I’m not looking for a permanent position and won’t consider that regardless of offer. My rate is $200/hour, negotiable only for longer term projects (3+ months).

I can start almost immediately (early June) and will be available until around October 2012. However, for US clients, I can only work onsite in the US for up to three months due to VISA requirements. EU is no problem because I am a  Norwegian citizen. Other parts of the world varies.

Although I’m looking for work, I’m by no means desperate, so I will turn down offers that are not interesting.

Interesting work, however, would be along the lines of:

• Technical training and mentoring for SharePoint developers
• Solution architecture, SharePoint or otherwise
• SharePoint 2013/15 evaluation/exploration
• Evaluating ROI for existing or new projects

If you have or know of projects that might fit, feel free to email me at furuknap+summer2012job@gmail.com.

Here’s an excerpt from my resume:

Bjørn Furuknap

Senior solutions architect and SharePoint developer. Professional speaker and published author. USPJ Academy faculty member. Lead Editor SharePoint Magazine.

In 5 sentences

• Senior solutions architect and developer with 16 years of experience
• Published book author (18 books and journals) and online writer, community speaker
• Multiple fields of expertise, including technical, marketing, and business
• Actively working as teacher in online SharePoint university
• Business advisor with good economic understanding

Skills

• Expert in Windows SharePoint Services 3
• Expert in SharePoint Foundation 2010
• Expert in SharePoint Server 2010
• Expert in C# development and ASP.NET
• Strong in ASP.NET MVC and Entity Framework
• Strong in Windows Servers, from NT4 to 2008
• Strong in Windows infrastructure. (MCSE completed in one week)
• Strong in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
• Strong in XML and related languages
• Strong in SQL server and SQL
• Strong in Perl, VB.NET, and .NET
• Strong in Server hardware design
• Strong communication skills, towards both technical and business audiences
• Working knowledge of several other languages such as C++, Java, ASP, and JavaScript/jQuery/jQueryUI.
• Working knowledge of most Microsoft infrastructure products, such as SCM, MOM, and SMS.
• Working knowledge of network design.

References

All references by request only. References will be chosen based on project requirements. Please note that most references will be Norwegian customers speaking English, but that due to time zone differences some may not be available for direct contact.

Why should you hire me?

I have extensive experience within several fields of IT, both from developer and IT pro areas. My education and experience as an entrepreneur means I also see the business side of IT. Combining these areas means I recognize problems both for developers and administrators and can work with both camps to resolve issues. With my experience from running and managing businesses I can add and present real business value from the projects in which I participate.

From my role as an architect in recent years, I have also gained experience with Agile methodologies and can lead teams of both developers, designers, and administrators using Agile methodology. I have also worked with both small and medium size businesses, as well as multi-national companies with thousands of employees around the world.

My active participation in online communities as well as my high visibility in the SharePoint community means I get access to new knowledge very fast. I love learning whatever I do not already know, and gladly share that knowledge both online and offline.

Further, my recent ventures into online training through USPJ Academy increase my ability to transfer knowledge to colleagues, team members, clients, and management. I have also been the principal business architect for the USPJ Academy organization, including developing business plans, optimizing processes in the organization, hiring and training staff, and mentoring C-level staff in the organization.

I work very hard and have a strong sense of loyalty. I have never been away from work a single day of my life.

In a comment, the organizers said something along the lines of the name being a mistake, but it now seems that, mistake at the time or not, Microsoft has now decided on the name.

While searching for something on MSDN, I found an article written for Visual Studio 2003, and although I don’t necessarily rush to adopt the latest and greatest tools, in this case, I needed something more recent. So, when selecting which version to view, I found the below screenshot, clearly stating that the name for the next version of Visual Studio, currently codenamed Visual Studio 11, is indeed Visual Studio 2012.

According to Google cache on May 20, it was still called Visual Studio 11 at the time, so change is fairly recent. Maybe this in preparation for official news in early June, although I haven’t heard anything related to this.

Now, all we need to do is wait to see what the official name for Office 15 and SharePoint 15 will be, and I’ll be happy as a fiddle in heat.

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If you’re interested in obtaining a subscription, priced at $14.95 for the entire series (monthly issues, 25-35 pages each), head over to http://sharepoint2013beta.com/.

