Are you still doing SharePoint?

A good friend of mine once said, don’t ever follow a product, always follow the platform. This observation still reminds me today of what I need to think about and prepare for every single year. It makes me think and strategize.

So let’s expand on the concept of this platform thing. The platform on which SharePoint resides represents a lot of technologies. To plan for, deploy and implement a successful SharePoint solution across the enterprise, you got to have expertise in the following areas:

• IIS
• ASP.NET
• Web Services (ASMX, WCF)
• SQL Server
• Active Directory
• Firewalls
• DNS
• Load balancing
• Certificates and Encryption
• Authentication protocols
• Security and Protection
• The Windows Server System
• Microsoft Office
• Globalization and Localization
• Virtualization
• Monitoring and Management
• …. we can stop here. This is enough. You get the point

Nothing new here. There is just so much to think about. Most of the stuff listed above have changed immensely. Do you think you can keep up? May be.

As you see, SharePoint touches everything around us. It delivered on its vision. Kudos to Microsoft ® SharePoint is serving us all very well. We’re living comfortably. Put SharePoint on your resume and you’re hot.

So what’s next? Well, from my perspective, I’ve seen SharePoint grow over 4 versions and I think it is time to focus in on key feature sets and not to get consumed with all of it anymore. Focus more on the underlying infrastructure and less on the fancy new stuff. Got to find a new niche.

There is still lots to do on SharePoint from a front end perspective. Don’t take me wrong. We’ll be busy for another round or two. But, like this good old saying from one of my favorite poets, Al-Mutanabbi 

“If you see the teeth of the lion, do not think that the lion is smiling at you” [Quote taken from Wikipedia® on January 31th 2012]

SharePoint is smiling. Come on in it says. Lots of people are doing it now and you should too. If you hear this voice, it is time to get out my friend. “Stay thirsty, my friends” like those Dos Equis commercial says

So what is it for you? What are you thinking about? What’s your focus this year?

Take it easy.

To the SharePoint® Conference we go

The SharePoint® Conference 2011 in Anaheim, California marks my third major SharePoint® conference I’ve attended over the years. It is very exciting to see how the product has progressed over these years and how Microsoft® stood behind it to get it to where it is today. With over a 100 million licenses sold, it is truly an amazing story.

And here we go again, around the circle we travel. We travel with partners, clients, colleagues, x-coworkers, and friends. We bring excitement wherever we go. We boost the economy and overload the inter-webs with social and blogging traffic. I heard that Microsoft® is expecting over seven thousand in attendance this year. That’s pretty cool.

As far as sessions, there are plenty of everything. I am personally looking forward to attending Cloud and Office 365 related sessions. I am going to focus in on the 400’s and 300’s level sessions this year with few 200’s here and there.

Sessions that I will attend include the following:

Title	Speaker	#
Out of the Sandbox and into the cloud: Build your next SharePoint…	Andrew Connell	SPC410
How Microsoft Builds, Deploys and Runs SharePoint Online: A Peek …	Roberto Taboada, Doron Bar-Caspi	SPC352
Deep Dive on Developing Custom Service Applications	Todd Bleeker	SPC401
Advanced SharePoint Data Access with Silverlight	Robert German, Ryan Sockalosky	SPC400
Identity in SharePoint Online	Phil Wicklund	SPC259
SharePoint, Azure and Claims Integration for Developers	Steve Peschka, James Petrosky	SPC412
Deep Dive: Implementing Kerberos for your BI Applications	Tom Wisnowski	SPC404
Building Business Applications on Azure using Office365 and Windows …	Tony Meleg, Jesus Rodriguez	SPC320
Cloud Packing: Preparing for the Move into SharePoint Online	James Petrosky, Kimmo Forss	SPC327
Branding SharePoint Online Sites	Randy Drisgill, John Ross	SPC205
Exploring the Office Developer Story in Microsoft Office 365	Tanuj Bansal, Devinder Singh	SPC346

Now, last time, Microsoft® did setup a purchasing system where you could buy the conference material if you didn’t get to attend it. I would think they’ll have something like that again this year.

References

• SharePoint Conference: http://www.mssharepointconference.com/pages/default.aspx
• SharePoint: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/Pages/default.aspx
• Office 365: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/online-software.aspx

Till next time, stay thirsty my friends.

To The Cloud, a brief look at Cloud-related matters

What do you want to know about the Cloud? Lots to read and learn, and lots more to experience. If you are not lost in the clouds about the Cloud, you haven’t been around lately. It is crazy out there. It is the new hype and you need to get on the bus. It’s actually a Ferrari and its going fast. Gartner says by 2012, one out of five businesses will own no IT assets; that’s 20% people. Few of us are already late and need to catch up, while others have been taking a nap from traveling too much up and down the cloudy highway.

