagging is related to a person and describes the person, such as what they do, which projects they work on or what skills they have.  Where social tagging of content allows users to organically flex and grow a portal’s information architecture over time, expertise tagging helps build relationships and connections to other people in the organization.
6. Team blogs which allows multiple people to publish blog posts together
7. New Lists - Assets Library (list to share and manage rich media assets such as image, audio and video files) , External List (list whose data source is an Enterprise Entity)
8. Site templates are deprecated in SP2010. But, "Save Site as Template" will create a solution package with a .wsp file name extension
9. Improved performance and management of large lists.  List item limitation has been removed – 1 million items for 3 secs. Windows SharePoint Services "14" and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 apply a default query threshold of 5,000 items. Any custom code that relies on query result sets that can exceed this maximum will not behave as expected. Queries on lists consisting of more than 5,000 items that include non-indexed fields in their query conditions will also fail, because those queries must scan all rows in a list. You can increase this limit or enable the object model to override it on the Central Administration site (under Application Management, click Manage Web Applications, click General Settings, and then click Resource Throttling
10. Lists support external data, can return results as DataTable; support calculated field rule validation and no more even’t receivers

Move the Log

The SharePoint log files commonly referred to as the ULS logs are by default created in
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\Logs.
These files can easily generate a lot of disk space—even if you  specify how many log files that should be stored.
You should always make sure that you move this location to any other disk you have available so you do not  run out of disk space on your c: drive and stop SharePoint from working..
This is done in Central administration -> Operations -> Diagnostics Logging

Forefront Protection 2010 for SharePoint

Microsoft Forefront Protection 2010 for SharePoint helps prevents users from uploading or downloading documents containing malware, out-of-policy content, or sensitive information to SharePoint libraries. Using multiple antimalware scanning engines from industry-leading security partners combined with file and keyword filtering, Forefront Protection 2010 for SharePoint provides comprehensive protection against the latest threats. The product integrates with SharePoint technologies to provide high performance, easily customized protection optimized for SharePoint collaboration environments.




New Features





Build 0354.0:



1.Added support for Windows PowerShell, the Windows command line shell that can be used to enter commands directly or to create scripts.

2.Product installation is now done with the Windows Installer (MSI). Unattended (silent or passive) installations are also supported.

3.The user interface has been revised and includes statistics and health monitoring reports.

4.Spyware can now be detected with the Microsoft Antimalware Engine in the realtime scan.

5.Administrators can now customize e-mail notifications to be sent for events such as a license expiration or an engine update failure.

6.There is a new scan job called the scheduled scan job, which is typically used to scan the entire database.

7.An on-demand scan job has been added in order to scan selected sites on an on-demand basis.You can choose the SharePoint sites to scan with the scheduled and on-demand scans using either the FPSP Administrator Console or Windows PowerShell commands.

8.FPSP can be run on the Hyper-V virtual platform.

9.FPSP can be deployed by using the System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM).

10.FPSP has improved its performance scanning Microsoft Office OpenXML files.

11.FPSP supports scanning files over 500 megabytes (MB).

12.FPSP offers increased stability over heavy loads.

13.FPSP is supported on 64-bit operating systems.

SharePoint 2010 Advanced IT Professional Training

For IT professionals, SharePoint 2010 offers enhancements to drive productivity, a scalable unified infrastructure, and flexible deployment. SharePoint 2010 Advanced IT Professional Training is a deep technical learning series for current SharePoint professionals who are looking to upgrade their skills to SharePoint 2010.

1. Core Architecture of SharePoint 2010
2. Security in SharePoint 2010
3. IT Pro Management in SharePoint 2010
4. Upgrading to SharePoint 2010
5. Enterprise Search in SharePoint 2010
6. Content Management in SharePoint 2010
7. Composite Solutions in SharePoint 2010
8. Communities in SharePoint 2010
9. Business Intelligence in SharePoint 2010
10. SharePoint Online Overview

SharePoint 2010 Advanced Developer Training

For developers, SharePoint 2010 provides a business collaboration platform to rapidly build solutions and respond to business needs. SharePoint 2010 Advanced Developer Training offers technical training as self-paced modules and hosted labs for SharePoint 2007 professionals who want to upgrade their skills to SharePoint 2010.

