JerrySevier.com

Iowa Code Camp: May 3rd, 2008

Jerry Sevier — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:07:14 GMT

Like I was saying before, it's been a really exciting month! Looks like I will be heading down next weekend to the Iowa Code Camp. I had so much fun at the Twin Cities Code Camp that I jumped at the opportunity to speak at another one.

If you are interested in attending, the details are:

Saturday, May 3^rd
8:00am - 5:30pm
No cost

Location:

University Conference Center
181 S Clinton St
Iowa City, IA 52240

To Register, please visit their site: www.iowacodecamp.com

Absolute Beginner's Guide to SharePoint

Jerry Sevier — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 17:50:20 GMT

I've been working for a bit on creating some starting point articles for people interested in SharePoint Web Content Management (WCM). I have just recently finished the first couple, and thought I would go ahead and post the links to them for anyone who may be interested. If you have feedback, please let me know. I'd like these to be a good reference point for people.

If you are interested, please take a look:

Absolute Beginner's Guide to SharePoint Web Content Management

Thanks,

Jerry

Silverlight Presentation

Jerry Sevier — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:59:43 GMT

Hi Everyone,

It certainly has been a busy month! Showcasing a lot of stuff in SharePoint, speaking at the Twin Cities .NET User Group, attending the launch event, presenting at the Twin Cities Code Camp, and now, helping start the Minnesota Silverlight / WPF User Group!

I get the distinct honor of being the first presenter of this User Group! Knowing how fast Silverlight and WPF are catching on industry wide, I am confident this will quickly become a large and active group.

The first session is described below. If you are interested in attending, I suggest you register now. These events often fill up fast!

5/20/2008. 12 pm - 2 pm

Topic: Building Rich Internet Applications Using SilverLight 2.0.

Abstract:

Take a walk through one of Microsoft's most exciting product offerings yet. Silverlight provides the foundation for not only Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), but also for distributed compatibility never before seen from a Microsoft platform. We'll walk through the capabilities of the software as well as the Expression Suite of tools used to develop graphically rich applications. We will discuss the capabilities of Silverlight 1..0 as well as delve into what is coming with version 2.0.

For More Information, Click Here

Jerry

Twin Cities Code Camp: Great JOB!!!

Jerry Sevier — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 19:46:03 GMT

Well, here it is a new week. Last Saturday (April 5th, 2008), Jason Bock had his fourth Twin Cities Code Camp session. It was the first one I attended (and presented) at, and I must say, I was highly impressed! The caliber of people at this event were, most definitely, top notch! It is also a much more relaxed environment where speakers are willing to deviate from the canned presenations and "experiment". Scary if you are a presenter, but AWESOME when you are an attendee!

For anyone interested, I've added the event to my links list in the side navigation. Be sure to check out his site for details on the next event (scheduled this fall, I believe). It is definitely something worth attending!

-- Jerry

Twin Cities Code Camp

Jerry Sevier — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 15:16:57 GMT

For anyone who missed the presentation on Thursday (at the Twin Cities .NET User's Group), I will be giving a similar, albeit modified, version of the presentation at the Twin Cities Code Camp. Looks like registration is full, but there is a waiting list if you wanted to try and get in.

My Presentation: Making Web Content Management Work for You.

Date:
April 5th, 2008

Location:
New Horizon's Facility
4510 W. 77th Street #210
Edina, MN 55435

.NET User Group Presentation -- Update

Jerry Sevier — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 03:39:35 GMT

Hello Everyone!

I wanted to take a moment to say thank you to everyone who came to the .NET User Group presentation tonight. I always have a lot of fun speaking about SharePoint, and the possibilities it has. I was especially impressed with the questions posed by everyone. It certainly helps me focus more on what everyone is wanting to learn, while making for a much less stiff presentation!

As promised, I've compiled the slide deck here if anyone is interested:

.NET User Group Presentation

Also, as a final note, I'm always interested to hear everyone elses stories with SharePoint. So, please feel free to let me know what your working on, and any questions / comments you may have.

Again, for all of those who came, thanks!

- Jerry

SharePoint, WSS, MOSS, ECM, WCM, What the heck?

Jerry Sevier — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 03:17:26 GMT

There seems to be a rash of products out from Microsoft as of the last couple years that, well, how should we say, have names that are a bit confusing? The last time I remember this much confusion was around Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Visual Studio Team Editions. One would have thought that perhaps a better marketing strategy would have been to better clarify these.

It seems, we are here again. This time, there is SharePoint. With the release of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, it seems that everything is now called SharePoint. And, well, it sort of it. But, what does it all mean and what are the differences?

For the most part, there is now an industry understanding on the lingo, and I'll attempt to outline here (and before all of you die hards get upset with me, please understand this is meant to be a generalization to simplify terminology).

Windows SharePoint Services (WSS)
WSS 3.0 is now out, and is the foundation for the latest SharePoint offerings.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS)
A huge collections of "add-ons" for WSS 3.0. These include Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Single Signon (SSO), Etc.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
Features for Content Management, such as the ability to version your website content, security based publishing, etc.

