Jul 172010

Australian TechEd 2010 in QLD (DEV330 and OFS3002)

I’m really honoured to be asked to present twice at the Australian TechEd 2010 conference in Queensland. I presented last year alongside Andrew Coates and had a great time! I’m really looking forward to going back again this year! For SharePoint’ers there is an Office Track along with a Development Track. I have sessions in each, one on my own in Dev Track and one with William Cornwill (my Manager at Microsoft in my vTSP role).

DEV330 - A day in the life of a SharePoint 2010 Developer - Breakout Session

Jeremy Thake

In this session Jeremy Thake, a SharePoint MVP, will demonstrate how developers can run SharePoint 2010 on their Windows 7 machine to develop a custom solution within Visual Studio 2010 that can be packaged and deployed to a site hosted in the cloud. Jeremy will demonstrate the ease of the new SharePoint Project Template to create a Visual Web Part that displays personalised weather information from an external source and will also be showing the tricks of the trade for experienced SharePoint Developers during demos which you can take back and use on your projects.

OFS3002 - Building Solutions with Business Connectivity Services - Breakout Session

Jeremy Thake, William Cornwill

Business Connectivity Services in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 enables integration with line-of-business applications and other enterprise and Web 2.0 data sources. It was known in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 as the Business Data Catalog (BDC) and has been significantly improved in SharePoint 2010. This session shows building BCS External Content Types with both the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 designer and with Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010. This provides multiple ways to expose line-of-business data, from a variety of sources, as SharePoint 2010 External Lists.

Unfortunately it seems that the TechEd site needs a little work as my Speaker page is blank Winking smile and Andrew’s page doesn’t include our talk either. Here is the direct link to last years session web cast.

"The Microsoft Office system evolved from a suite of personal productivity products into a comprehensive, multifaceted, and integrated system. Building on a solid foundation of familiar tools, the Microsoft Office system today includes applications, servers, services, and technologies designed to work together to solve a wide array of business problems. Jeremy Thake and Andrew Coates will present the SharePoint server and Office client tools available. This session will walk you through the journey of discovery on how to best leverage the client/server platform to build your solutions. Discussions around the new client side VSTO tools and the server side VSeWSS tools will focus on the creation of solutions from initial development to deployment. Come along to this demo-filled session to learn how to take advantage of the millions of programming hours that have gone into the Office platform and the .NET Framework and truly Stand on the Shoulders of Giants!""

Published: 7/17/2010 9:00 PM | 0 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Jul 142010

zevenseas answer to the SharePoint App Store - webcast

Daniel McPherson demoed me two products zevenseas have been working on, TunnelPoint and ProduShare.

Dan really got me thinking about the possibilities here to write assembly free solutions such as .webpart, .stp and themes that can be deployed to ProduShare. These can be free products or licensed products. It was really cool to see how seamless it was to click in ProduShare and see the web part or site template or theme be applied straight into a BPOS site and also a quick site I span up on my own public facing WSS 3.0 site.
It leverages the out of the box SharePoint Web Services and does an amazing job of show casing the extensibility of SharePoint.

In time to come, ProduShare will also (he promised in webcast) support SP2010 sandboxed solutions and hopefully SharePoint Sites not available over the Internet. This is a sure fire way to distribute your products and takes away the pain of building your own store!

Produshare – The one-click Application Store for SharePoint in the Cloud.

Produshare is all about bringing the simplicity of the Apple AppStore/iPhone combination to SharePoint. It’s a solution storefront that not only provides you with a single place to look for the solution you need, but that actually understands how to integrate with SharePoint. If you bnrowse our store and like something, then with a single click you can install it to your site. Product types include Web Parts, Lists, Themes, designs and even assembly free solutions.

TunnelPoint – A BDC/BCS for SharePoint in the Cloud

TunnelPoint is an internet application that allows you to connect a selection of internet based Web Services to SharePoint lists. For example, you can connect a Stock Quote service to a SharePoint list that stores stock tickers, with the prices automatically updated for you on a schedule. In this way it’s a broker that brings live data streaming straight into your SharePoint site, and it’s all done with just a few clicks.

I was so impressed with what he showed me that I scheduled a web cast with him yesterday and have uploaded this to the SharePointDevWiki.com Podcast space…please go and check it out…it’s really impressive! Better yet, go get yourself an account and try it out for yourself!

