souabi.eu ^^

Besides a lot of rumors, I came across a SDK preview voor SharePoint 15.

http://bit.ly/zoNzlZ

 

The last session of the SharePoint Conference I will be attending, before the SharePoint Conference 2011 comes to an end.

More and more enterprises want to use “video”  within their organizational boundaries. This sessions demonstrates how Microsoft got their own “youtube” built.

Using video can be for:

• Educational purposes (training video’s)
• News and information
• Social and collaboration purposes
• “Branding”  (who we are)
• Etc..

Key pattern elements:

• Using SharePoint 2010 to create a design blueprint for building social knowledge sharing systems.
• Key Components:
  Community & Social experience
  Document storage, management & delivery
  Managed Meta-data Service
  FAST Search
  Portal Design
  Windows Media Services (WMS) / Smooth Streaming

Microsoft uses a Publishing Site for the root of their portal site, with publishing pages. Next they use document sets to group all content for a single video together. For example a video contains the media file, a thumbnail, etc. These are grouped using Document Sets. Document Sets construct allows content to be consistently defined and displayed. The next layer is the Media Storage, where the physical media is stored. This needs good thought when starting to build your own video platform. The last layer is the Shared Services layer, where the social features are enabled.

I noticed that they use FAST Search to present related content and video’s on the pages of their portal. FAST is used to reduce page creation administration (related content is generated), by surfacing Repository in context of the visited page.

There is a hands on lab you can download that is used in the demo, here: http://aka.ms/podcasting

Choosing how to create, store and manager the actual video’s is an important architectural decision. There is no out of the box solution for this in SharePoint. Storing large amount’s of video in SharePoint itself is not recommended. Think about using Smooth Streaming (a plugin in IIS) to tune streaming to network conditions so the video always plays smoothly.

Session details:
Title: How Microsoft built Academy, it’s Social Video Platform
Speaker: Austin Winters

Multi-Tenancy is a way to securely “split” or partition information, operation and services in a single SharePoint farm to different organizations. I am following this session to hope and get more insight in this feature of SharePoint.

aThe session starts good. The first slide shows ” This is a technical session with lots of demo!”. This means my blog entry will be sort and show summaries.

Problem definition for Multi-Tenancy:

• Isolation of data, operational services and management.
• A unique deployment for each customer on shared set of resources.

Who is doing it?

• Office 365
• Webhosters as fbweb.net, Rackspace
• Private Cloud suppliers (IaaS)

Always remember: Multi0Tenancy in SharePoint 2010 was designed for Office 365!

This is a good remark, meaning that you can use it as it is. Changing it to your specific requirements will be hard.

Multi-Tenancy is not a point solution. A collection of features needs to be configured to deliver this funcitonality.

Features that are used:

• Host Named Site Collections
  In sort Site Collections with their own domain name.
• Site Subscriptions
  A logical grouping of site collections that share a number of settings and services.
  Each subscription has a unique ID. Once this is created Sites can be added to that subscription.
  Sites within the same subscription can be managed from a common site.
• Service Application Partitioning
  Use the same instance to serve multiple tenants. Provides data isolation for each tenant. Not database SQL partitioning.
  Note: Mode can not be changed after creation. Service application that do not store data do not need to be partitioned.
• Feature Pack
  Extremely useful for service levels. Group a number of features togehter.
• Tenant Administration
  Can manage configuration of Farm Administrator delegated features. Tenant Administration is a hidden site template. Self Service site creation is required for Site from Tenant Administration Site (this needs customizing the site template to make it workable in a live environment)
• Customizations
  Fully Trusted Code. Sanbox solutions.

High Level Configuration steps:

1. Configure Infra pre-requisites
2. Create Hosting Web Applications
3. Provision Service Applications
4. Create Feature Packs
5. Provision Tenants

From here the session goes into a demo to show these steps. As one might expect, creating and configuring a Multi-tenant environment is only possible using PowerShell.

There are a number of design constraints:

• Multi-Tenancy only works with a OU structure in a singel AD forest. Each tenant has their own ID.
• Search is not configurable at tenant level. This is a farm and therefore global setting.

Do not deploy unsupported Service application:

• FAST for SharePoint
• Performance Point
• Project Server

Session Details:
Title: Multi-Tenancy with SharePoint 2010 (10:30 6/10/2010)
Speaker: Spencer Harbar

The first session on the final day. I’ll try to live blog (6/10/2011 9:00) this session as wel as the two I did yesterday.

A good start, the session will focus on PowerPivot v2.

