Late Night with Nate Baum

Stsadm Resources

2009-12-21T21:56:37Z

It’s been FAR too long since my last blog post. November came and went as I did SharePoint 2010 overview after overview. December has been fun with an all-day SharePoint 2010 “Best of SharePoint Conference” event that I put on in the Detroit area. We help five sessions including a “why upgrade” talk, a SharePoint 2010 end user overview, SharePoint 2010 development, SharePoint 2010 admin and governance what’s new, and a SharePoint 2010 upgrade how-to talk. It was a full day. We had a similar event in Grand Rapids, MI that got snowed out but that’s been rescheduled for mid-January.

Anyway, I had a request come in that led me to validate a few operations available with the stsadm command line utility. I did a quick search and found some great stsadm reference sites that I wanted to share.

WSS Demo – SharePoint list

I hadn’t seen this before, but the WSS demo site has a great SharePoint list of out-of-box SharePoint stsadm commands, broken out by categories. What a great way to quickly look for an operation with examples and in many cases a link to the technet page. In my experience, this is the easiest way to navigate the out-of-box stsadm operations.

http://www.wssdemo.com/Lists/stsadm/AllItems.aspx

TechNet

The most authoritative listing of stsadm commands. Maintained formally by Microsoft, but some operations may also have community content.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262643.aspx

Custom stsadm commands

Gary Lapointe has a number of custom stsadm commands that he’s published. There are certainly other custom commands besides these, but Gary has done a great job of covering a number of needed administration areas. Gary also has some PowerShell Cmdlets as well (more on that option in another post):

http://stsadm.blogspot.com/2007/08/stsadm-commands_09.html

Windows App to run stsadm commands

I’ve never used, but here is information on a windows-form application that gives a graphical UI for those folks that need to use stsadm but are scared off by the command line. I think this also is a big boost for non-English speakers who need to use stsadm operations:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ronalus/archive/2007/01/04/stsadmwin-has-an-2007-version.aspx

This post is as much a help to me (bookmark) as anyone else on this post, since a quick search in bing will bring up these same great resources.

SharePoint Conference 2009 Recap – What’s Hot in SharePoint 2010

2009-10-28T06:07:30Z

I’m just now recovering from the SharePoint Conference and catching up on customer requests. I wanted to quickly share my impressions on what new features garnered the most interest at the SharePoint Conference last week.

1. Business Connectivity Services (BCS)

From my view, this was the big hit, far and away. The sessions were absolutely packed. There was a lot of discussion outside of the sessions; a lot of excitement. I thought the event did a great job of showing the basics (from the Ballmer keynote), to a broader overview and then a few deep dive sessions that got into coding against the BCS APIs using Visual Studio 2010 by Steve Fox. Great Stuff!

Here’s a quick link to the new BCS team blog for more info: http://blogs.msdn.com/bcs

2. Knowledge Management/Document Management

These sessions were also packed. From eavesdropping in the lunch line I heard a lot of people viewing the new document management capabilities as another big reset around ECM. All of a sudden SharePoint has a lot of credibility in the space because 2010 builds on all the best parts of 2007 and addresses some of the noted shortcomings. Managing taxonomy, metadata driven navigation, and the ability to refine your search terms in a document center scenario are all huge steps forward. Couple that with the new social capabilities and the ability to set policies and records retention across the farm and SharePoint 2010 is a big player in this space, all by itself. Add SharePoint search improvements and FAST for SharePoint and the story gets even better.

More info: http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com/product/capabilities/Content/Pages/default.aspx

3. Service Applications

There was a lot of buzz around service applications. The changes to remove the SSP and provide a more flexible shared service model were well received by the partners and customers I talked to. Attendees also liked that this architecture is built in to SharePoint Foundation 2010 (not just SharePoint Server 2010, like it is in 2007). I love that the architecture is extensible, so partners can implement products and capabilities that easily snap-in to the environment. Administrators love that. Administrators also like that these services are managed in central admin, not a separate site. Everything is in one spot. The applications can also all be managed and scripted with PowerShell. There is a ton of flexibility with the IT Pro in mind – and the design allows for an organization to significantly scale up their SharePoint environment.

More info in this document: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262881(office.14).aspx

Honorable Mentions

InfoPath – I think of this as the release where InfoPath goes from being a niche tool for a one-off form to a product that is used in many places within a SharePoint environment to take a site from out-of-the-box to a rich application.

Composites – rich solutions with no code has always been the dream. 2007 made a huge leap forward from 2003 but it still often requires someone with a lot of technical expertise to design a solution. And too soon a site owner is in SharePoint Designer and staring at HTML/CSS code with no clue. 2010 changes this. SharePoint Designer 2010 makes some huge tool changes to simplify the experience. The BCS and InfoPath also contribute to the ability to build composites. I loved the last session of the conference where Nick Dallett showed how mash-ups could be built using InfoPath. Powerful!

