Microknowledge

The Ultimate SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Content Management ECM Cheat Sheet

Hi again to everyone from SharePoint Saturday NY!  It was a great chance to get out with the SharePoint user community.  Great content – and flawless weather!  Midsummer in New York and I didn’t miss the beach once.  Ok, once.

Managed Metadata and Taxonomies in SharePoint 2010 remain a very popular topic, and I had great participation during my session.  (Presentation on SlideShare.)

Due to another speaker’s family emergency (unfortunately) I was asked to take over a previously announced presentation on Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Web Content Management (WCM) and Migration Strategies.  So I didn’t’ have as much time as I’d like to prepare -- but I did put together the ultimate SharePoint 2010 ECM “cheat sheet”.  Here goes. (Presentation on SlideShare.)

First, there’s a rich range of ECM features in SharePoint 2010.  Here’s a quick road map in order of increasing complexity and organizational maturity.  (Also, although some folks consider InfoPath and forms management to be an ECM feature, I’ve left it out for brevity.)

 

One general rule before we move through all of these – SharePoint 2010 now supports auto-generated document IDs.  When a document is first uploaded to SharePoint, the server assigns a unique identifier that follows the document throughout its lifecycle – even as it moves from site to site as part of workflows, organizer roles, or lifecycle management policies.

ECM Configuration Roadmap

Function	Feature Scope	Where to configure it
Content Organizer	Site	Site Settings | Content Organizer Rules
Hold and eDiscovery	Site	Site Settings | Hold and eDiscovery Section
In place Records Management	Site Collection	Context Menu | Compliance Details
Send to Records Center	Define in Central Admin	Central Admin: General Settings | Send To Connections
ILM	Variable	Content Type definition; or override at library/folder level in library settings – Information Management Policy Settings

Versioning and Metadata

Document versioning remains one of the oldest and strongest functions in SharePoint.   As users collaborate on a document, you can:

· Require the document be checked out to a user before edits

· Save a running copy of all draft and final published versions

· Require administrative approval before other users can see approved, published content

· Retain or delete prior drafts or published versions

In addition, you can – and should - use “Content Types” to establish sets of properties about a document – e.g.  Draft/final, presentation date, subject keywords, etc.  These types and properties will greatly help in using all the other features that let you manage content after it’s created and/or published.

Drop off library and Content organizer rules

In large, complex sites, users who occasionally write new content are faced with a dilemma – where should I post this?  They often pick one of two options:

· Post it nowhere for fear of “breaking” something

· Post it to multiple places – one of them is bound to be right.

The good news in SharePoint 2010 – users don’t need to remember all the “right” places to post a document.  Instead, by activating the Content Organizer, you can direct users to a single “drop-off library”, and then use rules to route the document to the correct location.  Rules are flexible, and can be driven by content types, document properties, titles, etc.  I’ve listed an example below for a rule to route audio files to a media library if they are copyrighted in 1997:

 
I can’t stress enough how important it is to be able to write rules based on properties, and not just Content Type.  In 2007, enterprises often had a proliferation of content types, or avoided them all together since that was the only way to route documents via Record Center, document retention policies.  The result was a separate content type for each department, subcategory etc. that might have a different policy.  The new rules sets for Content Organizer and related ECM functions are much more flexible.  Before, you would have needed to establish a content type just for audio files from 1997.

Finally, Content Organizer functions have to be activated as site features.

eDiscovery and Hold

Hold and eDiscovery allow an administrator or compliance staff to “freeze” a document it place, or route it to a holding area.  Holds can be implemented directly on a document.  You can also preview a set of search rules, and let the system add documents to a “hold” automatically (it saves an Excel report when done!)

This function can help outside of litigation support – we have clients who use this when they need to find and purge documents from cancelled deals – the documents are moved to a pending area and then deleted.

Records Management

Records management was included in SharePoint 2007, but the functions were so limited that they seldom saw enterprise use.  Essentially, you could copy content types to a new site collection and manage them as records there.  However, the original documents were left intact, and could be edited further.  SharePoint 2010 presumes you will do one of two things (most likely):

· Ship the document to a Record Center site collection and leave behind a link. 

· Declare the documents to be a record “in place” and manage it there.

Here’s another question – why?  Simple.  Once you’ve declared a document to be a record, you can more easily prevent the document form being deleted interactively, or exempt the record from other document retention policies.

