Dan on eScience & Technical Computing @ Microsoft : SharePoint

SharePoint Designer Available for Free

Dan Fay — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 03:29:52 GMT

Since I utilize SharePoint Designer allot for editing internal SharePoint sites…this is a really good thing to see.

Customize SharePoint with SharePoint Designer

We are implementing a number of changes to promote and facilitate even more customization efforts on top of the SharePoint platform including making SharePoint Designer 2007 available as a free download.

Download SharePoint Designer 2007 for free

SharePoint Designer Home Page - Microsoft Office Online

Windows HPC - Computational Finance Pilot

Dan Fay — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 19:16:06 GMT

The Windows HPC team has just made public their Computational Finance Pilot where they are enabling execution of computational fiance models for university courses - there is a good paper on the implementation. It would be good to see if the same type of implementation could be used for offering up science based services. The pilot brings is comprised of the following components:

Computing Resources - A 64-node\256-core compute cluster with 5 TB storage and a low latency interconnect
Central Market Dataset - Historical market data including 5 years of intraday equity tick data for the S&P 500, daily and fundamental data for 10,000 stocks and mortgage backed securities pool data
Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 Web Portal - A Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 portal to publish, browse and monitor models
Excel® HPC Task Pane - A Microsoft Excel 2007 user interface for model input and results
Model Execution Status Notifications - Model execution workflow with status email notifications

Introducing the Microsoft HPC++ CompFin Lab

The Microsoft HPC++ CompFin Lab integrates Microsoft HPC Server, a central market data database and Microsoft productivity products to provide university courses and research with an online service to publish, execute and manage computational finance models. Read more about it on our home page located here.

Windows HPC Community - CompFin Pilot

Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2008 - March 3-6, 2008

Dan Fay — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 05:59:02 GMT

The Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2008 - March 3-6, 2008 in Seattle. Sign up here

Application Templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 – Under the Hood

Dan Fay — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 20:19:44 GMT

Here's a really good paper on how to utilize SharePoint to create application templates - it goes through all the different features of SharePoint - lists, workflows, SharePoint Desinger, forms, etc. Now let's see who can utilize it to create some interesting Science based templates...

Windows SharePoint Services Document: Application Templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 – Under the Hood

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is a technology of Windows Server that offers an integrated portfolio of collaboration and communication services. It is also a platform for developing Web-based business applications. Taking advantage of this capability, Microsoft has developed forty Application Templates to provide out-of-the-box solutions to address the needs of common business processes, such as coordinating a Help Desk or tracking marketing campaigns.
This white paper describes how Microsoft developed the Application Templates, identifying best practices for how to work with core capabilities within both Windows SharePoint Services and Office SharePoint Designer 2007, with the goal of empowering customers and partners to create their own applications.

Source: Download details: Windows SharePoint Services Document: Application Templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 – Under the Hood

Delivering End-to-End High-Productivity Computing

Dan Fay — Wed, 23 May 2007 17:49:48 GMT

Here's a very good paper outlining the work by Marc Holmes (MTC) and Simon Cox on producing an end to end solution using WinCCS (HPC) and many other technologies - it would be great to get feedback from others if they have setup their WinCCS cluster this way or if there are architectures they are using for scientific research .

Here's the technologies they have incorporated -

Delivering End-to-End High-Productivity Computing

by Marc Holmes and Simon Cox
Summary: Performing a complex computational science and engineering calculation today is more than about just buying a big supercomputer. Although HPC traditionally stands for "high-performance computing," we believe that the real end-to-end solution should be about "high-productivity computing." What we mean by "high-productivity computing" is the whole computational and data-handling infrastructure, as well as the tools, technologies, and platforms required to coordinate, execute, and monitor such a calculation end-to-end.
Many challenges are associated with delivering a general high-productivity computing (HPC) solution for engineering and scientific domain problems. In this article, we discuss these challenges based on the typical requirements of such problems, propose various solutions, and demonstrate how they have been deployed to users in a specific end-to-end environmental-science exemplar. Our general technical solution will potentially translate to any solution requiring controlling and interface layers for a distributed service-oriented HPC service.
<...>
Conclusion

Architecting for high-productivity computing is not just a case of ensuring the "best" performance in order to compute results as quickly as possible; that is more of an expectation than a design feature. In the context of the overall value stream, the architecture must drive value from other areas, such as ease of access and decreasing cost of specialist skills to operate the system.
A successful architecture for high-productivity computing solutions involves consideration of the overall process alongside the computationally intensive activities, and, therefore, might use several integrated components to perform the individual aspects of the process. Microsoft Cluster Compute Server Edition is easy to include as a service gateway inside a general n-tier application structure, and is simple to integrate via command-line or API hooks.
Other available technologies can provide the basis for an HPC solution. In particular, Windows Workflow Foundation is well-suited to provide an application interface to CCS, because the features and extensibility of WF, such as persistence and tracking, lend themselves to the requirements of HPC-based solutions. The use of WF also opens up the available choices of user-experience technologies to be applied in a given domain.

Source: Delivering End-to-End High-Productivity Computing

Virtual Labs - giving away a Camera

Dan Fay — Thu, 17 May 2007 00:31:50 GMT

Just saw that the Virtual Labs folks are giving away a camera for using the labs...

I'd recommend the

Win a Digital SLR Camera!

Take part in any TechNet or MSDN virtual lab or labcast through June 30, 2007, and you could win* a digital SLR camera package.

Source: Welcome to the TechNet Virtual Labs

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Available for Download

Dan Fay — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 23:31:48 GMT

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is available for download - to understand how WSS and MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007) are related check out this link - http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/overview.mspx

SharePoint: Cross-browser authoring

Dan Fay — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 08:48:02 GMT

How timely this post is...at SC06 I was just having a discussion with someone (who would like to remain nameless) about this very topic...John, that's 1 down :-)

Cross-browser authoring

One of the most popular blog entries was the web browser compatibility one where folks were very vocal about the lack of authoring support on non-IE browsers. I'm proud to say that Telerik is announcing that they will support cross-browser authoring with an integrated rich text editor that will be available for all customers licensed for Office SharePoint Server at no additional cost. According to Telerik, you can use the rich text editor in the following scenarios:
• rich-text filed control in SharePoint forms (in Lists, etc.)
• rich-text editor WebPart
• Web Content Management scenario
You can read more about it in the press release.
They are going to launch a limited beta program in early December and plan to release final bits by end of calendar year. There should be a nomination form linked from http://www.telerik.com/sharepoint shortly.
Arpan Shah
http://blogs.msdn.com/arpans

Source: Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog : Cross-browser authoring