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SharePoint 2010 Business Connectivity Services

Written By Milo

Corey Roth from Sys-con demonstrates the use of Business Connectivity Services (BCS) in SharePoint 2010. Business Connectivity Services is the Business Data Catalog (BDC) in SharePoint 2007 which allows external data to be integrated into SharePoint.

In Corey’s example he shows another cool feature of SharePoint 2010 which is “external lists” where SharePoint can get data from different databases and webservices and perform Create, Update, Delete (CRUD) operations on the data.

Go ahead and read through Corey’s post here.

SharePoint 2010 SocialFest Competition

Written By Milo

SharePoint 2010 Social Fest A week ago the Emerging Business Team at the Microsoft Silicon Valley Campus hosted a SharePoint 2010 competition titled “SharePoint 2010 SocialFest” where seven startup companies were given one week to develop an application on SharePoint 2010. During the week long event activities such as talks from developers, SharePoint engineering and product management teams, and venture investors were done. By Friday, the contestants presented their applications to a panel of judges which included Charles Schwab & Co. and McKesson. The winner of the competition was Huddle, which was basically synching up external team sites.

The rest of the application developed are the following:

1. Calinda MindUP – presents email interactions into visual maps which help create conversations between groups enhancing collaboration.

2. Confer – is simply twitter on SharePoint 2010 for both internal and external employees.

3. Cortex Intelligence – is an intelligent RSS tools which is presented via webparts fpr discussion, sharing, etc.

4. Leverage Software – makes your email thread into on-deman social workspace for sharing with others.

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SharePoint 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2

Written By Milo

I am currently downloading SharePoint 2010 beta version and would probably take a week or two to install and play around it. One of the things on my mind is whether I would upgrade my current SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008.

Going through some readings I found the following posts helpful:

SharePoint 2010 Better Together with SQL 2008 R2 Database Enhancements Top 10 (SharePointJoel)

Top 10 SQL 2008 Features for SharePoint IT Pros (Joel @ MSDN)

High Availability Improvements in SharePoint 2010 (SharePoint MadScientist)

Top 10 Features of SQL 2008 R2 (Database Journal)

SQL and Storage Considerations for SharePoint 2010 (SharePoint MadScientist)

SQL Server 2008 and SharePoint 2010 is a very powerful combination where most of the improvements are around infrastructure, & administration. At a developer level, blob, external lists, & PowerPivot are great additions. My interest on installing SharePoint 2010 is learning its architecture and development and as such I am more likely to upgrade my SQL Server 2005 VMWare to SQL Server 2008.

SharePoint 2010 Hands On Days Training in Australia

Written By Milo

Gearing up for SharePoint 2010? SharePoint 2010 Hands On Day Australia is going to 6 cities for a SharePoint 2010 focused and accelerated training.

Below is their schedule:

Melbourne
For Developers 25th of February, 2010
For IT Professionals 26th of February, 2010

Sydney
For Developers 8th of March, 2010
For IT Professionals 9th of March, 2010

Canberra
For Developers 29th of March, 2010
For IT Professionals 30th of March, 2010

Brisbane
For Developers 7th of April, 2010
For IT Professionals 8th of April, 2010

Adelaide
For Developers 29th of April, 2010
For IT Professionals 30th of April, 2010

Perth
For Developers 4th of May, 2010
For IT Professionals 5th of May

More information on the SharePoint Hands on Day.

US Olympic Committee Press Box on SharePoint 2010

Written By Milo

SharePoint 2010 US Olympic Committee We are now seeing early adopters of the SharePoint 2010 platform even though the technology is still in beta status.

The US Olympic Committee has issued a press release that they are unveiling a new and powerful tool for the National Governing Bodies (NGBs) and to the world’s media covering their tournaments.

As stated: COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo., Jan. 27 /PRNewswire/—With 16 days remaining to the start of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games, the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) today unveiled a powerful new tool in its efforts to provide the very best technology to the National Governing Bodies (NGBs) and to the world’s media covering the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Teams in Vancouver and beyond.

The site titled USOC PressBox (found here) is built on SharePoint 2010 and integrated with Silverlight to provide better user experience. This implementation was developed by both Microsoft and Slalom Consulting targetted to work on all major browsers namely: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari.

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SharePoint 2010 Sneak Peek

Written By Milo

The SharePoint 2010 sneak peek is already available via the Microsoft SharePoint site.

It contains a video for overview, IT Professionals and Developers. I am still going through the site myself and would update you on the things I have seen.

How to Guide: SharePoint 2010 Migration or Upgrade from SharePoint 2007

Written By Milo

SharePoint 2010 is around the corner and similar to the release of SharePoint 2007, developers, architects, managers and stakeholders were getting their hands on information on migration or upgrade from their existing SharePoint 2003 site to SharePoint 2007.

I am still finding bandwidth to research migration from SharePoint 2003 or SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010; but I suppose the following approaches would still be applicable to the SharePoint 2010 move:

1. In-place upgrade
2. Gradual upgrade
3. Database migration (advanced)
4. Site & List Definition upgrade

I have heard from my colleague network that a number of large enterprise are inquiring and considering waiting and migrating to SharePoint 2010 before major enhancements are pushed forward; but until now, there is still no official recommendation on the upgrade strategies and approach on SharePoint 2010. The best option we can do at this time is to run the stsadm –o preupgradecheck. This stsadm command would create an XML and HTML report based on the following files:

1. Preupgradecheck.xml files
2. OssPreUpgradeCheck.xml
3. WssPreUpgradeCheck.xml

From the report, you can go ahead analyze the results , and try to match it up on the upgrade options I have outlined above.

