03 September, 2012

Share Point Recovery -- Restore the Farm to a Network Folder


Note: Only, if the recovery point was created from an express full backup rather than an incremental synchronization, then you have the option to recover a site to a network folder.

§  Click the Recovery tab.
§  Expand Data on Disk and Tapes->DPM Server->SharePoint Server->and click All Protected SharePoint Data.
§  In the Recoverable Item list, Select SharePointFarm\SharePoint_Config.
§  Click Recover.
§  On the Review Recovery Selection page, click Next.
§  On the Select Recovery Type page, select Copy all SharePoint content and components to a network folder.
§  Click Browse.
§  Expand SharePoint Server->Volumes/Shares->select the Network folder and click OK.
§  Click Next.
§  On the Specify Recovery Options page, click Next.
§  On the Summary page, click Recover.
§  Wait until the recovery status is successful and then click Close.
§  Wait until the status is successful and then click Close

If you have any queries/questions regarding the above mentioned information then please let me know, Thank you

Microsoft System Data Protection Manager 2007 – Recovering SharePoint Server

In this series, I will cover three main sections as follows:
Share Point Recovery -- Restoring the SharePoint at Farm level.
Share Point Recovery -- Restore the Farm to a Network Folder.
Share Point Recovery -- Site recovery on the share point farm itself.

SharePoint Recovery Options using DPM

Data Protection Manager 2007 can be used to protect the data on SharePoint server 2007 and Windows SharePoint services 3.0. DPM can protect the SharePoint at the farm level and can be used for recovering the data at multiple levels like:
·         Farm
·         Content databases
·         Sites
·         Webs/Sub Sites
·         Lists
·         Items/Documents

Share Point Recovery -- Restoring the SharePoint at Farm level.
Please follow the steps given below to restore the complete SharePoint production farm:

1.   Click the Recovery tab.
2.   Expand Data on Disk and Tapes--<Server Name>--MOSS27 and click All Protected SharePoint Data.
3.   In the Recoverable Item list, select SharePoint under the SharePoint Farm
4.   Click Recover
5.   On the Review Recovery Selection page, click Next
6.   On the Select Recovery Type page, point to Recover All SharePoint content and components
7.   Click Next
8.   On the Specify Recovery Options page, click Next
9.   On the Summary page, click Recover

Wait until the status is successful and then click Close

If you have any queries/questions regarding the above mentioned information then please let me know, Thank you

31 August, 2012

What's new in Microsoft Outlook 2010?

There has been a lot of positive buzz online about Microsoft Outlook 2010, and with good reason. The interface is familiar, yet cleaner. The expected functionality remains, but it has been improved. Several new features have been added that should be quite popular -- some because they're leading-edge technology and others because they address longstanding user requests.
More Office Ribbon integration
Microsoft Office 2007 introduced a new method to display user-initiated tasks in Office applications. Instead of using a flat, drop-down menu, Office 2007 uses a ribbon that displays options based on context. Outlook 2007 had 19 ribbons across its various forms; the main interface retained the legacy menu interface. Office 2010 completes the integration of the Office Ribbon into Outlook.

With the sheer number of menu options increasing drastically with each version of Office, the more dynamic, context-based Ribbon system reduces time spent searching for specific commands. The Ribbon options change according to which forms the user is viewing. Figure 1 shows the Outlook 2010's main Ribbon window.

Multiple Exchange accounts in one Outlook profile
One constant frustration with Outlook MAPI profiles has been the inability for a designated mailbox owner to fully and concurrently connect with multiple mailboxes. This has made it difficult to effectively manipulate content and send messages from different mailboxes without logging out of Outlook and logging in using a different profile. This option may be beneficial in administrative scenarios or in merger situations, where content resides across multiple systems or in different Exchange organizations.

To configure multiple Exchange accounts in a single profile Outlook must be completely closed (with outlook.exe no longer active in the Task Manager). You also must use the Mail applet in the Windows Control Panel.

Outlook Social Connector
Office applications like Outlook are extensible. Microsoft partners and third-party developers have developed some impressive applications to enhance the application. Recently, those enhancements include social media streams like Twitter. Personally, I've enjoyed using TwInbox (formerly OutTwit) in Outlook 2007 to manage my Twitter account through Outlook. All the benefits that you can experience with Outlook messages can also be applied to incoming tweets, including categories, rules and search folders.
MailTips
MailTips assists users when certain actions result in unintended consequences. A common example is a text alert that appears on top of a newly composed message that is addressed to an SMTP domain outside of the organization. Another productive MailTip provides an out-of-office (OOF) preview for a message addressee before sending an email.
Now, you no longer have to wait for an OOF response from coworkers or miss an OOF response. If your email message is addressed to too many recipients, the distribution group expansion feature will let you know. MailTips will advise you to trim the number of addressees to 300 in a single message before sending it. This proactive direction helps reduce productivity draining actions while simultaneously providing user training.

Conversation View
In previous versions of Outlook, you could group your inbox according to conversation, but that didn't show a formal threaded conversation with each message as a child of the original message. This new view displays which messages you have replied to. This view also makes it easier to understand a couple of other new features that focus on the Conversation View.

