10 years at iTech-Ed Ltd

2014 is a bit of a special year here at iTech-Ed Ltd. It was our 10th anniversary on 1 February. I thought you might be interested in some of the changes that have taken place in that time.

Before we set up iTech-Ed Ltd, I had worked for Xephon for 18 years. Xephon ran briefings on mainframe topics, ran surveys on mainframe topics, and created user guides to things like databases. In 1986, they decided to try a small publication by CICS professionals for CICS professionals. They called it CICS Update. It sold very well – remember there was no Google or Internet in those days and it was difficult to easily get your hands on working bits of code and alternative solutions to common problems. VM Update followed in 1987, and then a whole range of mainframe-based publications. I was there at the very beginning and over the next 18 years edited most of them.

In 2004, Xephon sold the name and the publications to TCI publications. We set up iTech-Ed and we got the contract to edit around five or six of these Updates each month. My first activity, at one minute after midnight on 1 February 2004, was to upload the new issues to the Web site.

Over the next three and half years, iTech-Ed was responsible for encouraging technical people to write articles, editing and checking them to produce each edition every month, paying contributors, and sending the publications to the printers and putting them on the Web site. A small team of experts checked the text for punctuation and grammar as well as technical accuracy.

At the same time, iTech-Ed was carrying out consultancy work and producing technical documentation that was used in-house by a number of well-known companies. And we also started blogging at Mainframe Update using Blogger and Mainframe World on IT Toolbox

Towards the end of 2007, the Updates ceased publication, and the very first Virtual IMS user group meeting was held using Webex. The user group was immediately very popular and was sponsored by NEON Enterprise Software. That year also saw a growth in number of companies using our Web design and development services.

In 2008 the company took its first steps in offering advice on social media and how organizations could use it both to get their message out there and also to interact with customers in a positive way. It was a hard job back then. I also qualified as a Microsoft Office trainer – MOS MI – and ran a number of on-site training courses.

We picked up the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook – the de facto reference work for mainframers – and have worked with Arcati for many years producing this. The 2014 edition is now available from arcati.com/newyearbook14.

I was made an IBM Champion in 2009 and have been a champion every year since. As well as producing internal documentation for companies, I have had numerous articles published in a variety of Web-based and printed publications, such as Enterprise Tech Journal. In 2010 I attended Microsoft SharePoint Administrator and Developer training. And I started my regular blog on Destination z in July 2011, where I’ve written about Big Data , the Internet of Things, Deep Learning, and, of course, mainframes.

Also in 2011, Fundi Software took over as sponsor of the Virtual IMS user group and we then launched the Virtual CICS user group. Both of them enjoy regular meetings and newsletters and have around 400 members. I chair both of these user groups, and we use Citrix GoToMeeting to facilitate the webinars.

Over recent years, we’ve published guest blogs and I’ve ghost written blogs for many other blog sites. I’ve also contributed to IBM’s IOD blogs for the past couple of years. And I’ve created podcasts for a number of different companies.

So, here we are – 2014. 10 years in business and still very much in demand and looking forward to the future. If you want to get in contact with us, our Web site is itech-ed.com or you can e-mail trevor@itech-ed.com. You can Like us on Facebook at fb.com/itech-ed, follow me on Twitter at @t_eddolls, connect on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/teddolls, or follow us on Google+ at google.com/+TrevorEddolls.

Lync and Yammer

Over the past couple of years I’ve been working with SharePoint at various sites, and more recently with Lync and Yammer. Now these are two products that mainframers may not be that familiar with and I thought people might be interested to know more.

Microsoft Lync was called Microsoft Office Communicator. It’s an Instant Messaging client – like MSN Messenger or Yahoo! Messenger – that can be used either with Microsoft Lync Server or Lync Online, which is available with Microsoft Office 365. In fact it is an up-to-date version of Windows Messenger which was used with Microsoft Exchange Server.

