So What is SharePoint Anyways?

The most common question I get about SharePoint is what is it. Defining new IT tools is probably impossible, once people use it then they will know what it is. Terms like Databases, Spreadsheets, and Word Processors probably can only be understood through repeated use and exposure.

SharePoint is something very new and for most user it will not replace anything they have used before.

The best way I have found to define it is to talk about what it aims to accomplish. SharePoint aims to give you a place you can go to do you work, regardless of the computer you are on. As long as you have access to a companies network and a valid identity you can work from any machine.

SharePoint also can help teams share information and work together. It supports making intranet sites, document sites, blogs, wikis and other standard Web 2.0 collaborative functions.

SharePoint is not a replacement for email, but it could reduce your companies dependence on email. SharePoint can also help you establish guidance and policy for collaborative working, to insure people groups work more effectively.

Tories doctor Wikipedia to cover up David Cameron's Titian gaffe

SNEAKY Tories changed online encyclopaedia Wikipedia in a desperate bid to spare party leader David Cameron's blushes yesterday.

The Conservative leader tried to taunt Gordon Brown at Prime Minister's Questions, accusing him of getting the age of Renaissance artist Titian wrong.

Within seconds, they realised they had gaffed as art historians insisted the true age of the painter, born in the 15th century, has never been known.

But rather than admit a mistake, panicking staffers at Conservative Central Office changed Wikipedia to make sure the online encyclopaedia agreed with their leader.

A Tory spokesman later blamed an "over-enthusiastic member of staff".

But a source lamely tried to claim they wanted to "correct" the page, rather than cover up Cameron's gaffe.

The source said: "We don't think it is our business to change entries in Wikipedia.

"In this case, an over-eager member of staff put right an entry which was clearly wrong."

But Labour MP Chris Ruane said: "We are used to Tories issuing tissues of lies. This time it's Titians of lies."

The gaffe was discovered because the computer registration number which was recorded alongside the change made on Wikipedia was traced back to Conservative Central Office within minutes.

The year the painter died was altered to back up Cameron's claim at 12.34pm - four minutes after Prime Minister's Questions.

The bizarre Westminster row began after a speech by Brown at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month.

He jokingly compared world leaders' struggle with the financial crisis to the Italian painter.

He said: "I'm reminded of the story of Titian, who's the great painter who reached the age of 90, finished the last of his nearly 100 brilliant paintings, and he said at the end of it, 'I'm finally beginning to learn how to paint,' and that is where we are."

During Prime Minister's questions, Cameron said: "You told us the other day you were like Titian aged 90."

As Tories MPs laughed, he said: "The fact is Titian died at 86."

According to Encyclopaedia Brittanica, Titian was born sometime between 1488 to 1490 and died in 1576. Titian himself claimed he was born in 1477.

Yesterday, the Wikipedia entries pages were changed a number of times.

Labour MP Peter Kilfoyle later poked fun at Cameron's embarrassment, asking the deputy Speaker: "I wonder whether you could tell the House whether you have had representations from the leader of the opposition so that he might correct the comments that he made about Titian.

"Or is it enough in this modern age for the leader of the opposition's staff simply to alter Wikipedia?"

Titian expert Caroline Campbell, of the Courtauld Institute of Art, said: "It is certainly not a fact Titian was 86 when he died. The artist himself actually claimed he was over 100 years old near the end of his life.

"The problem is we know when he died - in 1576 - but not when he was born because records of his birth have never been discovered.

"Saying he was 86 is a guess. We simply don't know for sure."

SharePont 2012: My Dream Tool

Fast forward about 3 years to the SharePoint after the next release. I suspect the next release will be evolutionary, but by 2012 it will be time for SharePoint, now more and more a Cloud tool, to take a big step to become a more standard Enterprise 2.0 tool. What new features would I like to see. Here is a list, starting from the most out there to the most mundane suggestions.

1, Virtual Reality.

SharePoint 2012 I would love to see support virtual reality Simulations like Second Life. The tool I hope will allow the construction of 3-D virtual spaces and persons with valid Active Directory accounts to create Avatars and interact in real time in Virtual Reality. This will be a major tool in remote working.