Send to Records Center

Record Center is a custom, in the box site template that you can add to an existing SharePoint 2010 farm.  Once you’ve established it, you can define a custom “Send To” action for the document context menu (the hove).  These settings can be found in Central Administration | General Settings.  You can pick a target location, and decide whether documents can be copied, moved, or moved with a link left behind.

 

Records In Place:

You can also let users declare records interactively through the context menu for Compliance Details.  (This can also be a great use of a Ribbon-based Custom Action if you want to customize the UI).

 
  
Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) Policy

As documents age, you can define a lot of things to happen automatically via Information Lifecycle Policies.  Historically you could only define these on a per content type basis – but now you can also define this at a library or folder level.   These settings are reached from the Ribbon for Library Settings.

 

Polices can be applied uniformly to all content, or can be excluded for files already flagged as a “Record”.  You can define stages and test for properties – usually based on document creation, modification or approval dates.

Most importantly, what can you do to these documents?  A lot:

ILM Actions

· Move to Recycle Bin

· Permanently Delete

· Transfer to another site or Records Center

· Start Workflow

· Skip to Next Stage

· Declare Record

· Delete prior drafts

· Delete Prior versions

Finally – don’t forget to generate a File Plan Report – it rolls up a summary of all the retention policies that govern a given library:

Good luck – there’s a lot to learn for ECM in SharePoint 2010!

SharePoint 2007 SP1 - Going, going, gone...

We're advising all clients who haven't yet updated their SharePoint 2007 environments, to upgrade to at least Service Pack 2 (SP2).  We told you only last week about the release of the June 2010 Cumulative Updates for SharePoint 2007.  One important note is buried in a related Microsoft article:

"Service Pack 1 for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is nearing the end of its life cycle and will be retired on July 13, 2010. After that date you must upgrade to Service Pack 2, which is a requirement for the August 2010 Cumulative Update."

SP2 will be a minimum going forward support requirement from Microsoft.  Although we had recommended cautious deployment when SP2 was first released (April 2009), it should be considered stable now.  Also, "while the hood is up", you might as well install the most recent Cumulative Update.  All the most recent CU's (since October 2009) include an enhanced version of the STSADM command line preupgradecheck too.  This is essential to assess SharePoint 2010 upgrade readiness.

Stay cool out there!

Blizzard of 1978, Greenlawn, NY, from http://www.flickr.com/photos/cmcnulty/
 

SharePoint intranet dos and don’ts – Part 2 – Bad practices

In a prior post, I covered some best practices learned from the field in deploying SharePoint intranets.  Today we’re going to discuss the opposite – things we’ve seen that can doom your SharePoint intranet project.  [All names have been changed to protect the innocent!]  And, for the record, failure rate percentages are completely subjective.

 

We can't fairly call these "worst" practices, but here are some bad things to avoid.

Run it as an IT project without business engagement.

The "business" hates being told what to do.  Building a SharePoint site that presumes to guess at the real needs is great way to get an abandoned site.  "We never asked for it, so I don't see why we should use it just becuase IT says so" is usually the end result.  Likelihood of project death - 90-100%.

Migrate legacy file shares as is without any re-planning of information architecture and lifecycle

This is one of my favorites.  Usually, some senior person complains they can never find anything on the "H drive".  Since SharePoint offers a searchable web interface, it has to be better, right?  Sure - except if you just dump all that content in without thinking, all you get is a SharePoint site with top level folders called "bobtest". "newtest", "newtest 2", and  “sales1997”.  Same problem, in a new shiny package.  Likelihood of project death – 50%.

Deploy 100s of content types

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should, and without proper training, you will only confuse people, at least, until someone goes in and simplifies it.  SharePoint is powerful, often complex.  Entering at the pinnacle of complexity management is a surefire way to alienate early adopters.  We’ve seen this multiple times, and the result is almost always the same.  Likelihood of project death – 75%, (until someone new comes in to clean up the complexity.)

Do no marketing, training or launch events. 

This one is pretty simple – how do you define success?  If success equals a well-used site, then this virtually guarantees failure.  Simply sending around an email announcing tour new site doesn’t cut it.  People learn differently, and many folks need multiple “touches” before they feel comfortable.  Death rate – 75%

Keep the home page out of box, unbranded, and static.