As well as running on PCs, Lync 2010 has Windows Phone, Android, and iOS apps. Lync provides instant messaging, Voice Over IP, and video conferencing facilities, and uses Microsoft Outlook contacts stored in a Microsoft Exchange Server. Office can show whether other people are working on the same document, and Lync allows file sharing.

What makes it so useful is those really unimportant e-mails that you don’t need an audit trail for can be replaced by Instant Messaging conversations. That cuts down on the number of e-mails that need to be backed up each evening and eventually stored on the off-chance they’re important. And, of course, you can type or you can talk. And you can set up meetings with people in offices around the country and video conference – assuming your organization has the bandwidth to do so.

Lync and Sharepoint integrate to an extent – they’re both from Microsoft. For example, there’s an “online presence indicator next to an individual’s name wherever their name appears in a site collection in SharePoint”. “Assist in providing colleague suggestions for use in My Sites, My Profiles, and People Search”. And “through Lync, provide access to SharePoint people and skills search including names and skills and a link to the user’s My Site”. Thank you to J D Wade, who’s blog at http://wadingthrough.com/2012/04/04/lync-and-sharepoint-integration-more-than-presence-information/ was the source for these examples.

Yammer is described as an enterprise social network service. It was launched in 2008, but, more importantly, Microsoft bought it last year. Yammer acts like a corporate Facebook service. It allows people to send message to other individuals or to groups. Only people with the same domain name in their e-mail address can access the corporate Yammer network. As well as access from a PC, there’s Android Windows Phone and iPhone apps available.

Chris Wright, in his blog at http://www.cmswire.com/cms/social-business/five-yammer-features-that-sharepoint-users-are-going-to-love-020339.php, lists features of Yammer that SharePoint users will like. Chris says “SharePoint has never really had its own ‘messaging’ system, so the Yammer Inbox fills a real gap”. Chris adds: “Yammer polls are a nice quick way to ask a question of people in your community, and will add a lot to the sense of community SharePoint is trying to foster”. Looking ahead, Chris says that documents held in a Yammer feed can be edited in Office web apps. He says: “This is a great example of a few of the features SharePoint is bringing to the table to improve Yammer (rather than the other way round)”.

We know that Microsoft plans to integrate Yammer with SharePoint and Office 365. It appears that Yammer will eventually replace SharePoint’s newsfeed. It seems there’s a plan to share documents with Yammer using SharePoint. And Yammer users will be able to upload and store documents using SkyDrive Pro. A file preview and edit capability with Yammer will work in conjunction with Office Web Apps. There’s even talk about translation capabilities being added to Yammer. Eventually Yammer and Lync (and Exchange) will be integrated.

The integration of Yammer builds on Open Graph – an open API protocol for following objects external to a social network site used by Facebook. IBMers are perhaps more familiar with OpenSocial 2.0 for IBM Connections. Both provide a way for people to follow things.

What makes Yammer and SharePoint integration so interesting is that staff can use a the type of social media they’re familiar with from home in a business situation. If I can see you’re meeting client A tomorrow, I might ask you to check how he thinks project X is going. Or I might even just want to say hello to someone who is an occasional customer. Yammer is a business tool that is fun and easy to use – certainly compared to the more heavyweight Web parts etc of SharePoint.

The fact that Instant Messaging and social media can be included in a business environment shows that these tools are maturing. And, like BYOD, it shows end users are driving the environment they want to experience at work. I wonder how long it will be, with IBM’s pushing of social media tools, before something like this is available to everyone on z/OS.

SharePoint 2007 site collection auditing

We start the year with another in our series of SharePoint hints and tips from our expert Darren Pritchard. This time he’s looking at how to sucessfully audit SharePoint site collections.

To enable/disable SharePoint auditing:

1. Open the site that you wish to audit
2. Click ‘Site Actions’
3. Select ‘Site Settings’
4. Click ‘Modify All Site Settings’
5. Under ‘Site Collection Administration’ you have ‘Site collection audit settings’
6. You would see Figure 1.
7. Here you can select what you wish to audit
8. Be very careful, SharePoint will not automatically purge these audit logs. They will continue to grow as long as they are enabled. I have seen content databases with 80GB of audit files!

