Things that Should be Easy

Brad Smith on Compliance and Governance in a Regulated Industry at the London SharePoint Evolution Conference [video]

2013-04-18T14:59:00.001-04:00

Brad Smith, Black Blade's CEO and SharePoint MVP is delivering his multi-part session on Compliance and Governance in a Regulated Industry at the London SharePoint Evolution Conference. Read past the break for the session abstracts, and check out the video of Brad's previous governance session on the Black Blade Associates blog.

Part 1: Framing the Problem

Sometimes it is hard to see the forest through the trees. In this session Brad will start by the process involved when establishing the current pain points, practices and processes in place within a business that is trying to move forward in its goal for going from ungoverned to governed.

Part 2: Solving the Problem

In the second session Brad will address the issues discovered in part 1 and then discuss ways that the business can change its methods , design and processes in order to move to the compliant standards required. Establishing the required level of control is not always straight forward and this session will show you real world examples of how to turn the ungoverned to a governed and uncontrolled to a governed and compliant system in a regulated industry.

Presenting "SharePoint Lied: It Isn’t a Document Management System, It’s Really a File Management System," at SharePoint Saturday Boston, April 27

2013-04-01T01:23:00.001-04:00

I'll been selected to speak my mind at SharePoint Saturday, Boston, April 27. I'm presenting my new session:

SharePoint Lied: It Isn’t a Document Management System, It’s Really a File Management System

Do you feel that SharePoint document management is missing something? It is. It's missing documents. Sure, it manages files well enough, but are files and documents the same thing? This class focuses on the relationships and differences between files and documents, and the effects they have on SharePoint's document-management capabilities. We will look at what we should expect from a true document-management system, and examine some strategies for converting SharePoint from just a file-management system to a document-management system.

You will gain concrete insights into why their SharePoint implementations are not fulfilling their document-management needs, and what requirements you should consider when embarking on or enhancing a SharePoint document-management implementation. You will be able to express to upper management what you need from their document management system and why. Experience working with non-trivial documents, especially in scenarios where a team must contribute to the same document, is helpful.

LEVEL : Intermediate
AUDIENCE : Business Users
TOPIC AREAS : Architecture, Information Worker

BYOD Beware: Samsung working to patch flaw that allows total bypass of Galaxy lock screens [video]

2013-03-21T00:26:00.001-04:00

Looks like Samsung is getting really good at copying Apple’s phones; Samsung even copied some lock screen exploits. BGR reports that through a combination of dialing non-existing emergency numbers and some fast fingers, a hacker can completely disable the lock screen on a locked Samsung Galaxy phone. Check out the source link for a video demonstration and to read the full report.

Source: Boy Genius Report

BYOD Beware: Apple's latest iOS update contains another big security vulnerability [video]

2013-03-21T00:03:00.001-04:00

If you let your users bring their own devices, and store company data like email, you should know about Apple’s latest iOS security vulnerability. BGR reports that Apple’s latest iOS update 6.1.3 released on Tuesday contains a security bug that allows the passcode security on an iPhone to be bypassed, granting unauthorized access to the address book and photos stored on the device. Ironically the 6.1.3 update was released in part to fix a similar, pin-bypassing security issue. Check out the source link to see a video demonstration of the vulnerability and to read the full report.

Source: Boy Genius Report

I'll be speaking at SPTechCon!

2012-12-04T22:48:00.001-05:00

I've been selected to speak my mind at SPTechCon, in San Francisco, March 3-6. I'm creating new content and adding must-learn info on SharePoint 2013.

Here are my sessions:

SharePoint Lied: It Isn’t a Document Management System, It’s Really a File Management System

LEVEL : Intermediate
TOPIC AREAS : Architecture Essentials, Information Worker Essentials

Using SharePoint for Business Process Management

This class is intended to give non-technical and semi-technical business-process management (BPM) professionals an overview of how SharePoint can be used to facilitate BPM usage scenarios. This class will examine SharePoint's core capabilities and mechanisms for implementing SharePoint solutions. It will also include discussion on various aspects of process management—such as data capture and management, workflow, and system integration—along with demos of implementations. A basic knowledge of the tenets of business-process management is helpful.

LEVEL : Intermediate
TOPIC AREAS : Architecture Essentials, Information Worker Essentials, Project Managers

Using Service-Oriented Methodologies to Create SharePoint Applications

Do you need to create a complex application or product for SharePoint, or to integrate an existing application with SharePoint? Are you concerned about the long-term effort of maintaining the application codebase, or about migrating the application to SharePoint 2013? This class focuses on applying the methodologies and architectural concepts of Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to the task of creating complex SharePoint applications.

We will see how an SOA approach can help us achieve a stable and scalable application or product, decrease support and maintenance costs by decreasing the application's complexity, and reduce the effort required to upgrade the application to the next version of SharePoint. You will learn about the many challenges involved in creating complex SharePoint applications and how the principles behind SOA can be used to mitigate those challenges. Experience in creating SharePoint components using Visual Studio 2008 or 2010, or in designing distributed applications, is helpful.

LEVEL : Advanced
TOPIC AREAS : Developer Essentials

Oh, and did I mention that if you register by December 7, you can save $500?!

