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Bamboo Nation: SharePoint for Innovation; Office 365 Web App Benefits; Steve Ballmer Worst CEO

Fri, 18 May 2012 03:39:00 -0400

Can we retire early now that we are all Facebook millionaires? - Dooley Top News StoriesChoosing SharePoint: An Innovative Approach to Just About Anything (CMSWire)I recently spoke with a client of mine on a new prospective project using SharePoint to deliver a records management solution. The solution was to replace an existing, outdated product that was in major need of a facelift. “Great!” I said. I prepared my finest consulting slides and brushed up on a few records management topics that I had become rusty on, and I was on my way to winning a new project. Designing a SharePoint Farm: Tiers Before Bedtime (ZDNet)The three-tier model seemed the best way forward for performance, convenience and reliability for our SharePoint farm. The first tier contains a SharePoint server doing nothing but IIS things. The second tier comprises three more SharePoint servers doing everything except the IIS things. Tier 3 is still SQL Server. In this layout, the middle tier machines can load-balance themselves and we can keep adding new servers to this layer if there are performance problems. Collaborative Technologies: Use 'em or Lose 'em (ITWorld)It’s easy for your collaboration efforts to “die a slow death” if the systems aren’t utilized by employees, according to Roman Coba. The CIO of McCain Foods Ltd. spoke at Cisco Systems Inc.’s Cisco Plus event in Toronto on Wednesday. Ensuring staff use collaboration technologies like Telepresence, messaging and presence, and getting buy-in from the executive suite are key to a successful initiative, Coba said in an interview with ComputerWorld Canada. Several factors drove McCain to implement its collaboration strategy. Four Benefits Of Office 365 Web Apps (ITProPortal)In previous articles, we've mentioned how Microsoft Office 365 Web Apps are not as feature-rich as their local counterparts, for example, the Office 365 Word Web App doesn't have multi-user change tracking, mail merge, WordArt, Table of Contents and many other features compared to Microsoft Word 2010. The Web Apps do, however, have several advantages that could save valuable time and prevent potential disaster. Here are four: Windows 8 Tablet PC Makers: We Can’t Compete with the iPad’s Price (ExtremeTech)If reports from Taiwan are to be believed, hardware manufacturers are struggling to create Windows 8 on ARM (Windows RT) devices that are competitively priced against Apple’s iPad and Amazon’s Kindle Fire. The reason? According to Digitimes, OEMs have to pay Microsoft $90-100 for a Windows 8 license. Steve Ballmer Called 'Worst CEO' by Forbes (ITWorld)Forbes says Ballmer wins "Worst CEO" award. True, or did Bill Gates hand over the keys at the right time? When the capitalist diary Forbes calls Ballmer "the worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company today," it looks bad. Even though Cisco's John Chambers is on the same list at #5, being called the worst is a bit insulting, especially when the title of the story is "Oops! Five CEOs Who Should Have Already Been Fired (Cisco, GE, WalMart, Sears, Microsoft)." Around the BlogosphereSharePoint: The CodePlex Corner - Introduction (SharePointDevWWiki)Welcome to the first of what I hope will part of a regular series of articles under the (not very creative) moniker of “The CodePlex Corner.” I´ve had the idea of a frequent feature on NBSP.com that focuses on the community Open Source SharePoint options for a while. Having recently checked the project count at CodePlex for anything related to our favourite Microsoft Platform, the number of projects across all iterations of SharePoint is pretty impressive. There are a few ways to set the search filters but having settled on just searching for “SharePoint” and selecting stable projects only, a search turned up 778 items. Many of which I suspect aren´t very well known to the SharePoint Community. SharePoint and Twitter (EndUserSharePoint)Last week I showed you how to add a YouTube video into SharePoint. This time I would like to share how you can create your own Twitter web part! Let’s get started! Free SharePoint Office 365 Master Page & CSS – Collaboration v1.0 (SP365)It is with great pleasure that I can release version 1.0 of my SharePoint 2010 Metro Style MasterPage and CSS. Installation instructions are simple, upload the WSP and approve and publish the files in the Style Library (working on making that automated). This works in office 365 as well as on premise team sites. Around Bamboo NationAssessing One's Own Project Management Skills (The Bottom-Line PM)The confluence of our busy season at work and a distinct lack of inspiration lately has had me floundering for topics to cover. I haven't been doing very project manager-y things at work lately, so the wellspring from which I usually draw topics has been pretty dry. SharePoint Job Listings*Business Development Consultant - RemoteSharePointHE.com is looking to hire a Business Development Consultant to be primarily responsible for proactively generating, qualifying, and closing opportunities that lead to new business for SharePointHE.com. Primary duties include the following: Proactively generate, qualify, and close opportunities that lead to new business; Manage the full sales cycle from proactively generating lead to closing opportunity; Management of the quality of overall deliverables throughout the whole sales process. Sr. Business Systems Analyst - SharePoint - Dallas, TexasAt CBRE, we are going through tremendous expansion in our IT group and are looking for fun and dynamic individuals to work for the largest commercial real estate company in the world.　These candidates will lead multiple projects and work directly with industry executives to design, build, and deploy many of our industry leading business systems.　These candidates must have significant experience with system implementations, possess strong communication skills, and have the desire to learn the complexities of the commercial real estate industry.　Responsibilities for this position include: Microsoft UpdatesNational Careers Service Website on Track to Meet the Needs of 20 Million Citizens (Microsoft Case Studies)The National Careers Service for England is a United Kingdom (U.K.) government initiative. The Skills Funding Agency is responsible for developing the service, built around an interactive learning and careers website. Working with Microsoft Services and using Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 communications and collaboration software, the agency is confident that its site meets government expectations and the needs of 20 million users. SharePoint Events* May 18, Online - Plotting a course for SharePoint in the Enterprise May 19, Johannesburg, South Africa - SharePoint Saturday May 19, Portland - SharePoint Saturday May 22, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Workflow Conductor Webinar May 23, Online - 5 Risky SharePoint Human Resource Temptations May 23, Online - How to Slash SharePoint Development Costs and Get More from Your Investment May 24, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Central Webinar May 24, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Time Tracking & Management Webinar May 26, Brisbane, Australia - SharePoint Saturday May 29, Online - The Missing Link in SharePoint Projects May 31, Birmingham, U.K. - Effective SharePoint Requirements with Serious Games June 2, St. Louis, Missouri - SharePoint Saturday June 2, Silicon Valley - SharePoint Saturday June 2, Atlanta, Georgia - SharePoint Saturday June 5, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Central Webinar June 6, Online (APAC Region) – Why Social at Stockland, Why Right Now? June 6, Online - The Essentials of SharePoint Disaster Recovery Planning June 7, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Knowledge Management Webinar June 9, Orlando13, Florida - SharePoint Saturday June 13, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Central Webinar June 14, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Workflow Conductor Webinar June 19, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Community Central Webinar June 20, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Central Webinar June 20, Online - Selecting and Protecting the Right SharePoint Backup Targets June 21, Online - Executives Beware: 5 Risky SharePoint Temptations for Executives June 25-27, Denver, Colorado - SharePoint Fest June 26, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Central Webinar June 28, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Time Tracking & Management Webinar June 30, Dayton, Ohio - SharePoint Saturday June 30, Adelaide, Australia - SharePoint Saturday September 25-27, Chicago, Illinois - SharePoint Fest SharePoint Training* May 21-25, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Administration Core Technologies - Mindsharp May 21-25, Online - SharePoint 2010 Administration Core Technologies - Mindsharp May 21-25, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint Foundation 2010 Developer - Mindsharp May 21-25, Online - SharePoint Foundation 2010 Developer - Mindsharp May 22-25, Chicago, Illinois – InfoPath 2010/SharePoint 2010 Workflow Deep Dive – SharePoint Solutions May 25, Online - Project Management Central End User Training - Bamboo Solutions May 30-31, Online - InfoPath 2010 Power End User - Mindsharp May 30-31, Nashville, Tennessee – Exploring SharePoint 2010 – New Features – SharePoint Solutions June 4-8, Calgary, Alberta, Canada - SharePoint 2010 Core Technologies - Mindsharp June 4-8, Washington, D.C. - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp June 5, Online - Workflow Conductor Designer Training - Bamboo Solutions June 5-6, Nashville, Tennessee – Introduction to SharePoint Foundation 2010 – SharePoint Solutions June 5-7, Arlington, Virginia – Introduction to SharePoint 2010 for Server Administrators – SharePoint Solutions June 5-8, Nashville, Tennessee – Introduction to SharePoint Server 2010 – SharePoint Solutions June 7, Huntsville, Alabama - SharePoint Re-Design And User Adoption Seminar - Mindsharp June 8, Online - Bamboo Select - Bamboo Solutions June 11-15, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Advanced Administrator - Mindsharp June 11-15, Calgary, Alberta, Canada - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp June 12-15, Dallas, Texas – InfoPath 2010/SharePoint 2010 Workflow Deep Dive – SharePoint Solutions June 18-21, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Power End User - Mindsharp June 18-22, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp June 20, Online - Project Management Central (3.0) Application Administrative Training - Session 1 - Bamboo Solutions June 21, Online - Project Management Central (3.0) Application Administrative Training - Session 2 - Bamboo Solutions June 25-29, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Core Technologies - Mindsharp June 26-27, Arlington, Virginia – Introduction to SharePoint Foundation 2010 – SharePoint Solutions June 26-29, Arlington, Virginia – Introduction to SharePoint Server 2010 – SharePoint Solutions July 3, Online - Workflow Conductor Designer Training - Bamboo Solutions July 9-13, Online - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp July 10-13, Nashville, Tennessee – InfoPath 2010/SharePoint 2010 Workflow Deep Dive – SharePoint Solutions July 10-13, Online - SharePoint 2010 Power End User - Mindsharp July 13, Online - Bamboo Select - Bamboo Solutions July 16-20, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Advanced Developer - Mindsharp July 16-20, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Designer - Mindsharp July 17-18, Chicago, Illinois – Introduction to SharePoint Foundation 2010 – SharePoint Solutions July 17-20, Chicago, Illinois – Introduction to SharePoint Server 2010 – SharePoint Solutions July, Online - Project Management Central (3.0) Application Administrative Training - Session 2 - Bamboo Solutions July 19, Online - SharePoint Re-Design And User Adoption Seminar - Mindsharp July 23-27, Online - SharePoint 2010 Core Technologies - Mindsharp July 24-26, Dallas, Texas – Introduction to SharePoint 2010 for Server Administrators – SharePoint Solutions July 30-Aug 3, Online - SharePoint 2010 Power End User - Mindsharp July 30-Aug 3, Online - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp * Please contact Chris Dooley (chris.dooley@bamboosolutions.com) to be included in SharePoint Daily™. 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eLumenotion Blog: Posts: Correctly Provisioning Managed Metadata Columns

Thu, 17 May 2012 09:58:01 -0400

Body: Last year I was brought in to help rescue a large and badly floundering project. The system in question made use of managed metadata in several areas and the original developers used Ari Bakker's blog and code as their basis, specifically the code and in this excellent blog post. Ari began his journey with this excellent blog post from Wictor Wilén. Over time we had sporadic issues with upgrade scenarios and duplicate hidden note fields, but these were pretty low on the list of issues we needed to deal with before the system could go live (it was a real mess) and I never had the chance to dig in and figure it out. Recently my friend and fellow MVP Dan Attis asked me to take a look at a similar issue he was facing with a sandbox solution. For whatever reason, the sandbox's behavior was slightly different from the equivalent farm code. It had the same sort of problem I'd seen on the rescue project, but in the sandbox case it was worse as it prevented his affected features from activating. Together, Dan and I found the issue which was an error in Ari's post. Before I get into that, having a look at the post in question is definitely worthwhile as what I have written here and my sample code is based upon his good work (which in turn is based on Wiktor's), and I won't be rehashing everything he wrote. The Mistakes Ari's mistake comes with his step 3. You should not do this. SharePoint will do it for you. If you do, SharePoint will create a duplicate with a different internal name in a farm solution and fail when you try to use an associated content type in a sandbox solution. Instead you need to provide enough information for SharePoint to create the required hidden note field as follows. The Value attribute above will cause SharePoint to automatically provision a hidden note field with an ID of {2702cde3-3435-0227-be7b-e86d5f1250cc}. Later in his post Ari writes about the creation of a Content Type that contains the metadata column and includes the hidden note field as one of the field references. You should not do this! Below is a sample content type inherits from the Document content type and includes the Color field shown above. At this point my sample diverges from Ari's because instead of using a list definition I use a ListInstance, a ContentTypeBinding, and a feature event receiver instead of a list definition. I do so because I think it's easier, I am lazy, and I need the receiver anyway as my sample illustrates the use of metadata navigation in the resulting library. More on that later… Timing is Everything For my example to work I need to control the order of events so that: SharePoint provisions the Field and Content Type A feature event receiver connects the field to the correct term set The Content Type is bound to the list If step 3 happens before step 2, the resulting list field(s) will not be connected to the term store. In Dan's case this didn't matter because in sandbox mode you have to wire up the metadata by hand as the required DLLs are not available in the sandbox. The Sample You can download the sample code from http://www.elumenotion.com/Downloads/MetadataSample.zip. It contains three features. Visual Studio activates them in the order indicated above because of the way I've configured the package, but in real life I'd have a fourth feature to control the order of activation. FieldsAndTypes includes the Field and ContentType elements shown in the screen shots above. TermSetConfig creates a term set named Colors and connects the Color field to the new term set. This code is stolen borrowed directly from Ari and Wiktor with some minor changes and so I won't cover it here. SampleDocumentLibrary creates the sample library, binds my content type and then executes code to configure the metadata navigation settings for the new library. The ListInstance and ContentTypeBinding look like this: The feature event receiver does the following steps. Delete the original document content type from the library. Configure the metadata navigation settings. Configure the default view to display the Color column public class SampleDocumentLibraryEventReceiver : SPFeatureReceiver {public override void FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties){ SPWeb web = (SPWeb)properties.Feature.Parent; SetupSampleDocumentLibrary(web);} private void SetupSampleDocumentLibrary(SPWeb web){ SPList docs = web.Lists["Library with Metadata"]; docs.ContentTypes[0].Delete(); var navSettings = MetadataNavigationSettings.GetMetadataNavigationSettings(docs); navSettings.ClearConfiguredHierarchies(); navSettings.ClearConfiguredKeyFilters(); AddKeyFilter(docs, navSettings, "Color"); AddHierarchy(docs, navSettings, "Color"); MetadataNavigationSettings.SetMetadataNavigationSettings(docs, navSettings, true); docs.RootFolder.Update(); SPView view = docs.DefaultView; view.ViewFields.DeleteAll(); view.ViewFields.Add("DocIcon"); view.ViewFields.Add("LinkFilename"); view.ViewFields.Add("Color"); view.Query = @""; view.Update();} private static void AddHierarchy(SPList matters, MetadataNavigationSettings navSettings, string fieldName){ MetadataNavigationHierarchy hierarchy = new MetadataNavigationHierarchy(matters.Fields[fieldName]); navSettings.AddConfiguredHierarchy(hierarchy);} private static void AddKeyFilter(SPList matters, MetadataNavigationSettings navSettings, string fieldName){ MetadataNavigationKeyFilter filterNavigation = new MetadataNavigationKeyFilter(matters.Fields[fieldName]); navSettings.AddConfiguredKeyFilter(filterNavigation);} Finally the screen shots below show the sample in action. Adding a document Metadata Navigation Happy SharePointing!!!--Doug Category: Random Whatnot Published: 5/17/2012 1:58 PM

Eli Robillard's World of Blog. : SharePoint: SharePoint Summit 2012 - Thank you!

Thu, 17 May 2012 05:37:00 -0400

Thanks to Danny, Reza, all the speakers and the rest of the team for hosting another great SharePoint conference in Toronto. Also a shout-out to the SharePoint Blues Band for putting on a great show Tuesday night, and for the privilege of joining them...(read more)

Bamboo Nation: SharePoint Content Organization; Windows RT Browser Restrictions; When Databases Rebel

Thu, 17 May 2012 03:35:00 -0400

WTF? When I left yesterday I had 2-3 unread emails in my inbox. When I got to the office this morning I had over 550. And another 150 more in the last hour. I'm going home now... - Dooley Top News StoriesOrganize SharePoint Content: Don't Upgrade Your Mess (CMSWire)It’s a common story. An employee reads about how SharePoint is a great tool for document sharing and collaboration, a great place for teams to work on projects, a great tool for the company intranet. They go out, get approval for the software, get IT to install it on a server(s) and then they start moving documents and content over from file shares, from desktop folders, from old databases. Everyone starts to use it. Oddly though, no one is happy. SharePoint Log: When Databases Rebel (ZDNet)Creating a structure for our SharePoint 2010 installation was clearly central to providing an effective service. One plan was to split the intranet into around seven chunks, one for each faculty and an extra one for our central non-academic departments. Each of these would be a separate site collection (and thus database). Within each collection will be sub-sites for schools and for individual departments. Microwave Ovens and Information Systems (AIIM)Nothing drives me crazier than see organizations throw gobs of money after information systems that were purchased without sufficient diligence being done up front about what they actually need those systems to do. Too often, figuring this out gets derailed by petty politics and business-as-usual, and the result is a technology that later is disparaged as being less than good. Should Microsoft Pay for Restricting Browsers on Windows RT? (CIO)Given Microsoft's monopolistic past, it's not surprising that Mozilla and Google are making a stink about Microsoft's decision to favor Internet Explorer on Windows RT, the company's upcoming OS that will run on ARM-based devices. Last week, Mozilla alleged that Microsoft is unfairly putting the Internet Explorer browser (IE10) at an advantage within Windows RT by restricting third-party browsers like Firefox and Chrome to the Metro sandbox with shaky API support, and also blocking the desktop versions of those browsers on Windows RT. Windows 8: Multi-monitors and Double Standards? (PC Magazine)I’m encouraged by reports that Microsoft has been working to improve multi-monitor support in the Release Preview of Windows 8. Admittedly, the information emerged in a rather strange way: it was published on Tuesday night on the MSDN “Building Windows 8” blog, then rapidly removed again for reasons unknown. But there’s no reason to doubt the details – after all, they came from an impeccable source, namely Microsoft’s Mark Yalovsky. Windows Phone: Great OS, Bad Name (Byte)Branding is important. People are comfortable with brands they trust and uncomfortable with brands they distrust. "Windows" isn't all that bad a brand overall, but in the smart phone market it doesn't gain trust. This is a shame because Windows Phone is a great operating system. Unfortunately, it's not a product. When you buy a desktop or notebook PC, you may be buying a Dell or Lenovo or HP, but you're also keenly aware that you are buying a Windows computer. Not so with phones for most consumers. Around the BlogosphereCode to Interfaces. Right. What’s an Interface? (Fear and Loathing)The premise of coding to interfaces has been around for a while now. The concept is simple. Given a definition of something you create things based on that definition. That might be a horrible description of an interface but I didn’t want to go all Computer Science on you. SharePoint: Get Started with jQuery - Part 2 (SharePointDevWiki)Last week we took a look at implementing our first jQuery control in SharePoint. The result was a simple transformation of the quick navigation menu into a tree view. We saw the potential of what we could do with jQuery in SharePoint by simply adding a link inside our master page that referenced the library hosted on public servers. This method was the quickest way to deploy jQuery but was it the best way? What about SharePoint sites that are not meant to access the internet? We can’t have their pages reference a public hosting of jQuery. Let’s take a look at alternative ways of deploying jQuery in our SharePoint environment. Hack SharePoint Master Pages: Part 1 (EndUserSharePoint)As I indicated in my introduction article, I’m going to write a series for the power user about master pages. In the first article, I explained the different branding steps and what a master page is. In this second article, I’m going to explain how the master pages are used in SharePoint. SharePoint Vendor Baseball - Three Strikes And They're OUT! (SharePoint Joel's SharePoint Land)Here are 10 criteria that you should be watching out for and Vendors should be paying attention to... Otherwise it's... 3 strikes and you're out! Around Bamboo NationAssessing One's Own Project Management Skills (The Bottom-Line PM)The confluence of our busy season at work and a distinct lack of inspiration lately has had me floundering for topics to cover. I haven't been doing very project manager-y things at work lately, so the wellspring from which I usually draw topics has been pretty dry. SharePoint Job Listings*Support Technician - Reston, VirginiaThis is a full-time, junior position, reporting to the Manager of Customer Support, with the opportunity to advance as the company grows. As our customers embrace Microsoft SharePoint in their organization, our products are used in more and more business critical applications across the customer enterprise. New customers often come to Bamboo for one or two web parts, but over time as the use of SharePoint expands in their organization, they come back for more web parts, applications, and eventually to purchase our entire suite of products. Therefore, we need to ensure that our customers have an exceptional experience with our product and service all of the time. SharePoint Technical Writer - Reston, VirginiaThe primary responsibility for this position is working with the product management team and technical resources to develop, write, and maintain software installation, configuration and usage instructions, online knowledge base content, supporting blog articles, quick start guides, supporting graphics, and web content for our online storefront. Microsoft UpdatesNational Careers Service Website on Track to Meet the Needs of 20 Million Citizens (Microsoft Case Studies)The National Careers Service for England is a United Kingdom (U.K.) government initiative. The Skills Funding Agency is responsible for developing the service, built around an interactive learning and careers website. Working with Microsoft Services and using Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 communications and collaboration software, the agency is confident that its site meets government expectations and the needs of 20 million users. SharePoint Events* May 17, Online (APAC Region) – Capture, Leverage, and Archive Your Social Content with NewsGator and AvePoint May 18, Online - Plotting a course for SharePoint in the Enterprise May 19, Johannesburg, South Africa - SharePoint Saturday May 19, Portland - SharePoint Saturday May 22, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Workflow Conductor Webinar May 23, Online - 5 Risky SharePoint Human Resource Temptations May 23, Online - How to Slash SharePoint Development Costs and Get More from Your Investment May 24, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Central Webinar May 24, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Time Tracking & Management Webinar May 26, Brisbane, Australia - SharePoint Saturday May 31, Birmingham, U.K. - Effective SharePoint Requirements with Serious Games June 2, St. Louis, Missouri - SharePoint Saturday June 2, Silicon Valley - SharePoint Saturday June 2, Atlanta, Georgia - SharePoint Saturday June 6, Online (APAC Region) – Why Social at Stockland, Why Right Now? June 6, Online - The Essentials of SharePoint Disaster Recovery Planning June 9, Orlando, Florida - SharePoint Saturday June 20, Online - Selecting and Protecting the Right SharePoint Backup Targets June 21, Online - Executives Beware: 5 Risky SharePoint Temptations for Executives June 25-27, Denver, Colorado - SharePoint Fest June 30, Dayton, Ohio - SharePoint Saturday June 30, Adelaide, Australia - SharePoint Saturday September 25-27, Chicago, Illinois - SharePoint Fest SharePoint Training* May 17, Online - Project Management Central End User Training - Bamboo Solutions May 17-18, Washington, D.C. - Delivering SharePoint Success Mentoring Workshop - Innovative-e May 21-25, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Administration Core Technologies - Mindsharp May 21-25, Online - SharePoint 2010 Administration Core Technologies - Mindsharp May 21-25, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint Foundation 2010 Developer - Mindsharp May 21-25, Online - SharePoint Foundation 2010 Developer - Mindsharp May 22-25, Chicago, Illinois – InfoPath 2010/SharePoint 2010 Workflow Deep Dive – SharePoint Solutions May 25, Online - Project Management Central End User Training - Bamboo Solutions May 30-31, Online - InfoPath 2010 Power End User - Mindsharp May 30-31, Nashville, Tennessee – Exploring SharePoint 2010 – New Features – SharePoint Solutions June 4-8, Calgary, Alberta, Canada - SharePoint 2010 Core Technologies - Mindsharp June 4-8, Washington, D.C. - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp June 5, Online - Workflow Conductor Designer Training - Bamboo Solutions June 5-6, Nashville, Tennessee – Introduction to SharePoint Foundation 2010 – SharePoint Solutions June 5-7, Arlington, Virginia – Introduction to SharePoint 2010 for Server Administrators – SharePoint Solutions June 5-8, Nashville, Tennessee – Introduction to SharePoint Server 2010 – SharePoint Solutions June 7, Huntsville, Alabama - SharePoint Re-Design And User Adoption Seminar - Mindsharp June 8, Online - Bamboo Select - Bamboo Solutions June 11-15, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Advanced Administrator - Mindsharp June 11-15, Calgary, Alberta, Canada - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp June 12-15, Dallas, Texas – InfoPath 2010/SharePoint 2010 Workflow Deep Dive – SharePoint Solutions June 18-21, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Power End User - Mindsharp June 18-22, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp June 20, Online - Project Management Central (3.0) Application Administrative Training - Session 1 - Bamboo Solutions June 21, Online - Project Management Central (3.0) Application Administrative Training - Session 2 - Bamboo Solutions June 25-29, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Core Technologies - Mindsharp June 26-27, Arlington, Virginia – Introduction to SharePoint Foundation 2010 – SharePoint Solutions June 26-29, Arlington, Virginia – Introduction to SharePoint Server 2010 – SharePoint Solutions July 3, Online - Workflow Conductor Designer Training - Bamboo Solutions July 9-13, Online - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp July 10-13, Nashville, Tennessee – InfoPath 2010/SharePoint 2010 Workflow Deep Dive – SharePoint Solutions July 10-13, Online - SharePoint 2010 Power End User - Mindsharp July 13, Online - Bamboo Select - Bamboo Solutions July 16-20, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Advanced Developer - Mindsharp July 16-20, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Designer - Mindsharp July 17-18, Chicago, Illinois – Introduction to SharePoint Foundation 2010 – SharePoint Solutions July 17-20, Chicago, Illinois – Introduction to SharePoint Server 2010 – SharePoint Solutions July, Online - Project Management Central (3.0) Application Administrative Training - Session 2 - Bamboo Solutions July 19, Online - SharePoint Re-Design And User Adoption Seminar - Mindsharp July 23-27, Online - SharePoint 2010 Core Technologies - Mindsharp July 24-26, Dallas, Texas – Introduction to SharePoint 2010 for Server Administrators – SharePoint Solutions July 30-Aug 3, Online - SharePoint 2010 Power End User - Mindsharp July 30-Aug 3, Online - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp * Please contact Chris Dooley (chris.dooley@bamboosolutions.com) to be included in SharePoint Daily™. Have SharePoint Daily™ delivered to your email inbox every morning.

