General Guidelines to consider are: 
If you need speed at any cost, choose asynchronous.
If you need data integrity, choose synchronous.

I am currently working on a deployment that has mirroring planned across Europe to North America .  Once I have some numbers to provide to provide real world feasibility of this type of mirroring strategy, I will post them to this site.

General Guidelines to consider are: 
If you need speed at any cost, choose asynchronous.
If you need data integrity, choose synchronous.

I am currently working on a deployment that has mirroring planned across Europe to North America .  Once I have some numbers to provide to provide real world feasibility of this type of mirroring strategy, I will post them to this site.

Archiving (ideally low cost): 

• SharePoint does not provide any capabilities to move old data to lost cost storage such as Centera.  Alot of vendors out there like Symantec, Meridio, Zantaz have pieces of the solution but none of them have the entire Sites and Document Life Cycle Management Integrated into WSS or MOSS.  For example, when a user is notified that their site is going to be deleted it would be ideal to be able to archive the site, compress it and put it onto Centera for a time period.  Right now, it's keep or delete.  
• Archiving list items to the record repository, not just documents.  The send to function only shows up for documents
• Single Instance Records Management.  When a document is sent to the records repository, to my knowledge the copies of the document are not associated to the records repository. 

 Content Types:

• It wold be nice to be able to associate documents when uploading or importing them to a specific content type.  Most organizations will want a taxonomy to be represented in SharePoint.  Today, users can only create content types with new documents.  Migrating 5 terabytes/1 million documents from a previous collaboration system to SharePoint and not have those associated to content types is a disadvantage, maybe even a showstopper to adoption.

SharePoint Planning Templates:

• Why didn't Microsoft create InfoPath forms for the planning templates instead of word documents?   Microsoft is promoting structure data capture but not facilitating it.  A vendor should produce a pre-canned SharePoint template with all the planning templates as content types.  Then ideally add workflows such as new site creation that generates sites based on an approval system.

Wikis:

• Tags…no support for keyword tags

Web Parts:

• The are no out of the box AJAX enabled web parts to my knowledge.  See http://www.google.com/ig as an example of a well driven User Experience based portlet.  You can drag them around without clicking "edit page".  Likewise you can edit their properties on the spot.  Very desirable. 

Shared vs Personal Views:

• This is a feature I preferred in SPS 2003.  This feature allows a Site Owner to create a page and define the web parts in it – called a Shared view.  The user can "personalize" it and deviate it from the original site owners intent.  In SPS 2003 you could toggle between the personal view and the shared view.  When a user cam into the site they saw the shared view but could toggle to their personal view.  That allowed the site owner to be assured (mostly) that the user at least saw what they wanted them to.  With WSS 3/MOSS users are auto logged into their personal view completely bypassing the shared view.  Also the toggle function to switch views is gone (although you can still append ?pageview=Shared to the end of a url and see it.

This is not an exhaustive list but it represent what I have seen in implementing very large SharePoint projects and the feedback I see when demoing the product to stakeholders.

All in all, SharePoint 2007 is an excellent product, I hope these shortcomings are addressed sooner rather than later.

Let me know of other shortcomings you feel need to be addressed.

Archiving (ideally low cost): 

• SharePoint does not provide any capabilities to move old data to lost cost storage such as Centera.  Alot of vendors out there like Symantec, Meridio, Zantaz have pieces of the solution but none of them have the entire Sites and Document Life Cycle Management Integrated into WSS or MOSS.  For example, when a user is notified that their site is going to be deleted it would be ideal to be able to archive the site, compress it and put it onto Centera for a time period.  Right now, it's keep or delete.  
• Archiving list items to the record repository, not just documents.  The send to function only shows up for documents
• Single Instance Records Management.  When a document is sent to the records repository, to my knowledge the copies of the document are not associated to the records repository. 

 Content Types:

• It wold be nice to be able to associate documents when uploading or importing them to a specific content type.  Most organizations will want a taxonomy to be represented in SharePoint.  Today, users can only create content types with new documents.  Migrating 5 terabytes/1 million documents from a previous collaboration system to SharePoint and not have those associated to content types is a disadvantage, maybe even a showstopper to adoption.

SharePoint Planning Templates:

• Why didn't Microsoft create InfoPath forms for the planning templates instead of word documents?   Microsoft is promoting structure data capture but not facilitating it.  A vendor should produce a pre-canned SharePoint template with all the planning templates as content types.  Then ideally add workflows such as new site creation that generates sites based on an approval system.

