Hany Mahmoud: The New Microsoft Wave

SharePoint 2010 in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for ECM

2012-03-19T01:12:00.000-07:00

Microsoft is placed in the Leaders Quadrant of Gartner Research (October 13, 2011), which looks at the enterprise content management market and how Gartner rates vendors and their packaged ECM products. According to Gartner “Changing delivery models, new value propositions, solution configurations and partner ecosystems make ECM relevant to every business.”.

Market Overview

ECM Today and Tomorrow

ECM has a rich history going back almost 30 years to the introduction of computer networks and document scanners to build the first document image processing applications. Functional elements such as the repository, scanning and capture tools, and workflow engines were often sourced from several vendors since full suites were rare. That changed during the late 1990s as IBM and others built out suites of technology to bring an integrated offering to bear. In the early 2000s, the impact of the Web hit ECM, and the concept of managing Web content and websites as user-friendly assets came under the ECM umbrella. By the mid 2000s, the market started experimenting with Microsoft's SharePoint 2003 as a low-end collaborative content management environment and those experiments got more serious by the time SharePoint 2007 was deployed. At the same time, other vendors were going through waves of acquisition — large vendors like EMC bought Documentum, IBM bought FileNet and then Oracle bought Stellent. Now, with four major vendors scrambling for ECM sales, the market really became a battleground post 2008. These top vendors control close to half the revenue of the ECM market today.

However, the future of ECM will not lie completely in the hands of these major players. Like in many IT markets, change is driven from the edges, by smaller vendors with innovative technology ideas not bound by the relative inflexibility of large corporations. These smaller vendors are often those in the Visionaries and Niche Players segments of the Magic Quadrant. Some of the forces of change on the future ECM market will come from these four key areas:

· The Cloud. Public cloud deployments of ECM allow enterprises the flexibility of launching new content initiatives quickly with no upfront costs for servers, system integrators and (usually) software licenses. The enterprise pays a per-user fee, and perhaps a fee for the volume of documents stored, and can reduce the size of a deployment, when needed. Today, this is often best suited to ECM needs that are more basic, such as advanced file server use cases, where customization and integration are not needed.

· Mobility. Given the clear demand for anywhere access and the rise of smartphones and tablets, ECM systems are deploying very functional clients for these devices in a post-PC era. In addition to simple use cases like repository access to documents, many vendors are developing interfaces for participation in process approvals and exception handling, camera-image (both still and video) and bar code inputs, case management system interfaces and, of course, the ability to maintain presence awareness of mobile users in an ECM system.

· Analytics. Content analytics defines a family of technologies that processes content and the behavior of users in consuming content to derive answers to specific questions. Content types include text of all kinds, such as documents, blogs, news sites, customer conversations (both audio and text), and social network discussions. Analytic approaches include text analytics, rich media and speech analytics, and behavioral analytics. As enterprises bring more of their content under the control of an ECM tool, they want to gain more valuable insights from the usage patterns, the latent knowledge in the content as well as the social interactions that occur during the collaborative creation and dissemination of the content.

· Big Content. Commonly accepted consumer file formats like audio and video have made their way into the enterprise and ECM systems are being leveraged to manage them in conjunction with many other file types. Enterprises seek to create a simpler view into a client or an issue which is agnostic of file type, and ECM tools are rising to the occasion. Big content refers both to the growth in size of repositories that organizations are able to achieve as file formats get larger, and also to the growth in diversity of content types. The world is getting bigger in terms of absolute quantities of content that enterprises must manage as well as diversity.

These new forces of change are having an effect on the solutions that vendors are building and they will spawn further new solutions. Gartner sees the market shifting toward four collections of technologies to suit them.

The Four Worlds of ECM

Changing delivery models, new value propositions, solution configurations and partner ecosystems make ECM relevant to every business. Understanding the four usage scenarios of ECM can help put enterprises on the path to success. Very few vendors have market-leading emphasis and ability in all four. Though many implementations span several scenarios, almost all will have to relate to content management as infrastructure.

The four major usage scenarios or "worlds" of ECM are as follows:

1. Transactional content management solutions focus on imaging, workflow/business process management (BPM), compliance/archives, records management and e-forms. Content contained within applications in this category tends to be static, rather than dynamic, though this may change as XML representations become more common. Processes tend to be stable, long-running and have a high volume of forms or documents that demand scalability, life cycle control and human approval, primarily for exceptions. An application interface is almost guaranteed. CCAs like those for invoice automation, case management frameworks, and other horizontal and vertical market templates and solutions are key considerations in vendor selection. Examples of solutions include offerings for customer communications management, processing of loan applications and electronic patient files.

Sample vendors: EMC, Hyland Software, IBM, OpenText, Perceptive Software, Saperion.

2. Social content management solutions focus on compound content object control and library services; document collaboration; workflow automation with alerts and calendaring; social content like wikis, blogs and videos; task tracking; browser or portal viewing; markup, annotation and version control. The focus is on systems of engagement — orchestrating high-value people involved in the project-based or long-running development and delivery of high-value documents, content or knowledge management, and optimizing the processes, interfaces and objectives that relate them through collaboration. Examples of these solutions include offerings for new drug discovery, new hire recruiting, onboarding and training, and construction project management.

Sample vendors: Alfresco, IBM, Microsoft, OpenText.

3. Online channel optimization solutions focus on Web channel sets of technology, including WCM, DAM, portals, electronic forms, Web and content analytics, social software, XML authoring, rich-media management, social content and collaboration, mobile device support and so on. The aim is to "idealize" them to serve as Web-delivered, context-aware engagement platforms for a variety of industry-focused solutions. Most important in delivering value will be a focus on relevancy and consequent measurable increases in the impact of the delivered experience. Examples of templates or solutions to engage customers more fully include online retail optimization, Web channel distributed claims processing, and constituency self-service in government.

Sample vendors: Adobe, OpenText, Oracle.

4. Content management as infrastructure solutions are increasingly being delivered by infrastructure vendors such as IBM, Oracle and Microsoft, which are embedding content management capabilities into their stacks. They are also increasingly becoming infrastructure platforms for supporting multiple CCAs. For example, when Microsoft SharePoint takes hold in an organization, users naturally begin exploring its suitability for a wider range of content management applications and its potential as a replacement for existing solutions. Essential considerations for this category include abilities to manage rich metadata, enable full life cycle control, allow easier migrations from other repositories, network drives or file servers, and to bring some analytic or business intelligence-like capability to unstructured data overall. Understanding how content relates to larger enterprise information management disciplines will also become critical.

Sample vendors: IBM, Microsoft, Oracle.

Market Definition/Description

ECM, defined as a strategy, can help enterprises take control of their content and, in so doing, boost effectiveness, encourage collaboration and make information easier to share.

