Some Concept

What is SharePoint? 

 SharePoint is a portal collaboration software, SharePoint 2010 is a platform where user can share Data, Collaborate and people can also take this platform and customized platform as per their requirements.

 What are the types of authentication available for SharePoint 2010?

1. Claims

2. Windows(classic)

3. Form Based Authentication

What are the two different versions in SharePoint 2010?

SharePoint 2010 has 2 different products namely SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010.

SharePoint Foundation 2010

SharePoint Server 2010

What’s new in Shared Service Provider (SSP) in SharePoint 2010 ?

“Service Application “or “Service App” is a concept in SharePoint 2010, where SSP Services are split out into separate services.

Profiles, Audiences People Service Application

Search Service Application

Excel Service Application

Project Server Application

Visio service application

What is the GAC?

The GAC stands for the global assembly cache. It is the machine wide code cache which will give custom binaries place into the full trust code group for SharePoint. Certain SharePoint assets, such as Feature Receivers need full trust to run correctly, and therefore are put into the GAC.

C:\WINDOWS\assembly) or %WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\assembly

What is a site collection?

A site collection contains a top-level website and can contain one or more sub-sites web sites that have the same owner and share administration settings.

What are Web Application Policies?

Enables security policy for users at the Web application level, rather than at the site collection or site level. Importantly, they override all other security settings.

What are content databases?

A content database can hold all the content for one or more site collections.

What is the difference between Classic mode authentication and Claims-based authentication?

As the name implies, classic authentication supports NT authentication types like Kerberos, NTLM, Basic, Digest, and anonymous. Claims based authentication uses claims identities against a trusted identity provider.

When would you use claims, and when would you use classic?

Classic is more commonly seen in upgraded 2007 environments whereas claims are the recommended path for new deployments.

What are Terms and Term Sets?

A term is a word or a phrase that can be associated with an item. A term set is a collection of related terms.

What are different types of Term Sets?

There are Local Term Sets and Global Term Sets, one created within the context of a site collection and the other created outside the context of a site collection, respectively.

What Is Governance in terms of SharePoint 2010?

Governance is the set of policies, roles, responsibilities, and processes that guide, direct, and control how an organization’s business divisions and IT teams cooperate to achieve business goals.

What are some useful, OOB features of SharePoint that aid with governance of an environment?

Please refer the following options:

Site templates – consistent branding, site structure, and layout can be enforce a set of customizations that are applied to a site definition.

Quotas – limits to the amount of storage a site collection can use.

Locks - prevent users from either adding content to a site collection or using the site collection.

Web application permissions and policies – comprehensive security settings that apply to all users and groups for all site collections within a Web application.

Self-service site creation - enables users to create their own site collections, thus must be incorporated into a governance scheme.

Basic Intro SharePoint Architecture Questions :

 What are Web Applications in SharePoint?

An IIS Web site created and used by SharePoint 2010. Saying an IIS virtual server is also an acceptable answer.

What is an application pool?

A group of one or more URLs that are served by a particular worker process or set of worker processes. Allows us to configure a level of isolation between diff web applications.

 Why are application pools important?

They provide a way for multiple sites to run on the same server but still have their own worker processes and identity.

What are zones?

Different logical paths (URLs meaning) of gaining access to the same SharePoint Web application.

What is a site?

 A site in SharePoint contains Web pages and related assets such as lists, all hosted within a site collection.

What are My Sites?

Specialized SharePoint sites personalized and targeted for each user.

 Describe the potential components for both a single server, and multiple servers, potentially several tiered farms:

A single-server SharePoint Server 2010 environment leverages a built-in SQL Server 2008 Express database. The problems with this environment is scalability, not being able to install the with built-in database on a domain controller, the database cannot be larger than 4 GB, and you cannot use User Profile Synchronization in a single server with built-in database installation.

An example of a multiple tier farm would be a three-tier topology, considered one of the more efficient physical and logical layouts to supports scaling out or scaling up and provides better distribution of services across the member servers of the farm. This is considered a good architecture since one can add Web servers to the Web tier, add app servers to the application tier, and add database servers to the database tier.

SharePoint Backup and Restore Questions:

 What are some of the tools that can be used when backing up a SharePoint 2010 environment?

