Mga Archive ng kategorya: SharePoint

A Little inis nadala…

SP2010 ay napaka-cool na bagay, ngunit nais kong nais nila inaayos ang wika sa listahan ng mga aklatan at mga setting sa mga pahina ng pagdating sa pamamahala ng mga uri ng nilalaman:

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Ang parehong wika ay nasa lugar para sa WSS / Moss.  Baguhin lamang ang salitang "delete" sa "alisin" at ito ay lamang plain gawing mas pakiramdam.

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Bagong Artikulo, "Mastering SharePoint”

My latest article for SharePointBriefing.com is up and kicking here: http://sharepointbriefing.com/features/article.php/3887276/The-Road-to-SharePoint-Mastery.htm

Narito ang isang teaser:

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Ito ay isa lamang ng isang medyo maikling at condensed bersyon ng aking pinaka-popular na pampublikong pagtatanghal sa "On upang Dagdagan SharePoint."  Walang bandyo biro, gayunman.

Tingnan ito!

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SharePoint On Line // BPOS - Ang ilang mga kamay Sa Karanasan

(Nota: artikulong ito ay na-cross-post dito: http://www.endusersharepoint.com/?p=1912)

I-update 09/01/09: Batay sa kaba ng feedback, I need to clarify that InfoPath is supported in the sense that BPOS provides forms libraries. What I mean when I write "not supported in any way" is that InfoPath forms services functions are not supported. That means that you can’t publish an InfoPath form to BPOS and and have it render in the web browser. It also means that some out of the box workflows, which use InfoPath (even in MOSS standard edition) don’t work in BPOS because their initiation and other forms use InfoPath. Hopefully that clears things up.

I had a chance to really dig into Microsoft Online’s offering earlier this year and specifically the business productivity online suite (BPOS). This came along before I even hard a firm plan to set out on my own at Arcovis. I immediately saw, gayunman, that BPOS could be a key part of my company’s internal infrastructure and over time, it has become exactly that. Arcovis, uses it on a daily basis. I thought I’d share some of that experience from a practical perspective in case you want to evaluate it for yourself or are just curious about it.

As the word “suite” in BPOS implies, you get a small bundle of applications:

  • Exchange
  • Live Meeting
  • Communicator
  • SharePoint

You can buy each of them separately, Naniniwala ako. It’s all spelled out relatively clearly on the Microsoft online site. You may be able to get better deals through MSFT partners. Arcovis has been working with Cloud Istratehiya and they seem to know their stuff, so I’d include them in your list of vendors if you do a multi-vendor search.

I outline my experience and thoughts for each of these respectively.

Exchange

This is a hosted exchange environment and from my perspective, it works like any other Exchange server I have ever used. It’s fully integrated with all of my fellow Arcovis partners’ environments and gives me access to the calendar (which is huge). Good stuff.

It also provides the Outlook Web Access (OWA) interface. That means I can get my email on any machine that has a web browser.

My HTC mobile phone, running Windows Mobile 6.1(?) connected to it nicely via Active Sync. It did this in exactly the way I expected and wanted.

I don’t consider myself much more than a casual outlook and exchange user so there may be really important Exchange features that just aren’t supported and I wouldn’t necessarily know it.

I think the strongest recommendation I make for this is that I am completely unaware that my exchange environment is “somewhere else.” I don’t know see any difference in Exchange and how I use it on a daily basis versus the half dozen or so other times I used someone’s exchange environment. Sa katunayan, this is better because it simply works.

Bottom line – hosted exchange is what it needs to be and I’m very happy with it.

Live Meeting

This is a truly indispensible tool when you’re in the consulting business. I fire up instant live meetings several times a week to show intermediate work product to clients, to watch them break my solutions so that I know how to fix them, do sales presentations, at iba pa. Live meeting is bundled with BPOS and it’s very easy to use.

I’m even less of a live meeting expert than I am on exchange. Gayunman, for my purposes, it’s great.

Communicator

Hanggang ngayon, I use communicator almost only for presence information. I say “only” but have that presence data available to me whenever I’m connect has become addictive. With communicator installed and running, my colleagues know when I’m available, what my schedule is like at this moment, and can IM me (though the IM interface is pretty dull, at best). It’s one of those things that I really miss when I don’t have it. I actually get a little annoyed when my colleagues aren’t running communicator because the presence information is missing.