Fear and Loathing: Code to Interfaces. Right. What’s an Interface?

Wed, 16 May 2012 18:48:28 -0400

The premise of coding to interfaces has been around for awhile now. The concept is simple. Given a definition of something you create things based on that definition. That might be a horrible description of an interface but I didn’t want to go all Computer Science on you. Interface? What’s an Interface? Here’s a simple interface: 1: interface ICustomerService 2: { 3: IEnumerable GetAllCustomers(); 4: } Pretty basic. We have a Customer class somewhere and this interface describes a method called GetAllCustomers that will return you a list of Customer objects. With an interface you don’t have an implementation. There’s no code here to say where we get the customers from, just that we expect this to return us a list of them. Now in our code we can write something like this: 1: public void DisplayAllCustomers(ICustomerService service) 2: { 3: foreach (var customer in service.GetAllCustomers()) 4: { 5: // Output whatever customer info here 6: } 7: } The method here expects an object that implements the ICustomerService interface. That’s how we can build and compile this but we have yet to build an implementation of this method. Of course the code won’t run because your application doesn’t know how to create an object that implements ICustomerService. Like I said, the implementation is up to you but you’ll probably be driving it from requirements or what the user needs to see or whatever. Here’s a sample implementation: 1: internal class CustomerRepository : ICustomerService 2: { 3: public IEnumerable GetAllCustomers() 4: { 5: return new List 6: { 7: new Customer {Name = "Harold"}, 8: new Customer {Name = "Kumar"} 9: }; 10: } 11: } So if we created an object of this CustomerRepository class and passed it to the DisplayAllCustomers method above, we would output Harold and Kumar’s names (or whatever your display code was). The $10,000 Question People will stare at the code and say, why? Why create that ICustomerService and then have to go to the trouble of creating it and passing it along to the DisplayAllCustomers. More code to maintain they say. More work. Let’s try to dispel some myths here. Coding to Interfaces is Hard Really? Do you understand the code above? That’s coding to an interface. Could you do that yourself? Sure you can. Let’s move on. Coding to Interfaces Constrains Me It’s true. If you added the method “void AddCustomer(Customer customer)” to your inteface, you wouldn’t be able to compile your code. The CustomerRepostory class (and any other class that implemented the ICustomerService interface) would require it. Stop thinking about this as a constraint, it’s a design choice. It’s like the Architect giving you a window or door on the side of your house. You don’t go cutting open another hole because you want another window. You have to take into account load bearing walls, structural integrity, etc. which is what the Architect does (I know, I used to be one). Just because it looks good or you need it, doesn’t mean it should be done (at least in the way you might want it). Coding to Interfaces makes you do extra work Yes, you have to create those interfaces so yeah, that’s extra work. Some might argue that if your implementation is simple then you’re writing double the code. Again, all true. There are benefits that will outweigh this which we’ll look at in a moment. Where are the Benefits? Let’s talk some benefits here. First coding to an interface is giving you a layer of abstraction. Remember that ICustomerService above? The implementation is sort of silly but shows that we can write code that does what the system intends. We could also build an implementation that reads from a database. Or Active Directory. Or SAP. Or a Web Service. Each time we write a new implementation, we don’t have to change our DIsplayAllCustomers method. That’s abstraction. You don’t have to worry in your DisplayAllCustomers method where the data came from or what infrastructure may or may not exist. All you care about is that you expect a list of customers to come back. Now multiply that by 10 or 100 and you get the benefits of abstraction against a real codebase. Some people will talk about future proofing and interfaces and while that may be a benefit down the road, and it can happen, consider it icing on the cake. Imagine if you had coded to an IEnumerable interface instead of ArrayList? Now you *might* not have to rewrite a lot of code (or any if you’re really lucky). I do believe, and have rarely seen, entire implementations changed. For example one classic is the “build a database interface so we can swap between SQL and Oracle”. You build an abstraction over a database to make it simpler to code to but not necessarily swap out technologies. Just don’t use the future proofing claim as a crutch to not code to interfaces claiming YAGNI or something. There are different reasons for this. The other big thing is testing. Going back to our CustomerRepository. It’s an in-memory representation to a list of customers. Imagine you had additional methods on your interface like this: 1: internal interface ICustomerService 2: { 3: IEnumerable GetAllCustomers(); 4: void AddCustomer(Customer newCustomer); 5: void DeleteCustomer(Customer customerToDelete); 6: } And now with your in-memory representation you can write tests that ensure items are added and deleted in your repository and the counts all match and the list comes back with the right names. Now you’re starting to test against your interface, which is a good thing. Testing Testing frameworks will let you do things like create stubs or fake implementations of the interface, without actually writing code to return actual values. Without interfaces if you tried to test the AddCustomer method in say a SQL based implementation, you would need a database, login information, test data, etc. That’s great for infrastructure tests but for unit tests it’s a lot of overhead you shouldn’t be getting into. Another benefit is getting ahead of infrastructure. Imagine if your ICustomerService is going to talk to a web service, as web service that won’t be written for another month. You could go ahead and wait for the infrastructure to show up, code concrete classes against it, and then start your testing but now you’re in the crunch to get the system done and you’re just starting your unit testing. Instead, based on requirements and perhaps UI discussions with users using paper, whiteboard, or digital wireframes, you come up with the interface. “We’re going to need to display the customer fields and oh yeah, we want to search by first and last name”. Great. From that description you can come up with an interface something like this: 1: interface ICustomerService 2: { 3: IEnumerable FindBy(string firstName); 4: IEnumerable FindBy(string firstName, string lastName); 5: } Again we can write up some implementation (maybe going against a preset list of names you import from a spreadsheet) and actually build out a working UI. The user can put their hands on it, search by names, and see the results returned. All without that pesky infrastructure. Then come the say the database gets built, you create your implementation to read it and do searches and BAM, your system is online and working end-to-end. On the testing front again, how would you test something that’s dependent on DateTime? For example you have a piece of code that ages some items in a system based on some business rules (or expires them). It’s all well and fine to start tossing around DateTime objects like this: 1: public void ExpireTest(ICustomerService service, DateTime date) 2: { 3: foreach (var customer in service.GetAllCustomers()) 4: { 5: if(customer.ContractDate > date) 6: { 7: ExpireContractFor(customer); 8: } 9: } 10: } However things get real ugly real fast. First I have to write this test and I’m sort of breaking both encapsulation and responsibility of the customer class. Maybe I should have a method on customer that takes in a DateTime object. Yuck. Now I’m passing that value into my business object which might be okay (it depends) but now consider the idea of something like this business rule: 1: foreach (var customer in service.GetAllCustomers()) 2: { 3: if(customer.ContractDate.Day == date.Day && date.Hour > 12) 4: { 5: ExpireContractFor(customer); 6: } 7: } Now I’ll only expire the contract if the date passed in is the same day as my contract and it’s after noon. Silly logic yes, but would require another test method, another date object to be passed in, etc. A lot of setup to test something and then along comes this somewhere in my Customer class: 1: class Customer 2: { 3: public string Name { get; set; } 4: 5: public DateTime ContractDate { get; set; } 6: 7: public int AgeOfContract() 8: { 9: return (int) (DateTime.Now - ContractDate).TotalDays; 10: } 11: } Now I’m screwed, both in testing in code and testing on the site. I’m going to have to create test data with very specific dates, maybe mess around with the values (because I certainly can’t change the clock on the server) and frankly I’m going to cry. Interfaces can save you here. What if we had an interface called: 1: interface IDateTime 2: { 3: DateTime Now { get; set; } 4: } And instead of the concrete implementation in our customer class we use the IDateTime interface. Here’s the Customer class refactored to use an interface: 1: class Customer 2: { 3: readonly IDateTime _dateTime; 4: 5: Customer(IDateTime dateTime) 6: { 7: _dateTime = dateTime; 8: } 9: 10: public string Name { get; set; } 11: 12: public IDateTime ContractDate { get; set; } 13: 14: public int AgeOfContract() 15: { 16: return (int) (_dateTime.Now - ContractDate).TotalDays; 17: } 18: } Yes, there’s more that needs to be here like how an IDateTime can subtract values from each other, return a TImeSpan object, etc. but this is just for concepts. With the interface added, I’m now abstracted away from the concrete implementation of DateTime hard coded into my Customer class. I’ll pass in something that might implement DateTime to return some real time but for testing I can set it to anything I want. Testing is easier now and I don’t have to change my domain logic to deal with responsibilities outside of my concerns. Interfaces vs. Classes is the kind of thing to start holy flame wars. Some argue it adds extra code/work to the developer, others claim it unnecessarily future-proofs your app (aka YAGNI) and others think it makes for easier testing and abstraction away from things that have yet to come. I like to live in the latter world where I build my systems loosely coupled but tightly integrated. Interfaces provide me that ability. I hope this article sheds some light on the subject for you, whatever you choose. Enjoy.

Andrew Connell [MVP MCMS]: Converting all your non-MP3 files to MP3’s with VLC, PowerShell & TagLib#

Wed, 16 May 2012 17:07:32 -0400

Last weekend I was poking around my music collection on my server and noticed a bunch of artists and albums not showing up in my library (I use Zune to listen to my music and copy it to my phone). Diving in I noticed one folder was full of M4A files… arg! Damn iTunes format… I don’t want Apple or Microsoft format, I want standard plain old MP3! Using the following PowerShell command, I found there were a ton of these types of files on my server: 1: Get-ChildItem "\RIVERCITY-NAS1Music" -recurse -include *.m4a Yikes… over 800 files! OK, that’s enough to look for a way to automate this conversion process. After a bit of research, I found the freely available VLC player had the ability to convert these types of files… for free. Sweet! So after a little work, I got this PowerShell script working: 1: function ConvertToMp3( 2: [switch] $inputObject, 3: [string] $vlc = 'C:Program Files (x86)VideoLANVLCvlc.exe') 4: { 5: PROCESS { 6: $codec = 'mp3'; 7: $oldFile = $_; 8: $newFile = $oldFile.FullName.Replace($oldFile.Extension, 9: ".$codec").Replace("'",""); 10: 11: &"$vlc" -I dummy "$oldFile" ":sout=#transcode{acodec=$codec, 12: vcodec=dummy}:standard{access=file,mux=raw,dst=`'$newFile`'}" vlc://quit | out-null; 13: 14: # delete the original file 15: Remove-Item $oldFile; 16: } 17: } 18: 19: function ConvertAllToMp3([string] $sourcePath) { 20: Get-ChildItem "$sourcePath*" -recurse -include *.m4a | ConvertToMp3; 21: } 22: 23: ConvertAllToMp3 '\RIVERCITY-NAS1Music'; Sweet… until I noticed all the MP3 files didn’t have any ID3 tags. So I needed to add a step. I found an old copy of the TagLib# library. that would read the tags from one file and copy them to another. So I added the following function to the script: 1: function DuplicateId3Tags 2: { 3: param ( 4: [string]$sourceM4aTrack, 5: [string]$targetMp3Track 6: ) 7: 8: # load sharp library for working with tags 9: [Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFrom("C:Usersandrew.RIVERCITYDocumentsMusic Workshoptaglib-sharp.dll") 10: 11: #load files 12: $sourceM4a = [TagLib.File]::Create($sourceM4aTrack); 13: $targetMp3 = [TagLib.File]::Create($targetMp3Track); 14: 15: # copy tags 16: [TagLib.Tag]::Duplicate($sourceM4a.Tag, $targetMp3.Tag, $true); 17: 18: $targetMp3.Save(); 19: } And added a call to the function right before I delete the original file and voila… 100% MP3 again! 1: # update ID3 tags on target file 2: DuplicateId3Tags "$oldFile" "$newFile";

SharePoint Joel's SharePoint Land: SharePoint Vendor Baseball - Three Strikes And They're OUT!

Wed, 16 May 2012 16:42:36 -0400

Here are 10 criteria that you should be watching out for and Vendors should be paying attention to... Otherwise it's... 3 strikes and you're out! 1. Their site looks like it was built in FrontPage 98 2. When you ask the vendor if they are deployed in the Sandbox or packaged in a server solution and you ask… “What’s a solution?” or “What’s a sandbox” 3. Vendor has never sponsored a SharePoint Saturday... What's that? 4. Vendor missed the last 2 SharePoint Conferences 5. When I tweet about your product, no one responds as having used it, and no one in your company reaches out to say hi. Can I help you? (Within 24 hrs) 6. When I or anyone tweets about the vendor product we get 4-5 replies of people saying they didn’t like it. 7. They say they recently got into SharePoint, but are still trying to figure it out. 8. Vendor doesn't know the SharePoint Influencers in their own city 9. They haven’t sponsored a SharePoint User Group this quarter (Really you should be sponsoring one a month) 10. When we ask the vendor about cross browser compatibility they say it doesn’t really matter, cause you can control that. Mobile? We'll get to that eventually. Macs, iPads? Is anyone really using that? (This is a little tongue in cheek and on the fly. I’ll put some thought into a real list as my own project on supporting and evaluating third party products gets under way.) Can this blog be SharePoint Switzerland? I have essentially created a side business out of SharePoint Joel where I’ve been openly communicating with SharePoint Vendors after hours, before and after work. It’s been very valuable to me in my position at work to better understand the functionality of our rich ecosystem, but also in better understanding the marketing initiatives of each of the vendors and understanding their go to market strategy for reaching out to the SharePoint Community. In my unique position I’ve been able to help them better reach out to you as well, by sharing what I’ve learned from my conversations with them and with my testing and demos I’ve been getting in each of these products. With each review I’ve found that there is a very rich ecosystem around SharePoint with over a thousand SharePoint vendors most of them small. There are those as well that are very important in addressing issues with gaps in the SharePoint offering. Microsoft is well aware of these gaps and highly encourages vendors to fill them. That’s the Microsoft way. These crumbs add up to 12 Billion according to Analysts. I think 10 Billion of it is systems integrators, while 2 Billion is available for the ISVs (Independent Software Vendors AKA software company). I could be wrong. I think some ISVs come into the SharePoint space understanding that there are 10’s of millions of seats and wonder why their software doesn’t sell like hot cakes. What I wanted to communicate with you is the fact that I believe that this relationship I’ve been building and in sharing this platform of SharePointJoel.com that I’ve built over the last number of years is worth doing. I believe it’s a WIN – WIN – WIN. I think it’s a win for me, a win for the vendor and a win for the customer. I’ve also been trying to be earnest in sharing when it’s a sponsored blog post, or review, or announcement like a webcast. You’ll have to let me know when you think it’s getting too commercial. I think it’s important to have balance, and keeping my voice in all this is also very important. In my mind the biggest problem is tying the problem or gap to the solution, and understanding how the solution works, seeing a bit of it, and understanding the context including limitations or downsides. Those are the areas I’ve been focusing on. I’ve shared in the past that I think there is room for a blogging network, but not everyone is as comfortable working with vendors in the blogging space as I am. I think part of this came from spending time both at Microsoft and at Quest hearing and seeing customers in pain, and knowing there was a vendor that had an answer to their problem. I also know there may be 5 solutions to their problem, and I may also know the differences between those 5 and that’s how I’m in a unique place. I’m hoping as more and more of these reviews surface there will be opportunities to put posts together that share these differences in an agnostic way. I am really not trying to push any one product especially now. I’m Swiss SharePoint! I have no agenda. I really do see a place for everyone, and if I don’t I want to understand how each are unique in their own way. Same with AvePoint, Metalogix, Quest, Axceler, Nintex, K2 and Bamboo. I love a good horserace. Just by listing those names I will be questioned why one is before another, and questioned why I left someone out and so on. I’m making myself available to do reviews for a flat fee. I've noticed others doing reviews as well. Hopefully this will mean knowledge in the community about all of the different soutions out there. SharePointReviews.com will continue to get more content and we'll all benefit as a result. I'm pushing any review I do, to that site after my inital post. Would it be great if we could all know what the latest and greatest of all of the SharePoint vendors offerings? How much time is spent in bake offs? Bake offs will continue to happen, but hopefully the reviews I’ve done and will continue to do will make the selection process easier. I welcome your feedback. I know the comments on my blog are a pain. I seriously have been considering moving to another blogging platform as Microsoft hasn’t really done anything to support external blogs in quite a LONG time. I’m interested in your thoughts on this one as well. Cheers! Love you guys. Thanks for your support. Looking forward to Sharing the Point Africa. That’s my next big trip. You’ll hear about that one soon… stay tuned.

Joel Oleson's SharePoint Land: SharePoint Vendor Baseball - Three Strikes And They're OUT!

Wed, 16 May 2012 16:42:36 -0400

Sharepoint Tips And Tricks: SharePoint Upgrade or Migrate

Wed, 16 May 2012 16:15:00 -0400

Hello again everyone. In March I have published an article in IDM magazine (australia) about upgrading sharepoint and what is the difference between that and migration, and the pros and cons of each one. I even gave tips to successfull upgrademigration projects. If you want to read it, I have now republished it in my company's site: http://www.extelligentdesign.com/Articles/UpgradingSharePoint.aspx Feel free to drop me comments on the article here (and please feel free to tell people about it).

Brian Smith's Project Support WebLog: Project 2010: Problems since the February CU if you have a semi-colon (;) as your list separator

Wed, 16 May 2012 15:37:50 -0400

In the February Cumulative Update for Project 2010 we fixed an issue described as: You create an .mpp file that was saved from a Project server by using the Save for Sharing command. When you try to resave the .mpp file back to the Project server in Project 2010, the save process fails, and you receive the following error message: Project Server was unable to find the specified resource. If the problem continues, contact your server administrator. This issue occurs when the list separator character that is contained in resource names within the .mpp file on the client differs from the list separator character on the server. We are now finding that in fixing this, we broke a couple of other things that you may be running into if you are using a list separator that is a semi-colon (;). This is most likely in Europe or Canada, but I’m sure there are plenty of other places that could see this too. The issues are all related and we are working on a fix for them all, but just wanted to share some workarounds in case you are hitting these. The different scenarios I have seen so far are: Using Task Information dialog to remove or add resource assignments to a task Using the Assign Resources dialog to add multiple resource assignments Using the Task Information Dialog to set predecessors or successor information *** Update - For Spanish readers - http://blogs.technet.com/b/elfarodeprojectserver/archive/2012/05/17/project-2010-problemas-desde-el-cu-de-febrero-2012-si-tenemos-un-punto-y-coma-como-separador-de-lista.aspx *** So here are some examples of what can go wrong – and these examples need certain settings to be in place before you would ever see them, so don’t feel left out if you don’t experience any of these issues. This first example assumes you have the semi-colon as list separator and also this is used in your resource names as a separator between first and last names. So you have a task that is already assigned to Smith; Brian and Jenkins; Adrian, and you want to add Fiessinger; Christophe. So initially your Task Information dialog looks like this: Then you add Fiessinger; Christophe – and click OK – then you will see this: That doesn’t look quite right? Opening up the Task Information dialog again I see: It has split each name in two, and created 6 new local resources – and assigned them. A couple of things here – it will not lose actual work – any assignments that already have work will be OK – and will not get un-assigned – but the extra local resource will still get created. Undo will also put things right. The same thing can occur even if you are removing a resource using this same dialog. If I removed Jenkins; Adrian, it would create Smith and Brian as two local resources. The workaround here is to use the Resource Names column in one of the views such as the Gantt view – and select/deselect from the drop down. The second issue is with the Assign Resources dialog (which is why it isn’t a good workaround for the first issues) and it has a couple of different scenarios depending on your use of the list separator in the resource names. If you do have the separator – like the example above – then you cannot assign from the Assign Resources dialog – the Assign button is disabled – as I show here. However, if I choose a resource with no list separator in the name the Assign button is active: The further issue with the Assign Resources comes when you make multiple selections that do not contain the list separator, such as the following: When I click Assign – I see an extra resource in my list, with a very cool name – “adrian jenkins;brian smith;christophe fiessinger” – and he/they has/have been assigned to the task. If I look at the resource sheet I can see “adrian jenkins;brian smith;christophe fiessinger” has been added as a new local resource. The workaround here, assuming you do not have the list separator in the name, is to assign one at a time, or of course the Resource Name column in the Gantt view can be used as for the previous example. The last scenario is back to the Task Information dialog, but this time we are looking at the Predecessors tab. Say we have 3 tasks, T1, T2, and, you guessed it, T3. We open the Task Information dialog for T3, go to the Predecessors tab and enter either the IDs of the first two tasks, or select them in the drop down like this, then press OK, we get the following error message. There is a problem with the predecessor information. The workaround for this one is to go to a view such as the Gantt view, and use the Predecessors column, and enter 1,2. For each of these you could also work around them by setting your list separator to not be the semi-colon – but I appreciate that might give you some issues elsewhere – as it is a global setting on your PC. If you wish to try this you can go to Control Panel - Clock, Language and Region - Change the date, time or number format, then select Additional Settings then change the List Separator from a semi-colon to a comma, for example. Sorry for any inconvenience this problem has caused you – and I will update this posting once I find out when a fix will be coming along – and potentially any other scenarios that I am made aware of where this bug rears its ugly head, and thanks to the customers that have quickly brought this to our attention.

