The normal answer would be to use InfoPath, but let’s face it, even with a very sympathetic sales rep, you’re still looking at thousands of dollars in license fees alone, not to mention that you’d still need to develop, test, and maintain those forms.

There are some third party alternatives like Nintex Forms, but it is still going to be thousands of dollars worth of licenses. The free and open-source alternatives I’ve seen haven’t impressed me so far.

I’ve made it a goal for 2013 to get developers to think more about the user experience of their solutions. The default user experience, especially when working with form data, leaves a lot to be desired, which is probably why InfoPath was so popular.

Your Wet Dream Come True!

Building custom forms in SharePoint shouldn’t be hard, though. In my SPInvoice solution, I have a form that looks like an invoice, with support for adding invoice rows and all, and it took me less than a day to get it running, and that included having to learn a bit about SPServices and JavaScript.

The method used in SPInvoice, though, isn’t complicated even if the results are stunning. In fact, give me a few minutes of your time to show you this video, and you’ll see what I mean.

In SPInvoice, I’m using far more complex techniques to accomplish some goals that may not be required for most forms. The underlying technique of getting the form to work, however, doesn’t need custom WSP development at all. It does require HTML, a bit of JavaScript including jQuery and SPServices, and you’ll need to setup a content type and a list to hold the submitted form data.

All of the techniques shown here rely on SharePoint Designer and a bit of know-how only; no custom development, no external dependencies, no programming required (unless you count copy-pasting some jQuery code programming).

For any PDF form, for example, or Word, or other applications that produce forms, you should be able to convert those forms into HTML using their respective applications and then tweak the HTML code to make it work with this method.

In fact, I’ll claim that with a bit of HTML5 know-how, you could easily replace a lot of the InfoPath functionality, and have the benefit of saving thousands of dollars and be able to put your forms on the public web if you so desire, even on a completely separate web server running your favorite brand of OS. With that, you can add nifty jQuery UI features or other web frameworks to your heart’s content. No longer are you limited by what the damned SharePoint Designer Design View can or cannot do.

Want to know the best part? This works in all version of SharePoint, from 2007 through 2013, because, well, it’s just HTML and JavaScript.

No stupid App framework to get in your way either… You can host your forms anywhere, set up SPServices to connect to your SharePoint backend, and viola, you have separated your web front end from the limitations of SharePoint.

Who said you couldn’t do SharePoint 2007 development on Linux?

Here’s the video, feel very free to post comments, questions, and so on below.

Oh, and here’s the sample code, but I must stress that this code is far from optimal so use it to learn, not in production.

.b

The post Replacing InfoPath in SharePoint – Do It Yourself! appeared first on Furuknap's SharePoint Corner.

I’ll break the news to you right now. That isn’t what SharePoint 2013 has done or will do.

And that’s a good thing because if SharePoint 2013 had succeeded, it would have killed SharePoint.

Why SharePoint 2013 Will Fail

Despite the massive hype around the new versions of virtually everything Microsoft, SharePoint 2013 has failed to live up to the expectations in a vast number of areas. The Apps platform hasn’t caught on, the move to cloud first isn’t comfortable for a lot of businesses and is riddled with issues, and the community doesn’t see the major benefits that the new version offers.

Combine this with the uncertainty of features, with SharePoint Online changing and taking choice away from users (You will use Yammer or you will be in pain! We’ve killed what you loved in SharePoint 2013 social because we can! We’ll roll out new features to your employees any day we damn well please!), and quite frankly, a bit of a roadmap nightmare for SharePoint developers in all tiers, and SharePoint 2013 has ended up in a very bad place.

These issues come on top of the issues that any new version of software has, with undiscovered bugs, new features or ways of working that users need to understand, lack of vendor support, and so on. These problems aren’t unique in any way to SharePoint, but they add to the burden that SharePoint 2013 must carry and hopefully resolve.

Microsoft isn’t helping with the situation, but looks like they treat this as some sort of experiment. As SharePoint users start to love and use the new and improved social features, Microsoft announces that it will take them away and replace them with Yammer, forcibly with SharePoint online shortly and likely at least in the next version of SharePoint on-premises too.

Developers and vendors are left bewildered. When SharePoint 2010 came out, we were asked to rush to the sandbox development method, and a lot of vendors and professionals went down that path. Three years later and Microsoft announces that it was all just a joke and that sandbox development really isn’t cool at all.

This time, we’re going to rush to the promise of HTML+JavaScript Apps, which apparently is a new thing. We should do all our development in Apps now, despite Apps technically not offering anything new that cannot already be done in earlier versions or even in SharePoint 2013 without the bonds of the App engine.

Am I the only one that has a trust issue with these kinds of reversals and promises about the glorious future of a new development method? Look at how Microsoft is handling the Windows 8 Start button and boot-to-desktop situation; they can’t seem to make up their minds either way.

Further, and this may or may not be a good thing, Microsoft has left thousands of SharePoint Designer users in the dark by removing Design view from the program. These users have no incentive to upgrade or push their organizations to upgrade. Staying with SharePoint 2010 means they still have a job; upgrading to SharePoint 2013 means they need to retrain significantly, and with training budgets apparently at a all-time low, they’ll probably need to pay for that training themselves.

Ask yourself, would you really sacrifice evenings and weekends for the next maybe six months to learn something completely new that offers no real benefit to you, or would you prefer to just stay with what you already know and hope the issues goes away in the future? I commend those that choose the former, but fully understand those that simply don’t see learning SharePoint as a goal in their lives.

At the same time, many businesses realize that the investments they have made in SharePoint 2010 based solutions still work very well! SharePoint 2013 doesn’t offer any significant improvements in solving business problems, and that’s what businesses want. Technically, sure, SharePoint 2013 may have benefits, but Mark in HR doesn’t really care because his vacation tracker solution works just the same today as tomorrow. It may very well break if he upgrades to 2013, though, and in the very best of situations, he’ll have to learn how to do his work with a new interface.

I’ve previously written that I believe SharePoint 2010 may be the Windows XP of SharePoint, a platform so good that it becomes virtually impossible to get users to upgrade. I’m even more convinced now.

Why SharePoint Will Succeed

You may think this is all doom and gloom, but it’s actually quite the opposite. You see, SharePoint is still alive and kicking, and it’s kicking hard. No, it won’t be the Facebook of the enterprise, and no, it won’t compete or should even try to compete with Google Docs. It won’t be the App platform (and I mean App in the 2013 sense, not in the generic sense) that Microsoft wants.

What SharePoint will be, though, and this is why it will succeed, is an efficient money-making platform for organizations. That’s right, SharePoint gives organizations money, and organizations like that, just as much as they dislike money being taken away from them.

SharePoint’s main advantage is its ability to solve people’s problems. For organizations, this can be as simple as replacing antiquated file servers and providing better search, but it can be as complex as you can imagine.

SharePoint does this with an efficiency that no other platforms can match. In some of the private presentations I do, I’ve set up vacation tracking for HR departments, I’ve set up time sheet reporting with HTML app access for road warriors, I’ve set up CRM systems that track and suggest sales opportunities, and I’ve usually done this to a fairly complete concept within the space of roughly 75 minutes. If I have 90 minutes, I usually end up adding some workflow automation too, to get every single jaw in the room down to floor level.

This is where SharePoint truly shines; not in its ability to be everything else, but in its ability to actually help people with the problems they have, right now, that are causing them pain every day. Throw in a couple of days of getting used to working with SharePoint, and people start solving their own problems, without the need for external consultants. Sure, they’ll more often than not fall on their faces, but they’ll learn, they’ll evolve, and they’ll be happier, with fewer problems than they had without SharePoint.

In more complex scenarios, SharePoint developers can come in and provide guidance. If those those SharePoint developers know how to tie their own shoelaces, they’ll know how to build solutions that take changing needs into account so that the solution can grow and adapt with the organization. They’ll protect the vital parts of a critical solution and allow flexibility of experimentation in more casual applications. That’s not because those developers are so brilliant, it is because SharePoint has the ability to support all those scenarios and thus support a much wider range of solutions than any other platform.

Notice anything in particular about this description?

It doesn’t mention SharePoint version once.

That’s right, campers, SharePoint isn’t about versions any more than astronomy is about telescopes, to paraphrase the late Edsger Dijkstra. You can do all these things with virtually any version of SharePoint. That is good news for new users because they can jump on the SharePoint 2013 wagon and be perfectly comfortable for years to come, but it’s bad news for Microsoft because existing users have very few or no reason to upgrade.

Just a few months ago, Microsoft stated that 40% of all SharePoint installations were still SharePoint 2007 or older! That’s a statement from its users; we have no need for a new interface, we have a need to solve our problems, and we can do that with our existing version.

I’ve said this before and I don’t mind saying it again: Business problems do not change when Microsoft decides to ship a new version of their software.

.b

The post The Year that SharePoint Died? appeared first on Furuknap's SharePoint Corner.

The question one of my students asked was how they could design their business entities or content types to support complete disconnection from the supporting workflow, and I had to think for a bit to come up with a good answer.

