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Missed the SharePoint Conference? Check out “Best of SharePoint” (2010) – Coming to Houston Nov 12th

2009-11-09T09:51:00.001-06:00

Following the excitement of Microsoft’s SharePoint Conference 2009, Catapult Systems is bringing this exclusive information back to you! Be the first to learn about improvements made to the platform and how they can add value to your organization. Catapult Systems and Microsoft invite you to join our solution experts for this free, one-day, all-access Best Of SharePoint event that will showcase composites of the very best sessions on Microsoft’s market-leading SharePoint products and technologies.

Nov, 10 - Best of SharePoint – Dallas
LIVE -- Microsoft Dallas Office

Nov, 12 - Best of SharePoint – Houston
LIVE -- Microsoft Houston Office

Nov, 19 - Best of SharePoint – Denver
LIVE -- Loews Hotel

Announcing SharePoint Tech Dives, coming to Houston Texas on November 11th, 2009.

2009-11-02T20:57:00.001-06:00

A little bit about SharePoint Tech Dives (http://www.sptechdives.com): Each meeting is an open forum for discussion and learning around specific topics chosen by the community. Technology experts provide structure and guidance around each of the topics selected, while attendees are encouraged to ask questions as well as share their views, experiences, and opinions. At the end of each meeting attendees will help determine the topic for the following meeting.

Next Event - Wednesday, November 11th from 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm.
Developing SharePoint Features, Feature Receivers, and Feature Staplers

During this session we will discuss best practices and provide guidance around SharePoint Feature development, Feature Receivers, and Feature Staplers. The session will include a hands on lab with step by step instructions on how to create a simple Feature with a Feature Receiver and Stapler. We will also demo how to create a similar Feature for SharePoint 2010, using the upcoming version of Visual Studio. Space is limited, so be sure to reserve your seat. We look forward to seeing you there.

The Evolution of the SharePoint Professional

2009-11-02T20:05:00.001-06:00

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how SharePoint 2010 is reshaping the future and the impact it will have on those of us who’ve been implementing and developing for SharePoint over the last several years. I look forward to dedicating a bit more time to this subject in a future post. The following is just a brief abstract of my thoughts regarding one of the areas that I feel will be affected the most, our roles.

MS has been making a lot of distinct references between what they call IT Pros (I’m not sure I agree with this term) and Developers in most of their SharePoint 2010 sites, presentations, and documentation. We’ve experienced the logical evolution of these 2 roles for several years, but for many of us, the line has remained somewhat gray. I suspect this to drastically change in the near future, and most who haven’t chosen to specialize in a specific track really need to start thinking about choosing a side, or risk getting overshadowed by experts coming from either direction. Of course regardless of what track you choose, you should dedicate time to learn at least the fundamentals of the other.

I suspect SharePoint will continue evolving to become the de facto web operating platform for companies and corporations world wide. If you think of the role Windows plays for each of the users in your company, and then think of your users as a collective; it shouldn't be too difficult to visualize SharePoint as your companies OS on the web. Now consider the teams and roles that take part in managing, developing, and supporting Windows, along with all of the applications it runs in your company or corporation. How many all around experts are there. The division is not just technical in nature, there are several business aspects to it as well…ever heard the term "Segregation of Duties". Suddenly "IT Pros" and "Developers" may not even seem like enough roles.

Takes on SPC 2009 and Top 10 on SharePoint 2010

2009-10-29T13:27:00.001-05:00

Its been just about week since the end of SPC 2009, and it doesn’t feel like enough time has gone by to digest all of the information that was given to us in the conference. So before my memory starts failing me, and the information becomes outdated; here are my takes on the conference and the top 10 things I look the most forward to on SharePoint 2010.

Highlights from the conference

For me, it was primarily about the sessions and learning more about how the new features in SharePoint come together. I’ve had access to SharePoint 2010 for some time, but the platform is just too broad to effectively explore on your own; you can learn a lot about certain features, but until you hear other peoples takes and Microsoft’s general direction, it can be hard to see the big picture; and it truly is a great picture!

Overall, the conference met and exceeded all of my expectations. Not only did I find the information and direction I sought after, but I shared with good friends, met some fantastic people, and it was all served in a silver platter…. Well, minus the last lunch, which was actually served in a cardboard box (a little bit of a let down.)

Things to look forward to in SharePoint 2010

Plenty of people have been blogging about this for several days now, so I wont go in to deep. The following are my favorite new features and improvements (in no particular order, I tried but was having to much of a tough time deciding how to sort them):

Windows 7 support: SharePoint 2010 can run on the 64 bit editions of Windows 7 (and Vista). We no longer need Virtual Machines to develop for SharePoint. This should significantly increase developer adoption, giving us a larger pool of SharePoint resources. There isn’t much information from Microsoft online yet, but it is listed as one of the supported OS’s in the MSDN article Setting Up the Development Environment for SharePoint Server and demoed in one of the vides at http://SharePoint2010.microsoft.com
Business Connectivity Services, External Content Types, and External Lists: The evolution of the Business Data Catalog; much easier to develop on, includes native Visual Studio 2010 support, CRUD capabilities (Create, Read, Update, Delete), display and interact with data as if in standard SharePoint lists. Check out the SharePoint 2010 SDK section on Business Connectivity Services for more information.
Client OM (.NET Managed, Silverlight, ECMA Script): Exposes a very large subset of the SharePoint object model for remote access and execution. We can easily write applications that interact with SharePoint data (both read and write) from remote clients using any number of technologies such as: JavaScript (AJAX), Silverlight, WPF, etc. Check out the SharePoint 2010 SDK section on the Managed Client Object Model for more information.
Sandboxed Solutions: Many SharePoint developers wont agree, but I feel is another great step in the right direction. This feature allows Farm Admins (IT Pros) to designate “sandboxes” in the SharePoint farm where developers can deploy web parts without administrative intervention, while giving the Admins the ability to monitor and restrict certain levels of resource consumption such as:
- Memory consumption
- Database query time
- Abnormal termination
- Critical exceptions
- Unhandled exceptions
- Data marshaling size
  