Matthew McDermott, MVP: Manage Your Service Apps Faster

Wed, 16 May 2012 12:34:28 -0400

In the SharePoint 2010 Administrators Survival Camp that I teach for Critical Path Training I teach a module on PowerShell (and a whole bunch of tips and tricks along the way). One of the tips that I teach is to use the Resources list in Central Administration to create links to the most often used service applications. While teaching the module this month I began creating a Farm Build script based on Gary Lapointe’s Farm-SPBuild script from ISC London. The script creates the Farm that the student creates manually on the first day of class. I went on to add the following script to create the links to my “favorite” web apps. #Get the URL to Central Administration $caUrl = Get-spwebapplication -includecentraladministration | where {$_.IsAdministrationWebApplication} | select Url -First 1 #Filter the Service Apps by those we want links $apps = Get-SPServiceApplication | ?{($_.TypeName -eq "User Profile Service Application") ` -or ($_.TypeName -eq "Managed Metadata Service") ` -or ($_.TypeName -eq "Business Data Connectivity Service Application") ` -or ($_.TypeName -eq "Search Service Application")} #Start our assignment for the web object $spAssignment = Start-SPAssignment #Grab our list in Central Admin $list = (Get-SPWeb -identity $caUrl.Url -AssignmentCollection $spAssignment).Lists["Resources"] #Enumerate the list and create links to each foreach ($app in $apps) { Write-Host "Adding" $app.DisplayName $field = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPFieldURLValue $field.Description = $app.DisplayName $field.URL = $app.ManageLink.Url $item = $list.Items.Add() $item["URL"] = $field $item["Comments"] = "Added From PowerShell" $item.Update() } #Dispose of the list Stop-SPAssignment $spAssignment #Open IE to Central Admin Write-Host "Launching IE" $ie = New-Object -com "InternetExplorer.Application" $ie.Navigate($caUrl.Url) $ie.Visible = $true I added this to the end of the script that builds all my service applications and then when Central Administration opens I see this:

Brian Smith's Project Support WebLog: If you didn’t get to Phoenix…

Wed, 16 May 2012 10:41:40 -0400

Brian Ru just published a blog post over on the main Project blog announcing the release of all the recorded content from the Project Conference 2012 – on the Project Channel of Microsoft Showcase. So if you didn’t get to Project Conference 2012 this is a great chance to catch up with all the great content. For good support topics see PC319 and PC349 – as recently “leaked” on this very blog… Enjoy!

Bamboo Nation: Migrating to SharePoint 2010; Is Social Revolutionary?; Microsoft Cloud Privacy

Wed, 16 May 2012 03:56:00 -0400

Summer is almost here (in Virginia at least). Time to pick up new sunscreen. - Dooley Top News StoriesThe Art of SharePoint Success: Transition - The Seeds of Change (CMSWire)Transition is the umbrella term that I use to refer to the combination of change management and user adoption which are vital ingredients in the success of SharePoint. This week we’ll be taking a look at what 1940’s North American farmers can teach us about SharePoint adoption. How Revolutionary is Social? (AIIM)We've all sat in a meeting or overheard someone talking on the train or while at lunch about the latest, greatest social technology, and about how it has changed the way they do their work, or whatever. Another empty-headed platitude, if you ask me. People love to dramatize their experiences with technology, and, of course, we also know how we all like to feel that we're at the cutting edge - nay, the bleeding edge of technology. So when there are 3 or 4 social computing solutions popping up online or on our phones each day, we each get an opportunity to feel superior than others for being the "first" to embrace and use the limited functionality of these utilities. Migrating to SharePoint 2010 Made Easy (White Paper Download)(CIO)Communication and sharing of knowledge, processes and content is a critical need within the modern day enterprise. With its unique blend of collaboration, document and content management support, SharePoint, the enterprise collaboration platform from Microsoft has experienced rapid adoption in recent years. Inside Microsoft’s New Azure Accelerator — Will Redmond Get The Startup Mojo? (TechCrunch)Back in March this year Microsoft launched its first ever “direct” startup accelerator, based out of Tel Aviv, Israel. That meant it would, for the first time, be an accelerator owner/operator. Dubbed the Windows Azure Accelerator (WAA) it looked, at least on first inspection, to be designed to push its Azure cloud computing platform. Perhaps this was some paper-thin marketing initiative? “Look everyone, startups are choosing to use Azure!” seemed to be the initial message. Microsoft Details Its Approach To Privacy In The Cloud (WebProNews)Privacy is the big ticket item this year. Everybody is absolutely paranoid about their personal data being siphoned off into some big tech company like Google or Facebook. Microsoft is also the target of privacy doomsayers, but they hope to alleviate these fears with a public explanation of their privacy policies. Kantar: Windows Phone Clawing Back Share Thanks to Nokia, but Android Still Rules the Roost (Engadget)It's seldom the case that we get to look at world smartphone market share on a national level, but Kantar WorldPanel has given a rare peek that might give Windows Phone fans some good news to crow about. Even though things haven't always gone well for the Microsoft camp, Nokia phones like the Lumia 800 sparked a minor Renaissance in some countries in the three months leading up to mid-April: Windows Phone was up to between three and four percent in France, Italy, the UK and the US. The Metro interface must also be sehr gut for Germans, which nearly doubled Windows Phone's local share to six percent in that short space of time. Around the BlogosphereInfoPath: Create Common Multiple Choice Selections (SharePoint911)In InfoPath, when using certain controls such as the Drop-Down List Box, Combo Box, List Box, or Multiple Selection List box, there are several different ways that you can obtain the list of choices that are available to people filling out the form. Why You Shouldn't Use Team Sites in SharePoint 2010 (EndUserSharePoint)The good old Team Site is a staple of any SharePoint implementation. Whether on SharePoint 2010, 2007 or 2003 the Team Site is commonly used as a catch all site to encourage 'collaboration'. Therein lies the problem. For the normal user the word 'collaboration' has as much meaning as the word 'Team Site'. Collaboration, as pointed out by luminaries such as Paul Culmsee, is a means to an end. You don't collaborate for the sake of collaboration, you collaborate to solve a business process, issue or provide some tangible outcome. SharePoint 2010 SQL 2012 Always On Configuration (ITPro)SQL 2012 brings some great capabilities to the table for an "Always-On" environment. In this post we will configure our SQL 2012 environment to be ready for SharePoint. To begin with my environment is made up of the following: Getting Started with ASP.NET MVC 3, Logging, and Depency Injection (Fear and Loathing)I started a new ASP.NET MVC project recently and wanted to give you a little insight on kicking off new projects. There’s some setup time you want to spend setting up your solution and getting the plumbing in order before you dive into writing unit tests and building out your site. Around Bamboo NationAssessing One's Own Project Management Skills (The Bottom-Line PM)The confluence of our busy season at work and a distinct lack of inspiration lately has had me floundering for topics to cover. I haven't been doing very project manager-y things at work lately, so the wellspring from which I usually draw topics has been pretty dry. This Week in Bamboo (May 6th, 2012 - May 12th, 2012) (The Bamboo Team Blog)Patch for Workflow Conductor SharePoint 2010 Release 2.5 was released to the storefront this week along with User Directory Web Part Release 1.7 and Group Email Web Part Release 1.7. Please check out the latest releases of this week and see below for more information on all the bug fixes and new known issues. SharePoint Job Listings*Business Development Consultant - RemoteSharePointHE.com is looking to hire a Business Development Consultant to be primarily responsible for proactively generating, qualifying, and closing opportunities that lead to new business for SharePointHE.com. Primary duties include the following: Proactively generate, qualify, and close opportunities that lead to new business. Manage the full sales cycle from proactively generating lead to closing opportunity. Solution Engineer - AustraliaThe Solution Engineer (SE) serves as the key technical point of contact for inside and enterprise sales groups. The SE works in a consultative role to assist in the successful closings of new deals and repeat purchases by performing pre/post-sales support and on-site demonstrations to our prospective and existing enterprise customers. The ideal candidate should have a solid technical background and experiences in solution selling and other enterprise sales skills. Above all else, the candidate will demonstrate a passion for enterprise social networking to the point of becoming a thought leader. Microsoft UpdatesNational Careers Service Website on Track to Meet the Needs of 20 Million Citizens (Microsoft Case Studies)The National Careers Service for England is a United Kingdom (U.K.) government initiative. The Skills Funding Agency is responsible for developing the service, built around an interactive learning and careers website. Working with Microsoft Services and using Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 communications and collaboration software, the agency is confident that its site meets government expectations and the needs of 20 million users. SharePoint Events* May 14-16, Toronto, Ontario - SharePoint Summit May 16, Online - Capture, Leverage, and Archive Your Social Content with NewsGator and AvePoint May 16, Online - Troubleshooting Common Performance Problems in SharePoint 2010 May 17, Online (APAC Region) – Capture, Leverage, and Archive Your Social Content with NewsGator and AvePoint May 18, Online - Plotting a course for SharePoint in the Enterprise May 19, Johannesburg, South Africa - SharePoint Saturday May 19, Portland - SharePoint Saturday May 22, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Workflow Conductor Webinar May 23, Online - 5 Risky SharePoint Human Resource Temptations May 23, Online - How to Slash SharePoint Development Costs and Get More from Your Investment May 24, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Central Webinar May 24, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Time Tracking & Management Webinar May 26, Brisbane, Australia - SharePoint Saturday May 31, Birmingham, U.K. - Effective SharePoint Requirements with Serious Games June 2, St. Louis, Missouri - SharePoint Saturday June 2, Silicon Valley - SharePoint Saturday June 2, Atlanta, Georgia - SharePoint Saturday June 6, Online (APAC Region) – Why Social at Stockland, Why Right Now? June 6, Online - The Essentials of SharePoint Disaster Recovery Planning June 9, Orlando, Florida - SharePoint Saturday June 20, Online - Selecting and Protecting the Right SharePoint Backup Targets June 21, Online - Executives Beware: 5 Risky SharePoint Temptations for Executives June 25-27, Denver, Colorado - SharePoint Fest June 30, Dayton, Ohio - SharePoint Saturday June 30, Adelaide, Australia - SharePoint Saturday September 25-27, Chicago, Illinois - SharePoint Fest SharePoint Training* May 16, Online - Project Management Central (3.0) Application Administrative Training - Bamboo Solutions May 17, Online - Project Management Central End User Training - Bamboo Solutions May 17-18, Washington, D.C. - Delivering SharePoint Success Mentoring Workshop - Innovative-e May 21-25, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Administration Core Technologies - Mindsharp May 21-25, Online - SharePoint 2010 Administration Core Technologies - Mindsharp May 21-25, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint Foundation 2010 Developer - Mindsharp May 21-25, Online - SharePoint Foundation 2010 Developer - Mindsharp May 22-25, Chicago, Illinois – InfoPath 2010/SharePoint 2010 Workflow Deep Dive – SharePoint Solutions May 25, Online - Project Management Central End User Training - Bamboo Solutions May 30-31, Online - InfoPath 2010 Power End User - Mindsharp May 30-31, Nashville, Tennessee – Exploring SharePoint 2010 – New Features – SharePoint Solutions June 4-8, Calgary, Alberta, Canada - SharePoint 2010 Core Technologies - Mindsharp June 4-8, Washington, D.C. - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp June 5, Online - Workflow Conductor Designer Training - Bamboo Solutions June 5-6, Nashville, Tennessee – Introduction to SharePoint Foundation 2010 – SharePoint Solutions June 5-7, Arlington, Virginia – Introduction to SharePoint 2010 for Server Administrators – SharePoint Solutions June 5-8, Nashville, Tennessee – Introduction to SharePoint Server 2010 – SharePoint Solutions June 7, Huntsville, Alabama - SharePoint Re-Design And User Adoption Seminar - Mindsharp June 8, Online - Bamboo Select - Bamboo Solutions June 11-15, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Advanced Administrator - Mindsharp June 11-15, Calgary, Alberta, Canada - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp June 12-15, Dallas, Texas – InfoPath 2010/SharePoint 2010 Workflow Deep Dive – SharePoint Solutions June 18-21, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Power End User - Mindsharp June 18-22, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp June 20, Online - Project Management Central (3.0) Application Administrative Training - Session 1 - Bamboo Solutions June 21, Online - Project Management Central (3.0) Application Administrative Training - Session 2 - Bamboo Solutions June 25-29, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Core Technologies - Mindsharp June 26-27, Arlington, Virginia – Introduction to SharePoint Foundation 2010 – SharePoint Solutions June 26-29, Arlington, Virginia – Introduction to SharePoint Server 2010 – SharePoint Solutions July 3, Online - Workflow Conductor Designer Training - Bamboo Solutions July 9-13, Online - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp July 10-13, Nashville, Tennessee – InfoPath 2010/SharePoint 2010 Workflow Deep Dive – SharePoint Solutions July 10-13, Online - SharePoint 2010 Power End User - Mindsharp July 13, Online - Bamboo Select - Bamboo Solutions July 16-20, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Advanced Developer - Mindsharp July 16-20, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Designer - Mindsharp July 17-18, Chicago, Illinois – Introduction to SharePoint Foundation 2010 – SharePoint Solutions July 17-20, Chicago, Illinois – Introduction to SharePoint Server 2010 – SharePoint Solutions July, Online - Project Management Central (3.0) Application Administrative Training - Session 2 - Bamboo Solutions July 19, Online - SharePoint Re-Design And User Adoption Seminar - Mindsharp July 23-27, Online - SharePoint 2010 Core Technologies - Mindsharp July 24-26, Dallas, Texas – Introduction to SharePoint 2010 for Server Administrators – SharePoint Solutions July 30-Aug 3, Online - SharePoint 2010 Power End User - Mindsharp July 30-Aug 3, Online - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp * Please contact Chris Dooley (chris.dooley@bamboosolutions.com) to be included in SharePoint Daily™. Have SharePoint Daily™ delivered to your email inbox every morning.

SBC DotNet Weblog: Keep Calm And PowerShell On

Wed, 16 May 2012 02:08:00 -0400

Another variation of the historic poster from WW2. SharePoint variations here…

The Guide of a MOSSLover: SharePoint Saturday NYC Update from the Trenches

Tue, 15 May 2012 21:49:04 -0400

So as you know I am yet again involved in SPS NYC with my awesome teammates, Greg Hurlman, Jason Gallicchio, Tasha Scott, and Tom Daly. The speakers have finally been picked and a first draft schedule has been posted at http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/ny. We are also still looking for sponsors if you guys are interested you can also click on the link to grab the form, sign it, and send it to sponsors@spsnyc.com. We are also looking for volunteers and you can fill out the form at the same place listed above. We are offering a t-shirt and a gift card for those who dedicate a couple hours of service to the event. I believe this year will be the best event yet. I am also considering wearing a Viking Helmut with horns if at least one other person will wear a similar item. I would consider dressing up if I could get another person to dress up, but I think that’s asking for too much. Also, I need to run around and help the others put out fires, so I’m not so sure full on dress attire would work out. Anyway, registration is not yet posted for those of you guys who wish to attend. We might post it more towards the end of June. I am not yet sure what the decision was on the exact date, but normally we post about 6 weeks prior to the event. I hope to see you all this year at the event. Yet again my dad is going to show up, so stop by, attend a few sessions, and say hi to everyone. Technorati Tags: SPS NYC,SharePoint Saturday,SharePoint

The Guide of a MOSSLover: Integrating SharePoint with Fruity Products

Tue, 15 May 2012 21:42:17 -0400

So as you can see this blog has not been the best in the world lately. Life changes and burn out are killing me lately. Don’t get me wrong I love my job. I love writing things in Visual Studio, in fact this week I got to work with MVC3 for the first time ever. I am completely hooked on MVC3 and will further explore that in the upcoming months. I have entertaining a completely different idea, because I think it would be fun and interesting. The downside is it involves me buying an Apple computer. I have been fighting buying a Macbook Pro for ages. I love building Windows PCs from scratch. I love knowing that I built the computer that I am using. I guess it stems back from my grandparents teaching me that hard work leads to a more fulfilling accomplishment. Anyway, I am not switching over to the darkside. I just built myself a gaming PC (core i7 process, 24 gb of ram-32 when I RMA the last two chips, 4 hard drives – main being an SSD, and an NVIDIA GTX 570 card). I just want to branch out and learn some new tech, so I figure if I have some spare time (which is like asking for a unicorn), I will start posting more about my new development. Anyway, I am waiting for the WWDC and then I am going to decide on what flavor of Macbook Pro to purchase. It turns out a Macbook Air won’t get me what I want programmatically the processor might not be quite up to par for hardcore development. I wouldn’t want to limit myself to anything softcore right? So check back here periodically or on twitter. I’m sure I will post something about my endeavors. In the meanwhile I am still working on my personal life and I am happy to say I have friends in the area. For the first time in a very long time some of them are actually female. As you all know my friends for the longest time were members of the SharePoint and .Net Community mainly and of the male breed. So things are working out. I still love every single day in NYC. It is the first city I can 100% say I belong in. If I have my way I will stay in the metro area for a long time. Anyway, I hope you all are having a good time and goodnight. Technorati Tags: SharePoint and Apple,Microsoft and Apple,Apple

Fear and Loathing: Getting Started with ASP.NET MVC 3, Logging, and Depency Injection

Tue, 15 May 2012 17:35:43 -0400

I started a new ASP.NET MVC project recently and wanted to give you a little insight on kicking off new projects. There’s some setup time you want to spend setting up your solution and getting the plumbing in order before you dive into writing unit tests and building out your site. For a full on, blow my mind, ultimate guide you *have* to go watch Rob Conery and his 90 minute walkthrough of setting up his MVC projects. I’ve watched this video a few times and Rob is awesome and knows his stuff. The tips he gives are gold. You can also check out the MVC 3 Starter Kit on CodePlex which is based on his MVC 2 Starter code but I found it was lacking a few features. In any case, go watch his video for the full meal deal either here on YouTube or here on TekPub. This post is just a mere shadow of his work but updates the use of Ninject with MVC 3. Okay, so we’re going to be doing some simple plumbing to get this going. We’ll put together the Hello World MVC 3 app, add in a logging system, and plumb in dependency injection in just a few minutes. You’ll need Visual Studio 2010 with MVC 3 and NuGet installed. You can get MVC 3 from the main site here. Next install NuGet from here. The MVC 3 framework is obviously needed (Visual Studio 2010 only comes with MVC 2 out of the box) and NuGet is used to install our additional libraries (trust me, if you haven’t used NuGet before it will blow your mind). First steps is to build a new MVC 3 app. File > New Project. Then select Visual C# > Web > ASP.NET MVC 3 Application and give it a name. Click OK and you’ll see the options dialog for a new MVC 3 Application. Pick Internet application as it will work for most everyone (Windows authentication works fine too but for this post it’s just easier to go with Internet). Let’s choose Razor for the view engine (ASPX is so 2011) and use HTML 5 markup (hey, it’s just a demo). We won’t create a unit test project but in a real project you’ll create one (or create a class library separately so you can use other unit testing frameworks). We’re creating a project based on the template to give us a controller as we’ll inject our dependency into it later, otherwise we would have to create those. In a real project we might start with an empty template and create our own controllers from scratch (again, demo land, remember?). Once you do that you’ll be at the Hello World project of the MVC world. Okay, now we’re going to install two NuGet packages, Ninject and NLog. Ninject is an open source dependency injection framework and makes working with external dependencies (like infrastructure and services) a breeze. NLog is a free logging solution for .NET and allows you to write anything to almost any target including files, event logs, web services, mail, forms. You name it, it can write to it. I was using log4net for all my projects but lately I’ve switched over to NLog. It’s super-simple to use and highly flexible. Did I mention it’s available as a NuGet package? Right click on the References in your project and choose Manage NuGet Packages… Make sure you’re looking at the Online packages (sometimes the dialog will open up to installed packages or updatable ones). Type in “nlog” into the search box and you’ll see the filtered search results. Choose NLog Configuration from the options. If you already had a log configuration file you can just choose NLog to install the logger but since we’re starting from scratch we need a config file to start with. Selecting NLog Configuration and you’ll see it has a dependency on NLog so you can just install the one package which installs a starter config file and then drags along the library with it. Easy. Once you’ve installed NLog you can enter “ninject” in the search box. This will bring up a list of packages for the dependency injection library Ninject by Nate Kohari. You’ll want to install the Ninject.MVC3 package by Remo Gloor and Ian Davis. This package will install Ninject itself and the extensions for MVC 3 (along with the bootstrapper for web projects. Ninject requires you to review and accept the license agreement before it will install so go ahead and do that. Two packages and all of their dependencies but you’re now only a few minutes (yes, minutes) away from dependency injection heaven and MVC 3. The first thing we’re going to do is create an interface that will be our logging system. We have a logger (NLog) but that’s an implementation and while we could scatter NLog statements all over the place, we would be tied directly to that library. If we decided to phase out NLog and replace it with another library (such as how I’ve shifted from log4net to NLog) we would have to go through everywhere in our code and replace the NLog calls with the next best thing. This the one of the principles of dependency injection, abstraction, and SOLID. Creating an abstraction of an implementation to code against without tying ourselves to any one system (so to speak). At the end of the day we’ll still be calling into NLog functions but we’ll be doing it through an implementation class via our interface. The other key thing about this approach is that we we can mock or stub out the actual implementation of our logger for unit testing. You can really do that (very well) with concrete implementations. Imagine having to start up a database, file system logger, and the Windows Event log service just to unit test some business code. In addition to being able to test our code, we can also code to interfaces meaning that we don’t need the actual implementation until it comes time to actually perform the work. For example the project I’m currently working on is going to require to call out to web services and databases. These components are not built yet and won’t be for another month or so. I don’t want to halt the development of my app so I create service interfaces and repositories that will abstract these away from my system, allowing me to build a fully working (and tested) system (which just happens to use hard coded values for now). Later when those services appear I just build an implementation to talk to them and voila, my system is still working exactly the way it does today. Okay, enough talk. Here’s the interface for our logging system. I’m borrowing from Rob’s approach by creating a folder called Infrastructure with a subfolder called Logging. In it I’ll create an ILogger interface that will let me write an information message (most logging systems have various levels of logging like Information, Warning, Errors, etc.) And here’s my ILogger interface: 1: namespace MvcStarter.Infrastructure.Logging 2: { 3: public interface ILogger 4: { 5: void Info(string message); 6: } 7: } Next we need an implementation. We’ll create one for NLog. This is a simple class that implements ILogger and provides the Info method (along with the setup needed for NLog to work). Here’s the NLogLogger class: 1: using NLog; 2: 3: namespace MvcStarter.Infrastructure.Logging 4: { 5: public class NLogLogger : ILogger 6: { 7: private Logger _logger; 8: 9: public NLogLogger() 10: { 11: _logger = LogManager.GetCurrentClassLogger(); 12: } 13: 14: public void Info(string message) 15: { 16: _logger.Info(message); 17: } 18: } 19: } We create a private variable of type NLog.Logger and create it in our constructor using the LogManager from NLog. Then to write using NLog we just call the Info method on the class, passing it our message. There are a lot of other methods we can call and add to our interface so later maybe we’ll extend that but this is enough to get you started. One more thing is that the default config file that was installed with the package is just that, blank. You need to tell it at least what target to use and what rules to apply to each target. The entire config file is documented online but you can just uncomment the sample implementation. Make sure to match up the logger rule (Trace in the config file) with your method you’re calling in the implementation. I just changed the minLevel of the NLog config file from Trace to Info to match our code. That’s all you need to have logging working but how do we call it? And how does Ninject fit in? Back when we installed Ninject it created a file for us. Go back to your project and check out the App_Start folder. Expand it and you’ll see a new file there called NinjectWebCommon.cs This sucker is responsible for kickstarting Ninject for you. If you watched Rob’s video or saw some tutorials on the net they talk about changing the base HttpApplication to a Ninject one. That’s one approach but with MVC 3 and the NuGet package this way is much simpler. There’s nothing for you to do except tell Ninject what dependencies you want to deal with and how to resolve them. Open up NinjectWebCommon.cs and scroll down to the RegisterServices method. This is where you’ll specify you own interfaces and concrete classes so Ninject can do it’s magic. With a single line we’re going to tell Ninject this: 1: ///

