Jun 282011

Cloud Focused Roundtable online July 21st 11am PST

I have the privilege to be on a roundtable discussion with key experts in the SharePoint Cloud arena from various walks of life:

Hosting Company – Matt Lathrop, RackSpace
ISV – Jeremy Thake, Enterprise Architect, AvePoint Inc.
Microsoft – Mark Kashman, Microsoft
Ecosystem – Owen Allen, SharePoint Directions
Analyst – Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Real Story Group

Facilitator - Richard Harbridge,Senior SharePoint Evangelist, Allin Consulting

The questions will be oriented around ‘real’ practical uses for SharePoint and the Cloud as well as real examples of challenges and their impact. This aligns perfectly with the work I’ve been doing lately presenting on “Office 365: does it work in a leap year?”, the whitepaper I am writing on Office 365 approaches and my internal work of migrating to the Cloud with AvePoint’s migration too.

To register for the event please go to the Focus page for the event.

Published: 6/28/2011 5:14 PM | 0 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Jun 282011

Expected more from New York Office 365 launch

There was an Office 365 launch event hosted by Microsoft at Chelsea Piers Brewery in New York today from 12 – 2pm. I was a little disappointed to be honest for a few reasons.

Turn out

The turn out was poor (<100) and was pretty much all Microsoft employees, Microsoft Partners (Services and Vendors) and the boat crew. A lot of the vendors who turned up commented on it being a disappointing turn out and had no opportunity to talk to anyone there.

The presentation

The presentation was very brief and the pitch was a little “sales” driven as apposed to actually talking about the benefits of Office 365 to the Information Worker, which I’m assuming the event was targeted at.

The “Only in America” campaign

I think the promotion of the event via the “Only in America” boat campaign was a little weak and during the presentation they really only promoted the use of Lync for use on the boat with people elsewhere. The remote office was pushed a little too far in my liking, by having them access it via a boat on 4G network.

The web site hosted at www.onlyinamerica.biz (http://onlyinamerica-web.sharepoint.com/) is hosted on SharePoint 2010. But to be honest, doesn’t’ really show off the WCM capabilities of SharePoint..especially when the videos are hosted on Youtube and not on SharePoint which if you read the marketing material can support Winking smile

Pitch around one partner

Microsoft do have the potential issue of promoting one partner and in this case the company that helped “Only in America” with their Office 365 vision. I’m sure there were some other disappointed Office 365 resellers who would have liked their name up there also Winking smile

Staff

There appeared to be good turn out from Microsoft Corp marketing folks, but not too many technical guys apart from one ATS from New York office. So if you had any questions around things like what is in and out of SharePoint, or what the SLA’s are…you wouldn’t have been in luck. Would have been great for the experts to be introduced to answer questions, the ATS was in a blue shirt, but that was it.

Small – Medium Business

It is very clear with their marketing that they are going after Small and Medium business with Office 365. Even with the case studies that in BPOS were the likes of Coca-Cola and Virgin has transformed to Girls Scouts of Chicago and Santa Monica Florida.

Also, with very silent murmurs around Office 365 D, it is clear that Enterprise isn’t something they are confident tackling just yet.

What would I have like to have seen at this event?

Well the event was titled a “customer appreciation event”…I’d have liked to have seen more on Office 365. Why would people want this over on-premise…rather than sales slides on why Microsoft think the industry want it. And percentages of companies that would look at this…IT managers can’t go back and quote those…they need hard benefits that Business Owners can quantify.

I would have liked to have seen a more realistic case study than “only in America'” that customers can relate too. Why not pick a small business and have a demonstration of what they’ve done to increase Business Productivity from and Information Worker or reducing maintenance from an IT Pro perspective.

I think although Microsoft’s marketing team are pushing hard with “the cloud”, they need to make sure they are targeting this correctly.

For more information, please check out www.office365.com and the Office 365 Live event here.

Published: 6/28/2011 12:38 PM | 0 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Jun 172011

RunAsRadio interview with Richard Campbell on SharePoint 2010

Whilst I was at TechEd North America this year, I was fortunate enough to be invited by Richard Campbell or RunAsRadio and DotNetRocks fame to be on his pod show. We talked candidly about SharePoint 2010 from an IT Pro perspective.