  More info on Sandboxed solutions at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee536577(office.14).aspx
Much Improved Large List Support: During the sessions multiple people demoed lists with hundreds of thousands, even millions of items. All of which displayed, filtered, and sorted information at very impressive speeds, or as my daughter would say: in lickity split.
Relational Lists with Cascading Deletes: Pretty self explanatory, and the cascading the deletes are configurable (they don’t have to be enforced.)
Developer Dashboard: This feature gives us performance metrics about the components running on a page. Helping developers identify and troubleshoot poorly running web parts. More information at: http://www.spfoxhole.com/Blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=131
Visual Upgrade: This feature facilitates the upgrade process by allowing us to maintain the 2007 look and feel (including the site admin pages), giving us more time to prepare our users for the transition.
Service Applications: These replace Shared Service Providers (SSPs), except that they are more flexible, more scalable, and we can build our own. Consider a scenario where you have a single web application from where you want to serve information from a BDC (Business Data Catalog) configured in one Shared Service Provider, but your search results need to come from another. SharePoint 2007 only allows us to associate one SSP per web application. Service Applications, help us overcome that barrier. Harbar has written a great introduction at: SharePoint 2010: Service Applications Part One: Model Overview
Developer Tools: Dramatically improved Visual Studio Support, out of the box SharePoint Projects Templates/Solutions (no more STSDEV or keeping up with the latest Visual Studio Extensions.) Integrated support for Team Foundation Server with team build capabilities. F5 debugging, and a slew of other features. Steve Fox writes a good intro at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee309510.aspx or take a look at the video at http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com/product/Benefits/IT-Developers/Pages/Top-Features.aspx

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Setting up a SharePoint 2010 Development Environment

2009-10-27T21:19:00.001-05:00

I came across the following MSDN article while browsing through the MSDN SharePoint 2010 documentation. It provides step by step instructions on setting up a SharePoint 2010 dev environment. Definitely cool content, check it out: Setting Up the Development Environment for SharePoint Server (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554869(office.14).aspx)

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Upgrading 2007 WCM sites to 2010 WCM – SPC 2009 Session Highlights

2009-10-22T16:13:00.001-05:00

I have to say that the 2007 to 2010 upgrade path for WCM sites looks very promising. During this session Andrew Connell demoed upgrading a site with fairly complex branding. He did so by using PowerShell to mount a copy of a SharePoint 2007 content database (the 2010 PowerShell equivalent of the stsadm addcontentdb command). The upgrade went through without a single hick-up... I don’t know that we’ll all be so lucky; although I am feeling pretty good about it.

Everything came across with the 2007 look and feel; I’ve already mentioned this capability in a number of previous posts; what may not have been so clear is that even the site admin pages look like they did in 2007… Almost feels like you are running 2007 and 2010 side by side; which BTW will not be supported; but if this works as smoothly as it did in the demo… who really cares (OK, maybe I’m being to optimistic)

Next comes the Visual Upgrade, this is the part that can get tricky as it changes the master pages which is where your most of your branding likely resides. Performing the Visual Upgrade is easy enough; there is a link in the site settings page. After the Visual Upgrade, some pages may break, most likely because of references on the page layout to Placeholder Controls that are not included in the 2010 master pages. However, you can easily change the master page back to the one you where using in your 2007 site, which still shows up in the list of available master pages. Now your content should look as it did in 2007 and your system pages should include all the goodness of 2010.

But the old master page doesn’t have a ribbon or a developer dashboard. Where is all the 2010 goodness for my users and developers? There will probably be more than one approach to do this, but the following steps should more or less help you get these on the page.

Master Pages

Create a new blank master page in SharePoint Designer
Copy the code from the 2007 master page over
Remove the Site Actions Menu
Remove Console (Page Editing Toolbar)
Add a ScriptLink to include certain JavaScript files used by the ribbon… (I cant tell you exactly what they are yet) but I know you can copy them from the v4 master page
Copy the v4 ribbon DIV into new master page from default 2010 master page
The ribbon has a couple of other dependencies(declarations) that you’ll need to copy of over.
- These should be easy to identify from the error messages. Look for and copy them over from the 2010 master page.
Copy the dev dashboard tags from the v4 master page

If you need to add new metadata properties to the pages, it “should be” as simple as opening the page layout in SharePoint Designer and dragging and dropping the field controls on the page. There still appear to be a couple of quirks with this process, at least there was with the demo, but I’m confident they will be worked out soon enough.

He also talked about, and demoed, some improvements to the Content Query Web Part which again look fantastic. Most notable, we no longer need to specify CommonViewFields and the Web Part Editor Tool Pane displays an enumeration of the available fields in the template.

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Business Connectivity Services Runtime and Object Model Deep Dive – SPC 2009 Session Highlights

2009-10-21T14:40:00.001-05:00

Let me start by saying that I don’t think the label “deep dive” was necessarily correct for this session. However, I don’t believe that to be a bad thing and it probably has a lot to do with how much this whole process was simplified by MS… seriously, fantastic improvements. That being said, it was deep and technical enough to where I had to pay a lot of attention and wasn’t able to take as many notes as I have in some of the previous sessions I attended, hence the shorter post. The following are some of the key highlights I came away with.

Important changes in Acronyms

BCS – Business Connectivity Services
BDC – Business Data Connectivity (he mentioned that this is what the case, but I continued to see the term “Business Data Catalog” used in various screens in SharePoint; this could be related to the BETA.)

Key BCS Investments

Development

Tools built-in to Visual Studio

Connectivity – Read and Write data
Tooling – Integrated tooling in VS and SharePoint Designer
Lifecycle Management – Automated solution packaging, deployment and management
Search

Item Level Security
Indexing attachments
Crawl and Query WCF svcs
Writing Custom Connectors
Incremental Crawls (LastModifiedTimeStamp)
Incremental Crawls (GetDeletedID, GetChangedIDs)
Batching

Easily Create Content Sources
Create “External Lists” that display data from BCS

BDC Runtime Improvements

Client and Server symmetrical model

Write back capable (was capable before, but now its supported and easy)
Batch read operations
Navigate and create associations
Bulk APIs
Read Blobs (streaming support)
Read and write back complex types (Dot notation)
Simple type conversion

Uniform experience across various systems types
Extensibility mechanisms

.NET Assembly Connector
Custom Connector
Secure Store Provider

Offline Capabilities with Office Integration

Errors and conflicts stop synchronization of affected items only and prompt user for action

Advanced API allows customizations so that users don’t necessarily get prompted and specific action be taken in case of conflicts.