Regardless of the paid options, I’ve been posting information on SharePoint 2013 on my blog too, so feel free to check out the SharePoint 2013 tagged articles for updates.

This excerpt appeared in issue 4, published in early April 2012.

SharePoint 2013 uses .NET 4.0 Runtime – Prepare Yourself!

In the previous issue, I wrote about my thoughts and findings around the .NET version of SharePoint 2013. As you may remember, my conclusion was that I thought Microsoft would leave the current .NET version alone and go with the 2.0 runtime.

(Web note: In the March issue, I speculated that Microsoft would want to maintain a single .NET runtime version for all its SharePoint versions. At the time, I did not have any hard facts, so I elaborated on the reasoning behind the argument)

Right after I published the previous issue, a reader tipped me that, although the reader thought my reasoning was correct, the conclusion was wrong. According to the tip, SharePoint 15 runs on .NET 4.0.

Now, I considered emailing all subscribers immediately, but I wanted to verify the claims of the tipper. Sadly, I haven’t been able to accurately do so, and the people who know are keeping their lips more tightly sealed than ever.

Note: Since publishing the April issue, several other readers have said the same thing, including one person ‘in-the-know’ confirming that SharePoint 2013 is based on .NET 4.0 Runtime.

Assuming that my reader is correct, and I have no doubt that this is the case, this is a huge deal for SharePoint developers, both for those that work on projects and for component developers.

If you’re completely foreign to development, you can view the following discussion as one of compatibility between two versions of the .NET runtime. The .NET runtime is responsible for executing the code that developers write to interact with SharePoint.

Despite there being numerous .NET Framework versions, there are only two runtime versions, .NET 2.0 and .NET 4.0. The problem arises from the fact that .NET 4.0 is backward compatible, with some major caveats for SharePoint developers, and that .NET 2.0 is not forward compatible.

Let’s look at what this means for future developers.

First, because SharePoint 2013 requires .NET 4.0, and .NET 2.0 won’t run .NET 4.0 code, this means that any code written to interact with SharePoint 2013 will not work on previous versions. This means that developers who want to support both current and future versions of SharePoint will need to maintain two sets of code.

So, why can’t you just run the current .NET 2.0 code in the .NET 4.0 runtime? After all, I did mention that .NET 4.0 is backwards compatible. If you write your code for .NET 2.0, you could simply load that code into the .NET 4.0 runtime and you’d be set, right?

It’s not that simple, I’m afraid. Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, has added code to explicitly prevent SharePoint 2010 to work with .NET 4.0 runtime. SharePoint 2007 simply won’t work and you will not be able to connect to any site if you use .NET 4.0.

Finally, because .NET 2.0 can’t load .NET 4.0 code (it’s not forward compatible, remember?) you also cannot write.NET 2.0 code to connect to SharePoint 2013.

These conditions mean that you will have two distinct development platforms; one that targets SharePoint 2010 and 2007, and one that targets 2013 and future versions. (At least until Microsoft puts a new runtime version out and upgrades SharePoint 2016 to that )

Obviously, this impacts the cost of development of new code that attempts to work on both SharePoint 2013 and earlier versions. Technically, you can write code that is simple to switch between .NET 2.0 and .NET 4.0. If you wrote only code that worked in both versions, it would simply be a matter of changing the target framework in Visual Studio and recompile.

However, reality won’t be that easy. If you start doing development on .NET 4.0, you want to take advantage of the added benefits of that version. Otherwise, what would be the point? Well, if you do, you’ll have to maintain two different versions of your codebase and make sure that any changes you make are added to both versions. Although there definitely are methods you can use to make your code more portable, it will still increase the burden on developers and ultimately the cost to customers.

Of course, it may be that Microsoft has some tricks up their sleeves, but considering the minor but significant incompatibilities between the various .NET runtimes and SharePoint, I’d much rather prepare for the worst and assume it will be two separate target environments from now.

.b

This has been an excerpt from the SharePoint 2013 Beta series of USP Journal. To pick up a subscription that costs $14.95, including access to all back issues, head over to http://sharepoint2013beta.com/

As always, treat any unofficial information as pure speculation and don’t make any important decisions based on this.

