Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Nick, Brett, and I just went live with another episode of the SharePoint Pod Show. In this episode, we interview SharePoint MVP Eric Shupps who was recently in London to speak to the SharePoint Users Group.
Also, we got new recording equipment, so this time the show quality is 1000% better than any of our previous episodes! Thanks to MVP Keith Elder of Deep Fried Bytes for helping me out with questions and showing me how they record their show. I really appreciate it! :-)
Click here to go to the show!
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Nick, Brett, and I just went live with
Episode 2 of the
SharePoint Pod Show. Check it out
here, the topic is "what is SharePoint and the differences between WSS 3.0 and MOSS (standard vs. enterprise)".
Monday, August 04, 2008
I just read a VERY good article called "The Zero Downtime SharePoint Patching Myth" by Todd Carter. If you are applying patches (SP1, Infrastructure Update), you should read this article immediately.
Great post, Todd!
Sunday, August 03, 2008
First of all thanks to all that are providing feedback on the show and suggestions on future shows!
So far, we've had several questions/comments about about the intro which have ranged from cool music, where did you get it....to dude...WTF is up with your intro music? :-) Ok, ok...I must come clean here...it's actually all me.
Nick, Brett, and I bought some pretty decent USB Mics to record the show with and I was actually testing out all different audio situations that included me talking right into the mic, me talking in the same room with the mic, etc...you get the idea. Being a music guy, I started grabbing guitars and plugging them in to see how the mic performed when recording live music.
Before I plugged my guitars in, I found an old drum loop that I had recorded years ago and queued it up a bunch of times in Audacity. Once I had it looping, I picked up my Strat, plugged into my '65 Deluxe Reverb and laid down the rhythm guitar part. It was a pretty dry mix with a very small amount of reverb (maybe set at like 2 or so). The rhythm guitar part that made it through was actually take #1 before I had a chance to really warm up.
Once the drums and rhythm guitar part made it through, it was time to record the lead line...you guessed it...Les Paul time! For the lead, I used my Les Paul and played around with a couple of different pickup combinations (bridge, neck, bridge+neck) and settled on the bridge position (nothing better than a searing Les Paul in the bridge position, right?). The lead line took maybe 5 or so takes and still need work IMHO, but hey...I don't pay the bills with my guitar, eh? :-)
At this point, I sent off the rough cut to Nick and Brett...not sure what they really thought, but they were very kind in their comments. :-) The track still needed something else to fill it out, so I grabbed my Vox Wah Wah pedal and added the third part which adds that late 70's sound.
So as the final cut that made the show last week, here's the breakdown of equipment:
Guitar 1: Fender Stratocaster--clean, neck+middle pickups used
Guitar 2: Custom Shop Gibson Les Paul--dirty with an Ibanez TS-808 pedal, bridge pickup
Guitar 3: Custom Shop Gibson Les Paul + Vox Wah Wah, bridge+neck pickup
Amp: Fender '65 Deluxe Reverb Reissue
So love it, hate it, or just tolerate it to get to the content of the show...that is the story behind the music. Nick plays guitar too, so the next time that we are both in the same physical location with access to guitars, I'm sure that we will lay down something new and cool with a more modern British/Oasis type sound. :-)
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
I would like to announce the launch of the SharePoint Pod Show!
Nick Swan, Brett Lonsdale and I (Rob Foster) will be hosting the show and will be bringing you the latest and greatest SharePoint news and topics relating to SharePoint. We have a lot of great topics lined up and are looking forward to doing the future shows.
In the first show, you will meet us as well as learn what the show will be about. Episode 1 is now live and you can expect new shows to be available every two weeks. Please let us know what you think!
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Free, unlimited installation and compatibility support is now available for all worldwide customers using Windows Vista SP1, until March 18, 2009. Telephone support is available worldwide. Chat and Email support in US and Canada only.
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Effective dates
From now until 18 March 2009.
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Wednesday, July 16, 2008
The SharePoint Infrastructure Update was released yesterday. My advice: install SP1 and then install the Infrastructure Update IMMEDIATELY! There are a lot of bug fixes and features in both of these updates that can make your SharePoint experience much better.
The updates can be downloaded from the links below:
Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297) - x86
Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297) - x64
Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB951695) - x86
Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB951695) - x64
Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Project 2007 (KB951547) - x86
You can read more about the release announcement on the SharePoint team blog here.
I would like to announce the launch of the International SharePoint Professionals Association (ISPA)!
This organization has been formed to support all SharePoint-based user groups and you can read about it in Bob Fox's post here.
I have been named as a Regional Evangelist for the Heartland district which covers Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Michigan. In my role, I will be helping support the user groups in my region so that they get what they need to build a successful community. I am looking forward to my role with ISPA and working with user groups in the Heartland district!
You can view the ISPA site at the following link: http://www.sharepointpros.org.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
What is it about "SharePoint" as a platform that is so difficult? I hear this almost every time that you get more than zero SharePoint people in a room. Quite possibly the most frustrating thing about SharePoint for me is the way that companies (not all, but some) view the SharePoint platform as well as staff and train for an operating model around SharePoint itself. A lot of companies are somewhat inadequately staffed or at least inadequately skilled for a full on SharePoint implementation, so I have a list of thoughts that I see out there in the trenches.
