Lessons learned from first SharePoint 2010 implementation

Just wanted to list down the lessons learnt from our first SharePoint 2010 implementation. While some of them are quite simple ones, some were disasterous.

1. Attempted to save a blog site as a template. SharePoint has succesfully created a sandbox wsp solution in the solutions gallery of the site collection. But it could not be activated. ULS Logs told that there were some errors in the xml. So we cleaned up the xml and rebuild the wsp (Visual Studio 2010 has a option to open wsp files and reverse engineer them). Uploaded the solution into solutions gallery. Activated the solution. At first it looked as if every thing went smooth. All fine. But later we have noticed that it corrupted the whole site collection taxanomy. We have noticed that the Site Columns and Content Types galleries were emptied during the activation. So to fix this, we had to restore from an old backup
2. SharePoint 2010 has closed the back door ability to save publishing site as a template.
3. SharePoint Designer 2010 often poses problems while working with page layouts. This is especially true with connected web parts and few OOB web parts such as the Note Board Web Part (comments web part). In case of connected web parts, SPD interferes and alters the connection IDs to 0000-0000-0000-000. In the case of NoteBoard Web Part, SPD does not let us to shange the title. Resolution for the Note Board Web Part is to change the properties in design mode.
4. It is not an easy and straight process to set certain properties like Picture URL in User Profile Properties. I have written a blog explaining how to map them to AD correctly Setting up the PictureURL User Profile Property using Forefront Synchronization Service Manager in SharePoint 2010
5. Forefront Server may cause lot of troubles in case of a single server farm
6. Content Query Web Part's styles do not work correctly untill they are fixed. Fellow colleague Sandeep Nahta wrote a blog about fixing the issue here
7. Microsoft has not yet provided options to automatically take backups. We still have to write scripts and use them with a automater like Task Scheduler
8. The infamous COLD, SLOW requests that baffles users still remains. We have used SPWakeUp with Task Scheduler to overcome this.
9. If you take a backup of a particular list using the SharePoint 2010 UI's new granular backup interface and restore it to the same location where it has been backed up from, do not expect the list to have the same list ID. It generates a new ID for the list. This can pose a problem especially if this list is being used by a lookup column and if the list gets corrupted for any reason.

--- More to come ---