Configurable Throttling (Really cool, can result in significant improvements to performance in the farm.)

Number of connections
Pau Load Size
Time Out
Power Shell support to read and modify settings

SharePoint Upgrade Fundamentals Part 1 – SPC 2009 Session Highlights

2009-10-20T19:49:00.001-05:00

There are some very welcome improvements with the upgrade process that don’t just apply to 2010 but SharePoint 2007 patch management as well. Unfortunately there is a bit of bad news (at least for some), so we’ll get started there to get it out of the way:

Requirements and Unsupported Scenarios

SharePoint 2010 will only support upgrading from WSS v3 and MOSS SP2. There will be no direct upgrade path for WSS 2.0 or SharePoint Portal Server.
SharePoint 2010 will only run on 64 bit environments (nothing new here, this has been known for quite some time)
No side by side installations. In other words you will not be able to run SharePoint 2007 or WSS 3.0 and SharePoint 2010 on the same hardware at the same time.
No gradual upgrade. This comes as a result of not being able to run both products side by side.

Supported Scenarios

In place upgrade
DB Attach

A couple of tools worth mentioning (discovery and diagnostics)

Pre Upgrade Checker: SharePoint 2010 equivalent of prescan, but unlike prescan.exe in 2007, you are not required to run it before performing the upgrade. I cant really see why you wouldn’t though as it provides tons of useful information, and does not modify the databases on the farm.

Worth noting that this already comes with SharePoint 2007 SP2 and a newer version is being released with the October Cummulative Update.

SP Diagnostics Utility: Already in SharePoint 2007 (at least in SP2), give some very useful information regarding the farm’s overall health
Test-SPContentDatabase: PowerShell commandlet which reports data from server and database pairing; this is where the database may include references to certain features which may not be on the server ( You can run this against both 2007 and 2010 databases). report data includes:

Custom Site Definitions

Language
Template ID
Count (how often its being used)
Installed or missing

Used and missing assemblies
Missing ghosted(ghostable) files
Custom Receiver Assemblies

In use
Installed or missing
Where are they being used

Features

In use
where
installed or missing

Feature Upgrade Capabilities: This allows you to create new versions of your features and indicate whether you want to upgraded these features, where they are being used, to their newer respective versions. I suspect this can be a bit tricky… but if it works well, its a fantastic improvement.
Visual Upgrade: I mentioned this in one of my earlier posts.. fantastic idea. The product ships with 2007 versions of most of the site definitions (that's right… most) that run on 2010. This means that you can upgrade now, and worry about the impact changing the look and feel will have later. Of course its important to note that this may not work with custom site definitions (although I hope its supported if we create their 2010 equivalents.)

By default, sites are upgraded with the 2007 look and feel
Can force to the new look and feel when performing the upgrade with the addcontentdb command or PowerShell mount command
Web owners can upgrade to the 2010 look and feel on their own when they are ready.
The following site definitions do not support Visual Upgrades:

My Site Core Site
PWA Core Site

Additional things worth noting

Central Administration provides great interfaces to help track the status of the upgrade. Giving us a look into the log information including current upgrade step and any errors.
Can run multiple upgrade sessions simultaneously and track via central admin.
One log per upgrade session

Upgrade errors only log

Fixed upgrade log schema (easier to report against)
Current DB Schema displayed in Central Admin
Easily re-run an upgrade that failed in the past.. this is useful if you know what caused the error and were able to fix it.

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Building Solutions with Business Connectivity Services and VS 2010 – SPC 2009 Session Highlights

2009-10-20T13:43:00.001-05:00

The demos on this presentation where moving a little too fast for my taste, would have preferred 1 demo covering the topic deeper instead off multiple demos that just felt like they were flying by. That’s not to say that there wasn't useful information, some of the highlights below:

Solution Types

No Code Solutions

Everything is managed by the runtime
Can connect to:

Existing WCF
SQL Server Databases
.NET Objects

SharePoint Designer
SharePoint SDK (XML i.e no code)
Surface Data in External Lists

Connect External Lists to Outlook, SPW

Customize InfoPath forms
Outlook Taskpane and Ribbon
Word Quickparts
Web Part Pages

Code

Visual Studio
Reusable
Can be incorporated into solutions that require no code
Custom Connectivity for data aggregation and transformation
Require business logic in code

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Cool SharePoint 2010 Online Resources

2009-10-20T12:40:00.001-05:00

Check out the following SharePoint 2010 Online Resources, courtesy of Catapult’s Tony Castronovo (http://twitter.com/tcastronovo) and Microsoft’s Paul McBride:

SharePoint 2010 Resources:

- SharePoint 2010 Website - to view SharePoint 2010 in action

- SharePoint 2010 forum- for SharePoint 2010 questions

- SharePoint 2010 PressPass- for the SPC 2009 keynote video, a Q&A with Jeff Teper, and more

- SharePoint 2010 Developer Center - for developer info (MSDN)

- http://www.mssharepointitpro.com - for IT Pro information (TechNet)

- http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint - for more SharePoint information

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Developing with SharePoint 2010 Sandboxed Solutions – SPC 2009 Presentation Highlights

2009-10-19T19:37:00.002-05:00

This is a really cool concept that’s new in SharePoint 2010. I was going to take a stab at describing it… but the presentation is already starting and I think the abstract is more than adequate:

Partial Abstract

”SharePoint 2010 adds a new deployment model for SharePoint called Sandboxed Solutions. It is a controlled solution packaging format that offers SharePoint Server Farm owners a way to easily mitigate risk that custom code will cause issues for them. It does this by restricting the API’s that can be called and governing resources that can be used...”