I would be updating this page for a robust information on the SharePoint 2010 migration. Keep this page as a hot item for now.

SharePoint Service Pack 2 Shuts Your System Down

Written By Milo

Our infrastructure engineers have installed and updated our SharePoint servers with the latest SharePoint Service Pack 2; however, I have just read from the SharePoint product team blog that there is a bug on the SP2 which changes the expiration date of the SharePoint site to 180 days after SP2 is deployed regardless of the full license you have installed. A SharePoint hotfix is underway, but I would definitely log this as a risk first thing in the morning tomorrow. We are in critical milestone paths on my current SharePoint project right now, and if this hotfix is not going to come out before we hit our deployment, our SharePoint infrastructure engineers need to rollback the system to SharePoint Service Pack 1.

As per SharePoint product team announcement:

We take product quality seriously and make every effort to avoid and resolve issues that adversely impact our customers. Unfortunately, we have recently discovered a bug with Service Pack 2 (SP2) that affects all customers that have deployed it for SharePoint Server 2007.

During the installation of SP2, a product expiration date is improperly activated. This means SharePoint will expire as though it was a trial installation 180 days after SP2 is deployed. The activation of the expiration date will not affect the normal function of SharePoint up until the expiration date passes. Furthermore, product expiration 180 days after SP2 installation will not affect customer’s data, configuration or application code but will render SharePoint inaccessible for end-users.

We are working to release a hotfix to automatically fix this issue. A manual work-around is currently available and involves customers re-entering their Product ID number (PID) on the Convert License Type page in Central Administration. For more information and detailed steps please read this KB article.

We want to assure our customers that this issue does not impact data integrity or their SharePoint deployment in any other way.

For your convenience, below are some answers to questions that you may have and we will update this blog post with a link to the hotfix as soon as it’s available.

We apologize for any inconvenience this issue may cause you.

Jeff Teper
Corporate Vice President
SharePoint.

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SharePoint Development Tools

Written By Milo

JOPX has posted a long list of development tools that you can use in SharePoint. I have used a lot of them and am curious how helpful the rest are. I would be trying them out and post my reviews here.

The list is found here.

Water cooled The Great Pyramid Computer Case

Written By Milo

Computer Gamer Enthusiast The Great Pyramid - Water cooled case

I plan to setup a gaming desktop machine with heavy multimedia functionalities powered by Windows Vista Ultimate. One of my requirements is having a cool computer case, something unique but packed with features. I came across “The Great Pyramid Computer Case” which is perfect to what my future space would look like. I’d also plan to install SharePoint 2007 on that Vista box and make it my prototyping server.

The image above shows how the case is taken to the next level and provides a lot of satisfaction for serious PC enthusiasts. The setup of the PC above is as follows:

Specs:
CPU: Q6600 B3 OC @ 3.15 GHz (Max stable OC @ 3.4 GHz) – “water cooled”
Mobo: GIGABYTE GA-EP35-DS3L
RAM: G-Skills 4GB PC2-8000 OC @ 1066 MHz
GPU: 512 MB 8800GT Zotac AMP Editions (700 MHz Core/ 2000 Mhz Memory)
HDD: 500 GB Cavier WD 300 SATA
PSU: 500 Watts Rosewill
Cooling: Thermaltake Tide water plus w/ Swiftech apogee GT CPU block

As written, there were only 200 cases of this that were made. I just want one. You can view more information here.

SharePoint Best Practice and Guidance Update on 28 Feb 09

Written By Milo

I have just started another project in SharePoint (My 9th project in 10 months, so tiring.) and one of the items in my checklist is creating the SharePoint development guidelines suited for the team and engagement. Before I do this, I make sure I check out the latest SharePoint Best Practice Documents available. As such, “patterns & practices SharePoint Guidance” has just released their 4th iteration of SPG v2 last Sat Feb 28 2009 which is tagged as a “Stable” version.

As per description:

Project Description
We develop guidance to help devs and architects build applications on SharePoint. The first release covered building intranet applications in a team environment. This release targets enterprise class content oriented applications accessing LOB system information.

Intended Audience
This guidance is intended for software architects and software developers who are building applications on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. Familiarity with Windows SharePoint Services, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, and ASP.NET is useful for evaluating the guidance.

I have started reading and going through them, you can take a look of it here.

Announcing the Microsoft SharePoint Developer Forum Challenge – March, April and May 2009

Written By Milo

There is an upcoming competition open for members of the SharePoint developer forum in MSDN.

As described: We want you to answer other peoples questions in the MSDN SharePoint Developer Forum. For the months of March, April and May during 2009 we are running a little challenge for people answering questions on the MSDN SharePoint Developer Forum. For each month an entry means a portfolio of at least ten (10) valid answers posted to the Microsoft SharePoint Developer Forum.

Prizes are as follows:

Each month during the Promotion Period, we’ll award the following prizes.
1st Prize – a 120GB Zune
2nd Prize – an Xbox 360 Arcade
3rd, 4th, 5th Prize – a 7” SharePoint Branded Digital Photo Frame

Details of the competition is here.

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