SharePoint - It's all about making the right choices and decisions - When to use custom site definitions.

This is the third posting about making the correct design decisions when implementing SharePoint. It's about site definition vs site templates.

I strongly believe that there are a couple of  reasons for using custom site definitions:

1. Better overall performance of using site definitions instead of site templates for creating sites
2. More control and flexibility in building a specific solution. One thing to keep in mind though is to keep your custom site definitions as minimal as possible and to use the SharePoint Features framework to add functionality.
3. Site templates are basically black boxes where you have limited control over the way that they are working - so when you get into trouble you're stuck.
4. It is easier to add additional functionality to site which are developed using a site definition in contrast with these built using a site template.

The main reason for choosing site templates is that overall it takes less effort to create a site template. You can just click everything together and use the Save site as template option. Another reason would be that you can change a site template without affecting existing sites (allthough this might be a disadvantage as well).

Some extra info: Site definitions versus site templates and deciding on the correct customization approach . On a similar note this same post from  Eric - The great debate: SharePoint Designer vs custom site definitions.

Previous postings:

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

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint,moss+2007,moss,design,architecture,microsoft

Visio design templates for SharePoint 2007

Reminder:

• Free visio template and stencil for designing SharePoint 2007 sites.
• Visio Shapes for SharePoint (Commercial)

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint,design,sharepoint+2007,visio,templates,microsoft,moss+2007,moss

List web part for Microsoft CRM 4.0

Another interesting one  to to integrate SharePoint and Microsoft CRM 4.0 is to use the List Web Part for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. (Released december 2008 - tip: there is a different web part for Dynamics CRM 3.0)

The List Web Part for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 provides a way to view and update Microsoft Dynamics CRM records using a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP1 or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 SP1 Web site. Microsoft Dynamics CRM users can create shared or personal List Web Parts of Microsoft Dynamics CRM records from a SharePoint Web site, open records in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 from the List Web Part, and create connected List Web Parts.

Tags van Technorati: dynamics+crm,sharepoint,crm,microsoft

Microsoft Dynamics Snap apps

If you want people to use the core applications you invested in (such as CRM and ERP), it is a good idea to integrate them into a familiar interface. Most people tend to use Office applications quite a lot in their daily job so why not integrate your CRM and ERP from within Office. Dynamics Snap applications show how information workers can work with data out of Dynamics CRM and Dynamics from within their Office applications (This is what Microsoft calls a Office Business Applications or OBA)

One that I tried out recently - Microsoft Dynamics Snap for Microsoft Dynamics AX on Codeplex – of which the current release supports Dynamics AX 2009. There are two different snaps available for Dynamics AX 2009:

• Offline Expense - This snap-in enables expenses to be entered in Excel while disconnected from the corporate network, and then posted to Dynamics AX at a later time. This snap-in uses WCF-based services and LINQ to retrieve data from Dynamics AX, and uses the Application Integration Framework, or AIF to send business documents to Dynamics AX.
• Business Data Lookup (BDL) - This snap-in enables information workers to access data from Dynamics AX from within Excel, Word and Outlook. This snap-in is an upgrade of the BDL snap-in that was distributed with Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0.

Unfortunately the Microsoft Dynamics Snap Team Blog doesn't show any activity since january 2007

References:

• Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Dynamics AX Integration Scenarios White Paper
• More about OBA and RAPs
• Office Business Applications – Crossing the chasm
• OBA Composition Reference Toolkit

Tags van Technorati: dynamics+ax,dynamics+crm,oba,microsoft,dynamics+snap,snap,codeplex

Troubleshooting Microsoft CRM

My colleague Koen has been writing some excellent blog posts about troubleshooting certain issues with Microsoft CRM:

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 – enable tracing/logging
• MS CRM 4.0 VPC – remove the “crm” host header
• MS CRM 4.0 custom workflow activity assembly update not executing the new code

Tags van Technorati: microsoft,crm,mscrm,development,troubleshooting

Belgian Azure User Group launched …

Kurt Claeys just announced the birth of a new Belgian user group – www.azug.be

AZUG.BE is a Belgian user group with focus on development and architecture of the Microsoft Azure Services Platform. Azure is a cloud hosted development platform for internet oriented applications aimed at high scalability and based on .NET technology.

Our goal is to share knowledge and experiences with the .NET community in development and architecture in the Azure Services Platform and the .NET Services technology. As new programming skills and a new architectural approach are needed I’m inviting you to become member of this user group to prepare you for building this new style of applications.

We’ll have regular public meetings (free of charge) providing demos, training, presentations and discussions on the technology part of Azure. First public meeting is planned in september 09.