The Scenario

Note: I’ve changed the scenario to avoid disclosing details from the student scenario, but the idea and outline remains the same.

In our scenario, we’re looking at an order process with three stages. Order reception, order processing, and order completion. We want to design a system that can maintain this process without tying the process into the orders or the workflow into the process.

Our order entities can be very simple, and to simplify even further, I’ll even drop some of the necessary details, such as the customer relationship.

We need to maintain the following data:

• Order Number (arbitrary identifier)
• Order Date (Date/Time)
• Order Sum (Currency)
• Order Status (Received, Processing, Complete)
• Received By (Person receiving the order)
• Packaged By (Person packaging the order)
• Sent By (Person shipping the order)

Again, this is simplified from a more complex business requirement, but should be sufficient to illustrate our approach.

Designing the Entities

Our first step is to normalize our data and come up with the business entities required to support this process.

Note: Data normalization is the process of structuring our data in a way that removes duplicate data and preserves data integrity.

You may be tempted in this scenario to use a workflow to represent the order process. By doing so, you can use the workflow status to represent the order status. SharePoint will even throw in a workflow status column in your default view when you start a new workflow.

Neat, eh?

No, not really.

You see, by doing that, we hard link the workflow we build into the order entity, and that order entity and its future now depends on that workflow operation like we think it will operate.

“Fine,” you say, “but I can just create a new workflow if I need to change the process radically”

If you do that, then you’ll break fundamental principles of virtually any development discipline. Your order will have two columns, one representing the old workflow and one representing the new. At the very least, this will confuse your users, but at worst, you create conflicting information. One of the workflows may say “Complete” while the other says “Processing”. Which is correct? You’ll have to tell your users, or hide the wrong workflow from sight.

“I’ll live with that,” you say, “we’re just a small company so telling the five people handling orders how to do this correctly is no issue”.

Well, you still have the issue of data history. If you remove a workflow that holds business data, you are essentially killing the history of those orders. Any orders process from that point in time will have a status but any orders processed prior to your new workflow will not.

Instead, we need to disconnect the workflow completely from the data.

First Stage of Separation

The first approach many take is to simply allow the workflow to update the Order Status. In a SharePoint Designer workflow, this is as simple as setting the value of a field in the current item.

The benefit of this approach is that you get rid of the direct relationship between the workflow status and the order status. If the workflow changes or goes away, you still maintain historical data. If you add a new workflow later, that new workflow can simply update the Order Status field and we’ve disassociated our workflow from our data.

This approach, while certainly better than trying the workflow directly to the Order Status field, is still not enough, though. Our goal isn’t just to separate the workflow from the data, we also want to separate out workflow from the process.

At this stage of separation, there is no distinction between the business process and the workflow. We still suffer from the same problems if our business process changes; we need to completely redesign our workflow to add a third intermediate order stage, for example.

What’s worse, if we cannot support in SharePoint workflows the requirements of the business process, we’re stuck. We either have to change the business process or add manual steps, both of which are very sub-optimal from the business perspective.

Finally, even though we do separate the workflow from the business data, we may still end up with business process information mixed in with the business data.

Let’s say that the order process requires an approval of some sort, maybe even a few approval stages (order approved, shipping verified, etc). In order to store such approval states outside the workflow, we need to add a column to the business data to store the state.

However, by adding one or more approval state columns, we have essentially polluted our business data. Whether an order is approved is irrelevant to the order itself; the approval is part of the process, not the order.

If we later decide we no longer need the shipping verification, for example, we now have a ton of orders containing irrelevant shipping verification data.

If we didn’t think that we needed a shipping verification in the beginning but later decided to introduce it, well, all orders prior to that decision will not have the correct shipping verification values and our reports will not be correct.

This certainly isn’t convenient in a flexible process where we want to ensure that our workflows adapt to changes in the business process.

Second Stage of Separation

The answer is to introduce a new stage of separation.

We’ve determined that we need to separate the business process from the workflow, and the business data from the process. Neither of these links are beneficial from the perspective of ever-changing business processes.

To accomplish this, we need to create an entirely new entity; the order process entity.

This entity will represent the order process, regardless of how the business data looks and regardless of what our workflow does.

In fact, this layer of separation allows us to have multiple and independent workflows, even from different automation technologies. We can combine SharePoint Designer workflows with event receivers with SharePoint 2013 type workflows with manual processing.

The business process entity will be responsible for working with the business data by updating information as required. Our workflows will never touch that business data at all, except to read information relevant to the workflow.

In our relatively simple order process, our order entity may look something like this:

• Order ID (Lookup or reference to an order identifier)
• Order Process Stage (Received, Processing, Complete)
• Order Approval State (Approved, Declined, Pending)

The order process entity will be the only gateway to update or modify our orders. Our workflow will update information in the order process, not in the orders.

This stage of separation requires a bit more work, though, because we need to get the business process to update the business data. However, this is a one-time operation that allows us much more flexibility in how we later work with our business process, so the tradeoff is definitely worth it.

By isolating our access through such an entity, we accomplish several goals.

1. We avoid storing superfluous data in the order (such as ever-changing states)
2. We have a single interface with which we can modify order data, accessible by any method or technology
3. We ensure that changes in the order data does not break our workflows

This approach is very common in regular software development, where developers are accustomed to building separate business layers and data layers, and access the data through the business layer only. Generally, it is considered a much safer approach as it prevents error in our interfaces from ruining our business data.

Note: Of course, this statement is only true if our business logic layer does not break the data

Further, this approach allows us much more freedom in terms of controlling our process. Let’s say we have one order that falls somehow outside the regular process for example if a customer picks up the shipment directly. In this case, an employee needs to manually change the process for this order only.

If we maintain a hard workflow-to-data model, in which the state of the order is stored in the order, we need to modify the order and possibly break the workflow currently running on that order.

With the two-stage separation model, however, the user can update the process entity without fear of breaking the underlying data or other processes that run.

Of course, this doesn’t apply to manual updates only. Perhaps we want to change our workflow engine to utilize the new SharePoint 2013 engine or we’ve purchased an external engine like Nintex Workflow.

Well, guess what, as long as our new workflow operates on the business process entity only, that’s perfectly fine. We can swap out parts of the business automation system without killing data or ruining reports.

Finally, this separation also allows us to change the business process without ruining data. This happens because there aren’t any links between the business data and the business process either; the process is simply making changes to the data but has no other ties to that data.

If we change or even remove completely the business process, that’s fine, our underlying data remains unchanged.

Conclusion

I hate writing these, but I’d like to summarize a few points.

Separation of data, business logic, and interface is a key principle in modern software development. This model explains how to accomplish this in SharePoint workflows as well, by creating a complete disconnection between the software we use to manipulate data (the workflow), the business logic or process, and the underlying data.

For years, I’ve been trying to get novice and professional SharePoint developers to understand that software development principles apply to SharePoint as well. Equally, bad software development introduces the same risks in SharePoint as it does on any other platform.

The multi-tier model described here will be well-known to experienced software developers, for example those familiar with MVC patterns. However, for many SharePoint developers, who have little or no other software development background, this may seem like a lot of extra hassle without any tangible benefits.

If you think this, however, I would like to take this opportunity to call you an idiot.

.b

The post Disconnected SharePoint Workflows appeared first on Furuknap's SharePoint Corner.

He asked for comments on Facebook, and I responded with one thing I feel he is forgetting, that is vital to securing SharePoint success.

You see, unlike that may be the attitude of many, a SharePoint workflow is not a business process. A SharePoint workflow is there to support a business process, but it isn’t and should never be the process itself.

Let me elaborate what that means.

The Lock of Doom

A lock of doom, well, I’m not really sure it is a term, but it sounded ominous, is when you have something that is so important you can’t live without it but so complex that you don’t dare change it. A lot of legacy software systems are like this; they were built as atomic units and 20 years down the line, the original developers are gone and nobody knows how to maintain the system. You’re locked in and you can’t change.

A key feature in well-designed software solutions is the ability to create loosely coupled components that work together to achieve a goal. If any component fails, needs to be modified, or replaced with different functionality, that’s fine because we can work on a single component only, leaving the others to go about their business.

I’m not going into too many technical details here, but think of it like a mobile phone charger. The process at which we’re looking is to get power from somewhere into your phone.

To get your Android or Windows phone to work, because you’re an idiot if you use iPhone, you need three loosely coupled components. You need

1. The power grid
2. The charger
3. The phone

Each of these components have specific tasks that they do successfully (another reason why I can’t include the iPhone in the list). The power grid delivers electricity to your socket, the charger converts that electricity into a format that the phone can use, and the phone eats that electricity like it’s candy.

You can replace any of these components, however. If your charger breaks, you can get another one or a different one. The power grid doesn’t even need to be the power grid, it can easily be a USB port on a PC. In fact, with these components, provided again you stay away from that god-awful iPhone thingy, you can charge other things too, like your MP3 player (no, not iPod), your tablet (no, not iPad), or your headset.

The interchangeability of the components means you have reuse and adaptability.