Wikis:

• Tags…no support for keyword tags

Web Parts:

• The are no out of the box AJAX enabled web parts to my knowledge.  See http://www.google.com/ig as an example of a well driven User Experience based portlet.  You can drag them around without clicking "edit page".  Likewise you can edit their properties on the spot.  Very desirable. 

Shared vs Personal Views:

• This is a feature I preferred in SPS 2003.  This feature allows a Site Owner to create a page and define the web parts in it – called a Shared view.  The user can "personalize" it and deviate it from the original site owners intent.  In SPS 2003 you could toggle between the personal view and the shared view.  When a user cam into the site they saw the shared view but could toggle to their personal view.  That allowed the site owner to be assured (mostly) that the user at least saw what they wanted them to.  With WSS 3/MOSS users are auto logged into their personal view completely bypassing the shared view.  Also the toggle function to switch views is gone (although you can still append ?pageview=Shared to the end of a url and see it.

This is not an exhaustive list but it represent what I have seen in implementing very large SharePoint projects and the feedback I see when demoing the product to stakeholders.

All in all, SharePoint 2007 is an excellent product, I hope these shortcomings are addressed sooner rather than later.

Let me know of other shortcomings you feel need to be addressed.

We are planning for disaster recovery across datacenters using database mirroring using a witness server to synchronize data between the primary tier 1 data center in Canada and the UAT environment in another datacenter in the United States.  The target, redundent SQL databases in UAT are not used by the UAT instance.  In addition, there is a parralel instance of SharePoint that EXACTLY matches the production environment – NOTE that this is not used for UAT, but sits on the same hardware. 

From a Release management perspective, all changes propigated from UAT to Production, MUST be released to the Failover instance on the UAT hardware as well. 

I will write more on this, in terms of configuring the database mirroring, and release management in the coming weeks.

We are planning for disaster recovery across datacenters using database mirroring using a witness server to synchronize data between the primary tier 1 data center in Canada and the UAT environment in another datacenter in the United States.  The target, redundent SQL databases in UAT are not used by the UAT instance.  In addition, there is a parralel instance of SharePoint that EXACTLY matches the production environment – NOTE that this is not used for UAT, but sits on the same hardware. 

From a Release management perspective, all changes propigated from UAT to Production, MUST be released to the Failover instance on the UAT hardware as well. 

I will write more on this, in terms of configuring the database mirroring, and release management in the coming weeks.

I went back to my office, an played around with it for a while to see if I could change the entry for txt.

First I tried:

<Mapping Key="txt" Value="ictxt.gif" EditText="Notepad" OpenControl="SharePoint.OpenDocuments"/>

That didn't work

Then I tried

<Mapping Key="txt" Value="ictxt.gif" EditText="Microsoft Office Word" OpenControl="SharePoint.OpenDocuments"/>

Which creashed my IE.

Then I did some research and found out that the SharePoint.OpenDocuments command only supports openning MS documents by executing the ActiveX that is installed as part of MS Office.  There isn't much documentation on it.  Here is thread that describes the problem and challenges. 

http://www.codecomments.com/message376491.html

 Here is the MSDN article that eludes to how to solve it, however it is vague at best.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/spptsdk/html/tsptAddingDocumentTypeIcon_SV01068572.asp

So for now, unless I look into where the WordPerfect activeX is that controls this behaviour, I won't be able to do this unless I write my own activeX and have it install on client machines.

I went back to my office, an played around with it for a while to see if I could change the entry for txt.

First I tried:

<Mapping Key="txt" Value="ictxt.gif" EditText="Notepad" OpenControl="SharePoint.OpenDocuments"/>

That didn't work

Then I tried

<Mapping Key="txt" Value="ictxt.gif" EditText="Microsoft Office Word" OpenControl="SharePoint.OpenDocuments"/>

Which creashed my IE.

Then I did some research and found out that the SharePoint.OpenDocuments command only supports openning MS documents by executing the ActiveX that is installed as part of MS Office.  There isn't much documentation on it.  Here is thread that describes the problem and challenges. 

http://www.codecomments.com/message376491.html

 Here is the MSDN article that eludes to how to solve it, however it is vague at best.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/spptsdk/html/tsptAddingDocumentTypeIcon_SV01068572.asp

So for now, unless I look into where the WordPerfect activeX is that controls this behaviour, I won't be able to do this unless I write my own activeX and have it install on client machines.