#1:
First Question: "SharePoint IS built around a bunch of technologies that we already have in house (referring to ASP.NET, C#, IIS, SQL Server, etc.). We have these skills...it's just about learning another object model, so let's just send our people to class and then they will be SharePoint people too."
NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!...This is quite possibly the first and easiest mistake that is made with a SharePoint implementation. Yes, you are likely to have ASP.NET and C# skills in house, but that's not all that is required. SharePoint is a platform that builds on top of ASP.NET. This means that your teams will need to be proficient in ASP.NET before beginning to learn how to develop SharePoint applications (yes, I’ve actually talked with people who think that they can just jump into SharePoint development with no prior web development experience).
With the SharePoint platform, there are MANY disciplines in development, so pick one or two development areas to begin with and then expand from there (TIP: start with web parts, event receivers, and FEATURES). Design for performance and scalability is an essential skill with SharePoint, especially when developing for lists that contain a lot of data.
You will still need to staff for operations, support, usability (e.g. screen designers, which could also be developers), architects, etc. Rolling out SharePoint is a big deal both technically and organizationally (once your users get a taste of the platform, it WILL take off like wildfire). Point of this question...GET YOUR PEOPLE THE PROPER TRAINING!!!! There are several companies that offer training and I would like to highlight 4 of the best: Ted Pattison Group, MindSharp, Combined Knowledge, and SharePoint Solutions. All offer a great lineup of classes with world class instructors, so don't be afraid to reach out to these guys for help, it just could save you a lot of time and effort later on down the road.
#2
So Exchange is a platform and SharePoint is a platform, why can't we just build out our infrastructure like we did for Exchange and be done? Well, technically the first part of the question is correct in that SharePoint and Exchange are both platforms...That's about it. Mind you, they are two different platforms. Exchange is a fairly static platform in that (in most cases) you are basically managing email and calendars for a relatively fixed set of users in your organization (yes, user count will go up and down, but it's not a major deal to capacity plan for users and their mail/calendars/public folders/etc.). SharePoint, on the other hand is a very dynamic platform in that you can have many users and at the same time, those users can have the ability to create sites (which can contain sub sites, documents, lists, workflows, etc.). This means that whatever your SharePoint infrastructure looks like today will not be what it looks like tomorrow, and will definitely not be what it looks like a month from now.
Comparing the operating model of SharePoint to Exchange is very bad, even though it's done a lot. Let's step back a little bit...Shouldn't we really be somewhat comparing the operating model to a product like SAP (not on as large of a scale with much different disciplines, of course)? I think that the SAP guys have it right. With SAP, there are developers that are specialized in a module of SAP (HR, Finance, etc.) and a configuration team that help “customize” or configure each module. There is also very specialized support staff, as well as administrators; all of these people are dedicated resources to any platform.
Arguably, the SAP model this is a correct approach for the SharePoint platform. Developers should specialize in a discipline of SharePoint development (BDC, Excel Services, Web Parts, etc.), you can also have configuration experts that are experts in setting up and operating the platform as well as administrators that are responsible for the platform governance. My point in answering this question is that SharePoint is a very large platform and no one can know it all very deeply…you will find little pockets of expertise with the platform, but at this time people just can’t be an expert in all things SharePoint.
#3
What about Development tools for SharePoint? I love this one, actually because it somewhat highlights something that I have seen building up over time as the development tools get better and better. Let me start off by saying that I think that Visual Studio 2008 is the best IDE that the world has ever seen, hands down. This yields both good and bad results, though. Good results are better developer productivity (and so on...too many to list, VS2008 really rocks). Bad results are developers are not always required to understand what is happening behind the scenes. Yes, Visual Studio does a lot of stuff for you. For example, When was the last time that you compiled a project using the CSC.EXE command-line tool? You don't really have to understand what is happening during compilation because Visual Studio takes the pain out of this process. Developer productivity has never been at a higher level.
So if Visual Studio 2008 is so great, why does development suck for the most part for the SharePoint developers? As bad as I hate to say it, the out of the box Visual Studio development experience for SharePoint is somewhat lacking. Out of the box, there just isn’t a lot of cool SharePoint dev stuff that ships with Visual Studio. We all know it and Microsoft has heard your feedback on this topic. We will just have to see what happens in the Visual Studio roadmap to compensate for this need. So if there is a need for a tool for Visual Studio and developers are the primary users of Visual Studio, you’d better believe that tools will start to pop up to help us out.
Two of such tools to get you started (there are > 200 on CodePlex alone!) are WSPBuilder and STSDev. These are both tool that will help you develop features in Visual Studio and I have used them both extensively. While you are on CodePlex, search for SharePoint and see what you get returned. At the time of this blog, there are over 200 tools that are out there specifically for SharePoint! Granted these are open source projects but don’t be fooled…a lot of these things really rock and can save you a lot of time, so go check them out now (after you finish reading this blog of course!).
