Serious props to Steve & Zoe and the rest of the Combined Knowledge crew for such a well organised conference.

Here are the slides for my session on "Delivering a Search-Driven User Experience with SharePoint and FAST":

Hope you all had a great conference too, see you next time!

Without access to the server logs I raised a service request and after trying loads of things that didn’t help I was advised to create a new view… without access to the list itself here is how (easy really but just in case anybody else finds this error!)

1. Log into the site
2. Go to site actions > site settings
3. Click on site libraries and lists (under Site administration)
4. Click on the library with the problem
5. Now you are in the settings page of that library, scroll down to the views and you should be able to create a view – ensure it is the default view (you can reset this if/when you fix the broken view!)

This happened on a site upgraded from SharePoint 2007 Online… unsure if that is related.

Hope this helps somebody!

We used a combination of our own billing system data (anonymised of course), publicly available market data from Yahoo, and some free data from the Azure Data Market. Whether that was wise or not you can be the judges…

Day 1: Jersey

A full house at the Pomme D’Or Hotel in St. Helier – great turn out and some good questions about combining versions of existing products with the shiny new technologies demonstrated. Apart from a minor mishap with a mouse breaking and a power cut nobody was hurt! Thanks to Cloudshare we recovered without anybody noticing… kind of…

Day 2: Guernsey

Little did we know when booking the Guernsey trip that the airport was shut for two days… Captain Mark to the rescue and a short boat trip across to St. Peter Port! Another full house at Old Government House and an excitable audience with absolutely tonnes of questions including SharePoint User Group in the Channel Islands (get involved here!). Too many others to mention.. thanks to Marc Laine for the massive build-up!

As promised you can view the slides here:

I also include screenshots from the fun demos below:

Scenario 1: Market Data using Reporting Services and SharePoint Foundation

Market Data (FTSE 100)
SQL 2008 Reporting Services hosted in SharePoint Foundation 2010

Market Data (Cac, Dow, Ftse)
Grid of the Shared Data Set (note the orange Atom data feed icon)

Parameterised Reporting Services with Ticker Price &
SQL 2008 R2 Reporting Services with Parameters

Report Builder 2012 (Free; very similar to 2008 R2)

Scenario 2: Visio Services 2010 and Performance Point Services 2010

Service Delivery Model with Linked Data Source
Visio Services 2010 (requires SharePoint 2010 Enterprise CALs)
Office/Visio Web Access

Service Delivery Model in Visio – set data sources

Organisation Dashboard
Performance Point Services 2010 (requires SharePoint 2010 Enterprise CALs)

Dashboard Designer 2010 (Free)

Scenario 3: Power View – Market & Billing Data

Market Data rendered in Power View – interactive filter & X-Axis
SQL Server 2012 Enterprise or Business Intelligence, Integrated SharePoint Reporting Services

Bubble Chart: Filtered Billing Data in Power View
Clients represented by bubbles with number of scopes along X-Axis

Bubble Chart: “Play” button progresses in time

Power View Video

I also recorded a short video of the final Power View demo using Lync which has been uploaded to my SkyDrive:

(WMV download here)

Finally

If you made it this far, well done! Would be happy to chat about BI and SharePoint in general… I’ll be speaking at the International SharePoint Conference in London end of April so maybe see you there.

This setting is in Central Administration – “Permissive Browser File Handling”, which allows users to open files in their native applications. This can be considered a security risk… however most organisations I have worked with are prepared to take that risk – the setting is at the Web Application level:

Or using PowerShell you can target individual MIME types which is more secure than allowing for all:

$webApp = Get-SPWebApplication("http://webAppUrl")
$webApp.AllowedInlineDownloadedMimeTypes.Add("application/pdf")
$webApp.Update()

However, on Office365 these options are not available and until recently, there was no fix for this!

Thankfully Microsoft have listened to requests and have added the following Site Collection feature – which now effectively enables Permissive Browser File Handling:

Note that it seems to be necessary to attempt to Edit the file for this to open with your favourite PDF reader, if just for reading:

Happy SharePointing and thank you Office 365 team for listening!

