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Category: General

  • How SharePoint Governance is like a moose in a swimming pool

    I was watching the news last night and a story came on about a man in Manchester, NH (about 30 minutes from my house) who heard a noise that was coming from his backyard, and when he turned on this lights he found a Moose in his backyard.  The moose was spooked by the sudden flood of light and charged through his fence and directly into the man’s swimming pool.

    moose

    The man from didn’t have many options going in to the situation, it just descended upon him from nature and he was forced to simply deal with the situation.  He went from having a nice quiet evening at home to needing help from 12 people to get a moose out of his pool, having a shredded pool cover, and ending up with his saga documented on the evening news.

    How this relates to SharePoint

    Lying in bed after fasting all day for Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of Atonement, all I could think was how similar this man’s scenario was to all too many deployments of SharePoint: Someone hears something, starts to investigate, the next thing they know they have a 2000 pound angry animal on their hands.

    In our many cases we have the ability to hold off the animal and redirect its efforts into something more productive and healthy with governance and proper planning, however many times the beast barrels through our defenses and we are dealing with a world of trouble that we didn’t intend on.

    The man in the story had many options:

    1. ignore the situation and hope it clears itself up
    2. grab a gun and shoot it himself
    3. call a local hunter to deal with it for him
    4. calmly call the police and figure out how best to deal with the situation with expert assistance

    I sincerely hope that when faced with situations like this we deal with things as well as the man from the news story did because in the end, all that was really lost was part of a fence, a $200 pool cover, and some time.

    Here are a couple of things to keep in mind, whether you are dealing with an angry moose, or an impending SharePoint deployment:

    1. Find out what you don’t know
    2. Stop and determine the correct plan of action before proceeding
    3. Understand what the drivers of your situation are
    4. Get control over an out of control situation

    When it comes to SharePoint deployments, whether properly conceived or not, it is always best to stop and examine your options.  It is always going to be best to take a bit of time up front to save a complete rebuild later.

    The moral of the story

    When cooler heads prevail, everyone comes out alive, and with a reasonably interesting story to share.  Think before you act, and in our world, before you implement.

  • Apples and Mangos and Raspberries, oh my! A fun day of fruit…

    I spent a good portion of my day watching phones update today.  

    My iPhone 3GS had finally ground to a halt and I decided to go back to baseline and reimage it.  It took almost 2 hours for my iPhone to reinstall the base iOS and restore a backup, but at the end it is performing like a new phone.  I highly recommend doing that every 6 months to improve performance of your iPhone.a

    The really big news of the day however was that Windows Phone 7.5, affectionately known by everyone in the world as Mango, dropped today.  I spent all day checking my phone to see if I was one of the lucky who would be graced with the update sooner rather than later.  Sadly, I was not.  Not until after posting a sad message in response to Andrew Connell’s jubilant Facebook message saying that he had just gotten Mango installed did I find that there was a magic trick out there to make Mango appear.

    Reiterated from WPCentral: (proceed at your own risk)

    1. Connect your Windows Phone to a PC and launch the Zune software
    2. Click on Phone/Settings/Update. Allow the software to tell you whether an update is available. If so, skip this guide. If not continue to the next step.
    3. Click the update button again, and this time immediately disconnect your computer from the internet (some people have better luck waiting 1-2 seconds). Do this by pulling the Ethernet cable, disabling Wi-Fi, disabling your NIC, etc.
      1. I had the best luck disabling my NIC.  Trying to get the cable unplugged in just the right amount of time was proving tedious
    4. Wait 30 seconds or so and you should receive a notification that an update is available. This is 7392, the Mango pre-update.
    5. Now reconnect to the internet and continue with the update process through the Zune software.
    6. After 7392 is fully installed, you may receive a notification that another update is available. If so, install Mango now. If not, proceed to the next step.
    7. If the second update isn’t popping up on its own, repeat steps 3-5, causing the 7403 update to appear.
    8. Install 7403.
    9. Mango time! At this point, Zune should automatically start installing 7720, Mango. If it doesn’t happen automatically, force it like in previous steps.

    b 

    The entire process took about an hour and a half and I am very excited to go play with my new toy, as all of my developer friends have been flashing their pre-release bits in my face for some weeks/months now.

    Oh, the raspberries… they were a part of dinner.  I just needed a third fruit for the alliteration.

  • Breaking the silence–a personal note

    Some people have noticed the unusual lull in my posting.  Others are probably wondering why in the world they are still reading after the title doesn’t have anything to do with SharePoint.

    The out of the norm silence is due to several things happening in my personal world, which I normally try to keep out of my blogging, but since this has a direct correlation to my SharePoint community involvement I have decided to share it here.

    Since my vacation at the beginning of July I started to recognize that my involvement in the community and my desire to be more involved in SharePoint not just inside of my employer were not well aligned with my current career path.  My employer, while supportive, was not overly interested in my SharePoint community involvement and combined with other internal factors I realized that it was time for me to consider my career options.