1. Developer Roadmap and Tools
2. Core Development
3. User Interfaces and Lists
4. Data Access in Technologies
5. Composite Solutions
6. Enterprise Content Management
7. Enterprise Search
8. Business Intelligence
9. Communities
10. Development Life Cycle

8 Things You Wanted to Know About SharePoint - From AIIM

 SharePoint is transforming the ECM landscape. With the release of SharePoint 2010, the already significant adoption rates initiated with MOSS will escalate. This e-book explores some of the issues associated with SharePoint implementations, particularly in the context of integration/competition with other ECM solutions.

•8 Way to Control Your SharePoint Infrastructure

•8 Things to Consider When it Comes to Getting Paper into SharePoint

•8 Things You Need to Know About Taxonomy, Metadata, and Information Architecture in SharePoint 2010

•8 Features in SharePoint 2010 That Rock

•8 Reasons SharePoint Looks Like a True ECM System

•8 Ways to Make Things Easy for Your SharePoint Development Team

•8 Ways IT Politics Can Wreck a SharePoint Project

•8 Things You Need to Know About SharePoint Governance

•8 More Things You Need to Know About SharePoint
•8 Things to Consider when Implementing SharePoint with Another ECM Engine
•8 Ways to Use SharePoint for Social Computing
•8 Reasons You Should Consider Automatic Classification and Metadata Tagging in SharePoint
•8 Things to do to Make Content More Findable in SharePoint
•8 Ways SharePoint Helps in Enterprise Governance, Risk, and Compliance
•8 Things to Consider When Selecting an Application to Scan or Capture into SharePoint
•8 Things You Should Know About Transactional Processing in SharePoint

Configure Search on Sites Using Forms Authentication

The default SharePoint search crawler cannot crawl on sites that are set up to use Forms Authentication or sites that use a security certificate. 
Alternate Access Mappings provide an alternate URL to access the same SharePoint site and
can also be set to different zones such as Default, Intranet, Internet or Extranet.  Create an AAM to a site that cannot be crawled and assign it to the default zone. 
Set the authentication method for this mapped site to Windows  Authentication. 
This is configured via the ‘Create or extend Web application’ menu from Central Administration -> Application Management. 
The original site that cannot be currently crawled should be moved over to a zone other than the default zone.  The newly created AAM site can then be set to use Windows Authentication, should not use a Security Certificate and should be assigned to the default zone.

Backup & Restore Site Collections using PowerShell

SharePoint 2010 you can take a backup of a site collection using the
Backup-SPSite cmdlet:

Backup-SPSite http://SP –Path C:\Backup\siteCollection.bak

Restoring a site collection in SharePoint 2010 is just as simple:

Restore-SPSite http://SP –Path C:\Backup\siteCollection.bak

Productivity Hub 2010 - Training for End-Users

Microsoft has developed the Productivity Hub to help support your ongoing end user training efforts.
The Hub is a SharePoint Server site collection for 2007 and 2010 that serves as a learning community and is fully customizable. It provides a central place for your training efforts, and includes training content from Microsoft’s core products. Microsoft also provides ongoing and updated content packs.

The Hub uses SharePoint Server’s social networking capabilities, such as blogs and discussion groups. In addition, it offers the Coach program, a change management feature to help you train end users to self-help, reducing the burden on your training and IT staff. The Coach program impacts productivity in a collaborative and positive way.

The 2007 Hub contains 2007 content only (v2) with 2010 content added in v3 (to be released in June 2010). You can also add 2010 content packages to your current Hub. Watch for more document on migration from your 2007 Hub to your 2010 Hub.

What the Productivity Hub is:

•  Format: Pre-loaded SharePoint site collection, optimized for Web 2.0 functionality and easily deployed within SharePoint Server 2007 or SharePoint 2010 environment, depending on version
•  Content: Convenient end user productivity training in a variety of formats (documents, videos, podcasts, etc.). Receive free quarterly updates of content that you will learn about through the Productivity blog.
•  Blog: The Productivity blog offers tips and tricks for end user productivity. Use it as is, or your training staff can use the posts as their own to help them get started in running an internal blog.
•  Train the trainer: Includes IT/Manager section to aid with deployment of the site collection, and guidance to develop the Coach program
• Products: Office 2007 and Office 2010 (including SharePoint Server 2007 and SharePoint 2010), Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 8, Project, Visio, Live Meeting, and Communicator

You can also download additional content packages that expand the training materials you can make available through the Hub.

