Steve Caravajal's Ramblings

2 Great Use Cases for my Kindle

Steve Caravajal — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 04:24:48 GMT

I love my Kindle, but still have a place in my heart for physical books. I continue to buy both ebooks and physical books. But my two uses for my Kindle that physical books just can’t compete with are reading multiple books at the same time, and reading while working out. I have both a 2nd gen Kindle and a Kindle Fire. I must say that I love the 2nd gen better for the value, but the Fire is growing on me.

1. Reading multiple books at the same time – Some would say this is a bad habit, and maybe so but I do it. I generally am reading 5-7 books at the same time. I’ve challenged myself to read a book a week. Unfortunately, I don’t always meet the goal, but typical I”ll hit at least 2 weeks out of 4. So one downside to this habit is I would have to carry with me all these books. Maybe ok if I just was in the car, but parctically it’s too painful. So the Kindle makes this soooooooo easy!

2. Reading while on the treadmill or elliptical machine – if you are like me, I absolutely hate walking on the treadmill or using the elliptical. I much prefer to walk or run outside. But alas, this needs to happen. Reading while exercising makes the painful time go by so much faster, but holding a book open with your hand is just not doable, especially if you are sweating up a storm. Enter the Kindle. I can do 45 min – 60 min reading the Kindle and time just flies by. I still hate the elliptical but Kindle makes it a love-hate relationship.

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Implementing Social Solutions to Improve Collaboration

Steve Caravajal — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 21:26:14 GMT

Over the last 12 months, I’ve been working with a lot of companies thinking, strategizing, piloting and deploying social media tools with the hope to improve their collaboration effectiveness. Yes social media is collaboration, because it requires user participation and/or user generated content. Consumer-focused social media tools include Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Google+ and Foursquare. There are a number of enterprise-equivalent tools each providing some or many of the features that these consumer tools provide. That is the context of social solution that I am referring to in this blog. In the corporate world, this means people would be expected to create and participate in things like creating profiles, blogging, microblogging, tweeting, rating and reviewing content, creating, posting and viewing videos. The more popular social solutions for corporations implement solutions that deliver features analogous to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and blogging.

What? Did I hear you say who cares about social media tools/solutions? Well, since you must have been living under a rock or deep inside the earth, here are some stats to chew on. Digital Marketing Intelligence source ComScore says in its 2011 report that social networking websites reach 82% of worldwide internet users. Facebook reaches over half of the worldwide audience, and accounts for one in every seven minutes spent online. Twitter grew nearly 60% in the last year, reaching one in ten internet users worldwide. Clearly social media use is growing like crazy, and making a big business impact within the marketing space as recently revealed by Econsultancy. Their report says that 91% of companies say social media is becoming more important to their overall marketing strategy. More specifically, their State of Social 2011 worldwide report indicates 87% use Twitter as part of their social media marketing strategy, and 82% use Facebook.

Well one could argue that success in marketing does not necessarily mean improved enterprise collaboration. And ROI from social tools has been the key issue keeping folks out of the water. But recently, say the last 18 months, “show me the ROI” has turned into “I don’t want to be at a competitive disadvantage” so even aqua-phobes are at least putting their toes in the water. So, I thought I would post some of the key learnings I’ve had from numerous projects, as well as others that I have not been intimately involved with but know about through colleagues. Surprisingly, or maybe not, the learnings apply across vertical industries and appear to be common to social solution adoption, and they also apply across different vendor’s tools and across platforms.

The customers I”ve been working with have been some of the larger enterprise companies, interested in “best of breed” solutions like Jive, Yammer, etc, as well as social platforms from IBM and Microsoft, and social applications like SF.com. These customers have a heterogeneous environment, usually utilizing both J2EE and .NET applications, and multiple portal and database products.

