Woody Windischman - The Sanity Point

Off Topic - String Along with Ford

Woody Windischman — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:18:00 GMT

Buried in Bureaucracy and Rebuffed

Note: This is a follow-up piece to my "In a Fix with Ford" article. See that if you need some additional background.

Where does one begin a tale of woe? For that, my friends, is what we have here. Six weeks ago, I wrote my original article with high hopes that I could prevail upon Ford to do the right thing, and fix the known design problems with my early production 2006 Ford Fusion. Little did I know that I had about as much chance of success as Don Quixote in tilting at windmills.

An Apology to the Messenger

First, I want to express my appreciation to Marq Boggs, Service Manager at Don Hinds Ford, in Fishers, IN. He had the great misfortune of being bearer of the bad news that Ford had no intention of fixing my car's problems. In my initial article, it may have seemed that I was "killing the messenger" by placing a big part of the blame on his dealership. That was not my intent, and if it was taken that way, I humbly apologize.

In fact, Marq has been of great assistance: first, in confirming that my car does indeed suffer from every one of the issues described in my first article; second, in taking it upon himself to address one of the problems by flashing my car's computer with up-to-date firmware; and finally, in chasing through some of the bureaucracy at Ford in an effort to find someone willing to address my problems.

Unfortunately, he was not successful.

Pointing Fingers, Hot Potatoes, and Monkeys in the Middle

The implication here is, that Ford has refused to repair my car. Interestingly, Ford customer service's own reply to me (I'll call it the "kiss-off" letter - others might choose a more colorful term) seems to imply that the dealership was the one with the final say in the matter:

Dear Woodrow Windischman,
We have looked into this matter and our records indicate that a decision has been made by your servicing dealership. In addition, they suggested that you take your vehicle to the selling dealership and see if they would provide additional assistance. Please be advised that the CRC can not overturn this decision. However, to ensure our records are complete we have documented your feedback.
We would like you to know that we understand your concern and that we appreciate the time that you have taken to write us about this issue.

(Emphasis added)

I talked to Marq again to see what was going on. It seems that each dealer is allocated a certain amount of "customer loyalty" money by Ford. This is supposed to be used to provide exceptional services to the dealer's customers. The official bottom-line position of Ford was that they weren't going to pay to fix my car, but if the dealer wanted to, they could provide the repairs out of these loyalty funds. Here's the rub - I didn't buy my car from Don Hinds, and I'm not really local (for now, I'm just in Indy on a contract), meaning future purchase prospects are limited as well. So, there really isn't a good reason for them to use a big chunk of these (rather scarce) resources on my car. I can understand this, and there are no ill-feelings from me on this account.

What about my "selling dealership" (Rice Ford, in Warsaw, IN - where I actually bought my car)? Well, I spoke to Bud Shanks, the service manager, and there was good news and bad news. The good news is, he and Mr. Rice agree that Ford should be responsible for fixing my car. The bad news is, they agree that Ford should be responsible for fixing my car. Therefore they don't feel it is appropriate to tap their loyalty funds for my repairs either. There is another complication - as I mentioned, I'm on a contract that has me over 100 miles away from the dealership during normal shop hours. In order for me to take my car there for service, I would need to take at least a day away from work, thus negating a big part of any benefit from having the repair covered.

How to Make a Billion Dollars

A company is more than its most recent marketing campaigns. I was proud of the fact that Ford didn't accept bail-out money from the government last year. I remember their "Quality is Job 1" campaign. I remember when they used to offer lifetime warranties on repair service. Notwithstanding the (truly minor) problems at issue here, I've been very happy with the service my Fusion has given me.

It is ironic that just a few days after I got their final kiss-off, Ford announced that they had made about $1,000,000,000 (that's one billion dollars) in profit during the quarter of my discontent. This during one of the worst economic downturns in recent memory. (No, how ever much the media likes to portray it that way, it isn't even close to the "real" depression of the 30's, or even the "stagflation" times of the late 70's. Doesn't anyone remember the double-digit mortgage interest rates?)

According to my experiences, and based on conversations with the dealers, a big part of this profit has been made by cutting back on the service and support provided to its customers and dealer base. Yet this "reputation" for quality and service is one of the reasons Ford was able to make sales while others were foundering.

The Big Picture

Everyone involved here agrees that it should be Ford's responsibility to fix my car. Everyone, that is, except Ford themselves.

Of course, whether paid for by Ford or not, I need to get my car fixed. This whole adventure started when I had to pay an ESP extended warranty deductible for a repair on my shifter, who's design was changed due to the very problem I suffered from. That case was made even more frustrating by the fact that the deductible was almost the entire cost of the repair. That ESP is still in place, and some of the issues I'm having are covered under that plan. Of course, I'll have to pay another deductible. In the end, given the cost of the ESP to begin with, I'll end up having paid the entire cost of the repairs, and then some.

If you've followed my blog for the last few months, you know that my life has been filled with highs and lows lately. In the grand scheme of things, is getting a few non-life threatening car repairs paid for all that important? Not really.

But that still doesn't make the way Ford has been treating its dealers and customers "right".

SharePoint 2010 Hits the Jackpot

Woody Windischman — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 23:52:00 GMT

SharePoint Conference 2009 Wrap-up

The show is over, but the adventure is only beginning. As stated before, SPC09 in Las Vegas was the coming out party for SharePoint 2010. While we will still have to wait a few weeks for stable bits to play with, over 7000 attendees came away with a treasure trove of knowledge and documentation.

In my previous installments, I talked about the venue, the atmosphere, and the keynotes. I've also touched on some of the new Office integration story.

Of course, the star of the show was SharePoint 2010 itself. So, I'm going to dedicate the rest of this post to a punch-list of changes/improvements. I know I've missed a few (or more than a few) new elements, or misunderstood a detail or two, but even so the list is impressive. You'll see that the SharePoint team at Microsoft have not been resting on their laurels during the three years we've been waiting. Over the next few months, I'll fill in more details on the individual features, correct what I got wrong, or update you on the inevitable feature changes as things get closer to release.

The Basics

It seems Microsoft can't release a new version of SharePoint without tweaking the names a bit. Just as "SharePoint Portal Server" and "SharePoint Team Services" became "Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS)" and "Windows SharePoint Services (WSS)" in the 2007/3.0 wave, For 2010/4.0, they're simply called "SharePoint Server" and "SharePoint Foundation" respectively.

The Public Beta of SharePoint 2010 is to be released in November 2009.

The actual product release is planned for the first half of 2010.

It is still "SharePoint". Although many weaknesses have been addressed, core functionality remains essentially similar, with lists, libraries, site model, etc... Since "form follows function", many of the visual elements will be very familiar.

Infrastructure and Administration

Requires 64bit throughout the stack
Windows Server 2008 as a baseline OS
Complete redesign of Central Admin
Shared Services: No more monolithic "Shared Services Provider". Instead things formerly grouped under an SSP are individual Shared Service Applications.
Search architecture changes: index role can be spread across multiple servers
"Normal" SharePoint search now scale-tested to around 100 million items.
Business Data Catalog transformed into Business Connectivity Services, and becomes part of SharePoint Foundation (no more enterprise CAL required).
BCS info becomes available throughout the Office 2010 suite, not just SharePoint, and offers read/write capability.
FAST Search is available as an add-on for Enterprise CAL users at per-server pricing.
Enterprise-wide metadata support
Lists are more scalable, and can be "external" to the SharePoint content database. Admin can set maximum returned items to prevent bogging the system down.
Servers can be upgraded without enabling the new UI by default. Site owners can then switch over when their members are ready for the change.
AD Group Policies can prevent installation of SharePoint on unapproved systems.
Even more databases.
Better auditing and reporting in-box.
"License" logging to see which features are used.
Allowed to read log/report database to build custom reports.

Client Facing

UI: No IE6 support for collaboration/team sites. Can still make IE6 friendly publishing sites.
Firefox 3.x is a Level 1 browser.
"Accessible" CSS-based layouts, and XSLT-based list views.
Table-based layouts are gone
Cleaner, modernized themes.
Ribbons are primary control mechanism, just like Office.
There is no longer a separate basic "Wiki" site type in SharePoint Foundation. (However, there is now a publishing-based "Enterprise Wiki" site in SharePoint Server.)
All team sites can have wiki functionality enabled, and made the default.
Theme colors can be imported from PowerPoint themes for compliance with corporate standards.
The GroupBoard template is available out of the box.
List lookups can pull multiple fields
List lookups support referential integrity (blocking/cascading deletes)
Field validation

Social

Major overhaul of profiles and My Sites.
Includes "status" functionality (i.e. FaceBook/Twitter style updates)
Unique org-chart presentation
"Folksonomy" to support user-created shared tags in addition to Enterprise "Taxonomy" metadata.
Can tag non-SharePoint content

Search (Standard)

Improved handling of metadata
Faceting (now called "refinement") is built-in
Social input to ranking

Search (FAST)

All standard SP Search features
Deep refinement (polls entire result set to get actual counts)
Concept metadata from unstructured content
User-role tailored result sets.
Massive scalability
Superset of standard SP Search API
Managed through the same admin UI

SharePoint Designer 2010

Complete UI redesign, based on SharePoint "artifacts" rather than file structure.
SPD 2010 tied to SP 2010. Will not work on older versions or non-SharePoint sites, and old SPD won’t work against SP 2010 sites.
Much better Visual Studio integration – exports Solutions that can be imported into VS for both site designs and workflows.
SPD Workflows can be independent of specific lists.
SPD Workflows can easily be exported into either Visio 2010 or Visual Studio 2010
Finer administrative control over what SPD users can do.
Page model is the same, but many changes based on new CSS layouts and Theme engine.

Development

The "platform" aspect of SharePoint receives a lot of emphasis with this version
Use Visual Studio 2010 for full visual web part design and other SharePoint integration points
Can install SharePoint on a client OS (Vista or Windows 7, 64-bit) for dev sandbox.
Much better developer documentation out of the gate
Client Side object model to make Silverlight controls and web parts easier to develop.
REST, ATOM, and other web service interfaces fully supported.

Conclusion

In his keynote and his write-up from a couple weeks ago, Jeff Teper pointed out that the vision and purpose of SharePoint hasn't really changed much from the original 1-page proposal over 10 years ago. Yet the implementation of that vision has grown by leaps and bounds over the succeeding versions. I hope I have shown you that SharePoint 2010 will continue in that tradition. As I said earlier, I'm sure I've missed things. These were just the elements that stuck out as I was going through sessions and reading material. But I have to admit, I'm excited.

