SharePoint: Don’t Automate, Do Stuff by Hand
January 4, 2009
The SharePointer (a place of sharing pointers) published “MOSS Variations: Page Properties that Do Not Get Propagated to Target Variations” is a useful article for two reasons. First, it solves a mystery that the geese at Beyond Search have encountered. Second, the write up shows what’s wrong with SharePoint. Why automate a function when you can do the work manually? Makes sense to some, I guess.
The author of the useful article here is Tehnoon Raza, a Senior Support Escalation Engineer at Microsoft. I love that title. At Beyond Search we will definitely add that to our SharePoint expert’s title. Now to the good stuff. Mr. Raza’s article explains that when you propagate a source site to its variations, the copy does not copy everything. The work around is easy. Create a custom column and manually insert these items for each page you want to propagate:
- URL Name (seems important, right?)
- Title
- Description
- Schedule Start Date
- Schedule End Date
- Audience Targeting
- Contact
- Contact Name
- Contact E-mail Address (another important item, right?)
- Contact Picture.
I did not notice an explanation that made much sense to me, an addled goose. You may be more in tune with the Microsoft way. My thought was, “Why not copy the properties?” No problem when there is one page. The recommended approach begs for a script when there are two or more pages. Maybe I’m missing something, but this strikes me as sort of clunky. Oh, hold on. Tess, our SharePoint expert, has a comment. She says, “It’s something a box would definitely not do.” Wow. Harsh.
Stephen Arnold, January 4, 2009
Dot Net Issues: Help Is Here
January 2, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who sent me the link to Red Gate here. The company owns a free Dot Net assembly explorer. With the software you can browse assemblies, see relationships between classes and methods, and check to make sure your own Dot Net code is obfuscated. But the feature that the geese at Beyond Search quacked happily about is that you can find where types are instantiated and exposed. There are more than two dozen add ins available; for example, two separate dependency analyzers. The software is called Dot Net Reflector. Snag a copy now.
Stephen Arnold, January 2, 2009
SharePoint Open Source
December 29, 2008
SDTimes.com published a short interview with Sam Ramji, Microsoft’s senior director of platform strategy here. In “Microsoft Mulling Open Source Strategy in SharePoint” Mr. Ramji summarizes Microsoft’s open source initiatives. There is one veiled reference to SharePoint as an open source enabler. In my opinion, this comment may presage a shift in Microsoft’s positioning of SharePoint:
We have heard the conversation internally about SharePoint as an example of a platform of great opportunity for open-source application strategy.
Microsoft offers a free search product. What happens if Microsoft finds that it must release some of the Fast Enterprise Search Platform technology as open source? My hunch is that Microsoft will be taking some big steps to deal with the pesky Google enterprise initiative. Making some of Fast ESP available as open source may be necessary in 2009.
Stephen Arnold, December 29, 2008
SharePoint Complexity
December 29, 2008
CIO Magazine has a white paper or report called “SharePoint.” You can start the tedious process of getting a copy here. I jumped through the hoops and was rewarded with a 19 page PDF. If you are one of the dilettantes who thinks SharePoint search is simple, you will be hard pressed to accept this report. “Better but More Complex” by Christine Casatelli makes one point again and again; namely, complexity. I must admit I wasn’t sure who wrote what in this white paper, but I came away with a sense that the authors did not fall for that “simple and easy” pitch for SharePoint that some wacky consultants are pitching. The five tips (page 5 and following) are pragmatic, but the authors don’t point out the time and effort required to verify metadata and permissions.
Stephen Arnold, December 29, 2008
Hog Tie That SharePoint Server
December 26, 2008
A happy quack to the reader who alerted me to five tips I need to make SharePoint server purr like a kitten. Well, maybe, oink like a well-fed pig. You can read “Managing Microsoft SharePoint Server — Five Tips” by Briony Smith here. Ms. Smith starts her write up by referencing SharePoint’s legendary ease of use. My first thought was that Ms. Smith has never installed a SharePoint server, but that’s neither here nor there. Quite a few pundits obtain technical expertise via interviews or telepathy. I am not comfortable reproducing Ms. Smith’s five tips. I think it’s permissible to reference two of them and offer a handful of comments.
One of her tips is to use role based access. The idea is that you don’t want to peg people to access. People belong to roles. Roles are easier to administer. I agree. I would suggest that you get your roles organized before setting up SharePoint. Putting the cart before the horse will make you life a bit more complicated.
Another tip that caught my attention was her observation that SharePoint deployments can get out of hand. Now that’s an understatement. My hunch is that Ms. Smith wants to flash some soft yellow lights about the costs and complexity of scaling, customizing, and tuning SharePoint.
What’s left out? Quite a bit. In fact, I think that much of the writing about SharePoint skips right over the challenges SharePoint presents. I am not sure why people are reluctant to describe what’s involved with SharePoint, but it is a mini trend. I may be missing something, but these “it’s really easy” discussions of SharePoint don’t match what I have experienced. Am I missing something? Let’s start with search, indexing more than 50 million documents, and figuring out how to get facets, expert identification, and views working quickly enough to keep users from Googling for an alternative.
Stephen Arnold, December 26, 2008
SharePoint Search Tip for Missing Content
December 25, 2008
Michael Nemtsev’s “Why Content Query Web Part (CQWP) Doesn’t Return All Results” here provided a useful tip we snipped and saved. Mr. Nemtsev said that missing content was “behavior by design”. Sounds like a thoughtful feature to me. The fix is to set “UseCache” property to false. A happy quack to Mr. Nemtsev for this tip.
