cawood's blog - geek literature

The Web Goes Dark Thanks to SOPA

2012-01-18T19:54:00.001-05:00

Wikipedia and O’Reilly Media are just two of the websites that went dark today in protest of the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) legislation in the United States. The US already has anti-piracy legislation and this new bill goes too far. As an author, I understand how terrible it feels to have your work stolen. My first Halo book was actually hand scanned then posted online and many of my other books have also been pirated in one way or another. I also have an interesting perspective on this issue because I was also wrongly accused of violating a legal agreement by writing one of my books—something I put to rest when I hired a lawyer and then went on to write two more books on the subject (one for O’Reilly Media BTW). The publisher in that case handled the issue extremely poorly and it’s precisely the sort of thing that would enable SOPA to shut down an innocent website. Copyright infringement is awful, but this bill simply isn’t the right way to deal with the issue.

What’s in this bill? Here’s some text from the summary: “This bill would establish a system for taking down websites that the Justice Department determines to be dedicated to copyright infringment [sic]. The DoJ or the copyright owner would be able to commence a legal action against any site they deem to have "only limited purpose or use other than infringement," and the DoJ would be allowed to demand that search engines, social networking sites and domain name services block access to the targeted site.”

From the Washington Post: “Why are tech start-ups so vehemently opposed? These companies have argued that the bills are tantamount to Internet censorship. Rather than receiving a notification for copyright violations, sites now face immediate action — up to and including being taken down before they have a chance to respond”

If you would like a quick visual explanation of this issue, visit americancensorship.org.

From today’s O’Reilly message…

Today, we’re going dark to show the world that O’Reilly Media does not support the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives or the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate.

…

These legislative attacks are not motivated by clear thinking about the future of the Internet or the global economy, but instead seek to protect entrenched companies with outdated business models. Rather than adapting and competing with new and better services, these organizations are asking Congress for cover.

Any forward-looking country must encourage its emerging industries, not protect its laggards. Yet, in a time when the American economy needs to catalyze domestic innovation to succeed in a hyper-competitive global marketplace, members of the United States Congress have advanced legislation that could damage the industries of the future.

…

Here’s what you can do:

1) Learn if your U.S. Representative or Senators support SOPA or PROTECT IP through SOPAOpera.org.

2) Use the tools at AmericanCensorship.org, StopTheWall.us and POPVOX to tell Congress where you stand.

3) Participate in Better Activism Day, a free livestream of experts discussing ways to "improve your power in Washington from people who’ve been successful at moving it."

4) Call or meet with your representatives in Congress. The single most effective action any concerned citizen who wants to talk to Congress can take is to see your Senator or Representative in person. Failing that, call them. Write them a letter. Make sure your voice is heard.

– Tim O’Reilly, CEO and Founder of O’Reilly Media

SharePoint Saturday Honolulu 2011

2011-12-07T18:18:00.001-05:00

This year marked the first SharePoint Saturday Honolulu event. And to distinguish themselves, they held the event on a Friday. I greatly enjoyed this event and it was well organized, so hats off to the organizing committee and the volunteers. It also didn’t hurt that I got to spend the week in Oahu, Hawaii.

- Yes, it was on a Friday

At the event, I presented a session about the SharePoint 2010 SP1 supportability changes and how these changes affect real-world storage considerations. Naturally, since Remote BLOB Storage (BLOB offloading) is the future of SharePoint storage management, I spent a good deal of my time talking about RBS.

I also enjoyed being on the Ask the Experts panel, which featured some prominent SharePoint community characters and some great conversation.

- Yes, that’s a dinosaur foot behind me. Honolulu Community College has dinosaurs

Thank you to the organizers and thanks for the invite to return next year. BTW –the real flower leis upon arrival were a nice touch.

Movember Coming to an End

2011-11-25T15:31:00.001-05:00

Well, it’s the final week of Movember and I’m only $23 out of 2nd place on my Metalogix team. If you can space a few bucks for a good cause (men's health), please visit my page and make a donation.

You can contribute to my Movember effort here: http://mobro.co/cawood

“During November each year, Movember is responsible for the sprouting of moustaches on thousands of men’s faces, in Canada and around the world. With their “Mo’s”, these men raise vital funds and awareness for men's health, specifically prostate cancer.”

At the end of the month, I’ll be posting the “after” photo showing my Tom Selleck-esque look.

Speaking at SharePoint Saturday Honolulu

2011-11-22T15:55:00.001-05:00

I’m pleased to be presenting at SharePoint Saturday Honolulu, Dec 2, 2011. I’ve been fortunate to present at a number of SharePoint Saturday events—from small ones all the way up to SharePoint Saturday the Conference in DC.

I’ll be doing a presentation about the SharePoint 2010 SP1 supportability changes. I’ve never been to Hawaii, so I’m looking forward to seeing the islands as well.

Yes, SharePoint Saturday Honolulu is on Friday.

I’m Speaking at Microsoft TechDays in Vancouver

2011-11-04T17:50:00.001-04:00

This year, I’ll be presenting a session about migration file shares to Microsoft SharePoint at Microsoft TechDays 2011 in Vancouver.

I’ve attended TechDays Halifax in the past, but this will be my first session at the conference.

Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011 Wrap-up

2011-10-20T23:03:00.000-04:00

This year’s sold out Microsoft SharePoint Conference (#SPC11) was so busy for me that it caught me a little off guard. You know those blog posts about preparing for conferences that list things such as stocking up on business cards and organizing meetings ahead of time, well I ran out of cards and completely ran out of time to talk to all the people I had meant to chat with. That same craziness explains why this post is just a tad late.

This year’s conference was October 3-6 in Anaheim, CA at the Anaheim Convention Center. Right next to Disneyland, you could argue that this is the happiest convention center on Earth.

The show was a smashing success for Metalogix—one of the reasons it was so busy for me. We had our most popular booth ever, talked our throats dry about SharePoint and Office 365, hosted multiple parties and met with countless partners and customers. We also had a pretty popular Metalogix prize giveaway.

The Anaheim convention center is a great venue

A swarm of people at the Metalogix booth

After the exhibit hall closed, I managed a shot without people blocking the Metalogix booth

Microsoft rented Disneyland for the attendee party. The last time I went to Disneyland was in 2005 for the E3 conference. I was happy to be able to ride Splash Mountain this time around as it went down for maintenance while I was in line last time. And, no, I didn’t get wet; others from Metalogix came out soaked, but I basically got sprayed once.

The @NBSharePoint “I’m just here for SharePint” shirt (I’m holding Minnie Mouse ears for my daughter)

At this year’s show, I presented a session with Steve Marsh about considerations for creating SharePoint farms with terabytes of data. Our session was literally the last one in the guide. It was fun closing the conference, but I have to admit that I prefer to speak early and then have the rest of the event to meet with people; until I actually speak, I can’t help but tweak my presentation, so it’s always on my mind.

The rooms were darkly lit, so not a great speaker photo op

Metalogix also had great representation in other sessions. For example, the session about the Microsoft Search First Initiative, co-presented by our partners Microsoft and Arcovis.

I’ll finish with one more shot of the venue. Doesn’t this image just yell, “SharePoint in the cloud?”

All in all, SPC11 was a great event and I’m really psyched about the Microsoft SharePoint Conference (#SPC12) in Las Vegas in 2012.

SharePoint Conference Attendance Is Down–Is that a problem?

2011-09-28T00:15:00.003-04:00

There are many, many, SharePoint conferences around the world. But the biggest one remains the Microsoft SharePoint Conference (SPC). It happens about every 18 months or so and it’s the official event for all things SharePoint. This year’s conference is October 3-6 in Anaheim, CA and many of the attendees are thrilled that Microsoft has rented Disneyland for the attendee party.

One interesting statistic about this year’s conference (#SPC11) is that registration is rumoured to be lower than the last show. The last SharePoint conference, SPC 2009, boasted an impressive 7,400 attendees at a time when the economy was still reeling from the crash. At that show, there was a buzz (and I was contributing to it) about how SharePoint was so healthy that there was no sign of the recession in the SharePoint space. By comparison, the 2007 conference had 3,800 attendees.

[Update: I’m told that registration has been solid right down to the wire and we should all stay tuned to see what the real number is when the show starts on Monday.]

[Update to the update: It has just been announced (the Friday before the show) that the conference has sold out. The actual attendee number hasn’t been announced yet.]

So, the rumoured lower attendance this year begs the question, “Is this a sign of a slow down in the SharePoint community?” and by extension, a problem that Microsoft needs to worry about? My position is that there is no issue and my rationale is threefold: the SharePoint business is healthy, this is the worst time in the SharePoint release cycle for a conference, and the SharePoint community is healthy.

The SharePoint business is healthy

SharePoint was the fastest Microsoft product in history to reach $1 Billion in revenue. That’s quite an accomplishment and it might be tempting for the SharePoint group to rest on their laurels. Well, that’s not the way Microsoft works. Product group employees typically change jobs every two years or so. That’s not to say that the whole team that shipped Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) has moved on to other projects, but most of them are likely in different roles and that means this is their first release with their current responsibilities. That’s one of the techniques at Microsoft for keeping employees engaged.

In a recent survey conducted by Metalogix Software and ESG, “which surveyed 3,129 IT professionals, 64 percent of North American and Western European organizations are currently using SharePoint, while an additional 12 percent intend to within the next 24 months. This overwhelmingly confirms that SharePoint is now considered to be a top business application – 80 percent ranked it among their top 10 business applications- a significant update since the March 2009 survey.”

Of course, there’s another key factor in the outlook for SharePoint. In short, Office 365 changes the landscape of SharePoint market potential. Office 365 is Microsoft’s cloud offering that includes SharePoint 2010. For many companies out there, the attraction to the economics of the cloud will have them taking a long hard look at the silver lining of the Office 365 cloud (yes, that’s a mangled metaphor I know, sorry). Also, as I recently discussed in a couple of Metalogix hybrid cloud webinars, there are many scenarios that organizations are looking at which involve both SharePoint Online (e.g., Office 365) and SharePoint on-premises.

This is the worst time in the release cycle for a conference

We’re basically in the middle of the SharePoint release cycle. It’s a terrible time for a conference since the Beta of the next version is not out yet and the current release has been out for some time. This makes the conference a tougher sell for many people who have to justify the time and expense to their managers.

The SharePoint community is healthy

If you have any doubts at all about the SharePoint community, just call up Dux Raymond Sy (@meetdux)—or any of the organizers for that matter—and ask how SharePoint Saturday the Conference went in DC this year. It was roughly twice the size of the same event last year and, at the time, that was the largest SharePoint Saturday event ever.

The SharePoint community is stronger than ever and it’s showing no signs of slowing. There are dozens of SharePoint experts around the world taking time out of their lives to travel to SharePoint conferences and deliver educational sessions. In fact, organizers of these events are receiving hundreds more session proposals than they can accommodate. The vibrant SharePoint community is envied by many and things are humming along just fine.

- signing a book at SPSTC in DC

And now, my shameless plug: I’ll be doing a book signing at the Metalogix booth (we’re giving away copies of How to Do Everything: SharePoint 2010) and I’ll be co-presenting a session with Dr. Steve Marsh, on Thursday, October 6, at noon. The session is entitled, “At Last - Size Doesn’t Matter! Considerations for building a SharePoint ECM platform to accommodate TBs of Content” and will focus on three different customer scenarios that demonstrate how to free your SharePoint content.

- the Metalogix billboard on Interstate 105 in Anaheim

I’m speaking at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011

2011-09-09T18:13:00.001-04:00

I’ll be presenting a session at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011 (#SPC11) in Anaheim, CA. I’ve had the honour of speaking at this show in the past—going back to the “Portal Airlift” in 2001. Last time, at SPC09, I presented a session on upgrading/migration to SharePoint 2010.

This year’s attendee party is at Disneyland, so I’m sure lots of people are excited about that.

Of course, Metalogix will also have a strong presence at the big event as well. If you’re attending the show, look for the Metalogix booth in the exhibitor’s hall.

What is SharePoint Governance to YOU? - Stephen Cawood

2011-08-27T13:12:00.001-04:00

A couple of weeks ago at SharePoint Saturday The Conference in DC, I recorded a short video for NothingButSharePoint.com’s video blog series What is SharePoint Governance to YOU?

I hadn’t announced GovernanceHx yet, so I didn’t talk about my own community project to provide SharePoint Governance administration in the cloud. But now that GovernanceHx has been announced, it’s clear why I chose the particular message for my contribution to What is SharePoint Governance to YOU? Check out the GovernanceHx post for more details.

Announcing GovernanceHx – SharePoint Governance for Everyone!

2011-08-13T16:04:00.008-04:00

I recently read an article that proclaimed--without any grey area--that Microsoft SharePoint governance has nothing to do with technology. I certainly understand the sentiment. Governing an enterprise platform such as SharePoint can be complicated and requires planning and buy-in from various people. However, I also believe that giving SharePoint users access to the right tools can empower them to keep track of whether their governance plans are being effectively enforced. To put it succinctly, wouldn’t you rather know right away about issues than wait until someone decides to proactively check for them?

In my vast spare time (for those who don’t know me, that’s a joke), I’ve been working on a SharePoint community application that I’m now ready to start talking about.

GovernanceHx is a web application that is bringing SharePoint governance to the Cloud. The application allows any SharePoint user to run free, read-only reports against their SharePoint servers with the express purpose of combatting SharePoint sprawl. This means that people without admin access, or development skills, can easily generate reports about the growth of their environment and use them to gain an insight into changes over time. This is why I chose to go with the name GovernanceHx. “Hx” is commonly used in the health care field as the abbreviation for history. GovernanceHx shows the governance health of your SharePoint server over time.

- A report results page from GovernanceHx

At this time, I’m showing some demos and recruiting a few SharePoint experts to be Governance Advisors on the project. I’m happy to announce that SharePoint expert and prolific conference speaker, Richard Harbridge, has joined the project as the first Governance Advisor.

These advisors will help shape the future of the project by using their real-world SharePoint experience to identify the best application of the GovernanceHx framework. Since GovernanceHx tracks growth, the advisors will help figure out which growth reports will be most useful.

And speaking of frameworks, that’s one of the coolest aspects of this project. I’ve developed the GovernanceHx reporting framework using Windows Azure, so users will not need to install anything at all on their SharePoint server to run reports against Office 365 or any SharePoint sites that are accessible over the net.

Cloud-based SharePoint governance opens up all sorts of possibilities for Office 365/SharePoint online customers. For example, I’m sure there are plenty of small to medium businesses that would like a solution to help with their governance enforcement but simply can’t afford a large enterprise reporting application for the job. GovernanceHx will be the low friction way for these users to discover sprawl issues before they become unmanageable.

Speaking at SharePoint Saturday The Conference 2011

2011-08-13T08:47:00.000-04:00

I had a great time this weekend presenting at SharePoint Saturday The Conference. It was the largest SharePoint Saturday event ever and it’s a great credit to the teams of organizers, volunteers, vendors and speakers that it went so well.

It is truly remarkable how the SharePoint community continues to produce these sorts of quality events. With 280 sessions, you can imagine how much effort went into the three days.

Where else can you see a talent show where a Metalogix employee (Corey) sings Mack the Knife while migrating a SharePoint 2007 site to SharePoint 2010?

At this year’s show, I co-presented two sessions about SharePoint migration and BLOB offloading with fellow Metalogix employee Corey Milliman and I also did two book signings for How to Do Everything: SharePoint 2010.

So now that #SPSTCDC is over, what will I do? I’m goin’ to Disneyland!

(For those who haven't heard, the attendee party is at Disneyland)

Metalogix Loves SharePoint Saturday

2011-08-04T14:19:00.001-04:00

This weekend I was in New York for SharePoint Saturday. I presented a session on migrating to Microsoft Office 365 (Metalogix was a Microsoft Office 365 sponsor). This was the third time I’ve attended the SharePoint Saturday New York event and I always enjoy going. This year was no exception, there were some great speakers and things ran smoothly.

In addition to sponsoring the event, we wanted to do something different. What we came up with was to post “Metalogix loves SharePoint” sign in Times Square. It was great to walk around Times Square and see the Metalogix logo between an infinite number of ads for the Smurfs. Metalogix is also giving away Flip cameras to people who tweeted photos of the billboard.

You can read all about it on the Metalogix blog: Metalogix Loves SharePoint Saturday, NY

Metalogix was a proud Microsoft Office 365 sponsor at SharePoint Saturday New York this weekend. To show our pride, we arranged to have "Metalogix loves SharePoint" shown on one of the big billboards in Times Square.

We also held a contest to win Flip cameras. People who took a photo of the Metalogix billboard in Times Square tweeted their photos to the @metalogix Twitter account and are now entered to win a camera. We will be notifying the winners of the Flip cameras this week.

Why I FINALLY became a OneNote User—and I’m not turning back

2011-08-03T20:31:00.001-04:00

I’ve been meaning to write a post about how Microsoft Office OneNote has improved my productivity, but really, who has the time? OK, sorry no more of that. Today, Microsoft announced that the Office OneNote iPhone app will be free for a limited time. (It was published to the Canadian app store last week). Now I can use the same TODO list on my PC, online and on my phone--all nicely synchronized.