Off Topic - A Brief Tribute

Woody Windischman — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:54:00 GMT

In Loving Memory of Three Wonderful People

I know you are expecting my wrap-up of the SharePoint conference here, and that will still be coming. But, for now, I need to digress. While I was in Las Vegas, I received word that my grandmother on my mom's side (my last grandparent) had passed away. This caps a series of three losses for me and my family over the past few weeks. In addition to my grandmother, Mary Cary Rudes, I lost and attended services for my uncle, Dr. Les Meyer, and my brother's wife's father, Tom Moore.

Each, in their own way, spent much of their lives helping others. My grandmother was an English teacher and patron of the arts. Uncle Les was not only a physician, but the founder of many programs that focused on helping children with orthopedic problems. Tom Moore was a man of many talents, from culinary arts, to jazz piano, which he always gladly shared with those around him.

No matter the situation, whether expected or sudden, the loss of a loved one has an impact on our hearts. The best we can hope to do is turn it into a reflection of the impacts of their lives, and use that reflection as an inspiration to share of ourselves as they shared with us.

Tom, Les, Grandma, may your journey into eternity be filled with joy and peace.

Thomas Moore

Les Meyer

Mary Cary Rudes

SharePoint Conference 2009 - Midpoint Musings

Woody Windischman — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 10:37:22 GMT

Keynotes, Sessions, and More

I can't believe how fast the time has gone. We're half-way through the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 already. If you're following me on Twitter, you'll know some of the things that caught my attention as I was sitting through the keynotes and sessions. I really haven't had much time to ponder things too deeply, but there are some items that stand out.

"SharePoint is Magical"

During Steve Ballmer's keynote, this was his answer to the question "What is SharePoint?" Although that seems more than a little hyperbolic, in some ways he's right. Not so much the product itself (though I am beginning to wonder), but the effect it is having.

Consider this: The SharePoint Conference has over 7,000 people participating. That's more than attended TechEd this year. TechEd is covers all of Microsoft's products and technologies. Yet this conference, for a single product, is bigger.

But, that is almost a mischaracterization. Although SharePoint is a single product (well, family of products), its impacts are far greater. Almost every other product Microsoft produces is influenced by SharePoint. In fact, many of the sessions at the conference revolve around some of those impacts.

SharePoint is Pervasive

One of the sessions I went to yesterday demonstrates this clearly. Access has been Microsoft's "end user" database product for well over a decade. It allows users to easily create sets of tables, forms, and reports.

With the 2010 release, Microsoft is introducing Access Web Services. Essentially, this allows you to take an Access database and convert it (not merely upload it) into SharePoint site, with virtually all of the functionality intact. Tables are converted to SharePoint lists. Macros are converted to JavaScript and SharePoint workflows. Even your forms and reports display virtually identically.

What's more, this isn't a one-way ticket - it is a round-trip. You can re-open the site in Access to tweak it, or have full "access" to the functionality that doesn't convert (either by product limit or your choice).

Integration now also exists for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Visio.

"The News"

Of course, no Microsoft event would be complete without the big Attendee Party. This year, the venue was pretty close to "home" - Mandalay Bay's "Beach". The theme was the 80's, so we had breakdancing, "big hair", leg warmers and headbands, even Rubik's Cubes. About the only thing missing was roller skates.

But the highlight of the night was a private concert by Huey Lewis and the News. Just to show you how out of touch with pop/rock music I am, I didn't even know he was the guy who did the songs in Back to the Future (among other things). I only knew him from the karaoke movie, Duets, with Gwyneth Paltrow. (I'm a karaoke singer/fan.) Of course, I had heard of him, but I didn't know which music he was associated with. But I definitely recognized most of the songs he did, as did the crowd - many of whom (myself included) ended up wading into the beach pool to get closer to the stage.

The "Other" News

Of course, as you probably have heard from everywhere by now, this conference is essentially the "coming out party" for SharePoint 2010. But the actual bits aren't quite ready for us yet. They've promised to have the public beta available sometime in November.

So, that's it for me at midway. Keep up with my tweets for in-line learnings, and I'll be back with a conference wrap-up once it is all over.

SharePoint Conference 2009 - Sunday

Woody Windischman — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 10:37:13 GMT

Day 0.5

The day started clear and cold. I would say "bright" and cold, but it was only 4:45 AM when I left for the airport, so it was dark. There was frost on my car windows as I made my way to the airport.

Traffic was light, but construction was heavy around O'Hare. The security line was long. Fortunately I had checked in online, so I didn't have to wait for my boarding pass. Still I ran through the B/C tunnel and barely made it before they closed the door.

And so began my trip to the SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas. The flight itself was pretty much uneventful, though once I arrived in Vegas I ended up captive in a shuttle while they waited for enough people to show up to fill it.

This is my first time in Las Vegas. Although the conference is officially in Mandalay Bay, most of the hotels on "the strip" are interconnected. I, along with lots of other SharePoint folks, are staying in the Luxor. That's the one that looks like a big black glass pyramid. On the inside, that pyramid is totally hollow. The rooms are arranged in a single "layer" along the wall, so that they have steeply slanted windows looking toward the outside. Inside, on each floor there is an open hallway that looks to the hollow interior. The base is filled with restaurants, theaters, and of course, the casino.

The elevators run up the support columns in each of the four corners. Although they are sealed so that you can't see it, they actually travel "slantways" as they go from the ground floor to the peak.

Getting your Exercise

While the Luxor is nominally "right next to" the Mandalay Bay, and they are connected by an interior walkway, that doesn't mean that they are truly "close". In fact, to get from the Luxor to the conference center, you need to walk a seemingly endless maze - through both hotels' casinos as well as a shopping center. All in all, it takes at least 10 minutes, if not a bit more, to cover if you maintain a brisk pace. Let's just say I'm glad I decided to bring the shoes that are most comfortable for walking rather than sitting around.

The Registration Packet

This year's registration premium is a simple spandex laptop pouch (in your choice of sizes). But hidden inside is something very juicy - a very well prepared booklet describing SharePoint 2010's features and functions (as they exist in current beta builds). I haven't had much chance to read it yet, but let's just say it looks like Microsoft has taken to heart the complaints of SharePoint 2007 not having enough documentation available early on. They are clearly taking steps to ensure that complaint isn't repeated.

Unfortunately, SharePoint 2010 software itself wasn't in there. But, there are still 4 days of "real" conference yet to come, so who knows?

Meeting and Greeting

The great thing about events like this is getting to see, in person, folks you normally only interact with online - or at events like this. ;) In addition to bumping into people throughout the day, you can always be sure of a nice mingle or two. Sunday night, there were two big ones - SharePint, and ShareIndian. Unfortunately, I hadn't gotten much sleep over the past three days, so I wasn't really feeling up to leaving the complex, so I missed ShareIndian. I did make it to SharePint briefly, however, and had a number of nice chats before I turned into a pumpkin at around 9:30. (I suspect I was turning into a virtual vegetable long before that.)

So ends my report of the Pre-conference. Stay tuned for more throughout the week!

SharePoint Conference Las Vegas

Woody Windischman — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 05:45:00 GMT

Preparing for the Flood... of Information

Before I get all wrapped up in the excitement around Vegas, the SharePoint conference, and the release of information about SharePoint 2010, I thought I would point out a few things.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I try to keep this blog unique. That said, with so much new information coming out, so fast, and publicized by an unprecedented number of people, there will be virtually no way to ensure I'm not repeating information. So, in this rare instance, I'm not even going to try.

I'm going to post about what I consider (and I hope you will find) interesting. Right now, I can't even predict what that will be, but you can rest assured that I'll be doing it from my own perspective. Even when I cover topics I know a zillion other people will talk about, I'm going to try to bring you something unique.

Like virtually everyone else in the SharePoint community, I'm also on Twitter. I may not be as prolific as some, but like here, I try to do things with my own spin. (But don't worry - I won't be tweeting the entire conference in Haiku form!) So if you aren't already following me, "now would be a good time." :)

See you in Vegas!

Knowing Your Limitations

Woody Windischman — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 13:20:00 GMT

"2.1 Billion ID's Should be Enough for Anybody!"

One of the more infamous stories about Bill Gates is that he once said "640K of memory should be enough for anyone." That wasn't true - he never said it, but it did point up the frustration that came from one of the design limits of the original IBM PC. The memory between 640K and 1MB (which was the physical limit of the CPU) was allocated by IBM for video, I/O buffers, and lots of other "housekeeping", and therefore couldn't be accessed by DOS. This was fine at the time, when the typical computer came with 64K of RAM, and even expanding to 512K was a luxury; but when applications (like Lotus 123, dBase III, and even Windows itself) became complicated enough to require that memory, and more powerful CPUs became available that allowed access to even more, that big "gap" before getting to the extended memory required more effort to program around than anyone could have predicted. (Yes, that's way over-simplified, but it is enough to get the point across...)

The reason I bring up this little history lesson is to point out that when you are designing products, you have to set limits somewhere. Sometimes these limits are intrinsic, like the 1MB maximum RAM of the 8088 CPU. Others are compromises, like how much of that 1MB to allocate for system housekeeping, and where to locate it in the address space. You hope you set these high enough that most users will never see them, but they are there.

SharePoint also has a number of limits. Most of them are well documented. Some of them are "soft" limits - places where you see performance degradation. Others are "hard" limits, like the maximum size of an integer value. But some limits are buried under the covers, because they are internal to a function, and users never see the processes that are impacted. If they are set high enough, the users will never even know they exist.

Crawling Forward

Unfortunately, there is a limit that wasn't set high enough. This was buried deep inside the MOSS and MSS search databases. Most database tables have a field for a unique identifier. This is automatically incremented every time a new row is added. Typically, a SQL Server Integer (int) is used for this ID, allowing up to just over 2 billion items to be added (2,147,483,647 if you must know). That's a lot. But this value just goes up - it isn't decremented if you delete a row.

In the SharePoint Search DB, there is a table that keeps track of all of the links in your crawled content. Whenever you do a new crawl, rows are added to and deleted from this table. This table originally used the int referenced above for its ID field. Now, there can be a lot of links in a SharePoint site, but still, 2.1 billion should take an awfully long time to reach, and in most cases it does. But reach it you can. For very large and complicated sites, if you do a full crawl every day (which deletes and replaces all of the link references) you can reach it faster than you might (and the developers did) think.

So, what happens if SharePoint actually hits this limit, and runs out of IDs? It isn't pretty. Essentially the crawling process gets stuck. It asks the database for permission to write the next available row, and since there isn't an ID that can be given to it, the database just says "no". Unfortunately, SharePoint doesn't take no for an answer, and keeps asking. You will, occasionally, see an error in the event log talking about a SQL Identity failure, but unless you were aware of this possibility, it wouldn't make much sense.