Do NOT adopt a fire, ready, aim approach. Well, just because some may be having success doesn’t mean you will. So don’t just throw on the bathing suite and jump in the water, even if you think you know how to swim. You must define your social strategy before you start. By strategy, you need to articulate how the social solution will improve innovation and create a competitive advantage. Big Gulp you say, well if the social solution is going to make a big difference why do it?Specifically,

Define your business objectives and ensure the social solution will solve very relevant business problems. What are you really trying to accomplish?
Design the solution and the implementation to take into account your company’s culture. This is critical because it is more about people and processes than technology.

I know you’re probably saying to yourself, “this is obvious, of course we’ll do this”. Well experience says that this is NOT being done. There is a lot of beef here and I”ll make sure to break this into a blog all it’s own. But just so I’m clear, by strategy I’m not talking about a 100 page document, and I’m not even saying it has to be a document, better if it is, but as for most things the process of discussing what you are really trying to accomplish BEFORE you design and deploy is what is key. You don’t even have to have 100% agreement before you start. I’m in the process of working with companies to develop their social strategy and it is a very interesting process, key word is PROCESS. More later.

Just because you build it, doesn’t mean they’ll come. Many organizations set very aggressive metrics for their deployments in terms of adoption, which were very unrealistic but they must have looked good to somebody. Many times I’ll see companies expecting 100% adoption of the new solution solution, only to be very surprised to find that they have less than 10% adoption. Even though they know that some of their folks will have to be dragged kicking and screaming to adopt anything new, they still think they will jump on the “next great solution”. It’s interesting that companies are finding that some employees adopt and contribute very readily while others will “participate” but very rarely contribute. Forrester has recently released its report “Global Social Media Adoption in 2011“. The full report is available to Forrester clients only but they publically share a great graphic that tells the whole story. If you have a chance to read the whole report definitely check it out. But one of the more interesting conclusions was that less than 25% of those who are online participants actively create content. This is pretty amazing when you think about it. Also notice, that the majority are spectators, folks who use the tools but just to read/see what others are doing. This has dramatic ramifications in how you implement and deploy your social solution, and I will devote a whole blog to this in the near future. Stay tuned.

Any social solution must take into account and maybe be part of the overall corporate communication strategy of the organization. This makes adoption more seamless, because it conforms to how people are communicating today and how they are getting their work done. You say, what is your corporate communication strategy? Well, I have found that most organizations have not articulated a strategy, but every corporation has one and it is implicit in how people communicate. Typically, the communication strategy utilizes the following, with email and DLs being the most prolific, with blogging and microblogging growing in interest. Interestingly, Web portal are under-achieving in terms of their value to the knowledge worker.

email
Distribution Lists
Web Portals
Video
Blogs and Wikis
Microblogging

This essentially means that people are used to communicating in some way(s), and they have a process for getting their work done. The social solution must conform to that process for doing work because this introduces the least change. Now it is also very clear that social solutions can change the way we communicate. So one could argue that the solution doesn’t have to conform to how folks work it it provides a radically more efficient and effective communication solution, and I have seen this as well, and so have others How Social Media Changes Technical Communication.

Social tool adoption within an organization must include a governance plan. Although very similar privacy issues occur with email, social tools provide many more opportunities and typically broader audiences for divulging information that should not be shared. Also, many corporations are having to manage social account proliferation as employees adopt these tools as discussed in Corporations at Risk From Social Media Adoption Issues. This has reminded me of the fire, ready, aim approach many have done with SharePoint and then realized that they had site proliferation and figured they should implement some type of governance.

Well much more to say, but as always too little time…until next time….

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Taxonomy Management and Autoclassification

Steve Caravajal — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 21:35:39 GMT

There is growing interest in using metadata, not just talking about it, or wanting to see a demo, but actually implementing the capability. One of the key challenges is how do you get users to actually utilize this capability. Of course you can configure the list or library to require certain fields be populated but then as you know that doesn’t mean they will utilize the desired naming. Well, I had a good discussion with BAInsight this week and got a peek at their Longitude AutoClassifier for SharePoint 2010 and FAST Search.

