SharePoint 2010 Caveats:Dont Get Caught Out!
Anyone who has worked with SharePoint for more than, well 5 minutes, knows that there are some caveats to the product. So over a conversation on Skype Paul Culmsee and myself came up with a hair brained idea to present a talk about some of the most common, dangerous and some downright strange caveats that SharePoint has to offer.
Fortunately the gracious people at the Australian and New Zealand SharePoint Conferences were nice enough to allow us to present our ramblings with the session below:
“Yes but…” is a common answer given by experienced SharePoint consultants when asked if a particular solution design “will work”. One of the key reasons for this is that SharePoint’s greatest strength is one of its weaknesses. The sheer number of components or features jam packed into the product, means that there are many complex interactions between them – often with small gotchas or large caveats that were not immediately apparent while the sales guy was dutifully taking you through the SharePoint pie diagram.
Unfortunately, some organizations trip up on such untested assumptions at times, and in turn it can renders the logical edifice of their solution design invalid. This is costly in terms of lost time to change approaches, but increased complexity since sometimes workarounds are worse than the caveats. In this fun, lively and interactive session, Michal Pisarek will put his MVP (not really) on the line, and with a little help from Paul Culmsee, examine some of SharePoint’s common caveats. Make no mistake, understanding these caveats and the approaches for mitigating them will save you considerable time, money and heartache.
Don’t miss this informative and eye opening session!
Now this is not meant to be a session where by we complain about some of the various limitations that SharePoint may contain or curse the name of Microsoft. Let’s be honest, considering the sheer breadth and depth of the product , the many features that it offers, it is a superbly engineered piece of software that we have all experienced.
But there are those occasions where love turns to frustration which turns to pulling your hair out and you feel like my little friend below.
In that light lets take a warts and all look at some of the most common caveats, the things that you should be aware of that could trip you up when implementing SharePoint.
However that is only half the story because for every caveat there is usually a workaround! We will attempt to both provide you with a selection of the best caveats that we can find along with the best way to mitigate these issues and get you back on track.
But we need your help! To make a truly great session we want to hear the caveats that have stopped you in your tracks and left you scratching your head. So please let us know your caveats by leaving a comment below or submit them to michalpisarek@sharepointanlysthq.com
Its going to be a super interactive session with us sharing our experiences and asking the audience for theirs. So if you are up for something a little bit different than the standard talk and want to learn and have some fun we would love to see you there.
If you create a managed metadata column then it will automatically create a new search refiner. That is nice if I only create a couple managed metadata columns, but what if I use a lot of these columns? There is no way to specify which ones appear as refiners. Even after editing the XML you can get all managed metadata columns as refiners or none.
Insert shameless Ontolica Search pitch…..
I am not sure if this is a real caveat, or if it was just a misunderstanding on my part. It stemmed from the caveat that PDFs are not indexed out of the box.
We setup a host-named site collection (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc424952.aspx) and when I went to demo the searching capabilities in SharePoint, it would not find anything in that side collection.
I have not verified with our farm admin people, but I think that you need to add the new host-named URL to the content sources to crawl.
1. A UserProfile service that acts like its still in beta.
2. A good search has to be licensed, installed and configured seperately (FAST).
3. Lookup Fields do not work cross site collections
4. The search templates have no navigation to get back
5. The installation is to easy – but the result is configured badly.
6. For good workflows you need an extra product
7. I still love SharePoint
@Ken about PDF’s this is not a caveat, it is a configuration that is required if you would like to index PDF’s on your site.
See here for offical instructions:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2293357
Note the emphasis on doing a FULL crawl after the configuration.