The SharePoint Blog

Short Overview of SharePoint Features in Visual Studio 2010

2009-10-29T12:29:00.001+05:30

Original article by Peter Jausovec
"As you probably know, Visual Studio 2010 was announced earlier this week and it contains a lot of cool features and project templates for SharePoint developers. Below is a short overview for some of the SharePoint development related features and project templates.

Configurable deployment

With all new SharePoint project templates you can leverage new configurable deployment feature which lets you configure the way you want to deploy or retract your project. Besides using provided, out of the box deployment steps (Run Pre-Deployment Command, Run Post-Deployment Command, Recycle IIS Application Pool, Retract Solution, Add Solution, and Activate Features) you can use SharePoint extensibility to create your own, custom deployment steps and deployment configurations.

Sandboxed and farm solutions

Some SharePoint projects can be deployed either as sandboxed or farm solutions. Sandboxed solutions run in a secure and monitored process that has limited resource access and with farm solutions user must have SharePoint administrator privileges to run or deploy the solution. You can read more about SharePoint sandboxed solution here.

Extending SharePoint Tools

Even though Visual Studio 2010 contains a set of project templates you can also extend them. You can create extensions for projects, project items, define your own project item types and create deployment extensions. You can read more about extending SharePoint tools on MSDN.

Feature and Package Designer

Feature and package designers give you the ability to customize features in your solution and with packaging designer you can customize which features are getting deployed and how. More about feature and package designer is here.

SharePoint Explorer

SharePoint Explorer is a new tool window that gives you a view into your SharePoint server. You can get a hierarchical view of lists, sites and workflows on your SharePoint server.

SharePoint Project and Project Item Templates

The following SharePoint specific project templates and project item templates are available in Visual Studio 2010:

Project Templates

Empty SharePoint project
Visual Web Part project
Sequential and State Machine Workflow
Business Data Connectivity Model
Event Receiver
List Definition
Content Type
Module Project
Site Definition

Project Item Templates

Empty Element
Web Part
User Control
Application Page
Association Form
Initiation Form
Business Data Connectivity Resource Item
List Instance
List Definition From Content Type
Global Resources File

Besides above mentioned project templates, there are two import project templates for importing .WSP file contents and importing reusable workflows:

Import Reusable Workflow
Import SharePoint Solution Package

How to download, install and get started

If you are a MSDN subscriber, you can download Visual Studio 2010 from here. Download will be available to everyone on October 21st.

If you want to know how to download and install Visual Studio 2010 watchChannel9 video.

To get you started, head over to MSDN and read some of the walkthroughs on SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010."

SharePoint 2010 Snack! a must for Developers

2009-10-20T12:44:00.000+05:30

5 Videos of SharePoint 2010 for developers. It will all seem very easy for those who are familiar with MOSS 2007
Link

SharePoint 2010: Professional Developer Evaluation Guide and Walkthroughs

2009-10-20T12:30:00.002+05:30

The SharePoint 2010 developer evaluation guide describes the SharePoint 2010 developer platform, including walkthroughs of some of the new capabilities for developers.
Download

Overview
This evaluation guide is designed to give you an overview of the feature set and extensibility points for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and an understanding of how the professional developer can use these features and extensibility points to create comprehensive solutions. This guide begins with an overview of the types of solutions that you can build by developing on SharePoint. It then addresses the developer tools for SharePoint 2010, the new platform features, and the solution deployment enhancements. The guide concludes with six walkthroughs that show example developer customizations in SharePoint 2010. The goal of this guide is to provide a framework for an effective evaluation of SharePoint 2010 as a solution creation platform. This guide is intended for the professional developer, development lead, and software architect. An evaluation guide focused on the SharePoint 2010 product and an evaluation guide for the IT Professional are also available.

SharePoint 2010 : Jeff Teper, Microsoft

2009-10-20T11:58:00.001+05:30

A very interesting post by Jeff Teper – Corporate Vice President, SharePoint Server, Microsoft on SharePoint 2010, read more...

This is my third and final post as part of our disclosure of SharePoint 2010 today. The previous posts covered the SharePoint History and how we Engineer SharePoint. This morning, Steve Ballmer and I are kicking off the SharePoint Conference so it is time to talk about SharePoint 2010! It is incredibly fun and rewarding to unveil this release driven input from you and innovative ideas from the team. As Steve announced, we will release the Beta of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 in November and look forward to your feedback as we finalization the product and documentation for release in the first half of next year.

Describing SharePoint 2010 in 1 Sentence, 8 Categories and 40 Feature Areas

SharePoint is a broad solution so we often get asked how we would describe it in a sentence. For SharePoint 2010, we settled on “The Business Collaboration Platform for the Enterprise and the Web”. A few words are worth explaining. We decided “Collaboration” was broad enough to cover the spectrum of publishing, sharing, finding, analyzing and managing information that SharePoint enables. We chose “Platform” not only because custom solutions are a major focus of the 2010 release but also "platform" conveyed a solid base for all the out-of-box usage that never requires a developer. Finally, we want to call out “the Web” to highlight both internet scenarios reaching customers and partners and the cloud-based delivery of SharePoint Online. For SharePoint 2007, we used a pie diagram chart to describe the major SharePoint categories such as “Enterprise Content Management”. This release, we picked words we thought were both simpler and gave us more freedom to innovate beyond traditional category boundaries. We settled on Sites, Communities, Content, Search, Insights andComposites as the new category names. Within each of these plus Administration andDevelopment, I will highlight 5 major feature areas for a total of 40. At the next level down are hundreds of exciting new features which will be covered on www.microsoft.com\sharepointand subsequent posts from the team. Needless to say, this is the biggest release of SharePoint yet and we hope you find it as exciting as we do!

Sites

In 2007, we expanded SharePoint to a single platform for intranet, extranet and internet sites. For SharePoint 2010, we improved the experience for this range of sites spanning browsers, Microsoft Office and mobile devices. The top five investment areas here are:

1. SharePoint Web Experience – We updated the SharePoint UI to make it simpler to access a growing range of tools. Highlights include incorporating the Office ribbon, in place web editing, AJAX responsiveness and richer navigation. We also expanded the reach of SharePoint sites through multi-lingual support, improved accessibility including WCAG 2.0 support and cross-browser support built on XHTML compliance.

2. Office Client – We continue to support previous versions of Microsoft Office working against SharePoint 2010. Office 2010 enhances this with features like offline editing with asynchronous saves as well as exposing SharePoint features through the new Office Backstage UI. Via the Backstage, you can access the context around the document including tags, related tagging and people.

3. SharePoint Workspace – In this release, we evolved and renamed Groove as SharePoint Workspace which provides great local and offline read-write access to SharePoint lists and libraries. SharePoint Workspace has a consistent experience with Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 including the Office ribbon. It supports advanced features like bringing external business data offline and is smart about synching changes and not entire files.