Recovering

This also prevents you from effectively controlling search. Because SharePoint insists on finishing the last thing it was doing, you can't stop the crawl. Because there isn't much to go on in the logs, and it takes some SQL Server proficiency to accurately diagnose the problem, many times, this results in folks rebuilding their SSP, with all of the pain and agony that entails, just for the want of an ID.

Note: At this point, you need to consider the search index on this SSP corrupt. There is nothing that can recover the ability to crawl new content without resetting your index and doing a full crawl as described in the prevention section below.

Even if you can successfully diagnose it, there are very few supportable solutions that *don't* involve rebuilding the SSP one way or another. Remember, directly modifying the SharePoint databases yourself can result in an unsupported state. So, if you reset the seed of the maxed-out table to 1 in order to get control of the crawl back and stop it, you should restore the search database from a backup to reach a production state before you reset the crawled content (see below), which resets the database to an initialized state.

You can also restore your whole SSP from a backup, but that's almost as much fun as rebuilding it, and it assumes you have a restorable backup of your SSP.

An Ounce of Prevention

Obviously, it is much better to prevent this problem from occurring in the first place than to try recovering from it. There are a couple ways to do this. The first and best is to upgrade your SharePoint environment to Service Pack 2. Among the many enhancements in SP2, the ID fields in the search databases that were prone to maxing out are updated to "big" integers. BigInts are twice the number of bits as regular integers. That doesn't just double the capacity, though. It makes it 4 billion times as large. (For those who really need to know it makes the number of possible ID's 9,223,372,036,854,775,807!) So, if it took 6 months to reach the old limit, it would take 24 billion months to reach the new one.

If you can't upgrade to SP2, you should consider adding a periodic reset of the index into your maintenance plans - especially if you have a very large corpus, with lots of links. The option to do this is available from Quick launch in the Search Administration page.

Resetting the crawled content doesn't impact your settings, keywords and best bets, etc... But it does delete your existing index and completely resets the search crawl database - including the table ID fields. After the reset, search results will not be available until a full crawl is performed, so you should schedule this to take place during a down time and/or notify your users of the search outage. If you have multiple content sources defined, you will need to crawl all of them.

When you select reset, you will get a screen asking if you want to turn off search alerts during the reset. It will default to being selected, and you should leave it that way.

The alerts can be reactivated once your crawls have been completed.

Conclusion

As Clint Eastwood once said as Dirty Harry, "A man's got to know his limitations." Everyone, and every thing, has limits.

Limits are only a problem when you don't know about them, and don't take them into account. SharePoint, as powerful as it is, has plenty of them. In addition to the hidden limit I covered in today's article, you might want to review some of the more well known limits in the SharePoint planning material: Planning for Software Boundaries.

The Four Disclaimers

Woody Windischman — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 07:57:00 GMT

On Monday, October 5th, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published some new ~~regulations~~ guidelines with regard to bloggers and product endorsements. While I'm certain they will be challenged, possibly even successfully, for now they are what they are.

What does this mean for The Sanity Point? For now, not much. I'm a SharePoint guy, and pretty much everyone knows it. I like SharePoint and I always have. Besides, I very rarely "review" or "endorse" products at all. I normally just provide information to help you figure out how to make them work (or work better) if you've already purchased them. I occasionally comment on the news, or my personal life.

But this rule change does point out that until now I haven't put forth any kind of statement with regard to policy on this blog. So, with a nod and an apology to the Public Radio program called "Whad'Ya Know?", I now list my own "Four Disclaimers" for this web site.

1. These Opinions are My Own, and They are Only Opinions

The opinions expressed on this web site are my own. They do not necessarily reflect those of my employers, clients, friends, neighbors, or the dog down the street. They are not the "Official Word" of any company, unless I am quoting from their own information. Such quotes will be clearly identified.

I am not a Doctor, Lawyer, Financial, or Menu advisor, nor do I play one on TV. Any statements made on this site are those of an informed layman. Even "best practices" are not always the best in every situation. Statements that are within my field of expertise, which describe what I would generally consider good practices, may not apply in your particular circumstance. Please make complete and verifiable backups and confirm your situation with your own local resources before taking "irreversible" actions.

I employ the Akismet spam blocker, and moderate the comments on this site. While I won't usually block a comment from someone who is critical or disagrees with me, I will not approve obvious spam, repeated posts, comments which (solely in my opinion) are in bad taste, or marketing posts that simply refer someone to their own product site. Comments that are approved may be edited if required to reflect the above-listed standards.

2. I Don't Do Paid Reviews, but I Do Accept Legal Free Stuff

While I very happily share my experience and expertise on the products I'm familiar with, nobody pays me to write the stuff on this site. In fact, nobody pays me anything at all for anything on this site, except copies of my book. If I like something, I'll say so. If I think something could be improved, I'll say that too.

That said, in IT, companies are always providing trial and demo copies of software, sometimes for download, often by the stack at conventions and other events. Sometimes these are full copies, other times they have timeouts, or functionality limited in other ways.

If I find such a product useful, I might write about it. Whether I paid for it or not, I always get it through some legal channel. I do not break my own NDA's, and I don't attempt to circumvent those of others by getting software through a back-channel where the NDA isn't presented to me.

I don't run random ads on my site. I link to Amazon so you can purchase copies of my book. I wrote the book - of course I benefit from you buying it! I also have an Amazon a-Store. Products purchased there can result in a commission for me. While it isn't linked from this site right now, if I do link to it, understand that all selected products in it are those that I would recommend to anyone, no matter where they might purchase them.

The MVP Award I just received does come with some goodies that could be considered "substantial"; however, it is not based on product endorsements. Rather, it is a reward based on recent past exceptional community participation, not a payment for any particular service or statement.

3. The Sky is Blue, Birds Fly, and Fish Swim. It's What They Do. Get Over It.

4. I Value Your Privacy

This site employs conventional web reporting technologies, such as logs, and scripts from Google Analytics and Feedburner. Google's privacy policies apply to their services. By the very nature of the Internet, information available to all web sites (not just this one) includes visitor source IP addresses, objects viewed, browser capabilities, session cookies, and several other types of information, all of which may be included in these logs and/or passed on to the analytics service. Other than this, and the information you enter into comments, I don't collect potentially personally identifiable information. I don't sell even the little information that is collected to anyone.

An MVP Once More

Woody Windischman — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 07:31:00 GMT

Last week, I got some great news: I have been awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for 2009!

To quote the Microsoft MVP site:

"Since the early 1990s, Microsoft has recognized the inspiring activities of MVPs around the world with the MVP Award. MVPs freely share their deep knowledge, real-world experience, and impartial, objective feedback to help people enhance the way they use technology. Of more than 100 million users who participate in technology communities, around 4,000 are recognized as Microsoft MVPs."

Those 4000 awardees are selected from across a variety of disciplines, specializing in a wide array of Microsoft products. Only a small fraction of them are SharePoint MVP's. This is not the first time I have been given this award, but it has been a few years. (A person's community contributions are analyzed each year - there is no "automatic" extension.)

I am deeply honored to have once more been selected for this group. Thank you, Microsoft! I hope to continue providing the SharePoint community with as much help as I can over the next year.

A Little Shout-Out to Bil Simser

Woody Windischman — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:03:00 GMT

Complete Agreement

As you may have noticed, I try to keep this blog "original." In other words, I don't cover the same material as another blogger has recently done, unless I have something major to add, or there is some kind of debate going on.

Today (September 29, 2009) SharePoint MVP Bil Simser has managed to "scoop" me, by writing an article on almost exactly the same subject I was planning to comment on in an upcoming post. In it, he talks about people who claim SharePoint is bad, and questions how whatever the "SharePoint Killer" of the day might actually compare beyond one particular forte.

While I would have been a little softer in my language, I can't fault the sentiments he has expressed. So, rather than seem like I'm repeating it, I'll simply give you the link to his post:

SharePoint FUD... Spreading Far, Wide and Fast

Note - I have actually written on this topic before, though specifically on the subject of Wikis. For my take on that subject, check out this article, from April of this year:

Wiki-in-the-Box - Is SharePoint Wiki Really that Bad?

Be sure to check out Bil, and all the other great SharePoint bloggers on my Blog Roll...

Indexing SharePoint List Columns

Woody Windischman — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 15:14:00 GMT

Helping SharePoint Help You

A SharePoint system manages a huge amount of data. Amazingly, in a SharePoint content database, all of the data, for every list and library item, in every site and subsite, is stored in a single table. Looking at hundreds of sites, each with dozens of lists and libraries, each potentially containing hundreds or thousands of items, and you end up with one massive table!

Not So Limiting After All

Everybody has heard about the so-called "2000 item limit" in SharePoint. Remember that this isn't really a limit. SharePoint is quite capable of handling lists with tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of items. The issue is the "rendering" of those items, which starts becoming perceptibly slower if you have more than 2000 items in a single view.

While the indexing discussed in this article can have a minor effect on this rendering, it really is more general, and can improve list performance across the board.

Ask any DBA how to achieve maximum performance on a huge table, while other options may also come up, at a minimum you'll always hear the word "indexing". And make no mistake - SharePoint (whether Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, or Office SharePoint Server 2007) does do a lot of indexing. But that is only dealing with the user data table as a whole.

Once SharePoint has figured out which site and list the data belongs to, normally it is pretty much done with indexing. When you perform a query - whether in code, or for a web part view - each item in the list is examined individually for a match. As the amount of information in your sites grows, this can take quite a bit of time and cause significant slowdowns (This is independent of the "2000 item limit" - see sidebar).

Fortunately, you don't have to put up with this default behavior. SharePoint gives you the additional ability to index the information within individual lists or libraries.

Look at the settings page for just about any list or library, and you will find a link for "Indexed columns":

When you click the link, you will be given the opportunity to select which columns in your list you wish to index. This is where an understanding of your information, and how you use it comes into play. While you could just click everything, that isn't usually a good idea. For each column you index, SharePoint needs to store extra information about every item in your list.

You should only select columns for indexing that you will be using to query/filter, sort, and group your list. For this list, I'll usually need to do this with the item's title (or name), who created or modified an item, and when it starts. So those are the columns I'll select to index:

Note: When setting up indexed columns, you will almost always want to include the title or name field.

Once you click OK, SharePoint will build the appropriate extra indexes. While there won't be any change to the way your list looks, you should see the performance results almost immediately. (Of course, the more items in your list, the greater the impact will be...)

One place you usually see immediate results is when you click on the context menu of a column title to change the sorting or filtering. The list of unique values builds much faster on an indexed column.