Social Computing – it is great to finally show all the great new social computing capabilities in 2010 without an NDA. I think this is a huge step forward from 2007. I believe in the next three years these technologies will continue to evolve and it will truly change how business is done, especially as more and more millennials enter the workforce. This is one area where we’ll continue to rely on great partners like Newsgator to innovate on top of the SharePoint platform.

Client Object Model – I had a few consultants tell me how excited they were about this. Client-side access to the server object model through a subset of members and types can make a developer’s job much easier in certain cases. More SharePoint 2010 dev resources here

New services (Access, Visio, Word, etc.) – I don’t have enough time to get into each of these, but I definitely heard from a number of attendees how they were excited about some of these new capabilities. There is some great content posted already on this. Here’s one good post where Word Services is mentioned as the favorite feature in SharePoint 2010. I don’t know if I’d put it in that category but I can definitely relate to the scenario it addresses. Goodbye KB #257757. I will not miss you.

I’m enjoying reading all the other impressions and excitement coming out of the conference. Much more to come as SP2010 Beta gets released next month!

SP Conference – quick tips on connectivity

2009-10-20T18:02:23Z

I ran into a few odd issues accessing MySPC and I helped a few different folks with some connectivity issues this morning while checking my email on break so I thought I’d post a few quick tips and then tweet about it in case others are hitting the same problems.

Connecting to the network

You can find this on the conference site, but users still seem confused. In short, you should connect to the MSFTINET network with the bars, not the connected PCs.

Accessing MySPC

I ran into an issue where MySPC wasn’t showing up on the main site and there wasn’t an option to sign-in/sign-out. After a few minutes I realized I was signed in to the browser session with another Live ID (that I didn’t use to sign-up for the conference). I went to http://www.windows.live.com and signed out. Then I went back to http://www.mssharepointconference.com and a link to Sign-in with my Live ID showed up on the page.

I signed-in using the right Live ID and I was good to go. The MySPC was showing up as expected.

Support

If you are having issues head to the support desk over by registration. They’ll be able to help you out much quicker than I can.

Hope this helps!

Nate

SharePoint Conference 2009: Taking off the covers

2009-10-20T03:05:00Z

It’s finally here! The biggest day for SharePoint enthusiasts in 3 years. There were A LOT of big announcements today but before I get to that here are some fast facts about the conference.

7400+ attendees (the last SP conference was 3,800, a 95% increase!)
Over 60 different countries represented at the conference
The SharePoint Conference has it’s own TV channel at my hotel. Nothing like drifting off to sleep hearing about SharePoint add-on products from our partners…
Two SharePoint Conference weddings. Meaning two separate weddings were scheduled around the conference. I know...wow.
Tuesday will be the biggest beach party ever (with Huey Lewis and the News playing) at Mandalay Bay. Pretty impressive considering we’re in Vegas, where everything is big
The partner pavilion is BIG. Lots of our key partners are there (and a few competitors looking to pitch their SharePoint integration components)

Big announcements today:

Full disclosure of SharePoint 2010 – this is the biggie. SharePoint 2010 is no longer an “NDA-only” discussion. All SharePoint capabilities are now out there. Expect to see a flood of new info on blogs, twitter, etc. This is especially evidenced by the 270-page conference guide that was given to all conference attendees. After quickly flipping through last night, this looks to be a great first resource for customers and partners and provides a lot of content, screenshots, code, and partner information all in a single guide. Fantastic!!

Visual Studio 2010 Beta – available today! This is the next generation development platform for SharePoint 2010. Note that the new Visual Studio Tools for SharePoint are focused on SharePoint 2010. (Click below)

Announcement of SharePoint 2010 public beta availability – Steve Ballmer announced that the beta will be available in November! Click the image for the sign-up page:

PowerPivot – previously known as Project Gemini. This is in-memory technology that sits on the client or server and let’s users sift through massive amounts of data (100M rows of data in Excel). There are two separate products. SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel (running on top of Excel 2010) pulls the data client-side and allows for users to build pivot tables against the data. SQL Server PowerPivot for SharePoint (leveraging SharePoint 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2) allows users to interact with extremely large volumes of data through a familiar SharePoint environment. It is really Analysis Services integration in SharePoint.

http://www.powerpivot.com/

Packaging announcements – there was a lot of content in the keynotes around the new names and versions of SharePoint, SharePoint Online, and search technologies. Here’s a quick summary, taken from the link below and the keynote:

WSS is now known as SharePoint Foundation 2010
MOSS is now Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 or SharePoint Server 2010, with Standard and Enterprise versions like 2007
Free basic search offering in Search Server Express 2010 (like 2007)
Default SharePoint search is not FAST. It builds on SharePoint Server 2007 with greater scale and capabilities
FAST Search for SharePoint add-on available to SharePoint Server Enterprise customers.
For Internet-facing sites, there are additional FAST search SKUs (both against SharePoint-based .com sites, and non-SharePoint .com sites)
New lower-cost “standard” version of SharePoint for Internet Sites – for small to medium sites
SharePoint Designer 2010 continues to be free (like 2007 as of April 2009)
SharePoint Workspace (f.k.a. Groove) is now part of Office 2010 Professional Plus
SharePoint Online – not included in the post below, but from the presentation it looks like there will be a new SharePoint Online cloud offering called SharePoint Online for Internet Sites

