The reason for that is that the rebuild of the index is quite aggressive in it’s nature and does not have any logic built in to it. It simply rebuilds the whole index daily.

If you look at the information from Microsoft at technet (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc678870.aspx) about the job it says:

If you have installed Office SharePoint Server 2007 with SP2:

• The job updates the query optimization statistics by sampling key tables every time that it runs, instead of performing a full scan.
• If you are running SQL Server 2005 or SQL Server 2008, the job rebuilds all indexes in the content databases every time that it runs.
• If you are running an Enterprise edition of SQL Server 2005 or SQL Server 2008, the job rebuilds most indexes online.
• If you are running a Standard edition of SQL Server 2005 or SQL Server 2008, the job rebuilds the indexes offline.
• If you are running SQL Server 2000, the job does not rebuild any indexes.

It actually also specifies that the job should only run weekly if you are running MOSS and daily if your using WSS. I assume that this is just a mistake in the documentation because in all environments I looked in it’s set to daily no matter if you are using Moss or WSS with SP2.

So what happens if you have a large environment where your have backups, or maybe a crawl running at the same time. Or maybe your SQL DBA’s have done their job and have their own reindex and update statistics job put directly in SQL? Well, you could run in to performance problems and extreme slow environments together with backups taking longer time then they should, error messages and maybe even corrupt databases. The later I have not seen but potentially it’s possible.

I’m not saying that bad things will happen to your environment with this job, but more of be aware and have a look at how this is configured in your environment. Maybe you should reschedule it if it’s in conflict with any other SQL job. And if you are not the SQL DBA talk to the DBAs and make sure that they don’t have any similar already in place. If they have, is it better with built in logic where they look at the fragmentation level? Then maybe you should disable the SharePoint Timer Job and only run the job put on the SQL server.

If you want to find out what settings you have you could first look in Central Administration. You have one Database Statistics job for each Web Application and you can see that under Operations and Timer Job Status. In the Timer Job Definition, found at the same place in Central administration, you can see if the job is run weekly or daily.
The best  way is however to use STSADM or SPDiag to get the information on when it’s scheduled. To reschedule jobs you need to use STSADM.

This is how you get the settings you have using STSADM:

stsadm -o getproperty -pn job-database-statistics -url http://YourSPSite

And to set a new value you do like this:

stsadm -o setproperty -pn job-database-statistics -pv “Weekly between Fri 22:00:00 and Sun 06:00:00″ -url http://YourSPSite

Here you have the STSADM reference for this particular task: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc424963.aspx

This morning I listened to a session called: SharePoint 2010 Governance: Planning and Implementation with Scott Jamison and Susan Hanley. It was a good session but for all of you that has read a lot about Governance it was not that much new. It is however a very important part of an implementation and the say that 20% of an implementation is techniqe. What will be new and that needs to be handled specifically in 2010 deployments is the handling of search, key words and social tagging.

They had a lot of full slides so I put some pictures here for this session:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262787.aspx

If you have not seen it before I recommend you to read it. It’s worth a look each time you design a new environment. I especially like the diagrams MS have made for us.

There has been an error creating the personal site. Contact your site administrator for more information.

when you open up My Site for the first time? I have heard about this before and also read the solution (for instance found here). This is usually related to permissions not set up the right way but the other day I found out that it can happen during other circumstances. It’s likely that you will not get it but I thought that it would be good to share the knowledge.

The strange thing this time was that it only happened to one user and not everyone. That indicates that it’s not a permission problem, or most likely not.

I looked in the SSP and the user was imported in the profile import and the info from the AD was there. I decided to delete the site collection and found out that there was already another My Site Site collection there but with another name. It turns out that a former employee had the same AD account name. The account had been deleted from the AD since it was a long time ago but the My Site was still there. So SharePoint were not able to create the My Site because it already had Site Collection with that name.

Lesson learned. An updated routine for when deleting AD accounts on former employees. Best practise would be to never delete AD accounts in terms of traceability but it might also be a good thing to have a policy for how long My Sites should be stored. A suggestion is to have a retention period for when you delete the content and then have a Custom Property connected to AD where you manage the employment status like “full time”, “contractor”, “Parental leave” and Left the company yy-mm-dd etc.