That's all there is to it! Setting up indexed columns in your SharePoint list really is that simple. Give it a shot, and you might be surprised at how much faster your SharePoint applications can be.

SharePoint Values Your Uniqueness

Woody Windischman — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 07:53:00 GMT

"Who Did You Say You Were?"

Today I'm going to talk about user accounts. In particular, Windows Active Directory accounts. You might be thinking, "This doesn't sound like a SharePoint topic!" But rest assured, it is.

I've talked about Windows accounts and SharePoint before. For example, I've told you about the many accounts you need to consider when setting up a SharePoint farm, and how to discover the Setup User account after the fact. I've also mentioned how you can let SharePoint know when User ID's change.

Normally, each person has one Windows account (user ID and password). They use this account to log into their PC in the morning, thus proving to the network who they are. This is called "authentication". Many systems that recognize Windows authentication (including SharePoint) will simply accept these credentials from the user's PC, without any further user intervention. The systems use these credentials to determine what data and functions the user has been "authorized" to access by the administrator of the system.

Note: Behind the scenes, it is quite a bit more complicated than that. While a complete discussion of handshaking and protocols is beyond the scope of this article, understand that the negotiations taking place do result in one of the issues I will describe below.

On Being a Highlander - "There Can Should be Only One"

By and large, this system works pretty well. However, it is based on a pretty big assumption - that each user has only one account for their "day to day" system usage, and each account has only one user. Unfortunately, from time to time this assumption doesn't hold true. This can cause some subtle, and not-so-subtle (but hard to trace) problems in SharePoint if you aren't careful.

I'm going to discuss three main scenarios:

One user has multiple accounts
One account is shared across multiple users
Accounts in different domains that have the same UserID portion, but different passwords.

For each group, I'll talk about why it might occur, how it presents a challenge, a few variations on the theme, and what you can do to minimize the difficulties presented by it.

One User, Multiple Accounts

Why it might happen:

There are many specific reasons a user might have multiple accounts, but they generally fall into three categories - Administration, Test, and Transition.

Transitions can be wide-spread - such as when companies realign or change naming standards, or individual - such as when marital status changes. Regardless of the reason for a transition though, generally there will be an "old" account, and a "new" account.

For purposes of this section, I'm considering administrative and test accounts to be equivalent. They don't need to be "administrators" per se, and the account may exist mainly for applications other than SharePoint. Essentially these are any accounts that a user signs into for a particular task that has different privileges from their normal User ID (e.g. DBA), and their use is often dictated by policy or best-practice. Regardless of the reason, the challenges and resolutions are basically the same.

Why this is a challenge:

Aside from the obvious - making sure each account actually has access to the correct resources - SharePoint keys a lot of stuff based on the current user. From Created and Modified by tags, to personalized pages, and audience targeting, SharePoint knows and shows who you are. But the real hazard of multiple accounts is their effect on profiles and my-sites.

User profiles are crated from Active Directory imports, as well as user-entered information. Certain features of My Sites, such as organizational relationships are built using the imported information. Typically a user's "primary" account will populate such fields a their title, office location, manager, and other useful business information. Administration and Test accounts, on the other hand, generally just use the name to describe the purpose of the account, and little else.

These impact not only the current user, but others as well. For example, suppose you fully populate AD info for each of the accounts. When someone clicks on the manager's profile, suddenly they will show all of the secondary accounts, as well as the "real" user, in their reporting relationships. Or, what if the user has reports of their own? Since each can only have one manager, you need to be very careful to assign it to the correct account, otherwise, someone may end up not appearing in org charts, or they may appear in the wrong place.

When someone starts using these secondary accounts for day-to-day activities in SharePoint, this is the account noted as the creator or modifier of data items, and tracked in logs. If you use Communicator, SharePoint's presence indicators can also be affected. They will show the presence and contact info for the account that actually made the change, rather than the potential real presence for the user.

Finally, aside from the profile, each of these accounts will register as separate for the creation of My Sites. Since Office can hook into a user's My Site as a default storage location, this can also cause confusion, as personal documents appear and disappear based upon which ID user is using to perform their activities.

Minimizing the pain:

Wherever possible, strive to make transitions instantaneous - at least as far as SharePoint is concerned. Don't let users access SharePoint with more than one of these accounts at a time. When the time comes, make use of the stsadm "migrateuser" operation as soon as possible, so that users don't get confused or accidentally start generating content under the new account before their old information is reassigned.

For admin/test situations, make sure there is a clear distinction in the users' minds about the purposes of each account. In addition, make sure the metadata in Active Directory correctly reflects which account will be used for day-to-day operations.

One Account, Multiple Users

Why it might happen:

The reasons for multiple users sharing an account typically revolve around cost savings in one form or another - either licensing or administrative.

A typical example might be in a "shop" situation, where one PC is on the floor, and once it is logged in, everyone just accesses the information they need.

Why this is a challenge:

Some of the challenges here are similar to those you might face in an Internet-facing, anonymous access, scenario. Essentially, when someone does something, you don't know who it was.

But there is an added complication. When you are authenticated, this triggers some things in SharePoint. For example, since you have an account, SharePoint will treat you as a named user for "Created by" information. But you can't use effectively use the "only their own" global list permission, or filter things by [Me], as everyone who shares the account will have that permission or see that information. Or on surveys that prevent multiple entries, only one person will be allowed to fill it in from that account. Discussion comments all appear to come from the same person.

Minimizing the pain:

By sharing a single account, you essentially remove the effectiveness "social" elements of SharePoint. Consider reducing confusion by turning off access to MySites and Personalization for the shared account. If you want to use interactive discussions, add a field for users to manually enter their names when posting, and make it a required field.

Frequently such shared resources are "read only". Consider simply allowing anonymous read-only access in those instances.

Another option is to enable a forms-based authentication zone for that group. This allows you to keep your AD clear of staff who otherwise don't use PC's, but still maintain individual control over SharePoint access, and monitor who is posting to writable areas.

Name's the Same, Different Domain

Why it might happen:

Unlike accounts within the same domain, which by definition must have unique IDs, it is possible for accounts in different domains to have the same "userID" part. For example, EMEA\SallieJo, AM\SallieJo, and APAC\SallieJo.

These may represent different users, or one user who travels. Sometimes organizations merge, and each already has their own Active Directory domain. Or for various reasons, your organization requires multiple domains on an ongoing basis. In some cases, this can be similar to "One User, Multiple Accounts". In fact, sometimes the situation is the same - accounts are held by the same user, and/or they are transitional. If this is the case, then the cautions mentioned in that section apply as well; but this situation presents its own unique challenges.

Why this is a challenge:

Here is where that "Behind the scenes" techie stuff I mentioned at the beginning comes into play. Essentially, when a user's web browser (Internet Explorer) and IIS (Internet Information Services) start negotiating authentication, only the UserID portion of their credentials, along with encrypted password information is sent from the client to the server. (SharePoint relies on IIS and the ASP.NET engine for authentication.)

Here's the problem - IIS usually assumes the user will be in the same domain as it is, and will try to match the ID with an account in that domain. Only if it doesn't find a match will it make a deeper query of Active Directory. If it finds an ID match, it will try to validate the encrypted password against the current domain. If the passwords match, no problem - or maybe big problem. SharePoint thinks IIS has authenticated the local user. If both accounts are really for the same person, you're OK. If it is a different user from the other domain, who just happened to have the same ID and password, they could actually be seeing the local user's information!

If the passwords don't match, unlike the situation when the UserID is different, IIS won't continue its search. It will just return a fatal error - typically a "500". (If the user is persistent, this also has the potential of locking out accounts in IIS' local domain.)

Note: This isn't an issue unique to SharePoint - you can encounter this problem with almost any system that requires NTLM pass-through authentication.

Minimizing the pain:

The best defense here is to make sure your user ID's are unique across all trusted domains accessing resources. Before initiating trusts, run reports and reconcile them, and set forest policies to prevent duplicates.

When duplicates exist for one or two users, a workaround for users in the remote domain is to assign your site to a specific zone (e.g. trusted sites) and configure Internet Explorer to always prompt for authentication in that zone.

If this is a problem for a large number of users, configuration changes at the server may be in order.

When the majority of your users are in a domain other than the one hosting SharePoint, you can configure IIS to use digest authentication and a different default realm. You can also extend SharePoint into multiple zones, and configure a different realm for each site in IIS. Then ensure that each domain's DNS points to the correct SharePoint zone.

Of course, if you change configurations - whether they be IE or AD, IIS or SharePoint - make sure you document them!

Off Topic - In a Fix with Ford

Woody Windischman — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 13:54:00 GMT

We interrupt this blog to bring you a small consumer rant. If you have no interest in cars or complaints, please disregard this post.

On Being a Ford Guy

Let me start this out by saying that I'm what they, in a past age, would have called "A Ford Man". I've owned a lot of cars over the course of my life, and most of them have been by Ford Motor Company (memorable exceptions include my first car - a 67 Dodge Dart - and the dilapidated VW Beetle I had in college, but didn't everyone have one of those at some point?). This includes every one of the four cars I have purchased new.

This doesn't mean that I wouldn't consider other brands - I do a pretty thorough search and comparison before major purchases. It is just that when new car time rolls around, more often than not I find that one of their products best meets my needs. And if it is otherwise a tie, the Ford (or Mercury, or Lincoln) product will probably win by default.

Falling for the Fusion

A few years ago, Ford decided to split one of their best selling car lines of all time - the Taurus - into two: A slightly larger car called the 500 (which has since reclaimed the Taurus name, and just received a major makeover); and a somewhat smaller vehicle called the Fusion (for those reading this in Europe, the US Fusion is nothing like the car of the same name sold over there - the US car is more of a size and kind with the current Mondeo).

By sheer coincidence, the Fusion came out right at the time I was ready to replace my old car (a Focus). It was virtually everything I was looking for in a car at the time. Now, that doesn't mean I was "first in line" to buy one. I still did all of the appropriate comparisons, but buy one I did, and it is one of the earliest made (November 2005, according to the sticker - more on that later). I am now the owner of a 2006 Ford Fusion SE, in "Red Fire":

In general, I have been very happy with my Fusion. It is comfortable, roomy, performs well with the 4 cylinder engine, and gets great mileage (well over 30 MPG on the highway). And, until recently, I haven't had any mechanical problems, either.

In the Driver's Seat

I don't buy a car to just look at. I buy it to drive. A lot. When you hear about warranties for "X years or Y thousand miles", you can bet your bottom dollar that I'm going to hit the miles number first. I spend a lot of time behind the wheel of my cars, and I get to know them pretty darned well. I learn every every quirky noise, every bump in the seat, every crease of the dash, on a first name basis.

