Agile Sharepoint development by 21apps and Andrew Woodward MVP

Back in the North West by popular demand.

Sign up here: http://suguk.org/forums/thread/9594.aspx – Its free as always and I heard some people will be heading to the bar afterwards so even more opportunity to chat.

1st Session : An introduction to the Silverlight blueprint for SharePoint – Andrew Woodward

During the first part of the event Andrew will Walk us through configuring SharePoint and the creation of your first Silverlight application followed by a Q&A session on what this means for you and some of the challenges you are likely to face introducing Silverlight into your SharePoint applications.

2nd Session : Kerberos and SharePoint: no ticket touting here. Does SharePoint add another head? – Spencer Harbar

In the second part of this event Spencer will run through an overview of Kerberos and the benefits it offers in a SharePoint 2007 deployment including: -
Discussion of whether your SharePoint deployment needs Kerberos.
Tour of the required pre-requisites and configuration settings.
Approaches to automating configuration in a SharePoint Farm.
Preview of the SharePoint Farm Kerberos Configuration Utility.
Q&A/Discussion.
The first presentation kicks off at 7pm, but get there at 630pm for drinks and networking.
Link here to the location : http://manchester.vbug.net/LocationList.aspx?id=1

One of the main projects I have been involved with over the past year is the Leeds Learning Network.  I have blogged about some of the technologies and recently launched a Special Interest Group for SharePoint in Education on the SUGUK site, but it’s also good to see some of the less technical information becoming available.

A recent article on MSDN UK Schools Blog is one such post.

There was a fantastic turn out for the SUGUK meeting in London last night – considering the awful weather we managed officially the biggest turnout with 106 people attending an suguk event!   Chris O’Brien took on the challenge of doing a deep dive into workflow in just 1 hour!   And as a bonus is giving away some of his top tips which he will be posting on his blog very soon, this was a great presentation and if you only take away one thing from it it should be ‘Look at the State Based workflows, this may save you a lot of time and reworking’.

The Search Server 2008 presentation was pretty much the same as that demo’ d at the recent Tech Net session in Newcastle,  this time however we did get the Google search working which is detailed here.

The feedback from the session regarding Search Server 2008 was very positive, people could really see how the simplicity of Federation and the way it has been implemented will be very useful in their organisation,  oh and the fact you get MOSS capable search for FREE with in the Express Edition helps .

I was a little surprised when I asked how many people tuned and updated their search settings.  Out of a room with 100+ people only 2 said they did this.   Jenny Everett (a regular at SUGUK meetings) has posted an article on how she has improved search results in her organisation, she has blogged on this here – definitely worth a read.

The files from the demo can be downloaded here from my SkyDrive.  If you want any more information on Microsoft Search Server 2008 visit http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/

See you at the next meeting

After a wonderful New Years break in Iceland I am back to work,  I would like to say refreshed but the 4 hours of daylight and ‘cultural’ drinking until 5am have had it’s toll

However I am a dedicated SUGUK member and looking forward to presenting Microsoft Search Server 2008 at this weeks meeting in London.  If your not already signed up please do here:  http://suguk.org/forums/thread/7300.aspx

And if Search is not your thing,  Chris O’Brien has a deep dive on developing workflows with Visual Studio and InfoPath which will be essential viewing.

Wishing you all a wonderful New Year.

Today I performed my first ‘Official’ Microsoft presentation at the TechNet briefing event in Newcastle.  I got to present on the same stage as seasoned presenters James O’Neill, Steve Lamb and new Evangelist team member Andrew Fryer.  

I got an email on the 27th Nov (along with other MOSS MVPs) asking if there was anyone who could cover a session on the newly released Microsoft Search Server 2008 to 100+ people!   After a small hesitation and some juggling with work commitments I raised my proverbial hand and I was in…  Luckily I had attended TechEd in Barcelona where Ryan Deguid had announced the product only 14 days earlier and had taken the time to install and play with the features,  see previous post from TechEd).   A few emails later and a ’semi’ interview with Viral Tarpara to ensure I was ‘on message’ and I had a slide deck and a rough agenda.  Georgina and Sarah were fantastic in sorting everything for me including obligatory TechNet T-Shirt.