John wants to go through the whole lifecycle, being:

1. Personal BI
   Tooling: PowerPivot for Excel
2. Team BI
   Tooling: PowerPivot for SharePoint (& Project Crescent)
3. Organizational BI
   Tooling: Analysis Services

Demo

Demo starts with the PowerPivot for Excel tool.

Step 1. Connect tot a database (or other sources), select tables and import the data.
The data can also be import from a SSRS report that is available for the user.

Step 2. Start exploring.
Even with 100-rds million of rows the tool performs. Nice!

Step 3. Build analysis, for exmple a Pivot Table.
This is exactly done as we are used to in Excel.

Step 4. Add mashups (additional data)
Here the fun starts. The power of the tool comes from using mashups, thus data from other sources to enrich you corporate date. In the demo John adds information from an access table to get a list of state names etc. This to enrich the data he already imported.

Step 5. Create relations between data and newly added data.
One needs to create relations off course to get the stats code in the base sata connected to the new data with the full state name, etc. The tool has a nice diagram viewer/editor to do this. It is NOT possible to export the diagram from the tool.
New: They added a number of new features in the advanced mode. You can go to the file tab and select “Switch to Advanced Mode”. This adds an advanced tab.
In the advanced tab:

• Perspectives (filter the data based of a specific field/competence/subject area/etc)
• Implicit measures
  Measures are in short more complex calculations (calculated columns). To handle measures they added a calculation area.

New: In V2 you can select the sort order. Just pick the sort by column and select your own order.
New: Calculations area to add complex calculated fields (measures) in the list view, that can be used in the pivot table.
Evolved: Key performance indicator. Improved handling and adding of KPI’s (in Excel).

Key is that with Power Pivot a user can create complex models without having to switch (to soon) to other more advanced tooling.

Step 6. Go to Team BI (next step in the lifecycle)

Demo continue with the PowerPivot for SharePoint.

Publish the Power Pivot created in Excel to SharePoint. Add things like daily/hourly refresh schedules. And share the pivot table with people in the same team. Edit the table in the browser without opening Excel.

Question: Can I secure parts of the sheet to different users in PowerPivot for SharePoint.
Answer: No, this is not possible with this tooling. (one needs to go to the next level in the lifecycle)

We also got a quick peak at Project Crescent, to build ad-hoc reports in the browser. Again nice!
Project Crescent is not a replacement for project builder, but Microsoft wants to get the power of building ad-hoc reports to the novice.

Step 7. Another step up the lifecycle is go op to Organizational BI

The demo shows the analysis services where John does a restore from PowerPivot, from th earlier created PowerPivot in Excel. Analysis services adds the more IT capabilities such as segmenting and security. From here it get’s to visual studio etc…

Nice demo where I as a business user can start with a pilot on my own environment and have this grow to a corporate BI dashboard.

Session details:
Title: Building Self-Service BI Applications using PowerPivot v2 ” Denali”  for Excel and SharePoint
Speaker: John C. Hancock

Well today is the final day @ the SharePoint Conference 2001 here in Anaheim. A great few days with lots, and lots, and lots, and lots, did I say lots of sessions.

I was a bit disappointed, during the keynote,  that we did not get any glimpse of new SharePoint development or the road Microsoft is taking this platform. But this was quickly made up by the lots of sessions and the care Microsoft took of us during the conference. I am as always amazed how they manage to serve breakfast and lunch to 7.500 people without any chaos.

I am glad, that as an expert on this platform, I could still learn a bit and take new idea’s with me back to the Netherlands. I hope to share them with my colleagues and customers as soon a I get back.

Up to the last sessions ….

 

My last session for today, and my second try for a live blog entry. I am a bit worried since Ben Robb mentions that this is a more “developer”  session. But the topic is a “business” topic, so I’ll stay put. My post wont have any code in it.

If we look at the document lifecycle we can see thee 3 high level steps:

• Create document (and store)
• Declare Record
• Dispose

Why should you worry about retention?

There may be clear demands from compliance/business/management/legal. The users often only want to know where the stuff is and be able to find it easy. The ease of use is more important for a user than compliance.

What out of the box features are available in SharePoint?

• Document ID service
• Information Management Policy
• Workflows
• Word Automation Service

I want to add (not mentioned in the presentation) that retention and disposition is not only from a legal or compliance point of view. Imagine the ability to “delete”  10 to 20% of your content each year. This will dramatically reduce the amount of storage you will need in 5 to 10 years. I smell a way to cut cost there! Even if it is just deteling the older versions of documents. Back to the session.

Ben demonstrates the out of the box information management policy functionality. You can find a lot of information about this topic here http://bit.ly/pJbwoJ.

When do you need to customize?

If you have compliance of legal constraints you will need to customize your process.

