SharePoint 2013 : the Big Five

SharePoint Server 2013 : The big five from Joris Poelmans

Trends impacting collaborative tools and platforms

I have been working for quite some years now consulting companies mostly on the technical side of building and designing collaborative environments but when preparing for a presentation about why people should upgrade their current environment to the latest (and off course greatest) version I tried to summarize some trends which significantly impact the way that we should think about these environments.

• It’s a multi-device & mobile world.  90% of people use multiple screens sequentially to accomplish their goals with search being the most common ways consumers continue from one device to another (Source Google: The New multi-screen world study )
• Social collaboration is the new norm. 82% of the world’s online population engages in social networks. The usage of social tools has changed the mindset of people and is blurring the division between private and work life. People are expecting to same ease of connecting with co-workers and keeping up to date  within the enterprise as they are used to connect and follow their social network outside  outside of it. The fact that a new digital generation ( a.k.a Generation Y) is entering the workforce will put even more pressure on companies to embrace social tools.
• Businesses are faced with an increased pace of change. Most people seem to think that the accelerating change is typical for technology but this accelerated pace of change also applies to business in general. According to research the average lifespan of a S&P 500 company is 18 years today (compared with 68 years in 1950). At this rate 75% of the S&P 500 will be replaced by 2027 (Source Innosight.com, 2012: Creative destruction whips through corporate America). Extrapolating from past patterns by the end of the year 2020, the average lifespan will have been shortened to about 10 years (See Survival and performance in the era of discontinuity). The only corporate survivors will be those that can increase the rate of creative destruction without losing control of present operations.
• No man is an island – collaboration is required for value creation. 66% of CIOs from top-performing organizations see collaboration as key to innovation. (Source: IBM CIO study, 2001). Most tasks performed by knowledge workers have become so complex that they require people with diverse skill sets and from multiple disciplines to collaborate. Unfortunately organization are still quite hierarchical organized which impedes efficient collaboration. Definitely read – Enterprise Social Networks what has changed and the changing role of middle management
• Renewed focus on people as the core asset in the battle for companies survival.  Although the next quote was made by Andrew Carnegie at the end of the 19th century it holds more true then ever.
The only irreplaceable capital an organization possesses is the knowledge and ability of its people. The productivity of that capital depends on how effectively people share their competence with those who can use it.
If you look at information workers (the typically users of your platform) you will notice a shift in structure based work (Processes, routines,controls,…) to more knowledge based work (research, problem-solving, relationship driven,…) But knowledge workers are more likely to excel when they are engaged. Gallup estimates that engaged employees are 18% more productive and that attrition decreases with 51%. At the same time employees are expecting more from their employers. They don’t just go to work to get paid, they want to be motivated, challenged and have a clear purpose( definitely check out the video What motivates us?)
Related posts:

• Enterprise 2.0 and organizational culture
• Knowledge and talent in a people ready business
• Knowledge is power! So why share your knowledge?
• The value in social networks
• Colleagues, Social Distance & Relevance in People Search, and other Social Networking tools in SharePoint
 

SharePoint Saturday Belgium 2013 – Building the “Hot or Not” app on SharePoint 2013 … or how not to sell social to your client or boss

I’m presenting a SharePoint development session on social at SharePoint Saturday Belgium 2013  end of April. I’m still in the brainstorming phase but below is the abstract – so if you have something specific you want to see in the session – leave a comment;

Session abstract: ​Enterprise social networks allow you share best practices within organizations, identify co-workers with particular expertise, exchange knowledge and work more efficiently together on projects , but they can also be a lot of fun. Microsoft has made some significant investments in social capabilities with SharePoint Server 2013. In this session we will explore the different social capabilities in SharePoint 2013 and show how to build a SharePoint app which leverages social and search features to build your own "Hot or Not" app. Technologies covered in this session include the new Social and Search REST APIs in SharePoint 2013, the SharePoint app framework, Azure , Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 ... but it is mostly about having some fun to build a social app. Warning: session is heavy on code ... and pretty girls.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,sharepoint2013,social,development,search,REST

Presenting at Be the Change Hero for better information collaboration in your organization

 

I’m presenting the keynote next week at “Be the Change Hero for better information collaboration in your organisation” in Brussels – if you are interested check out Be the Change Hero roadshow event site.  Focus of the sessions is on getting more value out of yor SharePoint investement. For those of you who can not attend – I will share the slidedeck afterwards.