Published: 7/14/2010 4:41 AM | 0 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Jul 142010

I’ll be showing off Project Server 2010 at Perth SharePoint User Group tomorrow night

I’ve been looking into Project Server 2010 for various clients lately and figured I’d show off it’s features at the User Group tomorrow night in Perth, Western Australia. Hope to see you there!

My good mate, Jose Flores is also presenting on using SharePoint Designer 2010 to create data centric applications so hopefully he’s showing off the XSLT List View Web Part in all its glory etc!

Details below…click here to register

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

After a month's break, we're back for July with a user group meeting Thursday 15th July 5:30pm to 7:10pm at EXCOM 23 Barrack Street, Perth.

We have two awesome presentations catering for a non-technical & technical audience, pizza sponsored by Beacon Technologies and some giveaways including a Resharper Licence from JetBrains. Subscriptions to TekPub and some left over conference bags from the Australia SharePoint Conference.

Presentation One

5:30pm to 6:15pm

Title: How Project Server 2010 can help your organisation

Description:

Jeremy Thake, SharePoint MVP, will present the benefits of Project Server 2010 on SharePoint Server 2010. This high level overview will help you understand the value of this in your organisation from Centralised Resource Management, Planning, Budgetting, Reporting and lots lots more!

Level: Not technical, aimed at Project Managers and anyone interested in understanding more about Project Server 2010

Presentation Two

6:25pm to 7:10pm

Title: Using SPD2010 to create Data Centric applications

Description:
In one way or another someone will request a custom SharePoint application driven by external data. This presentation will explore the new SharePoint Designer 2010 functionality using XSLT List View Web Part. We will demonstrate how we can leverage SharePoint Designer 2010 to assist with line of business data integration. We will also look into conditional formatting and various data source access methods available out of the box. Eg. REST, SOAP, DB, XML. Presented by Jose Flores, SharePoint Solutions Architect, Beacon Technologies.

Level: 300
Assumption: Previous exposure to SharePoint Designer 2007 or SPD 2010.

Pizza sponsored by Beacon Technologies.

Venue sponsored by EXCOM

Published: 7/14/2010 3:43 AM | 0 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Jul 072010

Naming SharePoint 2010 Service Accounts and Databases

At CSG we’ve been ploughing through SharePoint 2010 installations of late and have been trying to learn from our build experiences from SharePoint 2007. I just read Wouter’s post on naming service accounts that he’s just posted and figured I’d put my 2cents in.

Service Account naming

Completely agree on giving these things:

readable names - that any AD person can make sense of
prefix with SP – so that you can see they’re SharePoint Farm related
~~postfix with service~~ – I really like taken this a little further by using the below
- prefix with svc for all accounts
- suffix apppool for Application Pool accounts
environment prefix– I also find in most organisations that they use one Domain for Dev, Test, Prod…yes I know…shudder. But you have to play with the cards you’re dealt with. So to overcome this and encourage good separation I use environment suffix’s too:
- dev for Development environment
- tst for Test environment
- prd for Production environments

My experience is that you have to follow the customers standards more often than not so this usually gets thrown out the window.

Another gotcha to watch out for is that AD user names on pre 2008 AD domains will not like names over 20 characters like the ones below and SharePoint will expect them to be entered as the 2000 compatible names e.g. “svcDevIntranetAppPool” –> “svcDevIntranetAppPoo”….<giggle> “jeremy said Poo!” </giggle>

An example 3 environments farm is below:


svcDevSPFarm	Development SharePoint farm account
svcTstSPFarm	Test SharePoint farm account
svcPrdSPFarm	Production SharePoint farm account
svcDevSPIntranetAppPool	Development Web Application Pool (Intranet – 80 )
svcTstSPIntranetAppPool	Test Web Application Pool (Intranet – 80 )
svcPrdSPIntranetAppPool	Production Web Application Pool (Intranet – 80 )
svcDevSPMySiteAppPool	Development Web Application Pool (MySite – 80 )
svcTstSPMySiteAppPool	Test Web Application Pool (MySite – 80 )
svcPrdSPMySiteAppPool	Production Web Application Pool (MySite – 80 )
svcDevSPSearch	Development SharePoint Server Search
svcTstSPSearch	Test SharePoint Server Search
svcPrdSPSearch	Production SharePoint Server Search
svcDevSPWebSvcAppPoolDefault	Development Default App Pool acct for SharePoint Web Services
svcTstSPWebSvcAppPoolDefault	Test Default App Pool acct for SharePoint Web Services
svcPrdSPWebSvcAppPoolDefault	Production Default App Pool acct for SharePoint Web Services
svcDevSPSQL	Development SQL Server Instance Service Account
svcTstSPSQL	Test SQL Server Instance Service Account
svcPrdSPSQL	Production SQL Server Instance Service Account
svcDevSPADCrawl	Development User Profile AD Crawl account
svcTstSPADCrawl	Test User Profile AD Crawl account
svcPrdSPADCrawl	Production User Profile AD Crawl account