2. Live Communication fully in SharePoint

SharePoint becomes the base replacement for telephones, allowing Video and VOIP communications. This is not that technically revolutionary but would have a massive impact on business.

3. MySites/Facebook integration

SharePoint 2012, in my imagination, would connection MySites to the now almost universal Facebook. This would mean that MySite would have 3 levels, a private work space for each person, a public area for an enterprise and that potentially linked to a facebook site. This would be very useful for contractors connecting pools of established resources in to the enterprise.

4. Public Live Blogging from SharePoint

Microsoft Live blogging is presently pretty weak, SharePoint offers a great Blogging tool inside of the Enterprise. In 2012 I would love to see integration to the Cloud allowing enterprises to publish their blogs to Live, so as part of the publishing process a blog could be released to live.

5. Video Blogging

SharePoint 2012 would be fully SilverLight interfaced and provide a video blogging tool like current Flash sites.

Host Headers in MOSS 2007

I was going to post something about host headers in WSS 3. Thinking about it some I guess host headers with wild card is a cool technology that allows you to publish URLs from WSS administration tool, but I can't really see a reason to do this.

My own take on URLs is as follows. WSS Web Sites should be created with IPs and ports of the form http://site:port. You should use DNS mapping to connect the http://site:port to a URL. Why not do this in SharePont? Because I think it defeats the entire purpose of a Enterprise stack. You should be mapping all URL redirects in one place, in the DNS mappings on Windows Server. Why? Because when you want to change a URL or put another site on an existing URL you should be able to do this from one spot, for all HTTP and HTTPS delivered sites.

The entire point of having tiers is to keep all your functions of one kind in one area. For example when I was designing N-tier web sites I often came across the business logic in the application or database layer. I think that looking at this as a technical performance question in most issues is wrong. What I always believed is that you should use the same layer for all or none. I always hated working with a mixture of application business logic in ASP.NET AND TSQL. It is my strong belief that you should do it all on one level or another.

So if you use DNS to manage all your SharePoint sites you can easily change the redirect for a URL to another IP and port. You can also have one area with one expert to manage ALL your URLS running all your Enterprise technology.

The principle as I see it is grouping by function.

Lets Get Serious!!!!! Out of the Box is the true value of SharePoint

Okay lets talk about how IT generally has been run in the past.

IT is often viewed by companies as a kind of immunization. Firms need to put IT in because anyone who does not purchase IT will soon lose their job. Staff people hate new IT systems, IT people hate talking to staff, and year after year the IT and Internet grows without any clear road maps or logical business justifications.

When I got in to IT 20 years ago it was simply taken for granted that most big IT projects would fail. Over the last 10 years there has been a growing demand for ROI, but this has been actualized in my experience via talk rather than reality. SharePoint projects have been finished but generally sit either unused or even used in ways that actually hurt give no benefit over file shares.

There is a joke about why Microsoft offerings can't go after SAP. Any company that uses SAP has someone who purchased SAP, and anyone who purchase SAP can't be very interested in reality, truth or ROI. I know little about SAP but I think the joke admits something wider about the larger marketplace: a failure to see the truth of the sorry state of Enterprise adoption of IT has created a profession that is more of a religion than a science.

As far as I can tell the conditions around serious SharePoint adoption are pretty obvious. You are buying SharePoint not because its cheap or better than any other product. The reason you have SharePoint over another ECM stack is because its Microsoft. Microsoft is more of a government than a company; by using Microsoft you can engage in modern global network economics.

For example I started working in Microsoft in the early 1990s, when the firm made a big successful play for the Information Worker space. Today the reason firms use Office rather than OpenOffice is because they can find staff who know how to use the product and FEEL COMFORTABLE WITH IT.

I think Microsoft has forgotten this basis of their advantage. Office 2007 and Vista both fail to build on the established space of Microsoft as the system everyone knows and DOES NOT HAVE TO THINK ABOUT. Office 2003 and Windows XP establish a standard set of tools like a standard typewriter or accounting ledger. You know you can get staff globally who know how to use it.