More details on the whole announcement (and packaging info at the end): http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/10/19/sharepoint-2010.aspx

In general, demos went very well at both keynotes (no major issues) which should give everyone a good sense at how far down the path we are with the next product. For as painful as it was to have very limited conversations around SharePoint 2010 over the past several months I’m very pleased with the work and planning the product group has done to demo and deliver a good beta product. The 2010 content and demos at the conference is a lot more than smoke and mirrors, it is working code!

For more info check out the new SharePoint 2010 site on Microsoft.com (running on SharePoint 2010 Beta 2!)

http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com/Pages/default.aspx

Here's an official press announcement too.

Looking forward to many more discussions around SharePoint 2010!

Site security: secure down or secure up?

2009-10-06T06:28:00Z

I’m sure most of you are aware of how flexible SharePoint is in terms of securing content. There are several permission levels that can be created. Users can be assigned to a group, or directly to a particular permission level. And you can grant people permissions to nearly all artifacts within SharePoint, from the site collection down to the individual document or list item. So with all this flexibility, there are often several ways an organization could secure a certain solution on top of SharePoint. That’s the beauty (and sometime challenge). It’s important to understand the long-term implications of choosing a particular architecture or design.

So with this in find, there is often a could and should viewpoint on a SharePoint solution. A customer of mine recently emailed me a great example of a solution that could be implemented in one of several ways. This is a common scenario where a typical SharePoint site is in use by a team but then the site owner needs to share a small slice of that content to a particular group of people (that don’t and shouldn’t have read access to the rest of the site). More details are written up below (big thanks to my customer – I love working with people who can lay out the scenario and layout the steps to reproduce, what they expected, and what actually happens. This helps a ton!)

A site (collection) owner decides to create a library in their site that is to be accessible to an audience other than the Members and Visitors of the site. She creates a custom group, and places the desired users into it. At this point, this group has access to nothing in the site (i.e., no selection is made from the listed Permission Levels of the New Group form-page). Now she goes to the library and alters permissions on that to allow the custom group to have some level of access to it (the degree of access doesn’t matter here). At this point, the group has access only to that library, and nothing else in the entire site. This is precisely what the owner wants. She doesn’t want them even seeing the homepage or any other content in the site; just the one library. And she provides the library’s URL to those users, via email, so that they can jump directly to it. All good, so far.

Now, one of those users follows the link in the email and finds themselves at the list or library. But because of the amount of content there, let’s say, the user can’t see what they’re looking for. So they resort to the search function, using a search term that they know is associated to the item they’re looking for, and using either the This Site: or This Library: search scope. Instead of seeing the search results page, they see Access Denied. …Problem!

This is because the members of this custom group only have access to the one library and nothing else in the site…including the site’s own search results page (_layouts/OSSSearchResults.aspx). However, the site owner cannot set permissions on that page, to give that group read access to it –it doesn’t reside in the site. The only way to give that group access to the search results page is to give them read-access to the entire site, but that lets them see content that the site owner can’t allow them to see. She could alter permissions on all the other lists in the site to revoke that group’s access (YUCK!!), but she can’t hide the homepage from that group, since she doesn’t have access to that file either. (It’s not a Publishing site, so the default.aspx page does not reside in the site’s Pages library.)

From my perspective, this is a design flaw in the product. It seems to me that the search results page that each Team site has should be accessible by all authenticated users, or to all users listed through the site collection, and let permissions on the content determine what appears there. That would resolve the problem with this scenario.

A different approach

First of all, I can definitely appreciate the scenario, and how a site owner could head down this path. You CAN take the approach described above where security is set fairly tight at the top level but then becomes more open as you go deeper in the SharePoint containment hierarchy. SharePoint doesn’t block you from doing this. BUT as a general recommendation I’d suggest doing the opposite, for exactly the described issues. Certain resources or services are provided at the site level so if you make security too tight on the site and try to open it up then you run into strange behaviors (beyond just the scenario described above).

What I typically tell site owners is that securing at the site and then making it less restrictive with a document library is similar to locking a file cabinet and then giving access to one specific file folder in the cabinet. A colleague of mine in Chicago gave the analogy of dropping a user on a desert island. The user can get to that island of information (in the case above a document library) but they have no idea how they got to the library and no clear option for navigating away from the library. I really like this analogy. It highlights how this is a really bad user experience, in my opinion.

So I’d propose a different approach. Here are a few options:

Option 1: The site owner could give these users visitor perms on the site and secure other lists and libraries. This works when the number of lists and libraries is only a handful. Otherwise, it can be very tough to manage. If you have 20 libraries and 20 lists, this is a pain. But if you are set on keeping it all in one site and allowing for search this is the best bet. And these ‘restricted’ users could still have access to the main page. Content would be security trimmed and you could use audience targeting as well.