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,collaboration

Building a Windows 8 app for SharePoint 2013 Part 1: using Javascript and CSOM

I followed two sessions about building a Windows 8 app for SharePoint 2013 during the SharePoint conference in Vegas. The two sessions used a different approach for building such an app. In the next couple of blog posts I will outline the different approaches and provide some feedback around it. Let’s start with the CSOM approach.

The SharePoint CSOM and Javascript approach to build Windows 8 apps
During the session Fun with SharePoint Social, CSOM and Windows 8 delivered by Mark Rackley and Eric Harlan (Slideshare for a local BIWUG redelivery available here) at SharePoint Conference Las Vegas a solution depicted by the image below was built. For a complete walkthrough check out Creating your First Windows 8 Application using the Client Object Model (CSOM) and JavaScript
from Mark.

For those of you unfamiliar with CSOM – this is an abbreviation of the  SharePoint Client Side Object Model. So the basic setup was actually a Visual Studio solution which combines a JavaScript WinRT project and a Windows Runtime compontent.  Listed below is  a download link with a  very simple example to get you started.  This is how the code of the Windows Runtime Component looks like – it is basic CSOM code.  Some things you should think about:

• Add a reference to the required Microsoft SharePoint Client Runtime components
• Make sure that you pass in the required credentials – the code below assumes that the Windows 8 machine is in the same domain as your SharePoint Server and that you can log in with integrated security
• The SocialFollowingManager is the most important class – for background info on follows in SharePoint 2013 – check out Common programming tasks for following content in SharePoint 2013
• You will need to use a separate object to pass the information from the SocialFollowingManager back to the Javascript Windows Store App. By default the SocialFollowingManager returns a ClientResult of type SocialActor which is not a valid Windows Runtime Parameter type and which can’t be returned in a public method
• You can’t use nested classes – that’s whyFollowedContent is a separate class.
• If you receive “Unable to connect to the remote server” when connecting to SharePoint you probably still need to make sure that your application has the correct capabilities enabled.  Open up your Application Manifest and make sure that you have “Enterprise Authentication” and  “Private Networks (Client and Server) checked

  1: using System;
  2: using System.Collections.Generic;
  3: using System.Linq;
  4: using System.Text;
  5: using System.Threading.Tasks;
  6: using System.Net;
  7: using Microsoft.SharePoint.Client;
  8: using Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Social;
  9: 
 10: namespace CSOM
 11: {
 12:     public sealed class FollowedContent
 13:     {
 14:         public string ID { get; set; }
 15:         public string Type { get; set; }
 16:         public string Name { get; set; }
 17:         public string Uri { get; set; }
 18:     }
 19:     
 20:     public sealed class Social
 21:     {
 22: 
 23:         public static FollowedContent[] GetFollowedContent()
 24:         {
 25:             
 26:             ClientContext ctx = new ClientContext("http://sp2013");
 27:             ctx.Credentials = System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;
 28:             
 29:             SocialFollowingManager sfmgr = new SocialFollowingManager(ctx);
 30:             ClientResult<SocialActor[]> actors = sfmgr.GetFollowed(SocialActorTypes.All);
 31: 
 32:             sfmgr.Context.ExecuteQuery();
 33: 
 34:             FollowedContent[] followedContent = new FollowedContent[actors.Value.Length];
 35: 
 36:             int index = 0;
 37: 
 38:             foreach (SocialActor actor in actors.Value)
 39:             {
 40:                 FollowedContent content = new FollowedContent();
 41:                 content.ID = actor.Id;
 42:                 content.Type = actor.ActorType.ToString();
 43:                 content.Name = actor.Name;
 44:                 content.Uri = actor.Uri;
 45:                 followedContent[index++] = content;
 46: 
 47:             }
 48: 
 49:             return followedContent;
 50:         }
 51:     }
 52: }
 53: 

I like this approach of building Windows 8 apps since it allows for a clean separation of the SharePoint codebase from the UI part. At the same time SharePoint developers can leverage the SharePoint object model using CSOM.  It is possible to leverage numerous Javascript libraries (such as JQuery UI) to build a compelling user experience.