I have a number of environments shared across the team, mostly SharePoint 2010, some with FAST, some with CRM 2011, some with IRM, some even SharePoint 2007…

Anyway, the point of this post is to provide step-by-step instructions for setting up SharePoint 2010 Excel Services accessible via the web (Web Access) to share with e.g. non-techy colleagues, clients, or stakeholders for review/testing/etc. – hopefully avoiding the friendly “This workbook cannot be opened because it is not stored in an Excel Services Application trusted location”…

Extend your Web Application

This step may not be strictly required… but in many cases if you really are opening up your dev/test environment to an external party, you may want to lock it down to exactly the features and functionality they need to test not least in terms of security options (i.e. no “confusing” choice of authentication provider for them) – so easier to setup a new IIS website pointing at the same content. In fact in my case it made sense to allow anonymous access to facilitate the testing:

Setup an Alternate Access Mapping

In SharePoint 2010 add your unique public Cloudshare URL (e.g. http://uvof123456789.env.cloudshare.com) as an Internet URL as follows:

Modify your IIS Bindings

This step is only necessary if you do not extend your web application..

If you didn’t do this you will need to modify your IIS bindings in your original IIS website to add the Cloudshare URL as a valid host header.

Add Excel Services Trusted File Location

Assuming that the Excel Service Application has been added and Excel Services are running, add an Excel Services Trusted File Location for both the internal and external URL:

You should end up with something like this (my internal site is http://sp2010:8006):

Upload an Excel Workbook with a Pivot Chart

It doesn’t have to be a Pivot Chart of course, but this is easiest to demo and looks great!

Next ensure Enterprise Features are at the Site Collection level, and you will have the Excel Web Access Web Part available under Business Data:

Finally, all you should need to do is configure the webpart to link to the Excel file, and use the Named Item created (e.g. Chart 1):

Visit the site via the Web Access Public URL

Hopefully you will see something like this:

Comments welcome!

Gus

However, I’m using a small SSD as the OS drive for low power/noise and decent performance, so backing up my workstation to that drive wasn’t going to work. The default Client Computer Backups folder is on the C:\ drive, but due to the fact that I’ve got a bunch of drives using Drive Bender to mimic the Drive Extender functionality of WHS v1 I couldn’t move this folder… plenty of unknown errors.

So the next best thing to using a UI is obviously a registry hack – there are three locations in the registry which need to be updated with the location of your Client Computer Backups folder:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Server\Backup\ServerName

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Server\Media Streaming\Folders\{Guid}

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Server\StorageService\ClientBackupsPath

By default, values in all the above will be C:\ServerFolders\Client Computer Backups – I switched these to Z:\ (my Drive Bender pool) and rebooted – worked a treat!

I believe this should work with networked drives too but a full DR strategy has not been tested..

As always, do at your own risk, your mileage may vary etc. etc.… this is unsupported but “it works” and I’m not hosting mission critical data so happy to take the risk!

I think it’s fair to say that as Cloud-based services have evolved, so have opinions and the generally accepted definition of “The Cloud”, at least by IT professionals.

This evolution is bound to be confusing when the same term could mean different things to different people, due in part to the proliferation of technical terminology into common language, and all for the wrong reasons.

Consumer Perception of “The Cloud”

For example, in an embarrassingly blatant Cloud Washing effort Microsoft have muddied the waters by using “Cloud” in a bizarre ad on TV (in the UK, US and other countries too I imagine..)

In the video the lady exclaims “To The Cloud!”, and fixes a family photo using Windows Live Photo Gallery, a free photo management & editing program that is part of the free Windows Live Essentials family (great program, I use it for managing my photos before uploading to the web). The focus of the ad is the editing of the photo… which has NOTHING to do with the Cloud.. I’m not sure my parents need to know anything about this Cloud when they just want to edit photos..

The Cloud vs The Internet

Sure, they are uploaded to somewhere on/in the Internet, which could be represented in a network diagram surrounded by the Cloud-based shape whence the terminology came; but what is the obsession with labelling this “The Cloud”?

Do people really call Facebook “The Cloud”? Or Hotmail? Or Picasa? Or Gmail? Or Twitter? Or Flickr? Perhaps Usenet & newsgroups?

NO!

You can call it “The Cloud” if you are interested the cloud computing-specific properties which distinguish the service from a simple hosted solution. Otherwise it’s the Internet, the World Wide Web or just The Web. For consumers, it’s not really changed a lot in recent years other than the infuriating hype perpetuated by all providers..

Brand & Reputation

The brands mentioned may well be cloud computing services, or Software as a Service (SaaS). However using the term “Cloud” with respect to consumers is pointless and only adds to the confusion.

The SaaS services listed above are well-known brands, as they HAVE to be; there MUST be a level of trust between the user and the service, especially if they are entrusting data such as email and photos (less so with some services e.g. Twitter perhaps..).

