Tag: Community

Putting a bow on an amazing year of SharePoint

Last week I had the honor of presenting “Heavy Metal PowerPivot Redux” to the San Antonio SharePoint Users Group. My slide deck from that session can be found here: http://www.slideshare.net/SentriInc/sentris-saspug-deck-heavy-metal-power-pivot-redux

The SASUGers were a great group of folks to present to and the location was tremendous. We were hosted by Jeff Deverter at the RackSpace facility in Eastern San Antonio. They purchased the Windsor Park Mall and have converted it into their offices. It was completely wild experience touring a mall that I had shopped at previously and finding that it was now a state of the art office facility, complete with slide.

Here are a few pictures from the evening:

From the presentation, & you have to love an SPUG that provides beer at the meeting!

Touring the RackSpace Facility

Time to ride the slide!

Yes, I got stuck…

A post-slide group photo with the early birds

Needless to say it was a terrific evening and I can’t wait to come back and speak again at SASUG. Thanks to Tom Resing, Jessica Saucedo, and Jeff Deverter for all they did to make it possible.

December 20, 2011
#SPSDenver Wrap-up

I was honored to be a two-day speaker at SPSDenver this past weekend and had a marvelous time doing so. The conference was well organized, properly planned, and extremely well attended. Credit to Clayton Cobb and his team for putting on such a great event. From the care of ensuring that they understood every issue that an attendee had to making sure that the fragile egos of the speakers were well cared for to making sure that every sponsor got the most out of the event, they really had their act together. That was all before we even got to ShareSki!

Every time I travel for SharePoint I meet new, interesting people and it reinforces my opinion that the SharePoint Community is the greatest group of people with a common technology interest anywhere. It is always fun to get to know more people in our world and I am humbled to be a part of it.

Needless to say, I was impressed by SPSDenver and am looking forward to returning next year if they are kind enough to have me back.

For those who are looking for the SPSDenver slide decks please find them below:

SharePoint Logging and Debugging

SharePoint Performance Best Practices from the Field

November 18, 2011
SharePoint Connections Las Vegas 2011 Wrap up

I just completed my 5 sessions, 3 of which I presented with my great friend Cornelius J. van Dyk, here at SharePoint Connections Las Vegas. While here we received several pieces of great news:

1.) O’Reilly has green lit our book “SharePoint for Business Intelligence” which will be coming out in 2012 and will revolve around how you can solve business problems using SharePoint 2010, SQL Server 2012, & Visual Studio LightSwitch technologies for Business Intelligence.

2.) We will be doing our “SharePoint Disaster Avoidance for Large Scale Enterprises” post conference and several other sessions for the SharePoint Connections Las Vegas show in March 2012

3.) Power was finally restored to my house in Nashua after more than 6 days!

I had almost 450 attendees across my 5 sessions and I sincerely hope that you all enjoyed the conference as my as I did. As promised, here are links to my final decks:

SharePoint Logging & Debugging: The Troubleshooter’s Best Friend

SharePoint Performance: Best Practices from the Field

Battle Scarred But Still Standing: A SharePoint Administrator’s Tell All

Heavy Metal PowerPivot Redux

Human Workflow with Visio 2010 and SharePoint Designer 2010

Heading home tonight and then back to the SharePoint Road Trip on Thursday to hit SharePoint Saturday Denver!

November 4, 2011
SharePoint Road Trips!

With the devastating storm that has hit New Hampshire over the weekend, there is no better time for a SharePoint Road Trip to start than today! It was so bad up here that our city postponed Halloween Trick-or-treating until next Sunday. Here are a couple of pictures of the devastation, just from our driveway:

Here is a quick list of where you can find me over the next 2 months.