Imagine what the world would look like if all electrical devices had to be built into the power grid, like one giant atomic super-entity. It would be really impractical; you couldn’t put away your vacuum cleaner, for example, and you’d have to have the world’s longest cable to have a mobile phone. And, if something broke, you’d have to fix the entire grid. This would really be a lock of doom, because you would have to know about every single future device when you designed the power grid. Luckily, we have come up with far better solutions.

The process, however, is simple; you want to get electricity from wherever it is produced into your phone. The workflow and the components used to drive this process are the power grid, the charger, and the phone, but these are not the process.

SharePoint Workflows

Far too often, I see workflows that try to be the super entity of the former example. They try to implement everything into one workflow, often redesigning the process to accommodate the workflow rather than the other way around. “Sorry,” they say, “You can’t do it in that way because SharePoint doesn’t support it”.

The thing is, the workflow is not the process. The workflow is there to support and facilitate successful execution of a process, but like the charger isn’t the electricity or the charging process, a workflow isn’t the process.

Your workflows, then, should work to manipulate data to the extent it makes sense, but do so in a way that does not lock you into using that workflow. In other words, you can use a workflow to store data or even the status of a process.

This idea is actually already built into several aspects of workflows. For example, when a workflow assigns a task to someone, it does so by creating an external item in a task list. That task list is completely independent of the workflow, so the workflow effectively disconnects itself from the result of the workflow. The same happens with the workflow history; it is an external list that’s technically independent of the workflow.

Workflow designers need to think in the same fashion and understand that if you try to map a complete process in a single workflow, you will create a lock of doom situation, where you end up with a massive beast that you cannot touch from fear of breaking something.

It’s perfectly acceptable to create smaller sub-workflows that can run as part of a bigger process. For example, you may have an order execution process consisting of several ‘stages’. Each stage can be its own workflow, focused solely on supporting the process at that stage. On completion of an order entry stage, for example, you may trigger or update another workflow which will create and mange the subsequent stages of the process.

Note: Note my use of the words process and workflow; they mean different things.

I discussed workflows with one of my students a few weeks ago, and we discussed a somewhat complex business process involving many different stages and multiple levels of branching. The process itself was several pages of Visio screenshots, spanning at least two departments, and crossing several site collection boundaries.

Initially, the student was overwhelmed with the task, but as we broke it down into smaller components, we were actually able to build the entire process in a couple of hours. Then, when something needs to change, it is merely a matter of updating one small workflow, and the rest of the process goes on as if nothing happened.

A final point to make with this is that if you ensure the output of your workflow is not store in the workflow itself, you also ensure that if you decide to replace the entire workflow, no data is lost.

For example, if you have a report that shows the status of your latest 200 orders, well, if you get that status from the workflow and the workflow goes away, you suddenly have no data on the status.

Instead, if you update a status column or something like that as part of the workflow, then you can effectively remove the entire workflow, replace it with something else, and move on as if nothing had happened; no data loss, no broken reports, no redesign of taxonomy.

And that makes me a happy bear.

.b

The post SharePoint Workflows Aren’t Business Processes appeared first on Furuknap's SharePoint Corner.

Over the years, I’ve had great plans for stuff I want to do in SharePoint. Some of the ideas have turned into USP Journal issues, others into products, frameworks, or services, others have just been sitting there in the back of my mind, waiting for a day when I suddenly find myself with plenty of time and nothing else to do.

I come up with ideas all the time, often in rapid succession. However, I have the attention span of… Ooh, squirrel!

What I mean is that I rarely have time or the attention span to write down the ideas, come up with reasonable business plans, or anything like that. However, I always have easy access to register domain names, so that’s what I do as a reminder of the ideas I have.

By now, I have over a hundred domain names, many of which I’m not going to use, and I’d like to offer these domain names to the SharePoint community first before I try to sell them elsewhere. I figure you guys and gals will probably treat them better than I have.

If you like to get one of these domains, here’s your chance.

At or around May 3, I’ll start setting up an auction solution and start selling off whatever domains remain. Bidding will start at US$500 per domain with a Buy Now price US$1,500.

If you like to pick up one of these domains right now, however, you can do so for US$750. I’ll even give you a discount for three domains for a total price of US$1,500.00.

Update: Domains are now available through SEDO for $1,390 each. Contact me with offers above $1,000.

Terms of Sale

Before you decide, though, please read the following carefully:

To buy a domain, simply comment in the form below or send me an email at furuknap<[at]>gmail.com with the name you want to buy and your name and email address. I will not publish such comments, but I will contact you soon after to verify your information and start the transfer.

After I have received payment, I will transfer the domain to you and mark the domain as sold. If you have a GoDaddy account, this usually takes just a few minutes.

For settlement, I prefer Bitcoins or Litecoins, but I can accept bank payments to a US bank (Wells Fargo). With Bitcoin or Litecoin, payment confirmation happens within minutes, whereas with a bank transfer, it may take days.

If you do not have Bitcoins or Litecoins, and you don’t know how to pay to a US bank (and it can be tricky), you can pay through PayPal. However, there are some caveats with paying with PayPal.

If I do not know you already and you are not a highly reputable person in the SharePoint community, I will hold the domain name for 90 days after the payment has been received. This is due to PayPal’s policy of siding with the buyer in sales of electronic goods in case of a charge back for credit card based purchases. If I transfer the domain to you and you decide to scam me by filing a fraudulent chargeback, I have no recourse for getting the domain back.

I decide alone if you are known to me or a highly reputable person in the SharePoint community.

During those 90 days, I can either manage the domain for you or provide you with a login to manage the domain yourself. Only after 90 days will I transfer ownership of the domain to you.

I really want to trust everyone, but sadly I’ve been burned by people up to no good.

All sales are final. No refunds will be given for any reason, except if I am unable for whatever reason to transfer the domain to you.

Are we clear on these terms? Good, here is

The List

Domain names marked pending have received a purchase request but have yet to clear payment. Please check back in a few days to see if the domain is marked as sold.

Note that I have highlighted some interesting names for your attention only; highlighting is not an indication of any status. A sold domain is marked as (SOLD) and a pending domain is marked as (PENDING)

BAYAREASHAREPOINT.COM
BEGINNINGSHAREPOINTFOUNDATION.COM
BUILDINGSHAREPOINTAPPS.COM
DEVELOPINGSHAREPOINTAPPS.COM
HOWTOSHAREPOINT.COM
LEARNINGSHAREPOINT2010.COM
LEARNSHAREPOINT2010ONLINE.COM
LEARNSHAREPOINT2013.COM
LEARNSP.NET
MANAGINGSHAREPOINT.COM
MICROSOFTSHAREPOINT2010.COM
MYSPLAB.COM
MYSPLAB.NET
OFFICE-FOR-EDUCATION.COM
OFFICEFOREDUCATION.COM
OFFICEFOREDUCATION2013.COM
OFFICEPREVIEW.COM
PLANNINGFORSHAREPOINT.COM
SHAREPOINT-ACADEMY.COM
SHAREPOINT-DESIGN.COM
SHAREPOINT-FOUNDATION.COM
SHAREPOINT-U.COM
SHAREPOINT-U.NET
SHAREPOINT-U.ORG
SHAREPOINT-UNIVERSITY.COM
SHAREPOINT-UNIVERSITY.NET
SHAREPOINT2010RIBBON.COM
SHAREPOINT2010SOCIALFEATURES.COM
SHAREPOINT2010WORKFLOWDEVELOPMENT.COM
SHAREPOINT2013DEVELOPMENT.COM
SHAREPOINTADMINS.COM
SHAREPOINTBOOKS.COM
SHAREPOINTBUSINESSCONNECTIVITYSERVICES.COM
SHAREPOINTCERTIFICATION.COM
SHAREPOINTCHALLENGE.COM
SHAREPOINTCHALLENGES.COM
SHAREPOINTDESIGNER2013.COM
SHAREPOINTDESIGNERTRAINING.COM
SHAREPOINTFORDUMMIES.COM
SHAREPOINTFORUMS.COM
SHAREPOINTFOUNDATION.NET
SHAREPOINTFOUNDATION2013.COM
SHAREPOINTFOUNDATIONADMINISTRATION.COM
SHAREPOINTFOUNDATIONDEVELOPER.COM
SHAREPOINTFOUNDATIONDEVELOPMENT.COM
SHAREPOINTFOUNDATIONFORDUMMIES.COM
SHAREPOINTFOUNDATIONPOWERSHELL.COM
SHAREPOINTFOUNDATIONSEARCH.COM
SHAREPOINTFOUNDATIONTRAINING.COM
SHAREPOINTFOUNDATIONWEBPARTS.COM
SHAREPOINTFOUNDATIONWORKFLOW.COM
SHAREPOINTGROUPS.COM
SHAREPOINTGROUPS.NET
SHAREPOINTKNOWLEDGE.NET
SHAREPOINTMIGRATIONS.COM
SHAREPOINTMOBILITY.COM
SHAREPOINTMYSITE.COM
SHAREPOINTPROGRAMMING.COM
SHAREPOINTSOCIALFEATURES.COM
SHAREPOINTTRAINING.ORG
SHAREPOINTTRAININGREVIEW.COM
SHAREPOINTTUTORIALS.ORG
SHAREPOINTUPDATES.COM
SHAREPOINTVISIOWORKFLOWS.COM
SHAREPOINTVISUALSTUDIO2010WORKFLOW.COM
SHAREPOINTVISUALSTUDIOWORKFLOWS.COM
SHAREPOINTWEBPART.NET
SHAREPOINTWHITEPAPER.COM
SHAREPOINTWHITEPAPERS.COM
SHAREPOINTWORKFLOWS.COM
SHAREPOINTWORKFLOWTRAINING.COM
SILVERLIGHTINSHAREPOINT.COM
SP2013.NET
UPGRADESHAREPOINT.COM
VISUALSTUDIO2010SHAREPOINT.COM
WHATSNEWINSP2013.COM
WORKFLOWINSHAREPOINT.COM

Well, what are you waiting for? Fill in the comment field below or send me an email to request the domain you want! I don’t have all day, you know.