Cloud-related services are offered today by a slew of known and reputable companies, such as: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, Novell, IBM, VMware, and Oracle.  Take a look and see for yourself what each of these companies are offering. Few questions come to mind when trying to decide which is better than which

• What kinds of guarantees do each offer?
• What types of Cloud computing power do they offer in terms of performance, scalability, availability and reliability?
• What options do you have in regards to migration?
• Can you mix and match and coexist?
• How about administration and methods and processes used to operationalize your Cloud service?
• What type of software and applications can you host or serve from the Cloud?
• Licensing and plans? How much and how often?
• Upgrade plans?
• Support plans?
• And how about data and ability to synchronize back and forth?
• …

The Trend

Well, how much of this Cloud thing is the real deal and how much of it is fake? I don’t know much, but I know one thing from being around for 11 years. We tend to centralize, then decentralize, then centralize again, then decentralize again, … well, you catch my drift. This time around, it is centralization PLUS here’s all the hardware, we don’t need it anymore. We’ve got Microsoft’s triple nines guarantee. And not just that, we get paid back for lost time. Dude this is amazing. Things are changing. IT needs to wake up and the Business needs to start thinking about the ways they’ve done business.

Pains and Gains

There are pains and there are gains in moving to the Cloud. It’s all over the internet. No more keeping an inventory of hardware, switches and disk drives. No more blaming own IT staff for not performing their duties and pointing fingers at each other. No more slacking off and sitting around on Tuesdays because servers were patched last night and they seem to be sluggish. More and more reasons are coming out everyday. Is this good for IT? Is it good for the Business? Well, it is good for the people who are actually committed to do good and get better results. We can create our own reasons, but guess what, the business will continue to grow and move fast to catch up with the competition and IT, well… is trying to keep up. Will IT still be considered a cost center? not really. I think for an organization that is committed to moving to the Cloud, the bottle neck will probably become Development teams as they try to ramp up on Cloud technologies and migrate their applications to Azure, Office 365 and other non-Microsoft cloud offerings. Good times.

Final thoughts

Finally, I will end with this note. The Cloud is a big thing. It has been for a while now. Forget about the fancy terms, such as: PaaS, SaaS, IaaS, any Cloud service is probably good for you . My recommendation is for you as an organization to focus in and look at this as an opportunity to refine your IT and Business processes for better results and eliminate redundancy and rework that’s been costing you loads of money over the years.

Take it easy.

Remember The Name

This is not a blog post on Fort Minor’s Remember The Name song even though I like the song itself and I think it says a lot about our alter-ego along with a bunch of other stuff.

This post is about remembering individuals, who during our lifetime, have inspired us. It’s about people, a person, a manager, a supervisor, a friend, an enemy, a foe, mom or dad, brother or sister, anyone with a name that at one point in time sparked a fire inside of you. It’s about that moment when you discovered something amazing because of someone else’s helping hands. It’s about everything you’ve learned so far. It’s about who you are today and what you have become .

Remembering individuals who’ve helped me become who I am today is something I am very proud of. There is no day that goes by without thinking about them. This past weekend, I and my son Sammy traveled to Kansas to see a Nascar race. During our time there, we talked about my work, what I do and how I got here. I shared with Sammy and our relatives, who we were with, my story; about how I left Lebanon and traveled alone to the States seeking opportunity and success. I shared with them the many times I needed help and how there was always someone there to help me, guide me and direct me. I went on to emphasize the fact that people around us, the environment, events and circumstances have a very deep effect on our experience, knowledge, and intelligence. This is not a new concept here. We all know that, I hope. Yes, we are born with certain traits and yes those traits are adjusted during our growing period, and yes we can make our own choices, but guess what, you make a choice because of an event or because of some action someone else took. What I am trying to get to is simple: For every action, there is a reaction. There is no invention without a need. A bad answer may inspire a good one. Good can come out of bad and bad can come out of good. Without the first, there is no latter. We owe our knowledge to others who’ve done the work and spent the time discovering and documenting.

