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Ali Sanaei's SharePoint Blog

26/02/2009

Adventure Works SharePoint Site + Free SharePoint Designer

Here's two quick posts merged into one!

1. Adventure Works SharePount Site:

Just returned from the SharePoint User Group UK meeting. I caught up with Ben Robb and Nick Swan and asked them when the Adventure Works SharePoint site will be available to the public; the answer is three weeks from now [say mid to end of
March 2009].

The Adventure Works SharePoint site will be available in three formats on MSDN.

       1- As a virtual machine.
       2- Installation file, both EXE and MSI.
       3- Source code.

The project has been almost finished since July 2008 and has been stuck at some stages. It is now in its final legal process.

Good news is that everyone is free to use this great work or part of its solution anywhere they want to, say for themsleves or their clients.

If you are interested to see how it looks, I included a couple of screenshots in my post here.

2. SharePoint Designer for free:

Also while sitting at Microsoft offices today in front of 4 other MVPs; they just said that SharePoint Designer will be available free from April. More to be announced very soon by MS.

You probably already know that PerformancePoint will also be part of MOSS Enterprise from April.

Ali Sanaei

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Posted at 23:30 by Ali Sanaei | Category: Microsoft; MOSS; SharePoint; SUGUK | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

15/12/2008

Adventure-Works.com SharePoint Website - Screenshots

Just watched the recorded MSDN Webcast: SharePoint Products and Technologies for Internet Site Development: Getting Started. They demonstrated Adventure-Works.com SharePoint site. I get excited each time I see this! First time was in London's SUGUK meeting about two weeks ago when I posted a screenshot here a day after the meeting. Today while the webcast was running I took two more screenshots.

Apparently the website's virtual machine and source code will be provided. There quite a few codeplex projects deployed on the site but they have tried to keep things as much out of the box as possible! Which is really important in my opinion.

Ali Sanaei

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Posted at 14:37 by Ali Sanaei | Category: Microsoft; SharePoint; MOSS | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

03/12/2008

Doesn't Microsoft Know How to Spell Its Own Product?!

Does this annoy you as well, or it's just me?!

Ali Sanaei

Posted at 00:10 by Ali Sanaei | Category: Best Practice; Seach and Indexing; SharePoint; Microsoft | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (4)

26/11/2008

Best Practices SharePoint Conference Coming to London + Adventure-Works.com SharePoint Site Coming Soon!

Last night at Microsoft's Cardinal Place in London, SUGUK's last meeting in 2008 took place. Ben Robb gave a presentation on SharePoint's search capabilities and how to customise and optimise it. A generic one-hour session on the topic, but very informative. Second session was done by Rickard Lofberg on lessons learned deploying SharePoint at Credit Suisse. I found it quite practical and interesting. I guess the presentation slides will be available soon.

Two good news was announced last night:

1- For those planning to go to the States for the Best Practices SharePoint Conference; they don't need to anymore! Those guys will be coming to London and the same conference will happen here :) The unofficial date mentioned last night was around 6th April 2009.

2- Next good news is that Microsoft and partners are doing a excellent SharePoint demo site for Adventure Works. Below is a screenshot I managed to take with my phone. But apparently the website's VM and Source Code will be provided soon :) It had nice branding and looked really good, more importantly it had many out of the box and codeplex features on it which impressed all and made people ask about it.

Ali Sanaei

Posted at 09:22 by Ali Sanaei | Category: Seach and Indexing; SharePoint; Best Practice; SUGUK | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (1)

23/11/2008

How to publish blog posts to SharePoint using Office Word 2007

Few minutes ago I was writing a post on what needs to be done by a client in terms of server preparation before a SharePoint techy goes on site to Install MOSS. Then I thought to give Word a try on blogging this post. After setting up my account I realised how easy it is and changed my mind on the topic and am now going to show how to blog on a SharePoint blog site using Microsoft Office Word 2007.

It really takes a minute or two!