Slides posted - But it Works on My Box – Security for the SharePoint Developer, at SharePoint Saturday, NH

2012-09-26T11:27:00.001-04:00

Why is it so common for code that works on your development machine to fail in the test or production environments? More often than not, security is the answer.

The slides from my presentation, "But it Works on My Box – Security for the SharePoint Developer" at SharePoint Saturday, NH, September 22, are now available.

This presentation covered aspects of SharePoint security that developers need to be aware of in order to write production-ready code. Topics covered included:

SharePoint object security
Effects of different authentication modes on code
Full-trust vs. sandboxed solutions
New security model in SharePoint 2013

SharePoint Saturdays are free events where you can learn about all things SharePoint from top industry speakers, many of whom regularly speak at conferences costing thousands of dollars. If you missed this SharePoint Saturday event, check out other SharePoint Saturdays for your next chance to learn from SharePoint experts.

But it Works on My Box – Security for the SharePoint Developer, at SharePoint Saturday, NH

2012-08-29T15:05:00.001-04:00

Why is it so common for code that works on your development machine to fail in the test or production environments? More often than not, security is the answer.

Join me at SharePoint Saturday, NH, September 22, for my presentation, "But it Works on My Box – Security for the SharePoint Developer." The event is FREE, but you must register to reserve a spot.

This presentation covers aspects of SharePoint security that developers need to be aware of in order to write production-ready code. Topics covered include:

SharePoint object security
Effects of different authentication modes on code
Full-trust vs. sandboxed solutions
New security model in SharePoint 2013

When is Encryption Not Encryption? When it's on Your iPad?

2012-08-15T17:32:00.001-04:00

Isn't it wonderful being able to access your work documents anywhere from your iPad? Think they're safe? Maybe you need to think again. It turns out that the iOS encryption might not afford you quite as much protection as you think it does. This can be particularly painful for organization forming their bring your own device (BYOD) policies without all of the information about personal device security - remember, iOS, iPhone, and iPad were designed first and foremost for consumers, not businesses.

Mark Barrington of iPad Lawyer did a great post describing the false sense of security that iOS device encryption gives to iPad owner. Clearly, not all device encryption is created equally. Head over to the source link to read the full article.

Source: iPad Lawyer
Image credit: KyedTech.com

Windows 8 release to manufacturing! Download schedule and upgrade pricing announced!

2012-08-02T02:52:00.001-04:00

This is a huge milestone for Microsoft: Windows 8 has been released to manufacturing (RTM). This means that all the coding and testing are done, and Microsoft can start the process of getting shiny, new operating system in the hands of customers.

Microsoft has released a schedule of when people can start getting their hands on Windows 8, and has also released upgrade pricing. Read the details on the Windows Team Blog.

Office 2013 Public Beta ready for download!

2012-07-20T08:50:00.001-04:00

Microsoft released the public beta for Office 2013.

Download Office 2013 here:
http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en/whats-new

What's included in the preview?

The install is super fast, and will run on Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2008 R2, or Windows Server 2012. Also, don't miss the SharePoint 2013 downloads!

The SharePoint Newbie – Crashing SharePoint with Web Parts

2012-07-19T08:00:00.000-04:00

Does this sound familiar: Your SharePoint server is running fine, but then it starts slowing down so much that the only way you can get things going again is by restarting the server? Eventually you track things down to a page that seems to be causing the problem. And what's on the page? About 20 web parts, some of which are even third party content rollup web parts?

If you're new to SharePoint you may not know that every time you add a web part to a SharePoint page, you are increasing the processing load, memory utilization, and network bandwidth the page uses. Put too many web parts, or web parts that use lots of data onto a frequently accessed page, and you could bring down your SharePoint server.

Web Parts to be Mindful Of

Content Rollup or Aggregator Web Parts are notorious for crashing servers when used by untrained content managers. Why? Let me answer the question with this question: would you ever write this kind of query?

SELECT *
FROM [A Table with Millions of Rows]
'WHERE clauses are for the weak

Of course not. Even the most junior developer would know better than to query a huge amount of data from a very large database table. Developers get training, but users need a bit more protection. That's one reason SharePoint sets up boundaries for database queries by dividing items into lists, libraries, and sites.

But content rollup and aggregator web parts can bypass the protection that SharePoint normally affords to its users. If an untrained content manager adds a rollup web part to a page and doesn't properly set a scope for the data it returns, it's just like running that SQL query without a WHERE clause against your entire 200 GB SharePoint database.

Don't misunderstand, content rollup and aggregator web parts aren't any more evil than SQL. But these web parts need to be configured by trained content managers.

Where Can I Get SharePoint Training?

Please practice safe content management.

SharePoint 2013 Public Beta ready for download!

2012-07-16T18:28:00.001-04:00

Microsoft released the public beta for SharePoint 2013.

Download SharePoint 2013 Foundation here:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30345

Download SharePoint Server 2013 here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/evalcenter/hh973397.aspx?wt.mc_id=TEC_121_1_33

Here's a bunch of other SharePoint 2013 content
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/search.aspx?q=SharePoint%202013&p=1&r=40&t=32
…including:

Microsoft Office Web Apps Server Preview
SharePoint Designer 2013
Duet™ Enterprise for Microsoft SharePoint 2013 and SAP
Language packs
Architecture documents
Lab guides

Enjoy!

