SharePoint - service pack 2 thoughts
/SharePoint service pack 2 came out a couple of days ago, for some reason I was really excited about it and even woke up checking twitter regarding any news… It was surprisingly empty.
Anyway, over the last couple of days I’ve had a good whirl and here’s some thoughts – both mine, and heard over the grapevine.
Authentication — Improvements to forms-based authentication, authentication for Web applications, and the Business Data Catalog.
MSDN is saying that when Forms authentication is used SharePoint “should” do a better job at letting client (Browser) remember the password.
I’m hoping this means I don’t need to re-enter my password a billion times.
Database performance and integrity — Improved database performance and integrity by automatically rebuilding database indexes with a timer job.
Self checks are good
Interoperability — Improved support for standards-based document formats and compatibility with a broader range of browsers level 1 and level 2 browser support.
IE8 enters level 1 browser support – the rich text editing should get fixed
FireFox2/3 enters level 2 browser support
Read-only content databases — Improved user experience by automatically configuring site collections as read-only when the content database is configured as read-only.
Again a good thing
Stsadm command-line tool — In addition to operations for pre-upgrade scanning and variations analysis and repair, several operations are improved and new operations added to better support farm administration.
stsadm –o backup will now issue a stsadm –o setsitelock prior to the backup, unless otherwise stated.
This means that sharepoint administrators no longer need to do this in two steps.
stsadm –o deletesite now supports a force argument that allows orphaned site collections or orphaned sites to be deleted. Only time I’ve seen an orphan site is when we had a bad import that failed halfway.
Pre-upgrade scanning and reporting — An Stsadm operation that enables you to scan an existing farm and its servers to verify that they can be upgraded SharePoint Products and Technologies "14".
stsadm -o preupgradecheck
is only to check against future versions of SharePoint 2010.
Variations analysis and repair — An Stsadm operation that enables farm administrators to better manage and perform necessary operations against variations.
There’s a quite bit of work for variations. This isn’t an area where I’ve had a lot of experience.
Merge Content DB bug fixed
Yay
Breaking Changes:
Areas web service removed
There’s some impact to Nintex Workflows – there’s an interim fix that they’ve released, as well as a patch coming out within a week.