Presenter
Scott Hillier

Highlights

Creates a balance of stability (for IT admins) and agility (for developers) when developing, implementing, and testing solutions.
IT admins can control which servers in the farm will be allowed to run Sandbox Solutions
Only access to a Certain Subset through the proxy
- No access to enterprise class objects
Code Access Security Limits
- SharePointPermission.ObjectModel
- SecurityPermission.Execution
- AspNetHostingPermission.Level = Minimal
Can create a “fully-trusted proxy” that will allow us to reach outside the boundaries
Sandbox solutions deployed at the Site Collection Level
- Site Collection Admins determine which Sandbox solutions run in their site
From Central Admin Can
- Block Solutions
- Quota Templates
- Resource Monitoring
When deploying from Visual Studio 2010 will have to options to deploy solutions
- Deploy as Sandbox Solution (selected by default… hint hint.. this is the way they want us to go)
- Deploy as Farm Solution
VS adds and removes the Partially Trusted Callers based on Boolean value of the project properties which specifies if this is a Sandbox solution or not.

Full Trust Proxy
- Create a class that inherits from SPProxyOperationArgs
  - Class only passes arguments (Get and Set)
- Create another class that inherits from SPProxyOperations
  - Override Execute Method
    - Your logic goes here
  - Takes in the SPProxyOperationsArgs class
- The Full Trust Proxys must be registered on the farm via code (at least that is what he demoed… not sure if there is another way.)
- Can execute the the full trust proxy code by calling SPUtility.ExecuteRegisteredProxyOperation from the Sand Box solution class.
Supports Load Balancing across specific servers on the farm
Can monitor and set limits on:
- CPU, Memory, SQL, Exceptions, Critical Errors, Handles, Threads, etc..
- Can allocate “Resource Points” to solutions that if consumed by a specific resource will not allow that solution to run for the rest of the day. (I’m sure there will be plenty of arguments over this)

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SharePoint 2010 Administration Part 1 – SPC 2009 Presentation Highlights

2009-10-19T18:40:00.001-05:00

Presented By: Todd Klindt and Shane Young.

SharePoint Containment Hierarchy (Self Proclaimed Worlds Greatest Slide)
- Mostly Standard Stuff
  - Site Collection remain in in a single Content Database
  - Service Applications instead of Shared Service Provider
    - More flexible
    - Service Application Databases (per services)

Pre-req installer
- Interrogates Systems
- Checks for things you need
- Automatically goes to the internet to pull down and install pre-reqs
  - Configurable so that you can point to a specific workstation or server to get the pre-reqs from.
Installing bits very similar to 2007 install
- Farm Passphrase – helps address issues having to do with installation account being deleted.
Farm Configuration Wizards in Central Administration (that's right Wizards as in multiple)
- Initially one but extensible.. can create more.
Managed Accounts
- Keep Service Accounts secured
- SharePoint can manage password changes
  - Automatically change based on domain policy or other rules
    - Weekly, Monthly, etc.
  - Cool interface
    - See next time SharePoint will change the password
    - See last time SharePoint set the password
- Ribbon in Central Admin
  - Changes depending on the object you have selected (i.e Web Apps)
Web Applications
- When creating and specifying databases can specify failover server
  - SQL Mirroring Aware
- Can specify which services (service connections) a web application is consuming.
- Very easy to find Anonymous Policy button in ribbon
  - Similar buttons for other web app policies such as “User Policy”
- Specify Preferred Timer Job Server per web application

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Overview of SharePoint 2010 Developer Platform – SPC 2009 Presentation Highlights

2009-10-19T16:30:00.001-05:00

This is the second presentation I decided to attend. Presented by speaker; Paul Andrew from Microsoft. I’m posting the highlights from the presentation in the form of notes. As time allows over the coming months, I look forward to providing more in depth information on many of these:

Steve Creates a custom Web Part using Visual Studio 2010
Inserts the web part outside of a web part zone, in the content/wiki area of a page (very cool!)
Business Connectivity Services (Replaces Business Data Catalog)

Ability to Connect to .NET Data / .NET Types

SharePoint List Improvements

Cascading and Restricted Deletion (shown in demo)
Formula Based Validation (Excel like)
Lookup to multiple columns
List Index Auto Creation
List Query Throttling (allows IT Admins to set limits/restrictions on number of items in views)
Allows you to specify validation messages on fields for list… In other words, you don’t just specify that a field is required, or the format; but you can also specify the message that gets displayed to the user if it doesn't meet the requirements. (Fantastic)
XSLT based View creation rather than CAML

Client Object Model which runs on remote machines. Helps overcome issues with network load. Sample: Create reference to SharePoint Context > Load > Execute Query (call gets made which gets context info) > Execute Logic (such as UpdateTitle or AddItem) > Item.Update > Execute Query (call gets made again and change is applied)
Events Improvement

After-Synchronous Events
Site Scoped Events
Web Creation Events
List Creation Events

Workflow Improvements

VS 2010 Initiation and Association Forms (shown in demo, much much easier than it was before)
Import SPD Workflows in Visual Studio
Visio 2010 Workflow Design
Many more, at least another 15… (could not get them all, changed slide to quickly)

Sandboxed Solutions

Easy Deployment
Iterative Deployment
Solution Gallery

Way of Uploading the WSP into SharePoint

Does not sit on the file system of the machine until someone uses that piece of code until someone approves

Monitors Process and Restricts API Calls using code access security
If the code uses more resources than its permitted it gets shut down
There are several rules that can be created and applied to the solutions to make it easier to test these without bringing down the farm.
Processes run against proxy instead of directly against SharePoint API (will need more info about this, but sounds impressive)

Able to log the commands that are being routed through the proxy to among other stuff.

SharePoint Conference 2009 Opening Keynote Highlights

2009-10-19T13:38:00.003-05:00

The following are some of the highlights from the Opening Keynote by Tom Rizzo and Steve Ballmer.

Tom Rizzo

Welcome Message, Funnies, Fun Facts about the Conference.