Things to worry about.

• Application Lifecycle Management, where do you put the business rules that can change if law or other compliance rules change.
• Content Lifecycle Management. What happens if the rules of lifecycle management change.
• Legal Frameworks
• User Education

Ben mentions that communication to end users is very important. When content is moved communicate this to your user. They will find documents missing and may not know why.

Custom Retention

Out of the box retention is limited to common date fields. Here is where Custom retention formulas can support more complex business rules. The rest of the demo is code.

Custom Workflow

Custom workflows can be used to handle actions that are not available in the out of the box functionality. The example that Ben uses for a custom workflow is when a document is moved to a records center. When this is done, normally the social comments and workflow history stay at the teamsite. In the demo he showed that this can be done with a custom workflow. I like that he uses custom built workflow activities, so business users as me can stay in control when “rules”  change and change the workflow from SharePoint designer.

Session Details:
Title: Handling Explosive Content Growth: Advanced Strategies for Managing Retention and Disposition in SharePoint
Speaker: Ben Robb

 

 

 

 

 

I will try to live blog this session. So bare with me here.

A Hybrid architecture has the following benefits:

• Extend resource & communications to remote locations
• Provide controlled access outside your firewall
• Quickly setup public facing website

Adoption Inhibitors:

• Similar to Inter-Farm
• Transformation (Business, Technology, Operational)
• Data Governance
• Onboard/Offboard
• Cost

Opportunities of SharePoint

• Solutions platform
• Rationalize business functionality for agile adoption
• Use RaaS to explore extending capabilities
• Maturity evaluation

Levels of Hybridization:

• Redundant
• Partitioned
• Migrated
• Synchronized

Replication as a service. How can you manage the replication of information in a hybrid environment, without breaking information streams such as workflows etc. Michael Jordan introduces a third party product here, ecKnowledge Server by CASAHL.

The actions in replication are:

• Collection of the data, this is done with Crawling, Extraction & Load.
• Analysis, this is done with reporting and rationalization.
• Transformation, this is done by clustering, throttling, Replication, etc…

Now comes the demo. The demo does go into Office 365 & On Premise SharePoint.

They are talking about what’s easy en what is not.

Standard the following can be done with the standard products:

• Authentication, people will want single sign on for a hybrid environment to work.
• Branding
• Navigation
• Site Lifecycle

The demo gives a nice example of a company with an online and on-premise environment. With a clear branding that shows where a person is, that is in the online or on premise portal. Both with a gobal navigation to navigate between the portals. Off course with single sign on enabled.<insert image here >

I love the site-directory where the site lifecycle management is clear and shows sites that live in the cloud and on premise. When requesting a new site, the demo keeps in mind that users do not understand the difference of the portals. The demo uses the request for a site form to determine where the actual site is created. This can be based on governance, functionality, size requirements, etc…

There are some hybridization features that require some elbow grease of assistance

User Profiles & Social

Pick an environment where social and profiles are of most value
Only read-only of profile in other environment
Redirect MySites
Use same source of record
Redirect search of people to one environment

Data Replication

A business example (part of the demo) of replication is a project site where there are 2 document libraries. One is for internal documents only (thus only on the on premise env.). Second is a shared documents. Here they added a column “ReplicateToOnline”. Here the users can choose to share this information with another project site (for example where the project works with external people). The 3rd party synchronization tool (with correct configuration) takes care of the synchronization between the on premise and Office365 site. Nice! A good example to use the power of O365 to work with external people and leave internal data internal.

Search

Federate if you’re in O365-D (D is dedicated!)
Index O365-D w/ OnPerm FAST
Link between the two different search environments
Replicate meta-data to Online environment. This is shown in a nice demo

Customizations & Logic
Always use OOTB first
Sandbox if possible
Run all solutions through MSOCAF
Componentize
Leverage Replication as a Service.

Demo shows the online site where a customer can fill in a form for a request. This is replicated to the on premisce environment where the workflow is run. The response (after a workflow) is then replicated back to the cloud. Since we have time we get a bonus demo. ” Office365-S Sandboxed “Timer Job”. We off course know that time jobs are not possible on SharePoint online. In short the replication is used between the online environment and a on premise sql database to “fake” the timer job. Interessting!

Business Intelligence

Publish static reports to the cloud
Link for full report to local environment (not accessible for external users)

—

Concluding

Hybridization is …

• nothing new
• a complex environment (requires the same planning and effort as a complex on premises environment)
• not a place to relax your best practices
• yet another good reason to examine your workloads
• easier with additional capabilities
• getting better

There is a whitepaper about the subject “Hybrid SharePoint Environments with Office 365″ (that is much more readable than this blog entry) from http://bit.ly/ouNAVB

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another of the 5 sessions I attended on Tuesday was a practical approach on SharePoint Governance. You can probably see a pattern here.