ECM, defined as software, consists of a set of capabilities and/or applications for content life cycle management that interoperate, but that can also be sold and used separately.

The core components of an ECM suite and the updated weights for the Magic Quadrant scoring are described below.

Document management for check-in/check-out, version control, security and library services for business documents. Advanced capabilities such as compound document support and content replication score more highly than do basic library services.

Web content management (WCM) for controlling the content of a website through the use of specific management tools based on a core repository. This includes content creation functions, such as templating, workflow and change management, and content deployment functions that deliver prepackaged or on-demand content to Web servers. The minimum requirement is a formal partnership with a WCM provider. Native capabilities score more highly than partnerships. The relative complexities of provisioning content to users across intranet, extranet and Internet applications are also considered, as are the implications of analytics, social content and delivery models.

Several ECM vendors qualify for independent analysis of their WCM functionality (see "Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management").

Records management for long-term retention of content through automation and policies, ensuring legal, regulatory and industry compliance. The minimum requirement is an ability to enforce retention of critical business documents, based on a records retention schedule. Higher ratings are given for certified compliance with standards such as the Department of Defense (DoD) Directive 5015.2-STD, The National Archives (TNA), the Victorian Electronic Records Strategy (VERS) and Model Requirements for the Management of Electronic Records (MoReq2).

Several ECM vendors qualify for independent analysis of their records management functionality (see "MarketScope for Records Management").

Image-processing applications for capturing, transforming and managing images of paper documents. For this component we require a vendor to offer two things: (1) document capture (scanning hardware and software, optical and intelligent character recognition technologies, and form-processing technology) performed either using native capabilities or through a formal partnership with a third-party solution provider such as KnowledgeLake, Kofax, EMC (Captiva) and IBM (Datacap); (2) the ability to store images of scanned documents in the repository as "just another" content type in a folder, and to route them through an electronic process. Extra credit is granted for vertical or horizontal solutions delivered directly or through partners.

Several ECM vendors qualify for independent analysis of their image-processing functionality (see "Critical Capabilities for Composite Content Applications: Case Management").

Social content for document sharing, collaboration and knowledge management, and for supporting project teams. Blogs, wikis and support for other online interactions have been added. Social content — including video — is the fastest-growing category of new content in the enterprise. The name of this component has been changed from "document collaboration" to "social content" to reflect broader audience and content types.

Workflow/business process management (BPM) for supporting business processes, routing content, assigning work tasks and states, and creating audit trails. The minimum requirement is simple document review and approval workflow. Higher scores are given to vendors with graphical process builders, and both serial and parallel routing. Many vendors are drawing on stronger process capabilities to deliver frameworks or templates as CCAs.

Several ECM vendors qualify for independent analysis of their workflow/BPM functionality (see "Magic Quadrant for Business Process Management Suites").

Extended components can include one or more of the following: DAM, document composition, e-forms, search, content and Web analytics, email and information archiving, email management and packaged application integration.

Weighting changes from 2010 to 2011:

· Document management: 15% = no change

· WCM: 10% = no change

· Records management: 15% in 2010, 10% in 2011 = -5% change

· Image-processing applications: 15% = no change

· Social content: 10% in 2010, 15% in 2015 = +5% change

· Workflow/BPM: 25% = no change

· Extended components: 10% = no change

See "Evaluating ECM Using the Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management 2010."

Added

Software Innovation is a Scandinavian company specializing in ECM from a composite content application perspective.

Dropped

We have removed Autonomy because it is not actively promoting any products as ECM; rather, it focuses on meaning-based computing.

We have removed Xythos Software, a Blackboard company, because we have seen no client interest in its content management technology, nor have we seen any promotional efforts, since 2010.

You can enjoy reading the full Gartner Report here.

SharePoint 2010 Leads Gartner Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals for 2011

2012-03-19T00:32:00.000-07:00

SharePoint 2010 Continues to Lead Gartner Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals for as per Gartner (October 2011 ), Gartner positions Microsoft in the Leaders Quadrant on the 2011 Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals based on an evaluation of completeness of vision and ability to execute.

SharePoint 2010 gets a better position in the magic quadrant compared to 2010 report (for 2010 report click here).

Microsoft SharePoint's sweeping growth in the portal market is largely a factor of its appeal to business users, rather than the portal's IT owners. Until recently, most portal providers appealed to enterprise IT leaders first, often emphasizing the security and compliance counterpoints to this new, flexible, yet seemingly risky, user-centricity.

Market Overview

Portal Customers and Vendors Focus on the User Experience

Gartner client discussions point to significantly altered portal emphases in recent years. Whereas portal initiatives often involve aggregating and delivering information sources and extending business applications and processes, new portal customers recognize that they must engage end users to ensure the success of their portal efforts. Organizations are finding that older portals do not (or never did) garner significant adoption and loyalty from end users, which has led to significant portal failure and stagnancy.

Consumerization is largely responsible for this trend, with Web consumers and information workers bringing greater expectations into the workplace. Consumers have far different expectations of their organizations' portals and websites than what they had only a few years ago. They expect portals to be highly personalized, engaging, social, accessible, mobile, easy-to-use and synchronized across a wide range of channels.

In the meantime, users and consumers have a choice: If they don't like what their business gives them to support their information and collaboration needs, they can easily use consumer mechanisms, ranging from Google Documents to Facebook to Drop Box. Although organizations can still compel their internal users toward their own portals for access to enterprise applications and processes, person-centric activities such as collaboration and knowledge management tend to split off into numerous silos. This trend raises risks for the enterprise, creating new and more widespread privacy and compliance concerns, as well as new levels of knowledge and information management chaos. Rather than using portal technology only to gather value for themselves, enterprise IT and business organizations must ensure valuable and engaging experiences for their end users, whether they're employees, partners, customers or citizens.

Clearly, IT organizations, their business leaders and their end users need platforms that offer value and provide a balance of control and flexibility. Portal vendors are quickly realizing that they must enable flexibility and manageability by business users. They must offer social experiences and mechanisms that enhance usability and ensure end-user adoption of their products. Meanwhile, enterprise portal vendors must bring the appropriate level of user appeal into a productive, reliable, extensible and secure portal environment.

The user experience trend also means that portal providers must rely less on consultants, system integrators (SIs) and designers to ensure an engaging and productive user experience. That is, they must provide a shorter path to a fruitful user experience out of the box.

"Portlets-R-Us": The Portlet Catalog Becomes the App Store

Portal customers and vendors seeking to respond more readily to business needs are also revisiting and relabeling fundamental portal concepts. To accommodate more business needs, respond to consumerization, delegate capability to the business, improve extensibility and interoperability with third-party providers, and cultivate developer and vendor ecosystems, many portal providers are building or reviving their portlet catalog capabilities. Some vendors are starting to refer to them as "App Stores." Now that consumers and developers alike have grasped the concept (largely through their smartphone and tablet experiences), the market seems ripe for the concept.