BA Insight’s Longitude Auto-Classifier automatically categorizes content in two ways: 1) as content is uploaded into a SharePoint library, and 2) as content is indexed from external repositories using FAST. This classification is based on highly-customizable rule sets. As we looked at the rules, it reminded me of rules in Outlook for filtering email. It was a very simple process. Not using FAST for SharePoint you say? Well, they assured me you could use the library upload process to classify content and this does not require FAST for SharePoint.

This capability can be used in at least two ways:

1. To autoclassify content to circumvent the need for users to perform this function. This would ensure more reliable classification and ensure the process occurs.

2. To use in combination with user manual classification. This ensure that a standard taxonomy is being implemented and a users folksonomy is also occurring.

This solution provides a complete taxonomy management and automated content classification solution for the enterprise on top of the SharePoint 2010 platform. I plan to test it out after the holidays but it looks pretty sweet! So if you’re interested, check out the links below or send me an email and I”ll get you hooked up with the BAInsight folks for a demo.

15-minute video: http://www.bainsight.com/Pages/sharepoint-metadata-auto-classification-video.aspx

Data sheet: http://www.bainsight.com/Pages/sharepoint-metadata-auto-classification.aspx

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SharePoint BI on the iPad

Steve Caravajal — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 19:46:02 GMT

Good news for iPad users that want to view SharePoint BI content. The product group has recently released the December 2011 Cumulative Update for SharePoint 2010 and an overview is given here.

With this update, you can now view PerformancePoint reports and scorecards, Excel Services reports, and Reporting Services reports on iPad devices running the iOS 5 Safari browser. A recent TechNet article provides all the viewing and configuration details so go check it out Viewing reports and scorecards on Apple iPad devices.

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Sharing Content Outside Your Organization with O365

Steve Caravajal — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 23:07:57 GMT

Sharing content (documents, PowerPoint decks, etc) outside the organization is a frequent request and it’s much harder than it should be. Most IT organizations are not licensed or willing in enable SharePoint to share information outside the firewall. Ideally you’d provision an extranet, license the appropriate folks, establish authentication and authorize these external users for the content they need to see. So if content is too big as an email attachment, people start relying on options that may not be corporate sanctioned. It turns out, this is an excellent use case for SharePoint Online (O365) External Sharing. This is new capability just introduced in the November update to O365.

External sharing allows customers to share SharePoint sites with partners, vendors, and customers who are not licensed to use O365. An organization could utilize an O365 site specifically for when it needs to share content externally and still maintain their on-premise SharePoint deployment. This “hybrid” environment is drawing a lot of interest. With O365, you can invite an external user to your Web site just by sending them an email. External sharing is not available for all O365 subscriptions so check with your Microsoft or licensing specialist to confirm that you have or get the right subscription. But if you have the right subscription, you have 50 external sharing licenses. Keep in mind, this licensing may change over time.

The process for doing this is covered in depth here so I won’t repeat all the details. By default, SharePoint Online does not allow external users. SharePoint Online administrators can enable this capability as shown in the dialog below.

This approach could be used as a temporary solution while you add extranet capability to your on-premise SharePoint farm, or it could be used indefinitely, only resorting to a full fledged extranet as the need requires, or it could provide pseudo-extranet capabilities to your O365 deployment.

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SP2010 SP1 Productivity Hub and SPC2011 Videos

Steve Caravajal — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 19:38:42 GMT

Some new info I just saw posted over the holiday break that will be useful for a number of folks.

First, for those that did not attend the SharePoint Conference 2011 in Anaheim, CA, 193 of the conference presentations can be accessed on YouTube so go check them out.

Second, I continue to get requests daily for a version of the Productivity Hub that is compatible with SharePoint 2010 SP1. Well wait no longer, you can get it here.

Hope everyone had a great holiday break.

