Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010, or commonly referred to as TMG 2010, is the long awaited latest and greatest release of Microsoft’s Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) server in which we have all come to love or hate over the years.   TMG builds on ISA’s ability to deliver a comprehensive application layer reverse proxy firewall and is usually deployed on the edge of your network or in between an existing edge such as a firewall provided by Cisco or Checkpoint.  Today, I will begin a series of articles on installing and configuring Forefront TMG 2010, discuss some of the new...

Prior to the release of Exchange Server 2007, Microsoft announced that the future of public folders was in question, and that SharePoint libraries would take their place. Microsoft quickly changed its stance and continues to support Exchange public folders, but there still might be a number of compelling reasons why you would want to consider storing incoming messages in SharePoint document libraries — instead of public folders. SharePoint can enable incoming mail on lists and libraries. It also offers several out-of-the-box features like Alerts, Enterprise Search and Information Management...

We all know that out of the box, Microsoft decided NOT to implement item level permissions within InfoPath Forms Libraries and the same goes for Document Libraries, however if you venture into a standard SharePoint List and navigate to Settings / Advanced Settings,  you will notice that you can easily configure Item-level permissions and specify which items users can read and edit as per the below screen capture. We all know the primary use of InfoPath right? The ability to create fancy forms that can be easily submitted and stored in a Forms Library for easy retrieval.  In our organization, there...

I came across an obscure situation earlier this year with a new SharePoint farm that I had just designed and built.  It was a fairly straight forward setup comprising of a dedicated SQL 2008 server, 2 x Web Front Ends utilising Windows NLB and 1 x Central Administration server all running Windows 2008 Enterprise R2 in a virtual environment utilising VMware ESX. So after building the SharePoint farm, restoring the Content Databases and Shared Services Provider I thought to myself everything is actually going to plan for once, until…… I restarted one of the web front ends! I had then noticed that...

I have just recently built a new SharePoint 2007 farm on a complete Windows 2008 R2 server platform and part of my standard build procedure is to implement a warm up routine, usually in the form of a script that is scheduled every morning to launch my SharePoint Web Applications.  Most of you will most likely know what I am referring to here, the slowness that end users experience when loading a SharePoint site for the first time in the morning!? By default IIS will recycle its worker processes during the night, in my case IIS 7.5 tells me this happens at 1:04 AM.  You can locate this information in...

I’m currently using Microsoft’s Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2007 to provide consolidated disk based snapshots of our File Shares, Exchange, SharePoint and SQL databases.  I am in the process of upgrading our servers to Windows 2008 R2 and DPM was next on my list.  I really didn’t want to re-create the wheel and start from scratch (I have over 5TB’s worth of replicas on my Dell MD1000 and a plethora of protection groups setup). In today’s post, I will provide you with a step by step guide in restoring your DPM server whilst retaining your DPM database and DPM replicas, and also explain a...

Welcome back to the second article in this series on upgrading a SharePoint 2007 content database to SharePoint 2010.  In part 1 we deep dived into the preupgrade tool that Microsoft made available with SharePoint 2007 SP2 and today we will complete our upgrade journey utilising one of the 3 upgrade models that are available to you by Microsoft.  These are listed as follows; In-place upgrade Database attach upgrade to a new farm Hybrid approach (Read –only databases or Detach databases) There is a wealth of information regarding these different approaches on the Microsoft TechNet site under the...

I’m sure there are a lot of SharePointers out there who are excited about the 2010 release and as I have been working my way through the installation and configuration of this updated beast, I have also been providing you with posts along the way sharing my experiences.  Today isn’t any different, and in this two part series I will be providing you with a guide to upgrading your SharePoint 2007 content databases to SharePoint 2010.  There are already some great resources out there regarding upgrade options and preparation guidance including those from Microsoft on the TechNet Site and others...

We are at the final article in this series in getting your SharePoint 2010 environment up and running, however the fun doesn’t end here (there will be plenty more posts on 2010 now that our test environment is up and running) .  In this post I will be providing you with a step by step guide in creating your first SharePoint Web Application and Site Collection to host your sub webs.  If you need to catch up on my previous posts in this series you can access them from the following links; Installing SharePoint 2010 Beta on a Windows 2008 R2 Server Configuring SharePoint 2010 Beta Service...

June 1, 2010 :: This article has been updated, coinciding with the release of SharePoint 2010 RTM.  You can access my recent article “Configuring the User Profile Service in SharePoint 2010″ here. Welcome back to part 2 of this series in getting the basic bits and pieces of SharePoint 2010 beta up and running.  If you recall in part 1, I provided a step by step guide in installing SharePoint 2010 Beta on a Windows 2008 R2 server.  Today’s article will extend our setup and I will be providing another step by step guide in configuring SharePoint 2010 Service Applications in particular...