Late Night with Nate Baum

Future Proofing SharePoint Customizations

2013-05-15T06:56:24Z

I had a question come in from a customer who is currently on SharePoint 2010 running on-premises. Their question was “how can we future-proof the customizations we make in SharePoint today?” I thought this question was worth a post.

So the answer is of course, you can never completely future proof your customizations but here are a few key considerations that will help smooth the transition….

Understand what SharePoint can do out of the box

Too often I see customers that have built customizations or solutions that don’t utilize out-of-box functionality. I know this is easier said than done, because SharePoint packs a lot of features and functionality in to the product – but the general idea here is that any time a business problem or solution need is raised, the first step is to start with out-of-the-box capabilities. How far can you go with out-of-box? What can’t it do? Taking this approach could help to minimize customizations and in the long run, grease the skids for a smoother migration.

Resource: My SharePoint Saturday talk from a few years ago – 5 worse mistakes to avoid with SP development (skip ahead to slide 20 or so)

Understand Deprecated features list in 2013

There are a handful of features, sites, web parts, etc. that are either no longer part of SharePoint 2013, or we’ve publicly stated that we are no longer investing in it. We’ve had a few customers look at rolling out capabilities such as document workspaces and we always advice against doing this in SharePoint 2010 given that the feature is deprecated. This is true even in cases where features are still supported in SharePoint 2013. (most deprecated features will upgrade and are supported in SharePoint 2013 – but no guarantees for SharePoint v. Next.

Resource: Changes from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013 - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff607742.aspx#section4 or http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-help/discontinued-features-and-modified-functionality-in-microsoft-sharepoint-2013-preview-HA102892827.aspx#_Toc339867839

Sandbox Solutions and Apps for SharePoint

When SharePoint 2010 and Office 365 (“Wave 14”) launched we introduced Sandbox solutions as a way to develop customizations and run those in Office 365/SharePoint Online. If you want to develop customizations in SharePoint, any compiled code needs to be a sandbox solution to work in the cloud. Full-trust code will not work in Office 365 multi-tenant, and there is no foreseeable plan to allow for this to happen. In SharePoint 2013 we introduced a new application development model – Apps for SharePoint. This is an entirely new dev methodology and is really the go-forward strategy around customizations in SharePoint. Apps for SharePoint won’t work with SharePoint 2010 – this needs to be understood. So if you are running SharePoint 2010 and need to customize, first try to build as a sandbox solution. This is supported in SP2010 and SP 2013, cloud and on-premises. If you are running SharePoint 2013 and you want to future-proof your design, then build a SharePoint App, using the new development model. This works in SharePoint 2013 on-prem and cloud, and this is the go-forward strategy for SharePoint customizations.

Resource: Sandbox solutions - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee721992(v=office.14).aspx and http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff798382.aspx

Resource: video – code for the sandbox - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/SP2010DevTrainingCourse_CodeForTheSandBox

Resource: SharePoint Apps - http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/office/apps/fp179930(v=office.15)

Vet out 3^rd Party Solutions

Some customers I work with have done an assessment of SharePoint 2013. They love what they see but their biggest blocker to migrating in the near-term is that they have bought 3^rd party add-on solutions, and those solutions aren’t yet SharePoint 2013-ready. Microsoft does have a partner ISV program and we do our best to inform and educate all our partners on our SharePoint roadmap, and we have hundreds of great partners that are SharePoint 2013 ready – both for on-premises only solutions (full trust code) and also leveraging our new SharePoint App Store and the new app dev model. But the fact remains that there are still a number of partners who have not updated to SharePoint 2013 yet. And for some, it isn’t on their near-term roadmap. My advice for those considering a SharePoint 3^rd party add-on is to go through a validation process. Who builds it? How long have they worked with SharePoint? Are they SharePoint 2013 ready? Does it work in Office 365? What is their product roadmap? Is there any other feedback or reviews that you can track down? The more you know, the greater chance for no surprises come upgrade time or migration to the cloud.

The other consideration here is what is new in SharePoint 2013 (or just around with the corner with Yammer integration and new apps). How will the 3^rd party add-on work in SharePoint 2013? Does SharePoint 2013 introduce new functionality that will make the 3^rd party add-on obsolete or less critical? You may still opt to go with the add-on, but then you at least know it is a short-term investment and you can plan accordingly.

Resource: Apps for SharePoint store (SP 2013 only apps) - http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/store/apps-for-sharepoint-FX102804987.aspx

Resource: SharePoint Reviews – independent website - http://www.sharepointreviews.com/product-directory

Package Customizations and follow a methodology

When you do determine that customization is necessary, be sure to follow the guidance and methodology for custom dev. Document why the customization is needed, the business problem it fixes, and the department or team that is going to leverage the customization. This too often gets thrown by the wayside and then I’ll have meetings with customers that know they have customizations, but they don’t really have a good sense about why they customized. Many times the developers have since moved on to different jobs or left the company. Teams change and processes evolve. A clearly documented list of customizations can be a huge help come upgrade time – even if the “documentation” is just a simple custom list that you create in SharePoint. And along those same lines, customizations should be packaged up as wsp files, and go through the same methodology as other custom code. Unfortunately, I’ve seen too many times where a customization was deployed by dropping a few .dlls in the GAC and updating the web.config file manually. This can be a major challenge come upgrade time. Often these manual customizations won’t show up in upgrade reports, and only surface during upgrade tests and validation of functionality post-upgrade.

Resource: SharePoint 2010 test and deployment process - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sp2010devtrainingcourse_testinganddeployment

Bucket customizations and document

Finally, I think it is important to bucket your customizations, or group them together based on complexity. “SharePoint Customization” or “SharePoint Development” has a wide range of options. There are very simple customizations. For example a bit of javascript embedded on a page to change the behavior. Or branding customizations, where all the customization files are html, javascript, image assets, and css and stored in libraries within the site. And then mid-range customizations such as event receivers, custom workflow, or a custom web part. And then there are the more complex customizations involving server-side full-trust code and modifications to an entire web application, service application, or even central admin integrations. Not all customizations are created equal and I think it is important to consider this.

Resource: SharePoint 2010 Design Considerations - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/SP2010DevTrainingCourse_DesignConsiderations.aspx

Final Thoughts

As I mentioned above, there is no way to fully future-proof customizations, but I think the steps above go a long way in easing the upgrade or migration process. I’d also like to add that in my opinion the SharePoint product team has done a great job of reducing the upgrade and migration risk with SharePoint 2013. There is still work to do, but the ability to upgrade a web application to the SharePoint 2013 platform but keep individual site collections in 2010 mode for a period of time goes a long way in easing the migration efforts. It doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing over a weekend. SharePoint administrators now have the ability to upgrade one-step at a time, and move sites over one-at-a-time as soon as training, help desk, and communication planning are all in place. And of course, those that have already moved to Office 365 and SharePoint Online, we will upgrade the service regularly and ensure that customizations made to SharePoint in this environment continue to work, and provide proper communication if customization support does change down the line.

