Thoughts from Peter

Turning on Basic Web Parts such as the Content Editor Web Part

2010-03-18T12:20:00Z

I have been working on a SharePoint 2010 MySite implementation and wanted to do something that I thought would be fairly simple which was adding a Content Editor Web Part to the page. When I went to add the web part I noticed it did not show up in the gallery. I figured it must be because of the template being used for MySite and that a particular feature was not activated so I started activating a bunch of Features until it became available. The feature that made this and a few other web parts such as the Image Viewer and Page Viewer web parts available was the SharePoint Server Publishing Infrustructure however this makes a bunch of other stuff available and so I wanted to know if there was something else I could do. A person from Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) helped me with this and mentioned that you can turn on a hidden feature called "BasicWebParts" that enables this feature. I activate this as part of a Feature Receiver on the site and voila I now have access to those web parts.

Options for a SharePoint 2010 Development Environment

2010-02-06T05:41:00Z

One of the first things you will probably ask yourself when you start embarking on SharePoint 2010 development is where do you set up your development environment. As I started investigating this, I realized there are a number of various options each with their own implications. Below is listing of each option I found and some of my personal thoughts on each of them:

Option	Pros	Cons
Install SharePoint 2010 directly on our Windows 7 / Vista workstation/laptop	It's nice to have SharePoint available to you at any time.	I don't like the "clutter" it adds to my laptop as I like to keep it fairly clean in terms of what's installed. Pretty manual install
Create a bootable Hyper-V image	Keeps your development environment clean and partitioned from your business applications	If I have to boot to that image, I don't have access to my other application such as Office unless I decide to install all of that on the image which I don't think is very practical.
Create a Hyper-V image on a centrally located Hyper-V Server	Similar to bootable option except you can usually take advantage of better hardware which usually mean better image performance	If you are offline and can't connect to the image there's not much you can do.
Run VMWare Workstation	It supports 64-bit OS's which means you can run it on your Windows 7 or Vista environments without having to install SharePoint 2010 directly on your box. Allows you to keep your image portable	Not a great solution if you want to standardize on Hyper-V which can result in a little pain when you want to share an image.
Run Windows Server 2008 as your workstation/ laptop OS with Hyper-V	Works great if you have the right hardware.	Performance can be horrible if you don't have the right hardware. (Details on this here)

You may have noticed in the list above that there isn't a Microsoft Virtual PC option. That's because it doesn't support 64-bit OS's which is a requirement for SharePoint 2010. I have tried to find out if there is a plan for Microsoft to update Virtual PC to support 64-bit OS's however I have yet to hear anything that indicates this.

For my purposes, I decided to run a VMWare image because I just felt it worked well for me given the hardware I have, the desire to keep my laptop clean, and the fact that I want to remain portable with respect to the image. One other thing to note, if you want to take advantage of the new SharePoint 2010 developer tools in Visual Studio 2010 you'll need to have SharePoint 2010 installed on the same environment as Visual Studio 2010 which, in my opinion, makes the choice of the environment you choose all the more important.

I'd be really interested to hear other's thoughts on this topic.

Some noteworthy new features of SharePoint 2010

2009-12-07T03:57:00Z

In my last post I mentioned I had the privilege of attending the SharePoint 2010 conference. In this post I'd like to review the things I think were quite notable based on the sessions I attended:

Sandboxed Solutions: I have run into a lot of clients who want to use SharePoint as their application development platform and have various groups within their organization building their own applications. However the question that is always asked is how do we make sure that they can’t do something that brings down the entire farm. Sandboxed solutions provide the ability to limit access to resources and isolate worker processes from the rest of the platform reducing the risk that a particular application will bring down the farm.
Configurable Deployment: Deployment has always been big challenge and resulted in a lot of effort with SharePoint applications. With Visual Studio 2010 there is now a series of out of the box deployment steps as well as the ability to create your own custom deployment package. From what I have seen so far I think this is going to greatly improve SharePoint deployments.
Branch Caching with Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 and the Office Document Cache in Office 2010: These are features to improve the performance of global SharePoint deployments (ex. A centralized SharePoint Intranet being accessed from around the world.) Office 2010 provides an Office Document Cache which basically stores documents requested for SharePoint locally on the persons computer. Subsequent requests to the same document in SharePoint will result in a check to the server if the document as changed and if not, will serve the document from the local cache and if it has changed will send just the differences over (this is limited to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote). Branch caching provides the ability to cache documents at particular locations via either a Windows Server 2008 R2 server or on local Windows 7 workstations. Once cached subsequent requests will either go to the local Branch cache server (Windows Server 2008 R2 Box) or request the document from a local peer workstation thus reducing the need to transfer the document over long distances.
Multilingual User Interface: This is the ability to install multiple language packs and toggle between languages on the same site. Prior to this you would need a third party or completely custom solution to make this work and usually involved a lot of development effort. I am not sure of all the limitations but it’s a step in the right direction.
Social Computing: There are a lot of features that pull in Social Computing concepts from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter etc that should add a bunch of excitement to what is possible from a development perspective.
Phonetic People Search: This was pretty impressive. The demo showed the presenter misspelling a person’s name (ex. Cowfman) and it finding the person named Kauffman. It also does the same for common nicknames.

Other notable items:

All Search Web Parts will be open source.
Vastly improved SharePoint Designer Workflows (particularly being able to package them into a WSP so that you can deploy the workflow to other lists and SharePoint sites).
Very scalable farm architecture with a new concept of the Application Services Server. You can view the architecture here.
Integrated SharePoint support in Visual Studio IDE
Improved Search and FAST integration

I'll dive into this in more detail in future posts as I work with some of these items.

Another version of SharePoint? Actually SharePoint 2010 is pretty impressive.

2009-11-24T04:47:00Z

So this is my first blog post...ever! Yeah, I'm pretty excited that I have finally taken the plunge and decided to write about something, so here goes...

I have been working at imason for over 6 years now and in that time my main technology focus has been around SharePoint. I was lucky enough to attend the SharePoint 2010 conference in Las Vegas and have to say I came away being thoroughly impressed at what I had seen over the 4 days. If you had asked me prior to attending the conference what I thought about SharePoint 2010 I would have replied "Oh great, another version of SharePoint that I need to get up-to-speed on". Today, however, I am pretty excited about the new features and improvements in 2010 and I think it will make for some great potential solutions once it is released.

The SharePoint conference itself was fantastic. The sheer size (around 7500 attendants) and number of sessions (over 250) was very impressive and the sessions I did attend were very informative and went smoothly considering it is a beta product. I think the thing that stuck out to me the most was that for 2010 Microsoft focused on fixing the issues that developers and business users routinely complained about in MOSS 2007, providing a wealth of additional features that really solidifies SharePoint as a great development platform, and building in a lot of the social computing concepts we see in the public domain. Microsoft did a great job of focusing on what was new and improved which helped me understand the key differences between MOSS 2007 and SharePoint 2010. One of the things that can be overwhelming with a product the size of SharePoint is having the knowledge that something exists so that you can leverage it when needed and the conference was great at providing those details. At some point, you will probably be asked the question, "Why should we move to 2010?" and my hope is that over the next few weeks and months my posts will help provide some insight into helping you answer that question.