Presenting @ TechDays 2009 - Enhancing the SharePoint Developer Experience

It's kind of becoming a tradition - I'm presenting a session about SharePoint at this year's TechDays on th 11th of march at 14:30 PM.

The session will focus on best practices for SharePoint development based on lessons learnt. You will learn how to approach SharePoint development to build solutions in an effective way. This is not only about knowing the right tools and techniques to speed up the SharePoint development process but also about how to avoid mistakes and making the correct design decisions.

I'm still tweaking my presentation so if you think there is some wicked tool or technique out which should not be missing in the SharePoint developer toolset - leave a comment.

Hope to see you at TechDays 2009...

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint,development,microsoft,sharepoint+2007,techdays+2009,techdays,moss,wss

Congrats to winner of the free TechDays 2009 ticket

As you might have read - BIWUG - thanks to Microsoft has given away a free ticket for TechDays 2009. Congrats to Miro for guessing the correct number of replies ...

Hope to see you guys at the BIWUG booth at TechDays 2009.

Tags van Technorati: techdays+2009,microsoft,biwug

SharePoint logs - Tracing Service lost trace events

When troubleshooting problems with SharePoint one of the first places to look is the SharePoint ULS logs (also see Troubleshooting errors for InfoPath forms deployed on SharePoint). Last week I noticed something weird in the ULS logs - the only thing which seemed to be logged was "Tracing service lost trace events" log entries. The first thing to try to solve this is restarting the Windows SharePoint Service Tracing service. It definitely did the trick for me ....

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint,development,troubleshooting,microsoft,sharepoint+2007

Free TechDays 2009 ticket

BIWUG is giving away a free ticket for the TechDays 2009. This year it is organized on march 11th and 12th in Metropolis Antwerp. For more details check out biwug.be .

Technorati Tags: biwug,community,techdays,microsoft,sharepoint

Maturity of the IT industry

A fellow SharePoint geek pointed me to this transcript of the Inquiry into Identity Cards - the next part is sadly enough quite recognizable...

Q373 Mr Cameron:

The question I would like to ask all of you, to which a yes or no answer is sufficient, is: do you see the public procurement difficulties as insuperable?

Professor Thomas:

Yes, I do. I would like to tell you something that you will not believe but which I think it is important that you hear, and that is that almost every IT supplier in the world today is incompetent. I have worked in the IT industry almost all my working life for large and small organisations, and I know what I speak. For example, the typical rate of delivered faults after full user acceptance testing from the maker suppliers in the industry over many years has been steady at around 20 faults per thousand lines of code. We know how to deliver software with a fault rate that is down around 0.1 faults per thousand lines of code and the industry does not adopt these techniques. We are as an industry very much in the early stages. The industry is only 50 years old. If you compare that with civil engineering, which is several thousand years old, we are tackling some of the most complex engineering designs and building some of the most complex engineering systems that the world has ever seen, essentially using craft technology. If you looked at the methods that are employed in most companies you would come to the conclusion that actually IT system development is a fashion business, not an engineering business, because they jump from one methodology to another year after year so long as it has a whizzy name, "Agile this" or "Intensive that". The underlying engineering disciplines that every mature engineering discipline has learnt it needs to use in order to be able to show that the system it is building has the required properties have not yet been employed in software and systems engineering, and that is at the heart of why these things do not work.

What's your opinion? Leave a comment...

Tags van Technorati: IT+industry,transcript

Top SharePoint Blogs - Joel's list

Check it out  -  Back by popular demand ... the top SharePoint blogs

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint,microsoft,blogs,sharepoint+2007

Creating custom SharePoint alert handlers

If you need to create your own custom alert e-mails in SharePoint - definitely take a look at this one - Custom Alert Handlers: part 1 of 2 (Unfortunately part 2 was never written but part 1 will get you started just fine)

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint,sharepoint+2007,microsoft,alerts,development

Reminder - Pet project idea

This has been on my radar for quite a while - Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Sample : Using Excel 2003 to Manage Project Sites with Windows SharePoint Services 2003 . If I find the time I would like to upgrade this concept to Excel 2007 and WSS 3.0 ... or maybe some of you have already tried this? Leave a comment if you did...

Update : Here's the MSDN article which accompanies the source code.

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint,excel,pet+project,microsoft,vsto,visual+studio,wssv3,wss,sharepoint+2007

Accelerators for Dynamics CRM 4.0 Part I - Enterprise Search

The Accelerators for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 are finally available on Codeplex . The purpose of these accelerators is to showcase how the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 platform can be  extended to broaden marketing, sales and service capabilities – with a big focus on integration scenario’s.

