SharePoint Team Blog

The SharePoint Team Blog has moved

sharepointblog@live.com — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 10:58:55 GMT

Earlier today, the SharePoint team blog moved to a new home on the Microsoft Office Blogs site:

http://blogs.office.com/b/sharepoint/

Going forward, all new SharePoint posts will be published at this location, please make sure to update your RSS readers to the new site. We’re in the process of moving existing posts to our new home, but you can still access older content here in the meantime.

Thanks for reading, and we look forward to seeing you on the new blog.

The SharePoint Team

Don’t miss the Virtual Launch Event for the New Office 365 for Business

sharepointblog@live.com — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 08:04:50 GMT

Join us at our Virtual Launch Event on February 27th as we celebrate the availability of a major new release coming to Office 365 for businesses. If you are exploring cloud offerings, you do not want to miss this event. You’ll hear from Kurt DelBene, President of the Microsoft Office Division, about Microsoft’s vision for productivity, enterprise social and the cloud. We’ll demo new features in enterprise social and show how we’ve transformed the full Office experience you know into an always up-to-date service. Finally, you’ll hear real world stories from our customers about their move to the cloud. We’ll also answer questions via live chat as we go.

I hope you’ll join me there. Register now!

-Kirk Gregersen, General Manager, Microsoft

Following in SharePoint 2013

sharepointblog@live.com — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 08:05:15 GMT

By Ben Wilde and Robin Miller, Program Managers, SharePoint Engineering team

With following in SharePoint 2013, we feel that we've provided a very compelling experience that keeps you connected to the things that you care about the most, while also setting ourselves up for even more success in the future. But we've heard a lot of questions about what actually happens when you follow something.

What can I follow?

There are four things that you can follow: People, Documents, Sites, and #Tags.

The vision for this release was that when you follow any of these four items, three things would happen:

You'd have a rich, aggregated view where you could easily access the set of followed things and see additional information about those things.
You'd promote serendipitous discovery of new people and content through the posting of a "User is now following Item" post to all of your followers (if your privacy is set accordingly).
You'd see future updates about what you followed in the Following view of your Newsfeed.

People

Following people provides a rich set of activities in your Following view, including showing you things people say, things they do, and things that happen to them (for example, job title changes).

Figure 1. Notifications seen by people following Allie Bellew

You can choose which activities you want to share with your followers in the edit profile experience.

Figure 2. Activities you may share with your followers in the newsfeed.

If you choose to share your participation in communities, your followers are notified when you join, post a discussion, reach a higher achievement level, or have a post marked as the best reply to someone's discussion.

We also have a page where you can view all the people you're following and all the people following you. From that page, you can see the latest thing that they said, follow people who are following you, and click the "…" to see even more and to interact with them.

Figure 3. A view of all the people following me

Documents

Following a document provides a few key activities in your Following view, namely an indication of when the document was modified and an indication of when it was shared with others.

Figure 4. Newsfeed notification for a followed document

The Followed Documents page is pretty obvious, letting you go to a single place to access all of the documents that you care about, regardless of where in SharePoint they live or what device you're on.

Figure 5. Mobile apps for followed documents

Sites

Following a site brings all of the conversations that happen on the site's Newsfeed into your Following view.

Figure 6. A conversation that happens on a site you are following also appears in your newsfeed

Like documents, you can easily get to all of the sites that you follow from the Sites hub.

Figure 7. Sites hub

#Tags

Following a #tag brings conversations to your Following view that include that #tag, even if you have no idea who the person is that posted the conversation. This is a great way to indicate interest in a topic and be exposed to conversations around that idea.

Figure 8. Newsfeed notification from a followed #tag

You can see all of the #tags you're following in your Edit Profile experience.

Call to action

Start following these various things and use them to get work done. Create and follow sites to collaborate on projects. Follow documents that are shared with you. Follow people who you want to stay connected with. Follow tags that relate to the projects you work on. Then, provide feedback about what you'd like to see in the future in the comments section of this post!

Ben Wilde and Robin Miller are Program Managers on the SharePoint Engineering team, focused on social and user experience.

Localization and internationalization improvements in SharePoint 2013

sharepointblog@live.com — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 09:00:03 GMT

In this post, Josh Stickler and Kate Kelly provide an overview of what's new and improved with Variations in SharePoint 2013, with an emphasis on infrastructural improvements most interesting to IT Admins.

Variations is a SharePoint feature that enables users to create, manage, and translate locale-specific content for Internet and intranet Publishing sites. We first introduced Variations in SharePoint 2007. Since then, we've had the opportunity to learn how customers use the feature and better understand customer scenarios, pain points, and aspirations when it comes to managing content in multiple languages.

Here's a quick overview of what we'll cover in this post:

Package and export content for translation using Microsoft Translator or the translation tool of your choice
Add languages faster, handle more content, and operate more reliably
Support a diversity of localization management requirements among locales

Introducing integrated translation support

We're excited to introduce default support for exporting and importing Variations content for translation. SharePoint 2013 includes a Machine Translation Service that connects SharePoint to Microsoft Translator. You can also export SharePoint content as a package that you or a third-party translation vendor can use for human translation.

Machine translation provides a valuable first step to localizing website content, making your content accessible to users speaking other languages. Machine translation is available as an additional step, after you publish and approve source-language content and sync that content to a locale-specific site. You can then send pages, list items, and documents to Microsoft Translator, the same service you may be familiar with from Office client applications. Users around the world trust Microsoft Translator to translate millions of documents from or to 39 supported languages every day, in a way that is secure and preserves rich text formatting.

Many customers work with localization vendors to get their content professionally translated. In the past, we emphasized in-browser translation; but, localization vendors often prefer using their own tools and processes outside of SharePoint. SharePoint 2013 makes it easier to send content to localizers by exporting an XML Localization Interchange File Format (XLIFF) file. XLIFF is an Oasis open standard that is gaining popularity in the localization industry.

Translation is available only when using the Variations feature. Variations is different from our Multilingual User Interface (MUI) feature. Variations helps you manage user-generated content in multiple languages for both Internet and intranet Publishing sites. MUI switches the language of the SharePoint user interface elements (like the ribbon and Site Settings links) based on a user's browser language.

Variations adds languages faster, handles more content, and operates more reliably

Suppose you've been using Variations for a while and are ready to expand into a new market. Adding a language is now much faster. The operation runs in the timer service just like in SharePoint 2010, but instead of running as one large timer job, we've split the operation into a bunch of smaller work items. This way, if you encounter and resolve an error, you can pick up where you left off instead of having to delete any partially-created sites and start over.

You can also create more variation labels than ever before. Variation labels represent a locale-specific set of sites, lists, and navigation. We support creating up to 209 variation labels on-premises, one for each locale supported by SharePoint. Also, improvements to performance, scalability, reliability, and monitoring in SharePoint 2013 have enabled us to make Variations available to customers running Office 365. Office 365 now supports a maximum of 50 variation labels.

In SharePoint 2013 the Variations feature is also much more inclusive about what gets translated, and it offers greater flexibility in terms of when and how variants reach target locales. In SharePoint 2010, the only way to propagate a resource such as a document or image from a source library to a target library is to publish a source page that refers to that resource. Even if the source page is already published and has not changed, you have to publish a new version of the page to propagate changes to a related resource. In SharePoint 2013, lists and libraries can sync independently from pages. You can also sync and translate managed navigation terms to localize navigation and friendly URLs.

Variations supports diverse translation management requirements among locales

Interviewing customers about their translation management requirements, pain points, and aspirations reinforced a key lesson: When it comes to global content strategy, one size does not fit all. That's why we've designed Variations to accommodate diverse requirements among locales. Two general patterns emerged from our research: "centralized" and "distributed" control.

"Centralized" control organizations typically have a large core set of content that applies to all locales. While content owners in locales can create locale-specific content, owners must translate new and updated core content more often than not.

"Distributed" control organizations give locale content owners more discretion over how and when to incorporate source content changes into their sites. New source content may apply only to the source locale, or to a subset of target locales. For example, Contoso Electronics might offer a new product only in the United States and Mexico, but not Canada. When source content is updated, locale content owners can get an email notification and "opt in" to receiving and translating the changes.

Likely, one or both of these types of organizations sound familiar to you. You can choose a different approach for different locales and you can switch the approach at any time.

Thanks for reading! We'll cover more end-user improvements for Variations in our next post.

Josh Stickler is a Program Manager on the SharePoint Enterprise Content Management team, responsible for the Variations feature in SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013. Kate Kelly is a Program Manager on the Office Globalization Experience Platform Team, responsible for integrating Translation Services into SharePoint

Enabling modern SharePoint experiences on Windows 8 for students and teachers

edsiegrist@hotmail.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:41:12 GMT

The Contoso Learning Companion is a modern Windows 8 application built to work with SharePoint 2010 and 2013. It uses SharePoint sites as collaboration spaces for classes and study groups and integrates with the popular OneNote application for lessons and assignments. This popular starter kit provides everything you need to deliver tailored Windows 8 solutions for SharePoint.

By Gerald Ferry, Hillary Mutisya, and Lee Riefberg

Interacting with SharePoint sites through Windows 8 apps

Today's students and teachers are accustomed to working on touch-enabled mobile and slate devices. They check email on these devices, manage tasks, and catch up with their friends. Often, these devices enable interaction with data hosted in cloud services. This article presents a sample app built on Windows 8 that uses the rich tools in Office 365.

The Contoso Learning Companion was built to run on top of SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013, using SharePoint sites as collaboration spaces for classes and study groups. It integrates with the popular OneNote application, enabling teachers and students to work on lessons and assignments while on the go. OneNote enables digital note-taking by using a pen input device, recording audio notes, or typing.

The Contoso Learning Companion demonstrates how teaching and learning scenarios can be more effective with the help of Office 365 services and a modern Windows 8 application experience. It enables aggregation of multiple classes and study groups into a single UI, even if the sites reside within different schools and organizations.

The Learning Companion app includes:

Support for both Office 2010 and Office 2013.
An aggregated view of current events, classes, and study groups.
Access to class and study group sites and their respective elements (events, materials, and so on).
OneNote integration for consuming and managing lessons and assignments via a class notebook.

How teachers and students can use the Learning Companion

A local university has customized the app and provided it to its faculty and students. It has been branded in the school colors and watermarked with the school logo. It has also been preconfigured with default SharePoint information and the school's newsfeed.

When the app launches, the teacher's current classes are populated on the home screen. She wants to create a new class, and is able to add the new class site through a few simple steps. She also adds some class materials and a few announcements. When creating each class, the application also automatically creates a class notebook, where she adds relevant lessons and assignments.

The students receive an email message with a link to the Learning Companion app, and they install it. The students are met with an experience tailored to their school and their information. They find all of their classes and study groups quickly populated in one place—and now just one click away. They are greeted by an announcement welcoming them and a link to the campus map. Each class Tile is live, and each class inside provides them with all they need, including coming events, course materials, discussions, and other information. The students are ready to jump in right away.

Live Tiles keep you informed

Schools and institutions will want to customize the application and tailor it to fit their specific needs. Live Tiles are a great way to keep students (and teachers) informed. For example, notifications, current events, and even message alerts can be bubbled up.

Figure 1. Example Live Tile

The home screen provides quick access to classes and information

The home screen can be customized to support a customized background. Again, this can be driven by the service, by the user, or by some other source, depending on your requirements. Figure 2, for example, includes a What's New newsfeed that could be coming from the institution.

Figure 2. Example of a customized home screen experience

The customized Learning Companion home screen seen in Figure 2 illustrates the following categories:

Coming Up provides an aggregated view of your events, rolled up from your classes and study groups.
What's New could be the school's social or newsfeed, depending on how the app is customized before deployment, providing an ongoing forum for members to interact. Depending on how SharePoint is configured, social feeds may be easily supported.
Classes and Study Groups are categorized for easy access. If they haven't been preconfigured, it's easy to add them later.

Classes and Study Groups have everything students and teachers need

Classes and Study Groups are fully interactive. Students can do things such as post to class discussions, access course materials, and work in their notebooks. Where desired, the application can be extended by the developer to provide interaction with class members. All the information for their classes is right at their fingertips. Teachers and other authorized users can manage events, edit information, post new class materials, and perform other management tasks. Depending on how an institution decides to extend the application, there are many possibilities.

Figure 3. Example class view

On the example class view in Figure 3:

Coming up provides a list of events, respective to the class or study group, in chronological order. Authorized users can manage events via the application or from SharePoint.
Announcements, where supported, are provided in a list for quick reference. Announcements are managed by the teacher or other authorized users.
Materials is the document library included in every class or study group site. This is where class materials are provided by the teacher and also where the OneNote class notebook is created. And, where applied, materials protected by Information Rights Management (IRM) can also be supported.
Members provides the list of students and faculty with roles in the respective class or study group. Where the functionality has been extended, it may also be possible to see the member's online presence or location, or to initiate a chat session, a call, or an email message with them. Members are typically managed by the institution via a separate back-end system that the app pulls from, but they can be managed directly by an authorized administrator or dedicated role.
Discussions provide ongoing "rooms" of discussion for members on specific topics.

It's easy to take notes in context with OneNote integration

Each class site includes a OneNote notebook for students and teachers to use, either for collaborating on lessons and assignments or to simply take notes on important topics and lectures. Located in the Materials library, the notebook is designed by default to support student/teacher interaction. It has sections for lecture notes and assignments. These sections are visible to all members of the class (both students and teachers) but they can be edited only by the teachers. Sections are created for the teacher to input lessons and assignments for students to consume. Private sections are also created for each student—visible only to that student (and the teacher)—where they can keep their notes, work on assignments, and collaborate with the teacher. By using OneNote as the repository, the teacher is able to manage student submissions at a glance.

Scenario

The teacher assigns the first lesson and assignment of the semester. The student is notified via email and via a Learning Companion notification. The student clicks on the included link and the lesson opens in OneNote, where the student can immediately begin working.

Figure 4. Physics 101 class notebook

Because OneNote pages support various content types, including ink (sketches), audio, video, text, tables, and more, it's easy for the student to include all the information they need to complete the assignment.

Figure 5. OneNote lessons structure

The teacher is able to collaborate as the student is working on the assignment, checking progress, inserting comments, and answering any questions the student enters. When the assignment is due, the student can either drop a copy into a predetermined alternate folder or the teacher can assess and grade the assignment in the student's working folder. And because this is OneNote, grading can be done using ink!

Figure 6. OneNote assignment

More information about the Contoso Learning Companion, including the sample code, is available on the Microsoft Download Center: Contoso Learning Companion ver. 2.0 sample. Licensing is free for SharePoint solutions, and the sample is provided as-is, ready for customization. Watch for our follow-up blog post that will speak to the architecture behind the Contoso Learning Companion, along with requirements and ideas for making it your own.

The authors, Gerald Ferry, Hillary Mutisya, and Lee Riefberg come from the Microsoft Office engineering team, with experience and expertise in delivering modern data driven solutions leveraging numerous technology areas.

Content type and column usage report code samples from the SharePoint Conference!

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:40:45 GMT

By Chris Bortlik, SharePoint Technology Specialist

At the SharePoint Conference 2012, Scott Jamison and I discussed approaches for managing SharePoint enterprise content types and columns at scale.

During our session we reviewed how to create SharePoint columns and content types programmatically, how to optimize usage of the content type hub, and strategies for effectively managing columns and content types at large scale. We presented real-world customer examples and lessons learned.

We also reviewed column usage and content type reporting utilities that were originally developed for SharePoint 2010 by Pete Gonzalez del Solar on the SharePoint team, which we enhanced to support SharePoint 2013. These reports can help with managing site columns and content types across your organization.

Many people asked if they could use these reports within their organization, so we are pleased to announce that all of the samples have been published on MSDN under an open source license.

Here are the links:

SharePoint 2013: Column usage report
Analyzes the field definitions from across multiple SharePoint lists and subsites, and then writes the results to a CSV report that can be viewed by using Excel.
SharePoint 2013: Content type report Extends the column usage report to analyze the content type hierarchy and show which fields are referenced by which content types and whether the fields were customized.
SharePoint 2013: XML object snapshot
Generates a large XML report that represents the complete field schemas across all content types, lists, and subsites in a SharePoint site collection. These "snapshots" can be compared (for example, by using the WinDiff utility) as part of a diagnostic investigation to see what changed "before" and "after" an operation. At the conference, we talked about the content type push-down operation: What fields were impacted, and how did they change?

Conference attendees can download the slide deck and session video from here: SPC070: Deep dive on managing enterprise content types at scale.

Taxonomy code samples from SPC!

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:40:24 GMT

Hi, this is Pete Gonzalez. At the SharePoint Conference 2012, I discussed some automated approaches for synchronizing taxonomy objects between different systems. We first looked at C# code samples using the server object model, which is useful for administrative operations on an enterprise farm. The example we gave at the conference involved an external HR system with categories that are being imported into SharePoint. We then looked at some samples that use the new client object model, which provides a way to perform the same operations we performed on the server in the context of client applications, mobile devices, or cloud services. We also discussed an algorithm for incremental synchronization, which avoids data loss and improves performance when updating the term store.

People expressed a lot of interest in taxonomy programmability, not just for tagging and corporate taxonomy scenarios, but also because SharePoint 2013 uses the term store to drive the navigation menus and friendly URLs for publishing sites. Many people asked if they could use this code as a starting point for their own projects, so we are pleased to announce that all of the samples have been published on MSDN under an open source license. We also threw in two bonus samples, which use the server object model to achieve the same functionality as the client code from the conference.

Here are the links:

Demo #1: Term Set Import: Creates taxonomy objects that are read from an XML input file.
SharePoint 2013: Import a term set from an external source (Server OM)
Demo #2: Term Set Sync: Builds upon Demo #1 by incorporating an algorithm that performs incremental updates.
SharePoint 2013: Synchronize term sets with the term store (Client OM)
SharePoint 2013: Synchronize term sets with the term store (Server OM)
Demo #3: Automated Tagging: Assigns managed metadata fields by using inputs from a CSV file, which shows how to process large data sets.
SharePoint 2013: Automate tagging fields with terms (Client OM)
SharePoint 2013: Automate tagging fields with terms (Server OM)

Conference attendees can download the slide deck and session video from here: SPC068: Deep dive on integrating SharePoint metadata with other metadata stores.

Introducing the Content Search Web Part

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:40:04 GMT

Hi there. I'm Kerem Yuceturk, a program manager in the SharePoint Enterprise Content Management team. I am truly excited to start talking about the Content Search Web Part, one of the most interesting features that we added to SharePoint 2013, and the many scenarios it enables for SharePoint aficionados around the world.

Before I start to talk about Content Search, let me first set the stage by briefly outlining what this Web Part is trying to accomplish. If you ever dealt with publishing scenarios like creating an intranet portal or a knowledge management solution back in SharePoint 2007 and 2010 days, there is a good chance that you were using the Content Query Web Part. Content Query is great for showing dynamic content based on a set of criteria that you've set. So if you wanted to show a list of news articles on the intranet homepage, or to roll up a list of sales reports on your knowledge center, Content Query was the way to do it.

There was one catch though: If you ever wanted to show items that were not in the same site collection, you were out of luck. The scope of the Content Query Web Part was (and still is) limited to the site collection that the Web Part is placed in.

In SharePoint 2013, FAST Search and SharePoint Search fused together and got deeply integrated into SharePoint. As part of that change, we added a new tool for publishing content for your intranet or Internet site that knows no site-collection boundaries. This tool is the Content Search Web Part.

Content Search can show anything that's in the search index including content across site collections, and even content that comes from outside of SharePoint as long as it was crawled and placed in the search index. If search crawls it, you can display it, no matter where the content lives—provided the user viewing the page has permissions to see the item in question. Plus, thanks to the analytics capabilities that are built into SharePoint 2013, it can also show recommendations and popular items based on usage patterns.

If this sounds like something you want to try out, you can find Content Search in your SharePoint farms by going to the Web Part adder, and choosing the Content Rollup category. (Content Search is not available on Office 365 right now, but we are working on enabling it in the future.)

Figure 1. Two Content Search Web Parts from different contexts: on the left an intranet site that displays some PowerPoint files from another site collection, on the right the Contoso Electronics site that displays some items from the product catalog

At a very high level, using Content Search is easy by following these two steps:

Choose the items to show (formulate a search query that will return those items as results).
Format the items the way you want (use Display Templates to customize how items look).

Following is a little more detail about these two steps.

Choosing the items to show

The Content Search Web Part boasts a full-screen query builder that has several preconfigured queries to get you started, and a panel for previewing the results to enable you to tweak your query. It's fully integrated with the new search concepts of SharePoint 2013, like Results Sources and Query Rules, and can use these to get to results. It also has an advanced mode: basically, an enlarged search box where you can write any query using Keyword Query (KQL) syntax, which you can then try out by using the preview panel.

Figure 2. Query builder with tools on the left and preview of results on the right

Content Search also supports a rich set of dynamic values (also called query variables) to be used in queries such as today's date, the name of the current user, any field from the current page, or a custom property from the current web's property bag. Query Builder and dynamic values each deserve blog posts of their own, but for now, you can try out the following query variables in your queries if you want to explore some of the possibilities:

{Today-7}: The date for a week ago, great for "what's new this week" queries.
{User.Name}: The name of the current user. Great for surfacing content for the user who is viewing the page. Also works for any property, including custom properties from the current user's profile.
{Page.MyCustomTextField}: Gets the value of a field that you added to the content type you're using on the page.
{Site.URL}: Gets the current site's URL, or any custom property. Also works for SiteCollection.
{Term}: The current term from managed navigation. For more information, see the blog post Getting friendly with FURLs.

Formatting the items the way you want: Display templates

One of the main pain points we kept hearing from customers was about how irritating it is to use XSL to format the output of a Content Query Web Part. XSL is a relatively obscure web technology and it has a reputation for making most seasoned folks go scratch their heads about the syntax whenever they try to do something a little unusual while formatting the results.

In SharePoint 2013, there is a new way to format items shown in Content Search Web Parts using HTML and JavaScript instead of XSL: Display templates.

Display templates make it significantly easier to:

Specify what managed properties to retrieve from search.
Manipulate values of the retrieved managed properties in JavaScript, as needed.
Display the values in HTML in the browser.

Figure 3. Same search results displayed using three different sets of display templates in each of the columns

Display templates are located in the master page gallery of your site collection. There are several display templates that come pre-installed in a folder named Display Templates for your convenience, so feel free to browse around that folder if you'd like to get a feel for them. The best way to create a new display template is to copy one of the existing ones, and change its properties and content. Note that you should always deal with the .html files in those folders; .js files are auto-generated by SharePoint whenever you modify an .html file of the same name.

Display templates also deserve another blog post to do that topic any justice, so let me wrap this section up here to keep this post short and sweet.

Conclusion

I hope this gave you a taste of what the Content Search Web Part can do for you in your SharePoint deployments. Be sure to look for future posts that will go into more detail about some of the concepts introduced here.

The new SharePoint Online Administration Center—more customer control

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:39:43 GMT

Hi, I'm Kate Everitt, a Program Manager in SharePoint Online. I'm going to share insight about how to manage the new SharePoint Online environment while highlighting key features of the new SharePoint Online Administration Center. I'll then ask Phil Newman, a Program Manager on my team, to discuss how to automate SharePoint Online management tasks using remote Windows PowerShell.

The SharePoint Online Admin Center is evolving, and in the upcoming release we will introduce significant improvements in management, including configuration of Search, Apps, Project Online (if purchased), IRM, External Sharing, Start a Site, and more. We will touch on a few new scenarios below.

SharePoint Online Admin is embedded within the Office 365 management capabilities

The SharePoint Online Administration Center, included in the Office 365 Midmarket and Enterprise plans, is one part of the overall administration experience for Office 365, alongside the Exchange Online and Lync Online Administration Centers. You also perform certain tasks, like creating new users and assigning licenses, from within the global level of the Office 365 Administration Center.

What's new?

The first thing you'll notice about the new SharePoint Online Administration Center is its new look and feel—consistent across all of Office 365. We've also added a navigation bar across the top, which makes SharePoint sites and content more accessible as well as access to the other admin centers you have permissions to.

Figure 1. Access to various workloads and administration centers

Sharing

We've added more control over how sites are used and shared. The sharing setting allows administrators to choose whether site collections are for internal access only, or enabled for external sharing—this is called External Access. It is now possible to share individual documents via the new feature referred to as Guest Links, which enable both authenticated and anonymous methods of sharing Office documents. The new sharing features make it easier for teams to work with people and groups outside their company, while site administrators can make sure access to data remains secure.

To read more, please see the previous "Sharing - simplified" blog post by our colleague, Gaurav Doshi.

Figure 2. Notice the three levels of external sharing: all off, External Access of sites only, and enabled anonymous Guest Links

Search

A series of new search options make an appearance in SharePoint Online for the first time, which previously could be used only from inside the search service in Central Admin. You can manage search schema, dictionaries, and result sources, and remove search results you don't want. The new features give you control over how search queries act in your SharePoint Online environment and also enable you to import search configurations.

To read more, see the article What's new in search in SharePoint Server 2013.

Apps

One of the big investments this release is our new Cloud app model. Here, you can set up a corporate catalog to provide internal apps for your company, buy new apps, and manage and monitor how apps are to be consumed by your company and employees. To read more about the new Cloud app model, visit http://dev.office.com.

Site collection management

The easiest way to manage site collections is through the site collections list in the SharePoint Administration Center. This will allow you to create, delete, and manage quota and upgrade for site collections.

Figure 3. The main site collection management page

For those customers who have a lot of sites and are looking for a more powerful way to control them, I'm now going to turn this article over to Phil Newman, who will tell you about the new, faster way to handle your SharePoint Online tenancy.

Introducing the SharePoint Online Management Shell

The new SharePoint Online has an all-new Windows PowerShell module for admins to manage their sites and users! Windows PowerShell unlocks a lot of new scenarios, including bulk site creation and upgrade, and better quota management and reporting.

The basics

To get started, download the SharePoint Online Management Shell. After you've installed the shell, you're ready to start.

Given that you are running the SharePoint Online Management Shell on a computer that is not in SharePoint Online, you have to start each session by connecting to your SharePoint Online environment. To do that, use the Connect-SPOService cmdlet. You always connect to the SharePoint Online Administration Center URL.

To connect, run this script in the SharePoint Online Management Shell:

Connect-SPOService –url https://mytenant-admin.sharepoint.com

If you want to get fancy, you can also put credentials into the script. Be sure you protect files that have passwords in them.

$username = 'admin@contoso.onmicrosoft.com'
$password = 'MyPassword123'
$cred = New-Object -TypeName System.Management.Automation.PSCredential -argumentlist
$userName, $(convertto-securestring $Password -asplaintext -force)
Connect-SPOService –url https://contoso-admin.sharepoint.com –credential $cred

What can you do in Windows PowerShell?

We found that most of the activity in the SharePoint Online Administration center was around site management. As a result, we focused the new Windows PowerShell functionality on those scenarios. In Windows PowerShell, you can:

Create sites
Manage quotas
Upgrade sites
Manage site owners and admins
Manage permissions and groups

For detailed documentation, see the article Introduction to the SharePoint Online Management Shell.

Here are some details about a few handy scenarios:

Getting a list of all your sites

One of the common requests we get from large customers is for a way to get a list of all their sites and the characteristics of their sites. Using Windows PowerShell, it's easy:

Make sure you're connected.
Run "Get-SPOSite"

Windows PowerShell can actually create a CSV you can open in Excel in just one line. In one line, just run this:

Get-SPOSite | Export-CSV –path MyReport.csv

Figure 4. Results returned within Windows PowerShell showing all site collections using the Get-SPOSite command

Bulk site upgrade

Current Office 365 customers get full control over when their sites get upgraded to the new experience. Site owners will be able to upgrade individual site collections from within the SharePoint Online user interface (UI), but SharePoint Online Administrators will have the additional choice of upgrading site collections through Windows PowerShell—one at a time or in bulk.

To upgrade all of your sites from the SharePoint 2010 (14) UI and features to SharePoint 2013 UI (15), simply iterate through all "14" mode sites using a script like this one:

$14ModeSites = Get-SPOSite -limit all –detailed | Where-Object {$_.CompatibilityLevel – eq 14}
$14ModeSites | % {Upgrade-SPOSite -identity $_.url -VersionUpgrade}

Reporting

As you deploy hundreds of sites, Windows PowerShell can help you get a good picture of what's in your Office 365 environment. A slight variation on the script you used to get a list of all your sites can be used to get usage data.

Here is the new line that will give you more information. It can work with hundreds or thousands of sites.

Get-SPOSite –limit all –detailed | Export-CSV –path MyReport.csv

You'll notice two changes:

The use of "-limit all". By default, Get-SPOSite returns up to only 200 sites. Using "-limit all" gets you all of them.
The use of "–detailed". We've optimized Get-SPOSite for speed by retrieving only properties that we can get quickly by default. There are a few properties that won't come back unless you run in "-detailed" mode. Those properties are:

CompatabilityLevel
ResourceUsageCurrent
ResourceUsageAverage
StorageUsageCurrent
WebCount
Title

Now that you have a CSV of all of the properties, you can see how your usage quota is being consumed in your office 365 environment and make adjustments as necessary.

Windows PowerShell for SharePoint Command Builder

To make it easier to build out a variety of Windows PowerShell commands for SharePoint Online, we've designed a web-based tool named the Windows PowerShell for SharePoint Command Builder. (Note: To see all relevant SharePoint Online commands, select SharePoint Online from the Products drop-down list.) This tool can help you visualize what actions you want to take and dynamically build a Windows PowerShell command that you can copy into your management session.

Figure 5. Main screen of the Windows PowerShell for SharePoint Command Builder when you select SharePoint Online from the Products drop-down menu

SharePoint Online Admin and the Cloud app model

All of the functionality we have in Windows PowerShell is available in the Cloud app model too! I'm not going to go into too much detail in this blog post, but we've made sure that you already have everything you need to use the SharePoint Online Administration APIs when you have SharePoint developer tools. In any SharePoint client object model (CSOM) project, just add a reference to Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.client.dll and you're all set. The only caveat is that your app has to request and be granted tenant permissions.

Wrapping up…

We're excited to present the new features and improvements in the SharePoint Online Administration Center. We've focused heavily on consistency across all of Office 365, invested in the features you requested, and made it possible to automate common tasks by using Windows PowerShell. Try it all out and keep the feedback coming!

Making the most of SharePoint 2013 when you upgrade

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:39:20 GMT

Bojana Duke is a Program Manager on the SharePoint team. She’s been working on the sharing features along with the callout, performance and legacy features.

We know that people often use SharePoint sites for mission-critical information and processes. So it's extremely important that upgrades to our product and service are as quick and painless as possible. When you upgrade a site from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013, we go to great lengths to ensure that the content and structure of your site are preserved. But, there's a tradeoff here. Because we don't want to interfere with the way you've customized your site, some new features won't be enabled by default on your upgraded site. This post tells you about these features, and how you can enable them.

Your site, before and after upgrade

Before we dig into the features that are NOT present by default, let's look at all the differences we can see on an example site before and after upgrade:

Figure 1. Site before upgrade from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013

Figure 2. Site after upgrade from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013

New master page and visual style

The most obvious change after upgrade is the new default master page. It's simple and clean, designed to help showcase the contents of your site. The new master page includes the styles used to format text in your site, so you'll see that fonts, colors, and text sizes may have changed.

Most of the main components of the site are still there, and still in the same places; they just look a little different.

Site logo

In SharePoint 2010, the site logo was constrained to a small 60 x 60 pixel square. In SharePoint 2013, the optimal size for your site logo (assuming you use the default master page) is 180 x 64 pixels. You may want to upload a new logo graphic that helps you take advantage of the new space.

Ribbon

SharePoint 2010 introduced the ribbon as a central place to find commands for interacting with SharePoint. The ribbon still plays a major role in SharePoint 2013, but we've minimized it by default, to help people focus on the contents of their sites. Simply choose a ribbon tab (for example, click "PAGE in the upper-left corner)" to open the ribbon.

Global navigation bar

The blue (by default) global navigation bar now appears on every page of every site in SharePoint, to help people find their way around.

Site Actions menu

The menu known as "Site Actions" in SharePoint 2010 has moved to the top-right corner of the screen. It's represented by the "gear" icon and now referred to simply as "Settings." This menu is consistent with other products in the Office suite, like Outlook Web App.

Promoted actions

In SharePoint 2010, there were a few "Quick Action" icons in the upper-left corner of the screen, wedged in between the Site Actions menu and the ribbon. In SharePoint 2013, we've expanded this set of icons, and moved it to the right side of the page.

Edit Links command

You'll also notice a new EDIT LINKS command available at the end of the Quick Launch and Top Navigation menus. Use this command to enter a quick editing mode for organizing your site's navigation.

Differences between upgraded sites and fresh sites

If you create a fresh team site in SharePoint 2013, you'll notice several pretty obvious differences between it and your upgraded site.

Getting Started tiles

Perhaps the most obvious difference is the presence of "Getting Started tiles" on newly created team sites in SharePoint 2013.

Figure 3. Getting Started tiles

The tiles provide shortcuts to several common actions, like sharing your site and applying a theme. The tiles replace the "Getting Started" links from SharePoint 2010.

The tiles are automatically added to your upgraded site, but aren't added to your home page because we don't want to interfere with your content. You can access the tiles from the Settings menu by choosing Getting started.

Figure 4. Access the new Getting Started tiles by choosing Getting started on the Settings menu

Of course, you can also edit your home page to remove the old Getting Started links and add the tiles. To completely mimic the SharePoint 2013 home page, you'll have to make a few changes:

Change the page layout

Edit the home page, and then, on the Format Text tab of the ribbon, choose Text Layout. Then, choose Two columns with header.

Figure 5. Using the ribbon to change the page layout
Add the tiles

Position the text cursor in the header text area and then, from the INSERT tab of the ribbon, insert the Get started with your site web part.

Figure 6. Inserting the Get Started with Your Site web part, to add the new Getting Started tiles
Delete old content

If you want, you can remove old or unnecessary content from the two columns of the page.

Figure 7. Optionally deleting old content
Move shared documents
In SharePoint 2013, a site newsfeed goes in the left column of the home page. We'll discuss how to add that later. For now, drag the Shared Documents web part from the left to the right column.
Save the page and stop editing

Site Notebook feature

Team Sites in SharePoint 2013 come with a OneNote notebook. To add this notebook to an upgraded site, simply activate the Site Notebook feature. (Note that this feature requires an associated WAC server.)

To activate Site Notebook:

Settings (gear) -> Site settings -> Manage site features
From the Settings menu, choose Site settings, and then choose Manage site features.
Activate Site Notebook

For Site Notebook, choose Activate.

Figure 8. The Site Notebook feature

Site Newsfeed feature

Sites come with a site newsfeed in SharePoint 2013. There are a few prerequisites before you can add a feed to your upgraded site:

Requires SharePoint Server
My Site Host must be deployed
The site must be on the same web application as the My Site Host

To add a site newsfeed:

Settings (gear) -> Site settings -> Manage Site Features
From the Settings menu, choose Site settings, and then choose Manage site features.
Activate the "Site Feed" feature
For Site Newsfeed, choose Activate.
Add the Site Feed web part to the home page
Position the text cursor in the header text area and then, from the INSERT tab of the ribbon, insert the Site Feed web part.

Navigation structure

As I mentioned earlier, our philosophy in SharePoint 2013 is to focus on the contents of sites rather than the tools and structure of SharePoint. You can see this philosophy manifested in our decision to remove headings (like Libraries and Lists and Discussions) from the navigation menu.

You can easily update your site's navigation menu to match our new convention by removing headings:

In the navigation menu, choose EDIT LINKS.

Drag items out from under their headings.

Delete unnecessary headings.

In new SharePoint sites, we also try to avoid cluttering the site navigation with every list, library, app, or page that lives in the site. We encourage you to carefully curate the navigation menu, and delete items that are not commonly used.

And then we have several changes that aren't as obvious as the ones outlined above, but will still make a difference in your SharePoint experience.

Pages vs. dialogs for forms

With SharePoint 2013 and some of the great performance work we've done, we have a much smoother transition between pages. We have chosen to open List and Library forms by default in a full page, instead of in a dialog box. This helps you focus on the content of the form without being distracted by the background, and provides more space for you to see the information you're working on.

To enable your forms to open in a full page, you can change the List or Library settings:

On the List or Library tab on the ribbon, choose List Settings or Library Settings.

In the first column, choose Advanced Settings.

Scroll to the bottom, to see the Dialogs option:

Figure 9: Dialogs option

Select No, and then choose OK to save this setting.

Default permissions

We wanted to make SharePoint even more open to all users, so our new default permission level, Edit, includes the ability to create and manage lists and libraries. For existing sites, you'll have to change the permissions level of the Members group to be Edit:

On the Settings menu (the gear), choose Shared with.
Choose Advanced.

Select the check box next to the Members group for your site.

In the ribbon, choose Edit User Permissions.

Select the Edit option, and then choose OK.

Existing users in the Members group will now have these new permissions, and all new users added to the Members group will get these capabilities automatically.

Sharing with everyone

To help users understand how to share broadly without having to worry about managing complex permissions, we renamed the "All authenticated users" and "All tenant users" claims to more friendly terms: "Everyone" and "Everyone excluding external users." This enables users to search for these claims in the people picker simply by typing "everyone."

How upgraded users get these strings

"All authenticated users" is now called "Everyone" and "All tenant users" is now called "Everyone excluding external users," but these changes are not updated automatically during upgrade. To receive these changes, you have to activate (via Windows PowerShell) the feature with the following GUID: 10F73B29-5779-46b3-85A8-4817A6E9A6C2

$siteUrl = "http://www.contoso.com/" #URL of site collection
$site = Get-SPSite $siteUrl $site.Features.Add([System.Guid]"10F73B29-5779-46b3-85A8-4817A6E9A6C2")

Everyone vs. Everyone excluding external users

In SharePoint on-premises deployments, the "Everyone" claim is the new name for what was formerly known as "All authenticated users." SharePoint Online includes this "Everyone" claim, which will include external users if the feature is enabled (because external users are also "authenticated users"). SharePoint Online also includes a second claim "Everyone excluding external users," which maps to the former "All tenant users" claim and includes all authenticated users except external users.

Turning on Minimal Download Strategy (MDS)

MDS helps pages to perform faster and more smoothly by downloading only content that has changed as you move from page to page.

Because MDS is not compatible with all SharePoint customizations, we've left it off by default. You can decide whether to turn it on after upgrading. If you do not have any customizations, you can safely turn on MDS in Site Features:

On the Settings menu (the gear), choose Site Settings, and then choose Manage site features.

For Minimal Download Strategy, choose Activate.

If you do have customizations, you should consult forthcoming detailed guidance documentation to make sure your customizations are compatible with MDS. Customizations include third-party Web Parts, customized themes or master pages, and having the Publishing feature turned on.

We hope this lets you take full advantage of all the new features we’ve put together for SharePoint 2013. We’re excited about what we’ve built and are looking forward to hearing from you about how you’re using it!

Designing a beautiful search experience – The basics

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:38:51 GMT

Hello everybody! My name is Kate Dramstad, and I am a Program Manager on the SharePoint search team. The search experience in SharePoint 2013 is more extensible than ever—we've empowered designers and developers to build almost anything they can imagine. But, it's important to be careful when customizing the search experience. There is a fine line between a balanced page and a cluttered page, and we'd like to share with you some of our thinking about how to design a search experience that's both gorgeous and usable.

Whole-page alignment

One of the most important factors for our search experience is the alignment of all of the page elements. In our default design, you'll notice that the refinement Web Part (showing sorting options along the left side of the page) and the SharePoint search center icon (the magnifying glass image in the upper-left corner) are left-aligned. The search box, navigation, and results are also left-aligned. The top of the search box aligns with the top of the icon; the bottom of the navigation aligns with the bottom of the icon.

Figure 1. All of the elements on the search results page are aligned with a grid, shown here in green

This may seem like a minor detail, but snapping the elements on our page to a grid actually helps users to scan the page more easily. Components are separated from each other with strong vertical and horizontal lines of white space. This helps the eye to more easily distinguish between different components on the page, which is extremely important. A misaligned page, at best, just "feels wrong" to most users and, at worst, actually hinders the user from scanning results efficiently. When components are misaligned, it can create a "jagged edge". When the eye tries to scan a jagged edge, it has to dart back and forth. It is much more efficient for the eye to scan in straight lines.

Figure 2. In this image, the search icon is shifted to the left so it no longer aligns with the grid

When adding a new component to the page, or rearranging the existing components, it is very important to keep this grid in mind if you want the experience to be as polished as it can be.

Figure 3. Here we've modified the inline results to include a star-rating feature and some additional metadata. Notice how the added features still align with the grid.

Whole-page look and feel

Alignment is not the only thing that's important. You should also pay attention to the number of colors, fonts, and rich controls on the page. The focus of the search results page should almost always be the results themselves, so when styling components on the results page, you want to make sure you aren't drawing the user's eye away from the results. Following are some tips and tricks.

Use well-understood color mappings when possible

For example, it is a general convention in search results that blue text is the clickable result title, and green text is the URL of a given result. Deviating from this forces users to think more about what they're looking at.

Figure 4. Switching the color of the title and the URL is somewhat disorienting for users. Try to use color in a way that matches well-understood conventions

Use as few colors as possible

Colors are generally used to help certain key things stand out, such as a selected filter option, a result title, or a URL. But, using many colors can make it so that everything is trying to stand out, with everything competing for the user's attention. In the end, nothing stands out because it becomes a colorful visual jumble.

Figure 5. Too many different colors are distracting, making it difficult to decide where to look and what is important. Limit the number of colors used in the UI.

Use as few typefaces and font sizes as possible

Fonts, font sizing, and bolding/italics are used for similar reasons as color—to help certain, important elements stand out. Just as with color, if you use too many styles and fonts, everything appears cluttered. Our product team often refers to this as a "ransom note", where it looks like the page is cobbled together from different magazine clippings!

Keep rich controls as visually simple as possible

Take a look at the Date filter histogram refiner, under the heading Modified in Figure 6. Putting this refiner on our default page was risky at first, because it's a complex-looking control that could potentially stand out when compared to the text-based filters. But, we kept the colors consistent with the rest of the page, and kept the shapes and lines clean and simple. It's important to do the same when adding any custom control.

One idea we've played around with is a pie-chart filter. But, take a look in Figure 6 at how distracting this refiner is.

Figure 6. The custom pie-chart filter has too many colors and doesn't match the visual style of the other controls. It's too distracting.

Now, look at Figure 7 to see what happens if we simplify the color scheme and shapes.

Figure 7. By using colors that are already used in the UI and keeping with the visual style of the other controls, this pie-chart refiner is interesting enough that users will briefly explore its purpose—but not so distracting that they will be drawn away from their task

Conceptual division of the page

When designing a search experience, you should consider both aesthetic and conceptual details. Based on popular search conventions and our own research, we've organized the page components into different areas based on the functionality and the user-interaction model. When adding or rearranging components, it would be best to keep our conceptual division, so that users don't get lost looking for how to do something.

For example, all of our filter actions are on the left side of the search results page. When users want to filter their results set, they always know to look there. If you want to add a new filter to the page, it's best to add it next to the other filters, so users don't have to hunt around the page to find it.

Figure 8 shows an overview of the conceptual divisions of the default search results page.

Figure 8. The search results page is divided into five functional areas. When customizing this page, try to add new elements to their corresponding functional area.

These are just a few broad guidelines to get you started on building beautiful search experiences. I look forward to your comments and questions!

Yammer SKU plan and pricing: details direct from SharePoint Conference

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:38:32 GMT

Today, Microsoft announced the new Yammer SKU plan and pricing lineup at our annual SharePoint Conference. Yammer, the leader in enterprise social networking, was acquired by Microsoft earlier this year. The Microsoft/Yammer team has been hard at work designing a new pricing plan that makes it easier than ever for customers to experience Yammer.

Beginning March 1, 2013, Yammer will be available to Microsoft Enterprise Agreement customers. Enterprise Agreement customers will be able to purchase Yammer Enterprise via Microsoft volume licensing. Microsoft has also created a set of combo SKUs for SharePoint Online (Plan 1 and Plan 2) + Yammer Enterprise. SharePoint Online + Yammer provides customers with a world-class collaboration platform and enterprise social capabilities.

Yammer Enterprise will also ship with Office 365 for enterprises (Office 365 E Plans 1–4). Office 365 customers will have rights to run Office 365 for access to email, calendars, Office Web Apps, instant messaging, and file sharing and will have Yammer Enterprise for social.

Along with shipping Yammer with some of our most popular services, we will also be lowering the price for Yammer Enterprise standalone. Yammer Enterprise standalone will be available for $3 per user/per month (vs. the original price of $15 per user/per month). Yammer Basic standalone will also continue to be offered for free.