Hotmail Exchange ActiveSync update drops support for iOS, Android, Nokia, webOS, and others

2012-06-26T01:32:00.001-04:00

Please share this post to help others fix their Hotmail sync issues. Thanks!

Update: This is the official thread for this issue. If Hotmail has stopped syncing with your mobile device recently, click on the Me Too link and post a reply with your device information.

Update 2: Many people including myself have syncing restored after posting to the thread. If you have this issue, please post info about your device and email account to the thread so that Microsoft support can help you out.

A few years ago, wonderful thing happened: the Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) protocol that most mobile devices used to connect to Microsoft corporate email system, Microsoft Exchange, was adopted by Hotmail. All of a sudden, just about any mobile device or smartphone could synchronize not just email but also calendar events, contacts, and tasks with Hotmail. Then about a month ago, a very bad thing happened: Microsoft started breaking EAS for many mobile devices.

From the many (over 20) posts and hundreds of people on the Microsoft Answers forum, it looks like Microsoft is rolling out EAS updates to their Hotmail servers. The result of these updates is that many mobile devices are losing the ability to sync with Hotmail using EAS. This is not you average outage that may last for a few hours or days; this outage has lasted for over a month. Devices using these operating systems are reporting issues:

Apple OS 5.1.1
Android: 2.2, 2.3.4, 2.3.5, 2.3.6, 4.0.3
Meego PR1.2
WebOS: 1.4.5, 1.4.5.1, 2.1.1, 2.2.4, 3.0.5
Windows Mobile: 6.1, 6.5, 6.5 Pro
Windows Phone: 7

I've been a happy Hotmail user for many years, since way before I had a PDA much less a smartphone. I consider Hotmail to be one of the first cloud services with which I interacted. But after having first one then a second account stop working on my phone, I am really questioning how ready hosted cloud services are for prime-time. Sure lots of providers are rolling out services these days, but …

Can the service provider keep the service running over a long term? Anyone remember Windows Media marketplace? It's gone now. If you bought music from that marketplace and didn't backup your files when it closed, you're out of luck.
Can the provider keep your data and passwords safe? LinkedIn just lost millions of usernames and passwords. Sony lost millions last year.
Can the provider roll out new capabilities without breaking the service for existing users? Hotmail has done pretty well for years, but it is having a pretty big hiccup now.
What happens to my data if I cancel my service, or if I want to switch service providers?
If I subscribe to lots of cloud services will I need a separate username and password for each one? While some cloud services will let you login with an existing Twitter, Facebook, or other account, many services still make you create a new account.

It seems that the cloud services industry has a lot of maturing to do before people can have confidence in cloud computing's safety, reliability, and usability.

Image credit: The Hacker News

Does your SharePoint cloud or virtualization strategy sound like a Dilbert comic?

2012-05-30T15:27:00.001-04:00

You know you want SharePoint, but there are so many choices. How do you start? What do you need to know?

Original image credit: dilbert.com

Here are just a few of the choices you'll need to think about:

SharePoint Foundation, vs. SharePoint Standard vs. SharePoint Enterprise
- What's the difference?
- What do we need?
- How much will it cost?
Single server vs. farm deployment
- What if the server goes down?
- What is a SharePoint farm?
Deploy SharePoint to bare-metal or virtualize
- What if the hardware fails?
- How do we upgrade the hardware?
- Which virtual infrastructure should we use?
Central deployment vs. regional or branch office deployment
- Can everyone connect to the central deployment?
- Can we get rid of the VPN?
- Who's going to troubleshoot SharePoint in the branch offices if there's a problem?
On premises SharePoint vs. hosted SharePoint vs. SharePoint in the cloud
- Host with whom?
- Which cloud?
- Are people going to have to remember yet another username / password?

Unfortunately there is no "paint by numbers" or "silver bullet" solution. The important thing to remember is that the decision is about weighing the trade-offs. Each choice has its pros and cons, and what might be a pro to one organization might be a con for you.

The best advice I can give you is to start small. Rather than deploying to your entire organization, deploy to a department, or better yet to a small workgroup. Getting SharePoint in place doesn't have to cost a lot of money. This post shows how to set up SharePoint for 500 users for $1,100 with no monthly fees. SharePoint in the cloud can be a good way to go too, but there are many things that SharePoint cloud companies don't tell you, like it might be cheaper for you to host SharePoint internally. Want to speak fact-to-face to real people about SharePoint? Start by attending a local SharePoint users group. Our own Boston Area SharePoint User Group meets the second Wednesday of each month in Cambridge, MA. Attendance is FREE.

What SharePoint cloud hosters don't tell you

2012-05-11T19:56:00.001-04:00

Seeing how much hype there is about cloud computing / hosting / software as a service, I thought it would be good to share some of cloud computing’s dirty little secrets. Few people in the industry talk about these, and customers usually don’t find out until there's no going back.