You see, I’ve been working on upgrading one of the most popular USP Journal issues to a second edition. The issue, Beginning SharePoint Development, deals with, well, what you’d want to learn if you’re starting out as a new SharePoint developer.

A while back, I wrote a blog post on why SharePoint versions and tools don’t matter, where I said that I don’t see a point in upgrading screenshots when the purpose of learning is to learn the fundamental topic. In other words, because the core technology changes very little between SharePoint versions after 2007, what you learn in SharePoint 2007 applies equally in SharePoint 2010 and 2013, and vice-versa, for the most part. Granted, the .NET Runtime is different in SharePoint 2013, but that’s a different story and not one specifically related to SharePoint development.

So, why write a new edition? Well, first of all, I’ve learned a lot and gained valuable experience over the past couple of years since I wrote the first edition. Second, some parts of the issue, for example SharePoint Designer workflows, are definitely different between the versions. Third, I wanted to focus on the mentality of development in addition to the techy stuff.

These three reasons alone, at least the first and last, are not related to version at all, but are enough to make me want to write a second edition. So, having decided that, I could strike two birds with one stone by taking the screenshots from SharePoint 2010. I even used Visual Studio 2010 to cover all the bases, although I’m still a fan of WSP Builder so I’ve used that for the exercises.

You can use any tool, though, or SharePoint version. I’ve included a report titled “What’s New for SharePoint 2010 Developers” that show you how to use the, in my opinion, horrible Visual Studio 2010 Tools for SharePoint.  In fact, to ensure that even if you want to have the screenshots and exercises in SharePoint 2007, the purchase includes the entire first edition of the issue, including all the 21 videos that show exercises, tips, and tricks.

So, if you’re starting out as a SharePoint developer, don’t hesitate but pick up your issue today. There’s a ton of content, including over seven hours of video, all available for $14.95 at http://www.beginningsharepointdevelopment.com/.

.b

Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you what I’m talking about.

Last week, I picked up on an article citing Jonathan Barrett, a Microsoft employee in Australia, in which the main message was that if you want to get going with social in SharePoint, you want to buy Newsgator (and thanks to Alex Machester for reminding me)

Mr. Barrett said, according to the article, “We do have basic social features in SharePoint; they will be improved in [SharePoint 15], but that will not be at the level of feature richness that Newsgator has.”

Further, he said “I would say as a customer don’t wait for Wave15, unless you’ve got a really slow social media strategy or unless you want to use some really baseline features, I would start going ahead with our platform and Newsgator on top”

Now, this was said at an event heavily influenced by Newsgator, but unless Mr. Barrett really has no idea what he’s talking about, it’s a great message from Redmond. As late as March this year, Jared Spataro was chatting about the virtues of SharePoint as a social platform, and although he did mention the importance of third-party vendors, it was pretty clear that the next version would be oh’ so great on its own.

Spataro’s message rhymes with the official marketing chit-chat we would expect to hear at this point, which is essentially “Yeah, what we said a couple of months ago regarding how great SharePoint 2010 is, well, that’s bollocks. What you really, really want is to get the next version, which is going to be amazing and come with small cute kittens”.

Speaking of which, I’m also anticipating Spataro’s 2015 chat on to be something like “Yeah, we know SharePoint 2013 social features suck, but just wait to see what’s coming in the next version”.

Hold on, did you just say ‘a great message from Redmond’?

Yes, I did, and thanks for picking up on that. You see, I think Microsoft is on the completely wrong track with social. SharePoint has a three year product cycle, and before that at least two years of development, and the companies need at least a year for upgrading. Essentially, what customers get when they open up their newly upgraded SharePoint site is what was current five to six years ago. That’s why, when we got ‘social in SharePoint 2010’ we essentially got a glorified RSS reader and an innovative idea of tagging content (you know, like we did back in 2003).

So, if Mr. Barrett is right, he may not be the most popular guy in Microsoft these days, but he’s also sending a very important message of good news: Microsoft realizes and publicly says that it sucks at social and that you need to get something else if you want anything but the basics.

If this can be the start of a trend in which SharePoint becomes a platform first and product last, then the focus should shift from selling licenses to providing a stable and viable platform for long-term evolution. Today, because of Microsoft’s focus on selling licenses for SharePoint, the product cycle has become a ‘run like hell for one year, speculate about what’s coming for one year, be a newbie like everyone else for one year’.

