SharePoint and Nintex Workflow 2007: New database server

What's to do if you have to change the a database server in an existing SharePoint Farm for a new one? And what's happening with existing Nintex Workflow 2007 installations?
To exchange the database server used by SharePoint, you habe to do the following steps:

1. Make a full backup via SharePoint Central Administration.
2. Use the "SharePoint Products and Technologie Configuration Wizard" to disjoin every single SharePoint Server from the SharePoint farm.
3. Use the "SharePoint Products and Technologie Configuration Wizard" to create a NEW farm (wich means you create a new SharePoint Configuration database) and take the new database server for configuration settings.Join every single Server to the SharePoint farm.
4. Restore the full backup via CentralAdministration in the SharePoint Farm.

After this steps, your SharePoint farm use a new database server and should contain the old content and functionality. But what's with the Nintex Workflow databases? Contains the full backup the databases? Can you turn off the old database server? NO!!! You can't! Nintex Databases aren't include in a SharePoint backup, you have to transfer them to the new Database Server manuallly, p.e. with a database backup and restore.

After this, you have to update the internal reference of the Content DBs to the new server. This you can do with the nwadmin tool. You find this tool under the path C:\Program Files\Nintex\Nintex Workflow 2007\ in standard installations.
You have to run the following command line:

NWAdmin.exe -o UpdateContentDatabase -serverName serverName [-databaseName databaseName] [-newServerName newServerName] [-newDatabaseName newDatabaseName] [-integrated

-username username -password password]
 
Run this command line in the cmd and replace the parameters with you own values. After runing this command line, the references of your Nintex Databases will be updated.
Further information about UpdateContentDatabase operation with all parameters or and other nwadmin operations you can find in this pdf.
 
Regards,
 
Andreas
 

SharePoint 2010: Take control!! Resource Throttling

Many admins, same dream: Control the performance of the SharePoint Portal!!! Control and/ or eliminate the big performance killers for your System ( Beware – I don’t mean the biggest performance killer for every System: the end user! It’s a game, without them you can’t play it! ;-) ) is the first and best steps against phone calls like “Ohhhhh, MY Portal is soooo sloooooow!!”.
One of this performance killers in MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0 are large lists and libraries. This means not only many items, but big items with many columns also.
Many Columns = Many rows in AllUserData Database per Item = bigger query = lower performance for every user using the same Content DB. Remember: all content from a Website Collection, maybe from one Web Application, is stored in the AllUserData Content. Right there the bottleneck for your Portal is hidden!! One large list locks your AllUserData table and every other request from other user from other subsites. And to make your Admionistrator's horror scenario complete: You can not prevent a user for executing a big request in 2007!

Take control with SharePoint 2010's Resource throttling settings! You can find the setting in the Central Administration under the Genral Setting of a Web Application.

You can see, in SharePoint 2010 you can configure the maximum number of items a query can include, for normal users and for administrators. You can configure a "Happy Hour" time window for large queries.

Take control! Configure Resource Throttling in SharePoint 2010!

Regards,

Andreas

SharePoint 2010: Advantages of service applications

The Shared Service Providers are disappears, now SharePoint use "Service Applications". Service applications, as the name let you suppose, provides several services for your Sharepoint envriroment. One web application is not constrained to use a dedicated Shared Service Provider furthermore. Web Applications now can consume several service applications from the same SharePoint farm or another Sharepoint farm. Therefore, service applications can be a endpoint provider. This makes many new topology scenarios availible for SharePoint 2010 scenarios ( TechNet ). Per example, you can build a "Service Farm", shown in the figure below.

The arrows should show you, that the "Staging Farm" and the "Productiv Farm" consume from service applications of the "Service Farm". This allows to use the same taxonomies in every farm, per example. Or (and this is my favorite at the moment :-) ) to push central stored Content Typs to every Farm in your envriroment.

Chak Corner described the configuration for "Content Typ Hubs" in a blog post in detail.

Have fun by playing with service applications by yourself for the first time!

Regards,

Andreas

Early look: Site Quotas in SharePoint 2010

omething is happend with the quotas in SharePoint 2010!! And it seems to be good! You can configure your quotas in the Central Administration (Mange Web Applications), nothing new so far. But with the firt look at the screen, your responsible administrators heart jumps up and down in pleasure:

Take one piece more control about the developers!!! SharePoint 2010 has a points system for solutions running on a site. Each solution deployed for a site has certain points in this rating system and you as administrator can get the control about this rating! So you can prevent your farm to going down or has low performance because of to many and to hungry solutions. Visual solutions like special WebParts shows only a warning message if the per day limit is reached. Find out more about solutions in the blog entries from Paul Stubbs and Thorsten Hans.

The second cool new thing about quotas in SharePoint 2010 is: See it visual in "Storage Space Allocation" settings! With this settings in the Site Collection Administration settings, you can check the storage usage and storage allocation of a website collection.

Ok, it's not a special "Pimp Quotas" feature, but if you set restrictions, you mostly want to check the status, want not?! This is the point why this setting makes the life of admins better, which have worked with quotas before: Now, they easily can see, where the disk space is used for, before it is to late! Did you see the views for the storage usage list at the left? Cool stuff...!

Regards,

Andreas