• SharePoint farm backup and recovery
• SQL Server
• System Center Data Protection Manager

 What Microsoft tool can be used for incremental backups?

System Center Data Protection Manager

Managed Metadata Questions:

 What is Managed Metadata?

Managed metadata is a hierarchical collection of centrally managed terms that you can define, and then use as attributes for items.

 What are Terms and Term Sets?

A term is a word or a phrase that can be associated with an item.  A term set is a collection of related terms.

 How do Terms and Term Sets relate to Managed Metadata?

Managed metadata is a way of referring to the fact that terms and term sets can be created and managed independently from the columns themselves.

Are there different types of Term Sets?

There are Local Term Sets and Global Term Sets, one created within the context of a site collection and the other created outside the context of a site collection, respectively.

How are terms created and used?

There are several ways; however the most common is to use the Term Store Management Tool.

How are Managed Metadata, and the related Term technology used?

Through the UI, the most common use is through the managed metadata list column which allows you to specify the term set to use. It also related to searching and enhancing the user search experience.

Sandbox Solutions Questions:

 What is a sandboxed solution?

Components that are deployed to run within the sandboxed process rather than running in the production Internet Information Services (IIS) worker process.

 What are some examples of things that might run within the SharePoint sandbox?

Any of the following are acceptable answers:

 Web Parts
Event receivers
Feature receivers
Custom Microsoft SharePoint Designer workflow activities
Microsoft InfoPath business logic

Others….

Why are sandboxed solutions used?

Primarily because they promote high layers of isolation. By default they run within a rights-restricted, isolated process based around Code Access Security (CAS). Isolation is possible to increase with activities like running the sandboxing service on only specific SharePoint 2010 servers.

SharePoint Search Questions:

What is a content source in relation to SharePoint search? What’s the minimum amount of content sources?

A content source is a set of options that you can use to specify what type of content is crawled, what URLs to crawl, and how deep and when to crawl. You must create at least one content source before a crawl can occur.

What is a search scope?

A search scope defines a subset of information in the search index. Users can select a search scope when performing a search.

What is a federated location with SharePoint search?

Federated locations provide information that exists outside of your internal network to your end-users.

How does managed metadata affect search?

Enhances the end-user search experience by mapping crawled properties to managed properties. Managed properties show up in search results and help users perform more successful queries.

What is query logging in SharePoint 2010?

Collects information about user search queries and search results that users select on their computers to improve the relevancy of search results and to improve query suggestions.

What authentication type does the SharePoint crawler use?

The crawl component requires access to content using NTLM authentication.

Services Architecture Questions:

Please describe what a Service Application is in SharePoint 2010.

Service applications in SharePoint 2010 are a set of services that can possibly be shared across Web applications. Some of these services may or may not be shared across the SharePoint 2010 farm. The reason these applications are shared is the overall reduction of resources required to supply the functionality these services cultivate.

Please provide an example of one of these service applications.

Any of the below are acceptable answers:

Access Services
Business Data Connectivity service
Excel Services Application
Managed Metadata service
Performance Point Service Application
Search service
Secure Store Service
State service
Usage and Health Data Collection service
User Profile service
Visio Graphics Service
Web Analytics service
Word Automation Services
Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Subscription Settings Service

 What are Service Application Groups used for?

Just provides a logical grouping of services that are scoped to a particular Web Application.

How are Service Applications deployed in terms of IIS (Internet Information Services)?

They are provisioned as a single Internet Information Services (IIS) Web site.

Explain how connections are managed with Service Applications.

A virtual entity is used that is referred to as a proxy, due to label in Power Shell.

What are some common examples of SharePoint 2010 services architectures, and what are the advantages of each design?

The three most popular designs are single farms with either a single service application group or multiple service application groups, or Enterprise services farms.

Single farms with a single service application group are generally the most common, and have the advantages of easy deployment, simple service application allocation, effective resource utilization and cohesive management.

Single farms with multiple service application groups is less common, and have the advantage of potential individual management of service applications as well as allowing data isolation, and while being more complex to deploy and maintain allows targeting of sites to particular service applications.

Enterprise Service Farms is pretty uncommon as it is a complete farm dedicated to Service Applications but promotes autonomous management and high levels of data isolation.

Are there any other type of relevant service architectures?