Portlet catalogs typically offer portal components, modules, skins, themes, templates and connectors that customers can easily plug into their portal frameworks to improve usability and design, or to offer industry- or application-specific capability. The portlet store concept is applicable to internal scenarios, where organizations want to provision certain capabilities that can be readily and safely invoked by their business users and departmental developers, as well as to external communities, which use the portlet marketplaces to share and sell their components to other organizations. Internal portal app stores can be used to enable IT organizations to deploy useful, compliant and secure portal components that site administrators and end users can then plug into their personal or group sites.

Vendors including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Liferay, Backbase, DotNetNuke and Drupal support the portlet store concept, and many are relabeling their efforts to align with consumer app store trends. Vendors are also supporting consumer-Web widget standards, including OpenSocial, to leverage widely available components, such as Google Gadgets.

The Portal Market Split: UXPs and Lean Portals

The horizontal portal market will serve as a foundation for emerging UXPs (see "The Emerging User Experience Platform"), which provide the integration of technologies used to deliver portals, mashups, rich Internet applications (RIAs), Ajax-enabled websites, Web content management (WCM) and mobile applications. This integration can take the form of a set of separate, yet integrated, products that can be delivered as a suite or as a single product. Early examples of UXPs are largely derived from traditional portal technology, and include Microsoft SharePoint, Oracle WebCenter and IBM's broadening WebSphere Portal, with its related collaboration and content management portfolio, which is evolving toward a more cohesive UXP.

Although a dozen years of evolution and consolidation in the portal market have brought us sophisticated and versatile products, they've also brought functional bloat and technical complexity. Many organizations want lean portals: simple, more cost-effective products that focus on the portal's primary proposition and provide a personalized point of access to relevant information, business processes and people. Lean portals rely on modern architectures and representational state transfer (REST)-oriented standards for interoperability, often bringing customers faster time to value, without violating software standards in adjacent spaces, such as content management and analytics. The tendency toward lean portals accompanies a desire for lower costs, so it's a space in which open-source providers are playing a more prominent role.

The portal market's bifurcation is opening opportunities for software and service providers on both sides of the rift. Backbase and edge IPK, which is new to this year's Magic Quadrant, qualify as lean-portal providers. Although Liferay is beginning to broaden and deepen its portal capability with a view toward UXP, most customers acquire it for its lean-portal qualities. Open-source products such as DotNetNuke and Drupal are also entering the market with a lean proposition. Salesforce.com enters this Magic Quadrant combining a lean proposition with a software as a service (SaaS) model, which is aimed at lowering costs, easing accessibility and ensuring adoption.

On the UXP side, although they didn't meet the criteria for this year's portal Magic Quadrant, vendors such Adobe and Cisco loom large as potential players in the emerging UXP market, entering via content management in Adobe's case and collaboration in Cisco's.

Market Definition/Description

Gartner defines a portal as "a Web software infrastructure that provides interaction with relevant information assets (for example, information/content, applications and business processes), knowledge assets and human assets by select targeted audiences, delivered in a highly personalized manner." Enterprise portals may face different audiences, including:

· Business-to-employee (B2E)

· Business-to-consumer (B2C)

· Business partners (B2B)

Of course, the public-sector corollaries to these three high-level audience types are also considered applicable. A portal product is a packaged software application that is used to create and maintain enterprise portals. These products can be used to design vertical or horizontal portals:

· Vertical portals focus on accessing specific applications or business functions.

· Horizontal portals integrate and aggregate information from multiple cross-enterprise applications, as well as specific line-of-business tools and applications.

Inclusion And Exclusion Criteria

To be considered for the 2011 Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals, vendors must meet a combination of criteria. They need to provide technology supporting deployment in a variety of scenarios, including employee, customer/constituent-facing and partner portals.

The vendor must provide the following capabilities:

· A container or framework and component model (i.e., "portlets" or a similar component model)

· Security administration, including the ability to manage security rights and privileges by individual, group or role, such as single sign-on

· The ability to integrate with a wide range of data sources, applications, content, and services via various mechanisms, such as enterprise service bus, REST, Really Simple Syndication, Web services, iFrames and screen-scraping

· Personalization, including the ability to direct relevant content and information to individuals, groups and roles; change the content and behavior of page components, pages or page groups; and provide end-user customization (personalization may be driven by any number of static user-centric attributes, dynamic session-centric attributes, collaborative filtering or social relationships)

· Content management, including the ability to create, organize and publish content in the context of the portal, as well as search and content aggregation

· Business process management (BPM), including some means of providing or integrating with workflow and BPM tools or platforms

· Support for multichannel and multidevice delivery and presentation

The vendor must provide sales and support for the portal product in at least two of the following five geographic regions: North America; Latin America; Europe, the Middle East and Africa; Japan; and the Asia/Pacific (APAC) region.

The vendor must support clients in more than one industry vertical.

The vendor must have achieved one of the following:

· At least $4 million in annual portal-related product and service revenue as of 2010

· An installed base of at least 100 enterprise customers

Added

DotNetNuke, Drupal, edge IPK and salesforce.com met the criteria for this year's Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals and have been added to this assessment.

(Note: Tibco Software did not respond to requests for supplemental information or to review the draft contents of this document. Therefore, Gartner's analysis is based on other credible sources, including public information, Tibco's website, more than five discussions with PortalBuilder customers, our day-to-day interaction with Tibco users and information provided to us for the 2010 edition of this research.)

Dropped

No vendors were dropped from this year's Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals.

(Note: To support this research, Gartner collected information from vendors on their offerings, organizations and strategies through an extensive request for information, as well as supplementary briefings. We also surveyed and interviewed portal customers, some of which were provided by the vendors and some of which we located on our own. We also used information and experience gathered in our numerous client inquiries and other customer interactions.)

Click here to Read the full report, enjoy it

Download Windows Server 8 Beta

2012-03-12T00:32:00.000-07:00

Windows Server 8 Beta released you can download the new beta version of windows Server
8 from Microsoft Site here. I think this year Microsoft is planning a huge phenomenal launch wave.

Download Windows 8 Consumer Preview

2012-03-01T00:08:00.005-08:00

Windows 8 Consumer Preview Released (Windows 8 Beta Download), the next release of windows 8 replacing the expected beta release, you can download it from Microsoft site here. I will download it and try the new amazing features which I have already test some of them in the previous release developer preview version.

Skype for Windows Phone beta is now available for download

2012-02-28T21:44:00.004-08:00

Finally Skype for Windows Phone is now available in beta version after a long time of not being available on windows, you can download the beta version from now from download the
beta version directly from your Windows Phone or at the Marketplace from your computer to test drive Skype for Windows Phone. The new version of Skype brings voice and video calling to Windows Phone users around the globe.