As technologists, developers, and IT Pros, how many times we go online everyday looking for answers? It has become a routine thing for most of us. More and more we are relying on others and their knowledge to do our jobs. Remember those blog post authors, those TechNet and MSDN writers, and those books you read. All of these resources and people are making an impact on you and me. Let’s try to remember them. I love it when I hear someone hints that they know it all or write on their resume that they’re super advanced and experts in a certain area. Really? well, let’s cut out the internet and uninstall the help libraries from your computer, take away all the books you have, give you a problem you never seen or heard of before in a domain you never worked in and let’s see how you do. About 97% of us will fail miserably. The rest are geniuses. Hire them.

In summary, don’t take anything for granted. Always be grateful and always stay grateful. Be a student and remember the names of people who made a difference in your life and career.

Take it easy.

Imagine a World without Attachments

Imagine for a second a world without any email attachments. Got to thinking yesterday about this whole thing we call email and how SharePoint plays a major role today inside of organizations trying to get rid of email attachments.

I was thinking of the “why” behind email attachments. What was the main reason behind having such a feature?

• Was it simply to let be?
• Was it to allow people who are trying to communicate over a network to have the ability to share notes and documents they’re working on?
• Was it to get information stored in various forms over to the other side quickly?
• Was storage cheap back then?
• Was it laziness with no one caring about the implications of adding a feature like this?
• Was it that we all need context and that for me to understand what you’re really saying, I need to look at a screen shot?
• Was it I just don’t have the time to visit in person and sign your letter of intent, so just fax me it or you know what just send it to me in an attachment, I’ll sign it, scan it, and send it back the same way
• Was it to let developers share code
• I don’t know….

Email servers, in their simplest form, should be able to allow the transfer of email messages back and forth from client to client. That’s it. Email messages. Electronic mail. Mail should be only text. So where did we add this attachment thing? When did it come along? I’m still looking for the actual set of requirements that I may never find.

Challenges

Yes. With every new feature a new set of problems get introduced. We solve something and we bring something else to life. Some of the issues we encounter when it comes to dealing with and managing email attachments are:

• Attachment size and limits on the client and server side
• Virus and scanning for virus introduced by attachments
• Various File Formats and Rich content that may introduce a viewing or rendering issues
• Email client limitations
• Storage and retrieval
• Retention and auditing issues
• Information management
• Not all recipients of an email message with attachments need those attachments
• More… believe me

How can Exchange and SharePoint help

As an organization, think about email and how your users use it. Think about what information is contained in email messages that may help you make better decisions. There could be very important key information contained in email messages and attachments that you may like to track, organize and categorize.

Think about the unstructured and try to make it structured.

So, given the above challenges and assumed requirements, how can we use what’s at our disposal from a technology perspective to help mitigate and automate the communication and processes that surround email attachments.

Enter, Exchange Managed Folders and SharePoint Content and Document Management features.

My ultimate goal is to have the following:

1. 1. No more attachments in email messages
2. 2. Extract attachments and send them over to SharePoint with some metadata
3. 3. Users behind the firewall utilize SharePoint for content and document management
4. 4. Partners and Clients outside of the firewall utilize project workspaces and extranet sites for collaboration and communication
5. 5. Integrate the Outlook, Exchange, SharePoint, and the file system experience

Let’s paint the picture of a perfect world.

Let’s talk scenarios. Here are few scenarios along with their respective alternatives.

Scenario	Alternative
Developer to Developer sending a piece of code hidden inside of a zip file renamed to TXT file extension	Some mail servers and filtering agents are smart enough to know what’s going on. But in a perfect world, let’s think about an alternative here.1. Use Code repositories
Sharing a Sales presentation with a prospective client	2. View / Publish presentation so you can view it inside of a browser from anywhere
Communicating with an external project team member	1. Use externally facing project workspace
Internal employees collaborating on a project	1. Use project workspaces
Human Resources department communicating to employees about Policy changes	1. Use department workspace

Technically speaking, the following set of technologies may be deployed to meet and enhance the user experience when managing email and attachments.

Technology / Platform	Features
Exchange 2010	Managed Folders Inbox Rules Forward Mailboxes / Email Forwarding
SharePoint 2010	SMTP Server Incoming Email SharePoint Directory Management Service Content Organizer In-Place Records Managements Managed Metadata Advanced Routing Digital Asset Management PowerPoint 2010 Broadcast Office Web Applications Workflows Alerts Announcements
SharePoint Workspace 2010	Offline Content Team/Partner collaboration

Given time, I am hoping to follow up with additional posts that will dig into some of the features I listed above and how we would actually use them. Meanwhile, take a look at the following references to get you started.