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What you may not know, though, is that Bitcoin is just one of several emerging virtual currencies. Bitcoin is definitely the biggest, but it’s important to understand the other currencies too, especially if you plan on investing or mining coin.

In this article, part of the Understanding Bitcoin series, I’ll talk about each of the different cryptocurrencies and what distinguishes them from each other. I’ll focus mostly on the two largest, Bitcoin and Litecoin, and then give you a brief overview of some of the other cryptocurrencies out there.

Cryptocurrencies?

Let’s start with the basics. A cryptocurrency is a virtual currency that people use for various purchases. Currently, it’s used a lot of places online, but even offline brick-and-mortar stores are beginning to accept cryptocurrencies. This is especially true for Bitcoins.

There are already several cryptocurrencies in existence, each having slightly different characteristics and have uses in different scenarios. Which one will be used and which will die is a matter of great speculation, and as with all things that have a geeky nature, it’s often becoming a debate of passion. When I read these debates, I’m often reminded of Linux vs. Windows vs. Mac debates, or Android vs. iPhone, or similar debates where the underlying differences aren’t really that huge but people still get massively passionate about their particular favorite.

What most agree, though, is that digital currencies have a place in society now, and especially on the internet. With the democratic, global, and decentralized nature of cryptocoins, the ease of use for anyone, the inherent security and potential anonymity, as well as the technical abilities, cryptocurrencies are starting to look like a perfect model for internet heavy economies. Cryptocoins, although certainly not the only form of digital currency, seems to have the characteristics that users and society covets.

Cryptocurrencies work in much the same way as regular currencies and are in their simplest form nothing more. It’s money, and that’s really all you need to know. Whether the money is worth anything is up to society, if society adopts it as an accepted measure of value, then cryptocurrencies have value just like ‘hard’ (or fiat) currencies. Adoption is rising rapidly so there is evidence to support the idea that cryptocurrencies have merit and thus value.

On the flip-side, cryptocurrencies are extremely young and nobody really knows where they will go. The technology hasn’t been proven on a large scale and we know there are inherent problems that need to be resolved at some point. We do not know how governments around the world will react, although we do know that the US have declared digital money as just another foreign currency, giving it at least some credibility. We also have no way of determining value. Cryptocoins can take over online trade completely, and if so, even the current pricing is ridiculously low, or not exist at all in a year or two, in which case any value is overrated, even at one US cent per Bitcoin.

For the purposes of the rest of this article, I’m going to focus on two of the cryptocurrencies that derive from the open-source Bitcoin code. Bitcoin was the first of these currencies, but several other currencies have since appeared with different characteristics making them useful and beneficial in different situations. The other one is Litecoin.

Bitcoin (BTC)

Bitcoin was the first and remains by far the largest cryptocurrency. It is largest in market capitalization, acceptance by merchants, transactions, and mining power.

On the downside, Bitcoins’ size is starting to become a problem, or will shortly. For example, by design, a particular transaction block can be up to 1 Mb in size and must contain every transaction since the previous block was solved. This means that as more transactions happen, the block fills faster, and some transactions must wait until the next block, delaying transactions.

The mechanism designed to solve this is a voluntary transaction fee, which is added to the bonus of the block. As Bitcoin evolves and transactions increase, this voluntary transaction fee becomes the main revenue for mining operations, and if the market decides so, the fee will effectively be mandatory by giving low fee transactions less priority and slower transaction times, with a larger fee ensuring a faster transaction.

At the moment, mid-April 2013, BTC is seeing a rocket ride in terms of price. Be aware, though, that the actual value (as opposed to price) is still very undetermined and absolutely unknown. Anyone claiming to know is wrong at this point, whether they are warning against a bubble or hailing this as the most important thing on the planet.

Bitcoins have a fixed distribution rate and will end up with a maximum of 21 million coins. Most of those coins will be mined by 2032, though so after that (or even before) transaction fees will make up most of mining profitability. Bitcoins are mined using an SHA-256 based algorithm.

For Bitcoin based financial and investment services, there are currently both currency exchanges and stock markets, and other services from traditional financial markets are emerging. Still, because of the nature of Bitcoin, there is no government regulation or guarantees for these markets, so it is extremely risk to invest in BTC-based markets. The largest BTC/USD exchange by far is MTGox. Two other prominent currency markets are BTC-E and Vircurex, while MPEx (large, but expensive and somewhat difficult), BTC-T (smallest but easier), and Bitfunder corners the market on stock trades.

Litecoin (LTC)

Litecoin is the second largest cryptocurrency at this time, but is still much smaller than Bitcoin. Although the relative size varies in terms of market capitalization, at present the Litecoin economy is about 1/30 the size of Bitcoin.

Note: Numbers are based on sizes from http://dustcoin.com/mining

Litecoins have some different characteristics from Bitcoins. First, it is mined using a slightly different algorithm, called Scrypt, which is more resistant to massive mining rigs than the SHA-256 based currencies. That means that even personal computers, provided they have sufficiently powerful graphic card, can still participate in profitable mining.

Note: For a mining operations guide, read the previous post in this series on cryptocurrency mining.

Litecoins like Bitcoins are limited in total number of coins too, but its limit is 84 million coins. This really has nothing to do with its price or value, and because Litecoins are generated at a much faster rate, it evens out in the long run.

When I say that the Litecoin economy is much smaller, I mean much smaller, not just in market capitalization but also in adoption. Adoption is growing, though, but it looks like the community and merchants are waiting to see whether Bitcoins take off. Few merchants accept Litecoins yet, at least compared to Bitcoin, so its circulation is mostly based on person to person transactions and not so much for purchasing products or services.

On the plus side, Litecoins have a faster rate of block generation. Where Bitcoin blocks are designed to appear every 10 minutes, Litecoin blocks appear every 2.5 minutes. This has the benefit of giving potentially quicker and cheaper transactions, although it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be quicker or cheaper.

Also, as the largest of the alternative cryptocurrencies, it may take a place as a backup currency in case Bitcoin transactions have issues like high fees, slow transactions, or even technical issues. Adding support for Litecoins once a merchant has support for Bitcoins is easier than trying to add other backup payment alternatives.

At the moment, Litecoin price is tied closely to the price of Bitcoins, so a rise in Bitcoin price often lead to a rise in Litecoin price. Litecoins are mined using a Scrypt-based algorithm.

Note: You can see an exchange rate for LTC to BTC or USD on BTC-E http://btc-e.com/. MTGox, the largest Bitcoin exchange in the world, is rumored to introduce Litecoin support soon.

Other Cryptocurrencies

Bitcoin and Litecoin combined make up more than 99% of the market at the moment, but that doesn’t mean they are the only currencies available. Other currencies exist, perhaps with more obscure characteristics, and right now, nobody knows whether these will survive or grow alongside their bigger brothers.

Namecoin is a much smaller currency, even compared to Litecoin, having about 0.3% of the market share. It’s designed to work with identities, currently mainly through an alternate DNS system that allows for completely anonymous domain name registrations. Very much a currency and system for privacy freaks bit can also be used to provide secure identification services. Namecoins utilize merged mining, meaning they are mined alongside regular Bitcoin mining at no extra cost to the miner.

PPCoin is a somewhat different cryptocurrency that implements an alternative method of minting coins and securing transactions, called Proof of Stake (BTC and LTC uses Proof of Work). There are several benefits to this, and the details go beyond the scope of this article, but feel free to read up on it on the PPCoin Github wiki.

Devcoin is a coin designed to support open source development, where mining generates revenue for open source projects. 90% of coin generation goes to open-source projects, the distribution of which is done through bounties administered by a democratic voting process. Anyone can apply and three random administrators vote on whether to approve the project, thus giving revenue to the project.

Novacoin is a bit of a controversial coin due to allegations of fraud in the introduction of the coin. The founder allegedly pre-minded a lot of coins before the introduction, many or all of which were used in a bribe and later destroyed (read more). It is the only alternative coin that uses Scrypt for mining (like Litecoins) so it may be an alternative to Litecoins, should Litecoins need one.