4. Office Web Apps – We made SharePoint 2010 a great place to host the new Office Web Apps so you can view and update content from within a browser and include Office content as part of your web site (e.g. an Excel spreadsheet as part of “Sales Metrics Portal"). The Office Web Apps provide a familiar user experience, high fidelity viewing and essential editing without loss of data or formatting. They include Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. The OneNote client and Web App support is one of the coolest features of the release to enable multiple people to collaborate on a rich canvas online or offline. In addition to the Office Web Apps, we updated InfoPath Forms Services and Excel Services and added, new for 2010, Visio and Access Services.

5. SharePoint Mobile Access – We both improved the experience for mobile web browsers and are introducing a new SharePoint Workspace Mobile client so you can take Office content from SharePoint offline on a Windows Mobile device. These clients let you navigate lists and libraries, search content and people and even view and edit Office content within the Office Web App experience running on a mobile browser.

Communities

In the first post, I talked about breaking down organization and technology silos as key driver of our vision. Since then we have tried to make SharePoint the ultimate Swiss army knife for collaboration with smart connections across people and teams. You told us you want to embrace new Web 2.0 approaches within a unified experience which we included in SharePoint 2007. For SharePoint 2010, we expanded and enhanced the set of collaboration and social networking tools for both organic and managed communities across your organization. The top five investment areas:

1. Collaborative Content – Building on the new SharePoint user experience, we made it much easier to create and find content in SharePoint sites. This includes not only improved blogs and wikis (both simple and enterprise) but also calendars, discussions, tasks, contacts, pictures, video, presence and much more. With Office 2010, multiple people can simultaneously author content on a SharePoint site.

2. Social Feedback and Organization – With SharePoint 2010, we are introducing a consistent experience for organizing, finding and staying connected to information and people including bookmarks, tagging and ratings. We have taken a holistic approach across search, navigation, profiles, feeds and more. We are bringing together informal social tagging with formal taxonomy described below so you can choose the right approach for a given set of content. We have been using these features internally for a while and I think you will find the not only useful but fun.

3. User Profiles – We enhanced user profiles to reflect colleagues, interests, expertise – either via explicit tagging or recommendations based on Outlook and Office Communicator. The model is opt-in so users can manage what information is shared publically. They decide when an interest is something they want to share or be asked about by others in the organization.

4. MySites – We significantly enhanced MySites in SharePoint 2010 building on the updated SharePoint UI and user profile. We streamlined MySites to give you quick access to your content, profile and social network while continuing to let you customize, target and personalize pages to the needs of different roles and users in your organization. The enhanced newsfeed helps track interests and colleagues.

5. People Connections – In SharePoint 2003, we introduced a universal person hyperlink and presence icon so you can always navigate to a user’s MySite, send them mail, start an IM, call, etc. In this release, we enhanced this UI in conjunction with Outlook and Office Communicator as well as greatly improved the colleague tracking and people search features with new algorithms and user experience leveraging expertise, social data and more. MySites also include a new interactive organization browser built using Silverlight to give you another way to navigate the organization. In larger companies, org. chart browsing via the address book is one of the most popular features in Outlook and we think this takes that experience to the next level.

Content

SharePoint 2007 brought together document management, records management and web content management with a consistent user experience, architecture and platform. We built a common platform for metadata, security, workflow, etc. SharePoint 2010 adds scale and depth in these areas as well advancing the user experience. The top five investment areas:

1. Large Lists and Libraries – We made architecture and user experience investments so you have much larger document libraries with metadata driven navigation to help users go quickly to the content that is most important to them. Libraries will scale to tens of millions and archives to hundreds of millions of documents. This is a key investment for high-end document and records management but also helps organizations with lots of smaller sites. We enhanced the workflow capabilities and tools in SharePoint Designer.

2. Enterprise Metadata – We are addressing your feedback to support content types and taxonomies across not only across sites but also server farms. We have made applying this metadata easy (and valuable to users) in both the SharePoint and Office client user experience. The top-down taxonomy and bottoms-up social tagging (sometimes called folksonomy) combine to help improve search, navigation and people connections.

3. Document Sets – We are introducing a way to manage a collection of documents as a single object for workflow, metadata, etc. within SharePoint and Office so experience more closely models your work product (e.g. a proposal that may contain a presentation, budget, contract, etc.).

4. Web Publishing including Digital Asset Management – We made a number of key improvements to make it easier to publish rich sites on the intranet or internet. We used the new browser ribbon and editor experience to speed site customization, content authoring and publishing tasks. We added digital asset management features like thumbnails, metadata and ratings for images as well as video streaming from SharePoint. Finally, we improved content deployment robustness from authoring to production for larger scale sites.

5. Governance and Records Management – Compliance is an increasingly important requirement for organizations. We enhanced the Records Managements features in 2010 building on the scalable storage and enterprise metadata support described above. We improved the sophistication and flexibility of our governance tools. Just a few new features include location-based file plans, multi-stage dispositions, in-place records and e-discovery.

Search

As discussed in my first post, enterprise search is a big investment area for Microsoft from Search Server Express to SharePoint’s standard search to the new FAST Search for SharePoint. We added depth at all levels in 2010. While many customers will be fine with the base SharePoint search capabilities, FAST Search for SharePoint will meet the most sophisticated needs. FAST Search for SharePoint supersets the base SharePoint user experience, APIs and connectors. This is the first step, but a big one, and we will add more consistency and enhancements across our tiers of search in the future. We will continue to sell and enhance FAST ESP standalone as well. The top five investment areas here:

1. Interactive Search Experience – We built a richer search experience providing flexible navigation, refinement and related searches. Both Standard and FAST Search for SharePoint get query completion, spell checking, wild cards and more. FAST enhances this experience enabling feature content for common queries and providing more flexible navigation and document thumbnails and previews including in slide navigation of PowerPoint presentations which is a common end user scenario.

2. Relevance – We improved the out-of-box ranking and expanded the relevance factors including social data such as tagging and usage (clicks). FAST Search adds more configurable set of relevance inputs for custom applications and specialized corpuses.

3. People Search – We greatly improved people finding based on social networking and expertise algorithms and tailored user experience for people including getting views of authored content. As users frequently do not know or recall the spelling of people’s names, we built a new phonetic search algorithm that works much better than previous approaches to spell checking for names. In testing, we had a lot of fun coming up with crazy ways to misspell each others' names to see if we could stump it.

4. Connectivity – We know lots of data lives outside SharePoint so expanded and improved our connectors to index web sites, file servers, SharePoint, Exchange, Lotus Notes, Documentum and FileNet. The updated Business Connectivity Services (previously the BDC) described below makes it much easier to index an arbitrary source such as a custom database. You can create this search connection without code using the new SharePoint Designer.