Creating Customized List Views

Use Grouping when Creating Customized List Views 

there are several custom views that can be created from the User Interface.  Customizing these views can be done with a click of a button and completely changes the default, out-of-the-box list views that are visible on the web pages. 

Some specific settings include Grouping and Styling.  A simple ‘Group By’ setting will
automatically create a collapsed view of the list which is especially useful
for large lists.

To further filter the list data for a particular user, adding a simple Filter clause of ‘ where user=[Me]’ will display only data related to the current user.

SharePoint Foundation 2010 Objects with .NET 4

You Cannot Use SharePoint Foundation 2010 Objects with .NET4 

The SharePoint Foundation 2010 object model is not accessible using the .NET Framework 4 (or
later).  Calling any object or method in the object model using any framework version other than .NET 3.5 will throw the following exception: 

System.PlatformNotSupportedException

Microsoft SharePoint is not supported with version 4.0.30319.1 of the Microsoft .Net Runtime.

Download RTM version of the SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 VHD

The RTM version of the SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 VHD files are now available for download. This includes Windows Server 2008 R2, SharePoint 2010, Office 2010, Visual Studio 2010, SQL Server 2008 R2, Exchange 2010 and more. See the download site for a complete list of software. This is the the same virtual machine that we do all of our demos and presentations with
Download SharePoint 2010 VHD: http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9728417

Forefront Protection 2010 for SharePoint Now Available

http://www.microsoft.com/forefront/protection-for-sharepoint/en/us/default.aspx


Forefront Protection 2010 for SharePoint is now available for download. As the next generation of Forefront Security for SharePoint, this product helps prevent users from uploading or downloading documents containing malware, out-of-policy content, or sensitive information to SharePoint libraries, uses multiple anti-malware scanning engines from industry-leading security partners to provide comprehensive protection against the latest threats, and integrates with SharePoint technologies to provide high performance, easily customized protection optimized for SharePoint collaboration environments.

Explore the SharePoint Training Kit Offline with HOLs

on the SharePoint Learning Center home page, Click

download the Training Kit , then install

you can have it Offline

SharePoint 2010 Training Kit with Offline and Hands on Labs

http://channel9.msdn.com/learn/courses/SharePoint2010Developer/

This training course contains 14 training units covering all aspects of developing solutions on the SharePoint 2010 platform using Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint Designer 2010.

The update adds a downloadable version of the training course including Hands On Labs (HOLs) for all of the training units. SharePoint 2010 provides the business collaboration platform for developers to rapidly build solutions using familiar tools while leveraging a rich set of out of the box features.

Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint Designer 2010 make developers more productive and Visual Studio Team Foundation Server delivers support for application lifecycle management.

Developers can integrate Line of Business data in SharePoint 2010 with read/write capability delivered by Business Connectivity Services.

Sandboxed Solutions can be deployed to a shared hosting environment to limit the impact of unpredictable code to the other applications in use.

Chat with the SharePoint MVP Experts

Do you have tough technical questions regarding SharePoint for which you're seeking answers? Do you want to tap into the deep knowledge of the talented Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals? The SharePoint MVPs are the same people you see in the technical community as authors, speakers, user group leaders and answerers in the MSDN forums. This is the first time we have brought these experts together as a collective group to answer your questions live. So please join us and bring on the questions! This chat will cover WSS, MOSS and the SharePoint 2010 beta. Topics include setup and administration, design, development and general questions.

Date and Time
9:00 - 10:00 A.M. Pacific Time
Chat Room
Enter Chat Room

SharePoint Saturday Arabic

Registration is now open for participation in Live Online SharePoint Saturday Arabia. Live presentations, presented from 7:00am to 3:00pm (GMT+0), on March 27, 2010.
http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/arabia

In order to hear the presenters, you will need headphones or computer speakers. There will be no conference call dial-in phone numbers.

The live blogging platform will allow for real time questions to be passed to the presenters. There will be multiple sessions running simultaneously so that we can present to a diversified audience with different technical needs.

SharePoint 2010 & Office 2010 Launch date on May 12th, 2010

Watch Stephen Elop, President of the Microsoft Business Division, announce the launch of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 on May 12, 2010 at 11 a.m
After a long time of waiting, SharePoint 2010 will be released.
http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/businessproductivity/proof/pages/2010-launch-events.aspx#fbid=Oykvn5mGI-9

Meeting SharePoint Experts @Tech.Ed 2010

Yesterday, I was so happy to meet two of the top SharePoint experts in the world, Joel and Noel,
I am attending the first Tech.Ed in the Middle East which is now in Dubai

SharePoint Saturday EMEA – All Recordings Available

All of the recorded sessions from SharePoint Saturday are available for download.