Figure 1: Configure Audit settings page

To trim audit files:

1. Create the batch file shown in Figure 2. Note: CONTENTDATABASE is the name of the database within SQL.
2. Save it as ‘Purge Audit Logs.bat’
3. This will need to be run on your SharePoint Web frontend server as an Administrator. Do not be alarmed if it takes a little while to run. The time it takes depends on the amount of audit logs you are trying to trim.

SET STSADM="c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\bin\STSADM.EXE"

%stsadm% -o trimauditlog -date -databasename

Pause

Figure 2: Purge Audit Logs.bat

I would suggest running this on a system without users because it may have an impact on performance.

If you have large amounts of audit log files, I would recommend running the trim command on a month’s worth of audit logs at a time. The SQL transaction log file will grow very large during the trim process.

Once you have trimmed the audit logs you will need to run a shrink database task within SQL to reclaim the space used during the trim process.

I'd like to thank Darren for his continuing contributions, and a happy New Year to everyone.

Mainframe maintenance – a new paradigm with new challenges

For many organizations, we’re beginning to see a new model of how IT customer support can be organized – and the model is coming from management who are completely platform-agnostic. To them, IT is IT – it doesn’t matter whether something runs on a mainframe or a distributed platform. And this new way of working brings with it new challenges.

This whole change in staff structure is also being encouraged by the advent of the zEnterprise hybrid machines with their zBX blades running everything from AIX to, potentially, Windows. A consequence is that a mainframe specialist could be dealing with a Linux error message, or a Windows SharePoint guru might be trying to understand what’s going on inside CICS. What can you do to help them?

Or let’s suppose in a more traditional mainframe environment, for whatever reason, you lost some of your top technical people. Perhaps they got jobs elsewhere or perhaps they retired early, but suddenly you find yourself with a huge knowledge gap. Maybe you can transfer someone across from the distributed team. Or maybe you can recruit one of the new generation of youngsters who are learning the benefits of mainframe computing. But whatever you do, there will be a fairly long period of time during which anything out of the ordinary occurring is going to leave everyone scratching their heads and searching Google – whereas, previously, your in-house expert knew exactly what to do. So, in this situation, what are you going to do?

Let’s not worry too much at this stage about Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and performance targets. Let’s simply focus on the problem. How can any organization, irrespective of how its IT team is constructed, ensure that appropriate expertise is available at all times to whichever staff members are available?

Obviously you can have the manuals, and some could be on the IBM mainframe portal, but that doesn’t give you speedy access to the necessary information. A Google search will reveal hundredsof pages of results, but it takes a degree of expertise to sift through those and find the correct one quickly. And someone without any expertise could spend a very long time reading solutions to completely different problems before ever finding the right one. Not a satisfactory way to provide IT services to customers – whether internal or external to the organization.

So what would be a good solution? How can these issues of staff working outside their comfort zone be dealt with in a way that is good for the business? And what kind of a solution will still be able to ensure those business-critical mainframes are being supported in a year’s time, in five year’s, or even further into the future?

This is where a new breed of solutions that can address this coming challenge are positioning themselves. One of these, Softlib with its iSolve product (www.softlibsw.com/mvs.aspx), allows an organization to combine all its IT-related information into a single virtual library. That means users – your harassed staff – have to search in only one place, not as previously in many places, to find a solution to any problem. And once you have a single location for information available, you can allow product champions and other IT-literate staff access to it – which should result in more empowered and satisfied users and fewer calls to the Help Desk.

It makes sense to organize the information in this single virtual library using themes, so CICS information might be one theme, IMS another, Linux a third, etc. The information in the library starts from IBM and third-party software vendors’ manuals, and can be supplemented with information from newsgroups and other online resources. Plus, you can add your own technical expertise.