2: /// Load your modules or register your services here! 3: ///

4: /// The kernel. 5: private static void RegisterServices(IKernel kernel) 6: { 7: kernel.Bind().To().InSingletonScope(); 8: } What are we saying here? Simple. We’re telling Ninject to: Whenever you see the ILogger interface needed (e.g. passed into a constructor of a class) Resolve to the NLogLogger class Make it a singleton (i.e. only do it once and reuse it over and over again) We’re making our logger a singleton because we don’t need to start NLog every time we want to log a message. You can also specify other scopes (like by thread or on demand) but for logging a singleton works. Oh yeah, that’s it to hook up your dependency injection engine. And logging is ready to go. Let’s give it a whirl. Crack open the HomeController class and add a constructor that takes in an ILogger interface then using that interface, write out a message when the Index method is called (i.e. our home page is visited). Here’s the modified HomeController class: 1: using System.Web.Mvc; 2: using MvcStarter.Infrastructure.Logging; 3: 4: namespace MvcStarter.Controllers 5: { 6: public class HomeController : Controller 7: { 8: private readonly ILogger _logger; 9: 10: public HomeController(ILogger logger) 11: { 12: _logger = logger; 13: } 14: 15: public ActionResult Index() 16: { 17: ViewBag.Message = "Welcome to ASP.NET MVC!"; 18: _logger.Info("Home page visited"); 19: return View(); 20: } 21: 22: public ActionResult About() 23: { 24: return View(); 25: } 26: } 27: } We add an ILogger interface to the constructor. This trigger Ninject to figure out what implementation to grab (our NLogLogger one) and create it for us (or reuse it since we told it we wanted a singleton). Then we use that implementation in our Index() method to log a message. Compile and run the app to visit the home page of your app and you’ll see this in your log: 1: 2012-05-15 19:18:38.8471 INFO Home page visited That’s it. You have a logging system you can call anytime (just inject the interface into the class, Ninject will take care of the rest) and your project is setup with dependency injection and you’re ready to go. Now you can just add additional interfaces as you need them. The awesome thing here is that a) you can now mock or stub out your logging implementation and test it and b) replace that implementation with some other logger any time and your code will still just work. That’s the power of dependency injection. As a bonus piece of information, now that you have the dependency injection setup you can use it any time in case you’re in a pinch and don’t need/want to inject the implementation into your class. Here’s how you can call the logger from your Application_Start method (found in Global.asax.cs) before any controllers are fired up: 1: protected void Application_Start() 2: { 3: AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas(); 4: 5: RegisterGlobalFilters(GlobalFilters.Filters); 6: RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes); 7: 8: DependencyResolver.Current.GetService().Info("Application Started"); 9: } See that last line? DependencyResolver.Current.GetService will use whatever IoC you have configured and return the implementation of that interface. Okay, that’s enough to get started. Again, I encourage you to watch Rob’s *entire* video of setting up a new MVC project. Even though the video is for MVC 2, there are still a lot of idea that hold water in MVC 3 and it’s a great learning too (and free too). Enjoy!

Chris O'Brien's blog: Being a SharePoint Premier Field Engineer

Tue, 15 May 2012 16:14:00 -0400

Since the beginning of the year I’ve been contracting to Microsoft as a Premier Field Engineer, and I’ve been meaning to write about my experiences. Since my team (here in the UK) are looking for new people, now seems like a good time. Also, although I was already fairly close to Microsoft in many respects, it’s interesting being on the inside and seeing how certain things work - especially how MS IT deal with some of the challenges within a large organisation. I’ll talk about some of the cool things I notice at the end. It’s been a fun few months for me – I work in the SharePoint group within Premier Field Engineering, and the focus is definitely oriented to infrastructure/IT Pro topics, such as: Performance Scale High Availability Security Patching/upgrade Backup and recovery DR Monitoring etc. From a personal perspective, my background is all about development, customization, end-user experience, consulting and so on – within Microsoft, I’d say my “natural home” would probably be Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS), and consequently I thought working instead for PFE would be a good challenge for me. I always felt slightly guilty that some folks labelled me a SharePoint “expert”, but if a client asked me some “Achilles heel” questions (“What should my backup strategy look like in detail?”) I wouldn’t be able to give a good answer. How can that be right if you’re a product expert? If you’re a developer, I highly recommend trying “the other side” – you’ll learn about what’s really involved in running SharePoint (hint – it’s not all about your cool functionality). If you’re a SharePoint IT Pro, I can’t think of many better places to do this work than PFE. The UK team The SharePoint group within Premier Field Engineering UK currently consists of 16 engineers. Two of the guys are SharePoint 2010 MCMs (Sam Hassani and Chris Whitehead), and another colleague is on the current rotation. Another of the UK MCMs, Neil Hodgkinson, now works within the SharePoint Online group but is an ex-member of my team. I’m not sure how many SharePoint MCMs there are in the UK overall, but I’d guess that’s the highest concentration for any group here. Needless to say, the rest of the team are talented too - there’s a lot of technical capability here, and that makes it an appealing place to work. I’ve certainly had some highly interesting conversations about the nuts and bolts of SharePoint. My first interview felt like it went pretty badly. It was in the middle of a heavy period with my project at the time, and I went into the phone interview (with Chris W, one of the MCMs) immediately following a draining 3 hour conference call with my client. At the time, my day-to-day work was more around heavy customization, development sprints and story points, so it was tough to be thrown into quick-fire questions on infrastructure. I guess I’m used to performing quite well in dev/consulting interviews, so it was humbling to not have answers to some of the questions. After I put the phone down, I was kicking myself for not having prepared better – I realised that yes, I *did* in fact want to do this kind of work and that it would be great to plug some of those gaps. In the end, I heard I actually scored in the mid 80s during the technical test so I guess it just felt worse than it was! From there it was onto the second stage. This was a mock presentation to my manager and a SharePoint PFE, and since this is a key part of the transactional PFE role (more on this later) it was a good insight to the kind of conversations I’d have with clients. PFE work A PFE can be “dedicated” or “transactional”. The former typically serves 1 or 2 clients for a period of several months (e.g. during a rollout/upgrade) and spends most of his/her time on the client site. So far I’ve been transactional, which means I spend just a few days with each client before moving on to the next one. This is great for seeing many SharePoint farms and how clients are using the product in the field. I’m mainly involved with the “Risk and Health Assessment Program” for SharePoint (often abbreviated to “RAP”) so I’ll talk about this some more, but other things I’ve done include “chalk and talk” sessions (sometimes these last several days) and client visits as part of a reactive incident (e.g. “Crit Sit”). Some of the engagements have several aspects to them, and I often think back to a description I read in the hiring process – “Frequently, these problems will not only be technically complex, but will be politically-charged situations requiring the highest level of customer skill.” Other PFE engagements include performance labs and several types of workshops, some of which the engineer needs to be accredited to deliver. Only organisations with a Premier Support contract can make use of these services. Needless to say, SharePoint PFEs aren’t the only breed – different groups exist for many Microsoft technologies, and each will have engineers who can run the respective RAP offering: AD RAP (Active Directory) EX RAP (Exchange) SQL RAP (SQL) SP RAP (SharePoint) CM RAP (System Center Configuration Manager) OPS RAP (Operational Excellence/Service Management) WD RAP (Windows Desktop) Risk and Health Assessment Program A SharePoint RAP is a deep SharePoint health check, which assesses where the client may have deviated from what Microsoft consider to be good practice, particularly in terms of product configuration and management processes. From the service description - “The Risk and Health Assessment Program for Microsoft SharePoint Server includes an extensive environment review completed by a highly skilled, accredited field engineer. The onsite engineer will also complete hands-on knowledge transfer with your engineering staff, passing on some of the best real-world knowledge.” A big part of the RAP process is passing on key information which will help the client get to a better place with their SharePoint deployment, often down to low-level detail such as whether each of the changes being recommended will require a service outage. Being able to closely understand Microsoft’s view of health/risk issues for a SharePoint farm is certainly interesting, and I’ve definitely learnt a lot about SharePoint in the process. If you’re interested in the RAP process, I came up with this diagram which represents the different phases (my interpretation only): A good proportion of the “magic” of the RAP process is the use of an analysis tool written by a central group within Microsoft. This is effectively a shell, where different rule sets can be plugged in depending on the RAP being performed (e.g. a SharePoint rule set for SP RAP, Exchange rules for Ex RAP etc.). Like many developers, I might look at some tools and say “Pah, with enough time I could build that!”, but frankly, I’m deeply impressed with the RAP tooling and how it works. In addition to the core “environment interrogation” tasks, several other tasks are simplified – one aspect of a SharePoint RAP is performance analysis, and tool helps out with the process of monitoring all the servers in the farm for a period (usually 24 hours) using appropriate PerfMon counters. Of course, interpreting the results of much of this data and applying knowledge of how the organisation is using SharePoint is completely down to the engineer. Still, it’s clear that a lot of development has gone into the tool and the tests it performs, and to protect this IP the tool is digitally-signed to each Premier client who receives a RAP. This means that if the tool ever finds it’s way onto the internet, it’s of zero use to anyone other than the original client for their original environment. No tool can find everything though, and so other aspects of the RAP include an “operations interview” where several topics are covered. These include: Change management Operational Excellence/Service Management (e.g. SLAs) DR/backup and recovery Database maintenance procedures Security (e.g. anti-virus arrangements, service account configuration etc.) Monitoring So the RAP process is quite wide-ranging, and personally I’ve yet to have a delivery where the client hasn’t concluded it was extremely valuable. Working at Microsoft As I mentioned earlier, it’s interesting seeing how various things happen inside Microsoft. Perhaps more than anything, it’s the MS IT stuff that really gets my attention – after all, I’m just an end-user in terms of the helpdesk and operations teams. Here are my rough notes on “cool things” I’ve noticed along the way – what’s striking is that many are just good uses of Microsoft technologies: Efficiency of helpdesk Immediately take control of desktop via Lync Search When connected to Corpnet and browse to Bing, see beta/dogfood build SearchVote site – uses an IFrame onto both Bing and Google. Sends your search term to both and allows you to compare results, highlight areas of page and submit feedback (e.g. “this result is missing from Bing”) Remote access DirectAccess - DirectAccess is simply awesome. Effectively provides secure VPN access automatically when connected to internet, without needing to connect to VPN or use VPN client VPN via smart card – provided as a fallback option to DirectAccess Use of Forefront Identity Manager (FIM) to add yourself to AD groups and distribution lists (self-serve) Many internal websites/systems, usually just accessed by an internal DNS name (e.g. http://somesite) Check products for known bugs Access product source code See slide decks from Microsoft conferences Large array of intranet sites, all running on SharePoint Case management systems (MS CRM) Secure FTP site creation (for sharing large files with customers) Bitlocker IRM'd e-mails - can't open on personal PC/iPhone Can't forward/copy from/print etc. Automatic software updates via System Center 2012 Configuration Manager SharePoint PFE’s needed in the UK (May 2012) The team is on the lookout for talent, and I’ve been asked to help out. If you are based in the UK, are looking for a permanent role and think you have the technical expertise, then the team would like to hear from you. PFE look for people that have a solid technical base, can clearly convey their message, and who are willing to learn. Candidates who are successful in the pre-screening phase will go to face-to-face interviews at the Microsoft UK campus in Reading. Read the full job description In the first instance, please contact me through LinkedIn - I’ll perform a certain level of CV pre-screening

Bamboo Nation: This Week in Bamboo (May 6th, 2012 - May 12th, 2012)

Tue, 15 May 2012 10:28:00 -0400

Patch for Workflow Conductor SharePoint 2010 Release 2.5 was released to the storefront this week along with User Directory Web Part Release 1.7 and Group Email Web Part Release 1.7. Please check out the latest releases of this week and see below for more information on all the bug fixes and new known issues. SA08 Workflow Conductor for SharePoint 2010 (2.5.1) Bug Fixes: • Corrected behavior where the Request Approval widget followed the "Rejected" path when approved by a system account without an assigned email address. • Resolved issue where tabs on the template gallery stopped responding when the "Manage Templates" tab or filters were used after upgrading from an earlier version of Workflow Conductor. No new Known Issues and Limitations HW08 User Directory Web Part for SharePoint 2007 (1.7.29) and SharePoint 2010 (1.7.51) SharePoint 2007 (1.7.29) Bug Fixes: • When performing an Advanced Search of the profiles based on a Boolean (yes/no) value, not all results are returned. • String resource files (language files) missing the string "Loading - Please wait while the content loads".• If the "Directly Reports" attribute is mapped to a secondary field, the value is displayed in Distinguished Name format and not display friendly (Full Name) format. New Known Issue: • "Directly Reports" attribute is not editable. If the attribute's setting "Editable" = Yes in the ActiveDirectoryConfig list, the attribute will be hidden when a profile is in Edit mode. SharePoint 2010 (1.7.51) Bug Fixes: • When performing an Advanced Search of the profiles based on a Boolean (yes/no) value, not all results are returned. • In certain cases, when the user clicks the Page tab in the ribbon, the ribbon only says "Loading..." and on the bottom of Internet Explorer window user sees the message “Error on Page”. • String resource files (language files) missing the string "Loading - Please wait while the content loads".• If the "Directly Reports" attribute is mapped to a secondary field, the value is displayed in Distinguished Name format and not display friendly (Full Name) format. New Known Issue: • "Directly Reports" attribute is not editable. If the attribute's setting "Editable" = Yes in the ActiveDirectoryConfig list, the attribute will be hidden when a profile is in Edit mode. HW14 Group Email Web Part for SharePoint 2007 (1.7.33) Bug Fixes: • When Group Email Web Part is deployed, Users with less than administrator rights are unable to login to Sites with Form Based Authentication. No new Known Issues and Limitations

eLumenotion Blog: Posts: Atlanta Code Camp is this Weekend, Saturday May 19th

Tue, 15 May 2012 06:08:49 -0400

Body: For the last few weeks the organizing committee for this year's Atlanta Code Camp (including myself!) has been busily planning and organizing this year's Atlanta Code Camp. This year's event is once again on the campus of Southern Polytechnic State University in Marietta. You can read more and register for the event here: http://www.atlantacodecamp.org/default.aspx. If you're not familiar with code camps, they are free community‐focused events by and for the .NET developer community. The Atlanta Code Camp draws upon the expertise of local and regional developers, architects, and experts who come together to share their real world experiences, lessons learned, best practices, and general knowledge with other interested individuals. This event is unique in that it is "for the community, by the community" and is free for all that desire to attend. In past years, the Atlanta Code Camp has provided free training and networking opportunities for 300 of the best, most motivated development professionals. With our larger facility, we're expecting this year to be even bigger and better. This is a free event and we provide lunch. I hope to see you there! --Doug Category: Random Whatnot Published: 5/15/2012 10:08 AM

Bamboo Nation: Assessing One's Own Project Management Skills

Tue, 15 May 2012 05:30:00 -0400

The confluence of our busy season at work and a distinct lack of inspiration lately has had me floundering for topics to cover. I haven't been doing very project manager-y things at work lately, so the wellspring from which I usually draw topics has been pretty dry. The theory of capital-P, capital-M Project Management still fascinates me, though I haven't had the time to give it a lot of thought lately. Perhaps I'm just avoiding actually delving into the Big Bad Boogeyman that is Microsoft Project by lingering on the schools of thought that drive project management, but it seems to me that learning to be effective at managing projects requires comfort with the underlying premises and theories of project management. I don't think I'm rationalizing (and avoiding) too much with the continued contemplation of theory. It may also be that, as well as my having been too busy at work to spend a great deal of time mucking around with project management software and thinking about the theoretical foundations of project management, part of my lack of inspiration lately is because, for all that I've been doing this blogging gig for a couple of months, I don't feel much like a project manager. It's still kind of like playing house at this point, and I'm having trouble thinking of myself in that role. My colleague, Dux, gave me a book to read called Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management, by Scott Berkun. Dux says it's one of the best PM primers out there. I started reading it about seventy-five years ago before actual, real, paying work intruded. The first six pages or so read very smoothly, like it was going to be a fast and informative read, but then stuff happened and I put it down. I've been meaning to pick it back up, and hope to return to it starting this week or next. I think it's going to give me a good bit of practical theory, and I hope that maybe immersing myself in that will get me back on track with this here blogging project. In the meantime, casting about for something, anything to write about, I plugged "How to be a project manager if you're not a project manager" into Google, hoping something in the results would tickle my creative bone. One of the top results was a Mind Tools quiz on How Good are Your Project Management Skills? Hopeful that my PM skills were better than my keeping-up-with-a-blog skills, I took the quiz. For the purposes of the quiz, since I don't have an actual project team here at work, I thought about how I manage my family. (It was, surprisingly, mostly applicable for the bulk of the questions.) I scored a 64 on a scale of 1-100, which is very firmly middle-of-the-road. Basically, my PM skills are OK, and simple projects usually go pretty smoothly when handled the way I handle things. But more complex projects may be beyond me at my current skill level. When applying my skills to an actual, real project involving professional constraints and, you know, adults, I need to beef up my pre-planning process and ensure I prepare better for unexpected wrenches in the works. The nice thing about this quiz, besides allowing for a quick self-assessment (though I can't speak to how accurate it is, from the standpoint of an actual PM), is that as you're reading the questions, you can kind of interpret how you should be answering them, regardless of what your actual practice is. I kind of had an idea of where I needed to hone my skills as I was going through the quiz. So how about it - how do you measure up? Are you stuck in the middle and very average like I am? Do you need a PM intervention? Or do you have all your PM ducks in a row and you're waiting for your Nobel Prize in project management to be announced?

Bamboo Nation: Information Governance & Social ECM; SkyDrive Meets SharePoint; What is Collaboration Software?