Error:This page allows a limit of 200 controls, and that limit has been exceeded

2011-06-19T04:03:00.000-07:00

I received the above error when extending an existing web application in SharePoint 2010.

Solution :
SharePoint be default limits the number of controls per page to 200 in the extended site web.config file, all what you have to do is:

Edit the web.config of your application (e.g: C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\80)
Search for configuration/SharePoint/SafeMode then change the MaxControls attribute to a suitable value higher than 200, I tried 500 it worked like charm.

CRM 2011 RC Installation error: Setup failed to validate specified Reporting Services Report Server

2011-02-05T03:08:00.000-08:00

I faced the below error while installing the Dynamics CRM 2011 release candidate:

Setup failed to validate specified Reporting Services Report Server http://Servername/reportserver. Error: The request failed with HTTP status 503: Service Unavailable.
The request failed with HTTP status 503: Service Unavailable.
Installation environment:
· SQL server 2008 R2
· Windows 2008 R2 x64
· Dynamics CRM 2011 RC

Error cause:
The machine was renamed after installing the SQL server.
I managed to solve this error using the following steps:
· Run the following SQL script on your SQL server from Management Studio
sp_dropserver
GO
sp_addserver , local
GO
· Correct all service accounts of the SQL server and reporting service accounts from the windows services manager (services.msc)
· Run the Reporting Services Configuration Manager then
o choose the database tab
o click change database change the database server
o Choose an existing report server database.
o Choose the SQL server using the new machine name.
o Test the connection to make sure that the connection is successful.
o Click next
o Then make sure to select the correct report server database (the default database name is ReportServer)
o Then click next until the wizard is complete
Restart the SQL server Reporting Server service then rerun the CRM installer again.

New-SPConfigurationDatabase: The user does not exist or is not unique

2011-01-31T05:34:00.000-08:00

New-SPConfigurationDatabase : The user does not exist or is not unique.At line:1 char:28+ New-SPConfigurationDatabase <<<< + CategoryInfo : InvalidData: (Microsoft.Share...urationDatabase: SPCmdletNewSPConfigurationDatabase) [New-SPConfigurationDatabase], COMExce ption + FullyQualifiedErrorId : Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell.SPCmdletNewSPCon figurationDatabaseHere are some details on my setup:
-SharePoint 2010 Ent.
-Windows w2k8 R2 Ent x64.
-Using SQL Server 2008 R2 x64-The local accounts I added to SQL Server both have the rights to create dbs (dbcreator and also sysadmin)-Windows Firewall is off (this probably isn't a factor)-I checked the version of Geneva Framework I have in assembly and it was 1.0.0.0. anyway, but I uninstalled this via Add/Remove, rebooted server, installed again, no luck.-At the farm credentials stage, I am using the following credentials: Name of Windows account I am using (eg Hany, but not ComputerName\AccountName), and the password to login.-When I installed SQL Server, I added the Administrator local account and my named local account but also with mixed auth and a password.-I am running a fully updated version of Windows Server. I haven't installed the other updates mentioned in various posts.
I faced this problem and I managed to solve it through the following steps:
· Make sure that your machine name is limited to 15 bit to be within the NetBIOS naming limits.
· Makes sure that the local windows accounts you are using to run the command as well as the perform the database access account is are using the following format:
MachineName\accountname, where the MachineName is your new machine name

Download the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Server Release Candidate

2011-01-12T13:07:00.000-08:00

The Release Candidate is available for anyone to download, and will be available until the RTM release scheduled for Q1, 2011. you can download the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Server Release Candidate from:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=c3f82c6f-c123-4e80-b9b2-ee422a16b91d&displaylang=en&lc=1033the

Join us online for the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 global launch event

2011-01-12T05:30:00.000-08:00

Thursday, January 20th, 2011 at 9am PST
Attend this FREE global virtual launch event and watch Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer introduce Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. Learn how it is designed to help you boost sales, improve marketing, enrich customer service interactions, and accelerate line of business application development through xRM.
Hear keynote presentations by Kirill Tatarinov (Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Business Solutions), Michael Park (Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Business Solutions), and Brad Wilson (General Manager, Microsoft Dynamics CRM).
to Register Click here

Comparing Microsoft Dynamics CRM and SharePoint

2011-01-01T01:44:00.000-08:00

In this post will try to state part of a session I delivered in early 2010, in one of the community events in Saudi Arabia, I will discuss the comparison between , SharePoint and Dynamics CRM
SharePoint and Microsoft Dynamics CRM - Similarities

Both run as server applications on the Windows platform.
Both are built on the .NET developer platform.
Both use SQL Server as their database engine.
Both are web applications that run on the Internet Information Server (IIS).

SharePoint and Microsoft Dynamics CRM– Differences

Data model
In SharePoint for example, users can add an item to a list, and upload documents to a document library. These lists and libraries are customizable. While a list is similar to a table in a database application, SharePoint cannot create relationships between lists (however, you can use lists as lookups for each other). Microsoft Dynamics CRM has explicit out of the box support for relational database management features. Its "entities" correspond to database tables, which have customizable "attributes" (columns), and it has a powerful set of features for creating relationships between out of the box entities, and custom entities you create.
SharePoint Pages compared to CRM Forms
With SharePoint, the primary user experience is through web pages. Customizers of a SharePoint site can use the built-in user interface to create custom pages using Web Parts, and SharePoint Designer can be used to create highly graphical custom pages. These web pages do not generally have any built-in data awareness, and can be created entirely independent of any SharePoint lists or libraries. Dynamics CRM does not provide out of the box support for a generic web page. Every Dynamics CRM entity has only one form that manages the user experience of working with the highly structured data contained within Dynamics CRM.
Document management (Versioning, Approval, Source Control)
SharePoint has powerful out of the box features designed for efficient and secure collaboration on shared documents, such as major and minor versions, content approval based on security role, and the ability to require check-outs before allowing edits. Dynamics CRM documents can be attached to an entity's records, but there is no support for versioning or any of the other document management features available in SharePoint.
Query and Search
Dynamics CRM provides powerful end-user querying tools that are tailored to the product's relational database strengths. For example, users can easily include columns from multiple related entities within a single result set, and can sort and filter based on values from related entities. With SharePoint, search is much less structured, and the experience is more similar to a Live or Google web search experience where a user can enter a search keyword in the search box, and the SharePoint search engine will potentially find every occurrence of that keyword in every list, library, page or document in an entire site collection. SharePoint enterprise search is less structured and much broader than Dynamics CRM search, and offers users the potential to search across SharePoint content (including document libraries, lists, blogs, and wikis) as well as network file shares, external web sites, other business applications (such as SAP), and even Dynamics CRM data, (if you configure the SharePoint Business Connectivity Service).