Resource: SharePoint 2013 Upgrade diagrams - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263199(v=office.15)#upgrade

SharePoint Conference 2011–It’s a Wrap!

2011-10-11T14:15:00Z

It’s hard to get a grasp of just how far reaching and impactful SharePoint is these days, but an event like SharePoint Conference helps those of us who use and work with the product every day to visualize how absolutely HUGE SharePoint really is. During the keynote it was announced that if SharePoint were it’s own standalone company, it would be among the top 50 software companies in the world. With a sellout crowd of over 7,500 attendees and a massive exhibit hall with a lot of energy, you can see SharePoint’s impact firsthand. Here are some other fast stats from the keynote about SharePoint if you like to look at the numbers:

Over 125 million licenses sold to over 65,000 customers; 62 million SP 2010 licenses
80% of Fortune 500 companies have SharePoint
67% of our enterprise customers have deployed SharePoint for everyone
SharePoint 2010 is rated #1 in satisfaction, awareness, market share, and likelihood to recommend
Over 1,100 books written about SharePoint
80% of Fortune 500 companies use SharePoint internally. About a third of those also use SharePoint for external collab, or public-facing web-sites.

So what was the focus of SharePoint Conference 2011? From my perspective it was all about best practices, sharing customer and partner stories, and learning new ways to get even more value out of the SharePoint platform. SPC11 surfaced a lot of moments where attendees said, “I didn’t know SharePoint could do that.” Even coming in with years of experience on SharePoint I learned a lot at the conference, from hearing how our customers use SharePoint, to seeing up-and-coming technologies like Project Crescent, as well as several different partner products built on top of SharePoint.

The main topics I attended focused on search (mostly FAST, but some basic SharePoint search), business intelligence, and partner and customer solutions and stories.

Nate’s Unofficial SharePoint Conference Awards

Top Shenanigans

There are some very passionate SharePoint folks out there. From twitter, to Freeze Mobs, to screaming monkeys, and many, many SharePints and other Share-name-your-event. At any rate, I got a kick out of the Freeze Mob that was organized. Video here.

Most Creative Booth

There were a ton of unique giveaways and booths at the conference exhibit halls and parties. But my favorite just in terms of booth creativity was LaserFiche. They had a booth offering free massages – all you had to do was put on headphones and learn about their products and solutions on a screen under the massage chair.

Favorite shirt/giveaway

Lots of great shirts were handed out at the exhibition hall from all of our partners. My personal favorite was BA-insight’s ‘Eat, Drink, SharePoint’ shirt. Love it!

And the fun announcement at the end of the keynote, was also welcome news to all the attendees. SharePoint Conference 2012 is planned for November 2012 in Las Vegas. There is already a lot of excitement around this event.

Additional Info

Watch the Keynote - http://www.mssharepointconference.com/pages/keynote.aspx

Keynote Recap - http://redmondmag.com/articles/2011/10/03/microsoft-investing-in-sharepoint.aspx

Keynote Live Blog - http://www.sptechblog.com/2011/10/greetings-from-sharepoint-conference.html

Main SharePoint Conference site - http://www.mssharepointconference.com

Good top ten recap - http://www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=480

Windows Phone 7–Getting Started and Key Apps

2011-06-13T05:35:43Z

I thought with the recent availability of Windows Phone 7 on Verizon and with all four major carriers in the US offering a Windows Phone 7 device I’m sure to get more than a few family, friends, and colleagues that want to know the best way to setup and use Windows Phones. No, I am not a Windows Phone expert, but I do spend a lot of time using my phone. I love it. And I work with several very smart folks across the world who DO make and sell the phone so I’ve learned a lot from these sources.

My wife received the HTC Trophy on Verizon so I thought I’d document the steps I took in setting her phone up and installing my favorite applications (and hopefully her favorite applications). I’ve been using a Samsung Focus for a few months now so I’m not starting fresh in terms of learning how to set it all up.

Getting Started

From the box arriving via FedEx to making/receiving calls you need to go through the usual process. Charge the battery, turn it on and follow a short series of menu settings. Then you need to activate and program the phone by calling in to Verizon. It doesn’t take too long to get here.

Setting up your Live ID

The next setup step is to specify a Windows Live ID. You aren’t required to at this point, but it’s a good idea to do this. And it’s important to think through this. A few of the main points related to this are:

1. If you want to use an existing Zune and/or Xbox Live you must use the same associated Live ID. And if you use both services the Live ID must be the same for both

If you want your phone to sync to your Xbox Live account, you need to use the associated Live ID. And if you want to use Zune Pass you need to use the same account on your phone as you do for Zune Pass. So if you subscribe to both these services it needs to be the same Live ID that you use for both. There is a ton written on the web about this already. Note that you CAN have multiple hotmail accounts (or other types of email accounts like Exchange/Outlook, gmail, etc.) on a single phone. If you don’t use Zune or Xbox Live already, no worries – you are OK.

2. Don’t use the same Live ID on two different Windows Phones

It’s not recommended to share Live IDs across two different phones. There are several reasons why this doesn’t work well. Uploading to SkyDrive can cause conflicts and there are going to be enhancements in the next release (Mango) that could be impacted by sharing a Live ID. In short, don’t do it. Despite confusing language in the Zune interface, my advice is to not share IDs across multiple phones. That’s what I keep hearing from true experts in this space.

What Next? Connect to a PC

Probably the best next step is to connect your phone to a PC. If you have a PC where you have most of your music, videos, pictures, etc. this is the one to use. You’ll need to download the Zune software, which doesn’t take too long (http://www.zune.net). We already had this so it was a very simple process to connect, recognize the device, and then configure phone settings (name the phone, select sync settings, etc.) Then I moved over some music, video, and several hundred pictures to bring the picture hub and music+video hub (Zune) to life. If you use iTunes you can run a program to remove the rights management on your files. Once you do this Zune will find the content AND it can be played through Zune and synced to your phone.

One thing I also found in setting up the Zune account (again, using the same Live ID as I did on the phone) is that for my wife’s Verizon, you need to enter credit card info in your Zune account profile to buy applications. Hmm, for my Samsung Focus on AT&T if I buy an app it just gets added to my monthly bill. I’m not sure why there is that difference but it’s not a big deal.

Now sync those accounts!

The phone home screen is up, you can make and receive calls and text. Now what? Well next I’d finish setting up the Windows Live ID. The calendar and contacts from this account are synced but you may want to sync email as well. Go into Settings –> System and update the account.

Next go in and add accounts. Continue in the email and account section. Setup sync with another hotmail account, Yahoo, gmail, Outlook/Exchange, or POP3. There are options on what to sync with each (calendar, contacts, email, feeds, etc.) Facebook!!!! Like 500 million other people my wife uses Facebook quite a bit. Adding your Facebook account really brings the people and pictures hubs to life. I added another hotmail account for my wife (we use two) and also her Facebook account. Now we’re cooking. Pictures coming over from Facebook. Her contacts have never looked so good.