- the new OneNote iPhone app

I only recently became a devoted OneNote user. I know, I know… What took me so long? Well, I don’t have a great excuse. When I tried the first OneNote Beta build, it wasn’t able to create tables—obviously, it had far fewer features than the current release—but the inability to create tables was a deal breaker for me. Since then, I’ve seen a flood of people adopt OneNote and sing its praises. I often questioned if I was missing out, but I kept holding back. I’m a big Outlook fan and I just kept using Outlook for everything. E-mail, appointments, reminders… Why not keep notes in there as well? That’s what I did, but lately my inbox was getting the best of me and despite my best efforts, I could use some help. (I wrote about managing my Outlook inbox in my post, Don’t be an E-mail Hoarder–Improve Your Outlook Productivity.)

So what was I waiting for? It turns out that the killer feature for me was the ability to use Windows Live SkyDrive to synchronize my OneNote notebooks across multiples machines and the OneNote Web App. And, of course, as of today, my phone as well.

For me, the ability to share OneNote notebooks effortlessly across devices is a game changer. I can make notes at work, update them online and then when I grab my laptop, I can rest assured that it will update automatically when I go online. The cloud-based synchronization also means that my notebooks are automatically backed up for me—a hard drive crash isn’t going to mean any note data loss at all. The fact that SkyDrive, the OneNote web app, and the iPhone app are all free is a nice bonus.

If you’re still not sold on OneNote, take a look at the OneNote blog post about using OneNote notebooks to plan a vacation.

- Use the Office Web Apps version of OneNote to work with your notebooks online.

I’m happy that I finally took the time to investigate what OneNote can do and I don’t see myself giving up this excellent productivity tool. If nothing else, it will as least give my Outlook inbox a bit of a break.

- The Office client version of OneNote

Metalogix Times Square Contest for SharePoint Saturday NY

2011-07-27T21:28:00.001-04:00

If you’re going to SharePoint Saturday New York this weekend, you’re probably planning to go to Times Square anyway, so why not take a picture that could win you a Flip video camera?

All you have to do is take a picture of yourself in front of the Metalogix loves Microsoft SharePoint billboard, follow the @metalogix account and then tweet the photo with @metalogix and #SPSNY in the message and you’re entered to win a Flip video camera. (Winners will be notified by Twitter DM, so don’t forget to follow @metalogix.) The Metalogix banner will appear every hour 7am to 1am on Friday and 7am to 3pm on Saturday—the exact time is random. To get an idea of what it will look like, see the image below.

You can read about the contest on the Metalogix blog.

Metalogix is the official Office 365 sponsor for the event. I’ll be there to present a session about migrating file shares, ECM systems, Exchange public folders and other SharePoint systems to Office 365.

Speaking at SharePoint Saturday New York 2011

2011-07-26T10:11:00.001-04:00

For the third year in a row, I’ll enjoy the privilege of being at the SharePoint Saturday New York (#spsnyc) community conference.

Metalogix is the Office 365 sponsor and I’ll be speaking about SharePoint upgrade and migration.

website: http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/ny

Microsoft.com Case Study with Metalogix

2011-07-12T10:42:00.001-04:00

This week, Microsoft published a four-page case study about Metalogix Software. I’m the Director of Product Marketing (and Chief SharePoint Evangelist) for Metalogix, so I’m really happy to see this pat on the back from our most important partner. There are some quotes in there from me as well, so that’s another good reason for me to like it.

Metalogix helps organizations benefit from the collaboration and content management features of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. The company developed a portfolio of tools that customers use to manage and migrate from previous versions of SharePoint Server and third-party systems to SharePoint Server 2010. Metalogix also supports cloud migrations, helping customers flexibly adopt fully hosted and hybrid scenarios. Metalogix customers experience fast, easy, and cost-efficient migrations and on average, they report a lower total cost of ownership with SharePoint Server 2010 than competing solutions, experience cost savings from SharePoint Online, and achieve these gains faster by using Metalogix.

Since 2001, Metalogix has helped companies plan for and complete their transitions to Microsoft content management systems as quickly and cost-efficiently as possible. After acquiring two leading solution providers, Metalogix has expanded its product line to include binary large object (BLOB) storage/externalization, management, and archiving and technologies, and it has served more than 5,000 customers across the United States, Canada, Europe, and the Middle East. Metalogix is a member of the Microsoft Partner Network with a Gold Independent Software Vendor/Software competency.

With the release of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, Metalogix sees a significant number of organizations that want to take advantage of a unified environment for collaboration and content management. Metalogix customers are eager to embrace advancements to workflow, business intelligence, and content editing with the familiar Ribbon feature, part of the Microsoft Office Fluent user interface. “Customers are also attracted to the capabilities in SharePoint Server 2010 for connecting to external data,” says Stephen Cawood, Director of Product Marketing at Metalogix. Microsoft Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint Server 2010 enables organizations to easily connect their SharePoint Server 2010 intranets, extranets, and websites to line-of-business systems, databases, and other external systems. “The overarching theme of SharePoint Server 2010 for all customers is flexibility,” says Cawood.

Read the full Microsoft.com Metalogix Case Study and download the Microsoft Word version.

Canadian Microsoft Azure ISV Twitter Account and Blog

2011-07-11T11:02:00.001-04:00

“I See Value,” the Canadian Microsoft Azure ISV blog, now has a witter account @ISeeValue.

On the Canadian Microsoft Azure ISV blog, read about Connect2Fans, a BizSpark Startup that has developed a solution to help artists, writers and other people in the arts and entertainment industry who find it difficult to connect directly with their fans.

Windows Azure Table has Phantom Columns

2011-07-10T20:43:00.001-04:00

While working on my Windows Azure application this weekend, I ran into an issue that had me stumped for a few minutes until Neudesic’s Azure Storage Explorer helped me attain the moment of clarity that brought the resolution to me.

The issue I was running into was that one of my Azure tables was showing a number of columns that I wasn’t using. The answer was quite simple—I WAS using them in the past. Therefore, even if I deleted all the rows in the table, I wasn’t removing those old columns and they were showing null data.

- You can download Neudesic’s Azure Storage Explorer from www.codeplex.com.

In this case, it didn’t show my anything other than my Azure table had empty columns that I didn’t think I was adding, but that was enough for me to ‘see’ the issue.

Error Deserializing XML: There is an error in XML document (2, 2)

2011-07-08T23:32:00.001-04:00

While working with some XML documents, I ran into this cryptic error: “There is an error in XML document (2, 2).” The problem turned out to be a surprising case sensitivity in the C# code. When I was trying to deserialize from XML to an object, the XML elements didn’t match the case of the class properties.

Here is my original XML file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<test>
<name>stephen</name>
</test>

Test class:

public class Test
{
public string Name { get; set; }
}

And the code that I was using to deserialize the XML into the Test class object.

string xmlFile = String.Concat(HttpContext.Current.Request.PhysicalApplicationPath, "test.xml"); System.IO.StreamReader reader = System.IO.File.OpenText(xmlFile);
XmlSerializer xs = new XmlSerializer(typeof(ReportTemplate));
Test testData = (ReportTemplate)xs.Deserialize(reader);

The solution was quite simple. The case of the XML tags did not match the case of the class properties. By changing them to match, I resolved the error. Here is the working XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Test>
<Name>stephen</Name>
</Test>

BTW – If the root element case matches, but one of the sub-elements does not, you will see the beloved error “Object reference not set to an instance of an object.”

Microsoft’s SharePoint, Office 365 and ‘Cloud’ Terminology

2011-06-28T19:56:00.000-04:00

With today’s launch of Office 365, I have cloud computing on the brain. It’s no exaggeration to say that “cloud” is the hottest buzz word in IT these days. According to IDC, the cloud market will hit $72.9 billion in 2015. However, there isn’t just one flavour of cloud. From cumulus to Office 365, clouds come in all sorts of varieties. So what does “cloud” actually mean? Here’s a run-down of the terminology currently being used by the SharePoint community and Microsoft in its SharePoint Online (SharePoint in the cloud) messaging.

SharePoint Online

The term “SharePoint Online” has been used to refer to any hosted versions of SharePoint—but the image above shows that Microsoft has really claimed the name. Office 365, BPOS and SharePoint hosted by a provider (e.g., Rackspace, SharePointHosting.com or Fpweb) all fall under the loose use of this term. I liked the general usage, but I guess I should stick with the fact that SharePoint Online is part of Office 365/BPOS and therefore refers to SharePoint hosted by Microsoft.

Office 365

Office 365 launched today! According to Microsoft, Office 365 is “where Office meets the cloud.” What that actually means is that it’s hosted versions of Exchange Server, SharePoint 2010 Server, and Lync Server. The previous version was called the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). Users will have access to the web versions of Office products and some users will actually get a copy of Office Professional included.

Private Cloud

This is a mildly controversial term. According to Gartner, IT should be planning to move to private clouds. But if cloud computing is applications hosted online, then a private cloud is what exactly? According to a growing number of influences, a private cloud is not necessarily on the Internet at all—it’s any version of SharePoint that’s accessed over a network. A private cloud is usually SharePoint hosted in a private data center.

So what’s controversial about that? Well, cloud computing is meant to free organizations from the IT overhead of running their own systems. If a company is running SharePoint in a private data center then they’re not decreasing their overhead; they’re actually adding a complicated infrastructure.

Public Cloud

If the private cloud is a version of SharePoint that’s available to a restricted group and accessible over a private network, then a public cloud is a SharePoint system that’s accessible publicly across the Internet. Office 365 is an example of a public cloud since all you need is the right URL, username and password, and you’ll be able to access it from anywhere.

Hybrid Cloud

If you needed any proof that Microsoft is walking the walk when it comes to their “all in” cloud messaging. All you need to do is read the four-page Microsoft cloud ad in last month’s edition of Wired magazine. The main focus of that add is the hybrid cloud: part private cloud and part public cloud. Hybrid clouds are being promoted because they allow companies to get their feet wet in the cloud (pardon the mixed metaphor) without jumping all in.

I recently co-presented a SharePoint webinar with Bob Fahey, Senior Director at Avanade, on the subject of migrating to SharePoint online and hybrid clouds.

Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS)

The Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) from Microsoft is a cloud computing subscription offering and the first version of what’s now called Office 365. BPOS includes hosted versions of LiveMeeting, Exchange, SharePoint (it was Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 [MOSS]) and Office Communications Server. BPOS has two flavours: Standard (BPOS-S) and Dedicated (BPOS-D).

I’ve heard it through the grapevine that this was never meant to be a public name. It’s an awful acronym that has already been abandoned, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that little piece of gossip is true. Office 365 is a much better name.

BPOS-S

BPOS-S stands for “Business Productivity Online Suite – Standard Edition.” some people say “Shared Edition” but that’s incorrect.

From www.microsoft.com, “Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite is a set of messaging and collaboration tools, delivered as a subscription service, that gives your business rich capabilities without the need to deploy and maintain software and hardware on-premise. These online services are designed to help meet your needs for robust security, all-day every-day reliability, and user productivity.”

The difference between dedicated and standard editions is covered in the BPOS – What is it? blog post on TechNet. Basically, the standard edition is a multi-tenant environment with multiple customers sharing the same hardware and dedicated installs are reserved hardware for one account. In order to subscribe to the dedicated version, an organization needs to sign-up 5000 users.

BPOS-D

As mentioned above, the difference between dedicated and standard editions is covered in the BPOS – What is it? blog post on TechNet.

Shared Cloud

This is a general term for any multi-tenant cloud environment. As already mentioned, some people erroneously assumed that BPOS-S stood for BPOS “Shared” edition. BPOS and Office 365 both provide shared offerings. In fact, almost all BPOS and Office 365 customers use the shared cloud version of those offerings.

Standard Cloud

This refers to BPOS-S--Business Productivity Online Standard Suite--which is Microsoft’s shared cloud offering.

Microsoft Online Services

Microsoft Online Services (MOS) offers hosted applications such as Office 365. These services include Dynamics CRM Online, Windows Azure and SQL Azure.

Companies generally move to the cloud because they are looking to reduce overhead, so it can be all about saving money, but there are other reasons to move all or part of your applications to the cloud. Many BPOS customers moved to the cloud because they wanted to use Exchange Online. However, there will be plenty of cases where companies will move to Office 365 to use SharePoint online.

Furthermore, many companies will have a hybrid solution of SharePoint on-premises and SharePoint online. In closing, I’ll just mention that Metalogix Migration Manager for SharePoint is the only solution Microsoft has approved for migrating SharePoint content to Office 365 or BPOS dedicated.

Happy Birthday Office 365

2011-06-28T11:13:00.001-04:00

Today, Microsoft is launching Office 365, which includes SharePoint 2010 online.

I wrote a SharePoint 2010 birthday post when SharePoint 2010 launched that included the image below of the Metalogix office cake.

Metalogix has announced Office 365 support in Migration Manager for SharePoint.

From the Metalogix website:

“Whether you are using SharePoint on-premises, or SharePoint online in the cloud, Migration Manager for SharePoint (formerly SharePoint Site Migration Manager) is the best-of-breed solution for your needs. You might be moving to Office 365, or upgrading from SharePoint 2003 or 2007 to SharePoint 2010, moving between SharePoint servers, managing a hybrid cloud environment, or re-organizing your SharePoint content--regardless of your use case, Migration Manager for SharePoint is an easy-to-use and convenient way of moving, synchronizing or managing your SharePoint data. With its familiar copy-and-paste-style user interface, you can quickly migrate and manage all SharePoint sites, libraries, lists, web parts and permissions between servers.”

Azure Blob.FetchAttributes Throws “The specified blob does not exist.”

2011-06-19T21:28:00.001-04:00

I was working on a Windows Azure application this weekend and I ran into a strange error. I was trying to access the metadata associated with blobs using (blob.FetchAttributes()) and received an error message. The problem was actually that the metadata wasn’t being associated properly with the blobs, so there was nothing to return. However, the error thrown was, “The specified blob does not exist.” Needless to say, I found this to be strange.

My solution was to check the metadata count before trying to fetch any metadata. This allowed my code to return blank results rather than throw a misleading error.

// Check for the case where attributes haven't been set
if (blob.Attributes.Metadata.Count > 0)
{
blob.FetchAttributes();
}

Update: Upon further investigation, I found that this didn’t work even when the BLOB metadata was properly set. If you run into this, check that you’re blob container reference isn’t null.

Twitter for Business Part 2: Twitter Usage and Etiquette

2011-05-30T16:03:00.001-04:00

Not long ago, I posted a defence of Twitter called Twitter for Business: Beyond what you had for lunch. That post focused on the value and benefits of the Twitter service—emphasising that Twitter is open, democratic and acts as an instant worldwide bulletin board.

In the first post, my goal was to distinguish the legitimate value of Twitter from the widespread misunderstanding that Twitter is just people ranting about their pets and what they last ate. I didn’t cover the nuts and bolts of how to actually use Twitter for business and how to distinguish your marketing efforts from simple automated tweets—the ‘sock puppets’ for hire.

The reason I didn’t cover the ins and outs of using Twitter in the first post is simple that Twitter is not new; it has been around for many years and it should be the case that most people on Twitter understand how to use it. However, that’s not necessarily true. I’ve seen plenty of examples recently in the Microsoft SharePoint community of tweets that demonstrate a lack of understanding of the basics of Twitter. So here’s a quick refresher on using tweets.

Tweeting in All Capitals

Let’s get a quick one out of the way first. Do not tweet with the Caps Lock key. Just like other media—such as e-mail, newsgroups, forums, and texting—the convention on Twitter is that writing in all caps is tantamount to shouting. Don’t do it unless your team just won the Stanley cup or your daughter just got accepted to med school. In a business context, it’s easier—don’t do it.

(Ironic Note: The Heading 2 tag of this blog changes text to all caps, and the title of this blog template is always in caps. Let’s say that’s the exception that proves the rule.)

# Tags (read: HashTags)

Are hashtags important? Absolutely! (Or should I write, “ABSOLUTELY"!”?). Hashtags (the # symbol) are one of the best ways to get your tweets read and to attract new Twitter followers.

Hashtags started out as a workaround to the fact that there isn’t editable metadata associated with tweets. In other words, you can’t add your own taxonomy tags (like the categories on this blog) and use them to categorize or search. People would follow the @hashtags Twitter account and their tweets would be added to the data store that hashtags.org collects about tweets. Or in their own words, “Hashtags.org is the defacto standard for hashtag information. The # symbol, called a hashtag, is used to mark keyword or topic in a Tweet. Any Twitter user can categorize or follow topics with hashtags.”

This mechanism allows Twitter users to identify ‘trending’ topics or keep track of messages about a certain topic by searching for the hashtag. While it’s true that lots of people only read tweets coming through on the feed from the accounts they follow, it’s also true that many people set up searches on particular topics and read those feeds as well. In fact, if you’re a heavy Twitter user, these may be the only feeds you read.

But you’re saying to yourself, “I can create my own keyword search in my favourite Twitter client, so why do I need hashtags?” Yes, it’s true that you can create you own search using any words and look for tweets about a particular topic. However, let’s say you were interested in Microsoft’s cloud development framework: Windows Azure. If you were to create a Twitter search for “azure,” you would get all sorts of noise that didn’t interest you. For example, messages such as, “I’m putting up new drapes. I think I’ll go with azure.” On the other hand, if you use the hashtag #azure, then you know that you’ll only be reading tweets about Windows Azure. Hashtags are also a convenient shorthand for phrases that would otherwise be too long for convenient Twitter usage. For example, the 2011 Microsoft SharePoint Conference is nicely abbreviated to: SPC11, so I can search for that tag to follow tweets about the event. In many cases, these tags are advertised on websites, but often they are organically spawned by the community.

