Sunday, October 05, 2008
Review : Microsoft Sharepoint Server 2007 Best Practices by Ben Curry (Author), Bill English (Author)
Unlike some other Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 books that either talk about technical implementation of the product or delve only into the planning for a new implementation this book covers them all from Planning, Implementation and deployment of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007. The book is full of real world scenarios and point the reader to the best practices learned on the field by the author and his colleagues. What is so good about this book is that it also provides the reader with alternative approaches and discusses pros and cons of each of them. The author also discusses Business requirement, functional specs and Project management issues encountered while implementing MOSS in different size organizations. The book is divided into four main parts: Planning and Designing, Building, Deploying and Operating. So there is useful information for every IT person in this book. This is not by any way the complete and only reference for each of the above sections for MOSS deployment but none the less any MOSS deployment would benefit immensely by following the tips offered in this book.
The layout of the book is simple and user friendly. Real world examples are highlighted with simple box layout as is the direction for more details on the subject being discussed. You won't find too many colorful boxes and tones of diagrams to distract you from grasping the concept being discussed but where there is a need there is a diagram to demonstrate the concept. If you are new to SharePoint this book will save you countless hours of frustration and redoing the same thing again and again and worst to have to fix something down the road because it is not scalable. One of the most important selling features of MOSS is the ability to collaborate and find the relevant information quickly and easily. All of this is only possible if you have laid out the proper information Architecture. This is one of the many aspects where this book really shines.
All in all this is a wonderful book and should be made a compulsory part of any MOSS deployment or day to day operations.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Microsoft learning has announced that after August 31st, 2007 only Thomson Prometric will be allowed to conduct Microsoft Certification exams. Pearson Vue can take registration for exams till August 31st,2007 and can conduct the tests till December 31st,2007. In case you have any Pearson VUE vouchers its the time to book your registration for the exam.
The official details are here
I have recently taken exams for WSS 3.0 and MOSS with Pearson Vue and have taken exams with Prometric as well. I personally think that Pearson VUE was much better in conducting the exams. There customer service was much better and much less problems then Prometric. Being a MCT as well thats what I have heard from my students as well.
Thursday, January 05, 2006
After successfully completing my MCT exams using MeasureUp practice exams for my Microsoft certification I am now enjoying an Instructor role as well as a Consultant. Perason Vue has a new Instructor Rewards program that rewards both Instructor and the Students. So I am sharing with you the Promotion code that you need to use to get the following discount from them ....
Thursday, November 30, 2006
I have recently bought a Intel core 2 duo system with 2407FPW monitor from Dell through one of their Dell Kiosks in Toronto.I requested them to expediate the shipment since I need it early. The sales person informed me that they will try their best to get it early. I placed the order on 12th of Novenember that was due to be delivered on 22nd November. I got the System on 22nd but the monitor was missing.
I looked at th Packing list and the monitor was supposed to shipped with the system.
I immediately called Dell Customer care to notify them of the missing item. They informed me that by mistake the monitor is shipped seperately and gave me the tracking number and opened the case. They adviced me to wait for 24 hours. I keep calling purolator and was told the monitor will arrive after five or next day.
After 24 hours I have to call Dell again and they have to place another Order for the Monitor. I was informed since this is a missing item they epediate the order and I should get it it with 2 or 3 days. I waited for 7 days but the online status keep displaying that Monitor is in Production. Very strange that Monitor need to go through Production too. I kept calling customer care to no avail. Finally on November 29th I was told that Monitor was shipped on November 28th but they can't provide me with the Tracking Number yet and I should call on 29th. I called Customer care agin on 29th but was told quite rudely by the customer care representative that there is no tracking no and that the Dell will not extend the warrantly period on the CPU that I already have though I can't use it. Also Dell went ahead and placed the Bell sypatico 3 month free trial which I will not be able to use til I get the monitor.
I insisted to talk with the Customer care manager who has the same answers and was quite rude too. And told me that Monitor actualy is not even shipped because of bad weather in US and will be shipped after 2 days and implied that I should not even bother calling them for 3 more days .... Also he can't do any thing about High speed 3 month free offer that was part of Dell New order. I never talked with the ISP provider during whole process of ordering the Dell and getting the service but now He wanted me to call them directly to stop activation and Dell has nothing to do with it what so ever ..Surprise ...Surprise ......
I was not expecting such a Customer care service from company like Dell though i have read alot of horor stories in the newsgroups. All I wanted was courteous Cutomer care representative that take initiative to solve the customer issue and are proactive and contact the customers and update them with the status of their case.
Dell can easily provide a rental Monitor or replacement if they can't accomodate 2407 because of some production issues.
Dell Just lost another customer in IT industry and I would definitely not recommend to any one that I know. Please feel free to share your experiences with Dell ...Extending warranty on a system for 3 or 4 weeks or extending 1 month of Sypatico internet and Just showing that you are doing something about the Customer complain doesn't take much but makes all the difference and all the Good companies make sure they keep there existing and potential customers Happy ...
I called bell Sympatico after that to directly talk to them to stop activation of High speed internet till I get the system. Th person was really courteous. I signed and received the Modem a day earlier. The Customer representative from Bell told me no problem he will make sure that the conection is not activated till I get the Dell system and in case I get charged he will readjust the charges. I smiled ... Thats what a good Customer service should be like .. though I do know that some individuals had issues with Bell too ...