The presence indicator feels pervasive. It shows up in SharePoint whenever their name appears as an author to a document, assigned a task, at iba pa. It shows in email, embedded right in outlook. It shows up in the communicator client itself.

For the most it just sits there running in the background and decorates my outlook and SharePoint screens with real-time presence information. It’s very cool.

SharePoint

My favorite bit, mangyari pa, is SharePoint.

BPOS provides a modified version of MOSS standard edition. I’ll explain “modified” below. We’ve been using our BPOS SharePoint portal for stuff like:

  • Marketing information
  • Sales (proposals, lead tracking) –> we do plan to invest in a CRM solution but for now, SharePoint is working out as our CRM solution.
  • Partner and customer contacts
  • Hanapin
  • Client project information
  • Billing (mainly for storing our invoices)
  • Discussions
  • Prototyping solutions
  • Building out demonstration sites (e.g. new hire management HR process)
  • Time sheets
  • Document collaboration

Talaga, all the stuff you’d expect to use SharePoint for.

Along the way, we use technical features like:

  • Alerts
  • SharePoint Designer
    • Workflows
    • Branding
  • Content types
  • CQWP
  • Document libraries with version control
  • Custom lists for all kinds of things (like our time sheets)
  • jQuery (and all the goodness that can come from that, including AJAX calls to SharePoint web services)

What can’t I do with it? There are a bunch of things that would be nice:

  • I cannot provide anonymous access. Sa katunayan, i don’t think I can do that for any price. I could be wrong, or hopefully MSFT will change this in future.
  • No InfoPath of any kind.
    • This has the slightly strange side effect of blocking a few standard MOSS workflows that rely on InfoPath.
  • No server side code. That means, bukod sa iba pang mga bagay:
    • No event receivers
    • No custom SharePoint designer actions
    • No custom field types
    • No proper SDLC (i.e. features/solutions).
    • No access to stsadm
  • No access to a shared service provider.
    • The last bit is a little sad because we can’t do as much search configuration I would like.

      You basically give up a lot of technical capability and are forced to live within the confines of out-of-the-box SharePoint functionality.

      I can live with that. I have found myself wanting to slap together an event receiver or use a custom action once or twice,, but for the most part, I don’t notice the lack.

      I should add that this is not a comprehensive list of the differences between a hosted “on prem” MOSS environment and SharePoint on line. Cloud Strategies has a very detailed presentation that goes into all that if you’re interested. I’m speaking from the perspective of a business owner leveraging the tool.

      Ease of Use

      Microsoft provides a nifty desktop application that enables quick and easy access to all of the BPOS functions:

      image

      You don’t need to use it, but eliminates the need to log into each of the applications separately and for live meeting, It’s quite nice because you can do a “meet now” session with just 2 clicks (one on the “web conferencing” button above and another on the web browser that pops up). It’s also nice to get OWA with one click, though you can just put that in your browser favorites as well.

      The other major advantage with this desktop application is that it provides a background kind of single sign on service. As long as this is running in the background, I can open up web browsers and connect to my BPOS environment without ever needing to enter credentials.

      Full Disclosure

      Microsoft made BPOS available to me for free so I am not currently paying the monthly per user fee at this time. Gayunman, I see value there and you can accept on faith (o hindi) that I would pay for this service. The fact is that I can’t count on Microsoft providing this for free forever and it’s become so strongly integrated with my business that moving … the mind quails.

      Konklusyon

      BPOS is an insanely feature rich platform. Exchange, SharePoint (MOSS Standard!), presence, instant live meetings – it’s a lot of functionality that I would sorely, sorely miss if I had to live without it. My business would be severely impacted without it. Could I find replacement functionality? Probably, but I think I would have to cobble it together from a variety of other vendors, complicating my life. BPOS has so far proven itself to be stable and reliable. For the right kind of customer (like my company), BPOS is worth strong consideration.