If you are using Twitter for business then you want to ensure that your tweets are reaching the right audience. In the previous example, any tweets that you put out without the # symbol before the word “azure” would not reach the enthusiastic Azure development community. In other words, you may as well not be tweeting. Note that you only need to use these symbols once for each tweet, so “#SharePoint is cool. I like #SharePoint” is not necessary. Just use the hashtag once. Otherwise you’re wasting characters and demonstrating a lack of understanding of the Twitter medium.

At the beginning of this post, I mentioned that one dimension of Twitter that I’ll be touching on is how to gain more followers. Using hashtags is an excellent example of how to use Twitter tools to increase your followers. If your fascinating tweets consistently show up under a particular topic, the people interested in that topic will follow you.

In the current generation of Twitter clients, hashtags have taken on even more importance because the creative client developers have added some features that make them even more user-friendly. Personally, I use the TweetDeck client and adding search columns for hashtags is ridiculously easy, you literally click on a hashtag and you’re done; TweetDeck will create the search column for you.

Here’s some more information about hashtags from Wikipedia:

“Short messages on services such as Twitter, FriendFeed or identi.ca may be tagged by including one or more hashtags: words or phrases prefixed with a hash symbol (#) … Then, a person can search for … this tagged word will appear in the search engine results. These hashtags also show up in a number of trending topics websites, including Twitter's own front page. … The feature has been added to other, non-short-message-oriented services, such as the user comment systems on YouTube and Gawker Media … Real-time search aggregators such as Google Real-Time Search also support hashtags in syndicated posts, meaning that hashtags inserted into Twitter posts can be hyperlinked to incoming posts falling under that same hashtag.”

@ Tags(read: account tags)

Just like hash tags, the @ tag is a fundamental tool in the Twitter toolbox. Instead of writing, “I like Windows Azure,” you should tweet, “I like @WindowsAzure.” The difference may seem minimal, but it is key. The former is just text, the latter is the Twitter account name. Most Twitter users will monitor their ‘mentions.’ By using the account name instead of just a string of text, you’re alerting the user that someone has tweeted about them specifically—not just the subject in general. These mentions are often reciprocated by ’retweets’ (the next topic) and follows. Of course, this example applies when there is actually an official account. It would be harder to do this if your tweet was about wood or milk—although I’ve seen TV ads for both, so maybe not.

If you want people to notice you on Twitter, one of the best ways is to mention their personal account or their organization’s account in your tweets—it’s all about building a buzz and people won’t build you up if you don’t reciprocate. Furthermore, if you’re tweeting about your own organization, you should use your account name—with the @ symbol—so that any retweets show up in your twitter mentions. Mentions are another example of a feature that Twitter clients leverage. By tracking your mentions, it makes it simpler to keep track of who is tweeting about you.

“RT” (read: Retweet Tags)

A ‘retweet’ is the real power of Twitter; it’s like the old shampoo commercial, when someone retweets, you’ll tell two friends and they’ll tell two friends, etc. More retweets means more people will see your message (generally speaking) and you’ll have a wider audience. When a user retweets a tweet, they use the convention “RT “ and then the original users account name “@account:” to give credit to the person who first tweeted the message. Lack of the “RT “ convention in the same message sent out by multiple accounts is often an effective way to detect sock puppet accounts.

When you retweet, the user’s account will be included in the tweet, so the longer your account name, the shorter your tweets can be—if you want to make them easy to reweet, and you should. I like to call this the ‘Twitter tax’ since it take away characters that you’d be able to use. For example, my Twitter account is @cawood, so my Twitter tax is 10 characters because I also need to add the three characters used by “RT “. Every time I write a tweet that I want others to tweet, I should limit it to 140 – 7 – 3 = 130 characters. I don’t have to do this, but it makes my tweet easier to retweet and therefore reduces friction.

It is considered bad form to retweet someone else’s tweet without giving them credit (i.e., leaving off their account name). In the case where their “twitter tax” is too high to allow you to do a simple retweet, you can edit the message to allow it to work. I often have to edit tweets to retweet them properly. When I do this, I make sure that the spirit of the original tweet is maintained. Misquoting a tweet is a really bad idea.

Messages to People

If you are following an account, and that account is also following you, you will be able to send direct messages back and forth. These “DMs” allow you to have a private conversation over Twitter. For example, if you wanted to share your contact information with one account, but not send it out publicly. DMs are also a good way to send constructive feedback without publicly criticizing someone.

If you don’t want your twitter account to seem like a mindless sock puppet for hire, then make sure you actually engage in some social activity on the social network. Account’s that just send out retweets don’t have a personal feel and aren’t as likely to attract followers—which is conveniently the next topic.

How To Attract Followers

The simplest means to attract twitter followers is to have a focused account about a subject that interests you and then send out a reasonable number of tweets. If you send 20 tweets in a row, many users will find you too chatty and stop following. The appropriate number will vary, but understand that you can send out too many or too few tweets.

- Search for popular accounts that are also focused on your field of interest and follow them. Even if you don’t plan to read your Twitter feed regularly, you should follow these accounts because it will raise your profile. Some accounts will reciprocate your follow as a gesture of good will.

- Set up a search for hashtags relevant to your subject matter. Twitter clients such as TweetDeck are great for this.

- Retweet interesting tweets to get noticed by more accounts.

- Send messages to users answering questions or commenting on their tweets. In other words, engage.

There are services out that that advertise the ability to increase your Twitter followership. I haven’t looked into that option, because it seems like you’d just get a bunch of phony accounts building up your now meaningless follower number. However, it’s possible that I’m wrong about this, so I’ll just say that you can check out that option if it interests you.

Follow me on Twitter: @cawood

To read more about Twitter, you can read the Twitter usage Wikipedia article.

Microsoft Online Services Client Sign-in Issue

2011-05-21T10:41:00.001-04:00

I ran into an interesting error last week. I’ve rarely had issues with computers clocks, but for some inexplicable reason, two of my machines were on the wrong time last week. One of the consequences of this fact was that the Microsoft Online Service (MOS) sign-in tool for BPOS (now called Office 365) failed to work. This is one of my public service announcement posts—hopefully, this will help the next person quickly resolve the problem.

The error didn’t give me any indication that it was an issue with the clock: “The client was unable to establish a secure connection with the server. Please try signing in again.”

The solution was simply to set the computer clock correctly and change the server that I was using for online synchronization.

The full error is below. it was also reproducible on the MOS customer portal web page.

This issue is discussed on the Microsoft Online: Services Sign In for Windows forums here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/onlineservicessigninapplication/thread/3a5bd983-935b-4610-8cb4-6e11972cf3ee

Full Error:

The client was unable to establish a secure connection with the server. Please try signing in again. If the problem persists, please contact your system administrator.

The page requires a valid SSL client certificate

Your client certificate has expired or is not yet valid. A Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) client certificate is used for identifying you as a valid user of the resource.

Please try the following:

Contact the site administrator to establish client certificate permissions.
If you already have a valid client certificate, use your Web browser's security features to ensure that your client certificate is installed properly. (Some Web browsers refer to client certificates as browser or personal certificates.)
Change your client certificate and click the Refresh button, if appropriate.

HTTP Error 403.17 - Forbidden: Client certificate has expired or is not yet valid.
Internet Information Services (IIS)

Technical Information (for support personnel)

Go to Microsoft Product Support Services and perform a title search for the words HTTP and 403.
Open IIS Help, which is accessible in IIS Manager (inetmgr), and search for topics titled About Certificates, and About Custom Error Messages.

Geeklit Blog Passes 400,000 Page Views

2011-05-10T09:59:00.001-04:00

As you can see by the “old school” counter below, geeklit recently passed the 400,000 page views mark. (Yes, that’s views, not hits, so 400,000 people saw one page, or if it was one person—well that person really likes my blog.) This has me feeling a little nostalgic about the path that this blog has taken.

In the early days, it was very much about Halo. (And trying to be an advocate for legitimate Halo modders. Modding isn’t about cheating damn it!) The first post for this blog was written Monday, January 31, 2005 and the majority of the posts at that time were about my Halo books: Black Art of Halo Mods (Sams), Halo 2 Hacks (O'Reilly) and Halo 2 Battle Guide (Thompson). There was also some content about Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS) and the book I co-authored about that software: MCMS: A Complete Guide (AW). I don’t feel bad ‘plugging’ these titles because they’re so old now that I don’t think anyone is interested in paying for them anymore.

- this image was in the first post with the caption “I don't recall whether this was staged or not”

Of course, after leaving Microsoft, I eventually made it back into the fold (although writing books about Halo and XNA—how far did I really roam?) when I joined metalogix and started blogging and writing books about content management again—of course, Microsoft had consolidated on SharePoint by that point.

I’ve had people tell me over the years that my blog is eclectic, and I’ve always agreed with that assessment. Whether it was chronicling a drive across Canada, or writing about some development topic such as adding Growl/Prowl push notifications to SharePoint applications, I have jumped around a bit.

There is a common thread though, whether it’s Halo, MCMS, SharePoint, coding for XNA, or even highlighting the no left turn to Tim Hortons sign in Fredericton, it’s all pretty geeky.

Azure Debugging Database Error

2011-05-08T20:49:00.001-04:00

To set up the ability to debug Windows Azure projects in Visual Studio, you need to first run the “dsinit” command line utility (C:\Program Files\Windows Azure SDK\v1.2\bin\devstore>dsinit) which comes with the Windows Azure tools for Visual Studio. I recently ran into an issue where dsinit would not create the SQL Server Express database that would be used for debugging Azure projects.

The error is “Failed to create database ‘DevelopmentStorageDb20090919’: User does not have permission to perform this action. One or more initialization actions failed. The development storage cannot be used without resolving these errors.”

The issue was that the user logged into Windows did not have the “dbowner” right in SQL Express. It was also necessary to add the “sysadmin” right so that the user could set permissions once the database was created.

After adding sufficient rights in SQL Server Management Studio to the SQL Express database, dsinit successfully completed.

Windows Azure Debugging Issue with SQL Server

2011-05-01T21:37:00.004-04:00

I was working on a Windows Azure application today and when I tried to debug, I found that I was being stopped by the error below. I happen to have the full version of SQL Server on the machine in question, so my haughty first response was that I wasn’t going to install something else, but after trying the recommended approach, the simplest solution was to just install SQL Server Express.

Windows Azure Tools: Failed to initialize Development Storage service. Unable to start Development Storage. Failed to start Development Storage: the SQL Server instance ‘machinename\SQLExpress’ could not be found. Please configure the SQL Server instance for Development Storage using the ‘DSInit’ utility in the Windows Azure SDK.

I found this blog post that gives a lot of helpful info about the issue: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sql_protocols/archive/2007/05/13/sql-network-interfaces-error-26-error-locating-server-instance-specified.aspx. I first checked the firewall and that wasn’t the issue. Then I used the utility referenced on this page to check SQL connectivity.

Sure enough, the SQL Browser service was disabled (it showed NOT LISTENING). I started the service and was able to get past the original error message. I then ran DSInit to specify my SQL instance.

However, after running DSInit and specifying my SQL instance, I got the error below which advised me to install SQL Server Express. Fine. I did and it worked.

Server Error in '/' Application.

A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: SQL Network Interfaces, error: 26 - Error Locating Server/Instance Specified)

SQLExpress database file auto-creation error:

The connection string specifies a local Sql Server Express instance using a database location within the application's App_Data directory. The provider attempted to automatically create the application services database because the provider determined that the database does not exist. The following configuration requirements are necessary to successfully check for existence of the application services database and automatically create the application services database:

…

3. Sql Server Express must be installed on the machine.

…

Update: I haven't tried it, but I hear I'm supposed to use "/sqlserverinstance." to use the full version of SQL Server.

Panacea: The Language for Everything and Everyone

2011-04-01T13:41:00.001-04:00

In my vast spare time, I’ve been working on my own language project. I’m calling it the Panacea Coding Language. The goal is to provide an easy framework for everything and everyone.

Here’s a sample code block:

START
DO something
STOP

But it’s even better. You don't even need to include the start command:

DO some SharePoint stuff
IF something bad happens
THEN fix it before my manager finds out
STOP when done

Unlike other programming languages, Panacea also responds to begging:

PLEASE write this code for me so that I can go home

Panacea V2 will also allow colloquial coding:

DO some stuff LIKE FAST
SPARE ME the hassle of errors
JUST LIKE get it done
EOF SC

Installing SharePoint Custom Templates

2011-04-01T12:47:00.001-04:00

Just by virtue of the fact that it’s about MOSS 2007, this is a seriously retro post, but I had to do this just last week, so I figured I’d share it. Also, there’s always been talk about the idea of the Fab 40 templates being released for SharePoint 2010.

Of course, in 2010, there are other ways to deploy templates. For example, you can go to the Solutions Gallery and click Upload Solution. But for those of you lucky enough to have only done it that way, here’s a look back in time.

The Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Application Templates (the “Fab 40) are free templates available from Microsoft. To install one of the template, you must first install the “Template Core.” So, for example, to install the Bug Database template, you download these two:

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Application Template: Application Template Core http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=C1039E13-94DA-4D7D-8CAE-3B96FA5A4045

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Application Template: Bug Database
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyId=C72D23AF-F556-47AA-A6F2-0027246A9928&displaylang=en

First install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Application Template: Application Template Core. To do this, use the stsadm command line addsolution. Then follow the same steps for the Bug Database solution.

stsadm -o addsolution -filename <file_path>\ApplicationTemplateCore.wsp

After the solution is added, you need to use the deploysolution command to deploy it. The –immediate flag is used to deploy it right away.

stsadm -o deploysolution -name ApplicationTemplateCore.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate

stsadm -o copyappbincontent

To check the deployment status, browse to the SharePoint Central Administration site. Click the Operations tab, and then click Solution management under global configuration.

- SharePoint Central Administration showing the custom template not deployed

After all the solutions are marked Globally Deployed, run iisreset from the command line and you’re done!

- SharePoint Central Administration showing the deployed custom template

Moving to Marketing

2011-03-29T21:19:00.002-04:00

I’m changing job titles at Metalogix and that change was made official today. My new position is Director of Product Marketing and Chief SharePoint Evangelist.

The best message I’ve received so far in response to the news, “Welcome to the dark side.. ;).”

Supplement to SharePoint Taxonomy Series

2011-03-29T14:16:00.002-04:00

Ken Efta, writing for http://blog.allyis.com, has kindly mentioned my SharePoint Enterprise Metadata Management (SharePoint Taxonomy, Managed Metadata Service [MMS]) blog series in his post on the topic.

Also, Ken has touched on some aspects that I didn’t cover, so I’d like to return the favour. In his post, Managed Metadata Services and Term Sets in SharePoint 2010, Ken covers topics such as Localized Term Sets, Term Synonyms, and Using Terms Sets as part of Content Types (via the Managed Metadata Column).

Here are the links to my series:

Featured in MVP Summit Video on TechNet

2011-03-24T16:13:00.001-04:00

During the Microsoft MVP Summit Earlier this month, I participated in a video question session where Microsoft MVPs talked about how they currently use online resources.

If you blink, you’ll miss me, but you can see the video on TechNet.com. I’ll have to work on my showmanship—although, in my defense, I was sick as a dog during the conference and trying to keep that fact to myself.

Question 2 in the same series.

HTDE SharePoint Book Supplement–History of MCMS and SharePoint

2011-03-17T16:09:00.001-04:00

Last year, my SharePoint 2010 end-user book came out: How to Do Everything: Microsoft SharePoint 2010. To keep the momentum going, I’ve decided to write some short supplements. My goal is to add in things that I either didn’t have the time or the pages to do it in the printed book. After all, the express goal of the book was to not overwhelm end-users with too much information—as used to be common in the SharePoint world. The added topics might include background information, more examples, or maybe just colourful anecdotes about working on the Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS) and SharePoint teams at Microsoft. I’ll try and follow the chapter order, but if something compelling comes along that’s out of order, I won’t hold back the content just to keep the posts in sequence.

The first chapter of the book is an introduction to SharePoint and a history of the evolution of the platform (written by former Director of Marketing for SharePoint, Arpan Shah). It’s also one of my versions of answering the question, “what’s SharePoint?”—although you don’t hear that so much anymore. In this first supplement, I’ve decided to add a history of MCMS and talk about how publishing features from MCMS were added to SharePoint.

First off, if you look to the right-hand side of this page, you’ll see a logo that looks like the one below. (My apologies to those of you in the future who are reading this after I’ve changed my blog template or migrated to some sort of solar-powered blogging platform.) This logo was created for NCompass Resolution 3.0 and also used for v. 3.1—the last major release before Resolution became MCMS.

Prior to the Microsoft acquisition, NCompass Labs was a small company based in Vancouver, Canada. We worked in an old Hudson’s Bay Company fur warehouse in Gastown; it was the classic '”bricks and sticks” style that was popular during the .com boom. The office was on Water St. (so near the famous steam-powered clock that we could hear it form our desks) and boasted a view of the mountains and Burrard Inlet. I spent most of my time there facing Water St., but for a short time, I did enjoy that mountain view.