Cost

Whether hosting SharePoint costs less than hosting it on premises greatly depends on how you measure cost. Hosting companies measure it in terms of setup costs (your initial investment) and the monthly plan cost (your marginal cost). But you need to measure "cost" in terms of cumulative cost from the day SharePoint is made available. Here's why…

Making use of hosted services provides a cost-effective way to deploy SharePoint to your organization. However, it’s like renting an apartment vs. buying a house: you don't need a down payment to rent, but you never stop paying rent. The service fee is a constant monthly expense that never goes away.

Need a second service? There’s another monthly fee. The problem of course is that you never actually get ROI with this model. It’s more like a reverse ROI. You start out ahead of the game, because you had few start up costs. But after a few months, you get further and further behind, because at some point you’ve paid as much in service fees as it would have cost to do the implementation in house. And you keep on paying. Indefinitely.

Want to see how the numbers play out? Check out my post on how you can host SharePoint cheaper than the cloud hosting providers and realize that cost savings in between 5 to 11 months.

Add-on Availability and Customizability

SharePoint is not just a product, SharePoint is a platform. That means that in order to maximize the value you get from SharePoint, you will probably want to customize and extend it with one or more add-ons. The problem is that only a fraction of the SharePoint add-ons will work on shared hosting environments like Microsoft's Office 365.

The reason that so few add-ons work with Cloud-based SharePoint offerings is that most of the cloud providers use a multi-tenant SharePoint hosting model to keep costs down and increase profits. To extend the apartment rental analogy, in this model multiple renters are sharing the same building (the SharePoint farm). And just like when you rent an apartment, there are lots of restrictions on how much customizations you can apply to your space. These restrictions limit not only which add-ons you can install into your SharePoint cloud but also on what types of customizations you can implement.

You can get hosting plans that offer more support for 3rd party add-ons and customizations, but you will need to use the more expensive dedicated or virtual private hosting options. You may also have to assume a higher management burden with these hosting options thereby further increasing your costs and negating some of the benefits of cloud-based SharePoint hosting.

WAN vs. LAN bandwidth

How much bandwidth do most organizations have on their LANs? Most have 1,000 Mbps. Some even have 10,000 Mbps. How much bandwidth do these organizations have on their WANs? Usually less than 50 Mbps. That means that most organizations have roughly 20 times (2,000%) and 200 times (20,000%) the bandwidth on the LANs as on their WANs.

Cloud computing uses WAN bandwidth like it’s going out of style. That’s important since your users access your hosted SharePoint through the WAN. Working with SharePoint in the cloud is not like accessing other web-based cloud services. With SharePoint, users are not just browsing pages, they will regularly open and save large documents anywhere from 1 MB to 30 MB in size. Users may perceive a well-implemented SharePoint cloud service as being much slower and unresponsive as compared to even a mediocrely implemented in-house SharePoint simply due to WAN network limitations. SharePoint in the cloud is not slower; the problem lies with the users’ perceptions caused by their limited bandwidth in accessing SharePoint in the cloud.

WAN vs. LAN reliability

How often does your LAN go down? How often does your WAN go down? Imagine losing access to all of your organization’s documents in the event of an Internet connection loss? Even worse, how long does it take for the Internet connection to come back up? An hour? A day? Having a highly available SharePoint environment in the cloud does no good when your Internet connection goes down.

Switching Providers

How easy is it to migrate data from one SharePoint farm to another? Not too bad you say, you just need the right tools. Ok, now what about if you only had a 50 Mbps network connection to the source and target farms? Well, it can still be done, you say. It will just take a lot longer to do the data assessment and to actually move over the data. Verifying will also take a long time, but that's what nights and weekends are for.Ok, now what if you didn't have administrative access to either the source or target SharePoint farms, so you can't install those critical migration tools? That could definitely be a problem. How do you move your SharePoint data if you can't install the migration tools?

And that's just the start. What about migrating over the user accounts? How about the permissions and version information? What about workflows? The reality is that once you pick a SharePoint hosting provider you should be prepared to stick with that provider for at least 3-5 years. That is a really long commitment, especially in the IT industry where things change so quickly.

Single Sign-on

Single sign-on (SSO) is the concept that a user has to enter his or her credentials into one system, and that the credentials would get propagated into all other systems that the user needs to access. For example, a user would login to his or her desktop computer and would be able to access the organization’s email and portal systems without additional logins. For most organizations running Microsoft software in-house, this is a daily reality because all of the organizations systems including SharePoint are running off of the same user directory service, the organization’s Active Directory. But what happens when the organization makes use of SharePoint in the cloud? That service has its own usernames and passwords. Users now have an additional login for the hosted service. Web browsers can help by caching user credentials on their desktops, but there are other desktop applications that don’t do as good a job with that. The issue multiplies as the organization adds additional services, each service requiring its own username and password.

Some SharePoint hosting providers like Microsoft Office 365 are now starting to make desktop tools available to ease users' single sign-on woes. If you are shopping around for SharePoint cloud providers, ask what their single sign-on solution is, how it is deployed and managed, what infrastructure it needs to support it, and what additional fees you will incur to use it.

SharePoint 2010 also supports a more standards-based single sign-on capability called Claims Based Authentication. Claims is designed to allow users to access multiple systems from different organizations with a single username / password, but Claims can be very challenging to set up as it does require you to have some infrastructure and configuration on your end.