Open your Office Word 2007.
Click on Office button, hover on Publish, then click on Blog.
If it is your first using this feature in Word, the New Blog Account window will pop up. Click on the drop-down menu and select SharePoint blog and click on Next. As you see Windows Live Spaces, Blogger (Google's BlogSpot), TypePad and WordPress are available as well, with the option to blog on other spaces.
Then a small window will ask for your blog URI. Enter the URI and click on OK.

After processing the address and your username password details, Word will give you this message:
In my case Word automatically picked the correct Picture Options. If you want to change the picture library location (e.g. server or folder) or double-check the current settings, click on Manage Accounts on the top ribbon.

Select your account and click on Change.

Click on Picture Options.

Click on the drop-down menu and select My own server.

Then it will show you the current picture upload and source URLs. Here you can give it a different URL and click on OK.
You can also select categories for your post or add to the existing ones. To do so, click on Insert Category on the top ribbon:

This will give you the option to choose a category from a drop-down or type a new one.
Type the post's topic where it says Enter Post Title Here, and type the post's body text (and images) under the line.
Once you type your post, click on Publish located on the top ribbon.

Or click on Publish as Draft if you want to do so.
Now Word should give you a message informing you that the post has been published to the blog.
You should now have your post published on your blog.

Ali Sanaei

(You can automatically receive my blog posts by subscribing to this RSS feed.)

Posted at 23:48 by Ali Sanaei | Category: Blog; Training; How-to; SharePoint | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (3)

16/11/2008

SharePoint vs Documentum and How They Integrate

In October 2006 Microsoft and EMC announced a new enterprise content management alliance to enable organisations to become people-ready with their compliance, regulatory and other critical business data (press release).

EMC has two products for Microsoft SharePoint:

- Archive Services for SharePoint: Allow users to archive content to Documentum.

- Content Services for SharePoint: Complete front-end for document management, using SharePoint’s interface.

SharePoint and Documentum technical comparison:

- Platform:

o SharePoint: Windows, SQL, .Net

o Documentum: Unix/Linux, Oracle, and Windows.

- Storage:

o SharePoint: SQL

o Documentum: SQL, Oracle, file system

- Office integration:

o SharePoint: full integration with SharePoint.

o Documentum: Light integration using Webtop application connector.

- Other applications integration:

o SharePoint: Possible, but not out of the box.

o Documentum: Partially, as it does with Office.

- Working offline:

o SharePoint: gives variety of mechanisms, i.e. Outlook and Groove.

o Documentum: Requires Documentum Desktop application.

- Rights Management:

o SharePoint: natively supported in Office.

o Documentum: Requires Information Rights Manager application.

- Security Model:

o SharePoint: Extensive permission levels with the ability to create customised groups.

o Documentum: More extensive permissions for allowing users perform specific functions.

- Repository:

o SharePoint: Internal content, external content (i.e. file systems) needs custom code.

o Documentum: Internal content and file systems.

Documentum is a document management system (or better say EMC) only and does not have SharePoint’s collaboration, business intelligence (i.e. KPI and BDC), business forms/workflows, enterprise search and portal functionalities.

Many of Documentum's features (i.e. archiving in seperate environment) can be achieved by a bit of custom coding or even advanced workflows using SPD.

Organisations need to consider what their content management requirements are and wisely choose between SharePoint and Documentum, or integrate both if their budget allows them.

Based on a recent Gartner report published this September, Microsoft has driven the most change in the ECM market overt the past 18 months with WSS and MOSS. In the magic quadrant for ECM, Microsoft is in the top right quarter with IBM, EMC, Open Text and Oracle, but is leading in "completeness of vison" amongst all these vendors. And this is only for its content management.

Ali Sanaei

(You can automatically receive my blog posts by subscribing to this RSS feed.)

Posted at 01:52 by Ali Sanaei | Category: SharePoint; MOSS; DMS; EMS; CMS | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (3)

First post

This is my first post.

I am going to write mainly about SharePoint and other IT topics in this blog. I will change the site's look and feel and add some more lists and information as we go.

You can follow my posts by coming back to the site or its RSS feed.

Ali Sanaei

Posted at 01:20 by Ali Sanaei | Category: Blog | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

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