Terracoin is a relatively new coin that has seen some recent troubles due to its similarity to the Bitcoin code. In short, the profitability of mining rose drastically in a short time, making it practically worthless for normal miners to support. The developers have taken steps to correct the issue, which may help the coin survive.

Freicoin is another very interesting but obscure currency with some pretty remarkable characteristics. For one, it effectively implements negative interest, meaning you need to spend your money unless it loses its value gradually through Demurrage. The argument for this is that holding money is bad and circulation is good, encouraging investors to invest and banks to loan rather than hoard money.

Why, Oh Why?

With all these different types of coin in existence, it’s pretty clear there will be confusion for many people. The risk is huge like we saw with Terracoin, that technical issues and exploitation may kill smaller coins completely. New and innovative algorithms may stall this or prevent it completely, but it’s still a very immature technology and subject to malicious intent, like most other technologies.

However, it also shows that there is innovation in the way money works and should work and what society wants from its currencies. Cryptocurrencies is a great tool for encouraging innovation in monetary scenarios.

Even more, we have only seen the start of this innovation, perhaps at the level where the web was around 1997 when it too was four years old (Bitcoin is four years in 2013). Nobody knows yet whether this is a passing fad or whether the world is ready for new ways of using money, but if nothing else, Bitcoin and its smaller siblings have already had an effect on people’s minds.

I’m rooting for the future!

.b

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This may not be for the faint of heart, though, and will require that you do some research. In the end, your cost may exceed your earnings, so you don’t want to based your pension on mining coins unless you’re prepared to spend considerable time preparing.

For the purposes of this article, I’ll be using examples from mining Litecoins. Litecoins is a cryptocurrency, a younger and much smaller brother of Bitcoin, that uses a slightly different algorithm for mining than its big brother. I’ll explain more later in the article.

Oh, and the article is written in mid-April 2013, so chances are high that the numbers will be wildly different at a later date (better or worse; it will likely be different).

Mining for Money

In terms of cryptocurrencies (of which Bitcoin is the major player), mining refers to the process by which new money come into existence. This process is performed by performing massive amounts of calculations and then by sheer luck ending up with a certain result that matches a pre-determined value. I explained this briefly in the article Making Money!

This may sound strange, but works very well and is a very fair way of distributing money. You get more money if you put in more computational power.

It does, however, favor the geeks who are willing to spend the time to do the mining. Mining for coin is certainly not as easy as double-clicking Setup.exe and accepting all the defaults.

You need to make sure you have the right hardware. Technically, you can mine on any computer, but chances are you may be spending more money in electricity than you gain from the venture. Next, you need the right software and the patience to learn how it works, and to be honest, it’s quite hostile at times.

Finally, you need to get your expectations right. It’s easy to get blinded by the initial earnings you can reap from coin mining, but you’ll likely have a rude awakening before long unless you know what to expect.

Let me elaborate on these details.

Hardware

TL/DR; If you don’t have a high-end graphics card, you won’t make money.

The first consideration you need to make is what hardware to use. Now, you may have a brand new laptop that you’d want to use to mine or you have an old PC laying around that’s collecting dust, and you want to see whether you can get some money from it.

Chances are, you won’t make any money, and in fact may lose money due to power cost, unless you have a high-end graphics card, and preferably one from AMD.

The reason for this is simple; the computational tasks you need to perform are perfect for the graphics processing unit (GPU) of your graphics card, but utterly inefficient for a CPU. Your CPU is designed to perform a wide variety of tasks while your GPU is designed to do only one thing; crunch numbers by the billions. You can read more about why a CPU is inferior to a GPU in the Bitcoin Wiki.

A good high-end card, though, may pay for itself over a few months, so if you’re planning on upgrading your gaming PC in any case, then you may actually get the graphics card partially of even fully paid for by using it to mine coins.

By high-end graphics card, I mean the top two or three cards on the market. You always want to get an AMD card, for example a Radeon HD7950, over an nVidia Geforce card, for example, because the Radeon cards have more ALU pipelines than Geforce. If that tells you nothing, think of it as AMD having more but simpler ways of doing calculations. This means you can get more simple stuff done per second, often by a factor of 4-5 in favor of AMD, which is all that matters in coin mining.

How much money can you make from a card? Well, it greatly depends and it goes down over time. It’s impossible to accurately predict how much money you will make, but you can get a pretty good estimate by using numbers from a mining hardware guide and putting those numbers into a mining profitability calculator.

Note: The Dustcoin mining calculator at http://dustcoin.com/mining will show you the profitability of several cryptocurrencies so you can pick the one that gives you the most money.

Give Me Power!

TL/DR; You want enough power and a good PSU. A cheap or bad one may cost you money or lost revenue.

And important consideration in mining profitability is your power consumption. This is a reason why older machines perform far worse; they are simply less power efficient.

When you start mining, your power consumption will skyrocket. At idle, a GPU may consume 40-60 watts, but at full peak, a 7950 can easily drain 250 watts or more if you overclock it.

As such, keeping tabs on your power cost is vital to figuring out whether you will make money. For most older computers, they consume so much power and generate so little computational power that the calculations simply don’t add up.

As an example, my rather old Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU will generate around 14 kilohashes per second of computational power, but will consume 105 watts of power. Putting that into the mining calculator at at present, I will earn a whooping US$0.27 per week mining Litecoins. However, my new 7950 GPUs generate around 550 kilohashes per second (around 40 times as much as the CPU) consuming around 200 watts of power at peak. Put that into the calculator, and at present, it will generate around US$83 per week.

Note: Yes, those examples contained a lot of new terms. I’ll explain in a moment.

Because you need a lot of power, you also need to make sure your power supply unit (PSU) can cope. If you are building a new machine for the purpose of mining, that means a high-end PSU too. Expect around 200-250 watts per GPU plus 100-150 watts for the rest of the system. Also make sure you have a quality PSU; in terms of system stability, not all power is equal, and a bad PSU may seriously affect your mining operations and reduce profitability by giving you less than peak performance and possibly downtime.

Software

TL/DR; If you hate tweaking settings through a user hostile interface, you are out of luck.

The choice or software for mining is simpler, because in reality, there are just a couple of options. You can either use Reaper or cgminer. At the time of this writing, Reaper seems to be a dead project and the normal download links are dead, so cgminer is your weapon of choice.

cgminer is a free tool that is incredibly well designed once you get to know it. However, it has a console user interface and you need to know what you are doing to work it properly. Not using it properly means you lose a lot of hashing power, as much as 40-60 percent. It requires constant tweaking until you get it to run at peak efficiency.

As an example, with its default setting, my new GPUs do around 250 kh/s, while properly tweaked, they run at over double that.

There is a nice graphical user interface version that will give you an easy way to just get started, but I highly recommend not using that. As for a non-tweaked cgminer, it will simply yield lousy results and you’re throwing money out the window.

In other words, you should expect to spend a fair amount of time tweaking settings and learning what yields the best results, or you should avoid the whole thing; it simply won’t be worth it.

Expectations and Results

After you’ve set up your mining operation, it’s time to start evaluating the results of your hard work and time to understand some of the terms I used earlier.

First, you need to understand that there are two types of mining for cryptocurrencies; SHA-256 and Scrypt. Every currency uses one of these methods, but both share the property of being far more profitable on a GPU than a CPU.

For SHA-256 based currencies (like Bitcoin, Namecoin, and PPCoin), you usually evaluate your efficiency in millions of hashes solved per second, or MH/s. For Scrypt based currencies (like Litecoin and Novacoin), you usually evaluate your efficiency in thousands of hashes solved per second, or kH/s.

Note: A further difference is that Scrypt based mining is resilient against ASIC mining due to memory requirements. ASIC mining refers to using specialized chips that do hashing very fast, by several orders of magnitude.

This does not mean that Scrypt based mining is 1,000 times slower or less efficient. In fact, at the time of this writing, the Scrypt based currencies are more efficient than SHA-256 in terms of return on investment. You can check Dustcoin for the relative efficiency of the various currencies.

Of course, the only proof is in the pudding, so the ultimate evaluation of your result depends on whether you make more money than you spend.

What Will I Earn?

Patience, grasshopper, it’s not as easy as giving an amount X which works in all or even most situations.

First of all, you need to understand that mining profits adjust based on the need and power of the network. The more power combined, the more difficult it becomes for everyone to find a correct solution to the problem. Thus, the more profitable mining becomes, the more people will want to mine, and the harder it gets, reducing profitability. Then, when people stop mining from lack of profitability, the difficulty decreases, and profitability rises again.

Note: Mining power moves between the different currencies in response to profitability. You can check the relative profitability on the Dustcoin mining calculator.

Due to this self-regulating characteristic,

What is your electricity cost? If you are mining on inefficient or older hardware, chances are your output is going to be less than the cost of your power drain. At the time of this writing, mining using your CPU is already obsolete, and for SHA-256 mining, even GPUs are falling behind the efficiency of ASIC miners.

What is the cost of your hardware? If you are purchasing new equipment to mine for currencies, you need to account for the cost of hardware over time, and this becomes a bit more complicated due to the self-adjusting difficulty of mining operations.