Systems Integration

Does this sound familiar:

User: "Will I be able to keep all of my data in SharePoint?"

IT: "Sure….except we have this one system that…."

The fact is that most organizations have at least some data that is not in SharePoint and should not go into SharePoint. That's ok. SharePoint has lots of great tools and APIs that allow users to access data that SharePoint does not manage from external systems.

When SharePoint and the external systems are all on your internal network, and you have the ability to develop or deploy the appropriate connectors, integrating the systems is doable. But when SharePoint is in the cloud (on the Internet) and you your have more restrictions into the types of components you can deploy to SharePoint, things become complex (and potentially expensive) very quickly. Very simple things that used to be easy all of a sudden become hard.

For example, let's say that you have a network file share with 5 TB of files that you would like to be searchable through SharePoint search, but you don't want to upload the files into SharePoint (a very common requirement I might add). This is very easy to do when SharePoint and the network file share are on your internal network but becomes much, much harder when SharePoint is in the cloud.

I don't want to imply that there is no way to deal with systems integration scenarios when one or more systems are hosted in the cloud. There are certainly approaches that can work. But these approaches are very different from what works when all of the systems are inside of your network.

Conclusion

Does this mean that hosting in the cloud is bad? No, not all. There are many potential benefits to subscribing to SharePoint in the cloud. But you do need to keep in mind that when you change your system's topology (on premises vs. in the cloud) you will have trade offs. You need to be aware both of what you are getting and what you are giving up when you extend your systems into the cloud.

Who has the cheapest SharePoint 2010 hosting? Maybe you do.

2012-05-10T13:18:00.001-04:00

I get asked this question a lot, "Who has the cheapest SharePoint 2010 hosting?" Simply put, it depends on how many users you have. The "users" are the people who will access SharePoint. These will include your employees, sub contractors, partners, vendors, and anyone else who needs to view or upload data to your SharePoint system.

So how does the number of users affect who has the cheapest hosting? Let's see…

User Count	Monthly cost assuming basic $4 / user hosting plan	Monthly cost assuming bulk hosting plan (up to 500 users)
5	$20	$250
10	$40	$250
25	$100	$250
50	$200	$250
63	$252	$250
500	$2,000	$250

Clearly we can see from the above example, that when you have fewer than 63 users, you are much better off going with a per-user pricing plan. But if you have more than 63 users, it makes sense to look at a bulk plan.

Now, how can we get our SharePoint even cheaper? It comes down to how we measure "cheap." Hosting companies measure it in terms of setup costs (your initial investment) and the monthly plan cost (your marginal cost). But we are going to measure "cheaper" in terms of cumulative cost from the day SharePoint is made available.

Let's see how long it takes us to rack up $1,100 in total cumulative costs. Why $1,100 you ask? Because I show in this post how you can easily install your own SharePoint system that will support 500 users for $1,100 and no monthly fees.

User Count	Monthly cost assuming lowest cost hosting plan	Number of moths to reach $1,100 in cumulative costs
5	$20	55 months
10	$40	28 months
25	$100	11 months
50	$200	6 months
63	$250	5 months
500	$250	5 months

We can see that from a cost point, if you have under 10 users, you're best option is to use a per-user SharePoint hosting plan. But, if you have 25 users, you are better off installing SharePoint in-house, because that will save you money compared to hosting in 11 months. That's a measurable return on your investment to host SharePoint on premises. If you have at least 50 users, you'll see a return on your investment in less than 6 months by hosting SharePoint internally.

Who has the cheapest SharePoint 2010 hosting? Depending on how many users you have, you may have the cheapest hosting.

Does this mean that an organization of any size is always better off hosting internally? No. There are lots of factors that go into deciding whether to host internally or outsource hosting. But you should also be aware that when you outsource your hosting, you will encounter other issues that you do not currently have with your internally hosted system.

Join me at SharePoint Saturday, NYC for Creating SharePoint Custom Field Types with Visual Studio

2012-05-09T09:00:00.000-04:00

I am excited to be presenting a session on Creating SharePoint Custom Field Types with Visual Studio at SharePoint Saturday New York, July 28, 2012.

SharePoint has many customization options for the user interface and for the data model. SharePoint custom field types are unique in that they provide an integrated mechanism for customizing SharePoint user interface, data storage, data entry, data validation, and rendering. Best of all, these customizations stay with your data anywhere a List View Web Part or List View Form Page is used.

Here are the topics I will cover in the presentation:

Custom Field Types Defined
Learn what custom field types are and how they work.
Business Cases
Implementing custom field types is not trivial. What business reasons justify the effort?
Custom Field Types and Alternate SharePoint Extensibility
How do custom field types compare to other forms of SharePoint extensibility like web parts and event receivers? What are the pros and cons using each extensibility option?
Custom Field Types Implementation
What does it take to create a new custom field type? We will see all the components we need, including the CAML XML, the C# code, and the WSP.DDF file used for packaging and deployment.
Demo: Code walkthrough and demo of a media player custom field type
There’s nothing more exciting to users that seeing video on their portal site. We’ll create a custom field type that will let you turn your SharePoint site into a mini YouTube, well, almost :).

SharePoint Saturday New York is at the Microsoft Manhattan office at

1290 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY
July 28, 2012

See you there.