Steve Ballmer

SharePoint Public Beta Available in November
SharePoint Workspace Application in Office 2010 (Replacing Groove)
- Take SharePoint Information Offline
- Slow Links Support
End users can create their own custom SharePoint Applications (No Comments)
- Access Services
- InfoPath Form Services
- SharePoint Designer

Tom Rizzo – Demo 1

SharePoint Development on Windows 7 and Vista
SharePoint Designer
- Continues to be free
- SharePoint Designer supports creating External Content Types mapped to external databases with CRUD Support (Create Read Update and Delete)
  - These appear as Lists on the SharePoint site
    - Same (or similar) support for sorting, filtering, views, etc.
  - Can Map to types such as “Outlook Contacts” that are fully integrated with Office 2010
- XHTML Support
Visual Studio
- Very tight integration with SharePoint 2010
- Web Part Development very much like User Control (ASCX) development
- Easily step through code and insert breakpoints
- Developer Dashboard
  - Integrated Diagnostics
    - Performance Counters
    - Call Stack Data
- Sand Box Solutions
  - Gives greater control to IT Administrators (Farm Admins)
    - Can Allocate Quotas based on performance data
    - Can easily manage and terminate faulty solutions

Steve Ballmer

SharePoint Online and Cloud allow you to build solutions that run:
- On Premise
- On the Cloud
- In Mixed Mode

Tom Rizzo – Demo 2

End User Empowerment
- New Product Page
- Ribbon for Web Content Management
  - One-Click Page layout
  - Full Fidelity Copy Paste from MS Word 2010
- Siverlight based Media Player Web Part
- Fast Navigator Search Web Part (Queryless, Faceted, Drill Down)
  - Product Catalog
  - Slider Capabilities like those on the Bing Travel Site

Jeff Teper – VP Office Business Platform

Support for much larger lists and libraries
- Million + Items on Lists
- 10’s of Millions in Libraries
Taxonomy Management
- Tagging
- Content Types can be managed across site collections, web applications, and across all of the farms in your organization.
Digital Media / Records
- Define Records in place rather than going to a record center
Partition Search Indexes 2
Visio Services
- Integrate diagrams with Live Data
Take Business Intelligent Dashboards offline
Power Pivot (Previously called Gemini)
- 100 Million Rows in Excel
- Publish to Server with SharePoint
- SQL Server Power Pivot for Excel
- SQL Server Power Pivot for SharePoint

Jared Spataro – Demo

Page Editing
- Preview changes on the glass as you are changing fonts (while hovering over the different fonts without having to select one). Like MS Word.
- Add images to pages directly from your PC (don't need to be in picture/image library)
- Resize Images on the screen like in a WYSIWYG
Check-out multiple documents
Create Document Sets
- Manage Workflows (among other things) for groups of documents simultaneously
Integrated Taxonomy Picker in Office 2010
Facebook Wall like functionality to track what you and other colleagues are up to (document ratings, recommendations, documents worked on, etc.)
View Peoples “Recent Content” directly from People Search Results
Note Board – on MySites
Excel Services Co-Editing
Manipulate Large Datasets (100s of millions) very quickly
- Filtering, Sorting, etc.
Decomposition Tree in Performance Point allows us to very quickly break down where data is coming from.
SharePoint 2010 Mobile Workspace 2010 for Windows Mobile 6.5

Jeff Teper

500+ Power Shell SharePoint Commands
Extensive usage tracking reports
- Published Usage logging schema allows us to easily write our own reports.
Visual Upgrade Approach
- Upgrade keeping the same 2007 UI
- Dynamically switch to the 2010 UI when ready
  - Ability to preview site in SharePoint 2010 UI without committing changes

Arpan Shah

Central Admin
- SharePoint Help Analyzer
  - Tells you if there is something wrong with your farm
    - Rules that check security, performance, configuration (based on best practices)
- WSS is now SharePoint Foundation
Demo of SharePoint from a users standpoint using Firefox

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SharePoint Developer Training October 3rd and 10th Cancelled

2009-09-30T20:47:00.001-05:00

The SharePoint Developer Training sessions scheduled for October 3rd and 10th have been cancelled. My oldest daughter will be undergoing surgery Thursday, and I will be devoting my attention to her. Nothing major; tonsils; but we suspect she will be requiring a lot of attention for several days.

Houston Tech Fest 2009 – Best Practices on Developing and Customizing Web Parts

2009-09-27T17:11:00.001-05:00

I’ve posted the PowerPoint deck of the presentation Apollo and I gave yesterday at the Houston Tech Fest: click here to download a copy.

It was a great event and I look forward to participating again next year. Thanks to all who attended our presentation.

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Back to Basics: Using Folder Structures in SharePoint Libraries

2009-09-20T22:19:00.001-05:00

This is a topic that keeps on surfacing, and I don’t expect it to go away any time soon: When should we (if at all) use folder structures in SharePoint Libraries? As much as I hate to admit it, there is no simple answer. But personally, I don’t often see many compelling reasons to use folders in SharePoint.

Folders are essentially just another solution, or tool, to address a specific need; organizing files, or data, in some sort of logical structure, so that users can easily and/or quickly find the files or information that they are looking for. But using folders for this purpose with SharePoint would be much like using a modem to connect to the internet, while you had an Ethernet or WIFI connection readily available. Or storing your contacts on a rolodex, while having an electric organizer, PDA, or cell phone.

But if folders are so antiquated and inefficient, why does SharePoint gives us the option to use them? I can think of a couple of reasons, and have ran into some of them personally. I’ll elaborate on these a bit later, first I’d like to go over some of their limitations; some examples of why we should not use folders.

For starters folders are hierarchical in nature, and force us into a single structure per implementation; this alone has many implications. Consider the following scenario:

You’ve been given the task of organizing and maintaining manuals for specific systems within your organization (phone, fax, printers, copiers, voicemail, video conferencing, etc.) . Your organization is composed of several regions, each with specific divisions and offices in different locations. Not all offices share the same products or services (some do.) All of the offices share a common network. You’ve been given three simple requirements:

Group A needs to browse the files by location (ex. Region > Division > Office)
Group B needs to browse the files by product type (ex. Printers, Fax Machines, Copiers)
Group C needs to browse the files by vendor (ex. HP, Kodak, Lanier, Polycom)

You’d be in quite a predicament…. You could create a folder structure such as the following:

Manuals
- North America
- South America
- Asia
  - Division 1
  - Division 2
    - Office 1
    - Office 2
      - Phones
      - Fax Machines
      - Printers
      - Copiers

Which would satisfy the requirement of group A. But groups B and C would not likely be satisfied, and to make matters worse, you’d likely have to maintain duplicates of the same manuals (which you could possibly mitigate by utilizing shortcuts.) But all in all not a very elegant solution, some might say it is quite the opposite.