Please check out the download and also the rest of his podcasts…lots of great content there!

Published: 6/17/2011 5:55 AM | 0 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Jun 162011

DWTF: CRM Dynamics Online support

IT support guys have a rough time as they are expected to know everything. I was having a problem with configuring Microsoft Dynamics CRM add-in for Outlook 2010 on my Windows 7 machine. It worked fine on my laptop, but got connection errors on my shiny new Slate.

The support guy had me on the phone uninstalling stuff, repairing stuff so I asked for all the steps which he provided me rather than waiting on the phone.

In the end after following all he had, it still didn’t fix it and this was his response:

“Let me inform you that the CRM for outlook setup has been released before the Windows 7 slate was. So I am quite doubtful about the compatibility with CRM.”

Well, it made me laugh anyway.

For those that are interested here were the steps to fix it. Loving all these steps!

1. Confirm Date, Time and Time Zone

2. Check for the Trusted sites : Internet Options --> Security --> Trusted sites --> Sites --> https:\\*.crm.dynamics.com and https:\\*.login.live.com.

3. Clear Your IE cache.

4. Clear your temp files.

5. Check for the Windows Live Essential 2011 in Program and Features.

6. Go to Run type “control keymgr.dll”. Go to generic credential, click on drop down and click remove vault. Perform for all generic credentials.

7. Repair windows live essential 2011 by going to control panel >>Add remove program>> Windows live essential>>Repair OR install by link: http://explore.live.com/windows-live-essentials?os=other

8. Remove CRM form the Program and Features.

9. Delete MSCRM folder from C:\Users\Your username\AppData\local\Microsoft\MSCRM

10. Perform similar step for C:\Users\Your username\AppData\local\Microsoft\MSCRM and delete MSCRM folder if it exist.

11. Go to Run, type in regedit and delete the EXE files. Please take backup of registry keys before deleting them.

12. Click on HKEY_CURRENT_USER>>Software>>Microsoft>>MSCRM. Delete all MSRM folder.

13. Install add-in CRM for outlook and install by the following link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=22dc423a-7194-491e-a169-6ace16bfdd36&displaylang=en

14. Install CRM Update Rollup From this Following Link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=8cd2384e-e06a-4cf1-800d-303aec37f40b

15. Install CRM Update Rollup 2 from the following link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=a5a088be-c19e-43b5-87fb-219c2a2bc280

Published: 6/16/2011 1:35 PM | 0 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Jun 162011

SharePoint 2010 Developer Do’s and Don’ts…and what NYC are generally doing

Last night I presented at the New York Developer SharePoint User Group in Manhattan. We had a great turn out for my session on “Developer Do’s and Don’ts”, the room was full and people were standing at the back (guessing 60-70)!

Thanks to Kathryn Birstein for organizing the event and for Gig Werks for sponsoring the pizzas and drinks!

I covered off a raft of things that I’ve seen in the field with SharePoint development.

One thing that always shocks me is the amount of people that STILL don’t know about Disposing SPWeb/SPSite and have never heard of SPDisposeCheck *sigh* It’s my mission on Earth to keep spreading that word. Just wish SPDisposeCheck was part of the SharePoint 2010 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 by default. Would definitely help spread the word if errors fired up on build time by default!

The other interesting things, as I asked lots of questions throughout, were that:

- most were installing SharePoint locally on their machines in Windows 7
- most were not using Source Control
- most weren’t aware of FxCop and StyleCop for analysing code
- most weren’t using Continuous Integration
- no one was pushing Release builds of WSP’s to Test and Production
- still a lot of people in VS2008 and SP2007 land
- no one doing Unit Testing or Automated UI Testing

UPDATE: Please note that not everyone was playing along and raising their hands (spoil sports) so this isn’t a true representation and not everyone from community was there from New York (obviously)!

I’ve uploaded my slide deck in PDF format, so please feel free to down load the "SharePoint 2010 Developer Do’s and Don’ts” presentation now!

Published: 6/16/2011 11:19 AM | 0 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Jun 102011

Microsoft missed an opportunity at TechEd 2011 with SharePoint

I was absolutely amazed by the sheer scale of Microsoft TechEd 2011 North America this year with 10,000 attendees! I have been to few TechEd’s in Australia which get to around 4,000 attendees, but this really does make the Australian one look small.

