Tom Rizzo's SharePoint Blog

Federation comes to SharePoint Search!

In case you haven't heard, we released our infrastructure update for SharePoint! The infrastructure update is a mixture of a roll-up of fixes with some next features such as the federation and new administration for search. We're recommending everyone install this update so take a look at the official team blog to learn more about it - http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/07/15/announcing-availability-of-infrastructure-updates.aspx

Tom

SDPS – Get your deployments planned!

Just in case you missed it, we announced a little while back the new SharePoint Deployment Planning Services offering. For the FAQ on SDPS, check out http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/prodinfo/features/sdps_faq.mspx

Since one of the hardest things for folks is understanding their Software Assurance Benefits (and you get a lot of them!) and how to enable them, we put together in the FAQ a nice step-by-step on understanding how to activate them. Lots of times, it's your purchasing agents who get the info on the benefits so you may need to go talk with them about what benefits you have and how you can use them.

We worked hard on putting together the materials, certifying partners and making sure the experience for SDPS was great. Now it is your job as a customer to use the benefit and as a partner to get certified and start working with customers. Plus, you can use the benefit for either Office client or SharePoint so if you wanted to figure out your Office 2007 deployment at the same time you're figuring out your SharePoint deployment, go for it!

As always, we'd love feedback on the program, product or anything else you want to give us feedback on from a SharePoint standpoint.

Tom

SharePoint Connections Presentations

First, thank you to everyone who came to my full day of SharePoint presentations at Connections in Orlando. For the folks who sat through every presentation, it was a long day with the same bad jokes J Hopefully folks got a lot of good info on what you can build with SharePoint from Social Computing to Search to BI to ECM solutions. I've been getting a lot of requests for the slide decks so I wanted to update folks on status. I submitted the decks to the show folks so hopefully they will be on the site soon.

If you need the decks sooner, just email me and I'll send them out to you. It was a great conference and I'm looking forward to seeing everyone at TechEd and SharePoint Connections in the fall!

It’s been a while. . . Did it work?

It's been a while since I posted but with the craziness of the SharePoint Conference and just the tremendous growth of the business, there has been a lot going on. For those of you at the conference, thank you for attending! It was amazing to see all the folks jammed into the convention center excited and ready to learn about SharePoint. I always love the customer and partner presentations where you hear other folks talking about what they are using the software for or the new solutions that they're building on it.

One thing lots of folks asked about that were at the conference was whether pulling the blade live out of the server worked. I think the camera crew kept the screens on me rather than actually showing the performance monitoring application we built (it was a custom WPF app that talked to perfmon and the SharePoint web services if you're wondering). If they would have shown the application, you would have seen SQL Server 1 go down and SQL Server 2 pick up the load a few seconds later. And yes, we put the blade back in and failed back afterwards and everything worked fine.

SQL Server Database Mirroring (and I didn't get to show it but also the Transparent Data Encryption in SQL Server 2008) is an area we're working closely with the SQL Server team on making sure that we continue to have rich support for multiple scenarios. In fact, all the SQL HA technologies are supported such as clustering, log shipping and mirroring.

We're all exhausted from SPC 2008 but we're already starting work on the next one. If you have accolades, comments or suggestions on SPC 200X, drop me a line!

SharePoint Conference – SOLD OUT!

For those of you wondering if the website is wrong – http://www.mssharepointconference.com – it isn't! We sold out the conference last week with 5 weeks to go. Over 3000 people will descend on Seattle for 4 solid days of SharePoint goodness. We're bummed since there are a lot of people who wanted into the conference but we can't fit anymore. For the next conference, we're going to get a bigger space to hold it.

Don't discourage yet though if you didn't get in. . . make sure to sign up for the waiting list and you may get a spot if others drop out. Plus, we'll be webcasting the keynotes so you'll be able to see Bill Gates and Kurt DelBene showing off a bunch of new SharePoint investments we're making that you definitely won't want to miss!

SharePoint Connections Slides

Thanks to all the folks who attended my sessions at SharePoint connections. As promised, I'm posting the slides here for folks to download. If anyone has any questions on the content, just let me know. If I get some extra time, I'll post the code samples in another blog entry.

Changes to MOSSFIS Licensing

For those of you who know me, you know I love the technology AND the business side of SharePoint. So, when we discovered that some of our licensing was hampering your deployment architectures, we immediately got to work remedying the situation. For those of you who know how our licensing works, you know that you couldn't deploy an Intranet and Extranet in the same SharePoint farm because of the licensing. However, we built SharePoint from a technology standpoint to run Intranet, Extranet and even Internet sites all in the same farm, even on the same server! We worked lots and lots of special deals to help customers get changes to their individual licenses but that didn't help our broad community of customers.