#4
Ease into your SharePoint implementation. Another common mistake that companies make with SharePoint implementations is that they want too much too quickly. Start out slow with a base SharePoint deployment and slowly make your way into the custom development stuff. You might consider rolling out out of the box features such as Team Sites, My Sites, and Search to your users first before you start into your first custom SharePoint application. Trust me, your operations folks will thank you for waiting so that they can get their arms around MOSS before developers start chunking there newly developed DLLs at the platform.
These are only 4 (really) random thoughts to consider when creating an operating model (administration, operations, development, etc) for MOSS. Please let me know your thoughts, challenges, and successes by implementing SharePoint in your enterprise. We can all benefit from more of these types of conversations.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Get them here.
There are no new features, other than this works with Visual Studio 2008.
Check out this site. It has a lot of great information pertaining to SharePoint 2007 Development. There are hands on labs, VPCs, and a lot of information about developing on SharePoint 2007. All for free!
Thanks to the SharePoint team for getting this site up and running!
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
I have to call out this funny blog from Mike Houston. So true...see if you can find me and a few other SHAREPOINT NATION folks in the pics. :-)
Sunday, June 08, 2008
If you have been following my tweets (or have been anywhere around me since MVP Summit), you have likely heard me randomly screaming in my very obvious Nashville accent "SHAREPOINT NATION!", especially at events/conferences and such (they typically frown on me randomly screaming it at work). :-)
Here is a little insight. SharePoint Nation is a name that we started giving to all of us SharePoint folks as we seem to connect at conferences, events, etc. and somehow are bonded by the product that we work with everyday. It was really apparent at MVP summit when they were constantly trying to break us up by region (i.e. US, Europe, Asia, etc.) as well as TechEd 2008 this year. We all somehow connected and ended up having a lot of fun (and a couple of times actually saw the sun rise...yeah...it was a lot of late nights). Despite the free food and drinks at Summit, ALL of the SharePoint people refused to be separated into regions and ended up connecting elsewhere and doing our own thing. For example, we missed the first day of pre-conference stuff just to go play paintball!
THAT is what being a part of SharePoint Nation is all about. Connecting with people who have a common bond (in this case, it's SharePoint), despite your background, home town, personal beliefs, etc. and making friendships that stick. Maybe it is because we are collaboration people (e.g. SharePoint is a collaboration product), maybe not...I have made friendships that go way beyond people that you meet up with a conferences...Do you have to be a SharePoint MVP, author, or speaker? OF COURSE NOT! Whenever you see us out (we usually travel in large groups) join up, hang out, and have a good time! We are a fun bunch to hang out with.
We are SharePoint Nation!
Saturday, June 07, 2008
Just in case you missed it, Jam Sessions rocked for a bit this year. The band started out by playing some classic rock (Skynyrd, Creedence, etc.) when I got there with some of my SharePoint Nation brothers. Jeff Julian pointed out to me that Denny Boynton was a great drummer (Denny and I had previously had a phone interview where I was the interviewee a year or so ago). With this in mind (and knowing that Denny had NO idea who I was or that he had interviewed me) I told him to jump on drums and we were going to rock something.
Knowing that I wanted to play something from the classic rock era, I brought my TS-808 overdrive pedal, plugged in and grabbed something with a fixed bridge (this time it was a black Telecaster with CRAPPY strings). The band went into "Sweet Home Alabama", which gave me time to warm up the fingers a bit. After "SHA", everyone looked at each other like "what do we play next". There was some discussion and I just walked over to my amp, kicked in the TS-808 and started the intro to AC/DC's "Highway to Hell".
At this point, I immediately felt an electricity in the air...Denny kicked in with a heavy riff on drums and the bass player jumped in as well. After a few times through the intro, literally out of nowhere a guy jumped on stage who had a real look of a true rocker. He looked at me (who was getting nervous that no one was going to be able to sing) and said "we've got this!". After that, it was all gravy. He layed into the intro vocals and literally blew the roof off of The Groove in Orlando. I've played with a lot of people before, but have never played with someone who had the Brian Johnson vocals down so well.
After Highway to Hell, we stopped for a few seconds to take in the crowd as they were going nuts at this point (before we started playing, they were mostly just standing there doing nothing). While they were still cheering and screaming, I couldn't let it stop, so I immediately started AC/DC's "You Shook Me All Night Long". Again, the vocals were spot on. Again, the crowd went nuts.
We finished up with "Little Wing" by Hendrix which was OK, but I really got to be somewhat artistic with the lead guitar and have a good musical conversation with the lead singer during one of the verses. What was cool was all of us have never played together, and mostly never met! Music is such a great language in that you can always seem to talk to each other, no matter your background.
The next day when I was working the OBA booth at TechEd, I saw the lead singer walk by and we introduced ourselves. His name is Allan Pedersen from Denmark and his band's web site is located here and they ROCK!
Denny you rocked it, man! Great chops!
Allan...Jeez, you should bring your band to Nashville to launch your career. I've never had the honor of playing with such a great vocalist. Great job, mate!
If you have any pictures or videos from the show, post 'em up and let me know where to find them! I'd love to see it again!
Thursday, May 29, 2008
We have started a SharePoint Users Group in Nashville!!! Visit the site here!