A sessions that delivered what is promised. A practical approach. I liked the way Susan Hanley (@susanhanley) presented the sessions as “her experience” and lessons she learned. While SharePoint Governance sounds as dry as toast, no self respecting organization should skip this when implementing SharePoint. Even if it is to dismiss the need of it (as long as you have thought about it, I say).

Here is the Governance top ten (according to Susan). A list that can help you when you are interested in starting your own governance plan.

1. Identify an Inclusive Team
2. Start with “Framing” Decisions
3. Determine Your Deployment Model
4. Define a Clear Vision
5. Identify Roles and Responsibilities
6. Develop Guiding Principles
7. Decide Your Organizational Comfort Level with Social Computing
8. Define Policies and Guidelines
9. Document the Plan
10. Socialize and Promote

A number of Susan’s (and now our) lessons she learned:

• No one cares about governance – until you make it all about them!
• Less is more – avoid unnecessary bureaucracy
• Create a roadmap
• Build best practices into your site templates
• A governance plan doesn’t replace training
• … and training should include the governance plan

A good sessions with a practical guide that I will be using for sure!

Session Details:
Title: Practical Approach to SharePoint Governance: The Key to Successful SharePoint 2010 Solutions
Speaker: Susan Hanley

 

It is a challenge to keep up with the sessions and the jet-lag. Yesterday I attended a few sessions at #SPC11, this is one I liked. It is not a “tech” session, but absolutely up my ally.

We can imagine and build all kinds of nice features and add them to SharePoint. Even if we know it is smart, handy, better. How do you get the business and end-users to adopt it. This challenge is even bigger when you look at SharePoint, which is a platform, and not an application. What is the value for the business? How can you “sell”  your company that choosing SharePoint as a collaboration-, Intranet-, Business Intelligence-, HR -, Search-,etc. platform is the way to go?

On average, only 32% of end users are willing to use the systems that have been rolled out (not SharePoint specific).

Todd Ray talked about a study by CIOB, about “Improving the Return on IT Systems Through Increased Adoption” (n=5,325). The top5 are:

1. End-user voice
2. User Experience
3. Communications Quality
4. Process Change
5. Training Quality
6. Support
7. Leadership and Peer Support

For me this translates in, something we already know, involve the end-user in the whole process. Make sure people are trained, and start with your “support” staff. Introducing something new is always a change management process.

I think what you can take from this session is “Create a SharePoint Strategy for your company”. Todd showed a nice list of (complex) models and tools to help you with this. This information will be available in a white-paper he will be publishing soon. I will add a link to my blog as soon as it is published. I can’s wait!

Good session!

Session Details:
Title: SharePoint 2010 Planning and Adoption framework
Speaker: Todd Ray

 

 

This is the thrid of the three sessions I attented this first day at the SharePoint conference. The second session (no names) did not  really have an impact for me to summarize it. While I expected more from this session, I found it a mirror of recogintion of questions I come across in the field.

The session started with a basic concept of Document Management from the old to the current paradign. I agree with him here that SharePoint changed the field of Document Management by bringing it to the end-user. SharePoint changes the document management field from “though must”  to ” I want”, without losing an eye on regulations and compliance. I quote the speaker when he said why SharePoint is so successful: “ease of use + flexibility = adoption”.

Some highlights from this session.

The Three step ” Contract Management” Solution

Step 1:
Create Contract Template from the Template Library

Step 2:
Store contract in a Document Library
Start an approval or signature workflow

Step 3:
Report on obligations
Records Management compliance

This is an example of a document management solution that can easily be created with standard SharePoint funtionality.

During the middle of the session the speaker stood still, why Document Management projects fail and what you can do to improve their success. I do agree with the speaker on this list, because is it almost the same set of best practices I use at Rubicon.

Top 10 DM success factors:

1. Perform a survey to gather data requirements
2. Involve users in the project initially and keep them involved
3. Pick a specific business area in need of Document Management
4. Provide simple and advances search capabilities
5. Simplified forms and screens should be used where possible
6. Provide a variety of training approaches (class/video/quick ref guide)
7. Do not over automate with unnecessary processes/exceptions
8. Plan your content migration strategy
9. Consider a recognition program for contributors & consumption
10. Design for scalability and your organization’s SLA  requirements

Overall an ok session. The live demo’s while performed and executed very well, were to basic for my taste.

Session Details:
Title: Document Management: Planning for success
Speaker: Russ Edelman