Option 2: Create a sub-site. This is very easy to do and generally a much better experience for end users. This is my favorite option. I think this is a better option long-term in terms of both management and user experience.

Option 3: One final option that I proposed (but didn’t seem to work in my testing) is to tweak the permission levels to give these ‘restricted’ users access to application pages.

Hope this helps as you think through your site design!

Ramping up on data warehouse design

2009-09-30T08:42:38Z

As many of you know PerformancePoint Server is now licensed as part of the SharePoint Enterprise version. As a result of this change, those of us who focus on SharePoint have a much more significant role in presenting Microsoft’s approach to business intelligence. In a nutshell, SharePoint (plus PerformancePoint) and Excel ARE the business intelligence front-end. However, data warehouse and cube design are extremely critical to any good BI implementation.

To that end, my colleague, Rick Brewis, a SQL technical specialist, compiled a great list of resources related to data warehouse design. If you are in the process of assessing your data warehouse needs see Rick’s list below for some great resources and starting points:

Check out this book, “The Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit: With SQL Server 2005 and the Microsoft Business Intelligence Toolset” - http://www.kimballgroup.com/html/booksMDWT.html
- This book really covers the details on creating, designing, and managing data warehouses

SQL 2008 Data Warehousing home page - http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/data-warehousing.aspx
Best Practices for Data Warehousing with SQL Server 2008 - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc719165.aspx
Scaling Up Your Data Warehouse with SQL Server 2008 - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc719182.aspx
TechNet Article: SQL Server 2008 Data Warehouse Query Performance - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2008.04.dwperformance.aspx
TechNet Articles, Videos, and BLOG on SQL Server 2008 Data Warehousing - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/dd421879.aspx
Good Webcasts on Data Warehousing with SQL Server 2005 – these approaches still are applicable

Take a look at the Agenda Topics for this 4 Day Seminar that Kimball Group puts on every once in awhile – gives you a good understanding of the various subject areas you need to be thinking about for Data Mining - http://blogs.msdn.com/genewebb/archive/2007/11/12/microsoft-data-warehouse-in-depth-by-joy-mundy-and-warren-thornthwaite-co-authors-of-the-newly-published-microsoft-data-warehouse-toolkit.aspx
There used to be some free SQL Server 2008 eLearning Classes that might still be around at: http://blogs.msdn.com/genewebb/archive/2008/10/06/free-sql-2008-classes-on-microsoft-learning.aspx

Hope this helps to start you off. There is a wealth of knowledge in these links. The Kimball Group Book is a great start. The videos, webcasts, and white papers provide you concrete examples to build upon the information discussed in the book.

Also, one final note: I found the wikipedia entry for data warehouse to be fairly informative. It gives a brief history and of course covers the two design methodologies: top-down (Inmon) and bottom-up (Kimball, referenced above).

Thanks!

Workflow security – options for locking down a document

2009-09-29T06:31:07Z

I recently was asked by a customer how they would go about setting up a workflow process where the approver doesn’t have access to make changes to the document itself. In their words:

“The individual would complete a form with activities and time spent, then save the document which kicks off the workflow. There are three to four levels of approvers on the time report who should approve the document without being able to modify any of the time reported or other fields.

My understanding is that this would not be possible without some .net programming or something like that due to the sharepoint security scheme having document level security as the default and requiring programming to have field level security…”

It seemed like an interesting scenario so I thought I’d give it some thought and test out a few theories. I agree with the customer’s statement about SharePoint security being set at the document level, not per column. That’s definitely true. However, I did come up with a few options that could work without custom code.

Option 1: Set unique permissions on workflow related lists in SharePoint

SharePoint workflow uses a separate task list to manage tasks. You can set security separately for this list. I tested this by creating a user who had read-only permissions on a document library. On the document library I created a simple approval workflow where the new read-only user needed to approve the document. Then I went to the task list associated with the workflow and gave the user edit permissions. Finally, I created a document as a different user and saved into the document library. The workflow kicked off and assigned a task to my read-only user. I logged in as the read-only user. I could open the document but I wasn’t able to update anything in the document as expected (the user has read-only access). Then I went to the document library and clicked on the In Progress text related to the workflow. I opened the workflow task and I was able to approve as expected. The workflow completed as expected. The only issue is that the user had to approve the workflow through the SharePoint page. They weren’t be able to take advantage of the Word 2007/SharePoint integration.

Option 2: Let SharePoint invalidate the workflow when a doc has changed

This is a bit simpler. Leave the users as “contributors” so they CAN still change the document. But setup the workflow to cancel the workflow when a change has been made. For example, this would need to be checked

And this could be part of the configuration too

Option 3: Digital signatures

Probably the most secure way to accomplish this is to use digital signatures and InfoPath to officially sign the document. Once the document is signed approvers would not be able to change the data.