Intro and Keynote

Mark Miller, Dux Raymond Sy, Isaac Stith, Toni Frankola and Joel Oleson

Channel 1
1.SharePoint 2010 Planning and Best Practice Approaches to Upgrade
Joel Oleson
2.PowerShell for a SharePoint 2010 Environment
Claudio Brotto, SharePoint MVP
3.Creating Office Business Application Solutions with Business
Zlatan Dzinic, SharePoint MVP
4.SharePoint 2010, Getting Ready!
Marwan Tarek, SharePoint MVP
5.SharePoint 2010 Development Tips & Tricks
Mostafa Elzoghbi, C# MVP
6.Installing and Configuring SharePoint Server 2010 in a Virtual Environment
Muhanad Omar, SharePoint MVP
7.Architecting a Fault Tolerant and High Performance SharePoint 2010 Farm
Michael Noel

Channel 2
1.The Power of Content Editor Web Part
Boris Gomiunik
2.KPI roll-up in SharePoint 2007 (WSS and MOSS)
Christophe Humbert
3.Client Side Technologies in SharePoint 2010
Jan Tielens, SharePoint MVP
4.Access and SharePoint
Mohamed Yehia
5.SharePoint Social Computing and Social Networking in Everyday Use
Nicolas Georgeault, SharePoint MVP
6.Introducing the SharePoint 2010 Out-of-Box Web Parts
Laura Rogers

Channel 3
1.Data-Centric Composites (Mashups) in SharePoint 2010 (In Arabic)
Ayman El-Hattab
2.Delivering SharePoint Success – Why Collaboration is More Than Just Technology
Dux Raymond Sy
3.Design and Manage Site Collections in SharePoint 2010
Steve Smith, SharePoint MVP
4.SharePoint 2010 Search for the Business
Ágnes Molnár, SharePoint MVP
5.Explaining Metadata: Content Types and Site Columns
Ruven Gotz
6.Social Computing in the Enterprise, from 2007 to 2010
Daniel McPherson

SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Simplified - Q&A

Joel posted a very nice post that I would like to point to, Simplify your SharePoint 2010 Upgrade recorded archive is now available.
Download the Practical Guidance for SharePoint 2010 Upgrade deck from SlideShare - PPTX
Free tool for displaying storage, large files, size in versions, etc.. in a site or site collection: Storage Reports for SharePoint
details of the post here http://www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=306

E-Learning Clinics: What's New in Microsoft SharePoint 2010

Clinic 10277: What's New in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 for Developers
This clinic covers the following topics:

• Developing SharePoint 2010 Solutions with Visual Studio 2010
• Integrating New Development Features in SharePoint 2010 Solutions
• Developing Remote Clients for SharePoint 2010
• Incorporating External Data in SharePoint 2010 Solutions

Clinic 10279: What's New in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 for IT Professionals
This clinic covers the following topics:

• Introduction to SharePoint 2010
• Managing Data in SharePoint 2010
• Monitoring Data in SharePoint 2010

SharePoint 2010 Demonstration Virtual Machine (Beta) - NOW

This download contains a two Virtual Machine set for evaluating and demonstrating Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0c51819b-3d40-435c-a103-a5481fe0a0d2&displaylang=en

SharePoint Community Forums - My 1000 posts

I am very happy that I have reached the 1000 posts in the Microsoft SharePoint Forums
Achieving 340 answers out of 1000 means 34% of my posts have been marked as answers, for me it is great. In 5 months period of time this was a challenge.

I have started to be involved in these forums just to help and to be a part of the SharePoint Community; this helps me a lot more than I helped others.

I wish I could continue with this spirit.

Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint 2010

Business Connectivity Services (BCS) in SharePoint 2010 is all about connecting to external data. BCS enhances the SharePoint platform’s capabilities with out-of-box features, services and tools that streamline development of solutions with deep integration of external data and services. BCS builds upon its BDC predecessor in the key areas of presentation, connectivity, tooling and lifecycle management. For example, in SharePoint 2010 it’s easy to create an external content type with SharePoint Designer, create an external list in SharePoint’s Web user interface and take the list offline into Outlook as a set of contacts. Also, you can make updates to contacts in Outlook that will cause the data in the external system to update as well.