If I told anybody I was moving all my photos to “The Web”, “The Internet” or “The Cloud”, they would ask where specifically, i.e. who was providing a trustworthy and value-for-money service that I am happy to use.

Reputations can be ruined in a day; security issues with Dropbox and other providers mean that any serious faux pas and users are likely to switch en masse to another provider; another “cloud-based service” perhaps, but one which is trusted appropriately. This Economist article about the Keys to the cloud castle does a great job of summarising the issues that Dropbox and its competitors face around security.

So where does that leave us?

Cloud Services

“The Cloud” provides a service of some description – Infrastructure, Platform, Application/Software (all of the usual “as a Service” or “aaS” offerings.. )

Significant cost savings can exist when using the appropriate cloud computing model and services; it is doubtful that the services would exist without a business model that involves some degree of efficiency. It’s really not all hype!

However, I was surprised to be met with a prospective client’s expectation of “The Cloud”; it was thought that ALL desktop applications could and should be replaced by cloud computing services – no client other than a browser. Maybe one day…

Scalability: Capacity vs Performance

One of the strongest arguments for considering any Cloud-based service is the scalability requirement of the organisation. Where scalability is important, (especially elasticity for expansion and contraction) or dispersed geographies, it can be much cheaper to go “To the Cloud!” than a typical hosted or on-premise environment.

Moore’s law has predicted the exponential increase in computing power over the years fairly accurately, doubling roughly every 18 months for the last two decades. However increases in magnetic disk storage have surpassed this and doubled about every 12 months!

(source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore’s_law)

So storage is getting cheaper faster; a lot of the earlier cloud services available to the public had significant storage vs performance requirements e.g. Hotmail, Geocities, Flickr.

This trend has continued and it is no surprise that some Cloud-based email or storage services are practically unlimited; Mozy for backup is completely unlimited and Gmail (~7GB) or Office365 (~25GB) offer more storage than is typically needed just for email.

Microsoft’s Azure or Amazon’s EC2 Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings costs are based primarily on “Computing Hour” i.e. how long the processors are running for, not how much storage is needed (although this remains a small factor).

This means that for the foreseeable future the Cloud is not going to have comparable processing power to a desktop PC and remain scalable. The Virtual Desktop Interface (VDI) that was being described in the meeting I was at as “The Cloud” is simply not going to exist in the near future in my opinion.

Summary: Keeping up with the Moores

Which came first, the really fast processor or the compute hour-intensive software? Either way, desktop PCs will continue to evolve at their current rate, which would suggest that they will always remain ahead of the cloud model’s processing power so there will always be a case for local applications, and that is before you consider any offline requirements.

Next – SaaS, IaaS, PaaS options

In the next few posts on this topic, I’ll be exploring the viable options that I have used, am using, or am about to use or deploy in terms of Software, Infrastructure or Platform as as Service – some practical advice and experience of the Hybrid Cloud options available currently, including the possible impact for organisations in the Channel Islands or other location where jurisdiction is a hot topic.

In a twist to the conventional SharePoint Conference, this year’s event includes never done before solution tracks from inception to deployment/delivery, for IT Pros, Developers, Information Workers, End Users and Business Decision Makers.

I’m speaking in the Case Study track about “Delivering a Search-Driven User Experience with SharePoint and FAST”:

Do you always know exactly what you are looking for? The traditional Search Engine model requires known and accurate keywords to return meaningful content. This session will cover best use of FAST technology including pipeline extensibility, lemmatisation, fuzzy logic and synonyms which can be combined with SharePoint to break that model and provide a compelling Search-Driven User Experience. An in-depth case study with lessons learned will also be presented including a live demo, in which everything ever recorded by the Government numbering tens of thousands of documents in a variety of unstructured, difficult and lengthy formats is successfully parsed and indexed to deliver a public-facing SharePoint site driven by FAST Search for a great User Experience.

It’s on Wednesday 25th April 15:00 – 16:00 – hope to see you there and maybe for a SharePint after!

I also inherited a LinkedIn Channel Islands SharePoint User Group (open to all – do join if you have any interest!) which had stagnated a bit; it HAS taken a few months longer than anticipated but I’ve been delighted with the response from some of the regular SharePoint User Group UK speakers that I know from various events who were all happy to help share the SharePoint love! I am hoping to put on an event every couple of months, or as often as there is appetite. There was a suggestion of a SharePoint Saturday… but I think getting a few user group meetings under our belts will be the first step.

Hope to see you there – please contribute to discussions on LinkedIn if you have any suggestions/preferences for topics or types of session (e.g. Dev/IT Pro/Business) – I’ll conduct a poll after the first event.