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      Mahusay Sundin Microsoft SharePoint (at iba pang mga) SharePoint Mga Forum

      Ako ay na-pagsunod forum MSDN para na rin sa paglipas ng isang taon (at posibleng halos 2 taon sa puntong ito) and every now and then I hear from someone how “hard” it is to do that. I find it quite easy and thought I’d share my “technique”. This technique also works for www.endusersharepoint.com (http://www.endusersharepoint.com/STP).

      Pagkuha ng MSDN bilang isang halimbawa, Ako unang pumunta sa karaniwang pahina ng forum tulad ng General Tanong para sa SharePoint pangunahing pahina dito: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointgeneral/threads

      Dapat mo kaagad mapapansin na ang mga forum ng RSS pinaganang, tulad ng ipinapakita:

      image

      Ginagamit ko ang Google Reader para sa pamamahala ng aking mga RSS feed para sa isang mahabang panahon ngayon (www.google.com / reader). I go there, add the RSS feed for the forum and now I’m getting all new forums posts via RSS. My Google feeds for SharePoint forums look like this:

      image

      Ang Google ay nagbibigay sa akin ng magandang tanawin ng pag-post ng sarili nito:

      image

      At sa wakas, Google ay nagbibigay-daan sa akin gamitin ang keyboard upang mag-scroll sa pamamagitan ng mga pag-post sa mga forum na ito paraan.

      Maaari ba akong mabilis na i-scan sa pamamagitan ng mga post at tumutok lamang sa mga nararamdaman ko ang maaari kong gumawa ng isang kapaki-pakinabang na kontribusyon.

      Alerts close the loop. Updates to posts don’t come through RSS (kahit na sa tingin ko ginagamit ang mga ito sa isang mahabang oras ang nakalipas). Gayunman, kung ako mag-post ng tugon sa isang pag-post ng forum, the forums alert me via email and IM that someone responded in turn. O, kung hindi ako maaaring gumawa ng isang kapaki-pakinabang na kontribusyon ngunit gusto kong malaman kung ano pa ang sasabihin ng, Maaari ba akong mag-drill sa ito at tahasang humiling ng mga alerto kapag ang iba ay tumugon.

      Sa isang oras o mas mababa maaari mong itakda ang prosesong ito up at at sa isang linggo ng regular na paggamit, malaman ang iba't ibang trick keyboard shortcut at sa gayon ay ito ay nagiging ikalawang kalikasan.

      I use the exact same technique for End User SharePoint.Com’s “Stump the Panel” forums. This is their RSS feed: http://www.endusersharepoint.com/STP/rss/.

      Ang mga forum ay isang kahanga-hangang paraan, marahil ang pinakamahusay na paraan maikling ng direct personal na karanasan, ng pag-aaral ang mga produkto at pagkuha ng isang masarap na survey ng kung paano ang mundo, nakakawala, uses SharePoint. Give it a try!

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      Pamamahala ay isang Marketing Plan Masyadong

      Ang dahilan kung bakit gastusin namin kaya karaming oras (o dapat, gayon pa man) working out governance plans is because we want the SharePoint solution to be as effective as possible. We want good infrastructure and rules to keep it humming and safe in case of disaster. We want good security processes to both properly secure the environment but also make it reasonable to manage. We want a good information architecture that will stand the test of time, ideally managing to survive a major organizational change in the company.

      To achieve that desirable objective, a governance document and plan can devolve into a bunch of “thou shall” and “thou shall not’s”, tulad ng sa:

      • Thou shall not create SharePoint security group; use AD instead.
      • Thou shall not create folders in document libraries; use content types and views instead.
      • Thou shall create all document content types based off a specific custom base type.
      • Thou shall not create an information taxonomy based off today’s company org chart.

      “Thou shall” and “thou shall not” certainly have their place in the governance plan.

      A more successful governance plan will also have a strong marketing angle. It should sell and justify itself to the maximum extent possible. A truly successful governance plan relies upon the voluntary cooperation of all SharePoint users. (There are fringe cases where community cooperation is not needed, such as when SharePoint is used by a very small number of tightly managed users; I’m sure you can think of others). If the user community doesn’t buy into your governance plan then it will be partially successful at best.

