Good news is that since SharePoint 2010 SP1 we now have a ‘DatabaseName’ switch parameter when creating a new PerformancePoint Service Application through PowerShell!

Open PowerShell:

Type in: get-help New-SPPerformancePointServiceApplication -full
    -DatabaseName [<string>]
        Specifies the name of the PerformancePoint Service database used for the service application.
        Required?                    false
        Position?                    Named
        Default value
        Accept pipeline input?       False
        Accept wildcard characters?  false

http://cdn-smooth.ms-studiosmedia.com/msstudios/1005/1003463/Mod_2_Planning_Design_and_Deployment/Default.html

More videos:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/showcase/channeldetails.aspx?channelid=microsoftproject

Microsoft has conveniently pre-configured a virtual machine for testing, demo and evaluation purposes.

What you get pre-installed on the SharePoint 2010 server:

1. Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Standard Evaluation Edition, running as an Active Directory Domain Controller for the “CONTOSO.COM” domain with DNS and WINS
2. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition with Analysis, Notification, and Reporting Services
3. Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
4. Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 SP1 Enterprise Edition
5. Microsoft Office Web Applications SP1
6. Microsoft FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 SP1
7. Microsoft Project Server 2010 SP1
8. Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 SP1
9. Microsoft Visio 2010 SP1
10. Microsoft Project 2010 SP1
11. Microsoft Lync 2010

Microsoft states that Office Web Apps and SharePoint 2010 are ‘tightly integrated’ and thats absolutely right!

Problem:
Its so tightly integrated that Office Web Apps uninstalls may not work properly, SharePoint sites are removed, customisations are lost.. and so on.

Solution:
The solution is to DEACTIVATE Office Web Apps rather than uninstalling it. DONT think of uninstalling Office Web Apps unless you read this full article, clearly understand your environment, take full tested backups of everything and read the links that this articles has.

What happens when you uninstall Office Web Apps?

• All sites, including the Central Administration site, experience a loss in functionality until you have completely uninstalled Office Web Apps and then run the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard on all servers in the farm
• All Internet Information Services (IIS) Web applications and sites are removed from the server
• The server is removed from the farm
• Any customizations that you have made are removed and must be reapplied after you add the servers back to the farm. These customizations include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Changes to the web.config file on Web front-end servers
• Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates that were added to Web front-end servers
• Any features that you have deployed manually

I found a great article online..

Basically, you have to create a new dummy List workflow without any steps in the new (destination) site, then ‘export to visio’ in both the old (source) site.

Rename both source List Workflow and newly created destination List Workflow  vwi files and add a .zip file extension to both of them. Copy the workflow.xoml.wfconfig from the new Workflow zip file to the old Workflow zip file.

Then remove the .zip in the file name and Import from Visio in the destination site.

http://ikarstein.wordpress.com/2011/02/10/walkthrough-how-to-move-or-copy-a-sharepoint-designer-2010-list-workflow-to-another-list-on-the-same-site-or-another-site/

Download it here:

SharePoint 2010 Foundation SP1:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2460058

SharePoint Server 2010 SP1:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2460045

The install process:

1. Run the exe to extract and install the binaries
Running the exe (installing the binaries) will take 15-25 minutes.
This can be run concurrently on all SharePoint Servers.
2. Ensure that you have ran the exe on all servers in the SharePoint farm.
3. Run the SharePoint Products Config Wizard on all servers in the SharePoint Farm.
The SharePoint Products Config Wizard would take about 5-10 minutes.
This step cannot be run before the previous steps.
This step cannot be run concurrently on other servers in the same farm.
4. Reboot.
Reboot is a requirement as it is listed in the ‘Known issues’ of SP1
5. Restart the User Profile Sync Service (through SharePoint). This can take about 10 minutes.
This is a known issue with SP1.

Some other points:

I had to install the Office Web Apps SP 1 first before I did the SharePoint 2010 SP1.

Since I run SharePoint 2010 Enterprise, I did not install the SharePoint Foundation SP1 – because I extracted the exe and compared it with the SharePoint Server SP1 and all the files have been included.
So, save time and just install the SharePoint Server SP1 and not the SharePoint Foundation SP1 if you run SharePoint Server Standard or Enterprise.

Some Features of the SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1:

• Support for the next version of SQL Server Code Name “Denali”
• Shallow copy functionality allows you to move Site Collections from one Content Database to another Content Database without touching the underlying blob (unstructured) data. Only the pointers are updated. Functionality is provided in the Move-SPSite cmd in PowerShell.
• Site-level recycle bin allows administrators to recover Site Collections and sites that have been accidentally deleted by the owners.
• Improvements to storage management (StorMan.aspx)
SP1 introduces an improved StorMan.aspx, enabling users to better understand what is using up their quota and to act upon that information in order to reduce the size of their sites.
• Cascading filters for Performance Point services
New cascading filter support enables you to pass the value of one filter to another.
• Additional browser support
SP1 provides support for Internet Explorer 9 in Internet Explorer 8 Standards Mode and also provides support for the Google Chrome browser.