I've never gotten rid of a car with less than 6 figures (100,000 miles) on the odometer. I understand the concept of "normal wear-and-tear" as well as (if not better than) anybody. I accept them as a fact of life, and if my issues were in that category, there wouldn't be a need for me to write this article. In addition, I also always buy the "best" extended warranty plan available from the manufacturer (Ford calls this their "ESP") to make sure I get to at least 100,000 miles without a major breakdown expense. Until now, I have not regretted it.

"You Will Know a Pioneer..."

I also understand the realities of product design and manufacturing. Nothing is perfect out of the gate. Issues are discovered, and changes are made. Most of the problems are caught early. Many are fixed at the factory before the cars are delivered, and 99% of the time, this fine-tuning goes unnoticed by the consumer.

But occasionally a problem isn't caught, or a design flaw that impacts durability can't be discovered, until well after the cars are sold and people are using them in the "real world". Again, most of these issues are benign, and may never be noticed (e.g. a piece of misaligned trim on the bottom of the dashboard). Now and then, though, one rises to the level of consumer awareness.

In the case of problems that could affect safety, depending on how wide-spread it is, a general or specific recall is issued. Everyone impacted is alerted, and their cars are fixed. Period. Again, if my issues were in this category, I wouldn't be writing. Or would I?

And what about problems that aren't generally safety related? These aren't ignored, but they aren't exactly widely publicized either. They are handled through a process called the "Technical Service Bulletin" or TSB. Sometimes these are referred to as "Hidden Warranties". Essentially, they only get fixed if the customer notices and complains about the specific issue covered. Of course, if you are within your normal "bumper to bumper" warranty period, this won't even be an issue. It will be fixed no questions asked.

But that would be the case even if there wasn't a "known problem" with the design, and it was simply a one-off defect in material or workmanship. A TSB might be issued with with a symptom description like "premature wear". And when the fix involves a redesigned component, you can be pretty sure that the original design itself was faulty.

A "Key" Problem

Here is where my relationship with Ford starts to get a bit shaky. As I mentioned, my car was one of the first Fusions produced. Sometimes these design flaws take a while to manifest, and detecting the problems tends to be time, not mileage sensitive. But I drive a lot, so I hit the standard warranty mileage cap ages ago.

A few months back, I ran into a problem where my key wouldn't come out of the ignition. These days, leaving one's key in the car is not the wisest of actions, so of course I went to a dealer to get it fixed. Upon diagnosing the problem, the dealer noted that the issue and solution was described in a TSB, but because I was out of standard warranty by mileage, I would have to pay the ESP deductible of $100. (All the more frustrating because the repair itself would only have been within a few dollars of that).

While I had been aware of TSB's, this incident brought them to the forefront of my attention. First, I became upset that I had to pay at all to have what was clearly a design flaw remedied. Second, I was more frustrated because when I go in for ANY service, I regularly asked if there are any outstanding recalls or service bulletins that apply to my car.

Chasing the Wild Goose

So, I did what any self-respecting, Internet-savvy geek does these days - I Tweeted about it. I caught the attention of Ford's Social Media Guru, Scott Monty (@ScottMonty), who brought me into contact with Shawn @FordCustService. After taking my issue offline with Shawn, he eventually escalated me to Joe Wiegland, Program Manger for the ESP program. While he wouldn't do anything about getting my already-paid deductible refunded, he did ask me to contact him when I was ready to have some other chronic issues, that I had chalked up to either "facts of life" or "normal" wear and tear but my new research identified to be TSB items, addressed, and he would get things straightened out.

Here I must note - I appreciate Mr. Wiegland's involvement, but I believe this shouldn't even have been made an ESP issue. These are design flaws, not strictly material and workmanship defects, and should be repaired regardless of warranty status - normal or extended.

For various personal reasons, I was unable to return to these problems until a couple weeks ago. I called Mr. Wiegland's office, but was directed to his voicemail. I left a message reminding him of my situation, and requesting a callback.

That callback never came.

Nevertheless, armed with my list of applicable TSBs (see below), I paid the dealer (Don Hinds Ford, in Fishers, Indiana) another visit. For every issue, I was rebuffed. Frequently, it was "cannot reproduce". But even when acknowledging a problem, they replied with either "not covered", or that it would only be "partially" covered, even if they could reproduce it.

So, I took back to Twitter. Just a few posts saying that I wasn't pleased with Ford. This time, I got the attention of the newly created @Ford corporate account. They said, literally: If we had a clue as to why, we might be able to help. So, I followed them, and when they (presumably auto) followed me back, I provided contact information via a Direct Message in order to discuss it offline.

They never responded.

A Blogger Scorned

I had no desire to write this article. I tried to resolve my problems privately, but didn't get any satisfaction, so I'm turning to the bit-stream. I've laid out my story in language plain enough for anyone to understand. I'll bring it to the attention of the various Ford accounts on Twitter. I will update it with any resolution - or lack thereof -that may be forthcoming.

Note: I still like Ford products in general, and my Fusion in particular. I just want it fixed.

Appendix - The Issues

Here's a list of my issues, their TSB numbers, the dealer's response, and a few comments.

Key stuck in ignition / Shifter binding condition

My listing shows it as TSB 07-2-1, but the dealer worksheet shows 07-14-7

This is the one that started it all. The title is self-explanatory. The repair consisted of replacing the shifter handle with a redesigned unit. I got charged a deductible that I don't think I should have.

2.3L Engine belt squeal - verify proper serpentine belt and tensioner

This is TSB 06-22-13

While I was at the dealer the first time, I also mentioned a pretty noisy squeak/squeal that I get when the car is cold or the air is particularly damp. Unfortunately, the car is warmed up by the time I get to the shop, so the dealer couldn't reproduce the problem.

After I came in with my list of TSB's, however, this was the one where they said even if they could reproduce it, because the repair incorporated a part the ESP doesn't cover (a belt, which is usually considered a consumable), there would be a significant charge.

According to one source "Ford has issued a newly designed shield, belt, and tensioner to correct the squealing problem. Alignment instructions for the new tensioner are included in the TSB"

Redesign a part to correct a problem, the original design was bad. The belt is part of the redesign, and therefore should be covered.

Since it only happens when cold, here's a video I made that illustrates the noise. I kept the volume of the video down so that it isn't too bad in an office. Rest assured, that in person it is VERY loud, and I can be heard coming down the street from a block away.

Video Demonstrating Squeak and Window Issue

Note: this video also includes a segment demonstrating a crunching noise made by the driver's side window. As far as I know, there isn't a TSB on that, but it is also an intermittent issue that I wanted to get on record so maybe I can get it fixed before my real ESP extended warranty expires. My gut tells me this is a power-window failure waiting to happen. Unlike the squeaking, it is most obvious when it is hot out.

Seat Bolster Wear

This is TSB 07-13-3

Here's one that really bugs me. I brought this up well over a year ago to my local dealer's service department. At the time, it hadn't yet worn through the fabric. They said that it was normal wear that they couldn't do anything about. Now I have discovered that it is anything but.

The TSB description lists the cause as a wire inside the bolster cushion that causes "premature wear". The solution is a new seat cover and a redesigned foam pad that the wire can't wear through.

Here is what I get to look at every time I get into my car, and this is the kind of thing that can only get worse.

According to Hinds' service department, the ESP specifically excludes uphostery, and therefore even with this being a known issue, they can't cover it.

Again, redesign to fix means the design was flawed to begin with. Please Ford, fix this!

Rattle Noise Under Vehicle - Heat Shield

TSB 07-11-7

I can't reproduce it "on demand" but it is very disturbing when it happens. Typically during sub-freezing weather. It sounds like I have a gremlin with a jack-hammer under the car.

Cold Start Tip-in Hesitation

TSB 05-26-20

Again, I can't reproduce it on demand, but it definitely happens. Press the accelerator, and the engine skips a beat before revving up. I originally thought it was just characteristic of this particular power-train. Apparently it only happens on very early Fusions, built before 12/9/05 (like mine), and there's a fix for it. I want the fix.

Front Floor Mat Wear

TSB 06-18-14

Here's one that's been known for a long time. "Premature front driver side floor mat wear" according to the text of the bulletin. In fact, Ford did replace these for me once already. The fact that the replacements wore through just as fast means that the issue wasn't actually fixed at the time of my first replacement. Come on Ford, this is just floor mats! One would think these should have been mastered for decades...

That's It

Thank you for your time and attention. We now return you to your regularly scheduled SharePoint Blog.

Calculated Columns and SPD Workflow Part 2

Woody Windischman — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 23:38:00 GMT

In this two part series, I show you how to take advantage of SharePoint calculated columns in your SharePoint Designer workflows. Part 1 introduced calculated columns. Part 2 will describe several string manipulation functions, and show you how to consolidate these calculated columns into a "function library" of sorts.

Hide the Clutter

In part 1, I showed you how to use a calculated column to enhance a SharePoint Designer workflow. This is all well and good, but what if you have interim calculations? What if you need to do this manipulation on values entered by your user in the workflow initiation form? Or maybe you have other types of information you don't want getting in the way of your users when they view the list.

This is where that "Function Library" I talked about comes into play. Technically, in SharePoint terms, it is actually a function list. We will create a list in SharePoint that contains not just the calculated columns, but "input" columns for the functions as well. We will then hide the list in SharePoint designer. Your workflows can still access it, but your users won't even know it is there.

Holiday for Strings

String manipulation is a great application for calculated columns.

One common workflow scenario is processing the items sent to an email-enabled list. Typically, you will want to parse the subject line to find some routing information. This information may take several forms, including:

The beginning of the subject up to a delimiter
The end of the subject following a delimiter
The information contained within a pair of delimiters
Everything except what is contained between a pair of delimiters

Of course, there are other possibilities, but these should be enough to illustrate the concept.

Building the List

We're going to create a list that supports all of the calculations described in the previous section. To start, of course, we need to create the list. (Remember, SharePoint Designer 2007 doesn't have the ability to create or edit the columns in a MOSS 2007/WSS 3.0 list, so we'll do this in the web UI.)

From Site Actions, select "Create"
From the Create page, select "Custom List"
Give it the name TextFormulas. Since we're ultimately going to hid the list, don't show it on the QuickLaunch
Click Create

Now that we have a basic list, we need to create our input columns:

Display the newly-created TextFormulas list.
From the Settings toolbar, select List Settings
There is a "Title" column created by default. Click on it, change the name to "SourceString", and click OK.
Note: This step isn't technically required, but it helps things make sense in the Workflow Designer
Click Create Column
Enter "Delimiter1" for the Column Name.
Make sure "Single line of text" is selected as the field type, and click OK.
Repeat steps 4-6, except use "Delimiter2" as the column name.