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So what ya waiting for, start using PowerShell for SharePoint Admin

Steve Caravajal — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 00:49:00 GMT

PowerShell is an awesome tool. Granted there is a learning curve but once you get going you will love it. I continue to be surprised at the number of SharePoint admins that still have never used PS. A recent SP pilot offered a good opportunity, so I thought this would be a good time to increase the number of disciples…

So during a progress review, I popped open the laptop and started to show how easy it is. Unconsciously, I fired up PowerShell ISE, the OOTB editor. It’s almost second nature to me to use ISE and because that’s how I got started, after graduating from the universal Notepad app, because that’s how I like to learn by getting dirty and reading SDKs. But unfortunately, it’s not a good tool for ramping up folks quickly, especially ones that have the “just show me what I need to know” mentality.

So, I remembered that when I did the 2-day PowerShell workshop a couple of years ago (which by the way was very well attended), I used Idera’s PowerShell Plus for all my my demos and examples. I loved it, and admins from all the 4 different cities also loved it. But unfortunately I didn’t have PSP installed on the laptop so I had to use ISE.

So here are some tips for learning PS using the ISE. ISE is a very good tool but you have to do at least 2 things to really make it a good experience:

1. You need a reference to the online PS commandlets; there are several but I used this one: Index of SharePoint Server 2010 Windows PowerShell cmdlets

2. Modify the ISE to include the SharePoint snap-in, PSSnapin "Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell". I recently saw Kirk Evan’s blog post that summarizes how to do this so kudos to Kirk for not being lazy like me. If you don’t do this, it can be a frustrating experience for new users to constantly add this to the top of every script they write. So experienced folks are probably saying, why don’t you just use the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell shortcut to open the ISE? Well, that is the last step I tell folks, but I want them to understand some the key under-the-hood details as part of their learning experience, so they understand what to do when things go wrong.

Well the learning experience went very well and in the end we added several new PS disciples. You may want to graduate to a more powerful editor environment so I suggest 3 tools below, as well as I’ll refer you to a good review “PowerShell Editor Roundup” of editors, all though it’s a little dated.

You should download the Mastering PowerShell free book. This will tell you more than you wanted to know. Also, a new Windows PowerShell Command Builder tool has recently been released that provides a GUI environment for learning that may help as well. Plus, there is a wealth of information, free scripts, etc. so just go Bing and get busy.

So, I have vowed to add PowerShell training to any pilot I do in the future to increase the base of believers.

Maybe it’s time for another multi-city, PowerShell Admin training tour. Fun, fun, fun…..

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Tools:

Other Resources:

Windows PowerShell for SharePoint Server 2010

Mastering PowerShell

PowerShell Editor Roundup: Who's the Winner?

SharePoint 2010 Products administration by using Windows PowerShell

Best PowerShell Editor & Debugger

Host Header Named Site Collections in SP2010

Steve Caravajal — Sun, 30 May 2010 01:40:26 GMT

Working with a customer yesterday, they were perplexed because they couldn’t figure out how to create HH named site collections in SP2010. They had done this routinely in SP2007. They were somewhat relieved when I told them that it is still possible to do but that they had to use PowerShell to do it and I gave them this link and we did it together. Yep, HH creation is not available in the GUI.

Just another reason to begin using PowerShell, there is a wealth of capability there.

I taught a SharePoint 2010 PowerShell course in 4 different cities earlier this year and many attendees were amazed at the flexibility and capability, beyond what is available in the GUI. Especially since many features, eg., multitenancy, can only be enabled via PowerShell.

So what are you waiting for…

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Why should you be interested in SharePoint 2010

Steve Caravajal — Thu, 27 May 2010 23:20:38 GMT

I presented “Why should you be interested in SharePoint 2010” to the Association of IT Professionals this week and it went great. What a great group. Plus, they paid for my dinner so it was even better.

I delivered this same talk at several SP user groups but this time it was extremely interactive which made the whole discussion that much better.