Tue, 15 May 2012 03:36:00 -0400

I really don't understand people and I'm not sure I want to. - Dooley Top News StoriesThe Battle Ahead: Information Governance and the Need for Social ECM (AIIM)“Gartner predicts by 2016, 20% of CIOs in regulated industries will lose their jobs for failing to implement the discipline of information governance successfully.” Houston, we have a metadata problem. And search is broken but when was it ever fixed? Microsoft SkyDrive Meets SharePoint (WindowsITPro)If you've got Microsoft SkyDrive and SharePoint, you might be interested in checking out this Codeplex tool release April 5, 2012, called SkyDrive Connector for SharePoint. What is Collaboration Software? Back to the Basics (SYS-CON Media)Overuse tends to a suck a phrase of meaning, and the same may be said of “collaboration”. As an executive, you’ve probably been inundated with articles on “collaboration software” and its business possibilities. But it seems to mean different things at different times. Sometimes it means email, other times document sharing with Google Drive, and still other times managing projects with Basecamp. And when the social network Google + was launched, you were told enterprise collaboration was forever changed. What You Should Know About Migrating to the Cloud (The Register)Small businesses account for roughly half the UK economy. The technology requirements for a one-man band are wildly different from those of a 250-seat tech support service company, yet both fall under the SME banner. So what is the general advice that will work for everyone and anyone who is considering moving some IT into the cloud? Which Version of Windows 8? (PC Advisor)Microsoft has revealed how many versions of its latest operating system will be shipped – Windows 8, Windows 8 Pro, and Windows RT (which is designed to run on ARM hardware). So far so simple. There is, however, also a mystery fourth version for customers on Software Assurance licensing agreements, which Microsoft has mentioned only in passing – Windows 8 Enterprise. And we're not even going to mention Windows Server 8. Despite the slimmed-down range, many will still be wondering which edition of Windows 8 they should they opt for. (See also: Windows 8: the complete guide.) Siri Corrects Herself on 'Best Smartphone' Question (T3)Away from the often far-too-serious business of Apple rumours, iOS software updates and what-have-you, we allowed ourselves a light chuckle when Siri, the voice controlled personal assistant on the iPhone 4S, selected the Nokia Lumia 900 as the best smartphone on earth. Around the BlogosphereWS-Federation Authentication Module (WSFAM) and SharePoint Extensions (Beside the Point)In the Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) and Claims web applications utilizing it, the WS-Federation Authentication Module (WSFAM) and Session Authentication Module (SAM) are responsible for authentication. Like existing authentication modules for IIS and ASP.NET such as the Windows Authentication and Forms Authentication modules, the WIF authentication modules plug into stages in the integrated pipeline to interact with and influence request processing. Have You Exported Your User Profile Service (FIM) Encryption Key? (Ian's SharePoint Blog)If you have to move the User Profile Service to another server or restore the server hosting the UPS, you have to reconfigure the service and run a full sync. A better option is to export the FIM import/export encryption key and import it on the other servers in your farm (at least the other Application servers which are potential candidates to host the UPS). These steps will only work if the Sync Service has successfully started at least one time ;-) . You will see this event log message the first time the service starts. 10 Warning Signs that Your SharePoint Implementation may be Heading for Difficulty (PointBeyond)I encounter many SharePoint implementations that are planned or in progress. Some go on to be very successful, some are in difficulty. For the more problematic implementations there are often early warning signs that are common across many organisations. I have summarised the main warning signs that I have come across below. Around Bamboo NationThis Week in Bamboo (April 29th, 2012 - May 5th, 2012) (The Bamboo Team Blog)At Bamboo this week, we released the following patches: Alert Plus, List Rollup Web Part, Wiki Publisher, and Lookup Selector Column. We added some new features on latest releases of Alert Plus for SharePoint 2007 version and Wiki Publisher for both SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 versions. Please check out the new features and review the list below for more details about the patches of this week. SharePoint Job Listings*Sr. SharePoint Developer - Dallas, TexasDue to rapid growth, one of our most established clients in Dallas, TX has the immediate need to add a Sr. SharePoint Developer to their team. To be considered for this position, you must have solid SharePoint 2010, Enterprise Content Management, HTML, JavaScript and C#. You must also have experience developing SharePoint environments on a global, and multi-lingual scale. SharePoint Administrator - Charlotte, NCThis contract position is located within the Collaboration, Content, This team is responsible for multiple SharePoint environments supporting collaboration, project support, Portals and other applications within the company. Microsoft UpdatesNational Careers Service Website on Track to Meet the Needs of 20 Million Citizens (Microsoft Case Studies)The National Careers Service for England is a United Kingdom (U.K.) government initiative. The Skills Funding Agency is responsible for developing the service, built around an interactive learning and careers website. Working with Microsoft Services and using Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 communications and collaboration software, the agency is confident that its site meets government expectations and the needs of 20 million users. SharePoint Events* May 14-16, Toronto, Ontario - SharePoint Summit May 16, Online - Capture, Leverage, and Archive Your Social Content with NewsGator and AvePoint May 16, Online - Troubleshooting Common Performance Problems in SharePoint 2010 May 17, Online (APAC Region) – Capture, Leverage, and Archive Your Social Content with NewsGator and AvePoint May 18, Online - Plotting a course for SharePoint in the Enterprise May 19, Johannesburg, South Africa - SharePoint Saturday May 19, Portland - SharePoint Saturday May 22, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Workflow Conductor Webinar May 23, Online - 5 Risky SharePoint Human Resource Temptations May 23, Online - How to Slash SharePoint Development Costs and Get More from Your Investment May 24, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Central Webinar May 24, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Time Tracking & Management Webinar May 26, Brisbane, Australia - SharePoint Saturday May 31, Birmingham, U.K. - Effective SharePoint Requirements with Serious Games June 2, St. Louis, Missouri - SharePoint Saturday June 2, Silicon Valley - SharePoint Saturday June 2, Atlanta, Georgia - SharePoint Saturday June 6, Online (APAC Region) – Why Social at Stockland, Why Right Now? June 9, Orlando, Florida - SharePoint Saturday June 21, Online - Executives Beware: 5 Risky SharePoint Temptations for Executives June 25-27, Denver, Colorado - SharePoint Fest June 30, Dayton, Ohio - SharePoint Saturday June 30, Adelaide, Australia - SharePoint Saturday September 25-27, Chicago, Illinois - SharePoint Fest SharePoint Training* May 15-17, Nashville, Tennessee – Introduction to SharePoint 2010 for Server Administrators – SharePoint Solutions May 16, Online - Project Management Central (3.0) Application Administrative Training - Bamboo Solutions May 17, Online - Project Management Central End User Training - Bamboo Solutions May 17-18, Washington, D.C. - Delivering SharePoint Success Mentoring Workshop - Innovative-e May 21-25, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Administration Core Technologies - Mindsharp May 21-25, Online - SharePoint 2010 Administration Core Technologies - Mindsharp May 21-25, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint Foundation 2010 Developer - Mindsharp May 21-25, Online - SharePoint Foundation 2010 Developer - Mindsharp May 22-25, Chicago, Illinois – InfoPath 2010/SharePoint 2010 Workflow Deep Dive – SharePoint Solutions May 25, Online - Project Management Central End User Training - Bamboo Solutions May 30-31, Online - InfoPath 2010 Power End User - Mindsharp May 30-31, Nashville, Tennessee – Exploring SharePoint 2010 – New Features – SharePoint Solutions June 4-8, Calgary, Alberta, Canada - SharePoint 2010 Core Technologies - Mindsharp June 4-8, Washington, D.C. - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp June 5, Online - Workflow Conductor Designer Training - Bamboo Solutions June 5-6, Nashville, Tennessee – Introduction to SharePoint Foundation 2010 – SharePoint Solutions June 5-7, Arlington, Virginia – Introduction to SharePoint 2010 for Server Administrators – SharePoint Solutions June 5-8, Nashville, Tennessee – Introduction to SharePoint Server 2010 – SharePoint Solutions June 7, Huntsville, Alabama - SharePoint Re-Design And User Adoption Seminar - Mindsharp June 8, Online - Bamboo Select - Bamboo Solutions June 11-15, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Advanced Administrator - Mindsharp June 11-15, Calgary, Alberta, Canada - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp June 12-15, Dallas, Texas – InfoPath 2010/SharePoint 2010 Workflow Deep Dive – SharePoint Solutions June 18-21, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Power End User - Mindsharp June 18-22, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp June 20, Online - Project Management Central (3.0) Application Administrative Training - Session 1 - Bamboo Solutions June 21, Online - Project Management Central (3.0) Application Administrative Training - Session 2 - Bamboo Solutions June 25-29, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Core Technologies - Mindsharp June 26-27, Arlington, Virginia – Introduction to SharePoint Foundation 2010 – SharePoint Solutions June 26-29, Arlington, Virginia – Introduction to SharePoint Server 2010 – SharePoint Solutions July 3, Online - Workflow Conductor Designer Training - Bamboo Solutions July 9-13, Online - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp July 10-13, Nashville, Tennessee – InfoPath 2010/SharePoint 2010 Workflow Deep Dive – SharePoint Solutions July 10-13, Online - SharePoint 2010 Power End User - Mindsharp July 13, Online - Bamboo Select - Bamboo Solutions July 16-20, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Advanced Developer - Mindsharp July 16-20, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Designer - Mindsharp July 17-18, Chicago, Illinois – Introduction to SharePoint Foundation 2010 – SharePoint Solutions July 17-20, Chicago, Illinois – Introduction to SharePoint Server 2010 – SharePoint Solutions July, Online - Project Management Central (3.0) Application Administrative Training - Session 2 - Bamboo Solutions July 19, Online - SharePoint Re-Design And User Adoption Seminar - Mindsharp July 23-27, Online - SharePoint 2010 Core Technologies - Mindsharp July 24-26, Dallas, Texas – Introduction to SharePoint 2010 for Server Administrators – SharePoint Solutions July 30-Aug 3, Online - SharePoint 2010 Power End User - Mindsharp July 30-Aug 3, Online - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp * Please contact Chris Dooley (chris.dooley@bamboosolutions.com) to be included in SharePoint Daily™. Have SharePoint Daily™ delivered to your email inbox every morning.

SharePoint Joel's SharePoint Land: Upcoming Free SharePoint + Social Webinars from NewsGator

Mon, 14 May 2012 08:53:03 -0400

Upcoming NewsGator Webinars NewsGator has a few upcoming webinars. Sign up and mark your calendars! Capture, Leverage, and Archive Your Social Content with NewsGator and AvePointMay 16th @ 2pm ETCapture, Leverage, and Archive Your Social Content with NewsGator and AvePoint (APAC)May 17th @ 10 am EST (GMT +10 Hours) Why Social at Stockland, Why Right Now?June 6th @ 10 am EST (GMT +10 Hours) This is a sponsored story.

Joel Oleson's SharePoint Land: Upcoming Free SharePoint + Social Webinars from NewsGator

Mon, 14 May 2012 08:53:03 -0400

Bamboo Nation: Challenges of Custom-Coded SharePoint Applications; US Government Approves Office 365; Bing Friends Facebook

Mon, 14 May 2012 03:42:00 -0400

Sounds like someone has a case of the Mondays. - Dooley Top News StoriesSharePoint 2010 Communities: An Integrated Collaboration Platform (CMSWire)This is the third article in the series “What is This SharePoint Thing All About Anyway?” and in this article we are going to be looking at the concept of SharePoint Communities and how you could use them to improve your current working environment. Communities are a concept within SharePoint that provides a way for users to come together based on experience, needs and general working relationships. We will look at several key elements of communities in SharePoint before exploring how to utilize them to your best advantage in your work environment. Avoid the Top 3 Challenges of Custom-Coded SharePoint Applications (Download) (SDTimes)To satisfy SharePoint users’ requests for site enhancements and customizations, many organizations begin developing custom code. But custom coding brings with it three key challenges: Slow application delivery; High cost of ownership; Torturous upgrade path. Office 365 Gets Thumbs Up From US Government (ITProPortal)Microsoft's Office 365 is now officially compliant with the US Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), an important step for the cloud productivity service should it want to bid for government tenders. Mozilla on New Browser Brouhaha: Microsoft, Apple Different Cases (PC Advisor)Two wrongs don't make a right, Mozilla's chief counsel said Thursday when asked why his company hasn't lambasted Apple, as it did Microsoft, for blocking rival browsers from its mobile operating system. "The similarities to iOS don't justify an outcome on Windows that deprives users of choice, reduces competition and hurts innovation," said Harvey Anderson, Mozilla's top lawyer. Windows 8 Feature Focus: Start Screen (Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows)The Start screen is the face of the Metro environment in Windows 8 and the controversial replacement for the application launching capabilities of the Start menu from previous Windows versions. A full-screen experience, this interface is populated with live tiles representing Metro-style apps, desktop applications, web sites, libraries and folder locations, and other items. Microsoft Bing Friends Facebook (InformationWeek)Search is going social, like it or not. In a few weeks, Microsoft plans to roll out a revised version of its Bing search engine that includes a way to involve Facebook friends in the search process. While the move looks like a response to Google's Search Plus Your World social integration, announced in January, it's more than that. Microsoft believes it can make search better by enabling Bing users to pose questions during the search process to Facebook users. This functionality will be available to users shortly through a new sidebar interface. Around the BlogosphereWhat Traffic is Happening Behind the Scenes When Using an iOS SharePoint Application? (My SharePoint and Mobility Blog)Since my Harmon.ie review has been posted there has been a question raised on Nothing But SharePoint about whether anything needs to be installed within the SharePoint farm to support Harmon.ie and also what kind of traffic the application may generate. I’ve kept the focus of all the reviews I’ve done so far to applications that have no server-side dependencies. To use the applications I’ve reviewed, a user needs two things: On Gardens and Governance (4th post) (The SharePoint Guys)This is the last in a series of posts that uses the analogy that looking after SharePoint in your organization is a little like looking after a garden. Without some form of control over it, it will quickly deteriorate and end up as something that is neither a pleasure to use nor something from which you derive benefit. OK I Have my Office 365 Setup Now How do I Administer it (SharePointEduTech)On Wednesday I gave a webinar on the subject of administering your Office 365 stand-up I was very ably assisted by Chris Kolodziejski from MetaVis. So check out the webinar recording below and if you wish to try the MetaVis Office 365 tools you can download a trial version from http://metavistech.com/try Brand SharePoint "The Right Way" - What is a Branding? (Part 1) (EndUserSharePoint)Branding SharePoint is a way to change the default look and feel of SharePoint in order to give your site a personal (or professional) touch. There are many reasons to brand a SharePoint site, but the most common reasons are to adjust the site to match company design guidelines, increase user buy-in by improving the overall experience and last but not least, to brag about to your friends and colleagues. A custom branding can often be the difference between user apathy at yet another vanilla SharePoint site and interest in a useful collaboration tool they can identify with. Around Bamboo NationThis Week in Bamboo (April 29th, 2012 - May 5th, 2012) (The Bamboo Team Blog)At Bamboo this week, we released the following patches: Alert Plus, List Rollup Web Part, Wiki Publisher, and Lookup Selector Column. We added some new features on latest releases of Alert Plus for SharePoint 2007 version and Wiki Publisher for both SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 versions. Please check out the new features and review the list below for more details about the patches of this week. SharePoint Job Listings*SharePoint Architect - Charlotte, North CarolinaThe SharePoint Architect will provide guidance on best practices for implementing SharePoint, candidate is expected to have very clear understanding of SharePoint solution stack; have a thorough understanding of SharePoint farm configuration, security, availability, performance, monitoring and capacity planning. Excellent verbal and written communication skills are required. The candidate must be a quick study and be ready to work in a very complex, fast-paced and diverse environment. Software Development Engineer in Test II - SharePoint Job - Redmond, WARight now we are hiring for our team responsible for data integrity and service availability. This entails technology for migrating customers to the new O365 SharePoint offering, automated role redundancy and the ability to failover to another datacenter in the event of a disaster. We are engineering fast-turnaround service updates, as well as bringing the latest and greatest SharePoint bits into the cloud. Microsoft UpdatesNational Careers Service Website on Track to Meet the Needs of 20 Million Citizens (Microsoft Case Studies)The National Careers Service for England is a United Kingdom (U.K.) government initiative. The Skills Funding Agency is responsible for developing the service, built around an interactive learning and careers website. Working with Microsoft Services and using Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 communications and collaboration software, the agency is confident that its site meets government expectations and the needs of 20 million users. SharePoint Events* May 14-16, Toronto, Ontario - SharePoint Summit May 16, Online - Capture, Leverage, and Archive Your Social Content with NewsGator and AvePoint May 16, Online - Troubleshooting Common Performance Problems in SharePoint 2010 May 17, Online (APAC Region) – Capture, Leverage, and Archive Your Social Content with NewsGator and AvePoint May 18, Online - Plotting a course for SharePoint in the Enterprise May 19, Johannesburg, South Africa - SharePoint Saturday May 19, Portland - SharePoint Saturday May 22, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Workflow Conductor Webinar May 23, Online - 5 Risky SharePoint Human Resource Temptations May 23, Online - How to Slash SharePoint Development Costs and Get More from Your Investment May 24, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Central Webinar May 24, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Time Tracking & Management Webinar May 26, Brisbane, Australia - SharePoint Saturday May 31, Birmingham, U.K. - Effective SharePoint Requirements with Serious Games June 2, St. Louis, Missouri - SharePoint Saturday June 2, Silicon Valley - SharePoint Saturday June 2, Atlanta, Georgia - SharePoint Saturday June 6, Online (APAC Region) – Why Social at Stockland, Why Right Now? June 9, Orlando, Florida - SharePoint Saturday June 21, Online - Executives Beware: 5 Risky SharePoint Temptations for Executives June 25-27, Denver, Colorado - SharePoint Fest June 30, Dayton, Ohio - SharePoint Saturday June 30, Adelaide, Australia - SharePoint Saturday September 25-27, Chicago, Illinois - SharePoint Fest SharePoint Training* May 14-18, San Antonio, Texas - SharePoint 2010 Administration Core Technologies - Mindsharp May 14-18, Online - SharePoint 2010 Administration Core Technologies - Mindsharp May 15-17, Nashville, Tennessee – Introduction to SharePoint 2010 for Server Administrators – SharePoint Solutions May 16, Online - Project Management Central (3.0) Application Administrative Training - Bamboo Solutions May 17, Online - Project Management Central End User Training - Bamboo Solutions May 17-18, Washington, D.C. - Delivering SharePoint Success Mentoring Workshop - Innovative-e May 21-25, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Administration Core Technologies - Mindsharp May 21-25, Online - SharePoint 2010 Administration Core Technologies - Mindsharp May 21-25, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint Foundation 2010 Developer - Mindsharp May 21-25, Online - SharePoint Foundation 2010 Developer - Mindsharp May 22-25, Chicago, Illinois – InfoPath 2010/SharePoint 2010 Workflow Deep Dive – SharePoint Solutions May 25, Online - Project Management Central End User Training - Bamboo Solutions May 30-31, Online - InfoPath 2010 Power End User - Mindsharp May 30-31, Nashville, Tennessee – Exploring SharePoint 2010 – New Features – SharePoint Solutions June 4-8, Calgary, Alberta, Canada - SharePoint 2010 Core Technologies - Mindsharp June 4-8, Washington, D.C. - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp June 5, Online - Workflow Conductor Designer Training - Bamboo Solutions June 5-6, Nashville, Tennessee – Introduction to SharePoint Foundation 2010 – SharePoint Solutions June 5-7, Arlington, Virginia – Introduction to SharePoint 2010 for Server Administrators – SharePoint Solutions June 5-8, Nashville, Tennessee – Introduction to SharePoint Server 2010 – SharePoint Solutions June 7, Huntsville, Alabama - SharePoint Re-Design And User Adoption Seminar - Mindsharp June 8, Online - Bamboo Select - Bamboo Solutions June 11-15, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Advanced Administrator - Mindsharp June 11-15, Calgary, Alberta, Canada - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp June 12-15, Dallas, Texas – InfoPath 2010/SharePoint 2010 Workflow Deep Dive – SharePoint Solutions June 18-21, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Power End User - Mindsharp June 18-22, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp June 20, Online - Project Management Central (3.0) Application Administrative Training - Session 1 - Bamboo Solutions June 21, Online - Project Management Central (3.0) Application Administrative Training - Session 2 - Bamboo Solutions June 25-29, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Core Technologies - Mindsharp June 26-27, Arlington, Virginia – Introduction to SharePoint Foundation 2010 – SharePoint Solutions June 26-29, Arlington, Virginia – Introduction to SharePoint Server 2010 – SharePoint Solutions July 3, Online - Workflow Conductor Designer Training - Bamboo Solutions July 9-13, Online - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp July 10-13, Nashville, Tennessee – InfoPath 2010/SharePoint 2010 Workflow Deep Dive – SharePoint Solutions July 10-13, Online - SharePoint 2010 Power End User - Mindsharp July 13, Online - Bamboo Select - Bamboo Solutions July 16-20, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Advanced Developer - Mindsharp July 16-20, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Designer - Mindsharp July 17-18, Chicago, Illinois – Introduction to SharePoint Foundation 2010 – SharePoint Solutions July 17-20, Chicago, Illinois – Introduction to SharePoint Server 2010 – SharePoint Solutions July, Online - Project Management Central (3.0) Application Administrative Training - Session 2 - Bamboo Solutions July 19, Online - SharePoint Re-Design And User Adoption Seminar - Mindsharp July 23-27, Online - SharePoint 2010 Core Technologies - Mindsharp July 24-26, Dallas, Texas – Introduction to SharePoint 2010 for Server Administrators – SharePoint Solutions July 30-Aug 3, Online - SharePoint 2010 Power End User - Mindsharp July 30-Aug 3, Online - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp * Please contact Chris Dooley (chris.dooley@bamboosolutions.com) to be included in SharePoint Daily™. Have SharePoint Daily™ delivered to your email inbox every morning.

The Guide of a MOSSLover: NYC Metro Area Community Dinner

Sun, 13 May 2012 20:27:23 -0400

So I have decided to hold a community dinner the first week of June. I invited a bunch of MS community members who run user groups or contribute a lot in the NYC Metro area. If anyone is interested drop me comment on this blog with your email address. I won’t publish the comment with your email in case you don’t want everyone to see your address. I just figured that some people might see this blog that I missed via email. I am also going to spam the main community list for njny metro area. Hopefully, we can get a good turn out from the community at large and have some good dialog discussions on events we are running. I am sure a lot of don’t see each other often so I figured why not. Anyway hope to see you all at the dinner. Technorati Tags: Microsoft Community,New York Metro Microsoft Community

Sharepoint Tips And Tricks: Useful Event handlers for SharePoint

Sun, 13 May 2012 18:57:00 -0400

In a few of my recent posts, I wrote about event handlers to set titles and permissions on items automatically as items are created. Since then, I have received a lot of questions from none developers who wanted to use the code samples, but didnt want to compile themselves, and didnt want to go through making the code more generic and robust. So I have done the work for everyone out there who wants to have the code samples as a downloadable product. The product I am now selling as part of my Company's offerings is called "Extelligent Design's SharePoint List Events Package". The idea is that I will keep adding event handlers to that package, so you pay once, and get a whole lot of functionality. The event handlers are as flexible as possible - allowing you to configure what permissions are assigned and to whome, or what format the title of the list items or documents should be, and even hide the title field from users in the editing forms. If you purchase, not only do you get the code compiled, you also benefit from 1 year support (patches and added features). To read more, and to purchase, go to the product's page in our web site.

SharePoint Dan: SharePoint Technology Conference – Boston 2012

Sat, 12 May 2012 18:25:47 -0400

For anyone that’s interested in saving a little cash and going to a great conference in Boston, you’ll be happy to know that myself and Scott Hoag will be taking our show on the road to the SharePoint Technology Conference this July in Boston. We’re excited to be a part of the event and will be teaching a half day workshop for new IT Pros and Administrators as well as two sessions that we’ve been revamping and tuning content for this conference based on feedback from other user groups, conferences and such – it’s kinda like the Million Dollar Man, we’ve been building something that will rock your socks off… but unfortunately we’ve been informed that the light show and disco ball won’t be able to be rigged in time. Being a part of this conference is exciting for me for a couple reasons – one being that I’m honored to come back to speak at this conference. I was a speaker at the June 2009 event in Boston – a great experience and privilege to be a part of the event. This time around I’m stoked to be back co-presenting with my friend Scott Hoag who I met in October 2010 and have been working on different IT Pro and Architecture experiments in our free time when not SharePointing or watching AMC’s TWD. If you’re up for some dry humour, witty comments and rockin’ information I think you’ll enjoy our sessions. Nevertheless, if you’re interested in getting an extra $200 off of the conference admission fee (on top of other early bird discounts) be sure to use the code USHER in your registration and save a little cache, errr cash that is . I’m looking forward to a fantastic week in Boston, seeing friends from the community and meeting new folks too! Come find me and introduce yourselves! Here is no comments yet by the time your rss reader get this, Do you want to be the first commentor? Hurry up

OBA, SharePoint and Aghy: Small World

Sat, 12 May 2012 16:28:59 -0400

Body: Earlier this week, we’ve had a discussion about the benefits of social media at SharePoint Connections in Bavaria, Germany. One of the benefits was that social media helps to find old friends – looks like my life proves this immediately. I’ve just booked my flight to Boston for this Summer earlier this week – and turned out, one of my best friends will be there, same time. (Funny thing, we live 10 min driving from each other and our children are very good friends too. Will be fun to have a kind of “mothers’ party” in Boston, without our families :)) Last year I’ve seen Andrew Connell there, accidentally. How big is the mathematical chance for seeing a friend in Boston if you live in Europe and he lives in Florida?… Today I was flying to Toronto via Amsterdam. Checked in at Schiphol by Foursquare, and in less than 30 min, Christian Buckley checked in the same airport… He had a layover there heading down to South Africa for SPSJHB… Then arrived in Toronto, and an old friend’s message was waiting for me on Facebook: “hey, I moved to Toronto recently, what about a coffee this afternoon?” – I haven’t seen him for about two years… Literally, I feel the world is much smaller outside in Hungary than inside. Social networks make it so small. I LOVE it, having so much fun when travelling! Anyone in Boston this week’s second half? ;) Published: 5/12/2012 7:28 PM Year: 2,012

SBC DotNet Weblog: Keep Calm And SharePoint

Sat, 12 May 2012 11:29:00 -0400

Variations of the historic poster from WW2.