Let’s say you buy a new Radeon HD7950 card for $250, and put it through the hoops of tweaking until it reaches an output of around $10 per day. “Great”, you think, “I’ll have that baby paid off in a matter of weeks”.

Well, sorry to burst your bubble, Sunshine, but because the difficulty increases as more hashing power is added to the network, so does your profitability. At times, the difficulty has increased by 80-100% during a week, meaning your profitability may have dropped to $5-6 per day by the end of next week.

And yes, this will keep happening.

Oh, and let’s not forget that the reward for finding a block (which is how new coins are minted) goes down on a regular basis. That means that at predictable intervals, the profitability halves.

Get Rich Quick!

Here’s the bottom line, and I’ll elaborate on this further in a later article. If you think the price of cryptocurrencies is going to go up, there’s really no point in buying mining equipment. This may sound counter-intuitive, so let me explain.

First, though, allow me to thank Deprived over on Bitcointalk.org for explaining this somewhat counter-intuitive idea.

Let say you buy a Bitcoin right now at $250 because you think the price per Bitcoin will go up, and the future proves you’re right, sending the price per Bitcoin to $500 after a month. Now you can sell your Bitcoin and buy twice the processing power that you could when you started, because your equipment will be denominated in dollars.

Note: Denominated simply means its price is set in a certain currency

You won’t be nearly able to mine coins enough with your new equipment to warrant a repayment in a month. Most likely, you are looking at several months, probably more, before your investment has repaid itself. Of course, this also means that the Bitcoins you have mined will be more valuable.

Now, if you think the price per Bitcoin will fall, however, then buying your equipment now will mean you safeguard yourself against a drop in BTC prices because you’ve not invested anything in Bitcoins per se. Let’s say the price of a Bitcoin drops to $125; you can now buy two Bitcoins for the same dollar amount, so sell your mining equipment and buy two Bitcoins instead. Again, with the reduced Bitcoin value, your mining operation has likely produced a loss.

I’m not going to give financial advice, because I really suck at it, but you need to understand that the prospect of making your own money is more complex than you think. If you’re not willing or able to properly evaluate the investment before you begin, your chances of getting rich as opposed to losing money is minute.

Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to tip your waitress.

.b

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In this series, I’ll explain what Bitcoins are, how they work, and offer some thoughts and opinions. Feel free to leave comments or questions, and I’ll try to respond.

In this part, I’ll tell you how Bitcoins appear, and even how you can make your own money for free. No, it’s not an April fools joke; you can actually create your very own Bitcoins.

Sounds fishy? Read on and I’ll explain how it works, and more importantly, why it works.

Refer to the bottom of this article for other parts of the series.

Make you Own Money!

One very unique characteristic of Bitcoins is that you can make them yourself through a process called mining. I’m certain that sounds dubious at first, so let me explain briefly how that works. I’ll write this as simply as possible, so there will be some shortcuts that may make analogies inaccurate, but the principles are sound. If you want further information, check out the Bitcoin wiki.

Bitcoins creation is based on a concept called proof-of-work, which means that to get them you need to prove that you have done something. In the world of Bitcoins, that ‘something’ is generating hashes, which is a cryptographic tasks based on the fact that a hash is difficult to reverse but easy to create. This, in fact, is a key factor in all modern cryptography; a task is easy to verify but difficult to do.

Note: If you don’t care about the details, think of it like this; it is very difficult to predict a dice roll before the roll, but very easy to verify afterwards whether the prediction was right.

In Bitcoin terminology, the difficult task is to generate a cryptographic hash which has certain properties from a data ‘block’ of transactions. You can’t reverse engineer a hash, but you can easily verify whether it is correct once you have it. In Bitcoin, the properties of the hash which makes it a valid solution is that the hash should be lower than a certain global ‘target’, and since there is no known way to start with the hash and reverse it back to its source, you are forced to calculate a huge number of hashes to find the ones that ‘solve’ the particular block by being lower than the target.

The target is somewhat important here, because it determines the difficulty of solving new blocks. The Bitcoin network is designed to let the entire world solve approximately six blocks per hour. Of course, as computers become faster, the ability to solve hashes greatly increases, so to keep the rate steady, the Bitcoin network changes the difficulty my modifying the target required in the hash. So, if more computing power is thrown at ‘mining’, the difficulty increases, leaving the rate at a steady six per hour for the entire world.If fewer people mine, the difficulty decreases, and the rate is still steady.

When solving a hash for a given block, the ‘solver’ gets a reward in Bitcoins from the network. That reward is designed to decrease over time, but is currently at 25 BTC. In other words, if you solve one of these blocks and finds the right hash, you get 25 BTC.

Note: The reward is halved for every 210,000 blocks, so the next time it is halved, which happens in late 2016, the reward will be 12,5 BTC for a block.

Start Your Engines, or Don’t Bother

All of this means that you can start mining for Bitcoins by solving hashes right now. Your CPU is just sitting there doing nothing, and those wasted cycles can be used to generate Bitcoins which you can then use to purchase things or trade for other currencies like US dollars, Euros, Rupees, or Norwegian Kroner.

However, keep this in mind: Solving a particular block is very difficult on average. If you use a regular CPU then you may spend years before you are able to solve your first block and get the coveted 25 BTC (or even lower at a later date).

If you have a graphics card of some power, however, your ability to solve blocks greatly increases, by a factor of tens or maybe hundreds. The reason behind this is somewhat technical, but think of it in the way that a GPU is purposely built to solve massive amounts of simple calculations at the same time while your CPU is designed to solve many different tasks at once like manage memory, control hardware, and so on. Your GPUs ability to solve simple tasks at an astonishing rate means that it can generate hashes much faster than your CPU.

Check the resources section at the end of this article for information on mining, including software you need to mine.

However, you still will find that it will take a very long time to solve a block. There’s no accurate way to predict this because whether you find the right hash is simply a matter of luck, but as an example, on my Radeon HD6950 graphics card, having a fairly powerful GPU, it seems to take around 250 days to solve one block at the current difficulty. Again, not that this is completely random, so I may go for decades without finding a single one or I may find ten over the next hour.

There’s one other factor to put into the calculations. Because Bitcoins are rapidly becoming popular, several companies have made and are in the process of launching purpose built machines containing dedicated chips called ASICs that solve Bitcoin blocks at a rate that dwarves any current GPU. For a few hundred US dollars, you can soon buy Bitcoin ASIC machines that solve hashes at 300 times the speed of my current CPU, this reducing the time taken on average to just a few days.

Note: Remember that the rate of creation is steady so when these new monster ASIC machines enter the network, the rate at which current CPUs and GPUs can solve blocks go down rapidly. Because the difficulty increases, the ASIC machines won’t be as lucrative as the initial numbers may indicate.

Those were the bad news regarding mining, so let’s wrap up with some good news.

To counter the increasing difficulty of solo mining, several groups have formed mining pools. A mining pool works by having a large groups of people solve hashes together. When one of the participant in the pool solve the block, the reward gets distributed to all participants. Thus, instead of having to wait maybe months or years for a large reward, each participants get rapid but much smaller rewards. In fact, because the rate at which blocks are solved is steady, you can expect to get paid several times per day.

I’ve joined a pool called Slush’s pool, which is so far a stable and functional pool with a large enough group that it makes sense to participate and rewards are frequent. However, there are many other pools out there, so you may consider picking another one.

I’m Impatient – Give Me Bitcoins Now!

So, you want to get some Bitcoins, huh? Well, if you can’t wait around for mining to give you the huge piles of cash you’re unlikely to ever get, the alternative is to buy them. Again, this works just like any other currency; you exchange your money for other types of money.

The major difference is that, thus far, no traditional banks offers exchanges to Bitcoins. There are Bitcoin exchanges that partner with banks, like Bitcoin Central, but you can’t just go into any brick and mortar bank branch and ask to get Bitcoins moved to your wallet, at least not yet.

One reason for this is the irreversibility of transactions in Bitcoin. Where a traditional bank can reverse a credit card charge, once a BTC transaction has taken place, there’s no way to change it. Because banks and credit card companies in most civilized countries have responsibility for the charges made, this irreversibility doesn’t sit well with them.

This will probably be resolved at some point as digital currencies become more popular, but there are already ways for you to buy Bitcoins. I use Coinbase.com, a site that allows me to fund my Bitcoin balance directly from my US bank, but other exchanges offer similar funding options too. Very few offer the ability to pay with credit cards, though, for the reasons mentioned above.

Note: Be vary of anyone trading Bitcoins in reversible transactions and never sell Bitcoins using reversible transactions (including bank transfer, PayPal, credit card, and so on) to people you don’t know. Anyone can simply reverse the charges leaving you without money and without Bitcoins.

Getting Bitcoins take time because nobody wants to risk selling Bitcoins using a reversible transaction. You should always expect to prepay for your Bitcoins unless your marketplace of choice offers a direct link to your bank (like Coinbase).