Next step is to review your contacts. Here is where you could spend some time. In some cases your contacts that you pull in from various accounts might be out of date. Or you had contacts on your old phone but need to import those in. I’m not going to write here on how you import these in (there are several tools and several ways to do this) but I will say that one of the greatest aspects of Windows Phone is how it pulls together info on a single person from several places. It could be that you have contacts in hotmail, gmail, facebook, etc. and Windows Phone 7 does a great job of bringing all of these together in a single contact card. There are other really great settings in the people hub and calendar that allow you to manage people – and more features on their way too. But from a setup perspective, reviewing the people in your list and making sure they are linked properly is one of the setup steps you’ll need to plan for, as you would with any other phone. The benefit of Windows phone is that now all those contacts you have that are on Facebook now have pictures and other info.

Office Hub

Windows Phone 7 has six distinct “hubs.” More info here. I now have the People, Pictures, Music + Videos, and Marketplace Hubs setup. What’s left is the Games Hub and Office Hub. To be honest, I don’t know how much my wife will use the Office Hub for Word, Excel, PowerPoint. She just doesn’t use these apps that often, or need these on the go. Maybe she’ll sync a handful of documents that she can have handy. What I expect she will really like is the OneNote integration. I use that every day, whenever I’m away from my computer. The basic idea is that Windows Phone will use the Windows Live ID you first put in as the account used when syncing OneNote notes to the cloud. Really this just means the OneNote notes are stored securely on a Windows Live computer on a service called SkyDrive on the Internet, and you can access this info through any browser or a PC or iPad or phone.

I have my work to do list, my personal to do list, errands list, and a few other notes that I use regularly – and now these are always on my phone too. Perfect! The only setting here is to set to sync automatically for OneNote. I also have an Office 365 account and sync content to/from SharePoint but for my wife and many people they won’t use this initially.

Games

The heart of the Windows Phone gaming experience is the Xbox Live Games Hub.

One of the first Xbox Live downloads I grabbed was Xbox LIVE Extras. It’s a free app that let’s you setup an Xbox Live account, build an avatar and add/remove friends. It’s easy to get going. So once I did this for my wife – she was off and running. I also went in to Settings –> Applications and in the games section turned ‘Connect to Xbox LIVE’ to On. Speaking of Xbox LIVE – there are basically two different Xbox LIVE options – Silver and Gold. Silver is free – and this is what I set my wife up with. Gold is an annual fee and great for anyone with an Xbox. We have a Gold Subscription and this is what I use on my phone. If at some point my wife wanted to sync her achievements on her phone and on Xbox our next step would be an Xbox Family Pack, but not quite yet. Options on Xbox subscriptions are listed here.

There are a ton of games – both official Xbox Live games and other games. The difference between these two categories is that when you play an “Xbox” official game your achievements, etc. will be logged with your Xbox Live account – so your Xbox Live friends can see your games, achievements, rank, etc. all in one place and compare their own achievements. Nothing wrong with a little healthy competition.

You can also pin your favorite games to the main Live Tiles screen.

Applications

Yes, we have great apps. Lots of great apps. In fact, we just hit the 20,000 app milestone – on pace with the iPhone app growth when it launched and ahead of Android growth. Here’s a list of my favorites. A lot of times I’ll try before I buy so I can figure out if the app or game is interesting enough and I’ll use it. Or if my kids will play it.

This area more than any other changes by the day/week – but as of today – here’s what I put on my wife’s phone and/or my phone:

Basics

Facebook – it’s integrated in the phone, but nice to use as a separate app at times too
Netflix – when I explained what you could do with this app my wife got really excited
Weather Channel (or WeatherBug) – sometimes locks for my wife but great overall
Birdsong - awesome Twitter app – but it costs money
Amazon Kindle
StockAlert
Wikipedia
Bible
YouTube

Sports

ESPN – awesome, awesome app – one of my favorites
CBC Hockey – for my hockey fix

Shopping

Amazon.com
Home Depot
Best Price Calculator – written by one of my friends in West Michigan
eBay
Groupon

Games

Wordament – I think this is one of my favorite games. Lots of fun and very addictive. Check it out.
Doodle Jump – I’m addicted
Flight Control – my wife’s addicted
Fruit Ninja – my daughter’s addicted
Hydro Thunder GO – my son’s addicted
ilomilo – also addicted
Enigmo
Tetris
3D Mahjong
Bubble Game
Pipes
Solitaire
Tic Tac Toe Laser
Full House Poker

News

USA Today
MSN Video

Other Stuff

DirecTV
Fandango
IMDb
Last.fm
GasBuddy
White Yellow Pages
WPCentral
Tag Reader
QR Reader
History Here – History Channel app - perfect app for my mom (who loves historical facts)
Helium Voice – my kids just really crack up with this one

Business Apps and Geekier Stuff

Adobe Reader – you never know when someone will send you
Conf Call Dialer – easily dial-in to those conference calls with passcodes while on the road
TWiT – Techie News and podcasts
TouchStudio – declarative programming for phones!
Pocket C# – C# on the phone, compiled in Azure! (I warned you about the geeky stuff)

We have some Microsoft internal apps that I use often as well.

What’s Next?

I love my phone now. Couldn’t be happier. So I hate to focus on “what’s next.” But I’m very excited about what’s coming soon with the next release known as “Mango”. 500 new features will be released, enhancing the overall smartphone experience around communications, apps and the Internet. The “Mango” release will be available for free to Windows Phone 7 customers and is scheduled to ship on new phones beginning this fall. Here are a few of my favorite features coming – a quick top 10 list:

Multitasking. Quickly switch between apps in use and allow apps to run in the background, helping to preserve battery life and performance.
Local Scout. Provides hyper-local search results and recommends nearby restaurants, shopping and activities in an easy-to-use guide.
Bing on Windows Phone. More ways to search the Web, including Bing Vision, Music Search and Voice so it’s easy to discover and decide.
Improved Live Tiles. Get real-time information from apps without having to open them. Live Tiles can be more dynamic and hold more information.
Deeper social network integration. Twitter and LinkedIn feeds are now integrated into contact cards, and “Mango” includes built-in Facebook check-ins and new face detection software that makes it easier to quickly tag photos and post to the Web.
Groups. Group contacts into personalized Live Tiles to see the latest status updates right from the Start Screen and quickly send a text, email or IM to the whole group.
Threads. Switch between text, Facebook chat and Windows Live Messenger within the same conversation.
Internet Explorer 9. A browser based on the powerful Internet Explorer 9 and including support for HTML5 and full hardware acceleration. "Windows Phone 7 Mango's Internet Explorer 9 clobbers Android and iOS (current iterations) in HTML 5 speed tests.” -Business Insider
App Connect. By connecting apps to search results and deepening their integration with Windows Phone Hubs, including Music and Video and Pictures, “Mango” allows apps to be surfaced when and where they make sense.
Quick Cards. When searching for a product, movie, event or place, see a quick summary of relevant information, including related apps.