Beginning March 1, 2013:

Yammer Basic standalone: $0
Yammer Enterprise standalone: $3 per user/per month
New! SharePoint Online (Plan 1) + Yammer Enterprise $4 per user/per month
New! SharePoint Online (Plan 2) + Yammer Enterprise $8 per user/per month
Office 365 E Plans 1–4 + Yammer Enterprise $8–$22 per user/per month

(all pricing in USD)

Visit the Yammer pricing page to learn more. Stay tuned for more information in the coming months as we add more buying plans!

What's New with Information Rights Management in SharePoint and SharePoint Online?

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:35:56 GMT

by Barak Cohen, Lead PM Document Protection Services; Neil Wang, SDET Document Protection Services

Document protection in the cloud

The new Office is the version that brings document protection using Information Rights Management (IRM) services to the cloud for the first time. Office 365 users can get a service plan that includes IRM capabilities powered by a new document protection service also known as Windows Azure AD Rights Management (AADRM) , that is part of Office 365 Enterprise Plan 3 and Plan 4, and Academic Plan 3 and Plan 4. This capability is symmetric to the ability to assign a Windows Right Management Server (RMS Server) to an on premises SharePoint installation. Users can configure SharePoint Online to work with the service in their SharePoint Online Tenant Setting Page:

Figure 1. Enabling IRM service in Office 365 SharePoint Online Tenant Settings page

Note however, that the AADRM rights management service is not on by default in the SKUs listed above. Tenant admins have to enable it for their tenancy. Clicking the Refresh IRM Settings button on the Tenant Setting page queries the Office 365 directory for the AADRM settings and refreshes the settings in SharePoint Online.

To enable AADRM for Office 365 tenants you can go to this link to activate the service: https://activedirectory.windowsazure.com/RmsOnline/Manage.aspx?brandContextID=O365. (As mentioned above, one will have to have an Office 365 plan with AADRM for this to work, and one will have to log in using their Office 365 tenant admin credentials). This Rights Management page can also be accessed through the Information Protection menu on the Office 365 admin page.

Figure 2. Enabling AADRM rights management for Office 365 tenant on the AADRM portal

You can also use the following manual process to enable the service:

Download the Windows Azure AD Rights Management administration module (WindowsAzureADRightsManagementAdministration.exe) for Windows PowerShell from here.
From the local folder where you downloaded and saved the Rights Management installer file, double-click WindowsAzureADRightsManagementAdministration.exe to launch installation of the Rights Management administration module.
Open Windows PowerShell, and then type the following commands:
Enter your Office 365 Preview credentials when prompted. For example: user@company.onmicrosoft.com
Type the following commands:

Document protection on premises

On premises, IRM services are still supported by associating an AD RMS (Right Management Services) server role with a SharePoint farm, as described in the article AD RMS step-by-step guide. This is done by the farm admin on the Information Rights Management page that is linked from the farm admin page (the common configuration for on premises installation is for an RMS Server to be identified through Active directory). In SharePoint 2013, on-premises installations can target only on-premises RMS servers. (Note that SharePoint Online in Office 365 can target only AADRM).

Figure 3. Enabling IRM against an RMS Server in a SharePoint farm

Setting IRM is done at the farm level through the UI shown in Figure 3, or on a subscription level (new in Office 2013), which is the way it is implemented in the cloud. Setting IRM to specific SharePoint subscriptions on premises requires the check box in Figure 3 to be selected, and then a Microsoft PowerShell script is used to set the specific RMS server URL for each subscription.

Protecting documents is easy

After IRM services are configured online or on premises, site collection admins can enable IRM protection on individual document libraries.

Figure 4. Setting IRM protection on a document library

After these settings are in place, documents that are compatible with Office IRM services are protected after they are downloaded to the client. The additional options enable people to set the usage rights in more granular detail.

You can easily set usage rights

Enhanced in Office 2013, the IRM settings UI for a document library was made easier to use. Beyond writing the permission policy title and description, library admins can also do the following:

Set access rights, including rights to print, run scripts to enable screen readers, or enable writing on a copy of the document (new to Office 2013)
Set expiration date (the date after which the document cannot be used
Control whether documents that do not support IRM protection can be included in the library
Control whether Office Web Apps can render the documents in the library (new in Office 2013)

Protected documents can be rendered in the browser

Also new to Office 2013, Office Web Apps can render protected documents. This means that if an authenticated user does not have a compatible Office client, they can still view the documents using Office Web Apps. Note that in the case of Web Apps, the document is presented in read-only mode. Also note that screen capturing of protected content in the browser is not blocked (as it is on clients), but, the information about the protected documents is cleared from the browser cache. Library admins can always prevent this capability by selecting the Prevent opening documents in the browser for this Document Library check box on the Information Right Management setting page (shown below in figure 5).

You can protect documents for groups

When documents are downloaded from an IRM-enabled SharePoint document library, by default each supported file type is encrypted and rights are restricted to the authenticated user who downloaded the documents. Other users who have rights to the same library must get their own copy. One of the new features that SharePoint 2013 supports is to protect a library for a group. An admin can choose an Active Directory group and use it to stamp the usage license for the file. Then, documents that are downloaded can be used by all the members of the group, and the user who downloaded the copy can transfer the copy to any member of the group directly. In Office 365, these groups are created in the Exchange Control Panel (ECP).

Figure 5. Group protection as part of the advanced IRM settings on document libraries

IRM supports Office documents and PDF files

Many people have expressed interest in tighter integration of PDF files in SharePoint and Office in general. New to Office 2013, PDF documents are integrated better into SharePoint 2013. PDF readers can register a control to allow simple opening of PDF files, and PDF documents can be protected with Microsoft IRM services. IRM protection of PDF documents is an extension of the PDF standard, which PDF readers can implement and support. One reader that already supports this feature is the Foxit PDF reader.

Programmability

New in Office 2013, IRM settings at the farm/subscription level are programmatically controlled. Table 1 shows examples of how IRM settings at the farm or subscription level can be manipulated from Windows PowerShell.

Table 1. IRM programmability with PowerShell

Example	Windows PowerShell Command
Enable IRM for the farm and configure it to use the default RMS server that is configured in Active Directory.	Set-SPIRMSettings -IrmEnabled - UseActiveDirectoryDiscovery
Enable IRM for the farm and specify the URL of the RMS server to use.	Set-SPIRMSettings -IrmEnabled - CertificateServerUrl http://myrmsserver
Enable IRM for the specified tenant and specify the URL of the RMS server to use.	Set-SPIRMSettings –IrmEnabled - SubscriptionScopeSettingsEnabled site = Get-SPSite http://myspserver $subscription = $site.SiteSubscription Set-SPSiteSubscriptionIrmConfig -Identity $subscription -IrmEnabled - CertificateServerUrl http://myrmsserver
Disable IRM for the farm.	Set-SPIRMSettings -IrmEnabled:$false

For more information, see these links to descriptions of classes and APIs at the document library level:

SPInformationRightsManagementSettings class
SPInformationRightsManagementSettings members
SPInformationRightsManagementSettings methods
SPInformationRightsManagementSettings properties

The following Windows PowerShell script sample shows how a tenant admin can to turn on and configure IRM policy for all the document libraries on tenant’s sites:

$webUrl = "https://contoso.sharepoint.com"
$username = "admin@contoso.onmicrosoft.com"
$password = ConvertTo-SecureString "password" -AsPlainText -Force

Add-Type -Path "c:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\Web Server Extensions\15\ISAPI\Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.dll"
Add-Type -Path "c:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\Web Server Extensions\15\ISAPI\Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Runtime.dll"

$ctx = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ClientContext($webUrl)
$ctx.Credentials = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.SharePointOnlineCredentials($username, $password)
$lists = $ctx.Web.Lists
$ctx.Load($lists)
$ctx.ExecuteQuery()

$lists | `
    where { $_.BaseTemplate -eq [Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ListTemplateType]::DocumentLibrary } | `
        foreach { `
            $_.IrmEnabled = $true; `
            $_.InformationRightsManagementSettings.PolicyTitle = "IRM enabled"; `
            $_.InformationRightsManagementSettings.PolicyDescription = "This file is protected by SharePoint IRM."; `
            $_.Update(); `
            Write-Host "IRM enabled on $($_.Title)" `
        }
$ctx.ExecuteQuery()

Supported client matrix

On the Office 365 services side, both SharePoint 2013 Online and Exchange 2013 Online support IRM services. (To get the services, you have to be a subscriber to one of the Office365 service plans that include IRM support as described in the Office 365 Web Site).

Table 2 provides a coverage matrix for client applications that are compatible with IRM services in Office 2013.

Table 2. Client application support matrix

App	SharePoint 2013	SharePoint Online 2013	RMS Server	RMS Online
Word, PowerPoint, Excel 2013 (windows)	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Word, PowerPoint, Excel 2013 RT	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Word, PowerPoint, Excel 2010	Yes	Yes (After you install the Office 365 sign-on assistant.)	Yes	Yes
Office for Mac 2010	Yes	No	Yes	No
Outlook on Windows Phone 7	NR	NR	Yes	No
Word on Windows Phone 7	Yes	No	Yes	No
Foxit PDF reader on Windows	Yes	Yes (After you install the Office 365 sign-on assistant.)	Yes	Yes

Next Steps

IRM protection gives you better control of how you distribute and manage your digital documents. With the growing popularity of cloud services coupled with the affordable availability of the Office 365 platform, IRM services are easier to use and more readily available than ever before. Furthermore, trying the new service is available at no cost to anyone, so go ahead, sign up and never be worried about sensitive Microsoft Office and PDF document leaks. As always, our team is interested in feedback to help us improve the service further, feel free to comment

Intro to eDiscovery in SharePoint, Exchange, and Lync 2013

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:35:31 GMT

Like many organizations, yours probably has a vast amount of data in the form of email messages and electronic documents. Not only do you have lots of email and documents, but you also probably have other types of content such as social data, instant messages, and webpages. There are significant legal risks associated with preserving, searching, and producing this data when legal events occur. How do you search this content and export it into a format you can hand off for eDiscovery requests? How can you provide your users with the best collaboration technologies while protecting your business? The new eDiscovery capabilities in SharePoint Server 2013, Exchange Server 2013, and Lync 2013 do just that.

In case you are not familiar with eDiscovery, it is the process of finding, preserving, analyzing, and producing content in electronic formats as required by litigation or investigations. Now you can save time and help reduce your legal risk with In-Place Hold, near real-time search, and the ability to handle more types of content. We have built on our eDiscovery work in SharePoint 2010 and Exchange 2010 by enabling you to perform eDiscovery across SharePoint, Exchange, Lync, and file shares—all from one location. You can help protect content in SharePoint and Exchange by using In-Place Hold, identify and reduce the amount of content with eDiscovery queries, and export the results into an offline format you can hand off for legal review.

Here is a quick overview of eDiscovery with SharePoint 2013, Exchange 2013, and Lync 2013:

In-Place Hold: Protect content in-place and in real time with higher fidelity and reduced storage costs, without affecting the daily work of your users.
Query: Get up-to-date, relevant content and statistics quickly to help you answer questions fast. Export: Transfer relevant content out of the system into an offline and portable format.
More content: Preserve, search, and export documents, email messages, OneNote files, webpages, community posts, microblogs, Lync IMs, and more.

SharePoint 2013 introduces the eDiscovery Center site collection, which has features to help with the first half of the eDiscovery Reference Model (EDRM)—identification, preservation, collection, processing, and analysis. The eDiscovery Center is available on-premises and in Office 365 and can be connected to Exchange so you can do eDiscovery across SharePoint, Exchange, and Lync content archived into Exchange. In the eDiscovery Center you can create eDiscovery Case sites, which are used to organize in-place holds, queries, and exports for a particular case. The eDiscovery Case site is designed for in-house legal teams to perform their eDiscovery work.

Figure 1: The home page of the eDiscovery Case site

Using In-Place Hold to preserve data

Our customers have told us that when a legal event begins there is often a need to make sure that potentially relevant content that may be evidence is not modified or destroyed. Content is spread across many different locations including email servers, file shares, content management systems, and user’s computers. Previous versions of SharePoint were a challenge for eDiscovery because there are many types of content, such as pages and lists, which are difficult to export into an offline copy. SharePoint 2013 makes protecting content easier with eDiscovery Sets, a new feature used to identify Exchange mailboxes and SharePoint sites, group them together, apply filter criteria, and put the content on In-Place Hold.

Figure 2. The eDiscovery Set page is where you can manage In-Place Holds for Exchange mailboxes and SharePoint sites.

With In-Place Hold, users can continue editing and deleting their content while, behind the scenes, the system ensures the original versions are retained for eDiscovery. The metadata and context of each item is retained because it is kept in place.

In-Place Hold:

Preserves content in place, including blogs, wiki pages, microblog content, archived Lync instant messages, email messages, calendar items, contacts and much more.
Helps reduce your risk by broadly protecting content (SharePoint sites and Exchange mailboxes) quickly, rather than spending weeks or months making copies of all of the content that might be relevant.
Helps reduce your storage costs by preserving only content that is edited or deleted, and by entering filters to reduce the amount of content you keep under hold.

Identifying relevant data using queries

Legal review can cost thousands of dollars per gigabyte, so reducing the amount of content you hand off for legal review is an important part of the eDiscovery process. The new eDiscovery Query page helps you identify and reduce your data set by using keyword syntax, property restrictions, and refinements. The query experience focuses on statistics for individual sources and query fragments to help you make decisions about the content you are searching across. You can also preview SharePoint and Exchange content to make sure you have identified the right set of results.

Figure 3. The Query page enables you to identify relevant content with keywords, refiners, and statistics.

The eDiscovery query experience helps you reduce your content set to the relevant items you care about, with a focus on statistics and preview. Here are a few key features and examples:

Proximity search: For example, wingtip NEAR(30) marketing identifies results where "wingtip" is within 30 keywords of "marketing"
Exchange domain filtering: For example, return all results with @contoso.com
Search across Exchange, Lync content archived into Exchange, SharePoint, and file shares from one search page

Exporting data

One of the biggest eDiscovery challenges when dealing with SharePoint and Exchange is getting the data out of the system in a portable offline format. This is a concern both on premises and in Office 365. Exporting is now as easy as clicking a few buttons. After you finalize your query, you can click the export button, select a few options, and then download the search results directly to your local computer. Using our export, you can remove duplicate Exchange content, include document versions from SharePoint, and even include unsearchable items (items that have had indexing errors).

Figure 4. Export makes it easy to download your search results from Exchange and SharePoint whether the data is on premises or in Office 365.

An Electronic Discovery Reference Model XML manifest is included in the export to provide metadata about the exported items. After export:

Exchange content, including archived Lync content, is stored in PST files.
SharePoint content and file share content is downloaded in the native format.
SharePoint pages are captured as MHT files.
>SharePoint lists are stored as CSV files.

After you have completed your export, you can import it into popular review tools or hand it off for legal review.

Wrapping up…

The new eDiscovery capabilities have three advantages to help you get the job done when you need to handle legal investigations:

In-Place Hold—You can preserve and search across content in native stores. This is faster, easier, and provides higher fidelity than the processes in use today. Plus, with our in-place approach, you can reduce the storage space you use.
Near real-time search—Because we use the built-in search system of SharePoint and Exchange, content is always up-to-date and you can run searches anytime. You can get answers in minutes by searching across live and up-to-date content.
More content—You can preserve, search, and export OneNote files, webpages, communities, microblogs, Lync IMs, Lync meetings, and more.

SharePoint 2013, Exchange 2013, and Lync 2013 help you reduce your legal risk and save time. Now you have the tools you need to quickly respond to legal requests, so you can protect your organization without getting in the way of your users.

To get started, you can create an eDiscovery Center site collection and then create eDiscovery Case sites. Getting everything hooked up with Exchange requires some configuration—check the TechNet article Plan for eDiscovery in SharePoint Server 2013 to help you get started.

Thanks for reading, let me know if you have any questions.

Quentin Christensen
Program Manager, Enterprise Content Management

The SharePoint Conference Experience: Chock-Full of Win

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:35:09 GMT

In case you haven’t noticed, MySPC has been causing quite a stir. The scheduling and networking application was released early Wednesday morning, and SharePoint Conference attendees have been browsing sessions and building their schedules, seemingly without stopping to breathe.

In addition to being able to build a customized conference schedule, MySPC offers attendees a chance to link their social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) to their public profiles. Exercising this option allows users to see which social connections from the Community will be attending SharePoint Conference and puts them into a Favorites category for easy perusal. The handy Meetings function then makes scheduling 1:1 appointments a snap.

What does it all mean? It means SharePoint Conference offers a new level of networking not seen at previous events. Attendees can see who they need to meet and make sure business gets done.

One item on everyone’s schedule is the Opening Keynote slated for 8:30AM on Monday, the first full conference day. This is where Jared Spataro, Jeff Teper, Scott Guthrie, and David Sacks will speak on a variety of topics, including their vision for SharePoint 2013 and what the future holds for Enterprise Social Networking. It’s a can’t-miss event, and it’s the only time during SharePoint Conference when every attendee will be together to help push SharePoint into a new era.

SharePoint Conference 2012 is November 12-15 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Spots are still available for the conference and for Pre and Post Conference Trainings, and attendees will have an opportunity to see Bon Jovi and the Kings of Suburbia perform live on Tuesday night. If you have any questions about attending or exhibiting at SharePoint Conference, you can email spc@microsoft.com. Be sure to follow @SPConf on Twitter and like the SharePoint Conference Facebook page to stay up to date on news and events as they happen.

SharePoint Conference 2012 Countdown

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:34:42 GMT

SharePoint Conference 2012, the official gathering of Microsoft SharePoint professionals, is rapidly approaching. With only two weeks until the November 12 kickoff, time is running short for those who have been on the fence about attending.

One of the features of this year’s SharePoint Conference is a new SharePoint Community Lounge! This is an area where prominent SharePoint community leaders and organizations will have an opportunity to engage with attendees and speak about the benefits of participating in the SharePoint Community. From SharePoint User Groups to national community organizations, attendees will have at their disposal all manner of resources to further their SharePoint skills and careers.

No technical conference would be complete without a stellar lineup of Pre and Post Conference Trainings. SharePoint Conference 2012 is no exception with a la carte offerings such as The Best of the New Project Ignite and SharePoint 2013 Deployment and Administration. Tickets for these trainings are limited, and attendees should visit http://sharepointconference.com to secure their spots.

Finally, much buzz surrounds the release of MySPC. This scheduling and networking application has been used at recent Microsoft conferences to build business relationships and ensure maximum session scheduling efficiency, and the organizers of SharePoint Conference 2012 are excited to offer this new tool. Customizing the conference experience will be snap, and attendees will have brand new ways to connect with each other through business and social plugins. MySPC will truly be the perfect complement to an event like SharePoint Conference 2012.

If you have any questions about attending or exhibiting at SharePoint Conference, you can email spc@microsoft.com. Be sure to follow @SPConf on Twitter and like the SharePoint Conference Facebook page to stay up to date on news and events as they happen.

Show Off Your Style with SharePoint Theming

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:34:14 GMT

Lionel Robinson is a Program Manager on the SharePoint engineering team, focused on user experience.

Theming in SharePoint 2013 makes it easier to drastically change the look of your site and make it your own. That said, the new look of SharePoint sites is great, so why would you want to change it? Here's a personal example:

After the birth of our twins, I literally didn't fit in the driver seat of my car with both child seats installed. And even in the passenger seat, my knees where hitting the dash while sitting at an angle. Time for a bigger car. My wife and I both grew up riding around in minivans, and we were thrilled to find the exact make, model, and color we wanted. It fit the whole family plus, with tons of cargo space. It was great!

Perhaps it's just a psychological trick, but from that day forward it seemed like every third person on the road was driving the same car: our metallic light blue Honda Odyssey. On more than one occasion, I found myself in a parking lot, jamming the unlock button on the key fob, only to realize that my car was actually two aisles over.

What options do we have to truly make a car our own? The cheap fix is to slap a bumper sticker or decal onto the back. At the other end of the spectrum, you can pay someone to modify your car to your heart's content. Or bravely do it yourself.

We've seen some customers encounter this problem with current SharePoint sites. When everyone uses the same few templates, yours can get lost in a sea of strikingly similar sites. You can live with the similarity and hope to tell the sites apart based on minor differences (the bumper sticker), or you need to use CSS and HTML to customize your site, which can be detailed and time-consuming.

These are the problems we are addressing with the new SharePoint theming experience. Through this experience, you can customize your site in minutes by playing with four basic levers: colors, site layout, fonts, and background image. By changing these, you can get a look that is truly unique.

Quick walkthrough

Under "Getting started with your site”, click on the "What's your style?" tile. (If the tiles are hidden, you can also click "Change the look" on the settings menu or find "Change the look" in Site Settings under the heading "Look and Feel.")
The first page showcases a few starting points that we've put together, just to show you the range of options for your site's look and feel. Pick any of these options to start.

Now the fun begins. You can change any of the four levers we mentioned earlier (background, layout, colors, and fonts), and preview the change instantly. Drag your own background image onto the rectangle in the top-left corner, select a color palette to match, select the site layout you want, and choose the font scheme that best fits your personality.

After you select your perfect combination of options, click "Try it out" (at the top-right corner) to preview it on your own site.
This is where the magic happens! We make a copy of your site's CSS (the files that define the look and formatting) but change it to the new colors and images. After you see it you can either keep it or try again.

Have a specific color or font in mind?

We've included a set of color palettes and fonts that we like. But you can always add your own. All you need is your favorite text editor. Things are going to get slightly technical (and if you are familiar with theming in SharePoint 2010, you've got a head start). The main difference is that we are no longer using the THMX file format. We created a set of new and simple XML formats to describe theming options: SPColor files describe the color palette and SPFont files describe the font scheme. The easiest way to create your own palettes and font schemes is to start with the defaults in your team site. Navigate to the root site of the site collection, click on "site settings" in the settings menu, and then "theme gallery". You'll find the color palettes and font schemes in the folder named "15."

Color palettes

Each SPColor file contains simple XML that defines the color value, in hexadecimal, for each of the available color slots. If you know the color slot you want to change, just write in the new value and save a copy of the file into the same folder of the theme gallery (if versioning or publishing is turned on, make sure you check in and publish the file). Your new palette will be available in the color picker of the theming experience (step 3, mentioned earlier).

Here is a snippet of an SPColor file. Also new to this release is the ability to specify opacity values along with color. You can do this by using an 8-digit hexadecimal value, where the first two digits represent the opacity, followed by the traditional 6 digits representing red, green, and blue values.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<s:colorPalette isInverted="false" previewSlot1="BackgroundOverlay" previewSlot2="BodyText" previewSlot3="AccentText" xmlns:s="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">

<s:color name="BodyText" value="444444" />

<s:color name="SubtleBodyText" value="777777" />

<s:color name="StrongBodyText" value="262626" />

<s:color name="DisabledText" value="B1B1B1" />

<s:color name="SiteTitle" value="262626" />

<s:color name="WebPartHeading" value="444444" />

<s:color name="ErrorText" value="BF0000" />

<s:color name="AccentText" value="0072C6" />

<s:color name="SearchURL" value="338200" />

<s:color name="Hyperlink" value="0072C6" />

<s:color name="BackgroundOverlay" value="D8FFFFFF" />

...

</s:colorPalette>

Font schemes

Fonts can add a lot of personality to a site. One of the most exciting things about theming in SharePoint is support for web fonts. Prior to this feature, you had to choose between the same old 8–10 web-safe fonts (fonts that are known to be installed on almost all devices by default, like Arial, Times New Roman, and Georgia). By using web fonts, you can select from the rich variety of fonts available on the Internet, and the necessary files are downloaded by web browsers along with the rest of the page.

Similar to the SPColor file for color palettes, an SPFont file defines the font that is used for each of the available font slots. The easiest way to make a custom font scheme is to start from one that's already available and make tweaks as needed. SharePoint supports many languages and scripts, and so does font theming. For each font slot, you should define the font to be used in each script. For web-safe fonts, just include the name in the typeface attribute for each font slot. If you want to specify a web font, you'll have to provide the URL to your web font files in four font formats (for support across browsers), and a small and large thumbnail image that is used to render the font names in the font picker (see step 3, mentioned earlier).

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<s:fontScheme name="Impact" previewSlot1="title" previewSlot2="body" xmlns:s="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">

<s:fontSlots>

<s:fontSlot name="title">

<s:latin typeface="Impact"

eotsrc="/_layouts/15/fonts/Impact.eot"

woffsrc="/_layouts/15/fonts/Impact.woff"

ttfsrc="/_layouts/15/fonts/Impact.ttf"

svgsrc="/_layouts/15/fonts/Impact.svg"

largeimgsrc="/_layouts/15/fonts/ImpactLarge.png"

smallimgsrc="/_layouts/15/fonts/ImpactSmall.png" />

...

<s:font script="Arab" typeface="Segoe UI Light" />

<s:font script="Deva" typeface="Nirmala UI" />

<s:font script="Grek" typeface="Segoe UI Light" />

...

</s:fontSlot>

<s:fontSlot name="navigation">

<s:latin typeface="Segoe UI" />

...

<s:font script="Arab" typeface="Segoe UI" />

<s:font script="Deva" typeface="Nirmala UI" />

<s:font script="Grek" typeface="Segoe UI" />

...

</s:fontSlot>

...

</s:fontSlots>

</s:fontScheme>

Composed looks

"Composed looks" are the starting points shown in the first step of the theming experience. You can add new composed looks that use your custom colors palettes and font schemes. It's a great way to save a series of designs so you can apply them at any time. You'll find the list of composed looks in "Site Settings" under "Web Designer Galleries." You can manage the existing set of composed looks and add new ones. To add one, just add a new list item and fill in a name and title and the URLs to the masterpage, SPColor file, background image (optional), and SPFont file (optional). After you add a list item, the preview for your new composed look is added as a starting point on the "Change the look" page.

So go forth and play! Make your sites look great, show off your team's personality, and be truly unique. Now if only I could do the same to my minivan.

Boosting productivity, process efficiency, and ROI with SharePoint and Line-of-Business Systems

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:33:53 GMT

Business-Critical SharePoint (“BCSP”) was introduced to our blog readers a few months ago (post), as an approach to driving productivity with SharePoint-based solutions using line-of-business data. Since then, we’ve been witnessing the type of momentum that only a few had predicted - customers from around the world and across different industries have been adopting BCSP by connecting SharePoint to a variety of LOB systems (ERP, CRM, PLM and more), surfacing data in SharePoint and utilizing that data to share information and improve cross-team collaboration across their organization.

What customers are finding is that the business value to be gained from SharePoint is significantly enhanced when they take it beyond more basic scenarios such as Document Management and Intranet solutions. As Steven Wong from Concatenate puts it, “SharePoint is great as an Intranet but really rocks when you use it for connecting backend business systems.” A recent survey conducted by the Central Marketing Group at Microsoft found that customers that connect SharePoint to LOB systems and perceive it to be “Mission Critical” are the ones with the highest levels of product satisfaction when it comes to their SharePoint deployments.

At the forefront of the effort to address this surging demand by customers around utilizing SharePoint in these highly-connected scenarios, are 90 SharePoint partners who are leading the way with the Business-Critical SharePoint approach and helping companies break-down information silos.

Organizations implementing the BCSP approach are already seeing business process improvements and return on investment (ROI), including the Street Crane Company, the United Kingdom’s largest manufacturer of electric overhead traveling cranes. Their SharePoint-based solution from Siemens PLM Software now connects the previously disparate line-of-business systems; therefore, also the previously disconnected teams using the data. “Different people from within our organization are able to see different areas, write to different areas, or edit different areas,” said Chris Russell, Director of Development at Street Crane. “The opportunity was to improve the speed, efficiency and precision with which users inside and outside the company could access the data specific to them.” Andrew Pimblett, Managing Director, Street Crane concludes, “Without doubt, the return on our investment in using SharePoint and Solid Edge products has been absolutely second to none. We wouldn’t have achieved what we have, I believe, with any other products on the market.”

To learn more about how the benefits of the Business-Critical SharePoint approach and how the Business-Critical SharePoint partners can help companies like yours, join our BCSP Webcast on Dec. 4th, or find a partner in your area on www.sharepoint.com/bcsp.

Introducing SharePoint 2013 Search Result Types and Display Templates

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:33:32 GMT

Hello everybody! My name is Kate Dramstad, and I'm a Program Manager working on the SharePoint search team. I'll be talking to you about improvements in the SharePoint 2013 search experience. This post is a high-level overview of how result types and display templates work together to create rich search experiences. If you take away only one concept from this post it should be: Result Types + Display Templates = Rich Search Experiences.

Creating a great search experience

A great search experience is characterized by how easy it is for the user to quickly find what they are looking for. In most search UI, all of the search results look the same, so it is up to the user to carefully scan each result, or worse, to "pogostick"—jump back and forth between the results page and a result trying to decide if that particular result is what they were looking for. In an ideal search experience, the user should be able to click only once, feeling confident they have found what they were looking for.

SharePoint 2013 offers a huge improvement in the search experience through display templates and result types. Gone are the days of uniform-looking results and endless scanning. Documents aren't all the same, and search results shouldn't be either. In SharePoint 2013, you have the ability to control the look of the search results on a very granular level. Take a look at this screenshot below. Each colorful box represents an area of the UI that's being controlled by a different display template.

Figure 1: The look of each Search UI component is controlled by different display templates.

There are display templates for each of the different results types within the search results, the hover panel for each result type, and each of the refinement controls. Each of these areas can be customized so that you can deliver a search experience that will delight your users.

A result type consists primarily of a set of rules that describe which of the items in the search results match that result type. When a user issues a query, the results come back and each result is evaluated against the rules in the result types. A display template is then applied to the result based on the type that it matches. By default, SharePoint 2013 includes several predefined result types:

Rich document results for PowerPoint, Word, and Excel documents
Rich conversation results for Newsfeed posts, replies, and community discussions
Rich video results, and more…

You can read about the People result type in the blog post Introducing People Search. Each result type has its own display template, making it look different from other result types and surfacing properties that are most relevant to a specific kind of document.

Figure 2: Each result type is mapped to a display template.

Custom result types and display templates

In addition to the default result types, you can define your own result types. A result type can then be associated with a custom display template, enabling you to highlight specific kinds of results that are important for users. For example, let's say when users search for purchase orders, you'd like the search results to also display the person who approved the purchase order for each result. To accomplish this, start by creating a custom result type for Purchase Orders. In your company, purchase orders are Word documents with a property IsPurchaseOrder, along with some other additional metadata like Purchase Order Approver, Purchase Order Approval Date, and Purchase Order Cost. To create a Purchase Order Result type, you would copy the Microsoft Word Result Type and add a specification that results that match should have the custom property IsPurchaseOrder equal to "True."

The next step is creating a custom display template for Purchase Orders that surfaces the managed property POApprovedBy. Customizing display templates is straightforward. All customization is done in HTML and JavaScript, rather than XLST. To create a new template, start by copying an existing template. Add additional managed properties to the template so that you can surface important type-specific information. In the case of the Purchase Order example, copy the Word Item template and add the OPApprovedBy managed property to the template. Next, style the UI with HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.

The final step is to tell the Purchase Order result type to point to the Purchase Order display template. Now when a user issues a query, each result is first evaluated against the rule for Purchase Order results. If it matches, it is displayed using the Purchase Order display template. Otherwise, it is matched to one of the default result types and is displayed using the corresponding template. With this new search experience, you have made it easier than ever for users to find what they are looking for. But wait, there's more!

Next steps

As I mentioned earlier, display templates offer control over many aspects of the search UI, not just the result types. If you wanted to extend our Purchase Order example further, you could, for example, create a refiner for Purchase Order Cost using the Slider with Bar Graph template that is used by the Modified Date refiner by default. Or, you could create a custom hover panel that surfaces even more properties that are specific to Purchase Orders. The possibilities are basically limitless.

In my next blog post I'll cover the code-level details about how search administrators can create custom result types and display templates. I hope this post got you thinking about scenarios where custom result types and/or custom display templates can help deliver a delightful experience for users. I look forward to hearing your comments.

Lists, Libraries, and other Apps?

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:33:09 GMT

If you're used to earlier versions of SharePoint, you might have noticed that in those versions the UI made a distinction between things like lists, document libraries, picture libraries, discussion lists, and surveys. This distinction was based on technical differences rather than anything that was likely to matter to users, and generated a lot of confusion. For example, why did surveys and picture libraries get their own category when each contained only one kind of thing, but the lists category might have a couple dozen options? And who thinks of a calendar as a list, anyway?

Figure 1: Example of left navigation area from a SharePoint 2010 site showing the categorization of different lists and libraries.

While we were thinking about how to address the issue of oddly categorized functionality on the site, another interesting thing happened: the concept of "apps" became mainstream. People became comfortable with apps on their phones and on sites like Facebook. New places to install apps seemed to pop up on a daily basis. We wanted to make it easier for people to get new functionality into their SharePoint sites without requiring that they understand anything about how or where the code was deployed.

We considered tacking on "apps" as another category like lists/libraries/and so on, but it seemed a bit ridiculous. We asked customers how they thought about their sites and the things in them, and we repeatedly heard this message:

The site itself is a place.
Users are people who could go to that place.
A theme is a thing that changes how that place looks.
The remaining functionality in their lists/libraries/and so on is similar to "apps" you might find on your phone.

When we thought about it that way, calling everything an app made a lot of sense. The flow for interacting with existing ones, finding and acquiring new ones, and getting rid of ones that weren't relevant anymore were all the same for list/libraries and this new thing called apps. Rather than introducing a sixth category of "things that add functionality to my site but are for some reason technically different than the other five categories" we decided to consolidate everything under the term "app." There are technical differences between surveys and picture libraries and a third-party app from Contoso. But, from an experience perspective, they're all apps.

Figure 2: Example of the Site Contents page in a site in SharePoint 2013 showing the new single category for Lists, Libraries, and other Apps.

On the Site Contents page of a site, where we used to list the five categories of app-like things, the heading now reads Lists, Libraries, and other Apps. By invoking lists and libraries, we hope to bridge the gap between the old, hard-to-understand technical categorization and the new everything-is-an-app model. We're excited with the response we've gotten so far, and we're looking forward to hearing more about how you work with apps in your site. Let us know in the comments!

Hybrid Search in SharePoint 2013

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:32:40 GMT

One of the key guiding principles for us in designing this release of SharePoint was to provide customers with a consistent cloud experience. We know the cloud can provide huge benefits, but at different rates for individual customers and in different ways. And, we build so our customers won't sacrifice the rich capabilities they've come to expect from Office to take advantage of the cloud.

Our customers use SharePoint in wildly different ways, and have built up complex ecosystems around our tools to meet the needs of their businesses. Whether it's line-of-business applications, ERP system integration, or other systems and solutions, we know that the choice of a productivity suite is a lot more complex than deciding which tool you're going to use. A "rip and replace" strategy simply isn't going to work. So, we placed a huge emphasis on ensuring that customers can move to the cloud on their own terms. There are three key principles we used here:

Some customers will not fully move into the cloud —we believe that a mix of some cloud and some on-premises solutions will be the norm for the foreseeable future. Cloud and on-premises solutions must co-exist.
The cloud is not a closed system—much of the value customers get from SharePoint comes from the way we interact with other systems that customer businesses depend on—CRM, ERP, Big Data, and so on. No solution that is cut off from those systems can be very successful.
Customers have to see rapid value from the cloud, whether existing systems move to the cloud or not. We must enable experimentation and exploration of new capabilities for customers within the cloud, even if the bulk of their existing infrastructure remains on-premises.

All Office 365 services can handle a mix of cloud and on-premises instances. For example, a customer can move all or some mailboxes to the cloud, and leave all their SharePoint infrastructure on-premises. This degree of flexibility is a key design point for us.

Onboarding to the cloud was also a key focus area. In Exchange, for example, we provide a rich toolset for migrating mailboxes to and from the cloud, and for handling a mix of mailboxes in either environment.

For SharePoint, the challenge of handling mixed environments is tricky. In Exchange you have a single container, the mailbox, owned by a single user. Routing to the correct locale for the mailbox is enough to make it all work. SharePoint sites and services are about multiple people collaborating at a single site, integrating data from multiple sources, and searching across an entire collection of documents. The boundary between cloud and on-premises is by nature not at all clear. So the challenge for us was deciding how to approach these considerations—go breadth first and enable hybrid support everywhere, or focus in on the scenarios where we saw the highest value? In the end, we chose the latter. In particular, we focused on building an oAuth layer to enable service-to-service authentication and communication, and enabling rich hybrid support for search.

When you have SharePoint investments on-premises and in the cloud, one of the first needs of your users is to find content, regardless of where it lives. Users want to find what they are looking for quickly and easily, without having to learn new concepts or perform additional steps. We solved this problem by adding hybrid functionality for search. More specifically, we enable users to execute one search and see the most relevant results from SharePoint Online and SharePoint 2013 on-premises locations.

Along the way, we had to tackle a few challenging design problems:

How to retrieve fresh results from a remote system in a scalable way
How to integrate multiple sets of results in a single search experience
How to deliver great query performance

For the first problem, we evaluated both crawling/indexing the remote system and run-time query federation. We settled on the latter approach for a few reasons, including the effectiveness of fresh results, and more confidence in our ability to deliver a fast, predictable experience. (Imagine tens of thousands of customers' search crawlers all pinging SharePoint Online simultaneously, requesting changes.)

We then had to decide on the most efficient way to present results to the user. By using the new Query Rules capabilities introduced in SharePoint 2013, we present a result block containing the top n search results from the remote system inline in the search results page. Users see the top results in that location, and can click on the result block to see more results. The search system also learns over time—if results in that block are useful and users click on them, the entire block "moves up" the search results page over time. If users don't click on results in that block for a given query, the block is pushed further down.

Finally, we focused on how to streamline execution of these remote queries to optimize performance. With the move to client-side rendering of search results (after the initial page load) in SharePoint 2013, we started with a solid foundation to build on. We modeled these remote queries as closely as possible to regular queries against a local search index, with a minimum of additional logic to enable secure traversal of the corporate firewall (when presenting on-premises results in SharePoint Online).

By modeling hybrid search queries as closely as possible to regular search queries, we were able to minimize the complexity of the underlying code and ensure that the entire search experience—from graphical refiners to rich Office document previews in the hover panel—worked smoothly in hybrid scenarios.

Let’s close by tackling a few frequently asked questions. Thanks for your time, and let us know how you plan to use hybrid by leaving comments on the blog!

What does hybrid search enable me to do?

From a SharePoint Online site, get search results for content in the cloud and on-premises
From an on-premises SharePoint 2013 site, get search results for content on-premises and in the cloud
Conditionally enable "hybrid" results for specific types of queries

I want to try out hybrid search. What are the prerequisites?

Any SharePoint Online tenancy that's been upgraded to SharePoint 2013 (upgrades will happen on a rolling schedule through Spring 2013)
SharePoint Server 2013 deployed on-premises
User profiles from your on-premises Active Directory synchronized to Office 365, using the Microsoft Online Services Directory Synchronization tool
• Reverse Proxy or F5 device to securely expose your SharePoint 2013 on-premises farm to SharePoint Online (required only to enable users in SharePoint Online to find content on-premises)

Where can I find instructions?

Our writers are working hard to capture the full set of steps necessary to configure trust between on-premises instances and SharePoint Online, and the steps to configure search-specific concepts (result source, query rule, result block, Secure Store credentials) that are necessary to enable the hybrid search scenarios. We hope to have guidance published on TechNet in time for the SharePoint Conference (November 12–15, 2012).

SharePoint 2013 Cross-Site Publishing Overview: Part 1

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:32:13 GMT

Hey everyone! My name is Seth Bibler and I'm a Program Manager on the SharePoint team. I'm really excited to be telling all of you about one of the great new features that we have been working on for SharePoint 2013. Cross-site publishing (in this post, I will refer to it as XSP, even though it is not an official feature name) is the tool that enables you to write content in one place and surface it in other places through search. You'll be able to generate sites in some new and exciting ways. And for the first time, XSP breaks down the site collection barrier—content can be shared across site collections, web apps, and farms!

In a previous post, Josh began by talking about what's new with modern web experiences. He introduced our fictional business, Contoso Electronics, which intends to use SharePoint 2013 for their new sales websites. They have a library of sales article webpages. These articles must be able to be viewed on the Internet by anonymous users, as a part of a public site. On the public site, they want the articles to look and feel the same as the rest of the site without having to reformat each articles’ HTML. Search-driven content is just what Contoso Electronics needs, and XSP is a big part of their solution.

In this post, I introduce the concepts behind XSP. In my next blog post, I'll go beyond what Contoso Electronics wants to do and describe some of the kinds of sites that can be built using XSP. But first, let's start with the basics.

The basics

There are a few logical components to consider:

An authoring site is where authors go to create and host content; think of it as the source in XSP. This is where a list that is marked as a catalog lives.
A catalog is an attribute that you can add to a list or a library in the authoring site. Marking a list or a library as a catalog makes the content easily accessible to other site collections.
Search is the engine that connects your catalog to a publishing site.
The term store holds metadata terms that are used to organize content for publishing on target sites.
A publishing site is where visitors go to see and read content.

Figure 1 is a quick diagram that shows just the basics of XSP.

Figure 1. Basic cross-site publishing environment

Managed Navigation is a feature beyond the scope of this blog post, but to understand how the Term Store fits into this picture, its use should be briefly described. To organize the content on the authoring site, a managed metadata site column is used to categorize the articles by type. These tagging terms are used on the publishing side to build up a navigation structure and as part of the search query that is used to pull the article data. Figure 2 shows articles tagged on the authoring site and then surfaced on the publishing site.

Figure 2. Article pages tagged in an authoring site collection, and published in another.

This ties directly into Contoso Electronics' solution. They have a secure authoring site. Its pages library contains sales articles that they want to show on the Internet. They added a metadata site column to the pages library and ensured that all the pages were tagged appropriately. After that, they shared their pages library as an anonymously available catalog, which search indexed on the next crawl. On the publishing side, they then connected to the catalog, pinning the tagging term set into navigation. Finally, they customized the automatically generated category and item detail pages, which have content search web parts that query the search engine, and published the pages. And now they are actually showing sales articles on the Internet based on a search query!

Figure 3. Contoso Electronics’ basic cross-site publishing environment

Perhaps this may seem a tad mundane—we are just talking about sharing content across two sites using search. But think again! We are sharing content across two sites using search! This opens up many new possibilities for publishing in SharePoint. That's incredibly cool, but this is only the beginning.

What you can do

Have you ever written something multiple times, just to have it in multiple locations? Imagine that you're working on a small number of sites that all need to show content from a common library. For example, Contoso Electronics created their Internet site for the United States, but they also want to put up a site in Canada. XSP can be used to author in one place, and then present the content in many other locations, too!

Figure 4. Cross-site publishing to multiple sites consuming the same content

In terms of implementation, this is just an additional new publishing site, connected to the same catalog. Some styling can still be applied—master pages, page layouts, and display templates—but both Internet-facing sites are showing content from one catalog, and it was fairly painless to stand up!

It is perhaps best to think of XSP as a set of tools that we built to help you build these sites. Anonymous search access, managed navigation, tagging term sets, friendly URLs, content search web parts, category and item detail pages, result sources, and query rules are all features that you can configure separately. But now, with XSP, you can more easily share content across sites, site collections, and farms.

Most of the features that I just mentioned will be discussed in upcoming blog posts and documentation.

Getting started with XSP

I really hope that you'll try and love what XSP helps you do. Please take a look at the documentation we've published already. More is on the way, but these articles can help you to get up and going:

TechNet
Plan for cross-site publishing in SharePoint Server 2013
Configure cross-site publishing in SharePoint Server 2013

MSDN
Cross-site publishing in SharePoint 2013

Coming up next

Configuring XSP is an advanced publishing scenario. In my blog post next week, I'll explore some of the possible site topologies.

SharePoint Public Websites in Office 365

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:31:51 GMT

Hi, my name is Kevin Gjerstad, and I'm a Principal Program Manager in the SharePoint Internet Business Group. It's exciting to begin to take the wraps off of the new SharePoint Online Public Website feature (currently in Preview). I'm going to walk you through the latest advancements coming to SharePoint Online as part of Office 365—sharing new, exciting ways you can represent your public image and information to your clients, customers, and partners.

All new, all SharePoint, all in the cloud

One of our primary objectives with this release was to make the Public Website a first-class citizen of SharePoint Online (SPO) and Office 365 (O365). So, our first step was to rethink it as a highly customizable solution of SPO—building on the core SharePoint publishing portal engine. This means that the Public Website in O365 can now fully access SharePoint Online—benefittng from many feature investments in content management, social integration, the Cloud App Model, performance, design customization, SEO, and more. This also means the Public Website can be customized using many of the same tools and techniques used to customize any SharePoint-based site, adding to the value of your overall O365 investment.