Want to learn more about my thoughts? Check out my article on why SharePoint Server isn’t ready for the enterprise.

.b

Office 15 and SharePoint 15 Beta Availability

In the previous issue, I mentioned that I strongly suspect the beta version of SharePoint and Office 2013 to arrive in early June 2012. The background for this suspicion is a comment made by a TAP member on a LinkedIn group, stating that the NDA for SharePoint 15 would be lifted in June.

The comment from Danny, originally referenced in Issue 3 back in early March, states “everybody is on an NDA regarding SharePoint 15. It seem that by June we might be able to discuss.”

Update: Danny has asked me to post the following comments: “Currently, everybody who has been expose to the new version of SharePoint and Office are under NDA.  Even if most of people expect a Beta in June, we can always expect potential delays.”

Of course, this could mean anything, but other factors now point towards that June NDA lifting.

Microsoft has two major events planned for June, the TechEd events in the US and Europe (US is June 11-14, and Europe is June 26-29). It makes sense that they would try to get a beta out by then. After these June events, due to the summer breaks, it will be a long time before Microsoft has a similar opportunity to show the beta version.

However, up until now, this has been pure speculation, and Microsoft has officially only said “this summer”, which can mean anything up to the end of August.

That changed recently when the program for an Austrian SharePoint conference came out. In that program, SharePoint and Office 15 are on the schedule, and sessions are delivered by Microsoft employees and MVPs. If the NDA isn’t lifted by the conference, it will be extremely difficult for them to say anything. A public conference on SharePoint 15 with no NDA content would be very quiet indeed.

The conference is scheduled for June 25-26, so that is clear evidence that Microsoft plans to have the beta of both SharePoint and Office 2013 available by then.

Note
The conference, should you be interested in attending, has their web site on http://www.sharepointkonferenz.at/vienna/default.aspx

This isn’t the only information we can gain from the conference site, though. I’m not a native German speaker so Google Translate will need to take the role of interpreter for now, but the program page reveals additional information on SharePoint 2013.

Visual Studio 2012 and SharePoint 2013

The conference site talks about Visual Studio 2012 as a product name, which is news in itself. The session at the conference will show off the new taxonomy editing features of Visual Studio 11, including list and content type editors.

Further, the program talks about improved JavaScript and an advanced Silverlight Web Part. Despite rumors of its imminent death, this may mean that Microsoft wants Silverlight to live on at least in SharePoint.

Next, we can learn about a new mocking framework that makes it easier to use unit testing in SharePoint development. This will certainly be of interest to companies like TypeMock, who now suddenly gets competition from the Redmond Giant.

We also can learn that SharePoint 2013 will be built on HTML5 and CSS3. Finally, the program talks about a Metro UI in SharePoint, but gives no further details. Recent possible screenshots aside, I still have not found reliable sources for SharePoint 2013 screenshots, and I’m highly doubtful of random images appearing with no known source.

If you’re looking for all the known information about SharePoint 2013, you may want to check out my SharePoint 2013 Beta series. It’s a series of smaller journal issues that with a release frequency of about four weeks give you updated information about news and findings from public sources of SharePoint 15/Office 15 information. It’s $14,95 for the entire series, including all back issues.

.b

You probably also know that I’m highly focused on learning what’s new on any new SharePoint version and that I write a USP Journal series that details this research and the findings. In the first issue, now freely available to members of the USP Journal mailing list, I wrote about the new App store.

You can read more about the series on the SharePoint 2013 Beta series webpage.

Originally I wanted to write a mini-series of three parts, but since this is part four, it means that I’ll probably write some more too. Here’s some additional findings to confirm, from the guys in Redmond themselves, that SharePoint will have an App Marketplace.

This passage, by the way, is an excerpt from the fourth issue of the above mentioned series.

SharePoint Apps Marketplace – A Job Ad to End All Doubt

In one of my deep searches, I happened upon a now retired job ad for a software development engineer with Microsoft. Sadly, the job ad has now been deleted, but I managed to get a screenshot and capture the text of the ad.

In short, the job ad is for a software developer who can help the Visual Studio team build the next generation of tools for SharePoint.

