SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1 Will Be Available Shortly

According to the SharePoint Team Blog Service Pack 1 for SharePoint 2010 will be available towards the end of June and it promises stability, perfomance and security enhancements the community has been asking for.

Here are the highlights of what we can expect:

Site Recycle Bin
Service Pack 1 will introduce long awaited Site Recycle Bin functionality that enables self-service recovery of site collections and sites. In the past IT Professionals were tasked with restoring entire databases to recover deleted site collections and sites and would generally require expensive restore environments to support the task. Now in Service Pack 1 administrators can quickly and easily recover site collections and sites accidentally deleted by their owners in a process similar to that of the Recycle Bin we have for Lists, Libraries, and Documents.

Shallow Copy
If you’re using Remote BLOB Storage you’ve probably realized that when moving Site Collections (Move-SPSite) between content databases each unit of unstructured data (BLOB) was round tripped (I.e. uploaded and subsequently downloaded again) serially during the move. This operation was both time consuming and resource intensive. In Service Pack 1 we reduce that overhead by enabling “shallow copy” when moving Site Collections between databases where Remote BLOB Storage is used. New Shallow Copy functionality with the Move-SPSite CmdLet enables moving site collections between content databases without moving the underlying unstructured data, i.e. Microsoft Word documents, PowerPoint Presentations, etc. significantly increasing performance and reliability for organizations using Remote BLOB Storage by simply updating the pointers to those objects in the destination content database.

StorMan.aspx
In SharePoint 2010 we removed StorMan.aspx (Storage Space Allocation) (see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982587/EN-US) which in previous versions of SharePoint enabled granular management and insight into storage. For example, the page would show you the top 100 documents or document libraries in terms of size. With that information end users could the page to clean up content from their site(s) by deleting the large content that they no longer needed. In Service Pack 1 we are bringing back an improved StorMan.aspx, enabling users to better understand where their quota is going and act upon that information to reduce the size of their sites.

New enhancements will improve the way you interact with information in SharePoint 2010. Service Pack 1 adds support for working with SharePoint and the Office Web Applications using Internet Explorer 9 and the Google Chrome browser (for a complete list of supported browsers for SharePoint 2010 see also http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263526.aspx), support for Open Document Format documents, and more.

There are also some unconfirmed reports of improvements to backup and restore, better Project/SharePoint integration and support for Google Chrome.

To read the official announcement click here and to be notified of updates sign up for the RSS feed here. Joel Oleson also has some information on his excellent SharePoint blog here.

Error - An unhandled exception occured in the Silverlight Application

SharePoint 2010 users will come across this error eventually when they try to create a new site, list, library, etc.

Going by what the error said, we re-installed Silverlight on both the server and the client machine. No luck. After doing a Google search we learned that the error was caused by the Web Page Security Validation Web Application setting being set to Off.

To resolve the issue, follow the steps below:

1. Login to Central Admin
2. Select Application Management - Manage Web Applications.
3. Select the Web Application you were having the problem with, then select General Settings from the ribbon.
4. Scroll half way down the Web Application General Settings Window and turn security validation On.

That's it. Never has an error message given so little information to resolve the real problem!

Let us know if you have a similar issue.