Access to the information can be from a Web browser or a terminal server. It can be hosted locally, or as a cloud-based resource. The advantage of the cloud route is that the information is looked after by Softlib and they already have access to a huge number of the resources you’ll need. So you can start using the facility almost immediately. Plus the online documentation is automatically updated when new information becomes available. Other benefits include knowledge usage analytics that can help address missing or outdated knowledge, and seamless integration with CRM, bug-tracking, Service Desk, content-management applications, etc.

All in all, Softlib’s iSolve product has a lot to offer most mainframe sites, and certainly provides an answer to the question of what to do if you restructure your IT customer support and need to extend the working expertise of your staff onto other platforms such as AIX and Windows. It also offers a solution to the problem of losing key mainframe experts in a mainframe-only environment.

Get the size of all site collections for a Web application

Get the size of all site collections for a Web application

This week, Darren Pritchard, our SharePoint guru, lays out clearly exactly what needs to be done in order to find out the size of all site collections for a Web application in SharePoint 2007.

The first step is to create a batch file containing:

SET STSADM="c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\bin\STSADM.EXE"
%STSADM% -o enumsites -url SiteStats.txt
Pause

Pretty obviously, where it says , you need to change that to the name of the Web application that you need to produce the statistics for.

Next you need to copy the batch file to your Web front-end server and run it.

The output will be in a file called SiteStats.txt. Open the file and for each site collection you will see ‘StorageUsedMB=’ and a value. It’s the value that you’re interested in.

On a completely different topic: on Tuesday 13 September the Virtual CICS user group meets. Rocket Software’s Charles Jones will be discussing “CICS TS 4.2: Leveraging event processing and high-performance Java”. More details about how to register can be found on the user group Web site at fundi.com/virtualcics.

Create custom permissions – for SharePoint

It’s been a while since we’ve published one of iTech-Ed Associate Darren Pritchard’s SharePoint 2007 beginners’ guides. This time he’s explaining custom permissions and how to create them.

Let’s start off by defining what we’re talking about. Specifying custom permission levels give you more control over the degree of access users can have to SharePoint sites, site collections, or site content. In effect, you create a new security group.

So, let’s run through the steps:

1. From the site collection click ‘Site Actions’ 
2. Click ‘Site Settings’
3. Under ‘Users and Permissions’ click ‘Advanced Permissions’ 
4. You will then see a list for permission level group
5. Select the ‘Settings’ drop down
6. Click ‘Permission Levels’
7. Click ‘Add a Permission Level’
8. You will then be able to create your own security group.

It’s worth remembering that only this site and all its sub-sites will have access to your new group.

Below is a list of permissions that can be set. Please note that selecting one may also result in others being selected because they are required as part of your selection.

List Permissions:

• Manage Lists – create and delete lists, add or remove columns in a list, and add or remove public views of a list.
• Override Check Out – discard or check in a document that is checked out to another user.
• Add Items – add items to lists, add documents to document libraries, and add Web discussion comments.
• Edit Items – edit items in lists, edit documents in document libraries, edit Web discussion comments in documents, and customize Web Part Pages in document libraries.
• Delete Items – delete items from a list, documents from a document library, and Web discussion comments in documents.
• View Items – view items in lists, documents in document libraries, and view Web discussion comments.
• Approve Items – approve a minor version of a list item or document.
• Open Items – view the source of documents with server-side file handlers.
• View Versions – view past versions of a list item or document.
• Delete Versions – delete past versions of a list item or document.
• Create Alerts – create e-mail alerts.
• View Application Pages – view forms, views, and application pages. Enumerate lists.