Database naming

Another thing to bear in mind is Database names. I strongly recommend keeping SharePoint Databases in their own SQL Instances as you give the Farm Account dbcreator and securityadmin roles.

If you use the wizard approach to install you’ll get horrible GUID db names, if you use PowerShell scripts you’ll get choice. @brianlala’s scripts are a great start on this, just needs scripts for all the Service Applications. Again I try and make these names obvious too!

The approach I take here is:

prefix with SP2010 – prefix with SP2010 to show what major version of the databases it is
prefix with role of db – what am I?
- Config – a config database
- Logging – a logging database
- WebApp – a web application content database, also then prefixed with which Web App so if there are multiple Content Databases they’re grouped
- Service – a service application, also then prefixed with which Service Application it is

This makes it great for grouping things together

Database Name	Notes
SP2010_Config	Development Farm Config DB
SP2010_AdminContent	Development Central Admin content DB
SP2010_Logging	Development SharePoint Logging DB
SP2010_Service_UserProfile_Social	Development User Profile social database
SP2010_Service_UserProfile_Synch	Development User Profile synch database
SP2010_Service_UserProfile_Profile	Development User Profile database
SP2010_Service_UserProfile_MySites	Development User Profile MySites database
SP2010_WebApp_Intranet	Development Content DB for Intranet Top Level Site Collection
SP2010_Service_ManagedMetadata	Development Managed Metadata Service
SP2010_Service_Search	Development Search Service database
SP2010_Service_Search_Crawl	Development Search Service Crawl database
SP2010_Service_Search_Property	Development Search Service Property database
SP2010_Service_WebAnalytics_Reporting	Development Web Analytics Service reporting database
SP2010_Service_WebAnalytics_Staging	Development Web Analytics Service staging database
SP2010_Service_SecureStore	Development Secure Store Service database
SP2010_Service_State	Development State Service database
SP2010_Service_Usage	Development Usage Service database

Now again, this isn’t set in stone, but this is “how I roll”.

Published: 7/7/2010 5:51 AM | 0 Comments | 1 Links to this post

Jul 012010

Is honoured to be recognised as a SharePoint MVP!

It is a real honour to be recognised by Microsoft as an SharePoint MVP and to be associated with such amazing SharePoint Heroes of mine. Check out the list of SharePoint MVPs here and here.

WOW! I can’t wipe this smile off of my face.

What made this discovery even funnier is that as a Virtual Technology Specialist working under William Cornwill he rang me to congratulate me…I saw the announcements by my fellow Aussies Elaine Van Burgen and Chris O’Connor who were awarded on Twitter earlier in the day! Turns out an e-mail gets sent to inform you…but it went to my old company e-mail address Winking smile ! DOH!

It’s been a great journey in SharePoint land for me with helping run the Perth SharePoint User Group with Sezai Komur and Rick Risato, writing SPSource with Rich Finn, launching the SharePointDevWiki.com, presenting with Andrew Coates at TechEd, organising SharePoint Saturday Perth, writing a white paper on Application Lifecycle Management and recently at the Australian SharePoint Conference where I presented and ran a discussion sessionwith Arpan Shah. And there will be some even cooler announcements coming shortly Winking smile

If you haven’t already realised I love my job, love working with SharePoint and love the community people I deal with daily!

Looking forward to the new journey as a SharePoint MVP!

Published: 7/1/2010 11:04 PM | 0 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Whitepapers

NBSP

Solution Development in SharePoint 2007

Leveraging the SharePoint Platform

Webcasts

Podcasts

Archives

Links