Hope this benefits some of you out there who are faced with a similar solution need.

New Guidance on Developing SharePoint Applications

2009-09-06T10:16:25Z

I’ve had several customers ask me how they can develop a process within their organization to determine whether a solution or application is a good fit for SharePoint. It takes a lot of experience and technical understanding to determine this. And unfortunately, there hasn’t always been great content available that goes past the basic training on features.

Enter the Microsoft patterns and practices team. The P&P team provides applied guidance to software architects and developers. In a nutshell, they want development teams to be more productive and successful with Microsoft products. The team released “SharePoint Guidance” last November, a great first step for SharePoint developers. A few days ago the group released a great follow-up, Developing SharePoint Applications: Guidance for building collaborative applications that extend your LOB systems.

Key Links

MSDN Content: http://www.microsoft.com/spg
Community Site: http://www.codeplex.com/spg
Download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=91f3c22c-8be7-4721-9449-84f699337d55&displaylang=en

Interoperability and extending SharePoint to line of business systems seems to be coming up a lot lately in my conversations with customers so I’m very excited about this new content. A few of the release goals, copied from the Patterns and Practices team:

The goal of patterns & practices Developing SharePoint Applications guidance is to help customers understand how to develop large scale, content-driven SharePoint applications that extend the value of existing line of business systems:

Large Scale – guidance on building in the manageability, configurability, and performance expected from large scale applications.

Content Driven – more advanced SharePoint applications often include many sites and combine custom coded logic with created content. The guidance includes a demonstration of areas like custom navigation and publishing, composing Web parts with published information, and managing a consistent user experience.

Extend LOB Systems – SharePoint can aggregate and extend information from Line of Business systems to end users, enhancing structured business processes with informal processes through collaboration. The guidance shows how to integrate security considerations into business services, and demonstrate how to create collaborative sites that help manage business events like incident escalations and order exceptions.

The guidance also contains more complex example solutions that demonstrate various scenarios. For example, the diagram below shows a partner portal application that connects to back-end data. This solution is included in the guidance.

Check it out!

InfoPath 2010 Overview Video and Content – Eliminating the Clicks

2009-08-24T10:04:00Z

I spent a little time last week reviewing some of the new InfoPath 2010 features and content. One recent addition to the content is a video out on YouTube, posted by the InfoPath Product team. This eight minute video covers the basics of creating and publishing forms with InfoPath 2010. If you’re looking for a short but sweet demo of InfoPath 2010, go here first: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKJ3A12RfE8.

One thing that stands out to me as someone who’s spent a lot of time with InfoPath 2003 and InfoPath 2007 is a significant reduction in mouse clicks to get things done. If you’ve spent time with either InfoPath 2003 or 2007 you’ve probably noted that it takes a lot of clicks to design a form. For example, if you want to add a new condition on a rule it takes some time to click to add a rule and then go through the steps of adding a specific conditional statement. And then you end up clicking OK several times to finish the configuration. Here are four new capabilities that I think InfoPath form designers will love about InfoPath 2010, especially as it relates to reducing mouse clicks:

The Rules Manager. Now when a form designer wants to understand the form rules better, the Rules Manager provides a great way to view rules data in a single spot. Quick Rules is also something I’m excited about. This is sort of like your “fast cash withdrawal” of InfoPath rules. Depending on the control that is selected, the form designer is presented with a list of the most common rules for that control type. Fantastic!
Let’s not forget about the new ribbon. The Fluent UI is coming to InfoPath. And this will honestly save me several clicks as well. Sure, it takes a few days to grow on you, but most customers I talk to love the ribbon in Office 2007 applications like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. I think this UI change in InfoPath 2010 will ultimately ‘unbury’ many of the design features within the product. Just look at how easy it is to choose a page layout and add section layouts in the demo video. And the overall feel to an end user is very similar to Microsoft Word, a huge benefit when it comes to training.
The backstage area within InfoPath is a huge benefit as well. In previous InfoPath versions there was a Design Tasks option that was a good way to jump back to the top-level form design menu actions. Backstage builds on this by exposing a lot of these design tasks (Publishing, Design Checker, Submit Options) in a single location that’s always one-click away.
And finally, One-click publishing is a great way to quickly make changes and re-publish out to a location. Gone are the days where an InfoPath designer makes a small change to the form and is required to click through the publishing wizard six or eight times. Make the change, save, and publish.

For further reading/watching on InfoPath 2010 see the following blog postings from the InfoPath product team. And you’ll also note that there are several related videos out on YouTube covering Office 2010 in more details.

InfoPath 2010 feature videos

One final note: many of you know that InfoPath has several integration points with SharePoint. And at this point in time public information about SharePoint 2010 is fairly limited. It hasn’t been fully disclosed yet. So I was surprised to find an InfoPath Overview on the InfoPath team blog that touched on several up-and-coming integration features between InfoPath 2010 and SharePoint 2010.