Before You Jump Into Bitcoins

A word of caution, though. Bitcoins at the time of this writing (early April 2013), has seen an amazing rise in value and is currently trading at over US$100 per BTC. This may or may not be a bubble, and as for any investment, there’s always a risk that things can go terribly wrong. Don’t buy Bitcoins as an investment until you know about the risks involved in any currency speculation.

I am not a financial advisor and you should not listen to any financial advice I give you. Really. My personal opinion is that Bitcoins are extremely cool and I enjoy learning more and more about the technology. It’s equally fascinating from a technical point of view as observing how Bitcoins work in society.

I’ll offer further thoughts and ideas for Bicoins in future posts in this series.

Once you’ve gotten your Bitcoins, however, you can immediately start using them and enjoy low rates for transactions (free is as low as it gets), quick transfers, security, potential anonymity, and, of course, being part of the cool gang

Want More Bitcoin Information?

Check out these resources on how to get Bitcoins.

Bitcoin Wiki on Mining

GUI Miner for Windows

Install this to start mining. Make sure you have updated OpenCL drivers (graphics driver). I also highly recommend joining a mining pool first (see links below)

Slush’s Mining Pool

BTC Guild – Largest mining pool

Mining Pool Comparisons

Coinbase.com, my preferred purchase site

MTGox – Largest BTC Exchange

.b

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If you have no idea what Bitcoins are, it’s a way for you to make your own money. Really. Oh, and it’s free, as in beer.

Read on and I’ll tell you more.

In this series, I’ll explain what Bitcoins are, how they work, why they work, and how you can make your own money. First, I’m going to explain what Bitcoins are and how they work, and you can check the bottom of the article for more parts on the other topics.

What are Bitcoins?

A Bitcoin, or BTC, is a digital currency that solves a number of issues with existing national currencies (also called fiat currencies). It is the currency world’s equivalent of what the internet is to information; a distributed, tamper-resistant, decentralized, secure, and potentially anonymous way to handle money.

Bitcoins are becoming increasingly popular as a currency and you can already pay with Bitcoins on several sites and stores, such as Reddit and WordPress.com (plus many, many, many others). In addition, there are many currency exchanges that allow you to trade Bitcoins for traditional currencies and exchange it for ‘real’ money.

Note: I’m contemplating whether to start accepting Bitcoins as payment for my training and professional services and for USP Journal, and although the jury is still out, I’m leaning towards at least trying it for a while. I’ve added a Bitcoin donation option at the bottom of my blog articles for starters.

Unlike fiat currencies, though, there is no central authority behind the currency. The existence of Bitcoins relies solely on the thousands of users that participate in the network, which they do by running a Bitcoin client that allows them to store, send, and receive Bitcoins from others through a Bitcoin wallet.

Every transaction in the Bitcoin network is public, but the wallets are completely anonymous. In fact, you can even generate wallets yourself and all clients I’ve used allow you to do so easily. These wallets contain your Bitcoins, so you may think of them as similar to bank accounts, except you don’t have to be a bank or even a customer of one to have a wallet.

When I say that transactions are public, this is a key component to both the security and the stability of the Bitcoin network. Transactions are cryptographically signed and broadcast to the network, which then validates each transaction, and each transaction becomes part of the global chain of transactions which after it has been verified cannot be changed. Thus, you can’t ‘trick’ the system in any way because neither you nor the recipient is solely responsible for validating a transaction like you have in traditional banking, for example.

I’ll leave the finer details on how this works for a possible future post.

Is it Fake Money?

When I try to explain Bitcoins to people, the first thing people say is that “it’s not real money, it’s not backed by anything”.

Well, sunshine, nor is any other major currency in the world; it is backed only by demand and trust in the system, which is why fiat currencies like the US dollar or Euro fluctuate wildly depending on whether people trust the stability and demand of the currency. In fact, it’s been decades since the US dollar was backed by anything but the market’s demand for it; you can’t just go to the Federal Reserve and trade your US dollars for gold, for example, nor can you swap your Euros, your Norwegian Krone, or your Indian Rupees for anything but products and services or other currencies.

Bitcoins are no more real or fake than US dollars or Euros, although it is in much lower circulation. Think of it so far as a minor currency in that respect, like Norwegian Kroner. Only demand for the characteristics of Norwegian Kroner make it a viable alternative for representing value, and it’s only because society agrees somehow to ‘trust’ a currency to some extent that you can even say you have value when you hold a currency.

You can’t take a Norwegian Krone and buy stuff in Boston, and although you may get a bank to exchange it for US dollars, that’s going to cost you fees, and the bank decides the exchange rate. For Bitcoins, most transactions are completely free and it costs nothing to own a wallet either, so your money remains in your ‘account’ forever. On the flip-side, you don’t earn interest either, at least not until someone comes up with a banking system that can lend people BTC in the more traditional sense.

What Gives Bitcoins Value?

The only thing that gives value to Bitcoins, just like any currency, is your ability to buy stuff with it, and let’s face it, the options for buying is still very limited compared to traditional currencies. That said, there are already hundreds of sites that accept Bitcoins and you can exchange your Bitcoins for traditional currencies like you can with any traditional money. The valuation of Bitcoins depends on demand, which in turn depends on the ability to exchange it for other things, just like for any other currency.

Bitcoins have some unique characteristics that make it competitive to fiat currencies, though.

First, the for fiat currencies, you trust the issuer (Federal Reserve in the US, European Central Bank in the EU, Norges Bank in Norway) to control the value of the currency. Only they can issue new money, and you trust them not to double the amount of dollars in circulation, for example, which would skyrocket inflation. As we have seen in recent years, in times of crisis, countries like the US issue more money into circulation, thus reducing the value of each dollar and increasing inflation, meaning your money is less valuable.

For Bitcoin, the supply of money is steady and accurately predictable down to almost the hour through as technique called controlled supply. There will only ever be 21 million BTC in existence, and these are distributed through a process called mining, a process, by the way, in which you can participate and thus make your own money. I’ll go into more detail on how this works in Part 2 of this series.

Through controlled supply, the rate at which new Bitcoins enters circulation is fixed and predictable, and ends somewhere around the year 2140 (as in over a hundred years from now). However, most of the Bitcoin will enter circulation much faster, and more than 99% of all Bitcoins will be in circulation by late 2032.

Thus, there is now way that inflation will reduce the value of your Bitcoins; in fact, a problem may actually be deflation, in which your money becomes so valuable that people don’t want to part with them, driving prices for goods and services paid in BTC down.

Second, Bitcoins are cryptographically secure, meaning there is no way to counterfeit money or fake transactions. In fact, you can’t really have physical money at all, which solves a lot of the problems with traditional money (loosing them, ‘black market’ trading, counterfeiting, wear and tear, and so on).

Technically, it is possible to ‘trick’ a transaction for a few seconds after it has happened, but it would be the equivalent of swiping your credit card and then taking the products and run before the transaction can be verified by the credit card company. A Bitcoin transaction is more secure than regular transactions because there is no way to reverse it after a few seconds, which works to secure both the buyer and the seller against chargeback, fake money, validation issues, and so on. For larger transactions, you can just wait a bit longer before you approve the purchase, just to be extra sure that nothing can go wrong.

Third, Bitcoins can be completely anonymous, which may sound sketchy at first, but is important in some situations. I’ll leave the discussion about whether anonymity is good or bad for a later post, or preferably a different forum, but I’d like to point out a couple of things regarding that anonymity.

Bitcoin anonymity is just a potential anonymity, and you have to take special measures to ensure your transactions are anonymous. Everything in Bitcoin is completely transparent.

Keep in mind that every single transaction is publicly completely visible to the entire Bitcoin network. Thus, if the identity of a wallet’s owner is known, everyone can see who that person sends Bitcoins to or receives money from.

Because of this, everyone can also see how much money is in each wallet. If you put your wallet address in public, well, everyone now knows how many Bitcoins you have in that wallet.

This transparency may freak you out at first, but there are ways around having everyone snoop into your financials. Nobody knows who owns each wallet by default. You don’t have to publish your wallet address, and even if you do, you can still have as many wallets as you care to generate, so you can simply have a ‘receiving wallet’ and a ‘storing wallet’ or even multiple layers of wallets, which makes tracking more difficult. In fact, a recommendation for those wanting to retain anonymity is to use a single wallet for every transaction you make, which may sound like a lot of work, but is actually quite easy.

Conclusion for Now

The bottom line is this: Bitcoins are ‘real’ money in the same way other currencies are ‘real’ money. Bitcoins have many unique properties which address many problems with fiat currencies, but whether they have a value depends on whether people want them and whether merchants accept them.

In the next part, I’ll talk about how Bitcoins come into existence, and how you can make your own Bitcoins, at home, using nothing but your computer, a bit of electricity, and some patience.

Want to learn more about how Bitcoins work? Here are some resources from the Bitcoin wiki:

Bitcoin Wallets

Bitcoin Transactions

Bitcoin Transaction Fees

Controlled Supply

Anonymity

The post Understanding Bitcoins: What Is it and How Does it Work? appeared first on Furuknap's SharePoint Corner.