I have changed my presentation focus from feature demos to solution demos. When I have presented SP2010 to numerous companies I consistently get feedback that customers want to see use case/solution presentations, rather than feature presentations. Matter of fact, they are tired of feature presentations. So I have begun to do the solution presentations more and more. I have noticed that there is better comprehension of the features because they are in the context of a solution. Also, the more diverse the audience these seem to provide more for everyone. The challenge is that solution presentations are more work because they usually require some moderate to heavy customization.

Specifically, I focused on:

1. Implementing an Internet Web site using SP2010, and

2. Improving Innovation with Social Communities using SP2010

A special thanks to Bob Logan for being my host.

SP2010 is becoming very viral…

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Silverlight 4 Training

Steve Caravajal — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 22:55:25 GMT

This is an excellent intro for those wanting to get up to speed. You need to spend some time with the HOLs if you haven’t done much SL before, but it will be worth your time.

From the description:

“The Silverlight 4 Training Course includes a whitepaper explaining all of the new Silverlight 4 features, several hands-on-labs that explain the features, and a 8 unit course for building business applications with Silverlight 4. The business applications course includes 8 modules with extensive hands on labs as well as 25 accompanying videos that walk you through key aspects of building a business application with Silverlight. Key aspects in this course are working with numerous sandboxed and elevated out of browser features, the new RichTextBox control, implicit styling, webcam, drag and drop, multi touch, validation, authentication, MEF, WCF RIA Services, right mouse click, and much more!”

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SharePoint 2010 Resources

Steve Caravajal — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:52:00 GMT

Well the flood gates were opened last week at the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas. It was a great week. I’ve gotten a number of questions about resources so I thought I would share some of the ones I think are valuable. Your list may be different so if you have a favorite one not on the list below send it to me and I’ll add it (maybe). The list below is in no particular order. As time goes on, this list will definitely get longer.

SharePoint 2010 Web site. The site should definitely be bookmarked. This is the “all-up” site for SharePoint 2010, and therefore should be your one-stop shop for new information. One thing to note, check out the upper right-hand corner of the home page; this site is running on SharePoint 2010 beta. Yes, you heard me…well you read me anyway; it is running on SP2010 beta. What do you think about that level of confidence! Also, make sure to install the Silverlight v3 player. That’s right, we are up to v3 and getting better and more powerful with each version.

The Forrester Wave: Collaboration Platforms Q3’09

Microsoft and SharePoint continues to one of the very few leaders in this platform.

The Microsoft SharePoint Product Team Blog

Specifically, you will want to check out this post and this one.

Paul Andrew’s Blog

This is focused on SharePoint development, so if you’re not a developer then no need to go here but if you are then Paul leads this effort on the product team. One post you definitely should check out is this one, which is a summary of developer resources.

SharePoint 2010 Developer Center

Stay tuned, we have a lot to talk about.

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Silverlight v3

Steve Caravajal — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 19:39:52 GMT

SL3 has RTMed and Laurence Moroney continues his SL series that will update your skills. It’s based on the SL beta but it’s still valuable. I suggest you browse at your local bookstore with your favorite mocha at your side and see if it meets your needs. For those that are interested, there is a free downloadable copy that discusses only the new features (sorry, not the whole book). You can download it here. I recco the free download to get up to speed on the new features.

For those not yet on SL2, here is a developer book I highly recommend:

For the SharePoint developer, here is a great book by Steve and Paul. I’m told there won’t be an SL3 version, but maybe SL4????

Happy reading.

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SharePoint 2010 Sneak Peeks Available

Steve Caravajal — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:25:20 GMT

There is a new addition to the MOSS Web site on Microsoft.com today. You should go check it out…but if you would like to see it I”ve captured a snapshot of it below.

You can also go directly to the SharePoint 2010 info using this link:

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek/Pages/default.aspx

There are 3 videos you can check out that will give you some insight into the next version of SharePoint. It’s a very exciting time and the new version is going to be awesome. Oh, also make sure you register for the SharePoint Conference 2009 happening in October…hope to see you there!