5. Scale and Platform Flexibility – We made significant performance and scalability improvements through our search technology. Optimizing for 64-bit helped but we also introduce partitioned indices and scale-out query servers in SharePoint search this release. FAST scales-out even further and has significantly more pipeline extensibility to handle the largest collections and most complex value-added processing and search applications. We think both end users and IT will be immediately excited about the new capabilities supporting hundreds of millions of documents with great index freshness and query latency.

Insights

Historically, business intelligence has been a specialized toolset used by a small set of users with little ad-hoc interactivity. Our approach is to unlock data and enable collaboration on the analysis to help everyone in the organization get richer insights. Excel Services is one of the popular features of SharePoint 2007 as people like the ease of creating models in Excel and publishing them to server for broad access while maintaining central control and one version of the truth. We are expanding on this SharePoint 2010 with new visualization, navigation and BI features. The top five investment areas:

1. Excel Services – Excel rendering and interactivity in SharePoint gets better with richer pivoting, slicing and visualizations like heatmaps and sparklines. New REST support makes it easier to add server-based calculations and charts to web pages and mash-ups.

2. Performance Point Services – We enhanced scorecards, dashboard, key performance indicator and navigation features such as decomposition trees in SharePoint Server 2010 for the most sophisticated BI portals.

3. SQL Server – The SharePoint and SQL Server teams have worked together so SQL Server capabilities like Analysis Services and Reporting Services are easier to access from within SharePoint and Excel. We are exposing these interfaces and working with other BI vendors so they can plug in their solutions as well.

4. “Gemini” – “Gemini” is the name for a powerful new in memory database technology that lets Excel and Excel Services users navigate massive amounts of information without having to create or edit an OLAP cube. Imagine an Excel spreadsheet rendered (in the client or browser) with 100 million rows and you get the idea. Today at the SharePoint Conference, we announced the official name for “Gemini” is SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel and SharePoint.

5. Visio Services – As with Excel, users love the flexibility of creating rich diagrams in Visio. In 2010, we have added web rendering with interactivity and data binding including mashups from SharePoint with support for rendering Visio diagrams in a browser. We also added SharePoint workflow design support in Visio.

Composites

The single biggest area we increased our investment from SharePoint 2007 was making it easier for everyone – users, IT, partners, etc. – to build custom solutions on SharePoint that automate processes and connect disparate information. Some of the scenarios are more IT driven. Analysts often call them “Composite Applications”. Others are more end user centric or “Mash-Ups”. We thought “Composites” was a good short word to describe the breadth of solutions built with SharePoint. The top five investment areas:

1. SharePoint Designer – We revamped the SharePoint Designer experience to focus on the building blocks of a SharePoint solution vs. HTML source code. The user experience gets easier including the Office Ribbon and new tools for building workflows and connecting to external data. We have made SharePoint Designer customizations safe out-of-box in 2010 so IT can let users customize sites without risk. SharePoint Designer is also a great tool for mashing-up SharePoint (which now exposes REST) and external data.

2. InfoPath Forms Service – InfoPath is the best way to have a common form definition render in the browser as well as in a rich and offline client. For 2010, we improved the design environment to make it easier to build rich forms declaratively with little to no code and more client-side validation. We have also made it straightforward to use InfoPath forms as native SharePoint forms both on the web and when offline from within the SharePoint Workspace client.

3. Access Services - Users have long loved the ability to create database applications quickly with forms and views. Access Services lets you publish new Access solutions to a SharePoint site where they can be managed centrally and accessed (necessary pun) from a web browser.

4. Sandbox Solutions – In SharePoint 2007, custom code requires the farm administrator to trust the code running on the server. In SharePoint 2010 we are introducing a new SharePoint custom code sandbox with isolation and resource limitations (memory, SQL, CPU) that allows administrators to let others safely add and consume custom solutions without impacting overall farm performance and stability. While it does not cover the full SharePoint object model it addresses key scenarios like custom web parts and event receivers. We will use this and the client side object model described later to support custom SharePoint solutions in SharePoint Online as well.

5. Business Connectivity Services – We expanded the read-only Business Data Catalog from SharePoint 2007 to support create, read, update, delete, search and offline access to line-of-business (LOB) data. This data, such as a customer record from a database, web services, etc. is called an External List in SharePoint 2010 and it is mapped to an External Content Type so this data looks and behaves like native SharePoint lists. You can not only update this data from within SharePoint but can take it offline from SharePoint Workspace and, where it makes sense like contacts, in Outlook with offline editing. There is great support for BCS in SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio 2010. This perhaps our biggest “Wow, how did you do that?” demo. We will be building on the BCS for future LOB connectivity solutions.

Administration

We understand the most critical capability for you to introduce these features to your users is making it easier to manage. We have gotten a lot of great feedback in this area and made big investments for SharePoint 2010. As I have mentioned in previous posts, our experience with our CAT team, running SharePoint Online with SharePoint 2007 and targets for higher scale informed the design of SharePoint 2010. You have the choice of Server, Online or a mix. Even if you run SharePoint yourself, you benefit from our design and experience with Online. Beyond the fundamentals of scalability and reliability which got a lot of focus, the top five investment areas:

1. Improved Upgrade – We changed the model for SharePoint 2010 vs. the previous release. We will get your existing sites up and running with the existing SharePoint 2007 user interface including your customizations. You can preview and switch to the new UI at your convenience. With SP2 of SharePoint 2007, we released an upgrade checker tool that reports any potential issues. There are two key things to think about in planning the migration. First, as we announced a while ago, SharePoint 2010 is 64-bit only. Second, thin about places where you may have invested in custom code than can be replaced with out-of-box features such as the new enterprise metadata features described above.

2. Throttling, Health Monitoring, Analytics – Performance and reliability was a big focus for this release to address the scale of the largest organizations, web sites and the SharePoint Online service. We invested in optimizing the SharePoint, Windows Server and SQL Server architecture for scale and availability. We introduced more resource governors throughout SharePoint to prevent bulk operations or asynchronous jobs from slowing down the server. We built in proactive and extensible health reporting, monitoring and resolution in SharePoint 2010 based on analyzing a wide range of deployments. We will enhance this based on your feedback and our experience during the Beta and beyond. We are introducing a new usage analytics logging and reporting and are publishing the SQL schema for this analytics database so you can create your own reports.

3. Web and PowerShell Admin – We improved the web based administration interface for SharePoint 2010 and put it through the level of usability testing we had previously focused on for end user features. However, the biggest thing we heard from you was an improved scripting interface for SharePoint for simplified administration of farms. With the release of PowerShell, we were able to switch over all our administration to that framework and will ship with hundreds of commandlets you can use, edit and enhance. The administration framework is built on a new multi-tenant model we are be using on SharePoint Online but know is also of interest to 3^rd-party hosters and large organizations looking to do server consolidation.