Two weeks ago Joel Oleson wrote an excellent post about “SharePoint is Now core enterprise infrastructure“. This post is about the same topic and is a translation of a chronicle I wrote in Swedish for zipper.se.

During the summer, the Technical Preview of next SharePoint version, SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 was released to TAP (Technology Adoption Program) members and MVP:s.

In October during the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas a public beta will be available, but there is already a lot of buzz going on and a huge interest in what it will contain.

On the other hand, I often talk to customers that are quite sceptic and somewhat tired of the hole thing. This is often since they believe that it’s first now, after the SP2 (released during the spring) they have got stable environment. -”When we now finally have a stable environment and are finished with our migration, it’s time to start all over again.”

There are three interesting things about such a comment. The first thing is that SharePoint 2010 will not be released until the first half of 2010 (hopefully beginning of Q2), this means that if you have a very large environment you are probably not one of those early adopters and might not do any upgrade until the first Service Pack and that will probably be in 2011 (my own speculations).

So from that point of view you don’t have to stress and can just follow the info being released on what will be shipped with the next version.

However it is very likely that what you see will make you want to upgrade and that fast, because it will be very easy to build new business cases around the new features it contains. In Addition to that, a migration or upgrade will cause much less pain this time then when we moved from Version 2 to version 3.

The third and maybe the most interesting from a SharePoint product point of view is that an upgrade to SharePoint 2010 is taken for granted and seen as mandatory in such a comment. Collaboration platforms, whether it is SharePoint or not is now something that is taken for granted in the same way as the operating system, emails and Office applications.

There are Gartner reports that show that companies often upgrade their Office application to each new version but when it comes to operating systems they tend to more often skip one version. There are of course many different reasons for that, one is that a client migration is a more complex task then upgrading the Office Application. But if an upgrade to SharePoint 2010 is taken for granted, doesn’t that mean that collaboration platforms and in particular SharePoint is a part of the common IT infrastructure?

I very much agree with Joel Oleson that it is! But that also means that SharePoint should be seen, and managed as a part of the common IT infrastructure. If you have departments/groups that handle, policies, roadmaps and other stakeholder groups and forums to manage you client, well, then it’s time to start build your organization to support the latest kid in the family.

Decision/Business Case
42 km is quite long and for me it’s a milestone to achieve the NY Marathon. When you start consider to implement SharePoint within your company or organization you should ask yourself why. I know a million reasons were SharePoint can increase productivity and where SharePoint will do good for the Information Workers, but the question is do you. What do you want to achive and I’m not saying this in a negative tone. Start with one thing where you want to use SharePoint and go from there. My goal is not winning the Marathon, your goal should not be using all of the SharePoint functionalities from day one and it simply doesn’t work.
Equipment/Team
At least in Sweden running has become very popular during the last couple of years, this have made the sport more of a equipment sport with lightweight shoes, Gore-tex jackets and GPS watches. Well a GPS-watch will probably not do the implement of SharePoint for you but you certainly need a good team and hardware to do the job. Make sure you have a mixture of people with different knowledge. You will not only have SharePoint knowledge, invite someone from the SQL group, the AD and exchange guys and not to forget, people from the business, someone that knows what the business need.
Exercise/Testing
Running a marathon will not be like running to a meeting. I will probably need to do a +1000 km within the next year to be able to finish within a reasonable time. When you set up a SharePoint environment you will need to do a lot of testing, in most of the cases the setup includes some custom web part or workflow. Test again and again. If you plan for using it on many sites, test on many sites. The result will look the same if you use it on 1000 sites as it does on your small test site. If you have a lot of users you will need to do a lot of performance tests. They say that you never get a second change to make a first impression, well, if you launch day makes the server crash or act slow your installation will be synonym with bad things for a long time.
Preparations/Training
When the marathon (May 30, 2010) is around the corner I will need to plan my weeks, not only with the exercise but with food and sleep. In the same way you need to prepare your end users with training. I have a separate Fivelist regarding end user training. Make sure they know how to use the system, do you have different end user groups like editors and site collection owners make sure they know their responsibility.
Run/Implement
One of the most common mistake people do when running is to start too fast. Plan your run, calculate what time you are aiming for and keep track of you progress through the kilometres. Like the Decision/business case don’t go forward too fast. It takes time to incorporate SharePoint within business and to replace tools earlier used in day-to-day activities, so plan your implementation, talk to the business during the journey and don’t push it to fast, that could cause you to not finish the lap at all.