Tools for creating modern, professional-looking sites, simply

Figure 1. Example of O365 Public Website

When you navigate to your Public Website for the first time, you're taken to the home page with a default look and feel and placeholder content. Once there, you'll immediately notice the editing user interface seems very familiar. You can add and edit webpages and images, and embed videos and Office documents, custom applications, Web Parts, and more using the website editor toolbar. And, while the interface is familiar, we recognized not everyone is a web developer, a SharePoint expert, or a CSS guru. We carefully crafted the editing and site management user interface to give you just what you need, and hopefully not a lot of stuff you don't want when building a site. But there is a lot more power and flexibility to do more if you want to get under the hood, and I'll touch on that later.

Figure 2. Simple and familiar editing tools

First impressions matter a lot for business websites. For better or worse, visitors often judge by how a site looks. With this in mind, a key design principle for us was to let users of all types create compelling, professional-looking sites quickly and easily. You get a selection of site designs to choose from, a rich set of carefully selected color palettes, and appropriate fonts. You can select from a list of pre-made starting points that are designed to ensure consistent layout, typography, font size, color schemes, and legibility. You can preview a design and make further refinements to the colors, fonts, background, and so on, by using the "Choose the Look" feature. (We have a few designs in the Preview and more coming in the future.) After you've settled on a look, you can then brand the site with a background image, logo, title, navigation, custom pages, and content—all using just your web browser. With these simple tools, you can build an elegant-looking site quickly.

Figure 3. Change the look

If you want to do more, there is a set of tools you can use to get under the hood. For example, you can always get to the underlying HTML for the page or content region and make edits directly to the markup. You can also tweak the CSS for the site or the page, using the "Edit Style Sheet" feature from the toolbar. Changes are applied on-the-fly so you can see how the site looks as you make the changes. You can also add JavaScript to the page to add more interactivity.

Figure 4. Easy-to-use for non-experts, but flexible and adaptable for power users

You can also use the new Design Manager tool to completely change your site design or create a new design. Web developers and designers can edit in HTML using their favorite tools (such as DreamWeaver, Expression Web, or just Notepad) and SharePoint Online converts these files automatically. SharePoint Online provides a Snippet Gallery that designers can use as a reference to configure and then copy/paste web controls, Web Parts, and other aspects of a site design into page layouts.

Figure 5. Create a distinctive design in Design Manager

Video: Get Started with your public website
Article: Get started with your public website

SEO, blogs, and social

Having a compelling site doesn't matter much if people can't find it. The Public Website benefits from substantial web content management (WCM) investments in search engine optimization (SEO) to make it easier for Internet search engines to crawl content in SharePoint Online. This includes presenting friendly URLs for pages like "http://www.contosobistro.com/contact-us" and changes to the page markup that make them more SEO-friendly. To help search engines discover the relevant pages in your site, you can choose to have SharePoint Online generate a comprehensive extensible markup language (XML) sitemap. And, you can use the SEO tools to make properties like meta description and keywords more discoverable by search engines. Together, these changes give you the tools to ensure your site can be found from a web search. Of course, it's up to you to create compelling content and follow SEO content authoring guidelines. (We recommend you use the SEO evaluation tools freely available on the Internet to monitor the SEO of your site.)

Having an active blog on your Public Website can also improve your SEO. SharePoint Online Public Websites are automatically provisioned with a blog feature complete with a blog post summary page and blogging tools. As with regular content pages in SharePoint Online, blog posts get friendly URLs ("http://www.contosobistro.com/blog/post/2/our-new-menu"). You can use the full-featured, browser-based rich text editor to edit posts or you can use Word to author and publish blogs. It's super easy to embed multimedia content including images, maps, video, and more. Blogs on Public Websites have several other useful features including real simple syndication (RSS), which helps your users subscribe to real-time information about your posts. And we've pre-integrated the Facebook comments social plugin within the Blog feature to make commenting for anonymous users very simple.

Figure 6. Blogs with the Facebook comments social plugin

Beyond SEO, social networks have become increasingly important to attract new customers, increase awareness and reach, and tighten communication with existing customers. So, we've made it easy for you to add social plug-ins—the Like button, newsfeed, and comments—anywhere on your site. You simply add a social integration application from the SharePoint App Store and then drop the desired social plugin on the page using the ribbon UI. The social integration applications automatically promote page properties as Facebook metadata, which lets you control exactly what gets published to the corresponding social network. If you have a Facebook page for your company, you can do even more with this integration.

Figure 7. Public-facing applications in the SharePoint Store

Apps and extensibility

The social integration apps are some of the first apps available in the SharePoint Store for public-facing websites, and more are coming. SharePoint apps are easy to purchase and install and can be used to extend the functionality on your site and to get the most out of the full Office 365 suite. If you are an app developer, you can use the same patterns outlined in Jay Schmelzer's post to build your Public Website application. For example, you can choose to use the Azure AutoHosted option to host your solution as a proxy between the Public Website (accessible to anonymous users) and a Team site (private to your organization). This is simple to use and all of the connection setup work is done for you. This pattern enables you to manage your data (for example, customer or product data) securely, take in information from anonymous users, and publish or make available select data to the Public Website . The new cloud app model opens up many opportunities for solution providers. Expect to see a lot of innovation with apps for the Public Website in the new SharePoint Store.

So now you have the overview of what's new with Public Website in O365. There's a lot more to tell you about, so we'll be adding more posts in the coming weeks. Let us know what you think.

Visit the Office Customer Preview site and start your SharePoint Online Preview trial today.
And check out the other posts on this blog, and the evolving online help material for SharePoint Online websites.

SharePoint reaches RTM!

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:31:19 GMT

Today, Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president in the Microsoft Office Division, announced that engineering work on the new Office and SharePoint is complete. For SharePoint, this means a few things:

We will begin rolling out new capabilities to Office 365 Enterprise customers in our next service updates, starting in November through general availability.

Volume Licensing customers with Software Assurance (SA) will be able to download SharePoint 2013 on-premise through the Volume Licensing Service Center by mid-November. For business customers without SA, it will also be available on the Volume Licensing price list on December 1.

You can read more about it on Office News, thank you for following us!

Changes to the Design View in SharePoint Designer 2013

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:30:53 GMT

Hi, I’m Keenan Newton, a senior product marketing manager on the SharePoint team.

We’re making some changes to the Design View in SharePoint Designer 2013, and I wanted to talk about the reasoning behind the changes.

With SharePoint Server 2013 embracing new web standards for client side rendering of pages such as JavaScript, JSON, and OData, there is no longer a need to support a visual web page editor within SharePoint Designer. With that in mind, we removed the ability to visually edit pages in SharePoint Designer 2013 because its page editor is designed to only understand the unique features of a SharePoint web page. With our support of new web standards, any web page designer can now be used for editing web pages in SharePoint Server 2013. This includes form customization, conditional formatting of page content, layout, theming and branding. To simplify the process of integrating customized SharePoint pages, SharePoint Server 2013 includes a new feature called the SharePoint Design Manager. This feature enables a web designer to export a web page from SharePoint, customize it, and then import it back into SharePoint, all right from the SharePoint site.

SharePoint Designer 2013 will continue to support site, workflow, list, library, and external data customization and configuration. However, we will look for opportunities to leverage SharePoint itself as the primary tool for customization and configuration tasks.

5 Questions about SkyDrive Pro!

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:30:26 GMT

Hi, I'm Tejas Mehta, a senior marketing manager on the SharePoint team.

In July, we introduced the new SharePoint, which includes SkyDrive Pro. With the Preview in full swing, we wanted to provide some additional context on SkyDrive Pro. In this post, I'll answer some of the common questions being asked by our customers and partners. Please keep in mind that when I mention SharePoint, I am referencing the new SharePoint Server 2013 version, currently in Preview.

1. What's the difference between SkyDrive and SkyDrive Pro?

SkyDrive is for people to sync their personal files to the cloud and across their devices. SkyDrive is available free to individuals and is included in Office 365 Home Premium. With over 60 million users, SkyDrive has become synonymous with personal cloud storage. It enables access to documents across devices. In the new Office, SkyDrive becomes the default save location, making it easy to create, store, and share files with others.

SkyDrive Pro is a document storage service that organizations provision and manage for their users. It will be available as a service together with many Office 365 plans, and on-premises with the new version of SharePoint.

Like its consumer counterpart, SkyDrive Pro enables people to synchronize their work documents from SharePoint to the cloud, and also take documents offline when they're on the go. People can access or edit their documents across devices; files are automatically synchronized with SkyDrive Pro when connected online.

After SkyDrive Pro is set up, you can save documents directly to SkyDrive Pro from Office desktop applications, or synchronize them directly from SharePoint.

2. Why did Microsoft choose the name SkyDrive Pro?

We wanted to make it extremely simple for individuals to differentiate between our consumer and business offerings. For individuals looking for free, personal cloud storage, SkyDrive is the solution of choice. For businesses that want personal cloud storage for their users as part of their full collaboration suite, SkyDrive Pro is the answer. Because SkyDrive Pro is a feature of SharePoint, users get the full benefits of coauthoring, versioning, workflow and all the rest of the great capabilities SharePoint provides for document management.

3. How is SkyDrive Pro different from SharePoint Workspace?

With these new investments in SkyDrive, Microsoft will no longer ship new versions of SharePoint Workspace, and SharePoint Workspace is not included in the Office 2013 release. SkyDrive Pro provides the capability for which most customers use SharePoint Workspace today—offline document synchronization. For customers looking for other SharePoint Workspace capabilities not found in SkyDrive Pro, SharePoint Workspace 2010 will continue to work with both SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013 environments—including SharePoint Online—and will run side-by-side with SkyDrive Pro. An update to SharePoint Workspace 2010 is required to enable this side-by-side capability and can be found here.

4. How much storage space do users get with SkyDrive Pro?

With SharePoint Online, each user will have 7GB of personal storage capacity allocated to them. For on-premises SharePoint 2013 implementations, the per-user storage capacity is a configurable parameter that administrators can manage.

5. How do I get SkyDrive Pro?

SkyDrive Pro is included in most Office 2013 and Office 365 offerings. In SharePoint, if you choose SkyDrive in the top navigation bar, you are taken to your SkyDrive Pro folder, where all of your work-related documents reside. If you choose SYNC at the top-right below the navigation bar, the files in this folder are synchronized with your local computer. It's that simple.

SkyDrive Pro is also not limited to documents in your personal SharePoint library. You can synchronize any document library for which you have appropriate permissions.

And after you start working with it on your desktop, you can see the power and accessibility of SkyDrive and SkyDrive Pro. The screenshots below show that it's also easy to differentiate between SkyDrive and SkyDrive Pro on the desktop when they are added as Favorites in Windows Explorer. SkyDrive Pro appears as SkyDrive @ Contoso on Office 365 (we're using Contoso as an example tenant name), and simply as SkyDrive Pro for on-premises instances.

With SkyDrive Pro and SharePoint, your documents are always available for you to share and access, even when you are on the go.

Give it a try!

Give SkyDrive Pro a try, along with the many other features the new SharePoint has to offer. Try the new SharePoint Online in the Office 365 Preview or SharePoint Server Preview, and please leave feedback in the comments below!

Introduction to Hover Panel in Search 2013

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:29:49 GMT

Hi everyone—my name is Patrick Quinn, and I'm a Program Manager working on the SharePoint search user experience. I'd like to introduce you to one of the most exciting new Search user interface features in SharePoint Server 2013. Introducing…

…our new hover panel!

The new Search interface and hover panel.

When we designed the UI for this release, we focused primarily on making sure each result is quick and easy to find and read, while still displaying as much relevant information as possible to the end user. But, these two concepts are often in conflict with each other—the more information you add to a result, the more "cluttered" the UI looks. The more "cluttered" the UI, the harder it is to scan. There needs to be a balance between the quantity of information and the organization of that information.

The hover panel is an exciting addition to this release, and we think it solves this problem quite elegantly. We pared down our inline results to contain only key pieces of metadata common to most results, such as the title, URL, and hit-highlighted summary. These compact, streamlined results enable users to easily scan the page. Then, when the user wants to learn more about a result, they can hover their cursor over that result to see the hover panel dialog box. The hover panel contains rich metadata that enables users to investigate a result more thoroughly, without having to click through and load the document.

We've included some important metadata in the hover panel, such as the file type, the date the result was last edited, the people who have edited it recently, and view counts (so you can see how often a document was viewed). We've added more than just metadata, however. Document parsing tools allow us to index section headings and slide titles that are inside of a document, and we surface the headings and titles that are relevant to your query. We call these "deep links" and you can see them in the hover panel under the heading "Take a look inside". Even cooler, these headings and titles are links—clicking through will take you directly to that section (or slide) in the document! Now, users can search across millions of documents, and with a single click, zoom right in to one specific section of one document.

A closer look at the hover panel preview, document links, and actions.

The bottom of the hover panel contains a list of actions that may be performed on a result. Now you can follow or open the document, view the document's library, or send the document in an email message right from the results page. These actions are also completely customizable, so your results can be more actionable than ever.

Perhaps the most useful addition to the hover panel is the high-fidelity Web Application Viewer preview, available for all Office documents saved to SharePoint. These interactive previews are big enough to give you a solid idea of the structure, contents, and styling of the document you're hovering over. You can page through the document, view charts and tables, and even see the animations of a PowerPoint slide (If the Word preview text is a bit too small for you, here's a hint—double-click to zoom). It's never been easier for users to judge search results, because now they can quickly scan through an entire document to decide whether it's the one they're looking for. These previews are not limited to just documents, either. The hover panel shows you rich previews for webpages, so you can take a look inside before clicking. Videos have an embedded viewer so you can take a look before clicking through.

The video hover panel allows users to play videos.

Wow, it certainly sounds like there's a lot of data we can put in that hover panel. You may be thinking we've designed ourselves right back into the problem we were initially trying to solve—so much data in the hover panel reduces the overall readability of that data. That's where one of the coolest moving parts of our UI comes into play—Result Types! We don't squeeze all of the above into a single hover panel for every result. Instead, Result Type rules determine what 'type' of result you're looking at, and the correct hover panel will be shown based on those rules.

Result Types map categories of results with an appropriate rendering.

Essentially, each hover panel is customized to the result you're looking at. If you're hovering over a Community site, we'll show you the most popular discussions. Hover over an Office document, we'll show you the document preview. Hover over a Discussion thread, we'll show you some replies. For People results, we'll even show you documents that person has authored that are relevant to your search query. In this way, we can ensure the hover panel never feels cluttered but always contains the most important information!

I hope this short introduction gave you some insight into how and why we've introduced the hover panel, and what types of tasks it can be used for. Stay tuned for future blog posts about how you can customize the hover panel for your own unique result types!

Introducing People Search

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:29:25 GMT

This blog post introduces you to some of the new features in People Search in SharePoint Server 2013. In future posts, we will discuss each feature in more detail, include up-to-date screen shots, and cover additional topics.

Query Rules

Using Query Rules, for the first time People Search is out of its silo and integrated with core results. Users are able to find People results in line with document results, and use the latter as an entry point into the full People experience. For example, searching for "Garit Vaargas" finds the correct result "Garret Vargas" and provides additional information about Garret. Users are also able to use Search Navigation to move among the different search experiences, including People Search.

We've also used Query Rules to improve the search experience for targeted types of queries in People Search, including People Name, Location, or Phone Number. For example, if you want to find People by location, a search for "Operations London" returns results for People who work in the operations department or who work on operations projects and who are located in London.

The following image shows an example of the Name Query Rule showing People results in line with document results. Users are able to enter the full People experience by either clicking through the Query Rule title or by using Search navigation.

The following image shows an example of the Location query rule. Searching for "Garret London" returns all the people located in London.

In a separate post, I'll talk about the details of how we've designed each rule, and how admins can customize them.

Expertise Search

End users typically use People Search to find a subject matter expert (SME), a domain owner, or a point of contact (POC) for an issue. In the past, we relied on users editing their My Site profiles to identify whether they were experts in an area. But, this is dependent on diligent profile management by all employees in the company. So, in this release, we focused on providing users with a default expertise search experience. What does that mean? We now use documents (Word, PowerPoint, and PDF) that are available to Search in SharePoint to identify document authors as experts. A document's author is identified as an expert on the content mentioned in the document. We also display in the hover panel some of the documents used in expertise search.

In the following image, the user searches for "packaging project" and sees a block of expertise results.

Hovering over a result in the Expertise block displays the hover panel, which shows a subset of documents that are used to identify the person as a good result. In the following image, Dorena is a good result for "packaging projects" because she's written several relevant documents on the topic.

Name Suggestions

Name suggestions is one my favorite features this release. Using this feature, we've introduced a simple, easy, and intuitive way to find people by their names. "Word wheeling—typing a character(s) and seeing all the names starting with that character(s), is available on all names in the profile database, and therefore also in the People index. The feature supports exact name matches and also supports "fuzzy" matches. With fuzzy name matches, the spelling is similar but not exact because of phonetic misspellings or typing errors. (For example, see the second screen shot below.)

The following image shows an example of the fuzzy matching behavior. The search for "numan" suggests the result of "Belinda Newman".

Stay tuned for a post that talks about details of the fuzzy matching feature—and let us know what you think in the comments!

Overview of Search in SharePoint 2013

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:28:56 GMT

Quick introduction:
My name is Gerhard Schobbe, I'm the Group Program Manager for the team in the SharePoint organization that's focused on search scenarios for Information Workers in the Enterprise.

Goals for Release

Let me first talk about the goals for this release.

As for any release, there are several areas we were aiming to make progress in. Three were at the top of the list for the Office 2013 release:

Move to a single enterprise search platform
Deliver a truly visible step forward for end users interacting with the search system
Establish this platform as a more general information access layer for applications, including other parts of SharePoint and, of course, third-party development

I'll drill down into each one of those and use some examples to highlight the progress we made. This overview post will then be followed by a series of much more detailed tours behind the scenes of the various subsystems, coming over the next weeks and months.

Single Search Platform

First, let's take a look at the goal to get to a single enterprise search platform. With the acquisition of FAST in mid-2008 and the subsequent release of Office 2010, the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 product line-up includes a two-tiered search offering where the tiers are based on different technology stacks: SharePoint 2010 includes an enterprise search system based on a codebase developed in Redmond and the higher tier includes FAST Search Server 2010, a system developed based on the FAST technology stack in the wake of the acquisition.

However, it was also clear that a system that could combine the best of both implementations would offer a better enterprise search product all around while simplifying choices for our customers, creating a win-win. Even better, the process of re-thinking the overall architecture also offered the opportunity to integrate several of the modern components that FAST had been working on that had not seen broad release yet, including updated content and query processing frameworks.

The result of this plan, after several years of engineering work, is a system that combines the crawler and connector framework familiar from SharePoint Search with the next-generation content processing and query processing frameworks from FAST, all working in conjunction with a search core based on FAST Search.

The default user experiences for end users and IT administrators are again hosted in SharePoint—where the end-user experience has been completely re-worked from a server-based rendering approach in 2010 to an asynchronous client-side approach (more on that later).

Additionally, we were able to integrate a new analysis engine that serves as the runtime for a variety of jobs including ranking algorithms and recommendations.

It's worth mentioning that a lot of work has been done to make the search platform cloud-hosted—it will be powering the O365 service as the latest version is coming online.

The following figure shows a graphical summary (click the image to enlarge).

Create a breakthrough user experience

That brings us to the second investment area, delivering breakthrough improvements for all end users. Traditionally, a user would enter a set of search terms on a search center homepage that would be treated as keywords, and the results were a single ranked list of links with three-line summaries and a little metadata. Let me describe how we moved to the next level in each case.

Search Center homepage is the main entry point:

In this release, every search box in every teamsite offers full access to enterprise-wide search, people search, and other specialized search experiences in addition to the traditional scoped site search. Users can access the desired scope from the drop-down list inside the search box.

This puts the power of enterprise-level search experiences at the fingertips of any user working in a team site or one of the various hubs around SharePoint.

Every term is a keyword:

A close analysis of several customer query logs that we obtained permissions for showed clearly that many user queries are a mix of keywords and command words, where the latter might indicate the type of result the user is looking for. Another large class of queries were navigational queries in the sense that the expected result was a location, be it a team site, some other website, a document library, or even a particular document the user has already used a few times.

To expand on the concept of command words, let's look at the example "marketing deck". The user is clearly (to human eyes) looking for a presentation about marketing—but none of the presentations will contain the word "deck"—that's just the common lingo. It makes much more sense to classify the terms in the query into actual keywords ("marketing" in this case) and command words that need to be transformed into other constraints on the query, in this case a type constraint that limits the result type to all file types defined as presentations. The same idea applies, for example, to hints that the user is looking for a site or specifically looking for documents that are not webpages. This thought process led to the introduction of Query Rules, a generalized, extensible system for query analysis that maps the terms of a query into keywords and enables the transformation of the command words into property queries. Query Rules also have more advanced capabilities including leveraging user behavior to create result blocks. Additional blog posts will go much deeper into all the things that can be accomplished using Query Rules.

Single ranked list of results:

Query Rules allow for several interpretations of the same query. Maybe one interpretation focuses on a type restriction like in the example above, resulting in a set of documents. Another rule could trigger on "Marketing" being a well defined discipline from a dictionary of job categories at a company like Microsoft and so bring back a set of results specifically scoped to the corporate HR repository containing carefully moderated content for each discipline. And, it probably also makes sense to assume that both of those interpretations could be wrong and that the traditional keyword query against the index had the best chance to dig up the right results that the user was looking for. Recombining the three sets of results into a single page led to the concept of result blocks. These augment the single ranked list of individual results with a ranked set of blocks that are inserted at various locations, each block containing individually ranked results.

Again, this whole area requires a much more detailed explanation to show the power of the underlying concepts.

The following screenshot shows an example—the results page for the query "marketing deck" shows a block with the "decks" (the presentations) that match the query "marketing", followed by the regular results for the full query.

Links with three-line summaries:

It was clear that the attempts to cram even more information into the same amount of pixel space available on screen wasn't going to achieve true improvements in terms of a user's ability to inspect the results quickly to find the best one. The solution became a hover panel that could be made much larger to show visual previews of sites, documents, and conversations. It also gave us room to expand from an experience designed implicitly as a one-way street into reading a document or webpage into an extensible set of actions that users could perform right on the search result. For example, following a document, jumping right into Edit mode, or sharing or opening the library the document is stored in to see what other content is available—and those are just the default actions.

Last but not least, rather than betting only on textual summaries, we enabled the extraction of the semantic sections for several document types, which are shown as powerful "deep links" inside the hover panel. Because it is likely that the slide titles in a PowerPoint presentation were carefully designed by the presenter to summarize the content of each slide, even if the filename is not particularly descriptive.

We now extract and show the slide titles responding to the keywords, allowing a user to zoom from a query over 100 million items in the index down to a single slide with a relevant title—and then open the presentation exactly at that slide with a single click. This feature is also available for Word documents and Excel documents (focused on graphs and named tables) in addition to SharePoint sites (top subsites and document libraries).

The UI framework that supports all these new features has also been re-designed. It is based on a set of nested layout templates that are defined in JavaScript and HTML for much easier extensibility. Every result type has a template to control the layout in the results list and a hover panel template. Block layouts are controlled by a separate template and then the layout of all results is defined by a group template—all of which can be adapted to the desired presentation layout. One example is that the Video search that is included by default uses a grid layout with customized result layouts to present the video results. Quite a different look, achieved by merely changing a template with no code changes to the base results webpart required.

Together, these improvements create a powerful and highly responsive user experience that is accessible from anywhere in SharePoint, that understands the user query much better, and that delivers highly visual results with direct access to the most granular information inside of sites and documents, and then enables users to act on the results without having to leave the results page.

The following image shows an example of what that experience looks like for a PowerPoint presentation: links to the relevant slide titles inside the file, a visual preview that allows the user to page through the deck interactively and a set of action links along the bottom of the panel.

Search as an information access platform

The third goal was to establish the search platform as a more generalized information access platform.
A properly configured enterprise search index constitutes an amazing collection of information available in an enterprise—it crosses the information silos of different document management systems and also normalizes the metadata schema across these systems.

Exposing all this information as an interactive, keyword-driven user experience is nice, but why stop there? There are many information experiences that would benefit from pulling together a user-centric view that disregards the boundaries of the underlying silos and takes advantage of content keyword-based matching and ranking to show the most appropriate items first.

To show what this means, I want to highlight some of the examples that are included by default in SharePoint 2013:

In MySites, users can access a list of all SharePoint tasks assigned to them, regardless of which sites the assignments are stored in.
Every document library now has a search box at the top that enables users to search across metadata and the full text of its documents, and the result list is presented as a standard SharePoint view rather than as a results page.
Clicking on a hash tag in a post or discussion shows a list of all conversations about that topic enterprise-wide.

There are many more exciting new features available in this release, like a new way to define types based on rules (for example, a contract should be different than the generic file type "Word"), better out-of-box relevance that is tunable in the UI and via XRANK, eDiscovery that spans SharePoint and Exchange, continuous crawl that keeps content even more fresh, facilities to combine results from O365 tenancies with on-premises results in 'hybrid' configurations, and the system now offers CSOM and RESTful APIs and much, much more.

We hope you like it—sign up for the O365 Preview environment online, or download the bits here and install it on a local machine.

Let us know what you think!

G.

SharePoint Online: PDF In-Browser Viewing & MP4 File Streaming

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:28:28 GMT

This post originally appeared on the Microsoft Office 365 Community blog.

We are very excited to announce two compelling updates for SharePoint Online. The service will support in-browser viewing of PDF files and improved streaming of MP4 video files. We received a lot of feedback noting PDF viewing was limited while a number of customers expressed that they did not want PDF files to be downloadable to user’s desktops. In addition, users found that some MP4 files were being downloaded in full before playback would begin.

What will this update mean to the user?

A PDF document stored in a SharePoint Online library it will simply launch within their Internet browser. This too applies to PDFs embedded as attachments within list items.

Note: Users are required to have Adobe Reader on their machines to ensure the proper browser plug-in is available: http://get.adobe.com/reader.

Note: In some isolated instances, you may encounter an error when trying to open a PDF document in your Internet browser. If this happens, please try disabling the Adobe ActiveX plugin by going to Settings > Manage add-ons, highlight the Adobe PDF Link Helper add-on from the list of add-ons, and then click Disable.

An MP4 video file stored in a SharePoint Online library will begin streaming much faster without downloading the full file first.

We are at the tail end of rolling out the most recent SharePoint Online service update. The PDF adjustment will soon be a notable experience enhancement for all SharePoint Online customers across all Office 365 plans and offerings. The same applies to MP4 files stored in SharePoint Online – let the streaming begin! Microsoft expects to complete this service update rollout worldwide by the end of September 2012. We continue to improve the experience while maintaining the level of security you expect from Office 365.

Thank you for your patience and actionable feedback. SharePoint Online progressively evolves each quarter. At its core, the service is driven by AND adapts to the preferences of how users use it every day. Please keep it coming.

You can read about this and all of the latest features and innovation on the Office 365 Service Update wiki.

The SharePoint Online Team

Modern Web Experiences with SharePoint 2013

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:28:08 GMT

SharePoint 2013 enables organizations to create beautiful, adaptive, and personalized experiences that can span across different channels and markets. My name is Josh Stickler and I'm a Program Manager on the SharePoint team. In this post, I'll provide a high-level overview of what's new and improved in SharePoint Server 2013 as it relates to enterprise websites.

Over the coming weeks leading up to the release of SharePoint 2013 and beyond, you'll read about what's new in specific features, best practices, and opportunities for extensibility, all from the engineering team that built the product. Many posts will follow the story of how a hypothetical customer, Contoso Electronics, might use SharePoint 2013 to host an Internet-facing, product-centric website. While your organization may do business in a different industry, operate in different markets, or host intranet instead of Internet content, our hope is that you'll see a bit of yourself in Contoso Electronics, since our investments aren't limited to any particular type of site or vertical solution.

Meet Contoso Electronics

Contoso Electronics is a consumer electronics retailer that operates a chain of stores across the United States and Canada. Contoso Electronics hosts its website in Windows Azure using SharePoint 2013 and offers its product catalog (sourced from Microsoft Dynamics AX), articles about the latest devices and trends in consumer electronics, and a body of "how to" content featuring instructional videos.

This year, Contoso Electronics has set ambitious goals around driving additional business through its online presence. Contoso wants to attract more visitors to its site from Internet search engines like Bing and Google. Once visitors arrive at Contoso’s website, Contoso wants to keep them engaged and ultimately turn site visits into customer purchases. Contoso expects to attract site visitors who use a multitude of devices like smartphones and tablets and speak a variety of languages. The site should automatically tune itself over time to help meet these goals, by promoting and recommending content that is popular and relevant to visitors based on their activity.

Let's take a tour of how SharePoint 2013 enables Contoso Electronics to design a gorgeous site, efficiently publish content, and engage customers with personalized experiences.

Branding SharePoint sites gets easier and more familiar for Web Designers

We want any web designer or developer to be able to design a SharePoint site without having to become a SharePoint expert. We've made a large investment this release in enabling web designers to create gorgeous, modern websites using the tools they already know, like Adobe Dreamweaver and Microsoft Expression Blend. Instead of editing ASP.NET files to create design assets like master pages and page layouts, designers can edit in HTML and SharePoint will convert these files automatically.

More and more people are browsing the web using smartphones and tablets, so we're introducing the Device Channels feature, which enables designers to tailor a site's visual design to best fit specific devices. SharePoint can also serve up smaller renditions of images and videos to reduce page weight on limited-bandwidth devices. Finally, we’re exposing APIs to enable developers to build native mobile apps that can read data and interact with your SharePoint site.

Search-driven publishing enables you to re-use content across many sites

Closer integration between SharePoint 2013's content management and search capabilities enables sites to aggregate and present content more flexibly than ever before. Instead of deploying duplicate versions of content and keeping everything in sync, you can reference content indexed by search using the new Content Search Web Part, even if that content is stored in a separate site collection.

In the past, a site's navigation structure was defined by where content was stored. Customers often ended up creating lots of subsites to organize content and create search engine-friendly URLs. SharePoint 2013 introduces Managed Navigation, which organizes navigation based on Enterprise Managed Metadata terms. Reorganizing navigation becomes as easy as moving terms around and no longer requires migrating content.

The new cross-site collection publishing feature takes you even further in abstracting how you store your content from how site visitors consume it. You can re-use content like articles and products across site collections; for example, you could re-use content that is the same across multiple brand- or locale-specific versions of your site. Re-used content inherits the branding of the site where it appears and can seamlessly integrate into sites' navigation.

To learn more, take a look at Plan for cross-site publishing in SharePoint Server 2013 Preview.

Engage customers with personalized, adaptive experiences

Contoso Electronics doesn't just want to drive visitors to its website, it wants to keep them coming back and ultimately make a sale. In the past, Contoso Electronics had to rely on a "one size fits all" approach, grounded in static content. SharePoint 2013's usage tracking features enable your site to adapt to visitor behavior over time, recommending related products and content based on visitors' journeys through your site.

SharePoint 2013 integrates FAST search technology to dynamically return content in ways Contoso Electronics can control. For example, Contoso Electronics surfaces its most popular content right on the homepage. Contoso then targets promotions to users based on their behavior on the website. When users search for products on the website, Contoso can promote products it's most interested in selling higher in results or as featured results. Based on usage data, Contoso can tweak which "how to" articles are displayed to increase the likelihood of a sale.

Bringing it all together

In the coming posts, we'll show how Contoso Electronics uses SharePoint 2013 to build a large scale, manageable, and great-looking site. We'll talk about key decisions Contoso Electronics makes around information architecture in the search-driven publishing model, getting the most value out of new features, and maintaining the site over time.

We think SharePoint 2013 will enable organizations to make more efficient use of their content and reduce the overhead of organizing content. We hope you'll join us for the next few posts to learn more about what's new. Please leave feedback in the comments selection below; we'd love to learn what you'd like to read next and how you intend to use the product. Thanks for reading!

For more detail, check out What’s new in web content management for SharePoint 2013 Preview publishing sites on TechNet.

Keep Your Team in Sync with Site Mailboxes

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:27:40 GMT

As Nathaniel mentioned in his The New Team Site post a few weeks ago, you can add a new app called “Site Mailbox” to a SharePoint 2013 team site. A site mailbox brings Exchange emails and SharePoint documents together, allowing members of your site to have access to all important project communications. It also enables your members to view documents and add new ones to your SharePoint site’s document libraries right from Outlook 2013. The awesome folks in Exchange talked about it in more detail on their You Had me at EHLO blog last week, so make sure to check out their Site Mailboxes post.

Site Mailboxes is just the first of several scenarios that really come together across SharePoint, Exchange, and Lync in the 2013 release – so stay tuned for more posts on this blog about more suite-wide scenarios. And, of course, when you sign up for the SharePoint Online preview at Office.com/Preview, you’ll get the whole Office 365 suite as well, so you can take Site Mailboxes and other suite-wide scenarios for a test run.

Setting Up and Customizing Communities

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:27:19 GMT

Reagan Templin is a Senior Technical Writer specializing in SharePoint and Robin Miller is a program manager on the SharePoint Team.

We introduced SharePoint communities in a previous post. Now, let me show you how easy it is to set up and customize a community.

As a writer, I’m part of the Content Publishing discipline at Microsoft. Within Content Publishing, we have a lot of people who write, edit, manage, and publish content to our various sites. Within each division, we have different groups that align to specific products and schedules. Although we are working on different products, deliverables, and schedules, our core purpose is the same—to deliver great content to our customers. With a community of practice, we could share our experiences and best practices and learn from others who have similar roles and responsibilities outside of traditional organizational hierarchies. Let’s use this example to set up and customize a community of practice.

Creating a community
At Microsoft, I can request to have a community created for me by Microsoft IT. They determine where my community site collection will be created in the SharePoint environment and configure the appropriate administration settings. As the sponsor for this community, I will be the site owner and can customize and share the site, selecting appropriate permissions for other users to be site owners, moderators, members, or visitors. Another option would be to activate the Community a Site Feature on an existing site, but more on that later.

Customizing the community template
I’ve requested my Content Publishing community, and receive notice that it has been created. When I first visit the community, it is set up with the default template. It’s nice, but it doesn’t really represent the discipline this community is for.

So, let’s jazz it up! We can make some simple changes from the Site Settings page to make it pop. First, I’ll add a description and change the logo.

Next, I decide to change the look. I choose the Breeze template, but decide that I want a different background and color scheme. I replace the background with some books, and select a more snappy color palette.

I decide to try it out and preview how my site will look. I like the choices, so I decide to keep them.

Setting up categories
Now that the site looks cool, I need to set up the categories. I already uploaded some images to a SharePoint library, so I can use them to represent each category that I create. I also add descriptions for each category so that members will know where to post their questions.

This is how the categories look to members of the community. When they hover over one of the categories, like the General category, they can see more information about that category.

The About page has some default text, so I update it a bit, too. It’s easy since it’s a Wiki page that uses the rich text editor.

I also want to add some Apps to the Home page to make announcements and a calendar for events. I go to Site Contents, and add them to my site. I then edit the Home page, and insert them on the page. I move them beneath the intro text where they are front and center when members visit the page.

Configuring community and reputation settings
Now that our site represents the community, I’m going to review and tweak community and reputation settings before members start participating.

First, I go to the Community Settings page. The established date is fine, and I prefer not to enable auto-approval. To begin with, I will share the community with all of the people in Content Publishing groups, but I will approve one-off requests after that. However, I do want to enable members to flag posts. Most communities tend to be self-governing, but I want members to be able to alert moderators to any problems, such as questionable posts, the need to move a post to another category, and so on.

Next, I’m going to go to the Reputation Settings page and see if there is anything I want to change. I decide to update the member achievement point system so that creating and replying give the member 10 points, “Likes” give 20 points, and best replies give 100 points. Though you can edit these settings at a later time, it’s best to set these up before letting members participate.

Sharing the site
Now let’s share the site with our moderators. Community management is important to ensure thriving communities. Your moderators will loop people in to help answer questions, mark best replies, mark and update featured discussions, give recognition to members, monitor reported content, and so on.

Once Alex joins the community and appears as a member, I can assign a gifted badge to him so that other members will be able to easily identify him in the community.

Now it’s time to let members join the community. I’m going to add all of our content publishers to the members group in the community, and I’ll check the box to send them an email invitation to let them know about the community.

Activating the Community Site Feature
Remember way back when I said that communities are also available as a Site Feature? From the Site Settings page you can choose Manage site features and activate the Community Site Feature.

This will add the four community pages (Home, Categories, Members, and About) along with all the community Web Parts to your site. The key difference between the Community Feature and a Community Site is that only Community Sites will appear in the Community Portal. Sites with the Community Feature activated will also not use the community result template in search. The community functionality will be exactly the same.

For more information
Communities overview: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219805(v=office.15)
Plan for communities: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219489(v=office.15)
Create and configure communities: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219543(v=office.15)

Discover Answers and Share Expertise with SharePoint Communities

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:26:45 GMT

Robin Miller is a program manager on the SharePoint Team and Reagan Templin is a Senior Technical Writer specializing in SharePoint.

When I first became a Program Manager (PM) at Microsoft I discovered that there isn’t much formal training for the position. It’s like an apprenticeship; you have to seek out other PMs and learn from their experience. So I joined several email distribution lists (DLs), including one just for PMs in the Office division.

First of all, that DL has been around much longer than me. There is probably some great advice sitting in a more senior PM’s inbox somewhere that I’ll never get to read. I only get to see what happened before I joined if someone repeats it for me. However, if my question had already been discussed before, then a lot of people would choose to ignore it since they are tired of seeing the same question come through repeatedly. That’s assuming I even had the guts to ask. Outlook is kind enough to remind me that my questions are about to clutter the inboxes of over one thousand people. That’s pretty intimidating, and I always debated whether my little questions were worth that many peoples’ time. I liked when other PMs asked questions that would also benefit me to know the answer to, but if the response went only to the original sender then I had no idea what the answer was or if there even was one. On top of that, conversations got fragmented because people didn’t always respond to the most recent reply in the thread. This group badly needed a better way to communicate. That’s where the new SharePoint communities come in.

A Community is a new site template in SharePoint. Communities provide gathering places where information is shared and people connect. Discussions are key, participation is simple and inviting, expertise is recognized and rewarded, and most importantly, great content rises to the top. Big organizations become personal, navigable groups where individuals can share a sense of belonging and purpose. Now, discussion forums have been around for a while, but in addition to being a great discussion forum, SharePoint communities are integrated into the broader social fabric with things like new search result templates and newsfeed notifications. Let me show you.

Finding a community

The Community Portal is a great place to start. From here you can find communities, and discussions happening within them, from across your entire organization. If I’m trying to find a place to talk about being a PM I might search for “PM”.

New search results templates for communities and discussions provide relevant information at a glance. You can see conversations happening within a community, best replies to questions, and recent replies to a discussion post without having to leave the search results page.

Visiting a community

Discussions are key in a community so a list of recent discussions is front-and-center on the home page. The most recent discussions are shown, but you can also pivot to view popular discussions, your discussions, unanswered/answered questions, and featured discussions.

Every discussion falls into a category. The categories page shows a gorgeous tile view of all of the categories. Hovering over a tile will show you more information about that category.

When you visit one of these categories you’ll see any featured discussions at the top.

When you click into a discussion with a best reply you’ll see it right at the top near the original discussion post.

Discussions also allow you to reply inline to another reply rather than only to the root post, and you can click to reveal a callout with the context for these types of replies. For example, Alex has replied to one of Molly’s post in this discussion.

You’ll see that most members will have an earned reputation score, and you can get information about a person’s community reputation by hovering.

Alex, however, has a badge that indicates he is a community moderator. Badges help you identify key community members such as moderators or subject-matter experts.

Joining and participating in a community

When you click the join button you’ll see that you are now following the community so you can easily find your way back later. Your followers will see a notification in their newsfeeds, telling them that you’ve joined this community (unless you’ve disabled these activity notifications in your privacy settings). As a member you can now participate in discussions. Suppose I would like some advice on which courses to take to improve my skills as a PM. I’ll start a new discussion and type my question into the title field, check the box to indicate that this is a question, and choose a category.

When you check the box to specify you are asking a question your discussion will appear in the list of unanswered or answered questions, whichever the case may be. You can also easily include images, video, and documents in discussions and replies. A notification is sent to your newsfeed when you start a discussion, and you’ll get an email notification when someone replies so you don’t have to keep coming back to check.

Suppose that as you are browsing through a community you find a question you know the answer to and reply. The original poster gets an email notification that you have replied to her discussion, sees the answer, and marks it as the best reply. A notification is sent to your newsfeed to let you (and people who follow you) know. On top of that, your contribution earned enough reputation points that you’ve moved up in status. Congratulations! You get another notification in your newsfeed.

You can go to the Members page to see information about your reputation. The point system is set by each community owner or moderator so it varies across the communities you are a member of.

So as you can see, with communities I have all the discussions that ever occurred available in one place, discoverable through search, and with the best content promoted by reputation or featured by community moderators. I know who the top contributors are so that I know who to trust and follow. I can even go to them directly if needed (thanks to the integrated Lync people card). Importantly, I can serendipitously discover great content, and help others do the same, thanks to feed notifications for key activities. And, its all based on SharePoint so communities can bring all the great content and funtionality that Sharepoint includes (like custom lists, document libraries, workflows, governance, etc).

There’s so much more to see! In an upcoming post we’ll show you how easy it is to set up and customize your community. In the mean time, check out the Office 365 Preview and feel free to ask questions or share your thoughts by posting a comment below.

Building Apps for SharePoint and Office 365

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:26:14 GMT

As Jeff Teper mentioned in the SharePoint overview post on July 17th, we’re introducing a new SharePoint app model that takes advantage of common web technologies and a marketplace for third party developers and ISV’s to publish and sell their apps. Howard Crow, Group Program Manager for SharePoint, provides a deep-dive on the new model and how to get started over on the Apps for Office and SharePoint blog. Check it out!

The Social Spectrum

sharepointblog@live.com — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 09:46:58 GMT

Chris Slemp is a senior solution manager in Microsoft IT, and has been directing Microsoft's internal social business solutions for the past 3 years.

I hate Christmas cards. Don’t get me wrong, I’m the furthest thing from a Scrooge. But writing—and in some cases, even reading—those traditional summaries of the year that get mailed around is my least favorite part of the holiday. It’s devolved into bragging about overachieving kids instead of just being a good excuse to reconnect. It also bugs me because the medium doesn’t fit the purpose. I prefer to stay connected all year through snippets on Facebook, blog posts, or email. I call my grandma of course (though not as often as I should), and I try to pick non-holidays to do it so I can hear in her voice how she’s really doing.

Story two, and then I promise to get to the point. There’s this guy in my town—nice, well meaning—but he doesn’t know how to end a conversation. Despite the fact that he has my email address and is on Facebook, he insists on calling me for any question and taking 10 minutes for what should be a 60 second call. I’ve learned to spot him on the caller ID. We all know THAT guy.

Use the right tool

What do these stories above have in common? They’re about using the right tool for the job. Communication may be the most important activity in most of our careers, and being efficient and effective with it is the difference between mediocrity and wild success. The new version of SharePoint gives us more tools to add to email and IM, creating an opportunity to shift our collaboration habits to unlock a more transparent and efficient way to work.
I’m talking about newsfeeds, of course. But there’s two flavors of them in the new SharePoint: the public feed, and site feeds. We also have a new community site template. With so many options, our employees sometimes wonder which one to use. Hopefully, the lessons we’ve learned here at Microsoft will help your company too.

What’s wrong with email?

First, you often have to answer the question, “Why should I use any of this new-fangled stuff?” Email has its place as the most ubiquitous tool for targeting a message to a known group, but that’s not really what we’re after much of the time. Here’s a partial list of the benefits of getting communication out of inboxes and into the open:

Search previous conversations without trying to find, join and archive the “right” distribution lists in Outlook.
A wider, more diverse audience than you’ll find in email, as messages are potentially seen by more people.
Keep your inbox focused on your team’s deliverables instead of free-ranging conversations.
Influence at the office means not only being useful, but being seen as useful. Newsfeed posts and web forums are inherently more visible than email.

How to think about newsfeeds and communities

Next, we start to tease apart what each of these tools do best. Let’s start with the difference between the default Newsfeed view in SharePoint and the Everyone view. They’re both valuable, but the default view is like a manicured garden, sprouting conversations that you’re interested in because you’ve “planted the seeds” by following interesting people, sites, documents, and tags. The Everyone view is more like the wilderness: organic and unpredictable, filled with posts from anyone who wants to share broadly. But some of the unexpected conversations and people you’ll find there could prove invaluable, like the surprise of a scenic view as you come around the corner on a hiking trail.

Community sites, on the other hand, are about crowdsourcing: harnessing a large group of people that share a common interest to answer each other’s questions, curating and exposing all that hidden knowledge, or just providing a place to connect where you need more than just the conversation.

Comparing user features

The table below might help you figure out the strengths of each tool from the perspective of those using the tools. Will you have to a pull out a chart every time you want to communicate? Of course not, no more than you do now when deciding to email, IM, or pick up the phone. It’ll become natural after a while.