    Like anyone who is considering a major life change I turned to my friends and family for advice, but I also reached out to my friends and trusted advisors in the SharePoint community and the response was overwhelming.  The support and advice that I received from colleagues around the community was amazing.  I am hard pressed to think of another group of professionals that are as impressively supportive and helpful of people (that they may have never actually met in person) as the SharePoint community.

    With the decision made that it was time for a change, I returned home to find a new SharePoint Users Group was starting in my area and I immediately dove in.  Now one of the organizers for the group we have made strategic moves to improve the community interaction here in New Hampshire, such as moving the meeting date and time out of conflict with our sister User Group down in Boston and getting some top quality talent to come and speak to our members.  We have also gotten sponsors for raffles, giveaways, and a new SharePoint Foundation 2010 site hosted by FPWeb.net that will come online later this month.  For more information about NHSPUG visit our site at http://www.granitestatesharepoint.org/

    I also got involved with SharePoint Saturday New Hampshire, which is this coming Saturday, September 24th in Manchester, NH at the Southern New Hampshire University Campus. You can still register for SharePoint Saturday New Hampshire by visiting our site at http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/nh/default.aspx

    All of that made me feel great and really reconnected me with the community, but I still had to figure out what I really wanted to do from a career perspective.  That’s where LinkedIn came in.  I have always seemed to get between 5-12 linked in requests per week from recruiters and always ignored them.  I decided that it was time to hear what some of them had to say.  So I responded to 5 of them.  Almost instantly I got a call from a woman named Debbie Strevens from Workbridge Associates who claimed to have connections to every person in a power position in the Greater New England area and would find me the exact right for for me.  I chuckled a little bit internally after the call thinking, “Wow, she has some pitch but there is no way she can be for real.”  Turns out, she was. 

    A few months prior I had gotten some great advice from Christian Buckley of Axceler, whom I have come to respect and value as a friend and community contributor (and hopefully soon to be SharePoint MVP), which was “Sit down and write my own job description.  Before you look for a new career opportunity, know what you want.”

    I gave my job description to Debbie and in just under two weeks I had numerous competitive offers.  After much soul searching and long discussions with my wife I accepted an offer from Sentri, Inc. to be their new SharePoint Practice Director.

    While it was hard leaving what I had put my blood, sweat and tears into at my previous employer, I have been warmly embraced by Sentri and am truly excited to be working with a dynamic organization that is whole heartedly committed to Microsoft technology.  Sentri’s president, Philip Green, is famous for saying “At Sentri we put all our eggs in one basket, Microsoft Software.  Fortunately, this is one very, very safe basket.  We are Microsoft Technology Experts.”  It’s a pretty compelling statement to someone who has dedicated their career to Microsoft Technologies.

    Sentri has embraced and is fostering my commitment to the SharePoint community, encouraging my blogging (which will be cross posted on the Sentri site soon), speaking, and activities with the User Groups and SharePoint Saturdays.

    I am excited to be on a new career path that will allow and encourage me to follow my passion.  Expect more regular & diverse content in the weeks and months to come.

  • Office Web Apps Service Pack 1 is here!

    It has almost gone overlooked, but Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 are not the only products to get a Service Pack 1 release today.  I know that the Office Web Apps are a bolt on to SharePoint 2010 and so they don’t get a whole lot of attention, but from an end user feature enhancement perspective, I am almost more excited about the Office Web Apps SP1 than anything else released today (Office 365 not withstanding).

    Sourced directly from Microsoft’s KB2460073:

    Overview of Office Web Apps SP1 improvements

    These are the key areas of improvement in SP1.

    All Office Web Apps

    • OpenDocument Format (ODF) support:
      Lets you view and edit ODF documents in Office Web Apps.
    • Lets you use Office Web Apps with the Google Chrome browser.
    • Outlook Web App document attachment viewing (for Exchange Online only):
      Lets you view Office document attachments in the browser directly from Outlook Web App.
    • Lets you use Office Web Apps with Internet Explorer 9 in Native mode.

    Word Web App

    Lets you print Word documents from Edit mode (in addition to View mode).

    Excel Web App

    • Added a Close button.
    • Lets you insert charts in Excel Web App.
    • Lets you copy and paste values and formulas by dragging the fill handle.

    PowerPoint Web App

    • Lets you print presentations from PowerPoint Web App.
    • Lets you edit text in more shapes, not just placeholder shapes.
    • Lets you insert clip art in PowerPoint Web App. (By default clip art support is disabled. An administrator can decide to enable it.)

     It is important to keep in mind that Microsoft has already released the June 2011 Cumulative Updates that contain security patches important enough to be released simultaneously with these Service Packs, so be sure to install that as well.