Monday evening involved a long train ride from Telford to Newcastle,  I have to apologies to anyone sitting near me as I took the opportunity to work through the slides;  a technique I have found very useful for this is to record myself using Camtasia and play back to myself to see how it sounds – it amazing how quickly you can improve you flow and presentation story in just a few takes.

I made the hotel before the bar closed and met up with Georgina, James, Steve and Andrew.   My slot was the second of the morning so enough time to get warmed up but also allow the pre-match nerves to build,  this was my first 100+ audience after all.

Enterprise Search from Microsoft

my name is Andrew Woodward, I am a SharePoint MVP and I feel Greeeaaat!

my opening line was a reference to this MVP parody You Tube video that makes me laugh today.  For all those who attended and looked at me like I had lost the plot – now you know 

A great tip I had from someone after one of my early suguk presentations,  make sure you have the first 5 minutes in your head so you can start with confidence.   This helps you with the presentation but also gets the audience on side.

A summary of the content below,  the slide deck is available and videos will be available soon.  For those that missed it and watch the video you will see Viral back in action for the session in London and Reading.

• Version differences between Search Server 2008 (MSS) and Search Server 2008 Express (MSSX)  – or lack of them!
• How does MSS fit into the MOSS release schedule
  • MOSS and WSS SP1
  • MSS RTM
  • MSS Update Patch for MOSS
  • MSS rolled into MOSS SP2
• What’s needed to run MSSX
• Ease of Installation
  • ~20 mins to install and 10 clicks
  • Serving results in ~35minutes
  • You can do this over lunch!
• Upgrades, the supported and unsupported paths
• Consolidated Administration interface
• Federation
  • See below as this is really cool!   You need this
• Ending with a demo
  • We even opened up Visual Notepad and presented some C# code to an ITPro crowd – now that doesn’t happen every day   

Federation

Direct quote from the slides, and answered exactly by the knowledgeable audience.

“Federation enables the display of results from other search engines or application to be displayed alongside local results”

You no longer need to try and crawl and index all of the content you want to search,  you can leverage the search capabilities of the existing applications like Live.com and present these to the end user.   Federation is achieved through the implementation of Federation Definition Location (*.FLD) files which define how the application can be searched using the the OpenSearch syntax.  for example on Live.com this could be

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q={searchTerms}

The calling of and display of the results are managed via two web parts, each of which expect the results of the query to be returned in XML format,  more specifically the out of the box XSLT is setup to work with RSS format XML.  The Federation Results Web part  displays the results from a single FDL and the Top Federated Results Web Part displays the content based on multiple FLDs, based on an order of preference.

Authentication has been covered in detail and allows federation using anonymous,  common (shared) or user.   Note, if you intend to use User based authentication you will need to roll your own code,   samples are expected at RTM.

So what does this mean to you?

You need to download the software from http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch deploy this in your environment and see how it works.  There are still opportunities to have an impact on the RTM product so if you have any ideas/bugs please post them here and I will forward them to the channels within Microsoft.

Questions from the Day

Q. MSSX and Small Business Server – do they work together?   

A.  Under investigation,  you can help here http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2391132&SiteID=17

Q. Will the Federated web parts work without an Internet connection if the federation is to the Local Search Results?

A. Yes,  Local Search Results Federation will work without an Internet connection.

Q. Accessibility – WSS is known to fall down on Accessibility,  will MSS/MSSX be accessible?

A. Not out of the box, but! – This is not a MSS problem specifically but more an issue with the WSS platform on which it is built.   Microsoft have released the Accessibility Kit for SharePoint V1, and the timeline for AKS 1.1 to address some of the collaboration accessibility should mean this will be available to be implemented with MSS.   So with some work on the master page and implementation of the AKS you should be able to provide an Accessible Search Server 2008 solution.