BCS Architecture

BDC Metadata Store – The BDC Metadata Store provides storage for a collection of external content types, each of which describes how to connect to the external store. The Metadata Store acts as part of the services layer. External content types are a fundamental building block of BCS.

BDC Server Runtime – The BDC Server Runtime understands how to reach into the back-end store and connect to data based on the external content types defined within the content type store. It’s important to note the new usage of the acronym BDC to refer to the set of services that provides connectivity that is a component of BCS.

Security – BCS provides integration with the Secure Store Service (SSS), as well as enabling your own security model.

Solution Packaging – Solutions built with BCS can be packaged as a Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) package to be delivered to a rich client, including SharePoint Workspace, Outlook and Word. BCS also exposes APIs to extend solution packaging to target additional clients.

Out of Box UI – BCS carries forward the ability to display external data through a Web Part UI and provides deeper integration through the addition of external lists.

BDC Client Runtime – A symmetrical runtime is provided for client and server, enabling you to take solutions offline with a client-side cache and to connect and push changes back to the server in a consistent manner. Use of the BDC Client Runtime enables offline operations, interacting with the external data cache.

Design Tools – SharePoint Designer provides a wealth of out-of-box functionality for creating BCS solutions, including the ability to define external content types and external lists, and to define InfoPath forms to surface the data to create simple solutions. Visual Studio provides the ability for the professional developer to extend those capabilities to create advanced solutions while leveraging the existing framework.

No more SSP in SharePoint 2010

In SharePoint 2010 Shared Service Providers (SSP’s) are replaced by Service Applications. Services are no longer combined into a SSP. Services are running independent as a service application.

Benefits the new Service Model provides:

• A more effective targeting of services to the Web apps you’ve created (Web apps consume services on an individual basis)
• Each Web app can use any combination of the available Service Apps
• You can deploy multiple instances of the same Service Apps – giving each one a unique name
• This model also allows Cross-Farm Service Apps
• You can also write your own services that take advantage of the SharePoint infrastructure!

 
With this new Service model, comes some new terms

Service: A set of bits installed on a SharePoint 2010 farm that’s capable of providing some functionality
Service Application: A specific farm-level configuration of the Service in SharePoint. For example, the specific configuration of Office Web apps Service in your new SharePoint 2010 farm.
Service Machine Instance: A machine-level instance of the Service running on an app server
Service App Proxy: A pointer to a Service App that exists on the WFE
Service Consumer: A SharePoint feature, such as a web-part, that talks with the service and makes its functionality available to an end user

What Service apps are NEW and what actually they do?

You’ve seen from the above that the architecture has been modified and they are lots of NEW Services available in SharePoint 2010. I’ve provided a brief list of some of the new Services and what they do below:

Access Services – Allows viewing, editing, and interacting with Access databases in a browser.
Managed Metadata Service – Provides access to managed taxonomy hierarchies, keywords, social tags and Content Type publishing across site collections.
Secure Store Service –Provides capability to store data (e.g. credential set) securely and associate it to a specific identity or group of identities.
State Service – Provides temporary storage of user session data for Office SharePoint Server components.
Usage and Health data collection – This service collects farm wide usage and health data and provides the ability to view various usage and health reports.
Visio Graphics Service – Enables viewing and refreshing of published Visio diagrams in a web browser.
Web Analytics Service Application – Enable rich insights into web usage patterns by processing and analyzing web analytics data .
Word Conversion Service Application – Provides a framework for performing automated document conversions

A First Look at Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010

This series will look at the new features of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. Topics to include: SharePoint 2010 from the Technical Decision Maker perspective, SharePoint 2010 Excel Services, Forms Services, and Visio Services

• Microsoft SharePoint 2010: Overview for TDM's
• Microsoft SharePoint 2010: Overview for Developers
• Microsoft SharePoint 2010: Overview for Implementers
• Microsoft SharePoint 2010: Developing with Visual Studio 2010
• Microsoft SharePoint 2010: Developing with SharePoint Designer

http://www.msdev.com/Directory/SearchResults.aspx?productId=26

SharePoint 2010 Training

Point8020 has released free SharePoint 2010 end user training that you can access from http://www.point8020.com/SharePointEndUserTraining.aspx
It includes 50 short videos for end-users & site administrators covering a number of different common tasks.