Interested in participating as boardmember ? Shoot a mail at board@azug.be.

Interested in the agenda of upcoming events, visit www.azug.be regularly or register for the newsletter at newsletter@azug.be with the word subscribe as subject. Hope to see you.

Tags van Technorati: user+group,community,belgium,azure,microsoft,cloud+computing

What’s in a name – SharePoint Online, BPOS and Microsoft Online Services

SharePoint Online, Microsoft Online Services or BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) are terms which you hear flying around when you look for information about Microsoft’s endeavors in the cloud. Here’s some more background information:

• SharePoint Online : is a collection of web-based collaboration tools built on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and provided by Microsoft as a hosted service. For some more information check out Service Description for Microsoft Office SharePoint Online
• Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) : goes broader then SharePoint – it is a set of messaging and collaboration solutions hosted by Microsoft, and consists of Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting, and Office Communications Online.
• Microsoft Online Services: is the overall name of all services Microsoft will offer in a hosted environment – current focus for Belgium is BPOS but the offering will probably extend to also include Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online in the coming months.

Before you rush in it is probably best to first take a look at what the trade offs are when you choose the SharePoint Online option instead of an on-premise deployment.  A good start is the SharePoint Online Infrastructure Planning and Design (IPD) guide. Infrastructure Planning and Design (IPD) guides help you in making design decisions by looking at available options, taking into account cost, complexity and technical contstraints. They help you to align your business and IT more efficiently. There are already a number of IPD’s available (released versions)  - Infrastructure Planning and Design Guides

It is also important to note that the use of SharePoint Online is not mutually exclusive with a SharePoint installation on premise. These two forms can quite easily co-exist, it is however important that you define policies and rules for users when to use what. This is typically an important aspect of a SharePoint governance plan.

If you want to try it out – there is a 30-day free trial which you can use at the Microsoft Online Services – Customer Portal

More background info:

• Microsoft Online Services – Team Blog
• SharePoint Online (SAAS) review – what it is and what it isn’t
• Trial Guide for Microsoft Online Services
• Microsoft SharePoint Online Standard Developer Guide (133 pages) – the different sections already provide some guidance  about what is possible and what is not - Getting Started , Creating SharePoint Online Sites ,Customizing SharePoint Online Applications , Using a Data Form Web Part in SharePoint Online Applications, Using SharePoint Online Web Services , Integrating Microsoft Silverlight with a SharePoint Online Page , Workflows Using SharePoint Designer 
• Comment on Microsoft Online and the GSK Customer case (Bill Pray)

Tags van Technorati: bpos,microsoft,sharepoint+online,sharepoint+server,saas,cloud+computing

PDF Annotations

A common requirement for PDF files is the ability to add comments and annotations. Docutrack has an interesting tool called PDF-XChange viewer (which is free) which allows you to do just that.

Tags van Technorati: PDF,PDF+tool,annotations

Free Documentum Developer Edition available

On june 2d EMC announced  a free developer edition of EMC Documentum Content Server 6.5 which you can download from the ECM Developer Community.

To get you started take a look at the Content Server Developer Edition Install instructions. What’s a little bit weird is that Windows Server 2008 seems to be missing from the list of supported OS – I tried installing it anyway but it failed with this error -  DIWAOEMExecuteConfigurationscripts failed - "creating index agent" failed. Runtime execution failed with childprocess
launchftconfigurationprogram.bat

Too bad  … time to setup a new blank Windows Server 2003.

Technorati Tags: documentum,emc,content+server

Add some spice to your Powerpoint decks with PPtPlex

Last week somebody told me about Prezi.com – which seems to be some kind of Web 2.0 example of how you can build more interactive presentations with zoom effects and so on …

It kind of reminded me of something which I saw a couple of months ago – PptPlex from OfficeLabs

pptPlex uses Plex technology to give you the power to zoom in and out of slide sections and move directly between slides that are not sequential in your presentation. Watch the videos below to see how pptPlex can help you organize and present information in a non-linear fashion. Test drive pptPlex and wow your audience with your next presentation.

I just installed and I plan to use it for every a couple of weeks … see what it gives…

Tags van Technorati: microsoft,presentation,powerpoint,pptplex,office+labs

Web Testing (and load testing) SharePoint 2007 with Visual Studio 2008

Testing a SharePoint project is quite a tedious job – there are a lot of floating parts out there which make it complicated and time consuming. So everything which makes it a little easier is interesting. (Another reason for using it was to generate usage logs so that I could start working on my SharePoint extensions – Usage Statistics again) The last couple of days I have been looking at how I can use Visual Studio 2008 Test Edition to test SharePoint Server 2007 (this would also work with WSS 3.0).