Web Content Management (WCM)
Upgrade path for Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS) 2002. All functionality of MCMS is now rolled into MOSS 2007.

Twin Cities .NET User Group -- Presentation

Jerry Sevier — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 14:47:12 GMT

Happy Friday everyone!

I just wanted to let everyone know that I will be speaking at the Twin Cities .NET User Group meeting on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008. The event is scheduled to go from 5pm to 7pm, but I would recommend getting there a bit early. It's a wonderful place to network, and I'm always open to fielding specific questions before or after the event!

Presentation Abstract:

Since Content Management Server 2002 has been Microsoft's only solution to Content Management for over six years, it has become less and less of a contender in the Content Management world. Now enters MOSS 2007, the new upgrade path for CMS 2002. We will review the ins and outs of the new features of MOSS 2007's CMS module. What's great, what just works, and the things that could work better. Find out if SharePoint is the right choice for you and your organization.

We will dispel the myth that sites running on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 have to look like SharePoint Sites. You will see how to create robust, visually attractive sites in minutes and we will look at the code that makes it all possible.

To attend, please register:

http://www.ilmservice.com/twincitiesnet/Signup.aspx?eventid=80

Heroes happen {here} -- Minneapolis, MN

Jerry Sevier — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 19:56:42 GMT

I will be attending the Microsoft "Hereos Happen {here}" 2008 launch event. I'll be spending some time at the "Ask The Experts" booth answering SharePoint Web Content Management questions.

If you are planning on attending, please stop by and say hello!

To Register:

http://www.microsoft.com/heroeshappenhere/events/Minneapolis/default.mspx

After the show, be sure to check back here, I'll be posting anything worth while I learn while there.

MOSS 2007 Web Content Management: Failures in Content Deployment

Jerry Sevier — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 19:54:32 GMT

One of the biggest gaps in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is the Site Deployment component. This component is, quite frankly, buggy and feature incomplete. It is not production ready and does not address most site deployment configurations seen in the real world.

To start off, Microsoft’s vision is very short-sited when it comes to how to develop and deploy SharePoint content. The idea that you will have a fully functional development, stage, and production environment is foreign to the current SharePoint vision. At a high level, you would develop your SharePoint components (i.e., WebParts) in a development environment, and port that application to your “stage” environment. Then, using Content Deployment, would push that environment to your production environment.

But what about Web Content Management? And, how does that affect this scenario.

In short… it affects it dramatically. First of all, in the Web Content Management (WCM) world, the idea of developing separated to your functional look and feel is pure fiction. In today’s day and age, it is vital that we see how content looks and perform unit testing on it before we look to begin integrating into other environments.

On one project I worked, the client was a long term user of Microsoft’s Content Management Server 2002. Using the upgrade wizard, the site content (all 2.5GB of it) was ported to MOSS 2007. Once on this platform, we quickly realized that we needed a workable solution to the “team development” environment situation. How does one create new content, mixed with SharePoint configuration settings, and integrated code without having to rebuild each on all developer workstations? With Microsoft’s recommended approach, you can see how this would quickly become a nightmare.

Our solution was simple, but led to a new complication we did not anticipate. We created a development SharePoint Farm. We had a SharePoint Development server and we basically took each development image and joined it to that Farm. Use Team Foundation Services (TFS) to manage code, and presto, we appeared to be in business.

After a surprisingly short period of time, we had our first site upgraded and ready to begin testing. Well, like any good programming shop, the next step was to move our work to the “Stage” environment so that we could point our testers at it and let them do their (evil) job of picking apart our failures.

Well, it became quickly apparent that the Content Deployment tool that is included in Central Admin was not really going to live up to what it promised. Over the period of 7 days, we attempted to do content deployment to our Stage environment to no avail. We tried full deployments, we tried incremental. We tried partial and complete content bases. We finally just settled on a backup / restore solution and decided to revisit this later.

As testing progressed, we eventually migrated a portion of our site to production under the new platform. Woo Hoo! Well, not exactly.

We wound up painting ourselves into a corner here. You see, once we went live with this content, our stage and development environments would never be synchronized to a level that we could simply backup and restore our environments to deploy. We needed a content deployment option, and we needed one fast.

Well, with no other option to think of, we opened a Premier Support ticket with MS. After a week of the usual ups and downs of recreating the problem, we got confirmation this was a valid issue from MS. The only problem was that the hotfix was schedule way past our drop dead launch date for new content deployment.

Well, we went down the path of writing our own content deployment application using the deployment API’s included with SharePoint. This got us about 90% of the way towards where we were going, but we still had some issues with key conflicts, etc. Using STSAdm.exe, we were able to bridge the last 10% and were on our way.

As a final note to this article, I have it on good authority that sometime this week, Microsoft will be releasing a hotfix to address the primary bug that we faced:

" Violation of PRIMARY KEY constraint 'PK__#ExportObjects____XXXXXX'. Cannot insert duplicate key in object 'dbo.#ExportObjects "

Once we have the details on that fix, I’ll post them here.

Also, for anyone interested, I hear rumors they are planning on revamping the entire Content Deployment piece scheduled tentatively for May of this year. I’ll keep you informed as I learn more myself.