SharePoint 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh - Hands-On

So yesterday I rushed over to the Microsoft downloads area to get my hands on the SharePoint 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh files, for obvious reasons . I know that the rest of the Office system also had technical refreshes made available yesterday as well but, quite frankly, I've got SharePoint myopia at the moment and can see nothing past SharePoint right now.

So I was a good little beta tester and made sure I downloaded the installation guide documents. At first I was pretty intimidated, with each installation document weighing in at about 30 pages! Turns out that, unlike previous betas, they actually documented things quite nicely this time around. The instructions are clear, concise, and mostly accurate. The only real problem I had was that for some reason Microsoft forgot that the Services control panel is available from Administrative Tools and not Control Panel on Windows Server 2003. :)

I've got two different VPCs of SharePoint 2007 right now - one running on Windows Server 2003 Enterprise R2 that is in its own workgroup, and another one running on Windows Server 2003 Standard R2 that is part of a domain. I upgraded the workgroup one first. On a 3ghz 2GB RAM laptop the VPC took 4 hours to complete the installation. During the installation I got one error related to a type load exception, but it didn't seem to have an impact because the installation kept on going. The Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition VPC is running on a Dual-Core tower with 3GB available RAM and that upgrade took about 35 minutes, but then again I had less data. The amount of time the patch takes to upgrade your system is directly related to how much content you have floating around.

Unfortunately, my Win 2003 R2 Enterprise installation is completely horked. After installing the patch, I cannot see, modify, create, or otherwise configure user profiles and/or user profile properties. This is definitely going to put a big damper on any code I write against user profiles ;)

Thankfully there isn't much to notice - by the time you hit beta 2 Technical Refresh, the changes being pushed out should be in the form of stability enhancements, performance improvements, and bug fixes. The overall experience should not change very much. There were a couple changes made to the site creation experience that I thought were definitely necessary (the site template selector is much more responsive now, and actually works in most scenarios). Also, the Firefox experience has drastically improved. I can actually use the site administration facility now and manipulate web part properties using Firefox. I used to be able to switch in an out of edit mode but be able to do nothing more under the previous Beta 2 bits. Kudos to Microsoft for that - I'm hoping the final experience will be indistinguishable between Firefox and IE7, but I know that's asking for too much.

A few quick trips through some problem areas that used to crash my site revealed no crashes or bugs. The system seems a little more spunky, too. I don't know if they did anything to improve the performance, but the pages seem to load quicker and the administration actions seem to respond much quicker. The installation experience is still horrible and needs to be cleaned up before RC, but install is usually the last thing tweaked, so I'm not worried (yet).

Hopefully in the near future I'll be able to start posting some SharePoint code samples that won't give away the table of contents for the book :) Until then - go get yourself the beta 2 TRs and start tinkering on your own - though I definitely recommend virtualization - don't risk destroying a clean OS machine by putting Office Server and WSS v3 on it. 

tags: sharepoint  wss  publications  beta  

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