    Also, Microsoft has already released a list of known issues when installing Service Pack 1.  The Office Web Apps specific item,sourced directly from Microsoft’s KB2532126, is:

    • If Office Web Apps will be used in a mixed version environment, where Office Web Apps has SP1-or-later applied while SharePoint Server 2010 remains on the RTM version, you must install the following two updates before you install SP1 for Office Web Apps:

      • 2510639 Description of the SharePoint Server 2010 update: April 12, 2011

      • 2510648 Description of the Office Web Apps update: April 12, 2011

    Here are the download links:

    Service Pack 1 for Microsoft Office Web Apps 2010 (KB2460073)
    http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26639

    Downloadable list of issues that the service pack fixes
    http://download.microsoft.com/download/B/0/D/B0D1540B-6CF6-4674-9C8E-7A45FD91C163/Microsoft%20SharePoint%202010%20and%20Office%20servers%20Service%20Pack%201%20Changes.xlsx

    SharePoint Foundation 2010 June 2011 CU (UPDATED)
    http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbln=en-us&kbnum=2536601

  • Review of TechEd PreCon: “Microsoft Silverlight Inside and Out” by Jeff Prosise

    I attended the terrific “PRC03 Microsoft Silverlight Inside and Out” presented by Jeff Prosise.  The session was packed with a good background on Silverlight development and a bunch of great tips, tricks and samples.  Some of my favorites were:

    Dynamic XAP Loading: you can break apart your xap file into pieces to allow for faster load because you aren’t loading all of your assemblise on initial load of your silverlight app.  You have the ability to do the initial load and only call to the secondary xap files when the assemblies are needed.

    Automatic Out-of-browser updates: In only a few lines of code you can have your Silverlight OOB app check to see if there are any updates to the app and install them automatically.  A notification can be thrown to alert the user that a new version has been installed and that they need to close and reopen the app to get the new version to run.

    Client HTTP Stack: Silverlight has the ability to us the OS stack, rather than just the browser stack to give you information, such as errors.

    External URIs:  Using some samples that Jeff has, located on www.wintellect.com, that allow you to implement calling external URIs rather than ones that are only inside of your solution.

    Some of the cool new features available in this release of the Silverlight 5 beta:

    Style Data Binding: the xaml version of CSS.  Allows you to do dynamic theming easily.

    Data Binding Debugging (aka: XAML Debugging): you now get the ability to put break points in your xaml and debug the same way you can with C#.  Right now it only works with binding expressions, but keep your fingers crossed that they will expand on this dramatically as the beta rolls on.  This demo got a much deserved round of applause.

    Trusted Applications in Browser:  All of the goodness of trusted applications that was only accessible in the OOB experience is now available IN Browser!

    Trusted Application Out-of-browser enhancements: You can now access the file system completely.  Not just the user’s “My Documents” folder, but the ENTIRE file system.  As an Operations guy this scares me a bit, but it is an ever changing world.

    RichTextBoxOverflow:  This allows you to have a better text box experience where, in this particular demo, putting a richtextbox and a richtextboxoverflow in a horizonal scenario Jeff was able to increase the space between characters and show how the text flowed seamlessly from one text box into the next.

    Some cool things still to come in the Silverlight 5 beta:

    WS-Trust support for services
    64-bit support for the plugin
    COM interop for trusted in-browser applications
    P/Invoke for trusted applications
    PivotViewer control improvements and distributed in the SDK

    I am skipping a ton of cool stuff that Jeff showed us, but visit his blog where you can read about most of this and much, much more at http://www.wintellect.com/CS/blogs/jprosise/.  I didn’t even touch on any of the Windows Phone 7 goodness that he talked about.

    This was my first time attending a TechEd PreCon, and I will definitely be back.  Would have been a terrific value at twice the price.  This level of data dump in a single day is rare, I hope to live up to this standard SharePoint Connections Coast to Coast next week when Corne and I give our “SharePoint Collaboration Bootcamp” PreCon!

  • Silverlight with RIA Services GroupBy in a DataGrid

    There are lots of examples for Silverlight 3 and before when System.ComponentModel was directly accessible, however in Silverlight 4 with RIA Services none of those patterns work.  We looked at the sample videos, some great blogs by Tim Heuer and others, and even looked at the most recent Silverlight Toolkit but had no luck.

    After an hour or searching for the proper way to do grouping in a DataGrid in Silverlight 4 with RIA Services we found that it is really very simple:

    1.) Open Domain Data Source

    2.) Under Other: add GroupDescriptors

    3.) Add the PropertyPath to your desired GroupBy

    Thanks to my good friend, Dave Feldman, for helping to figure this out.

  • The definitive BCS in SharePoint 2010 book now available

    My friend and colleague Scot Hillier has just published his new book with his co-author, Brad Stevenson, called “Professional Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint 2010”. 

    Scot brought me a copy today and from the brief bits that I have had an opportunity to read so far (plus what I was privilege to review prior to the printing), it far exceeds the expectations one might have for simply being THE BOOK (yes I know there is only one out there) on BCS.  Scot targets the book to C# developers, but even a simple admin/architect type like me is able to understand and follow Scot’s easy to read style of writing and grasp the concepts.

    As the “stereotypical SharePoint admin” model punching bag for Scot’s presentations I may be a bit biased as I get to work with this talented guy on a regular basis, but I highly recommend you invest in this book, available in paperback or e-book, and give it a thorough read.  Chapter 8 on “Working with BCS Security” and the details he gives around Secure Store and Claims Authentication make it worth the investment alone for us admin types.

    Shameless Plug (as though this whole post wasn’t already!)
    Buy Scot’s book from the publisher or from Amazon.com and support his good work.