      I use that word “buy” deliberately. The community will buy the governance plan if it’s fundamentally sound and you go to some effort to sell them on it. Selling leads to marketing and that’s why I think that a governance plan should be considered a marketing plan too. Convince your end users that they need to follow the governance plan and they will voluntarily follow it. If you can get a critical mass of people following the governance plan then the plan’s benefits follow and you’ll have a stronger environment for it.

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      Paggamit ng MSDN (at iba pang mga) Mga Forum para sa SharePoint Support

      Maaari kong isulat sa sa mahusay na haba tungkol sa MSDN forums, tuntunin ng magandang asal, convention sa pagbibigay ng, hanapin, at iba pa. I may do that, sa katunayan. I wanted to point out a small thing which may help people have a better overall experience.

      I’ve lately been telling people that if you run into some kind of problem with your SharePoint environment, development project or other SharePoint related activity, post a question to the forums earlier in your action chain rather than later. I know for myself that when I have a problem, a number of potential solutions present themselves right away. I order these potential solutions in terms of likelihood, applicability and how easy they are to investigate. I go through that list and by the time I’ve gotten to #10, I’m making registry changes to a key “/foo/bar/almostThere/isThisIt/noThisIsNotIt/iCantBelieveIAmDoingThis/finallyThere!” on the advice of a blog found on page 8 of a Google search. When that doesn’t work, I finally post a question to MSDN (e.g. dito: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointgeneral/threads).

      I suggest that you reverse that approach. Post the forums much earlier in your investigation because:

      • It’s free to you anyway.
      • There’s no guaranteed SLA (of which I’m aware, kahit).
      • Samakatwid, it can take a long time for people to respond.
      • People often do respond eventually.
      • If you wait until 2 o 3 days after the problem first surfaced, you’re frantic for a response and forums are not a good place for emergency help (unless you’re lucky).

      Kaya, talaga, it’s easy and free and you have a good shot at getting some kind of answer, but it will take a while to get that answer (muli, unless you’re lucky).

      I used to think that I should hold off on looking for community help because I don’t want to waste someone’s time asking for help when I could find it out myself. Some forum moderators and active participants may feel that way, but I don’t (kahit, I don’t feel that way any more). I don’t see any downside. The worst case is that you post a question and then answer it yourself some time later, possibly “wasting” some one’s time. I don’t see a big risk in that and there’s value in the researching of questions like that in any event.

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      SharePoint prediksyon para sa 2009

      Ko na basahin ng ilang retrospectives sa 2008 and this has got me to thinking about 2009. Here are my guesses at the future of SharePoint in 2009.

      Maliit Disclaimer

      Ako ay isang SharePoint MVP at bilang isang resulta, I sometimes get a little advance information before it’s public. I am NOT making any such information public. I really haven’t been around long enough to be entrusted with that kind of stuff anyway.

      With that out of the way, on to the predictions …

      FAST

      I believe that FAST will become a very hot topic in 2009. It’s already well known in the enterprise search community. Gayunman, everyone that plays around with SharePoint in 2009 will soon be interested in this product and what it can do for them. New consulting companies will spring up around it and existing partners will work and scramble to add it to its portfolio. This time next year, almost everyone in the SharePoint community will have heard of and have an opinion about FAST.

      FAST is targeted at large companies and that will continue. I think there’s at least an outside chance that Microsoft will release a more focused version of the product that is accessible to smaller companies. Failing that, they will open up the SharePoint search engine so that it can be customized along the lines that FAST can be customized. Halimbawa, FAST uses pipeline architecture for consuming content and indexing it. FAST admins and developers can assemble pipeline components per data source and even create new pipeline components. We don’t have this flexibility with SharePoint today. If FAST remains firmly targeted at very large companies, SharePoint search will adopt some of FAST’s features.

      SharePoint V.Next

      I believe it will come out in 2009.

      I believe that it will provide us the ability to secure views on a list or document library. This may be more of a hope than a belief 🙂

      I hope it will provide some better support for end users in SharePoint Designer and particularly workflow.

      I don’t know much else, I have been actively tracking what I do find here: http://delicious.com/pagalvin/SharePoint_O14.

