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Nov 04

A couple of worrying changes in SP 2010 products compared to the v3 equivalents

Published: November 04, 2009 03:11 AM by Mike Walsh Powered by: Mindsharp and Summit 7

The first problem area is SPD 2010.

It has been confirmed in a thread in the new SharePoint 2010 (General) forum

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepoint2010general/threads

that it is not possible to edit v3 sites using SPD 2010.

This is against all previous practice (with SPD 2007 and FrontPage 2003) where downward compatibility was available but naturally upgrade compatibility wasn't.

The only slightly bright spot is that it was also confirmed that SPD 2010 and SPD 2007 can be run together on the same client machine. So you don't need two machines just to be able to work with v3 and v4 sites.

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That problem area however fades rapidly into insignificance if you are a WSS 3.0 user using Windows Internal Database.

As such you have a free database system which unlike the standard SQL Server 2005 Express it is based on does not have a 4GB database size limit.

Well it looks as if people who are running this and have exceeded this figure (non-limit!) or about to do so will have serious problems if they want to upgrade their system to SharePoint Foundation 2010.

I don't have any other explanation that in yesterdays massive batch of over twenty KB articles on the "Pre-Upgrade Checker for WSS 3.0 SP2" two of them are about the Windows Internal Database and both of them are about warnings that you get if you exceed 4GB in the size of a database "The large size of a database can prevent it from being upgraded".

Doesn't this seem to you as if Microsoft with SP Foundation 2010 intend to go back to the situation with I think WSS 2.0 and have a size restriction on the database sizes of the basic installation of SP Foundation 2010?

It's a clear indication of this when the only databases that throw up this "problem" are those using Windows Internal Database. There are no equivalent KB articles for databases over 4GB using (say) SQL Server 2005.

Comments

SPD 2010 + SPD 2007

Keep in mind that it is not a good idea to run x64 and x86 office applications on the same machine... since SPD 2007 is x86 only, you won't be able to run x64 of Office 2010 if you want to run SPD side by side. Shouldn't be a big deal though - just run SPD 2007 in XP Mode if you're running Windows 7. More: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepointdesigner/archive/2009/11/02/sharepoint-designer-2010-new-shell-tour.aspx, see: "A Few Limitations to Call Out" near the bottom. Mike's comment: This URL points to a post in the SharePoint Designer Team Blog and the refered-to section is a very good reference for this blog item of mine.

The second one is not a problem

Within reasonable limits, the second issue is not a problem. Take a look at the following article on Technet: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee663471%28office.14%29.aspx. Databases larger than 4GB (again, within reasonable limits) will be migrated to SQL Server Express with Remote Blob Storage during the upgrade process. BLOBs stored on the filesystem don't count against the 4GB limit of SQL Express. Mike's comment: Setting up Remote Blog Storage is probably beyond the possibilities of many people who today install the Basic Installation version of WSS 3.0. (Anyway Search databases still have a 4GB limit as they can't use RBS). But my main objection is that having moved to an unlimited database size in one version, MS take it away in the next. Providing a workaround for some cases mitigates that very poor and unfair decision but doesn't imo justify it.

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