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Getting Ready to Buy a Netbook?

Steve Caravajal — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 03:38:45 GMT

If so, you might want to check out:

Top 6 Things to Consider Before Buying a Small Notebook PC

I like both of these: ASUS Eee 1000HE and the HP 2140 mini.

Let me know your favorites.

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New Silverlight-Based STSADM Reference

Steve Caravajal — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 02:45:00 GMT

Looking for a specific STSADM command? If so, you can find it here for WSS and here for MOSS.

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SharePoint 2007 Reader’s Choice Award Winner

Steve Caravajal — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:48:38 GMT

More than 8000 readers of the magazine ASP.NETPro voted MOSS the best Content Management System.

Rock on!

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SharePoint Customization, Development and Governance

Steve Caravajal — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 23:19:27 GMT

SharePoint Designer

No it’s not an April fools joke and yes as of April 2, 2009, SharePoint Designer 2007 is available as a free download. General SharePoint Designer info can be found here. This eliminates any cost issue associated with providing users the necessary tools for site customization and is a great opportunity for those companies that need to customize SharePoint sites as part of their enterprise plans. But it also emphasizes the need for defining site customization governance.

So, as part of maintaining control, how do I “lock down” SPD use? This is a very common question. There are two resources that should be required reading for all SharePoint admins and any business users that are site owners:

How to prevent SharePoint Designer 2007 users from changing a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 site or a SharePoint Server 2007 site

Locking Down SharePoint Designer

Many new awesome features are on tap for the next version of SharePoint Designer so stay tuned.

Visual Studio 2010

Soma’s blog gave a good introduction to what’s coming in VS2010 with regard to SharePoint development:

In Visual Studio 2010, we’re going to expand SharePoint support in two key areas. First, Visual Studio 2010 will deliver a broad set of project templates, designers, and deployment infrastructure that will make any .NET developer instantly more productive on the SharePoint platform. Second, we are exposing an extensibility API that will continue to foster the ecosystem of third party developers who create development tools and technologies.

Visual Studio 2010 will come with a broad set of project and items templates. You’ll be able to use these to quickly create or update SharePoint elements such as list definitions, list instances, site definitions, workflows, event receivers, Business Data Catalog models, and content types.

There were also several presentations at MIX09 discussing the SharePoint development experience. If you missed MIX, then you can check out the recorded presentations here, at least for awhile, not sure how long they will be available. Make sure to check out the keynotes, they will give you a good overview of what’s coming.

Expression Blend v3

Also at MIX, it was announced that the next version of Expression (v3) will have SharePoint integration so designers familiar with the Expression tool can apply these skills to SP design. I’ve gotten a number of questions from folks asking why is there another design tool for SharePoint? Is SharePoint Designer going away? No, SPD is not going away. You should read this is part of the heavy commitment for making the SharePoint design, customization and development experience the best it can be with the tools you are the most familiar. As EXv3 gets closer, there will be more information on the specifics.

So, the SharePoint design, customization and development experience is only getting better and the gaps in the tool sets that exist today are being filled. It’s an awesome time to be working with a great product, especially since we are on the verge of a new release.

Governance

As part of my governance discussions, I include 2 topics of relevance here:

1. Custom Artifacts (eg custom Web parts, custom workflows, etc.)

2. Customization vs Development (aka SharePoint Designer vs Visual Studio)

These are critical discussion points for any organization that is going to use SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio as part of their tools for meeting their design requirements.

Now I know that governance is definitely not a favorite topic and it can be overwhelming, but defining the customization and development requirements and how they will be delivered BEFORE you deploy is extremely important. Only bite off the necessary governance chunks that are absolutely necessary and then add more over time; this makes the whole process more successful.