Once you have your input columns defined, you might think it is time to create your calculated columns. While you could, there is one more step you might want to perform. Because the output from string calculations isn't always obvious, it can be helpful to have some sample data to work with so you can see if the formulas are doing what you want them to.

Add an item to your list:

This item will give you all of the possibilities that we might want to work with - text before, after, within, and outside of, delimiters.

Now we're ready to create the calculated columns.

For the first column we just want the text to the left of the first delimiter. This has the simplest formula, but it isn't necessarily as obvious as you might think. The formula is "trim(left([SourceString],find([Delimiter1],[SourceString])-1))"

We're using three string functions: Trim(), Left(), and Find(). They're also "nested", meaning that we're calling one function from within another function.

The obvious function is "Left()". It takes two parameters, the string we want the left hand side of, and how much of the string we want. Unfortunately, since this is delimited rather than a fixed position, we need to "Find()" the position of the delimiter in the source string.

That's all well and good, but why are we then subtracting 1? That's because we would otherwise return the delimiter itself in our results. Find returns the position of the delimiter, and Left function expects a count of returned characters. Since we don't want the delimiter, we subtract 1 so that we get the position immediately before it.

The Trim() function gets rid of any leading and trailing spaces, as even if you don't see them, these can make comparisons fail.

Create your calculated columns in accordance with this table:

Column Name	Formula
BeforeDelimiter1	trim(left([SourceString],find([Delimiter1],[SourceString])-1))
AfterDelimiter1	trim(right([SourceString],len([SourceString])-len([BeforeDelimiter1])-2)
BetweenDelimiters	trim(left([AfterDelimiter1],find([Delimiter2],[AfterDelimiter1])-1))
AfterDelimiter2	trim(right([AfterDelimiter1],len([AfterDelimiter1])-len([BetweenDelimiters])-2)
OutsideDelimiters	[BeforeDelimiter1]&" "&[AfterDelimiter2]

Notice that each formula builds on the one before it - we're using the results of some calculated columns as input to others. This helps us avoid the 8-deep function nesting limit, as well as the 1000 character formula length limit. It also makes them a lot easier to read!

Assuming the formulas are entered correctly, viewing your sample data item will give you these results:

While the value for "AfterDelimiter1" doesn't look very useful in and of itself, that is only because of the particular SourceString we are using. In this case, it is simply an interim value for deriving the BetweenDelimiters result. With a different SourceString it could be the final answer you are looking for. For example, you may have a simple two-part source with a single delimiter, such as "G131131|Memory Failure". That string, with just the pipe (|) as Delimiter1, will result in "Memory Failure" for the AfterDelimiter1 value.

Back to SharePoint Designer

Once you have your function list created, you can use it in your SharePoint Designer workflows.

For this example, we're going to create a workflow on an email-enabled Time Off list. When a new item arrives, we want to parse the subject line to get the reason for the absence and assign it to the reason field. The reason text follows a dash (-), so we're just going to use the "AfterDelimiter1" calculated value.

Note: You may need to enable email-based workflows with the following command before using this example: "stsadm -o setproperty -pn declarativeworkflowautostartonemailenabled -pv true" See this KB Article for details.

When you define your workflow, first check the "Automatically start this workflow when a new item is created box, as shown below:

Click Next.

From the Actions menu, select Create List Item. (Since the menu is built from recently used actions, you may need to select it from the "More Actions" dialog.) You will get a new line in the Actions block that looks like the one below. Click the "this list" link.

Select the TextFormulas list from the dropdown:

The SourceString (*) field will already be chosen, as it is a required field. (This will be the "Title" field if you didn't rename it earlier.)

Click the "Modify..." button. You want to use the E-Mail Subject field from the current item as the source.

After you click OK, Click Add in the Create New List Item dialog, and add the Delimiter1 field. Enter the dash as the Value. When you click OK, the Create dialog should look like this:

Click OK. Notice SPD automatically generates a variable called "Create" as the output of this function. That variable will hold the item ID for the formula item we create. This will be needed later.

A Pregnant Pause

The next action may seem a little odd. We're going to select the "Pause for Duration" action, and then set it to 0 days, 0 hours, and 0 minutes. The reason for this is that the calculations in our function list item don't take place instantaneously. If we were to try to grab the result as the next step, all we would get is an empty string. By telling our workflow to Pause, we give SharePoint a chance to catch up.

Note: Even though we set everything in the pause to zero, the workflow will wait until the next event cycle to continue. This delay may be a minute or so.

Back to Work

Once the workflow comes back from its coffee break, we need to get our value back.

From the Actions menu, select Set Field in Current Item.
Click the "field" link, and select Reason from the dropdown.
Click the "value" link, then click the fx button that appears.
Select TextFormulas for the Source, with the Field of AfterDelimiter1.

Now we need to tell the workflow how to find the row we want. Here's where that "create" variable comes into play.

Select the TextFormulas:ID field from the Field dropdown
Click the fx button beside the Value field.
Select Workflow Data for the Source, and Varable: create for the Field
If your lookup dialog looks like the one below, click OK

The reason lookup should now look like the capture below:

Click OK.

Cleaning Up

Now it is time to clean up after ourselves.

Just as "real" SharePoint developers need to keep in mind the need to "dispose" objects they create once they are done with them, we need to delete the formula record we created now that we are done with it. Fortunately, SharePoint provides a "Delete Item" action item for us. Select it from the Actions menu, and click the "this list" link. As you might guess by now, we're going to use the same "create" variable as before to select the item to delete from the TextFormulas list.

Click OK, then click Finish in the Workflow Designer. SharePoint Designer will then validate the workflow and save it.

Covering our Tracks

Finally, as I mentioned way back at the beginning of this article, you may not want your users to readily see your formula list. Especially since the interim information will be hanging around during that pause. Although we suppressed the list from the Quick Launch when we created it, people can still see it from the "View All Site Content" link. To make it go away from there, we can take advantage of SharePoint Designer's ability to "hide" a list.

To hide a list, first open the Lists folder (you won't need this step for document libraries).

Right-click the list you want to hide and select Properties, as shown below:

Click the "General" tab. Click on the checkbox labeled "Hide from browsers".

Click OK

Now the list will be "invisible" via most normal ways of discovering SharePoint content. That is also why we waited until after the workflow was done in order to hide it. Although you can still see and work with hidden lists in most parts of SharePoint Designer, the function called by the Workflow Designer to enumerate lists is the same one used by the web interface, so you wouldn't be able to select it.

Conclusion

This second part took a bit longer to write than I expected. I hope you found it worth the wait!

In these two articles, I have showed you the power of SharePoint calculated columns, and how to use them in a SharePoint Designer workflow. In the process, I have introduced a number of other concepts, including:

String functions
Hidden lists
Email enabling lists
Using the output of one calculated column to feed another.
Workflow variables

Even so, I have barely scratched the surface. I encourage you to explore further the capabilities of calculated columns and SharePoint Designer workflows.

Advanced Calculations in SharePoint Designer Workflow

Woody Windischman — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 08:27:00 GMT

In this two part series, I'll be showing you how to take advantage of SharePoint calculated columns in your SharePoint Designer workflows. Part 1 will introduce calculated columns. Part 2 will show you how to consolidate your columns into a "function library" of sorts.

Part 1 of 2: When Basic Arithmetic Won't Cut It

SharePoint Designer workflows are very powerful, but there are a number of acknowledged limitations. One of these is the fairly limited selection of operations for performing calculations. For numbers, you have a basic selection of arithmetic (add, subtract, multiply, divide, and mod) operations, but no advanced math. For strings, you have the dynamic string builder, but you have no way to break down, or analyze, a string.

One way around this would be to design custom actions to perform the desired manipulation. But that requires Visual Studio, coding skills, and installation on the server by a willing administrator. Fortunately there is another option, already built into SharePoint, that gives you access to a wide array of functions.

Meet the Calculated Column

This option is the "Calculated Column". While this isn't a direct part of a SharePoint Designer workflow, your workflows do have access to the calculated columns in he lists and libraries of your site. If you haven't used a calculated column, this is a feature in SharePoint that allows you to create a column (or field) based on information contained in other fields in your list.

Creating a calculated column is pretty easy. Just select "Create Column", either from the Settings dropdown of a list view, or from the Columns section of your list's settings page. Near the bottom of your Type choices will be "Calculated".

When you select Calculated, the Additional Column Settings section is changed to show the Formula builder. In the example shown below, I have two date fields, Start and End. I want to know how many days are between them. All I need to do is enter the formula [End]-[Start], and I now have the duration of my event.

Note: After you save a formula, it is reformatted slightly, so if you go back into the field to review it later, you will see "=End-Start". You can also enter the formula directly in this format if you like.

But in addition to being able to display this in my list, I can now use that duration in my workflow to make decisions. For example, if the list is a time-off notification form, I might want to alert HR to arrange temp coverage if the employee is going to be out for more than 3 days:

Of course, that was a very simple calculation, and one that could have been done within the workflow. Where the calculated column starts coming into its own is more complex operations.

Let's say our time-off notification list is configured to allow people to email their requests into it. That's simple enough - SharePoint supports email enabling in several list types.

But, what if you want to process the request differently based on information in the subject line, such as whether the person is on vacation or sick. Your convention might be to put extra information in the subject (e.g. "sick - going to the doctor"). The relevant information to the workflow is to the left of the dash, so you need to grab just that. You could create another calculated column, called "Reason". The formula here is a bit more complex:

TRIM(LEFT([Title],FIND("-",[Title])-1))

You can find a complete list of the functions available for calculated columns at either of these links (the list is the same for WSS and MOSS):

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointtechnology/CH100650061033.aspx

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/CH101760291033.aspx

There are a couple of limits to be aware of when creating calculated columns:

You can only nest functions 8-deep
Your total formula length can't exceed around 1000 characters.

A Good Start

In this post, I've shown you how SharePoint calculated columns can help you get around the limited calculation ability built into SharePoint Designer. You can use calculated columns to perform almost unlimited manipulation of your SharePoint data, and make use of that in your workflow. But what if you need many calculations in your workflow, or you don't want your users to see any "interim" values? In Part 2, I'll show you how to build a "function library" that you can call from any SharePoint Designer workflow in your site.

Until then, Happy Computing!

My Free SharePoint Twitter Integration Components

Woody Windischman — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 21:02:00 GMT

Yes - I Still Like Twitter!

If you've been following my saga over the last few weeks, you'll know that I was temporarily suspended from Twitter due to a cross-site attack, that caused an inappropriate spam link to be injected into my tweetstream. While I am still disappointed that it took Twitter customer service almost two weeks to reinstate me, I do still like Twitter.

