On Saturday, I attended the SharePoint Saturday Redmond 2011 event held by Puget Sound SharePoint User Group at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wa. Here are some notes, announcements, and guidance I took down during the morning sessions.

Keynote

Speaker:
Bill Baer
Technical Product Manager
SharePoint Product Group
SharePoint MCM

Announcement: SharePoint Diagnostics Studio Version 2.0 (SPDiag.exe)

• Will be released as part of upcoming SharePoint Administration Toolkit in about a month
• Will supplement the SCOM and the Health Analyzer to provide advanced diagnostics
• Surfaces diagnostic data from all servers across the farm, remotely
• Reports: Base, Capacity, Performance, Availability, Usage
• Integrated search: Can report on data by Correlation ID, Date/Time, or User
• Snapshot/Export report to view offline
• Two components: SPDiag.exe (Client) and ExtendedDiagnoticProviders.exp (Farm solution)
• Will be released via the SharePoint team blog

Visio & SharePoint with a Twist of Silverlight (Developer)

Speaker:
Barb Coplen
Portal Program Manager
Server & Tools Business, Microsoft

Demo and walkthrough of how to use Visio Services, a SharePoint list, and Visio Services JavaScript API to build a dynamic view of clickable shapes and additional details in a SharePoint Web Part page.

SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Strategies & Best Practices (IT Pro)

Speaker:
Joel Oleson
SharePoint Technology Evangelist
Quest Software
http://sharepointjoel.com

• Pre-Upgrade: Verify system requirements, run STSADM -O PREUPGRADECHECK and Test-SPContentDatabase
• Database Attach is the best way to upgrade your content
• In Place is the best way to upgrade your SSP to Service Applications
• If you feel “stuck” with In Place upgrade due to hardware constraints: Take one of your WFE servers out of the farm, rebuilded it as a new SP2010 farm, use the existing SQL infrastructure, do the Database Attach upgrade to that server, then rebuild/add the other servers as part of the upgrade window
• Unless you have a lot invested in your SSP, don’t upgrade them as it is much cleaner / less trouble to just start with clean Services Applications
• Guidance for Service Application installation:
  • Don’t turn them all on initially, rather install them as you need them
  • Guidance is to roughly match the SharePoint SKUs
  • Baseline = Service Applications in Foundation
  • Next = those in Standard
  • Last = those in Enterprise
  • Example: Microsoft IT, for internal deployment, turned on only those that matched their 2007 environments, then installed the additional Service Applications incrementally over time
• Upgrades that take longer than a weekend: Either AAM redirection (not preferred) or see if your business can handle Read Only
• Items not compatible with Visual Upgrade = off
  • My Sites
  • Project Server
  • Report Web Part
• Information on upgrading Fabulous 20 templates: http://bit.ly/dhQUjd