Boston Area SharePoint Users Group May 9, 2012 Meeting

2012-05-08T16:56:00.001-04:00

REGISTER
Register for the next meeting. It's FREE, but space is limited.

PRESENTER
The presenter for our next meeting is Donal Conlon, of Jornata. He will be presenting "Implementing Forms Based Authentication."

SESSION ABSTRACT
There are many reasons to not use Forms Based Authentication and many reasons to use it. This session talks about the do’s and don’ts of FBA, planning for authentication, what your options are and goes through a live demo of configuring it successfully.

ABOUT DONAL
Donal Conlon is a principal consultant at Jornata LLC, a Boston-based SharePoint consulting firm. He has over 16 years experience designing and developing solutions using Microsoft technologies. Donal has been working with SharePoint for over 9 years and is a contributing author of Essential SharePoint 2010.

ABOUT BOSTON AREA SHAREPOINT USERS GROUP
The Boston Area SharePoint Users Group (BASPUG) was founded to bring together like minds to network and share their experiences, triumphs, and tribulations around Microsoft SharePoint, to provide a community platform for Boston area SharePoint users, administrators, developers, architects, of all experience levels, even brand new to SharePoint, to share their knowledge with the community.

We meet on the 2nd Wednesday of every month at either the Microsoft New England Research and Development Center in Cambridge, MA, or at the Microsoft office in Waltham on Jones Road.

MEETING SPONSOR - K2
Process-driven applications — fast.

K2® offers three software products to help you increase business efficiency and simplify work. K2's visual tools allow people of various technical and non-technical backgrounds to create applications that automate processes and streamline operations. And when something in the business changes, modifying the applications to keep up is easy.

K2 applications can be set up to manage simple business processes — such as document approval or inventory tracking — and they can be set up to pull together processes, people, services, information and systems into a single application that helps drive business. Then, what's been built can be used like building blocks to assemble new applications.

Because K2 tools are built on Microsoft technology and because K2 users actually complete work in the Microsoft programs they already know — like SharePoint and Visual Studio — little training is required and user buy-in is quick. In fact, K2 provides more Microsoft integration points than any other software product in the space.

We have a range of products to meet the needs of organizations with unique business challenges, technical resources and budgets; because, in software, one size does not fit all.

www.k2.com

SUSTENANCE
Food and beverages will be provided at the event.

RAFFLE PRIZES
We will be handing out raffle tickets at the BASPUG meetings.

Black Blade Associates will be raffling of a license, valued at $2000, for their SharePoint Zip product.
Lightning Tools will be raffling off a license for one of their products - the winner may choose!
CubisOne will be raffling off a license for their SharePoint Power Pack iChat product, valued at $1000.
We will also have books, T-Shirts, and more!

LOCATION
We will be meeting at the Microsoft Waltham office, located at 201 Jones Road 6th Floor, Waltham, MA, US.

LINKEDIN
Join our group on LinkedIn today to connect with the rest of the BASPUG members and spread the word!

FACEBOOK
We are also on Facebook! http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Boston-Area-SharePoint-User-Group/113652405354617

TWITTER
Follow news about the Boston Area SharePoint Users Group on twitter by following us @BASPUG, and by using the hashtag #BASPUG.

WEB
Visit the Boston Area SharePoint Users Group website at http://www.bostonsharepointug.org

ORGANIZERS
Event meetings are organized by Geoff Varosky of Jornata, Eugene Rosenfeld of Black Blade Associates, Talbott Crowell of Third Millennium, and Dan Diachenko of Baufest.

Slides Posted - Advanced SharePoint Document Management with Multi-file Documents, SharePoint Saturday, Boston

2012-04-29T23:13:00.001-04:00

Update: Check out my post on why we would want to consider multi-file document management for SharePoint. The post shows how SharePoint's single-file document management approach greatly limits your its capabilities in terms of version history, workflow, security, and other areas. View the post here:

http://thingsthatshouldbeeasy.blogspot.com/2010/08/how-good-is-sharepoint-as-document.html

It was great speaking at SharePoint Saturday Boston. My presentation on Advanced SharePoint Document Management with Multi-file Documents is now available.

Session abstract:

Do you feel that you're getting the most out of your SharePoint document management investments? Are you using SharePoint as a web-based document store but are struggling to do more and not sure how?
This session focuses on implementing advanced SharePoint document management systems with virtual and compound documents. We will look at why we would want to consider multi-file documents as part of our SharePoint document management system and some characteristics of a good implementation. We will also investigate some usage scenarios that are made possible or practical through multi-file documents. The session is best suited to content managers and information architects.
Attendees will gain concrete insights into why their SharePoint implementations are not fulfilling their document management needs, and what can be done about it. Attendees will see how to transform SharePoint into a modern document management platform, rather than just using it as a web-based network file share.

Save 25% on SharePoint Best Practices Conference Registration

2012-04-18T17:45:00.001-04:00

Get 25% off of the registration fee for the SharePoint Best Practices Conference, in May 2013! How? Just take this survey. You will get instructions on redeeming the offer upon survey completion. The SharePoint Best Practices Conference focuses not just on what you can do with SharePoint, but on what you should do. If you want practical advice on choosing amongst the many approaches to implementing SharePoint, this is the conference for you. Check out past sessions to get a glimpse of what you can expect this year.