One of the most interesting ones for a SharePoint developer is the Enterprise Search Accelerator which contains a Business Data Catalog (BDC) definition file for the different entities in CRM 4.0. This way you can access information about Accounts, Activities, Campaigns, Cases,Contacts,Contracts,Customer Address, Invoices, Leads,Opportunities,Quotes and Sales Orders which are entered in CRM from within your SharePoint environment.

Although the accelerator seems to focus on Enterprise Search you will be able to use BDC data in a number of places:

• Using Business Data web parts such as the Business Data List, Business Data Item, Business Data Item Builder, etc …
• As metadata/column in a SharePoint list or library
• As content source for Search
• As secondary import source to add information to the SharePoint User Profile store

Some things to think about though:

• Business Data Catalog (BDC) is a feature which is only available in SharePoint Server Enterprise Edition – check out Microsoft SharePoint Server edition comparison . So this requires Enterprise CALs.
• The CRM BDC 4.0 definition file is huge – it basically displays all the possible information which is available. So you will need to put in some effort to define which information you actually want to be available.
• Next to the Enterprise CAL you will also need a CRM read access license (aka CRM limited CAL) as a minimum for any users who are going to access this information.

If you want to learn more about BDC – check out SharePoint article series – Business Data Catalog

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,crm,crm4,crm+accelerator,codeplex,microsoft,moss,moss+2007,sharepoint+2007

Installing Microsoft CRM 4.0 – a SharePoint developer perspective

Trying out integrating SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft CRM has been on my to-do list for quite a while now. I finally found some time so you can expect some blog posts about this in the coming weeks. First thing to do installing Microsoft CRM 4.0 on my SharePoint developer VPC.

Make sure that you check out the requirements – so download the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Implementation guide – first thing I had to do is installing Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2. Other warnings are unfortunately only provided after you have completed a number of steps so here are some other things to watch out for:

• Make sure that the Windows Indexing Service is running – you can disable it after installation since it is only used to index help files (Microsoft does not recommend this)
• Make sure that you have SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 installed
• Make sure that the SQL Server Agent is running.

Different steps in installation:

• Specify Server Roles: I installed both the CRM Application Server Role (provides the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Web user interface and services) and CRM Platform Server Role (used to deploy the asynchronous services, such as the Workflow and Bulk E-mail services) on the same machine.
• Specify Deployment options: create a new deployment or connect to an existing one and select the SQL Server you will use. You can use SQL Server 2008 together with CRM 4.0 but you will need to install some additional hotfixes – see Microsoft Support KB 957053  - I still used SQL 2005.
• Specify Organization Name and currency options
• Select Web Site – specify web site where you want to host the CRM web user interface
• Specify Reporting Services Server
• Select the Organization Unit in Active Directory – during installation a number of security groups are created – specify where you want them to be created.
• Specify security account – used for the CRM service accounts and the ASP.NET application pool account. I used the domain admin account of the domain in my virtual environment – definitely not a best practice but this is a dev environment so :-) …
• Specify email router settings –  I skipped this one – gave me a warning. If you are not configuring e-mail integration noew, after Microsoft Dynamics CRM Email Router setup is complete, you must add the E-Mail Router server name to the PrivUsersGroup in AD
• System Requirements check – kind of awkward that is does another check at the end – it could have indicated some issues a lot sooner.

Next, you will probably need some test data within your CRM demo environment. First you will need to install Microsoft CRM 4.0 Data Migration Manager – next download the Microsoft CRM 4.0 Sample Data (On-premise Edition) and walk through the CRM Sample Database  readme to perform the import of the data.

All in all everything went quite smoothly although I got a very weird error when I first opened the CRM 4.0 web interface – I resolved this one by making sure the CRM service account was added to the different AD groups which were created during the installation. Next time let’s see how we can integrate SharePoint and CRM.

Technorati Tags: microsoft,crm,crm+4.0,dynamics,crm4,installation+guide

Windows Live Writer 2009 released

Windows Live Writer 2009 is finally available … my two favorite new features:

• Better photo support
• Integrates with YouTube for video support

Technorati Tags: windows+live,microsoft

LOL - Macbook wheel

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/apple_introduces_revolutionary

Why to stay away from the SharePoint External Storage API

I got this question when teaching a class about architecting Document and Records Management solutions with SharePoint - is it possible to store the documents outside of the SQL database and the metadata within SharePoint?

Yes, this is possible - take a look at the External storage option for Binary Large Objects (BLOBS) in Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

However, there are some reasons to stay away from it - at least for now - recently some more information was added to the SDK - External storing of BLOBs -  Operational limits and trade-off analysis - which contains some interesting information:

The external BLOB storage feature in the present release will not remain syntactically consistent with external BLOB storage technology to be released with the next full-version release of Microsoft Office and Windows SharePoint Services. Such compatibility was not a design goal, so you cannot assume that your implementation using the present version will be compatible with future versions of Microsoft Office or Windows SharePoint Services.