This one is debatable.  If users have never seen SharePoint before, things will still look new to their eyes, so it may not be a showstopper.  It tends to be more of an issue when there is internal “competition” among different solutions to your intranet needs.  Also, initial projects may be constrained by experience and or/budget, so sometimes it’s a necessary tradeoff.  However, if nothing ever changes on the home page it’s hard to establish it as a useful destination.  Project failure rate – <25%

Assume that search will solve all data access questions.

This one seldom kills the project outright.  But “I can’t find anything” is one of the most common intranet complaints.  Keeping pages clean and free of navigation signposts, while expecting users to know what search terms will reveal recent, relevant information is asking way too much.  Project failure rate - <25%, buts can grow over time.

Too much, or too little governance.

We’ve seen implementations where multiple users establish multiple sites for same pools of data.  As a result, no one knows where they should go, search yields numerous incompatible results, navigation is inconsistent and performance is degraded.  On the other side, we’ve seen enterprises make it too hard to get started – in the interest of governance, they establish a 30 day waiting period, establish stringent pre-education requirements, and curtail functionality to the point that SharePoint is only a web-fronted file share – without versioned libraries, customization, apps, forms, data, blogs, wikis. 

Ugh.  Either way, you’re not balancing manageability and usability.  Project failure rate – about 50%.

OK, to sum up, here are some major things to avoid on your SharePoint intranet.  With a little planning, you should be able to avoid these, and your next project will be a success!  Good luck.

SharePoint Cardinal Sin	Project Death Rate
Exclude business stakeholders	90-100%
“As-is” migration of legacy file shares	50%
Too many content types	75%
No training or launch plan	75%
Unbranded, out of box home page	25%
Overreliance on search	25%
Governance mismatch	50%

Super Geeky LDAP-ADAM Configuration with SharePoint 2007

We were recently working on a client SharePoint farm that required an extranet authentication provider to link to an LDAP-oriented Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM) server.  For those of you keeping score, ADAM is a lightweight version of Active Directory dedicated to user authentication.

We began by extending the primary intranet application to a new top level URL, also on port 80, as part of the Internet zone.  .  This automatically adds the Alternate Access Mapping and creates the appropriate IIS Web Site.

 

Next we added the right configuration settings inside web.config for the primary site, the extended site, and Central Admin.  (All of these can be found by default at C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\virtualdirectorories).  The following setting go at very beginning of the systems.web node (e.g. immediately after the <system.web> tag.)   [Your server and userContainer tags will vary from this sample, fyi, but trust me, this is correct.]

 

<membership defaultProvider="ADAMMembership">

    <providers>

    <add name="ADAMMembership"

     type="Microsoft.Office.Server.Security.LDAPMembershipProvider, Microsoft.Office.Server, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71E9BCE111E9429C"

     server="SERVERNAME"

         port="389"

         useSSL="false"

         userDNAttribute="distinguishedName"

         userNameAttribute="cn"

         userContainer="OU=users,DC=[SAMPLE],DC=[SAMPLE],DC=com"

         userObjectClass="user"

         userFilter="(ObjectClass=user)"

         scope="Subtree"

         otherRequiredUserAttributes="sn,givenname,cn" />

        </providers>

   </membership>

 

 

 

Then we configured the Internet zone to use Forms authentication against the ADAMMembership provider.  And users still couldn’t login.

 So we checked again, and wanted to verify that the central admin and web pools had the right permissions to read from the ADAM server.    In ADSI Edit, we connected to the LDAP server  and switched from “Default  Naming Context” to “Configuration.  Next, ,we selected the "Roles" container and right-clicked the “Readers”.  Edit the Members  property and click Add Windows Account to verify which accounts can access the ADAM server.

And, like that, ADAM users can login to SharePoint. 

Microsoft TechEd 2010 Day 4 Recap

Hello from decidedly unsultry New England!  (Not in New Orleans anymore!)  Last Thursday was the final day of TechEd 2010, and we stayed right up to session-ing through the very end.  Followed, of course, by the closing party at Mardi Gras World. 

 

Previous posts in this series:

• Day 1 Recap
• Day 2 Recap
• Day 3 Recap
• SharePoint Adoption Strategies -- TechEd Session Recap

I promised to recap all four days, and although I’ll admit to a bit of conference fatigue by Day 4, let me summarize the highlights:

· Visual Studio 2010 makes the template generation for SharePoint 2010 development almost automatic.   VS2010 also comes with a code generation utility to speed the reference of entity classes, and allows deployment directly from the IDE.  SO when I say you can build a data presentation Web Part in 10 minutes – OK, maybe it’s really 12 – but still.