Jobs for SharePoint

Document management and collaboration.
Web sites and web content management.
Reporting and dashboard applications.
Enterprise portals and Enterprise search.

Jobs for Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Marketing Management.

The Dynamics CRM is used by the marketing team to manage the entire marketing process; Dynamics CRM manages the entire marketing processes it helps in: marketing planning and budgeting, campaigns, marketing lists, marketing teams and marketing activities reporting…etc.

Sales Management.

You can use Dynamics CRM for the management of your sales processes starting from very simple sales process to roughly saying very complex sales processes.

Customer service

Such as case management, service scheduling, contract management, knowledge base.

xRM (Any Relationship Management).

xRM is a business application framework that accelerates the development and delivery of enterprise-class, relational business applications. It the one of the amazing extensibility features of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, it moves you to a space where sky is the limit. xRM capabilities forged from customization, configuration and business process automation investments.

SharePoint 2010 Leads Gartner Magic Quadrant for ECM

2010-11-26T23:32:00.000-08:00

SharePoint 2010 gains one more edge over other competing products, by leading the Gartner Magic Quadrant for ECM, this is a piece of the wonderful Gartner report:

Market Overview
ECM is becoming as much an essential part of an enterprise information infrastructure as it is an investment in strategies, suites and solutions. New delivery models, content as infrastructure, and process enablement can all help companies realize a worthwhile return on investment (ROI). But that's only part of the measurement of business value that buyers now expect from content investments.
The ECM market registered 4.8% growth in 2009, primarily due to global economic conditions. According to Gartner's statistics, worldwide ECM software license and maintenance revenue came to $3.5 billion in 2009. Subsets of the market continued to generate higher revenue. For example, in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), WCM revenue grew to claim almost 30% of this region's content management market.
Gartner forecasts that total software revenue in the ECM market will grow at a compound annual rate of 10.1% through 2014. The market's return to stronger growth is expected to start in 2010, with rates climbing to double digits and worldwide ECM software revenue exceeding $5.7 billion by 2014. This represents a strong market, but it is also one that is undergoing transformation.
The ECM market has seen more mergers and acquisitions in 2010. Lexmark purchased Perceptive Software and Adobe acquired Day Software. We see more vendors augmenting broader strategies in relation to information management by expanding their CCA foundations or promoting integration with Microsoft SharePoint. Underlying buyer concerns about technological dependency on vendors with multiple partners in capture, search, analytics and so on have spurred mergers and acquisitions. IBM's announced acquisition of Datacap further underscores the need to deliver a stable set of components on a single contract from a single vendor — though still rarely on a single stock-keeping unit.
What Lies Ahead for ECM?
The basic content management requirements of organizations have become more complex. So has the definition of what comprises "basic content" — from text, to audio, to video, to various types of social-media content.
Content management technologies have also matured. Market consolidation has enabled leading vendors to deliver a broader set of solutions with combinations of technologies, although, even when buying from a single vendor, it can still prove a challenge to get its organic and acquired components to work together seamlessly. An ECM suite, while still relevant, is not necessarily the best option for meet changing business requirements. New use cases will require new solutions and we see the market shifting toward four collections of technologies to suit them.