These videos are consumable, easy to navigate and free!

Tips Troubleshooting SharePoint 2010 Installations

Here are the best references I found:
- Ji Lie Installation Instructions and Warning

- Joel's 10 Tips Troubleshooting Installations for SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint Foundation

- CodeProject: Step by Step SharePoint Server 2010 Installation

- Microsoft (MSDN) for Win 7: Setting Up the Development Environment for SharePoint Server

Windows PowerShell compiled Help for SharePoint Server 2010

Brief Description

Downloadable .chm file that contains Help for Windows PowerShell cmdlets for SharePoint Server 2010.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=045f7af5-b226-4a05-8ace-4e17cfdef856&displaylang=en

Microsoft 2010 Beta Product Keys

Most application products of Office 2010 Beta and SharePoint 2010 Beta can be activated using MAK (Multiple Activation Key) product key, including Office Professional Plus 2010, which is a suite of Office 2010 which intends for volume licensing customers. Best of all, the “generic” MAK product key (which is the same for every downloaders) can be used to activate unlimited copy of Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta, Visio Premium 2010 Beta, Project Professional 2010 Beta, and SharePoint Server 2010 Beta.


Here’s the list of all MAK product keys for Office 2010 Beta and SharePoint 2010 Beta or their related apps.

Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta Product Key
7XD2X-JWJ94-BCHBW-W9WXP-J2WPT
2PWHY-KT4X6-96PYW-XQR7V-HW2W9
YF79C-7Y4B4-PGM89-6BKGJ-46PBT
PYMDW-8DFY2-Y68BB-XHDGD-CT443

Microsoft Visio Premium 2010 Beta Product Key
MQQGY-6JQ3R-9M89C-F9VVT-VCCKT

Microsoft Project Professional 2010 Beta Product Key
TQHBF-DY3KV-KMFRM-P43FK-3M4DD

Microsoft Project Server 2010 Beta Product Key
HRPDM-9C238-7YD9V-DBBR7-QB6BQ

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Beta Product Key
PKXTJ-DCM9D-6MM3V-G86P8-MJ8CY

Microsoft SharePoint Server for Internet Sites Enterprise 2010 Beta Product Key
BV7VC-RMR6B-26P6Y-BTQDG-DX2KQ

Top 10 benefits of SharePoint Workspace 2010

http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/en/sharepoint-workspace/default.aspx

Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010, the new name for Microsoft Office Groove, expands the boundaries of collaboration by allowing fast, anytime, anywhere access to your Microsoft SharePoint team sites. Synchronize SharePoint Server 2010 document libraries with SharePoint Workspace so you can access, view and edit files anytime and anywhere from your computer. Lists such as Discussion, Tasks, and custom lists are supported as well. You can even synchronize Business Connectivity Services lists so access to your backend systems is easy and painless. SharePoint Workspace 2010 ushers in an entirely new way of working with your SharePoint team sites.

SharePoint 2010 Virtual Conference

http://sharepointvcx.com/agenda.aspx

This FREE event requires no travel, no conference fees and no time away from work. You and your team can listen to the industry's most respected speakers on topics you must know, and solutions that make it all happen. You can also network directly one-on-one through the Virtual Expo Hall.

SharePoint 2010 Live's revolutionary Virtual Expo Hall gives you the full-fidelity experience of a real conference, without all the travel. Interact directly with real people in each virtual expo booth. Learn about their products, ask questions, and get the answers you need. Along with our live presentations, our Virtual Expo hall puts the "Live" in SharePoint 2010 Live

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products (Beta) Management Pack

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products (Beta) Management Pack
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c8a9d749-b7a8-412a-b2db-f3e464ed3fcf&displaylang=en

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 (Beta) Management Pack
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=43D5EE9A-B9A6-441D-A35E-8A7B9B15E20C&displaylang=en

SharePoint Server 2010 Beta 2 - Download

Quick Details
File Name: 14.0.4536.1000_OfficeServer_none_ship_x64_en-us_exe\OfficeServer.exe
Version: 1
Date Published: 11/17/2009
Language: English
Download Size: 561.9 MB

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=3ed6e43b-22da-4021-8e90-56e47536d772&DisplayLang=en

Live Online SharePoint Saturday EMEA - FREE

http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/emea/default.aspx