Where will we go from here? It’s hard to say. Some predict Windows Phone 7 passing the iPhone market share by 2015 – especially given the Microsoft partnership with Nokia. Hard to say. What I can say is that feedback from those who have a Windows Phone is generally very positive. The carriers and (more importantly) salespeople at the carriers still seem to be learning about the new platform – but there is a lot of excitement and Microsoft is clearly in it for the long haul.

Competition is great for consumers. We’ve seen some Android apps try to copy the Windows Phone look and feel. Many of the new Apple iOS 5 features ‘borrowed’ from features already in or announced on Windows Phone 7 or Android. And yes, we’ve done that as well. Should be interesting to see how each platform evolves.

More Info

Main Getting Started Windows Phone 7 site - http://www.microsoft.com/windowsphone/en-us/howto/wp7/get-started.aspx
Discover the Features - http://www.microsoft.com/windowsphone/en-us/features/default.aspx
Verizon – HTC Trophy - http://www.microsoft.com/windowsphone/en-us/buy/7/phones.aspx#detail=1685
Mango (upcoming Fall release) - http://www.microsoft.com/windowsphone/en-us/features/whats-next.aspx
Windows Phone 7 Images - http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/windowsphone/imagegallery.aspx

And in closing - a few fun videos too:

Official Windows Phone 7 commercial

Fan made Windows Phone 7 ad

Another fan-made Windows Phone 7 video

Microsoft SharePoint Successes Featured in Automotive News

2010-07-21T05:58:00Z

I was in a customer meeting yesterday and a common question came up: “what other companies are using SharePoint in my industry?” Given that it was an auto customer it reminded me of an article in the Automotive News a few months ago and I thought it was worth highlighting here. Frankly, I’m surprised I haven’t highlighted it sooner. For all the press that has come out around the launch of SharePoint 2010, looking at what’s possible with the new release, it’s worth looking back at what our customers have already done with SharePoint 2007.

I love that four important Microsoft customers in Michigan have publicly endorsed SharePoint as their collaboration software of choice to drive productivity improvements across the business. I work with all four of these customers so it’s great to hear their stories and successes. This is one of the most rewarding aspects of my job.

Here are a few article highlights, borrowing some text from our industry team director:

GM – Around the globe engineers use SharePoint to collaborate on the development of the Chevrolet Cruz compact sedan
Ford –SharePoint has been uses to develop new cars and trucks, including the new Ford Focus compact sedan
BorgWarner – Sharing supplier quality scorecards, manuals and other information
Federal Mogul – Consolidate information from all over the organization on a single platform

A link to the article: http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100412/OEM06/304129989

We were also fortunate to have folks from both Borg Warner and Ford at the SharePoint Saturday event in Ann Arbor, MI back in March presenting on their SharePoint success stories as well as their plans with SharePoint 2010.

Enjoy!

Nate

SharePoint 2010 Governance Resources

2010-07-08T19:18:52Z

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I’ve had several customers ask me recently for SharePoint 2010 governance information. I consider this a very good sign. The message is finally getting out that a governance plan is absolutely essential to any SharePoint deployment. Especially as SharePoint has grown significantly in capabilities over the past two releases. This wasn’t always emphasized in the past with SharePoint, and poor governance has certainly led to several chaotic SharePoint deployments.

I fully expect the number of SharePoint 2010 governance content to explode in the next few months, which could make this post quickly out-of-date. But since I’ve had several customers ask me for this content in the past week, I thought a post was necessary. First, a quick look at what I mean when I refer to governance. I follow the definition used by The Burton Group: “governance uses people, process, technology, and process to define a service, resolve ambiguity, and mitigate conflict within an organization.” This is close, but not exactly, to the definition out on our TechNet site: “Governance is the set of policies, roles, responsibilities, and processes that guide, direct, and control how an organization's business divisions and IT teams cooperate to achieve business goals.” Close enough.

So with this in mind, what are the best SharePoint 2010 governance resources today? Here are my top three:

1. TechNet SharePoint 2010 Governance Site.

http ://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff598584.aspx

In my view, the best place to get started is the SharePoint 2010 Governance Site. This site provides a great overview of SharePoint governance, a deeper look at SharePoint 2010 governance features (focusing on the technology aspect of governance), a deeper look at sandbox solutions which is a big new feature area for SharePoint 2010, and finally a book excerpt focused on SharePoint 2010 governance. Plenty of information to get you started.

2. SharePoint 2007 Governance Resource Center

http ://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepointserver/bb507202.aspx

We don’t have a SharePoint 2010 governance resource center yet. But going back to the definition of governance, technology is only one aspect of the plan. Along this line of thinking a lot of the content found in the SharePoint 2007 governance resource center still applies to SharePoint 2010.

3. SharePoint Governance – 10 Steps to a Successful Deployment

This presentation/article created by Joel Oleson, a well-known SharePoint guru, is based on SharePoint 2007 but even with the new release it is incredibly relevant. Sure the containment hierarchy might be drawn differently with the introduction of service applications, but the key points remain the same. Governance at the center of your deployment planning is key. Here’s the top 10 list in article format as well as in slide format.

SharePoint Magazine article: http://sharepointmagazine.net/technical/administration/avoid-newbie-mistakes-10-steps-to-successful-sharepoint-deployments

PowerPoint slides: http://www.slideshare.net/joeloleson/share-point-governance-10-steps-to-successful-deployment-by-joel-oleson-best-of-sharepoint-conference-chicago

More to Come

As I said up above, I expect to see much more to come on this topic. Specifically on the new features and areas of SharePoint. For example, how do you create a governance plan on Visio Services? How about Access Services? PowerPivot? I’ve already reviewed several internal SharePoint 2010 MSIT showcase governance presentations that will hopefully find their way out to the main MSIT Showcase site for SharePoint soon. These decks highlight how we do SharePoint governance at Microsoft. There are already a few SharePoint 2010 related articles and videos on the showcase site. Stay tuned.

Closing Thoughts

Now more than ever customers need to look at SharePoint differently. There are so many new features, capabilities, and options in SharePoint 2010. Organizations can not afford to deploy SharePoint without a plan, specifically a governance plan. Just look at all the out-of-the-box service applications. Each service application requires planning. And every organization is different in terms of what’s important to add value to their business. One size definitely does not fit all.

So my #1 recommendation in terms of governance is to view SharePoint as a platform that enables I.T. to deliver solutions that add value to the organization. Each solution is enabled through SharePoint services, or service applications. Don’t try to do everything all at once. Pick a few significant pain points within your organization (lack of…. team collaboration, enterprise search, document management, social, easy-to-use web publishing, etc.) and define the services within SharePoint 2010 to deliver a well-governed solution. At the end of the day it’s not exactly rocket science. :-)

Good luck!