SharePoint User Group UK: London user group meeting 14th June

Fri, 11 May 2012 09:19:00 -0400

Hi, Here's the link to sign up for the next London meeting on 14th June http://suguk.org/forums/28744/ShowThread.aspx#28744 S:)

SharePoint User Group UK: London user group meeting 14th June

Fri, 11 May 2012 09:19:00 -0400

Hi, Here's the link to sign up for the next London meeting on 14th June http://suguk.org/forums/28744/ShowThread.aspx#28744 S:)

Brain Dump: Posts: How do I - Add a User Account to the Local Administrators security group of a Domain Controller

Fri, 11 May 2012 07:37:27 -0400

Body: Once you have done a DCPROMO (promoting your server to a domain controller) on your server, Windows removes the ability to manage local administrators from the server, at least via the GUI interface. As you can see here in the following two screen shots, the “Local Users and Groups” GUI option which is normally available on a non domain controller server thus: Is removed once the server is promoted to a domain controller thus: How do we work around this issue then? Bring out the good old administrative command line… Click through your Start menu and navigate to locate the "Command Prompt". Right click the "Command Prompt" icon. On the popup menu, click "Run as administrator". In the admin window that opens, use the following syntax to add the target account to the local administrators group of the server: net localgroup administrators /add Where the value is the target domain and the value is the target user e.g. In the example above we added the DEVSPADM account to the server's local administrators group. Later C Category: Tips; R2; Windows Server Published: 5/15/2012 8:05 AM Attachments: http://www.cjvandyk.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Attachments/346/image_73f0f511-7089-4330-bb2b-81ebb9a55392_0EBE6B7B.pnghttp://www.cjvandyk.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Attachments/346/image_870a3cf1-e5db-43b9-8753-132f17c29c54_0EBE6B7B.pnghttp://www.cjvandyk.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Attachments/346/image_90f1a703-cf66-4d2a-8a21-ad60f0758dc8_0EBE6B7B.pnghttp://www.cjvandyk.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Attachments/346/image_f0223324-2cb7-4823-bc8b-fa4cc5c223d3_0EBE6B7B.png

Brain Dump: Posts: White Paper-2010 Office and SharePoint-Good, Better, Best

Thu, 10 May 2012 12:47:19 -0400

Body: My clients and conference attendees are constantly asking me for this reference document. It’s silly that it’s so hard to locate on the Microsoft site, but it’s a great resource and the Appendix where it lists the Office versions side by side is indispensable. Come and get it! http://www.crayveon.com/Downloads/SharePoint/2010/Office-and-SharePoint-Good-Better-Best-White-Paper.pdf Enjoy C Published: 5/10/2012 1:47 PM

Things that Should be Easy: Who has the cheapest SharePoint 2010 hosting? Maybe you do.

Thu, 10 May 2012 05:18:00 -0400

I get asked this question a lot, "Who has the cheapest SharePoint 2010 hosting?" Simply put, it depends on how many users you have. The "users" are the people who will access SharePoint. These will include your employees, sub contractors, partners, vendors, and anyone else who needs to view or upload data to your SharePoint system. So how does the number of users affect who has the cheapest hosting? Let's see… User Count Monthly cost assuming basic $4 / user hosting plan Monthly cost assuming bulk hosting plan (up to 500 users) 5 $20 $250 10 $40 $250 25 $100 $250 50 $200 $250 63 $252 $250 500 $2,000 $250 Clearly we can see from the above example, that when you have fewer than 63 users, you are much better off going with a per-user pricing plan. But if you have more than 63 users, it makes sense to look at a bulk plan. Now, how can we get our SharePoint even cheaper? It comes down to how we measure "cheap." Hosting companies measure it in terms of setup costs (your initial investment) and the monthly plan cost (your marginal cost). But we are going to measure "cheaper" in terms of cumulative cost from the day SharePoint is made available. Let's see how long it takes us to rack up $1,100 in total cumulative costs. Why $1,100 you ask? Because I show in this post how you can easily install your own SharePoint system that will support 500 users for $1,100 and no monthly fees. User Count Monthly cost assuming lowest cost hosting plan Number of moths to reach $1,100 in cumulative costs 5 $20 55 months 10 $40 28 months 25 $100 11 months 50 $200 6 months 63 $250 5 months 500 $250 5 months We can see that from a cost point, if you have under 10 users, you're best option is to use a per-user SharePoint hosting plan. But, if you have 25 users, you are better off installing SharePoint in-house, because that will save you money compared to hosting in 11 months. That's a measurable return on your investment to host SharePoint on premises. If you have at least 50 users, you'll see a return on your investment in less than 6 months by hosting SharePoint internally. Who has the cheapest SharePoint 2010 hosting? Depending on how many users you have, you may have the cheapest hosting. Does this mean that an organization of any size is always better off hosting internally? No. There are lots of factors that go into deciding whether to host internally or outsource hosting. But you should also be aware that when you outsource your hosting, you will encounter other issues that you do not currently have with your internally hosted system.

Bamboo Nation: SharePoint Deployment Pitfalls; Firefox Banned on ARM-based Windows; Don’t Ignore Office 365

Thu, 10 May 2012 03:34:00 -0400

Didn't we see this happening in "Rise of the Planet of the Apes"? Maybe it really is the end for humans. - Dooley Top News StoriesSharePoint 15: 8 Things to Help You Prepare (CMSWire)It seems like only yesterday that we were shouting about the upcoming release of SharePoint 2010. In fact, it is just about two years ago (May 12, 2010) that it was released. And with a mere two years on the market, we’re starting to shout about the release of the next edition — SharePoint 15. SharePoint Deployment: Pitfalls of a Pioneer (ZDNet)In part one of my diary, I outlined the decision to use SharePoint, which was taken in early 2010, shortly before the formal launch of the product. A group of around a dozen people had previously been evaluating all of the major players in the market, and looking for a solution to both our lack of a portal product and our need for a new content management system for our main public-facing website at www.brighton.ac.uk. Microsoft SkyDrive Meets SharePoint (WindowsITPro)If you've got Microsoft SkyDrive and SharePoint, you might be interested in checking out this Codeplex tool release April 5, 2012, called SkyDrive Connector for SharePoint. Microsoft Bans Firefox on ARM-based Windows, Mozilla says (CNET)Stop me if you've heard this one before: Microsoft muscles aside other browsers and cements the dominance of Internet Explorer. The browser market, deprived of competition, stagnates. That, of course, is what happened during the first browser war of the 1990s and beyond, on personal computers. Today, Mozilla's top lawyer warned that Microsoft's behavior threatens a repeat of history, because it's telling Mozilla that it's barring Firefox from forthcoming Windows 8 machines that use ARM processors. Crazy Idea: Don’t Ignore Office 365, Google Apps (MSPMentor)If you can’t fight them — join them? A growing number of MSPs and VARs seem to be finding cloud success promoting Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps to customers. And old arguments about thin SaaS profit margins and cloud customer billing models seem to quieting down. Why’s that? Here’s the update. Is Windows Phone 8 Already Dead on Arrival? (IntoMobile)Paul Thurrott is to Microsoft what John Gruber is to Apple. By that I mean he’s been championing the desktop software giant since the 1990s. He recently wrote a piece on The Supersite for Windows where he outlined how Windows Phone 8 might land straight on its face due to the following reasons: First, Windows Phone hasn’t penetrated the market. It has a market share of less than 2% and it’ll be a miracle if that number doubles by the end of this year. That figure makes developers hesitant to build applications for the platform, because what’s the point if all the money is in iOS and all the volume is in Android? Around the BlogosphereInconvenient Sandboxed Web Templates and Navigation (Waldek Mastykarz)Web Templates are the new recommended approach for templating sites. Combined with Sandboxed Solutions they empower power users and offer them great flexibility and productivity. There is however one inconvenience with regard to how SharePoint Navigation Providers deal with Sandboxed Web Templates. Office Web App Licensing Quick Guide (Reza Alirezaei's Blog)Office Web Apps have no dependency on your SharePoint licensing model; instead they are licensed with Office 2010 Professional Plus and Office 2010 Standard licenses. If you have volume license for either Office Professional Plus or Office Standard, then you are already licensed for Office Web App. Install the bits on your SharePoint 2010 server or SharePoint Foundation server and enjoy the life…The difference is Office Professional Plus includes the license for SharePoint workspace which standard doesn’t! Note that Office Web Apps only covers the required licenses for Word Web App, Excel Web App, PowerPoint Web App, and OneNote Web App. Brand SharePoint "The Right Way" - An Introduction (EndUserSharePoint)I’ve been working in software development for many years now and I like to think that I have a very structured approach to software development. I like to follow best practices and organize my projects in a way that will allow other developers (or myself, at a later date) to be able to navigate the solution and understand what’s going on easily. I’ve been working with SharePoint for the better part of three years but until now, most of my work had been confined to the back-end and the external interfaces (Web Services, Client Object Model, etc.). SharePoint File Explorer and the Great File Server Debate (SharePointEduTech )When SharePoint became a huge product back in 2007 there was a wide variety of debates about moving file server content to SharePoint and the benefits this would bring. This is a topic which perhaps affects educational establishments more than any other. Do any other institutions undergo a 100% turnover in users over 5-7 years as schools and colleges do with students? In almost all schools these users will have access to their own personal ‘Home Drive’ and perhaps a number of file shares which contain resources shared by teachers. The question is when SharePoint comes along in a school should you get rid of Home Drives and file shares? Around Bamboo NationThis Week in Bamboo (April 29th, 2012 - May 5th, 2012) (The Bamboo Team Blog)At Bamboo this week, we released the following patches: Alert Plus, List Rollup Web Part, Wiki Publisher, and Lookup Selector Column. We added some new features on latest releases of Alert Plus for SharePoint 2007 version and Wiki Publisher for both SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 versions. Please check out the new features and review the list below for more details about the patches of this week. SharePoint Job Listings*Microsoft SharePoint Developer - Washington, DCOne highly experienced Senior SharePoint Developer to play the lead hands-on role in assisting the Bank team with the integration of SharePoint into the Bank’s Operations Portal. Responsibilities will include using expertise in SharePoint 2010, .Net Frameworks, SQL Server, AJAX, XML, InfoPath, and other tools to implement the logical and technical design as well as writing and debugging code for the portal implementation. SharePoint Administrator - Somerset, NJSHI has an exciting opportunity for an experienced SharePoint Administrator in the IT department at our corporate headquarters in Somerset, NJ. We are looking for a highly motivated, detail oriented, and self-sufficient individual with strong analytical and communication skills to manage and maintain our SharePoint infrastructure including SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2007 servers. This is a great opportunity to become part of a highly motivated team of technical professionals and advance your career. Microsoft UpdatesImporting SharePoint 2010 Site Definitions in Visual Studio 2010 (MSDN)Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 provides a project type that enables you to import a site definition and add code. You can then deploy this site definition to the SharePoint Solutions Gallery and create new sites based on the site definition. SharePoint Events* May 10, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Workflow Conductor Webinar May 11, Chase Village, Maryland - Best Practices for SharePoint Governance by AvePoint & Innovative-e May 12, Baltimore, Maryland - SharePoint Saturday May 14-16, Toronto, Ontario - SharePoint Summit May 16, Online - Capture, Leverage, and Archive Your Social Content with NewsGator and AvePoint May 16, Online - Troubleshooting Common Performance Problems in SharePoint 2010 May 17, Online (APAC Region) – Capture, Leverage, and Archive Your Social Content with NewsGator and AvePoint May 18, Online - Plotting a course for SharePoint in the Enterprise May 19, Johannesburg, South Africa - SharePoint Saturday May 19, Portland - SharePoint Saturday May 22, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Workflow Conductor Webinar May 23, Online - 5 Risky SharePoint Human Resource Temptations May 23, Online - How to Slash SharePoint Development Costs and Get More from Your Investment May 24, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Central Webinar May 24, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Time Tracking & Management Webinar May 26, Brisbane, Australia - SharePoint Saturday May 31, Birmingham, U.K. - Effective SharePoint Requirements with Serious Games June 2, St. Louis, Missouri - SharePoint Saturday June 2, Silicon Valley - SharePoint Saturday June 2, Atlanta, Georgia - SharePoint Saturday June 6, Online (APAC Region) – Why Social at Stockland, Why Right Now? June 9, Orlando, Florida - SharePoint Saturday June 21, Online - Executives Beware: 5 Risky SharePoint Temptations for Executives June 25-27, Denver, Colorado - SharePoint Fest June 30, Dayton, Ohio - SharePoint Saturday June 30, Adelaide, Australia - SharePoint Saturday September 25-27, Chicago, Illinois - SharePoint Fest SharePoint Training* May 11, Online - Bamboo Select Training - Bamboo Solutions May 14-18, San Antonio, Texas - SharePoint 2010 Administration Core Technologies - Mindsharp May 14-18, Online - SharePoint 2010 Administration Core Technologies - Mindsharp May 15-17, Nashville, Tennessee – Introduction to SharePoint 2010 for Server Administrators – SharePoint Solutions May 16, Online - Project Management Central (3.0) Application Administrative Training - Bamboo Solutions May 17, Online - Project Management Central End User Training - Bamboo Solutions May 17-18, Washington, D.C. - Delivering SharePoint Success Mentoring Workshop - Innovative-e May 21-25, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Administration Core Technologies - Mindsharp May 21-25, Online - SharePoint 2010 Administration Core Technologies - Mindsharp May 21-25, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint Foundation 2010 Developer - Mindsharp May 21-25, Online - SharePoint Foundation 2010 Developer - Mindsharp May 22-25, Chicago, Illinois – InfoPath 2010/SharePoint 2010 Workflow Deep Dive – SharePoint Solutions May 25, Online - Project Management Central End User Training - Bamboo Solutions May 30-31, Online - InfoPath 2010 Power End User - Mindsharp May 30-31, Nashville, Tennessee – Exploring SharePoint 2010 – New Features – SharePoint Solutions June 4-8, Calgary, Alberta, Canada - SharePoint 2010 Core Technologies - Mindsharp June 4-8, Washington, D.C. - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp June 5, Online - Workflow Conductor Designer Training - Bamboo Solutions June 5-6, Nashville, Tennessee – Introduction to SharePoint Foundation 2010 – SharePoint Solutions June 5-7, Arlington, Virginia – Introduction to SharePoint 2010 for Server Administrators – SharePoint Solutions June 5-8, Nashville, Tennessee – Introduction to SharePoint Server 2010 – SharePoint Solutions June 7, Huntsville, Alabama - SharePoint Re-Design And User Adoption Seminar - Mindsharp June 8, Online - Bamboo Select - Bamboo Solutions June 11-15, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Advanced Administrator - Mindsharp June 11-15, Calgary, Alberta, Canada - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp June 12-15, Dallas, Texas – InfoPath 2010/SharePoint 2010 Workflow Deep Dive – SharePoint Solutions June 18-21, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Power End User - Mindsharp June 18-22, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp June 20, Online - Project Management Central (3.0) Application Administrative Training - Session 1 - Bamboo Solutions June 21, Online - Project Management Central (3.0) Application Administrative Training - Session 2 - Bamboo Solutions June 25-29, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Core Technologies - Mindsharp June 26-27, Arlington, Virginia – Introduction to SharePoint Foundation 2010 – SharePoint Solutions June 26-29, Arlington, Virginia – Introduction to SharePoint Server 2010 – SharePoint Solutions July 3, Online - Workflow Conductor Designer Training - Bamboo Solutions July 9-13, Online - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp July 10-13, Nashville, Tennessee – InfoPath 2010/SharePoint 2010 Workflow Deep Dive – SharePoint Solutions July 10-13, Online - SharePoint 2010 Power End User - Mindsharp July 13, Online - Bamboo Select - Bamboo Solutions July 16-20, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Advanced Developer - Mindsharp July 16-20, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Designer - Mindsharp July 17-18, Chicago, Illinois – Introduction to SharePoint Foundation 2010 – SharePoint Solutions July 17-20, Chicago, Illinois – Introduction to SharePoint Server 2010 – SharePoint Solutions July, Online - Project Management Central (3.0) Application Administrative Training - Session 2 - Bamboo Solutions July 19, Online - SharePoint Re-Design And User Adoption Seminar - Mindsharp July 23-27, Online - SharePoint 2010 Core Technologies - Mindsharp July 24-26, Dallas, Texas – Introduction to SharePoint 2010 for Server Administrators – SharePoint Solutions July 30-Aug 3, Online - SharePoint 2010 Power End User - Mindsharp July 30-Aug 3, Online - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp * Please contact Chris Dooley (chris.dooley@bamboosolutions.com) to be included in SharePoint Daily™. Have SharePoint Daily™ delivered to your email inbox every morning.

Bamboo Nation: SharePoint Migration Odyssey; Windows 8 Security Hole; Azure Rebranded

