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