Reference Topic	Link
Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2010 SP1	Understanding Managed Folders http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee364744.aspxMessaging Records Management http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb123507.aspx Mail Forwarding http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd351134.aspx
SharePoint 2010	Plan Incoming Email http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263260.aspxPlan for SharePoint Workspace 2010 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee649106.aspx What’s New in ECM http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee559353.aspx Office Web Applications http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff431687.aspx Configure Broadcast site http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee837423.aspx Plan Digital Asset Libraries http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee414275.aspx

Take it easy.

Prevent your Contributors from adding Scriptable Web Parts in SharePoint 2010

We all heard of the Content Editor Web Part and how SharePoint users can take advantage of it. You’ll find blog entries here and there talking about the God-given powers of the editor web part and how in few lines of JavaScript code, or may I say JQuery code, you may do this and do that. Everyone gets excited about this, and you know why? It’s simple, by pass the IT conglomerate and be free.

Enter, a new feature of lock down power in SharePoint 2010; Allow or Prevent Contributors from adding or editing scriptable web parts.

From a first glance at this, I figured right away that the dudes at Microsoft are talking nicely about the Content Editor Web Part. Later I figured that they’re also referring to the HTML Form Web Part.

So how can you do this.

Here are few pre-requisites.

1. You will need access to SharePoint 2010 Central Administration. You got to be the Farm Administrator

2. The users you are targeting will need to be members of the default Members SharePoint Group or a group with similar Permission Levels. Having additional Site Level permissions, like Add and Customize Pages will not be good and will override what I’m trying to communicate here rendering this blog post useless.

Here’s an example user I created locally on my machine.

Here’s a custom permission level created via a Copy of the Contributor permission level. See links and references below for more information on how to do this.

Here’s the user added to my custom Contributor group.

Default Web Application Settings

The default setting offered by SharePoint for scriptable web parts is to “Allow contributors to add or edit scriptable Web Parts”.

Prevent Contributors from adding scriptable web parts

Now, on to preventing users from adding scriptable web parts, such as: Content Editor Web Part. Here’s how to do it. You guessed it.

1. Access the Web Application List page

2. Select the Web Application you wish to modify the Web Part Security settings for

3. From the Security Ribbon Action Group menu (or whatever you call it), select Web Part Security

4. Scroll to the end of the page and select the radio button choice to “Prevent contributors from adding … “

5. And you’ve got it. Now, if a contributor is trying to add let’s say the Content Editor Web Part to his/her page, this windows browser dialog will appear. Click Add

The above message also appears to users trying to add the HTML Form Web Part.

Finally

Here are few resources you may find helpful.

Resource	Link
Content Editor Web Part	http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/using-the-content-editor-web-part-HA101794745.aspx
HTML Form Web Part	http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/use-the-html-form-web-part-to-filter-and-display-data-in-another-web-part-HA101791813.aspx
Copy Existing Permission Level	http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263239.aspx#section2

Take it easy.

The Method of SharePoint, a study in SharePointology

In this blog post I will dig deep into the many faces of SharePoint, not just from a technology perspective, but more so from its softer side, the conceptual side, the approach, the method of its reach, and much more. I’ll call it SharePointology; A term I thought I can first introduce here on this blog, but as it turns out, someone else has it. Man! Gosh! Darn it!. Not a problem at all I say. This is just amazing. Anyways, we keep going.

Introduction

SharePoint, as a technology, offers organizations and their employees an opportunity to connect with one another, communicate and collaborate on teams, manage and define their data, locate and personalize their content, automate their processes and as a result make better business decisions. It doesn’t stop there. SharePoint goes out the door connecting you with your customers. And today, all of that is available to the enterprise. With SharePoint 2010, Microsoft is reaching high grounds. Not a surprise to anyone in this field. With every new version, a new experience we shall have and a new way of doing things.

SharePoint 2010 is The Business Collaboration Platform for the Enterprise and the Web. It has many features from creating sites and team workspaces for both internal and external consumption to automating business processes and integrated data and reporting capabilities. More and more you’ll find as you dig deeper and deeper into the platform.

Now, having been involved on many SharePoint-related projects, I’ve noticed a trend in the product. We’ve seen some new and amazing features come online and we’ve seen some old ones stay afloat. We’ve seen some features that still have the same issues and some new ones with a whole set of their own problems. Few come to mind; HTML rendering still a mess even though there is a much better focus on usability and accessibility. Navigation Inheritance from one Site Collection to the next still an issue. Personalization Links for My Sites, etc.

So, what’s the matter you think? Where are we doing with this? Here are few of my observations that will hopefully shed some light onto the conversation; I call them collectively, The Method of SharePoint. Well, of Microsoft.