How to: Get Started Making Awesome Web Pages

2012-04-12T09:00:00.000-04:00

So you want to try your hand at making web pages that actually look good, feel snazzy, and are a pleasure for people to use, but you’re not a web developer, or even a web designer? How do you get started?

This is meant to be a quick, short post to help someone new to web page creation get started. I would suggest learning some HTML, CSS, and some JavaScript (different from Java) with jQuery. That will allow you to create really nice web pages and sites very quickly. HTML5 is the next step in the evolution of HTML specification, however most people also group together lots of related technologies like CSS3 when they think of HTML5.

Here’s how things fit together:

HTML – Used to create the structure and content of a web page
CSS – Provides style, color, and often some element positioning on web pages
JavaScript – Used to create web pages that respond to events, like button clicks, mouse movement, etc.
JQuery – A library built on top of JavaScript that greatly simplifies the use of JavaScript

Check out a few resources to get started:

http://www.w3schools.com – nice site with lots of reference material on HTML, JavaScript, and CSS
http://jquery.com – jQuery site with documentation, downloads, and most importantly plugins. The availability of very nice and free jQuery plugins is what makes it so valuable to learn.
http://www.csszengarden.com – site that shows examples of just how different a web page can look purely by changing the CSS

The really great thing about learning these basic skills is that you can easily apply them to creating web pages in other, more powerful frameworks like ASP.Net, SharePoint, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and many others.

Ready to try your hand? Start with an existing template rather from a blank slate to make learning easier. Check out the free templates on DreamTemplate. You can start developing your skills with these. Happy webbing :-)

Call to Action - "What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?" by Regina Dugan, then director of DARPA

2012-04-03T08:30:00.000-04:00

What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?

Regina Dugan, then director of DARPA (now with Google) did an amazing TED presentation with the theme, “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?”. For those who don’t know, DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA’s mission is to prevent technological surprise to the US, and also to create technological surprise for its enemies. DARPA pioneered world-changing innovations like the Internet and GPS, and is working one new ones like self-driving vehicles, advanced prosthetic arms to help amputees, and exoskeletons to help the disabled and elderly walk again.

Regina’s main message in her presentation was to urge everyone to discard their fears of failure and attempt the impossible. Failure is part of the road that leads to world-changing innovation.

Unfortunately the comments are inundated with people who are either ignorant of DARPA's immense contributions to the world or down-play those contributions because of DARPA's military associations. Ironically this comment by David E. on the presentation is a perfect example of the ignorance, fear, and complacency that Regina’s presentation urges people to overcome in order for humanity to continue to accomplish the amazing.

The call to action – this is the important part…

In today’s world, ignorance is simply intolerable. Show your support for discussion based on reality and informed opinion rather than fear and ignorance by adding comments to Regina’s TED presentation that set the record straight or by simply "voting up" other comments that do so. And please spread the word.

The debate

Here's an example of the type of comment that needs to be called out for its lack of any supporting evidence and simple contradiction of reality...

Update: It's working! All of David E.'s comments on the discussion have been deleted! Keep up the good work.

David E….
What would I do if I knew I could not fail?
I would shutdown DARPA and redirect their entire budget into public schools and healthcare. While at it make the "nerds" who think it's cool (or a good career move) to create bomb delivery systems, go live on the ground in the places America has subjected to "shock and awe" campaigns.

My rebuttal…
"I would shutdown DARPA and redirect their entire budget into public schools and healthcare." I guess you haven't heard that DARPA has created a prosthetic arm that will help millions of amputees and exoskeleton legs that will help both paralyzed and elderly people walk again. Or you may not know that many children, especially poor children and children in developing nations are now able to use the Internet that DARPA pioneered to gain access to vast amounts of learning material that had been previously unreachable.

David E….
People like Regina Dugan are dangerous because they rationalize what they're doing as "for the greater good" all the while creating weapons that shouldn't exist and that no one should be allowed to deploy on this all-too-small planet. She takes a question that has a potentially a very positive implication, and weaves it into a case for creating mass destruction. People are very good at separating themselves from the consequences of their actions.

And then when challenged retreats behind the lame "we just invent the stuff" excuse. This same rationale was used by the Nazi's who built the death camps. "We were just doing our jobs." These people need to take a long hard look in the mirror.

My rebuttal…
"People are very good at separating themselves from the consequences of their actions," or the implied statement that you should not invent things that will be used to ill. That is the oldest, most tired excuse used to justify inaction and stagnation. How can we know today how the new technology we create will be used in the coming decades? Could the inventors of the Internet have known it would be used as both a major commerce platform as well as a major piracy platform? Did the inventors of GPS know it would be used to as a way to guide missiles as well to guide regular cars or save lives by dispatching the closest ambulance to a medical emergency? What about the autonomous cars DARPA is developing? How many millions of blind, elderly, and disabled people will regain their freedom my taking back control of their own transportation?

