SharePoint: Review 2009

2009 was a good year for the SharePoint community! with many interesting things happening. Here my overview:

1. SharePoint Conferences and events. From the cool SharePint to the SharePoint conferences, I think this focused and specialized events are the result of a vibrant community of open minded experts. 2009 opened the door to a new set of opportunities for better events. I have participated organizing the SharePoint Conference in Slovenia and I have in plans to participate in as many conferences and events during the 2010! The experience here was great!
2. SharePoint Community. Somehow SharePoint became a sample of a global community. Sharepoint professionals from all different kind of backgrounds (Enterprise or SME) and with a wide range of expertise (Web design.... development) came together to transform their careers in a super interesting opportunity for expanding their knowledge and experience by sharing information. Something I can't remember happening with such energy in the past.
3. SharePoint as an opportunity for all. During 2009 I have heard all kind of cases related to SharePoint. From big organizations using SharePoint as a way to publish information to the Web as small schools or organizations using SharePoint for sharing documents and information privately. From 500$ projects to millions! SharePoint and the huge base of partners are preparing themselves for offering solutions to many different segments of the market.
4. Global SharePoint. I just came from a trip to Peru and I discovered that the community of SharePoint partners is growing fast! Most Banks are already working with SharePoint and some Ministries as well. South America is present in the community and hungry for expertise.

I believe the 2010 will come with a consolidation of the community and some kind of coordinated set of events. At least that is my wish.

What I'm thinking to do:

1. Transform the "SharePoint Days" event in an open source model for all the community to use for their events. Do you want to make an event? well SharePoint Days should provide you with all what you need.
2. Coordinate with all possible SharePoint experts and Sponsors to build a group available for global events. For example: Someone in Asia would like to organize a conference, then he would contact the group and from there easily would get in touch with interested sponsors and speakers.

Of course, feel free to contact me and send me your ideas and comments!

My Facebook profile: http://www.facebook.com/b4contact

Follow me in Twitter: http://twitter.com/joseamorales

JQuery library for SharePoint

yesterday was a marathon for SharePoint. It was the opening day of the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas. Twitter was busy busy and one of the interesting posts was about an open source project that makes JQuery friendly with SharePoint, that is great news!

Here the link: http://spservices.codeplex.com/

Partner Program for SharePoint Simple CMS

I just finished making a short video about what the SharePoint Simple CMS provides to partners. I hope it is easy to understand.. my English is far from perfect :)

SharePoint Simple CMS Partnership Program from Jose Antonio Morales on Vimeo.

Steve Smith : Scalling out a SharePoint farm and configuring network load balancing on the web servers

Steve Smith full video session during the SharePoint Conference in Slovenia (2008).
A great session every SharePoint Pro needs to see!

Scalling out a SharePoint farm and configuring network load balancing on the web servers from Matjaz Korenjak on Vimeo.

Visit Steve's Web site at: http://www.combined-knowledge.com/

How to Share backups of SharePoint SItes with your customers?

We are runing periodical backups using STSADM.exe. To do it we use a batch file that incldues all the instructions we need to: run the backup and specify the storage location.
The backups we use are "name.dat" and that extension is not supported by default by IIS. That means that a user would not be able to download it.

Why would I need a user to download the .dat file? Because that user is a customer and providing them with a copy of her/his site backup is a good way to decrease risk in case of emergency.

The first idea would be to share within his own SharePoint site a folder where to store the backups. But that is not a good idea because otherwise the next backup will make a backup of the site plus all the backup files inside... and end with a huge file size. It would also overcrowd the SQL Server unnecessarily.

My second idea is I think better, I made an IIS Web site, without SharePoint, and created all the folders (virtual directories from IIS) needed for each one of my customers to have a URL, something like backup.xxx.com/customer/ I made the right permissions of course so only their administrator could access that. Wel having tens of customers is a problem for permissions... (maybe there is a good way to automate the process).

The customer folders are set to let "browse" and "read". That makes the files within the folder visible and downloadable. Now the problem is that IIS does not support ".dat" files by default for security reasons. What you need to do to solve the problem is to create a MIME type:

Associated Extension: .dat
Content Type(MIME): application/octet-stream
Check the instructions.

Now we have a new service to include in our hosting service!

SharePoint Simple CMS Partners in the World

View B4Contact and SharePoint Simple CMS Partners in a larger map

First list of speakers for SharePoint Conference in Slovenia

I'm happy to share with you the first list of SharePoint experts that will speak on the Slovenian SharePoint Conference that will take place on November 27:

Claudio Brotto, MVP, Italy
Zlatan Džinič, MVP, South Africa
Toni Frankola, Croatia
Michael Gannotti, US
Daniel McPherson, Netherlands
Agnes Molnar, MVP, Hungary
Sarju Raja, US
Steve Smith, MVP, UK
Andrew Woodward, MVP, UK

Feel free to join the FaceBook group of the conference by clicking here.

Or visit the conference's Web site: www.sharepointconference.si

The strategy on the back of SharePoint Simple CMS (Part 1)

When I'm talking about the SharePoint Simple CMS something that captures the attention is how we defined our product.

In this article I will also publish information about what we are finding out and what are we planning to do with our product.

1. Trying to modify the out of the Box Sharepoint is senseless. At least from the perspective of adopting new future versions of SharePoint. Any deep modification on the current SharePoint would be expensive when a migration to a new version would take place.
2. SharePoint by itself presents many limitations when thinking on Web design. Isn't it better to start with a blank canvas? Masterpages are synonym of freedom!
3. Many users doesn't care if they use SharePoint or whatever else... the important thing is that can be "used" and serves its purpose. That means that the interface is important.

