Wednesday, May 26, 2010

SharePoint 2010 development random links

Mental note – need to check links listed below about SharePoint 2010 – some interesting stuff in there. Probably something to do during the summer holidays…

Download links for SharePoint Foundation 2010 (WSS 4.0) and SharePoint Designer 2010

Did you know that there’s a great way to learn to work with the SharePoint 2010 platform. Just download SharePoint Foundation 2010 - if you would follow the logic of naming from the previous versions, this would have been Windows SharePoint Services 4.0 – together with SharePoint Designer 2010. These tools do not have any additional license cost. So why not try them out…

  • SharePoint Foundation 2010
  • SharePoint Designer 2010 (32-bit)
  • SharePoint Designer 2010 (64-bit) Note: This is the 64-bit version of SharePoint Designer. SharePoint Designer 2010 only connects to SharePoint 2010. To connect to SharePoint 2007 and earlier sites you must continue to use SharePoint Designer 2007. If you elect to install both applications side-by-side, you must download the 32-bit version of SharePoint Designer 2010, and install it after installing SharePoint Designer 2007. Please also note that 64 bit Office applications will not run if SharePoint Designer 2007 is installed; 64-bit Office 2010 applications should only be used if not connecting to SharePoint 2007 servers.
  • Search Server 2010 Express -If you’re using SharePoint Foundation, you can easily add search capabilities to your collaboration environment across SharePoint sites, file shares, web sites, Exchange Public Folders, and third party repositories using Microsoft Search Server 2010 Express

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

PowerPivot is the analysts/managers killer app

I did some demos recently at a SharePoint event @RealDolmen last week and one of the things I demoed was PowerPivot – a technology not specifically linked to SharePoint but it can be integrated.  So here goes my PowerPivot elevator pitch:

PowerPivot is a separate add-in for Excel which adds an in-memory cube which allows you import enormous quantities of data with incredible speed into Excel from different data sources.  You can define relationships between these data sources and parse through this data using pivot tables, pivot charts or using the new Data Analysis Expressions (DAX).

If you want to learn more about PowerPivot definitely take a look at PowerPivot Component Architecture which is an excerpt from the Microsoft SQL Server PowerPivot Planning and Deployment technical white paper.

Business intelligence in SharePoint 2010

As I already mentioned in one of the SharePoint 2010 practice sessions here at RealDolmen – Business Intelligence on the Microsoft platform is a great value proposition. With SharePoint as front end visualization plaform you can create amazing looking dashboards – here are a collection of links which came through in the RSS feeds I follow but I’m still surprised by how people still seem to ignore this great feature set.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Enterprise Search in SharePoint Server 2010 and FAST Search 2010

Here’s a collection of links which will help you get started with Enterprise Search on the 2010 platform. With the addition of Fast  to the Microsoft Enterprise gamma the functional spectrum which is covered has broadened enormously. Have fun …

Starting points:

  • Search Technologies for SharePoint 2010 Products Visio schema 
  • FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint Evaluation Guide
  • SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Search Evaluation Guide
  • Getting started with Enterprise Search in SharePoint 2010
  • Guide for IT Pros for Microsoft Search Server 2010 Beta
  • Learning material:

  • Microsoft Partner Training – Developer training – Advanced Fast Search for Developers
  • Microsoft Partner Training – IT Pro Training – Advanced Fast Search for IT Pros 
  • Technical articles:

    Background info:

    Microsoft free e-books – Visual Studio 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2

    • Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 : The book is not a language primer, a language reference, or a single technology book. It’s a book that will help professional developers move from previous versions of Visual Studio (starting with 2003 and on up). It will cover the features of Visual Studio 2010 through an application. It will go through a lot of the exciting new language features and new versions of the most popular technologies without putting the emphasis on the technologies themselves. It will instead put the emphasis on how you would get to those new tools and features from Visual Studio 2010
    • Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 : Part I, “Database Administration,” is written with the DBA in mind and introduces
      readers to the numerous innovations in SQL Server 2008 R2. In Part II, “Business Intelligence Development,” readers discover components new to the SQL Server data platform, as well as significant enhancements to the reporting component.