4. Scalability and Availability – We made the shared services and federation model much more flexible to support richer scale out as you add services, sites and applications to SharePoint. We reduced the downtime for SharePoint 2010 with improved patching and SQL Server configuration, backup-restore, log shipping support and more.

5. Identity Management and Security – We have introduced more flexibility identity lifecycle management including updates between SharePoint with identity sources like Active Directory, LDAP servers and HR applications.

Development

I covered the higher-level solutions features under “Composites” above. Many of these enable building solutions with much less code than possible before. We also invested in a number of lower level development features as well for hard core developers. The top give investment areas:

1. New SharePoint APIs – This bullet is a blog post itself! The new UI framework has more extensibility in the ribbon and natively uses XSLT DataViews in lists vs. previous CAML views. There are new APIs for AJAX and Silverlight applications that make it make it much easier to access SharePoint data with less code and better performance. We significantly improved list access and programmability with REST, ATOM, JSON and LINQ including richer data relationship, validation, joins and projections over SharePoint lists which as described above can now reach far higher scale points.

2. Application Lifecycle – We have converged and improved on WSP as the packaging and deployment format for SharePoint solutions. You can save as WSP in SPD and bring that into Visual Studio 2010.

3. Visual Studio 2010 Support – SharePoint 2010 is a first class target for Visual Studio 2010. This includes F5 deployment and debugging (applause welcome …) as well as designers for various SharePoint project types, web parts, workflow, business connectivity services and integration with the VS Server Explorer. The early feedback on this has been so great, we decided to highlight it in Steve Ballmer's keynote at the SharePoint Conference.

4. Developer Dashboard View – If you have the rights, you can turn on a mode for a SharePoint page which will render at the bottom to show full trace and latency through the SharePoint, .NET and SQL layers. You can use our reporting tools described earlier to identify any slow pages in your site and then turn on this view to see a custom web part has bogged down the page by making repeated expensive SharePoint object model calls.

5. Development on Windows 7 – We now support development on Windows 7 and Vista client machines. Although it isn’t a supported configuration for production, we heard you that you want to use it as a development environment.

Summing Up

I hope this was a helpful overview. There will be many more details shared onwww.microsoft.com\sharepoint and this blog in the coming days. We will follow the Conference, Blog and Forum traffic to update the answers to common questions and feedback and get the documentation ready for RTM. I thought I’d address two big questions quickly:

· Timeline – As Steve Ballmer announced today, Office and SharePoint Server 2010 will be available for broad Beta in November. The release is on track for the first half of 2010 as we have said for a while. We are upgrading all of Microsoft after having used earlier builds in production for thousands of users for the last year. While we have some tuning to do on the way to release, expect the Beta to be feature complete. We encourage and welcome all your feedback for this release, the documentation and beyond. We are committed to making this a solid release so your data will help tell us exactly when we are ready to ship in the first half of next calendar year.

· Packaging – We incorporated your feedback as we simplified packaging and naming this round. Here is the quick tour. The Server family includes SharePoint Foundation (simpler new name for “WSS”) and SharePoint Server (simpler name for “MOSS”). SharePoint Server continues to have Standard and Enterprise CAL tiers of features. We are enhancing our free basic search offering in Search Server Express 2010. The FAST Search capabilities will be available via the FAST Search for SharePoint add-on server for customers with the Enterprise CAL. For internet access by customers, we are enhancing the existing per server licensed SharePoint for Internet Sites and introducing a lower priced “Standard Version” for small to medium sites. As we announced a while back, SharePoint Designer is free. We think this combined with enhanced usability, designers and safety in SharePoint Designer 2010 client will expand the number and robustness of custom solutions. SharePoint Workspace (formerly Groove) is included in Office Professional Plus. We will announce updates to the SharePoint Online offerings closer to release. We will post additional details on this blog as we get closer to release.

Thanks again for reading the posts. I hope to see you at the SharePoint Conference. We look forward to your feedback and seeing your great sites and solutions on SharePoint 2010!

Jeff

c# : Read XML from URL

2009-10-05T12:37:00.000+05:30

There are multiple methods to capture XML from a URL, but this particular example is helpful when you are dealing with special characters of foreign languages. The loaded XML will display them in correct format for the charset specified.

//Include the following packages
using System.Net;
using System.IO;

//request the particular web page
HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("http://feeds.feedburner.com/pointsharepoint?format=xml");

//define the login credentials of the requested file/page
request.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(”UserName”, “Password”);

//get the response from the request
HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();

//create a stream to hold the contents of the response
Stream receiveStream = response.GetResponseStream();

//create your XML document
XmlDocument mySourceDoc = new XmlDocument();

//load the file from the stream
mySourceDoc.Load(receiveStream);

//close the stream
receiveStream.Close()

Today's Sharepoint Tip : _spBodyOnLoadFunctionNames

2009-09-14T10:20:00.007+05:30

In most cases SharePoint pages are based on a master page that contains the "body" element. These content pages can’t directly add a function to the body’s onload event. In order to work around this limitation, SharePoint provides the "_spBodyOnLoadFunctionNames" array. When the body is loaded, the onload event handler executes each function whose name is contained in this array.

'<'script language="javascript"'>'
_spBodyOnLoadFunctionNames.push("FunctionName");
function FunctionName()
{
// Code
}
'<'/script'>'

What is SharePoint?

2009-09-08T21:09:00.001+05:30

This is that :-) SharePoint in plain English

SharePoint & it's Competitors

2009-08-31T17:30:00.002+05:30

Shawn from CMS watch has a very interesting point in the latest trend for competing with (by alternate CMS systems) SharePoint head on. Though at these times, the best bet for them is to move along.

"As any product gains in popularity, especially if it's seen as dominant, you tend to see more and more news about alternatives that inevitably get dubbed "killers." The news media and the product's competitors are continually trying to best the dominant solution and predict a product's demise. We can see this clearly with the iPhone and, as Seth Gottlieb pointed out, "who isn't working on a SharePoint killer?" But in many cases, these "killers" are only hopefuls with virtually no evidence they could harm a fly."