After Microsoft acquired NCompass Labs, Resolution 3.1 became MCMS 2001. The .NET initiative was on every dev manager’s mind at Microsoft and MCMS 2002 was released to add support for .NET. One of my tasks with the MCMS team was to port the Woodgrove Bank sample site to Woodgrove.NET. As you may have guessed, SharePoint 2003 was released the next year.

I’ve heard some revisionist history accounts of what happened during this period. So here’s my take. Since SharePoint and MCMS were both used to create websites, people often chose to do this using the erroneous distinction that SharePoint was for internal sites and MCMS was for public facing sites. In truth, SharePoint was focused on team collaboration and the fact that it wasn’t being used for public facing sites had a lot to do with the licensing model. MCMS could be used for any website but it didn’t ship with templates out of the box the way SharePoint did. However, MCMS was built from day one with public facing sites in mind and later versions had been tuned extensively for optimal performance on heavily trafficked sites.

- In honour of it’s Canadian roots, the MCMS box and screens featured images of the Vancouver library.

The two products weren’t even in the same business unit. SharePoint was in the Office Server Group and MCMS was in the now defunct E-Business servers group that was working on an e-business suite codenamed “Jupiter.” Jupiter was meant to include BizTalk, Host Integration Server, Commerce Server and MCMS. However, as time went on Jupiter remained a far-out idea and the confusion around which Microsoft product customers should use for building their site still remained. Microsoft knew that a change was in order. The resolution (pardon the pun) came when MCMS was retired and the MCMS team was folded in the Office Server Group. We were quickly set out to add more publishing features to SharePoint. Before I left Microsoft, I was working on SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) navigation, but I moved back to Canada before the release.

SharePoint today is a popular and rich platform for building websites. If someone asks, “what’s SharePoint?” feel free to use that line.

Microsoft MVP Summit 2011

2011-02-26T19:33:00.001-05:00

I’m currently in Vancouver and tomorrow I’ll be making my way down to the Seattle area for the Microsoft MVP Summit. Last October, I received an MVP Award for Microsoft SharePoint, so this is my first visit to the summit.

Unfortunately, for my blog, everything at the summit is under the umbrella of the MVP non-disclosure agreement, so I won’t be able to blog or tweet about the content of the sessions.

As usual, I’ll try to find time to meet up with my former colleagues in the area, but I’m really looking forward to the summit itself. The main keynote speaker is Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft. I once lost $10 because a friend bet me that I’d speak to or shake hands with Ballmer or Gates within a year of starting work in Redmond. I bumped into Ballmer backstage at a Microsoft conference in New Orleans and I was $10 the poorer.

Twitter for Business: Beyond what you had for lunch

2011-02-04T18:56:00.002-05:00

Since Twitter launched in 2006, I’ve heard many criticisms of the short message communication system. Some of the limitations of Twitter are obvious—after all, you can’t expect to be able to express every idea in 140 characters or less. However, I’ve also found that many hacks against Twitter are unfounded and stem from a lack of understanding about how Twitter works and the value it can add. This is particularly true in the context of using Twitter for business purposes.

Recent events have shown that Twitter has profound value in other contexts. For example, political rallies or disaster scenarios. Messages can be sent about demonstration locations or places to find food and shelter. I successfully use Twitter to keep up-to-date on what’s happening in the Microsoft SharePoint community, so I take it a little personally when someone claims that the technology has no value. Here’s a quick defense of the value of Twitter for business.

Update: I’ve now posted a second part to this post: Twitter for Business Part 2: Twitter Usage and Etiquette

Twitter is Open

Some people love to rant that, “Twitter makes no sense because we already have Facebook status.” What these people don’t realize is that unlike Facebook status, Twitter is open. Sure, the Twitter direct message (“DM”) system can be used for private messages, but most messages are not sent as DMs; most Twitter messages are public.

What this means is that any user has the ability to ‘follow’ any other user and read their messages. I doubt Bill Gates would accept a friend request from me, but I can follow him on Twitter to see how his foundation is faring in its fight against polio. Once you’re following a user, it makes it easier for you to see their messages—a.k.a. tweets—but you’re not even required to follow someone to read their tweets. You can visit their Twitter page anonymously and read what they’ve written.

This is great for business because anyone interested in a particular subject—let’s say SharePoint migration software from Metalogix—can read tweets by @metalogix or create a search for tweets with “SharePoint” in the text (or “#SharePoint” if you prefer Twitter hashtags). In other words, if I send out a tweet with key terms, I know that I’ll be reaching an audience interested in those subjects.

Twitter is Democratic

With the exception of some “Who to follow” or “Highlighted users” suggestions, Twitter is largely a democratic system. Each user chooses who he or she will follow and whether a tweet becomes popular depends on how many users choose to ‘retweet’ it. This is radically different than traditional marketing or public relations because business users might choose to follow a software developer’s account instead of the corporate PR account. This must be frightening to old school media types, but companies that effectively use Twitter can reach audiences that might otherwise simply ignore their marketing efforts.

Hypothetically, I might not want to follow a movie studio’s twitter account, but if I choose to read the tweets of an actor starring in one of their movies, I would still see some (maybe a lot?) of plugs for their movie.

Twitter is an Instant Worldwide Bulletin Board

The most common complaint I hear about Twitter is that it’s used for glib messages that no ones cares about. In an episode of the TV show Criminal Minds, a killer tracked social networking users who sent out tweets such as, “Mmm scones.” This is the sort of thing that many associate with Twitter. So much so that, I’ve heard Twitter called “keyboard masturbation.” What these critics need to realize is that those using Twitter in a business context aren’t going to behave this way.

Think of standing on a corner and having a constant flow of people walking by giving you Post-It Notes about the subjects that interest you. It can be incredibly useful and powerful to have that sort of instant access to what people are typing about any subject at any point in time.

When someone tries to put down Twitter, I simply say that if I follow someone for business reasons, and all he does is tweet what he had for lunch (not that I’ve ever done that), I’ll just unfollow him. Besides, it’s a lot less insulting than being un-friended.

Update: I’ve now posted a second part to this post: Twitter for Business Part 2: Twitter Usage and Etiquette

Follow me on Twitter: @cawood

Add Push Notification to SharePoint Apps

2011-01-07T09:41:00.001-05:00

I’ve been working on an application to help me with some SharePoint 2010 API/web services/client OM performance testing—I’ve given this app the sufficiently geeky name ‘SharePoint Genesis Device.’ The operations that this application runs can take many hours, and I don’t want to have to keep checking if it has completed. For this reason, I’ve added Growl/Prowl support so that I can receive push notifications on my PCs and smart phone.

- A Prowl notification sent to my phone

I’ve just started on this project, but the screenshot below shows what the SharePoint Genesis Device looks like today. I’m going to use Prowl ($2.99) as my mobile app for Growl notifications, but there are other options out there. However, I found Prowl to be easy to set up, so I recommend it.

After adding Growl (PC notifications) and Prowl (iPhone notifications) support, I am able to send push notifications both to PCs and smart phones. If you would like to do the same, I suggest you focus on getting Growl working first. It’s a requirement for the Prowl setup, so don’t worry about Prowl until you have Growl notifications working.

Follow these steps to add Growl and Prowl support to your C# application:

1. Download the Growl for Windows client and install it.

2. Download the Growl SDK and read the Growl documentation for details on adding Growl code to your application. Here is the code I used:

using Growl.CoreLibrary;
using Growl.Connector;

DateTime stopTime = DateTime.Now;
wlConnector growl = new GrowlConnector();
Growl.Connector.Application application = new Growl.Connector.Application("SharePoint Genesis Device");
application.Icon = @"\GrowlNetLibraries\growl4windows.jpg";
NotificationType operationComplete = new NotificationType("COMPLETE", "Operation Complete");
growl.Register(application, new NotificationType[] { operationComplete });
Notification notification = new Notification("SharePoint Genesis Device", "COMPLETE", "ID", "Operation Complete", "End time: " + stopTime.TimeOfDay.ToString());
growl.Notify(notification);

After you execute this code, you should see your application registered in Growl and the updates should appear on your PC. To open Growl, right-click on it in the system tray and choose Open Growl.

- Updates from my SharePoint app in Growl

If you have Growl set up and working, then you can add Prowl to send notifications to your phone. If you only want PC notifications, then you’re done.

3. Register for Prowl.

4. Login to the Prowl website and get your Prowl API key. You will need to enter this key into the Growl client so that notifications can be forwarded to your Prowl device.

5. Open the Growl client on your PC and add Prowl as a computer for forwarded notifications. Use the API key from Prowl.

6. Install Prowl on your iPhone from the app store and enter your login credentials.

That’s all! You’ve now got push notifications on your PC and smart phone.

Free Motion Chart Visualization

2010-12-23T12:43:00.001-05:00

If you’re not familiar with Hans Rosling's work, you should take a look at The Economist’s rollup of his TED talks about infant mortality. His style is engaging enough for the article to be entitled “Hans Rosling's greatest hits.” Hans is a great speaker and his presentations are interesting unto themselves, however, another interesting aspect of his talks is that you can leverage his cool visualization software for your own purposes.

The software that powers the bubble motion charts was purchased by Google and is free at Google Motion Chart—you just need to enter your data and run the HTML on any web server.

I have the sample data running on my web server and I’ve also entered the data for the Metalogix support team so that people can visualize how our support workload has fluctuated over time.

SharePoint Template Videos on YouTube

2010-11-24T12:08:00.001-05:00

If you’re looking for some videos about SharePoint 2010, I recommend you check out the GetStartedSharePoint channel on YouTube. This is a more end-user focused version of the SharePoint 2010 developer videos available on MSDN.

You can find introductory video about various SharePoint concepts such as sites, search, publishing pages, and content.

But you can also find videos about the various SharePoint 2010 templates:

Visio Repository site template
Team Site template
Social Meeting Workspace site template
Records Center site template
Publishing site template
Personalization site template
Multipage Meeting Workspace site template
Group Work Site template
Enterprise Wiki site template
Document Workspace site template
Document Center site template
Decision Meeting Workspace site template
Blog Site template

New Microsoft Community Contributor Award

2010-11-10T15:00:00.001-05:00

I’m happy to say that (minutes ago) Microsoft announced a new award called the Microsoft Community Contributor Award that will recognize individuals who make value contributions to the online Microsoft community.

“The Microsoft Community Contributor Award seeks to recognize notable contributions to Microsoft online community forums such as TechNet, MSDN^® and Answers. The value of these resources is greatly enhanced by participants who voluntarily contribute their time and energy to improve the online community experience for others. Each day around the world, Microsoft Community Contributor Award recipients contribute to Microsoft online technical communities in a range of ways, including providing helpful answers, translating online resources into local languages and serving as moderators.”

This is a very different award than the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) which recognizes people who have focused on specific technologies and are contributing to the community via conferences, blog posts, webinars, etc. Although MVPs also may contribute to forums, there are plenty of people out there doing good work in the forum who aren’t necessarily able to do things like attend conferences around the world.

“Through the Microsoft^® Community Contributor Award, we express our thanks to individuals who freely volunteer their time and energy to help improve the Microsoft online technical community experience for others.”

I think this is a great idea as there are a group of hardcore contributors out there that keep forums such as TechNet and MSDN relevant. Without their voluntary efforts, the forums would have a difficult time keeping up with the vast volume and broad range of questions that are submitted.

For more information, refer to the Microsoft Community Contributor Award FAQ.

Critical Information SharePoint Server October Cumulative Update

2010-11-08T10:34:00.001-05:00

From the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog:

"Microsoft has discovered a critical issue in the recently released October Cumulative Updates for SharePoint Server 2010 and Project Server 2010, and we have removed the files from download availability. If you have already downloaded the CU, do not install it. If you have installed the CU, please contact Microsoft Support for assistance. We will be posting additional information about the issue here as soon as we have it, and will make the Cumulative Update available for download again as soon as the issue has been fully resolved."

Microsoft Tech Days in Halifax!

2010-11-02T11:43:00.001-04:00

Microsoft TechDays is in Halifax November 2-3 at the World Trade Centre.

This is a great local event and I’m happy to see that Microsoft decided to come back to Halifax after the sold out show last year.

From the Tech Days session page: “If you're a technical professional in Canada, review from the six tracks offered through the two day Tech•Days experience in each venue. Select from over 50 sessions to build your schedule.”

Last night, I went to the speaker dinner and met a bunch of the people who have flown in to present on various topics.

I highly recommend this event. Check it out!

Rally to Restore Sanity This Weekend

2010-10-28T17:54:00.002-04:00

This weekend, comedian Jon Stewart, from The Daily Show, will be leading a rally in Washington, DC called Rally to Restore Sanity.

Some opponents have made strong negative statements about this event, but I have to say that it makes perfect sense to me. From the perspective of someone outside the system, it seems quite clear that a portion of the media and some politicians in the U.S.A. have convinced a lot of people that they cannot have a rational conversation with someone who doesn’t share their ideology. This creates a toxic environment where people cannot reach reasonable compromises, and it also paralyzes the government because politicians are more loyal to the concept of fighting the other party than they are to their personal values.

So, why would anyone criticize a rally designed to promote rational conversation? Why wouldn’t someone support a forum for people who aren’t extremists? Perhaps because they’re part of the problem.

Microsoft SharePoint MVP 2010

2010-10-01T11:34:00.001-04:00

I’m happy to say that I’ve received a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award for SharePoint.

What is that you ask? According to Microsoft:

“This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in SharePoint Services technical communities during the past year.”

In practical terms, this means helping with community-focused resources such as contributing to the SharePoint newsgroups, speaking at conferences, writing about SharePoint and contributing to CodePlex (an open source site used by the SharePoint community).

Getting into the MVP program has been a long story for me. Back in 2001, NCompass Resolution became Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS) and I had started what became the MCMS FAQ. The FAQ was a searchable CHM containing hundreds of questions and answers. I created it partly for the consulting team, but it was mainly targeted at the community at large. When NCompass Resolution became MCMS, I wondered if I could be an MVP. However (and I’m not complaining), I was hired by Microsoft and employees aren’t eligible for the MVP program.

In 2004, the MCMS team was folded into the SharePoint team, and I started getting involved with the SharePoint community. But I took a break to do some writing, so it really wasn’t until 2008 that I was deeply involved with SharePoint community activity.

Thank you to everyone who helped along the way. My employer, Metalogix Software, has been tremendously supportive and I wouldn’t have received this award without their help.

SharePoint Taxonomy Series Featured in SPTechReport

2010-09-29T15:03:00.001-04:00

My blog series on SharePoint taxonomy (SharePoint Enterprise Metadata Management) has been featured in this week’s SharePoint Tech Report newsletter.

This e-mail newsletter is free and you can sign up quickly by visiting the SD Times website.

SharePoint Incompatible Web Part markup detected

2010-09-10T08:59:00.001-04:00

I was working on my Game of Life SharePoint 2010 taxonomy sample, when I suddenly started to get this error message when I tried to add my web part to a page:

“Incompatible Web Part markup detected. Use *.dwp Web Part XML instead of *.webpart Web Part XML.”

The problem is that the .NET framework web part and SharePoint web parts are not the same thing. If you’re deriving your web part from System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart, then you are using the .NET web part. But if you’re using Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.WebPart, then it’s a SharePoint web part.

As far as I can tell, you can actually use either one inside SharePoint, but there are differences in the way that you code them. If you’re using a SharePoint web part, then you should have a .dwp file in your feature. If you’re using the .NET class, then it should be .webpart. The error about the web part markup occurs when you try to use the wrong one. The .dwp and .webpart files are both XML, but they use a different schema. So if you change from one to the other, you can’t just rename the file, you have to re-write it.

I don’t know why my project suddenly decided that it didn’t want to work. As far as I can remember, all I did was change the assembly version number, but anyway…

To resolve the issue, I had to ensure that I was consistent across my project. I want to use the .NET webpart class, so this is what the beginning of my webpart.cs file looks like. I’ve used the long format for the WebPart class to make things crystal clear:

using System;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts;
using Microsoft.SharePoint;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls;

//Added references
using System.Xml.Serialization;

Now that I’ve clarified which type of web part I’m using, any custom properties that I add have to be in the correct format for that type of web part. If you add custom properties using the other format, the project may compile and deploy, but the properties won’t appear in the web part property pane.

// Custom web part property for the term group name
private string m_termStoreGroupName = "Game of Life";
[System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebBrowsable(true),
System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebDisplayName("Term Store Group Name"),
System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebDescription("The name of the term store group you'll use."),
System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.Personalizable(
System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.PersonalizationScope.Shared),
System.ComponentModel.Category("Game of Life Settings"),
System.ComponentModel.DefaultValue("Game of Life")]
public string TermStoreGroupName
{
get { return m_termStoreGroupName; }
set { m_termStoreGroupName = value; }
}

This is what the same property would have looked like if I was using .dwp and the SharePoint web part class:

private string m_termStoreGroupName = "Game of Life";
[Category("Game of Life Settings")]
[WebPartStorage(Storage.Personal)]
[FriendlyNameAttribute("Term Store Group Name")]
[Browsable(true)]
[Description("The name of the m_group you'll use in your term store.")]
[DisplayName("Term Store Group Name")]
[XmlElement(ElementName = "TermStoreGroupName")]
public string TermStoreGroupName
{
get { return m_termStoreGroupName; }
set { m_termStoreGroupName = value; }
}

If you decide to change from .webpart to .dwp or vice versa, you’ll need to add the new file to your project and also update the feature package. If you don’t add the new file to the feature package, your web part won’t appear in the web part gallery because it requires that XML file.