· Silverlight is also a great way to write data aware code for external data sources, such as Dynamics CRM.

· SharePoint Designer 2010 generates WSP-formatted workflows that can be imported to Visual Studio – however, it’s a one way trip – you can’t necessarily reimport the workflow back to SPD.

· Microsoft’s current business online offerings – BPOS -- offer services like SharePoint and SQL.  How do you get a cloud service to reflect your corporate secure identity – usually tie3e3d to Active Directory?  At present, most login integration is handled by a client Windows “tray” program that links your ID to your online ID.  This is expected to evolve over the 36 months:

o   Next, your online identity will be kept in sync with your AD identity using a Microsoft DirSync appliance – the client utility goes away.

o   The final stage if this evolution will use Active Directory federated identity services (ADFS) 2.0 along with the DirSync appliance to offer full two way trust and synchronization over secure services.

· SharePoint 2010 will soon be offered as a cloud hosted multi-tenant service.   One thing to expect is a lack of direct access to the file system.  This means to expect “sandboxed” solutions – no visual web parts or ASCX files, for example.  Setting the VS2010 output to “sandboxed” solution will trim the IDE IntelliSense” settings to help avoid developing unsupported code.

· Finally.  5pm Thursday.  Marc Russinovich, the original developer of the Sysinternals web site, ran a huge audience through troubleshooting techniques – mystery server reboots, failing SSRS reports, suddenly disconnected IE clients.  .  Mark is often the internal escalation pain of last resort inside Microsoft.  The best recommendation was to visit www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals and download the free Process Explorer, Process Monitor, and AutoRuns to expose extra performance details.  Want to change the color of the fables Blue Screen of Death?  Now, you can.

OK, back to Boston.  Go Red Sox, go Celtics, go Patriots (hey, training camp starts next month!)  Thanks for reading, and see you at TechEd 2011 in Atlanta!

Microsoft TechEd 2010 - Day 3 Recap

Hello from summer-like New Orleans!  Last night was filled with fantastic food, explorations of the French Quarter, and introductions to many of the leading figures of the SharePoint community.   We got to watch the founding meeting of the New Orleans SharePoint User Group, and were generously hosted at the Quest Software party on Bourbon Street.  Well-earned relaxation, I think, since we’re all so tired walking around the Ernest Morial Convention Center.  Here’s a picture – note – the building runs well beyond the bridge in the distance:

OK, on to yesterday’s highlights.  It was another heavy day of business intelligence sessions at TechEd.

PowerPivot

PowerPivot is Microsoft’s new tool, released as part of SQL Server 2008 R2, which allows fast, in-memory access to multimillion row data sets in Excel 2010 and SharePoint 2010.  The Excel client add in can be downloaded at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=155905 [requires Excel 2010].  Once installed, you can work with SharePoint hosted PowerPivot just by uploading the spreadsheet to a PowerPivot Gallery on SharePoint.

There’s a lot of subtlety to troubleshooting the Excel client – make sure the add-in is enabled; and disable spurious error messages by adding the following environment variable:

VSTO_suppressdisplayalerts = 0

There are other techniques, like opening up the local in memory Analysis Services cube backup file and attaching in to the AS PowerPivot instance on SharePoint 2010 to open up additional diagnostics.  A great resource for more tips is http://powerpivotgeek.com/

SharePoint Adoption

My own session on SharePoint adoption strategies.  [I had a lot of fun!]    

SharePoint 2010 Document Sets

Andrew Connell had a great presentation on document sets in SP2010.  If you don’t know, document sets allow you to define and work with a collection of documents with common properties and workflow.  For example, you might define a product portfolio to always include at least a product overview, sales presentation, and pricing spreadsheet.   Here’s one I built – notice that KMAProductAudience is a property of the set, and each element has individual properties.

Equally valuable was the overview of using Visual Studio 2010 templates, which are much more SharePoint friendly than ever before.  There’s a compelling case for using declarative features to define custom columns, pages, etc. because the difficulty is greatly reduced – if it takes only 15 minutes to define a site column definition as a deployable feature across the farm, it makes maintenance late much easier.  Great session all around.