To me, the issue is not whether one model is better than the other, but rather what problem a new model solves. In the case of the App model, I have yet to see anyone come up with real problems that aren’t readily solvable using other methods. I don’t actually see why I need an App solution at all; it’s a solution to problems that don’t exist.

Let me briefly respond to Doug’s points.

Modern Web Development Techniques

Doug states that between farm solutions and Apps, there is a tie in the case of modern web development techniques, and by this he is referring to HTML5+CSS3+JavaScript, and stuff like that.

He is correct in one thing, in that a Farm solution has no downside compared to Apps. Farm solutions has always been able to output pretty much whatever you want, including but not limited to what’s currently defined as ‘modern’. In fact, I’ve shown this by pulling a completely HTML+JS+CSS based web page for an invoice and with a couple of hours of jQuery work, made that page work directly with SharePoint data for SPInvoice, shown below.

Granted, it’s not HTML5, but that’s just because I couldn’t find one readily available.

This is a farm solution, and it works in SP2007 (or should, I didn’t actually test). No need for a new model to build ‘modern’ anything.

However, the App model, in terms of ‘modern’ development is actually more limited, simply because JavaScript lacks maturity in tooling, robustness, and flexibility. It’s a bit like being told to build a house using only your right hand, which, although possible and certainly something you could learn, is still far more limiting than having both hands available, which is what you have with Farm solutions.

In simpler terms, there’s nothing that the App model gives you that you cannot already do in SharePoint, within the topic of ‘modern’ UI development.

Scalability

Doug favors Apps when it comes to scalability. His argument is that code running in Farm solutions must run on the farm and thus taking away performance from the farm. Increase the load and your farm will eventually suffer. This, Doug claims, is solved in Apps.

The truth is that this is again a non-problem and Apps solve this no different than you can solve it in Farm solutions.

There are two scenarios to keep in mind here. First is when you are working with SharePoint data and the second is when connecting to external data.

SharePoint Data

When you access SharePoint data, it doesn’t really matter too much whether you access that data using an App or a Farm solution. The performance impact does not come from the rendering of the data on the page but rather from accessing the data. That access needs to happen regardless of whether your client is an App or a Farm solution. Apps scale no better than other access methods, they query the same data, hit the same SQL servers, loads it over the same network, and SharePoint needs to work just as much to retrieve that data.

I’m guessing that someone will think that when you’re accessing and rendering data using JavaScript, you’re taking a load off the web server and putting that on the client. That may be true, but if this is a real problem, you can solve it using JavaScript output from a Farm solution just as easily as you can using an App. Marc Anderson’s SPServices is a great example of this, and it’s working all the way back to SharePoint 2007.

In fact, with Apps, you have _fewer_ options for rendering data, because you _must_ use JavaScript on the client. A server can much more easily cache data, rendered or not, and has far more options for providing scale than Apps have. With an App, you essentially turn the responsibility of caching or optimizing over to the clients, over which you have no centralized control.

External Data

One key argument for the App model is that it’s easier and more scalable to offload performance intensive work to external services. If you have data stored in web services on another farm, a public web service, or a ‘potato-powered’ web server running on GEOS, according to the arguments, Apps are better because they allow you to integrate that data into SharePoint pages.

Again, this is simply not true, at least the ‘better’ part. SharePoint has long been able to integrate external data in Farm solutions, both on the server side, but of course also on the client side.

On the server side, you have decades (at least one and a bit) of experience in .NET development to aid you in integrating external data, whether that is access to SQL servers, SAP, Exchange, or any other external service. This puts load on the server, but if that’s of concern to you and you’re not willing or able to solve that on the server side, you can always fall back to exactly what the App model is doing; running it on the client side.

Keep in mind that Apps do nothing beyond what is already possible in the browser, and you can do exactly the same things by outputting the same or similar JavaScript and HTML code from a Farm solution, in a page. You can put your ‘App parts’ anywhere, including on the potato-powered CBM64 wannabe, and still include it on any page using the same iframe and JavaScript tricks that an App would do. You can use jQuery and SPServices to bridge multiple SharePoint farms; you can use VBScript for crying out loud, if you really want to shoot your foot off.

So, Apps solve no problem that you can’t already solve with Farm solutions in the exact same way. What Apps cannot do, however, is centralize caching, load balancing, performance management, and all the other benefits you get from server-side code. Loss again for the App model in terms of options for scalability.

Maintainability

Doug’s final argument in favor of Apps comes from its maintainability over Farm solutions. I’ll quote Doug’s argument verbatim as of today:

The downside to farm solutions is that they use a very powerful but comparatively rigid combination of file systems and a SQL databases in conjunction with lots of XML files. In order to use a solution, it must be installed on a farm and put files directly on each server. The XML files are features, site templates, list templates, and a wide variety of other artifacts. This system works really well unless the same solution is installed on multiple farms and used by many site collections and needs to change to accommodate new features or bug fixes. Furthermore, some things, like site and list templates, are very dangerous to change once sites and lists exist that use the templates.

These issues with farm solutions, in short the ability to maintain bug fixes, changes to solutions, site and list templates, and so on, have been solved years ago, and is simply a result of lack of maturity in SharePoint understanding. Although others have come up with similar solutions, I explained a method or framework for building maintainable and agile solutions in SharePoint in 2009, in Professional SharePoint Development and have since used that method for virtually every solution I’ve built.

The argument is thus void and a bit of a straw man argument against farm solutions.

Doug further goes on and argues that

The app model makes it possible to centralize and serve content to as many farms as is necessary and if you use CSOM to provision everything instead of XML you remove the coupling between concrete instances of sites and lists and their definitions. CSOM allows the creation of fields, content types, lists, web part pages, and other types of files. In my app everything, with the exception of one page, is provisioned by the application server running on Azure. The app server is capable of updating these items and of adding new items. It makes no difference how many farms use the app from an update perspective, each can be patched centrally whenever a user launches the app.

This isn’t true for two reasons. First, the App model does not make this possible; the client side object model (CSOM) does. CSOM is available to Farm solutions as well, both as traditional Farm solutions, as Sandbox solutions, and again through client side code, if you so desire. You don’t even need to run this from the server, you can again output the CSOM code from a PHP page, a text file loaded from a mobile App, or from any other source you like. Completely possible from 2010 onwards, which marked the introduction of CSOM.

The second reason why Doug’s argument is false is that when you are creating artifacts, changing the definition of those artifacts after the fact won’t change the artifacts. Put in a simpler analogy, if you change a recipe for a dish you cooked, the dishes you’ve already cooked based on the previous recipe won’t change. You can ‘patch’ the recipe by, for example, creating a second recipe to add sprinkles on your cinnamon rolls, and you can even change the innards of those cinnamon rolls by specifying that you should inject some vanilla custard into them, but you can’t ‘uncook’ and ‘recook’ an existing dish by changing the recipe.

The same applies to SharePoint, especially when it comes to templates, but even if you have scripts or code that creates artifacts. For templates, you avoid this by having ‘no content’ templates (or as I like to call them, the perfect templates) and create the content using code.

However, even if you write code to create for example lists and content types, changing the code will not change the lists and content types. You still need to create new code to modify those lists and content types. This applies equally to JavaScript with CSOM, Farm code with server-side code, Apps calling CSOM, or anything other combination that creates artifacts in SharePoint.

Sorry for ruining the arguments for everyone, but again, the App model fails to add anything that cannot already be done, and be done quicker, easier, and with more options, with Farm solutions.

What About the Marketplace?

Ah, I knew that was coming. Apps, of course, are the only solutions available through Microsoft’s App marketplace. Unless you build Apps, you can’t really get access to the gazillions of SharePoint installations out there. Must be a great opportunity, right?

This is true, the ‘opportunity’ part only to the extent that you believe that somewhere in the future, organizations will jump at the chance to buy critical business applications through a dollar store.

However, again, the App model doesn’t solve this problem. It’s perfectly feasible and possible to build App stores for SharePoint prior to SharePoint 2013 too. Below is my SP SIN store running on SharePoint 2007.

In fact, the App store isn’t even related to Apps per se; it’s simply an interface to distribute Apps and has nothing to do with the App model as a development platform. It is, despite all it’s glory, nothing but a marketing tool to get people to jump on Apps as a development model. You can run Apps perfectly well without the marketplace; they are completely technologically unrelated.

Do I Hate Apps?

Before you start your flame wars about how I must hate Apps and must be stuck in the stone ages, I don’t hate apps at all. However, I have yet to see real arguments for

1. What real problems do Apps solve that you cannot solve already using other models?
2. What are the technical benefits to using Apps compared to existing models?

In other words, I just don’t see the point of Apps. I fully understand them in terms of Office, I can understand them as extensions of closed frameworks (think Facebook, Hootsuite, Yammer, etc) where you don’t really have the option of building server-side code. I don’t see the scalability issues because these are easily solved in current models too and nothing done in Apps cannot be done already.

So, there you have it. My jury is still out, and they’ve been trying to find evidence that the App model is a useful tool. 

They haven’t decided against it yet, though.

.b

The post SharePoint 2013 App Model Solves Non-Problems Only? appeared first on Furuknap's SharePoint Corner.