Stephen Arnold, December 25, 2008
SharePoint Holiday Treats
December 25, 2008
Eli Robillard’s “The Best Free SharePoint Downloads” might be a useful holiday treat for you. We find ourselves enjoying SharePoint each day. Despite its ease of use and rock solid code, we often find ourselves looking for special tools that make life easier and even more fun. If you are like the ArnoldIT.com team, you will want to navigate here and peruse the list of freebies for SharePoint. We particularly liked the faceted search extension. You can find that here. The free tool might night be as rich as some third party solutions, but it may be good enough for some SharePoint administrators. The tool groups search results by facet and provides other features sure to grease the squeaky wheels in marketing and business development. These folks are never satisfied with their SharePoint search results in our experience.
Stephen Arnold, December 25, 2008
A Certified Master: Microsoft and MOSS
December 24, 2008
Randy Muller wrote an interesting article about Microsoft’s newest certification track, the Microsoft Certified Master. You can read his story “The New Microsoft Certified Master” here. Mr. Muller noted that the Master program has “generated some confusion about its purpose, scope, and place within the certification hierarchy.” His article’s purpose was to clarify the program. For me the most important comment in the write up was:
The costs of the tests are part of the US $18,000 dollar program fee – but are expensive if you need to retake them.
I know about Jedi knights and black belts in karate, but I don’t know if I would have the desire, stamina, or cash to fork over $18,000 to become a certified master of SharePoint 2007. SharePoint 2007 is a complicated amalgam of functions and in order to deliver a successful hook up of SharePoint and Fast Enterprise Search Platform, I would have to be a heck of a lot more intelligent than I am. With SharePoint a simple challenge can expand to consume considerable time. Toss in Fast ESP and you have an even more daunting task. I would assert that a single Certified Master would not be up to the task. If I step back from a program to create a Certified Master, I am of the opinion that the certification is designed to generate cash and overly confident individuals. When tackling the job of hooking two Microsoft servers together, the task may be impossible. A Certified Master will fail just as surely as my engineers. Try this. Select any three Microsoft server products such as Dynamics, Performance Point, and Exchange plus SharePoint. Now configure these to make their content and services available to a SharePoint user. If you have difficulties getting those graphical reports from each application into SharePoint, you are in my corner of the world. We found that the transport mechanism that works okay is plain vanilla Excel. A lowly spreadsheet becomes the way to display data in a multi server environment, not the servers’ built in graphing functions. Maybe $18,000 includes common sense. Well, maybe not. The Certified Master just spent $18,000.
Stephen Arnold, December 24, 2008
Microsoft SharePoint and the Law Firm
December 22, 2008
Lawyers are, in general, similar to Scrooge McDuck. If you are too young to remember, the Donald Duck funny papers, Scrooge McDuck was tight with a penny. Lawyers eschew capital expenditures if possible. When a client foots the bill, the legal eagles will become slightly less abstemious, but in my experience, not too profligate with money.
Microsoft SharePoint offers an unbeatable combination for some law firms. Because the operating system is Microsoft’s, lawyers know that programmers, technical assistance, and even the junior college introductory computer class can be a source of expertise. And, Microsoft includes with SharePoint a search system. Go with Microsoft and visions of lower initial costs, bundles, and a competitive market from which to select the technical expertise you need. What could be better? Well, maybe a big pharma outfit struggling with a government agency? Most attorneys would drool with anticipation to work for either the company or the US government. A new client is more exciting than software.
Several people sent me links to Mark Gerow’s article “Elements of a Successful SharePoint Search.” You can read the full text of his article at Law.com here. The article does a good job of walking through a SharePoint installation for a law firm. You will also find passing references to other vendors’ systems. The focus is SharePoint.
Could this be a metaphor for a SharePoint installation?
I found several points interesting. First, Mr. Gerow explains why search in a law firm is not like running a query on Microsoft’s Web search or any other Web indexing system. There is a reference to Google’s assertion that it has indexed one trillion Web pages and an accurate comment about the inadequacy of Federal government information in public search systems. I am not certain that attorneys will understand why Google has been able to land some law firms and a number of Federal agencies as customers with its search appliance. I know from experience that many professionals have a difficult time differentiating the content that’s available via the Web, content on the organization’s Web site, content on an Intranet, and content that may be available behind a firewall yet pulled from various sources. Also, I don’t think one can ignore the need for specialized systems to handle information obtained during the discovery process. Those systems do search, but law firms often pay hundreds of thousands of dollars because “traditional” search systems don’t do what attorneys need to do when preparing their documentation for litigation. These topics are referenced but not in a way that makes much sense for SharePoint, a singularly tricky collaborative, content management, search, and Swiss Army Knife collection of software packages as “one big thing”.
SharePoint: ChooseChicago
December 18, 2008
I scanned the MSDN Web log postings and saw this headline: “SharePoint Web Sites in Government.” My first reaction was that the author Jamesbr had compiled a list of public facing Web sites running on Microsoft’s fascinating SharePoint content management, collaboration, search, and Swiss Army Knife software. No joy. Mr. Jamesbr pointed to another person’s list which was a trifle thin. You can check out this official WSS tally here. Don’t let the WSS fool you. The sites are SharePoint, and there are 432 of them as of December 16, 2008. I navigated to the featured site, ChooseChicago.com. My broadband connection was having a bad hair day. It took 10 seconds for the base page to render and I had to hit the escape key after 30 seconds to stop the page from trying to locate a missing resource. Sigh. Because this was a featured site that impressed Jamesbr, I did some exploring. First, I navigated to the ChooseChicago.com site and saw this on December 16, 2008:
The search box is located at the top right hand corner of the page and also at the bottom right hand corner. But the search system was a tad sluggish. After entering my query “Chinese”, the system cranked for 20 seconds before returning the results list:
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