How to get Raw HTML from a Page : System.Net.WebResponse

2009-08-31T17:26:00.000+05:30

Retrieving a page's HTML can sometimes be necessary in applications. You could be filling columns for actual meta data of sites or may retrieving remote web sites for specific content. It's require very simple code to do all the stuff

// pass the site URL
string strHTML = Strip(Request(strWebURL + "/" + file.Url, "GET"));

//The Request Function
String Request(String uri, String verb)   {

   WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(uri);
   request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
   request.Method = verb;
   request.ContentLength = 0;
   WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();
   if (response == null) return null;
   StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream());
   return reader.ReadToEnd().Trim();
   }

// The Strip function, to remove style, scripts & Html tags from the text

public string Strip(string text)
   {
   text = Regex.Replace(text, "", "", RegexOptions.Singleline | RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
   text = Regex.Replace(text, "", "", RegexOptions.Singleline | RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
   text = Regex.Replace(text, @"<(.|\n)*?>", string.Empty);
   text = text.Replace("\r\n\t", " ").Replace("\n", " ").Replace("\r", " ").Replace("\t", " ");
   return text;
   }

// That's All

Making Sense of the SharePoint 2010 Pie

2009-08-21T14:42:00.012+05:30

With so many blogs now on SharePoint, it has become more like a box of choclates, You never know what you're gonna get.

Mark bower in his article has explained the Sharepoint 2010 pie, here is a repost

"A new version of SharePoint gives us an updated SharePoint Pie. Like the SharePoint 2007 pie, SharePoint 2010 has six slices, most subtly renamed."

Collaboration becomes Communites

Renamed, perhaps to emphasize the intent to make SharePoint 2010 a more social experience.
Aim to empower people to work together in new ways through ad-hoc collaboration in communities of interest or in work-group communities

Content Management becomes simply Content

Does this imply a de-emphasis of SharePoint as a serious content management platform? I think not. I suspect this is a desire to move people away from traditional equation of content management to web content management, towards a broader view of content management…covering document management, records management as well as web content management.

Search stays as Search

What’s publicly known right now is inclusion of FAST technologies and improvements to people and line of business application search. At the top end of the market Microsoft is loosing out to the likes of Autonomy, and they’ll want to put the brakes on that.

Business Intelligence becomes Insights

The new name emphasises the business impact, rather than the technology function, which is powerful. Perhaps again, Microsoft is taking a broader view of this capability, thinking about getting insights in a more human way, through crowdsourcing or collaborative approaches, as well as simply through data crunching. Just speculating.

Business Process and Forms becomes Composities

Composite Applications being a more corporate-friendly word than mashups.
The idea once again I think is to broaden the category to include other user and developer tasks of creating custom business solutions through mashing together web parts, forms and processes.

Portal becomes Sites

This moves away from positioning SharePoint as an Intranet Portal product to being a product capable of serving as a intranet, extranet or Internet site

SharePoint Object Hierarchy: How it all fits together

2009-08-21T14:37:00.001+05:30

A very useful article by Martin Kearn about How objects in SharePoint relate to each other? It gives you a bird eye view of the country called SharePoint.

From the article:
"I often get asked to clarify how all of the objects in SharePoint relate to each. For example, people do not always understanding the differnence between a site collection and a site or how a web application and content database relate to each other.

To help out, I have produced this diagram which I think explains all of the main SharePoint objects and how they relate to each other. I did consider writing some kind of description to go with this, however I think it is better that I just do my best to answer any questions via the comments. If there are any re-occuring themes, I'll add to this article and try to explain them."

10 Things SharePoint Can Do for Your Firm

2009-07-31T17:18:00.003+05:30

By Mark Gerow

Special to Law.com

July 28, 2009

"I often find myself staring at Microsoft SharePoint and wondering how I can do more with it to enable a 21st century law firm; one in which attorneys, clients and staff can easily share ideas, expertise and information across time and distance. How can it be used to reduce costs while expanding the ways in which we collaborate?

In this article I'll suggest 10 ways you can use SharePoint today in your firm to improve attorney effectiveness, deliver better client service and reduce costs. This is not a "how to" but a "what now" article, written to answer that perennial question: "now what?" "

1: REPLACE YOUR DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

2. AUTOMATE NEW BUSINESS INTAKE

3. SEARCH ACROSS ALL YOUR SYSTEMS

4. ENCOURAGE 'COMMUNITIES OF INTEREST' USING 'MY SITES'

5. CREATE A FIRMWIDE CALENDAR

6. CREATE A PRACTICE GROUP WIKI

7. COLLABORATE WITH CLIENTS USING EXTRANETS

8. MANAGE PROJECTS

9. DISPLAY 'KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS'

10. CREATE A 'MASHUP'

How to programmatically determine customized pages in a site

2009-07-31T17:05:00.001+05:30

What happens when the need is to determine programmatically that a given page has been customized/ghosted or not?

We can use the "vti_hasdefaultcontent" property of the "SPFile" class to determine whether a file is customized or native.

SPFile file = SPContext.Current.Web.RootFolder.Files["default.aspx"];

bool IsCustomized = (bool)file.Properties["vti_hasdefaultcontent"];

SharePoint 2010 Technical Preview

2009-07-29T18:02:00.002+05:30

From SharePoint's team blog:
"Today, we’re announcing that SharePoint 2010 has reached the technical preview engineering milestone. The SharePoint team is running a limited, invitation only Technical Preview program. While we’re not sharing SharePoint 2010 details at this point, we did want to give our customers & partners a sneak peek at SharePoint 2010! We’re very excited about SharePoint 2010 and looking forward to the SharePoint Conference this October where we’ll talk about all the investment areas across workloads and the platform. What we’re sharing today is just a fraction of what will be in SharePoint 2010!"
More here...

UPN (User Principal Name) for Authentication

2009-07-16T11:35:00.000+05:30

It's common for end users to complaint about the domain prefix that they have to use at the login for a SharePoint site (windows authentication). And it frustates users when they can't login with their usernames and have to be reminded time and again about the domain prefix.

One alternative is to use UPN or User Principal Name to be used as login. UPN is nothing but a suffix that is added after a username which can be used in place of "Samaccount" name to authenticate a user. So lets say if your company is called Microsoft, then instead of Microsoft\Username you can use username@microsoft.com at the authetication popup.

Adding an UPN to active directory is straight and simple (only requirement is the access to global catalog server). http://support.microsoft.com/kb/243629

10 Themes for SharePoint : Packaged and Delivered

2009-06-16T17:18:00.001+05:30

Microsoft' released a set of 10 themes for SharePoint and we just packaged them into a solution file with installer. Simply download & install.

Download :

Theme	Preview
Construction
Contoso
Corporate
Events
OARP
Procurement
Publishing
Sporting
StartUp
Team

SharePoint Best Practices : Architecture, Planning, Installation, Development Environment,Backup and Recovery, Virtualization

2009-06-11T14:31:00.004+05:30

Every now and them we hear stories where things went wrong because no body planned a thing. The new companies implementing such technology have very less know how in terms of details and best practices, and that's where opportunist or say amateurish developers try to score easy brownies. For them it's a easy and fast way to lay hands on SharePoint development and learn as they go but that comes as a cost to the company which in turn puts the blame on the technology.