Depending on the environment requirements, a specialized farm can also be used in order to deploy specific services tailored to the organizational requirements which can aid in scaling out and conservation of resources.

What is the User Profile service?

Allows configuring and managing User profile properties, Audiences, Profile synchronization settings, organization browsing and management settings, and My Site settings.

 What are User Profiles?

Aggregates properties from diverse identity content sources together to create unified and consistent profiles across an organization, used throughout the SharePoint environment.

What is Excel Services?

Allows sharing, securing, managing, and using Excel 2010 workbooks in a SharePoint Server Web site or document library. Excel Services consists of the Excel Calculation Services (ECS), Microsoft Excel Web Access (EWA), and Excel Web Services (EWS) components.

What is Performance Point Services?

Allows users to monitor and analyze a business by building dashboards, scorecards, and key performance indicators (KPIs).

What is Visio Services?

Allows users to share and view Microsoft Visio Web drawings. The service also enables data-connected Microsoft Visio 2010 Web drawings to be refreshed and updated from various data sources.

What is Access Services?

Allows users to edit, update, and create linked Microsoft Access 2010 databases that can be viewed and manipulated by using an internet browser, the Access client, or a linked HTML page.

What is the Secure Store Service (SSS)?

A secure database for storing credentials that is associated with application IDs

What is Content Deployment?

Content deployment enables you to copy content from a source site collection to a destination site collection.

Backup / DR Questions:

 Describe how redundancy can be built into a SharePoint environment. Please be specific in regards to any auxiliary components.

Multiple front-end web servers (WFE’s) can be deployed and correlated through Windows NLB or anything approach. Application servers can be deployed into the farm for a variety of purposes, depending on organizational requirements. Databases can be clustered or mirrored, again depending on requirements and environment.

From a basic standpoint, what is the difference between SQL clustering and mirroring?

Clustering provides a failover scenario whereby one or more nodes can be swapped as active depending on whether a node goes down. In mirroring, transactions are sent directly from a principal database and server to a mirror database to establish essentially a replica of the database.

Governance Questions:

What Is Governance in terms of SharePoint 2010?

Governance is the set of policies, roles, responsibilities, and processes that guide, direct, and control how an organization’s business divisions and IT teams cooperate to achieve business goals.

 What are some useful, OOB features of SharePoint that aid with governance of an environment?

Any of the below are acceptable answers. There are some others but these are the major ones that I generally look for from a candidate:

Site templates – consistent branding, site structure, and layout can be enforce a set of customizations that are applied to a site definition.

Quotas – limits to the amount of storage a site collection can use.

Locks - prevent users from either adding content to a site collection or using the site collection.

Web application permissions and policies – comprehensive security settings that apply to all users and groups for all site collections within a Web application.

Self-service site creation - enables users to create their own site collections, thus must be incorporated into a governance scheme.

Monitoring Questions:

Describe the monitoring features that are baked into SharePoint 2010.

Diagnostic logging captures data about the state of the system, whereas health and usage data collection uses specific timer jobs to perform monitoring tasks, collecting information about:

• Performance Counter Fata
• Event Log Data
• Timer Service Data
• Metrics For Site Collections and Sites
• Search Usage Data 

what’s the service application proxy?

Essentially, the service application proxy is a virtual link that connects web applications to a particular service application. So, when you create your web application, you can specify your association to a service-application proxy, and it’s the proxy that actually manages the communication back and forth.

BloB Cache Questions:

1.What is Blob Cache?

Disk-based Caching for Binary Large Objects

Disk-based caching controls caching for binary large objects (BLOBs) such as image, sound, and video files, as well as code fragments. Disk-based caching is extremely fast and eliminates the need for database round trips. BLOBs are retrieved from the database once and stored on the Web client. Further requests are served from the cache and trimmed based on security.

2.Enabling and modifying disk-based caching for SharePoint sites.

Disk-based caching is disabled by default. To enable and customize the disk-based cache, you must modify the following statement in the web.config file for the SharePoint Web application.