Notice that these tools are arranged into a “spectrum” that ranges from completely transparent on the left to very private on the right. It’s also a spectrum of social norms for response time, which on the far left could easily be never, and on the far right is almost instant (thus the name). We find these two factors, breadth of audience and urgency of response, to be really useful for people to place these tools in the context of tools they already understand: email and IM.
Some might say, “Then why is e-mail on the right? I admit it’s very private, but many of my emails never get a response!” Sadly, YES! That’s because in the past, we’ve crammed all the communication that belongs in the other tools into your inbox. Important email that needs a response is lost in a sea of “me too” reply-alls and chatter about a fascinating, but distracting TechCrunch article. I’ve just counted the email that I processed from 8am-3pm, and I’ve only needed to keep and act on 14% of those 200 emails. Imagine if the other 86% had been in my newsfeed instead… I could’ve spent much less time deleting mail I didn’t need.

Comparing business scenarios

The next table is focused more on the aspects that business owners care more about: how easily will the “best” content be found, what’s the ability to integrate these tools into other experiences, or to lock them down for sensitive conversations.

Having more tools in the collaboration toolbox is a great thing. Knowing which tool to use for each scenario is even better. If there’s one thing I hope this post would do, it would be to eliminate forever those Reply All’s that contains one line: “Me too.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d better go call my grandma…

Photos from Flickr: DavidK and SteveD

SharePoint Profiles, Privacy, and Search

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:25:42 GMT

Matthew Feczko is a program manager on the SharePoint engineering team, focused on social experiences.

Profile

You’re at the company meeting with thousands of fellow co-workers, and you meet Jim, who works on a partner team on the other side of the country. Besides what he looks like, you don’t know anything about him. You don’t know what projects he’s worked on, his expertise, or who you both know in common. Fortunately, you and Jim both have SharePoint profiles, so you can learn more about Jim, follow him, and stay connected even after the company meeting has ended.

Why update your profile?

Sharing who you are, your expertise, skills, and interests helps others find you when they need to get their job done. If you’re looking for someone with technical knowledge of a specific subject, you can search for that topic and find the right person to answer your question. And, it’s a great way to meet others at your organization, especially when you work hundreds of miles away with thousands of other people.

To get started, fill out the About Me section, so that people can read your bio front and center on your profile. Then add key areas or topics to Ask Me About, Interests, and other areas of your profile, which help people find you more easily. Your profile contains much more, so fill out as much as possible!

Privacy settings

If you’re like me, you probably care a lot about privacy and how your personal information is presented online. That’s why we’ve made privacy settings in SharePoint clear and simple. Private is the default. If you travel around on SharePoint, follow people or documents, post in a community, etc. all of those activities will not appear in the newsfeed. You don’t have to worry about sharing something that wasn’t meant to be shared.

However, the first time you visit the newsfeed, we’ll invite you to change your privacy settings to be more social. We believe it’s useful and important to share your activities with your co-workers. This is how others will discover new and interesting people, communities, and more. If you accept, then we’ll set your activities to public. You can always go back to your profile and make everything private.

Your privacy settings, which are located on the “Newsfeed Settings” section of your profile, are broken into two parts: People and Activities.

People privacy

When the “People I follow” option is unchecked, visitors to your profile will not be able to see who you’re following and who’s following you. This information is completely hidden and protected.

Activities privacy

As Ben described earlier in the week, the newsfeed displays not only conversations, but also activities from people you follow. When you follow a new person, document, or site, or if your title changes or it’s your birthday, those events (and others) will trigger new posts in the newsfeeds of the people who have followed you. Your activities privacy settings control which of your activities, if any, are published in the newsfeed. Even if you make all your activities public, certain events, such as following a private document, are only ever seen by people who have access to the items in question.

People Search results

Once you’ve filled out your profile, other people can search and find you more easily. On any page, type keywords or names into the search box and let the magic happen. You can refine down your search results to search for Conversations, People, Video or just plain Everything.

People Search is powered not only by your profile, but also by the content that you produce—i.e. the posts you make, the documents you create, and the discussions you have on communities. So in a way, your profile is more than just what you put into it, it’s everything you do.

Photo and Photo Sync

The last piece I want to share with you is probably one of my favorite improvements to the profile page: A larger and more prominent profile photo, so you can identify yourself to others. Make it all about you: include your kids, recent ski trip, or your Darth Vader costume. Whatever you like, the photo will look great. And what’s even better is that in this release we’ll sync your photo not only across SharePoint but Exchange too. This means, the same photo will appear all across the Office suite.

It only takes a few minutes to fill out your profile and update your privacy settings, and it will help others find you and get their jobs done. So don’t delay, update your profile today

Sharing - simplified

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:25:18 GMT

Gaurav Doshi is a program manager on the SharePoint engineering team, focused on user experience.

One of the reasons I love working for Microsoft is the pervasive culture of giving. Everyone I know here is involved in some non-profit volunteering activities. I too do work for a non-profit, managing a group of volunteers in India who provide education and primary health care to underprivileged kids.

We regularly exchange a lot of information: photos, videos, budget documents, receipts and legal stuff. We collaborate on presentations, edit videos and create hand-outs. Currently, all this is done by email, and as you can imagine, it’s a mess. Our stuff is scattered. It’s common to lose updates from people and versions get out of control quickly.

SharePoint is ideal to sort this mess out. A site is a perfect place to store everything related to a project. I can easily share the site with people in our organization, or with volunteers who are external users. I can collaborate with anyone, anywhere to create presentations and edit videos – without ever losing updates.

If you’re familiar with SharePoint, you may have heard of permissions, groups and inheritance, but “sharing”? That’s something new! It’s incredibly simple and yet very powerful. Let’s walk through it.

Sharing a site

Sites are meant to be shared with people. Sharing a site is simple in the new version of SharePoint. On every page of the site, there’s a “Share” button in the top right corner. Just click on it, type in names of people you want to share with, and hit enter. That’s it, you’re done! SharePoint still uses powerful concepts like permission levels, groups and inheritance to provide this experience, but you don’t have to understand those concepts anymore to accomplish everyday tasks like sharing a site.

The people you just shared with will get an email invitation with a link to the site.

If you’re using Office 365, you can invite people outside your company. Just type in their email addresses, and they too will get an invitation.

Part of sharing is also understanding who can see something. If you want to find out who is already on this site, you can check that easily as well. Under the “Settings” menu in top right corner, click on “Shared with” and you’ll see the names and pictures of people who have access to the site.

Sharing a document

Sometimes you just want to share a single document, not an entire site. You can upload that document to SkyDrive Pro. It’s not shared with anyone at this point. When you’re ready to share, click on the “Lock” icon next to the document, and then “Invite People”, type in names and hit enter. As you invite people, the “Lock” icon now changes to indicate that document is shared.

You can also share individual documents within a site by selecting “Share” on the document callout.

When you share a document with people outside your organization, by default, they need to sign in with a free Microsoft Account (formerly known as a Live ID). But if you uncheck the “Require sign-in” option, they won’t have to sign-in. This will be ideal for me when I want to share a handout for a fundraising event. Anyone I share with can forward the link to others. I can take the link and put it on my Facebook to advertise my event and so on. Whoever gets the link will be able to access the handout without signing in.

It’s worth noting that administrators have control over certain sharing settings, like the ability to share without requiring sign-in.

Access requests

If you have used SharePoint, I am sure you have seen this at some point:

In the past, when you hit access denied, it was a dead end and there was nothing you could do about it.

In the new version of SharePoint, when you try to visit a site or a document that’s not shared with you, you’re no longer stuck. Instead, you can explain why you need access, sending a notification to the site owner. Once the owner approves your request, you’ll be notified by email. It’s no longer a dead end; it’s a door with a doorbell on it!

I can’t wait to start using SharePoint 2013 to store and share everything related to my non-profit work. How will simple sharing improve your everyday tasks: putting together proposals with a vendor? Working with partners quickly and securely? Collaborating across organizational boundaries?

Try the preview of SharePoint today, and give us your feedback!

The New Team Site

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:24:49 GMT

Nathaniel Granor is a Program Manager on the SharePoint engineering team, focused on user experience.

Someday, I hope to remodel my kitchen. My first problem is that I don’t have a kitchen; the closet that holds a fridge and miniature gas range in my Manhattan walk-up doesn’t count. So for the sake of this blog post, let’s all imagine that I live in a lovely ranch house in the Seattle suburbs and it has a kitchen and I’ve decided to remodel it.

I love projects. I get energized. My heart beats faster. Sometimes I giggle. Remodeling a kitchen is definitely a project. Over the next several months, I’ll amass piles of sketches, notes, contact information, schedules, contracts, blueprints and photos. These materials won’t do any good sitting on my desk. I need to share them, talk about them, and reference them when I’m at the contractor’s office, or chatting on the phone with my mom (hi mom!).

Nail, meet hammer. This is a job for a SharePoint Team Site.

OK, OK. I build SharePoint, so may I have a slight tendency to believe everything is a job for a SharePoint site. But that’s the flexibility of SharePoint. A team site is a place for working together with a group of people. In this version of SharePoint, we’ve focused on making it a tool that is so useful and so enjoyable that you’ll want to apply it to a wide variety of situations. Let me walk you through it.

Getting Started

When you first visit a new team site, you’re greeted by the Getting Started tiles. The tiles help explain some of the ways you can tailor the site to the project at hand.

The first thing I like to do with a site is change the look. I have a lot of projects and giving each one a unique look and feel helps me keep track of them. It’s also a lot of fun. The tile called “what’s your style?” takes you to a gallery where you can skim through a set of beautiful templates for the site.

Once you choose a template, you can tweak it by adjusting the layout, color palette, fonts and background image. After a quick preview, you’ve applied your own custom SharePoint theme.

We’ll come back to the rest of the tiles later. One pro tip: when you’ve finished setting up your site, click on “remove this” and the tiles will get out of your way. You can always add them back to the page later, or visit Getting Started on the settings menu.

With the tiles removed, there’s room on the page for whatever should be front and center. Click “edit” in the top right corner to add your own content. You can add text, links and images, or embed videos, maps and other rich content from the web.

Documents

Documents is a fancy word for files. We know from mountains of research and data that documents are the heart and soul of most projects. Every team site comes with a library for storing documents, which is automatically shared with everyone who has access to the site.

We’ve made a lot of improvements to the document experience in the new SharePoint Here are a few quick points:

Try dragging files from your desktop or file explorer to the document library.

Click on the “…” icon next to a document’s title to see a quick preview of the document along with other useful information, like the file’s address and who most recently changed the file. This is called a Document callout. You’ll find similar callouts all over SharePoint.

Look for the “Sync” icon in the top right corner of the page when you are viewing a document library. Press this button to synchronize the library with your computer. Once you sync a library, you can access all of the files in it from Windows Explorer and Office even if you don’t have an internet connection.

Notebook

Now a quick digression: If you’ve never heard of Microsoft OneNote, I secretly feel a little sorry for you. If you’ve heard of it, and seen its icon sitting there in the Microsoft Office folder, but never opened it up, well then I’m just plain disappointed. It’s a fantastic piece of software (and I’m not saying that just because I work here!). OneNote is a digital notebook, made up of sections and pages. You can write in it, add pictures and videos, paste in clippings from websites or documents. If you’ve got a digital pen, OneNote can capture whatever you draw/write/scribble.

Magic happens when you put a notebook on a SharePoint site. Your notebook is now in the cloud. You can access it from any computer or mobile device, using a native OneNote app or a browser. Even better, you can share it with other people. You’ll see their notes appear as they write them and they’ll see yours.

We think OneNote is such a fantastic tool that we’ve included a shared notebook in each new team site. Everyone who has access to your site will be able to use the notebook. Click on the “notebook” link in the Quick Launch (the navigation menu on the left) to open it in the OneNote Web App. From there you can open the site notebook in OneNote on your PC, Mac or mobile device and it’ll be available offline and stay in sync automatically.

Newsfeed

Working together is all about communication. There are many different tools for communication, each suited for a particular use. The site’s newsfeed is a lightweight and simple way to have ad-hoc conversations with the people involved in the project. You can embed images, videos and links, @mention specific people and use #hashtags.

I have lots of projects, and each one has its own group of people (and its own team site). The Newsfeed hub in SharePoint will show me a consolidated view of the conversations going on in each of my projects.

For a more detailed look at Newsfeeds in SharePoint, check out Ben Wilde’s post.

Other stuff

Each project is different. We intentionally made the new team site template simple. There are only a few items in the site’s Quick Launch at first: Home, Notebook, Newsfeed, Documents. We’ve included these items because we think they are universally applicable. Every project will want these features (though if you don’t want them, feel free to remove them). Everything else is an app that you can add if you need.

Remember the Getting Started tiles? Several of those tiles represent common apps that you might want to add to your site:

“Working on a deadline?” installs the Tasks and Calendar apps. These apps help organize the schedule and keep track of who’s doing what. Read Eilene’s post about these features.
“Keep email in context” installs a brand new app that we’re very excited about, called “Site Mailbox”. It’s a shared inbox in Microsoft Exchange that all the members of your site can access. Again, we’ll discuss this at length in a future post.
"Add lists, libraries and other apps” is a shortcut to the “Add an app” page, which lists all of the apps available for installation on the site, and links to the SharePoint Store where you can find even more apps to help you get work done.

(If you are experienced with SharePoint, you might be a little confused by this term “app”. In SharePoint 2013, “App” refers to a piece of functionality that you can add to a site. Lists and libraries are apps, but there are other new kinds of apps as well (for example, the Site Mailbox app isn’t a list or a library).

As you add new apps to your site, they’ll be available from the “Site Contents” page. The five most recently installed apps will also show up on the Quick Launch under the heading “Recent.” You can edit the Quick Launch to keep it organized and ensure that the most important items in your site are available. For example, after I install the Tasks app, I’ll edit the navigation and drag Tasks a bit higher, because it’s important.

Onwards and upwards

As the project continues, the site can adapt to suit your needs. In the case of my kitchen remodel, eventually I’ll share the site with my contractor so he has access to all of the project information and can add his updates. Later, we’ll share certain documents on the site with sub-contractors (but we won’t give them access to the whole thing). We’ve drastically simplified the experience around sharing sites and documents. Keep an eye out for a post focusing on this topic.

When construction of my kitchen gets underway, I’ll add a Picture Library and upload photos showing progress. Perhaps I’ll share this with friends and family.

There’s so much more to show about sites and the rest of the new SharePoint Experience! Check out the Office 365 Preview to see for yourself how a SharePoint team site is now a living and breathing place for getting things done.

Keep track of your work

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:24:24 GMT

Eilene Hao Klaka is a Program Manager on the Work Management Apps team.

Almost any project we work on is collaborative these days. A restaurateur might be working with his staff and publicists to develop and advertise a new menu. A wedding planner might be working with florists and venue coordinators to make someone’s dream wedding come true. You need a way to coordinate to-dos, easily communicate status, and stay in sync with your team without leaving your favorite tools.

In the next version of SharePoint, we’ve created an intuitive new experience for the team as whole to get organized as well as for individuals to stay on top of their work across projects. The two core pieces of this are new task management features for team sites, and My Tasks in your Newsfeed Hub. Let’s take a tour.

Working as a team on a project

In the next version of SharePoint, you can add task management capabilities to enhance any team site so you can get organized, plan and track tasks, and communicate deadlines, all in the same place you store documents and notes. Just click on the “Working on a deadline?” tile on the main page of your new site.

This will give you a few tools to help you do work:

A tasks list for capturing actions, to-dos, and deadlines
A calendar to track important dates and meetings, and
A project summary to keep the team in the loop

Coordinating work and deadlines with the Task List

The new Tasks list is the place for quickly creating and editing tasks for your team. The starting view of the task list is optimized for allowing you to capture the type of info that you might jot down on a legal pad during a phone call: task, due date, and who it’s assigned to. If you click on “edit this list”, you get a grid where you can edit inline like you would in Excel. To address the need to adjust projects as things change or new developments come up, this mode also gives you a lot more flexibility for organizing tasks, including the ability to drag and drop tasks to reorder them and indent tasks to create hierarchy. Forgot to add task that needs to be done between these other two? Just click Insert and add it directly in the middle.

At the top of the page, you’ll find an interactive timeline to give you a visual representation of the most important tasks and milestones. This gives everyone involved with the project a good picture of how their work fits into the context of other tasks. Any task with dates can be added to the timeline with the click of a button using the ribbon or the task callout.

With the task list, it’s easy to get organized around work your team needs to complete and see how you’re doing.

Communicating project status at a glance

The Tasks list is great for the person driving the project but everyone else that visits the site (team members, stakeholders) need an at-a-glance view of the project status. For this, we have the Project Summary on the home page of the site which makes it easy to communicate how the project is going, calls out the next upcoming milestone, and shows a couple of display modes. The first is the timeline (from the Tasks list), which gives casual stakeholders a high level overview of where things are heading. The second is a list of upcoming task deadlines and calendar events, which gives folks who need specific details a good picture of next steps. So anyone who goes to the site will have a good high level picture of how things are going and what people should be working on. At Microsoft, we love using our own tools – we call it dogfooding (or eating our own dogfood). We have a lot of new sites cropping up within Office with the Project Summary on the home page. The feedback has been great. People tell us that having this Project Summary on their site makes them look and feel organized and keeps the team in sync.

Growing with your needs

The Tasks list is a great place to get organized around the team’s work, but sometimes the scope of a project will grow into something larger that needs a greater level of control, structure, and reporting. In these cases, you can open a task list in Microsoft Project 2013. Click the “Open in Project” button in the ribbon to get great reporting features and an even higher level of organization to track your project schedule and deadlines, and saving in Project will synchronize changes directly back into the list for everyone to share.

All My Work in One Place

On average, people work on five to seven projects at a time. For example, the wedding planner may have several clients that she is planning weddings for, with a task management site in SharePoint for each. In this case, she’ll have tasks assigned to her from several different places, in addition to tracking personal tasks outside of those projects.

Rather than drilling into each site individually to see her assignments, she can now use a new feature called My Tasks, under the Newsfeed Hub, to see at a glance all the things she needs to do across projects together in one place.

My Tasks can aggregate all tasks assigned to you in SharePoint, Outlook, and Project into one experience and allows you to organize and manage both personal and assigned tasks alike.

The goal is not just to show you tasks but to be a one stop shop to take action on them too J. Here are some things it can help you do.

Organizing and taking action on tasks

To get to My Tasks, go your Newsfeed Hub and click on “Tasks” in the quick launch. When you first go there, we’ll bring in all your tasks and show them to you grouped by project so that you have context of where they came from.

Once you see your tasks, you're bound to think of other important things you need to do. My Tasks makes it easy to quickly capture tasks with inline add controls.

To prioritize tasks, you can drag and drop them up and down to reorder them. You can also highlight the tasks that you want to focus on most by marking them as important. Doing this will make them show up in the “Important and Upcoming” view, which we’ll talk about in the next section.

To complete a task, just check the checkbox like you would in a task list and feel the satisfaction of watching it cross itself off and disappear. (You’ll still find these in the Completed view.) You can also edit the task inline or open the task form directly; all changes will be written back to the project site so that the team is immediately aware of your status and updates.

To help you do your tasks, you can also get more context information, including a link to the project site where related collateral lives by opening the callout.

Using “Important and Upcoming” to decide what to work on next

My Tasks provides a special view called “Important and Upcoming” to help you pick what’s next from everything that’s asked of you. It gives you a personal timeline to visualize of all your tasks due in the next few weeks, all tasks that you’ve marked as “important,” and a list of upcoming tasks that are due in the near future. This is a self-cleaning view, meaning that it continually changes content to prevent your task lists from becoming overwhelming. As important tasks linger, they gradually lose prominence in this view so that old tasks that you haven’t gotten around to but aren’t really important anymore don’t clutter the list.

Take tasks with you everywhere

Last but not least, you can synchronize tasks with Outlook. Not only will you see these tasks in Outlook or Outlook Web App, but also in your favorite Outlook tasks app for your phone, such as the Calendar hub on the Windows Phone or the Reminders app on iOS. Just go to the ribbon in My Tasks and click “Sync to Outlook” to turn it on and we’ll sync tasks on a regular basis.

This is just a glimpse of how the next version of SharePoint can help you get organized and stay in sync with your team without leaving your favorite tools. Give it a try and let us know if this makes you more productive and your projects great!

Feeding the Newsfeed

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:23:57 GMT

Ben Wilde, SharePoint Program Manager, discusses how to take advantage of SharePoint’s new Social features by posting rich messages to the newsfeed and making sure the right people see them.

Why Social?

I’ll admit it: when I started working on SharePoint’s social features, I didn’t understand the value and was worried that we’d be building something that distracted people from getting their work done.

As we near the end of the release, my view on what social features are and what value they bring couldn’t be more different. After I grab my morning coffee, the first thing that I do is bring up my Newsfeed to scope out what’s happening with my co-workers and projects, and to see what’s being discussed across the company. My Newsfeed gives me a sense of comfort, a reassuring feeling that I’m up-to-date on the things that I care about and the things that are happening around me. In fact, I love reading my new SharePoint Newsfeed so much that I already wrote a blog post that includes a description of how I use it.

In addition to using the feed to see what others are saying and doing, it is also a valuable tool to proactively seek out new information. Who can I ask about upgrading from SharePoint 2010? Has anybody ever set up a SQL Server? Does anybody have any contacts on the Windows design team? Posts reach a large audience and I’ve found that I am usually able to get answers within minutes. I can also choose to have a conversation with a smaller group of people to discuss progress on a particular project.

I’ll use the rest of this post to talk about some of the rich ways that you can add new posts to the Newsfeed, and how you can take advantage of it to get your work done every day, whether you’re focus is on general sharing and discussion or on targeted collaboration.

Sharing with Everyone

When I navigate to my Newsfeed and make a post, by default, it will be visible to everyone at Microsoft. I’ve found that this is a key way to share broad information or to get difficult questions answered. The act of posting in the feed is simple and familiar (and we spent a lot of design time ensuring that this would be the case), but there are a few tricks to make sure that the right people are made aware of the post.

When I want to get someone’s attention in a post, I “@mention” that person. Almost every day, I see questions in the feed. I don’t always know the answer, but sometimes I know who does. I’ll often reply to a question, mentioning someone (by typing the @ sign in my reply) to make sure the question gets on their radar. This is still a public post but it appears in that person’s Mentions view and they’ll get an email to draw their attention to it.

Sometimes, when creating a post, I add a #tag to associate the post with a particular topic. As we’ve been building the feed, we’ve found (and fixed!) quite a few bugs. One common way that people report bugs is by posting in the feed with the tag #BugForThat, as in, “There’s a bug for that.” In addition to making it clear that someone’s found a bug, our team leaders can follow #BugForThat to see what’s broken as issues are reported. Or, they can click on #BugForThat and see all of the posts reporting issues. They also find it helpful when posts have screenshots and videos demonstrating a #BugForThat.

One last thing I want to mention is that, unlike other feeds I’ve used, posts that contain links to documents show a preview in the feed. Scanning this preview often this gives me enough information without opening the full version. How cool is that!?

Posting to Certain Groups of People

I love being able to post broad questions, but sometimes I want to have smaller, more private discussions. To do this, I use a Site Feed (just like it sounds, it’s like a Newsfeed, but on a site). Only people with access to that site can read it. Since this feed lives on a SharePoint site, we can also add other apps and functionality to the site to share documents, track tasks, etc. And the best part? If I follow those sites, all of the conversations that happen on them will be consolidated into my Newsfeed, so it truly does become a single place where I can find out about all the things I care about.

I’ve tuned in. You should too.

After using the Newsfeed every day for the past year, I can’t imagine getting work done without it. I’m way more informed at work than I’ve ever been before, and I feel empowered to get quick answers to my questions and feedback on ideas that I share. I couldn’t be more proud to be a part of the team that’s built such a great set of features which, contrary to my initial concerns, have proved to be a huge productivity boost for everyone who uses them.

Introducing SkyDrive Pro

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:23:33 GMT

It's 7am on Thursday. Today's a big day. You're presenting an important marketing proposal to management for your company's new ice cream flavor, the Arc de Triple Chocolate Chunk. Where others might have under-delivered and fallen apart, you’ve worked tirelessly to create a presentation that demonstrates how to guarantee success for your frozen masterpiece, how you’ll target the $10 billion take-home ice cream market, and how your team will launch this exciting new flavor before the end of July, National Ice Cream Month. You've pulled together a lot of information from a lot of different people, and it looks great. In an age of doing, you are the go-to person, the James Bond of ice cream marketing, and you've mastered it using SkyDrive Pro.

If you’re familiar with the personal cloud storage service you get with SkyDrive, you’ll be right at home with SkyDrive Pro, a service optimized for business and managed by your company or organization. It’s your hub for work documents: the one place to find, store, and share the files you care about for work. And today, SkyDrive Pro is going to launch you to productivity superstardom. Let’s rewind a bit and see how you got here.

Monday, 10am: Get started with your documents

R&D has come out with a new flavor, and your head honcho wants a marketing proposal for it by the end of week. You need to gather a lot of information and fast: a report on the global change in ice cream preference among small children, a chart showing flavor sales by month, and ice cream label design comparisons. Creating new documents in SkyDrive Pro is simple: start a Word Document, Excel Workbook, PowerPoint Slideshow, or OneNote Notebook directly from your browser, or create a document in any of the Office applications and save it directly to SkyDrive Pro.

You can also keep your label designs, market analysis PDFs, and quarterly sales reports in SkyDrive Pro by saving there directly or dragging the files into SkyDrive Pro in a web browser.

Monday, 1pm: Work on your documents

Once your documents are in SkyDrive Pro, it’s easy to see details and work with them. Right click the row or click the document callout button to quickly see more information about a document and take actions like opening, editing, and changing properties. With Office Web Apps, you can view an interactive preview of your Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. You’ll also see who the file is shared with and be able to share it with others.

Tuesday, 9am: Share your documents with others

Up until now, the documents you’ve started have been private, but now it’s time for the team to put pen to paper. Share specific documents with people: Armando from the marketing team can add his piece on the importance of marketing ice cream regionally, and Sara from brand management can include her bit on why creamy, “premium” ice cream is more popular than individually-wrapped novelties. With co-authoring (available in Office 2010 and later and in the Office Web Apps), everyone can work on the same document without having to deal with outdated copies or combining multiple files.

Tuesday, 1:30: Data loss crisis, averted

You open up the Ice Cream Labeling and Quality Report to find out that critical data about customer satisfaction for ice cream fat content is missing! It looks Andy, the new intern, accidentally deleted a slide. Fortunately, SkyDrive Pro always automatically saves the last version of the document that you edited, so you can always return to your previous copy. Your data is recovered, and Andy has a learning moment that doesn’t cause an ice cream meltdown.

Wednesday, 11am: Find what’s important

In addition to your own documents, SkyDrive Pro lets you find documents you care about across SharePoint by showing a list of your followed documents. Follow Sameer’s report on the latest market trends or Kim’s branding proposal presentation, and you can find them on the Followed Documents page in SkyDrive Pro. SkyDrive Pro and SharePoint revolve around you so it’s easy to find your way around.

In Office 365, you’ll also find a list of recent documents, so you can quickly find that marketing analysis report that started writing with Armando yesterday. You’ll find this list everywhere you log into Office 365, including SkyDrive Pro in the browser, and the Office Apps on your desktop or mobile device.

Today, 7:30am: Access your documents anywhere

As a productivity all-star, you don't waste time commuting to the office: you take your office with you. You can sync SkyDrive Pro to your local computer, so you can work on that important presentation even when you don't have access to the internet.

Sync your files with one push of a button, and you're ready to use your minutes on the metro to get things done. You'll have a polished presentation ready for management before they have time to grab their morning coffee.

Tonight, 7pm: Mobile access so you can get done & get back to dinner

You're at dinner celebrating a job well done when your manager emails you that the presentation was a hit! So much so that they want to show the CMO tomorrow, and they need that presentation… now. Whip out your phone and share the document faster than the waiter can bring you a basket of bread and butter. It’ll make your boss look good, and you can get back to your dinner date. Your files are with you, no matter where you are.

Tomorrow: Sharing with your organization

Management loved your finalized marketing report, so you can share your masterpiece with everyone in your organization; drag the presentation into the “Shared with Everyone” folder. Every file placed here will automatically be visible and editable by everyone in your organization; no need to individually share them with each person. You can also post the document in the newsfeed, or send the link out by email.

Say good-bye to email attachment overload and worrying about outdated documents. Gone are the days of frantically trying to track down that document you were working on and making last-minute slide corrections. Today, you’ve got a great looking presentation that proves you’re a chocolate ice cream marketing genius and a document collaboration master. Your boss is so impressed, he’ll be asking you for tips on how you pulled it all together.

Welcome to the world of frictionless document collaboration at work.

Welcome to SkyDrive Pro.

SharePoint Revolves Around You

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:23:07 GMT

Nathaniel Granor is a Program Manager on the SharePoint Engineering team, focused on user experience.

I’m kind of obsessed with space. I wanted to be an astronaut when I was growing up. I even went to Space Camp – twice. That’s probably why I think of SharePoint as its own universe. Instead of stars and planets, SharePoint is brimming with sites and documents and lists.

In previous versions of SharePoint, we gave each user a place, called My Site, to store personal files and interact with social features. My Site used to be “just another site” – an extra solar system in a galaxy far, far away.

In SharePoint 2013, we’ve changed My Site. It’s now your own personal spaceship - a tool to help you navigate the collections of people, data and content stored in SharePoint. We’ve split My Site into three areas or “hubs,” each one orbiting around the most important thing in the SharePoint universe: You. These three hubs are available in a global navigation bar at the top of every page in SharePoint and Office 365.

The first hub, called “Newsfeed,” is focused on people and activity. The main page of this hub features the SharePoint newsfeed, and allows you to add your own personal SharePoint apps, like Tasks.

The second hub is “SkyDrive Pro,” a place to store your files in the cloud.

The final hub is “Sites,” which will help you keep track of the SharePoint locations most valuable to getting things done.

To power these hubs, we’ve introduced a concept called following. In SharePoint 2013, you can follow people, documents, sites and tags. When something is important or interesting, follow it. We’ll show you information about the things you’ve followed in your newsfeed. Also, we’ll keep track of those things and give you easy access to them from the three hubs.

In Office 365, Newsfeed, SkyDrive and Sites are joined by links to other products in the service, like the Outlook, Calendar, and People hubs from the Outlook Web App.

In the rest of this post, we’ll take a look at the contents of the Newsfeed, SkyDrive Pro and Sites hubs.

Newsfeed

The “Newsfeed” hub is the command center of your SharePoint spaceship. Here you’ll find the SharePoint newsfeed, featuring conversations with the people you care about and updates about important content. You can view and edit your profile to manage the way you appear to others in your organization. And you can view the list of people you are following and those following you.

The “Newsfeed” hub is also a place for lists, libraries and other apps for your personal use. For example, you’ll find the Tasks app already installed. This app aggregates all of the tasks assigned to you anywhere in SharePoint or in your Outlook mailbox (assuming you are on Office 365, or your administrator has configured Microsoft Exchange). You can add other apps as well, such as a blog or a picture library.

If you had a My Site in previous versions of SharePoint and used it for things other than documents, you’ll find the contents of your My Site in the “Newsfeed” hub as well.

SkyDrive Pro

For years, people have used Microsoft SkyDrive to store, share and sync their personal files. With SharePoint 2013, we’re bringing you a professional-grade version of SkyDrive, integrated with SharePoint. This hub is your spaceship’s cargo bay, where you carry your most precious payloads.

The SkyDrive hub is the single place to store, share and collect all of the files you care about. From “My Documents,” you can create new Office documents, upload files with Drag and Drop, or manage the files in your collection. The files you upload are private by default, but it’s simple to share them with people or groups in your organization, or anyone on the internet. We’ve also created a folder called “Shared with Everyone.” When you place files in that folder, they’ll automatically be available to all of your coworkers.

In addition to your personal files, the SkyDrive hub displays the collection of documents you’ve followed, recommended documents from across SharePoint, and (in Office 365) the list of documents you recently opened on any device.

SkyDrive is more than just a hub you can visit in your web browser. In future posts, we’ll talk all about the exciting features SkyDrive Pro has to offer on your desktop or mobile device.

Sites

Sites are places to work together with different groups of people. Sites are the building blocks of SharePoint, which means that they are often as numerous as stars in the sky. It’s a lot to take in! Enter the Sites hub: like the starship Enterprise, your SharePoint spaceship is equipped with a transporter room, capable of beaming you directly to the sites that host the most important data, content and conversations.

If your administrator has enabled it, the first thing you’ll see in the Sites hub is a button to create a new site, followed by a search box. Try searching for sites before you create a new one. You might find that the site you need already exists. When you create a site from the Sites hub, you'll automatically follow that site, so you can easily return to it later.

Moving down the page, there’s a set of big tiles representing sites that your organization’s administrators have chosen to promote. These might point to important internal portals or tools, or perhaps to your CEO’s blog.

Below the tiles is a list of sites that you’re following. No longer do you need to memorize URLs or scrawl them on post-it notes stuck to your computer monitor. When you discover a site that is interesting or valuable, follow it! You can find all of the sites you've followed in this central list, available whenever you use SharePoint. We’ll also make some suggestions about other sites that may be relevant to you.

Communities are a special kind of site built for bringing together large groups of people around a shared topic or interest. If your organization uses communities, you can move from the Sites hub to the community portal: a page which surfaces the latest and greatest open communities.

We’ve worked hard to ensure that the SharePoint universe revolves around you. Use the “Newsfeed,” “SkyDrive,” and “Sites” hubs to guide you as you explore the brave new world of SharePoint 2013.

The New SharePoint

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:22:39 GMT

It has never been clearer how important simple but powerful collaboration tools are to the success of organizations of all sizes. This has driven our vision since the beginning and we are profoundly thankful for your support growing SharePoint as the leading collaboration platform for over 135 million people and 4000 partners delivering innovative solutions. The SharePoint team has always been incredibly passionate about leapfrogging expectations and today we’re excited to announce the preview of the next version of SharePoint.

Cloud First
It’s been a busy year. Last June we expanded the simplicity and reach of SharePoint 2010 through our Office 365 cloud service. Since then, tens of thousands of organizations with millions of users have moved to Office 365 to improve their productivity, reduce costs and enable IT to partner with users to drive their organizations forward. The team has been working on both quarterly updates to SharePoint Online and our most exciting release of SharePoint yet. With the new release, we are delivering SharePoint as a service and server simultaneously for the first time and laying the foundation to deliver significant new capabilities to the cloud first in the future.

Introducing the New SharePoint
This is the first of many blog posts with more details to come in subsequent posts and at the 2012 SharePoint Conference. The highlights:

New SharePoint Experience – Building on our heritage as the easiest way for teams to collaborate, we re-designed the SharePoint user experience to be clean and simple. The new SharePoint provides quick access to your newsfeed, documents and sites with engaging new experiences for saving documents, editing lists, sharing content, theming sites. And if you want to take SharePoint with you on the go, you can share documents and update your newsfeed from your mobile phone or tablet to keep you connected from virtually anywhere.
Pervasive Social Networking – We’re expanding on SharePoint’s collaboration tools by adding rich new microblogging, newsfeed, community and other social features. Pervasive following of people, sites, documents and hashtags across SharePoint means you can see and act on the latest information in one place. In addition, last month we announced Microsoft is acquiring Yammer, the fastest growing enterprise social networking vendor, and that after the acquisition closes, we will expand the connections between Yammer and SharePoint and other Microsoft technologies.
SkyDrive Pro – SkyDrive Pro makes it easy it to work with your documents in SharePoint - save, sync, share and collaborate are all drop-dead simple. The name conveys the simplicity and increased consistency with our SkyDrive consumer cloud service while reinforcing the “Pro” features of SharePoint like social networking, collaboration, search, metadata, workflow and compliance. Click “Sync” on a SharePoint library and you will get the documents offline in the Windows Explorer, Office applications and more. SkyDrive Pro is part of both the SharePoint service in Office 365 and server.
SharePoint Sites – The new “Sites Hub” shows all of your sites in one place – whether they are sites that you have created or followed or sites that have been promoted by your organization or our new recommendation platform. We streamlined the new site experience and expanded team collaboration tools beyond SharePoint’s rich document libraries and lists to include new team newsfeeds, team OneNote notebooks with real-time co-authoring, task timelines and Exchange team mailboxes.
Projects for Everyone – Since the most common use of SharePoint sites is to help teams get work done, we added task management capabilities to any team site and a personal view of all your SharePoint and Outlook tasks in one place. For project managers, we’ve made it easy to sync a site’s tasks list with Project Pro or add Project Online to get a view of all your organization’s projects and tasks.
FAST Search and Recommendations – One of the largest investments we made this release was building on the most advanced enterprise search platform in the industry to deliver innovative new search experiences, dynamic web sites and unified compliance. Combining the next generation FAST technology with learnings from Microsoft Research and Bing we provide powerful navigation of documents, sites, people, conversations, videos, reports and more through a new extensible query framework.
Cloud App Model and Marketplace – The new SharePoint makes it much easier to build, buy, deploy and manage applications via the our new Cloud App Model for the Office 2013 Wave using web standards like HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, REST, OAuth and OData. The back-end can be anywhere but we streamlined access to Azure services. We built in the new “Napa” web-based development from the Visual Studio team right inside the SharePoint browser experience. Finally, we are introducing a new Office Marketplace for partner solutions and enabling you to create a Corporate Galleries to manage and promote the solutions you build and buy for SharePoint and Office.
Dynamic Publishing – This release also improves the productivity of site designers building engaging, multi-device, multi-lingual intranet and internet sites. SharePoint 2013 supports designs coming from 3rd-party tools in HTML (vs. primarily low-level ASP.NET templates) and simplifies delivering dynamic sites through the new FAST content-by-query platform, content re-use, integrated translation, new video features and more.
In-Place Governance and Compliance – Building on new content management and search tools, we are introducing a new unified policy management and eDiscovery solution that works across the new releases of SharePoint, Exchange and Lync without expensive and low fidelity duplication of content.

Again, this just scratches of the surface of all the new capabilities that we will cover in future posts.

Cloud Architecture
Given our history supporting ISPs and large enterprises, SharePoint was designed from the beginning with cloud principles of statelessness, load balancing and partitioning. SharePoint 2010 added native multi-tenancy and content and search scalability to hundreds of millions of documents. With Office 365, we introduced a massive scale service fabric (deployment, monitoring, disaster recovery, etc.) to run tens of thousands of servers in multiple datacenters supporting hundreds of millions of users.
With SharePoint 15 we take the next step in investments for both Office 365 and on-premises SharePoint. New architectures like Velocity Distributed Caching, SQL Server Sparse Columns and Shredded Content Storage allow us to support more users, content and events with lower SQL Server I/O and better overall performance. Our new Profile Storage and Sync system increases directory freshness and supports our new social networking features. Finally, major tuning of our Page Rendering Framework reduces server-side rendering 50% and improves client-side rendering with the largest gains coming in Office 365 where we add Content Delivery Network support. Again, we’ll cover a lot more here in the future.

Great SharePoint Deployments
While designing the next wave, our team met with hundreds of customers and partners around the world which influenced not only the evolution of the product but also the guidance that we will update in this blog and on MSDN and TechNet. I wanted to emphasize two points as we roll-out the new release:

Use SharePoint as an out-of-box application whenever possible - We designed the new SharePoint UI to be clean, simple and fast and work great out-of-box. We encourage you not to modify it which could add complexity, performance and upgradeability and to focus your energy on working with users and groups to understand how to use SharePoint to improve productivity and collaboration and identifying and promoting best practices in your organization.
Be thorough in custom web design, development and testing – We know many SharePoint sites are published portals or custom web apps and are excited about the new features we designed for these scenarios. We encourage you to review the new features and guidance to reduce the amount of custom work you need to do. But even there, code is code and we encourage you to validate your design early in your development cycle and with particular focus on peak usage performance testing for how your customizations impact HTTP and SQL Server roundtrips. We have guidance and page and object caching techniques that can help here.

Next Steps
Thanks for reading our first post on the new wave. We hope you:

Try the new SharePoint Online in the Office 365 Preview or SharePoint Server Preview. We welcome your comments and feedback. If you move to Office 365 running SharePoint 2010, we will handle the upgrade to SharePoint 2013 for you.
Follow the SharePoint Team Blog. We will post more details in the coming weeks with a deeper dive into our enterprise social investments, the new app development model, business intelligence, search and content management.
Attend the 2012 SharePoint Conference in November. It will be our biggest and best yet. It is a great place to connect and learn best practices from the rapidly growing SharePoint community. There will be some exciting new product details that we plan to share at the event vs. in this preview.

Thanks again!
Jeff Teper
Corporate Vice President SharePoint

Storage Update for SharePoint Online Enterprise Plans

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:21:59 GMT

"Business is business and business must grow.”

-Once-ler from The Lorax by Dr. Seuss.

Your feedback was clear: “We need more online storage and it needs to be cheaper.”

So we adjusted the SharePoint Online service accordingly—both in per tenant storage quota limits and the cost of additional storage. Now, you can be less constrained as you plan your content management strategy and determine how and where you share files and manage projects.

Tenant storage quota limit increase—Now up to 25 terabytes(TB)

Individual customers (tenants) can now consume up to 25TB of data and content, compared to the previous per tenant limit of 5TB. As a result, storage limits are no longer such a barrier. Go ahead and create new documents, share them, version them, move them from DRAFT to FINAL, review and approve them, populate lists, publish forms, generate new sites, upload marketing assets, create company-wide Document Centers, design your company intranet, and more.

Additional storage costs decrease—A 92 percent price reduction

Along with the recent price reductions across Office 365, the SharePoint Online additional storage add-on has decreased by 92 percent effective immediately. The reduction translates to a drop from U.S. $2.50 per GB/month, to $0.20 per GB/month. Yes, you read that right—20 cents each month. So if you need more storage than you originally received by default, go ahead. You won’t break the bank.

How much storage do you need?

There is a simple equation to help determine how much SharePoint Online content and data storage space your company gets by default when you purchase of Office 365. Please note that “seats” refers to individual user licenses.

Total available tenant storage quota

10GB + (500MB * E1-E4 seats) + purchased additional storage

Note: Kiosk workers (K1 & K2) and external users do not contribute to the total available tenant storage quota.

In addition to overall combined company storage, every user that gets a My Site (E1-E4) will also get 500MB of personal storage. My Sites are a central location to store and manage documents, favorite links, and personal blog and wiki pages.

Two example scenarios:

1

Contoso Inc. purchases a total of 2,300 seats: 1,000 Office 365 E1, 500 Office 365 E2, 500 Office 365 E3, 300 Office 365 K2, and plans to invite 35 vendors as external users for various event activities. Contoso will not need more storage beyond its default allocation.

·   Total available tenant storage quota = 10GB + (2,000 * 500MB) = 1010GBs <~1TB>

·    Individuals who get My Site storage (500MB each) = 2,000

2

Fabrikam purchases a total of 45,000 seats: 30,000 Office 365 E1, 10,000 Office 365 E3, 5,000 Office 365 K1, and plans to invite 250 clients as external users to share drafts and final deliverables. The company will require an additional 100GB.

·    Total available tenant storage quota = 10GB + (40,000 * 500MB) + 100GB =20,110GBs <~ 20TBs>

·    Individuals who get My Site storage (500MB each) = 40,000

You can go here to read more about SharePoint Online boundaries. And please review the SharePoint Online service description for more information on user rights across the various license types.

Thanks,
SharePoint Online Team

Unlock your customer’s value by Integrating SharePoint with your CRM system

sharepointblog@live.com — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 20:38:40 GMT

SharePoint customers are finding new ways to leverage the power of SharePoint in combination with other Microsoft products to achieve their goals. Two customers that have taken advantage of the great integration between SharePoint Server 2010 for Internet Sites and Dynamics CRM are Copenhagen Airports (CPH) and Boys and Girls Club of Canada (BGCC). By combining SharePoint with Dynamics CRM they have improved their customer experience and relationships while increasing site traffic and revenue goals.

Copenhagen Airports (CPH) owns and operates the airports in Kastrup and Roskilde, Denmark. Kastrup airport, with more than 22.7 million passengers in 2011, is the busiest of the Scandinavian countries.CPH wanted to improve its service to passengers and increase retail revenue, but it had no data on passengers that it could use to sell them products and services. Using Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 for Internet Sites and Microsoft Dynamics CRM to create the program website and a related shopping website, CPH was able to launch a customer loyalty program.

Benefits to CPH:

·         Able to attract 50,000 members in two months

·         Improved service to travelers

·         Increased initial revenues by 45 percent

·         Gained platform for future expansion

Learn more at http://bit.ly/Hg1dX0.

Boys and Girls Clubs of Canada (BGCC) provides physical, educational, and social development to more than 200,000 young people and their families in more than 700 communities across Canada.BGCC wanted to revitalize its website and also create a members-only portal where employees could share information with BGCC clubs across the country. BGCC worked with technology partner Envision IT to build a new public-facing website and employee intranet using Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 for Internet Sites. From an operations perspective, Microsoft Dynamics CRM is the key line-of-business application at BGCC. It tracks all clubs, service locations, staff, volunteers, donations, campaigns, newsletters, and marketing campaigns. It was crucial to BGCC that everything on the website feed into this program.

