1. “OUT-OF-THE-BOX”: How to get Web Analytics through using SharePoint out-of-the-box
2. “BUILD”: How to get advanced Web Analytics through custom solutions. E.g. shows how to use custom javascript to track user requests and report on that
3. “BUY / INTEROPERABILITY”: How to provide Web Analytics to customers preferring or already possessing 3rd party on-premise or SaaS solutions

Check it out here

Hi Community Friends,

Sorry for the delay in posting the materials I used to present the UX on SharePoint session at the last IW community. I have uploaded the contents to the events tab on the information worker web site. It includes the following:

1. presentation
2. sample master page, style sheet and images used
3. sample media player web part code
4. sample silverlight organogram control (team browser control)

http://www.informationworker.co.za/Pages/Events.aspx

Enjoy,

Michael

The SharePoint conference 2009 has been an absolute blast. With so much new and exciting content around SharePoint 2010 it is hard to decide what to blog about. However I thought it pertinent to briefly mention some of the new stuff in both SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 that will seriously help us out locally, specifically around constrained network connections.

Does SharePoint 2010 help out in South Africa with our expensive and constrained WAN connections? In short the answer is “YES” and in long the answer is “YES”!!! Let me summarise some of the key scenarios which will help.

1. Cache Office documents on client computer, with differential synchronisation between Office client and SharePoint server

Office 2010 now has a local file cache which resides on the user’s computer, this is called the Office Document Cache (ODC). When a user opens and document from SharePoint the document is downloaded into this cache and then opened from there. When a user saves the document back to SharePoint it is saved into the document cache and then uploaded in the background (asynchronously) to SharePoint (like email leaving your outbox and going into sent items without you knowing). On top of both this download and upload scenario, only file differentials are sent across the wire, so if only 1 paragraph has changed, it is essentially just that paragraph which is sent on the wire, not the whole document.  There are a few benefits to this ODC model:

1. A user can open a document previously cached if the SharePoint server is not available e.g. offline
2. reduced network utilisation which improves both performance and costs (many customers in South Africa pay for the amount of data sent / received)
3. When a user saves a document back to SharePoint, it seems like it has happening immediately and they get control back of the application immediately, in the background the document is uploaded to the server. Thus having a GREAT user experience.

This uses a new protocol Microsoft has put together called FSSHTTP (File Sync via SOAP over HTTP). There are some important points to note about this though:

1. It only works with Office 2010 on the client and SharePoint 2010 on the server. This is because it requires new components on the client and server to deal with FSSHTTP
2. It only works with the XML based Office file formats i.e. docx, xlsx, pptx etc

You might be thinking “what happens if conflict occurs as 2 people could possible edit the same document at the same time?”

SharePoint uses the same multi-master conflict used in co-authoring for the Office Web Applications:

1. If 2 users change different sections in the document, the changes will be merged
2. If 2 users change the same sections, you will need to resolve the conflict

2. BranchCache support for SharePoint deployments

SharePoint 2010 supports Windows BranchCache. BranchCache would need some more detailed explanation beyond this post (which can be found in this TechNet article), but in summary it does the following:

If you have a remote/satellite office with users who need to access centralised SharePoint server resources, either a dedicated server in the branch office can be used to host cached SharePoint objects or users desktop machines (Windows 7) can cache objects and share the objects with other user’s machines.

The first time a user in the remote office requests a  SharePoint page / document the object is fetched from the central SharePoint server, but then it is cached on a dedicated local server or on that users machine. Therefore when another user requests the same object, the cached object(s) can either be returned from the dedicated cache server or from another Windows 7 pc which has the object(s).

This model still ensures that a user can only access content they have access to, by ensuring the requests will always still hit the central server to check permissions, even though the object will be returned from a local cache machine.

