Agile Sharepoint development by 21apps and Andrew Woodward MVP

Wow, two great SUGUK events planned for November.   London on 25th and Scotland on 27th.

Edinburgh at the Scottish Parliment

Thurs 27th November

Spencer Harbar SharePoint MVP - MythBusters - debunking common SharePoint Farm Misconceptions
This interactive, whiteboard session will dive into common SharePoint Farm Myths and discuss common misconceptions around Global Deployments, Farm Topologies, Shared Service Providers, High Availability, Security and more. Alongside best practices for each “myth”, the SharePoint “magic numbers” will be covered and there will be plenty of scope to discuss any particular queries you may have on farm deployment.

Andrew Woodward SharePoint MVP - Test Driven Development – Contrary to popular belief it can be done on SharePoint projects
In the style of Don Box this PowerPoint free session will take you through the development of a SharePoint solution using TDD. We will introduce TDD , the tools of the trade, how TDD influences you design and mocking out the core SharePoint object model elements using the new Typemock Isolator APIs.

Sign Up for the Edinburgh event at SUGUK forum with your full name.

London at Microsoft Cardinal Place

Tue 25th November

Ben Robb SharePoint MVP - Customizing SharePoint Search

SharePoint Search is very powerful, and there are some key best practices which should be used to ensure that your search results are giving users the ability to find information more quickly. In this session we will learn how to customise search results and what search rules should be put in place to make sure that system pages do not find their way into search results. Finally, we will explore how to apply Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques so that external search engines can crawl public facing sites effectively.

Rickard Lofberg - Lessons learned deploying SharePoint at Credit Suisse

This session will explore how Credit Suisse, a world leading financial services company, has deployed SharePoint as a large scale collaboration platform.
We will learn about the design, best practises and challenges of hosting more than 2000 Site Collections and 1.8 TB of data.
We will cover topics ranging from the physical farm architecture to SharePoint Designer Contributor settings.
Finally, we will discuss some of the operational process and policies needed to ensure platform stability.

Sign Up for the London event

The SUGUK Big Event of 2008 took place last night and was a resounding success. I presented an introduction to Agile SharePoint Dev with zero code demos, which was a welcome relief to the audience as Todd Bleeker had just fried their brains with the SPD to Visual Studio workflow session. (looking forward to seeing this online). This introduction looked at what Agile means, the importance of the Empirical approach and the problems with the prescriptive process that so many organisation continue to flog. I introduced the Agile manifesto which is the foundation to the changes happening in the industry.

The talk looked at Scrum as an example of an agile management process interwoven with some discussion on XP processes and how the two work together.

I have uploaded the presentation here.

Agile Sharepoint Dev (Suguk 11 July 08)

There was a lot of really good discussion that continued in the bar afterwards, a lot of things to cover over the coming months.

If you have any comments on what was presented, or what areas of agile SharePoint development you think are lacking on the web please post them here.

A big thank you to Steve Smith and Nick Swan for organising a great event, to Matt Groves, Todd Bleeker, Bill English, Penny Coventry and Steve Smith for presenting.

Hope to see you all at a future SUGUK event, the next is scheduled for 14th August in London.

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

There was a good turn out at the SUGUK meeting in Reading on 28th June.  

First Session:
Groove: A powerful tool for collaboration, that is now part of Office 07

There was a guest presentation by the Groove User Group by Jim Moffat.   The groove user group is fairly new and I was lucky enough to attend the very first ever meeting anywhere in the world at the recent UK EVO Day in Reading.

The number of users is increasing we are trying to do some ‘dog fooding’ as we have a Groove workspace setup for the UK members.    Some of the key questions that came from the meeting

How will Groove do the sync if i’m in a locked down environment with no network access?  not even email.

Well it kinda makes collaboration difficult and I’m afraid groove won’t help you here - carrier pigeon was suggested!

Doesn’t Groove and SharePoint do the same thing?

Yes and No.   There was discussion on this and this posting helps explain it.   This is something that the user group will be taking up to try and help people explain and understand.