Benefits to BGCC:

·         Increased site traffic by 20 percent

·         Increased donations by 50 percent

·         Improved information sharing

·         Achieved annual administrative savings of US $30,000

Learn more at http://bit.ly/HFpztw.

What’s new in the User Profile Service Application

sharepointblog@live.com — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 07:30:35 GMT

The User Profile Service Application stores information about users in a centralized location used by SharePoint’s social computing features to support natural collaboration. The User Profile Service Application is also required when provisioning My Site personal sites, enabling certain social computing features such as newsfeeds, and the creation and distribution of user profiles across server farms or sites.

To learn more about the User Profile Service Application see also http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee662538.aspx.

The User Profile Service Application is based on technologies provided through ForeFront Identity Manager which provides a comprehensive solution for identity and credential management and identity-based access policies.

To learn more about ForeFront Identity Manager see also http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/forefront/identity-manager.aspx.

Since RTM the User Profile Service Application has been incrementally improved through Cumulative Updates and Service Packs to improve both its performance and resiliency. Recent improvements include:

Parallel SharePoint, Active Directory, and Business Connectivity Services import and export support
ForeFront Identity Manager performance improvements
Reduction of full table scans and indexing specific user properties
Batch import of Business Connectivity Services user properties
Removed automatic provisioning of users and groups to ILM MA
Programmatic cleanup of large run histories
Resolution of AD-Contact objects in ForeFront Identity Manager as opposed to SharePoint Server 2010

As a result of these improvements there has been a dramatic reduction of the time required to import user information into SharePoint. For example, inside of Microsoft on the RTM version of SharePoint Server 2010 with 100,000 users our profile import duration for full sychronization commonly required 2 weeks to complete and 2-3 days to support an incremental synchronization. This same scenario on SharePoint Server 2010 with the December 2011 Cumulative Update has been reduced to 120-140 hours for a full synchronization and 6 hours for an incremental synchronization.

If you’re experience delays in importing users and properties or are just looking to improve the security, reliability, and performance of your SharePoint 2010 environment we recommend installing the latest Cumulative Update or Service Pack.

Resources

Download SharePoint Server 2010 Service Pack 1

Download the SharePoint Server 2010 February 2012 Cumulative Update

Bill Baer

Senior Product Marketing Manager (Microsoft, SharePoint)

The road to the social enterprise

sharepointblog@live.com — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 14:25:32 GMT

There is no doubt that the world of social networking has been heating up. As Facebook has captured the attention of the consumer world, many organizations are looking at how they can use social networking within a business context. It’s a frothy market, and there’s a lot of noise – and the stand-alone vendors have historically been more focused on features and functions than on real business outcomes.

Our view is that social is about putting people at the center of your business – helping employees, customers, and partners connect with the people and information they need to complete specific tasks. People interact with your organization all day, every day, and they’re trying to get things done. Customers want to buy things and get their questions answered. Partners need to perform services and make deliveries. Employees need to complete tasks. Social helps all of these people get things done.

To make a real business impact with social, companies must provide both a connected experience and a connected social platform.

The connected experience

Social should unify a business, not fragment it. Most social technologies today require people to go to yet another place to connect with each other, when what they really need are tools that are woven into the fabric of the tools they already use. The last thing you need is another inbox.

We recently conducted research with Harris Interactive (download the summary), asking 202 business and IT decision makers in organizations with more than 1,000 employees here in the U.S. why they are implementing enterprise social networking solutions and where they see value. The results showed that when looking at the type of features organizations want in a social solution, sixty-seven percent of decision makers said instant messaging, sixty-four percent said email, and sixty-two percent said video conferencing. It was only after those that they started to say things like “likes,” “follows,” and activity streams.

By bringing all of these features together, you’re able to augment collaboration and leverage a new type of communication social introduces: serendipity (or “connecting the dots”). For example, I was in Boston last week and because I let my network know I would be at the Cambridge office, a member of the team there reached out, and we were able to have a short meeting about some very important work they’re doing. If I hadn’t shared that update, I never would have connected with the team. There’s real value in creating and leveraging those serendipitous moments.

The connected platform

A connected platform is also critical to success. According to the Harris research, ninety percent of decision makers cited security as a top concern when it comes to social; sixty-six percent are concerned about integration with other systems; and fifty-three percent are worried about compliance. A connected platform approach addresses all of those concerns, as well as ensures you have a strong system in place to manage and analyze the data your social graph generates.

Early days

The research also showed that we’re still in the very early stages, as only thirty percent of decision makers had implemented a social solution broadly across their organizations. The majority of respondents – forty-eight percent – were still in a small, pilot phase. So as we look at how companies can be successful, a pilot phase is common and a great way to address your company’s unique culture and business needs. Once you have a solid approach in place, you can start to think about expanding more broadly across your organization or add additional functionality.

Social is here to stay

Social is a big area of investment for us because it speaks to our vision for the Microsoft Office Division: putting people –employees, customers, and partners – at the center of your business to get tasks and real work done. A connected experience infuses social into the places where people already work, making the interactions more meaningful and task-oriented. A connected platform helps you manage and secure the information and interactions in the enterprise social network. If you’re looking for examples of successful social solutions, see how three Fortune 500 companies have fostered a social online community across their organizations: download the whitepaper.

So, what do you think? How are you using social? Or are you using social? Join me for a Facebook Live Chat on Thursday, March 29 at 11 a.m. Pacific. Bring your questions and thoughts on enterprise social networking.

Look forward to talking with you then!

Jared Spataro

A Perspective on the Community Ecosystem

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 06:56:28 GMT

“Back in the day, products came with manuals. Now they come with communities.”
@ScotHillier

Well said, ahem tweeted, Scot. The gravitational pull of technology seeks the glue that binds. And that is community. Where do you turn when you are in question? Community. What sounding board is available when you have a nascent idea? Community. And most importantly, who do you SharePint with? Community. J

I wanted to share my perspective on two recent SharePoint Community events (managed by the community) that I got to take part in. One was a fast-paced hour of online text flurry, virtuous opinions, hashtags and speed replies. The other was an inaugural, in-person event with 1,875 back-to-back minutes of solid info from class-A presenters. Combined, the two events highlight the tip of what is truly a rich ecosystem of people coming together to share.

State of the SharePoint Community Tweet Jam 2012

The Tweet Jam (moderated by @markfidelman of harmon.ie, his event recap) spawned out of this original question: “Is the SharePoint Community still relevant?” And if you solely went by how many people showed up to partici-tweet, you could answer the question with an emphatic “yes!” But that’s too easy. The real beauty of the event was the tremendous dialogue squashed into 60 minutes – a flurry of Q&A: 484 original tweets, 285 retweets, 196 @mentions. The Community was active and trending in the positive with tweets like:

·         “As long as people are answering and asking questions”

·         “Education and training piece of the platform is huge”

·         “Will be relevant as long as SharePoint is around”

The topics then spanned beyond ‘relevancy’ and dove into questions about ways to improve community effectiveness, community impact on the product, and how does community mature as the product matures. The answers to all were impressive, challenging, and engaging.

It was great to be an active participant, to represent the SharePoint Team, and watch the SharePoint community flex its muscles. The community was there and relevant way before the Tweet Jam, and so great to see people engaging - not running for the irrelevant hills. I look forward to the next #SPJam – anxious for the next topic.

Office 365 Saturday – Inaugural Event in Redmond, WA

First came SQL Saturday, then SharePoint Saturday, and now Office 365 Saturday: 175 attendees, 5 tracks, 25 sessions, 1,875 minutes of great, free content - all packed into one very active day - in Microsoft’s backyard at the Redmond campus conference center (again completely managed by the community).

I was honored to give the keynote speech. I brought three rabid SharePoint fans with me (my dad, my daughter and my son). J The content focused on Office 365 momentum, roadmap and a peek into the data centers that power Office 365. There were a lot of good questions and great to see both new and familiar faces. Here’s a screengrab of slide #1 of my deck:

Once the keynote ended, the real depth content began to flow. Topics ranged from deployment, hybrid, out-of-box solutions to coded solutions, planning and evaluation, and more. And all were delivered by fantastic presenters – who attended on their own dime (a testament to their commitment).

The hallways were the real lens into the community. With each break, the doors would open, people spilling out chitchatting about what they had learned. My favorite overheard comment was, “These events are great. I learn something every time and love seeing my peeps.” And numerous times I would hear people share best practices and advice on how they work on/with Office 365.

Check out the Office 365 Saturday Redmond website (powered by SharePoint Online!) for more information about this event. And visit the broader Office 365 Saturday website to learn about their upcoming events.

2012 is starting strong. Many months to come and the calendar is a-buzz – there are so many opportunities to get engaged, voice your opinions, and share ideas. Hit us up via SharePoint’s Twitter page or use #SharePoint, the SharePoint Facebook page – or a good ol’ high five any time. I look forward to hearing from, seeing, and speaking with many of you!

Thanks,

Mark Kashman
@mkashman

PDF Files in SharePoint Online

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:21:32 GMT

We are pleased to announce that we worked with Adobe to improve access to PDF files. You can now open PDF files directly in Adobe Reader – and the PDF file will remain connected to SharePoint Online. You can also edit and save your changes to SharePoint Online from the desktop. And further, you can now use versioning (check-in and check-out) with PDF files for better management and review. We have improved the experience while maintaining the level of security you expect from Office 365.

To take advantage of this update, do the following steps.

Wait for the update to the SharePoint Online service, which is in progress now.
Upgrade Adobe Reader to the version 10.1.2 client.
Add your SharePoint Online root URL/domain to the Trusted Sites security zone in Internet Explorer¹ (e.g., https://contoso.sharepoint.com).
Check the Keep me signed in box when you log in to a SharePoint Online site.

This SharePoint Online update is currently being rolled out worldwide along with several other new features.

Thank you for your feedback and patience,

The SharePoint Online Team

¹To add your root site to the Trusted Sites security zone, open Internet Explorer, browse to your root SharePoint online site, click Tools, and then click Internet options. Click the Security tab, click Trusted sites, click Sites, and then click Add.

SharePoint Online: Service Update

sharepointblog@live.com — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 15:34:22 GMT

The second update to SharePoint Online (SPO) since the launch of Office 365 (O365) is beginning to roll out worldwide. We want to share information about the new features that will be available as part of this service update.

Enterprise Readiness

SharePoint Online was initially scoped to scale to customers with fewer than 20,000 Active Directory entries (specifically user objects). This service update allows customers with up to 500,000 user objects to provision SharePoint Online. As a result, customers of any size can easily start using SharePoint Online. And in the future, you can expect even larger scale limits.

To learn more about how SharePoint Online meets the requirements of enterprises, please visit the SharePoint Online planning guide of Office 365 for enterprises. There is also a SharePoint Online planning guide of Office 365 for small businesses.

Recycle Bin Enhancements

Business is full of "oops" moments, and sometimes these moments can really slow down productivity. SharePoint Online now offers numerous levels of recovery no matter what gets deleted. Specifically, enterprise customers can now restore full site collections, in addition to sites, documents, lists, and list items.

This new feature is found in the SharePoint Online Administration Center. After the update is in place, you will see a new "Recycle Bin" button, which gives you the power to self-restore data—including entire site collections—with just a few clicks in just minutes.

To learn more about how to restore full SharePoint Online site collections, visit the SharePoint Online Support Resource Center article on this topic.

External Sharing Gets a Broader Reach

The days when external invitees had to use a specific domain-based email address are gone. Instead, external users can now use their business email address to authenticate when invited into an Office 365 customer's site collection. How does it work? It’s simple. External users just associate their business email address (ex: user@contoso.com) with the Windows LiveID system. Then, Office 365 customers invite their partners and clients to their external sharing sites by using their primary email account. As long as this email has been associated to the LiveID system, the external user can sign in with their primary user name and associated password.

To associate a business email user name to the Live ID system, go to https://idsignup.live.com, select "Use existing email address:" and follow the instructions.

You can learn more about how to use external sharing within Office 365 for small businesses or within Office 365 for enterprises.

PDFs

Office 365 users wanted a better, more connected and governed experience when it came to working with PDF files within SharePoint Online document libraries. Thanks to your direct comments and active voices in the Community forums, PDF files will now open directly into Adobe Reader without requiring that it be downloaded first. The PDF remains connected and stored in your SharePoint Online document library as you view and edit the file. You can even check it out like other Office documents.

After the SharePoint Online environment has been updated, users must have the latest Adobe Reader version (10.1.2) installed: http://get.adobe.com/reader/

The SharePoint Online service description will also reflect all of the new features and changes.

Our goal is continuous innovation to enable collaboration from anywhere, with anyone, on any device. We hope you enjoy these new features and if you’re not yet using SharePoint Online, try it now risk free for 30 days!

Thanks,
The SharePoint Team

What’s New in SharePoint Online: November 2011 Update

sharepointblog@live.com — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 14:13:00 GMT

Our first update to SharePoint Online (SPO) since the launch of Office 365 (O365) became generally available on June 28, 2011 is now complete worldwide. We thought it would be a good time to share information about the new features and fixes available as part of this service update. On a broad level, this update enables greater reach to both people and external data, while at the same time increasing the number of supported devices and Web browsers. We also added some self-management recovery capabilities. But there’s a lot more, too.

Business Connectivity Services

At SharePoint Conference 2011 (Oct. 3-6) in Anaheim, CA, Jeff Teper (Corporate Vice President of SharePoint engineering) announced, “Business Connectivity Services (BCS) is coming to SharePoint Online by the end of this calendar year.” Available now to all Office 365 midsize and enterprise customers worldwide, BCS in SPO enables them to connect to external data sources via Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Web Services endpoints in both read and write modes.

Now, you can design solutions that extend collaboration capabilities that include external business data, such as line-of-business (LoB) applications that sit behind customer firewalls, or are being transitioned to the cloud (think SQL Azure). Best yet, you can download SharePoint Designer 2010 for free to help make the connections.

And for BCS experts, SPO now also supports external lists and data columns, the Business Data Catalogue (BDC) service for WCF connectors, and the Secure Store Service partitioned at the tenant level within customers’ SharePoint Online Administration Center. What is not yet available: external data search, rich client integration, profile pages and direct connectivity to SQL Azure without a WCF endpoint.

Want more information? Check out Steve Fox’s (Azure CoE) informative blog post. In addition, we’ve recently published new SPO BCS related documentation on MSDN:

·   Introduction to Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint Online

·   What's New for BCS in SharePoint Online

·   SharePoint Online Developer Resource Center

External Sharing

BCS is all about breaking down the boundaries to external data. Now let’s turn to breaking down the barriers when you work with people. This service update adds support for working with people who are not part of your company, such as vendors, trusted business partners, and customers. With these external sharing capabilities, a company can invite external users to view, share, and collaborate on their SharePoint Online sites. This feature is turned off by default, but a SharePoint Online Administrator can enable external sharing for the whole company. Then, individual site collection owner administrators can decide if they wish to share externally.

Please note: External users may sign in to the service using a Microsoft Online Services ID and/or a Windows Live ID. Live IDs may include @Live.com, @Hotmail.com and @MSN.com user names, plus regional derivations.

For more information:

· Learn more about how to use external sharing within Office 365 for small businesses or within Office 365 for enterprises

With the release of Windows Phone 7.5 codenamed “Mango,” Office 365 users can now access list items and work on documents stored in SharePoint Online lists and document libraries—in addition to email, calendar and contacts. This new support applies to all Office 365 plans, including those for small businesses and professionals (http://-based) and enterprises (https://-based).

For more information:

· Read the original Windows Phone TechNet blog post when Office 365 support was announced at TechEd 2011.

· Watch this video to see how easy it is to connect Windows Phone 7.5 to Office 365 services.

Better connections

In addition to earlier versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox, SharePoint Online now officially supports Internet Explorer 9 and Chrome. No matter which browser you prefer, you’ll get a better experience. Just launch your favorite browser. Then, hit your favorite SharePoint Online team site or intranet company site, work with Office Web Apps, and more.

Connections to other services are also better. For instance, Microsoft Dynamics CRM customers can now take advantage of the rich SharePoint Online document management functionality directly within the Microsoft Dynamics CRM application. As a result, users can create SharePoint Online Document Libraries dynamically within CRM—when and where they are needed. Companies can also add Document Management capabilities to entities such as Accounts, Opportunities, Cases or even custom entities in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

For more information:

· Get high-level details in the blog post here,

· Get more technical details in the blog post here.

Recycle Bin

Lastly, SharePoint Online makes it easier to recover from accidental deletions. This service update gives site collection administrators more control by significantly improving all site collection recycle bins. In other words, you can now restore an entire sub site (or document, list, library, etc.) within a few clicks, and within a few minutes.

Fixes

This update to SharePoint Online also includes numerous fixes. Many of these fixes were driven by customer feedback and Office 365 Support requests. We’re listening and appreciate your feedback. Some of the key fixes include:

Companies using SharePoint Online for small businesses will no longer be able to delete their root site—a great benefit considering that this offering is based around a single site collection.
SharePoint Online-based Public Websites will no longer prompt unauthenticated users for credentials on their mobile devices.
When Windows Phone 7.5, codenamed “Mango” was released, customers that applied a vanity URL to their Office 365 tenancy could not connect to their SharePoint Online site via the “Locations” section of the Office Hub. Now they can.
The “-my” root site collection—the parent site collection to all of a tenant’s My Sites—has returned to the SharePoint Online Administration Center within the list of site collections. It is again possible to allocate server resources, assign owners, and now this site collection cannot be deleted.

The SharePoint Online service description has been updated to reflect all the new features and changes.

The boundaries continue to break down; ever closer to collaboration from anywhere, with anyone, on any device. We hope all who are already enjoying the service will like all the new capabilities of SharePoint Online. And if you’re not yet using the service, try it today risk free for 30 days! To the Cloud!

Thanks,
The SharePoint Team

Business-critical processes with SharePoint and SQL

sharepointblog@live.com — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 09:45:08 GMT

SharePoint 2010 provides the ability to connect to backend business systems, surface business data in SharePoint and make it accessible by, and useful to, employees across the organization. Almost every company of significant size uses ERP and CRM solutions to run core business processes. Over time, companies have developed detailed practices around using such systems to support vertical disciplines within the organization (e.g. product planning, financial performance management, supply-chain management, etc.), yet challenges remain with regard to driving visibility and collaboration, based on business data, across different disciplines and teams. These challenges stem from the fact that only a fraction of employees are licensed and trained to use those backend systems, and from the high cost and complexity of integrating such systems across different functions and teams.

With SharePoint and SQL, once the relevant business data is surfaced in an enterprise-wide collaboration platform, several benefits can be gained; first and foremost, access to the data that underlines core business processes can now be viewed, analyzed and acted on by any employee in the organization (based on business priorities and permissions granted). With the relevant business data readily available, better decision making, quicker and more effective exception handling, and faster time-to-market can all be achieved. In addition, users are able to interact with the business data through a user interface they are already familiar with instead of having to switch between multiple user interfaces which are oftentimes not as user friendly.

Interestingly enough, training-related cost reductions do not count for the bulk of the TCO reductions that could be achieved by implementing backend data connectivity with SharePoint. The more significant source of such efficiencies is the impact related to reducing business risk; as more functions in the organization are exposed to the business data that is related to their daily responsibilities, and as workflows are implemented to support cross-team exception handling and problem solving, more and more of the risk associated with the underlying business processes can be mitigated, leading to more efficient processes and to reduced operational costs.

To learn more about the benefits related to enable business-critical solutions with SharePoint and SQL, click here.

SharePoint Conference 2011 – A Week In Review

sharepointblog@live.com — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 09:13:52 GMT

It’s hard to believe that SharePoint Conference 2011 just wrapped up. Most of the attendees are on planes back to all corners of the world, laden down with knowledge and swag and plans to meet again in Las Vegas next year.

We kicked off Monday with a great keynote by Jared Spataro, Jeff Teper and Kurt Del Bene, including announcements about integration with Office 365, the Certified Architects Program for SharePoint and an interactive donation for NetHope. Of course one of the highlights was the on-stage live demonstration of the failover of a 14-Terabyte SharePoint database – in less than 40 seconds.

We then kicked off the conference proper with more sessions than are possible to list in a single blog post. The SharePoint Express sessions in Microsoft’s booth proved extremely popular, with most of them turning into standing-room-only events. Videos from most sessions have already been posted on MySPC for attendees to download at their leisure to review.

Tuesday evening was another huge event – the Disneyland party, where we got to let our proverbial hair down (and Mickey Mouse ears out) for a few hours. We heard through the grapevine that one attendee rode Star Tours no less than 8 times that night. If you heard of anyone riding it more, let us know. We want to know if there are bigger geeks out there than we are.

Wednesday night we had our Ask the Experts session followed by the annual SharePint event at ESPN Sportszone. Both were well-attended, and the SharePint crowd agreed to reconvene on Thursday night to continue the party.

Another big star at SharePoint conference was the SharePoint monkey (whom some of the attendees suggested we call Franklin after the rumored return of a certain television comedy show). Twice a day attendees “found the monkey” in exchange for prizes, and on Wednesday afternoon we had the world’s largest (and to our knowledge only) monkey fling, where around 70 people shot monkey slingshots into the air, creating a heck of a spectacle.

SharePoint Conference 2012 will be the next time we all get to meet, and it’ll be in Vegas next November! You can imagine that there will be plenty of great things to see and do, and of course, a whole new parcel of places to find the monkey. We look forward to seeing everyone there!

NetHope uses SharePoint to help 33 Leading Humanitarian Organizations share best practices.

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 06:30:17 GMT

When natural disasters occur, the ability to coordinate relief efficiently and effectively is critical. Responders are faced with a challenging environment that includes increasing complexity of inter-agency coordination, damaged and limited communications infrastructure, outdated or paper-based mapping/topography information, and difficulty in disseminating information quickly (both between the various response participants and the public). These challenges have been compounded by the increasing frequency and severity of natural disasters as well as deepening global inter-dependencies occurring in the last decade.

One organization that is helping these countries tackle the digital divide is NetHope. Formed 10 years ago, NetHope is a nonprofit collaboration of IT leaders from 33 leading international NGOs that serve tens of millions of people each year in over 180 countries and that manage more than $30 billion (U.S.) in aid. NetHope members currently use SharePoint to share information, technology resources and best practices across their organizations in order to better support healthcare, education, agriculture, natural resource management, emergency response and microfinance programs. By fostering partnerships between NGOs as well as socially responsible corporations and foundations, NetHope leverages the power of collaboration and technology to scale humanitarian relief, emergency response and conservation programs to reach more people in need.

While NetHope has been using SharePoint and Microsoft technologies for more than five years, the non-profit consortium is migrating to Office 365 to take advantage of the advancements in collaboration, information sharing, and productivity offered by SharePoint Online and Lync Online.

Pooling knowledge and other resources amongst NGOs increases their ability to scale programs and reach more people in need. These organizations need to work around the clock, often providing as many as 20-25 programs simultaneously in different parts of the world. From providing health programs in sub-Saharan Africa to dealing with flooding in Pakistan to helping to resolve conflict in the Middle East, NetHope is looking to SharePoint Online and Lync Online to better connect its members, share resources and solutions, and improve responses to natural disasters, famine, and war.

NetHope and Microsoft together believe that technology can accelerate change and help to address some of society’s most pressing problems. Watch this video to see how NetHope, World Vision and SharePoint are working together:

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/Pages/Videos.aspx?VideoID=32

Welcome to Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011!

sharepointblog@live.com — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 06:29:14 GMT

As the sold-out SharePoint Conference begins in Anaheim, California today, businesses continue to adopt SharePoint 2010 at an unprecedented pace. Microsoft will reflect on ten years of redefining collaboration and look ahead to where the cloud and a growing SharePoint ecosystem will take the product next. Here are a few things we’ll be talking about this week.

SharePoint is a thriving business, and one of the biggest products at Microsoft - its success speaks for itself:

In 2008, SharePoint surpassed $1 billion in revenues - the fastest product at Microsoft to reach this milestone, and it continues to grow at double-digit speed.
More than 125 million people in 66,000 organizations have SharePoint.
Over 62 million SharePoint 2010 licenses have been sold.
More businesses chose SharePoint than all other vendors combined as their primary collaboration tool to share information inside and outside their organization.

SharePoint has a vibrant ecosystem, and today there are endless options for the SharePoint platform.

More than 700,000 SharePoint developers.
Currently 1,000 ISV solutions for SharePoint 2010 and another 1,000 in development.
This year alone, Microsoft trained more than 93,000 partners on the SharePoint platform.

New SharePoint certification program designed to take customers’ SharePoint deployments to the next level. Today, Microsoft announced there’s an addition to the suite of Microsoft Certified Architect (MCA) certifications: MCA SharePoint. Through a rigorous review board and exam process, the MCA program helps the highest-achieving IT architecture professionals distinguish their expertise with Microsoft server technologies, including SharePoint solutions for enterprise customers. Learn more about the MCA Program here.

SharePoint and Office 365, deliver enhanced collaboration and productivity tools in the cloud. Office 365 is not just about creating documents. Whether you’re a mom-and-pop shop or the largest global corporation, it’s what you can do with your information that matters. Office 365 provides tools to create, share and collaborate using the Office productivity suite, email and calendar, shared documents, team workspaces, IM, online meetings and video chat. Businesses using SharePoint Online and Office 365 are already reporting impressive results.

Business Connectivity Services come to SharePoint Online. Microsoft plans to expand the business critical services delivered by Office 365 and Azure and make moving to the cloud even easier for customers. By the end of the year, the first round of service updates to SharePoint Online since Office 365 launched will be complete and will enable customers to use Business Connectivity Services (BCS) to connect to data sources via Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Web Services endpoints. BCS lets customers use and search data from other systems as if it lives in SharePoint—in both read and write modes.

For more information about the SharePoint Conference and a replay of today’s keynote, please visit the SharePoint Conference virtual press room at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/office/servers/ And enjoy the conference!

Top 5 SharePoint Conference Sessions

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:19:26 GMT

Are you having trouble deciding which sessions to attend while you are at the SharePoint Conference next week? With more than 300 sessions we thought we would try to help shed some light on your decision making. The lists below show what your fellow conference goers are most interested in attending based on calendar additions.

Feel free to use this as a guide of what to attend -- or for those of you looking to choose your own track, what not to attend. For a complete list of sessions, click here

With only days to go we hope you are as excited for SharePoint Conference 2011 as we are. Stay tuned in the coming days for more SPC 11 information right here on the SharePoint Team Blog.

Monday, October 3rd

SPC285	Understanding SharePoint Administration Part 1
SPC221	Work Smarter, not Harder! Top Ten Tips for Improving Productivity with SharePoint
SPC350	Got iPads, Android tablets, smart phones and Windows devices? Managing Office 2010 endpoints in an Interoperable and multi-device World
SPC216	Creating Beautiful and Engaging Web Sites with SharePoint 2010
SPC202	Attractive Business Intelligence: Dashboards, Pivots, Scorecards, KPIs, and Reports Using Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Office 2010, PowerPivot, and SQL Server 2008 R2

Tuesday, October 4th

SPC310	Best Practices Around SharePoint 2010 User Profiles
SPC338	Developing SharePoint applications with HTML5 and JQuery
SPC307	Automating Business Processes with SharePoint 2010 (Part 1) - Using SharePoint Designer, InfoPath and Workflow
SPC391	SharePoint Workflow Best Practices
SPC215	Creating Awesome Dashboards with SharePoint 2010, Infopath 2010 and SharePoint Designer

Wednesday, October 5th

SPC308	Automating Business Processes with SharePoint 2010 (Part 2) - Using BCS, Word Automation Services (and More Workflow)
SPC296	InfoPath 2010 – Best Practices for Design and Performance
SPC329	Content Query WebPart: A Deep Dive on SharePoint's Swiss Army Knife WebPart
SPC203	Best Practices from the Field: Managing Corporate Metadata and Taxonomies with SharePoint 2010
SPC373	Performance Tuning SharePoint 2010

Thursday, October 6th

SPC3983	Business Intelligence Overall Architecture
SPC394	Taxonomy Based Content Targeting for a SharePoint Internet Site
SPC413	The Inside Scoop: How the SharePoint Dev Team Troubleshoots Performance and Reliability
SPC411	Security Design with Claims Based Authentication
SPC300	A Closer Look at SQL and SharePoint: Tips and tricks from the field

Get Social with SharePoint

sharepointblog@live.com — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 06:57:49 GMT

After months of planning, prepping, stressing (and a little “monkeying” around) it’s finally here – SharePoint Conference 2011 in Anaheim, CA, USA.

We’re excited and we hope those of you attending this week’s sessions and activities are too. And for those unable to join us this year, don’t worry – our social media team will keep you updated on All Things SPC11.

Whether you will be joining us and the ever-present SharePoint Monkey at the conference or just soaking it all in online, we want to give you a brief overview what will be happening on the social front and how you can participate in the conversation:

Official Social Media Channels - Make sure to check them out and “like” or follow us if you haven’t already:

o Facebook SharePoint Main Page: http://www.facebook.com/MSSharePoint

o Facebook SharePoint Conference Page: http://www.facebook.com/wwspc

o Twitter Channel: http://twitter.com/SharePoint

o Twitter SharePoint Monkey Channel: http://twitter.com/TheSPMonkey

o YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/mssharepoint

o Blog: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blog/Pages/default.aspx

Twitter Hashtags - Be sure to use the #SPC11 hashtag for all tweets, and you can add a related event hashtag as well (we’ll be sure to let you know what they are.) Even if you aren’t attending but want to weigh in on the conversation, keynotes or anything else conference related, use the #SPC11 tag to be heard!

Foursquare Check-In Locations - We have set up several Foursquare check-in venues for #SPC11 and will provided some handy “tips” for you to download when you check-in at each marked location. The “Mayor” of each venue will receive a prize at the conclusion of the conference (hint: It’s a seriously great prize, trust us) J

“Find the Monkey” Contests – These fun on-site giveaways will be scheduled throughout the conference. Attendees will be notified via Twitter (make sure to follow us!) that the monkey is “on the move” -- the first 10 people who find him will receive a prize and pictures will be posted of daily winners on Facebook.

Monkey Fling “Flash Mob” - Everyone and anyone with a monkey “slingshot” toy will meet at a pre-determined location and “fling” their screaming monkeys into the air at once – the event will be captured on video and posted online for all to enjoy. For attendees who don’t have a monkey from the 2009 conference, we will have a “monkey giveaway” one hour prior to the Fling. Stay tuned to the SharePoint social media channels for more details!

“Man on the Street” Interviews - Don’t be shy, all interested conference-goers are welcome to participate in a simple “Q&A” style video and share your thoughts about #SPC11 on Monday, Oct. 3 and Wednesday, Oct. 5. We’ll let you know exactly where and when (or just look for the video cameras, they will be hard to miss.)

If you have any questions or need assistance during the conference, just ping us via Twitter or Facebook and a member of the social media team will be happy to help. And remember to use the #SPC11 hashtag whenever you tweet!

It’s going to be a busy and exciting week – thanks in advance for your participation and support. Let #SPC11 begin!

Guidance to Move to the Cloud on Your Terms

sharepointblog@live.com — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 06:29:48 GMT

Introducing the new whitepaper, “Hybrid SharePoint Environments with Office 365.”

hy·brid (n) - something (as a power plant, vehicle, or electronic circuit) that has two different types of components performing essentially the same function.
- Merriam-Webster.com

Are you evaluating how Office 365 fits into your overall communication and collaboration strategy plan, both today and into the future? Specific to SharePoint, are you planning for full cloud adoption within your firewall, or will you begin your move to the cloud with a mixed deployment across SharePoint environments – both on-premises and online within Office 365? To provide insight in this area, we’re excited to announce the new “Hybrid SharePoint Environments with Office 365” whitepaper - downloadable here: www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=154e9524-27a1-4c1f-b4ea-efeb0027b1bc

As of June 28^th, 2011, Office 365 introduced the ability to achieve single sign-on (SSO) via Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS). Once established, this enables end-users to securely move between on-premises and online boundaries. The “Hybrid SharePoint Environments with Office 365” whitepaper provides step-by-step guidance for extending SharePoint and SharePoint Online beyond SSO – covering best practices for planning your cross-domain information architecture, direction for approaching security and compliance requirements, and insights on the ways branding & navigation play an important role in building a consistent end-user experience. The paper equally weighs a variety of business scenarios providing clear guidance about which deployment approach might make the most sense in your organization.

We believe you should move to the cloud on your terms and we encourage you to use the hybrid guidance and technical capabilities in this whitepaper to chart your cloud roadmap. The SharePoint team continues to plan and design for future hybrid scenarios and we are committed to supporting you every step of the way. We believe a thoughtful hybrid deployment plan will bridge gaps between existing investments, ease migration to the cloud and foster rapid, cloud-first innovation for your organization.

Enjoy the read,
The SharePoint Team

Related resources:

o   Prepare for single sign-on (SSO) – Office 365

o   The main Deploying Office 365 page

o   The Microsoft Office 365 Deployment Guide for Enterprises

o   SharePoint Online Planning Guide for Office 365 for enterprises

o   Exchange Online hybrid deployment and migration with Office 365

Microsoft SharePoint Director, Jared Spataro, to Host Live Chat on Facebook!

sharepointblog@live.com — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 13:15:58 GMT

Yes, our blog is typically a place for us to post technical tips and news, but in this case, we wanted to remind you about an exciting upcoming live chat that will be hosted by our Microsoft SharePoint Director, Jared Spataro!

And though this won’t be a technical discussion, we encourage you to bring all your questions related to the SharePoint business. Mark your calendars for this hour-long event happening Wednesday, September 14th from 12:30pm – 1:30p.m. PDT, GMT -7. And if you haven’t already, you should “like” Microsoft SharePoint on Facebook and RSVP for Jared Spataro’s live chat here.

Jared is looking forward to your questions -- hopes to chat with you then!

-Microsoft SharePoint Team

Jared Spataro on the Growing SharePoint Business: Exciting Times for Customers and Partners

sharepointblog@live.com — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 10:11:05 GMT

Hi, everyone! I’ve recently taken over as the lead on the SharePoint business and, with summer behind us, I want to take this opportunity to introduce myself. I’ve met many of you over the last five years in my role on the SharePoint search and core product management teams. Your passion for SharePoint is one of the reasons I’m so excited about my new job—so I look forward to meeting many more of you over the coming (busy!) months. I also want thank the previous SharePoint lead, Eric Swift, for his leadership. Eric recently accepted a role leading world-wide productivity sales for Microsoft, so he will still be telling the SharePoint story along with the rest of our productivity offerings: Exchange, Lync, Office, and Office 365. Please join me in wishing Eric all the best in his new position!

It’s an exciting time for SharePoint and our customers. We continue to see double-digital growth for the business, and it’s rewarding to see how customers are using SharePoint to truly change the way they share information and work together. We launched Office 365 (including SharePoint Online) in June, and the uptake has been amazing – just two weeks post-launch, more than 50,000 organizations had already signed up to try the service. Already, we’ve seen many of our SharePoint 2010 customers evaluating the online version to reduce costs and complexity. We also had great conversations with our partners at the Worldwide Partner Conference. The energy at this event was infectious. This year, our partners told me they’re growing their SharePoint businesses and a big part of this growth is the new opportunities they see with SharePoint Online. Sky’s the limit! (Sorry, corny cloud joke. Couldn’t resist. J)

The SharePoint community is what makes this one of the most rewarding jobs at Microsoft. I will use this blog to provide updates on occasion and – as always – I want to hear your feedback! I hope to see you all in one month at the SharePoint Conference in Anaheim, California. My team has been working hard to get ready for the event, putting together an incredible conference packed with over 250 sessions, access to experts, and hands-on labs to ensure you’re getting the most from your SharePoint deployment. If you haven’t already registered, go to the SharePoint Conference site to sign up and learn more. In the meantime, please join me for my upcoming Facebook Live Conference on Wednesday, September 14 at 12:30-1:30pm PST (3:30 – 4:30pm EST). Register here!

Talk to you soon!

Jared Spataro

SharePoint Online Learning Materials for IT Professionals

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 08:54:50 GMT

Are you an IT Professional looking to learn more about how SharePoint Online can help supplement your on-premise SharePoint 2010 Products deployment? We’ve recently put together a comprehensive set of learning materials that illustrate the benefits of SharePoint Online and how you can leverage its capabilities to bring additional value to your on-premise deployment.

Video Learning Series

Narrated Presentation

Exploring SharePoint Online for IT Professionals

Whitepaper

Microsoft SharePoint Online: An Overview for Enterprise IT Professionals

June 2011 Cumulative Update Refresh

sharepointblog@live.com — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 09:57:37 GMT

The June 2011 Cumulative Update has been refreshed with additional updates and fixes that resolve specific issues (see below) that were not included in the June 2011 Cumulative Update published between June 28th, 2011 and July 8th, 2011. We recommend customers install the latest June 2011 Cumulative Update to take advantage of these updates and fixes.

The latest June 2011 Cumulative Update will install on server farms with an existing June 2011 Cumulative Update installed, Service Pack 1 installed, or on environments where previous or no Cumulative Updates are installed. To learn more about updating SharePoint 2010 Products see the Updates for SharePoint 2010 Products Resource Center at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/ff800847.

Issues resolved in the June 2011 Update Cumulative Update Refresh:

• Install fails on environments with .NET 4.0 installed
• Some services do not start when the June 2011 Cumulative Update is installed on environments following a least privileged model

June 2011 Cumulative Update Downloads

SharePoint Foundation 2010

SharePoint Server 2010

Data Storage Changes for SharePoint 2010

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:21:02 GMT

Today we are announcing two related changes to the way we describe data storage in SharePoint. First, by taking advantage of performance and reliability improvements in SP1 and by defining specific requirements for large data storage in SharePoint, Microsoft is able to increase the supported limits for data storage in SharePoint.

Additionally, we are announcing that the SQL Server FILESTREAM RBS provider is now supported for use with SharePoint so that lower cost iSCSI connected NAS disk can be used. This post outlines the new data storage support limits and guidelines for scaling to those limits and it defines RBS including the new FILESTREAM RBS provider.

The SharePoint Content Database Data Size Limit

With the release of SharePoint 2010 SP1 and some new guidance we are changing the supported data size limits for SharePoint content databases. Prior to SP1 the content database limit was 200 GB for collaboration and 1 TB for document archive. The content database size includes both metadata and BLOBs regardless of where the BLOBs are located and use of RBS does not bypass or increase these limits.

The new guidance for supported content database size details outlines specific guidance for SharePoint administrators as the data size grows. If this new guidance is followed SharePoint can support up to 4 TB of data in all usage scenarios and has no imposed size limit for document archive scenarios. The details are in the TechNet document SharePoint Server 2010 capacity management: Software boundaries and limits and the primary changes are:

For a SharePoint content database up to 200 GB there are no special requirements and this limit is included for consistency.
For a SharePoint content database up to 4 TB you need to additionally plan for the following two requirements:

Requires disk sub-system performance of 0.25 IOPS per GB, 2 IOPS per GB is recommended for optimal performance.
Requires the customer to have plans for high availability, disaster recovery, future capacity, and performance testing.
And you need to review additional considerations in the TechNet Boundaries and Limits article.

For a SharePoint content database over 4TB specifically for a Document Archive scenario you are required to additionally plan for the following:

SharePoint sites must be based on Document Center or Records Center site templates and must be an archive scenario where less than 5% of content is actively read from each month and less than 1% of content is actively written to.
Do not use alerts, workflows, link fix-ups, or item level security on any SharePoint objects in the content database. Note: document archive content databases can be the recipient of documents as a result of Content Routing workflow.

Other specific limits changes being made at the same time:

A new limit of 60million items in any one SharePoint content database
The specific 5 TB limit per SQL Server instance has been removed. Instead you should work with a SQL Server professional to plan for database storage.

Please review the full TechNet Article SharePoint Server 2010 capacity management: Software boundaries and limits document. We have also published a guide on SharePoint 2010 scalability here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=223599. In the near future we will publish a test report of large scale testing that supports these new size limits.

The Value of Remote Blob Store with SharePoint

RBS (Remote Blob Store) is a set of standardized APIs that allow storage/retrieval of BLOBs (binary large object data) outside of your main SQL database where a dedicated BLOB store is desirable. RBS uses a provider model for plugging in any dedicated BLOB store that implements the RBS APIs. RBS was introduced in SharePoint 2010 and providers can be installed into SharePoint and are used to store BLOBs. Documents in SharePoint document libraries are BLOBs and with RBS they can be stored remote to the SQL Server database. This commonly means the BLOBs are stored on the same machine as SQL Server though they may be on a network connected SQL Server machine.

Above are two diagrams showing common architectures for SharePoint using RBS. Both show the RBS Client Provider which is installed on the SharePoint Web Front End. The left diagram shows the generic RBS implementation where a third party has implemented RBS to access their storage. The right diagram shows the SQL Server FILESTREAM RBS provider which stores blobs in the Windows file system.

By storing BLOBs outside of the SQL Server database there can be certain advantages such as:

· RBS enables SharePoint Foundation 2010 running on SQL Express to store more data than the SQL Express limit of 4 GB. In SQL Express 2008 R2 this limit was increased to 10 GB.

· Some operations can be performance optimized with average blob sizes over 1Mb. This result is from tests with the SQL RBS Provider. Ref: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc949109(SQL.100).aspx

· There could be storage optimizations with potential disk space and disk cost savings from differential backups or tiered storage.

· We have completed testing on the SQL RBS FILESTREAM provider which can enable iSCSI connected storage for RBS use. Using iSCSI allows for the use of lower cost NAS storage.

· Other potential data optimizations may be developed by ISV’s using the supported public RBS APIs and SharePoint APIs.

There are a few things to be careful with when implementing RBS:

· Backup strategy must be carefully considered. Both document metadata and document BLOBs must be backed up at exactly the same point in time. This means any third party backup solution needs to be capable of restoring both the SQL database used by SharePoint and the BLOBs used by SharePoint as a set where no variance occurs which would have the database reference BLOBs that are not available from the same backup.

· RBS is most likely to be used for document archive scenarios where documents are written and not updated. BLOBs in RBS are never updated once they are written; instead a new BLOB is created for any update. BLOBs are immutable, old BLOBs are garbage collected later. You can read more about RBS garbage collection in this article: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff628583.aspx

· RBS providers are required to return the first byte of data in a request in 20ms. This applies for all requests between SharePoint and the RBS provider storage layer.

· The SharePoint database is not intended to be read from or written to except by SharePoint. RBS providers don’t have separate access to the data. This includes direct access to blobs. Ref: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/841057/en-us

· Performance may decrease for smaller BLOB sizes when using RBS. This is also shown in the “FILESTREAM Storage in SQL Server 2008” article referenced above.

· There are many RBS providers available and customers should evaluate them for suitability for their implementations.

Additional Documentation from Microsoft on RBS in SharePoint

TechNet Documentation RBS Links:

· Plan for RBS (SharePoint Server 2010) [http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff628583.aspx]

· Overview of RBS (SharePoint Server 2010) [http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee748649.aspx]

· Maintain RBS (SharePoint Server 2010) [http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff943565.aspx]

Q & A

·  Q: How come you couldn’t provide these increased data limits when SharePoint 2010 launched?

·   A: We have learned more about how customers implement document archive solutions on SharePoint in the past 12 months. Now by providing specific guidance around data size scaling and focusing supportability around those we can have an increased data size limit for SharePoint and avoid having a data size limit for the document archive scenario.

·   Q: What is the new data size limit for document archives on SharePoint

·    A: There isn’t a data size limit, though the new guidance factors for building supportable large scale systems must be followed. If the additional factors are not properly addressed then the lower supportability limit applies.

·   Q: What if I really need more than 4 TB on a SharePoint farm and it isn’t document archive?

·    A: You should use a scale out topology. This involves having multiple content databases in a single farm and spread sites out amongst them. Each content database can grow to 4 TB by following the guidance.

·  Q: What if I had incorrectly assumed the 200 GB limit could be avoided by moving BLOBs to a Remote Blob Storage provider thereby reducing the amount of SQL Server stored data for SharePoint?

· A: We recommend that you upgrade to SharePoint 2010 SP1 and follow the new guidance for the total size you have. Consult the company you purchased your RBS provider from to ensure they are tested with SharePoint 2010 SP1. If you have a deployment that falls outside of the new and old limits we recommend you to contact Microsoft Support and request a supportability review. This is a paid support review and the support engineer will be able to tell you if your current implementation can be supported or if changes to reduce the data per content database are recommended.

· Q: Since NAS is supported, does the SQL Server RBS FILESTREAM provider allow use of a network share to store BLOBs on?

·  A: No, NAS must be connected using iSCSI and appear as a local drive on the SQL Server machine.