Project Dallas

Forget TechEd 2011 in Atlanta or SPC2011 in California – the future is in Dallas.  “Dallas” is the codename for Microsoft’s ambitious project to host public reference datasets on Azure – on a public domain and or subscription basis.  In their architecture, all the datasets are directly referenceable for download, browser view, access from PowerPivot in Excel and/or SharePoint.  Also, you can easily code .NET solutions to them using OData since they’re also URI addressable as WCF endpoints.

Enough geek speak – just visit at http://www.sqlazureservices.com.  For example, here’s recent information on global ice cream production from the UN on “Dallas”.

PerformancePoint Dashboards

Performance Point Dashboards are really simple, once you get started.  I sat in on a great walkthrough to create a live dashboard of twitter sentiment.  We used the following steps:

· Build a PowerPivot Excel chart to pull in data from AS cube – see a similar screen shot – and upload to SharePoint.

· Build a SQL Reporting Services (SSRS) report – use URL argument “rs:ClearSession=true” to avoid caching real-time data.

· Use Dashboard Designer to integrate the elements into a single web part page

· Add auto refresh filters to keep data real-time.

That’s all for now – onward through Day 4 and tonight’s closing party.   See you all when I’m back in Boston!

SharePoint Adoption Strategies - Microsoft TechEd 2010

Wow.  This week I was honored to be able to present a session at Microsoft TechEd on SharePoint Adoption Strategies.  It was great to meet dozens and dozens of you who are so passionate about SharePoint’s strengths and weaknesses as you work to drive many diverse global SharePoint implementations.  As promised, here’s my recap of the session – please feel free to add your comments etc. if you want to continue the dialog online.

Before I continue, thanks to several people.  First, thanks to Microsoft, INETA, and GITCA for sponsoring this session, especially Russell from GITCA, our in room facilitator.  Second, thanks to KMA for sponsoring my trip here.  Finally, a special thanks to my colleague Sadalit van Buren for generously sharing her notes, observations and time while I prepared this session.   [Read Sadie’s blog for more insight!]

GITCA is a huge advocate for local user groups.  We encourage folks to seek out their local communities, either via local “SPUG”’s [SharePoint User Groups] or SharePoint Saturday, which sponsors free periodic regional conferences and seminars.

First off, we had a pretty diverse crowd – attendees spanned from southern Louisiana to the other side of the world, and a good n=mix of developers, IT pros and business users. 

SharePoint 2010 can be compared to a functional “firehose”, having grown from a simple tool for team documents and dashboards in 2001, to the rich multifunctional environment of SharePoint 2010.  (BI!  Workflow!  Social computing! Data integration!  Etc.) And if you can’t push on a rope, as they say, you really can’t push a firehose – users need to pull it in.  Attendees passionately shared their stories about the major intrinsic enablers and roadblocks to SharePoint adoption.

 

Enablers/Indicators

Roadblocks

· Long uptimes · Business users perceive value · No complaints, no help desk tickets, happy users · Measurable ROI (e.g. online collaboration reduces travel costs · Speed to Market – Rapid development and deployment of user-orrented solutions

· Speed to market – boil the ocean approach to solving too many problems · Over governance (e.g. too hard to get sites) · Maintenance (hard to tune performance) · No Top down buy-in from management · Docents duplicated in file systems and multiple sites - redundancy of content – lack of operational governance and user guidance · Too many docs "Field of dreams" build it mentality – if you build it they will come.

 

Furthermore, we had a good discussion about the importance of responsive, qualitative system performance for users to sustain enthusiasm.

Next was a run-through of tools and techniques people have used to help spur adoption – many of these suggested or used by attendees.  I’ve grouped them by general areas, in no particular order:

Offer unique applications and solutions

· Lunch Application – as noted before, several KMA clients use lunch or catering order application on SharePoint.  Users seem to really emotionally bond to these solutions – it’s fun & essential and replaces slower, manual processes.

· Dynamic Content on Home Page – Offering a fresh cycle of new information on the home page is thought to be equally or more important to clean attractive design.

· Birthday List – another example of fun, unique and essential information that bonds users with the site

Assessment

· Survey – use SharePoint surveys to measure success and determine future directions

Training

· Lunch and Learn – widely used technique to attract people to events desgined to foster usage-oriented learning.

· Formal Training – multiple opinions exist.  Internal training is seen as being more tailored to particular corporate needs; external trainers are often more available and easier to schedule.

Marketing

· Branding/Naming – In particular when companies are launching or relaunching a SharePoint based project, it helps to brand the project with the name of the site (e.g. “I’m using MyCompany” instead of “I’m using “SharePoint”.