I have had time to reflect a little bit on this conference and believe that Microsoft’s SharePoint Product Team really did miss a great opportunity to educate and raise awareness to the attendees at this event. The focus on SharePoint at TechEd was extremely poor in both the available sessions and booth setup in the expo hall.

General Opinion

TechEd was a mixture of attendees, essentially a lot of the traffic we saw at our AvePoint booth were people IT Managers “looking to get into SharePoint”, IT Pros who “looked after SharePoint along with Exchange, Lync, SQL etc.”, Developers who “looking to get started in SharePoint Development” and Business Users who were there to learn about all Microsoft Technologies and had an interest in how SharePoint could help them. Oh, and people wanting a chance to win a new Ducati motorcycle!

Expo Floor

TechEd gives attendees the opportunity to speak to people about particular technologies and get guidance and steered in the right direction. The general opinion from attendees I spoke to was their disappointment in Microsoft SharePoint representation on the expo floor (I counted 2 from SharePoint product team) and the mis-targeted sessions available on SharePoint. If it wasn’t for the excellent job that the nominated SharePoint MVPs did on the SharePoint booth, it would have been a lot more negative.

There was a poor turn out of SharePoint Vendors too (AvePoint, Nintex, Axceler, Quest, fpWeb, Idera only) and I think the Vendors also thought that it was a lot due to knowing the attendance would be lower for SharePoint interest due to SPC11 later in the year.

Mis-judged

I believe the attitude from Microsoft SharePoint team is that “we have our own conference” in that they have SharePoint Conference 2011 in Anaheim this year (SPC11). The problem with this attitude is that not every person is purely a SharePoint resource in an organization so when they have to decide what conference they go to, often they will only be approved for TechEd because it is assumed it’ll cover all the Microsoft technologies they look after rather than focusing solely on one.

Poor Session Structure

With this in mind, the TechEd tracks should indeed cater for these audiences. So each would be looking for intro level sessions:

IT Pros: Upgrade to SP2010, Deployment Planning of SP2010, Data Protection on SP2010
Business Users: “What’s new in SP2010”, “Intranet in a box”, “Collaboration in a box”
IT Managers: “SharePoint Governance”, “SharePoint Adoption”
Developers: “Getting started with SharePoint Development”

Instead what they got was a very mis-mash of 51 sessions in the SharePoint marked sessions from level 200 to level 400 which a lot assumed had serious experience in SharePoint already. Not to take anything away from the quality of the presenters, as I’ve seen these guys at various events and they are the cream of the crop. But I believe it may have not been the most appropriate sessions for this target audience.

Session Selection Strategies

I believe this is inherent with the strategy of getting people to “Submit your sessions” and “we’ll pick what we want”. I love what SAP conferences do where they’ll actually go out and research what the attendees main concerns/pain points are and build out some session themes and then request submissions based on this. It would have been great to see this at SPC11, but again they followed the same format. This definitely does lead to a mis-mash rather than structured delivery.

UPDATE (11 Jun 2011): Chris Johnson from Microsoft has posted a response to my comments around the selection process at SPC11. Although they do ask for sessions from MVPs/MCMs this is only 10% of the selection process. Read the post titled SharePoint Conference 2011– Content Planning Process–A glimpse inside.

There are also a lot of discussion at the moment around the un-conferences such as SharePoint Saturdays where attendees don’t have to pay to attend. These un-conferences typically have the same set of speakers and content for free, so why in fact would people bother paying $1000+ for a conference? I think this won’t affect the large scale conferences such as SPC’s and TechEd’s, but will certainly dent the Best Practices Conferences and SPTechCon privately run ones. Again, it would definitely set these conferences apart if they went out there with the "submit a session around this theme” strategy rather than the “send me your session titles for us to pick from”.

This worked at the Share2010 conference held in Australia, which was coincidently run by the same conference organizers that run the SAP conferences.