Wed, 09 May 2012 03:45:00 -0400

Since when is it OK to fire someone because they "Like" a political candidate on Facebook? - Dooley Top News StoriesSharePoint 2010: A Migration Odyssey (ZDNet)Last Summer, the University of Brighton embarked on an ambitious project to roll out SharePoint 2010 from scratch. Between them, 12 servers provide both a test and production environment that will eventually deliver personal file storage for the university's 4,000 staff; departmental storage areas for all schools, faculties and central admin departments; and a fully functional staff extranet. With eight years' experience in PHP/MySQL development and teaching staff the basics of web authorship, I got the job of deployment. What do we Know (AIIM)Last year at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, Andrew McAfee of MIT quoted Lew Platt, former CEO of HP, who once said “If HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times as profitable.” I included that in a blog entry as a challenge to SharePoint practitioners, and now that challenge has come full circle. We are building out a complex site to store information on a variety of subjects, and one of the challenges will be to somehow cut across the lists and libraries to discover what we know about ‘x’. Typical of the math courses you hated in high school, ‘x’ is unknown. Can Google Apps Unseat Microsoft Office and Exchange? (PCWorld)In an IT environment of MacBook laptops, Windows PCs, iPhones, iPads and Droid devices, why would any enterprise stick with Microsoft Outlook for email and collaboration? That very question prompted a 60-day pilot test at New England Biolabs, an Ipswich, Mass.-based molecular biology company. Given the growth of Macs and mobile BYOD technology at the company, as well as the need to collaborate with mobile users and international subsidiaries, the IT team decided it was time to seriously investigate Google Apps for Business as an alternative to Microsoft Outlook and Exchange Server. Microsoft Continues Rebranding, This Time It's Azure (CMSWire)Microsoft must be in a mood to rename things this month. First, the company re-branded its small and medium business advertising site and eliminated Windows Live branding. Now it’s moved on to Azure. Will any of these changes have a positive impact on revenue or just result in confused customers? Is the Windows 8 Security Hole Really a Big Deal? (ComputerWorld)A security researcher has found a potentially massive security hole in Windows 8 that would expose someone's contacts and other information from social networking services and email including Gmail, Facebook, Hotmail, LinkedIn, and Twitter, among others. It sounds serious, but there may be less to the security hole than meets the eye. Is Time Running Out for Windows Phone? (WindowsITPro)Despite what will no doubt be some strong gains by Nokia this quarter, the prognosis for Windows Phone isn't good: Microsoft’s mobile platform controls just 2 percent of the market for smartphones today, and even a best-case scenario won’t see it crack the 5 percent plateau before Windows Phone 8 ships late this year. Is time running out for Windows Phone? Around the BlogosphereSharePoint: Flip the Switch to Effectively Promote Change (EndUserSharePoint)I recently completed reading ‘Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard‘ by the brothers Chip and Dan Heath. As I was reading this fantastic book on change management, I couldn’t help but relate each point to my own experience with SharePoint. Each implementation, regardless if the organization is starting fresh or performing an upgrade, involves in some manner a shift in policies, procedures and corporate culture. Getting stakeholders and the project team to buy into this change hurdle sound feasible, but getting the entire company to see, think and act differently can seem intolerable. Kill SharePoint 2010 Mobile Interface (SharePoint Joel's SharePoint Land)I’ve always thought the word kill comes on a little strong, but at the same time… I think it gets the point across. I’ve been very big into mobile lately and SharePoint’s default mobile WAP interface is driving me crazy. About 5 months ago I wrote about some of my experiences: SharePoint For Mobile – Yes we can! Information Architecture Defined (SharePointEduTech)Consider this. Microsoft has sold over 125 million licenses of SharePoint. It is a multi-billion dollar business. SharePoint is a platform that everyone seems to have, many actually use and most don’t understand how to implement and manage properly. There is no platform more in need of a proper information architecture than SharePoint. But what exactly does that mean? What is an Information Architecture? SharePoint: Compression in IIS (ITPro)There’s a relatively obscure setting in IIS that can have a dramatic effect on the performance perceived by SharePoint users. By enabling IIS to compress the communication to the user, communication to the user can consume less bandwidth. The trade-off is with CPU usage to compress the messages. Note the setting is quite fine-grained, allowing you to find the optimal balance of bandwidth conversation against the available SharePoint farm WFE (Web Front End) CPU. Office 365 and Education (SP365)this blogpost I’ll try to cover why -in my opinion- Office 365 is a powerful gift to (Higher) education based upon my experiences as an IT manager within education the last 3 years. To Start with: One is the main purposes of an education organization is to make sure that they prepare their students for the life they enter when they stop being a student. There are many different opinions in how that can be done via technology. Around Bamboo NationReal-World Collaboration in Action with SharePoint Online & Office Web Apps! (I Love It When a Plan Comes Together) (The Bottom-Line PM)I recently had to step away from my test case - this blog project, which is a bit of a work-play thing for me - in order to actually do some real-world work. My company received an RFP from a major organization a week before the proposal was due. Because this was such a big project for a big organization, we couldn't rely on boilerplate proposals. So we had a week to put together a very comprehensive proposal from scratch. SharePoint Job Listings*Application/Web Designer/Developer with SharePoint Experience - Santa Clara, CAThis role will involve primarily front-end development work while collaborating with other team members on site design issues, creating highly usable interfaces while tackling complex problems of scale. It will require an understanding of the practical benefits and limitations of Web technologies (JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and related technologies like AJAX, JSON, and XML). Specifically this will be focused on application interface design and integration to our unique SharePoint portal. It will also require comprehensive knowledge of interface design principles and best practices for information architecture, content organization, user-centric design, and site navigation patterns. Our ideal candidates are excellent problem-solvers with experience building and shipping production-quality software to a large consumer audience, especially with an emphasis on user-centric design and development. SharePoint Designer - Boulder, COThis position reports to the Director of Operational & Strategic Support (OSS), Systems Engineering Solutions (SES) strategic business unit of Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. (BATC). SES provides professional technical services to defense, intelligence, and civil government organizations and industry partners. It is comprised of over 500 employees and geographically dispersed over the four U.S. time zones. Microsoft UpdatesImporting SharePoint 2010 Site Definitions in Visual Studio 2010 (MSDN)Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 provides a project type that enables you to import a site definition and add code. You can then deploy this site definition to the SharePoint Solutions Gallery and create new sites based on the site definition. SharePoint Events* May 9, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Central Webinar May 10, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Workflow Conductor Webinar May 11, Chase Village, Maryland - Best Practices for SharePoint Governance by AvePoint & Innovative-e May 12, Baltimore, Maryland - SharePoint Saturday May 14-16, Toronto, Ontario - SharePoint Summit May 16, Online - Capture, Leverage, and Archive Your Social Content with NewsGator and AvePoint May 16, Online - Troubleshooting Common Performance Problems in SharePoint 2010 May 17, Online (APAC Region) – Capture, Leverage, and Archive Your Social Content with NewsGator and AvePoint May 18, Online - Plotting a course for SharePoint in the Enterprise May 19, Johannesburg, South Africa - SharePoint Saturday May 19, Portland - SharePoint Saturday May 22, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Workflow Conductor Webinar May 23, Online - 5 Risky SharePoint Human Resource Temptations May 24, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Central Webinar May 24, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Time Tracking & Management Webinar May 26, Brisbane, Australia - SharePoint Saturday May 31, Birmingham, U.K. - Effective SharePoint Requirements with Serious Games June 2, St. Louis, Missouri - SharePoint Saturday June 2, Silicon Valley - SharePoint Saturday June 2, Atlanta, Georgia - SharePoint Saturday June 6, Online (APAC Region) – Why Social at Stockland, Why Right Now? June 9, Orlando, Florida - SharePoint Saturday June 21, Online - Executives Beware: 5 Risky SharePoint Temptations for Executives June 25-27, Denver, Colorado - SharePoint Fest June 30, Dayton, Ohio - SharePoint Saturday June 30, Adelaide, Australia - SharePoint Saturday September 25-27, Chicago, Illinois - SharePoint Fest SharePoint Training* May 11, Online - Bamboo Select Training - Bamboo Solutions May 14-18, San Antonio, Texas - SharePoint 2010 Administration Core Technologies - Mindsharp May 14-18, Online - SharePoint 2010 Administration Core Technologies - Mindsharp May 15-17, Nashville, Tennessee – Introduction to SharePoint 2010 for Server Administrators – SharePoint Solutions May 16, Online - Project Management Central (3.0) Application Administrative Training - Bamboo Solutions May 17, Online - Project Management Central End User Training - Bamboo Solutions May 17-18, Washington, D.C. - Delivering SharePoint Success Mentoring Workshop - Innovative-e May 21-25, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Administration Core Technologies - Mindsharp May 21-25, Online - SharePoint 2010 Administration Core Technologies - Mindsharp May 21-25, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint Foundation 2010 Developer - Mindsharp May 21-25, Online - SharePoint Foundation 2010 Developer - Mindsharp May 22-25, Chicago, Illinois – InfoPath 2010/SharePoint 2010 Workflow Deep Dive – SharePoint Solutions May 25, Online - Project Management Central End User Training - Bamboo Solutions May 30-31, Online - InfoPath 2010 Power End User - Mindsharp May 30-31, Nashville, Tennessee – Exploring SharePoint 2010 – New Features – SharePoint Solutions June 4-8, Calgary, Alberta, Canada - SharePoint 2010 Core Technologies - Mindsharp June 4-8, Washington, D.C. - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp June 5, Online - Workflow Conductor Designer Training - Bamboo Solutions June 5-6, Nashville, Tennessee – Introduction to SharePoint Foundation 2010 – SharePoint Solutions June 5-7, Arlington, Virginia – Introduction to SharePoint 2010 for Server Administrators – SharePoint Solutions June 5-8, Nashville, Tennessee – Introduction to SharePoint Server 2010 – SharePoint Solutions June 7, Huntsville, Alabama - SharePoint Re-Design And User Adoption Seminar - Mindsharp June 8, Online - Bamboo Select - Bamboo Solutions June 11-15, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Advanced Administrator - Mindsharp June 11-15, Calgary, Alberta, Canada - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp June 12-15, Dallas, Texas – InfoPath 2010/SharePoint 2010 Workflow Deep Dive – SharePoint Solutions June 18-21, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Power End User - Mindsharp June 18-22, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp June 20, Online - Project Management Central (3.0) Application Administrative Training - Session 1 - Bamboo Solutions June 21, Online - Project Management Central (3.0) Application Administrative Training - Session 2 - Bamboo Solutions June 25-29, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Core Technologies - Mindsharp June 26-27, Arlington, Virginia – Introduction to SharePoint Foundation 2010 – SharePoint Solutions June 26-29, Arlington, Virginia – Introduction to SharePoint Server 2010 – SharePoint Solutions July 3, Online - Workflow Conductor Designer Training - Bamboo Solutions July 9-13, Online - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp July 10-13, Nashville, Tennessee – InfoPath 2010/SharePoint 2010 Workflow Deep Dive – SharePoint Solutions July 10-13, Online - SharePoint 2010 Power End User - Mindsharp July 13, Online - Bamboo Select - Bamboo Solutions July 16-20, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Advanced Developer - Mindsharp July 16-20, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Designer - Mindsharp July 17-18, Chicago, Illinois – Introduction to SharePoint Foundation 2010 – SharePoint Solutions July 17-20, Chicago, Illinois – Introduction to SharePoint Server 2010 – SharePoint Solutions July, Online - Project Management Central (3.0) Application Administrative Training - Session 2 - Bamboo Solutions July 19, Online - SharePoint Re-Design And User Adoption Seminar - Mindsharp July 23-27, Online - SharePoint 2010 Core Technologies - Mindsharp July 24-26, Dallas, Texas – Introduction to SharePoint 2010 for Server Administrators – SharePoint Solutions July 30-Aug 3, Online - SharePoint 2010 Power End User - Mindsharp July 30-Aug 3, Online - SharePoint 2010 Foundation Developer - Mindsharp * Please contact Chris Dooley (chris.dooley@bamboosolutions.com) to be included in SharePoint Daily™. Have SharePoint Daily™ delivered to your email inbox every morning.

Things that Should be Easy: Join me at SharePoint Saturday, NYC for Creating SharePoint Custom Field Types with Visual Studio

Wed, 09 May 2012 01:00:00 -0400

I am excited to be presenting a session on Creating SharePoint Custom Field Types with Visual Studio at SharePoint Saturday New York, July 28, 2012. SharePoint has many customization options for the user interface and for the data model. SharePoint custom field types are unique in that they provide an integrated mechanism for customizing SharePoint user interface, data storage, data entry, data validation, and rendering. Best of all, these customizations stay with your data anywhere a List View Web Part or List View Form Page is used. Here are the topics I will cover in the presentation: Custom Field Types DefinedLearn what custom field types are and how they work. Business CasesImplementing custom field types is not trivial. What business reasons justify the effort? Custom Field Types and Alternate SharePoint ExtensibilityHow do custom field types compare to other forms of SharePoint extensibility like web parts and event receivers? What are the pros and cons using each extensibility option? Custom Field Types ImplementationWhat does it take to create a new custom field type? We will see all the components we need, including the CAML XML, the C# code, and the WSP.DDF file used for packaging and deployment. Demo: Code walkthrough and demo of a media player custom field typeThere’s nothing more exciting to users that seeing video on their portal site. We’ll create a custom field type that will let you turn your SharePoint site into a mini YouTube, well, almost :). SharePoint Saturday New York is at the Microsoft Manhattan office at 1290 Avenue of the AmericasNew York, NYJuly 28, 2012 See you there.

Waldek Mastykarz: Inconvenient Sandboxed Web Templates and Navigation

Wed, 09 May 2012 00:59:28 -0400

Web Templates are the new recommended approach for templating sites. Combined with Sandboxed Solutions they empower power users and offer them great flexibility and productivity. There is however one inconvenience with regard to how SharePoint Navigation Providers deal with Sandboxed Web Templates. Web Templates are the way to go Back in SharePoint 2007 we had two options for templating sites: we could either save sites as templates which resulted in unmaintainable STP files or create Site Definitions and deploy them using Solution Packages. In both scenario we were locked and unable to change the template. Even though Site Definitions were deployed using solutions, changing them after sites have been created off them was not allowed and creating another Site Definition was the only option. Unfortunately, since Site Templates didn’t support Publishing Sites, creating Site Definitions was the only option in SharePoint 2007 if you had to offer the publishing capabilities in your template. With the release of SharePoint 2010 Microsoft introduced Web Templates – a new, highly flexible concept for templating sites. Because there is no reference between the created site and the Web Template itself modifying Web Templates is not a problem. There is no restriction to the capabilities supported by Web Templates so you can use them with any kind of sites that you want. Additionally Web Templates can be deployed on both Farm and Site Collection level using a Farm or Sandboxed Solutions and that allows you to use Web Templates with SharePoint Online. And although Web Templates have some limitations, they are the recommended way of templating sites in SharePoint 2010. Sandboxed Web Templates Web Templates can be deployed on specific Site Collections only as opposite to the whole Farm and with that they can be deployed using Sandboxed Solutions. This offers great flexibility to IT-Pros, developers and power users. Sandboxed Solutions require virtually no maintenance from IT-Pros. Site Templates created by power users are saved as Sandboxed Solutions and with some effort they can be extended by developers with new functionality. Distributing Web Templates using Sandboxed Solutions allows you to truly benefit of the customization capabilities of the SharePoint 2010 platform and create business solutions that are usable both on-premise and on-line. Although there is no difference in building Web Templates for the Sandbox and Farm Solutions, there are some differences in how SharePoint provisions contents of Sandboxed Solutions. One of those difference impacts using Web Templates for templating sites. Inconvenient Sandboxed Web Templates and Navigation Imagine we had a Web Template distributed with a Sandboxed Solution. The Web Template is a template for a Publishing Site used for creating subsites on a Publishing Site Collection with anonymous access. As soon as you create a subsite off the Web Template what you will see is that the link to that particular site is automatically added to the navigation. This works as expected given we are authenticated and have access to pages that haven’t been published yet. Unfortunately if you access the same site as an anonymous user you will still be able to see the link to the newly created subsite that hasn’t been published yet! It’s not that hard to imagine that as soon as you click this link you will see a 404 error: after all the Welcome Page of that subsite hasn’t been published yet and therefore is not available for anonymous users. If you now go back to the newly created subsite and check in the Welcome Page as draft, the link to that subsite will disappear from the navigation for anonymous users – just as you would expect it to in the first place. This odd behavior has partly to do with the fact how Sandboxed Solutions provision files by default. Whenever you provision a file using a Module in a Sandboxed Solution that file will remain checked out and there is no version checked in at all. What’s surprising is how SharePoint Navigation Providers deal with that scenario. Instead of hiding the link to the website, the link is displayed in the navigation and if the content author isn’t careful enough, such “broken” links will appear to anonymous users. Sandboxed Web Templates and Navigation – better together Provisioning files as checked out without any version checked in is how Sandboxed Solution handle Modules by default. Unfortunately there is now way to change this behavior declaratively and with that there are two solutions that you can choose from. Teach, teach, teach One approach that you could choose for is to stick with the standard SharePoint 2010 behavior and educate content authors to always check in the Welcome Page after creating a subsite. This is useful not only to prevent broken links to be displayed in the navigation but also to allow other members of the content authoring team to edit the contents of the Welcome Page. The great benefit of this approach is that you stick with the standard approach and instead of altering it or introducing custom solutions you educate users about the issue and potential consequences. Check it in… automatically Another choice that you have is to add a Feature Receiver to the Feature responsible for provisioning the Welcome Page and have it automatically check in the Welcome Page as a draft. With that the Welcome Page remains invisible to anonymous/unprivileged users and no additional effort is required from the content authors. The only downside is that custom code is required and is something that cannot be created by power users themselves and would need to be maintained and tested in the future. As you can imagine both approaches have their pro’s and cons. It’s important to know that neither of them is better than the other and which one you choose depends a lot on your team and requirements. Summary Web Templates are the new recommended way for templating sites in SharePoint 2010. Unfortunately when used with Sandboxed Solutions, when you create a subsite off a Web Template, a broken link is added to the navigation for all users. This inconvenience can be solved by either manually checking in the Welcome Page of the subsite or using custom code and the choice for either approach should be made based on the requirements of the particular scenario.

SharePoint Joel's SharePoint Land: Kill SharePoint 2010 Mobile Interface

Tue, 08 May 2012 17:52:20 -0400

I’ve always thought the word kill comes on a little strong, but at the same time… I think it gets the point across. I’ve been very big into mobile lately and SharePoint’s default mobile WAP interface is driving me crazy. About 5 months ago I wrote about some of my experiences: SharePoint For Mobile – Yes we can! It’s also not the first time I’ve said “SharePoint Defaults have Faults.” I’ve found we are missing out on more valuable mobile experiences with SharePoint because the mobile interface is on by default in SharePoint 2010. Ironically there is a hidden feature to turn on mobile support, I say turn on because it is off by default. In SharePoint 2007 you could turn on the feature, now that feature is hidden, and oh by the way… it’s useless. Just ignore it. Essentially in SharePoint 2010 you need to work your way up the stack. There are essentially two ways to turn off the mobile browsing interface in SharePoint. It’s the most annoying interface. The experience is horrible for Intranets (no webparts), very sad for publishing sites (no content management), and not even decent at best at collaboration sites (no good info outside of lists). I have to even wonder if there’s someone in India that is appreciating it right now with their old school flip phone. People are NOT using WAP phones, those old text based phones to hit SharePoint anyway I now get 4% mobile traffic and less than 1% of that is WAP the strong majority is smart. They are using their Androids, iPhones, Windows Phone 7. Smart phones recently took over as the most popular in the world. I’m ready to declare victory over the old WAP phones and tell everyone to turn it off… You are losing people because there is NO easy way to browse to SharePoint by default on your phone without getting a bad experience. It requires the Administrator to turn off the WAP interface. TURN IT OFF Modify the web.config in the root of the web app Add three lines of code that set all browsers to not be redirected Does not allow for browsers to be handled individually File is on the server in C:InetpubwwwrootwssVirtualDirectoriesPORTbin folder of your SharePoint site, where PORT is the port of your site Add this section right before the close tag: Code to add: isMobileDevice=false TURN IT OFF Selectively by USER AGENT Redirect based on User Agent: compat.browser - This file lists all of the browser User Agent strings that it will redirect Changing a value from true to false for all of them will cause it to NOT redirect those browsers Allows for flexibility in switching some browsers back if needed Allows more browsers to be added in the future This may be hammered during any SP update File is commonly at C:inetpubwwwrootwssVirutalDirectories80App_Browserscompat.browser (Modify the path based on your webapp) Code to change (for each User Agent): Example of a few phones this was built for: Pocket Internet Explorer in Microsoft Windows Mobile (as in pre-Windows Phone) The Nocki WAP 2.0 browser (xHTML only) Motorola Mobile Information Browser 2.2 or later Operwave UP browser 6.2 or 7.0 Can I turn it off on one site? I don’t think so. If you come across the hidden feature exposed through STSADM and Powershell… that’s fine in SharePoint 2007, but I have not found success with it in 2010. I’ll list it here for someone to correct me if I’m wrong. Windows Powershell · Disable-SPFeature -Identity MobilityRedirect -Url http://yoursite STSADM · stsadm -o activatefeature -name MobilityRedirect -URL http://site While SharePoint for Mobile sounds like a bad experience, it doesn’t have to be. The default masterpage, and even those that are written should have mobile in mind. I end up using SharePoint rich with mobile on occasion, it’s not bad when an admin has turned off the horrible “mobile” WAP interface. One of these days I’m going to make a masterpage that’s designed for mobile phones. I’m making sure our internal masterpages are tested with mobile devices. Interest in that? Let me know. I’ve considered partnering with Heather Waterman or someone cool like that. All our internet facing stuff has had the mobile interface turned off, now after a meeting today we are turning it off on ALL our web apps… no exceptions. If you’re looking for a real rich experience you should check out a few of the product reviews recently I’ve done. Harmon.ie launched their product this week, and Colligo launched a couple of months ago. Both of them are pretty sweet. · Product Review: harmon.ie Mobile – SharePoint on the GO on your Terms! · Product Review: Colligo Briefcase - Secure SharePoint Sync on your Terms

Joel Oleson's SharePoint Land: Kill SharePoint 2010 Mobile Interface

Tue, 08 May 2012 17:52:20 -0400

Bamboo Nation: This Week in Bamboo (April 29th, 2012 - May 5th, 2012)

Tue, 08 May 2012 11:12:00 -0400

At Bamboo this week, we released the following patches: Alert Plus, List Rollup Web Part, Wiki Publisher, and Lookup Selector Column. We added some new features on latest releases of Alert Plus for SharePoint 2007 version and Wiki Publisher for both SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 versions. Please check out the new features and review the list below for more details about the patches of this week. HW05 Alert Plus for SharePoint 2007 (3.2.74) New Features: Two new tokens are available in the Mail Format tab: o {ItemURL} returns just the item url. Can be used in tag for example Link to itemo {SiteURL} returns just the site url. Can be used in tag for example Link to site Bug Fixes: Alerts fail to send on expanded recurring events. Alerts fail to send when recipient is set to "Lookup an Email Address in the Alert List" and the value of the selected lookup column is a SharePoint Group instead of a User. We need an alternative to showing the big, long hyperlink for the "SiteLink" variable in an email message No new Known Issues and Limitations HW24 List Rollup Web Part for SharePoint 2007 (5.0.154) Bug Fixes: When sorting or grouping resulting data produced by List Rollup Classic Edition Web Part displays the error message “Unable to display this web part. To troubleshoot the problem...". When filtering lists of type Calendar using CAML Query the optional parameter fails to return any items in the resulting aggregated views. New Limitations: Users experience slower performance when viewing aggregated data if recurring events are expanded. HW51 Wiki Publisher for SharePoint 2007 (1.0.66) and SharePoint 2010 (1.0.65) New Features: Added the options to include wiki page name in the header and export date and/or page number in the footer of single page exports. Wiki Publisher now packaged Bamboo Web License Manager Version 2.0.10.0. Bug Fixes: When exporting multiple pages, the list of "Available Wiki Pages" is sorted by ID not alphabetically. Content alignment is not correct, causing content to be chopped off on the right side of the PDF. Anonymous users prompted for login when exporting to PDF. Resource file "Bamboo.SPWiki.en-US.resx" missing from the solution causing the error "Failed to read resource file..." to be listed in the SharePoint logs. Unable to configure the Picture Library for importing Word documents using Wiki Publisher on sites using French language pack. New Limitations: Importing Word Documents: Images displayed in the wrong position. For example if the image is displayed in the right corner within the Word document but after importing into a wiki page, it is in the left corner. If the document contains multiple images, the orders of the images are reversed when imported into a wiki page. If the document contains a table and the content of the table includes other formatting, such as: Lists (number/bullet), Bold/Italic/Underline font style or heading style, resulting wiki format is incorrect. Tables: In some cases, if a table width is beyond a certain length, content can be cut off. HW41AB Lookup Selector Column for SharePoint 2007 (1.3.56) and SharePoint 2010 (2.3.53) Bug Fixes: If the Source List contains more than 20 records, the values displayed in Lookup Selector column are the record ID, not the selected Display Column. No new Known Issues or Limitations

Things that Should be Easy: Boston Area SharePoint Users Group May 9, 2012 Meeting

Tue, 08 May 2012 08:56:00 -0400

REGISTERRegister for the next meeting. It's FREE, but space is limited. PRESENTER The presenter for our next meeting is Donal Conlon, of Jornata. He will be presenting "Implementing Forms Based Authentication." SESSION ABSTRACT There are many reasons to not use Forms Based Authentication and many reasons to use it. This session talks about the do’s and don’ts of FBA, planning for authentication, what your options are and goes through a live demo of configuring it successfully. ABOUT DONAL Donal Conlon is a principal consultant at Jornata LLC, a Boston-based SharePoint consulting firm. He has over 16 years experience designing and developing solutions using Microsoft technologies. Donal has been working with SharePoint for over 9 years and is a contributing author of Essential SharePoint 2010. ABOUT BOSTON AREA SHAREPOINT USERS GROUP The Boston Area SharePoint Users Group (BASPUG) was founded to bring together like minds to network and share their experiences, triumphs, and tribulations around Microsoft SharePoint, to provide a community platform for Boston area SharePoint users, administrators, developers, architects, of all experience levels, even brand new to SharePoint, to share their knowledge with the community. We meet on the 2nd Wednesday of every month at either the Microsoft New England Research and Development Center in Cambridge, MA, or at the Microsoft office in Waltham on Jones Road. MEETING SPONSOR - K2 Process-driven applications — fast. K2® offers three software products to help you increase business efficiency and simplify work. K2's visual tools allow people of various technical and non-technical backgrounds to create applications that automate processes and streamline operations. And when something in the business changes, modifying the applications to keep up is easy. K2 applications can be set up to manage simple business processes — such as document approval or inventory tracking — and they can be set up to pull together processes, people, services, information and systems into a single application that helps drive business. Then, what's been built can be used like building blocks to assemble new applications. Because K2 tools are built on Microsoft technology and because K2 users actually complete work in the Microsoft programs they already know — like SharePoint and Visual Studio — little training is required and user buy-in is quick. In fact, K2 provides more Microsoft integration points than any other software product in the space. We have a range of products to meet the needs of organizations with unique business challenges, technical resources and budgets; because, in software, one size does not fit all. www.k2.com SUSTENANCE Food and beverages will be provided at the event. RAFFLE PRIZES We will be handing out raffle tickets at the BASPUG meetings. Black Blade Associates will be raffling of a license, valued at $2000, for their SharePoint Zip product. Lightning Tools will be raffling off a license for one of their products - the winner may choose! CubisOne will be raffling off a license for their SharePoint Power Pack iChat product, valued at $1000. We will also have books, T-Shirts, and more! LOCATION We will be meeting at the Microsoft Waltham office, located at 201 Jones Road 6th Floor, Waltham, MA, US. LINKEDIN Join our group on LinkedIn today to connect with the rest of the BASPUG members and spread the word! FACEBOOK We are also on Facebook! http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Boston-Area-SharePoint-User-Group/113652405354617 TWITTER Follow news about the Boston Area SharePoint Users Group on twitter by following us @BASPUG, and by using the hashtag #BASPUG. WEB Visit the Boston Area SharePoint Users Group website at http://www.bostonsharepointug.org ORGANIZERS Event meetings are organized by Geoff Varosky of Jornata, Eugene Rosenfeld of Black Blade Associates, Talbott Crowell of Third Millennium, and Dan Diachenko of Baufest.