·  Q: Will the content database size limit or the 20mS TTFB limit be enforced in the software?

·  A: No. These are support limits that we recommend customers stay within for best performance and in order to get the best support from Microsoft. They are not hard boundaries that are measured by the SharePoint software.

·  Q: Where was the old 200 GB limit detailed on TechNet?

· A: It was listed on the SharePoint Capacity Planning Boundaries and Limits page on TechNet. Whilst RBS and BLOBs were not previously specifically called out, the limit of 200 GB was clearly stated for a SharePoint Content Database which includes metadata and BLOBs. This article has been updated for the new limits and to list RBS to be more explicit and to avoid any future misinterpretation.

·   Q: Can a large document archive have multiple SharePoint sites collections?

·   A: Yes. However our guidance is that if you have a site collection over 100 GB, it should be the only site collection in a content database.

·   Q: Can a large document archive have multiple document libraries?

·   A: Yes. You can have multiple document libraries with different permissions set.

·  Q: Is SharePoint 2010 SP1 required to take advantage of these new content database limits?

·   A: No. The limits apply to SharePoint 2010 regardless of whether SP1 is applied. However due to improvements in SharePoint 2010 SP1 you are strongly encouraged to install it.

Jared Spataro on Office 365

sharepointblog@live.com — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 08:41:34 GMT

Hi everyone, I’m hoping you had the chance to catch Steve’s Office 365 announcement in NYC this morning. This is a really important milestone for the SharePoint business, and I’m thrilled to finally be able to talk to you more about Office 365 and SharePoint Online.

Ten years ago, the SharePoint team started with a simple goal—to help you share your work with others. Over the last decade, we’ve experienced tremendous growth. We’ve sold more than 100 million licenses and have grown the product into a recognized leader in collaboration, content management, search, and more. As a part of Office 365, SharePoint Online represents the next chapter of our story and will make it easier than ever before to share your work with the people that help you get things done.

There’s so much packed into Office 365, but there are three things I wanted to highlight:

1. First, you’re going to love the way Office 365 makes you more productive. The combination of Office, Exchange, Lync, and SharePoint gives you everything you need to get your work done more efficiently.

2. Second, you’ll be amazed at how easy it is to get started. Until now, world-class collaboration solutions like SharePoint required setting up your own servers and installing the software. Office 365 changes the game by putting a world-class productivity infrastructure just a click away.

3. Finally, there’s an army of people ready to help. We have an amazing partner ecosystem and with the release of Office 365 we’re partnering in new ways with service providers like Bell Canada, Telstra and Vodafone to serve businesses of all sizes.

Get Started Today!

Whether you’re a small business or a large enterprise, the best way to learn about Office 365 and SharePoint Online is to experience them for yourself. Here are a few ideas to get started:

· Try it out - If you didn’t sign up for the beta back in April, check out the Office 365 site and try it out today.

· Move your My Sites, Team Sites, and Intranet Sites online – Once you’ve seen what it can do, you’ll want more. For immediate cost savings, consider moving your My Sites, Team Sites, and Intranet Sites to SharePoint Online. Use the SharePoint Online planning guide for Office 365 to help you develop a migration strategy.

· Customize and extend – SharePoint Online has a lot to offer right out of the box. But you can also customize and extend it to meet the needs of your growing business. Simplify routine processes using forms and workflows. Manage tasks and schedules with team sites. Track business performance with dashboards and reports. Check out the Developer Guide for more ways to make SharePoint Online work for your business.

Office 365 is an incredible value for customers and a fantastic opportunity for partners. It’s a significant milestone for the SharePoint business, and I hope you’ll take some time to see what it can do for you. The journey to the cloud will be an exciting ride for all of us, and I look forward to sharing more with you in Anaheim at the SharePoint Conference in October.

Thanks,

Jared

Service Pack 1 for SharePoint 2010 Products is Now Available for Download

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:20:35 GMT

Service Pack 1 for SharePoint 2010 Products is Now Available for Download

Service Pack 1 includes stability, performance, and security enhancements that are a direct result of your feedback.

IMPORTANT NOTE

It is strongly recommended to install the June 2011 Cumulative Update immediately after the installation of Service Pack 1. The June Cumulative Update includes several important security and bug fixes that are not included Service Pack 1.

Installing Service Pack 1

Prior to installing Service Pack 1 you should carefully read the known issues and release notes at

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2532126

Service Pack 1 includes all fixes released through April 2011 so it can be installed directly to RTM builds of SharePoint 2010 Products, or any prior Cumulative Update.

Install the service packs in the following order on every server in the farm.

1. Service Pack 1 for SharePoint Foundation 2010

2. Service Pack 1 for SharePoint Foundation 2010 Language Pack (if applicable)

3. Service Pack 1 for SharePoint Server 2010

4. Service Pack 1 for SharePoint Server 2010 Language Pack (if applicable)

The SharePoint 2010 Products Configuration Wizard or "psconfig –cmd upgrade –inplace b2b -wait” should be run once on every server in the farm following the final update installed.

The version of content databases will be 14.0.6029.1000 after successfully installation. For more in-depth guidance for the update process, we recommend reviewing the following articles. These articles provide a correct way to deploy updates and identify known issues (and resolutions).

Prepare to deploy a software update for SharePoint Foundation 2010

Install a software update for SharePoint Foundation 2010

Prepare to deploy a software update for SharePoint Server 2010

Install a software update for SharePoint Server 2010

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Can I install Service Pack 1 on RTM builds of SharePoint 2010 Products?

A: Yes, Service Pack 1 can be installed directly on RTM builds; however, we suggest you install Service Pack 1 then apply the June 2011 Cumulative Update.

Q: Do I need to run psconfig after the install of every package?

A: No, apply all of the available packages then run psconfig - the database will only be updated once, to the newest version.

Q: Do I need to run psconfig on every machine in the farm?

A: Yes. Although database is already updated, the binaries on each server need to be set and permissioned using psconfig.

Q: Will there be a slipstream build including Service Pack 1 available for download?

A: At this time a slipstream build including Service Pack 1 is not available.

Additional Resources

To learn about what’s new in Service Pack 1 read the Service Pack 1 for SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 whitepaper.

Learn more about installing updates for SharePoint 2010 at the Updates for SharePoint 2010 Products Resource Center

For a description of new functionality in Service Pack 1 see the Service Pack for SharePoint 2010 Coming Soon... blog post on the SharePoint Team Blog.

That’s Why I Use SharePoint

sharepointblog@live.com — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 13:24:03 GMT

Ever spill coffee on your computer only to lose important files, or end a document title with -version 6 only to send -version 5? Then SharePoint can help! This week, we launched iusesharepoint.com a new SharePoint website dedicated to inspiring everyday business users to do more with SharePoint 2010 by demonstrating how it can help make the work day just a little smoother. I Use SharePoint visitors will find humorous webisodes, how-to videos, quick reference cards, tips and tricks and success stories from everyday users.

Changing the way you work can be a challenge, so we have created two different adoption kits to help you and your organization get more out of SharePoint. In option A you will find a white paper on adoption strategies, a lunch themed SharePoint template, webisodes, show me how videos, a tips and tricks sheet and quick reference cards. The highlight of this kit is the lunch and learn site template where users can familiarize themselves with meeting workspaces, blogs, wikis, discussion boards on a topic is near and dear to everyone-Lunch. Option B is perfect if your organization already has an established resource hub to place all of the new content. With both kits you will find, customizable poster, email and table tent templates to drive users to these new resources.

Here's to an easier work week with SharePoint 2010!

SharePoint MVP chat; Wednesday, June 22nd at 9am PDT

sharepointblog@live.com — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 07:38:02 GMT

Do you have tough technical questions regarding SharePoint for which you're seeking answers? Do you want to tap into the deep knowledge of the talented Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals? The SharePoint MVPs are the same people you see in the technical community as authors, speakers, user group leaders and answerers in the MSDN and TechNet forums.

By popular demand, we have brought these experts together as a collective group to answer your questions live. So please join us and bring on the questions! This chat will cover WSS 3.0, MOSS, SharePoint Foundation 2010 and the SharePoint Server 2010. Topics include setup and administration, design, development and general question.

Please join us on Wednesday June 22nd at 9am PDT to chat with MVPs from around the world. Learn more and add these chats to your calendar by visiting the MSDN event page http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/events/aa497438.aspx

Collaborate with Colleagues Using SharePoint My Sites

sharepointblog@live.com — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 11:46:26 GMT

This blog is post #3 in the Ten Days of Office series to celebrate the one-year anniversary since the release of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. Tune in each weekday for new tips and tricks to get the most from your Office and SharePoint e experience.

On Wednesday, as part of the one-year anniversary celebration of Office 2010, my colleague Erik Jensen wrote a great post about one way that you can get the most out of Microsoft PowerPoint through the broadcast feature. Yesterday, Roby Kurian wrote about Outlook Social Connector, including how it can provide information from SharePoint My Sites. Today, I want to share one of the ways you can get the most out of the social capabilities in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 by promoting the use of My Sites within an organization.

There’s a lot of buzz today about social networking within an organization, and with good reason! According to Gartner, “It is no longer a question of if an enterprise should invest in social software, but when, from which provider and for what business purposes.” and by 2015, 40% of large enterprises will have a corporate "Facebook," for circulating both business and personal data. (Gartner, Predicts 2011: When Social and Business Processes Collide, November 19, 2010) When done right, enterprise social networking can be a very valuable tool in helping employees find colleagues with the expertise they need to solve a problem or better serve customers. SharePoint has included My Sites since the 2003 version, and today in 2010 they are better than ever at helping people locate one another and the critical business information they share, enabling everyone to do their jobs more efficiently and feel more connected across the enterprise.

Now onto the good stuff! SharePoint My Sites is only as valuable as the information people contribute, which you can do easily by leveraging tools such as tagging, document and photo libraries and colleague connections. So in an already busy work environment, how do you ensure your employees understand the value of My Sites? Below are some tips for driving adoption in your organization.

Identify a select group of early adopters who can spread the word about My Sites among their colleagues. Showcase them through email, a newsletter or an Intranet feature story, citing personal examples of how My Sites has improved their everyday work life. Also, reach out to the avid consumer social network users in your organization to become early adopters and promoters of safe, secure social networking inside the organization.
Use My Sites as a marketing tool inside organizations. For example, smaller teams within a larger organization can boost their profile by making sure their My Sites are completely utilized. Each team member can list expertise, share documents, tag material and update newsfeeds, making them easier to find in an organization. In fact, simply saving your documents to your My Site will make it much easier for people to find out what you know and benefit from your work. It is much easier to find files by looking up people in SharePoint.
Make My Sites your own. Custom skins that live on top of SharePoint allow organizations to brand My Sites, helping drive interest and loyalty. The theme might be for your department, role, or a corporate HR-sponsored initiative—whatever is most relevant for your business.
Incorporate filling out My Sites as part of an employee orientation. This helps quickly drive adoption and ensures employees know how to properly utilize the tool. Many of your new employees will already be familiar with these tools as consumers and successful job seekers.
Encourage high-profile executive involvement. When your executives share, they set the tone for everyone. Using the built-in blog on a My Site is a great way for executives to share trip reports, reflections on the business, and career development tips. This knowledge is shared more visibly and persistently than in email and encourages other employees to share their experiences as well.

We use My Sites widely across Microsoft, and from personal experience, it has helped me engage colleagues more quickly, locate expertise and find the information I need to not only do my job better, but be more efficient. When I can find the right contact for a customer by doing a people search, take advantage of colleagues’ presentation by finding it on their My Sites, or stay in touch with a colleague through their personal updates, SharePoint is enabling me to benefit from the power of social computing in the enterprise. That makes me more productive, effective and connected in today’s fast-paced world of business.

Christian Finn

Unleashing SharePoint 2010 for Records Management, Governance and Compliance

sharepointblog@live.com — Sat, 28 May 2011 07:00:30 GMT

Webinar: Thursday, June 2, 8:00 AM Pacific / 11:00 AM Eastern / 4:00 PM GMT

As governance and compliance play increasingly essential roles in records management (RM) strategy, organizations worldwide are replacing their legacy RM systems with SharePoint.

What is driving this change?

Join Ryan Duguid, Senior Product Manager, ECM and Compliance at Microsoft, for an inside look at the extensive records management (RM) capabilities of SharePoint 2010.

Ryan will be joined by Art Bellis, VP Sales and Marketing, GimmalSoft, who will review the role of DoD 5015.2-compliance in an enterprise RM strategy, and Trevor Dyck, Director, Product Management, Colligo, to explain the importance of always retaining, organizing and managing corporate email as records.

During this one-hour webinar, you'll explore:

• Leveraging the new records management capabilities of SharePoint 2010

• Utilizing the Records Center and in-place records management

• Deploying the Content Organizer and enterprise-managed metadata

• Extending SharePoint 2010 for DoD 5015.2-compliance

• Integrating Outlook and SharePoint for email management

Find out how you can unleash the power of SharePoint 2010 for records management, governance and compliance.

Busy on that day? Register Now to receive the on-demand recording.

Microsoft SharePoint General Manager, Eric Swift, to Host Exclusive Live Chat on Facebook!

sharepointblog@live.com — Tue, 31 May 2011 07:00:26 GMT

While we typically post technical tips and news here, we wanted to let you know about an exciting upcoming live chat that will be hosted by none other than Microsoft SharePoint General Manager, Eric Swift!

Though this won’t be a technical discussion, we encourage you to bring all your questions related to the SharePoint business in general, including the future of SharePoint in the Cloud and what SharePoint can do for you (and your business). Mark your calendars for the hour-long event happening Thursday, June 2 from 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. PDT, GMT-7. And if you haven’t already, you should “like” Microsoft SharePoint on Facebook and RSVP for Eric Swift’s live chat here.

Eric and the team look forward to your questions -- hope to chat with you then!

-Microsoft SharePoint Team

SharePoint Lifecycle Management Solution with Project Server 2010

sharepointblog@live.com — Sat, 28 May 2011 06:34:14 GMT

Author: Christophe Fiessinger , Senior Technical Product Manager, Microsoft Corporation

I am excited to announce the release of SharePoint Lifecycle Management Solution with Project Server 2010. Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 provides a vast number of capabilities that empower both business users and IT to create solutions quickly. For this reason, many organizations consider implementing SharePoint as a central platform to address a wide array of business solutions. For those organizations, it is likely that they will need a good way to track, manage, and prioritize those business requests. The SharePoint Lifecycle Management Solution with Project Server 2010 provides a framework and guidance for managing SharePoint business requests and includes two white papers and a sample dataset.

This no-code solution includes:

Business Decision Maker/Technical Decision Maker white paper containing a business evaluation of how Microsoft Project Server 2010 can be employed to help manage your SharePoint Lifecycle through enhancement requests and project proposals.
Technical white paper contains step-by-step instructions on how to install and customize the SharePoint Lifecycle Management solution, along with basic instructions on how to use it.
Project Server 2010 sample databases and templates that can be used to illustrate concepts. The sample dataset requires a farm that has a working installation of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 with Project Server 2010 fully configured (please refer to Project Server 2010 Tech Center); and the Dynamic Workflow and Workflow Visualization web part solutions from Microsoft Project 2010 Solution Starters.

For an overview of the solution produced by Jornata, please watch this recent recording from Tech.Ed last week: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2011/OSP202

BDM white paper Table of Content

Why Customers Choose SharePoint

SharePoint as a Central Service

SharePoint Lifecycle Management

Introducing the SharePoint Lifecycle Management Solution with Project Server 2010

Managing SharePoint Requests

Discovery and Further Definition

SharePoint Project Selection

Project Planning and Management

Evaluating SharePoint Project Success

SharePoint Lifecycle Management Solution with Project Server 2010: Key Benefits

About the Solution

Solution Artifacts

Conclusion

Last but not least do not forget to check out other existing white papers on Microsoft Project Portfolio Management offering on our Project site at http://www.microsoft.com/project/en/us/articles-white-papers.aspx.

SharePoint MVP chat; Wednesday May 25th at 9am PDT

sharepointblog@live.com — Wed, 25 May 2011 12:03:55 GMT

Please join us on Wednesday May 25th at 9am PDT to chat with MVPs from around the world. Learn more and add these chats to your calendar by visiting the MSDN event page http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/events/aa497438.aspx

Service Pack 1 for SharePoint 2010 Coming Soon…

sharepointblog@live.com — Wed, 18 May 2011 09:58:43 GMT

Author: Bill Baer, Senior Technical Product Manager, Microsoft Corporation

As we near the release of Service Pack 1 in late June 2011 we wanted to take a moment to share some of the important new functionality that will be brought to SharePoint 2010 with Service Pack 1. Service Pack 1 represents stability, performance, and security enhancements that are a direct result of your feedback and designed to extend the value you are experiencing with SharePoint 2010.

At this time we’re ready to share some of these improvements and as we move closer to late June 2011 we’ll be providing additional insight into additional functionality and specific fixes.

Site Recycle Bin

Service Pack 1 will introduce long awaited Site Recycle Bin functionality that enables self-service recovery of site collections and sites. In the past IT Professionals were tasked with restoring entire databases to recover deleted site collections and sites and would generally require expensive restore environments to support the task. Now in Service Pack 1 administrators can quickly and easily recover site collections and sites accidentally deleted by their owners in a process similar to that of the Recycle Bin we have for Lists, Libraries, and Documents.

Shallow Copy

If you’re using Remote BLOB Storage you’ve probably realized that when moving Site Collections (Move-SPSite) between content databases each unit of unstructured data (BLOB) was round tripped (I.e. uploaded and subsequently downloaded again) serially during the move. This operation was both time consuming and resource intensive. In Service Pack 1 we reduce that overhead by enabling “shallow copy” when moving Site Collections between databases where Remote BLOB Storage is used. New Shallow Copy functionality with the Move-SPSite CmdLet enables moving site collections between content databases without moving the underlying unstructured data, i.e. Microsoft Word documents, PowerPoint Presentations, etc. significantly increasing performance and reliability for organizations using Remote BLOB Storage by simply updating the pointers to those objects in the destination content database.

StorMan.aspx

In SharePoint 2010 we removed StorMan.aspx (Storage Space Allocation) (see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982587/EN-US) which in previous versions of SharePoint enabled granular management and insight into storage. For example, the page would show you the top 100 documents or document libraries in terms of size. With that information end users could the page to clean up content from their site(s) by deleting the large content that they no longer needed. In Service Pack 1 we are bringing back an improved StorMan.aspx, enabling users to better understand where their quota is going and act upon that information to reduce the size of their sites.

New enhancements will improve the way you interact with information in SharePoint 2010. Service Pack 1 adds support for working with SharePoint and the Office Web Applications using Internet Explorer 9 and the Google Chrome browser (for a complete list of supported browsers for SharePoint 2010 see also http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263526.aspx), support for Open Document Format documents, and more.

NOTE

The plan browser support articles on TechNet for SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 will be updated with the new browser support information as Service Pack 1 nears release in late June 2011.

In addition to the new functionality Service Pack 1 provides, as with all Service Packs, it will include a number of fixes designed to improve your experience with SharePoint 2010 and will include all Cumulative and Public Updates through the April 2011 Cumulative Update.

The data below is an accumulated list of all 2010 fixes that have already shipped. These will be included in our Service Pack 1 release. This is a combination of Cumulative Updates and Public Updates. In addition to what is listed below, Service Pack 1 will contain more fixes in each product. Between now and the time of release, we will publish more details about the coming changes.

SharePoint Server 2010 February 2011 Cumulative Update
SharePoint Foundation 2011 February Cumulative Update
SharePoint Server 2010 December Cumulative Update
SharePoint Foundation 2010 December 2010 Cumulative Update
SharePoint Server 2010 October 2010 Cumulative Update
SharePoint Foundation 2010 October 2010 Cumulative Update
SharePoint Server 2010 August 2010 Cumulative Update
SharePoint Foundation 2010 August 2010 Cumulative Update
SharePoint Server 2010 June 2010 Cumulative Update (there was no consolidated update provided for June 2010)

SharePoint Foundation 2010 June 2010 Cumulative Update

Enjoy Service Pack 1. We made it for you.

To keep informed with up to date Service Pack 1 information subscribe to the CAPES blog at http://blogs.technet.com/b/office_sustained_engineering/.

Search First Migration Accelerator

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 06:29:20 GMT

Author: Bill Baer, Senior Technical Product Manager, Microsoft Corporation

Search has become the primary means in the Enterprise for surfacing and locating information, as a result, it has become a mission critical component of SharePoint deployments. The rise in adoption of SharePoint 2010 in organizations has led to more customers seeking to leverage the benefits of the new search architectures, whether Enterprise Search in SharePoint 2010 or FAST Search Server 2010, as part of their topologies. In either scenario, customers are faced with a decision on how to accomplish upgrade and accommodate their end users. A result of these decisions can include migrating or upgrading the existing SharePoint deployments to include search, or optionally migrating components of the existing deployments. In the componentized case, many organizations are looking to maintain a familiar user experience, while gaining the performance, scalability, and richness of new search options in SharePoint 2010 - that’s where the Search First Migration Accelerator comes in.

The Search First Migration Accelerator is a combination of guidance and tools provided by Microsoft and Metalogix enabling organizations to establish a more granular approach to upgrade by allowing them upgrade their Office SharePoint Server 2007 search component(s) prior to the underlying content, supporting a familiar search user experience, and enabling IT Professionals to approach upgrade in established phases while allowing the organization to benefit from the improvements in SharePoint Search 2010 or FAST Search for SharePoint 2010.

Read the Metalogix press release at http://www.metalogix.net/Company/News/ByYear/2010/Metalogix-and-Microsoft-Team-Together-to-Launch-Search-First-Migration-Accelerator-Free-Tool/.

Download the Search First Migration Accelerator from Metalogix at http://www.metalogix.net/Free-Tools/Search-First-Migration-Accelerator/Download/.

Gain additional granularity and support for Search configuration through the SharePoint Enterprise Search Migration Tool for SharePoint Server 2010.

When upgrading from Office SharePoint Server 2007 to SharePoint Server 2010 using the database attach upgrade approach, only the source environments’ content is transferred to the destination environment, leaving the configuration settings in the source environment. Transferring these settings can be a complex task and often require an array of custom tools. The SharePoint Enterprise Search Migration Tool for SharePoint Server 2010 simplifies this process by providing support for the migration of search-related data such as best bets, search scopes, and site collection search settings.

The SharePoint Enterprise Search Migration Tool for SharePoint Server 2010 allows you to programmatically export and import search-related data between Office SharePoint Server 2007, SharePoint Server 2010, and FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint.

Supported Migration Paths

Read the SharePoint Enterprise Search Migration Tool documentation at SharePoint Enterprise Search Migration Tool for SharePoint Server 2010.

Download the SharePoint Enterprise Search Migration Tool for SharePoint Server 2010 at http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/odcsp2010searchmigra.

Additional Resources

Announcing the SharePoint Diagnostic Studio

sharepointblog@live.com — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 13:40:00 GMT

Author: Bill Baer, Senior Technical Product Manager, Microsoft Corporation - SharePoint

One of the most challenging aspects of maintaining a SharePoint deployment is understanding why certain events have transpired in the environment, often IT Professionals and Developers only have access to when an event occurred and are tasked with parsing Performance Counters, Event and Diagnostic logs, or executing Transact-SQL statements against the Usage database to put the what and why to the when. These tasks are typically accomplished through an array of tools such as Excel, Log Parser, SQL Server Management Studio and others and the IT Professional and Developer are challenged to correlate and condense this information into a meaningful format - large complex server farm environments make these tasks all the more difficult.

Often the most accessible solutions are used to identify and resolve issues occurring in a server farm environment to include the SharePoint Health Analyzer and Systems Center Operations Manager.

The next version (v2.0) of the SharePoint Administration Toolkit includes the new SharePoint Diagnostics Studio. The SharePoint Diagnostics Studio provides a 3^rd layer than can be implemented to support these processes and solutions.

In the new version of the SharePoint Administration Toolkit we’ve introduced a new and revised SharePoint Diagnostics Studio that represents a complete departure from previous diagnostics toolkits. The next generation SharePoint Diagnostics Tool, the SharePoint Diagnostics Studio, presents server diagnostic information in a visual and structured way that enables Developers and IT Professionals to quickly diagnose and act upon intermittent performance, reliability and functionality problems in a SharePoint 2010 environment.

The SharePoint Diagnostics Studio offers unprecedented depth surfacing every request, across every machine, remotely, with minimal permissions. This depth and usage allows the IT Professional or Developer to rapidly identity and isolate issues without requiring access to the physical hardware that supports the underlying environment.

The SharePoint Diagnostics Studio gathers and consolidates Event and Diagnostic (ULS) logs in addition to information from the Usage database and presents it through a graphical user interface supporting clarity and a single view into issues impacting a deployment.

The SharePoint Diagnostics Studio provides a wide variety of reports intended to address the most common issues impacting capacity, performance, availability, and usage that can be used independently or together to identify and isolate issues occurring in a SharePoint environment.

The SharePoint Diagnostics Studio provides reports in 5 separate categories:

1.       Base

2.       Capacity

3.       Performance

4.       Availability

5.       Usage

Integrated search enables rapid insight into issues that have occurred during the lifecycle of a request allowing the IT Professional or Developer to search against the most common criteria including date and time, Correlation Id, and the source user.

Snapshot and export support in the SharePoint Diagnostics Studio provides the ability to take information offline.

Context sensitive help provides guidance on both the purpose and how each report should be used.

Download the SharePoint Administration Toolkit and start solving your problems with the SharePoint Diagnostic Studio today.

Additional Resources

Read the SharePoint Diagnostics Studio documentation at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh144782.aspx.

FILESTREAM with SharePoint 2010

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:20:10 GMT

Author: Bill Baer, Senior Technical Product Manager, Microsoft Corporation - SharePoint

FILESTREAM is a new feature in SQL Server 2008 that enables the storage of unstructured data on a NTFS file system. FILESTREAM (local or remote) is supported in SharePoint 2010 as one mechanism of reducing capital expenditures through enabling the storage of large binary unstructured data on content addressable or commodity storage.

Unstructured Data

Unstructured data refers to information that does not adhere to a defined model or does not fit well into relational tables in SharePoint unstructured data can refer to Microsoft Office document file formats, video, audio, and related file types.

Structured Data

Structured data in SharePoint refers to the metadata associated with its corresponding unstructured data or BLOB. Relational databases are most often cited as examples of structured data.

SQL Server and Unstructured Data Storage

There are three (3) approaches to storing unstructured data with SQL Server, RBS, SQL BLOB, and FILESTREAM:

Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) in which SharePoint relies on a new layer in SQL Server to read or update BLOB data stored outside of the database on separate BLOB Stores (file system or dedicated BLOB stores)
SQL BLOB which refers to traditional BLOB storage with SharePoint, BLOB data is stored along side the structured metadata in the Content Database
FILESTREAM

FILESTREAM Overview

FILESTREAM is implemented on the varbinary(max) datatype instructing the database engine to store unstructured data on the file system through a FILESTREAM filegroup that contains file system directories instead of the files themselves also known as data containers. Data containers are the interface between database engine storage and file system storage. varbinary is the binary data type designation for binary large objects stored in SharePoint 2010 content databases and refers to variable-length binary data. (MAX) refers to a value that max indicates that the maximum storage size is 2^31-1 bytes or otherwise 2GB. Remote BLOB Storage does not provide a mechanism to exceed to the 2GB file size limit imposed by SharePoint.

In SharePoint 2010 remote BLOB data is referenced by a unique identifier in content databases configured for RBS (see illustration).

FILESTREAM offers several benefits as related to performance 1) FILESTREAM uses the NT system cache for caching file data reducing the effect that FILESTREAM data has on Database Engine performance and 2) the SQL Server buffer pool is not used; therefore, memory is available for query processing.

FILESTREAM provides optimum value in scenarios where SharePoint is used to storage large BLOB data such as video files that will benefit from FILESTREAM or BLOB data that exceeds 1MB.

Special Considerations

FILESTREAM and Business Continuity Management

Database mirroring does not support FILESTREAM since a FILESTREAM filegroup cannot be created on the principal server and database mirroring cannot be configured for a database that contains FILESTREAM filegroups. If the FILESTREAM provider is used to store BLOB data locally (within the same content database) the database cannot be configured for database mirroring.

If the FILESTREAM provider is configured to store the BLOB data within a separate SQL database or when using a 3rd party BLOB store, the content database can be mirrored; however, database mirroring will apply only to the content database and not the BLOB data. The BLOB data needs to be handled separately and kept in sync with the associated metadata (content database). For FILESTREAM BLOB databases, this can be done through log shipping.

To learn about the differences between FILESTREAM and SQL Server Remote BLOB Store see also http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlrbs/archive/2009/11/18/sql-server-remote-blob-store-and-filestream-feature-comparison.aspx.

FILESTREAM and the Office Web Applications Cache

The Office Web Applications cache is used by Word and PowerPoint Web Applications to create a version of a document requested for viewing through the browser improving performance and reducing resource consumption on server machines by making cached versions of a document or presentation available in cases where there are multiple requests for the same document.

The Office Web Applications cache occurs in two (2) distinct tiers, on the server file system and within a “specialized” site collection hosted on a per Web application basis. Document or presentation requests made through the Office Web Applications are served through both caches as the images are rendered for client consumption. Both cache locations are used by all site collections within a Web application where the Office Web Applications features activated.

Content databases where FILESTREAM is configured will store the cached versions of the document or presentation in the configured provider location. It is recommended to configure the Office Web Applications cache on a database that is not configured for FILESTREAM.

Configuring FILESTREAM with SharePoint 2010

The instructions that follow are designed to be used on a single-server deployment for demonstration purposes and implements the local FILESTREAM Provider.

Enable FILESTREAM on the target SQL Server Instance

1.       On the Start menu, point to All Programs, point to Microsoft SQL Server 2008 (R2), point to Configuration Tools, and then click SQL Server Configuration Manager.

2.       In the list of services, right-click SQL Server Services, and then click Open.

3.       In the SQL Server Configuration Manager snap-in, locate the instance of SQL Server on which you want to enable FILESTREAM.

4.       Right-click the instance and then click Properties.

5.       In the SQL Server Properties dialog box, click the FILESTREAM tab.

6.       Select the Enable FILESTREAM for Transact-SQL access check box.

7.       If you want to read and write FILESTREAM data from Windows, click Enable FILESTREAM for file I/O streaming access. Enter the name of the Windows share in the Windows Share Name box.

8.       If remote clients must access the FILESTREAM data that is stored on this share, select Allow remote clients to have streaming access to FILESTREAM data.

9.       Click Apply.

10.    Click Start, click All Programs, click Microsoft SQL Server 2008 (R2), and then click SQL Server Management Studio.

11.    In SQL Server Management Studio, click New Query to display the Query Editor.

12.    In Query Editor, enter the following Transact-SQL code:

EXEC sp_configure filestream_access_level, 2

In Query Editor, enter the following Transact-SQL code:

RECONFIGURE

Provision the RBS Data Store

1.       Click Start, click All Programs, click Microsoft SQL Server 2008 (R2), and then click SQL Server Management Studio.

2.       Expand Databases.

3.       Select the content database for which you want to create a BLOB store, and then click New Query.

4.       In SQL Server Management Studio, click New Query to display the Query Editor.

5.       In Query Editor, enter the following Transact-SQL code:

use [Database Name]

if not exists (select * from sys.symmetric_keys where name = N'##MS_DatabaseMasterKey##')create master key encryption by password = N'Admin Key Password !2#4'

In Query Editor, enter the following Transact-SQL code:

use [Database Name]

if not exists (select groupname from sysfilegroups where groupname=N'RBSFilestreamProvider')alter database [Database Name] add filegroup RBSFilestreamProvider contains filestream

In Query Editor, enter the following Transact-SQL code:

use [Database Name]

alter database [Database Name] add file (name = RBSFilestreamFile, filename = 'c:\BlobStore') to filegroup RBSFilestreamProvider

Install the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Remote Blob Store

Download the x64 package for the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Remote Blob Store from the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Feature Pack at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=ceb4346f-657f-4d28-83f5-aae0c5c83d52&displaylang=en.

Open a Command Prompt with Administrator permissions and execute the following command to install RBS.MSI downloaded in the previous step:

msiexec /qn /lvx* rbs_install_log.txt /i RBS.msi TRUSTSERVERCERTIFICATE=true FILEGROUP=PRIMARY DBNAME="<Database Name>" DBINSTANCE="<Instance Name>" FILESTREAMFILEGROUP=RBSFilestreamProvider FILESTREAMSTORENAME=FilestreamProvider_1

NOTE

Specify the full path to RBS.MSI in the above state, i.e. C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\RBS.MSI. Replace the values for DBNAME and DBINSTANCE to match your environment.

Enable Remote BLOB Storage

1.       On the Start menu, click All Programs.

2.       Click Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products.

3.       Click SharePoint 2010 Management Shell.

4.       In the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell, enter the following Windows PowerShell statement to set the content database to be configured:

$database=Get-SPContentDatabase –Identity “Database Name”

In the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell, enter the following Windows PowerShell statement to gets the object that holds settings that determine how the content database uses Microsoft SQL Server Remote Blob Storage:

$rbs=$database.RemoteBlobStorageSettings

In the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell, enter the following Windows PowerShell statement to determine if RBS has been installed for the selected content database:

$rbs.Installed()

NOTE

The result of $rbs.Installed() should be True, if the result is False, verify RBS.MSI has been installed successfully by reviewing rbs_install_log.txt. Ensure the install statement was running In the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell, enter the following Windows PowerShell statement to enable RBS for the selected content database:

$rbs.Enable()

In the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell, enter the following Windows PowerShell statements to set the RBSprovider for the selected content database:

$rbs.SetActiveProviderName($rbs.GetProviderNames()[0])

$rbs

NOTE

The result of $rbs should be:

Table 1

Appendix for Table 1

Enabled specifies whether or not RBS has been enabled for the selected content database.

ActiveProviderName is name of the SQL Remote Blob Storage provider new files will be stored in. This will be null if new files will not be stored using SQL Remote Blob storage.

MinimumBlobStorageSize refers to the minimum size a BLOB may be to be considered RBS storage worthy, BLOB data exceeding the specified MinimumBlobStorageSize will be stored in the RBS data store.

FILESTREAM performance data shows BLOB data exceeding 1MB provides the most efficient streaming performance. See also http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc949109(SQL.100).aspx.

To configure the MinimumBlobStorageSize:

1.       On the Start menu, click All Programs.

2.       Click Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products.

3.       Click SharePoint 2010 Management Shell.

4.       In the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell, enter the following Windows PowerShell statements to configure the MinimumBlobStorageSize at 1MB:

$database = Get-SPContentDatabase “Database Name”

$database.RemoteBlobStorageSettings.MinimumBlobStorageSize=1048576

$database.Update()

UpgradePersistedProperties specifies the collection of field names and values for fields that were deleted or changed.

Validate Installation

To validate the FILESTREAM configuration and RBS installation:

1.       Click Start, click All Programs, click Microsoft SQL Server 2008, and then click SQL Server Management Studio.

2.       Expand Databases.

3.       Select the content database for which you want to create a BLOB store, and then click New Query.

4.       In SQL Server Management Studio, click New Query to display the Query Editor.

5.       In Query Editor, enter the following Transact-SQL code:

USE [Database Name]

SELECT * FROM dbo.DatabaseInformation

Confirm that both the RBSCollectionId and RBSProvider rows are available.

Test the RBS Data Store

1.       Select a desired Document Library on a site in the configured content database.

2.       Upload a file that is greater than 1 MB.

3.       On the computer that contains the RBS data store, click Start, and then click Computer.

4.       Browse to the RBS data store directory.

5.       Browse to the file list and open the folder that has the most recent modified date (other than $FSLOG). In that folder, open the file that has the most recent modified date. Verify that this file has the same size and contents as the file that you uploaded. If it does not, ensure that RBS is installed and enabled correctly.

The data store directory structure will appear similar to that in the following diagram.

NOTE

In the event error "The URL '<Document Library>/File' is invalid. It may refer to a nonexistent file or folder, or refer to a valid file or folder that is not in the current Web.” is displayed when uploading documents greater than the configured MinimumBlobStorageSize open SQL Server Configuration Manager and enable Enable FILESTREAM for file I/O streaming access and restart the SQL Server (MSSQLSERVER) service.

Additional Resources

SharePoint MVP web chat; Wednesday, April 20th.

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 06:50:27 GMT

Do you have tough technical questions regarding SharePoint for which you're seeking answers? Do you want to tap into the deep knowledge of the talented Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals?

The SharePoint MVPs are the same people you see in the technical community as authors, speakers, user group leaders and answerers in the MSDN and TechNet forums. By popular demand, we have brought these experts together as a collective group to answer your questions live.

So please join us and bring on the questions! This chat will cover WSS 3.0, MOSS, SharePoint Foundation 2010 and the SharePoint Server 2010. Topics include setup and administration, design, development and general question.

Please join us on Wednesday April 20th at 9am PDT to chat with MVPs from around the world. Learn more and add these chats to your calendar by visiting the MSDN event page at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/events/aa497438.aspx

Happy Birthday SharePoint!

sharepointblog@live.com — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 06:56:38 GMT

Author: Jeff Teper, Corporate Vice President; Sharepoint

This week is the 10th anniversary of the first release of SharePoint Portal and Team Services. As I was digging through my closet to find the first SharePoint T-Shirt to wear to work, I reflected on how timely it was to both look back at the progress as well as look forward to the next chapter where SharePoint Online will help even more people and organizations as part of the upcoming release of Office 365.

The team and I feel incredibly fortunate to have reached so many customers and partners around the world – in fact we have been adding nearly 20,000 new SharePoint users a day for the last five years. Still, the most fun part of our jobs is to hear the amazing variety of stories of how SharePoint helps organizations of all sizes and types be more productive. When we started the group, some thought we were bold if not crazy. But we saw a tremendous opportunity to help our customers break down silos between people and technologies. The notion that we could deliver users an experience that transcended the web and Microsoft Office combining traditional collaboration, document management, search and portals capabilities with an architecture spanning personal, team, intranet and internet sites challenged many assumptions in the industry about what was possible. Today, SharePoint is the industry leading collaboration platform used by tens of thousands of organizations and supported by a wide range of partner solutions innovating in a multi-billion dollar ecosystem. While we continue to provide the simplest team collaboration solution, we have added deep capabilities ranging from powerful FAST Search to advanced Excel and PowerPivot Business Intelligence to line-of-business integration including Microsoft Dynamics and SAP via Duet. One fun fact is when I last looked, there were over 1,000 SharePoint books on Amazon.

The engine that has always pushed us forward is the passionate feedback of the SharePoint community. We saw that in full force at the SharePoint Conference where we unveiled SharePoint 2010 and have been amazed by your response. Thank you to those who attended and are planning to attend our upcoming conference this fall. The most common theme of the feedback we hear is that SharePoint succeeded because we made many things easier than before and you want us to take the unique SharePoint balance of simplicity and flexibility to the next level. While we have delivered our SharePoint Online cloud service for the last couple years, we will take a big step in simplifying access to the easiest and most powerful collaboration technologies as part of Office 365. We have a great team working hard on that as well as releases to follow that I think will surprise and delight people even more than our past releases of SharePoint. We’re excited to see what you do with it and hear what you think of it.

Thanks again to all our customers, partners and employees for their support of SharePoint during the past decade and the years ahead. The best is yet to come!

Jeff

Conservation International leans on SharePoint as a major component to their digital marketing strategy

sharepointblog@live.com — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 09:19:06 GMT

Authors: Alex Dinnouti and Lindsay Walter-Cox, Conservation International

Conservation International is a non-governmental organization that works to ensure a healthy and productive planet for the benefit of humanity. Through science, policy and field work, Conservation International is applying smart solutions to protect the resources that we all depend on.

Conservation.org has a small web team of 3 full-time staff to manage and produce content. They support more than 20 staff members in different parts of the organization with different backgrounds to produce web pages and respond quickly to demands.

Rather than have all the content go through the hands of the web-team, the non-technical staff can use SharePoint to create their content and submit it to the web-team for review and approval. One advantage of this decentralized and empowering approach is that staff can quickly correct errors or make essential changes without encountering bottleneck. Staff enjoy the ease of using SharePoint in many countries and with many languages, and the flexibility of interacting with the CMS differently depending on their skill level.

Non-technical staff can also expand their assigned section by adding pages or sub-sites with minimal training and web team involvement. This allows content to be not only developed creatively, but implemented on the web in-country or within the department.

The website was built with the collaboration of Portal Solutions, a Gold Microsoft partner in digital marketing, and portals and collaboration.

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/Pages/Videos.aspx?VideoID=30

http://www.conservation.org/Pages/default.aspx

Taxonomy–The Challenge of Starting from Scratch

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:18:47 GMT

One of the most talked about capabilities since the launch of SharePoint 2010 is the Managed Metadata Service. For those of you who aren’t already familiar with this service and the support it provides for modeling and deploying a rich corporate taxonomy, I’d recommend reading Pat’s post Introducing Enterprise Metadata Management. For those of you who are familiar with the great taxonomy capabilities in SharePoint 2010, I’m sure many of you have spent time looking at an empty term store wondering where to start. If you’re lucky, you already have a well defined corporate taxonomy and should by now have leveraged our import capabilities to pre load SharePoint with the vocabulary you want your users to leverage for tagging and finding content. On the other hand, you could be like many customers I talk to who don’t even know where to start when it comes to developing a taxonomy, or have spent years in conference rooms debating what the right taxonomy should be. You’ve probably even head someone say “I’m sure someone has already solved this problem”, and if that’s the case, that someone was the smartest person in the room for two key reasons. The first is that there are professional taxonomists who have already modeled most business domains and the second is that the people responsible for creating content in your company have already developed a community vocabulary or folksonomy that they use extensively.

If you happen to be one of those customers who is stuck looking at an empty term store then I’ve got great news for you. The SharePoint team have teamed up with WAND, a leading provider of Enterprise Taxonomies, to make their General Business Taxonomy available as a freely available download. The General Business Taxonomy consists of around 500 terms describing common functional areas that exist in most businesses. The General Business Taxonomy can be imported in to the SharePoint 2010 term store within minutes and provides a great starting point for customers looking to build a corporate vocabulary and take advantage of the Managed Metadata Service. In addition to this freely available download, WAND provide a range of taxonomies covering a variety of domains including Products and Services, Local Search, Enterprise, Jobs, Travel, Medical, Lifecycle, Finance and Records Retention.

Download the General Business Taxonomy today and start to explore the benefits that taxonomy can bring to your business and your people.

If you’re new to taxonomy and the benefits it can brings to your business, take a look at the following sites:

Ryan Duguid
Senior Product Manager
Microsoft Corporation

Duet Enterprise Workflow SharePoint Extension

sharepointblog@live.com — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 12:09:09 GMT

Author: Kiki Shuxteau

This is a follow up blog on a SAP blog about how to develop a custom workflow solution on the backend. This blog is to explain how workflow works on the SharePoint side and offer some customization entry points for you to create extended solutions leverage SAP backend process and SharePoint workflow and flexible UI options.

First, let us review how workflow function is working on Duet Enterprise.

DE workflow feature enables SAP business process expose to SharePoint in a declarative manner. It abstracts away the site structure needed to keep the distinct task types from exposing to the calling application. Each workflow decision step maps to a SharePoint task type. Each task type is hosted within a workflow subsite that is built on top of the taskflow template. The customization can be applied per task type without changing any backend code. SAP creates tasks via Duet Enterprise workflow service. SP end user interact with backend process via BDC task entity’s user actions to send decision result back.

When we configure workflow on the SharePoint side, we are essentially registering a set of target URLs for SAP to send documents to. For each task type, we are assigning a subsite and a target library. When SAP sends XML payload to the SharePoint business data document library, the SharePoint approval workflow is started. Approval task is generated. Duet Enterprise provides a task interface that includes additional web parts and SAP data. In this blog, we will talk about options of customizing the SharePoint user interface.

Follow Edward Lu’s blog on how to configure and develop workflow on the SAP backend. In our scenario, our use case is a custom invoice approval process. We have already created a SAP workflow outbound handler and an inbound handler to expose the key decision making steps and let SharePoint users to consume the step and interact with the workflow task via SharePoint workflow workspace.

SharePoint workflow extension Options:

1. Building dynamic “related links” or “Related Actions” with workflow parameters from the SAP backend; one use case is to take user to the collaborative workspace based on related entities.

You can configure Related Actions list to open collaboration workspace to show user the workflow related contextual information. DUET ENTERPRISE related actions web part will pick up the token and replace with the correct value below.

http://litware/ProductCenter/_layouts/OBA/CollabSiteRedirect.aspx?MaterialId={BIZ.POID}&EntityName=Product&EntityNamespace=SAP.Office.DuetEnterprise.Product&LobsystemInstance=Product&ShowInECB=true

In this case, I am opening up a purchase order collaboration workspace that is related to this workflow. Say I want to approve PO ID 10010. SAP sends the POID extended property within the BizDoc XML payload. SharePoint will use this parameter to open the workspace for the specific business entity.