Code samples – download BIWUGApp1.rar

SharePoint 2010 Productivity Hub – Direct download links

The Productivity Hub is a Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 site collection that offers training material for end-users. It is fully customizable and Microsoft provides content packs with training materials that you can add to the Productivity Hub. You first need to install the Core before installing the different Content packs.

SharePoint 2010 Productivity Hub

Listed below are the different direct download links:

• Productivity Hub SP2010 SP1 – Core install
• Productivity Hub SP2010 – Content Pack 1 – training material for Access 2007/2010, Communicator 2007/2010, Excel 2007/2010, Groove, InfoPath 2007/2010, Internet Explorer 9.0, Live Meeting, Lync 2010
• Productivity Hub SP2010 – Content Pack 2 – training material for OneNote, Outlook 2007/2010, Project 2007:2010 and Publisher 2007/2010
• Productivity Hub SP2010 – Content Pack 3 – PowerPoint 2007/2010, Ribbon and SharePoint
• Productivity Hub SP2010 – Content Pack 4 – SharePoint Workspace, Visio 2007/2010, Windows 7 and Word 2007/2010

Quick steps to get started:

1. Make sure that your SharePoint Server has the correct patching level – you will need to have SharePoint Server 2010 SP1 installed and SharePoint Server 2010 August 2011 Cumulative updates or later (KB2553050)
2. Create a separate site collection for the Productivity hub
3. Extract the core install file
4. Unpack the content packs that you want to include and copy the different extracted folders underneath the core install directory. Remark: if the content packs are not imported you can still import them afterwards – check out the Microsoft Productivity Hub 2010 SP1 Installation Guide which is included in the Core install
5. Install the Productivity Hub using a Powershell command which is included.

The code for the Productivity Hub Silverlight components and other add-ons are also available on Codeplex - http://productivityhub.codeplex.com/

Technorati Tags: sharepoint2010,productivity,training,user+adoption

Drag and drop files into a SharePoint 2013 document library depends on installed browser and Office version

 

Drag and drop in SharePoint 2013 is supported by the drag and drop feature in HTML 5 (for an interesting overview of browser support for HTML5 check out http://html5test.com/ ). Unfortunately this is not supported in Internet Explorer 8.x and Internet Explorer 9.x but when you install Office 2013 it will add an extra ActiveX control which will support drag and drop. So if you don’t have Office 2013 installed you will not be able to use this nice feature (An interesting hack around this is installing SharePoint Designer 2013 but this is something you probably don’t want to do for your end users).  Mozilla Firefox 3.5 (or later), Google Chrome and Safari 5.x (or later) seem to support this out of the box.

 Other references:

• How to: Drag and drop files into SharePoint 2013 Document Libraries
• Technet blogpost on Drag and drop support in SharePoint 2013
• Blog post on moving content around in SharePoint 2013 with drag and drop

Technorati Tags: sharepoint2013,office2013

Repairing missing My Site link in the welcome menu

A while ago - the My Site link went missing on my SharePoint 2010 development machine. This posting - Repairing missing My Site and My Profile links in SharePoint 2010 put me on the correct track. In my case I had deactivated the Social Tags and Note Board Ribbon Controls Farm Feature, which also made the My Site and My Profile links disappear - after reactivating it again - the links reappeared.

Understanding SharePoint 2010 default My Site and the wWWWHomepage attribute

 

The first time that you visit your SharePoint 2010 My Site you probably got a popup message which asked you to save this site as your default my site. What this does behind the scenes is filling up the wWWHomePage  attribute in Active Directory. This same attribute is used in your contact card to view the My Site of a users. This same attribute is also by default mapped in an Active Directory import into the SharePoint user profiles to the User Profile field PublicSiteRedirect (and it still is in SharePoint 2013 – see Default user profile property mappings in SharePoint Server 2013 ) This property contains the URL to use to redirect to the public view of a specified user profile.