I'm happy to say that beginning Sept 1^st, we made a change that makes running MOSS Server Licenses and MOSSFIS legal in the same farm. So, let the deploying begin! One thing to realize is that this does not reduce the number of licenses you need to buy. So, if you're running MOSS Server licenses and MOSSFIS on the same farm, you still need to buy both licenses as well as the correct number of client access licenses (CALs) for your internal users.

Does your brain hurt yet from all the licensing mumbo jumbo? Well, to make hurt even more, I'm including a link to our licensing FAQ, product list where the change took place and the actual legalize from the product list so you can read through it at your leisure (bedtime makes a perfect time!).

Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet Sites

Accommodation for simultaneous use of server software under Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet sites:

The same software is licensed under Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet sites under different use rights.  Office SharePoint Server 2007's use rights support private intranet sites and require CALs for licensed access, while Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet Sites does not require CALs, but does require that all content, information and applications be accessible through the internet to non-employees.  Please refer to the Product Use Rights (PUR) document for these products' use rights.

As an accommodation for possible deployment scenarios, customers wishing to consolidate their SharePoint needs under a single deployment may acquire licenses for both products, assign those licenses to the same server, and use the same running instance of the software simultaneously under both licenses.  However, customers must acquire CALs as required under the Office SharePoint Server 2007 use rights for users and devices accessing content in any manner not permitted under the Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet sites use rights.  

As always, if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to me. We're working hard to make sure SharePoint meets all your needs, both technically and business/licensing wise. If you don't tell us what you need, we can't build it so keep the feedback coming. I know none of you are shy J

Tom

It’s been a long time: SharePoint for End Users

Yes, I haven't been slacking off taking the summer to relax which is why I haven't posted to my blog. Instead, we're heads-down working with customers, partners and our own field to sell and deploy MOSS 2007 and get ready for the next release. There were some exciting announcements recently around SharePoint as a business ($800M!!!), the BDC editor tool, and a bunch of other new technologies. As always, we can't achieve the success we've seen with SharePoint without the great support of our customers and partners.

I've been talking recently with a number of customers and I'm always amazed at the innovative solutions that they build on our technology. One customer runs a lot of their business processes on SharePoint using just customized lists. They are expanding the solution to include InfoPath Forms Services and mobile forms but the solution really opened my eyes to the end user empowerment that SharePoint delivers. The end users customize the columns, create the views and skin the site. Having come from the Exchange/Outlook world, that was always the vision for our collaboration platform – to make it simple for end users to customize their experience to make them more productive. Digression - One Outlook tip that a lot of people don't know about Outlook – natural language dating – try typing "third Tuesday of August" into an Outlook date field and you'll see what I mean.

Getting back to the topic at hand. Given that we want to make SharePoint ubiquitous and useful for everyone in an organization, you will see us come out with some new end user training for SharePoint over the next few weeks. Take a look when it comes out and provide your feedback. We believe that everyone in an organization can become more productive because of SharePoint, its integration with Office and its power to transform websites into collaboration sites.

Here's to the continuing success of SharePoint and having it help you and your business!

Tom

Beta 2 Tech Refresh (B2TR) Expires May 15th 2007!!

I wanted to make sure everyone knows that our B2TR expires May 15^th. If you have not upgraded your servers to RTM, make sure you do that now. We had a spike in calls to support when Beta 2 expired a few months back and we want to avoid that pain for both you and us J

Use our prescriptive guidance to help with your upgrade - http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/3df597d0-bad0-4c73-9c26-a10bb80449881033.mspx?mfr=true

See you all at Teched in June! If you have suggestions on what you want to see in my MOSS Overview or Customizing Search sessions, send them my way.

Dynamics and SharePoint – A Match made in Heaven

We announced today the ability for Dynamics customers to buy SharePoint and have tight integration between their Dynamics environment and SharePoint. Check out the press release - http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/mar07/03-12Day1DynamicsOfficePR.mspx

This is a continuation of the work we started with the Dynamics team. Check out the following blog post that talks about our integration with MS CRM - http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/itaysk/archive/2007/03/04/BDC-metadata-definition-file-for-Microsoft-Dynamics-CRM-3.0.aspx

We're working hard on coming out with more integration of MOSS with other Microsoft products. The list continues to grow with Dynamics, SQL Server Reporting Services, PerformancePoint, etc. Keep looking out for other MSFT products that will integrate great with SharePoint.

Yes! I’m still here! I’m just building Reports in SharePoint with SQL Server 2005 SP2!

As you may be wondering based on my lack of postings whether I'm still around. Well, yes I am! We've been swamped in the SharePoint team due to the amount of interest that customers and partners have shown for our product. Thank you, thank you, thank you. In the last few months, I've probably done at least 2 or 3 customer briefings a week and been trying to answer the flood of emails I've been getting about the product.

With that said, I wanted to make sure I highlighted something that was released that is near and dear to two of my favorite products, SharePoint and SQL Server (I used to work in the SQL Server group before I joined the SharePoint team (again J)). We blogged about it on the official team site here.