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A New Book on the BDC

Steve Caravajal — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 05:11:26 GMT

The authors behind the the awesome BDC MetaMan tool have written a book:

SharePoint 2007 Developer's Guide to Business Data Catalog

A got my hands on an early copy via the MEAP and I’m about 3/4 through. If you're new to the BDC, it will be a great reference and it will get you up to speed ASAP. If you have been working with the BDC for awhile now, then it will be a complete resource you can refer to as necessary. Either way, it’s definitely worth a look, it’s the only book on the market dedicated to the BDC.

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SharePoint Developers and Visual Studio 10

Steve Caravajal — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 21:51:24 GMT

Some really great news for SharePoint developers along the tools front. Check out Soma’s blog for a good summary of what’s coming.

Sharepoint tools support in Visual Studio

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SharePoint Deployment and Install Guide

Steve Caravajal — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 04:07:54 GMT

My good buddy Shane and friends at SharePoint911.com have written a great paper:

Administrator’s Guide of Topics to Consider before Deployment

If you just learning SharePoint because your company has decided to deploy….yes you know who you are…..then this paper is for you. It is a great introduction to all things you need to know to get up speed quickly.

So, don’t you dare run setup.exe before reading this!

Also, I was fortunate enough to spend all last week with Shane co-teaching the Professional SharePoint Server 2007 Administration course to 28 folks in the Columbus, OH area. It was great fun. We put this together as an “invite-only” offering with the help from Jeff Warnat (Microsoft SharePoint Strategist) and Microsoft, and it was hosted at the Microsoft office.

If you have a chance to take the course you gotta do it.

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PRISM: Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight

Steve Caravajal — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 21:43:06 GMT

You say, “what are composite applications?” Good question. Generally, a composite application is an application built by combining multiple existing functions into a new application. Functionality can be a part of other applications, or an entire application can be utilized.

The Composite Client Application Guidance is designed to help you build composite applications that utilize Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight.

Included in this release:

· Composite Application Library

· Reference Implementation (Stock Traders application in WPF and Silverlight)

· Quick starts (9)

· How-Tos (26) and

· Lots of documentation for everything you want to know about UI patterns and client architectures

PRISM

Prism: patterns & practices Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight site.

Books

Introducing Microsoft Silverlight 2.0, 2nd Edition

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SharePoint is getting even more powerful!! Welcome PerformancePoint Services!

Steve Caravajal — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 22:47:11 GMT

Some very exciting news was announced yesterday. SharePoint’s mission has always been to provide collaboration to the masses. Collaboration in the broadest sense has meant business intelligence capability with Excel integration, Excel Services, KPIs, Report Center, etc.

Well, as of yesterday, collaboration to the masses now also includes BI for the masses with the inclusion of PerformancePoint Services. Yep, that’s right! The next version of SharePoint (aka SharePoint14) will include PerformancePoint Services. You say you can’t wait till SharePoint14, well you might not have to, read on…

This is an update to our Business Intelligence roadmap. This will greatly facilitate delivering BI to everyone in the organization.

Specifically, this includes consolidating the scorecard, dashboard, and analytic functionality from PerformancePoint Server into SharePoint Server Enterprise as PerformancePoint Services.

PerformancePoint Services will be a license entitlement for SharePoint Server 2007 ECAL customers with Software Assurance. This means that customers who want to deploy PerformancePoint can do so today at no additional cost. Yep, you read that right.

PerformancePoint Server 2007 will no longer be available as a standalone item after April 1, 2009.

For more info,

Microsoft Business Intelligence strategy update and SharePoint

Microsoft Business Intelligence

The BI Blog

Business Intelligence with Microsoft® Office PerformancePoint Server 2007

For me, this is a very exciting announcement, specifically for two reasons:

1. For a lot of my customers, BI is something that they want to do, but many find it cost prohibitive and some have it siloed within the organization so that only a few have access. There are likely many other reasons but the end result is a less than successful implementation and utilization. They now don’t have to worry about buying a separate BI point solution that doesn’t integrate very well. They already have their enterprise portal and collaboration environment in MOSS, and now they’ll have excellent BI as well.

