Announcing Exchange Active Sync Support for Hotmail E-Mail, Calendars, and Contacts

The Windows Live Blog just announced exchange support for Hotmail E-mail, Calendars, and Contacts. Check out the announcement at http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archive/2010/08/30/hotmail-now-supports-push-email-calendar-and-contacts-with-exchange-activesync.aspx

Office 2010 Web Apps on Facebook

By now you’ve probably heard the news that the Office 2010 Web Apps are available for all Windows Live Customers, essentially anybody with a Windows Live or Passport ID. If you haven’t heard, logon at http://www.live.com  and check out the “Office Link” in the top menu or go directly to http://office.live.com. 
 

Click here for the original announcement.

What you probably haven’t heard, is that the Office 2010 Web Apps are also available in Facebook via the “Docs” application; from where you can easily create, upload, and share your MS Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) with your friends, or everyone for that matter.

You can even designate your friends as editors, and collaborate on documents, worksheets, or presentations. Once you are done, you can easily post it to your wall and share with everyone. All via your Web Browser.

I’ve uploaded several presentations to “My Facebook Docs” for you to check out (you must be logged in to Facebook).

Consumer Reports recommends against buying iPhone 4

Consumer Reports arrived at this conclusion after testing three devices purchased at three different retailers, and testing them in a controlled environment. Their findings call into question the recent claim by Apple that the iPhone 4′s signal-strength issues were largely an optical illusion caused by faulty software that “mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength.

Check out the posting at:

http://blogs.consumerreports.org/electronics/2010/07/apple-iphone-4-antenna-issue-iphone4-problems-dropped-calls-lab-test-confirmed-problem-issues-signal-strength-att-network-gsm.html

BCS External List Error – Unable to Display this Web Part; Target Application Not Found.

There is a good chance you’ll run into this error now and again when working with BCS Business Connectivity Services and External Lists:

Unable to display this Web Part. To troubleshoot the problem, open this Web page in a Microsoft SharePoint Foundation-compatible HTML editor such as Microsoft SharePoint Designer. If the problem persists, contact your Web server administrator.

Correlation ID:{correlation GUID}

If after looking for the Correlation ID in your logs you find the following error:

The Microsoft Secure Store Service application Secure Store Service failed to retrieve credentials. The error returned was ‘Target application not found (application id: {SecuredStoreApplicationID}).’

It may be an indication that you’ve not established an association between the Secured Store Service Application and your Web Application.

To check your associations go to Central Administration > Application Management and click on “Manage Service Application Associations”

Look in the “Applications Proxies” Column for your Secured Store Service Application

Keep in mind that you may have configured more than one Secure Store Service Application, and even if one is listed, it may be the wrong one; in which case you’ll need to change the association. You can change the association by changing the default Application Proxy Group, (clicking on the “default” link,) but beware that this would change it for all of the default associations. Alternatively you could create custom associations for your Web Application. But the better alternative (if a “default” Secured Store has already been established) might just be to re-create the Target Application in the “default” Secured Store.

SharePoint 2010 BCS – SharePoint Tech Dive Today at CTREC Hilton

Join us this afternoon March 16th at 6:30 at the C-TREC HILTON IT Academy, where we’ll discuss Business Connectivity Services and the Secured Store Service in SharePoint 2010. Go to http://www.sptechdives.com/ for more information.

Step by Step Video: SharePoint 2010 External Content Type (and List) with SPD and BCS

I just finished uploading a step by step video on how to create a SharePoint 2010 External Content Type (and list) using SharePoint Designer and Business Connectivity Services. The volume is a bit low, so you’ll likely need to raise it, although it sounded fine with headphones. If you find it too difficult to hear, let me know and I’ll re-record.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=9509918&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1

The Evolution of the SharePoint Professional

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how SharePoint 2010 is reshaping the future and the impact it will have on those of us who’ve been implementing and developing for SharePoint over the last several years. I look forward to dedicating a bit more time to this subject in a future post. The following is just a brief abstract of my thoughts regarding one of the areas that I feel will be affected the most, our roles.

MS has been making a lot of distinct references between what they call IT Pros (I’m not sure I agree with this term) and Developers in most of their SharePoint 2010 sites, presentations, and documentation. We’ve experienced the logical evolution of these 2 roles for several years, but for many of us, the line has remained somewhat gray. I suspect this to drastically change in the near future, and most who haven’t chosen to specialize in a specific track really need to start thinking about choosing a side, or risk getting overshadowed by experts coming from either direction. Of course regardless of what track you choose, you should dedicate time to learn at least the fundamentals of the other.

I suspect SharePoint will continue evolving to become the de facto web operating platform for companies and corporations world wide. If you think of the role Windows plays for each of the users in your company, and then think of your users as a collective; it shouldn’t be too difficult to visualize SharePoint as your companies OS on the web. Now consider the teams and roles that take part in managing, developing, and supporting Windows, along with all of the applications it runs in your company or corporation. How many all around experts are there. The division is not just technical in nature, there are several business aspects to it as well…ever heard the term “Segregation of Duties”. Suddenly “IT Pros” and “Developers” may not even seem like enough roles.

Upgrading 2007 WCM sites to 2010 WCM – SPC 2009 Session Highlights

I have to say that the 2007 to 2010 upgrade path for WCM sites looks very promising. During this session Andrew Connell demoed upgrading a site with fairly complex branding. He did so by using PowerShell to mount a copy of a SharePoint 2007 content database (the 2010 PowerShell equivalent of the stsadm addcontentdb command).  The upgrade went through without a single hick-up… I don’t know that we’ll all be so lucky; although I am feeling pretty good about it.

