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.