Friday, November 11, 2005
Real exciting news from Web Content Management team at Microsoft.The Service Pack 2 now provides much awaited support for Microsoft SQL 2005 and Viusla Studio 2005 is now available in MCMS 2002.Master Pages as well as the authentication and navigation provider models support.
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
While developing a Website you might want to limit the users to download the file only once or would like to hide the link if they successfully downloaded a particular file. In traditional way of downloading the file its hard to know on the server side that file is downloaded successfully by the client. Solution is to stream the file in small chunk and make sure that is connected before streaming the next chunk. If you sucessfully transmitted the whiole file then this would mean that client has
Monday, October 03, 2005
Here are few useful online free books listed on MSDN that will get you started with Microsoft Content Management Server before you do your own investment and buy a MCMS 2002 Book or take an official MOC Training.
Friday, September 30, 2005
Validating user input is an important requirement of most web applications. However, many ASP.NET developers find the standard ASP.NET validation controls to be either hard to use or lacking in features. Peter Blum answers the most frequently asked questions concerning ASP.NET validation.
Thursday, September 29, 2005
I have created a Windows App utility that can search All or Specific Portal for any particular string to be found in any of the placeholders.
Portal is determined to be the First Level Channel after /Channels root.
Here is a Great article explaining Web publishing Content Management Systems in general. Who should be using them. What are the advantages and benefits of using a web based Content Management System and the different players offering Web based Content Management Solutions.
I get lot of queries from the Clients and from my Blog readers about the recommendation MCMS 2002 Book/Tutorial. The following book is great for Starters as well as seasoned MCMS professionals. I would highly recommend it ....
Friday, August 26, 2005
Recently I came across this issue with KB#836895. It installs perfectly on Windows 2003 machines but refused to install on Windows XP development machines.
Since we are using some custome paramters that needed to be passed to different MCMS posting it was hard to debug since all the development machines where Windows XP.
If you are using FomrsAuthentication against ActiveDirectory you might want to search if a User Id exist in Active Directory or not before taking certain action like creating new profile.This return true or false depending on if user is found or not.
Monday, July 11, 2005
MCMS 2002 Service Pack 2 will have the support for ASP.Net 2.0 though there will still be some New features that will not be supported or fully suported by MCMS running under ASp.Net 2.0 framework for example Web Parts ...
Friday, June 24, 2005
While working on a Data Form in an ASp.Net application you might want to get a value from the user that corresponds to the Enum you created in your Business Layer. Since Enum types are not strings or .ToString() function doesn't work directly with Enums you need to do it in slightly different way ...
Solution:
Lets take an example ...
Thursday, June 23, 2005
ieSpell is a free Internet Explorer browser extension that spell checks text input boxes on a webpage. It should come in particularly handy for users who do a lot of web-based text entry (e.g. web mails, forums, blogs, diaries). Even if your web application already includes spell checking functionality, you might still want to install this utility because it is definitely much faster than a server-side solution. Plus you get to store and use your personal word list across all your applications,
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
In numerous occasions you want to display a drop down box that contains for example a Cit and City No but you also want to have it linked with let's say Employee number since the city list is in a Form where you filling the employee data. the out of box drop down doesn't allow you to store more then 2 fields at a time.
Following solution allows you to store an extra field with the given 2 fields in ASP.Net drop down list.
Monday, June 20, 2005
Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 makes it easy to create multiple websites using the same template set. This feature is very useful if you are creating sites that require different feel and look but same/similar functionality or at-least share some templates between each other.The challenge here is how to add a CSS to the rendered posting so the feel and look is different depending on which MCMS Site Hierarchy you are in.
Following is the solution. This solution allows you to treat
Saturday, May 14, 2005
I was looking for some reliable and useful Custom Control. In ASP.Net Projects it is very common to use Calendar Control or masked edit controls. The biggest challenge for our project was to find a Time Picker instead of Date Picker. Matt Hawley has great set of custom controls on his Excentrics World website. I am glad that I finally found it? In addition to a few standards (calendar, show/hide panel), he's added some very useful variations like a textbox that uses an input mask (see the phone number demo) and a time picker to go with all your calendars. Sweet!!!
- Accordion Panel
- Bread Crumb Trail
- Calendar Popup
- Collapsable Panel
- Empty DataGrid
- Faq Repeater
- Masked TextBox
- Multi-Text List Controls
- Numeric Box
- Ordered ListBox
- Time Picker
There are all free commercial Custom Controls. It seems Matt also update the custom control quite frequently. He also has a section where customers can vote on their wishes. What kind of improvements or new controls they want to see. Have a look and let me know if you like them ...
Excentrics World
Also Check out the MetaBuilder website. They have some nifty Custom controls as well ...
MetaBuilders
Also check out the Free Text Box that has tons of features and would allow the users to use MS Word WYSIWYG features while editing a TextArea.
FreeTextBox
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Community Editor is web based WYSIWYG HTML editor. It enables ASP.Net Web developers to replace the Textarea in your existing/new Web Sites with a powerful, but easy to use WYSIWYG Editor.
This rich editing tool empowers end users with an intuitive, easy-to-use interface for creating and publishing Posts/Forms without relying on any client-side components or controls.