SharePoint Office Web Access

SharePoint capability of creating/viewing office documents in the browser itself although not all Office features are supported in Office Web Access.

Governance purpose you can enable Office Web Access only on some site collections as required to keep the Server Performance under check.

All About Office Web Access:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff431682(v=office.14).aspx

Installation Consideration to manage services and service application running in the SP Farm.

You need to differentiate between services and a service application. A service is a component that provides an output that can be utilized by an application. A service application is an application that is built to utilize one or more services that exist in the environment. Services in SharePoint 2010 are the foundation for service applications. Some of these services are associated with service applications. You deploy your service applications by starting the associated services on the desired server, selecting those same services when running the initial Configuration Wizard, or by using Windows PowerShell. The number of services running varies depending on the business requirements of your environment.

So for the Office Web App

We can have the services running (to support office web app i.e. Word/Excel Services) only on one Web Front End server and a separate server running service application (for office web app) to optimize performance as OWA eats ups lot of server resources compared to other features of SharePoint

SharePoint Visual WebParts

Visual Web Parts are integral part of SharePoint and best friend of developers.

In SharePoint 2010 Visual Web Parts can't be used in sand box solution.

To overcome this you can use:
Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Power Tools 

This tool basically compiles all the files into dll and not ascx file is there which get copied onto the server

In SharePoint 2013, visual web part no longer uses controltemplates folder to store the ascx but instead just compiles everything into the DLL.

Sandbox solutions are deprecated in SharePoint 2013 and App Model is introduced.

Extracting DLL's out of GAC

To backup the dll's in the GAC i.e. Extracting DLL's out of GAC we can use either of the below methods.


Method 1:
Change the Windows\Assembly\GAC folder from the GAC view to the Windows Explorer view by editing the Registry:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Fusion\

Add a DWORD value called DisableCacheViewer and set the value to 1 Don't Forget to change it back to 0 once your done with the backup.

As shown below:

Method 2 (32 bit only):

From command prompt run
regsvr32 -u C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\shfusion.dll

GAC back to it’s original structure, use
regsvr32 C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\shfusion.dll

spWeb.Lists vs spWeb.GetList

// Best Practice To Retrieve List Item

// Below example updates the Task list Item based on the task id

 ....
SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(delegate()
{
        using (SPSite oSiteCollection = new SPSite(url))
        {
                        using (SPWeb spWeb = oSiteCollection.OpenWeb())
                        {
                            spWeb.AllowUnsafeUpdates = true;
                            SPList oList = spWeb.Lists["New_Task_List"]; // Gets the entire List Collection and then picks the list mentioned
                            SPListItem oListItem = oList.GetItemById(taskid);

                           //Instead the following should be used, get the intended list directly
                           //SPListItem oListItem = spWeb.GetList("/Lists/New_Task_Lis/AllItems.aspx").GetItemById(taskid);

                            if (oListItem != null)
                            {
                                oListItem["flag"] = Guid.NewGuid().ToString();
                                oListItem["actiontaken"] = "Claim";
                                oListItem["actiontakenby"] = CustomUtility.GetUtility().GetLoggedInUserID();
                                oListItem.Update();
                            }
                            tempID = Convert.ToInt64(oListItem["TicketNumber"].ToString());
                        }
                    }
                });
...

Large Lists and List View Threshold

You would need to know or as we know

         List View Threshold (LVT)

                o   Every web application in SP 2010, has a default configured constant LVT value.

                o   Administrator default LVT is generally set to a higher value compared to end user (default is  

                     20000 for admin / 5000 for end users).

Consideration for Large Lists

              Large List should have:

o   Limited number of columns

o   Limited number of lookup fields (<= 8)

o   Filter criteria should be on Indexed fields (around 2)

o   Folder Structure with number of items less than LVT of web application ( default 5000)

Why not List View

o   List View is not appropriate for list having large number of items

o   The LVT value limits the Views to work for certain Lists, this decision is based on some logical limits (SQL applies database lock on table when more than 5000 items are being touched on a single query) to counter balance the performance degradation of the SharePoint Farm.

o   Conditions, when the List View won’t work

§  When using the Filter on a column and the number of items; having same value in the column is repeated more than the number of threshold value.

·         Regardless of using

o   Folder

o   Index

o   Item Limit

o   And Condition

o   OR Condition

o   For List View to work without or with Filter criteria

§  The number of items should be less than the LVT of the web application

Alternatives for Viewing List Items

o   Search with result shown in the end user expected format

o   Metadata Navigation consideration while designing the List

§  Metadata Navigation applies to doc lib page only

§  Document library design is critical to have useful Metadata Navigation

o   Object Model Custom Code

o   Content Query Web Part

Consideration for Large Lists 

 From a high level, it looks like we can perform activity at three different levels; which can help avoid List View Threshold issue and performance degradation:

            Document Library Level

·         Redesign the document library, split into multiple logical library based on business needs

·         Items storage in the document library has to be modularized / use container

           Page Level

·         Create custom Views for pages to access data
·         Caching via Content Query Web Part if required

      Archival
            ·         Implement Archiving policy for the document library (auto/manual)

·         Document / version cleanup, based on document life cycle

·         Content Organizer can be utilized