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Creative SharePoint Blog > Posts > SharePoint 2010, Project Server 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 - the Holy Grail
June 15
SharePoint 2010, Project Server 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 - the Holy Grail
by  273262-WEB1\chris.corke  on 15/06/2010 09:45
Category: General

We are a small company with big clients.  Many of our clients commission multiple projects ranging from small, single person projects taking less than a week to large, team-based projects lasting months.  Clients have supoort issues that need to be dealt with fast and they request quotes for enhancements or new projects which also take time.  Work is developed using Visual Studio, tested internally and released for client testing and then deployed to production environments hosted by clients.

 

As a company we need to be aware of what our capacity is in order to schedule work.  The clients we work with require and deserve a dynamic approach to scheduling: our priorities have to be able to change week to week and day to day whilst we still deliver all of the work that we have committed to.  We use elements of Scrum where they are appropriate and a more structured approach to allow us to set client expectations.

 

Our objective is to implement SharePoint 2010, Project Server 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 (TFS) in order to manage the work and the development.  Our intranet, external website and client extranet will all be hosted on SharePoint 2010.  On top of SharePoint 2010 we will have Project Server 2010 to manage the work that needs to be done.  The development tasks will be managed using TFS, as will version control, testing and builds.

 

This is the perfect scenario for our business.  There are, however, issues that are standing in our way:

 

  1. How do we integrate Project Server 2010 and TFS 2010 so that management of projects are governed through Project server 2010 and development and testing tasks are managed through TFS 2010?
  2. How do we associate multiple projects, quote requests and support issues in Project Server 2010 and TFS 2010 with clients?
  3. How can we expose selected information in both Project Server 2010 and TFS 2010 to clients via an extranet for each client?

These are the initial objectives and issues that we are facing.  We have the people with the capable skills and they have the hunger to update their skils and learn about all of these technologies.  We also have the thirst, as a company, to deliver this solution for three reasons:

  1. Our lives will be easier
  2. Our clients will be happier
  3. We will be able to work more efficiently

We will be pursuing these objectives and will, no doubt, encounter many more challenges.  Bring 'em on - we'll get there.

 



Alan Eardley - Project Manager, Creative SharePoint



 

Permanent Link to Post | Email Post Link | Number of Comments 4 Comment(s)

Comments

Clustering or Mirroring for SQL?

Howdy

There seems to be some confusion about Sharepoint 2010 and whether the MS best practice is mirroring or clutsering.

What are peoples thoughts on this please? To me mirroring seems less sensible for Sharepoint as I have found its rare to lose a database, you'd be more likely to lose a whole SQL instance.

Also, while setting up a cluster is more messy, once its running its usually fine. I find the mirroring only makes sense if you must not have ANY downtime at all, but that said you could use say VMWare Fault Tolerance if things got really critical and achieve the same result.

We are looking at running SQL 2008 R2 on Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise on VM. We have some seriously grunty new boxes so perfomance wont be an issue.

All thoughts welcome..
 on 16/06/2010 01:01

Thanks for the comment.

  The main difference between clustering and mirroring is that clustering is server level and mirroring is database level.  For SharePoint, clustering is preferred as all of the databases in an instance are included, whereas with mirroring, each database needs to be configured individually.

The drawbacks of clustering include increased licensing costs, the requirement for shared network storage and, as you have pointed out, a more complex set-up process. 

Alternatively mirroring offers the ability to take snapshots of the mirrored DB and to run read only queries off it.

Al
273262-WEB1\chris.corke on 17/06/2010 11:06

This may help...

Regarding the last comment about virtualising SQL, I found the following technet article specifically focusing on SP2010 in virtualised environments:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff607811.aspx

Steve Jeffery
273262-WEB1\chris.corke on 17/06/2010 11:07

Re: SharePoint 2010, Project Server 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 - the Holy Grail

Clustering -
Hardware layer protection – all databases are protected.
Increased costing for hardware and licensing?

Mirroring -
Database level protection – no protection against media failure.

SP2010 now allows you to name a failover partner per web app, which will failover to the named partner (another instance of SQL, default 15 seconds). In theory you should not need to make any configuration changes in SP. Before this, you would have to stsadm –o renameserver (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263117(office.12).aspx)

So perhaps the decision is one based around cost/budget and availability requirements rather than best vs poor practise..?

Steve Jeffery
273262-WEB1\chris.corke on 17/06/2010 11:09

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