Microsoft Productivity Hub 2010 – Coming Soon to a download center near you

2010-06-27T15:03:00Z

One of the common questions I heard as a consultant when SharePoint 2007 launched was “how can we train our users?” Companies want a simple, inexpensive way to provide basic training, feedback, and build momentum with their launch of SharePoint or Office deployment. Companies realized that this would help drive adoption of both Office and SharePoint and ensure that users were getting the most out of their investment.

Microsoft released a SharePoint Learning Kit that was SCORM compliant but it didn’t seem to fit in well with existing Learning Management Systems (LMS) and wasn’t as simple to implement or customize. And customers can buy an off-the-shelf product, but the majority would rather create something internal in my experience, they just needed help getting started.

Enter the Productivity Hub. The 2007 version of the hub has been available for download for over a year, and several customers had it running before then. What is the Productivity Hub? Taken from the existing 2007 download center “the Hub is a SharePoint Server 2007 site collection that serves as a learning community and is fully customizable.” What gets my customers excited is that the hub is:

Built on SharePoint
Uses almost entirely out-of-the-box features
Can be easily extended, customized, tweaked, branded
Is easy to get setup and rolled out
Incorporates social networking elements and pushes the concept of an internal user group

In short, it’s a quick win! Even in cases where customers have an existing LMS, the hub can add tremendous value because it is less formal and promotes social elements. The 2007 Productivity Hub literally saved the day at one of my customers. They needed a way to build buzz and offer basic training but hadn’t implemented a training plan. It was two weeks before go live. The Productivity Hub was rolled out in their test environment and then in production. Instant training. Instant win.

Enter the 2010 release of SharePoint and Office. The Microsoft team responsible for the hub has been hard at work implementing a new version built on SharePoint 2010. What is the 2010 Productivity Hub? Taken from the hub install itself:

“The Microsoft Productivity Hub 2010 is a customizable, on-premise training site for the Microsoft Office 2010, based on Microsoft SharePoint 2010. The Hub can help improve information worker productivity by giving you the answers you need quickly. The site delivers an engaging user experience by offering rich, task-based training content, how-to videos, learning roadmaps, forums, and more.

By incorporating rich Silverlight applications, relevant product documentation, and using native SharePoint features like dataviews, the Productivity Hub solution illustrates just a few of the many capabilities of SharePoint 2010. Additionally, the site can be customized to reflect your company's branding or other unique training requirements.”

So the 2010 version has the same basic objectives as 2007, but with some new features and branding including Silverlight controls and a built-in quiz feature. It also takes advantage of many of the new SharePoint 2010 features like ratings. A picture is worth a thousand words, so here’s a screenshot of the main page:

UPDATE 6/30/2010: You can now download it here: http://bit.ly/msph2010dl

Installation

So now that you understand WHAT it is, let me talk for a bit about what it takes to get installed. Obviously since this is a SharePoint 2010 site collection you need SharePoint 2010 installed. The first step is to figure out where to install the hub. It needs to be it’s own site collection, so it could be a managed path in an existing web app or a completely separate web app. One word of caution (and this is called out in the install doc): do not specify an existing site collection, it will blow it away. And the PowerShell install script will now prompt you first (the 2007 hub didn’t, and I lost a site collection on my dev box as a result).

Once you decide where it should go, you are ready to install. There are really three basic steps: unzip/prep, install, configure search

Prep work: Permissions and unpackaging

If you are hoping to install the default content packs you need be sure to follow the specific folder structure guidance in the install document. There are three packages to unzip and then I’d recommending carefully moving folders around to fit the screenshot in the install doc.

The other bit of work you need to do is to ensure the account you’re using has the proper permissions. Guidance in the install doc is very clear and simple.

Installation

The installation is really just a simple PowerShell script that should be run from the SharePoint PowerShell command window with the site collection URL as a parameter. A few screenshots of the experience:

That’s it! At this point the Productivity Hub site is up and running. It will look exactly like the screenshot I included above. The final step in the install process is crawling the content to ensure content is available for search.

Search Configuration

Again, the install documentation does a great job of how to crawl the content with SharePoint search. However, in the case of my demo environment I have FAST search configured instead. If you are using SharePoint search follow the install doc. With FAST search, see the process below. If you aren’t sure how search is setup in the farm, check out how the service applications are associated to the various web applications in your environment.

If you click on this image you’ll see that for http://intranet.contoso.com FASTQuery is associated, and not SharePoint Search. I also ensured this service app was started on the farm:

To crawl content with FAST you need to go to the FASTContent service application. Once you go there the general process for starting a full crawl is nearly identical to the steps with SharePoint search. Click the image below to see my results after a full crawl. Note that I added other content besides the hub to account for the 6,358 items crawled. Still, the hub does add well over 1,000 documents and videos.

Installation is complete!

Configuring the Hub

Now that the hub is up and running let’s take a look at configuring permissions. There are four pre-built SharePoint groups that determine which menu options the end users see when they login. More details in the install document. My recommendation is to start identifying users and add to the site in various groups. Hopefully this is a test environment so you’ll be able to play around and see the hub experience with users in each of the four SharePoint groups.

Once you have put a few users in these groups my next recommendation would be to check out the configuration guidance under the Site Admin Help menu option on the top. There are a number of short articles describing administrative tasks. For example, if you add a user to the Coaches SharePoint permission group, they still aren’t visible on the coaches page. An additional list form needs to be filled out to make that happen.

One word of caution as you configure the hub. Be sure you understand all the aspects of the hub before making significant changes. There are a number of lists and libraries in the hub and if you start making major changes to (or deleting) these lists without a full understanding of the impact you’ll likely have problems. And if you can setup in a training environment with snapshots this is a great way to test your changes.

If you log-in as a coach you’ll see that a few tabs are gone from the top. The SA Benefits and Site Admin Help menu options are only available to administrators. However, coaches will see a Coach Help menu choice and again this is a great place to understand common questions coaches might have (and even what a “coach” is in the hub). And a quick word on the coaches model. In my experience it works best to recognize the coaches within your organization. In other words, employees won’t want to be coaches if they perceive that the leadership is not behind this. And finding a creative way to reward coaches (a simple prize or drawing every month) could go a long way in gaining momentum.

A Deeper Look

Now let’s take a deeper look at some of the hub functionality. In the first screenshot at the top of this post I’m logged in as Eric Gruber, who happens to be a member of the site (end user). You’ll notice that Eric can only see Productivity Hub and Hub Help menus on the top, due to security settings. As an end user, Hub Help will answer a lot of the basic questions. And keep in mind that this is easily extensible.

On the left navigation users have several options. At any time users can jump directly to a specific product page.

Products page (after an item was tagged as a favorite)

Get it Done flips the help content on another pivot, common themes that end users are interested in. Content is targeted based on the theme selected. The four themes are manage, market, collaborate, and organize.