    Saturday, May 15, 2010

    People you know and things you can do….

    Excellent blogpost  - No man is an island – truer today than ever with a reference to this interesting survey – Informal networks linked to success of change initiatives.

    The answer to the question about whether networking makes a difference: yes! The study showed a significant relationship between the success of a change initiative and the strength of the personal networks of the leader(s) managing the initiative.

    93% of completely successful change initiatives were led by leaders with very strong or strong personal networks. Not one change initiatives described as less successful was led by leader(s) with strong or very strong personal networks.

    On the other hand, the majority of less successful change initiatives (73%) were led by people described as having moderate or weak personal networks.

    Monday, May 10, 2010

    Getting Office 2010 to work on a single box SharePoint 2010 demo environment

    Last week I finished installing a new SharePoint 2010 demo environment. As it is a demo environment I installed everything on one server – so Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008, SharePoint Server 2010 and Office 2010 on one single machine. Unfortunately when I tried the “Edit in word” option in SharePoint 2010 it gave me an error “Word has encountered an error”. Same if I tried the “New document” option in a SharePoint 2010 document library.



    Thanks to Steven for providing the solution – go to File Options> Trust Center. Next click the Trust Center Settings button. On the new screen which pops up – go to the Protected View and unselect all the tree protected view options displayed on the top of this settings page

    Close your Office 2010  and try the “Edit in word” option again – you will notice that it works like a charm.

    Troubleshooting UserProfile import in SharePoint 2010

    If you need to configure user profile synchronization in SharePoint Server 2010 – you definitely need to check out the Microsoft Technet Documentation on SharePoint Server 2010 – Manage Profile Synchronization – configure user profile synchronization.

    There is one thing however which helped me out which isn’t mentionned in the documentation – when trying to start the user profile synchronization service it failed – after restarting the SharePoint timer service it started successfully.

    Solving could not load type error with ListData.svc in SharePoint 2010 RTM

    If you encounter the following error when you access the listdata.svc service in SharePoint Server 2010 RTM -

    Could not load type 'System.Data.Services.Providers.IDataServiceUpdateProvider' from assembly 'System.Data.Services, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089'

    you are probably missing the latest update of ADO.NET Data Services for .Net Framework 3.5 SP1. There are two versions -

    Apparently this is not picked up by the prerequisites installer.

    Wednesday, May 05, 2010

    Don’t forget to start the Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Sandboxed Code Service …

    When you want to use sandboxed solutions in SharePoint Foundation 2010 or SharePoint Server 2010 you have to check that the Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Sandboxed Code Service is started. If it is not you will see the following errors:

    • You will be able to upload sandboxed solutions to the solutions gallery but the Activate solution button will remain greyed out.
    • When you try to deploy a sandboxed solution from within Visual Studio 2010 you will get the following error: Error occurred in deployment step 'Activate Features': Cannot start service SPUserCodeV4 on computer ''


    To start it go to SharePoint 2010 Central Admin and select Manage services on server.


    On the application page make sure that the Sandboxed Code Service is started.




    Tuesday, May 04, 2010

    Which Visio version to install?

    There’s a great blog post on the Visio team blogVisio 2010 versions overview which describes the differences between the standard, professional and premium edition. For integration with SharePoint and the new Visio Services you will at least need Visio Professional 2010. If you also want to design SharePoint workflows in Visio, you will need Visio Premium 2010.

    Monday, May 03, 2010

    SharePoint 2010 Tools Extensibility

    Visual Studio 2010 allows you to extend the SharePoint 2010 tool support by creating custom extensions, this way you can for example create custom SharePoint Project Items (SPI’s) which are not available out of the box.

    There are already some interesting examples out there of theses extensions and what’s all possible

    A number of extensions are also grouped within the CKS:Development Tools Edition on Codeplex (Source code available on Codeplex) – these are currently being rewritten to work with Visual Studio 2010 RTM.

    If you have some other interesting extensions – please add a comment.