Alternatively you could create a folder structure like this:

Manuals
- Phones
- Fax Machines
- Printers
- Copiers
  - HP
  - Kodak
  - Lanier

This would likely meet the requirements of group B and maybe even group C. It would also do away with duplicates. But what about group A.

There are many variations to this scenario, and the requirements may not always be given up front. A specific folder structure may work well for a period of time, and suddenly change; management may decide they want to view files in a different way.

But why would you try to use folders in the first place, when you could rely on views? Views would meet any one and all of these requirements. The information captured in the folder names should be stored as metadata with the specific files. You could then create a view that groups by; Region, Division, and Office; another that groups by Product Type; and yet another that groups by Vendor. Given the right AD groups and putting a little extra work towards setting up audiences, and you could create a page that automatically shows a different web part with the correct view for each group.

Some other reasons not to use folders:

If you are basing your folder structure on your organizational hierarchy; keep in mind that these hierarchies can and often do change. Something much easier to manage using site columns, and views.
If you do have to change the value of a Region, Division, or Office; which you’ve happened to use in your folder structure. Any links, bookmarks, or shortcuts to these files would probably break as the folder names form part of the Url.
Folders increase the length of the Urls, which can cause errors after reaching a certain limit.
Get your users thinking outside the box. Giving your users a couple of views that have properly named helps them think of other ways to look at the data. Even when your views closely resemble a folder structure. For instance giving them a view named “Products by Region”, lets them know that they could just as easily have a “Products by Office”, “Products by Type”, or “Products by Vendor”. And that they themselves could create similar views for the data they are responsible for in SharePoint.

So why does SharePoint offer folders in the first place, if you can just as easily and more efficiently organize your data with views? The following are a few scenarios where I’ve seen folders come in handy:

Folders make it easier to apply different set of permissions to logical groups of files within a single library. However, keep in mind that this can and often should be accomplished by using different libraries. If you are worried about consistency across the libraries; consider using content types, or a library template.
Copying files from libraries in bulk (using explorer view) and keeping some sort of logical structure. In my experience I don’t often see many scenarios that require users to copy files in bulk. While certain users may have the need to do this every once in a while, consider the repercussions, and remember that you should be configuring your library for the norm and not the exception. If copying or moving files in bulk happens to be the norm if your scenario; consider creating a new sub site for the group as a whole and splitting the files up into multiple libraries within that sub site.

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HTTP Error 403 – Forbidden with Custom or Updated Features and Application Pages

2009-08-31T13:08:00.002-05:00

This is a fairly common and non-descriptive error that continues to surface more and more as the SharePoint developer community continues to grow. Surprisingly, I’ve found very little information in the web regarding what I believe to the most common cause and solution (hence this blog post).

Many things can trigger this error, and as you might expect by the description the error is security/permissions related. I’ve seen it most often, when browsing the Site Features and Site Collection Feature pages… but it has been known to take down a whole site; although mostly (and luckily) in dev environments.

So why do I keep referring back to development? And more importantly, what is this “most common” cause/solution? Its mostly tied to “drag and drop”; when you drag and drop files, permissions usually go with them (albeit there are a few exceptions.) With development rarely taking place directly in the 12 hive features, or layouts folder; its shouldn't be surprising to see developers (and administrators alike) deploying and often testing changes to features by dragging and dropping files from their Desktop, My Documents, or project folders. Naturally this approach doesn’t follow best practices, but I wont deny having made the mistake while testing a quick change to a feature or elements xml file in a development environment. All updates to production environments should be done via WSPs.

So how do you solve the problem? Finding the culprit shouldn’t be too difficult, think of any items that have been recently deployed/updated. Cant think of any, search for any recently updated files of folders. If you do think of or find any; check the permissions and make any required modifications; also consider redeploying them via a WSP.

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SharePoint 2010 Preview (Sneak Peak)

2009-07-13T18:34:00.001-05:00

Check out the latest (and first publicly available) SharePoint 2010 Sneak Peek at http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek/Pages/default.aspx. It includes information on the following topics:

Enjoy!

Editor Parts – Extending the Web Part Editor Tool Pane (HSPUG)

2009-06-19T10:01:00.001-05:00

This week, I gave a presentation on “Editor Parts” at Houston’s SharePoint User Group event. It included a live demo on how to build an Editor Part that displays a dropdown of all of the Lists for the site where the corresponding web part is being deployed. I’m including links to download the presentation and source code below:

Download Presentation

Download Source Code

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RunWithElevatedPrivileges – Exception, Not the Norm

2009-06-03T19:16:00.002-05:00

Let me start by saying that while executing code via RunWithElevatedPrivileges may help you overcome certain “access denied” exceptions in your code, using it should be the exception not the norm. This is not meant to be a “how to” posting on RunWithElevatedPrivileges, there are plenty of articles out there that already cover just that. Instead I’d like to focus on a subject that I consider to be just as important; when is the right (and wrong) time to use this command.

I recently wrote an article for the MSDN on “Securing Application Pages for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0”. In it, I provided several code samples on how to do just what its title implies; some of which included calls to RunWithElevatedPrivileges. A respected colleague was quick to point out a concern; that some of the information contained in the article (specifically references to RunWithElevatedPrivileges) might result in certain individuals using the command without giving it sufficient thought.

The very reason I wrote the article, stems from how often I’ve seen this command used, and the security risks it presents. I’d hate for the article to be seen as a case or excuse for calling this command, when in large part is the very thing it tries to protect developers from.