The Four Worlds of ECM
Changing delivery models, new value propositions, solution configurations and partner ecosystems make ECM relevant to every business. 2010 is a year in which strategies for managing everything from cleanup of legacy content to social content require further investments of time, money and resources.
Understanding the "four worlds" of ECM can help put enterprises on the path to success. Very few vendors have market-leading emphasis and ability in all four. Though many implementations span several worlds, almost all will have to relate to content management as infrastructure.
The four worlds of ECM are as follows:
1. Transactional content management solutions focus on imaging, workflow/business process management (BPM), compliance/archives, records management and e-forms. Content contained within applications in this category tends to be static, rather than dynamic, though this may change as XML representations become more common. Processes tend to be stable, long-running and have a high volume of forms or documents that demand scalability, life cycle control and human approval, primarily for exceptions. An application interface is almost guaranteed. CCAs like those for invoice automation, case management frameworks, and other horizontal and vertical market templates and solutions are key considerations in vendor selection. Examples of solutions include offerings for customer communications management, processing of loan applications and electronic patient files.
Sample vendors: EMC, Hyland Software, IBM, Open Text.
2. Social content management solutions focus on compound content object control and library services; document collaboration; workflow automation with alerts and calendaring; social content like wikis, blogs and videos; task tracking; browser or portal viewing; markup, annotation and version control. The focus is on systems of engagement — orchestrating high-value people involved in the project-based or long-running development and delivery of high-value documents, content or knowledge management, and optimizing the processes, interfaces and objectives that relate them through collaboration. Examples of these solutions include offerings for new drug discovery, new hire recruiting, on-boarding and training, and construction project management.
Sample vendors: Alfresco, IBM/Lotus, Microsoft, Open Text.
3. Online channel optimization solutions focus on Web channel sets of technology, including WCM, DAM, portals, electronic forms, Web and content analytics, social software, XML authoring, rich-media management, social content and collaboration, mobile device support and so on. The aim is to "idealize" them to serve as Web-delivered, context-aware engagement platforms for a variety of industry-focused solutions. Most important in delivering value will be a focus on relevancy and consequent measurable increases in the impact of the delivered experience. Examples of templates or solutions to engage customers more fully include online retail optimization, Web channel distributed claims processing, and constituency self-service in government.
Sample vendors: Autonomy, Adobe, Open Text, Oracle.
4. Content management as infrastructure solutions are increasingly being delivered by infrastructure vendors such as IBM, Oracle and Microsoft, which are embedding content management capabilities into their stacks. They are also increasingly becoming infrastructure platforms for supporting multiple CCAs. For example, when Microsoft SharePoint takes hold in an organization, users naturally begin exploring its suitability for a wider range of content management applications and its potential as a replacement for existing solutions. Essential considerations for this category in 2010 and 2011 are updated, richer metadata, policies for life cycle control prior to migrations from other repositories, network drives or file servers, and business intelligence for unstructured data overall. Understanding how content relates to larger enterprise information management disciplines will also become critical. Examples of early use cases include file server content migration and integration of content with manufacturing processes.
Sample vendors: IBM, Microsoft, Oracle.
Key Topics for ECM in 2010 and 2011
Legacy information management: Many enterprises are looking at this to address their vast information stores and support compliance and legal discovery requirements. It involves the process of proactively managing and valuing enterprise content that exists in applications, repositories and file systems to decide on its retention and storage for business and operational purposes. Gartner predicts that, by 2013, the predominant solution for archiving will be integrated content archiving. Specifically, it will be a solution that encompasses multiple types of content, such as e-mail, files, Microsoft SharePoint and other ECM content, instant messages and, optionally, other types such as images, database content and Web content.
There is already some movement in this direction. Many solutions that started out as e-mail archiving applications have added support for file and SharePoint archiving. But in nearly all cases, the full value of these solutions has yet to be realized, as features such as common policy management for retention and disposition, indexing/search, deduplication, user management and sharing of archived data across applications do not work seamlessly across all content types.
Major questions also remain about how to move content into the archive, and how to determine the criteria for doing so. Given that multiple copies of almost every digital file exist in every organization, even deduplication is a problem, especially for a large, diverse and geographically and architecturally vast organization. Still, methods do exist, and the largest hurdle remains simply making the decisions that need to be made, which requires input from IT, the business users who create and use the content, and the company's legal and compliance teams. The process is difficult, but not impossible, and Gartner recommends "good enough" solutions, as nothing like perfection exists (or ever will exist) when it comes to deciding which content to keep and which to delete.
Search and content analytics: One way to meet the challenge of legacy content is by using search and content analytics applications. These are very valuable for making unstructured data — whether "at rest" in a repository or in motion — searchable and analytically accessible, which is a challenge for companies seeking to solve a variety of business problems. The benefits of auto-classification — whether in eliminating aging, redundant or useless content, improving migration from other content containers, or determining the relationship of content to structured data, processes and user populations — are not yet fully realized. Executive managers are seldom moved by typical IT arguments about the relatively low cost of storage — they consider risk reduction and value creation to be more compelling reasons to adopt a technology.
Composite content applications and case management frameworks: Gartner uses the term "composite content application" (CCA) to describe frameworks and templates for specific business processes that are built on ECM and/or BPM platforms. The term relates to both vertical and horizontal examples of solutions where collections of content, the platforms that store and manage them, the processes that leverage them, and the context required to deliver value from them for the benefit of end users and business buyers, are optimized by technology vendors and their domain expert partners. As well as relating to modern composite application development, the term refers to the componentization of content and to the value of combining systems and information to create strengthened value propositions and business outcomes. As examples of CCAs, case management frameworks are the electronic equivalent of what has supported business for centuries: the cabinets, drawers, folders, forms and collaborative workflow processes that support important human decisions. Many ECM vendors are staking a great deal of their future revenue on defining and delivering CCAs directly and via partners.
Electronic discovery: The legal landscape around electronic information is changing rapidly, and many enterprises are making assessments, buying technology and devising plans in regard to e-discovery. E-discovery often begins as a project in its own right, but organizations quickly realize that it touches on many other areas of interest — all of which normally involve the creation and storage of so-called unstructured information.
Shared services and alternative delivery models for ECM: More companies and governments want new methods of obtaining ECM capability, including cloud-hosted, on-premises rental, managed via outsourcers and open-source software. These new methods will grow in comparison to conventional delivery, but they will not eclipse it.
Content in the cloud: Cloud computing is starting to change the ECM market landscape, based on potential cost savings and technology benefits. The influence of the three biggest cloud vendors — Google, IBM and Microsoft — on the future ECM market has yet to be determined.
Market Definition/Description
ECM, defined as a strategy, can help enterprises take control of their content and, in so doing, boost productivity, encourage collaboration and make information easier to share.
ECM, defined as software, consists of a set of capabilities and/or applications for content life cycle management that interoperate, but that can also be sold and used separately.
The core components of an ECM suite and the updated weights for the Magic Quadrant scoring are described below.
Document management for check-in/check-out, version control, security and library services for business documents. Advanced capabilities such as compound document support and content replication score more highly than do basic library services.
Web content management (WCM) for controlling the content of a website through the use of specific management tools based on a core repository. This includes content creation functions, such as templating, workflow and change management, and content deployment functions that deliver prepackaged or on-demand content to Web servers. The minimum requirement is a formal partnership with a WCM provider. Native capabilities score more highly than partnerships. The relative complexities of provisioning content to users across intranet, extranet and Internet applications are also considered, as are the implications of analytics, social content and delivery models.
Several ECM vendors qualify for independent analysis of their WCM functionality.
Records management for long-term retention of content through automation and policies, ensuring legal, regulatory and industry compliance. The minimum requirement is an ability to enforce retention of critical business documents, based on a records retention schedule. Higher ratings are given for certified compliance with standards such as the Department of Defense (DoD) Directive 5015.2-STD, The National Archives (TNA), the Victorian Electronic Records Strategy (VERS) and Model Requirements for the Management of Electronic Records (MoReq2).
Several ECM vendors qualify for independent analysis of their records management functionality.
Image-processing applications for capturing, transforming and managing images of paper documents. For this component we require a vendor to offer two things: (1) document capture (scanning hardware and software, optical and intelligent character recognition technologies, and form-processing technology) performed either using native capabilities or through a formal partnership with a third-party solution provider such as KnowledgeLake, Kofax, EMC (Captiva) and IBM (Datacap); (2) the ability to store images of scanned documents in the repository as "just another" content type in a folder, and to route them through an electronic process. Extra credit is granted for vertical or horizontal solutions delivered directly or through partners.
Several ECM vendors qualify for independent analysis of their image-processing functionality.
Social content for document sharing, collaboration and knowledge management, and for supporting project teams. Blogs, wikis and support for other online interactions have been added. Social content — including video — is the fastest-growing category of new content in the enterprise. The name of this component has been changed from "document collaboration" to "social content" to reflect broader audience and content types.
Workflow/BPM for supporting business processes, routing content, assigning work tasks and states, and creating audit trails. The minimum requirement is simple document review and approval workflow. Higher scores are given to vendors with graphical process builders, and both serial and parallel routing. Many vendors are drawing on stronger process capabilities to deliver frameworks or templates as CCAs.
Several ECM vendors qualify for independent analysis of their workflow/BPM functionality.
Extended components can include one or more of the following: DAM, document composition, e-forms, search, content and Web analytics, e-mail and information archiving, e-mail management and packaged application integration.
You can enjoy reading the full Gartner Report here

Top Community Champion Award for the year 2010

2010-11-09T00:52:00.000-08:00

I have been awarded by Microsoft Arabia ”Top Community Champion Award for the year 2010”.
I am very proud to be recognized by Microsoft Arabia. I would like to thank all Microsoft Arabia team; special thanks are due to Ammar Abuthuraya (Product & Audience Marketing Manager, Developer & Platform Group in Microsoft Arabia) for his continuous support to all communities.

I would like also to thank all communities in Saudi Arabia for their outstanding cooperation. Special thanks are due to Jerry Yasir(SharePoint MVP) for his wonderful spirit and cooperation during all community activities.