There is however at least one vendor which has written it's own implementation using this API - Open Text Storage Services for SharePoint.

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint,microsoft,sharepoint+server,moss+2007,wss,wss3

SharePoint in the Life Science sector and beyond ...

Life science companies are traditionally strongholds for typical ECM vendors such as IBM FileNet and EMC Documentum. But what about SharePoint Server 2007? My guess is that SharePoint is being adopted but not as an alternative to the traditional ECM players but as a complement. Especially the collaboration part is being strongly embraced  but with regards to pure ECM functionality I have my doubts - and trust me I'm a strong believer in SharePoint.

Traditional players seem to draw the "be nice to Microsoft and let's integrate with SharePoint" card.  Interesting quote I recently got from a Documentum guy -  "SharePoint has a good UI - probably better then our own ... but if you really need a safe - read compliant  - environment you probably still want to use our tools." 

This means that pure play ECM vendors are moving into the back-end and  their components will be eventually considered as a pure unstructured data storage layer components - similar to the way that we think about relational databases. Is this really the sweet spot that vendors are looking for?

I'm wondering what the Introduction of Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification will do to further accelerate this trend?

 Related links:

• Guidance on configuring SharePoint for Part 11 Compliance
• MSDN Industry Center -  Life Sciences
• Explanation of SharePoint/Documentum integration
• How do I know whether *I need* a traditional ECM system with SharePoint?
• SharePoint as a replacement for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Systems?

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint,documentum,ecm,life+science,healthcare,microsoft,cmis

Google Insight for Search

Something cool to take a look at -  Google Insight for Search

I just tried it out to check out how "SharePoint Server 2007" search usage evolved over time -

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Presentations BIWUG december 2008

The last BIWUG session was a success with over 60 persons present. Unfortunately I had to send out a mail to some people to tell them that we were overbooked.

I just uploaded the presentations on our BIWUG site:

• Introduction to Silverlight 2
• Silverlight meets SharePoint - Enriching the SharePoint user interface

If you are interested in presenting a session just leave a comment.

Tags van Technorati: biwug,microsoft,sharepoint,silverlight,sharepoint+2007,moss,moss+2007,PKS

Installing Expression Encoder 2.0 on Windows Server 2003 SP1

I had some problems when installing Expression Encoder 2.0 (Available through MSDN or download Expression Encoder 2.0 Trial) on my Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1. It kept on nagging about an incorrect version of Windows Installer.

Setup requires a minimum Windows Installer version 3.1.4000.2435 and detected version 3.1.4000.1830. Please update your system and run Setup again.

But when you look for the latest version of Windows Installer you will find this one - Windows Installer 3.1 Redistributable (v2) which will not install on Windows Server 2003 SP1. Instead use this one - Update for Windows Server 2003 SP1 Service Pack 1 (KB898715). Restart your server and continue installing Expression Encoder.

Tags van Technorati: expression,expression+encoder,microsoft,windows+server

SharePoint Governance Presentation

Thursday I will be doing a session at the CM Innovation Event about SharePoint Governance.

Session abstract: Because of the viral nature of SharePoint -  without effective governance - SharePoint will only replicate your business’ existing problems at a faster rate and on a larger scale than you thought possible! In this session we will focus on some key principles for developing a SharePoint Governance plan and show you how you can manage risks when deploying or running a SharePoint environment.

Registration is free.

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint,sharepoint+2007,MOSS,MOSS+2007,governance,event

SharePoint - It's all about making the right choices and decisions - Part II - One or multiple site decisions

Part 1 - It's all about making the right choices and decisions: Visual Studio Workflow Extensions vs SharePoint Designer

Site collections allow for your intranet to scale as well as provide for a model where it is easier to delegate control to power users for specific subsets of your portal.

Most people will tell you that you will need to have multiple site collections because of the database size restrictions but this is just a myth. There is no physical restriction on your database size, there's only the constraint of how long your backup/restore might take. For some background info - How large for a single SharePoint database as well as Tips on site collection sizing and How many databases for my x TBs of data? and SharePoint deployment capacity & performance planning 2003 & 2007 - what you need to know

There are however some other reasons for using multiple site collections  - one of the main reasons being a controllable management of security. Security groups are shared at the site collection level so you will have one specific group of owners,members and readers for each division. When you use multiple site collections it will be easier to delegate security settings to the site collection administrator. 

Some more background information:

• SharePoint 2007 - Site Collections and when to use them
• When to use SharePoint site collections? 
•  Decisions About When To Use a Farm, Web Application, Content Database or Site Collection
• Site Collection taxonomy thoughts

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint,moss+2007,moss,sharepoint+2007,information+architecture,ECM