Alternatively, if I want to open a site page or application page or external page with the SAP parameters, I can configure the related links list to make it happen.

In this case, I added an item to related links list and try to use the SAP biz document extended property named URL to generate a dynamic link.

http://www.bing.com/search?q={biz.URL}

2. Customize Task interface by modifying the SPD generated InfoPath form associated with the approval workflow.

1. Modify the WRKTASKIP.aspx site page. You can add custom web parts, custom user controls, etc. to this page to extend the task UI. You can also suppress the InfoPath control and use your custom web part to interact with the workflow instance and setting the decision result and complete the workflow.

For example, you can have your custom web part to take additional user input and set the value for task item and complete the current workflow instance.

SPWorkflowTask.AlterTask((task as SPListItem), ht, true);

2. You can modify the OOB SPD generated approval workflow. For instance you can add custom workflow activities or even plug in your own workflow to associate with the bizdoc library.

Finally, since as we pointed out earlier, the workflow in Duet Enterprise is designed to declarative and template based. After your customization, you can save the template for deployment and future reuse with other task types.

Duet Enterprise and Excel 2010

sharepointblog@live.com — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 08:39:07 GMT

Author: Joyanta Sen (Microsoft France)

Here is a step-by-step description of an example based on Duet Enterprise list integration inside Excel 2010. The goal is to display the Customer list in an Excel 2010 Spreadsheet.

Preliminary steps

To consume External List from an External Content Type in a VSTO Excel application, you should perform the following operations:

Create an external List from an External Content Type

Excel VSTO application

1. Create a VSTO workbook project using Visual Studio 2010:

2. Create a helper class called SPHelper in a project folder called Helpers

3. Add a type in your project corresponding to the Customer structure in a class called CommonTypes.cd in a Common directory:

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Linq;

using System.Text;

namespace DuetExcelWorkbook.Common

{

    public struct CustomerType

    {

        public string FirstLineName;

        public string CountryCode;

        public string AddressregionCode;

        public string AddresscityName;

    }

}

4. Add the Client OM assembly:

-      C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\ISAPI\
-          Add the two following assembly references to your project:

o   Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.dll

o   Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Runtime.dll
-          Create a class called SPHelpers.cs in Common:

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Linq;

using System.Text;

using Microsoft.SharePoint.Client;

using System.Linq.Expressions;

using System.Xml;

namespace DuetExcelWorkbook.Helpers

{

    public static class SPHelper

    {

        public static List<CustomerType> GetCustomerList(string TargetSiteUrl, string TargetListName)

        {

            List<CustomerType> CustomerList = new List<CustomerType>();

            try

            {

                ClientContext clientContext = new ClientContext(TargetSiteUrl);

                List externalList = clientContext.Web.Lists.GetByTitle(

                    TargetListName);

                // To properly construct the CamlQuery and

                // ClientContext.LoadQuery,

                // we need some View data of the Virtual List.

                // In particular, the View will give us the CamlQuery

                // Method and Fields.

                clientContext.Load(

                    externalList.Views,

                    viewCollection => viewCollection.Include(

                        view => view.ViewFields,

                        view => view.HtmlSchemaXml));

                // This tells us how many list items we can retrieve.

                clientContext.Load(clientContext.Site,

                    s => s.MaxItemsPerThrottledOperation);

                clientContext.ExecuteQuery();

                // Let's just pick the first View.

                View targetView = externalList.Views[0];

                string method = ReadMethodFromViewXml(

                    targetView.HtmlSchemaXml);

                ViewFieldCollection viewFields = targetView.ViewFields;

                CamlQuery vlQuery = CreateCamlQuery(

                    clientContext.Site.MaxItemsPerThrottledOperation,

                    method,

                    viewFields);

                Expression<Func<ListItem, object>>[] listItemExpressions =

                    CreateListItemLoadExpressions(viewFields);

                ListItemCollection listItemCollection =

                    externalList.GetItems(vlQuery);

                // Note: Due to limitation, you currently cannot use

                // ClientContext.Load.

                //       (you'll get InvalidQueryExpressionException)

                IEnumerable<ListItem> resultData = clientContext.LoadQuery(

                    listItemCollection.Include(listItemExpressions));

                clientContext.ExecuteQuery();

                foreach (ListItem li in resultData)

                {

                    // Now you can use the ListItem data!

                    CustomerType customer = new CustomerType();

                    customer.FirstLineName = li["FirstLineName"].ToString();

                    //customer.AddresscityName = li["AddresscityName"].ToString();

                    //customer.AddressregionCode = li["AddressregionCode"].ToString();

                    customer.CountryCode = li["CountryCode"].ToString();

                    CustomerList.Add(customer);

                    Console.WriteLine("First Name: {0} Country : {1} \n", li["FirstLineName"].ToString(), li["CountryCode"].ToString());

                    // Note: In the CamlQuery, we specified RowLimit of

                    // MaxItemsPerThrottledOperation.

                    // You may want to check whether there are other rows

                    // not yet retrieved.

                }

            }

            catch (Exception ex)

            {

                throw ex;

            }

            return CustomerList;

        }

        /// <summary>

        /// Parses the viewXml and returns the Method value.

        /// </summary>

        private static string ReadMethodFromViewXml(string viewXml)

        {

            XmlReaderSettings readerSettings = new XmlReaderSettings();

            readerSettings.ConformanceLevel = ConformanceLevel.Fragment;

            XmlReader xmlReader = XmlReader.Create(

                new StringReader(viewXml), readerSettings);

            while (xmlReader.Read())

            {

                switch (xmlReader.NodeType)

                {

                    case XmlNodeType.Element:

                        if (xmlReader.Name == "Method")

                        {

                            while (xmlReader.MoveToNextAttribute())

                            {

                                if (xmlReader.Name == "Name")

                                {

                                    return xmlReader.Value;

                                }

                            }

                        }

                        break;

                }

            }

            throw new Exception("Unable to find Method in View XML");

        }

        /// <summary>

        /// Creates a CamlQuery based on the inputs.

        /// </summary>

        private static CamlQuery CreateCamlQuery(

            uint rowLimit, string method, ViewFieldCollection viewFields)

        {

            CamlQuery query = new CamlQuery();

            XmlWriterSettings xmlSettings = new XmlWriterSettings();

            xmlSettings.OmitXmlDeclaration = true;

            StringBuilder stringBuilder = new StringBuilder();

            XmlWriter writer = XmlWriter.Create(

                stringBuilder, xmlSettings);

            writer.WriteStartElement("View");

            // Specifies we want all items, regardless of folder level.

            writer.WriteAttributeString("Scope", "RecursiveAll");

            writer.WriteStartElement("Method");

            writer.WriteAttributeString("Name", method);

            writer.WriteEndElement(); // Method

            if (viewFields.Count > 0)

            {

                writer.WriteStartElement("ViewFields");

                foreach (string viewField in viewFields)

                {

                    if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(viewField))

                    {

                        writer.WriteStartElement("FieldRef");

                        writer.WriteAttributeString("Name", viewField);

                        writer.WriteEndElement(); // FieldRef

                    }

                }

                writer.WriteEndElement(); // ViewFields

            }

            writer.WriteElementString(

                "RowLimit", rowLimit.ToString(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture));

            writer.WriteEndElement(); // View

            writer.Close();

            query.ViewXml = stringBuilder.ToString();

            return query;

        }

        /// <summary>

        /// Returns an array of Expression used in

        /// ClientContext.LoadQuery to retrieve

        /// the specified field data from a ListItem.

        /// </summary>

        private static Expression<Func<ListItem, object>>[]

            CreateListItemLoadExpressions(

            ViewFieldCollection viewFields)

        {

            List<Expression<Func<ListItem, object>>> expressions =

                new List<Expression<Func<ListItem, object>>>();

            foreach (string viewFieldEntry in viewFields)

            {

                // Note: While this may look unimportant,

                // and something we can skip, in actuality,

                //       we need this step. The expression should

                // be built with local variable.

                string fieldInternalName = viewFieldEntry;

                Expression<Func<ListItem, object>>

                    retrieveFieldDataExpression =

                    listItem => listItem[fieldInternalName];

                expressions.Add(retrieveFieldDataExpression);

            }

            return expressions.ToArray();

        }

    }

5. Now we will code the user interface, the part of the code that will call the Client OM class.

Add a Ribbon on you project:

Modify the following properties for the Ribbon:

Label: Duet Enterprise
Name: tabDuet

Add a button on the ribbon and modifies the following properties:

ControlSize: RibbonControlSizeLarge
Label: Customers
OfficeImageId: SlideMasterChartPlacehoderInsert

6.  Add the following code in the buttonCustomers_Click() function:
private void buttonCustomers_Click(object sender, RibbonControlEventArgs e)

        {

            List<CustomerType> result = new List<CustomerType>();

            try

            {

                result = SPHelper.GetCustomerList("http://litware", "SAPCustomers");

                //string[] Names = new string[];

                //string[] Countries;

                List<string> Names = new List<string>();

                List<string> Countries = new List<string>();

                int counter = 0;

                // Fill the collections

                foreach (var item in result)

                {

                    // Add the customers in the ListView

                    Names.Add(item.FirstLineName);

                    Countries.Add(item.CountryCode);



                    counter++;

                }

                // Create a data table with two columns.

                System.Data.DataTable table = new DataTable();

                DataColumn column1 = new DataColumn("Name", typeof(string));

                DataColumn column2 = new DataColumn("Country", typeof(string));

                table.Columns.Add(column1);

                table.Columns.Add(column2);

                // Add the four rows of data to the table.

                DataRow row;

                for (int i = 0; i < counter; i++)

                {

                    row = table.NewRow();

                    row["Name"] = Names[i];

                    row["Country"] = Countries[i];

                    table.Rows.Add(row);

                }

                Microsoft.Office.Tools.Excel.ListObject list1 =

                    Globals.Sheet1.Controls.AddListObject(Globals.Sheet1.Range["A1", "B4"], "list1");

                // Bind the list object to the table.

                list1.SetDataBinding(table);

            }

            catch (Exception ex)

            {

                MessageBox.Show(ex.Message);

                throw;

            }

        }

7. Run Visual Studio

Note: make sure you run Visual Studio using the correct user identity. The user must be able to have appropriate read permission on the Customers list.

Click on the Duet Enterprise Ribbon and click on the Customers button. You will see the customers list added to Microsoft Excel:

Searching SAP Data with Duet Enterprise 1.0 and SharePoint Server 2010

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 08:50:05 GMT

Author: John Kelly

Introduction & Options

The best news I have heard about Duet Enterprise came the moment I learned of its integration via SharePoint Business Connectivity Services (BCS). With that, Duet Enterprise delivers all the capabilities one would expect of searching content from line of business systems with SharePoint. More specifically, Duet Enterprise provides the ability to search SAP data through BCS. This is possible using the enterprise search features of either SharePoint Server 2010 or Fast Search Server 2010 for SharePoint. In this post, I will focus entirely on the SharePoint Server 2010 option.

Implementation Overview

At a high level, the steps required to enable searching SAP data with Duet Enterprise and SharePoint Server 2010 include: Preparing profile pages, creating external content types (ECTs), indexing the content, setting up the search user interface, and testing.

First, create the entity profile pages for rendering the data when the users select search results. Next, connect SharePoint BCS to the SAP data source by creating an ECT that maps to the target data. After the ECT creation, indexing the target data becomes possible. At a minimum, indexing requires setting up a content source and starting a crawl. In some cases, it is desirable to configure a crawl rule, but it is not always necessary and thus omitted for brevity. After the first crawl has completed, verify that it processed correctly. Following confirmation of the successful crawl, the content is ready for searching. From there, enable the SharePoint search user interface by creating a basic search center site. Once that is out of the way, proceed with testing the search against SAP data by visiting the search center site, entering a keyword search, and verifying that SharePoint returns appropriate results.

Implementation Details

For detailed instructions on performing these steps, please refer to the following article:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg512148.aspx

Note: The article above includes all of the instructions necessary to implement search against SAP data with SharePoint Server 2010 and Duet Enterprise 1.0. However, the instructions included in the section regarding ECTs would need significant modification in order to support SAP data. In particular, the back-end data source settings require changing from the SQL Server database configuration to one appropriate for a group of ABAP web services hosted on SAP NetWeaver 7.02.

Conclusion

Once the implementation details are completed, users should be able to enter queries for SAP data and retrieve search results accordingly.

Note: This approach does not result in security trimmed search results. In other words, users will be able to see all the search results returned by their query whether they have permission to view them or not. If the user selects a search result that they do not have permission to read, access will fail and an authorization error message will render on the entity profile page.

Duet Enterprise Architecture

sharepointblog@live.com — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 08:03:52 GMT

Author: Matjaz Perpar

This post is the first in a series of four dedicated to Duet technical content.

Duet Enterprise is a jointly developed product from SAP and Microsoft that enables customers to consume and extend SAP processes and information from within SharePoint intranet sites and Microsoft Office 2010. Duet Enterprise Foundation is built on top of SAP Netweaver and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.

A Duet Enterprise Landscape consists of at least two systems, an SAP system and a SharePoint Server, but in most deployments, there are actually three systems. The additional third system is Service Consumption Layer (SCL) and exists physically separated from SAP LOB applications. The reason for this separation is that even if the LOB system meets the technical requirements for the SCL layer, it is better to have separated control over the SCL and the backend systems.

To better understand the product and solutions the first step is to know the basic landscape.

There are four main pillars in a Duet Enterprise landscape:

· SAP Line of Business Application (ECC, CRM, etc.)

· Service Consumption Layer (SCL + Duet Enterprise Add-on)

· SharePoint 2010 with Duet Enterprise Add-on

· Client (browser and Office 2010)

SAP Line of Business Application

The SAP LOB application exposes the data via remote enabled function modules (RFCs) or via Web Services.

The most commonly integrated solution is SAP ERP (e.g. SAP ECC 6.0), but the Duet Enterprise platform can also handle other solutions like SAP CRM and others. One of the benefits of using Duet Enterprise is its standardized interoperability with various backend systems.

Service Consumption Layer

The SCL layer is a framework that connects SAP systems to SharePoint and Office clients. It has several functions:

· Connects to multiple SAP LOB systems

· Flattening deep objects so it can be consumed by SharePoint

· Aggregates different SAP systems

· Serves as a proxy for SharePoint system to access SAP business content and processes

· Develop design time composite solution

The SCL layer can connect to more than one SAP LOB system. Depending on the data requested, the SCL calls the appropriate SAP LOB system where the requested data resides. If the data needs aggregation, the SCL calls multiple LOB systems and aggregates the resulting data.

The SCL system exposes solutions and data to SharePoint as WCF Web Services. SharePoint consumes these Web Services with Business Connectivity Services. All communications between the SCL and SharePoint leverage http or https.

As mentioned, the Service Consumption Layer is mostly separated from SAP LOB systems. As a component, the SCL is an add-on for the SAP Netweaver 7.02, ABAP stack.

SharePoint 2010 with Duet Enterprise Add-on

Duet Enterprise uses core functionalities of SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise, especially Business Connectivity Services (BCS) to connect to Web Services that are published on the SCL. Entities exposed through BCS are represented as external content types. The most common user interface type for representing external content types is the external list. SharePoint never copies the SAP data or stores it locally, but always retrieves it on demand from SAP LOB systems via the SCL.

In addition to the Business Connectivity Services, Duet Enterprise uses the following services as well:

Secure Store Service

Necessary for storing the credentials used to read the WSDL published on the SCL layer during the deployment phase

Security Token Service

Enables Claims Based Authentication with the SAP environment over the Business Connectivity Services connection

User Profile Service

Required for the role sync feature. Service must be deployed and configured before application of role sync settings

Client

Supported clients include all SharePoint 2010 supported browsers and Office 2010 applications. End-user computers do not require any installation or configuration.

Enterprise Service Repository

An additional system that is required in the Duet Enterprise landscape is the Enterprise Services Repository (ESR). It provides an integrated modeling environment for defining enterprise services and other objects.

In a Duet Enterprise scenario, the ESR is used to create a Web Service Interface Definition that is imported into the SCL. Instances of that Web Service are then hosted within the SCL. Later, this Web Service exposes the SAP data to SharePoint 2010.

The ESR is required only during design time (when developing new solutions).

The Enterprise Services Repository and Registry are shipped with:

· SAP NetWeaver Process Integration 7.1

· SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment 7.1

For more details, see the following: http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/nw-esr

Duet Enterprise Virtual Launch Summit – February 1st

sharepointblog@live.com — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 09:59:47 GMT

Author: Eric Swift

I encourage everyone in our SharePoint community to register and join us for the Duet Enterprise virtual launch summit February 1st at 8AM PST.

During the virtual summit you will hear Microsoft and SAP customers, partners, and executives talk about how Duet Enterprise increases productivity and business agility by enabling IT and business users to extend and consume SAP processes and data in SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise and Microsoft Office 2010.

Duet Enterprise blends the SAP processes businesses run on with the way people work together, share information and make decisions using SharePoint. Developers and IT professionals can use Duet Enterprise to build solutions for end users. With interoperability between SAP applications and SharePoint 2010, Duet Enterprise enables high value scenarios:

Select and run SAP reports from within a SharePoint site
Manage SAP workflows within SharePoint and Outlook 2010
Access HR information from SAP in SharePoint profile
Surface and update SAP data in a SharePoint list or document library
Add Duet Enterprise Web Parts to SharePoint sites to enable users to customize solutions

SharePoint IT pros and administrators can get up to speed on Duet Enterprise on TechNet where you will find information on Duet Enterprise set-up and management, including step-by-step deployment guidance.

SharePoint Developers can use Duet Enterprise to accelerate the development of custom solutions using the familiar SharePoint Designer 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 tools to build their solutions. Check out Duet Enterprise on MSDN for information on how Duet Enterprise uses the SharePoint 2010 object model, Business Connectivity Services (BCS) and InfoPath forms to bring data and functionality from SAP into SharePoint and Office.

Microsoft’s partnership with SAP reflects the shared commitment of both companies to help our customers realize more value from their productivity and ERP investments. You can learn more about Duet Enterprise on our SharePoint website and by joining the virtual launch next week.

-Eric

SharePoint 2010 and Apple iPad

sharepointblog@live.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:18:23 GMT

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 supports several modern, standards based, XHTML 1.0 compliant browsers such as Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.6 and Safari 4.x as detailed in the “Plan browser support (SharePoint Server 2010)” on Microsoft TechNet. It explains in detail which features work and which do not across the browsers and is the most up to date browser support information. The mobile versions of Safari browser on the Apple iPhone OS (used by the iPhone and iPad) have not been tested by Microsoft, and there may be issues using them with SharePoint 2010.

Cause:

Apple Safari 4 or higher for a Mac/PC and Safari for the iPhone OS are not the same. Whereas the desktop version of Safari supports contenteditable attribute, Safari on the iPhone OS does not. The contenteditable attribute is used by SharePoint 2010 and other collaboration products, such as Office Web Apps, to provide a rich editing experience within a supported browser. In the future, if Apple were to add support for the contenteditable on the Apple iPad, then we will investigate and update this post.

Workarounds:

Option 1:

SharePoint Server 2010 mobile features support access by web browser enabled mobile devices like the Apple iPad to view and navigate to SharePoint pages, document libraries, list data, content, and Office documents using Office Web Apps.

By adding the Apple iPad’s Safari USERAGENT string to SharePoint 2010’s compat.browser file, SharePoint 2010 can detect the Apple iPad and automatically redirect to a mobile view (lightweight web interface). For some scenarios (i.e. branded publishing web site), you may want to present the full web interface to the Apple iPad. In this case, you can disable the automatic redirect by setting the isMobile attribute to “false.” As future mobile devices become available, you can follow these steps to add them to SharePoint 2010’s mobile view list.

How to add Apple iPad to compat.browser:

• To add or update mobile browsers, you will need to edit the compat.browser file.

• You can find the file under <system>\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\80\App_browsers\compat.browser.

• To add the iPad useragent, edit the compat.browser file and append this after the iPhone section:

<browser id="iPadSafari" parentID="AppleSafari">
<identification>
<userAgent match="iPad" />
<userAgent match="Mobile" />
</identification>
<capabilities>
<capability name="isMobileDevice" value="true" />
<capability name="canInitiateVoiceCall" value="true" />
<capability name="optimumPageWeight" value="1500" />
<capability name="requiresViewportMetaTag" value="true" />
<capability name="supportsTouchScreen" value="true" />
<capability name="telephoneNumberDetectionDisabled" value="true" />
</capabilities>
</browser>

• Restart Internet Information Services (IIS) by typing the following at the command prompt, and then press ENTER: iisreset /noforce

Option 2:

We have several partners and 3rd party developers that provide mobile access solutions for SharePoint 2010 content, including Apple iPhone/iPad, through client applications. You can find many of these in the Apple iPhone/iPad App Store.

SharePoint journeys

sharepointblog@live.com — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 11:51:24 GMT

Have you heard? We launched a unique online video contest called SharePoint journeys, which is a platform for our customers and partners to tell us where they are on their SharePoint “journey,” as well as the unique ways they’ve used SharePoint to enhance their organizations. www.sharepointjourneys.com.

From now through February 16, we’re asking SharePoint users to create a two-minute video illustrating their use of SharePoint in one of three categories (videos must be submitted in English).

· Ramping Up: Early use of SharePoint using a few of the workloads for part of an organization to improve how people share information and work together. Examples include building team sites or MySites, deploying Intranet sites or portals, or implementation of an extranet to collaborate with partners.

· Building Momentum: Consolidation of content management and collaboration infrastructure on SharePoint to drive broad adoption across an organization and beyond. Examples include using multiple workloads, implementing dotcom sites, and end user adoption success.

· Driving Business Value: Building applications on SharePoint that integrate back end data in documents, business processes and web experiences. Examples include building custom applications, business intelligence solutions and FAST search for Internet sites.

Also let us know what you are doing NEXT!

Through these videos, we want SharePoint professionals to share and review their work, inspire each other to think about SharePoint in new ways, and take the next step on their journey. Right now the site only allows for submissions, but as videos come in we will turn on the interactive pieces of the site that will allow for social media sharing, commenting on videos, and the ability to embed videos into personal blogs.

When it’s all said and done, we’ll announce three winners, one for each category, during the week of February 21, on the SharePoint journeys website and SharePoint social media channels. Each winner receives a pass to SharePoint Conference 2011 in Anaheim and a chance to speak to their video. Full contest details including judging criteria can be found on the site.

We look forward to seeing the great work that’s being done in this community. Good luck!

Announcing the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog on SharePoint 2010

sharepointblog@live.com — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 08:20:37 GMT

We are very excited to announce that The Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog has moved to a SharePoint 2010 hosted environment at http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blog and we're hoping you didn’t feel a thing! Please be patient with us as we finish the transition.

The SharePoint Team Blog has become a communications hub for SharePoint product group announcements, ISV solutions, and community news. With the investments in social capabilities and internet business in SharePoint 2010, the product group is excited about blogging about SharePoint on SharePoint. We will no longer be posting on our old platform, so please make these changes to your preferences SOON!

Happy reading!

The Microsoft SharePoint Product Team

October 2010 Cumulative Updates for SharePoint & Project Server 2010 Republished

sharepointblog@live.com — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 22:07:49 GMT

The October 2010 Cumulative Updates have been republished for SharePoint Server 2010, SharePoint Foundation 2010, and Project Server 2010 resolving the issues described in the following blog post http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sharepoint/archive/2010/11/06/details-and-workaround.aspx.

For additional information about these updates see also http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2449183.

Download

Documentation

Find and manage updates in one place for Office, Forms Server, Groove Server, PerformancePoint Server, Project Portfolio Server, Project Server, Search Server, SharePoint Server, SharePoint Foundation, Windows SharePoint Services, and FAST Search Server for SharePoint by subscribing to the Updates Resource Center at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/ee748587.aspx.

Eric Swift on Connecting Lync to SharePoint

sharepointblog@live.com — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 22:02:31 GMT

The launch of Lync 2010 on Wednesday completes and really super-charges our wave of 2010 productivity products released in the past year, including Office, SharePoint and Exchange. I enjoyed hearing Bill Gates share his thoughts on the significance of Lync and the future of the unified communications space.

As an end user myself I love the experience Lync brings to SharePoint and Office with the real-time collaboration I rely on every day to find and interact with people and teams across our business and others outside Microsoft. These products were built to work together and the experience speaks for itself. Here are my personal favorites:

See the people I interact with through the visual experience of Lync and the social capabilities of SharePoint, including photos from SharePoint My Site and high definition video that delivers the best image based on bandwidth.
Find the people I need to work with using Lync skills search which accesses SharePoint’s people search and skills, expertise and organization information in SharePoint My Site. I can quickly find who I’m looking for and start interacting with them immediately. No more sending e-mails to large aliases asking “does anyone know…?”
Connect instantly with people’s names lit up with presence icons throughout SharePoint and Office that allow me to initiate IM, phone or online meetings on the fly. This allows me to interact with someone as we co-author a document or ask a question to the person who submitted approval for a budget in Excel from inside SharePoint or Excel. Very cool and very fast.
Post recorded meetings to SharePoint sites using the Lync recording manager. All of my team’s documents, meeting notes and interactions and decisions can be easily saved and shared in SharePoint.
Know more about the people I’m working with through Lync contact cards that show up every place I see someone’s name. No more assigning a task or workflow approval to the wrong person!

There are a ton of other compelling new Lync features that will delight your users. I encourage every SharePoint customer to explore the incredible productivity and business impact that many of our Lync customers are realizing today. Many customers can experience hosted versions of these products working together through the recently announced Office 365 service.

For our SharePoint IT professionals and developers, SharePoint 2010 and Lync 2010 offer an extensible platform to build rich applications that deliver unified communications and collaboration. The possibilities are endless. Workflow solutions with the ability to click to communicate instantly with others in the approval chain to make a decision, sales portals that launch team sites with new opportunities and invite the account team to an online meeting, line of business applications with document management and the ability to work in real-time with others and the list goes on and on. Experience these products together the way we designed them. The Lync experience makes SharePoint better and more importantly makes all our work more productive and impactful.

-Eric Swift

General Manager

SharePoint Product Management Group

SharePoint 2010 October Cumulative Update Issue: Details and Workaround

sharepointblog@live.com — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 22:00:37 GMT

Below are further details and a workaround for the SharePoint 2010 October Cumulative Update issue discovered yesterday.

Packages Impacted

The Cumulative Update packages affected are the Server Packages for SharePoint Foundation, SharePoint Server and Project Server 2010, specifically;

SharePoint Server Package 2394320
Project Server Package 2394322

The downloads for both of these packages have been removed from our servers. If you have already downloaded them you SHOULD NOT install them. They will be republished.

Issue Details

The October Cumulative Update for the packages listed above makes some changes and updates to the user profile database. Unfortunately there are certain situations where this update does not complete as expected and leaves the update in an inconsistent state. This causes issues with several SharePoint features that use the User Profile Application such as MySites, People and Expertise Search & Ratings.

Workaround

If you have already applied the October Cumulative Updates mentioned above, you should perform the following steps;

If you encounter any issues following these steps or have questions specific to your environment/deployment please call Microsoft Product Support for assistance.

Check the following locations for the Microsoft.Office.Server.dll to determine the version. If the version is 14.0.5128.5000 or greater, the October CU is applied.

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\ISAPI\Microsoft.Office.Server.dll
C:\Windows\assembly\GAC_MSIL\Microsoft.Office.Server\14.0.0.0__71e9bce111e9429c\Microsoft.Office.Server.dll

Using Central Administration perform the following steps

Click on Manage Service Applications
Select User Profile Service Application by clicking on it
At the top of the screen on the Service Applications tab, click on Manage
On the Manage Profile Service: User Profile Service Application page, click Manage User Permissions
On the Permissions for User Profile Service Application dialog, you will need to

Specify the desired user accounts and click the Add button to add them to the list
By default SharePoint 2010 RTM has these accounts
1. NT Authority\authenticated users
2. All Authenticated Users
Once the user accounts are in the list, you will need to set the permissions appropriately for your environment and click OK.

Packages NOT Impacted

The following Cumulate Update packages are NOT affected by this issue and are safe to install;

SharePoint Foundation Server “Uber” Package 2394323
SharePoint Foundation Server Package 2405789
SharePoint Foundation Server Package 2427410
SharePoint Foundation Server Package 2436034

This issue does not impact the 2007 versions of these products.

Critical Information about the SharePoint Server 2010 October Cumulative Update

sharepointblog@live.com — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 22:07:25 GMT

Microsoft has discovered a critical issue in the recently released October Cumulative Updates for SharePoint Server 2010 and Project Server 2010, and we have removed the files from download availability. If you have already downloaded the CU, do not install it. If you have installed the CU, please contact Microsoft Support for assistance. We will be posting additional information about the issue here as soon as we have it, and will make the Cumulative Update available for download again as soon as the issue has been fully resolved.

ShowMe for SharePoint 2010

System Account — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 03:43:00 GMT

How We Did It: ShowMe for SharePoint 2010

Not surprisingly, one of the most frequent requests from SharePoint customers is for information worker training and more comprehensive help for end users. This issue cuts across the rich, diverse, and powerful capabilities of SharePoint; it applies regardless of whether information workers use the platform for collaboration, insights, search, content publishing, community building, or assembling their own composite solutions. Given the successful release of SharePoint 2010, with its completely new user interfaces and its impressive array of new features, almost every organization that implements SharePoint will encounter this request for more comprehensive help and training. At Point8020 Limited, we have worked with the SharePoint team at Microsoft for many years to create official training courses, videos, evaluation guides, and other educational material. It seemed only natural, then, for us to provide an answer to this most common of requests from SharePoint customers and partners.

Some might say we got carried away, seeing that we took this issue to the extreme and built a rich, engaging, video-based solution that provides on-demand, 'how-to' videos to SharePoint users. We're glad we did though, as we ended up integrating our solution right into the SharePoint user interface where it is most useful!

Our solution is called ShowMe for SharePoint 2010, and I'd like to take this opportunity to describe the benefits of our solution and also to describe how we developed it.

Overcoming the biggest barriers to returns on investment in SharePoint 2010

Organizations can be somewhat reluctant to roll out SharePoint 2010, even though they know that the new platform can introduce many efficiencies into how their employees work. The problem lies not with what SharePoint 2010 is capable of, but rather with the daunting task of ensuring that your information workers can adapt to some of the new ways of working.

To paraphrase one of the most important questions: 'What's the point of a new, improved version of SharePoint if our employees don't know how to use it?'

Perhaps an even trickier concern is 'We know that SharePoint 2010 will eventually introduce new efficiencies, but won't our current productivity levels diminish while everyone gets up to speed?'

In short, you want to know that what you spend on deploying SharePoint 2010 will quickly show a return on investment and increased business value for your organization. This applies whether you are implementing an upgrade from WSS 3.0/MOSS 2007 or whether this is your first time deploying SharePoint. And you know that the biggest, most pervasive barrier to such deployments is adoption of the new platform by your information workers.

That's exactly what ShowMe for SharePoint 2010 provides: It helps your users get up to speed in an incredibly short time.

Why users need help with SharePoint 2010

One of the most common reasons why your users need help and training in using SharePoint 2010 is that it provides a completely new user interface. So much so that even actions with which your users are familiar from previous versions are now performed in new ways. Providing help and training ensures that current productivity levels for upgrade scenarios do not diminish.

Another reason why your users need help and training is that SharePoint 2010 provides much more efficient ways of working, compared to previous versions of the platform. And, of course, you want your users to start working more efficiently, otherwise why upgrade? So showing them quickly how to achieve specific tasks efficiently must be one your goals.

Taking these concepts further, SharePoint 2010 provides completely new capabilities with which even the most experienced of your users will initially be unfamiliar. You need to raise awareness of these new capabilities and show your information workers how to use them, or the huge value that your organization can derive from SharePoint 2010 will remain unrealized.

What is our solution?

The main driver for our efforts was to develop a solution that provides video-based, on-demand help that can show information workers how to perform many tasks in SharePoint 2010. In fact, specific words in what I've just stated are key:

§ Video-based. Our approach has always been that the best way to teach a complex product is to break it down into bite-size chunks and show people how that specific bit can be used. Our solution includes 101 videos, all of which are focused on one specific task and almost all of which are less than two minutes long. (Many are less than one minute in length!) In brief, our videos are consumable and useful and don't take valuable time away from the user performing their tasks!

§ On-demand. We provide help and training to users when and where they need it. Our solution is integrated into the SharePoint user interface, so information workers can get help and learn while actually performing the tasks they need to fulfil their role in your organization.

§ In SharePoint. The key with integration into the SharePoint user interface is to make use of the amazing new (and not-so-new) features of SharePoint to deliver our solutions. For example, we provide access to our solution from the standard Site Actions menu, from the new context-sensitive ribbon, and through search results.

What does the solution look like?

The following screenshots show the key integration points of ShowMe for SharePoint 2010 with the new user interface of SharePoint.

Figure 1 shows how our solution adds a context-sensitive ribbon tab called 'ShowMe'. This ribbon tab appears when users need it, in 50 different contexts. You can see the controls on the ribbon tab - each control leads to multiple videos in that specific category.

Figure 1. The ShowMe for SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Tab

Figure 2 shows the engaging Silverlight-based help and training system that appears when a user clicks a control on the ribbon. Users can watch videos right here. They can also navigate through the other categories, all of which is provided in an iTunes-style, engaging user interface. (Well, we had to make it look good, didn't we?)

Figure 1. The ShowMe for SharePoint 2010 User Experience.

There are 101 short, bite-size videos that your users can learn from. We have assessed the core tasks that are undertaken by users and ensured that ShowMe for SharePoint 2010 covers those core tasks. We will be creating even more videos over the next few months and these will become available to our customers and partners free of charge! For the current list of videos, refer to our FAQ. (This FAQ topic has a link to the list of videos that we keep up to date.)

Figure 3 shows how the solution is accessible through the Site Actions menu. This ensures that regardless of context, the solution is 'always available' to your users.

Figure 3. The ShowMe for SharePoint 2010 Site Actions Menu.

One other integration point is extremely important: Search! Your information workers use the built-in search features as part of their daily tasks, so we ensured that the words spoken in our videos are indexed and that relevant videos appear in normal search results. This is a 'first' for SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Search in the entire world!

To see all of these features in action, you can view our demo.

How did we build it?

The key development efforts for our solution were:

§ Building a rich, engaging user interface. More development effort was required for this part of our solution than for the rest of the product put together, but Silverlight proved to be the ideal development platform. We made extensive use of the new SharePoint 2010 Client Object Model for Silverlight which now makes building rich interactive applications on SharePoint a reality. In short, Silverlight provides the slick user interface components (such as navigation and being able to play videos) while SharePoint provides storage for the videos, images and configuration files. The client object model bridges the gap between these two different environments, so we are eternally grateful to the SharePoint team for providing this key bridging technology! Without the client object model, our development would have taken much more time and effort.

§ Integration with the ribbon and Site Actions menu. The good news is that this bit turned out to be relatively easy. We created ribbon controls by using what's called the 'declarative' model. Truth be told, this took some getting used to, but the documentation for ribbon control development is getting better and better as time goes by!

§ Integration with the SharePoint client-side dialog platform. As you can see from the screenshots, our solution is typically displayed in dialogs that are similar to the built-in ones provided by SharePoint. This development was pretty straightforward and turned out to be one of the joys of SharePoint user interface development. Who knew it could be so easy? Well, we did as it happens, because we wrote the official developer Getting Started course for Microsoft! You can learn more about dialog development in Module 10 of the Getting Started course.

Next Steps:

For more information about ShowMe for SharePoint, you can refer to the FAQ page.

If you want to evaluate and play with ShowMe for SharePoint 2010, you can download the fully-featured evaluation version.

If you are a Microsoft Partner and want to learn how you can use our learning solutions to drive SharePoint adoption and create business value for you and your customers, you can refer to our partner program.

If you want more information or insight into our learning solutions, feel free to contact us!

About the Blogger

Martin Harwar is Chief Solution Architect for Point8020 Limited. He develops content for the SharePoint team at Microsoft as well as developing learning solutions based on Silverlight and SharePoint.

Updated SharePoint 2010 SDK Now Available for Download

System Account — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 13:41:00 GMT

The SharePoint 2010 Software Development Kit (SDK) has been updated! Get it here: Download from the Microsoft Download Center

Tips: Installing and Using the SharePoint 2010 SDK Download

What’s New in this SDK Update

We are excited to announce the latest quarterly update of the SDK for SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010. This free update replaces previous 2010 versions of the SDK and includes the following:

New code samples: Silverlight List Viewer, plus new samples in Business Connectivity Services (BCS), Enterprise Content Management (ECM), and User Profiles and Social Data
Updated documentation, including: new and updated How To, reference , and conceptual content
Updated IntelliSense XML files for tooltips and auto-complete in Visual Studio

Here are two MSDN topics listing new and updated content and code samples in the AUG2010 version of the SDK (14.0.4763.1031):

A complete listing and description of the 44 code samples currently available in the SDK can be found here on MSDN Code Gallery: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/sp2010sdk.

Change History Tables

Wondering what has changed in the SDK? You can do a quick search in the compiled HTML Help (.chm) files for the phrase “content update” (include the quotes) to see all the changed topics. We also publish the “Updated” date at the top of each article. Check out an example here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff623048.aspx.

Working with Help in Visual Studio (MSDN and Local)

This update also coincides with republish of the SDK in the MSDN Library, in addition to offline Visual Studio Help for SharePoint. Yes, that’s right—now you can get context-sensitive Help directly from your code by pressing F1 in Visual Studio.

F1 Help and Working Offline

The MSDN Library is always the most up-to-date source of information, and Visual Studio uses online Help as its primary source by default when you press F1. If you need to work offline, however, you can first download Help content from MSDN using the Visual Studio 2010 Help Library Manager (Help > Manage Help Settings). Here’s how:

Click Check for updates online.
You may need to change your settings to I want to use local help. You can find this under Choose online or local help in Help Library Manager.
Scroll down to SharePoint 2010 SDK, click Add, and then click Update.

IntelliSense XML Files Update

The latest drop of the SDK also updates all the IntelliSense XML files for SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010. Please refer to the Readme.txt file for installation instructions. The readme.txt files is in the C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\SharePoint 2010\Intellisense once the SDK is installed.

You will get tooltips, updated descriptions, and auto-complete as you type code in the Visual Studio 2010 IDE once the IntelliSense XML files are updated. Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010 must be installed on the computer you are installing the IntelliSense XML files on; the IntelliSense files only work in Visual Studio when the DLL and the XML file of the same name are in the same directory. Please refer to the Readme.txt file for more information.

Randall Isenhour

Sr. Content Manager, SharePoint SDK

Security Advisory 2416728 (Vulnerability in ASP.NET) and SharePoint.

System Account — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 18:17:28 GMT

** Updated 9/27/2010 7:20PM ** – Updated with Out of Band Security Update announcement details.
** Updated 9/24/2010 4:30PM ** – Updated with additional defensive workaround published by the ASP.NET team valid for ALL affected versions of SharePoint listed below.
** Updated 9/22/2010 10:40AM ** – Updated verification step for SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and added an exception in the workaround for Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 running under ASP.NET 1.1.
** Updated 9/21/2010 11:05PM ** – Updated with workaround for SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and updated SharePoint 2010 workaround.
** Updated 9/21/2010 3:06PM ** – Included details for previous releases and workaround for WSS 2.0.

Update: Out of Band Release to address Microsoft Security Advisory 2416728 announcement. See this post for details.

Update: Please note the additional workaround published 9/24/2010 4:40PM. The original security advisory has been updated this afternoon to include additional defensive measures (Installing and enabling UrlScan or configuring IIS request filtering). Please read the workarounds section of the security advisory and the update posted here for full details. This extra step is applicable for ALL versions of SharePoint affected by this issue.

Update: Please note the important change from the 9/21/2010 3:06PM update to this blog post. We originally stated that SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 did not require the workaround to be applied, however, we have recently discovered through testing that a variant of the issue does affect SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and also requires extra steps in the workaround for SharePoint Server 2010 (Steps 5-9). Customers with these versions should refer to the relevant workaround below. We will continue to keep this post updated with the latest guidance.

We recently released a Microsoft Security Advisory for a vulnerability affecting ASP.NET. This post documents recommended workarounds for the following SharePoint products:

SharePoint 2010
SharePoint Foundation 2010
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
Windows SharePoint Services 2.0

A workaround is not necessary for SharePoint Portal Server 2003.

The workarounds for the affected versions of SharePoint and Windows SharePoint Services listed above are temporary measures that do not fix the underlying issue but help to block known attack vectors until an ASP.NET security update is released. We will provide instructions on how to revert the workarounds when the security update is released.

We recommend that all affected SharePoint customers apply the workaround as soon as possible. You should apply the workaround to every web front-end in your SharePoint farm.

Workaround for SharePoint 2010 & SharePoint Foundation 2010

Navigate to the SharePoint installation directory at %ProgramFiles%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\template\layouts.
Create a new file called error2.aspx in this directory with the following content:
```
<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" %>
<%@ Import Namespace="System.Security.Cryptography" %>
<%@ Import Namespace="System.Threading" %>

<script runat="server">
   void Page_Load() {
      byte[] delay = new byte[1];
      RandomNumberGenerator prng = new RNGCryptoServiceProvider();

      prng.GetBytes(delay);
      Thread.Sleep((int)delay[0]);
        
      IDisposable disposable = prng as IDisposable;
      if (disposable != null) { disposable.Dispose(); }
    }
</script>

<html>
<head runat="server">
    <title>Error</title>
</head>
<body>
    <div>
        An error occurred while processing your request.
    </div>
</body>
</html>
```
Navigate to %SystemDrive%\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\virtualdirectories.
For each subfolder in this directory, do the following:
1. Edit web.config
2. Find the customErrors node and change it to;
```
<customErrors mode="On" redirectMode="ResponseRewrite" defaultRedirect="/_layouts/error2.aspx" />
```
3. Save your changes
Navigate to %ProgramFiles%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\isapi.
Make a copy of the web.config file at this location and rename it to web_backup.config
1. Important: if you skip this step, the workaround may affect your ability to apply patches to your SharePoint installation at a later date
Edit web.config and add the following lines immediately following the <configuration> node, before <system.web>:
```
<system.webServer>
    <handlers>
        <remove name="AssemblyResourceLoader-Integrated-4.0" />
        <remove name="AssemblyResourceLoader-Integrated" />
    </handlers>
</system.webServer>
```
Save your changes
Run iisreset /noforce

Verifying the workaround: After applying the workaround, you may not see a change in SharePoint’s error handling behavior. For example, you will still receive a 404 error if you try to access a page that does not exist – this is unique to the SharePoint workaround and is different from the expected behavior described here. This is by design — the workaround described here specifically protects against the ASP.NET vulnerability in error cases that are not handled by SharePoint.

Workaround for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Navigate to the SharePoint installation directory at %ProgramFiles%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\isapi.
Make a copy of the web.config file at this location and rename it to web_backup.config
1. Important: if you skip this step, the workaround may affect your ability to apply patches to your SharePoint installation at a later date.

Edit web.config and add an httpHandlers section as shown:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<configuration>
    <system.web>
        <webServices>
            <protocols>
                <remove name="HttpGet" />
                <remove name="HttpPost" />
                <remove name="HttpPostLocalhost" />
                <add name="Documentation" />
            </protocols>
        </webServices>
        <customErrors mode="On" />
      <httpHandlers>   
         <remove path="WebResource.axd" verb="GET"/>    
      </httpHandlers> 
    </system.web>
    <location path="authentication.asmx">
        <system.web>
            <authorization>
                <allow users="*"/>
            </authorization>
        </system.web>
    </location>
    <location path="wsdisco.aspx">
        <system.web>
            <authorization>
                <allow users="*"/>
            </authorization>
        </system.web>
    </location>
    <location path="wswsdl.aspx">
        <system.web>
            <authorization>
                <allow users="*"/>
            </authorization>
        </system.web>
    </location> 
</configuration>

Save your changes
Run iisreset /noforce

Verifying the workaround: Browse to http://servername/_vti_bin/webresource.axd. In both cases (with and without the workaround), SharePoint will handle the error and redirect you to /_layouts/error.aspx. This page takes a query parameter (ErrorText) with a more detailed description of the error that occurred.

After applying the workaround, ErrorText will always say “Path /_vti_bin/webresource.axd was not found”.

Workaround for Windows SharePoint Services 2.0

Only apply this workaround for sites that run under ASP.NET 2.0. Sites running under ASP.NET 1.1 are not affected and do not need a workaround.

Navigate to the SharePoint installation directory at %ProgramFiles%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\60\template\layouts.