Everything came across with the 2007 look and feel; I’ve already mentioned this capability in a number of previous posts; what may not have been so clear is that even the site admin pages look like they did in 2007… Almost feels like you are running 2007 and 2010 side by side; which BTW will not be supported; but if this works as smoothly as it did in the demo… who really cares (OK, maybe I’m being to optimistic)

Next comes the Visual Upgrade, this is the part that can get tricky as it changes the master pages which is where your most of your branding likely resides. Performing the Visual Upgrade is easy enough; there is a link in the site settings page. After the Visual Upgrade, some pages may break, most likely because of references on the page layout to Placeholder Controls that are not included in the 2010 master pages. However, you can easily change the master page back to the one you where using in your 2007 site, which still shows up in the list of available master pages. Now your content should look as it did in 2007 and your system pages should include all the goodness of 2010.

But the old master page doesn’t have a ribbon or a developer dashboard. Where is all the 2010 goodness for my users and developers? There will probably be more than one approach to do this, but the following steps should more or less help you get these on the page.

Master Pages

• Create a new blank master page in SharePoint Designer
• Copy the code from the 2007 master page over
• Remove the Site Actions Menu
• Remove Console (Page Editing Toolbar)
• Add a ScriptLink to include certain JavaScript files used by the ribbon… (I cant tell you exactly what they are yet) but I know you can copy them from the v4 master page
• Copy the v4 ribbon DIV into new master page from default 2010 master page
• The ribbon has a couple of other dependencies(declarations) that you’ll need to copy of over.
  • These should be easy to identify from the error messages. Look for and copy them over from the 2010 master page.
• Copy the dev dashboard tags from the v4 master page

If you need to add new metadata properties to the pages, it “should be” as simple as opening the page layout in SharePoint Designer and dragging and dropping the field controls on the page. There still appear to be a couple of quirks with this process, at least there was with the demo, but I’m confident they will be worked out soon enough.

He also talked about, and demoed, some improvements to the Content Query Web Part which again look fantastic. Most notable, we no longer need to specify CommonViewFields and the Web Part Editor Tool Pane displays an enumeration of the available fields in the template.

Business Connectivity Services Runtime and Object Model Deep Dive – SPC 2009 Session Highlights

Let me start by saying that I don’t think the label “deep dive” was necessarily correct for this session. However, I don’t believe that to be a bad thing and it probably has a lot to do with how much this whole process was simplified by MS… seriously, fantastic improvements. That being said, it was deep and technical enough to where I had to pay a lot of attention and wasn’t able to take as many notes as I have in some of the previous sessions I attended, hence the shorter post. The following are some of the key highlights I came away with.

Important changes in Acronyms

• BCS – Business Connectivity Services
• BDC – Business Data Connectivity (he mentioned that this is what the case, but I continued to see the term “Business Data Catalog” used in various screens in SharePoint; this could be related to the BETA.)

Key BCS Investments

• Development
• Tools built-in to Visual Studio
• Connectivity – Read and Write data
• Tooling – Integrated tooling in VS and SharePoint Designer
• Lifecycle Management – Automated solution packaging, deployment and management
• Search
• Item Level Security
• Indexing attachments
• Crawl and Query WCF svcs
• Writing Custom Connectors
• Incremental Crawls (LastModifiedTimeStamp)
• Incremental Crawls (GetDeletedID, GetChangedIDs)
• Batching
• Easily Create Content Sources
• Create “External Lists” that display data from BCS

BDC Runtime Improvements

• Client and Server symmetrical model
• Write back capable (was capable before, but now its supported and easy)
• Batch read operations
• Navigate and create associations
• Bulk APIs
• Read Blobs (streaming support)
• Read and write back complex types (Dot notation)
• Simple type conversion
• Uniform experience across various systems types
• Extensibility mechanisms
• .NET Assembly Connector
• Custom Connector
• Secure Store Provider

Offline Capabilities with Office Integration

• Errors and conflicts stop synchronization of affected items only and prompt user for action
• Advanced API allows customizations so that users don’t necessarily get prompted and specific action be taken in case of conflicts.

Configurable Throttling (Really cool, can result in significant improvements to performance in the farm.)

• Number of connections
• Pau Load Size
• Time Out
• Power Shell support to read and modify settings

SharePoint 2010 Administration Part 1 – SPC 2009 Presentation Highlights

Presented By: Todd Klindt and Shane Young.

• SharePoint Containment Hierarchy (Self Proclaimed Worlds Greatest Slide)
  • Mostly Standard Stuff
    • Site Collection remain in in a single Content Database
    • Service Applications instead of Shared Service Provider
      • More flexible
      • Service Application Databases (per services)

• Pre-req installer
  • Interrogates Systems
  • Checks for things you need
  • Automatically goes to the internet to pull down and install pre-reqs
    • Configurable so that you can point to a specific workstation or server to get the pre-reqs from.
• Installing bits very similar to 2007 install
  • Farm Passphrase – helps address issues having to do with installation account being deleted.
• Farm Configuration Wizards in Central Administration (that’s right Wizards as in multiple)
  • Initially one but extensible.. can create more.
• Managed Accounts
  • Keep Service Accounts secured
  • SharePoint can manage password changes
    • Automatically change based on domain policy or other rules
      • Weekly, Monthly, etc.
    • Cool interface
      • See next time SharePoint will change the password
      • See last time SharePoint set the password
  • Ribbon in Central Admin
    • Changes depending on the object you have selected (i.e Web Apps)
• Web Applications
  • When creating and specifying databases can specify failover server
    • SQL Mirroring Aware
  • Can specify which services (service connections) a web application is consuming.
  • Very easy to find Anonymous Policy button in ribbon
    • Similar buttons for other web app policies such as “User Policy”
  • Specify Preferred Timer Job Server per web application