Michael Nemtsev on sharepointmagazine.net has come up with a 6 series best practises guide on how to extract the best out of SharePoint. Here are the snippets and link to posts

Part 1 - Architecture and Logical Planning

"Many factors may affect farm design, performance, scalability and redundancy - from hardware devices in organization network, to network topology. As a result, leveraging and finding compromises among those factors helps to build consistent, reliable and flexible environment."

Introduction

Organizations adopting SharePoint face a variety of tasks - from planning, strategy, infrastructure and architecture design, UI Design, migration, and to development. All these tasks imply flexible infrastructural baseline before actual work starts. However, in reality we face the outdated environment and misconfigured farms that are not ready to implement new requirements. In such cases, baseline architecture becomes foundation stone of all SharePoint projects.

Why would we care about infrastructure and not about something else, for example development? Fixing infrastructure errors is very expensive task and leads into significant changes across SharePoint farm.Development errors are not so expensive and can be fixed relatively quickly

Architectural Planning

Plan your farm and network communications before starting actual installation. The first thing to start is designing SharePoint architecture across corporate network. This includes understanding network structure, examining network devices and choosing the right SharePoint topology to fit the existing infrastructure and new requirements.

Network response time is one of the important factors that can affect SharePoint farm design. Ideally, you need to measure the latency between SharePoint servers and users in order to reorganize servers according the smallest response time.

Network latency is the key point to determine which of the proposed scenarios to implement in the current SharePoint deployment. (Latency is the time required for a packet to travel from one point on a network to another).

Analyse the existing infrastructure and plan a SharePoint topology for redundancy.There are several different topologies - from three to six servers in farm, which can be used as a baseline. Which one to choose depends on the level of redundancy and available hardware. Not all clients can afford topology with six or ten servers in farm due to budget limitation or data centre capabilities. Finding the compromise between numbers of servers, type of hosting and servers’ roles become critical task, because this choice will affect performance and extensibility of the SharePoint farm for several years ahead.

Logical Planning

Plan number of site collections and sub sites in advance - content, location, security. Start with the single site collections and several sub sites rather then creating several site collections, and try to avoid new site collection if there are no requirements for this. The reason of such structure is that each new site collection works as a new application, with isolated scope to features, templates and search. Maintaining such structure is much easier than several site collections.

Do not end up with one big content database, because data optimisation will cause troubles in this case. For the small and development environments, single content database might be a preferable choice. However, for the large farms create several content databases and organize site collections among them. Having several content databases with sites helps to address the following:

Keep content database size <100>
Data usage optimization.
Simplify farm backup and restoration.
Flexibility for Disaster Recovery (DR) strategies.

Stsadm Technical Reference for SharePoint Server 2007 & Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

2009-06-11T14:21:00.002+05:30

Now that's cool, an simple and sweet application in silverlight for all your STSADM commands! No more seraching the black screen for the correct command.

For MOSS 2007

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepointserver/cc948709.aspx

For WSS 3.0

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/sharepoint/dd418924.aspx

Web Package .fwp

2009-06-03T09:31:00.007+05:30

A Web package is a bundled collection of files that you export or import for use in a Web site. A Web package uses an .fwp file name extension. You may want to create a Web package if you want to share or reuse Web pages, a Web site, a list, or a library structure. When you create a Web package, you can include the whole Web site in the package. Or, you can include only the specific Web pages that you want. After you create a Web package, you can import and deploy the .fwp file to as many Web sites as you want.

A Web package may include the following items:
Lists
Libraries
Any documents in lists and in libraries
Web pages
Web Part pages
Custom link bars

However, a Web package cannot contain list data, subsites, or security and permissions settings. When a Web site is moved as empty content, list data that is part of the original Web site does not move with the Web pages in the package. For example, a document library may contain a column that you created to track the status of documents. When you package the library, the package includes the documents, the custom column, and the settings for that column. The package does not include the data that indicates the status of the documents.

Bug in SharePoint Service Pack 2 Changes a Production License to Trial

2009-05-26T23:14:00.001+05:30

From cmswire :

During the installation of Server Pack 2 for SharePoint 2007, a product expiry date is accidentally triggered, effectively rendering production licenses into trial licenses. Hmmm, not good.

Microsoft was quick to respond with an apology and somewhat comforting news that this bug will not affect how SharePoint functions until the expiry date has passed (180 days from the service pack install). They also said it will have no impact on customer data, configuration or application code.

While a hotfix is in the works, you can now get a manual workaround to resolve the problem. Note this was the most popular link in the blog announcing the bug. The fix requires SharePoint Admins to re-enter their product licenses numbers in the Convert License Type page in Central Administration.

The bug affects Office SharePoint Server 2007, Project Server 2007, Form Server 2007, Search Server 2008 and Search Server 2008 Express, but not Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.

Microsoft is still encouraging organizations to install the service pack. You just also have to apply the manual fix to the expiration date at the same time and you'll be on your way.

SharePoint 2010 Features

2009-05-26T22:42:00.005+05:30

Edit : Official Update is out, catch it here....

The information about feature set of SharePoint server 2010 is varying and blurry. I will try to sump up the facts from various sources here in a single entry

Inline editing for list items : no need to hit the datasheet view
BDC will be a two way road : sp2010 may support inserting data from BDC
No IE 6.0 Support : SharePoint 2010 will be “targeting standards based browsers (XHTML 1.0 compliant) including Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.x. running on Windows Operating Systems.
With same architechture as of MOSS 2007, the stress will be on intergarting the advanced UI features, watchout for office like ribbon control, ajaxed controls etc
Content Management Interoperability Services : This will allow SharePoint to communicate with other CMS

SharePoint Server 2010 Preliminary System Requirements

2009-05-19T19:21:00.002+05:30

64 Bit! Yes, that's what next decade is all about. In a good sense, it opens the way for large RAM on servers. Though enterprise MOSS 2007 are already 64 bit, SharePoint 2010 will empower developers with the new hardware and OS.

The other thing is cross browser support, which will satisfy many a clients.

Microsoft has released prelimenary system requirements:

SharePoint Server 2010 will be 64-bit only.
SharePoint Server 2010 will require 64-bit Windows Server 2008 or 64-bit Windows Server 2008 R2.
SharePoint Server 2010 will require 64-bit SQL Server 2008 or 64-bit SQL Server 2005.

In addition to the requirements listed above we also wanted to share with you some preliminary detail about SharePoint Server 2010 browser compatibility.

To ensure the best possible experience across multiple browsers we’re focusing our SharePoint 2010 engineering efforts on targeting standards based browsers (XHTML 1.0 compliant) including Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.x. running on Windows Operating Systems. In addition we’re planning on an increased level of compatibility with Firefox 3.x and Safari 3.x on non-Windows Operating Systems. Due to this focus Internet Explorer 6 will not be a supported browser for SharePoint Server 2010.