Then we thought: "We need to make an easy to use CMS that limits advanced functionality to editors, that can look great and be compliant with standards, that doesn't touch any our of the box SharePoint page and of course that uses independent custom master pages". Therefore we made the SharePoint Simple CMS.

It is great because it lets users to have good looking public facing Web sites and edit them with ease. The SharePoint Simple CMS is delivered as a STP file and it is compatible with WSS and MOSS. Having a STP file out f a Web site is great! because you can create as many sites as you wish using that template.

After a year we havediscovered some things that need to be improved:

1. The code should be simplified and optimized.
2. We should include more code on the "server side" instead of the "Client side".
3. We need to include more capabilities to customize the layout of the pages.

So.. how are we thinking to cover the challenges? we are building a community of partners that can use SharePoint Simple CMS and build solutions on top of it.

Embed videos in SharePoint

Do you need to embed videos within your SharePoint Site?
Well, I'm proud to day that Boris, B4Contact's SharePoint Guru, made it possible. (I mentioned that before)
But this time he achieved something special: A very involved SharePoint guy.. noticed it and he prepared a full video dedicated to him:


Video: Extended Rich Text Editor for SharePoint

Visit Boris Blog.

SharePoint Simple CMS 3

If you are editing your Web site, you can make mistakes. Deleting contents is something that worries the most. Check this video to learn how to solve that problem for your SharePoint Simple CMS site:

Video 2: SharePoint Simple CMS

The power of having a Web Site ready in a couple of minutes is something the SharePoint Simple CMS knows to do. It is a good sample of using SharePoint technologies to make our work easier.

Video 1: SharePoint Simple CMS

The SharePoint Simple CMS is a new product developed to enhance Windows SharePoint Services and Office SharePoint Server web sites. It is a CMS because it helps users to edit their contents.
How can you use it? Well there are many ways...

1. It lets you to have the Web design that you wish.
2. It lets you use Web design templates: www.pixelmill.com
3. Can be used within enterprises as departmental web sites or even internal Blogs or even team collaboration sites. The difference is that this sites look great!
4. For SMB or SME this is the right solution for easy to edit, browser editable, rights managed Web sites.
5. For Schools... there is a special template designed for schools.
6. Are you applying to Grants or Tenders? this can be a great way of having a site for your project.

It is not expensive.
Would you like to develop on top of SharePoint Simple CMS? just contact me.

Problems opening and editing Excel files from SharePoint? (Windows Vista?)

When using Windows Vista there is a special annoyance when working with files stored on a SharePoint 3 document library. I just lost one hour finding a solution and I would like to share it with all of you cursing Windows Vista.

The symptom is: all the files are opened in "read only" mode, therefore is not possible to edit the files and saving them on the same document. Excel pushes you to save it locally, and that is certainly terrible because then you have to upload the files to the SharePoint complicating the work and of course multiplying the chances of overwriting the wrong version of the same document.

What you need to do is to "Check out" the document. Then you can work as you did with Windows XP.

Then there are some other interesting ways of working with that system of checking in out. But that will be covered in a future post.

Web designers Sharing Point

If you are a web designer or you know some person that runs a business related to Web design then my Blog "Web Designers Sharing Point" can be interesting.

Actually the main idea of that Blog is to start creating a community of professional designers interested in advertising their work and complement it with our experience with SharePoint and our own CMS.

We are looking for the sinergy between B4Contact's team and professionals of Web design. We have customers that need their work and we could add CMS functionality to their designs also improving their business. I think it is a win to win offer.

We are interested in supporting the open source community and we are willing to finance the creation of free CSS templates.

Like a sign of our interest in that community we are offering free hosting for the web site of the designers. Like that we presume that we can be saving some money to freelancers and professionals.

SharePoint Learning Kit

B4Contact, my company, is involved in the world of e-learning. But we are alos working strongly with a technology called Sharepoint that helps organizations to create collaboration web sites and portals.
Now is available for download the SharePoint Learning Kit that is exactly the way to use SharePoint technologies and E-learning contents. Lear more visiting the web site of Codeplex.

WSS - Changing the "administrator" username and password

Today we received the call from one of our customers because for some reason their Windows SharePoint Services web site and intranet stopped working. Some days ago they were making some work with Exchange so the first thought was that Exchange could be causing some problem.
After checking from close the server logs I discovered that some errors were pointing some kind of authorization problems. So something changed with the authentication.
IIS was working without showing errors and the web sites looked working... but the browser was showing an error. Then I went checking the Application Pools inside of the same IIS and I discovered that the application pools of each one of the sites were disabled. Inside of their properties in the tab "identity" I found that the user name and password were not updated. The solution was to select a network service like authorized user. Then like art of magic... the web sites apeared online again!

Windows SharePoint Services 3

WSS 3 is a great application but I have to say that the upgrade from the WSS3 technical refresh version to the RTM was very painful.
2 important web sites where running on the WSS TR before the upgrade and after it... were not working anymore. It took me many hours to solve the problem. So after all that I think I'm able to give some recommendations for any kind of upgrade to WSS.

1. If you are running WSS3 TR make a backup of the complete server farm using the SharePoint 3 Central Addministration site. Go to the Operations section and find the "perform backup" option.
2. Check that the backup was finsihed without errors.
3. Make a copy of all the content databases of your WSS sites and include also the log files related to them. Locate the copies in a different folder.
4. Using the SharePoint Designer (Latest version) make a backup of each one of your sites.
5. Install the WSS 3 RTM. If you are lucky all will go fine... If you have the same problem than me... you will find that you have any of your sites listed within the Web Applications list. If that's the case you will need to create a web application per each web site you had before. Then you will need to remove the content database of each one, restart the IIS and use the STSADMIN.EXE to add the old content databases. You must use the STSADMIN because it converts the databases to what WSS3 needs.

If all fails... you have the back ups and you can contact me using this post. Good luck!