By default, it looks like this:
<BlobCache location="C:\blobCache" path="\.(gif|jpg|png|css|js)$" maxSize="10" enabled="false" />

In order to improve the performance of your site, the BlobCache should be enabled.
<BlobCache location="C:\blobCache" path="\.(gif|jpg|png|css|js)$" maxSize="10" enabled="true" />

Example:

<BlobCache location="C:\blobCache" path="\.(gif|jpg|png|css|js)$" maxSize="10" max-age="86400" enabled="false"/>

In the preceding example:

• location is the directory where the cached files will be stored
• path specifies in the form of a regular expression which files are cached based on the file extension
• maxSize is the maximum allowable size of the disk-based cache in gigabytes
• max-age specifies the maximum amount of time in seconds that the client browser caches BLOBs downloaded to the client computer. If the downloaded items have not expired since the last download, the same items are not re-requested when the page is requested. The max-age attribute is set by default to 86400 seconds (that is, 24 hours), but it can be set to a time period of 0 or greater.
• enabled is a Boolean that disables or enables the cache.

3. Flushing the Disk-based Cache:

We can flush the current site collection object cache. To do this, browse to the following location on the web site,
Site collection administration -> site collection object cache -> disk based cache reset.

If we have multiple WFEs in the farm, each WFE will maintain its own copy of Disk-based Cache. SharePoint does not have a Web user interface (UI) to flush the disk-based cache on all the servers in a farm and neither is there an option to select a specific WFE.

4.The option provided in the Administration page for flushing the cache is only to the flush the cache on the web front end to which you are currently browsing.

if you would like to flush the complete binary large object (BLOB) caches associated with a specific Web Application on different Web front-end computers in a farm, then you can use the STSADM command to do so.

STSADM -o setproperty -propertyname blobcacheflushcount -propertyvalue 11 -url http://mywebapp:port

5.Internals of the blob cache functionality within SharePoint:

After enabling blob cache in web.config, do an IISRESET and browse to the /settings.aspx first, instead of home page (Collaboration portal site).

When we browse to the settings.aspx, it will create the following files change.bin, dump.bin and flushcount.bin (all the files will be 1KB in size).

Browse to the home page now, it will create a folder PUBLISHINGIMAGES, all the images rendered from the database will be stored here and the above bin files will also get updated (we can see the difference in file size).

Every time when a new image file is rendered from the database, the image folder gets a copy of the image. The bin files (index) will get updated with an additional entry for the new file.

Every request from client will check the index file first. It will only check the cache index and not the image folder directly for the image. If the index file does not have an entry for the image, then the request is served from the database. During this time, a copy of the image will be stored in the images folder and the index file also gets updated, so that the next request will not go to the database.

6.What happens I manually delete just the image file in the cache folder or the image file in the cache folder gets corrupted?

We will not see the image on the client page; we get a broken image ‘X’.

7.How are these cache files stored?

Filename.extension.cache is the file naming format.

8.What can I do if the cached file gets corrupted?

Recommendation: We can reset the index file. Site settings -> Site collection object cache -> Check the box for “Force this server to reset its disk based cache”. It will completely delete all the images and reset the bin files back to 1KB, so that next request will go to database and the complete index will get rebuilt.

Workaround: If you do not want to reset the complete index. Find out the missing image and copy just that file to the cache folder, name it as “filename.extension.cache”
Refresh the page now; it should pick up the image.

9.How is the Index file maintained?

Every time when the web.config initializes, the index file is loaded from the blobcache folder to memory. All new entries will keep getting updated in index file when in memory.
IISRESET /stop will flush the updated index file from memory to disc within the blobcache folder.
IISRESET /start will load the index file from blobcache folder to memory.
As long as the application pool is alive the index file will be getting updated in memory itself.

10.Can an Index file get corrupt?

Index file corruption is possible only when IIS crash or the index file is overwritten with wrong information. When IIS tries to load the index file from blobcache to memory and identifies that it is a corrupted file (not a valid file), it will get completely rebuilt (flush) as fresh file (1KB), all the old entries and images will be lost.

11.In a farm environment, is there any way of having all the WFEs' blob caches synchronized among each other?

No, this cannot be done because SharePoint maintains the index and the cache files individually on each server.

12.In a single WFE environment using web gardening, how does blob caching function? Is there any sync that happens among the working processes?

Web gardening is not supported.

- See more at: http://expertsharepoint.blogspot.in/p/sharepoint-interview-q.html#sthash.twrnorm4.dpuf