In an effort to "bury the hatchet", I am re-posting links to some components I wrote to bring Twitter into SharePoint. The first two are simple and fancy Federated Location Definitions for Search Server 2008, or MOSS Search (post-Infrastructure Update). The third is a simple Data View web part that can provide a twitter search result on any SharePoint page, including WSS.

(Note: For all of the download links below, right-click and choose "Save target as" to retrieve them.)

Federated Locations

See the original articles: Part 1, Part 2

Download the "basic" Twitter search results Federated Location Definition	Download the "deluxe" Twitter search results Federated Location Definition

Data View Web Part

See the article on how to create this part.

Download this part.

You can see all three components in action here.

Twitter Account Reinstated

Woody Windischman — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 21:46:02 GMT

I finally got the attention of someone in Twitter support. They have reinstated my account, but I still don’t have a solid confirmation of why I was suspended in the first place. My other posts list my suspicion, but if they ever give me a good explanation, I’ll pass it on to you, so hopefully you won’t fall into the same trap.

Until then, Happy Tweeting!

An Open Letter to Twitter Support

Woody Windischman — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 11:58:00 GMT

To Whom it May Concern:

I am becoming very frustrated over the amount of time it is taking for you to resolve my issue and reactivate/unsuspend my account.

As far as I can tell, I was suspended for inadvertently accessing a spam site, which used a cross-site scripting vulnerability to inject an untoward post into my stream. While I immediately addressed the problem and deleted the offending post, your system had already automatically suspended my account.

It has now been almost two weeks, and I still have not even had anything other than a single automated acknowledgement of my issue. Yet you have closed my issue twice as resolved, without any actual resolution having taken place. I have also posted a public apology to my followers on my blog, which based upon my treatment here, I am starting to regret (not regretting apologizing to my followers, but for believing that the suspension might have been in any way justified).

While this delay may simply be a sign of "growing pains", you will need to make significant improvements to your customer service if you wish to continue growing - especially if you hope to venture into paid-level services.

I would appreciate a direct response to my queries, an unsuspension of my account, and an apology for the delay at your earliest convenience.

Sincerely,

Woodrow Windischman
(@WoodyWindy)

The Office 2010 Synchronization Center

Woody Windischman — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 07:59:00 GMT

As I play around with the Office 2010 client applications, naturally I'm finding some things are the same, while others are different. Today I'm going to talk about how Office 2010 saves files to a SharePoint site.

Reminder: Because SharePoint 2010 is still "under wraps", I'm only talking about using Office 2010 to access a SharePoint 2007 (or WSS 3.0) site in this article. Interaction with SharePoint 2010 may be very different. Also, because this is still pre-release software, things are subject to change between now and future releases.

What has Gone Before

Ever since Office 97 (yes, as in 1997) the Office client applications have had at least some ability to work with online data. By that, I'm not talking about network shares or mapped drives (that goes back even farther), but rather the ability to reach out onto the Internet to open and store files. Now, back then, the Web was just one part of the Internet, and a small one at that.

Most folks' interaction with the Web was read-only, and primarily for HTML text and a few images. If you wanted to move actual documents or other kinds of files around, you used a method called the "File Transfer Protocol" or FTP (original, isn't it). Office 97 had the ability to use FTP integrated just as though it were another kind of shared drive. You just entered the FTP address (e.g. ftp://ftp.example.com) into the file open or save dialog, and there you were!

Office 2000 took that a step further, by integrating the FrontPage communications protocol. This enabled Office client applications to directly read and write to any web site which uses the FrontPage Server Extensions (FPSE). In addition, the FPSE themselves had been enhanced to become the Office Server Extensions (OSE). While the original OSE themselves saw very limited use in the real world, they formed one nucleus of what was to eventually become SharePoint.

Starting with Office XP (2002) and continuing on through Office 2007, the core client applications (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) have pretty much used the same method for accessing SharePoint sites. An "enhanced" file dialog, which displays a "web page" listing of the document libraries in your site, and allows you drill into them and select either which file you want to open, or where you want to save your current document. Once you have chosen your file, essentially the same protocol as was introduced in Office 2000 is used to actually transfer it.

In Office 2010, this is superficially the same process, as you can see from the File Open and Save As dialogs below:

And, when you're opening a file, as far as I can see, it pretty much is the same. But when the time comes to save, things get a little different.

"The Man in the Middle" - Introducing the Office Synchronization Center

If you've done much downloading over the last few years, you have probably become familiar with the concept of a "download manager". This is an application that allows you to queue up a list of files (especially large ones) you want to download, and it handles getting them onto your PC. It compensates for broken connections, and partial communications.

Well, for Office 2010, Microsoft has essentially brought that concept to uploading as well. They have created a new applet called the "Office Synchronization Center". When you tell Word (for example) to save a file, rather than sending it directly to the SharePoint site, it hands it off to the Synchronization Center, which does the uploading, including such niceties as retrying if for some reason the upload fails the first time. It also allows you to continue working once you have started the save process - sort of like a "background save" on steroids.

Most of the time, you won't actually see much of the Synchronization center. By default, it settles into your system tray, and all you see is a little "Office Logo" bug. But, if you hover over it, you can see that there is more going on here than initially meets the eye:

When you click it, as with most tray icons, you get a nice menu of options:

So, what if I select the option to "Pause Uploads"? I might do this if I'm in the middle of working on a file at an airport, and I need to go offline to get on a plane. Rather than stop working, or saving a copy of my document somewhere else, I can just hit "save" normally, and continue the upload once I get connectivity back. The same thing happens if I lose connectivity for some other reason. Naturally, if the change hasn't been saved due to lost connectivity and I try to close the document or exit the application, I'd like to know about it. Office 2010 takes this into account, so by default I get a nice warning:

Office even gives me a link into the Sync Center, so I can see what's going on!

Once I have connectivity back, I can just click "Upload All" and all will be right with the world.

Conclusion and a Taste of Things to Come

With Office 2010, Microsoft has added the Office Synchronization Center as a method for dealing with uploading files to remote locations. This offers many potential benefits, such as continuing to work if you need to go offline, or not getting stuck waiting for communication if you are working with large files over a slow connection.

Yet this is not the only "offline story" for SharePoint that you will find in Office 2010. There are reasons Groove has been renamed SharePoint Workspace - but that's another story.

Professional SharePoint Designer Now on Kindle

Woody Windischman — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 19:35:28 GMT

"Paper, or Electrons?"

Great news, everyone!

I've just been informed by my publisher that my book, Professional Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007, is now available electronically for the Amazon Kindle. Since it appears that SharePoint Designer 2010 won't be usable on SharePoint 2007 and WSS 3.0 sites, this title is going to be relevant for a long time. So now you have your choice of media!

It Was Not Me - But I AM Sorry

Woody Windischman — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 09:03:59 GMT

First, I want to apologize to anyone who follows me on Twitter if they received any inappropriate messages from my account.

My Twitter Account is Currently Suspended

I got home from a road-trip yesterday, and found that my Twitter account had been suspended "for suspicious activity". While I have opened a support call with Twitter, I still do not know exactly what kind of activity triggered the suspension. I can only assume that my account was somehow hacked, and was sending inappropriate messages.

If you were the recipient of such a message, again I want to extend a heartfelt apology. Please understand that there are certain things I would never, ever do, and I am horrified to think that someone else may have been doing them under my name.

A Teachable Moment - Life Goes On

I've been in this industry for years, and I know all about the things that can lead to accounts being hacked. I take a wide array of precautions, from firewalls, to antivirus and antispyware software, to complex passwords, to not opening unsolicited email attachments. I keep my patches up to date. I don't run "unknown" applications, and I don't do torrents or other methods of illegally sharing files.

Yet I'm also aware that even with the best practices, the only sure way of avoiding problems is to never create an online account, or even turn your machine on at all. Since that is not an option, we must all accept the fact that there will always be some risk.

Now you know as much about the situation as I do. I'll keep you up to date on what I find out. If there were any other steps I could have taken to prevent it, I'll be sure to share those, too, so you can avoid the same problem.

Thank you for your understanding, and I hope to be back on Twitter soon.

SharePoint on a Shoestring

Woody Windischman — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 07:00:00 GMT

When the Best is Too Much

You've heard the buzz about SharePoint. You've started doing your research. You're looking at best practices, configuration guides, and all sorts of good stuff. You're loving everything you read. You're head is swimming with facts and figures when suddenly you run across an article that makes your heart stop.

You might see an industry analyst group is reporting that it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and a phalanx of dedicated developers, administrators, and other IT pros to do an "average" complete SharePoint implementation. Suddenly your high hopes are dashed. There's no way you can get that into your budget. Heck, you might even be the only person in your company that knows what the initials "IT" stand for.

Does this mean that SharePoint is out of reach? Of course not!

What is "Good Enough"?

While it is certainly possible to take SharePoint to a huge extreme, you don't need to do that in order to gain many of the benefits of SharePoint. In fact, many people forget that there are actually free versions of SharePoint available. Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express (MSSX) are both available as free downloads, and offer an amazing amount of functionality right off the bat.

Windows SharePoint Services gives you:

Team collaboration
Document Sharing
Discussion Boards
Custom List Management
Calendars and meeting management
Contact lists
Simple Project management
Basic user profiles and customization
Blogs
Wikis
Integration with Microsoft Office (e.g. Outlook and calendars)
Announcements
Email integration
Site Search
Customization and data integration with SharePoint Designer (now also free)
A huge array of existing add ins (Fab 40 application templates, Community Kit, etc...)
A great platform for development

Search Server Express gives you all of that, plus extended Enterprise-class search capability:

SharePoint sites
File shares
non-SharePoint web sites
Exchange public folders
Notes/domino databases

All of this is available with a simple installation on a Windows server. Heck, you don't even need to purchase a full SQL Server if you don't want to (though I do strongly recommend it). You can use the included Windows Integrated Database (with WSS) or SQL Express (with MSSX).

What About Hardware?

As I said before, it is quite possible to do a complete SharePoint installation on a single box. Naturally, you probably won't want to load it up on a netbook-class machine if you are going to base your business on it. But beyond that, almost any decent server can handle a small user base. This website, for example, is SharePoint (MSSX) based, and runs on a single processor, dual-core, server, with 3GB RAM.

In most cases, unless you have hundreds or thousands of concurrent users, the main reason you split functions onto separate boxes is resilience, not performance. You are trying to avoid a single point of failure, or perhaps bottlenecks where a peak in one process' activity may block access to other functions. Yet even there, the free versions of SharePoint have your back.