Read the post here: What's New in InfoPath 2010

I’m very excited about several of these new capabilities, and I’ll have much more to say about these capabilities after SharePoint 2010 full disclosure.

Stay tuned!

Update 9/8/2009: See comment below for a link to another great video on InfoPath 2010/SharePoint 2010 integration. Thanks Michael!

Explaining SharePoint to your Mom

2009-08-17T06:43:30Z

A colleague just pointed me to a great new video produced by Common Craft called SharePoint in Plain English. This 3 minute video can be found here: www.microsoft.com/video/en/us/details/76e8d3af-c2bd-42a6-bb12-befcbd041bf1 It’s also out on YouTube.

When I moved out to Seattle and joined Microsoft back in 1997 I’m pretty sure my parents thought my office was attached to a giant plant where CDs/floppy disks were loaded with Microsoft’s latest software and packaged for shipping out to retail stores. Growing up in the midwest, this is generally how it is with big companies (mostly manufacturing in Michigan too). They couldn’t really picture an entire campus of office buildings and no manufacturing facility so I think they were pretty surprised when they came out for a visit.

My job at the time was to “build” Microsoft Exchange (v5.0 SP and 5.5). Explaining Microsoft Exchange to my mom was a bit of a challenge. And I couldn’t find a nice way to describe what it meant to ‘build’ Exchange in plain English. How do you water down the process of syncing all the source code and compiling it, localizing it, and arranging the files into an installable software program. It was better to just say “I write code using a computer language to automate certain tasks.”

Twelve years later and back with Microsoft I still find it challenging to explain what I do to my mom. I think she understands my job a lot better and she knows I help to sell and provide technical guidance on SharePoint, but I’d bet a steak dinner that if someone were to ask her what SharePoint is, she wouldn’t have a good response.

All that to say, a huge THANKS to Common Craft for producing this easy-to-reference, easy-to-consume video. I’ve already sent a link to my mom and dad.

One additional comment: I definitely agree with the comment left on the YouTube site: the video really focuses on collaboration/document management but SharePoint is SO much more than that. What about social, BI, enterprise search, forms? And the ability to develop on top of SharePoint. The list could go on and on…

OK, so this isn’t the complete SharePoint picture but you need to start somewhere, right? If it were a ten minute video I think a non-technical, non-IT viewer’s eyes would start to glaze over. But I’d love to see a few of these videos created, maybe one for each basic workload. What are your thoughts? What sort of content can we (Microsoft) produce to best support end users in the SharePoint 2010 timeframe?

Discussion Boards and Content Types

2009-08-03T10:28:08Z

My last night in Seattle/Redmond. I have one day left of SharePoint 2010 Developer Ignite training and I am wiped out. What better time to crank out a blog post.

I received an interesting email from a customer not too long ago regarding Discussion Boards. In a nutshell (and names changed to protect the innocent) here is what the business user was looking for:

“I would like to set up one discussion board capable of capturing multiple content types, like Unplanned Event, Equipment Problem, etc. Each content type would have a common group of columns, like created by, created on, last modified, subject, description, etc. Each would also have additional columns which are specific to the content type. For instance, Unplanned Event might have columns for event start/end date and time, event type, corrective actions taken, etc. Equipment Problem might have columns for equipment location, trouble-shooting performed, abnormal running conditions, etc. Each content type would likely have a different work flow.

The subject view of the discussion group would display all entries, regardless of content type. This view would display some of the common columns and probably be ordered on last modified date. Viewing/editing forms would display all columns, including the content type specific columns. Each entry would allow replies to be added.”

Now, I’ve done a lot of work with discussion boards in the past, but more around basic capabilities. I’d never had a request come in for this type of solution so I never peeled back the onion to see how content types are configured. I was surprised to find out that by default multiple content types are allowed for this list type. There are two content types available on the list. The first content type, ‘Discussion’, is the default. It inherits from the folder content type. This is the only type of content you can create from the ‘New’ button (despite default settings below). The second content type is ‘Message’. This content type can only be created by clicking the ‘reply’ button on the form.

So in Essence, the Discussion content type is just a fancy folder. When a user creates a discussion and views this, the list has a special out-of-box view. Part of that view is that users can click “reply”. This basically creates a new list item based on the message content type. This new item is placed ‘under’ the Discussion list item. All this is wired up natively.

So what’s the answer?

My customer originally went down the path of creating a new content type, inheriting from discussion (which inherits from folder) and adding site columns. When my customer attempted to add this content type to the discussion board the ‘enhanced discussion’ content type could not be found. It turns out that the discussion board is picky as to what content types it allows. The folder content type is not on the list. And my feeling was that even if you could get around this with code, there would still be several issues. First, you’d need to address making the ‘reply’ button unique for each ‘enhanced discussion’ content type with custom logic. Second, you’d have to handle the custom capabilities in the views settings. The list goes on.