SharePoint provides a very extensive and well thought out API, at least from a security standpoint ;). It uses impersonation, meaning that the code you write will execute under the context of the user viewing the page where your code resides. If you write a web part or application page that reads or writes information from a SharePoint List, Library, or Site that does not grant the user such rights; your web part or application page will throw an error… as it should. Your first instinct should not be to rewrite your code so that this logic executes via the RunWithElevatedPrivileges command. Doing so might be considered a hack.

That’s not to say using RunWithElevatedPrivileges is a “hack” every time, there are certain unique cases where you don’t have much of a choice. But first consider checking if the user has the necessary permissions via the DoesUserHavePermission method of either the SPSite, SPWeb, SPList, or even SPListItem your accessing with your code, and avoid doing anything further on that item if the method returns false for the required permission level. Alternatively (although often cause for debate) consider handling the access denied exception. Ultimately, don’t hurry too much writing your code, the quickest way is not always the best way.

Happy Coding. Oh.. and thanks for the pointer Matt.

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Just Released - MSDN: Securing Application Pages in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. By me :)

2009-06-02T19:17:00.002-05:00

An article I recently wrote has just been published on MSDN. It covers the basic principles of securing application pages, and why they are often at risk; as well as providing code samples on how to properly secure your application pages, including:

How and when to validate page requests
How to verify Base Permissions
How to verify Role Definitions
How to verify Group Memberships

Check it out at: Securing Application Pages in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd878359.aspx)

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Project Planning for SharePoint Implementations

2009-05-27T21:46:00.001-05:00

Last week, I presented this topic at the Houston SharePoint Users Group. I really enjoyed giving the presentation, only slightly disappointed that I wasn’t able to attend the technical track which was occurring simultaneously…. I’ll get over it though :)

The presentation itself contains a lot of useful information. Thanks to all who provided feedback, and my colleagues at Catapult who helped put it together.

I have uploaded the presentation here.
(http://www.rafelo.com/ProjectPlanningforSharePoint.pptx)

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SharePoint Developer Training - Weekend Crash Course, Houston Texas

2009-05-13T21:47:00.004-05:00

For the latest information on upcoming sessions go to http://www.rafelo.com/sharepointtraining.

The last SharePoint Developer - Weekend Crash Course was a complete success. I’d like to extend a big thanks to all of you who participated in helping me put it together, and to all of the attendees for your positive feedback and references; you all rock!

Based on the number of inquiries I’ve had from readers and references who’ve shown interest in taking the course, I’ve decided to repeat the course here in Houston on September 12th and 13th of 2009.

Course Description
This course is designed to cover the most common and critical SharePoint development topics I’ve come to expect from SharePoint implementations, based on several years of experience across multiple industry sectors. The course is meant for experienced .NET developers with entry to mid level SharePoint development experience.

The class will consists of a series of discussions and instructor led hands-on labs. The full agenda has been listed below. Attendees will need to bring their own laptops, for which I have posted minimum requirements (see hardware and software requirements below.)

Attendees will receive:

An external USB 2.0 Hard Drive with 80 GB or more of storage
A Virtual PC image running trial versions of Windows 2003, SharePoint 2007, and Visual Studio (included in the hard drive.)

Course Agenda

Day 1

Core Concepts (8:30 am - 9:45 am)
• Customization vs. Development
• SharePoint Designer
• Visual Studio
• Content Types and Site Columns
• Site Templates and Site Definitions
• Master Pages and Page Layouts
• Features
• Solution Packages

15 minute break

Extending the Out of the Box Experience (10:00 am - 12:00 pm)
Instructor led Hands On Lab
• Creating Custom Content Types
• Customizing the Content Query Web Part
• Connecting to Web Services with the Data Form Web Part
• Customizing Search and People Search Results

1 hour lunch break

Custom Web Part Development (1:30 pm – 2:45 pm)
Instructor led Hands On Lab
• Creating a List Aggregator Web Part

15 minute break

Custom Site Definitions (3:00 pm – 5:00)
Instructor led Hands On Lab
• Creating a Custom Site Definition
• Lists and Libraries
• Provisioning Files into Libraries
• Adding Web Parts and Web Part Pages
• Provisioning Multiple Sites from a Single Template (The Portal Concept)

Day 2

Feature Development and Feature Stapling (8:30 am – 9:45 am)
Presentation and Instructor led Hands on Lab
• Feature Scopes
• Site Features
• Site Collection Features
• Web Application Features
• Farm Features
• Feature Elements
• Feature Receivers
• Creating a Custom Master Page Feature
• Creating a Feature Stapler

15 minute break

Content Types and Event Handlers (10:00 am - 12:00 pm)
Instructor led Hands On Lab
• Developing and Deploying Content Types with Features
• Developing and Registering Event Handlers

1 hour lunch break

Custom Application Pages and Extending the Menu System with Action Items (1:30 pm – 2:45 pm) Instructor led Hands On Lab
• Creating a Custom Application Page
• Adding Menu Items to the Site Actions and Site Settings Menus
• Creating a Custom Administration Page
• Adding Menu Items to Central Administration

15 minute break

SharePoint Solution Packaging and Deployment (3:00 pm – 5:00pm)
Instructor led Hands On Lab
• Packaging Features and Site Definitions
• Packaging Application and Administration Pages
• Assemblies and Safe Control Entries

Hardware and Software Requirements:

Laptop computer with a processor speed of at least 2.5 GHz with Hyper Threading or Dual Core Technology
RAM capacity of 2 GB minimum (3-4 GB recommended)
Must be able to allocate a minimum 1 GB of RAM to the Virtual OS
Operating System: Windows XP Professional or Windows Vista
Additional Software: Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft XPS Viewer

Additional Information:

This course is not meant to provide an introduction to SharePoint or the .NET framework. Attendees are expected to have experience with the SharePoint platform as well as .NET development with Visual Studio.
Registration is limited.

Cost:
550 US dollars per person
(group discount rates available)

Location:
Catapult Systems, Houston
10370 Richmond Ave. Suite 1250, Houston, TX 77042

Registration:

1. Click here to download the registration form
2. Complete the registration form and fax toll free to (877) 819-0945

Call 832-472-3648 or e-mail training@rafelo.com for more information

Please refer to http://www.rafelo.com/sharepointtraining for the latest information.