Create a new file called error.aspx in this directory with the following content:

<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" %>
<%@ Import Namespace="System.Security.Cryptography" %>
<%@ Import Namespace="System.Threading" %>

<script runat="server">
   void Page_Load() {
      byte[] delay = new byte[1];
      RandomNumberGenerator prng = new RNGCryptoServiceProvider();

      prng.GetBytes(delay);
      Thread.Sleep((int)delay[0]);
        
      IDisposable disposable = prng as IDisposable;
      if (disposable != null) { disposable.Dispose(); }
    }
</script>

<html>
<head runat="server">
    <title>Error</title>
</head>
<body>
    <div>
        An error occurred while processing your request.
    </div>
</body>
</html>

Navigate to %ProgramFiles%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\60\isapi.
Make a copy of the web.config file at this location and rename it to web_backup.config
1. Important: if you skip this step, the workaround may affect your ability to apply patches to your SharePoint installation at a later date

Edit web.config and add an httpHandlers section as shown:

<configuration>
   <system.web>
      <webServices>
         <protocols>
            <remove name="HttpGet" />
            <remove name="HttpPost" />
            <remove name="HttpPostLocalhost" />
            <add name="Documentation" />
         </protocols>
      </webServices> 
      <httpHandlers>   
         <remove path="WebResource.axd" verb="GET"/>    
      </httpHandlers>  
      <customErrors mode="On"/>
      <trust level="Full" originUrl="" />
   </system.web>
</configuration>

Save your changes
Run iisreset /noforce

Verifying the workaround: For Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 installations, you can verify the workaround in two parts:

Browse to http://servername/_layouts/foo.aspx. You should receive an error message stating “An error occurred while processing your request.”
Browse to http://servername/_vti_bin/webresource.axd. You should receive an error message stating “Path ‘/_vti_bin/webresource.axd’ was not found.”

For more information:

Microsoft Security Advisory (2416728) – (Updated 9/24/2010) Vulnerability in ASP.NET Could Allow Information Disclosure

Security Advisory 2416728 Released – Microsoft Security Response Center Blog

Understanding the ASP.NET Vulnerability – Microsoft Security Research & Defense Blog

Important: ASP.NET Security Vulnerability – Scott Guthrie’s Blog

Frequently Asked Questions about the ASP.NET Security Vulnerability – Scott Guthrie’s Blog

Update on ASP.NET Vulnerability - Scott Guthrie’s Blog

Security Advisory 2416728 - Workaround Update - Microsoft Security Response Center Blog

Have you connected with a SharePoint MVP?

System Account — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 01:43:24 GMT

Who are the SharePoint MVPs? The SharePoint MVPs are a passionate group of 225 individuals across 50 countries, who freely share their deep knowledge, real-world experience, and objective feedback to help people enhance the way they use SharePoint. They are independent experts who are acknowledged as community experts on SharePoint, and are awarded for their community involvement. You can see some MVP highlights on the community page of our SharePoint product site.

How can I connect with a SharePoint MVP?

· Attend one of the many conferences where they’re attending or speaking

o Many SharePoint MVPs will be speaking at the SharePoint Connections conference in November

· Interact with them via live chat

o The next chat is on Wednesday 9/29 at 9am PDT

o Learn more and add these chats to your calendar by visiting the MSDN event page http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/chats/default.aspx

o Twitter Hashtag: spmvpchat

· Join our Facebook group or follow us on twitter to hear about upcoming chats and events

· Review the MVP profiles and connect through their websites

· Find them answering questions in the forums

How do I nominate an MVP?

If you know of someone extremely active in the SharePoint community, who is passionate about the product, goes above and beyond to share their knowledge and help others, and creates original content, then nominate them to become a SharePoint MVP

Out of Band Release to Address Microsoft Security Advisory 2416728

System Account — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 19:13:53 GMT

x-post from the Microsoft Security Response Center blog.

Today we provided advance notification to customers that we will release an out-of-band security update to address the vulnerability discussed in Security Advisory 2416728. The update is scheduled for release tomorrow, Tuesday, September 28, 2010 at approximately 10:00 AM PDT. The bulletin has a severity rating of Important and addresses a publicly disclosed vulnerability in ASP.NET that affects all versions of the .NET Framework when used on Windows Server operating systems. Windows desktop systems are listed as affected, but consumers are not vulnerable unless they are running a Web server from their computer.

Based on our comprehensive monitoring of the threat landscape, we have determined an out-of-band release is needed to protect customers as we have seen limited attacks and continued attempts to bypass current defenses and workarounds.

The security update is fully tested and ready for release, but will be made available initially only on the Microsoft Download Center. This enables us to get the update out as quickly as possible, allowing administrators with enterprise installations, or end users who want to install this security update manually, the ability to test and update their systems immediately. We strongly encourage these customers to visit the Download Center, download the update, test it in their environment and deploy it as soon as possible.

The update will also be released through Windows Update and Windows Server Update Services within the next few days as we test to make sure distribution will be successful through these channels. This approach allows us to release sooner to customers who may choose to deploy it manually without delaying for broader distribution.

For customers using Automatic Update, this Security Update will automatically be applied once it is released broadly. Once the Security Update is applied, customers are protected against known attacks related to Security Advisory 2416728.

We will also hold a special edition webcast for the bulletin release on Tuesday, September 28, 2010 at 1:00 PM PDT, where we will present information on the bulletin and take customer questions. If you are interested in attending the webcast, click here to sign up.

More information:

ASP.NET Security Update Shipping Tuesday, Sept 28th – Scott Guthrie’s blog.

Out of Band Release to Address Microsoft Security Advisory 2416728 – Microsoft Security Response Center

Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification for September 2010 – TechNet Security Bulletin

MS10-070 Released Out-of-Band Today

System Account — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 11:29:48 GMT

x-post from the Microsoft Security Response Center blog -- The download links for the security updates are in the Security Bulletin.

As we announced yesterday, today we released Security Bulletin MS10-070 out-of-band to address a vulnerability in ASP.NET. The bulletin and the blog by Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft's .NET Developer Platform are available for more information.

This security update addresses a vulnerability affecting all versions of the .NET Framework when used on Windows Server operating system. While desktop systems are listed as affected, consumers are not vulnerable unless they are running a web server from their computer.

The update will be made available initially only through the Microsoft Download Center and then released through Windows Update and Windows Server Update Services within the next few days. This allows customers the option to deploy it manually now without delaying for broader distribution.

For customers who use Automatic Updates, the update will be automatically applied once it is released broadly. Once the Security Update is applied, customers are protected against known attacks related to Security Advisory 2416728.

If you can, please join me and Dustin Childs today for a live webcast where we will cover the details of this bulletin and take customer questions live. Here is the registration information:

Date: Tuesday September 28, 2010
Time: 1:00 p.m. PDT
Click Here to Register

Thanks,
Dave Forstrom
Director, Trustworthy Computing

SharePoint 2010 Governance

System Account — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 05:26:00 GMT

Governance is a key component to ensuring the success of your SharePoint 2010 deployment, and one we frequently get asked about it as we travel to conferences and events. Represented by a set of established processes, procedures, and stakeholders, a well designed and implemented governance plan promotes adoption, ensures participation, and maximizes ROI. By using the governance techniques, best practices, and recommendations available below, you can align your policies for using SharePoint 2010 with your culture and goals while still enabling teams and individuals to effectively collaborate and share information.

Resources

Resource Center (Governance in SharePoint Server 2010)

The Governance Resource Center provides documentation, references, and solutions to help IT Professionals plan and prepare to govern SharePoint 2010 environments. The Governance Resource Center aligns to three (3) specific areas:

1. IT Governance

2. Information Management

3. Application Management

Resource Center (ALM Resource Center | SharePoint 2010)

The ALM Resource Center provides documentation, resources, references, and solutions to help Developers with the coordination of all aspects of software engineering.

Whitepaper (SharePoint 2010 Governance Planning)

The SharePoint 2010 Governance Planning whitepaper targets the business value of governance and provides guidance for the necessary governance planning and implementation of SharePoint Server 2010.

Whitepaper (Implementing Governance in SharePoint 2010)

This document focuses on the product and technology aspects of SharePoint governance – the technical implementation. It provides high-level guidance on the many configuration options SharePoint provides to enable you to manage the environment for the benefit of all.

Whitepaper (SharePoint Server 2010 Operations Framework and Checklists)

This document details the operational processes, tasks, and tools that are required to operate and maintain a Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 environment. It explains how the management of SharePoint Server 2010 fits in with the overall Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) model.

Publication (Essential SharePoint 2010: Overview, Governance, and Planning (Addison-Wesley Microsoft Technology Series)

Essential SharePoint 2010 provides information derived from a business value perspective that documents and illustrates how to plan and implement SharePoint 2010-based solutions to maximize business results.

Virtual Lab (Configuring Tenant Administration on SharePoint Server 2010)

After completing this lab, you will be better able to create a new Tenant Administration site collection, manage site collections through Tenant Administration, and create a partitioned service application.

Virtual Lab (Monitoring SharePoint 2010)

The objective of this lab is to provide a basic introduction to using Service Level Monitoring to monitor services provided by SharePoint Server 2010. By the end of this lab you will be better able to create a Service Level Object, generate a Report of SharePoint Services Availability, and configure a Service Level Dashboard.

Solutions

Active Directory Domain Services Markers

Active Directory Domain Services Markers can be used to prevent and report on SharePoint installations in your organization.

Quotas

Quotas are used to specify limits to the amount of storage that can be used by a site collection and establish resource limits on sandboxed solutions.

Locks

Locks are used to prevent users from from adding content to or accessing site collections.

Self-Service Site Creation

Self-Service Site Creation is used to allow or prevent users from creating site collections on demand.

For a comprehensive list of governance features see also http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262287.aspx.

Eric Swift on Office 365

System Account — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 15:34:00 GMT

This week our President Kurt DelBene let the world know of our plans to release Office 365 and I wanted to share my thoughts on the announcement and positive impact it will have on the market, SharePoint customers, and our partners. Today Office, Exchange, Lync and SharePoint provide the productivity backbone for many organizations. With these products, companies are already seeing great results and high ROI. With Office 365 we’re proud to announce the next step in the future of productivity, bringing together these capabilities in an always-up-to-date cloud service. It provides businesses of all sizes with professional grade productivity solutions at a predictable monthly cost.

To date, SharePoint 2010 is a huge hit with our customers. When I joined the business earlier this year, I was impressed with the passion shown by customers and partners using the product to transform the way their organizations collaborate and share information. We have more than 17,000 customers and 100 million people that rely on SharePoint every day. Now, with SharePoint Online as part of Office 365, millions more will be able to benefit from the power of SharePoint.

With great applications, SharePoint Online helps organizations and professionals create sites to securely share information, insights, and important documents with colleagues, customers, and partners.

It’s simple to create Office documents and save them directly to SharePoint Online, easy to access your content off-line or on your phone, and quickly share information and insights using familiar tools.

And, with Office 365, organizations get the full benefit of Office, Exchange, Lync, and SharePoint because it is designed to work together.

For SharePoint developers and independent software vendors (ISV’s), the opportunities to configure and extend SharePoint Online today include the ability to:

configure master pages, templates, page layouts, and site columns
customize the site UI with custom Silverlight controls, navigation or functional controls
build customized document workflows, using data and documents contained within SharePoint Online
customize lists and content types
use Sandbox Solutions to build custom web parts
design browser based forms using InfoPath forms

Please visit the MSDN SharePoint Online Developer Resource Center to learn more about the opportunities to extend and customize SharePoint Online.

I know many ISV’s will be wondering how to support some of the rich solutions created for SharePoint 2010, such as those that rely on full-trust code or connect to back-end systems using Business Connectivity services (BCS). Over time we intend to enable many of these features online, such as BCS. Others like full-trust code require a new approach to run effectively in a highly scalable shared service. As we move towards public availability we will be providing further guidance on how we will be moving the capabilities or providing alternative approaches to support these advanced scenarios online.

For IT professionals and site administrators, SharePoint Online offers easy ways to plan, set up and manage your SharePoint Online service using the SharePoint Online Administration Center including the ability to:

set up a new service
create or delete a site collection
build extranet sites and invite customers and partners securely
manage administrators for a site collection
change storage quota and warning level
access end user support and training content

Please visit the TechNet SharePoint Online Administration and Planning site for guidance on setting up and managing your SharePoint Online service and stay tuned for more information in the coming weeks.

The announcement of Office 365 is an important milestone for the SharePoint business and I am looking forward to the opportunity it will bring to many more organizations and professionals who can now benefit from the power of SharePoint. Starting today, we begin testing Office 365 with a few thousand organizations around the world. Over time, we’ll expand the beta to more organizations as we prepare to launch the service worldwide next year. I encourage you to learn more about SharePoint Online and sign up for the Office 365 beta at office365.com.

-Eric Swift

General Manager
SharePoint Product Management Group

SharePoint's Role in Microsoft's Collaboration Strategy

System Account — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 08:25:00 GMT

Hello,

SharePoint Products and Technologies have become a key part of our strategy for delivering a complete working environment for information workers, where they can collaborate together, share information with others, and find information and people that can help them solve their business problems. PJ Hough created a blog on Windows SharePoint Services (http://blogs.msdn.com/pjhough/default.aspx), and Gerhard Schobbe has spoken about web content management and SharePoint (https://blogs.msdn.com/wcm/default.aspx) , but in talking with the team, we thought it’d be a good idea to create a broad SharePoint blog, where we can talk about topics across the SharePoint family, details on the next versions we will release later this year with Office 12 and Windows Server, insights into our decisions/process, and what we are learning from seeing customers and partners use SharePoint to help them be more effective. That’s the purpose of this blog.

I thought I’d start by talking a little about how SharePoint fits into Microsoft’s broad goals of helping information workers be more productive. Those of you who have spent time with SharePoint Products and Technologies may find this redundant, but hopefully I can provide you with some additional insights even still. If you’re sure that’s not possible, then feel free to stop reading and wait for a more interesting posting to follow. J

First, we think of SharePoint as fitting into a broader goal of providing a rich collaboration environment for users. Collaboration is a pretty fuzzy term in the industry. Let me clarify how we think about collaboration. We don’t think that collaboration is a place you go to. We think it’s a set of tools that you have available to you in the context of how you already work. So we talk about delivering “pervasive” collaboration, meaning we want to infuse collaboration into how you work. For example, in WSS v2 (the currently shipping version), we created a feature called the Document Workspace where you can collaborate on authoring a document with others. Since we knew that people most often share documents via email, we added a feature to Outlook to prompt the user when they attach a document to an email message as to whether they would like to create a Document Workspace for the attachment, so others can get updated versions of the document as the contents change, see who else is working on the document through presence, and see tasks lists for the document. This is just one example of thinking of collaboration as not existing in yet another system you have to learn but rather occurring naturally within the context of what you’re already doing.

This brings in another key element of our approach to collaboration – supporting both “rich” and “reach” access. We think there are great collaboration scenarios that we can enable within the “rich” Office clients, such as the one I described above, and we also believe in “reach” access to collaboration spaces, via the web browser and mobile devices. To us it’s all about making sure customers can access their information from anywhere and providing the user experience that best fits the particular scenario.

So our approach is to provide “pervasive” collaboration capabilities via a broad set of Microsoft products that work together to solve user problems. We think about those solutions as falling into four large buckets: Integrated Communications, Collaborative Workspaces, Access to People and Information, and People-driven Processes:

· Integrated Communications: Enable people to more effectively manage their communications. Enable them to triage their communications effectively. Let them select whatever communications mechanism works best for them (email, IM, RTC, VOIP) and transition from one method of communicating to another effortlessly. Many of our investments in Outlook, Exchange, and RTC are to accomplish this goal.

· Collaborative Workspaces: Provide spaces for people to work on projects together in the context of the work they are doing. Facilitate high value collaborative activities like collaborative authoring and meetings. This is where Windows SharePoint Services fits in. It also includes our investments in Groove as rich, task-oriented, peer-to-peer workspaces.

· Access to People and Information: Enable people to find the information they need to do their jobs by either browsing to it from an organization’s portals, searching for it, or being proactively notified about it. Since much of the information they want to find will be newly created in collaborative workspaces, we built our portal product, SharePoint Portal Server, on top of a foundation of Windows SharePoint Services. This means customers can deploy a single infrastructure for information sharing in their organization and only have to learn a single way to manage and customize portals and collaboration spaces. Finding people is also a key scenario for us, since often times the most topical information is the information still in people’s heads. This is where SharePoint Portal Server “MySites” come in as a place for people to share information and expertise with others.

· People-driven Processes: When you have a rich information sharing environment, as SharePoint is, it is natural to want to integrate business processes in with team spaces and portals. In the Office 12 release, we have invested in integrating workflow into SharePoint and into the Microsoft Office applications, so people can build spaces that automate key business processes. For example, a marketing team space might want to include workflows associated with approving a marketing plan or enable the team to kick off related purchase requests that are submitted directly to back-end ERP systems using rich forms, such as InfoPath, which is available as a server service in the Office 12 release.

So hopefully this gives you a sense that we think of collaboration from a very broad vantage point. This broad viewpoint drives us to think about features in our collaboration products in terms of the end-to-end scenarios that we are enabling for customers. We often invest in features that cross over several products, but we do so in a way that is logical to the end user because our efforts are scenario-based. It also pushes us to invest in features that go beyond traditional definitions of collaboration. A good example of this is our inclusion of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) features in the upcoming release of SharePoint Portal Server. This decision derives from two primary observations. First, with the growing popularity of SharePoint, more and more critical business content is ending up in SharePoint sites. Customers want a way to manage that content effectively. This need to manage collaboration content is particularly acute with the introduction of regulations like Sarbanes Oxley. Second, ECM features like workflow and policy are the next set of features our customers are asking for to support the collaborative authoring scenario itself.

But ECM and SharePoint is probably a topic best left for another blog submission. The main point for this entry is to talk about how we think of collaboration very broadly, from the perspective of end user scenarios, and with the notion of facilitating not only collaboration itself, but the related activities of communicating with others, finding information, and engaging in business processes.

- Kurt DelBene

SharePoint Roadmap and Light-Up Not Just Roll-Up

System Account — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 22:17:00 GMT

Hi! I thought I would follow Kurt’s post with some background on our next release of the SharePoint technologies and the thought process behind one of the goals for the release that we internally call “light-up not just roll-up”.

SharePoint for the Office 12 Wave

As we did with Office and SharePoint 2003, we are designing, developing and testing the SharePoint technologies as part of the Office “12” cycle to make sure we have an end-to-end solution. Of course, you will continue be able to access a growing number of SharePoint features with just a web browser, previous versions of Office and other applications. We began sharing information on Office and SharePoint 12 at the PDC in September (check out Steven Sinofsky’s keynote) and the technical beta in November.

We think about SharePoint in two parts – the underlying platform (e.g. the web site framework, list and document storage, security model) and the solutions build on top. With the new platform investments in Windows SharePoint Services - including support for ASP.NET 2.0 and Windows Workflow Foundation - we are making it easier for developers to build, deploy and integrate sophisticated applications vs. rolling their own web framework from scratch. While this is in response to a lot of terrific feedback from SharePoint developer community, it is also the foundation of we are doing inside Microsoft for the next release of our SharePoint solutions.

For the Office 12 wave, we are investing on top of the WSS platform in six solution areas. Below is an overview with more to come in future postings:

Collaboration – richer calendars, surveys, discussions and e-mail integration, blogs, wikis, RSS, offline (in Outlook and Groove), basic project management (with Project Server for larger projects), tracking applications (including Access integration), etc.

Portal – published portals built on the new CMS integration, declarative LOB integration from web services, database and 3rd-party applications like SAP and enhanced MySites with aggregation, personalization and social networking
Search – improved user experience, relevance, administration and programmability and rich support for finding people and business data with a consistent experience across WSS and SPS.
Content Management – integrated document, records and web content management including workflow, metadata, security, policies, template publishing, etc. and upgrade from CMS 2002 to an integrated SPS \ CMS (more on this soon but the goal is to make it much easier to build and manage a sophisticated internet or intranet site)
Business Process – server-based XML forms designed with InfoPath and rendered in either web browsers or the rich InfoPath client integrated with SharePoint including the new workflow capabilities with web, graphical and Visual Studio-based customization
Business Intelligence - business intelligence portals with dashboards, KPIs, SQL Analysis Reporting Services integration and Excel capabilities on the server combining the flexibility of the spreadsheet with the power of server-based deployment and rendering

We are still working on packaging and will update you on that as soon as we are finalized. But generally, the platform and collaboration solution capabilities will continue to be part of Windows Server providing a broad platform and “next-generation file server” for developers, users and IT. The rest of the solutions will be provided on top.

Light-Up Not Just Roll-Up

We have seen in many organizations that “portals” and “team sites” are not really discrete points vs. a continuum of web presences. Supporting this was a big focus of our V2 but we are excited about the evolution in the model in V3 so I thought I’d give how we thought about this.

When we delivered V1, we got a lot of feedback that the previous top-down worlds of “portals” and bottoms-up world of “collaboration” was not that clean. The disparate user, developer and manager experiences really did not make sense. If you did custom development for a portal (e.g. a web part viewing sales information), why couldn’t the sales team use that web part? We saw lots of “team” sites were calling themselves “portals” (the word means an “important web site” to most people so who doesn’t want their web site to be important?). This caused a lot of pain for both users and IT. That led us to putting the web part framework into WSS (and now with version 3 into ASP.NET 2.0 to support a broader set of applications and re-use) and building SPS 2003 on top of WSS 2003 so we could have the continuity between portals and collaboration.

SPS 2003 was primarily focused on aggregation and personalization (Search, MySites, Site Directory) or what we call “Roll-up”. But we have been surprised about the adoption pattern and seen far more portals than we expected in organizations and many team sites that want “portal” features. Microsoft’s own IT group has an internally hosted service that supports over 300 portals! We also realized we needed to take the model forward as we added new capabilities above WSS like document lifecycle, web publishing and reporting that were clearly not just for parent portals.
So we began the 12 release with a mantra - “Light-Up Not Just Roll-Up” - so every site could have every capability whether provided by Microsoft or an external developer. As part of WSS V3 we are introducing a new feature we call “featurization” (still named by the development team . . .) where the server administration deploys new capabilities and the site administration can decide if they are available to users in their site. We are using this to build the 6 categories of solution features I described on top of the WSS platform using this model. Now any SharePoint site can be supercharged with new features when you deploy a value-added product like SPS or our partner solutions.

This raised a couple questions. First, won’t sites get too busy with all these features? Possibly, but we also saw is one size doesn’t fit all so we are introducing focused templates (e.g. a large document library vs. an internet presence) to support specific scenarios and expose a practical subset of features. Second, won’t this lead to more chaos on an intranet as more sites become “portals”? Not necessarily. Just because more capabilities are exposed, does not mean you can’t impose whatever structure works for your organization and culture.

Some companies create the site structure for all their sites all up front and let few users change it. Others are more decentralized and let a thousands flowers bloom. Most are into the middle where they create the official portals and let users create team and project sites below this. Our goal is to provide a template, security and aggregation model to let you use whatever approach to intranet, extranet and internet presence design makes sense for you. We’ll also have better support for physical and hierarchies in the next release to enable this.

We will be getting into many more details in future posts. If you are interested in more right away, I would recommend Arpan’s blog and PJ’s video on Channel 9.

Jeff Teper, GM - SharePoint Portal, Content Management and Search

BI Portals and Excel Services

System Account — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 13:06:00 GMT

Like many people, my epiphany on the power of software came from my first exposure to an electronic spreadsheet (in my case VisiCalc on a TRS-80). It is great to SharePoint's customizable lists and web part pages have same "wow this is flexible" first impression on people. With the Office 12 wave, we are taking the next logical step bringing these together to enable highly customizable solutions for data analysis and reporting.

The Excel team has created an engine that supports databinding, calculation and rendering of Excel workbooks on top of SharePoint. All HTML. No ActiveX. You see the data on the SharePoint page and (if you have permission) open it in the Excel client for your own analysis. This gives users a very flexible canvas using Excel's modelling, formatting and charting capabilities and more natural way to discover and analyze data. For more information, check out the Excel team's blog (I've linked to their server posts - start at the bottom as they cover a lot).

We are building on this to enable people to create more flexible BI portals rapidly with new SharePoint BI tools such as the "Report Center" and "Dashboards". The Report Center is a special SharePoint document library for browsing Excel, SQL Reporting Services, Dashboards and other reports. Dashboards are easy to construct web part pages with out-of-box "shared slicing" (e.g. filter by product line) of Excel workbooks, SQL Reporting Services reports, Key Performance Indicators (e.g. red stoplights if sales are under-budget) and views on Business Data entities (e.g. customers from SAP). We'll cover these in future articles. Besides the Excel blog, it is worth checking out our BI strategy announcements and the SQL Server 2005 BI Page.

I'd add that when we show people previews of these, they often ask with a little confusion "So is SharePoint for content management OR business intelligence?" The answer is "Yes". Just as we brought together tools for documents and spreadsheets together in Office with Word and Excel because users need an integrated set of tools for many tasks like preparing business plans, we are bringing a variety of server capabilities from workflow to BI to search together on top of Windows SharePoint Services to enable more flexible and cost-effective information management solutions.

Jeff

Double Dogfood Week

System Account — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 09:53:00 GMT

This was an exciting week for the SharePoint development team as we expanded our "dogfooding" of Beta 1 of SharePoint v3 to include 1) the entire Office team for all SharePoint features and 2) all of Microsoft for the next round of SharePoint Search. For people who have not heard the term before, "dogfood" means running early builds in production well before release to help find issues, shape best practices documentation and articulate the business case for technology. To make it real, we operate "without a net" such that we completely depend on the product to get 100% of our work done vs. just trying out. We learn a lot from this.

With our IT group, we have published the details on our existing deployment of WSS and SPS 2003 at http://www.microsoft.com/services/microsoftservices/office_sps.mspx

Here are some more recent fun facts. As of the week of January 6, 2006, our IT service hosts in four data centers (with Washington state by the largest): 348 portals, 49,660 top-level WSS sites (and 182,661 webs total!), 55,676 MySites and 15,159 extranet webs. SharePoint is storing about 7 terabytes of data in SQL Server and service availability for the week was 99.97%. We use SharePoint from our top-level portal (MSWeb) to the major project sites for things like the next release of Office and Windows to sites that only live a couple weeks as the collaboration space for product managers making a decision that spans Europe. Many of the security, scalability, provisioning, administration and lifecyle management features that let our IT group operate at this scale with a small staff are as a result of their feedback from the 2001 release and the same will be true for "V3" features from undelete to shared service providers to better customization support.

We have been running a pre-beta version for the hundreds of people in the Office Server Group for several months. We've been 100% dependent. After the holiday break, this week we rolled out Beta 1 of SharePoint to thousands of people in the entire Office group and upgraded to SharePoint Search on our intranet portal for all our employees. We're going even more broad with beta 2 including using the new publishing features from the CMS / SPS integration on MSWeb. The feedback has been great (particularly the search relevance, people and business data search) but of course, please do not deploy early beta software in production. Let us do it first.

Jeff

Content Management Server and SharePoint

System Account — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 14:41:00 GMT

By now many people have heard that the upcoming version of MCMS 2002 (which I’ll refer to as ‘CMS’ for the sake of this post) will be built entirely on the Windows SharePoint Services architecture (with SharePoint Portal integrating the new CMS publishing features). I wanted to give some insight into how we went about making this decision.

Going into the release cycle, the CMS team faced a set of challenges: Should we continue to iterate on the code base that the current CMS2002 product was built on or take a more radical path by switching to the Windows SharePoint Services infrastructure?

A few key individuals in the team took on the challenge to work out how an re-implementation of CMS would look like, working across teams with both the ASP.Net 2.0 team and the WSS team as the combined platform this would be based on. The driving force for this effort was derived from the developer and customer feedback we had received, some directly, some through the Microsoft field. This feedback provided the backbone for the goals that have defined the work for this release. Note that these goals are intentionally high-level, technology-agnostic in nature.

Provide much deeper integration between CMS and SharePoint functionality.
Make creation of dynamic, highly customized, content-centric websites dramatically faster and easier
Address the miscellaneous collection of 2nd order (compared to the call for integration) feedback that had collected up

I’ll expand on all three goals briefly because each one contributed to the ultimate decision what technology platform to build on.

The first goal came through loud and clear in many conversations with developers and customers ever since the MCMS 2002 release. This was phrased many times as: ‘Don’t make me pick between CMS and SharePoint every time I start a new website’. Other times, it was expressed as requests for more expansive versions of the MCMS 2002 Connector for SharePoint Technologies (codename “Spark”) which we had released as a first response. It was however becoming increasingly clear that continuing down a path of patching over the technology gap between the stacks scenario for scenario wasn’t a suitable long-term strategy to address the customer needs.
The second goal boiled down to lowering the amount of costly (to design/code/maintain) custom code all CMS users had to write: Why did everyone have to code to get site navigation? Or search integration? Or workflow flexibility beyond what was hard-coded into the product? Surely there was a better line to draw that would free customers from most of this routine work.
Thirdly, looking at the list of existing customer pain points was painful: add a security API, remove the scale limitation around the # of pages/channel, offer versioning and rollback for all assets, add search (seen a website without search lately?), figure out more flexible authentication, create a better workflow story, improve content deployment tools and reliability, eliminate client-side installs for the HTML editor as well as the site manager -- the list was long and distinguished. None of the requests were unreasonable and each clearly was driven by a valuable scenario. But the list was long. Too much to do in one release for the team. Well, assuming we had to do all the work, anyway.

At this point, it became very interesting to work out what it would mean to build the web content management product natively on Windows SharePoint Services. It would get the CMS team out of the business of worrying about repository services like check-in/check-out, versioning, backup/restore, DAV support, security etc. It would also lay a very strong foundation for goal #1: integration. Furthermore, the WSS team had plans to make authentication pluggable via the ASP.Net 2.0 provider model and they were working on integrating a complete workflow engine (Windows Workflow Foundation). The storage system had been designed to handle hundreds of thousands or even millions of items so scale wasn’t really a concern. And integrating on top of WSS would simplify integrating with SPS so published sites could use personalization, search, line-of-business integration and other capabilities.

The key question was whether the fundamental work of integrating the concepts of a web content management system into the larger SharePoint family was a) possible in principle and then b) effective enough from a development cost perspective to leave us room to improve the WCM application and take care of the pain points that would not already be addressed as part of the integration itself. Phrased another way, would the sum total development work to add template-based page rendering, web-based and client-based content authoring experiences, performance improvements to support Internet scale reliably, content staging, schedule trimming etc. still allow us to deliver a release in a reasonable timeframe AND leave room for much-needed feature adds to get a much more complete and reliable content staging feature (a pain point) and support for multi-lingual web sites?
It took several months of design and costing effort with several iterations to arrive at a feature list that achieved all these things with reasonable risk trade-offs. In the end, it turned out to be attractive enough to finalize an architecture based on the new and improved WSS “v3” platform.

At all times, we had tracked the amount of work required to ensure a smooth transition for existing customers as a “P0” (meaning work in this area would be considered even more important than the many features labeled “Priority 1”). Data formats would be different so we designed a data migration feature that could be run repeatedly and also offered incremental content migration. The custom code that made up the actual site application that each CMS customer created needed migration so we set out to make the APIs equivalent and kicked off work streams to create guidance for developers that would make whatever porting work was required as easy as possible. It was during this time that we also had a LOT of discussions on whether to attempt a shim for the CMS Publishing API. We ultimately decided against that route for a set of reasons: Despite a lot of design work and testing, it was likely that the shim would not work in 100% of cases as the underlying semantics of the SharePoint store and business logic were pretty different. We had looked at quite a few real-world examples and had to assume we would not succeed at 100% compatibility. The conclusion indeed was that it was likely that the shim would work for 80% of the code for 100% of customers (which would compel everyone to code changes and thus satisfying no one) rather than working 100% for 80% of customers (which would have been a better indication to go forward). In addition, we had plans on the books to REPLACE much of the need for the “standard” custom code as part of the second goal, e.g. for site navigation, deployment scripts, authoring console customization and workflow. In the end, we picked a path of 100% automated data migration coupled with assisted (but ultimately manual) code and template migration. Targeted call-downs to key customers met with approval so this became the plan of record.

Having built an overall plan that seemed to satisfy the constraints, we then started in on the work. And now, a little more than two years after the work began, we have shipped the first beta of what has turned into a very compelling overall Office 12 servers story of which WCM is now an integrated and fundamental part of to a limited audience of early adopters. We’re indeed heading for a much broader Beta 2 release that will let everyone have a look at the full web content management system that is built on top of WSS “v3” platform.

I’ll end this first chapter of the story here. We’ll be posting a ton of details on what is actually in the product, who would want to use the feature set and in which scenarios, how things work under the hood (starting with the ‘page rendering model’) and occasionally even why. We’ll also go into details on how the migration from existing, CMS-powered sites will work and how SPS sites will benefit from the enhanced publishing features.

Gerhard Schobbe
Group Program Manager – CMS Team

Taking the Show on the Road

System Account — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 10:32:00 GMT

I just finished a couple weeks where I got to present our “12”-wave plans to internal and external groups. I told audiences not only was I excited to talk about the new software, I was equally grateful to be released temporarily from the locked R&D lab and to sample the heady fragrances of the outer world. (No actual sunshine of course – it is Seattle after all.) Kidding aside, I see my family every night, but the teams are definitely starting to feel the burn as we try to get everything checked in, fixed, and polished for the public beta.

Highlights

There were a number of applause moments from folks who are currently running (or supporting) the 2003-wave product when I showed how we'll be addressing their feature requests for item-level security, lower-cost disaster recovery options, workflow, more flexible authentication, etc. The top moment was when I demonstrated fulltext search over customer data from our CRM system to about 750 technical field specialists and sales folks who have to find customer info every day.
We’ve put together some demos for how the new features and services interact; they’re fun to show. It's all based on our private beta bits (pretty close to what we showed at the PDC) so I am looking forward to freshening these with newer code.
The "common platform" message is getting across – it’s easy to describe how all that approval and versioning stuff that worked in the document scenario works almost identically for web content, or how just like you can get an RSS feed to announcements on a team site, you can also get an RSS feed to reports in a report library, etc.
This is overall just a pleasant time-window for the engineering folks to describe their work – we’ve got “new” features to show, we’re still getting pats on the back for the stuff we’ve improved, but no one has had the serious time to find all the things we’ll be working on in the next release. The honeymoon will end, but it’s nice while it lasts.

Lowlights

I still haven’t found the best way to get it all into an hour. With the new investments in Business Intelligence, Forms, and Content Management on top of the enhancements to the 2003 stuff, it’s super hard to deliver the overview without making it feel like a content-free screen-a-minute whirlwind tour. We still need to do a bunch of demo tuning to maximize the show:tell ratio.
Everyone wants to know the details of pricing, packaging, and naming. We’re not ready to announce yet, not even within Microsoft. It makes some folks grumpy, but the pain of saying “here it is” and then saying “nope, we were just kidding, here it is really” seems worse. My “Bear with us, we’ll get there” message isn't too satisfying.

Configure it Out

System Account — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 11:31:00 GMT

A couple of days ago, I reviewed how our test teams have been doing to extend out the configurations we validate as we move closer to the next beta. Beyond per-feature validation, the teams collaborate to produce a “config of the week” that combines several different topology elements into a deployment that’s then the basis for both focused and ad-hoc validation that week. Each week the team rolls a new config, with the previous week’s config left up for a while so the developers can debug, test fixes, etc.

In the earlier phases of the project, the testing was very directed – essentially try one thing and make sure it works– ADFS support or SQL auth for instance. Then it’s a case of “Lather, rinse, repeat” for existing and new config options. Once the stuff works in isolation, we move on to simple combinations, then more complex ones, etc. Last week’s “config of the week” was an extranet deployment with fully qualified domain names, ssl, simultaneous vanilla LDAP & Windows auth (on separate URL namespaces, both hosting the same base content), inter-farm federation (between two medium farms), a mix of 32-bit and 64-bit builds, all running a non-English language. This week they switched to an English build and added multiple shared service providers (our new way of hosting different search, user profile, and other services for different portals all on the same farm) so one portal on the farm got its user profile info from an LDAP-based directory while another synchronized with the Active Directory. Finally, they drastically dialed back the privileges for all the service accounts to lowest privilege level.

Now as a program manager on the team, I am of course supremely confident in our engineering methodology and dev/test prowess. But even I would have given even odds that the first time all this stuff was turned on at once, it would have taken a couple days to get pages to render reliably. (On my more cynical days, I might have predicted needing a haz-mat crew to wipe down what was left of the lab.) We did find a bunch of bugs, but all the pages on all the portals in both farms rendered in both auth contexts. They’d never admit it, but I think the test guys were a little disappointed. Obviously, there are still miles to go on config scale-up/scale-out, but I like the progress.

--Jonathan Kauffman, Group Program Manager, SharePoint Portal Server

InfoPath Forms as Part of SharePoint Sites

System Account — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 12:09:00 GMT

A big goal for our next release is to make it much easier to integrate enterprise applications (e.g. SAP, Dynamics, Siebel, custom databases and web services) into SharePoint Portals. Customers have asked us to make it more cost-effective to adapt processes and empower people with business data across the lifecycle from transactional input to analysis.

I posted earlier on our plans for analysis (or "BI Portals") with support for dashboards, key performance indicators, SQL Analysis and Reporting Services and Excel Services. I thought I’d give a pointer on the transactional side, specifically forms.

Of course, you can write ASP.NET applications and we make this easier in the next release, but I think the best way to do this is via re-usable and declarative forms that separate presentation from data - aka InfoPath. Many organizations today use InfoPath Forms combined with SharePoint. SharePoint is the place to discover and submit forms that talk to the back-end applications via their native web services or database interface or via an integration technology such as BizTalk. People have done lots of neat stuff with this like nurses spending more time with patients using Tablet PCs with InfoPath forms that later submit to multiple legacy hospital back-ends via web services front-ends.

While lots of people like the InfoPath + SharePoint + Web Services model, many have asked us for browser-rendered forms integrated with the SharePoint site. Besides line-of-business portals, this opens up lots of possiblities such as e-government initiatives that use the new CMS/SPS integration to build large scale internet sites for their citizens that expose browser rendered InfoPath forms that can interface with their existing systems or convert paper processes to digital.

Here’s a link to Tudor’s blog that goes the InfoPath roadmap in more detail.

Jeff

Page Anatomy

System Account — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 10:02:00 GMT

No this post is not about a popular TV show! We'll cover the integrated framework we are using in the next release of SPS + CMS (breaking news - now officially Office SharePoint Server 2007 - I will cover that in a second post later today) to enable people to create, manage and publish the spectrum of very simple to very sophisticated internet sites. We've learned a lot from a variety of customer feedback on ASP.NET, WSS, SPS, CMS, FrontPage and more and hopefully brought this all together in a powerful way. Let's go through them piece by piece.

1) Master Page

Master Pages are an ASP.NET 2.0 feature that lets child pages inherit and re-use a common design. This only makes development and maintenance of the site much easier. New pages don't have to re-do the work of the master. When you want to apply a new design, just change the master. Typically they will contain the branding, navigation, header and footer for the site. We used this to implement the overall "visual blueprint" of SharePoint including access to the end user features. In a more static internet site, little of this will be exposed which is why we'll provide different example master pages to support different scenarios. At rendering time, the page brings in the code from the master so it is always up to date. Master Pages have first class support in the next release of Windows SharePoint Services and Office SharePoint Designer 2007 (also new - wait until next post). In the picture above, the branding section and navigation are part of the master page. I should note that we'll have a lot richer navigation options out-of-box than SPS 2003 or CMS 2002 and if you don't like ours you can buy or build a 3rd-party controls written to the new ASP.NET 2.0 navigation provider interface and still use all our underlying site management capabilities.

2) Page Layouts

Page Layouts are a feature we evolved from CMS 2002 into the new integrated SPS \ CMS (oops Office SharePoint Server - still getting used to that) building on the Master Page support in the next release of WSS. In a large site, there a number of different page types (e.g. Product Description, Press Release, Executive Biography) that should have a standard look and feel. Web site owners not only want to save the work of redoing these, they also want to enforce consistency in the site across the authors and have the flexibility to change them later. The layout is separate from the underlying content in the site. The "page layout" is an ASP.NET page with special "field controls" (aka placeholders in CMS 2002) that know how to bind to WSS data. These layouts may or may not also have web part zones which tells the framework if users can add parts in the browser. More on this below. In the example above, we have a standard Adventure Works "News" Page Template with the authoring console visibile (it isn't by default and people who don't have the rights to see this won't). The stuff on the left is based on field controls and the stuff on the right is in a web part zone we have allowed the page editors to customize.

3) Page

Just like CMS 2002, we use the powerful concept of separating presentation from data in web publishing. In the Office SharePoint Server, the actual "page" is a item a WSS list and the framework knows how to assemble these. This list has columns that are bound to three field controls (title, picture, article). Re-using SharePoint lists for data storage lets us build on existing and new WSS list features like content types, check-in/out, versioning, per item security, workflow and more more. In edit mode, the field controls place constraints on the author for what content they can put in the "page".The screenshot above shows the page with the console visible where authors, approvers, etc. have the appropriate actions based on their role.

4) Web Parts Zones

One of the trickiest aspects of the design was getting the relationship between field controls and web parts right. Field controls are bound to a WSS item so workflow, etc. just works. By design, Web Parts are less tightly coupled. In fact one of their advantage is just using the browser, users can add them to the page. As with WSS and SPS V2, there's a lot of flexibility in this model for customization, personalization and targeting that site owners can choose to use.

a) Customization allows parts to be added for all users - we see a lot of site owners restricting it to a few people for more productive site design in just the browser. It will be fun to see what stuff people do upfront using Page Layouts vs. just-in-time via Web Parts. Feel free to choose any point on the spectrum on using field controls exclusively to using web parts or a combination.

b) Personalization allows each user to set their own parts in the zone - ASP.NET and WSS do the bookkeeping in SQL tables for this. There's a lot of pages where enabling personalization makes sense but many where it does not and you can turn it off.

c) Targeting is an SPS V2 feature (one many CMS 2002 customers asked for as well - it comes return in the trade for page layouts) that lets publishers show different content to developers vs. marketing based on their "audience". In the example above, the top right web part could be targeted just to sales people but everyone else accessing the page wouldn't see the part. We have made targeting even easier in the next release by letting you directly target to an existing group vs. requiring the work (and the privleges) to set up an audience that maps to the group.

5) General Purpose Web Parts

Almost home! One thing we noticed across CMS and SharePoint was many people were writing the same code over and over for many pages and sites particularly for summary "landing pages" and views on business data. While I love our flexibility with ASP.NET, I really want to reduce the code required to build and maintain cool sites. We have also learned the robustness of the ASP.NET and WSS security model can be a double-edged sword. To install a new web part in SharePoint, you need pretty advanced priveleges which many IT admins have restricted in consolidated intranet SharePoint farms and internet prescences for obvious reasons. Often they don't have the time or resources to test new potential web parts. So what we've tried to do is create some extremely flexible, data-driven parts that empower the site publishers.

a) Summary Links and Content-By-Query - These parts address the incredibly common practice of tweaking HTML tables with a list of links and formatting of associated pictures and text. We will be provided a lot of different styles out of the box and support adding your own CSSs. The middle web part in the right column is an example of this. We'll have two versions - one that does versioning and workflow of the links as part of the page and a second (Content-By-Query) that lets you query content elsewhere in the site. We'll probably tweak these names before we ship. But hopefully, a lot less table tweaking to build cooler lists of links, images and people.

b) Business Data Web Parts - We are greatly enhancing the WYSWIG XSLT web part that came with V2 called Data View and let you do rich formatting of remote XML or database calls. You can use this directly against your remote source but it will also be the rendering foundaiton for re-usable business data conncetions we are calling the Business Data Catalog. You can use the BDC to register entities and actions from remote LOB systems like SAP, Siebel and Dynamics as well as databases vs. hard coding them into every web part. Just like with content - we are trying to provide separation of presentation from data and easier re-use and customization. In addition to the BDC parts, we'll have parts designed for simple business intelligence scenarios. In the example above, I've shown a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) Web Part that can bring in data from SQL Analysis Services, Excel Services, SharePoint lists or even just static data.

We're eager to see all the cool intranet, extranet and internet presences you build with the next release!

-- Jeff

1	Contoso Inc. purchases a total of 2,300 seats: 1,000 Office 365 E1, 500 Office 365 E2, 500 Office 365 E3, 300 Office 365 K2, and plans to invite 35 vendors as external users for various event activities. Contoso will not need more storage beyond its default allocation.
· Total available tenant storage quota = 10GB + (2,000 * 500MB) = 1010GBs <~1TB> · Individuals who get My Site storage (500MB each) = 2,000

2	Fabrikam purchases a total of 45,000 seats: 30,000 Office 365 E1, 10,000 Office 365 E3, 5,000 Office 365 K1, and plans to invite 250 clients as external users to share drafts and final deliverables. The company will require an additional 100GB.
· Total available tenant storage quota = 10GB + (40,000 * 500MB) + 100GB =20,110GBs <~ 20TBs> · Individuals who get My Site storage (500MB each) = 40,000