Option 2

So what was the answer? Well based on the architecture of the out-of-box discussion group list definition my personal recommendation was to use multiple discussion groups to achieve the desired results. In the end I think it’d be far easier to manage and customize using the built in SharePoint methods. This would allow a team to easily add metadata columns to each discussion group list through the web admin. Plain and easy.

The only challenge with this configuration is the roll-up view. The requirements state “the subject view of the discussion group would display all entries, regardless of content type. This view would display some of the common columns and probably be ordered on last modified date. Viewing/editing forms would display all columns, including the content type specific columns.”

This could be accomplished a number of ways including content by query web part, data view web part, or a custom web part. All in all, much easier than the prospect of hacking things through the UI, or writing code, or creating a new discussion list definition.

There are always multiple ways to accomplish something in SharePoint and I’m not suggesting it’s not possible to create a list with multiple discussion/message content types, but my opinion is that it will take a lot more work to do this, and a lot more customization than the approach I describe above.

Are there any other creative approaches to handling the above requirements in SharePoint? Add your thoughts!

A Scorching TechReady and the Deploy Now Versus Later Question

2009-07-31T11:24:55Z

One day left at TechReady 9 and I’ve already had a great week. The record-setting heat in Seattle hasn’t gotten in the way one bit. I’ve been inside most of the day in air-conditioning learning about great technologies, both current and future. There are some really fantastic products coming out in the next year.

I’ve also enjoyed getting together with current colleagues in my district, re-uniting with old colleagues, and meeting several new technical specialists in the field. I also really enjoy getting a chance to meet people from the product group. I’m always amazed at how friendly and engaging these people are, especially with deadlines looming and endless requests for their time.

In addition to TechReady activities I’ve been keeping up with customers and today I got my first email asking for my thoughts on whether to deploy a solution on SharePoint 2007 or wait for SharePoint 2010. In this case, SharePoint isn’t in the environment anywhere. I’m expecting several more so I thought I’d post my opinion out here for all to see.

The Typical Questions

1. When will it be available?

Answer: The latest announced information is first half of calendar year 2010

2. Will it be stable?

Answer: That’s a fairly broad question. And of course there is no way to make guarantees for every feature/function of SharePoint. That said, this is our version 4 of the product, and version 3 (2007) was stable out of the gate in my experience.

3. What was 2007 like initially as far as bugs?

Answer: This is also fairly broad. I’m sure some might complain about certain features/workloads of SharePoint and the challenges they had out of the gate. The biggest complaint I heard from my consultant peers at the time was lack of deep documentation. I know we are focused on addressing this up front this time around.

My personal experience deploying SharePoint 2007 (v3) in a 10K person organization was very good. Some stats:

General availability of SharePoint 2007: January 2007
Launch of enterprise-wide SharePoint-based portal, My Sites, enterprise search, and collaboration platform: April 13, 2007
Number of hours of downtime as of Dec 31, 2007: 1 (due to shared SQL issue)
Percentage uptime over this period: 99.98%
Number of servers in the farm (including clustered SQL): 6

My Advice

My suggestion today (July 31st) for most organizations is to move forward with 2007 planning and deployment but keep one eye on SharePoint 2010 announcements/information.

The best advice I can give is to ramp up on 2010 and follow best practice with 2007 today.

Some additional thoughts:

1. Hardware/software/browser requirements - you’ll notice in the post below that we’ve released general 2010 hardware guidance, so build your 2007 environment on this same hardware so you are ready to upgrade when 2010 is available. And check out the other great recommendations in this post as far as using Windows Server 2008 and getting users off of IE6. There are several requirements for 2010 that you can address now.

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/11/announcing-sharepoint-server-2010-preliminary-system-requirements.aspx

2. When deploying on 2007 use out-of-box as much as possible. Limit customizations to common customizations (e.g. custom master pages). And check for customization compatibility using the Upgrade Checker that was released with Service Pack 2: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd793607.aspx. Run the Upgrade Check, especially if deeper customizations are considered. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t deploy custom solutions, etc. But you should be aware of how these solutions might impact an upgrade to SharePoint 2010.

3. If you are considering 3^rd party solutions, either free open source (codeplex) or MS partner products consider upgrade challenges. If you are purchasing a solution I’d ask the company what their roadmap is for SharePoint 2010 and how their product will upgrade. Are they aligned with Microsoft? Also, what is the timeframe for having an upgrade solution? It might be interesting to install the vendor’s solution and run the Upgrade Checker to see what happens.

4. For each solution/component of SharePoint you are looking to leverage consider how it might change in 2010. For example, how will the BDC change in 2010? In some cases there is some basic info in the sneak peak video on SharePoint 2010.

5. Plan to upgrade from the start, both from a planning perspective and a budget perspective.

6. When 2010 is released and you upgrade shortly after RTM, don’t try to push the platform to the limits. Use it the way it was designed (and tested). If you have a unique business solution, test it first.