SharePoint Game of Life Web Part on CodePlex

2010-09-09T10:30:00.001-04:00

Earlier this year, I presented a session at SharePoint Saturday New York on the new SharePoint 2010 taxonomy features (Enterprise Metadata Management). At the time, I offered to provide the source code for the visual web part sample I used in the developer portion of the talk.

The sample is a simple SharePoint 2010 visual web part based on John Conway’s Game of Life cellular automaton. I wrote about the SharePoint Game of Life web part previously on this blog. If you’re interested in SharePoint taxonomy, you can also check out my blog series on Enterprise Metadata Management (EMM).

The idea is that each term in the SharePoint taxonomy term store represents an organism. As you run through each generation, terms are added and deleted based on the parameters of the simulation.

It took a few months, but I’ve cleaned it up, added better error handling and uploaded the code to the SharePoint 2010 Game of Life Web Part project on CodePlex. This project is written in C#. It requires Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010 Server.

The Long Tale: This SharePoint 2010 taxonomy sample is actually a port of an old-school ASP code sample that I wrote in 1999 for the NCompass Resolution API. Resolution went on to become Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS).

Visual Studio Designer View Doesn’t Work After Adding a Table

2010-09-01T14:53:00.001-04:00

I’ve been working to clean up my SharePoint Game of Life web part so that I can give it out publicly. I found recently that when I added an ASP.NET Table control to an ASCX page, I could no longer select the individual controls on the page. This is annoying since I you can’t quickly get to their property grids.

In the Visual Studio designer view, I could only select the Table control that now encompassed all of the other controls. If I clicked on anything, it just selected the large table. The other ways of selecting nested controls that I would use with WinForms don't work either.

- after adding the table, only the whole table could be selected

After messing about, I found the solution. Since I don't actually need the main table to be a Table control, all I had to do was change it to a simple HTML table. So instead of <asp:Table><asp:TableRow><asp:TableCell>…. I used: <table><tr><td>…

Now the designer is usable again!

- after removing the ASP Table control, controls are accessible again

SharePoint Web Part Property Default Value

2010-08-30T11:50:00.001-04:00

I’ve been working on the final touches of my SharePoint 2010 taxonomy ‘Game of Life’ web part. I showed this web part during my SharePoint Enterprise Metadata Management (EMM or taxonomy) talk at SharePoint Saturday in New York earlier this year.

One of the final changes is taking the settings out of the ASPX page (and also removing the hard-coded ones), and moving them into the web part properties pane. This isn’t difficult to do, but I ran into a minor snag when I tried to set the default value of the properties. For example, most people playing with this control will be using the default term store name, so I may as well have that name, "Managed Metadata Service", already in the property box.

You can see these properties working in the image below (bottom, right).

At first, I thought the format was pretty obvious. I specified the default value like this: [DefaultValue("Managed Metadata Service")]. However, that didn’t work—the default property value was blank. I also tried adding a const string variable and using that to set the value: private const string m_TermStoreDefault = "Managed Metadata Service"; and then [DefaultValue(c_TermStoreDefault)]. But that didn’t work either—I still had an empty default value.

The solution was to set the member variable for the property to the default value. So instead of private string m_termStoreName; I used private string m_termStoreName = "Managed Metadata Service";. This sets the member variable that’s used for the property get method to the default value I want.

Note that if you don’t specify where you want your custom properties stored (see “XmlRoot(Namespace” below), you will see an error when you try to edit a property. Something like “Cannot save the property settings for this Web Part.”

For clarity, here’s what the file looks like (I’ve cut out some stuff that isn’t useful to this post) :

using System;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
//using System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts;
using Microsoft.SharePoint;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls;

//Added references
using Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages;
using System.Xml.Serialization;

namespace GameOfLifeWebPartProject.GameOfLifeWebPart
{
    [ToolboxItemAttribute(false)]
    [DefaultProperty("Text"), ToolboxData("<{0}:GameOfLifeWebPart runat=server></{0}:GameOfLifeWebPart>"), XmlRoot(Namespace = "GameOfLifeWebPart")]
    public class GameOfLifeWebPart : WebPart
    {
        // Visual Studio might automatically update this path when you change the Visual Web Part project item.
        private const string _ascxPath = @"~/_CONTROLTEMPLATES/GameOfLifeWebPartProject/GameOfLifeWebPart/GameOfLifeWebPartUserControl.ascx";

        protected override void CreateChildControls()
        {
            Control control = Page.LoadControl(_ascxPath);
            Controls.Add(control);
        }

        // Set the default value
       private string m_termStoreName = "Managed Metadata Service";
        // Create a custom category in the property sheet
        [Category("Game of Life Settings")]
        // Property is available in both Personalization and Customization mode
        [WebPartStorage(Storage.Personal)]
        // The caption that appears in the property sheet.
        [FriendlyNameAttribute("Term Store Name")]
        [Browsable(true)]
        [Description("The name of the term store you'll use.")]
        [DisplayName("Term Store Name")]
        [XmlElement(ElementName = "TermStoreName")]
        public string TermStoreName
        {
            get { return m_termStoreName; }
            set { m_termStoreName = value; }
        }
   …
    }
}

Web Part Error -- The type is not registered as safe

2010-08-27T16:18:00.001-04:00

I’ve been working on a SharePoint 2010 web part project and when I pressed F5 to debug, I ran across the error: “A Web Part or Web Form Control on this Page cannot be displayed or imported. The type is not registered as safe.”

This can be caused by innocently renaming your assembly/namespaces/classes. The first thing to check is: SharePointProjectItem.spdata. Your web part should be properly referenced in the SafeControl section.

You can also get this error if you've added a web part to a page (e.g., debugging) and then the web part has been removed from the gallery.

If that doesn't resolve it, check your other files.

e.g. VisualWebPart1.webpart file:
<type name="VisualWebPartProject2.VisualWebPart1.VisualWebPart1, $SharePoint.Project.AssemblyFullName$" />

VisualWebPart1.ascx.cs namespace name
namespace VisualWebPartProject2.VisualWebPart1
{
    public partial class VisualWebPart1UserControl : UserControl
    {

VisualWebPart1.ascx
<%@ Control Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="VisualWebPart1UserControl.ascx.cs" Inherits="VisualWebPartProject2.VisualWebPart1.VisualWebPart1UserControl" %>

VisualWebPart1.cs
namespace VisualWebPartProject2.VisualWebPart1
{
    [ToolboxItemAttribute(false)]
    public class VisualWebPart1 : WebPart

Elements.xml
<File Path="VisualWebPart1\VisualWebPart1.webpart" Url="VisualWebPartProject2_VisualWebPart1.webpart" Type="GhostableInLibrary" >

Assemblyinfo.cs
[assembly: AssemblyTitle("VisualWebPartProject2")]
...
[assembly: AssemblyProduct("VisualWebPartProject2")]

Windows Live Writer 2011 Beta

2010-08-27T09:39:00.000-04:00

Last year, I posted a message about Windows Live Writer for blog Authoring and I mentioned that I had heard a rumour that Live Writer would soon have the Office ribbon UI. Well the future is now.

The Windows Live Writer 2011 Beta is out and it does indeed have the ribbon interface.

I’ve only written one post so far (this one), but I really am happy to see that ribbon. I have to say though that a couple of things seem to be missing in this Beta. For example, pasting in a picture from the clipboard isn’t working for me (I use that all the time), so I had to use the ribbon Insert option. Also, I don’t see the Format Painter. I dig the Format Painter.

You can read my original Live Writer post if you’re curious why I choose to use this great app. But the short list is: access to multiple blog accounts, easy editing and image handling with my FTP server and having the power of a rich-client.

Outlook 2010 Quick Steps

2010-08-20T11:18:00.001-04:00

So I finally got around to adding some quick steps in Outlook 2010 and I’m glad that I took the time to discover the value of this feature. I work at Metalogix Software and anyone who works in a technology company will get a lot of e-mail. I previously posted about how I use Outlook Quick Parts, Outlook Safe Senders and how I manage my inbox (Don’t be an E-Mail Hoarder).

Quick steps allow you to create an action that contains a number of other actions. For example, you might want to move a message to a particular folder and mark it as done at the same time. The quick steps saves you the time of having to complete each action individually. In this way, you could say that Quick Steps are like macros.

I didn’t jump right on this feature because I didn’t initially appreciate that it could save me time. However, when playing around with it, I discovered that I can associate a keyboard shortcut with a Quick Step. Now, that’s interesting to me. Perhaps I only want to perform one action, such as moving messages to a folder, but now I can do it with a keyboard shortcut. That will save me time.

To create a Quick Step, you can go up to the ribbon, or you can right-click a message and find the option in the context menu.

With the context menu open, choose Create New to bring up the Edit Quick Step dialog. In this window, you can give your new Quick Step a name and choose the actions that you’d like to apply. Some of the options include moving, copying, deleting, marking as read or unread, setting the message importance, flagging the message, etc.

Once you have your Quick Step defined, you can go to the bottom of the dialog and choose a shortcut key and you can even add a tooltip to remind you how this Quick Step is meant to be used.

That’s it! You’re all sort to start streamlining your Outlook mail management.

SharePoint Web Services in Visual Studio 2010

2010-08-18T15:56:00.001-04:00

When you want to add a reference to your SharePoint 2010 web services, you might be confused by the “Add Service Reference” option in Visual Studio 2010. If you choose this option, everything will seem to generate fine, but you won’t end up with what you want.

To use the SharePoint 2010 (or MOSS) web services in VS 2010, you should choose Add Service Reference, but don’t enter the URL into the address box. Instead, click the Advanced button at the bottom.

Once you get to the Service Reference Settings dialog, click Add Web Reference at the bottom. This will open the familiar Web Reference dialog that you would have used in Visual Studio 2005.

With the good ‘ol Add Web Reference dialog open, you can feel free to enter the URL of your web services (e.g., http://servername/_vti_bin/Webs.asmx). Now you can use the same code you had previously used to leverage SharePoint web services in your applications.

Update: If you right-click on Web References, and choose Add Web Reference you can get to this option right away. However, you may need to create one the other way to get the Web Reference folder to appear.

If you do try to add a service reference to the SharePoint web services (e.g., http://servername/_vti_adm/Webs.asmx), you may see this error message:

There was an error downloading 'http://servername/_vti_adm/Webs.asmx'.
The request failed with the error message:
<html><head>
<title>The file you are attempting to save or retrieve has been blocked from this Web site by the server administrators.<nativehr>0x800401e6</nativehr>

WPF DockPanel and StatusBar Gotcha

2010-08-18T14:09:00.001-04:00

I’ve only recently started to work with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on an actual project. WPF is the new Microsoft technology for building powerful user interfaces.

I ran into this simple gotcha with the DockPanel control and thought I’d share. The issue was that my status bar would not dock properly at the bottom of the UI.

I wanted to add a toolbar, then some controls underneath that which are contained in a StackPanel control, and then the StatusBar control at the bottom. From an XML/HTML perspective, the following code made sense to me.

However, this didn’t work. The other controls messed up the StatusBar even though it was the only one set to dock to the bottom. The solution was to move the StatusBar all the way to the beginning of the DockPanel control. The reason this was happening makes sense to me now (for example, you might want the control on the left to go all the way to the bottom), but I assumed that if controls weren’t nested, then they wouldn’t affect one another.

Adding Senders to Outlook 2010 Safe Sender List

2010-08-02T11:38:00.002-04:00

To save time having to choose to download pictures in Microsoft Outlook messages from outside the Metalogix GAL, I often add addresses to the Outlook safe senders list. Unfortunately, I have found that this isn’t as straightforward as it used to be in Outlook 2007.

The Outlook 2007 method for adding a sender to the Outlook 2010 safe list does not work for me. Despite the follow note in the Outlook documentation, I do not get the option when I right-click a message or go up to the Junk E-mail option in the ribbon.

“To quickly add a sender, domain name, or mailing list name to the Safe Senders or Safe Recipients Lists, right-click the message you consider safe, and then on the shortcut menu, point to Junk E-mail, and then click Add Sender to Safe Senders List, Add Sender's Domain (@example.com) to Safe Senders List, or Add Recipient to Safe Recipients List.”

It appears that the option has simply been removed from the context menu and wasn’t added to the ribbon. You might be tricked into thinking that “Never Block Sender” achieves the same effect, but I’ve tried it and that option does not add the sender to the safe senders list.

The longer method (from the same documentation page) will work, but it’s cumbersome:

On the Home tab of the ribbon, click the dropdown arrow next to Junk
Select Junk Email Options...
Click the Safe Senders or Safe Recipients tab.
Click Add.
In the Enter an e-mail address or Internet domain name to be added to the list box, enter the name or address you want added, and then click OK.
Repeat steps 4 and 5 for each name or address that you want to add.

In previous versions of Outlook:

On the Tools menu, click Options.
On the Preferences tab, under E-mail, click Junk E-mail.
Click the Safe Senders or Safe Recipients tab.
Click Add.
In the Enter an e-mail address or Internet domain name to be added to the list box, enter the name or address you want added, and then click OK.
Repeat steps 4 and 5 for each name or address that you want to add.

These is however, a faster way to do it. If the message contains images—which is my main use case anyway—you can use the “Click here to download pictures” bar to quickly add the sender to the safe list. To do this, right-click on the bar at the top of the message preview and choose “Add Sender to Safe Senders List.” Quick and easy. Now you don’t need to choose to download images from senders you trust.

SharePoint Saturday New York This Weekend

2010-07-30T09:43:00.001-04:00

Tomorrow is another SharePoint Saturday New York (#spsnyc) community conference. I’ll be flying out today to attend the sold out event. 300 attendees are expected and they’ll be treated to 35 sessions.

Chris Geier from Metalogix will be speaking about Information Management in SharePoint 2010.

website: http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/ny

New SharePoint 2010 Book is Here!

2010-07-29T09:24:00.001-04:00

I stopped by FedEx yesterday to pick up my hot off the presses copies of my new book, How to Do Everything: SharePoint 2010. I suspect that it’s already on its way to the Amazon warehouse and will be released there soon.

This is my first end-user book and I’m very happy with it. McGraw-Hill did a great job from start to finish—quality editing and excellent presentation. So if you’re interested in SharePoint, but don’t know where to start, here’s an option for you.

Thanks to SharePoint MVP, Sean Wallbridge (from itgroove) for his technical editing skills and Arpan Shah, (Director, Microsoft) for writing the foreword. Also, big thanks to Roger Stewart from McGraw-Hill for bringing the whole project together. And, of course, my agent Neil Salkind for putting me in front of great publishers.

This book is part of a series called “How to Do Everything,” and I really hope that I don’t have to deal with, “you didn’t cover everything” comments. :) This is SharePoint after all—covering every aspect would take a substantial series of books.

Topics in this SharePoint 2010 end-user book include:

SharePoint Concepts
The SharePoint UI
Document Management
Collaboration
Taxonomy and Social Tagging
Navigation
My Sites
Web Parts
Customization
SharePoint Client Applications

WPC 2010 Wrap-Up

2010-07-15T22:34:00.001-04:00

Another Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) has come and gone. As usual, Metalogix had a great show. We were fortunate to see a number of our international partners and maybe start some new relationships as well.

- The WPC 2010 Metalogix booth

At this year’s show, the emphasis was clearly on the cloud and Metalogix was thrilled to be there to talk about our migration to BPOS and from BPOS to SharePoint 2010.

- Freeman crates behind the curtain at #WPC10

SharePoint 2010 Phantom Web Part Error

2010-06-17T14:42:00.001-04:00

I've been playing around with SharePoint 2010 visual web parts and I happened to find that one of my old—and deleted—sample parts was still (unsuccessfully) being loaded on the server. The web part did not exist on the page (at least it didn’t appear anywhere in published or edit more) and it had been deleted from the web part galleries.

I stumbled across the error when I enabled the SharePoint 2010 developer dashboard on the home page of my server. The web part errors appeared in the “Asserts and Critical Events” section of the dashboard.

To get rid of the error, I put the page in edit mode and removed all the white space (just a line break or two from the main content area on the page. (I also added and removed a different web part, but I’m not sure that it had any effect.) Now I don’t get the error… crazy.

- The developer dashboard no longer shows any critical errors

Here’s the error from the SharePoint developer dashboard:

Web Parts 18 7935 http://sp2010/SitePages/Home.aspx - An unexpected error has been encountered in this Web Part. Error: A Web Part or Web Form Control on this Page cannot be displayed or imported. The type VisualWebPartProject2.VisualWebPart1.VisualWebPart1, VisualWebPartProject2, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=50d4a10608bc4e38 could not be found or it is not registered as safe., Source: [UnsafeControlException: A Web Part or Web Form Control on this Page cannot be displayed or imported. The type VisualWebPartProject2.VisualWebPart1.VisualWebPart1, VisualWebPartProject2, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=50d4a10608bc4e38 could not be found or it is not registered as safe.]<br/>  at Microsoft.SharePoint.ApplicationRuntime.SafeControls.GetTypeFromGuid(Guid guid, Guid solutionId, String assemblyFullName, String typeFullName, Boolean throwIfNotFound)
<br/>  at Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.SPWebPartManager.CreateWebPartsFromRowSetData(Boolean onlyInitializeClosedWebParts)

Halifax SharePint Tomorrow

2010-06-15T10:45:00.001-04:00

There will be a SharePint tomorrow in Halifax, Canada!