Second Session:
Customising MOSS the supported way – from end-user to admin interfaces

Chris O’Brien did an excellent demo on the supported ways of customising MOSS,  some really good tips on the use of the Delegate Control and where Microsoft themselves have missed a trick.

I recommend you read through Chris’ blog,  he even has a really good theme :) which I am sure you will find familiar.

Down the Pub Session:
To the George 

A good turn out at the Down the Pub session,  if you haven’t stayed on after a SUGUK event I recommend you do.  This is the best opportunity to talk about things like the current market, meet potential customers or resources.  Oh and you get to have a few beers as well.

Looking forward to seeing you all at the next one,  which I think will be London in July (am I allowed to say that Nick?) - watch out for formal confirmation on the SUGUK site.

At the SharePoint User Group UK meeting in Telford on 12th June;  I presented InfoPath and InfoPath Forms Server to demonstrate how easy it is to create, post and manage forms using the administrative model (most demos take the straight to the document library approach).

I have posted a screen cast of the first part of the demo which covers:

• Making your form browser enabled
• Publishing the form for the administrators to use
• Mapping form content to list fields in the created content type
• Admin upload and activation to a site collection
• Creation of form library and activation of the content type
• Enabling entry via browser
• Customisation of the Submit event to automatically name the form

Video: InfoPath and Forms Services Demo - SUGUK.org

Andrew Florendine did a really great demo that took this a stage further and used InfoPath Forms to control data entry into a standard SharePoint contacts list.

I will follow up this with the second part of my presentation a short demo showing how easy it is to embed this form in a web part.

Telford and Wrekin Council are kindly hosting a user group meeting for us on Tuesday 12th June. In this session we’ll cover the following topics:

1, SharePoint 2007 and Access 2007
Brett Lonsdale will take us through how you can build online/offline applications using Access 2007 and SharePoint 2007 as a data store. We’ll get to see how you can use workflows, InfoPath Forms and much more from Access 2007.

2, InfoPath and Forms Services
Andrew Woodward (that me :)) and Andrew Florendine will take us through how to easily collect information from your intranet users using InfoPath 2007 and Forms Services.

The session will start at 1830 sharp, so please arrange to arrive from 1800.

A link to a map is here

If you’d like to come along please add your name to the sign up list here…

Having recently completed my first public speaking engagement for the SUGUK I had the misfortune to experience some of the ‘live demo’ demons. I think I managed to recover, and even received a round of applause when the Excel sheet was rendered in the browser, but it did hit home to me that I need to update my toolkit to help cope with future presentations. Darren Strange (Office Rocker) has posted a really good post ‘Death by PowerPoint - Giving better presentations‘. It was also very reassuring to see that even seasoned professionals have off days

Whilst looking for ways to improve my presenting I came across the following that may be useful.

Jeffery Veen - Seven Steps to better presentations
Apple -v- Microsoft - the different presenting styles
How to get a standing ovation - Point 4. Know your audience would have really helped me as I was planning to do a demo coding against the Excel Web Services. I did not know the audience was mostly admins until I had to offer them a preference. Had I found this out up front I could have tweaked the presentation but kept it slick.

What next:- Learn some stories, practice, practice and practice more. Be confident and talk from the heart about things I am passionate about - like MOSS 2007

I have the honour of presenting on the same stage as Bill English and Todd Bleeker at the Sharepoint Usergroup meeting - Ullesthorpe - March 7th.

Agenda :

6.15 - 7.00pm - Andrew Woodward - Under The Hood with Excel Services

7.00 - 8.00pm - Bill English - Decision Points for achieving a great Deployment

break

8.15 - 9.15pm - Todd Bleeker - Customizing Sites

Refreshments and hosting of the event will be courtesy of Combined Knowledge.

Start Time will be 6.15pm and Finish around 9.15 - 9.30pm with drinks in the bar after.

Please do come along if only to take the rare opportunity of seeing Bill and Todd present.