Finally, I would love to dedicate this great award to my wife and kids (Omar and Ahmad) that supported me even though, I was taking from the time that I was supposed to spend with them.

The Middle East SharePoint Conference 2010

2010-10-26T00:28:00.000-07:00

Qatar hosts the Middle East SharePoint conference 2010, which will be held at the Four Seasons Hotel in Doha, Qatar from December 5-6, 2010. The Middle East event will be the biggest across the region for technology professionals to learn more about Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010, the business collaboration platform for the enterprise, the internet and related technologies.

I will be attending this event. I hope i see you all there.

To Register in the event click here

SharePoint 2010 Leads Gartner Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals

2010-10-12T05:10:00.000-07:00

Microsoft SharePoint is a consideration in more Gartner portal inquiries — over 70% — than any other vendor.
Five vendors dominated portal selections during the latter part of 2009 and into 2010: Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, SAP and Liferay. Open-source Liferay has made the strongest move toward the forefront of portal decisions for Gartner's customers. IBM has retained its position as a strategic provider of portals for enterprises with complex and widespread needs. Oracle's acquisitions have brought it an enormous portal installed base and, accordingly, enormous attention on the direction of its various portal products.

Open source for portals is hitting its stride. During this prolonged period of economic uncertainty, many companies first looked at open-source products from Liferay, Red Hat JBoss and others as a pure cost consideration. However, these products are also winning deals as they prove themselves at larger organizations. They're relatively easy to acquire, test and implement; their open architectures strike a chord for interoperability and vendor independence; and they provide basic portal functions without the bulk of the megavendors' offerings. Products that come with enterprise content management (ECM), collaboration or social platforms can more easily conflict with other installed products.

The field of viable portal vendors has narrowed considerably, dropping from more than 50 vendors in 2003 to fewer than a dozen in 2010. However, the consolidation of traditional portal vendors doesn't necessarily mean the commoditization of the market. In light of pressing business needs to improve the user experience across channels, and amidst the innovations of Web 2.0 and the cloud, making the right portal choice is more important than ever.

The major technology shifts toward Web 2.0, the cloud and business versus the IT influence are galvanizing the portal market. Portals provide a single, personalized point of access to relevant information, processes and people. They appeal to business leaders as a means to improve employee productivity and collaboration, extend business processes and applications to broader audiences, improve business visibility and responsiveness, engage and serve customers, and improve relationships and efficiency among value chain partners. More importantly than ever, portals appeal to end users overwrought with too many systems to log into and too much information. Enterprise portals unify the user experience, and provide relevancy and context across disparate applications. They provide a unified user experience by spanning across on-premises and cloud boundaries, as well as business and social boundaries. IT organizations need them more than ever to pull together and aggregate disparate information, exert control and ensure compliance, and scale their ability to agilely deliver these applications to the business and users.

Looking forward, the horizontal portal market will serve as an important foundation for the emerging user experience platform (UXP). Organizations are focusing on business-level issues, requiring better engagement of users across a widening range of devices and channels, and new vendors are entering the market with alternative approaches to accomplishing the portal proposition. As portals, user interfaces, and user interaction technologies and practices have proliferated, they have evolved into disconnected stovepipes. Portal products, mashup tools, rich Internet application (RIA) tools, Ajax solutions, Web content management and mobile application development tools all target their respective platforms effectively, but they require enterprise developers to create separate user interaction models and code bases — with few, if any, cross-platform capabilities. Vendors have started to address enterprise concerns with the convergence of these related technologies. The UXP provides integration of technologies used to deliver portals, mashups, RIAs, Ajax-enabled websites, Web content management and mobile applications. This integration can take the form of a set of separate, yet integrated, products (that may or may not be delivered as a suite) or a single product. Early examples of the UXP are largely derived from portal technology, and include Microsoft SharePoint, Oracle WebCenter along with Universal Content Management (UCM), and IBM's broadening WebSphere Portal with its related collaboration and content management portfolio, which is developing toward a more cohesive user experience platform.

The importance of portals and the future of UXP are not lost on vendors; enterprise vendors are using portals to promote their most-sweeping and most-critical agendas. Many of the vendors are using the portal to promote a far broader and deeper agenda, whether it's their developer platforms and tools, content management capabilities, databases and middleware, or enterprise applications. As an inherently cloud-friendly aspect of middleware, portals are also a fundamental vehicle for transitioning customers to the cloud. The portal choice is, therefore, critical to ensure that organizations can accomplish their business goals, while ensuring vendor independence and agility.

Organizations tend to make portal decisions based on a wide range of factors, including functionality, familiarity, price, interoperability, usability, momentum among customers and the IT ecosystem at large. As portals have evolved, basic portal functions, such as user management, personalization, content management and integration, have been extended and enhanced, and new capabilities, such as social computing, analytics and business process management, have been added to respond to subsequent customer demands.

Click here to Read the full, report, Enjoy it

Join Us At Microsoft OpenDoor 2010 Event- With keynote address by Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer

2010-10-06T00:33:00.001-07:00

THE LATEST INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY UPDATES AWAIT YOU ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DOOR

JOIN MICROSOFT'S CEO, STEVE BALLMER AND FIND OUT MORE

Join us at the Microsoft Open Door 2010 event in Saudi Arabia, which will kick off in Riyadh on 2nd November with a keynote address by Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer.

Attend this exciting event and learn about the transition to Cloud Computing and the latest information on Microsoft's technology roadmap. Open Door is an opportunity to advance your business and technical skills, and network with many IT professionals.

Visit www.microsoft.com/saudi/about/opendoor to register* and for more information on the event.

Microsoft Saudi Arabia

RIYADH 2nd & 3rd November, 2010 Four Seasons Hotel	JEDDAH 7th November, 2010 Intercontinental Hotel
Register	Register
Please be advised that online registration is required in order to attend the event. Know more about our sponsors here*.

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Forrester reports ranks Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a Leader in New Customer Service Research

2010-08-15T02:48:00.000-07:00

Forrester reports ranks Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a Leader in New Customer Service Research
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/itanalyst/docs/07-19-10CRM.PDF

Microsoft Dynamics CRM: A Leader for Midsize and Large Organizations
See below analyst relations announcement for more details and you might want to check out the blogs below as well.
· The Inside Scoop On How The CRM Vendors Stack Up
http://blogs.forrester.com/william_band/10-06-16-inside_scoop_how_crm_vendors_stack
· Large Organizations
http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/wave%26trade%3B_crm_suites_for_large_organizations%2C_q2/q/id/55828/t/2
· Midsized Organizations
http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/wave%26trade%3B_crm_suites_for_midsized_organizations%2C_q2/q/id/56879/t/2

Microsoft Mouse Mischief

2010-06-07T02:30:00.000-07:00

I am pleased to announce the web release of Microsoft® Mouse Mischief™ a FREE add-in for PowerPoint 2007 and 2010 that lets teachers make their classroom lessons interactive using ordinary mouse hardware [Internet, , Press].