Ignore conversations
If you find the Conversation View insufficient when streamlining your inbox, you can ignore conversations to remove them from the current view. For ongoing threads that either do not apply to you or that you're done reading, right-click on a message and select Ignore. This transfers all the messages in that conversation, along with new messages related to that conversation, to your Deleted Items folder to keep your inbox more relevant.

Conversation Clean Up
When you reply to a message and include the text of the message, there is duplicate text in the conversation. When the next person replies, more than likely, they'll retain your reply, as well as the previous reply in the message body. There are now multiple copies of the text within the conversation.
Conversation Clean Up parses the conversation and removes messages in which the text is already included in another message in the conversation. This operation is launched when a message in a conversation is selected and Conversation is chosen from the Clean Up button drop-down list in the Delete section of the Home ribbon tab.

Schedule View Improvements
The Schedule View function has also been improved. Figure 5 shows a basic day for a user, with a secondary calendar selected. The second calendar is a subscription to another user's Internet-published calendar. You can control the Time Scale to show more or less detail in this view -- in five or six-minute increments.

Organizing Collaborating with SharePoint Site Collections and Sites

Building upon the power of the repositories previously discussed (lists and libraries), SharePoint 2010 provides a powerful framework of sites and site collections to manage these repositories and provides additional management tools. The sites and site collections enable IT to build a framework that provides working spaces for departments, groups, teams, programs, divisions, offices, and any other type of business grouping. These sites can be branded with appropriate logos and color schemes and have web parts added to .aspx pages that perform many tasks, from simply displaying rich text, graphics, and charts to stock tickers, information about the weather, or data pulled directly from corporate databases.
Site collections are collections of sites that can be managed as a unit.
A wide range of templates are available that make it quick and easy to create functionally specific site collections, such as the following:
·         Team Site
·         Document Workspace
·         Blog
·         Meeting Workspace
·         Document Center
·         Records Center
·         Business Intelligence Center
·         Publishing Portal
·         Enterprise Wiki
For the sites created within the site collection, many other templates are available, including the following:
·         Assets Web Database
·         Basic Meeting Workspace
·         Blog
·         Contacts Web Database
·         Document Center
·         Enterprise Search Center
·         Enterprise Wiki
·         FAST Search Center
·         Group Work Site
·         Issues Web Database
·         Projects Web Database
·         Publishing Site with Workflow
·         Records Center
·         Team Site
·         Visio Process Repository

Outlining Improvements in SharePoint 2010

Microsoft has spent considerable time gathering input from customers on previous versions of SharePoint. This input was directly used by the development team to create new functionality and features in this version of SharePoint. The product team delivered a huge range of services and functionality. For SharePoint administrators familiar with SharePoint 2007, it is important to gain a better understanding of what those changes are and how they can be used to build a better collaboration environment for your organization.
Understanding the Scalable Service Application Model in SharePoint 2010
One of the most significant architectural changes in SharePoint 2010 is the change to service application architecture from the shared services provider architecture of SharePoint 2007. Service applications in SharePoint 2010 are independent services that can be shared across web applications or across farms.  Service applications in SharePoint 2010 include the Business Data Connectivity Service, which allows for connection to an external data source, the Managed Metadata Service, which enforces common metadata across a farm, and the Search Service, which is critical for Enterprise Search functionality. In total, there are more than a dozen service applications available out-of-the-box in SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft enables third-party service applications to be created as well. Service applications enable a SharePoint 2010 environment to be more scalable because they can be easily shared across multiple servers. SharePoint architects can define which servers run which service applications, and which service applications apply to what farms. By separating the functionality in SharePoint onto this highly flexible service application tier, it becomes easier to scale up the environment with the needs of the individual environment.
Outlining Search Improvements in SharePoint 2010

Another area of significant improvement in SharePoint 2010 is SharePoint’s built-in Enterprise Search functionality. Rebuilt as a service application, SharePoint’s native search tool has been rearchitected to enable the following:
·         Redundant index functionality, now providing for index redundancy and high availability, something not possible in SharePoint 2007.
·         Content sources can now be divided among multiple index partitions, such as what In addition to improvements in SharePoint 2010’s native search, Microsoft also offers a different tool for SharePoint search: FAST Search Server 2010. FAST Search has all of the improvements available with the native SharePoint 2010 search but adds additional features, such as thumbnail previews, click-through relevance, and automatic metadata tagging.

Accessing the Improved Administration, Monitoring, and Backup Tools
There are two major improvements in the area of administration for SharePoint. The first comes in a revamped SharePoint Central Administration tool and the second comes with the addition of Microsoft PowerShell as a scripting administration interface. Administrators familiar with SharePoint 2007 will recall the SharePoint Central Admin tool, a web-based interface used to administer SharePoint functionality.
The addition of Microsoft Power Shell as a SharePoint administration tool enables administrators to have a robust and comprehensive scripting interface that allows for automation of manual tasks, scripted installations, and remote administration support. Microsoft created more than 500 commandlets for Power Shell specific to SharePoint.