Bottom line: You’ve heard it said before: “walk before you run”. So start walking on 2007, upgrade, and then run on 2010. This will give you immediate value today, with a plan for a broader deployment with SharePoint 2010.

Timing is Everything

As more details are released, dates firm up, and beta builds become public it may make sense to focus on SharePoint 2010. It also depends on the specific solution you are looking to launch. What are the requirements? How soon is the business asking for it? These all weigh in to the final strategy.

What I Can’t Tell You

I realize that every organization is unique. And you know your organization better than I do. In some cases, there might be a policy on how quickly you can deploy a product in the enterprise after it releases. In other cases, it could be extremely hard to budget for an upgrade. In other words, you might get one shot to get SharePoint out in the enterprise. These organization policies could impact the final decision more than any other aspect.

Hope this helps as you think through your strategy. Happy SharePointing!

TechReady - Ready to Sizzle

2009-07-27T10:37:09Z

Twice a year Microsoft puts on a Microsoft-only technical conference called TechReady. I’m fortunate enough to be able to attend this week. TechReady 9, as it’s called, is in Seattle and it looks like it’ll be a scorcher. The weather forecast is calling for a week of highs in upper 90s. Having spent nearly 6 years out here, I know first hand that this sort of heat is very rare in Seattle. But for all of us technology geeks that have descended on to Seattle what will really be hot this week is all the new technologies and products on display. This is a special TechReady in that we have SO many new products coming out soon. So for me, this particular TechReady is really all about getting ramped up on the next wave.

The announcement last week that Windows 7 has been released to manufacturing (ready to sell) and Windows Server 2008 R2 is released too will certainly generate some buzz and excitement. Exchange 2010 is also on the horizon. There have also been several announcements about Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 in recent weeks and we will no doubt be digging deeper into both these products over the course of the week. Since I focus my energies on Office and SharePoint I’m especially excited to roll up my sleeves and see the latest in action. Sorry, but I won’t be able to disclose any new info on SharePoint 2010. Check the official sites for updates and sign up for the SharePoint Conference in 11 weeks. At the SPC in Las Vegas SharePoint 2010 content will be hot off the presses!

SharePoint Surveys – Overview and Links

2009-07-15T09:57:23Z

A few months ago I looked high and low for a simple table/list covering SharePoint survey capabilities for a customer. I wasn’t able to find one so I put together the following list of SharePoint survey capabilities:

Default survey template comes out of the box
Familiar interface to end users - no need to learn a new application
Several options for capturing survey responses ( text, dropdown list, yes/no, ratings, date, currency, etc.)
Ability to export results to Excel, view as an RSS feed, or get an email alert on survey responses
Graphical display of responses
Ability to save user data with the survey or capture results as anonymous*. NOTE: the survey response user is still tagged, just hidden from the survey admin. So it IS possible to see who sent in an anonymous survey response with the right level of permissions
Ability to allow individuals to submit multiple responses, or limit each user to a single response
Branching logic is now supported in MOSS 2007 surveys (e.g. questions are asked/not asked based on responses to other questions)
Longer surveys and forms can be broken up over multiple pages
Ability to customize look-and-feel using SharePoint Designer
Ability to extend survey capabilities with 3rd party solutions at a low cost

I also found the following articles which may help in understanding these features better:

Technet article on SharePoint surveys – I wouldn’t put too much emphasis on the forms services piece (I didn’t include this in the capabilities list above, since it is an Enterprise SharePoint capability, and more involved)

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc194407.aspx

Washington State survey review – I thought this gave some good screenshots/basics on using the out-of-box SharePoint survey list

https://sharepoint.cahnrs.wsu.edu/sandbox/surveys/wiki/Home.aspx

Hope this helps!

Big Day at the WPC

2009-07-14T07:04:00Z

Today ended up being a big day of announcements at the Worldwide Partner Conference. Office 2010 was demo’ed – very fun to see it highlighted. The Office 2010 Technical Preview private beta was released. We also announced some sneak peaks of SharePoint 2010, posted out to a new site.

If you want to see and learn more about both Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 today, here’s my list of top sites to check out:

Digital Partner Conference Site

Overview: Go here to see the keynotes and read about the announcements. Also watch tomorrow’s keynote live

http://www.digitalwpc.com/

http://www.digitalwpc.com/Products/AllProducts/Office2010

Office 2010 – the movie

Overview: this site has been live for quite some time. More content was added today after the announcement

http://www.office2010themovie.com/

New Office 2010 Engineering team Blog

Overview: a new blog launched – the official blog of the Office 2010 product development team

http://blogs.technet.com/office2010/

SharePoint Team Blog post on SharePoint 2010

Overview: info on the new SharePoint 2010 site and sneak peak videos

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/07/13/announcing-sharepoint-2010-technical-preview.aspx

SharePoint 2010 Sneak Peak site

Overview: new site on the public sharepoint.microsoft.com site

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

Stay tuned – a lot more exciting news to come! And now is a great time to plan on attending the SharePoint Conference in October too!

Thanks,

Nate