First up on Thursday 9th Feb from 17:45 – 20:30 at the Jersey Arts Centre – I’m delighted to announce we have two great sessions from veteran SharePoint community members & speakers with some great experience and insight to offer.

Please register at http://cispug.eventbrite.com so I know how much food to order!

Session 1: John Timney (SharePoint MVP/Cap Gemini)
SharePoint 2010 Virtualisation remains a hot topic and for many firms it is still as yet unexplored territory and the concepts surrounding virtualisation are pushing the knowledge boundaries for SharePoint Infrastructure Architects, Administrators and Solution Architects into areas they thought they wouldn’t need to understand, away from the physical and into the conceptual. This presentation offers an introductory view of some of the important aspects to consider when thinking about utilizing virtualization in the SharePoint 2010 world and considers reasons for virtualizing SharePoint 2010, supported physical and virtual platform architectures, guidelines for choosing which aspects of farm to virtualize, support and the issues it brings, considers layered designs as an easy means of visualising virtual architecture and introduces conceptual Geo-DR

Session 2: Andrew Woodward (SharePoint MVP/21 Apps) & Ant Clay (21 Apps)
Using Innovation Games® to understand what your users really need from SharePoint
An overview of Innovation Games®, how we feel these techniques can apply to your SharePoint projects AND we’ll get to play so you see hands-on the value the techniques can bring. Serious Fun!

Bios:

Andrew Woodward

Andrew Woodward is a developer by heart, with a wealth of experience in mentoring and leading agile teams. He has taken this learning and experience and expanded it with emergent thinking, dialog mapping, and serious games enabling him to really help organizations understand the rationale behind decisions and ask the tough question ‘Why’ and how to measure the benefit. Through his enthusiasm and application Andrew has promoted innovative techniques to the SharePoint community and has been awarded Microsoft MVP award for SharePoint continuously since 2007. He is also founder of 21apps.

Ant Clay

Ant is Chief Strategy Officer at 21app. With over 15 years IT delivery and consulting experience, Ant is one of a new breed of SharePoint ‘business consultants’ working with clients using visualisations, game-play and organisational storytelling to ‘change the way they work’ and effectively deliver their organisational vision through SharePoint and Office 365. Ant consults and delivers on a range of topics including facilitating project governance, innovating client’s business models, architecting and delivering business aligned technology solutions and a number of innovative training and workshop sessions. He is a regular speaker across Europe on a range of topics including SharePoint & Office 365 governance, the ‘Celery Effect’, business model innovation, hybrid organisations, social media and aligning technology with the business vision.

John Timney

John Timney is a Principal Strategy Consultant based in the UK. Much of his interest and day to day work is around Business Impact and Technical Strategies for Collaborative Solutions based on SharePoint, including Architectural Assurance and Governance, Project Management, Service Assurance and Delivery and Accessibility compliance. He is currently employed by Capgemini and is based in the North of England.

With 20 years in IT, he has a lot of experience to draw upon and has architected some of the largest and most influential SharePoint systems currently deployed. John has in the past co-authored a number of books and is active in the Technet forums daily. He also reviews for some of the world’s leading book companies and recently co-authored the SharePoint Handbook. He is a veteran Microsoft SharePoint MVP, the North east Co-ordinator and a regular speaker for the Sharepoint User Group in the UK.

Unless I’ve missed something, it’s not possible (apart from the slightly hacky HTTP request to check if the URL exists or if a 404 is returned..):

Lists.asmx – GetListItems requires a view, which has a default limit of 5,000… so no good for large document libraries

DspSts.asmx – Whilst deprecated in 2010 in favour of the Client Object Model (for good reason..) the QueryMethod is actually really flexible.. sending CAML via the web service, BUT… it isn’t folder-aware…

In order to test both of the above, and to test various other ways of ensuring any successful method also works on document libraries of a certain size, I needed thousands of folders in my local document library – PowerShell to the rescue!

Add-PSSnapin "Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell"

[Void][System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint") | Out-Null;
$SPSite = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite("http://sp2010");
$OpenWeb = $SpSite.OpenWeb("/docs");
$OpenList = $OpenWeb.Lists["Documents"];

$i = 1
While ($i -le 10000)
{
    $folder = "Folder " + $i

    $item = $OpenList.Folders.Add("",[Microsoft.SharePoint.SPFileSystemObjectType]::Folder,$folder);
    $item.Update();
    $folder + " Created!";

    $i++
}
$SPSite.Dispose();