Cumulative Updates in SharePoint SP 1:

SP 1 includes all SharePoint 2010 updates upto and including April 2011 CU. It does not include the June 2011 CU. You must apply that separately. I encourage you not to rush and install the June 2011 yet. Only apply it if it fixes a specific issue you are experiencing.

SharePoint 2010 SP 1 also provides a number of fixes to improve the user experience.

Now, as I have been working full time with SharePoint for years, I thought its a good time to pull out a little bit about SharePoint with IPv6 from the net…

Some things I picked up from reading on the net which may be important to you are:

• Windows Server 2003: By default, the IPv6 protocol is not installed. However, it can be added.
• Windows Server 2008: By default, the IPv6 protocol and the IPv4 protocol are both installed and enabled. When both IPv4 and IPv6 are enabled, IPv6 is given preference over IPv4.
• Microsoft provides supported IPv6 implementations for Windows Server 2003, Windows XP with SP1 or later, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 or later.
• When Windows is configured with IPv6, SQL 2005, 2008 and 2008 R2 Server components automatically recognize the existence of IPv6. No special SQL Server configuration is necessary.
• The SQL Server Database Engine and the other server components can listen on both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses at the same time. When both IPv4 and IPv6 are present, you can use SQL Server Configuration Manager to configure the Database Engine to listen only on IPv4 addresses or only on IPv6 addresses.
• When the SQL Server Browser service running on a machine that supports both IPv4 and IPv6 is queried on an IPv4 address, it responds with an IPv4 address and the first IPv4 TCP port in its list. When queried on an IPv6 address, it responds with an IPv6 address and the first IPv6 TCP port in its list. To avoid inconsistency, Microsoft recommends that the IPv4 and IPv6 listeners be configured to listen to the same port.
• Tools such as SQL Server Management Studio and SQL Server Configuration Manager accept both IPv4 and IPv6 formats for IP addresses. In most cases, the connection string does not need to be modified if the <computer_name>\<instance_name> is specified using server hostname or fully qualified domain name (FQDN).
• In SQL Server R2, Native Client attempts to establish connections using these IP addresses in the order received from TCP/IP and uses the first connection that succeeds. Because the order cannot be predicted by SQL Server Native Client, this should be regarded as random order. IPv4 addresses are attempted first if both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses are present. This logic is transparent to the users of ODBC, OLE DB, or ADO.NET.
• All versions of Microsoft SQL Server supported for SharePoint 2010 Products also support IPv6.
• In SharePoint 2010, when using IPv6 protocol, all end-user Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) must be based on DNS names with AAAA records.
• Browsing to SharePoint URLs that use IPv6 literal addresses is not supported.
• SharePoint 2010 Products support entering IPv6 literal addresses for certain farm administration functionality, such as entering the server name when creating or attaching databases. For server names that use a literal address format, you must enclose the literal address within square brackets. An example of a literal address URL is http://[2002:db8:85a2:8d4:1219:8b2e:370:7424]

Introduction to IPv6
Microsoft Technology Position Paper
Microsoft's Objectives for IP Version 6
Migrating IPv6.exe Commands to Netsh Command
IPv6 Transition Technologies
IPv6 Security Considerations and Recommendations
Using Windows Tools to Obtain IPv6 Configuration Information

Microsofts link:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2532126

The following are issues that you may experience when you install these service packs:

• Before you install the SP1 packages, make sure that you have sufficient disk space. For caching, the packages may require up to four times their file size in remaining disk space during installation.
• You must restart your computer at the end of the Office 2010 SP1 installation process.
• If Office Web Apps will be used in a mixed version environment, where Office Web Apps has SP1-or-later applied while SharePoint Server 2010 remains on the RTM version, you must install the following two updates before you install SP1 for Office Web Apps:
  • 2510639 Description of the SharePoint Server 2010 update: April 12, 2011
  • 2510648 Description of the Office Web Apps update: April 12, 2011
• After SharePoint Server 2010 SP1 is installed, the Workflow feature is disabled  when a new site collection is created. To use the Workflow feature in a new site collection, enable it in the Site Collection Settings page.

Tip: I highly recommend you install and test all Service Packs and CUs in a DEV environment first, wait for more feedback from the public / forums/blogs and then install in your Production environment.

Download link to SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1:
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=26623

Admins, please note: you would have to download the June 2011 CU separately and install it after the Service Pack 1 is installed. The June Cumulative Update includes several important security and bug fixes that are not included Service Pack 1.

Download June 2011 CU here:
http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=2536599

Related links:

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blog/Pages/BlogPost.aspx?pID=984

http://blogs.technet.com/b/office_sustained_engineering

You can easily run this in PowerShell. All it does is start all the timer jobs with ‘Health’ in its name. That fires off all SharePoint 2010 Health Analyzer jobs for your new farm in one go.

# Check to ensure Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell is loaded
$snapin = Get-PSSnapin | Where-Object {$_.Name -eq 'Microsoft.SharePoint.Powershell'}
if ($snapin -eq $null) {
  Write-Host "Loading SharePoint Powershell Snapin"
  Add-PSSnapin "Microsoft.SharePoint.Powershell"
}
Get-SPTimerJob | Where {$_.Name -like "*Health*" -and $_.Name -like "*-all-*"} | Start-SPTimerJob