So, what can you do today to get into the best shape for SharePoint Server 2010?

Start by ensuring new hardware is 64-bit. Deploying 64-bit is our current best practice recommendation for SharePoint 2007.
Deploy Service Pack 2 and take a good look at the SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Checker that’s shipped as part of the update. The Upgrade Checker will scan your SharePoint Server 2007 deployment for many issues that could affect a future upgrade to SharePoint 2010.
Get to know Windows Server 2008 with SharePoint 2007, this post is a great starting point.
Consider your desktop browser strategy if you have large population of Internet Explorer 6 users.
Continue to follow the Best Practices guidance for SharePoint Server 2007.
Keep an eye on this blog for updates and more details in the coming months.

Microsoft Office 2010 Beta is here! Sharepoint 2010 in 2 months!

2009-05-19T18:03:00.002+05:30

Office 2010 beta is here for all to test ! and along comes the new SharePoint designer(won't work with MOSS 2007 sites)

And Microsoft will launch an invitation-only SharePoint Server 2010 beta test in July with a select group of customers and then follow the program up with a public testing phase ahead of the Office 2010 release in the first half of next year.

The SharePoint 2010 beta/technology preview will be invitation-only and will focus on a number of its enterprise customers and target specific enterprise deployment scenarios.

Case Study: Pfizer & Content Managment

2009-04-24T17:19:00.003+05:30

After having started my carrer in Sharepoint from Pfizer's projects, it's nice to know how the company has come a long and successfull way in content management.

They took the risk of being early starters and with super Microsoft's support, the result has been more than just great.

A case study from Gartner on Pfizer Shows Why & How:

Like many large global companies, Pfizer had multiple content management systems in place and a range of user needs. It ultimately standardized on two global solutions: one to address collaborative content and one a system of record for regulated documents.

Overview

This Case Study details how Pfizer standardized on a basic content services (BCS) offering for work in progress along with a robust enterprise content management (ECM) platform that addresses Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-mandated content applications. CIOs, business and IT leaders, and application managers executives should read this study to see how Pfizer dealt with governance issues, migration from legacy systems and the costs of maintaining two solutions.

Key Findings

Pfizer had multiple content management systems (CMS) in place resulting in costly maintenance fees, strains on support and development resources, and siloed content. By standardizing on two platforms for clearly delineated tasks, it can eliminate servers and support for the legacy systems.
Success factors included having a solid business case, implementing a strong governance policy, leveraging third-party solutions where necessary and establishing a methodology for recouping costs.
Pfizer adopted a self-service model for new site provisioning that is enabled through a custom-created Site Wizard.

Recommendations

Consider the coexistence of a collaborative document management platform and a more process-centric system to balance user needs and different content applications. Identify deployment scenarios and establish clear usage guidelines, so users understand when to use which tool.
Build a solid business case for your SharePoint investments and for retiring legacy systems by focusing on opportunities for hard dollar savings, such as eliminating servers, not renewing maintenance fees and reducing the number of support resources applied to legacy applications.
As you begin to standardize on a shortlist of vendors in ECM and embark on a strategy to retire legacy systems, adopt a holistic approach to moving content into the newer systems. Along with migrating metadata and content objects, this approach should consider human issues such as going through a content valuation exercise to prune content volume.

About Pfizer

Pfizer, a global pharmaceutical company, adopted a two-prong strategy to solve its content management requirements. Pfizer's two-pronged approach is a prime example of how many Gartner clients are addressing the varying content types they must manage and providing users with appropriate tools for the tasks. It highlights the importance of good governance, building a solid business case and rationale, and leveraging third-party solutions to extend its Microsoft SharePoint implementation.

Introduction

Like many large global companies, Pfizer had multiple content management systems deployed, resulting in costly maintenance fees, strains on support and development resources, and siloed content. Yet, Pfizer recognized it had a range of user needs and that one solution would not meet all. It ultimately standardized on two: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS), a basic content services offering for collaborative content and EMC Documentum, a process-centric solution for its regulated documents. Documentum also serves as the official repository for all corporate records.

The Challenge

Being a pharmaceutical company, Pfizer had to accommodate highly regulated documents and records, but it also needed a way to support the more ad hoc and collaborative processes. For managing and storing its controlled documents and those associated with new drug submissions to the FDA, Pfizer had implemented EMC Documentum. Over the years, it has invested heavily in Documentum, resulting in a large collection of software and servers with associated customizations and IT resources. For its more casual document and content management needs, however, Pfizer had a variety of legacy systems including EMC eRoom, Open Text Livelink, Vignette's Web content management system, Plumtree and ColdFusion sites, Lotus Notes databases, Microsoft Exchange Public Folders and traditional file shares. Having this plethora of content repositories and applications resulted in costly maintenance fees, strains on support and development resources, and siloed content. Pfizer is not unusual in this regard. In a 2008 Gartner survey of nearly 400 respondents (see Note 1), 69% of enterprises indicated they had more than six repositories.

Approach

Pfizer set about to consolidate its legacy content management systems. Since the firm had already made a lasting investment in EMC Documentum, the Worldwide Technology team chose to keep it as the enterprise standard for regulated documents and corporate records. EMC's Centera is used as the long-term archive for inactive documents and records. For collaborative and work in progress content, Pfizer chose to build an enterprise collaboration platform on MOSS. This is in keeping with Gartner's advice to IT leaders, architects and planners that they consider SharePoint as a tactical basic content service providing a place to store, find and deliver documents and other content associated with project-related activities or work-in-progress content. When content is deemed final and needs to be kept long-term, it should be moved into an ECM system

Known formally within Pfizer as Enterprise Collaboration Framework (ECF), the SharePoint implementation is a collaborative, non-validated environment that handles business operational content as well as work in process documents. It is the global standard replacing the multitude of legacy systems for non-regulated content, especially eRoom and Livelink. Pfizer already migrated its static Web pages off of Plumtree into MOSS and has begun migrating other content. It anticipates moving fully to MOSS and Documentum by 2010. It will eventually be used to support the Web content capabilities now delivered via Documentum. ECF went live in September 2007, after a six-month early adopter phase. Part of the success of its coexistence strategy was due to communication and setting expectations. The Pfizer Technology Engineering team communicated to the users that Documentum focuses on facilitating the life cycle of a document, while SharePoint's focus is on facilitating the life cycle of a team.

Pfizer's ECF (MOSS) is used for a variety of collaborative and ad hoc content management activities. These include managing weekly meetings, building a knowledge base with wikis, maintaining custom contact information about team members, publishing information via a blog, task routing, creating slide show presentations and soliciting feedback with discussion boards. Pfizer implemented a library of prebuilt site templates to enable faster site creation. ECF is becoming as pervasive as e-mail within Pfizer.