The ad, however, reveals more information than I suspect Microsoft intended, and confirms the existence of the new App model, the App Marketplace, simplified HTML and JavaScript, and leveraging Windows Azure and SQL Azure for data, logic, and workflows.

Here’s the description of the job being offered, and I’ve highlighted a few passages for your entertainment:

We are the Visual Studio Pro team – part of Visual Studio – that builds developer tools for SharePoint 15 and Office. Next version of SharePoint will bring about a new and exciting application model designed to attract and enable web developers to build apps for SharePoint platform. New model will significantly simplify use of HTML and JavaScript in SharePoint, leverage Windows Azure and SQL Azure capabilities for data, logic and workflows. This model is designed to enable developers to build apps that are ready to be deployed to the marketplace to reach corporate users, can be easily installed and upgraded without compatibility issues.

The job ad is now gone, but I’ve taken a screenshot that you may view below.

I’ve cropped some of the standard job ad filler, but I think you get the drift.

For those interested, the Google cache version of the page is still available here.

If you haven’t checked out the current information, you may want to explore this mini-series using the series links below or check out Mary-Jo Foley’s initial post on the SharePoint Marketplace.

This article is an excerpt from the fourth issue of the USP Journal  SharePoint 2013 Beta series. The issue contains more on the SharePoint App Marketplace as well as additional information, comments, news, and rumors. You can get the first issue free of charge on the issue web page.

Combined, this mini-series comprise only the content related to SharePoint Apps from the first issue. Later issues, included in the subscription, contain even more information, both in SharePoint Apps and other new features.

.b

You may also have heard that I’m not particularly fond of how Microsoft talks to the market about these things. I’m fairly negative, not because I’m offended by not being part of ‘the inner circle’ but rather because Microsoft’s silence is hurting the community.

How? Well, I’ll tell you how.

The Current State of Affairs

Today’s policy means that only a select few customers and partners are let in on what Microsoft is planning. In addition, MVPs get access, probably as some form of reward for being good puppies.

Microsoft’s reasoning may be that they don’t want to show off incomplete products because the product may change before release and thus give people the wrong impression or that the product may contain errors that may negatively affect the reputation of said product.

On the flip side, you may say that Microsoft is opening up to some people rather than being completely silent, and that their purpose is actually to elicit feedback from a select group of users that they think represent the whole market.

I’m not sure if these are the real reasons, but I don’t buy any of them if they are the reasons.

In any case, the current situation is that those who gain access to early information need to sign strict non-disclosure agreements under punishment of death (or so it is meant to seem). Break the contract and you’re liable for all sorts of bad stuff, and Microsoft will never come out to play with you again, even if you say you’re sorry.

So why is this so bad for the SharePoint community?

I Don’t Know What to Say!

During the course of a product cycle of three years, there’s at least one year of complete uncertainty, right after the first official news comes out about a new version. The uncertainty stems from several factors, depending on where you are in the food chain.

People in the community base their professional existence on knowing SharePoint, and almost like clockwork, Microsoft hints ever so slightly that the current version isn’t as good as what comes next.

Consider the following scenario: A client comes to you and asks for advice on what to do with SharePoint. Should they build their new ACME system on SharePoint now? As an advisor, you know that there is a major new version of SharePoint coming within a few months, but you have no idea what that version includes. Perhaps it contains 90% of ACME built-in. If you tell your client to start work now, they may be wasting a lot of resources building something they get for free in a few months.

But you don’t know, so what do you say? Do you take the clients money now and risk their investment in a few months or do you recommend they wait at the risk of not landing their business?

“Ah, but hang on”, you say, “nobody wants to upgrade right away in any case, so why rush? After all, a year after the next version comes out, it will be stable and tested.”

Well, that’s great, but a year after SharePoint 2013 comes out, it’s already 2014 (or close to) and Microsoft is already planning the next version! Another one year, and the news about SharePoint 2016 starts leaking and your clients are again left with the difficult choice.

This is a constant problem, however, and not just with SharePoint. After all, Office has the same situation, as does Exchange, Windows, or any other software.