Targeted primarily at teachers, Mouse Mischief is releasing worldwide in 12 languages and is a shared resource solution which will help:
· Pull through latest versions of Office (2007 and 2010)
· Pull through Windows 7
· Serve as Open Office/Linux, and Google Apps Compete in Education PC deals

In addition, Mouse Mischief will create invaluable touch points among students and educators and drive PR:

“For any student who has ever sat through a dry PowerPoint presentation, Mouse Mischief will be a welcome foray back into synergistic classroom technology.” Education.com

you can find more details about the Mouse Mischief excitement on Twitter and Facebook.

Walkthrough SharePoint 2007 upgrade to SharePoint 2010 Project Part 2 of 2

2010-05-22T02:06:00.000-07:00

In this part, I will explain the MOSS 2007 Site collection upgrade to SharePoint 2010.
1. Use the Stsadm to perform the pre upgrade check on the MOSS 2007 environment, this option is available in MOSS 2007 SP2.
Run the following command
Stsadm –o PreUpgradeCheck
, check the resulting reports to identify the following:
a. Information & Configuration
i. Content Sources & Start addresses
ii. Farm & Search Topology
iii. Servers
iv. Upgrade Types
v. AAMs, Large Lists & Libraries
b. Important Issues and Dependencies
i. Site Definition (referenced & missing)
ii. Installed Language Pack
iii. Features (referenced & missing)
iv. Custom List Views & Custom Field Types, Web.Config entries

2. I used the “attach content database” migration option. So you need to take a backup of all the content databases in your MOSS 2007 server farm.
3. Restore the content databases to your new SharePoint 2010 server farm. Using the simple SQL server attach database option.
4. You can also use a backup/ restore database option.
5. Make sure that you have the same language pack on MOSS 2007 and SharePoint 2010.
6. Create a new empty SharePoint 2010 web application on the new SharePoint farm. You can do this from SharePoint 2010 central administration
7. Perform the “attach content database” command as shown in the below figure. You can do this from the SharePoint 2010 Management power shell

STSADM -o addcontentdb -url http://itweb.contoso.com/ -databasename SP_2007_Content -databaseserver Demo2010

8. Change the site collection owner of the new restored site collection to a suitable user account, as well as the secondary site collection owner. You can do this from the SharePoint 2010 Management power shell using the below command line
stsadm.exe -o siteowner -url http://SiteURL:Port -ownerlogin doamin\username -secondownerlogin domain\secondusername

9. Merge the compiled source code to the new virtual directory of your web application. You can find details about this source code and its upgrade in the following part 1 of this post:
http://hanymahmoud.blogspot.com/2010/05/moss-2007-upgrade-to-sharepoint-project.html

10. Finally perform the visual upgrade from the site sittings menu (as shown in the below figure) or using the SharePoint 2010 Management power shell. I recommend taking a full backup of you site collection before performing visual upgrade to be able to recover in case of this step encounters any errors.

Walkthrough SharePoint 2007 upgrade to SharePoint 2010 Project Part 1 of 2

2010-05-19T23:57:00.000-07:00

I have a project of migrating a solution on top of MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010. The project is an intranet portal with 12 applications on top of MOSS 2007. The applications are 3 tiers (DLL,BLL, UI) the UI layer contains a set of web parts controlled by the BLL which in turn accesses the database through the DLL.
1. Upgrade you solution to be on top of MOSS 2007 SP2 and WSS 3.2 SP2.
2. Compile the source code for the solution using VS 2010 and choose the .Net framework 3.5 as your target framework.
3. Replace references to all Microsoft.SharePoint assemblies with the new SharePoint assemblies you may use the below this article to solve the bugs resulted from changing references
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262967.aspx

4. You can find a list of assemblies and name spaces changes between MOSS 2007 and SharePoint 2010 in the below link
http://techtrainingnotes.blogspot.com/2010/01/sharepoint-2010-namespace-and-assembly.html

5. You may need to add reference to SharePoint assemblies from "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\ISAPI" such as "microsoft.sharepoint.portal.dll", if you cannot find them in global assembly cache.
I will complete this article in part 2 soon , once I have time to write it.

Customer Care Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM

2010-05-08T00:13:00.000-07:00

The Customer Care Accelerator provides the main contact center enabling functionalities, such as the ability to create a unified desktop by combining data elements from disparate line of business applications and displaying it in a single user interface. The core functionalities for this accelerator can be summarized as follows:
Integrated desktop: Customers can aggregate information from diverse business applications into an integrated desktop providing employees with a 360° view of the customer interactions. Customer service representatives have immediate access to business critical information to serve customers quickly and efficiently, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Duplicate Data Entry. Organizations can streamline business processes by creating desktop automation workflows. Process automation eliminates the need for agents to re-enter the same data in multiple applications. Minimizing duplication helps to reduce human error and ensures a consistent customer service experience.
Computer Telephony Integration (CTI): Organizations are provided with a consistent framework to connect CTI systems with key lines of business.
Activity Reporting: Contact center managers have swift access to agent desktop transaction reporting, helping them to identify process bottlenecks. This capability is currently addressed by ICC Accelerator AIF component.
You can download it from http://crmcca.codeplex.com/More details can be found at http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/default.aspx

The Microsoft Offecial Launch for VS.net 2010 and SQL R2

2010-05-06T09:30:00.001-07:00

the Microsoft Offecial Launch for VS.net 2010 and SQL R2 has been postponed to be in June , i will update you soon

I in an Interview with some of the Microsoft Communities Leads in Riyadh Saudi Arabia

2010-05-06T09:11:00.000-07:00

We recorded this session during the academic launch of VS.Net 2010

enjoy it:
http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=29977735

Visual Studio .Net 2010 Professional Launch Microsoft Innovation Center - Riyadh

2010-05-03T00:05:00.000-07:00

On 4th May 2010 in the Microsoft Innovation Center (Yamma University – Riyadh Saudi Arabia )we will do the community launch of Microsoft Visual Studio .Net 2010 for professionals. We will give the professionals full fledge about what is new in VS 2010. Moreover, I will introduce the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Experts Community to the professionals

Visual Studio .Net 2010 Academic Launch Microsoft Innovation Center - Riyadh

2010-04-30T03:02:00.000-07:00

Yesterday (29- April 2010)in the Microsoft Innovation Center (Yamma University – Riyadh Saudi Arabia )we launched the VS 2010 for academic students. We gave the students full fledge about what is new in VS 2010. Moreover, I introduced the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Experts Community to the students and I think they like it very much.
One student won a community gift for answering a question about Microsoft Dynamics CRM