It should however be clear that this is not about security holes in SharePoint but rather a question about architecture and security pitfalls. Because, if you plan your deployment well, you can secure you Environment quite easy.  Here are 5 things to consider when securing SharePoint.

Antivirus
Even if you have antivirus software on your clients and servers you should seriously consider to install an antivirus software on your SharePoint Servers. Every well known antivirus software vendor has a version for SharePoint today. I have used Microsoft Forefront a couple of times and it works perfect. What’s also good with this one is that if you have enterprise CAL’s you probably have this already in some kind of SA agreement or likewise.

Allowed file types
From the Central Administration you can set up what kind of files are allowed to upload or not. By default file types like .exe and .bat is not allowed but you should review this list so that it match your policies.

Secure external access
If your SharePoint environment is available to your end users via an extranet, you should really make sure that it’s properly secured. The most classified information you have should not be stored in an environment that is accessible from internet at all. If you have information that you want to have accessible from internet you should look in to Zones and proper set up of your Web applications to secure your environment.

Security Review
One thing that is missing out of the box in both WSS and Moss is a good way to do a security review. You should in you governance plan have at least an annual security review. There are a couple of tools available and it might be fairly easy to build something that might work for a smaller set up. In a coming post I will talk about Sushi, a codeplex project that could get you started.

IRM (Information Rights Management)
Finally I would like to mention the IRM. It’s not anything that protects you from viruses or threats but it helps you secure the content and even if your environment is only accessible from inside, you might want to secure some high confidential information with IRM. In that way you can encrypt the information with RSA 1024 bit encryption and you can then decide what the reader can do with the document e.g. save it, print it, forward it etc.

Everyone that has worked with the KPI’s in Moss knows that it has a lot of limitations so this comes a really great news. We can now look forward to a better and more complete BI product in the “SharePoint 14″ (in lack of other name for it) version.

I will in a coming post write about the capabilities that PerformancePoint and MOSS offers so stay tuned.

Microsoft article: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/jan09/01-27KurtDelbeneQA.mspx

Swedish IDG news article:  http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.208802/microsoft-andrar-strategi-for-beslutsstod

If you have thoughts and findings on the subject I would love to hear about them.

Think big, start small
I have written about it before, SharePoint is a huge platform with endless of possibilities, but all the possibilities often tends to be SharePoint’s biggest opponent. Don’t try to implement everything at the same time, that will lead to that your project never will be finished. Find out what’s most important, what does the business crave for? What is the most urgent issue? If you can start solving that you will not only take the first step towards a successful deployment but you will also make it easier to get “buy-in” from your end users with your next step in you bigger implementation. So start small and build from there.

Education and Communication
Microsoft are very good at making user friendly application but SharePoint is not that easy to everyone. Maybe your end users can figure out how to upload a document but to really gain anything from you SharePoint implementation you need to educate them with more than just uploading documents. You need to introduce them to the navigation, to views, version history, the importance of metadata, search and what and where to store their information. You should also consider having a role based education since there will be employees with different roles. Some will only contribute and use information, others will be site or site collection owners and need a broader education.

But education is not the only thing that needs to be handled, you also need to put a lot of effort in communicating you implementation. Why, What, Who, When? There are a lot of questions that could lead to resistance among the end users if they are answered. If the end users are not on the same page, understands the importance of the implementation and what is expected from them they will not likely be interested in start using SharePoint.

So, build your education in modules and create a communication plan!