Technorati Tags: sharepoint2013,sharepoint2010,administration,sharepoint

How to determine the version and edition of SQL Server and its components

 

KB321185 explains a number of different methods to determine the version and edition (Developer, Standard, Enterprise,…) of SQL Server. The easiest in my opinion is method 4:

Connect to the instance of SQL Server, and then run the following query:

SELECT SERVERPROPERTY('productversion'), SERVERPROPERTY ('productlevel'), SERVERPROPERTY ('edition')

Technorati Tags: SQLServer,Microsoft,administration

Manually configure Lync 2013 clients for Office 365

If you want to manually configure a connection to Lync Online – select Tools > Options in the Lync Client. Next select the Personal category on the left hand-side. You will see a screen which lists your sign-in address – click on the Advanced button next to it and select the Manual Configuration option. Fill in the following settings:

• Internal server name: sipdir.online.lync.com:443
• External server name: sipdir.online.lync.com:443

 

Technorati Tags: Lync2013,Office365,Lync,configuration

Getting started with JQuery UI Tabs

JQuery UI Tabs allows you to create HTML tabs in a very simple fashion. Listed below are the different steps you need to take:

1. Add a reference to the JQuery javascript files

1. Add a reference to a JQuery UI css

1. Create your tabs by adding an unordered list in a div – note the href=”#tabs-1” part which points to the id of a div which will contain the tab content

1. Create the divs which will contain the tab content

1. Initialize your tabs by adding some javascript code

Finally your code should look this

 

Some interesting references:

• JQuery UI Tabs Styling
• JQuery UI Tabs samples

Tags van Technorati: JQuery,Javascript,tabs,HTML

6 interesting facts about continuous crawling in SharePoint 2013

One of the new features in SharePoint 2013 is continuous crawling which  allows your SharePoint search results to be be as fresh as possible. Continuous crawls run every 15 minutes by default but you can change the interval. This might sound similar to incremental crawling but there are some important differences:

• Continuous crawls can run in parallel and a crawl does not require a previous crawl to be completed prior to launch
• Processed results will appear in the search results immediate after the crawl – there is no need for index merging
• Continuous crawling is only available for SharePoint content
• It is not possible to pause or stop continuous crawls
• Continuous crawling is not available in SharePoint Online – only in on-premise deployments (See Search features in Office 365 Preview)
• A SharePoint 2013 farm will also be able to crawl older versions of SharePoint using continuous crawling.

References:

• How can I achieve the best freshness of search results? Introducing continuous crawls for SharePoint
• Manage continuous crawls in SharePoint Server 2013

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint,sharepoint2013,sp2013,search,microsoft,administration

How and why to compact your Outlook OST file

When you delete items in your mailbox, the size of the Outlook data file (.pst or .ost file – it is an ost file if you are using Microsoft Exchange Server) might not decrease as much as you expected. You can free more space by doing a compact of your mailbox – check out How to compact PST and OST files to eliminate deleted file spaces in Outlook. This is especially useful after you have done a complete cleanup of your mailbox since this probably grew your .ost file because the deleted items are also kept in this same .ost file.

Tags van Technorati: Outlook,tip,microsoft

Office apps development - Getting started building an Excel task pane app

Apps for Office are a new type of apps which allow you to extend Office 2013 client applications  using a combination of web technologies (Javascript, CSS and HTML) and the new Javascript API for Office. If you are new to this I recommend that you check out these apps for Office and SharePoint 90 second videos. 

Afterwards you can immediately dive in and check out Build apps for Office. In this series of blog posts I will explain how I learned to built an Excel Content app and issues I faced when trying to built this type of app. There are different types of Office 2013 apps – check out.

A good place to start building a task pane app is Sample task pane and content app walkthroughs – which shows you how to build a Bing Maps content app.

The Excel content app I will build is a variant of the Bing Finance apps – which is basically aimed at integrating stock data into Excel. Where the Excel 2013 app which I will illustrate will differ in a first version:

• Allow the app to work with Excel sheets which already have tables to add and bind to these existing tables and refresh data in these apps
• Incorporate financial data from multiple sources (not only Bing Finance)

Usage scenario is the following:

• User selects an existing Excel table which contains stock information – every row is representing a stock. For each stock there should be a column which contains the stock symbol code. User defines which column contains this stockdata and in which column he wants to update the stock price.
• Provide a button to update the table with the latest stock price for each stock in the table
• When a row is selected in the Excel table – show extra information in the task pane.