Bamboo Nation: Real-World Collaboration in Action with SharePoint Online & Office Web Apps! (I Love It When a Plan Comes Together)

Tue, 08 May 2012 05:30:00 -0400

I recently had to step away from my test case - this blog project, which is a bit of a work-play thing for me - in order to actually do some real-world work. My company received an RFP from a major organization a week before the proposal was due. Because this was such a big project for a big organization, we couldn't rely on boilerplate proposals. So we had a week to put together a very comprehensive proposal from scratch. Pre-SharePoint, we'd have been emailing revisions of the document back and forth, and version control would have been tricky at best and a total mess at worst, at a time when we couldn't afford anything but a streamlined authoring process. We took it one step further and used SharePoint Online, the Office 365 SharePoint offering, which puts everything on the cloud and allows for real-time collaborating and authoring by multiple persons simultaneously. Office 365 officially launched last summer, and we, being the eager-beaver early adopters that we are, immediately created an Office 365 project site to help us corral some documentation pulled together by many hands for a SharePoint Saturday conference we were helping to host and organize. At the time, Office 365 wasn't quite yet ready for prime time - a lot of people who needed to access the project site weren't able to get in, and we fell back on the old nasty habits of files flying back and forth via email instead of being put in a central spot where all pertinent folks could access all the files. This time, however, Office 365 performed admirably and helped us do the near-impossible and build a large proposal from scratch in a week. We put the document up on SharePoint Online, and up to four people could make changes to the document at once. We could see who else was in the document, which sections they were working on, and, with a refresh, we could see the changes each author had made. Everything was in real-time, and there was no lag between tweaking this or that section and having that new and improved version of the document available to all the team members working on the proposal. I had read the whitepaper we did for Microsoft about using Office 365 for collaboration, and even written a small piece showcasing a video of the co-authoring process, but watching a video of it is in no way nearly as cool as seeing it in action on a piece of work that matters to you. Seeing it come together flawlessly and work exactly as it should work was... it was like watching magic happen and not knowing how it happened, but appreciating the trick as a feat deserving nothing less than utter wonderment. It was that "I love it when a plan comes together" moment than Hannibal from the A-Team referenced every episode. (There were fewer explosions involved in the coming together of our plan, though. More's the pity. That would have been a great way to spice up a workday.) We discovered some quirks in the process, however, and knowing about them might serve you well should you decide to make your own co-authoring plan come together: Only four people at a time can work on a document. I'm not sure if others can view it, so you can have, say, four co-authors and two people looking at it on a read-only basis, for instance. But no matter how many pairs of eyes can look at the document at a time, only four pairs of hands can be working on it. At first, the four-person limit seems, well, limiting, but then, how many hands do you really want on your document at a time, anyway? Too many cooks spoil the broth, and too many co-authors ruin the proposal. Another user's changes will not be visible to you until they save. Likewise, nobody else will be able to see what you've done until you save your changes. Save often when co-authoring. I just got in the habit of saving every time I made a tweak. We found in a couple of instances that the document would kind of lock if one person tried to work on the same section another person had just finished with. Again, saving is the key. Whomever last made changes to that section must save it not only to make their changes visible to other users, but also to make that section editable by other users. You can either edit documents in your browser or open the document in Word, Excel, or OneNote. (We were using Word.) Office 365 doesn't play tremendously well with 64-bit browsers, and locating your 32-bit version of IE may be a bit of a trick, if you're running a 64-bit OS. Hopefully, Office 365 will soon work seamlessly with 64-bit browsers, but until then, fire up your 32-bit IE and use that for your co-authoring efforts. Dux also pointed me to a page discussing accessing data-sheet view with 64-bit browsers. While the issues I had used Word, and I think the data-sheet view probably refers to Excel, there is good knowledge in that link.

SharePoint Dan: FEDSPUG – 3 May 2012

Tue, 08 May 2012 04:13:45 -0400

After a quick jaunt up to New York City, Scott Hoag and I had the fortunate opportunity to present at the Federal SharePoint Users Group. We shared insights and information on the topic of architectural design and process failures when moving to SharePoint 2010. If you’ve been following us, we’ve been presenting quite a bit on the topic of Migration Pitfalls, this time around though from a different angle. Overall, the presentation went well and we would like to extend our thanks once more to our hosts for allowing us the privilege to present. If you missed the meeting and are interested in looking through slides, it can be done so below. Or if you’re like me, and you want a copy of the PowerPoint deck, you can find a link below. Architectural Design and Process Failures – Moving to SharePoint 2010 View more PowerPoint from Dan Usher PowerPoint 2010 Format Download Here is no comments yet by the time your rss reader get this, Do you want to be the first commentor? Hurry up

Bamboo Nation: Governance & Strategy Key to SharePoint Deployment; Office 365 for Project Collaboration; Microsoft Anti-iPad Strategy

Tue, 08 May 2012 03:53:00 -0400

??? - Dooley Top News StoriesGartner: Governance and Strategy Key to SharePoint Deployments (RedmondMag)Gartner recently offered some tips on deploying Microsoft SharePoint, which requires lots of team effort and coordination, according to the analyst and consulting firm. Organizations will need to have their governance and strategy plans locked down before proceeding with a SharePoint deployment, according to Mark R. Gilbert, research vice president and lead analyst on SharePoint at Gartner. He gave a Webinar talk on the topic of "Making Microsoft SharePoint Deliver" on April 18. Harmon.ie Brings SharePoint Collaboration To iPad (InformationWeek)Harmon.ie wants to turn Microsoft SharePoint into a collaboration tool you can hold in your hands. Best known for its social collaboration SharePoint plugin for Outlook, which makes a feed of SharePoint updates available as a sidebar to email collaboration, Harmon.ie now wants to do something similar for the iPad. "It's definitely the same concept, but adapted to the platform," said Yaacov Cohen, CEO of Harmon.ie. Video Blog: Leveraging Office 365 for Project Collaboration - Create Visual Reports with Dashboard (CMSWire)Dashboards are a pretty hot topic these days in online applications. Dashboards let you place frequently accessed information all on one single page and lend themselves particularly well to placing graphical info about your project in one place where it affords your team and senior stakeholders the ability to grab visual info quickly. Windows 8 Privacy Worry Overblown, says Microsoft Analyst (CSO)It sounds like a privacy hole big enough for a truckload of your personal information to be leaked to the world, but experts say a recently disclosed Windows 8 privacy issue is really a non-issue. Microsoft's Windows 8, which connects its users with networks including Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Hotmail, Gmail, Exchange leaves a "lingering cache of automatically collected contacts [that] are stored unencrypted on a Windows 8 client," InfoWorld's Woody Leonhard reports this week. Upcoming Windows Phone Developer Conference Reveals Apollo Info (WPCentral)Back in January, we brought you the news of the first independent Windows Phone developer conference not sponsored by Microsoft called WP DevCon occurring October 22-24th in Burlingame, CA. The listing and descriptions of the classes being offered during the conference have been released and interestingly enough, there's a whole class on Windows Phone Apollo development. Seeing as the classes are in late October, perhaps we shouldn't be shocked that Windows Phone 8 will be discussed at length during such an event. But what makes it interesting is some of the details revealed. Why Microsoft's Anti-iPad Strategy will Backfire (InfoWorld)When Steve Jobs came back to run Apple in summer 1997, he famously told Apple's Mac fans "we need to get away from this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose." He then announced a $150 million investment in the then-struggling Apple by Microsoft -- with Bill Gates joining the Macworld Expo announcement via satellite -- and a commitment by Microsoft to keep Office for Mac on the market and at parity with the Windows version. That investment went a long way toward calming investor fears and set the stage for Jobs and team to reinvent and reinvigorate the Mac, then create the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad over the next decade. Around the BlogosphereSharePoint: Advantages and Disadvantages of the Client Object Model (SharePointDevWiki)I have implemented the Client Object Model (COM) extensively in Silverlight as well as in ECMAScript. I've failed many times in accomplishing certain tasks and succeeded many times too. You may love or hate COM but you cannot ignore it if you are a SharePoint 2010 developer. So, I’m going to list the advantages and disadvantages of COM that I have faced while implementing it. Let's look at the advantages first. Netcast 117 - No SQL for Old SharePoint (Todd Klindt's SharePoint Admin Blog )Tonight's netcast is chock full of meaty SharePointy goodness. I talk about a tool that can be used to migrate SQL Server Reporting Services. I also tell everyone about the April CU and remind folks to be careful. I break the news to SharePoint 2007 admins about SQL 2012 support, or lack thereof. Plus even more good SharePoint information. SharePoint: Learn to Brand from the Start (Part 2) (EndUserSharePoint)Small Beginnings: I set myself on a quest to change the Global Navigation or Top Links Bar of my SharePoint 2010 Team Site. That is the horizontal bar at the top of your SharePoint where new sites you create typically go. Like any good SharePoint branding beginner, I started by looking online for help and searched popular books about branding. The first book I read started talking about Master Pages, Page Layouts and other concepts, this is way too complex – I need something for a beginner. Online documentation was the same with articles like “Edit your Master Page to add a Megadropdown menu with jquery”. Troubleshooting SharePoint’s Page Output Caching (todd-carter.com)As a follow up to my previous post “When Page Output Caching Does Not Output” I have recorded a video which actually walks you through the steps and issues which I documented in this previous post. So for those of you whom don’t like to read all that much you may watch this video and/or refer back to my previous post on the same subject. Around Bamboo NationSHARE 2012 Keynote - Sarah Haase's 'It Doesn't Take a Miracle: Driving Successful User Adoption' (The Bamboo Team Blog)Sarah Haase, Collaboration & Search Engineer at Best Buy, presented the final keynote (and the final case study) of SHARE last Wednesday afternoon. In concluding what had already been a fantastic three days of information-packed sessions, networking events, parties, and more, Sarah's presentation ensured that SHARE --which will return to Atlanta next April-- would finish strong. Sarah said at the outset of her presentation that the core message she sought to share was how to transfer one's passion for SharePoint to others in an organization. Based on her own experiences at Best Buy, Sarah's core thesis was that if you can influence some, they will in turn influence others. SharePoint Job Listings*Support Technician - Reston, VABamboo Solutions is the leading provider of technologies that augment the Microsoft SharePoint platform. We offer more than 70 products providing a broad range of enhanced capabilities for the SharePoint environment. To date, over 8,000 organizations world-wide have chosen to enhance their SharePoint deployment by taking advantage of the functionality and quality that Bamboo products provide. This is a full-time, junior position, reporting to the Manager of Customer Support, with the opportunity to advance as the company grows. Director - Microsoft Alliance - Denver, CO or Redmond/Seattle, WANewsGator (Microsoft’s 2011 U.S. Partner of the Year) is seeking a driven and results-oriented individual to help us grow and expand our highly successful Microsoft partnership. The Director - Microsoft Alliance will manage NewsGator’s global Microsoft partnership with responsibility for strategic direction, co-marketing efforts, field engagement, product marketing activities, and partner program requirements. The Director will report to the VP-Microsoft Alliance and assist with maintaining NewsGator’s ‘depth-managed’ Microsoft partnership status while working to expand the depth and breadth of the partnership across Microsoft’s international subsidiaries. Microsoft UpdatesImporting SharePoint 2010 Site Definitions in Visual Studio 2010 (MSDN)Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 provides a project type that enables you to import a site definition and add code. You can then deploy this site definition to the SharePoint Solutions Gallery and create new sites based on the site definition. SharePoint Events* May 8, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Central Webinar May 9, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Central Webinar May 10, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Workflow Conductor Webinar May 12, Baltimore, Maryland - SharePoint Saturday May 14-16, Toronto, Ontario - SharePoint Summit May 16, Online - Capture, Leverage, and Archive Your Social Content with NewsGator and AvePoint May 17, Online (APAC Region) – Capture, Leverage, and Archive Your Social Content with NewsGator and AvePoint May 19, Johannesburg, South Africa - SharePoint Saturday May 19, Portland - SharePoint Saturday May 22, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Workflow Conductor Webinar May 23, Online - 5 Risky SharePoint Human Resource Temptations May 24, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Central Webinar May 24, Online - Bamboo SharePoint Time Tracking & Management Webinar May 26, Brisbane, Australia - SharePoint Saturday June 2, St. Louis, Missouri - SharePoint Saturday June 2, Silicon Valley - SharePoint Saturday June 2, Atlanta, Georgia - SharePoint Saturday June 6, Online (APAC Region) – Why Social at Stockland, Why Right Now? June 9, Orlando, Florida - SharePoint Saturday June 21, Online - Executives Beware: 5 Risky SharePoint Temptations for Executives June 25-27, Denver, Colorado - SharePoint Fest June 30, Dayton, Ohio - SharePoint Saturday June 30, Adelaide, Australia - SharePoint Saturday September 25-27, Chicago, Illinois - SharePoint Fest SharePoint Training* May 11, Online - Bamboo Select Training - Bamboo Solutions May 14-18, San Antonio, Texas - SharePoint 2010 Administration Core Technologies - Mindsharp May 14-18, Online - SharePoint 2010 Administration Core Technologies - Mindsharp May 15-17, Nashville, Tennessee – Introduction to SharePoint 2010 for Server Administrators – SharePoint Solutions May 16, Online - Project Management Central (3.0) Application Administrative Training - Bamboo Solutions May 17, Online - Project Management Central End User Training - Bamboo Solutions May 17-18, Washington, D.C. - Delivering SharePoint Success Mentoring Workshop - Innovative-e May 21-25, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint 2010 Administration Core Technologies - Mindsharp May 21-25, Online - SharePoint 2010 Administration Core Technologies - Mindsharp May 21-25, Minneapolis, Minnesota - SharePoint Foundation 2010 Developer - Mindsharp May 21-25, Online - SharePoint Foundation 2010 Developer - Mindsharp May 22-25, Chicago, Illinois – InfoPath 2010/SharePoint 2010 Workflow Deep Dive – SharePoint Solutions May 30-31, Online - InfoPath 2010 Power End User - Mindsharp May 30-31, Nashville, Tennessee – Exploring SharePoint 2010 – New Features – SharePoint Solutions June 5-6, Nashville, Tennessee – Introduction to SharePoint Foundation 2010 – SharePoint Solutions June 5-7, Arlington, Virginia – Introduction to SharePoint 2010 for Server Administrators – SharePoint Solutions June 5-8, Nashville, Tennessee – Introduction to SharePoint Server 2010 – SharePoint Solutions June 12-15, Dallas, Texas – InfoPath 2010/SharePoint 2010 Workflow Deep Dive – SharePoint Solutions June 26-27, Arlington, Virginia – Introduction to SharePoint Foundation 2010 – SharePoint Solutions June 26-29, Arlington, Virginia – Introduction to SharePoint Server 2010 – SharePoint Solutions July 10-13, Nashville, Tennessee – InfoPath 2010/SharePoint 2010 Workflow Deep Dive – SharePoint Solutions July 17-18, Chicago, Illinois – Introduction to SharePoint Foundation 2010 – SharePoint Solutions July 17-20, Chicago, Illinois – Introduction to SharePoint Server 2010 – SharePoint Solutions July 24-26, Dallas, Texas – Introduction to SharePoint 2010 for Server Administrators – SharePoint Solutions * Please contact Chris Dooley (chris.dooley@bamboosolutions.com) to be included in SharePoint Daily™. 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SBC DotNet Weblog: Cronyism comes to the SharePoint Community

Tue, 08 May 2012 01:00:52 -0400

Last year, for SharePoint Saturday New York 2011 #SPSNYC , I had submitted 3 proposed developer sessions and all three were rejected. Apparently, there were 7 SharePoint governance sessions in a track that crowded out the developers but four of the governance sessions were presented by speakers from the event sponsors themselves (sort of buying your way into a voluntary community event and being paid for it). This year a developer session was submitted by someone and was accepted - But what the above agenda appears to be is a blatant plagiarism from a recent posting at the Microsoft MSDN site - I am not going to speculate whether he was in a hurry or doesn’t know the subject but he is a friend of the organizers' of the SharePoint Saturday New York event. Also in this line-up: two sessions by two separate speakers with exceedingly similar content (I presume both friends of the organizers). Lastly, someone has been given two presentations sessions – one on Governance and ironically, the other on Community. He also happens to be employed by one of the event sponsor. For this SharePoint Saturday New York event #SPSNYC , there were over 250 sessions submitted by many and only 60 were accepted – the friend gets two. SharePoint Saturday New York is not representative of the SharePoint community in NY - there are two regular SharePoint groups: the NY SharePoint Developers Group and the NY SharePoint Users Group and none of these local organizations are represented in the administration of the SharePoint Saturday NYC event. I submitted six proposed sessions this year and all were rejected - had I believed in demagoguery and cronyism, I would have only submitted one.

The Mossman: SharePoint Saturday Orlando Registrations are Open

Mon, 07 May 2012 07:00:00 -0400

We have opened up registration for the first ever SharePoint Saturday in Orlando, Saturday, June 9th, 2012. The event is free but seats are going quickly… we have given out about half of them already! If you are interested in attending please fill out our Eventbrite form so that we can make sure there is a spot for you! Here is the registration link: And here is the event website: http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/orlando/default.aspx Location: ITT Technical Institute Suite 100 8301 Southpark Cir Orlando, FL 32819 Google Map

SharePoint Joel's SharePoint Land: Product Review: harmon.ie Mobile – SharePoint on the GO on your Terms!

Mon, 07 May 2012 06:40:04 -0400

Overview The irony continues to amaze me. SharePoint is practically everywhere, but one of its biggest challenges continues to be accessing SharePoint on the go. The experience takes a huge leap backwards whenever you leave your desktop and pull out your mobile device. No longer. I recently visited the people at harmon.ie and was very impressed with their brand new mobile offering, hitting the streets for the first time. harmon.ie Mobile delivers a full-featured document collaboration and social experience on-the-go that's consistent with harmon.ie for SharePoint on the desktop. It's definitely worth a look. Figure 1: harmon.ie Mobile Startup Screen on the iPad Understanding Challenges Today In the world we live in, it's not uncommon to find yourself rushing out the door with one or more unfinished documents you need during your trip. You don't bring your heavy laptop but face urgent deadlines. What to do? Most people resort to asking people back in the office to "email the latest changes." And that's when the chaos begins. As soon as you receive the email, you're hit with all the classic version control issues that SharePoint is designed to solve. These issues really cause a lot of problems. The document is not checked out, other people may be making changes simultaneously and there is little to no collaboration between you and your team. So what happens? All sorts of errors and omissions creep into the documents you're traveling hundreds or thousands of miles to present. Then, when you're next online, you upload your version of the documents and BAM! The documents get overwritten and the version history gets blasted. That's the crux of the problem caused by a lack of reviews and lack of collaboration. As well, projects are constantly changing while you're out of the office. If you're not available to weigh in on document changes, you may cause huge delays or miss deadlines, which is not good for business. So how can you better equip people to collaborate while on the go? Imagine having all your team documents and colleagues in a unified view on your iPad or iPhone with read-write document access and the ability to share links, see contacts' presence and contact info and get real-time document and status updates. Now we're talking… My Experience with harmon.ie Mobile I recently installed harmon.ie on my iPad and pointed to http://www.sharepointjoel.com. Adding a site is really basic. After getting past that initial authentication, which I believe is always the biggest hurdle with any mobile app connecting to SharePoint, I was happy to see all my documents. I navigated into my folders and browsed around. By clicking on a document, I could see the version history and last modified info in clear view; check it out and open it either with a default viewer or document editor; check it back in on SharePoint and email the document or link to a colleague. Figure 2: harmon.ie Mobile – Documents on the go Trying to connect to my Intranet, I had a little trouble with our customized single sign on solution, so I started digging. I found that harmon.ie supports a broad range of authentication mechanisms in harmon.ie Mobile. For example: harmon.ie Mobile supports Windows Authentication, Form-Based Authentication, Custom Web login Forms, Client Certificates, legacy Microsoft ISA Server and Microsoft Forefront Authentication or UAG, including the regular basic over SSL with HTTPS and self-signed SSL certificates. I contacted harmon.ie support, and they're preparing a fix. In the meantime, I pointed to harmon.ie's sample site, available out-of-the-box, to check out all the collaboration and social features. I quickly discovered that my favorite harmon.ie feature, rich document updates, is also available on the iPad. Awesome! This really this is the killer feature, I believe. I can get real time document updates, without having to call or email anyone. So there's no more pestering colleagues to let me know when they've updated a document, and having to wait and wait and wait for that email update. Instead, I can easily see what changes a person makes and when. It's important to note this is something that is not in-the-box in SharePoint. This is special sauce. Good stuff from harmon.ie. I really like the people focus. Figure 3: harmon.ie Mobile's killer feature: real-time document and status updates I also love having access to everyone on SharePoint, and when I want to contact them, say to ask a question, I simply click on the contact name and I'm staring at the rich profile details from their SharePoint profiles! Now that's a surprise. I have people search right on my device, and it's a simple step to click on a number to save that info in my contacts. Figure 4: Access colleagues' profiles and save contact info in personal contacts It's very comforting to know I've got all my team's contact info, including contacts outside my team working on the project. I can also search by skills, competencies, projects, and all the other goodies stored in the profile. These features give you that "connected enterprise feel" while on-the-go. So what's the downside? Tongue-in-cheek, harmon.ie claims they make SharePoint so accessible that they've created a public health risk, as mobile users everywhere begin "SharePointing" while walking. Check out the footage of the mass hysteria at www.DontSharePointWhileWalking.com. It's quite entertaining and an off-beat way to engage users about SharePoint on-the-go. Figure 5: Pandemonium caused by SharePointing while walking Seriously, though there's really very little downside to speak of. I think the biggest thing people will find a bit surprising is that harmon.ie is not a document sync tool. It is primarily for online use. You can obviously work with the documents you saved or emailed that are offline, but harmon.ie is not an offline sync client app. So there's no offline cache to worry about if a device is lost. Some businesses have spent a lot of time and effort investing in offline sync apps and document encryption, but with harmon.ie, you've got nothing stored, so the risk is minimized. The other potential downside may be in the roadmap. There's currently a desktop version for Outlook and an iOS version. So if you're a Windows Phone user or Droid fan, sorry. harmon.ie says these are in the works, but it's worthwhile to let them know you care. Conclusion harmon.ie has gone after a key scenario that users are looking for… that unified user experience across the desktop and mobile. In their efforts to address the needs of users to get at their documents, versions, updates, and the people writing the documents, harmon.ie has done a great job at connecting people in an otherwise disconnected scenario. The out-of-the-box mobile experience on the iPad and iPhone is awful. There's no arguing that. harmon.ie Mobile has differentiated itself by focusing on the people and quick access to documents with the ability to open it across many apps. That will make your users smile. The additional social capabilities that harmon.ie brings to the table are engaging, and the first attempt at nailing down the various authentication hurdles is a very noble one. I recommend people try the free read-only version first to ensure that you can get at your sites before downloading the $19.99 version. As well, I know they'd love to hear from you. They are easy to contact on twitter at @teamharmonie or through their site http://harmon.ie. This product review is an unbiased review and a paid service by Joel Oleson. How did I do?

Joel Oleson's SharePoint Land: Product Review: harmon.ie Mobile – SharePoint on the GO on your Terms!

Mon, 07 May 2012 06:40:04 -0400