Ben Curry (SharePoint MVP extraordinaire, CISSP, MCT, MCP and all-around great guy) asked me to help contribute to this book (scheduled to now be out on July 4th) and let me tell you, what a learning experience this was.  It was my first foray into the realm of publishing and it was a lot of work for something relatively small (in terms of amount of pages that I was responsible for) and while it took up a ton of time (as you could tell from my lack of recent blog posts) it was an exceptional learning experience.  My contribution was the My Sites / User Profiles chapter and while it's a bit of a what/how-to, there are a couple "whys" thrown in there as well.  I'm really looking forward to checking out the finished product.

Big/huge thanks again to Ben for letting me help out on this! - M

Amazon link to Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administrator's Pocket Consultant

As reported on the SharePoint Team Blog, SP2 will be out on April 28th.  Plan all your patch windows accordigly, as well as spin up your new virtuals with it.  I'll be playing with it to see if updating the instructions for the clonable environment change. - M

Service Pack 2 for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 due to ship April 28th

Microsoft has announced the December Cumulative Update for Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 on the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog.  Make sure you read the whole post before applying as there's information related to earlier reported errors. - M

I've seen many posts around the topic of SSL-enabling a Web Application and how many go through the process of Extending the Web Application to do so. While this does work, it is not necessary. Extending a Web Application should really be used when you want to offer a different authentication mechanism than the default one. To SSL-enable a Web Application all you need to do is (1) add an Alternate Access Mapping entry and (2) install the SSL certificate on the web site. To add a new AAM entry perform the following steps:

1. From the Central Administration home page navigate through Operations --> Alternate Access Mappings (under the Global Configuration section)
2. In the Alternate Access Mapping Collection dropdown (near upper-right) select Change Alternate Access Mapping Collection
3. In the Select An Alternate Access Mapping Collection page select the relevant Web Application Name you want to create a new entry for
4. In the Alternate Access Mappings page click the Edit Public URLs button near the upper-left.
5. Enter the desired URL in one of the 4 Zones available then click the button
6. Install the SSL certificate to the relevant IIS website

At this point you should be good to go!

- M