EMC Documentum and ECF coexist at Pfizer and are well integrated. Pfizer worked with EMC to develop the integration between Documentum and SharePoint. Content can be easily promoted from SharePoint into Documentum. Schema Logic is used to provision shared taxonomies so that the same metadata can be enforced in both systems. Pfizer originally selected Fast (now owned by Microsoft) as the search engine to support federated searches against both systems. According to Program Manager, David Biersach, Pfizer's goal is to leverage the best of both tools and provide a smooth interoperability experience for end users.

Results

Pfizer now has more than 41,000 active SharePoint users with 1,000 top-level, cross business unit sites and 7,000 total active team sites. It also supports secure external collaboration sites accessible to authorized non-Pfizer employees. SharePoint is installed in four data centers and supports 11 Pfizer divisions and 122 departments. By design, approximately 42% of team sites are open to all Pfizer employees, rather than just a select group and over 25% of the current team sites have members that span departments and geographic locations. This has fostered information sharing and collaboration within Pfizer.

Though it required a number of third-party add-ons and partner solutions, Pfizer found SharePoint to be agile and easy to use. Training was handled through a combination of Web-based training and classroom-based training. As implemented, ECF did not require Office 2007. Approximately 60% of Pfizer's collaborative workflow needs were met out of the box with SharePoint; another 30% are addressed via SharePoint Designer and the remaining 10% were addressed without the need for custom code using K2's blackpearl product. Pfizer leverages Cisco for load balancing, AvePoint for fine-grained backup and restore, and Vital Path for content and metadata migration. So far, Pfizer has migrated 1.3 million documents from at least eight legacy systems into ECF.

To recoup costs of the SharePoint infrastructure (licenses, FTEs, third-party add-ons and so on) and the costs of legacy system migration, Pfizer initially implemented a chargeback approach. The business departments are charged a flat fee for each SharePoint site they created. Costs were assigned to the primary owner of the department of the site and a detailed use report was provided to each department head listing every site that was assigned to them. This approach has worked well as the businesses wanted greater transparency in service costs than they had received in previous content management solutions. However, the IT department found that they have had to grant a lot of exceptions in the per site fee and it is no longer practical. In 2009, they are considering moving to a model based on storage volume (x$ per gigabyte of storage per year) rather than the per-site fee.

Critical Success Factors

Governance and usage guidelines. Pfizer put in place a strong governance policy and guidelines for usage of ECF and Documentum. Everyone at Pfizer has their own MySite and the IT leadership encourages business colleagues to create and delete sites often as projects continually come and go. Communication was key; Pfizer created a document platform comparison matrix to help explain the standard tools. It also enabled self-provisioning through an online site request wizard. This requires users to identify document types and proposed use cases for the site to ensure compliance with their governance directives.

Shared services approach. By implementing SharePoint as a shared services approach and charging back the business, the IT department's cost model had a positive chilling effect on stopping the rampant proliferation of sites for spurious reasons. This approach gave the business transparency into costs and resulted in them taking an active role in self-policing SharePoint sites.

Content valuation exercise. Content migration efforts required the business to pare down content volumes. Though the human effort required was not trivial, the benefits were worth the effort. As part of this assessment, they found that some documents in the organization had not been touched in five years. They were able to reduce 13 terabytes of document storage down to six or seven terabytes prior to migration.

Business case and executive sponsorship. The CFO and CIO required hard dollar savings. Pfizer built a business case on hard dollar savings and cost avoidance: taking servers out of the data center, not renewing software licenses and maintenance, and by reducing costs for support resources associated with legacy systems. Success will be measured by how quickly they can decommission legacy systems, with the anticipation that that will occur by 2010.

Lessons Learned

Migration. Pfizer's IT team had looked at many third-party tools and tried a few; yet found the current generation of tools and the content migration market to be in its infancy. There is urgent demand for improvement of the tools and for deeper expertise among the consulting services providers. They ended up having to write some of their own scripts to analyze documents and information in legacy systems to prune unwanted data. When doing migrations, it can be the little things, such as file naming conventions and document links, that trip you up. With SharePoint it is easy to break links to documents if a team site needs to move to a completely new or renamed path hierarchy.

Managing the businesses expectations. This was where they went wrong, according to Pfizer. They had a formal timeline for doing inventory, metadata mapping and migration, and records management, but it was too aggressive and was driven by artificial funding timelines and not realistic estimates of how long these tasks would truly take to completely accomplish. Business often did not know whether documents were needed for legal or records management purposes. An ongoing challenge is the need to ensure that SharePoint is not used as a dumping ground, but as an active content collaboration tool.

Microsoft SharePoint 14 == Microsoft SharePoint 2010

2009-04-24T16:49:00.000+05:30

From the official SharePoint blog:

"You have probably seen the news announcement today where we announced the public beta for the new Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. As part of that announcement, we also talked about some of the names for the “14” wave of products including Microsoft Office 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. I wanted to answer some questions that I think will inevitably pop to the top of your mind:

What happened to the Office piece of the name? We love MOSS. . . .

The first thing you’ll notice is that the MOSS acronym goes away with the new name since Office is no longer in the SharePoint official name. No one should worry that SharePoint doesn’t work great with Office 2010 since we removed Office from the name, just like people didn’t worry whether SharePoint was a great portal product when we removed Portal from the 2007 name.

The primary reason why we took Office out of the name - lots of folks associate the name Office with the Office client. We wanted to take the opportunity to reestablish the Office name and brand to be synonymous with the client suite. I say “Give the people what they Want” so everyone should immediately think of Microsoft Office = Office apps.

Don’t try to acronym Microsoft SharePoint Server to MSS since MSS is already taken by Microsoft Search Server. Just remember, SharePoint is SharePoint is SharePoint.

What about Windows SharePoint Services?

When you read through the announcement, you may be wondering what happened to Windows SharePoint Services. While we didn’t announcement anything new for WSS, and I want to assure you that we’re definitely working on a new v4 version of the product. It’s too early to drill into any of the details but WSS is getting a lot of new features and will be a great release. We’ll talk more about WSS at a later date.

So, what was announced?

Here are my key takeaways from the interview with Chris Capossela:

• Exchange 2010 will lead the way for the 2010 (previously referred by its codename “14”) wave of technologies and it will be available in the second half of 2009. You can download a beta today.

• Using Office Web applications, customers will be able to create, edit and collaborate on Office documents through a browser.

• IT professionals will be able to choose to either deploy and manage on-premises or hosted as a service.

• For developers, we are working on Open APIs, deep support for industry standards and developer tool support with Visual Studio 2010."

Actually MOSS sounded better, but anyways we will learn to say "SharePoint Twenty Ten" very soon!

* Just registered sharepoint2010.in, no wonder good ones were already taken!