David E….
Regina Dugan's words remind me of Donald Rumsfeld when he talked about "surgical bombing" in Iraq. (As if there's anything precise about that kind of payload.) But this is how people think... those who sit safely behind a computer screen while nameless people somewhere else are being killed, incinerated, blown up with high-tech weapons created through the help of same said computer screens. "If we only build bombs to look like hummingbirds then we can get even more surgical." Madness.
When are people going to wake up to the fact that what happens "there" always makes it back to "here?" That what we fail to learn from "then" will come back to "now" and thus shape the future. The same one we all must live in.
True freedom doesn't require weapons of war. We will come to understand this or we will all perish. Do we kill those we disagree with, come to see as a threat, or do we ask them what it is they too want from their precious life?

My rebuttal…
None needed. The last two paragraphs of David’s comment are more of a rant, and are so far outside of the topic of Regina’s presentation that he may as well be debating the benefits of thin vs. thick crust pizza.

My closing remarks…

The type of person I consider to be "dangerous" is the person who will embrace his own fear and ignorance to keep humanity from making the attempt to evolve and improve itself. It is each person's responsibility to choose how he or she will use things, for good or for ill. You can either use water to save a person wandering in the desert or drown him. There is risk in everything we do. The only thing that is absolutely certain is that nothing will improve without action and innovation.

How To: Install DoD Root Certificates on Windows / Cannot Access DCO

2012-04-02T09:00:00.000-04:00

If you try to access DCO and are getting a “...problem with this website” error, it means that the DoD certificates have not been installed correctly.

Internet Explorer will not prompt you to download the certificates. You will need to download them from this site before attempting to access DCO:
http://dodpki.c3pki.chamb.disa.mil/rootca.html

You must browse the site using IE or the site will not let you download the certificate files. The instructions on the site are cumbersome. These are a bit easier to follow:

Navigate to http://dodpki.c3pki.chamb.disa.mil/rootca.html and download the 3 root CA certificate files:
Once you download them, you will have 3 files:
Right click on each file, and select Install Certificate (do not select Open):
This starts the certificate installation wizard:
Make sure to select the option to Place all certificates in the following store, then browse to the Trusted Root Certification Authorities
You’ll see a confirmation, then click Finish:
You will then get prompted for each certificate in each p7b file. The first two just have a few certificates each, but the rel3_dodroot_2048.p7b file has over 40. That means over 40 prompts. Notice that the certificate name is different in the two following screen shots:
Finally, for each p7b file, you will get a confirmation message saying the import was successful:

At this point, you should close all browser windows. Then open a new IE window and attempt to connect to DCO.

Join me at SharePoint Saturday, Boston – April 28, 2012, for “Advanced SharePoint Document Management with Multi-file Documents”

2012-03-26T09:30:00.000-04:00

I am presenting my “Advanced SharePoint Document Management with Multi-file Documents” session on SharePoint Saturday, Boston, April 28, 2012. Registration is FREE, but register early to reserve your spot.

This session focuses on implementing advanced SharePoint document management systems with virtual and compound documents. We will look at why we would want to consider multi-file documents as part of our SharePoint document management system and investigate some usage scenarios that are made possible or practical through multi-file documents. We will round out the session with a deep dive into some characteristics of a good multi-file document management implementation and see how they impacted Black Blade’s own document management implementation. The session is best suited to content managers and information architects.

Tell your friends, and register while there is still space available. Check out a preview of the presentation, with animations.

Compare Office Web Apps to Google Docs, a Criticism

2012-03-19T18:42:00.001-04:00

A few days ago I wrote a post comparing Office Web Apps to Google Docs. I received a some good criticism from an anonymous commentator that I feel merits its own post. In part of the post I compared the rendering of a sample Word document in both Office Web Apps and Google Docs. Here is the criticism:

Come on, Eugene. You cannot say "Office Web Apps are better" if you only compare one product: the word processor and only show us the rendering of two pages.

I'm not saying your conclusion is wrong for the Word comparison, but to say which product is better you will need to dig a bit deeper and compare Excel and PowerPoint as well. Also you only compared the layout of the rendered pages, yet you say "much better viewing and editing experience" whereas you only tell us about the viewing experience. Why don't you compare all features e.g. In Google Docs you can indent text like so... and in Office Web Apps like so.

On the surface the criticism seems to have some merit. But as I have stated previously, I don't believe that a feature-by-feature comparison is a valid way of comparing products like authoring software. The important thing to compare is the quality of the respective products' outputs, which is what I did. I used the output from the Word app as a representative comparison, but you could do the same for Excel and PowerPoint as well. This article did a more exhaustive comparison and determined that if "Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are a regular part of your online life, Office Web Apps has it all over Google." If I create a proposal or resume, the reader is not interested in what features my authoring software has, only in how the final output looks. Don't take my word. The file used for the comparison is available here. Try it yourself.

Aside from the output quality, I wanted to call out the privacy concerns and the cloud service provider’s information handling policies. These criteria are often overlooked when organizations evaluate cloud services providers. Given recent headlines about Google’s privacy policies, it’s a very valid concern. Of course the best way to mitigate the concerns of the provider's data policies is to have the option to keep your data on your network storage with in-house hosted software, something that only Microsoft offers.

But if you really want a feature-by-feature comparison, check out this post that concluded, "with the possible exception of cost, it seems that Microsoft has an edge in almost every category of comparison."