Here’s what some of the attendees had to say about the last session:

“Rafael's Developer Crash Course was excellent! It really was a crash course covering a lot of concepts in a short period of time. But every item covered was a practical, real-world solution that I can use as a .Net Developer to help our Administrators more easily manage our SharePoint farm. And he made it easy....” – Barry Thomas, Panhandle Energy

“I was excited about the class before it started and was not disappointed when it was over. You delivered everything I expected and more.” – Don McKenzie

"Rafael provided clear, step-by-step instruction as to the ins and outs of content management in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. I would recommend this class as an effective, inexpensive way to hone your SharePoint development skills." - Troy Lanphier, Catapult Systems

“Rafael’s training series gets two thumbs up. The precision of this course was a balance of a technical and functional workshop to illustrate real life scenarios of business solutions utilized in our day to day corporate operations.” ”I recommend this course to developers and functional people who wish to add value to their organization and grow within the SharePoint community. Rafael, best wishes and continued success on all of your SharePoint endeavors.” – Reece Collins, Inseptions

"Prior to attending the class, I was convinced that I would need a great deal of C# training before I could begin to develop in SharePoint. Rafael's class provided insight that allowed me to build and deploy solutions for my clients' SharePoint environments." - Marlene Lanphier, GUIO

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Submitting Items to Lists from Custom Application Pages

2009-05-06T10:57:00.001-05:00

This posting is in response to a comment I had on a previous posting; “Using the InputFormSection and InputFormControl to build Custom Application Pages that look like OOTB Pages”. One of the readers posted a comment asking how to go about using the submit button to post to a list. Needless to say, I didn’t feel that answering his question by replying to his comment would be the best response. So I’ve decided to post my response here, where its a little bit easier to elaborate on the subject.

Application pages can in fact be used to create list items, but there are a number of things to consider. The first and probably most important thing, is that application pages can be accessed from any site in your SharePoint farm. If the list the form is meant to write to is accessible globally this may not be much of a problem, but I’d have to question how that list was created and where it is stored. Application pages are part of what I consider to be a fairly modular development framework in SharePoint, and the scenario mentioned doesn’t sound very modular at all; a page that is deployed or accessible from every site, but the list it writes to is only deployed to one. What if the site containing the list is deleted? Or certain fields changed? The site administrator would likely be able to do either, but he/she wouldn’t be able to update the Application Page, which would likely break.

So how do I recommend using Application Pages to write to lists? There are many ways, most (if not all) of which would involve Features. The following is a sample approach:

1. Develop a site or site collection Feature that creates a list. Since we will be writing to this list from a Custom Application Page, I recommend that the list be hidden. This recommendation stems from the fact that we don’t want anybody accidentally deleting or modifying the list, which may impact the Application Page. Of course this would probably mean creating another page to view and/or edit list items; this could be a Content Page or Application Page.

2. Develop the Application Page that writes to the list created by the feature, including logic in it that checks if the feature is activated. If the logic determines that the feature is not activated, the page should display a message stating that the feature needs to be activated for the page to work.

3. Use Custom Actions and Custom Action Groups to create a link to the Application Page(s) from the “Site Settings”, or “Site Actions” menu.

I don’t mean to imply that an Application Page shouldn’t be used to save items to a single globally accessible list. But it requires even more consideration and planning than the scenario mentioned above. Actually, I’ve had to develop such pages; in one example the list resides in Central Administration and is created as part of a Feature scoped at the Farm level.

In another scenario, the list may not be hidden, or even created by the feature. The list may be manually created (to capture very specific criteria) by a site or farm administrator, in which case another Application Page may be used to capture the location of the list, and save it in the property bag of the site or site collection. The Application Page that writes to the list, fist looks at the property bag to determine its location, if the property has not been set, the page simply returns a friendly error.

Like the above mentioned scenarios, I’m sure there are hundreds more. The point is all of them require some thought. Unless strictly used to display information that you know is always available, an Application Page is rarely a solution as a whole. Take time to carefully plan and design your Application Pages, examine your solution from multiple angles making sure it doesn't easily break. Remember, if you fail to plan you are planning to fail.

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Missed the SharePoint Conference? Check out “Best of SharePoint” (2010) – Coming to Houston Nov 12th

Announcing SharePoint Tech Dives, coming to Houston Texas on November 11th, 2009.

Next Event - Wednesday, November 11th from 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm. Developing SharePoint Features, Feature Receivers, and Feature Staplers

The Evolution of the SharePoint Professional

Takes on SPC 2009 and Top 10 on SharePoint 2010

Setting up a SharePoint 2010 Development Environment

Upgrading 2007 WCM sites to 2010 WCM – SPC 2009 Session Highlights

Business Connectivity Services Runtime and Object Model Deep Dive – SPC 2009 Session Highlights

SharePoint Upgrade Fundamentals Part 1 – SPC 2009 Session Highlights

Building Solutions with Business Connectivity Services and VS 2010 – SPC 2009 Session Highlights

Cool SharePoint 2010 Online Resources

Developing with SharePoint 2010 Sandboxed Solutions – SPC 2009 Presentation Highlights

SharePoint 2010 Administration Part 1 – SPC 2009 Presentation Highlights

Overview of SharePoint 2010 Developer Platform – SPC 2009 Presentation Highlights

SharePoint Conference 2009 Opening Keynote Highlights

SharePoint Developer Training October 3rd and 10th Cancelled

Houston Tech Fest 2009 – Best Practices on Developing and Customizing Web Parts

Back to Basics: Using Folder Structures in SharePoint Libraries

HTTP Error 403 – Forbidden with Custom or Updated Features and Application Pages

SharePoint 2010 Preview (Sneak Peak)

Editor Parts – Extending the Web Part Editor Tool Pane (HSPUG)

RunWithElevatedPrivileges – Exception, Not the Norm

Just Released - MSDN: Securing Application Pages in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. By me :)

Project Planning for SharePoint Implementations

SharePoint Developer Training - Weekend Crash Course, Houston Texas

Submitting Items to Lists from Custom Application Pages

Next Event - Wednesday, November 11th from 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm.
Developing SharePoint Features, Feature Receivers, and Feature Staplers