Wednesday, June 16th at Durty Nelly's Irish Pub. 6pm

For future events, follow @HUGSharePoint on Twitter and check out http://www.hugsharepoint.org.

Windows Live Mesh Beta - Free

2010-06-10T11:17:00.002-04:00

A while ago, I wrote a post about SyncToy. It’s a free utility that let’s you sync folders across computers. Well, now I have something even better to blog about. I switched over to Windows Live Mesh (Beta) a few months ago and I’m really happy with it.

- Use the online interface to add devices to Live Mesh

Live Mesh allows you to quickly and easily share folders amongst machines that have network access. All you have to do it install a small app and then create folders. In the Beta, you get 5GB for free and both 32bit and 64bit machines are supported. I was particularly happy to find that Windows Server 2008 R2 64bit works because I’m a SharePoint guy and that’s what I run at Metalogix.

Once you have set it up, you can rest easy as the folders are synchronized in the background. For example, I just went to the Microsoft TechEd conference and I knew getting on the plane that my laptop was in sync with my shared folder at work. In a sense, Live Mesh is like a USB key that you don’t need to carry with you.

- A Live Mesh folder showing two devices are synchronized

Also note that Live Mesh offers a remote desktop option that allows you to remote to the computers that are being used. This adds tremendous value since most networks use DHCP and you can't be sure which IP to connect to unless you install something like DynDNS. In other words, connecting to work might be easy, but connecting to home can be more of a challenge; Live Mesh resolves that challenge.

Minor Surgery

2010-05-30T11:51:00.001-04:00

I had to go in for a minor procedure yesterday. I’m at home recovering and all went well.

A few years ago, I was snowboarding in Whistler and I tore my abdominal wall. I didn’t feel anything at the time and it wasn’t until a couple of days later that I noticed a bump around my navel—I basically became an outy when I used to be an inny. I had no idea what it was, but fortunately my wife is an M.D. and she immediately said “that looks like an umbilical hernia.” I hadn’t heard of it before, but it’s quite common.

The procedure is so minor that I prefer not to use the term umbilical hernia. It just makes it sound a lot worse. Most people associate the word “hernia” with inguinal hernias and those are much worse. Many people have congenital umbilical hernias and might never have them repaired. In fact, when I originally had my surgical consult, the surgeon recommended a wait and see approach. Even with Jujitsu and Water Polo, there was a chance that I wouldn’t have to be opened up, and that suited me just fine.

Unfortunately, the hole was getting larger and yesterday I went in to get stitched up. I have only had surgery once before and that was on a finger, so other than getting sick from the general anesthetic, I didn’t have to deal with much discomfort. This time around I only needed local anesthetic and obviously, that meant I was conscious during the procedure.

It wasn’t fun feeling the numbed sensations of the surgeons cutting, clamping and sewing up my insides, but I know some people who have had much more involved surgeries lately, so I really can’t complain about half an hour of discomfort and then a few sore days. I’ll be back at Jujitsu, running and in the pool in a few weeks.

SharePoint Saturday in DC

2010-05-17T12:40:00.001-04:00

Thank you to the organizers of SPS DC for an impressive SharePoint Saturday gathering this weekend. I hear the final count was 929 people—including 90 speakers who presented over 100 sessions. I co-presented a session on SharePoint 2010 migration and storage optimization.

Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to get a video of @meetdux rapping during the keynote—hopefully, someone will post it to YouTube. It was along the same lines as the SharePoint is Nice Nice Baby BPC09 Remix, except this one was to the tune of Empire State of Mind.

Metalogix was a platinum sponsor at the event, so obviously we had a booth and were talking to lots of people about how they can use Metalogix software to upgrade to SharePoint 2010, migrate content from other systems to SharePoint 2010, improve SharePoint performance with StoragePoint, archive SharePoint and many other topics.

SharePoint Coast is here

2010-05-17T10:41:00.001-04:00

I had an idea to create a blog called SharePoint Coast to highlight interesting and memorable things going on in the Microsoft SharePoint community. The emphasis was meant to be on the SharePoint Coast Hall of Fame. (If you’d like to nominate a worthy entry, please send a message to @cawood on Twitter.)

However, after realizing that I didn’t have the time to create a template for the blog, I have to accept that I simply don’t have the time to do a good job on two blogs. For this reason, I’ve moved the posts over to this blog.

At least I got to do a Halo mod…

SharePoint Community Hall of Fame

2010-05-17T10:32:00.001-04:00

The goal for this post is to provide links to the most interesting things that have been done in the SharePoint community. Please send your nominations to @cawood on Twitter.

Let’s get going—envelope please!

Best SharePoint Jingle

Bamboo Solutions web parts for SharePoint by therockcookiebottom

Best SharePoint Jokes

Check Norrie SharePoint jokes by SharePoint Comic

Honourable mention: Top 20 SharePoint Pickup Lines by The SharePoint Hillbilly

Best SharePoint Social Activity

Andrew Connell’s SharePint.

SharePoint Reviews posted an article about SharePint. Here are some SharePint logos.

Best SharePoint Ad Video

Microsoft Russia video explaining the benefits of SharePoint

Note: I think this was created by Microsoft Russia, but someone can correct me if that’s not true.

Best SharePoint Conference Contest

SharePoint Shooters custom Xbox 360 video game from Metalogix.

- SharePoint Shooters game play

Best SharePoint Conference Giveaway

The Colligo “Share” shirt

- totally posed btw

Best Digital Decorations

SharePoint 2010 wallpapers by SharePoint Comic

How to Do Everything SharePoint 2010

2010-05-13T14:27:00.001-04:00

I’m thrilled to announce that my latest book project is an end-user SharePoint 2010 book called How to Do Everything: Microsoft SharePoint 2010. My good friend, Arpan Shah, Microsoft Director of Technical Product Management for SharePoint, has contributed a section on the history of SharePoint and also written the foreword.

What I tried to do in this book is focus on the most important cases for the day-to-day user, but also provide an insight into power user and administrative tasks. With only ~315 pages, there’s only so much that I could cover. I trust readers are conscious of the fact that the “How to Do Everything” series name doesn’t mean that all of SharePoint can be summed up in one book. This book is squarely focused at the end-user.

The publisher is McGraw-Hill Osborne Media and I’m excited to be working with them again. The book will be on shelves this summer. However, you can order your copy today from the Amazon and McGraw-Hill sites.

Here’s some text from the book description:

"Written by a former member of the SharePoint development team, this is a step-by-step guide to mastering the latest release of this integrated suite of server capabilities.In How to Do Everything: Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Stephen Cawood—one of the people who helped build SharePoint—offers advice from his many years of working with SharePoint customers, cutting to the core and focusing on key features to get you up to speed quickly. You’ll get easy-to-follow tutorials on blogs, wikis, My Sites, Web parts, taxonomy, document management, workflow, publishing sites, team sites, and much more. Take full advantage of the content management, enterprise search, collaboration, and information-sharing capabilities of SharePoint 2010 with help from this practical guide."

Happy Birthday Microsoft SharePoint 2010!

2010-05-12T13:50:00.001-04:00

For those of us who work in the content management space, today was a very important day. Microsoft has officially launched Microsoft SharePoint 2010. SharePoint 2010 is clearly going to be the largest release of SharePoint ever—the largest release of ANY information management platform ever.

- The Metalogix Halifax SharePoint 2010 birthday cake

At Metalogix, we were also thrilled to be included in Microsoft’s keynote presentation as one of the key SharePoint Gold Certified Partners. Here is the slide that Stephen Elop, President, Microsoft Business Division used in his presentation.

SharePoint 2010 Taxonomy Web Part Development Screencast

2010-05-11T11:27:00.001-04:00

I have posted another video demo on the Metalogix blog. The SharePoint 2010 Taxonomy Web Part Development Screencast demonstrates how to create a Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Visual Web Part that uses the new Taxonomy API. The Taxonomy API is one of the Enterprise Metadata Management features provided in SharePoint 2010.

You can get the code used in this example in my blog series on SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Metadata Management (a.k.a. Taxonomy).

Metalogix is a Platinum Sponsor of Microsoft’s Official SharePoint 2010 Launch Tour. Come see Metalogix product in action and speak with a Metalogix representative at one of these SharePoint 2010 Launch Tour Events.

Business in Vancouver Interview about Augmented Reality

2010-05-10T12:52:00.001-04:00

Curt Cherewayko from Business in Vancouver recently interviewed me about my book, Pragmatic Augmented Reality.

It is quite clear that Augmented Reality (AR) has caught the attention of many developers and reporters. But as I was quoted as saying in the Business in Vancouver article, people probably “won’t know the underlying technology is augmented reality. They’ll just accept that this is the way it works.”

SharePoint Site Migration Manager 2010 PowerShell Screencast

2010-05-10T10:59:00.001-04:00

This screencast shows a quick demo of how anyone can easily use Metalogix SharePoint Site Migration Manager (SSMM) 2010 to generate PowerShell scripts for upgrading, migrating or managing Microsoft SharePoint.

See the screencast video here: http://www.metalogix.net/SharePoint-Site-Migration-Manager-2010-PowerShell-Screencast/

- The log view now contains the “Generate PowerShell Script” button

SharePoint Site Migration Manager UI Upgrade

2010-05-06T11:11:00.001-04:00

My latest Metalogix blog post, SharePoint Site Migration Manager 2010 UI, is live on the Metalogix blog.

- The new Metalogix SharePoint Site Migration Manager 2010 options dialog

- gotta love that ‘Generate PowerShell Script’ button

Enabling SharePoint 2010 Alerts

2010-05-03T11:42:00.001-04:00

In case you find that your SharePoint server does not offer you the ability to add alerts (e.g., from the ribbon), here are the steps to enable alerts in SharePoint 2010. The setup isn’t very hard, but it does require a couple of changes. In order to complete this setup, you need both administrative access to Windows and to SharePoint.

1. Install the SMTP feature on the SharePoint server. Once you have the server ready, you can set up Alerts from Central Administration.

- Adding the SMTP feature to the server

2. Go to Central Administration > System Settings > Configure outgoing e-mail settings and add in the appropriate details.

- Configuring the Outgoing E-Mail Settings in SharePoint 2010 Central Administration

3. After you have set things up, try using the ribbon to add an alert in a document library.

- Choosing to add an alert from the ribbon

- Configuring a SharePoint alert

After adding the alert, you’ll receive e-mail messages notifying you when your criteria have been met.

SharePoint 2010 is out!

2010-04-23T13:23:00.001-04:00

I tweeted about this yesterday when the bits actually appeared, but here are the URLs from SharePoint MVP Sean Wallbridge:

SharePoint 2010 is on MSDN.

Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010 (32 bit)

Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010 (64 bit)

Reminder: SharePoint Designer 2010 only connects to SharePoint 2010 sites. You will want to continue to use SharePoint Designer 2007 to connect to your WSS/MOSS sites.

Also note that you can't mix 32bit and 64bit Office versions, so you’ll want to download either Office 32bit and SPD 32bit or the 64bit versions of both.

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010

Also, you might want to read the SharePoint 2010 hardware and software requirements

- a shout out to the MCMS folks

Silicon is Not Religion

2010-04-20T15:33:00.001-04:00

If blogs from the 60s existed, I’m willing to bet that there would be plenty of lamentations about how people tend to lose all sense of rational thought when they start debating computer preferences.

Another example popped up a while ago in a blog post called From MSFT evangelist to Mac enthusiast. In this post, the author suggests that he’s writing about the difference between Apple and Microsoft. In reality, as you read through each argument, it’s clear that logic is taking a back stage to opinions.

Just so you don’t think I’m falling into the same trap, here’s my viewpoint upfront. I used to work at Microsoft, I own an iPhone. I don’t have a Mac, but my wife does. I wrote about the problem of criticizing Microsoft in my post The Microsoft Paradox. I’m perfectly willing to have a good argument with someone about hardware or software—in fact, I encourage it—but I hate to see bad arguments applied to technical topics. Technology should be free of such indiscretions.

Argument #1: “The most obvious distinction between Microsoft and Apple is design”
This is when I knew I had to write this post. In a classic case of comparing apples to oranges, the writer has decided to ignore the fact that Microsoft didn’t design his computer. “My Windows machine was a Lenovo X301” he writes.

Argument #2: “End to end experience”
”One of the major advantages Apple has is controlling the end to end user experience. This means the hardware works perfectly with the software.” I’m willing to grant that if you make both the hardware and the software, this can be an advantage. However, since Apple is the only major computer manufacturer that decided to maintain this level of “control,” you also have to acknowledge that an open system that encourages competition amongst peripheral vendors also has its advantages—like price for one.

Argument #2: “Functional differences”
The author uses multi-touch as his main functional difference between his new Mac and his old PC: ”Finally someone tipped me off that the Mac does many of the same ‘right click’ function by holding two fingers on the touchpad.” Unfortunately, this argument is exactly that, a comparison between an old computer and a new computer. As anyone who attended PDC can attest, multi-touch Windows machines have been available for some time.

The post really falls apart with the assertion “From a functional point of view you can do anything on a Mac that you can do on a PC…and vice versa.” This would have been a great chance for him to point out differences between the software available on the two systems, but he doesn’t do it. Unless he’s abstracting to the fact that one can run Windows on a Mac—I don’t think that’s where he wanted to go. I can’t use iLife on my PC and I can’t run Visual Studio on my wife’s Mac. That’s the sort of thing that a logical person would think about.

Windows Live Messenger Translation TBot

2010-04-09T14:57:00.001-04:00

This is a very cool feature that I’ve started to use. It’s called Tbot and it will translate whatever you type into a Windows Live Messenger conversation. All you have to do is add the bot (mtbot@hotmail.com) to your messenger contacts and then start typing. Tbot will translate what you write almost instantly.

Description from Microsoft: “Tbot is an automated buddy that provides translations for Windows Live Messenger. It was first launched in 2008 as a prototype and has since become immensely popular. You can have one-on-one conversations with Tbot or invite friends who speak different languages with Tbot translating for you.
Simply add mtbot@hotmail.com to your Messenger contacts. Simply add mtbot@hotmail.com to your Messenger contacts. ”

- using Tbot in Windows Live Messenger

Here are the Tbot commands:

1 TBot lang - Show the current language pair
2 TBot change - Select translation languages
3 TBot stop - Stop translations
4 TBot start - Start translations again
5 TBot set - Set your preferred language
6 TBot detect - Detects the language of the text
7 TBot ? - Show this list of commands

SharePoint Designer 2010 Beta and Office 2010

2010-04-06T11:05:00.001-04:00

If you’re looking to download both the SharePoint Designer 2010 beta and the Office 2010 beta, you may have discovered that there is a 64bit public beta for SPD, but the public beta for Office 2010 is 32bit.

I installed SPD 64bit first--only to find that the 32bit Office beta wouldn’t install if a 64bit Office application was already installed.

The solution is to download the Office 2010 64bit beta from MSDN downloads.

Augmented Reality Interview for AOL News

2010-03-29T10:17:00.001-04:00

I recently did an interview about Augmented Reality for an AOL News site (www.asylum.com). A few years ago, I co-wrote a book about Augmented Reality that was based on the work of Dr. Mark Fiala—an old friend of mine and creator of the ARTag marker system.

The writer was interested in a number of AR applications that have started to make it into mainstream culture. For example, AR tattoos are apparently gaining popularity (see video below).

- Augmented Reality tattoo

SharePoint 2010 Config Wizard Error

2010-03-19T10:46:00.001-04:00

I was getting this error when trying to run the configuration wizard for the SharePoint 2010 RC Hyper-V Image.

In the wizard, I was specifying a domain account with sufficient permissions, but I still got the access denied error. The solution was quite simple, I had forgotten that I was logged into the machine as the local admin account—not a domain account. The config wizard needs to read some info about the domain account you’re using for the setup. When I switched users to my own domain account, the wizard ran successfully.

Here’s a snipped from the install log:

Task configdb has failed with an unknown exception 03/19/2010 06:38:14 9 ERR Exception: System.InvalidOperationException: An error occurred while getting information about the user SharePointAdmin at server internal: Access is denied

at Microsoft.SharePoint.Win32.SPNetApi32.NetUserGetInfo1(String server, String name
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPManagedAccount.GetUserAccountControl(String username)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPManagedAccount.Update()
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPProcessIdentity.Update()
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPApplicationPool.Update()
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebApplication.CreateDefaultInstance(SPWebService service, Guid id, String applicationPoolId, SPProcessAccount processAccount, String iisServerComment, Boolean secureSocketsLayer, String iisHostHeader, Int32 iisPort, Boolean iisAllowAnonymous, DirectoryInfo iisRootDirectory, Uri defaultZoneUri, Boolean iisEnsureNTLM, Boolean createDatabase, String databaseServer, String databaseName, String databaseUsername, String databasePassword, SPSearchServiceInstance searchServiceInstance, Boolean autoActivateFeatures)

Live Blogging from SPTechCon

2010-02-10T12:11:00.001-05:00

I’m here in San Francisco live blogging for EndUserSharePoint.com at SPTechCon (#SPTechCon).