The Coaches menu choice allows you to find a coach by product, and view additional details about them (typical availability, etc.)

The Videos page contains a Silverlight gallery. Users can scroll through and watch a how-to video.

Forums are a great to get community involvement and gain momentum. One example of a customer who did this successfully with SharePoint 2007 is Borg Warner. From the Borg Warner case study:

“The company also created a site called ICE Tools that includes training documents, announcements about new features, how-to videos for specific user tasks, and a discussion board where users can post and respond to questions, problems, and issues that they have encountered. Each time a user posts a question, the system alerts 30 to 40 administrators across the company, who then provide answers when they have experience to share.”

A search center isn’t part of the productivity hub site, but could easily be added. In my case, I had an existing FAST search center. Here is a look at hub results in FAST (note exact count navigators, doc thumbnails, and PowerPoint previews).

A few more screenshots of Productivity Hub capabilities…

Adding featured content to your favorites

Here’s a product (SharePoint Workspace) screenshot with content in the quiz, forums, and coaches section.

Quiz example. Note the link to the Ribbon Hero option.

What if Silverlight isn’t on desktops within the organization? The two Silverlight pages (main page and video) have a basic experience. An example of the main page below.

And one final look at the main page with top rated content.

OK, whew! There’s a lot to look at. Hopefully this gives you an in-depth look at the Productivity Hub. And again, one big benefit is that you can customize and extend. A customization guide is included in the install with more details.

I’ll post an update link once it is available (SOON!). Stay tuned!

Pictures, Pictures Everywhere

2010-06-16T19:07:55Z

As I’ve been demo’ing SharePoint 2010, Outlook 2010, and Exchange 2010 a few recurring questions have come up related to pictures and the new social aspects of Outlook and SharePoint.

The first is how do the pictures in SharePoint and Outlooktie together?

The second is where are these pictures stored?

And the third is how do we reconcile the typical high-res digital images users might add to their My Site with the pictures thumbnails you see in Outlook?

I just got a few of these same questions again when I spoke at the 2010 launch event in Detroit a few weeks ago so I decided to take some time to dig in and understand how things are working from the backend. This post focuses on describing how this works together at a high-level and in turn answering the questions above.

Backend Architecture

The first is to understand what is really happening on the backend. What products are involved? And how do they talk to each other? To boil it down, there are really three server products involved in enabling pictures across e-mail, unified communications/IM/presence, and SharePoint. The three products are:

Active Directory (Windows Server)
Exchange
SharePoint Server 2010

Let’s break these out into two groups. First let’s look at AD and Exchange. Exchange and OCS fully rely on AD as the data source, so that’s the first place to look. In AD, there is a property called Picture (ldapDisplayName is thumbnailPhoto). This is used by Exchange 2010 (and from a client side Outlook 2010) to show pictures to users. This attribute is limited to 10K, or about a 96x96 photo. If a user has this attribute populated, then the picture will show up in Outlook 2010.

Here is a great post by the Exchange team that goes into more details with pictures. Incredibly helpful: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2010/03/10/454223.aspx

There are several options for populating the attribute. The post above has one option with PowerShell. Here’s another great post with a similar approach: http://blogs.technet.com/b/ilvancri/archive/2009/11/17/upload-picture-in-outlook-2010-using-the-exchange-management-shell-exchange-2010.aspx There are tools for sale, such as this AD Photos (I haven’t used this, just for the record). The best option to use depends on the organization and the set of technologies they have in place (keep reading).

OK, what about SharePoint 2010? Well, photos aren’t a new thing with SharePoint 2010. It’s been a part of My Sites since 2003. The common scenario with SharePoint is that a user updates his profile and uploads a new photo. This could be high-res picture from a digital camera. SharePoint 2010 will actually take the uploaded photo and resize into three different sizes: 144x144, 96x96, and 32x32. Here is a great post on this process.

http://www.learninggateway.net/blogs/ajp/archive/2010/03/25/sharepoint-2010-where-do-my-user-profile-photos-go.aspx

So when I uploaded a photo of myself in my test environment (50 KB) SharePoint created three separate images – 4K, 3K, and 1K in size.

View of the user photos picture library, with picture size and file size:

OK, so now that we understand how it works in AD/Exchange/Outlook and SharePoint, how do we tie these together? Obviously organizations could have Exchange/AD/Outlook without SharePoint and vice versa. And this works just fine. But if you have both, then you are almost certainly going to want to integrate the two. And since Outlook/Exchange does not have an easy way to allow users to update their picture and SharePoint does, the common scenario that most customers want is to allow users to update their picture in SharePoint (like they have done since SPS 2003) and have the change update thumbnailPhoto in AD. This is now possible with SharePoint Server 2010.

There are a number of considerations but in summary, you can now configure SharePoint Server 2010 to export the Picture property to thumbnailPhoto in AD. And the 96x96 photo is used in AD – which is typically well within the 10K. The following two links were extremely helpful in understanding this process:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/russmax/archive/2010/02/27/sharepoint-2010-profile-picture-property-101.aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff182925.aspx

Answers

So getting back to the questions above.

The first is how do the pictures in SharePoint and Outlook tie together? Just answered above – new capability in SharePoint 2010

The second is where are these pictures stored? The AD thumbnailPhoto attribute for Exchange/Outlook; special picture library for SharePoint

And the third is how do we reconcile the typical high-res digital images users might add to their My Site with the pictures thumbnails you see in Outlook? Based on the reference links, we saw above that AD limits to 10K or less for the thumbnailPhoto (96x96) so it isn’t even possible to put an entire high-res photo into AD. And SharePoint generates a 96x96 (or smaller) image for every profile picture so the export will work just fine.

Key Links

Just to repeat from above – these four links go into much more detail and together (along with some testing) they were the key for me to understanding the overall process.

Exchange/AD: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2010/03/10/454223.aspx

SharePoint Pictures: http://www.learninggateway.net/blogs/ajp/archive/2010/03/25/sharepoint-2010-where-do-my-user-profile-photos-go.aspx

Sync Process: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/russmax/archive/2010/02/27/sharepoint-2010-profile-picture-property-101.aspx

TechNet User Profile Sync: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff182925.aspx

Hopefully this clarifies the overall process and how things work from the backend. There are obviously several other considerations including BCS data, AD attribute extensions, etc. My advice: understand how out-of-the-box works first. Then determine if you can go this route versus a completely custom solution.

Good luck!

SharePoint 2007 and Office 2010

2010-06-04T16:25:20Z

I received an interesting question this week from a customer, and something that seems like a fairly common scenario. My customer just finished an upgrade/consolidation from WSS 2.0 to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. They aren’t anticipating a quick upgrade to SharePoint Server 2010 at this point – they own it but they have other projects in the works and won’t have the resources to dedicate to the upgrade in the near term.

However, they are planning on deploying a new version of Office, and they want to know what you lose by using Office 2010 with SharePoint 2007 (versus SharePoint 2010). And most importantly, is Office 2007 and SharePoint 2007 a better experience than Office 2010 and SharePoint 2007.