I fly out to Las Vegas this evening to present 5 sessions at the SharePoint Connections Conference this week (October 31st – November 4th), 3 of which are with my good friend and collaborator Cornelius J. van Dyk. I am presenting:

HAD13: SharePoint Logging & Debugging: The Troubleshooter’s Best Friend (Tuesday)

HAD14: SharePoint Performance: Best Practices from the Field (Tuesday)

HAD15: Battle Scarred But Still Standing: A SharePoint Admin’s Tell-All (Wednesday)

HAD12: Heavy Metal PowerPivot (Thursday)

HNC04: Human Workflow with Visio 2010 and SharePoint Designer 2010 (Thursday)

After Las Vegas I head to Colorado to take part in SharePoint Saturday Denver (November 11-13), an amazing 2 day event (registration is open and there are still some seats available), where I will be presenting:

SharePoint Logging & Debugging: The Troubleshooter’s Best Friend (Friday)

SharePoint Performance: Best Practices from the Field (Saturday)

I am also planning on taking part in my first ShareSki as a part of SharePoint Saturday Denver! I haven’t skied in Colorado in almost 10 years (East Coast skiing is nothing like Colorado sadly), but if you can’t find me on the slopes after my sessions, look for the guy in the full body cast by the fire drinking scotch

Corne & I will be presenting at the December installment of the Granite State SharePoint Users Group located at Daniel Webster College on 12/8 @ 6pm, which I happen to co-organize, followed by a SharePint.

We will be doing our SharePoint Logging & Debugging: The Troubleshooter’s Best Friend session. If you are in the area New Hampshire / Northern Massachusetts area please check us out. We have had 7 sessions and we are continuing to grow. We have great list of speakers already lined up for 2012!

I am heading back to the Lone Star State to round out the calendar year of SharePoint where I will be speaking at the SASPUG meeting on December 15th and presenting Heavy Metal PowerPivot Redux, a session featuring the goodness of PowerPivot v1 and a preview of PowerPivot v2 and Power View. Join us at Rackspace – Castle I-35 and Walzem starting at 530p.

Happy New Years!

That will wrap my SharePoint Road Trip to a close. I hope to see you at one of more of these great events. The 2012 calendar of SharePoint events is already starting to fill up with amazing events so keep an eye out for an announcement later in the year about those dates.

October 31, 2011
Presenting “Heavy Metal PowerPivot Redux” tonight at BASPUG

My good friend, Cornelius J. van Dyk, & I are presenting one of our favorite topics at the Boston Area SharePoint User Group this evening, Heavy Metal PowerPivot!

For those of you who have seen us present this topic in the past, you might be asking “ok, I’ve seen it before, why should I attend?”. The answer is simple: SQL Server 2012 CTP3. We will be demoing the new installation experience as well as a few of the new features that are coming in the update to this amazing product.

We hope you will come out and join us for this deep dive into the existing version and a glimpse into Denali.

Our friends at BASPUG would like me to mention that you can/should register for the event at http://baspug18.eventbrite.com/

October 12, 2011
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.

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.
October 10, 2011
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.

September 22, 2011
Speaking at SharePoint Connections Coast to Coast 2011 in Chicago

My friend, Cornelius J. van Dyk, and I will be presenting at this year’s SharePoint Connections Coast to Coast conference in Chicago held August 8-10 at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place. (Anyone sensing a reoccurring theme here? Any guesses which conference we are speaking at in early November? Here’s a hint! )

We will be bringing back our acclaimed ITPro Pre-Conference “SharePoint Collaboration Bootcamp” plus presenting three sessions, “Heavy Metal PowerPivot”, “Time Is Money. How SharePoint Logging will Save You Both!”, and “Battle Scarred But Still Standing: A SharePoint Admin’s Tell-All”. We have updated all of these sessions to be fresh, current, and exciting so come out and see us if you’re anywhere in the Chicago area during that time.

We are also participating in a Speakers Panel for the Chicago SharePoint Users Group on Tuesday evening August 9th starting at 5:30pm. CSPUG is hosting us and will be providing pizza and lively discussion.

We hope to see you there!

August 1, 2011
How to use PowerShell to get quota information in a usable way

There are many good resources out there about how to create, modify, & set quotas using PowerShell, that isn’t an issue. Zach Rosenfield has a good post on Managing Bulk Site Collection Quotas in PowerShell and there are dozens of others out there who can give you all of the information about making changes to quotas that you want. My problem was how do I tell what a site’s quota template assignment is and how close they are to the limits using PowerShell rather than having to do a one by one click through the UI?