In the 1990s there were 2 ways to do an Office roll-out. One was to give your users Office and spend the money training them. The other was to spend tons of money writing VBA appliations to run in the Office tools to carry out all your special "business logic". Today any Enterprise that went down the VBA is stuck with millions or billions of lines of business logic stuck in silos. The better way to go was to use Office out of the box.

Remember that all generalizations are false, including this one. Still radical standards are good starting points for thinking and here is my radical stand on SharePont out of the box!!!!

Its stupid to NOT deploy as an out of the box. Money spent on styling and custom Web Parts is money almost certainly poorly spent. I would go as far to say that SharePoint should only be customized in cases were you have high accessability requirements (AA or AAA) or massive legacy systems that need integration and portal deployment (in which case you should be looking for a SOA broker). In both cases I doubt MOSS is the best PORTAL tool.

Out of the box SharePoint deployments have the following benefits:

1. You can find staff who have SharePoint experience, gain from collective experience. Just as you don't have to train new staff in Windows or Office you won't have to train staff in 4 years to use OTB MOSS. Think about it!!!!
2. You can connect to other firms who use SharePoint without worrying about customizations. We live in the economy of networks, open standards are good but nothing can beat actually standard tools. The ability to connect to other companies IT systems quickly could give great benefits.
3. SharePoint can be very hard to customize.

I think only very mature SharePoint implementations should be at a point where complex WebParts and Workflows are needed. Deploy SharePoint first as an Out of the Box with solid Information Management rules. BPM and SOA should be long term road maps with SharePoint as a part.

Master pages in SharePoint Designer

Using designer you can select and modify the master page. By changing the master page you will change the look and layout of all pages that inherit it as a master. For example the search function at the top of the page has this place holder code behind it.







Here we see a "QuickLaunchNavigationManager" side bar which uses the class SP SPNavigationManager.

SPNavigationManager object means that SharePoint manages and maintains the navigation out of the box. In earlier versions of ASP.NET this was often very complex.

A look back

Today



Yesterday

Starting Master Pages

Click on the images to see full details.

Every page in a SharePoint site now have a master page. This blog above is using the default.master. If you click on the graphic you can see that in blue above the ASPX code is provided the path to a master page. Designer always shows the active master page for any page in this way.



Using the side nav bar you can open the default.master in Designer. You can use designer to make changes to the master page. In the above example I have checked out the master page for editing which shows up with a green check.



In Designer I click on a web part in the master page and see the code that creates it:

SharePoint:DelegateControl runat="server" ControlId="SmallSearchInputBox"/

This means that a SharePoint SmallSearchInBox will be inserted in to the site. This code sets a space for a control, which runs on the server, in this case a small default search engine.

You can learn more about delegate controls in WSS here.

Imaging the Internet 1981

Latest Vulnerability in MOSS 2007

Vulnerability in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server Could Cause Elevation of Privilege (957175): MS08-077

Affected Software: Office SharePoint Server 2007, Office SharePoint Server 2007 x64 Edition

Warning over 'surveillance state'

Electronic surveillance and collection of personal data are "pervasive" in British society and threaten to undermine democracy, peers have warned.

CCTV cameras and the DNA database were two examples of threats to privacy, the Lords constitution committee said.
It called for compensation for people subject to illegal surveillance.

The government said CCTV and DNA were "essential" to fight crime but campaign group Liberty said abuses of power mean "even the innocent have a lot to fear".

'Orwellian'

Civil liberties campaigners have warned about the risks of a "surveillance society" in which the state acquires ever-greater powers to track people's movements and retain personal data.

Controversial government plans for a database to store details of people's phone calls and e-mails were put on hold late last year after they were branded "Orwellian".

Read Full at BBC

Excellent Best Practices slide for SharePoint!!!!!!

Best Practices Conference Spring 09 Avoiding Failed Deployments and Newbie Mistakes 10 Steps to Success Keynote by Joel Oleson

View more presentations from Joel Oleson. (tags: newbie deployments)