· Marketing & Segmentation – it’s important to understand that the adoption message needs to be distinguished not only for different groups of business users (power users/casual users) but also different IT constituents (developers/server teams/analysts & PMs)

Project Design

· Departmental Approach – build success at a lower level first before tackling enterprise wide adoption

· Steering Committee (Cross-Functional) – it helps when the project is accountable to a frequently meeting team of empowered business stakeholders drawn from multiple departments, not just IT and HR.

· Move Fast – quick early successes count more than long, late successes

Support

· SharePoint -> SharePoint – use a SharePoint site itself to supply support to users

· Prepare Support Teams – make sure Help Desks and customization teams are available and trained in advance to minimize the risk of failing to meet rising expectations.

· Self Service Support/Communities – some companies reports tremendous success using discussions, blogs, and wikis to help users help each other

· Team Leaders Support/Decentralized – Another approach is to decentralize support to power users or team captains in each logical group of users

· Tech Sheets – Quick one page tips or FAQs can be written and distributed to users and helps desk via email, web sites, print distribution or knowledge bases.

Miscellaneous

· SLAs – some companies offer internal discounts or higher service levels for divisions that move to SharePoint away from more costly legacy technology

· Home Page – If the home page is enough of a gateway to needed information, some enterprises lock in the SharePoint intranet as their home page.  Performance and site design can become more critical is you’re forcing users to the site.

· Mandate – In some companies, adoption is as simple as corporate policy or tying individual compensation/reviews to usage.

· Viral Communications/Social Communities – hard to plan, but very effective if you can use it, especially if SharePoint based

Launch Events

Many users schedule a “big event” (usually a breakfast event in the morning, sometimes a lunch, rarely an evening happy hour) the day the site “launches”.  In conjunction, these events often offer:

· Training

· Contests and prizes, often with a scavenger hunt

· Public awards

· Giveaways – branded coffee cups, mouse pads or wallet cards with tips and helpful information

My closing thoughts for the session:

· Consider a multi-generational audience – different generations adopt technology differently.   Different ages have different comfort levels with web technology (corporate sites vs. social networking) and platforms (PC or laptop or smartphone)

· Also, remember that global audience can also be distinguished not only by different preferences for platforms or tools, but even bandwidth and site performance expectations.

Thanks again, everyone!

Microsoft TechEd 2010 Day 2 Recap

Hello from steamy New Orleans!  More good food and more good details from this year’s premiere Microsoft technical conference.

Some picked up tidbits from around the sessions and the show floor:

Business intelligence and TSM integration are expected to be major areas where developers and integrators can add value in Project Server 2010, according to Christophe Fiessenger (Microsoft Product Manager for EPM).  In particular, user demand for integration with Team Foundation Server is also high.  Team Foundation Server allows a software development team to manage its code process for requests, user scenarios, builds, sprints, etc. – and, in concept, integrate their progress with an enterprise managed project on Project Server.

I thought it was really interesting that the line of business data (BizTalk) people were heavily touting SharePoint 2010 Business Connectivity Services as a preferred way to open up Oracle data to end users.

Steve Fox, Microsoft Platform Evangelist, ran a great session on integrating SharePoint and Windows Azure.  (Details here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/steve_fox/archive/2010/06/09/sharepoint-2010-amp-windows-azure-how-they-play-together.aspx)  There are three general ways, in increasing complexity order:

· Iframe (Content Editor Web Part).  Easiest, no code, but visually not well nitrated – the look and feel doesn’t match

· Use BCS to republish data from Azure into SharePoint

· Use a web part or Silverlight control or BCS to reach out to a custom, SharePoint aware data service in the cloud

Interested in simple business intelligence?  Teach your users to use Excel 2010, with or without PowerPivot.  It’s real simple to use slicers, Pivot Tables and Excel Services to build a simple web dashboard for data analysis – here’s one I pulled together in 10 minutes during the session, showing page views on my blog – discovering that Tuesday is my readers’ busiest day.  You can do even more with JSOM in the Excel file, and then using the REST syntax to extract essential elements of the sheet, such as charts.

Finally, I sat in on Joel Oleson’s presentation of extending the enterprise reach of SharePoint 2010 Shared Services applications – using centralized farms for common services like User Profile or Managed Metadata.  It’s important to understand the pros and cons of centralizing search – in some cases, you can construct a better performing model using federated search if you would have a lot of crawling across WAN connections.  In addition, although many folks think of a centralized approach to publishing service apps, in many cases farms might swap services as peers, based on operational topologies.