However, the situation is a bit different with SharePoint. Organizations put a lot of valuable resources into SharePoint, in building solutions, training employees, and storing business critical data. Also, because SharePoint’s changes and improvements are often so drastic (just look at the user interface changes from 2007 to 2010, or the ‘new’ way of doing social in organizations) that swapping one version for another isn’t as easy as upgrading from one version of Office to another, or replacing an older version of Exchange with a new one.

There’s also the problem with those learning SharePoint development now. Should they learn .NET 2.0 because that will be used in SharePoint 2013 too? Well, Microsoft isn’t saying what version of .NET will be used so it’s anyone’s guess (or you can listen to me and go for .NET 4.0, but sshhh, don’t tell the Redmond folks I told you so).

Business is Business

Sure, I’ve addressed one problematic scenario, but that can’t be the whole problem, right? What about vendors? Well, for vendors, the situation is even more problematic.

Imagine this situation: your company makes an ACME feature for SharePoint, on which you base most of your income. Many third-party vendors are in this situation, betting that Microsoft will stay away from the product market and stick to building platforms.

Now consider this: Microsoft promises to come out with a new version of ‘something’, but not revealing what that ‘something’ is, you don’t know whether you’ll be in business in a year.

I just spoke to one SharePoint eLearning software provider, a partner of Microsoft no less, who very recently (and I mean _very_ recently) was assured by Microsoft’s head of education that Microsoft would never engage in building an education product on SharePoint, or so the provider thought.

Well, now we know different. Microsoft is building an education product on top of SharePoint Server, and it’s called “Office for Education”. They even published the specifications before the vendor was promised Microsoft would never do such a thing!

So now this vendor is in deep waters. They just got one of their closest partners as their main competitor, a huge mammoth of a company that can throw billions of dollars into marketing to grab that vendors market.

At least now, thanks to someone (who has two thumbs and doesn’t give a rats ass about Microsoft’s secrecy policy), they have a year to prepare, rather than a few months or even shorter had they waited until the privacy crap stopped.

Even this, however, isn’t news to anyone in software. Competitors come and go all the time, right?

Well, it is a major thing when Microsoft suddenly becomes a competitor, especially when they swear not to do so or try to hide the fact. Besides, Microsoft does invite some partners to know what’s going on, giving these partners advance notice compared to those outside the ‘inner circle’. At the very best, it is extremely unfair to those who are not invited but still have helped Microsoft build SharePoint to what it is today.

Competition isn’t the only problem either. Vendors are cautious about launching new products to SharePoint 2010 because they don’t know whether those products will work the same way in SharePoint 2013. Even a simple thing as the .NET 2.0/4.0 problem directly affects development decisions, and right now, vendors can’t make that decision because Microsoft refuses to let anyone know what framework they’re using in a few months.

Well, the Problem Is…

Microsoft says that they let some people have access in order to find bugs so Microsoft can fix them before release. That’s fine, but why does it make sense to only have a few people find bugs? Microsoft’s v1.0 software, whether that is the first release of a new version or an entirely new feature, is rarely bug free.

In fact, many will say that, as I mentioned earlier, upgrading to a new SharePoint version right after release is a huge risk because there may be bugs and problems that haven’t been fixed yet. These bugs are discovered only after Microsoft exposes the software to a large user base. Only after a huge number of users have worked with the new version for a few months can you get fixes and start relying on the platform as stable and more or less error free.

See where I’m getting with this? If those users had access months before ‘official’ release, those bugs would have been found earlier and the product would be much more stable when released to the public. The people who would work with the product at such a stage of completion would be the most tech-savvy of the user base, knowing full well the risks of running beta (or even alpha) software.

Microsoft actually does this to some extent already, by having a public beta be available this summer. That’s a good thing, and kudos to them for at least doing that, but at the moment they are losing out on valuable input from technology interested people who would jump at the chance to dig into the product this early and provide help in finding bugs and problems.

In fact, when the public beta hits the shelves, only minor changes will happen to the finished before the final product becomes available. What about all the wonderful feedback and suggestions that could have come from early adopters when it was still time to make important changes?

Instead, Microsoft releases a product they know will have bugs, leading people to correctly chant that you should delay adoption for a year so Microsoft can sort out all the bugs they didn’t allow anyone to discover earlier. The SharePoint name suffers, costs to early adopters  go up, and everyone but the demo-trained sales people are miserable for several months after release.