3. Office SharePoint Workspace

Office SharePoint Workspace (formerly called Groove), is a desktop client application which is installed on a users desktop machine. This product allows a user to copy a SharePoint site’s content onto their desktop PC (offline into SharePoint workspace). The user can then work on the content locally and synchronise it back to SharePoint server either as needed or SharePoint Workspace will do the sync as soon as their is a network connection (e.g. like Outlook’s RPC over HTTP works). The Outlook user experience is a very good one when no network connection exists, and in the same way SharePoint Workspace allows for a similar way of working with SharePoint content.

It also only sends file delta’s between SharePoint Workspace and SharePoint Server (for downloads and uploads). This will improve performance and reduce the amount of traffic on the wire, which once again could save costs.

4. Office Web Application pages are generally smaller than downloading entire documents

In most scenarios viewing a document through the Office Web Applications (as HTML) will result in less data coming down the wire than if a user had to download the whole document and then open it in the Office application (Word, PowerPoint, Excel etc). This is because the Office Web Applications only download and show the first page and only when a user selects to move to the next page would it download the next page’s content.

You can configure the default action when a user clicks a document link in SharePoint, and by default it is to open in the Office Web Application instead of the Office client desktop application.

One again, this is a better user experience and saves on bandwidth. Ever downloaded a massive document only to find out it is not the one you want? With Office Web Application, you could see the first few pages, decide that it is not the correct one and then close the document, not needing to download the whole thing.

If you are using FAST Search for SharePoint, then in your search results, you will get thumbnail images for documents in the result set and for PowerPoint documents thumbnail images for each of the the slides in the presentation. This is a similar model which could assist in improving the user’s experience across a constrained network connection as well as save on bandwidth.

5. Page weight of “normal” SharePoint pages

In general SharePoint page weights are less than in SharePoint 2007. The style sheets and JavaScript files are smaller and the product teams are working hard to make them smaller still for RTM. This means that without any of the previous scenarios, a users web page browsing experience should be better based on the page weight.

The product also now has several AJAX style functions in pages which don’t require full page postbacks, this results in less HTML being pulled across the wire in many standard user operations. The user experience feels a lot more snappy and results in less bandwidth consumption.

 6. Page weight of mobile SharePoint pages

SharePoint ships with mobile web browser views for pages in a SharePoint site. These pages are tiny (very very tiny) and so in extreme cases you could even use these pages from a desktop web browser. Not only can you view web pages but you can also view documents in this view. The Microsoft Office documents are rendered in a text only view when selected, the document is stripped of all images and so you can do basic reading of the document, and once again the document is tiny in this mode.

The user also has the choice to see pages in a document as thumbnails (well images, JPG, that are bigger than thumbnails) for a full view of a page without images stripped out. Once again, these page images are much smaller than downloading the document and reading the pages.

In those extreme cases, users can get their jobs done using the mobile views across the smallest of network connections. Yes, might not look that pretty, but will work well.

7. Use Log shipping / Mirroring to copy data to a server close to a user

SharePoint 2010 supports both SQL log shipping and mirroring to “replicate” content databases to SharePoint deployments which are located close to a user. IMPORTANT – this is not a 2-way replication, but rather designed for one-way replication where you copy a site form one location to another and the destination location is read-only for users. This would work well in brochure-ware intranet scenarios, were the users just consume information rather than update information from the remote locations.

As you can see, the team has really put in some hard work to address constrained network scenarios, and using these in combination with each other or even by themselves should make a big difference for our users as well on the cost of our network.

Michael

Proudly South African SharePoint theme store http://www.sharepointshop.co.za/ has just launched with some great looking themes for your SharePoint sites. Check them out here

These are delivered by local partner, bSolve.

Michael

Looking to build an internet (or even intranet) solution on SharePoint 2007. Microsoft are hosting a 2 day intensive training workshop (SWAT series) in October.

“In this SWAT series workshop we will look at how to build a Web Content Management solution on SharePoint from scratch. If you are planning to build Internet sites on SharePoint then this workshop is for you. We'll take you from zero to hero in two days, with instructor-led theory followed by intensive hands-on-labs.