All versions of SharePoint support multiple web front-ends (WFE) connected to a back-end SQL Server database. MSSX also supports having the WFEs separated from the Application server. However, MSSX only supports a single application server, which must hold both the Index crawler and Query roles. (Note, if you do decide to go the farm route, you need to use a full SQL Server back-end.)

The Not-Quite-Best Practices

Naturally, keeping a SharePoint environment's costs to a minimum means you are also going to end up compromising on what most in the industry consider "best" practices. Not splitting functions out onto multiple servers, as described above, is just one of the compromises. Some of the others involve the setup process itself.

For example, if you are not going to purchase a full version of SQL Server, you need to understand the limits of the free editions of SQL Server that are included with the free editions of SharePoint. SQL Express (included with MSSX, but usable with WSS) has a 4GB per database hard-cap.

The other free SQL is the Windows Integrated Database, which is included with WSS. This is the only free version of SQL Server that doesn't limit your site's content growth. However, the only way to get WSS to use this is to perform a "basic" installation. In fact, even if you have another edition of SQL installed, a basic installation will configure WSS to use the WID. (Note: Basic installation with MSSX or any other version of SharePoint besides WSS will install SQL Express instead.)

There are limits of a basic install, though. One is that you CANNOT later add more servers to create a farm. You would need to essentially build a new SharePoint environment and migrate your content into it. The other is that the basic install doesn't give you any control over the accounts used to create the services that run SharePoint behind the scenes.

Yet many businesses have lived without that level of resilience for years with other systems. A single file server or mail server is not uncommon. So, if that is satisfactory in your environment, a single server SharePoint installation is no worse - go for it! Just be careful, as with your other systems, to ensure you have good and tested backups. (Reality check - Yes, I know. You don't have good, tested, backups for your other systems either... The point is, SharePoint doesn't change the rules. You just need to follow whatever rules are appropriate to your environment.)

In Conclusion

In this article, I've talked about how you really can implement SharePoint without a huge outlay in time or money. When you compare the "out of box" effort to get a powerful and functioning SharePoint environment up and running, I think you will find it is at least competitive with the "alternative" offerings you might have seen. In fact, you may even be surprised to find that the default functionality often far surpasses them. As with any system, though, the more you put into it "up front" the more value you and your users will get out of it in the end.

Office 2010 - A Quick Look

Woody Windischman — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 23:03:00 GMT

This article is the first in what I hope will be a series about Office 2010 and SharePoint integration. In it, I'll talk about the current state of Office 2010, and some brief first impressions. I plan to focus later articles on each application, and how it integrates with SharePoint.

One Foot in the Future, One in the Present

Last week I (and just about everyone else in the known universe) posted that the Office 2010 Technical Preview had been released to a select group of people, and that SharePoint 2010 was going into technical preview to an even more limited audience. I'm pleased to say that not only I am one of those who has access to the Office 2010 client software preview, Microsoft has lifted the gag order on these client pieces as well. Unfortunately, SharePoint 2010 is still pretty much under wraps (see the Sneak Peek site for the stuff that Microsoft has elected to make available).

That doesn't mean there is nothing to say about Office 2010 and SharePoint. In fact, there is one scenario that is likely to be common for quite some time, even after the public release of SharePoint 2010. That is, accessing "old" SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 sites with the new Office 2010 client pieces.

Note: Depending upon your enterprise, you may also encounter the reverse scenario - attempting to access a server running SharePoint 2010 with Office 2007 (or earlier) client tools. (Obviously, we won't be able to talk about that until the SharePoint 2010 pieces are available.)

Are We There Yet?

One important point to remember is, Office 2010 is still undergoing heavy development. The build included in the preview (4006.1110) is not even considered "beta". That means that even the features Office will support at release are not necessarily ready for prime time now, or features that are in the build may not make it into final production. Because of this, I'm not usually going to be too critical when I find that something doesn't work quite the way I might expect. On the other hand, when something looks pretty cut-and-dried, I'll make sure to point it out, and discuss some of the ramifications.

Getting Started

The Office 2010 preview consists of several independent elements:

Office 2010 Professional, which contains Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, Outlook, and OneNote.
Business Contact Manager for Outlook
SharePoint Designer 2010
SharePoint Workspace 2010 (formerly known as Groove)
InfoPath 2010
Microsoft Visio 2010

Each of these is available in 32 and 64 bit editions. There are also assorted pieces of documentation.

Setup is pretty much the same as most Microsoft applications over the last few years, so I won't dwell on that. You can install it side-by-side with older versions of Office, or upgrade your existing applications, except for Outlook 2010 and SharePoint Workspace. These must always upgrade/replace any existing version of Outlook or Groove, respectively. One other caution here - if you open an application of a version different from the most recent one, a partial setup will occur, which resets certain defaults (e.g. file associations) to reflect the newly opened version. This can take several minutes, and is a bit of a pain if you open the wrong version by accident. (This has always been the case with multiple versions of Office on the same system, and isn't a 2010 specific complaint.)

At First Glance

Once you have Office 2010 installed, and open an application, it looks pretty familiar. Below, you can see Word, with the by now quite familiar tabbed ribbon (aka Fluent) user interface. One change you may notice is that the big round "jewel", which summoned Office 2007's equivalent of the File menu, has been replaced with a tab.

Unlike the jewel, however, and also unlike the file menu, this tab reveals one of the first "new" elements of the Office 2010 products - the "Back Stage." As with the jewel menu before it, this includes the typical file-related elements, such as Open and Save, as well as access to utility functions. But, it also now provides a much richer application management experience.

You might also have noticed the blue background and tab color. This also is new, and provides a way to recognize the different Office 2010 applications. As you can see in the carousel image below, each application has been assigned a different color for its Back Stage.

A Flexible Ribbon

One of the biggest complaints about the ribbon in Office 2007 has been its "static" nature. Even if you didn't like the order of tabs, or the groups Microsoft supplied by default, you were pretty much stuck. In the Office 2010 clients, that isn't the case. In fact, you pretty much have free reign to rearrange the defaults, or create virtually any custom ribbon you desire.

A Note About SharePoint Designer 2010

I mentioned earlier that when I encountered something that looked pretty cut and dried, I would point it out, and discuss the ramifications. One of these areas revolves around a product near and dear to my heart, SharePoint Designer. Unfortunately, even though SharePoint Designer 2010 is included in the preview, I won't be able to give you much detail about it until SharePoint 2010 itself becomes more publicly available. Unlike FrontPage and SharePoint Designer 2007, SharePoint Designer 2010 is so tightly linked to SharePoint 2010 that you cannot even open a non-SP-2010 site. If you try, you get the following dialog (which is very similar to the one Expression Web gives when you try to open any SharePoint site):

Even though the date on SharePoint is wrong (it says 2009 rather than 2010), you get the idea. What's more, SPD 2010 won't even open an individual page from the file system unless you already have a SP 2010 site open.

So, what does this mean? Essentially, if you want to customize WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007 sites, you still need to keep a copy of SharePoint Designer 2007 around. In addition, SPD 2007 is a great tool for editing non-SharePoint web sites (including legacy FrontPage based sites) which it appears will not be the case for SPD 2010.

Summary

In this article I talked about the Office 2010 preview release. We looked at the components, as well as some of the User Experience changes - particularly the color-coded Back Stage feature. I also talked briefly about SharePoint Designer 2010 and the fact that SharePoint Designer 2007 will be needed as long as SharePoint 2007 and WSS 3 are around. All of this, and we have just barely scratched Office 2010's shiny-new surface.

Taking the Stage - Office and SharePoint 2010

Woody Windischman — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 11:26:00 GMT

In conjunction with the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), Microsoft has started showing off a bit more of the next versions of Office and SharePoint. Still no bits for most of us* to play with, but there are some preview videos talking about the changes. Click the link below to check out the Sneak Peek site, and stay tuned!

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek/Pages/default.aspx

* Note: There is an invitation-only preview program. Tech-Ed 2009 attendees got invitations for the Office client pieces. I'm not sure at this time about SharePoint Server.

Share the Power

Woody Windischman — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:50:00 GMT

A Tale of Two "Points"

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… No, wait – that's the wrong tale!

It was the best of Points, it was the worst of Points…

Today I'm going to talk about PowerPoint, and how the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Slide Library takes it to the next level.
(Note: I originally wrote and published this article on my original blog site when MOSS was first released. It is just as relevant now, so I've decided to repost it here to be seen with fresh eyes.)

PowerPoint presentations are the lifeblood of many a corporate meeting; however, getting a consistent message across has been difficult due to the fact that a PowerPoint deck is one big file. Sometimes, it is one really big file. If you have certain key business information and you want to ensure everyone presenting "gets it right", your choices have generally been limited to providing a "standards" deck, containing all of your company's boilerplate, and making everyone pull out the slides they need; or going through the tedious process of saving each slide or small block of slides individually, then having your users merge each file them into their working presentation.

That can be very difficult, not only because you might have many such standard slides, but it means that the user needs to try to copy and paste them from the base presentation into their working copy, or merge many separate files. Finding just the right slide can be a task as well. Wouldn't it be great if you could just have each slide in its own file, and easily pick and choose which ones you wanted in your presentation? Well, with PowerPoint 2007 and MOSS, you can!

The slide library feature of MOSS allows you to create a repository of standard company slides, that is true, but because it is based on SharePoint, you can do so much more! Your library can include custom fields so you can make it easy to find just the slides you are looking for (e.g. sales figures, company policies, key executive bios), either by search, or by filter. You can separate slides for internal use only from those suitable for public consumption.

Creating a Slide Library

Creating a slide library in MOSS 2007 is just as easy as creating any other type of list or library - just go to the Create page, and select Slide Library:

You will then be asked the normal questions, like what you want to call it, if you want it on the quick launch, etc...

Accessing your library

Once you've created your slide library, you will want to populate it.

Open a presentation that has some slides you wish to re-use. Then, from the Office menu, select Publish, and click Publish slides.

Use the Browse button to select your site and library (and optionally folder), as normal. Now you can pick and choose which slides you want to save in the library, optionally renaming them and giving them new descriptions at the same time!

Now, what about getting the slides into a new presentation? Easy as can be! Open your slide library, tick the boxes beside the slides you want, and click the "Send to Presentation" link. You will be asked if you want to create a new presentation, or insert the slides into an existing one.

You can have the slides retain their original formatting, or assume the format of the target presentation. You can even have PowerPoint tell you if the source slides have changed since you inserted them into the presentation!

Conclusion

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 are both great products on their own, and even greater together. The MOSS slide library brings this integration to the next level. With a final apology to Charles Dickens:

It is a far, far better thing that they do, than they have ever done; it is a far, far better combination they bring than we have ever known…