I’ve seen a lot of content that flips this scenario around, comparing Office 2007 versus Office 2010 against SharePoint 2010. But this is very different. So after doing a little looking on my own and pinging my Office Specialist, I was alerted to a helpful Appendix section at the end of the recently released “Collaboration without Compromise” whitepaper.

If you look at Appendix B there is a section comparing Office 2010 against SharePoint versions in a nice table format. This is a great resource, but I did want to make a few additional notes:

You definitely need to read beyond the heading for each row. In some cases there are subtle differences and the headings aren’t enough to understand the differences.
SharePoint Designer 2010 cannot be used to edit SharePoint 2007 sites. So if you use SPD will need to install SPD 2007 separate from the Office 2010 install.
SharePoint Workspace 2010 (offline client for SharePoint sites - part of Office 2010 Pro Plus) can’t be used with SharePoint 2007 sites. See section on SharePoint Workspaces from this SP Workspace help content: http://office2010.microsoft.com/client/helppreview14.aspx?AssetId=HA010288417&lcid=1033&NS=GROOVE&Version=14&tl=2&CTT=5&origin=HA101856398
And finally Office Web Apps (web versions of Office 2010) need SharePoint 2010 to work. This could be SharePoint Foundation 2010 or SharePoint Server 2010, but SharePoint 2010 must be installed and the content must be stored in this environment.

I think the real question is, “if we are sticking with SharePoint 2007 for the next 6 months to a year, does it make sense to deploy Office 2010 now, or would it be better to deploy Office 2007 and upgrade to 2010 when we move to SharePoint 2010?” In my opinion I would absolutely recommend moving to Office 2010 now. I’ve run with this mix in our internal Microsoft environment for many months and there is nothing missing from this scenario versus using Office 2007. And I was able to take advantage of several Office 2010 benefits that don’t require SharePoint 2010.

Hope this helps – I’m sure my bulleted list isn’t a complete list of differences so feel free to add a few more in the comments.

SharePoint 2010 People Search – Missing Content Mystery Solved

2010-04-13T14:29:40Z

A quick post on an issue I hit today with the SharePoint 2010 beta – updates to user profile data were not showing up when doing a people search. There were missing users, missing info, etc. After a few hours or so of digging the root cause was found. And it ended up being an issue in terms of how I was thinking about search (stuck in my SharePoint 2007 ways), not a problem with the product itself. Let me back-up though.

Scenario

I am working with a customer on a social computing focused proof of concept with SharePoint 2010 (beta of course, which makes it more interesting). The customer decided to leverage the pre-built SharePoint 2010 Hyper-V images as a starting point.The benefit here, is that my customer has a working SharePoint 2010 environment with demo users provisioned, Office 2010 installed, OCS, Exchange, all ready to go. The environment was made available to us at 2 PM on Monday and we had a good customer-focused demo scenario put together after about a day’s worth of work together.

This customer demo will use some of the out-of-the-box users that are included in the pre-built image. This is a huge time saver in terms of setting up users, adding data, and establishing a prototype org structure. And people search works right out of the box. My customer liked it but they wanted to update a few of the user’s profile data to better fit their organization. For example, updated job titles, locations, interests, etc. We also went into Active Directory and created a few AD users for the four of us that were working on this project together.

Next step, import the users in from AD into the user profile store. As noted in dozens of blogs there are ‘challenges’ with this in the beta if you don’t get it quite right, but we were in good shape with the demo image. And I’ve built a farm before with this working. So far so good.

Next step, kick off a crawl. I chose a full crawl, but an incremental should be fine. And I used the pre-defined content source, “Local SharePoint sites”. The crawl completed as expected – with mostly successful crawls. So now I’d expect, having done this hundreds of times with SharePoint 2007, that I could go to the people search tab and search for one of the new users or updated user info. Unfortunately, results were not returned as expected. Time to troubleshoot.

User Profiles

The first step to troubleshoot is fairly easy. Just go to the User Profile Service Application and verify user data was showing up there. Also verify that new users created in AD were showing here as well. Done.

Crawling

Now I needed to verify the crawls. This is a little more time consuming because I need to kick off crawls after updates and wait for these crawls to complete. First I went to the content source and verified that there was an entry for sps3. In my case I decided to just create a new content source with sps3://intranet.contoso.com as the single start address. This helped make my crawls faster (less to crawl) – a good troubleshooting technique. I kicked off the crawl and verified results. New users and updated users were showing up in the crawl log as expected (as a side note, the demo image has 3 errors – due to the fact that Juliani is setup as his own manager. To fix, just go to AD or the user profile and set his manager as someone else). So content is crawled OK.

Scopes

The next step I took was to mess with the scopes. I spent way too much time here, since the numbers weren’t matching my expectations. I thought this could be the cause of missing data in search, and I wasn’t thinking there was any other option. Keep in mind that people search was working for me – just not updating with the latest updates to data in user profiles.

Now What?

Hmmm, was there a problem with how the index was being propagated? No, that couldn’t be. After some head scratching, and some online searching, I found my answer. I needed to go in and confirm that the search service application (the one I’d been using for crawls/scopes/etc.) was actually associated with the web app I was using for my search center. It seems so simple, but it never occurred to me, since people search was working for me all along.

The downloadable SharePoint 2010 beta image includes FAST search, and the FAST Query SSA was associated and checked as default. And the (SharePoint) Search Service Application was unchecked. My internal image was configured the same way. Bingo!

So the fix is simple – just update the association for your web application. To do this go to Central Admin, click on Application Management, and in the Service Application section click on ‘Configure service application associations’. This is one of those pages in the new Central Admin that you don’t think about very often but it is so important.

Now you will get a list of associations. In general, this is grouped into a single “default” application proxy group, but this could obviously be a lot more complex depending on your farm. The current view (upper right on screen) is showing associations by Web Application. Prior to my fix this screen showed me that Fast Query SSA was associated (under the Application Proxies column) but the Search Service Application was not.

You could click on a web app and create a custom application proxy group. But for my fix, I wanted to update the Application Proxies for all web apps so I clicked on ‘default’. This brings up a dialog where I can check/uncheck service applications. I unchecked FAST Query SSA (FAST is amazing, but my customer wanted to see what SharePoint search could do as a first step, since they are licensed for SharePoint Standard). And I checked Search Service Application and set this as the default.

As soon as I did this I went over to my people search, ran a few test queries to validate user updates/additions were now showing up. Check, check, check! All is good!

SharePoint 2010 Training

2010-04-09T20:22:00Z

One question that I’m hearing more and more often from customers and partners is “how can I get ramped up on SharePoint 2010?” And they want to go a little deeper now, more than just a teaser site. So to that end - the post below is dedicated to resources and options as of today, April 9th, 2010, and with a local (Michigan) spin. Obviously this will change over time, especially after the product launches next month and more content is published. Hopefully, this gives my customers and partners a great consolidated view as a starting point. I will likely update with a follow-up post after launch.