We've also been getting some questions about the SQL Server Report Packs for SharePoint that we had for the 2003 release. I'd love to hear folks' comments on whether they want us to update those report packs for MOSS or are you not using them or you didn't even know we had them!

Master Page from my Demos

Many folks have been asking for the Master Page that I use in my demos. Here it is with the images that you need. There is a file called internal.master for the master page and then a folder called internal and then a folder called images under it. You'll need to post these to your Master Page galley for your SharePoint site and then make your site use the new Master Page.

If there are any issues that you have trying to use this, just let me know.

Happy Thanksgiving and Update on the RTM Bits Download

Just in case you didn't know, we released the RTM bits both to the SharePoint server site (http://office.microsoft.com/search/redir.aspx?AssetID=XT102104951033&Origin=HH102081821033&CTT=5) and also to the Microsoft Volume Licensing site. So, that may lead to some questions. Let me try to answer some of them:

1. It looks like only the x86 bits are available for evaluation, what about x64?
2. We're working hard on getting the x64 bits up there. I don't have a good ETA but hopefully it will be soon. The 2007 Office system is a lot of products and bits so it's taking a bit processing all the new software onto the myriad of download sites.

Q) What about MSDN? I don't see the bits there.
A) We're working hard to get the bits on MSDN. You can download the eval bits and then later on enter in your MSDN key if you can't wait to get started. ETA is hopefully within a week to get it on MSDN.

Q) What about non-English versions?
A) if you access the MVLS download site (our volume licensing site), you will see the language packs for WSS and MOSS. On MS.COM, we're still figuring out timing and what to release for the different languages. Right now, MS.COM only has the English language and x86 evaluation version.

Q) What about SharePoint Designer?
A) SharePoint Designer just hit MSDN in the last 24 hours so go download it immediately J

Q) What about Office Forms Server and MOSS for Search?
A) Still TBD. You can evaluate the functionality in both products by getting the MOSS bits since both are subsets of the full MOSS product.

Q) Should I enter in the Enterprise or Standard PID key?
A) It depends. If you want to evaluate the full capabilities, enter in the Enterprise key. A big WARNING though is that you cannot downgrade from Enterprise to Standard so this is a one-way conversion. You can however go from Eval keys to production keys and also upgrade using a key from Standard to Enterprise. Yes, I know, the licensing is CAL based and there is no two server licenses that you can buy (Standard vs. Enterprise). The main reason we did this was so that you could understand that you need to buy the right CALs depending on the functionality you're going to use on the server. Plus, all servers in a farm must be the same type – eg, all Standard or all Enterprise.

I'll be checking the comments so if you have any other questions or comments, let me know. Good luck in evaluating MOSS and happy holidays!

The Sweet Smell of RTM and SharePoint Connections!

[Edited since I realized that one of my comments came out the wrong way :)] 

Yes, it's true, the 2007 Office system is golden! Now, you may be wondering how you get it. Well, it's going to take a little bit but you should see the bits appearing on the web in a few weeks. Make sure to keep checking back to Office Online (http://www.microsoft.com/office) Both WSS v3 and MOSS 2007 are major changes for the SharePoint set of products and technologies. Now, the real work begins with more and more customers deploying the product and partners building on top of it.

Since I've been working with customers during the beta process, I've seen some exciting things that MOSS enables with its new capabilities. You'll also learn about one of the customers I've been working with at the launch on November 30^th. I won't give away who it is but it's definitely a hip company to work with. I wish they would just include me in some of the things they produce as a company J They do innovative things with our technology but I'd love to be part of the cast they have for certain things.  That's all I can say without giving away the company but make sure to listen in on Nov 30th and find out who it is. 

So, keep looking for the bits, get involved in the newsgroups, blogs and community. For those of you down at SharePoint or Office Connections in Las Vegas, I'll be seeing you soon. Stop by, say hi and the lattes are on me.

Tom

Welcome to the world of Office 2007 B2TR!

Yes, you probably have heard that we've release Beta 2 TR. In fact, my team is working hard to get information out on how to best upgrade to the tech refresh build.

There are lots of enhancements in B2TR. Since I've been working recently working with the workflow designer in SharePoint Designer, I just wanted to highlight it here.

All I have to say on the workflow designer is wow. The SharePoint Designer team did a great job in adding a number of new features in B2TR. If you haven't tried SPD, I recommend you take a look. There a number of new conditions and actions that will allow you to build richer workflows with less work.

Of course, you may still opt to go the Visual Studio route but I found that I could design a lot more workflows in the new SPD than I could in the previous version. With some creative design, I think if someone threw out some processes they wanted to automate, I could design it in SPD. With the custom activity support SPD has – you can plug in VS designed custom activities - there's an even greater set of capabilities that you can do with SPD and SharePoint.

Give it a try!

Tom