2. A lot of customers are very interested in a few of the ECAL features, but not enough to push them to pay the additional licensing costs. With the ECAL now including PPS, this will definitely rock their world, IMHO, and enable even greater collaboration capability.

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SharePoint Intranets are among the Best

Steve Caravajal — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 22:46:52 GMT

Jakob Nielsen has just released his report describing the top 10 best intranet sites worldwide for 2009. He is internationally recognized as one of the best Web Usability experts. His report has quite a bit of great information so make sure you check it out.

A blurb from the report:

“In total, the 10 winners were built on 26 different products — substantially fewer than the 41 used in 2008 or the 49 used in 2007. Most impressively, fully half of the winning intranets used SharePoint, especially the recent MOSS platform (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007). As the following chart shows, SharePoint use has grown dramatically in recent years. This is particularly impressive given that, from 2003–2006, the winning intranets didn't use earlier versions of SharePoint at all.”

The winners of the award for 10 best-designed intranets for 2009 are:

Altran, a large engineering and innovation consultancy (France)
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), a developer of computer and graphics processors (USA)
BASF SE, the world's leading chemical manufacturing company (Germany)
COWI Group A/S, a consulting group focusing on engineering, environmental science, and economics (Denmark)
Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu (DTT), a global professional services network providing audit, tax, consulting, and financial advisory services (a Global member organization)
Environmental Resource Management (ERM), one of the world's leading providers of environmental consulting services (Global)
HSBC Bank Brazil (Brazil)
Kaupthing Bank (Iceland)
L.L.Bean, a vendor of apparel and outdoor equipment (USA)
McKesson Corporation, a large provider of pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, and health care information technologies (USA)

SharePoint keeps rocking the world….

</steve>

Windows Live going Social....

Steve Caravajal — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 22:44:19 GMT

Social Networking will continue to create a lot of watercooler talk and executive discussions in 2009, with more and more companies applying Web 2.0 tool in the Enterprise. I've seen tremendous interest in the last 6-9 months in this topic with the customers that I speak with. A lot is happening in the blogsphere and it's becoming more difficult to keep up with all the chatter. Here is a new announcement you many not of heard:

Is Microsoft Biting Its Own Hand with Windows Live?

Microsoft will add Facebook-like features to Windows Live over the next few months. How will Microsoft business partner feel about this?

"...Microsoft announced yesterday that it would empower its Windows Live portal with social networking features starting sometime next year. With Windows Live getting more social, 283 million Hotmail users are prone to become part of the world's largest social network..."

</steve>

SharePoint and Commerce Server Integration

Steve Caravajal — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 21:18:33 GMT

There is a set of excellent blog posts that will tell you most of what you need to know if you are considering Commerce Server 2007.

Wrap-Up: Commerce Server 2007 Architecture Series

Well, as you might expect, Commerce Server 2009 is just on the horizon and a CTP has been released in December.

Announcement: Commerce Server 2009 & December CTP Availability

One of the CS2009 features that I'm planning to check out is SharePoint Commerce Services. Here are a few blurbs from the announcement:

"Commerce Server 2009 delivers the ability to increase your business reach by making it possible to sell via multiple channels using an out-of-the-box shopping site, SharePoint Commerce Services.

...The new out-of-the-box shopping site leverages SharePoint Commerce Services, which provides a gallery of ASP.NET 3.5 Web Parts, a comprehensive e-commerce shopping feature-set, and technology integration between Commerce Server and SharePoint technologies.

...Complete out-of-the-box e-commerce shopping site in SharePoint with new search functionality, new shopping features, and what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) content management and design experiences. This helps to facilitate rapid assembly and maintenance of e-commerce Web sites by business users and creative professionals."

This sounds pretty cool and fills an e-commerce gap SharePoint has today that several of my customers want.

</steve>