Q. Can I run MSSX on the Internet?

A. Yes, if you have the Windows Connector licence that enables WSS to run on the Internet this would be the same for MSSX with SQL Express. If you have full SQL you will also need get the Per Processor licenses for this as well.

I would like to thank everyone who attended and hope you got what you expected from the session,  I certainly did

To support the growing use of SharePoint in Education we have created a Special Interest forum on the UK SharePoint User Group site specifically targeted at Education.  

This forum aims to cover all areas of SharePoint in Education from the Microsoft Learning Gateway, SharePoint Learning Kit,  Community Kit for SharePoint : Schools Edition to 3rd Party VLE integration, best practice, general support and user wish lists.   

Out hope is the forum will be used by

• Teachers and Students who have a SharePoint solution in their school or college
• IT support people who install and manage these school based installation
• Local Authorities who provide managed solutions
• SharePoint developers and consultants who work in education 
• solutions providers to support there products and looking for ideas on new features

to share experiences, pain points, and just help improve what we can achieved and through its inclusion in the SUGUK we should see some cross over in support and expertise.

The forum is open so please use this to ask questions,  make suggestions or generally talk about what’s hot and what’s not.   

Want to see something specific in your school?  ask the question – someone may have an answer, have the code to share or just might be willing to write something.

Are you doing something really great that you want to share?

Wow, the UK SharePoint User Group SUGUK, has reached the 2,000 members milestone.   Well done to Nick Swan and Steve Smith for making this one of the biggest and, I’m slightly biased, best SharePoint User Groups globally.

If you are not a member please do sign up,  we have a very active forum and the events schedule is really fantastic.

Hope to see some new faces online and at the events like last nights meeting in Reading with Patrick Tisseghem and Steven Lamb.

Lawrence sent through a link to this You Tube video which shows what every newly awarded MVP goes through.  I just had to post it as this has made my day….

and from the comments I’ve had back from friends and colleagues this pretty much sums up a newbee’s first foray into the world of being an MVP.

Chris has posted his slides and code from the SUGUK meeting in Reading on 26th.

‘Customizing SharePoint the supported way’ – slides and sample code now available

Enjoy

This has got to be one of the best SUGUK line ups to date and it will be held in Microsoft’s new venue.

Space for 100 so sign up here to see if we can fill it.   Oh yes and I did promise to buy the first round,  gulp!

Event details – there will be 3 SharePoint MVPs presenting and more in the crowd to heckle

First Session: 6.30 – 7.30 – Presenter Steve Smith – SharePoint MVP

SharePoint 2007 Capacity Planning – In this session I will be discussing the design and planning for effective SharePoint servers,sites,lists and libraries. We will look at the cause and effect of various topologies and the considerations for resilience as well as well as performance such as list views and Web Application Web Gardens. This session is based on my Berlin SharePoint Conference session.

Second Session: 7.30 – 8.30 -Presenter Penny Coventry – SharePoint MVP

SharePoint Designer for All – During this session, you’ll see how SharePoint Designer can be used to customise SharePoint Team Sites, advanced data manipulation using the DataView Web Part, consume RSS feeds and how to complete administrative tasks, such as moving documents, including their metadata and limiting what users can do with SharePoint Designer.

Third Session: 8.30 – 9.15 – Presenter Stephen Cummins – SharePoint MVP

Managing the SharePoint 2007 platform presents a number of challenges to administrators and developers. Topics include :

How do you deploy changes to workflows, content types, design and security between a test environment and production?

How do you update already deployed web parts and workflows?

How do you maintain consistent metadata across all your site collections?

How do you migrate form the 2003 version to 2007?

How do you import content in bulk from other systems such as Windows File Shares, Exchange Public Folders or Lotus Notes Databases?