In the End

I’m not going to drag this on forever, so let me just conclude with the following. Microsoft hurts the community by making its participants uncertain about the future and alienates its partners by consistently refusing to disclose new features that directly affect them. They also hurt the community by delivering a product that everyone knows will have bugs on release, bugs that could have been discovered with a broader access to information and bits at an earlier stage.

If you disagree, I’m all ears, because I’m still looking for well-founded (and that doesn’t mean marketing-based) arguments for why Microsoft continues to deny the community vital information that directly affects their future, can help vendors prepare, and could have made SharePoint a much better product.

.b

In my ongoing USP Journal subscription series called SharePoint 2013 Beta ($14.95 for the entire series) I posted some initial findings on the SharePoint Education component for the second issue.

Over the course of a few blog articles, I’ll repost some of the findings presented in that issue, and even provide some additional insights. I’ve rewritten it slightly but the bulk of the content remains the same.

This article provides a deeper detail into some of the SharePoint Education features mentioned in the first article. Look towards the bottom of this article for further articles as they become available.

SharePoint Communities

SharePoint Education introduces a new grouping mechanism called a community. Communities are parents of courses, and hold memberships, status, and site information for the course.

The parent relationship means that courses are a sub-type of communities. This is important to understand for two reasons, one firm and one speculation.

The firm reason is that everything that applies to communities, including its state, memberships, and so on, also applies to courses. The second and speculative reason is that communities may be meant to be extensible (they are extensible, but are the meant to be used as extensible entities?) and can thus form the basis for custom community development.

Communities are either in a planning, active, or inactive state. Provided the ‘communities are classes’ assumption holds, this would mean that teachers and faculty can set up classes prior to class start and then activate them at the appropriate time.

When transitioning from ‘planning’ to ‘active’, members are granted access, and when the community transitions from ‘active’ to ‘inactive’, the community (or course) becomes read-only.

Users are added to the community through memberships, and have roles as members, although it’s not said in the documentation whether these roles are normal SharePoint roles (like contribute, read, and design) or whether roles are unique for communities (like student, teacher, and so on).

Courses can also be tagged, and the client object model states that these tags should have a text string format. This may be meant as a method of categorization of different communities and courses, but may also be a method for allowing users to add social tagging for courses they like.

Finally, a community has a SiteURL property that points to where the community resides. For a course (see below), this could be the course home page, and for a study group, it could be a page containing libraries of material, discussion groups, and so on.

Courses

Courses are the main method of delivering learning material.

In addition to the above description of communities, courses contain additional properties. Courses contain a course code, name, description, assignments (including assigning assignments to users), documents and academic documents, events and schedules, grades, lessons, course materials, and submissions, plus a few others.

Lessons

Lessons are exactly what the name implies, a unit of learning.

Lessons are organized in a hierarchy, so each lesson can have child lessons. Lessons also have sequences to control delivery of information. Lessons contain assignments, documents, and events, and are connected to a community (or course).

Assignments

Assignments are also exactly what the name implies; tasks for students to perform to demonstrate or practice their understanding of a topic or lesson. Assignments are assigned either to a list of users or to all users in a course. The format of an assignment is either document or quiz.

Note I’ll talk more about the quiz option in a later issue; I’m rapidly running out of time and space…

Assignments can be set up in a specific sequence to arrange the delivery of multiple assignments in a specific order. In addition, you can specify a start date and time to indicate from when an assignment is available to student. Of course, you can also set a deadline, at which point the assignment is due for submission.

The life of an assignment goes through several states. Initially, an assignment is Unassigned before moving into the Assigned state. When the assignment becomes assigned, all those who are targeted for the assignment gets the assignment added to their list of tasks.

When the assignment moves to the next stage from Assigned, it can take three paths, either to GradingStarted, to GradesPublished, or back to Unassigned. If moving to the GradesPublished state, any assignment grades are published.

Submission

Of course, there’s nothing to point in assigning anything to students if there are no submissions. SharePoint Education has a dedicated object for this purpose.

Submissions are what users send as a response to an assignment. When students begin a submission, SharePoint will automatically create a folder to hold the submission.

The student can work on the submission in SharePoint before actually submitting the documents for the assignment.