Governance, roles and responsibility
It is probably the biggest buzzword in the SharePoint community right now but there is a reason for why there is so much talk about it. As I mentioned in the first section SharePoint offers a lot of possibilities and SharePoint is built in such a way that much of the customization and in some way the administration are handled by the business itself. If there is no group (Governance) that can close the gap between IT and the business needs, set up roles, responsibilities, best practices and so forth you will end up in chaos.
There is unfortunately no predefined way or magic trick to put up a successful Governance group since every business is unique and has different company structure. But start small, include people from the different business units, IT and the Communication department. You should probably don’t have much more than 10 people, meet often in the beginning to set the framework and go on from there.

Structure, navigation and Taxonomy
If your end users don’t know where to store or find information you probably need to rethink your structure. It has to be easy to find and navigate through your SharePoint Environment. Organizations tend to change over time so prepare for changes in the business structure. Before you start migrating documents into your environment, investigate what kind of information you are using today. From that, build up a taxonomy structure with Content Types and Site Columns. If your company has problems with Office templates not being used correctly or wrongly (or you don’t have any at all), take the opportunity to clean that up and to put templates to your Content Types. When you educate the sales people about how easy it is to start creating a new contract or sales order built on the correct Office Template they will be thrilled! Well, maybe not the sales people but everyone else will…

Architect and create services for you business
SharePoint is vary scalable and I will therefore not talk about how to set up your environment, just make sure that you have room for scaling up or scaling out.
If you have built up an intranet portal maybe the intranet part should be more strictly controlled and then you set up a separate “play ground” for collaboration between teams with team sites and meeting workspaces. You should also consider having this delivered as services to your business units. Maybe they have different demands on up time, availability, security, storage etc. Therefore you might create different SLAs to meet those needs.

Let’s skip the tech-talk for a while, after all the technique is not the tricky part here (or am I just getting spoiled from all great tech-guys that solves all the tricky things for me?)

One of SharePoint’s strengths tends often to be its weakness. What I mean is that SharePoint as a platform offers so many different possibilities that the business (or IT for that matter) doesn’t know where to start. By experience, I’m fully convinced that in more or less every department within a company, no matter what kind of business or size, can improve processes, routines or their way of working with help from a solution built on SharePoint and by that increase the productivity. Because that’s what it’s all about. Increased productivity.

When the IT department decides to change from Windows XP to Windows Vista or to upgrade the Office suite t 2007, the business case is often built on, more secured and stable environment, standardizing or the maintenance agreement from Microsoft or third-party vendors is about to end. But it’s very unusually built on better productivity for the Information Workers, people like you and me.

So, how can SharePoint contribute to increased productivity?
That’s a question with many answers. The first thing we need to do is to listen to the business and understand what causes frustration in their daily work and after that we can look at how best use SharePoint to support their needs.
Is it simpler sharing and access to information or the document management that needs to be better, is it a place to collaborate in projects and work with task lists, calendars and issue tracking? Is it an intranet or extranet solution with possibilities to approve the information with an automated workflow process before it’s released? Maybe the search needs to be improved?

There are surveys that indicates that Information Workers spend as much as 9 hours a week to search for the right information and that 75% of the information is semi or completely unstructured. This is where the productivity can be improved, but the business needs help. They need help to shape their SharePoint environment so that it supports their needs and this is where it so often fails.

What happens is that it creates a gap between IT and the Information Workers. SharePoint is a relatively easy to learn as end user but what’s needed is a common way of working, an overall structure and guideline for how to work with and use the SharePoint environment.

The gap has to be closed and the solution is spelled Governance. A governance function needs to be involved from day on if not your implementation should end up in the same information and structure chaos that you came from.
Another common mistake when implementing a collaboration platform like SharePoint is that the implementation project is compared with how you implement a new application or roll out a new standard client. It does not necessarily have to be more difficult but it is a couple of different questions that needs to be handled. But whenever that is done there is no end to the possibilities, the productivity and the quality will increase.

Hopefully we will see a first beta of the next SharePoint during the end of the first quarter next year. What happens then is left to find out but SharePoint is for sure here to stay.