To get you started there are some interesting sources out there on  Hello Its Liam:

• MOSS 2007 Testing Using Visual Studio Team System 2008 – shows how you can test uploading a document
• MOSS 2007 – Testing using Visual Studio Team System 2008 – Creating Team Sites
• MOSS 2007 – Visual Studio 2008 Testing (Search)
• MOSSS 2007 – Visual Studio 2008 Testing (Load Testing)

Some other usefull resources (SharePoint specific):

• Load Testen van SharePoint met VSTS 2008 en VSTT Load Agents – Deel 1 (Dutch only)
• Load testen van SharePoint met VSTS 2008 en VSTT Load Agents – Deel 2 (Dutch only)
• How to configure a stress test project for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 using Visual Studio Team Suite 2008
• Load Testing SharePoint (Lessons Learned) (Part 1)
• Load Testing SharePoint (Lessons Learned) (Part 2)

General information about VSTS 2008:

• Content Index for Web Tests and Load Tests (Ed Glas’s blog on VSTS load testing)
• SharePoint (Performance, Stress) Load Testing
• Web and Load Testing using Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Test Edition

Tags van Technorati: visualstudio2008,vsts,load+testing,web+testing,microsoft,visual+studio+2008,sharepoint,sharepoint+2007,moss+2007,moss

SharePoint Server 2010 – some random info on the web

More and more information starts to spread about SharePoint Server 2010 – here are some links to get you started. As with most information at this stage, it is not sure that it will be a 100% accurate – and a lot of speculation is going around - but still …

• Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 beta in two months - Microsoft will launch an invitation-only SharePoint Server 2010 beta test in July with a select group of customers and then follow the program up with a public testing phase ahead of the Office 2010 release in the first half of next year.
• Groove renamed to SharePoint Workspace - Microsoft claims that this is a natural progression since Groove is to SharePoint like Outlook is to Exchange. This definitely sounds interesting – can’t wait to get my hands on that one. I’m wondering how much overlap there will be with a tool such as Colligo Contributor for SharePoint. You should probably keep an eye out for more information on the Groove Development Team Blog or the newly created Working the spaces, sharing the point blog
• New Microsoft SharePoint 2010 details start to emerge  - some interesting quotes - SharePoint Server 2010 will be 64-bit only and require 64-bit Windows Server 2008 or 64-bit Windows Server 2008 R2 to run. It also will require 64-bit SQL Server 2008 or 64-bit SQL Server 2005. - SharePoint 2010 will feature a “Web-enabled Ribbon control” and support greater use of Silverlight controls - A new version of FAST Search for SharePoint will be made available at a lower cost. Meanwhile, according to contractor and SharePoint blogger Lars Fastrup (whose blog entry is the source of a lot of this post), “the SharePoint team have scrapped their efforts to make the SharePoint search engine scale beyond 50 million documents in a single index. The argument will be to move to the FAST search engine instead.”
• New Gemini demo’s dissected -  0:40 The Sharepoint report centre. OK, so we can rate reports with stars, yeah that’s going to be useful… but other ‘social tools for collaboration’ might be interesting. 1:21 Seeing the report in a thin client. This is Excel Services, I think…? This will only make it harder to choose between Excel/Excel Services/Gemini on one hand and SSRS on the other. It would be nice if there was some kind of story linking the two.
• Microsoft Office 2010 IT Blog available
• Office2010 the movie …
• Microsoft Office 2010 Discussion Forum

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint+2010,microsoft,office+2010

Community Day 2009 – don’t forget to register

Don’t miss the biggest Belgian Community event - Community Day 2009!  This year, Community Day will take place on Thursday 25th June 2009 in Utopolis, Mechelen.

The Community Day 2009 is supported by BESUG, BIWUG, IT-Talks, MVUG (Microsoft Virtualization User Group) , Pro-Exchange, SCUG, SQLUG, VBIB (Visual Basic in Belgium), Visug, WinSec, XNA-BUG.

Register now for free for this all day event on www.communityday.be !

Tags van Technorati: biwug,community,community+day,belgium,microsoft

PHP SDK for Windows Azure

Not really my cup of tea but still … http://phpazure.codeplex.com  - kudos to Maarten for another great initiative.

As part of Microsoft’s commitment to Interoperability, this open source project is an effort bridge PHP developers to Windows Azure. PHPAzure is an open source project to provide software development kit for Windows Azure and Windows Azure Storage – Blobs, Tables & Queues

PHP SDK for Windows Azure is an open source collaboration project driven by RealDolmen and Microsoft, based on a blog post of Maarten Balliauw.