Upon submitting, the submission automatically becomes read-only for both students and teachers, and the date of submission is set. In addition, the assignment for the student gets a status of ‘submitted’.

Finally, when the teacher has graded and published the grade, the status of the assignment for the student becomes ‘Graded’. Optionally, the teacher may provide a feedback document to the student.

Grades

Speaking of grading, SharePoint Education supports grading on multiple levels and in multiple formats.

Grades can be assigned both to individual assignments and to the entire course. You can set grades in numbers or as a text (A, B, F, and so on, possibly also arbitrary grades like ‘passed’ or ‘failed’ too), but the documentation does not state whether there is any correlation between the two, for example by saying that any score over 93 is an A, any score between 85 and 92 is a B, and so on.

Further, you can aggregate data about a user across multiple courses and assignments to produce reports such as grade reports, completed courses, and so on.

Events

The Event in SharePoint Education remains somewhat elusive. It’s not that it’s difficult to deduce what an event is; it’s just that it is not clear exactly how SharePoint Education will use these events.

The Event object, according to the protocol documentation, represents a scheduled event, a logical description, and it has a start date, an end date, a category, and a location, a name, and a description, to name a few properties that are also natural.

In addition, and to indicate that events have very generic usages, an event may also contain assignments, documents, and lessons, and can be tied to a community. In other words, it seems that an event in SharePoint Education may be as generic as ‘something that happens’.

At this point, however, I‘m not sure further speculation improves the clarity, but I’ll keep digging to find additional information.

</end excerpt>

Disclaimer: Everything about SharePoint 2013 is speculation at this point. Don’t make important decisions based on preliminary speculation. If you do, you may find yourself in trouble, such as, but not limited to, your open-faced sandwich always falling face down.

If you still want to get the insights into what’s likely coming in SharePoint 2013, there’s no better way than subscribing to the SharePoint 2013 Beta series for $14.95.

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Here’s what I wrote:

I mentioned in the previous issue that interface and client developers will get far more tools in their shed in SharePoint 2013. One of these is the minimal download strategy framework (MDS).

This is a very interesting technology for developing web pages that are responsive and take far less bandwidth than full pages.

Consider this scenario: You have an application with perhaps 15 different pages where most of the pages (navigation, header, footer, and so on) are more or less similar.

Today, even though most of the content is the same for all of the pages, you still need to download the full pages every time you load a new page. For SharePoint, that’s a burden, because pages are quite heavy with tons of CSS, behind-the-scenes scripts, view states, and so on. In fact, a default home page in a SharePoint 2010 team site is 675 kb large

Note: Thanks to James Love for figuring the page size out for me. I didn’t have a lab at the time of this writing.

The image below shows a typical page and its components, with the grey areas being similar across multiple pages.

Wouldn’t it be better to simply load only the changes from one page to the next? In many pages, the changes from one page to the next may be just a kilobyte or two of text, saving literally hundreds of Kb of bandwidth on every page hit. Loading only those changes would make your network guys very happy.

Well, that’s exactly what MDS tries to do. What the MDS does is that it allows users to load only what changes between pages. This drastically reduces page load time and speeds up responsiveness for the entire application.

The way this technically happens is that users navigate to a start page (start.aspx), which accepts as its parameters the URL of a base page (for example page1.aspx). When the user navigates to the next page (for example page2.aspx) only the changes between page1.aspx and page2.aspx are loaded and sent to the client. The start.aspx page is responsible for updating the sections of the pages that change.

Now, to seasoned web developers, this won’t come as a great new innovation. After all, we’ve had AJAX for many years, including in Microsoft’s own ASP.NET framework.

However, what may be innovative is that the partial loading seems to be largely automatic. Making partially loading pages possible in other frameworks and platforms may require lot of work. Perhaps the greatest benefit will be in an easier approach or possibly even a fully automatic partial page loading.

</end excerpt>

Disclaimer: Everything about SharePoint 2013 is speculation at this point. Don’t make important decisions based on preliminary speculation. If you do, you may find yourself in trouble, such as, but not limited to, your spouse finding lipstick on your shirt collar (applies to both men and women).

If you still want to get the insights into what’s likely coming in SharePoint 2013, there’s no better way than subscribing to the SharePoint 2013 Beta series for $14.95.

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