      Vendors Will Create Business Applications

      Ngayon, most SharePoint vendors seem to be gadget oriented. Take Kawayan o Corasworks halimbawa. They have a huge following and great portfolio of products. Gayunman, they seem sort of gadgety to me or developer / tool focused. Admin tools, workflow tools, at iba pa. That’s not a criticism at all because SharePoint can definitely use some gadgets.

      Sa 2009, some vendors (and very possibly Bamboo themselves, if I read this correctly) will put together verticalized business applications in the form of templates, features, solutions, at iba pa. I’m thinking about the fabulous forty templates today but tailored to specific industries. I’m sort of surprised it’s not already exploited this way. SharePoint is a platform for delivering these kinds of things. What’s everyone waiting for? They won’t wait any longer in 2009.

      Sa parehong oras, Silverlight and other cool .NET stuff will fuel new, better and more interesting gadgets.

      Sharepointreviews.com will become the essential community catalog of these products.

      End User Focus

      2009 will see the emergence of the End User as a major focus for bloggers, organizations and Microsoft themselves. Mark Miller’s End User SharePoint.Com played a big role in 2008 and will continue to do so in 2009. End Users will begin to blog, help to transform user groups into less technical venues and even convince someone or organization to launch a pure End User focused conference.

      Conferences, User Groups, Code Camps, at iba pa

      Speaking of conferences – they will continue to expand and grow in number and focus. Aside from end user content, they will continue to cater to developers and administrators.

      Virtual conferences will start to pick up and existing conferences will provide live feeds to remote attendees who cannot or choose not to attend in person.

      Free venues will expand, tulad ng Mike Lotter’s (et al) SharePoint Sabado.

      This is going to be very important because there will continue to be a large influx of new developers, admins and end users who will be craving the kind of information these groups provide.

      Social compute

      Demand for social computing features will rise. All things being equal, companies that implement effective social computing strategies will do better and be stronger than their competitors.

      Smaller companies will adopt these features more quickly and effectively than large companies.

      Large companies: beware 🙂

      Best Practices versus Remediation

      Sa 2008, a lot of SharePoint bloggers and organizations and Microsoft themselves spent a lot of time figuring out the best way to solve certain problems (usually technical problems).

      There are still opportunities to define and foster adoption of best practices. Gayunman, while we’ve been figuring out the best way to install, configure and manage SharePoint, hundreds and thousands of companies have been installing, configuring and managing SharePoint without those best practices at hand.

      Sa 2009, a lot of companies are going to realize they have some deeply rooted problems to solve and will be looking to the elite members of the SharePoint community and Microsoft for help to fix them. I think this will extend well into 2010 and possibly spawn a cottage industry providing remediation services for companies that really need and use SharePoint, but are hurting badly because of poor decisions made early in their implementation.

      The Mother Ship Will Return

      Sa 2009, the Mother Ship will return and bring Bob Fox home.

      Final Thoughts

      I didn’t start working with SharePoint myself in any real way until January 2007. It seems to me that SharePoint has really taken off and proven itself capable of delivering a lot of value in these two years. I think that in many ways, it didn’t really straighten itself out until the infrastructure update. It still has its bugs and problems, but we’ve all come along way since 01/2007. 2009 is going to be a banner year for SharePoint.

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      Employee Pagsasanay Iskedyul at Materyales Template — Upuan Count Bug PLUS Security Fix(?)

      Ito ay isang medyo popular "hindi kapani-paniwala 40" template. It also has a bug which is widely known (Kahit ko na blog tungkol sa kung paano ayusin ito).

      Sogeti Naglabas ng isang codeplex proyekto ito linggo na ang Inaayos ng bug (na kung saan ay maganda sa pamamagitan ng kanyang sarili, ngunit hindi earth-mapanira) ngunit sila rin i-claim na nalutas ang isang magkano ang problema thornier: security. The fab 40 template ay nangangailangan ng isang napakamapagbigay setting sa seguridad (mga user ay kailangang kontribyutor access level sa halos lahat ng bagay). Not any more! According to the codeplex summary:

      "This template also includes a new custom workflow action which enables the template to work without having to give all users contribute permissions to the courses list."

      Iyon ay magagandang bagay-bagay at nagkakahalaga ng check out.

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