Session list for reference

COS375-INT | Integrating Windows Phone and Microsoft SharePoint Using Windows Azure

Interactive Discussion | 300 - Advanced | Cloud Computing & Online Services

Speaker(s): Steve Fox

OSP372-INT | Building Cloud Apps Using Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and Windows Azure

Interactive Discussion | 300 - Advanced | Cloud Computing & Online Services, Office & SharePoint

Speaker(s): Girish Raja

DBI201 | BI Power Hour

Breakout Session | 200 - Intermediate | Database & Business Intelligence

Speaker(s): Allan Folting, Carolyn Chau, Julie Strauss, Manpratap Suri, Matt Masson, Pej Javaheri

DBI209 | A Lap around Microsoft Business Intelligence

Breakout Session | 200 - Intermediate | Database & Business Intelligence

Speaker(s): Herain Oberoi, Pej Javaheri

DBI210 | Getting Started with Cloud Business Intelligence

Breakout Session | 200 - Intermediate | Database & Business Intelligence

Speaker(s): Pej Javaheri, Tharun Tharian

DBI272-INT | What to Use and When

Interactive Discussion | 200 - Intermediate | Database & Business Intelligence

Speaker(s): Paul Turley, Pej Javaheri

DBI273-INT | Real-World Business Intelligence (Repeats on 5/17 at 5pm)

Interactive Discussion | 200 - Intermediate | Database & Business Intelligence

Speaker(s): Tyler Chessman

DBI321 | Advanced Dashboard Creation Using PerformancePoint Services

Breakout Session | 300 - Advanced | Database & Business Intelligence

Speaker(s): Jason Burns

DBI325 | End-to-End PerformancePoint Services

Breakout Session | 300 - Advanced | Database & Business Intelligence

Speaker(s): Peter Myers

DBI328 | Integrating Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services with Microsoft SharePoint Technologies

Breakout Session | 300 - Advanced | Database & Business Intelligence

Speaker(s): Prash Shirolkar

DBI330 | Can Your BI Solution Scale?

Breakout Session | 300 - Advanced | Database & Business Intelligence

Speaker(s): Teo Lachev

DBI335 | Advanced Business Intelligence Solutions Using Microsoft Excel + Excel Services

Breakout Session | 300 - Advanced | Database & Business Intelligence

Speaker(s): Kevin Fan, Manpratap Suri

DBI379-INT | Migrating Your PerformancePoint Solution from Test to Production

Interactive Discussion | 300 - Advanced | Database & Business Intelligence

Speaker(s): Jason Burns

OSP205 | Creating Self-Service Analytic BI Applications with Microsoft SharePoint 2010

Breakout Session | 200 - Intermediate | Database & Business Intelligence, Office & SharePoint

Speaker(s): Peter Myers

DEV203 | Introduction to SharePoint Development with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010

Breakout Session | 200 - Intermediate | Developer Tools, Languages & Frameworks

Speaker(s): Mike Morton

DEV330 | Delivering End-End Video Workflow Using Microsoft SharePoint, IIS Media Services, Microsoft Expression Encoder and Microsoft Silverlight

Breakout Session | 300 - Advanced | Developer Tools, Languages & Frameworks

Speaker(s): Steven Woodward

BOF18-ITP | Advanced Architectures for Microsoft SharePoint 2010

Birds-of-a-Feather | 300 - Advanced | Office & SharePoint

Speaker(s): Shannon Bray

OSP202 | SharePoint Governance and Lifecycle Management with Microsoft Project Server 2010

Breakout Session | 200 - Intermediate | Office & SharePoint

Speaker(s): Brian Smith, Christophe Fiessinger, Scott Jamison

OSP204 | Productivity Scenarios That Make IT the Star

Breakout Session | 200 - Intermediate | Office & SharePoint

Speaker(s): Andy O'Donald

OSP207 | Complete Enterprise Content Management in Microsoft SharePoint 2010

Breakout Session | 200 - Intermediate | Office & SharePoint

Speaker(s): Israel Vega, Kurt Allebach, Oleg Kofman

OSP209 | Building Your First Windows Phone Application for Microsoft SharePoint 2010

Breakout Session | 200 - Intermediate | Office & SharePoint

Speaker(s): Paul Stubbs

OSP210 | Microsoft SharePoint Online Overview

Breakout Session | 200 - Intermediate | Office & SharePoint

Speaker(s): Mark Kashman

OSP272-INT | Licensing Microsoft Online Services

Interactive Discussion | 200 - Intermediate | Office & SharePoint

Speaker(s): Mark Croft

OSP301 | Integrating Microsoft SharePoint 2010 with Windows Azure