The Painful Process

You have a number of different quota templates and a reasonable number of site collections in your farm. In order to stay ahead of the curve you want to be able to monitor the growth of your site collections and know when they are heading toward their quota limits. In the UI you will go to Central Administration and visit the Application Management Section where you will find “Configure quotas and locks” as seen below:

Next you will change the Site Collection selector to the site you want and that site’s information will be displayed like this:

Valuable information & the ability to change the quota all in one place. Simple, easily, elegant. Only one problem: you have to do walk through this for EVERY site collection to get the information if you are simply trying to do an audit of the information.

The PowerShell Solution

I searched the blogosphere high and low looking for an answer to this problem. I pinged experts and friends who I expected would have had to solve this solution. The response I got in most cases was “there are pay products that have that functionality” or “I really hadn’t thought about that yet. Let me know when you find an answer”.

Here is what I came up with: (download a copy as a text or PowerShell from GitHub)

The output of this script looks like this:

Url : http://sharepoint2010
Storage Used/1MB : 3
Storage Available Warning/1MB : 0
Storage Available Maximum/1MB : 0
Sandboxed Resource Points Warning : 100
Sandboxed Resource Points Maximum : 300
Quota Name : No Template Applied

Url : http://sharepoint2010/my/personal/spadmin
Storage Used/1MB : 3
Storage Available Warning/1MB : 80
Storage Available Maximum/1MB : 100
Sandboxed Resource Points Warning : 200
Sandboxed Resource Points Maximum : 300
Quota Name : Personal Site

Url : http://sharepoint2010/sites/large
Storage Used/1MB : 0
Storage Available Warning/1MB : 800
Storage Available Maximum/1MB : 1024
Sandboxed Resource Points Warning : 400
Sandboxed Resource Points Maximum : 500
Quota Name : Large Site

Url : http://sharepoint2010/sites/medium
Storage Used/1MB : 0
Storage Available Warning/1MB : 400
Storage Available Maximum/1MB : 500
Sandboxed Resource Points Warning : 200
Sandboxed Resource Points Maximum : 300
Quota Name : Medium Site

This script loops through ALL of your web applications and retrieves information about ALL of your sites.

You can specify a web application to run this against in line 3 just before the pipe. Additionally, if you want to use the script as is you will need to create the text file quotaoutput.txt in your C: root. You can change the name and location of that output file or just remove the “>> c:quotaoutput.txt“ all together and it will merely print to the screen.

This is the information that I found useful. If you want to tweak the script to fit your needs please check out the MSDN articles about SPQuota Members and SPQuotaTemplate Members

Caveat: If you have lots of sites, you might want to consider specifying a web application or a site collection. While I have a dispose statement in here, the script is loading the quotatemplate and spsite information into memory for every site in order to give you the information. This can be a long running operation and take up some significant resources on your server while it is happening. Know your environment and don’t allow this to cause you an issue. I send this information out to a file because I run this over night on my app server and can then look at the information later. The information can be shared with the team who handles support and customer relations so that we can work with the customer to either reduce the size of their site, or raise their quota as needed (usually comes with an additional cost).

Does Storman.aspx solve this issue in SP1?

As of this blog post I have not yet played with SP1 as I am methodically, to my detriment, walking through a complete new build of SharePoint 2010 SP1 on top of SQL 2008 R2 SP1 and Denali CTP3 side by side to do a comparative article (hint on future content). As a result I have been delayed in getting to validate and test this, so the honest answer is I am just not sure yet. Regardless, I know that there are going to be lots of people who will take months to upgrade to SP1 and hopefully this script will be able to help them in the mean time.

Even if Storman.aspx does give a better UI interface, having the text file output of this information is going to be vitally important for better customer support in my opinion.

Credit where credit is due

Shannon Bray, the co-author of one of my current favorite tech books, Automating SharePoint 2010 with Windows PowerShell 2.0, pointed me to a lead in his book that started me on a path and numerous unnamed blog articles each lent a bit to the final answer which you see above. Additionally, two of my co-workers were instrumental in getting me over the last hurdles of this process, Jim Rearick & JJ Willette (supplied the nifty code to get the quota name). Thanks for all of your contributions.

PowerShell Get-QuotaInfo Script from GitHub

Text Get-QuotaInfo file

July 20, 2011