In the sample code from the Bing Maps content app - you notice that you need to create bindings to interact with specific sections of your Office apps – see Binding to regions in a document or spreadsheet . This is something I will need as well for the Excel table with stocks.

There are 3 types of bindings which you can create and from which you can read data  ( see BindingType enumeration) – in this case I want to use Office.BindingType.Table and read information from that binding afterwards. First create the binding:

Office.context.document.bindings.addFromSelectionAsync(Office.BindingType.Table, { id: 'stockdata' }, function (asyncResult) {
        if (asyncResult.status == Office.AsyncResultStatus.Failed) {
            write('Action failed. Error: ' + asyncResult.error.message);
        } else {
            write('Added new binding for table with' asyncResult.value.columnCount + ' columns');
        }
    });

Afterwards you can retrieve the binding again and read data from that binding. Unfortunately the sample code in the MSDN article only showed how to read data from a text binding – so it took me some time to find out how to read it from TableData object.

//Retrieve binding - if no binding - provide warning
Office.context.document.bindings.getByIdAsync("stockdata", function (asyncResult) {
   if (asyncResult.status == Office.AsyncResultStatus.Succeeded) 
   {
         //Loop over table rows
         asyncResult.value.getDataAsync({coerciontype:Office.CoercionType.Table},function(asyncResult2){
           if (asyncResult2.status == Office.AsyncResultStatus.Succeeded)
           {
               var rows = asyncResult2.value.rows;
               for (i = 0; i < rows.length; i++)
               {
                  write(rows[i][1]);
               }                       
            }
         });                
    }
});

In a next blog post I will explain how you can you use events in combination with the binding object.

Technorati Tags: Office2013,apps,development,microsoft,Office.js

Unable to use Windows Phone 8 Emulator without SLAT support

After installing the Windows Phone 8 SDK I got an error stating that hardware virtualization was not supported on my machine therefore I could not use the emulator.

Apparently there are two requirements for your machine to meet to support the Windows Phone 8 emulator:

• Support for hardware virtualization in the form of either Intel-Virtualization Technology (Intel-VT) or AMD-V (also called SVM)
• Support for Second Level Address Translation (SLAT) – see How to Check if your CPU supports SLAT – on Intel CPUs this is also called Extended Pages Tables.

This is caused by the fact that the Windows Phone 8 Emulator is using the client version of Hyper-V (which ships with Windows 8 client OS) which requires SLAT. The Hyper-V server does not.

Because I don’t have a Windows Phone 8 device on hand – I’m pretty much stuck building Windows Phone 7.1 apps.

Technorati Tags: WP8,SLAT,microsoft,fail

First sessions announced for TechDays 2013 Belgium - early bird discount available

TechDays 2013 will take place on 5,6 and 7 March at Kinepolis Antwerp – the agenda is slowly filling up. For SharePoint developers there is an interesting pre-conference deep dive track with sessions by Dan Holme, Serge Luca and Lieven Iliano.

SharePoint sessions:

• Deep Dive SharePoint 2013: Brave New World: What SharePoint 2013 Really Means...
• Deep Dive SharePoint 2013: Developing applications in SharePoint 2013: forget...
• Deep Dive SharePoint 2013: SharePoint app development fundamentals
• Deep Dive SharePoint 2013: Accessing SharePoint data
• Deep Dive SharePoint 2013: SharePoint app security

During the main conference no SharePoint sessions seem to be scheduled which is quite strange because the goal of the new SharePoint app model was to open up SharePoint to the average .NET developer.

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint+2013,techdaysbe,microsoft

Fun with Social, Windows 8 and Javascript

Fun with Social, Windows 8 and Javascript from Joris Poelmans

Office 365 Dedicated environments service descriptions

Ever wondered what’s the difference between the Office 365 dedicated and multi-tenant environments? Check out Microsoft Office 365 Service Descriptions and Service Level Agreements for Dedicated Subscription Plans.

Tags van Technorati: Office365,SharePoint+Online

Exploring search driven applications with SharePoint Server 2013

Exploring search driven applications with SharePoint 2013