I’m currently in the SharePoint developer workshop being run by Phil Wicklund. It’s a full day overview of SharePoint development.

SharePoint Game of Life

2010-02-03T12:18:00.002-05:00

I’m sure some SharePoint community folks will remember John Conway’s Game of Life population simulation (cellular automaton) from comp. sci. For my SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Metadata Management (EMM, or taxonomy) talk at SharePoint Saturday in New York last weekend, I decided to create my own version for testing the performance of the new SharePoint taxonomy API.

Update: I have posted the source code for the SharePoint Game of Life web part on CodePlex. If you’re interested in SharePoint taxonomy, you can also check out my blog series on Enterprise Metadata Management (EMM).

Using the rules of the Game of Life, I created a SharePoint 2010 Visual Web Part that creates a new taxonomy term for each organism spawned during the simulation. When the creature dies, the term is deleted from the term store.

- SharePoint Game of Life running a glider

I actually did this back in 1999 for the NCompass Resolution Publishing API (the software that eventually became Microsoft Content Management Server), so I also had an interesting exercise of porting ASP script to C# code. The SharePoint Game of Life web part tracks the number of terms created and the time it took to run. I’m planning to use this web part as a sample for a SharePoint 2010 book project.

Here are the rules of the game (from Wikipedia):

Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by under population.

Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.

Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.

Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell.

The most famous pattern in the game is called a glider. This pattern is interesting because over iterations, it will simply continue to move across the grid. The glider configuration has been adopted as the hacker emblem.

- the glider starting position

For dramatic effect, I decided to add an image for a dead organism—as you can see in the animation. This isn’t normally done, so for the Game of Life purists, I’ll probably add an option to disable it in the release version of the code.

The code isn’t ready for prime time yet, so I don’t have perf numbers to publish yet. But hopefully, I’ll get a chance to polish it up soon.

BTW – The creature is an homage to Mazogs. A ZX-81 (Timex Sinclair 1000) game I played as a kid.

Paul Quarrington

2010-01-22T00:26:00.001-05:00

It’s truly a tragedy that Canada has lost one of its best novelists at such a young age. Paul Quarrington passed away yesterday.

I had the good fortune to have Paul as my mentor for a writing course and his book, Boy on the Back of the Turtle, helped inspire my wife and I to go on a trip to the Galapagos Islands.

If you want to read a truly great novel, find a copy of Quarrington’s Whale Music.

Office Ribbon Hero

2010-01-19T15:35:00.003-05:00

Further to my previous post Games are the Way to Test Software, I wanted to mention the new Office Ribbon Hero game. Score points by using the ribbon, accept challenges and share your results with your Facebook friends.

Can you imagine if you were new to Office how helpful this would be? It makes me think of the XT typing tutor game I played back in high school. It was similar to missile command--words falling down the screen and the player has to type them before they destroy bases. Great game.

Hyper-V Import Again Fails

2010-01-18T15:42:00.001-05:00

I ran into this Hyper-V subtlety, so I figure I’ll share it here and make it easier to find with a search. If you try to import a Hyper-V image and the import fails, you will not be able to use the same files to try the import again. Hyper-V actually deletes and alters files as part of the import process.

The error you’ll likely see is “Import failed. Import failed. Unable to find virtual machine import files under location … You can import a virtual machine only if you used Hyper-V to create and export it.” At face value this error is infuriating since you are trying to import a Hyper-V export, but the fact that you’re running the import for the second time means that Hyper-V does not consider your source to be valid.

The lesson here is don’t try and import your exported Hyper-V image without first making a backup copy. If you have a backup, you can just copy over the small files again and not have to export or copy the large image files a second time.

Microsoft’s Free SyncToy

2010-01-15T16:01:00.003-05:00

I have been using the Mozy online backup service for a while now, and while it is an affordable and convenient way to backup my laptop, it’s not a solution for syncing folders between my laptop, my home desktop and my work desktop.

In order to resolve the sync problem, I decided to try Microsoft’s free SyncToy PowerToy. I believe that Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010 is where I will eventually go for at least part of this functionality, but a quick—not to mention, free—resolution is appealing to me today.

UPDATE: If you're interested in this utility, you should check out the new version: Windows Live Mesh.

Backup vs. Sync

While there certainly is a relationship between sync and backup, the two are not the same. The reason I want to backup my files is because I want to be able to recover something that was lost due to a failure such as a hard drive crash. The reason I want to sync my files is that I want to do things such as walk home from work and have the same file on my home machine that I was just editing at work. In fact, I don’t want it just to be the same file, it must be the same version of the file.

Microsoft SharePoint can be useful for these scenarios, but I use it primarily for work. I use Mozy online backup to protect assets such as my vacation photos. I want to be able to sync because when I open my laptop on a plane (like I just did to write this post), I want the right versions of a bunch of files to be there. Furthermore, I may not know which files I want, so the sync is something that should happen automatically.

What can SyncToy do?

SyncToy is able to help with most of my files syncing needs. Using the tool, I can create a relationship between files shares on as many computers as I want and specify a few options for how I would like those files to be handled.

- creating a folder pair for syncing

Once I have my sync pairs created, I can run the operation and the files on my desktop at work will be synchronized with my files on my laptop.

- running a sync

If you’re not sure what’s going to happen with the click the Run button, there is also a preview run feature that you can use to see what the operation will do before it runs.

- previewing a sync run

Note: Synctoy will write a file (.dat) to each folder that you add to a folder pair. If you delete this file, SyncToy will no longer be able to run the synchronization.

Schedule SyncToy

Since SyncToy does not have a way to configure a sync operation to run, you will need to use Windows Scheduler to automate the task. This is not ideal and doesn’t allow for real-time synchronization, but as you can see in the steps below, it’s trivial to set it up to run at a set time.

From the SyncToy 2.1 Help:

While you do not have to schedule SyncToy to use it, some users may find it helpful to schedule recurrent SyncToy runs. Perhaps you have a folder pair that takes a long time to sync and you want to run SyncToy in the middle of the night, for example.
SyncToy does not provide a user interface to schedule folder pairs to run at designated times. However, there is a method to schedule tasks using the Microsoft© Windows© operating system.

Windows Vista/ Win7
To schedule a task using the operating system:
1. From the Start menu, select All Programs - Accessories - System Tools - Task Scheduler.
2. Select Create Basic Task in the Actions pane on the right.
3. Add a Name and Description and select Next.
4. Choose when you want the task to start and select Next.
5. Choose date/times (if applicable) to run task and select Next.
6. Choose Start a Program option and select Next.
7. Select Browse and locate the SyncToyCmd.exe.
8. Type "-R" in the Add Arguments textbox. –R all by itself will run all folder pairs that are active for run all. If you want to run just a single folder pair, add –R “My Pair” to the end of the command line.

Note: If the folder pair name contains a space, surround it with quotation marks… "C:\Program Files\SyncToy 2.1\SyncToyCmd.exe" -R "My folder pair."

The weakness of SyncToy comes to light in the ‘stepping on a plane’ scenario. Today, SyncToy does not have a UI option for scheduling synchronization and even if you use Windows scheduler, you’re still not in the Nirvana state because a lot could happen between the time that your scheduled sync runs and when you get onboard your flight. However, despite these limitations, I’m going to be using SyncToy for the time being.

Try SyncToy 2.1 for free.

History of SharePoint ECM Through Shirts

2010-01-09T22:56:00.001-05:00

I moved a while back and was amazed how many free shirts I still have kicking around. I thought I’d pick the most relevant ones and do a quick history of SharePoint ECM through clothing.

Note: If you want to do an animation like this, I recommend smiling. While no expression is easier to duplicate, there’s less chance that you’ll look like the psychotic killer in a Criminal Minds episode.

1998 – 2001 (NCompass Labs t-shirt and leather jacket)
NCompass Labs was located in Vancouver, Canada. NCompass Resolution was built to be a platform for creating websites with content management features and it would go on to become Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS). MCMS was the basis of today’s SharePoint publishing sites functionality.

2001 (e-biz hoodie, MCMS 2001 polo, Microsoft Portal Airlift windbreaker)
SharePoint Portal Server 2001 and MCMS 2001 were released. At this point, SharePoint was an application designed to build Intranets. MCMS was built as a development platform for web content management. The fact that both could be used to build Intranets caused confusion—some people liked to say that SharePoint was for Intranets and MCMS was for public sites, but that wasn’t accurate. MCMS was moved to the newly created E-Business Servers division and SharePoint was in the Office Servers division.

Aside: The “EBZ” hoodie was given out because the team that left Redmond building 1 before we moved in were so messy that the space “looked like a frat house.”

2002 (E-Business Servers Hawaiian speaker shirt, MCMS 2002 t-shirt)
MCMS 2002 was released primarily to add support for .NET developers. The marketplace confusion about the two content management products from Microsoft continued. The E-Business Servers division embarked on the Jupiter project which was a vision for an integrated suite of business products including BizTalk and MCMS.

2003 (TechEd 2003 Speaker shirt)
SharePoint Portal Server 2003 was released. SPS added key features and scalability. SPS also kicks off the SharePoint vision to be both a platform and an application.

2004 – 2007 Metalogix Booth Staff polo and Colligo share shirt
The E-Business group is dissolved (because of their taste in shirts?) and the MCMS team becomes part of the SharePoint team.

From Microsoft: “Based on extensive customer feedback, we have integrated the Web content management capabilities of CMS 2002 into the new Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007”

A key aspect of this timeframe is that the SharePoint partner ecosystem grows dramatically. Because of this, I threw in a couple of partner shirts. More ECM features are added to SharePoint.

Aside: I left out the speaker shirt from TechEd New Zealand. As native South Africans, my brother would never forgive me if I published a photo of me wearing the silver fern. But to be fair, I had a fantastic time, met some great people, and hope to go again.

2007 – 2009 SharePoint Conference Speaker shirt
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) was released and SharePoint gains the impressive title as the fastest product to grow to 1B (in yearly revenue ) in Microsoft history. The market clearly demonstrates that it wants one solution that is both a platform and an application for building websites. Also, SharePoint gains significant mindshare as a solution for public internet sites. At the end of the decade, SharePoint 2010 Server and SharePoint Foundation are in public Beta—both receiving favourable reviews.

SharePoint Managed Metadata End-User Experience

2010-01-07T15:56:00.003-05:00

This post is part two in a series that I’m writing about SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Managed Metadata (EMM or ‘taxonomy’). If you haven’t set up a SharePoint 2010 development environment yet, you may also want to check out SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 install.

There are two types of tags in the new SharePoint 2010 taxonomy system: managed keywords and managed terms. I’ll cover each one and give example of how users can take advantage of the various features that each type enables.

Managed Keywords

Keywords are used to informally tag content within SharePoint. Instead of relying on a centrally managed store of terms that they must choose from, keywords allow users to add their own tags. This means that faculties such as folksonomy and informal tag clouds are enabled.

Note: Managed keywords are stored in a separate single database and do not have a hierarchical structure.

To add a managed term to a document, first select the document in the document library and select Edit Properties.

- Selecting a document for editing

Once you have the edit document properties dialog open, find the Managed Keywords field and you can either start typing an existing keyword (which will prompt you with suggestions) or you can type in a new keyword.

- Adding a keyword to a document

The Tag Cloud Web Part

Once you’ve begun tagging things, you’ll probably want to be able to use that data in convenient ways. The tag cloud web part is a quick way to get a sense of the folksonomy being created on your SharePoint server.

If you have sufficient permissions to create a web part page and add web parts, you’ll be able to add the tag cloud web part to web part pages.

- Adding the tag cloud web part to a page

Once added, there are a number of options in the tag cloud settings.

- A tag cloud web part in edit page mode

- A tag cloud web part in published mode

Note: A lot of features aren’t activated at the site collection level by default. Activating the “SharePoint Server Standard” feature enables the Tag Cloud web part. If you find that you’re not offered the Tag Cloud web part, ask your SharePoint admin to investigate.

Managed Terms

Managed terms are placed in a central repository of terms. This enables consistency across users, provides hierarchical organization, and allows for strict information architecture. In the SharePoint Term Store Management Tool, users with sufficient permissions are be able to perform many operations on terms in the hierarchy. However, most users will simply use the terms from the central store.

As with keywords, terms can be added to many types of content within SharePoint. This example, will show how to add a term to a document within a document library that has already been enabled for tagging with terms. For more information about enabling a SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 document for tagging with managed terms, refer to SharePoint Taxonomy Part Three – Administrator Experience.

To add a managed term to a document, first select the document in the document library and select Edit Properties. Once you have the edit document properties dialog open, find the managed metadata field and you can either start typing a term or click the “Browse for a valid choice” icon on the right.

- Browsing for a term to add to a document

The screenshot below shows the suggest as you type feature which will show terms that match your partial input. Also, in the box below, you can see the labels (synonyms) and the description which helps users understand how different tags should be used.

Metadata-driven Navigation

Managed Metadata can also be used to enable some cool navigational features within SharePoint 2010. For example, if you go to a list that has a managed metadata column, you’ll be able to filter the view by simply selecting one of the terms being used in the list. This enables the end-user to instantly filter lists without having to create a custom view.

- Filtering a document library using the Managed Metadata term “Cape Town”

Once you apply the filter, the column heading will show a funnel icon to indicate that you’re not seeing the full list. This essentially allows you to see SharePoint through a simple parametric navigation mechanism—or as we used to say on the SharePoint team, “navigation goggles.”

- The filtered results

Happy tagging!

[Disclaimer: This information is based on SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 and may differ from the RTM build.]

SharePoint Managed Metadata Administrator Experience

2010-01-05T20:28:00.004-05:00

This post is part three in a series that I’m writing about SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Managed Metadata (EMM or ‘taxonomy’). If you haven’t set up a SharePoint 2010 development environment yet, you may also want to check out SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 install.

SharePoint Taxonomy Part One – Introduction to SharePoint Managed Metadata
SharePoint Taxonomy Part Two – End-User Experience
SharePoint Taxonomy Part Three – Administrator Experience
(including Using SharePoint Term Stores and SharePoint Taxonomy Hierarchy)
SharePoint Taxonomy Part Four – Developer Experience
(including SharePoint 2010 Visual Web Parts and SharePoint 2010 Taxonomy Reference Issues)

As a SharePoint administrator, the first step when using the new EMM features is to learn how to use SharePoint Term Stores and research the details for creating a SharePoint Taxonomy Hierarchy. You’ll also want to read Microsoft’s best practices and make use of the managed metadata planning data sheets. You can find those links at the bottom of my post SharePoint Taxonomy Part One – Introduction to SharePoint Managed Metadata.

After you have got your term store set up and you’ve decided how your taxonomy will be organized, you’ll need to set the permissions on your term store and enable various content for tagging. Remember that there are two types of tagging: managed keywords and managed metadata. Managed keywords are used for informal “folksonomy” style tagging and managed terms are used for centrally controlled and delegated hierarchical term structures.

How to Enable Managed Metadata on Your Server

Step 1: Add an administrator to your term store.
I covered this process in Using SharePoint Term Stores.

Step 2. Create some terms.
I covered the details of this topic in SharePoint Taxonomy Hierarchy.

Step 3. Add a column of type “Managed Metadata”
I’m not sure if this will be the case when the RTM version of SharePoint 2010 ships, but despite the fact that the documentation suggests that many content types (inc. document) come with a managed metadata column for tagging, I have found that this column only works for keywords—not for managed terms. In Beta 2, the column that comes with a document library is called “Managed Keywords” and has the internal name “TaxKeyword.”

To use managed terms, I had to add a new column to my document libraries. To do this, first go to the list you want to enable and choose the Library tab from the ribbon, then Library Settings from the Settings area. Once there, choose Create Column.

- Adding a new column to a list

When the Create Column dialog opens, choose the Managed Metadata column type and give it a name. You’ll also be able to choose options such as whether you want to allow multiple values.

- Use the Managed Metadata column type for managed terms

After adding this column, you should be able to edit the properties of a document in the document library and see a new option to choose managed terms to put into the new managed metadata field. Click on the little tags icon on the right of the field to browse your term store.

- After adding the managed metadata column, terms can be associated with the document

Promoting a Managed Keyword to a Managed Term

One philosophy for building a taxonomy is to let the users decide which terms are important. In SharePoint 2010, there are two ways to achieve this. First, you can allow “fill-in” keywords in your term sets. Secondly, you can allow users to tag with managed keywords and then choose to promote some (or all) of them to managed terms.

To change a managed keyword to a managed term, you simply open the term store management tool (from central admin or site settings) and use the "Move” option to move the keyword into the term hierarchy.

- Moving a keyword to the term store will convert it to a managed term

Note: It is not possible to move a managed term to the keywords store. In other words, you can promote a managed keyword to a managed term, but you can’t demote a term to a keyword.

Polyhierarchy

A polyhierarchy enabled tree can include leaves (nodes) that have more than one branch (parent node). In SharePoint Server 2010, you can create a polyhierarchical structure with the Reuse Terms action in the Term Store Management Tool.