A lot to cover!  Off to my own session on SharePoint Adoption strategies! 

Microsoft TechEd 2010 Day 1 Recap

Hello from sultry New Orleans! TechEd is big this year – over 11,000 attendees.  And this city is surging with energy in multiple neighborhoods – the caffeine rush at Café du Monde, the candlelight fortune tellers at Jackson Square, Bourbon Street revelry. 

The same could be said for TechEd – no single huge announcement, but many new developments across the board.  Microsoft has released new version of Office, SharePoint, SQL and Visual Studio in the past two months…here are some highlights:

Keynote Address

Bob Muglia led a cavalcade of Microsoft management to present news from across its offerings, including:

· The release of .NET Framework 4.0\

· The July 2010 beta release of SP1 for Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2

· Cloud deployments – Azure – are here now, with new support for goodies like remote debugging, secure cloud access to on premise systems, direct deployment from Visual Studio 2010 to the cloud and .NET 4.0 supports.

· SharePoint integration for the forthcoming Communications Server “14” – mainly, using SharePoint for photos, expertise, micro blogging

· Some fantastic scenarios for real-time document collaboration and annotation against SharePoint 2010 document libraries with Windows Phone 7

· Expansion of “Project Dallas” public cloud data sets as addition sources for Azure-based business intelligence using Power Pivot for Excel and SharePoint

That’s a lot, already.  Here are a few picked up tidbits from other sessions:

· Jason Zander announced the release of Visual Studio Power Tools for SharePoint later in June 2010, as well as the immediate release of Expression 4.  I saw some fantastic demos of rapid Silverlight UI prototyping using Expression Sketchflow.

· The next release of SQL Server “11” will include new functions to assess data quality. BI is becoming pervasive across the board – from simpler Excel sources all the way through IT-owned master data.

· Azure and the cloud are here now, with   thousands of applications already developed and hosted there.     I’m presently getting started on a new Azure app myself.  You can get started on your end by reviewing the downloadable code labs at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=413E88F8-5966-4A83-B309-53B7B77EDF78&displaylang=en . These were updated yesterday to support all the new Azure 1.2/.NET 4.0 related enhancements.  And remember, when you’re reviewing your online applications – billing status is color coded:

o   “Gray you’re OK, blue bill is due.”

Master Data Manager

This one is more than a bullet.  John McAllister led a great review of the Master Data Manager in SQL Server 2008 R2.   Essentially, you can define a master hierarchy of centralized data, such as corporate locations.  Think of these as the “nouns” of your business.   MDM can track imports and updates to its core data via SSIS batches, with full support for data forensics to help determine how a value came to be in the hierarchy.  The MDM model also allows you define security down to the single attribute level – for example, Bob can edit all cities that are part of the East Region, Michelle can only pick among two possible values for building type on the West Coast, etc.  In addition, MDM can trigger notification workflows and SharePoint workflows when values change – for example, if a corporate office address changes you should invalidate its square footage, etc.

Two major thoughts about MDM.  First, obviously, it’s an essential enabler for centralizing business intelligence since it should help define and maintain the key dimensions of your corporate data.  It doesn’t (yet!) provide a simple way to publish only “changes” to subscribing downstream systems, since the thought is that the data sets should be succinct and less dynamic.  (Not sure I agree!)

The second – personal bias – it would be great to see these features make their way into the Managed Metadata Service Application in SharePoint 2010.

Thanks again!  Stay tuned for more updates.

Speaking this week at Microsoft TechEd 2010

I wanted to let everyone know I’ll be attending Microsoft’s TechEd 2010 in New Orleans this week.  I’ll be posting regular updates from the show floor throughout the week.  In addition to usual coverage of SharePoint, I’ll also be covering Azure, SQL Server 2008 R2, PowerPivot, Dallas, Silverlight, and Microsoft’s evolving business intelligence platforms.

In addition, I’m presenting a session on “SharePoint Adoption Strategies – Drinking from the Firehose” on Wednesday, June 9 at 9:45am.  If you’re in town, I hope to see you there!

Other upcoming sessions:

· June 23, 2010 - Managed Metadata in SharePoint 2010 – Webinar at http://www.kma-llc.net

· July 31, 2010 – Managed Metadata – Live Presentation at SharePoint Saturday New York