To get the most from the training, a good background in html, CSS and JavaScript is essential”

For more information, or to book follow this booking link

Get the details on Security Essentials and download it free from the Security Essentials web site

It is frightening to see how many SharePoint installations have been installed with wrong service accounts. Either people are using the default domain administrator or local machine administrator for all service accounts, or they are creating a single service account for everything and in many cases giving it WAY too many rights. SharePoint 2007 has been out for a fair amount of time and people are still getting this massively wrong. We can dissect later why that is, but for now I wanted to give my quick overview on what I suggest for service accounts in SharePoint 2007.

Few golden rules:

1. Never use domain administrator or built-in machine administrator for any SharePoint service account, and never be logged onto a server with as either of these accounts when installing SharePoint.
2. Never use the same service account for all SharePoint services
3. Never manually grant SQL Server rights to any service account (except the one you use to install SharePoint – farm service account, will come back to this later). SharePoint will give all SQL Server rights to the appropriate service accounts
4. Read the installation documentation. This is not a simple installation and configuration, so don’t treat it as such. Do you home-work before installing and configuring a SharePoint farm. Seriously, this is not a file server!

Depending which resources you read, will see suggestions anywhere from 3 to 7 service accounts required for SharePoint Server 2007. In my suggestion below, I recommend 5 service accounts. There are many arguments to be had around details, but I don't believe you will be going wrong with this.

Question: How do I change my already bad deployment? Check this KB article out, which may help http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;934838

I hope this helps in some little way next time you are tasked with this.

Michael

Both of these web sites (developed by local partner Intervate) have gone live using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS). When you have a chance, hope on over and take a look.

www.montecasino.co.za

www.tsogosun.co.za

Once, again these have been updated on www.informationworker.co.za/pages/showcase.aspx for a complete reference of local SA sites on MOSS.

Here is a site dedicated to SharePoint Governance (http://www.sharepointgovernance.org/default.aspx). I haven’t taken a deep look at the content, but I am sure it will have something that could add value to your sharepoint deployment (new or existing).

Me

There are some cool demo videos, showing key features in Office 2010 (including SharePoint Workspace), available for viewing on the recently announced Office 2010 site.

Check them out here

Yes! Microsoft have released some sneak peek videos of SharePoint 2010. These are just overview videos, more detailed information will be released at the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas in October.

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

Check out http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/social. It’s about organisations using social computing technologies inside the firewall for business benefit. Watch this space (site) as it delivers more information over time which I am sure will be of value to you.

Oh, and yes, it’s built in SharePoint and Silverlight.

The session list is now 95% confirmed, there might be a few tweaks here and there, but for the most part it is done. In total almost double the amount of SharePoint sessions from last year. We have also added self paced hands-on labs and instructor-led labs (although the exact labs have yet to be confirmed).

Anyway, here is the list of sessions which I can share with you today (and these exclude the BI track which cover’s SharePoint technologies too). The Tech-Ed web site should be updated with this in the near future.

SharePoint guru Joel “Governance” Oleson is coming to South Africa to share his experiences around SharePoint governance, architecture and deployment at Tech-Ed. This is exciting news because there are many organisations who are still battling in this space. Co-founder of the Baltimore SharePoint user group Eric Harlan is also joining us to share his vast SharePoint experience from the field. They will also both be at the Ask the Experts evening (with I think is on Monday night at Tech-Ed, so you can drill them then).

We are excited that both of them will be joining us for the event and I am sure the South African IW community will show them our warm South African hospitality. That is, if they don’t get chomped by a Lion in Kruger before the event.

In my next post I will share with you the SharePoint session titles for the event. You will be pleasantly surprised that we have almost doubled the amount of SharePoint sessions from last year :-)

Michael

Featuring Microsoft Silverlight and MOSS 2007, Durban’s official FIFA World Cup Host City web site has launched. Local South African partner AdaptIT has done an excellent job in assembling this great looking web site.

This has been added to the SA showcase of MOSS internet sites.

Michael