This example doesn’t really make sense, but let’s just imagine that I had used terms that weren’t as regimented as a geography. Say, for example, I had used people instead and the Term Sets defined teams to which they belong. In that case, a person could be on more than one team and therefore, you might want to reuse the term. For simplicity, the screen below shows the same hierarchy used in my other examples, but the Cairo term has been reused and it now appears in two different locations in the tree hierarchy.

- An example of polyhierarchy

If you look at the properties of the term (see screen below), you can see that it now belongs to two term sets.

More Notes about EMM Administration

- When you create a new term store, make sure the application pool is running.
- the Term Store Management Tool (TSMT) is available in Central Administration (and site settings). This tool manages terms centrally for the whole farm and can be used to create, copy, reuse, move, duplicate (for polyhierarchy), deprecate, delete and merge terms. The TSMT is also used to manage permissions on term stores.

- Term management options

- The Managed Metadata column can allow multiple values.
- All managed keywords are stored in a single non-hierarchical term set called the keyword set.
- Site collections can optionally use their own term sets at the column level rather than use the central term store.
- You can enable fill-in choices with a submission policy, this enables folksonomy.
- Multilingual (MUI) terms are available.
- Terms can be labelled to create synonyms that help users figure out which term to use.

[Disclaimer: This information is based on SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 and may differ from the RTM build.]

SharePoint Taxonomy Hierarchy

2009-12-31T17:11:00.003-05:00

If you’re wondering how to organize your SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Managed Metadata (EMM), you should start by reading the TechNet article, Plan terms and term sets (SharePoint Server 2010). I’m going to highlight some of the key points of that article and also add a few points from other sources.

While the TechNet article reminds us that you could simply allow your users to add keywords and then use their input to create your taxonomy—promoting keywords to managed terms—it seems likely that most organizations will want to start with an organized metadata hierarchy.

As explained in SharePoint Taxonomy Part One – Introduction to SharePoint Managed Metadata, the SharePoint 2010 EMM is organized into a hierarchy. The objects within this hierarchy are term stores, groups, term sets, and terms.

Note: Keywords are stored in a non-hierarchical fashion in there own storage space.

These are the rules for the taxonomy hierarchy:
• When a Managed Metadata service is created, a term store will be created. Once you have a term store, you can create a group. A group is a security boundary.
• Once you have a group, you can create a term set. A term set must be the child of a single parent group.
• Under a term set, terms can be created. A term can be the child of a term set, or of another term.
• A term can be added as a child of another term.
• Terms can be nested to seven levels. [Update: this documented rule is not enforced in the RTM version]

One of the key points of the TechNet article about planning your terms and term sets is that a group is a security boundary. A group contributor can manage the term sets in the groups and create new term sets. All users who have access to a term set under a group can see all of the other term sets—even if they don’t have rights to manage the other term sets. Based on this, you should organize your term sets into groups based on the groups of users who will manage them. For this reason, your taxonomy may correlate to your organizational structure. Let’s take a look at an example.

- Sample SharePoint 2010 EMM (taxonomy) hierarchy

Term Store: In the sample hierarchy shown in the figure above, you can see that there is one term store (called “Taxonomy” for lack of inspiration for a better name). Remember that you can have multiple terms stores, but each term store is stored in a separate SQL Server database.

Group: Under the term store are two groups: Africa and North America. The idea is that these could be significant geographical locations to this particular fictional organization. Remember that the groups are a security boundary, so the users assigned to the Africa group don’t have to have any access to the Egypt group. However, if users are given rights to a term set under one of the groups, they will be able to see the names of all the term sets under that group.

Term Set: Inside the Africa group there are two term sets: South Africa and Egypt.

Terms: At the top level, the South Africa term set contains the terms Cape Town, Johannesburg and Joburg. Terms can be nested seven levels deep. In this case, the Cape Town term contains the child term “Newlands” (a neighbourhood in Cape Town), and that term contains the child term “Ravensberg Avenue” (the street I lived on in Cape Town).

When you’re creating your managed terms, you’re free to identify synonyms; you can also specify which is the preferred term so that when a user types in “Joburg,” she will be asked to assign the term “Johannesburg.”

Here are a couple more quick points to keep in mind:

- You can specify a custom sort order for terms, so it isn’t necessary to show them in alphabetical order.
- Term sets can be open or closed. Open sets allow all users to add terms. Terms can only be added to closed sets by users who are contributors to the group.
- In addition to terms, SharePoint 2010 EMM contains keywords. Keywords aren’t restricted, so they can be used informally to create “folksonomy,” but keywords can be promoted to managed terms.

If you’ve been tasked with creating the taxonomy for your EMM hierarchy, keep these points in mind, but I strongly recommend that you also take advantage of the articles and the worksheets available on TechNet.

Note: You can see the taxonomy terms in a hidden list: http://servername/Lists/TaxonomyHiddenList

[Disclaimer: This information is based on SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 and may differ from the RTM build.]

Can't Paste into Blogger with IE8

2009-12-30T18:53:00.004-05:00

Over the last few weeks, I've found that I'm unable to paste text into the blogger web editor. This problem was actually the final straw that drove me to try Windows Live Writer for blog Authoring--which BTW is working out splendidly and I'm happy that I finally gave it a shot.

But getting back to the topic at hand... I did find a way to resolve the pasting issue. Since the issue occurs on multiple machines, I wondered if it was an IE8 problem with the Blogger control. I tried switching IE8 to IE7 mode and sure enough, I can now paste this text:

To run a webpage in IE7 mode in IE8, open Tools –> Developer Tools (or use the F12 key) to launch the developer tools window.

And since images are so easy to work with in Windows Live Writer, I'm going to save this draft and paste in a screenshot using Live Writer.

SharePoint Managed Metadata Developer Experience

2009-12-30T16:17:00.010-05:00

This post is part four in a series that I’m writing about SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Managed Metadata (EMM or ‘taxonomy’). If you haven’t set up a SharePoint 2010 development environment yet, you may also want to check out SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 install.

Update: I have posted a video demo on the Metalogix blog showing how to create a SharePoint 2010 Taxonomy Web Part.

Opening Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy in the Visual Studio Object Browser reveals a long list of objects, but you won’t need to worry about a number of them. In this post, I’m going to start with the most useful and then add others if I find that they’re worth covering.

- Exploring the Taxonomy DLL in the Object Browser

But if you’re curious, here’s the full list:

ChangedGroup
ChangedItem
ChangedItemCollection
ChangedItemType
ChangedOperationType
ChangedSite
ChangedTerm
ChangedTermSet
ChangedTermStore
FeatureIds
Group (used in the sample below)
GroupCollection
HiddenListFullSyncJobDefinition
ImportManager
Label
LabelCollection
MobileTaxonomyField
StringMatchOption
TaxonomyField
TaxonomyFieldControl
TaxonomyFieldEditor
TaxonomyFieldValue
TaxonomyFieldValueCollection
TaxonomyItem (base class for classes such as Term and TermSet)
TaxonomyRights
TaxonomySession (used in the sample below)
TaxonomyWebtaggingControl
Term (used in the sample below)
TermCollection
TermSet (used in the sample below)
TermItem
TermStore (used in the sample below)
TermStoreCollection
TermStoreOperationException
TreeControl

TaxonomySession

The first class to cover is TaxonomySession. To use the taxonomy API to manipulate managed metadata, you’ll first need to instantiate a TaxonomySession object. Microsoft describes the class in this way:

“The TaxonomySession class creates a new session in which to instantiate objects and commit changes transactionally to the TermStore object. A TaxonomySession object can have zero or more TermStore objects associated with it. TermStore objects are associated with the Web application of the parent SPSite object.”

I’m going to continue with the example I started in SharePoint 2010 Visual Web Parts, but don’t worry if you’re not interested in building a web part, I just happened to choose that as the example. You can use the same code from a number of different places (e.g., a Windows Form application). I won’t be covering remote access to the taxonomy API in this post since that will topic is worthy of its own attention.

The starting point for this conversation is VisualWebPart1UserControl.ascx.cs from the simple web part example. I covered issues adding the references in SharePoint 2010 Taxonomy Reference Issues.

using System;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts;

// Added references
using Microsoft.SharePoint;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy;

public partial class VisualWebPart1UserControl : UserControl
{
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
using (SPSite site = new SPSite("http://localhost/"))
{
//Instantiates a new TaxonomySession for the current site.
TaxonomySession session = new TaxonomySession(site);

//Instantiates the connection for the current session
TermStore termStore = session.TermStores["Managed Metadata Service"];

// Write out the names of the term stores to a label
Label1.Text = “”;
foreach (TermStore termstore in session.TermStores)
{
Label1.Text += termstore.Name.ToString() + " … ";
}

// Write the name of the term store to a label
Label1.Text += " Finished";
}
}
}

As you can see, this is a pretty straightforward example of how to get a TaxonomySession object and employ it. Once loaded, this web part will immediately write out the names of each term store available on the server.

So let’s break it down. The first thing that happens inside the Page_Load method is getting an SPSite object. As mentioned above, TermStore objects are associated with the Web application of the parent SPSite object. By running the code within a using statement, you can rest assured that dispose() will be properly called on your objects. Since this web part project is using the SharePoint Visual Web part template, the only references I had to add were Microsoft.SharePoint (for the SPSite object) and Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy (for the taxonomy objects).

Now that you have a taxonomy session, you can start to use the taxonomy classes. In this case we’ll loop through each available term store on the server and write the results to a label. The label was simply dragged onto VisualWebPart1UserControl.ascx from the Toolbox onto design view for the web part.

- After dragging the label from the toolbox

Pressing F5 will start the debugger and allow you to run the code as described in SharePoint 2010 Visual Web Parts.

- Running the web part to see the term store name

In this case, there is only one term store, so only one name is returned. It’s a simple example but useful since you will need to know the name of your term store before you instantiate a term store object and start reading from or writing to your taxonomy.

Note: If you get the name of your term store wrong, the error you see may not immediately tip you off that you’re fat fingered the text value. The error is:

System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException was unhandled by user code
Message=Specified argument was out of the range of valid values.
Parameter name: index
Source=Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy
ParamName=index
StackTrace: at Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy.Generic.IndexedCollection`1.get_Item(String index)

The Hierarchy of Managed Metadata

As explained in SharePoint Taxonomy Part One – Introduction to SharePoint Managed Metadata, the SharePoint 2010 EMM is organized into a hierarchy. The objects within this hierarchy are term stores, groups, term sets, and terms. For more info about the EMM hierarchy, refer to my SharePoint Taxonomy Hierarchy post.

There are the rules for the taxonomy hierarchy (the latter three are from Microsoft):
• When a Managed Metadata service is created, a term store will be created. Once you have a term store, you can create a group. The Taxonomy API cannot create a term store (it is done through Central Administration or with a PowerShell script). However, the rest of the EMM containers can be created using the Taxonomy API.
• After a Group object is created, the first TermSet object can be created. A TermSet object must be the child of a single parent Group object.
• After a TermSet object is created, the first Term object can be created. A Term object can be the child of a TermSet object, or of another Term object.
• After a Term object is created, another Term object can be created and added as a child Term object.

Method to the Madness

Here are some common methods that you’ll use when working with the EMM API:

termStore.CreateGroup()
group.CreateTermSet();
termSet.CreateTerm()
term.SetDescription()
term.CreateLabel()
term.Delete()
termStore.CommitAll()

Let’s start with the last one first: the CommitAll method. After performing write operations to a TermStore object, you must call CommitAll to commit the transactions. The taxonomy API is transactional so either every operation will be successfully committed, or none of the changes will be applied. As you saw in the list of classes above, the object model also includes changes. For example, ChangedItem and ChangedGroup. These are used to record what has happened.

The SetDescription method allows you to create a description for the term and you can use CreateLabel to create synonyms. You can choose whether the label will be the default using a true or false Boolean. Of course, the Delete method will delete an object.

Note that when creating a term or label, EMM provides the ability to supply the same term in different languages. This provides a number of multilingual features, but it also means that you’ll need to supply a Locale Identifier (LCID) when using some of the create methods. Windows uses the LCID to choose the language and culture when displaying information. The ID for English is 1033.

Here’s a longer version of the using statement from above--it shows an example of these methods in action:

using (SPSite site = new SPSite("http://localhost/"))
{
//Instantiates a new TaxonomySession for the current site.
TaxonomySession session = new TaxonomySession(site);

//Instantiates the connection named "Managed Metadata Service" for the current session.
TermStore termStore = session.TermStores["Managed Metadata Service"];

Group group = termStore.CreateGroup("Africa");
TermSet termSet = group.CreateTermSet("South Africa");
Term term = termSet.CreateTerm("Cape Town", 1033);
term.SetDescription("This is the city term for Cape Town", 1033);
term.CreateLabel("Cape of Good Hope", 1033, false);
Term termChild = term.CreateTerm("Newlands", 1033);
termChild.Delete();
termStore.CommitAll();

Label1.Text = " Finished";
}

- The hierarchy has been created and the description and label were set

[Disclaimer: This information is based on SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 and may differ from the RTM build.]

SharePoint Conferences in 2010

2009-12-30T12:44:00.005-05:00

To help organize my time, I’m going to get started on my conference list early this year. I don’t have many details about which conferences Metalogix will exhibit at, or where I’ll be speaking, but at least I can put the dates in my calendar. I’ll add the missing information when it’s available.

SharePoint Saturday New York (#spsnyc) – January 30, NY – Speaker (Enterprise Metadata Management (EMM), Taxonomy)
SPTechCon (#SPTechCon) – February 10-12, San Francisco – Live Blogger for EndUserSharePoint.com
Kollabria SharePoint Seminar series – February 11, San Francisco – Speaker (Migration)
Microsoft MVP Summit - February 16-19, Redmond, WA - Speaker (Migration to SharePoint blogs)
SharePoint Pro – March 16-19, Las Vegas
Kollabria SharePoint Seminar series – March 23, Atlanta – Speaker (Migration)
SharePoint Summit – April 12-14, Montreal
SharePoint Pro Connections Deep Dive – May 10 – Speaker (EMM, Taxonomy)
SharePoint Saturday Washington, DC (#spsdc) – May 15 – Speaker
Microsoft TechEd – June 7-10, New Orleans
Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference – July 12–15, Washington, D.C. (Booth Staff)
SharePoint Saturday New York (#spsnyc), July 31st, Microsoft Manhattan Office (Booth Staff)
Microsoft PDC -- October 28-29, Redmond
Microsoft SharePoint Conference – No conference in 2010
SharePoint Connections (DevConnections) -- November 1-4, Las Vegas
Microsoft TechDays in Halifax – November 2-3, Halifax, Canada. World Trade Centre
TechEd Europe -- November 8-12, Berlin

SharePoint Saturday New York Presentation

2009-12-29T20:04:00.000-05:00

I'll be speaking about SharePoint 2010 Managed Metadata (taxonomy) at SharePoint Saturday in New York (#spsnyc) on January 30th.

website: http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/ny

I’ve been digging into the new taxonomy features and I’m looking forward to showing off some code.

SharePoint 2010 Taxonomy Reference Issues

2009-12-29T19:20:00.001-05:00

If you’re looking to use the new SharePoint 2010 Managed Metadata (Taxonomy) API, you will likely run into one or both of these issues. One of them is mentioned in the known issues for SharePoint 2010 Beta 2, but not in a way that’s conducive to finding the solution with Bing or Google, so I’m including it here as well as a new one I’ve stumbled across.

The first issue is that after adding the Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy reference, your project will not recognize any of the taxonomy classes (e.g., TaxonomySession). The first thing that I noticed is that adding the reference to Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy from the .NET reference list simply did not work. Instead, I got a reference to Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy.Intl—which is obviously a different DLL.

- Broken reference to Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy

To resolve this issue, I simply used the browse option and added the right DLL explicitly from: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\ISAPI\Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy.dll. I deleted the other Taxonomy reference just for clarity.

- Browsing to the Taxonomy DLL will resolve the first issue

When you add the right version, you may see the error: “’Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy.dll’ or one of its dependencies, requires a later version of the .NET framework than the one specified in the project. You can change the .NET Framework target by clicking Properties on the Project menu...” You can ignore this error (you want to use .NET 3.5), it is resolved by the next solution.

- You can ignore this message

The second problem is the one mentioned in the known Beta 2 issues:

“Some assemblies, such as Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, appear in some cases to have a dependency on an incorrect version of the System.Web.DataVisualization assembly. The incorrect reference causes build failures. If you see this problem, add a reference to the correct version of System.Web.DataVisualization on your system. If you installation is on the C drive, that assembly will be located here: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Chart Controls\Assemblies\System.Web.DataVisualization.dll”

Evidently, Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy is another one of the assemblies with this issue. Fortunately, the solution is straightforward. Simply add a reference to System.Web.DataVisualization using the path above and your problems are solved.

- After fixing the Taxonomy reference and adding DataVisualization, the project compiles

[Disclaimer: This information is based on SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 and may differ from the RTM build.]

cawood's blog - geek literature

The Web Goes Dark Thanks to SOPA

Today, we’re going dark to show the world that O’Reilly Media does not support the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives or the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate.

– Tim O’Reilly, CEO and Founder of O’Reilly Media

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HTTP Error 403.17 - Forbidden: Client certificate has expired or is not yet valid.
Internet Information Services (IIS)