Please note: anything you read here is my own opinion with a sliver of insight and creativity yeah, ok now.

The Method of SharePoint

Reach – Go wide then deep. A simple approach to cover more ground. In a SharePoint sense, add features then improve on existing ones. SharePoint has always been called the “Swiss Army Knife” of collaboration software. It has a wide range of features from content management capabilities to reporting and process automation. In the professional services world, there’s always this question: Go for large-size projects less volume per year or reach more customers and increase your pipeline, but deliver small? Which one is good for you? I don’t know. SharePoint seems, at least from my opinion, to go for the features and increase its reach. SharePoint is not and I don’t think it will be in the short term, The Enterprise Content Management platform around. Unlike some vendors out there, SharePoint is still missing some depth when it comes to Records Management and Content Management. Deep auditing and workflow capabilities still missing. We’re still faced with the same problems and nothing has changed in the solution. Ask some SharePoint Administrators. Yes, in SharePoint 2010 we have better auditing and monitoring capabilities, but we still don’t know the answer to who has access to what question. We’re dependent on third party vendors to fill in the gap. This brings me to my second observation.

Fill in the Blank, Third Party Heaven -  Do a BING on the phrase “SharePoint” and come back and let me know what you find. Thousands and thousands of pages producing technical content, videos and training material, blogs and newsletters, off-the-shelf software products to fill every gab, full life cycle management systems built for SharePoint, 3rd party vendors upon 3rd party vendors, community and open source projects, etc. etc. etc. SharePoint this and SharePoint that. Everybody wants SharePoint and we’ve been competing on who can come up with the next SharePoint plug in or adapter or web part or middle-tier product to complement what SharePoint Out-Of-the-Box (OOB) offers. You can say whatever you want; product team missed this or they didn’t figure this out or that out, etc. I say, Microsoft is smarter than all of us. If you want to stay around, you don’t build a complete package. You give your customers what they need at the moment and what they can handle. You buy time. You build a market around the product. For us developers, we love to write components that show up somewhere. We love to integrate. And that’s what we have with SharePoint. A fill in the blank policy written for developers meant for the business.

Market Induction – Oh well, here we go. Let’s build a product, a great product with a great vision and call it SharePoint. Then, lets’ build a product that breaks the product we just created. Let’s call this one SharePoint Designer. Great idea. Offer and promote product features to a wide range of users; Average, Power User, and Site Administrators. Don’t forget the Farm Administrators though, SharePoint 2010 offers a plethora of monitoring, reporting and control features to make sure things don’t get out of hand. We will also add this throttling feature to BCS and Lists and such, but allow the developer to override it. Nice I say. Actually very good. See, what’s happening here is an execution of a strategy to keep the ball moving forward and not in just one direction, but in many directions. Microsoft doesn’t just think of the business and the business user (power to the people), they think of us technical folks also. Everybody has something to do and work on and no one gets tired. The market grows in many directions. Imagine SharePoint is here and there is no way to extend its functionality, modify it, configure it, or do anything with it except through a single interface or tool. Imagine this for a second and you’ll see what I mean. It’s all about balance. I give you something 50%, you get excited, you hire me, I code the other 50%. We’re both happy.

From the horizontal to the vertical – Pretty soon, SharePoint itself will become it. A single unit of work and feature set. It will mature enough to start driving deeper, going vertical into .NET; its underlying power house. Pretty soon things we needed code for will be able to do without a line of code. Example: Visual Web Part, Visio Workflows, etc. SharePoint will become the transportation system on which our work travels. Things will become simpler and simpler as technology advances and SharePoint adapts. SharePoint will drive more into .NET than it has ever driven. Notice this version, V4 (2010). REST got introduced. WCF got introduced. JQUERY got introduced, Client Object Model (managed and ECMA or JavaScript) got introduced. I am hoping MVC get’s in there as well. All of this should make you think about the direction here. I’ll summarize it for you:

• More into the .NET platform for consistency, simplicity, converting people from pure .NET to SharePoint developers and back and forth
• Back to the 1990’s with more support for client side scripting. Better user experience now we’ve got the tools with Ajax Support and SOA models

Pretty soon, the horizontal goes vertical, matures, finds more common ground and genericise its features.

Summary

Looks like this post is growing out of hand and I need to close it down here. I’ve enjoyed writing this post and I hope you find it interesting. I’ll try to break some of this down and organize it better next time around. Till then, think of SharePoint more than you do today. Look at its angles and ask yourself why is it like this. Hopefully you’ll figure out where its heading next.

Take it easy.