Online Sites/Blogs

Let’s start with online resources. Here is my top 5 list of SharePoint 2010 sites.

Main SharePoint 2010 site – lots of short videos and docs by workload: http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com
SharePoint 2010 training portal – great single view of Microsoft training options: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/training/sharepoint.aspx#2010sec5
TechNet information for IT Pros – a lot more content due out soon: http://MSSharePointITPro.com
MSDN – main information site for SharePoint developers (also more content coming soon!): http://MSSharePointDeveloper.com
SharePoint Product Team Blog – great real-time info and guidance: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/

Obviously, there are several great blogs and other sites, but five is a good starting point. A list of good blogs could take up an entire post.

Local (Michigan) SharePoint User Groups

Both the Southeast Michigan SharePoint User Group (http://www.semsug.org) and West Michigan User Group (http://www.wmspug.org) meet monthly and cover a variety of topics. Since November, most topics have centered on SharePoint 2010 – including deep dives on social computing (communities), document management, end user features, and WCM. Our April topics include Insights with SharePoint 2010 (e.g. Business Intelligence) in Grand Rapids and SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Scenarios in Southfield, MI.

Local (Michigan) SharePoint 2010 Training events

We’ve already held several SharePoint 2010 focused seminars including free all-day SharePoint 2010 In Action events in both Detroit and Grand Rapids. I also participated in a partner-led SharePoint Saturday Michigan event in Ann Arbor, MI in March. Lots of SharePoint 2010 content. Consultants from Sogeti, CDH, and Trillium Teamologies did a great job organizing the event – and over 200 people showed up – on a Saturday!

OK, that’s great but what’s coming up in terms of local training? We do have a few SharePoint/Office 2010 launch events in the works. The official virtual launch is May 12th, as announced on the SharePoint Team blog. We’ll have a few Microsoft-held events scheduled after that date. Tentatively, we will have events in the Detroit area on May 13th and May 25th. I will post links/info as a comment as soon as it’s available. Stay tuned!

We also have a few local partners that have held free SharePoint 2010 seminars. I’ll include a sampling below. If I missed your organization, send me info and I’ll add a link.

C/D/H (http://www.cdh.com) – C/D/H has been way ahead of the curve, holding seminars on doc management and social computing before the beta release was even out. C/D/H has a number of very talented consultants who are dialed in to SharePoint 2010, and they do a great job in putting these events together and sending out communications. See Seminar and Events on the top navigation.
RCM (http://www.rcmt.com) – a variety of seminars and free training options; some in person and some as webcasts. Contact the local office to find out about upcoming events.
Sogeti - (http://www.us.sogeti.com/) – this is a national site, but you can contact the local office for upcoming local events.

Customized trainings/consulting is also available at a cost from these folks as well. Again, this isn’t an exhaustive list of skilled Michigan-based SharePoint 2010 consultants, just a short list of our partners that I know of that have put on seminars and events around the technology.

Regional training and webcasts are also available from a few key partners. Examples below:

SharePoint 911 - (http://sharepoint911.com) – SharePoint 911 has live webcasts offerings around SharePoint 2010 for a small fee. This organization is headquartered in Ohio, a short drive to Michigan. More details here.
Critical Path Training (http://www.criticalpathtraining.com) – offering a free 10-week webcast series on SharePoint 2010. Details here and more info below on Critical Path Training: http://www.criticalpathtraining.com/Schedule/Webcasts/Pages/default.aspx

UPDATE (4/12): Also, a quick shout out to Mindsharp (http://mindsharp.com), one of our key SharePoint training partners, See my comment at the end of the post for links/info to SharePoint 2010 training options.

Hands On SharePoint 2010 Training

And finally, if you are interested in hands-on training, where you actually get to sit down in a lab environment and use the technology there are options available. The organization I’m most familiar with – and feel very confident in recommending – is Critical Path Training. Critical Path Training has several top consultants and MVPs on staff. Many of these folks have actually been training on SharePoint 2010 for well over a year, including training several Microsoft employees including me. I took a great SharePoint 2010 Dev Ignite class from Ted Pattison and Scot Hillier last July. Here’s a great starting point for finding training that suits your needs: http://www.criticalpathtraining.com/Courses/Pages/default.aspx

Books

A quick search on Amazon for SharePoint 2010 books shows that there are a lot of titles in the works, but nothing available yet. One that I’ll be ordering when it’s available is Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administrator’s Companion by Bill English. The 2007 version of this book got a lot of mileage for me. A little on the big side (my wife mocks me when I pack this with my “vacation reading”) but if the 2007 edition is any indication, it will be packed full of great info. The second book that I’ll almost certainly get is Inside Microsoft SharePoint 2010 by Ted Pattison. From the description, this will be similar to the Inside Office SharePoint Server 2007 book, written by Patrick Tisseghem. I loved the content in this book, and I hope the 2010 version delivers the same format and real-world scenarios/examples. I’ve given away dozens of the 2007 version of this book.

Also, quick shout outs to books by Steve Fox and Steve Caravajal, two colleagues of mine in the SharePoint trenches. Both are seasoned authors and have a ton of experience with SharePoint, Silverlight, and .NET. Check out Professional SharePoint 2010 Administration by Todd Klindt, Shane Young, and Steve Caravajal. And also Beginning SharePoint 2010 Development by Steve Fox.

The SharePoint Conference 2009 Guidebook

OK, this is great. But all these books have availability dates of June or July. What if I want a book now? I mentioned the 270-page SharePoint 2010 “book” provided to all SharePoint Conference 2009 attendees in an earlier post. This really is a great, easy-to-consume resource – providing a nice look at capabilities. The good news is that almost all of the content is available as a free download.

In looking at the guide, It is broken up into five sections. Section titles and links to the sections below:

SharePoint 2010 Overview (50-page look at new end-user features): SharePoint 2010 Beta - Overview Evaluation Guide
SharePoint 2010 Overview for IT Professionals (60-page Word doc on SP 2010 admin and governance): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=110318ec-0238-4811-8fc7-ec4399d3c100
SharePoint 2010 Overview for Developers (123 page overview with walkthrough examples): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=cffb14e8-88a9-43bd-87aa-4792ab60d320&displaylang=en
SharePoint 2010 Licensing Overview (basic recap on this web-page): http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com/product/editions/Pages/default.aspx
Exhibitor Marketplace: No link available, this contained roughly 20-pages of advertisements. Some of this content can be found on http://www.sharepointreviews.com but it isn’t SharePoint 2010 specific.

Other Downloadable Books

A few other mini-books available to get ramped up, specific to Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010.

Collaboration without compromise - SharePoint and Office 2010 – A better together whitepaper

First Look: Microsoft Office 2010 e-book - 14 chapters and 180+ pages

OK, I think that should keep us all busy. Hope this helps!