SharePoint Pod Show Notes
In episode 3, the SharePoint performance episode, one important point was verifying that SQL 2005 (or perhaps 2008) is not set by default to “autogrow” by one 1MB. This can be a serious performance hit for a search crawler, scanning and recording huge areas of files.
I’m almost sure that this is the episode where the issue of running SharePoint in a virtual machine is explored. The short answer is run SharePoint on metal. However, for developers one preferred setup is running a virtual machine on the desktop (this allows the developer to control snapshot-making without having to ask operations folks tending some centralized blade of VMs—SharePoint can break; being able to roll back to a snapshot helps).
In episode 4 and episode 6, “SharePoint Governance, Engagement, and Taxonomy” (with SharePoint MVP, author, and consultant Rob Bogue), it was suggested that Governance is just a non-technical-manager keyword for telling people what to do indirectly with SharePoint; Engagement I missed but seemed to be related to training (and the difficulty of training users who don’t care about the technology of SharePoint—and they should not care)—and it seemed to be related to using My Site to encourage business people to learn SharePoint because of their self-interest in My Site; Taxonomy is just another pretty word for getting people to add metadata to their SharePoint files (based on some kind of elegant sense of order) so that data can be found through “navigation” (lots of clicking) or search (more important).
In episode 7, “MOSS Enterprise Search and SharePoint Workflow,” we get an introduction to Search Server 2008, which is separate product that is installed (kind of) with Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297).