Tags van Technorati: PHP,Azure,Microsoft,codeplex

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 for Microsoft Outlook

Since I need to work with Dynamics CRM quite a lot lately I decided to give Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 for Microsoft Outlook a spin. This is basically an addin which allows you to work with Dynamics CRM directly from within Outlook. Allthough I like the functionality a lot I’m under the impression that it slows down Outlook quite a lot and it definitely is a memory hog. I also noticed that when your CRM server has gone down, your CRM addin can completely lockup Outlook.

Anyone care to share tips and tricks about how to overcome these annoyances?

Tags van Technorati: CRM,Outlook,Microsoft

BIWUG presentations about SCOM, SharePoint and SharePoint Designer 2007 online

I just uploaded the presentations of yesterday’s BIWUG session to our site www.biwug.be (check out the Meeting presentations doclib). Thanks again to Alexandre from SCUG (System Center User Group) Belgium for the presentation. In case you missed it – the presentation should be available in the coming weeks on MSDN Chopsticks as well.

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint,scom,system+center,biwug,spd+2007,sharepoint+designer+2007

Tip of the week : search for documents in SharePoint Server 2007 from within Office or Internet Explorer

Sometimes small things make the difference between a good and a great platform. This is the first of a small tips which will make your daily interaction with SharePoint a lot more productive – let’s call it SharePoint Lifehacking

Exposing Enterprise Search in SharePoint Server 2007 by using Internet Explorer 7 and the Office Research Pane

If you have a tip you want to share   - leave a comment.

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

How to configure the SharePoint people picker to search for users in other domains

The people picker will by default show the users in the forest that the SharePoint farm is installed (that is, the resource forest). According to the documentation Peoplepicker-searchadforests: stsadm property (Office SharePoint Server) – it should also display users in all two way trusted domains and forests but you can still use the stsadm command to be sure.

For one way trusted domains (or forests) you will need to do some extra stuff.

In a one way trust you will probably need to specify a user name and a password. This requires you to run the setapppassword operation first (For more details see Select users from multiple forest domains) - STSADM.exe -o setapppassword -password key. The key you specify here is used to encrypt the password you will use to establish the people picker connection. Note: run this on every WFE of your farm.

Next you need to add the forests/domains you are going to query using the people picker.

stsadm –o setproperty –pn peoplepicker-searchadforests –pv <list of forests or domains> -url <WebApp>,<LoginName>, <Password>

where <list of forests or domains> can be something like this "forest:contoso.corp.com;domain:bar.contoso.corp.com".

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint,sharepoint+2007,moss+2007,moss,active+directory,microsoft

BIWUG on SharePoint, SCOM and SPD

Another BIWUG event is planned on the 20th of may in the RealDolmen Offices in Huizingen - doors open at 18:00.

Agenda:

• Introduction: 18:30 - 18:45
• SharePoint and SCOM: 18:45-19:45
  • System Center Operations Manager 2007 is THE end to end Monitoring Solution. In this session we will discuss what you, as SharePoint guys, find relevant to be monitored. System Center Operations Manager uses a SharePoint Monitoring toolkit for monitoring the SharePoint Environment. This toolkit consists of a set of System Center Operations Manager 2007 management packs designed to help IT pros monitor their WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 and 2007 SP1 environments. These newly released packs were engineered to take advantage of SCOM 2007’s features, including new and improved reporting, additional actions, new views, and integrate IIS and SQL health rollup for a better understanding of the system-level dependencies of the SharePoint environments.And last but not least: System Center Operations Manager can also emulate end user experience by monitoring a Web Application. We will show you how to monitor a Web Application, even if it is require credentials, and how to record a browser session. If you have a SharePoint environment and don’t have a monitoring solution at the moment then you can’t miss this session!
  • Speaker: Alexandre Verkinderen, SCOM MVP
• Break: 19:45-20:00
• SharePoint Designer 2007 – Things you always wanted to know but were afraid to ask: 20h00-21h00
  • This session will show different tips and tricks about how you can use SharePoint Designer 2007 to customize SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. There is room for questions so we will foresee 15 minutes for an whiteboard discussion about what to do and what not to do with SharePoint Designer.
  • Speaker: Joris Poelmans, SharePoint MVP

We will also give away 2 copies of SharePoint Server 2007, The Definitive Guide (O'Reilly) to attendees with the most interesting tip or trick to use SPD2007.

Location

RealDolmen
Industriezone Zenneveld
A. Vaucampslaan 42
1654 Huizingen
T +32 2 362 55 55
F +32 2 362 55 99

Download the directions.

Register for the next event

 

Tags van Technorati: biwug,sharepoint,sharepoint+designer+2007,spd+2007,scom,system+center

Price and value

“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get." (Warren Buffett)