Site Permissions:

• Manage Permissions – create and change permission levels on the Web site and assign permissions to users and groups.
• View Usage Data – view reports on Web site usage.
• Create Subsites – create subsites such as team sites, Meeting Workspace sites, and Document Workspace sites.
• Manage Web Site – grants the ability to perform all administration tasks for the Web site as well as manage content.
• Add and Customize Pages – add, change, or delete HTML pages or Web Part Pages, and edit the Web site using a Windows SharePoint Services-compatible editor.
• Apply Themes and Borders – apply a theme or borders to the entire Web site.
• Apply Style Sheets – apply a style sheet (.css file) to the Web site.
• Create Groups – create a group of users that can be used anywhere within the site collection.
• Browse Directories – enumerate files and folders in a Web site using SharePoint Designer and Web DAV (Distributed Authoring and Versioning) interfaces.
• View Pages – view pages in a Web site.
• Enumerate Permissions – enumerate permissions on the Web site, list, folder, document, or list item.
• Browse User Information – view information about users of the Web site.
• Manage Alerts – manage alerts for all users of the Web site.
• Use Remote Interfaces – use SOAP, (Simple Object Access Protocol) Web DAV, or SharePoint Designer interfaces to access the Web site.
• Use Client Integration Features – use features that launch client applications. Without this permission, users will have to work on documents locally and upload their changes.
• Open – allows users to open a Web site, list, or folder in order to access items inside that container.
• Edit Personal User Information – allows a user to change his or her own user information, such as adding a picture.

Personal Permissions:

• Manage Personal Views – create, change, and delete personal views of lists.
• Add/Remove Personal Web Parts – add or remove personal Web Parts on a Web Part Page.
• Update Personal Web Parts – update Web Parts to display personalized information.

Armed with that information, you’re now in a position to try to create a new security group and give a person or a group of people a different level of access from what they had previously.

Where do the tablets go?

So, your organization has a mainframe – had one for years – and everything is nicely locked down. You can recover almost up to the minute the system or subsystem crashed (which it hardly ever does), and you’ve got people who seem to know, almost by instinct these days, when something isn’t performing quite right.

On top of that, you’ve got another layer of IT. People who use laptops with Windows and/or people who use Linux, and possibly bits or Solaris dotted around. These people have more interesting lives. They have to fight to get the best performance. Their back-up strategy is good if they can recover to last night! They probably still insist on people using XP as their Windows operating system because Vista was no good and it’s a bit of a jump to Windows 7. Plus they’re probably coming to the end of a virtualization project to reduce the number of server boxes they’ve got lying around. Parhaps they’re installing Citrix to virtualize desktops, or SharePoint to produce an intranet and join up all the separate islands of computing.

Plus you’ve got remote users, who are logging in over somebody else’s wifi. Or they might be using the 3G network on their smartphone. It’s your fault, of course, because you spent so long changing your CICS and IMS applications so they could be used in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) environment. But, I guess you have strategies in place to secure the connection, and secure what applications they can run, and what data they can see.
In fact, you’re probably convincing senior managers in your organization that it really was their idea all along to combine the strengths of mainframe computing with the flexibility of distributed systems. What your organization needs is a nice z196 mainframe – perhaps one of the planned-but-not-quite-announced Business Class (BC) machines.

For those of you who’ve spent the past year on Mars, the z196 brings together the latest mainframe technology with POWER7 and x86 IBM blade systems, giving potential users z/OS, AIX, Linux, and (coming soon) Windows, all on the one box. At this stage, I should point out that there are very strong arguments for going to zLinux. It’s been around for 10 years now, and is just becoming an overnight success – as they say.

So, there you are thinking that you can use your mainframe experience and expertise to tidy up all the other computing areas in your organization and get them under your control when HR tells you they have supplied everyone on the board of directors with an iPad. Now, you might think this is a good opportunity to bring some of the board into the 21st century, but it creates yet another rip in the secure blanket you've been throwing over the company’s computing infrastructure. Can you set up a security policy for iPads? Well, yes, if they come into a Microsoft server – in the same way you would for Mac users. Can you allow board members to download apps? Or can they have only pre-approved ones? Where do you start building proper security? It’s back to herding cats!

And don’t think I’ve singled out iPads, Androids have similar issues. You can download firewalls and anti-virus software for them, but it’s not the same as RACF!

And it might not just be board members – you may still have road warriors that want the small form factor of a tablet. The issues of theft or forgetfulness compound your security problems.

My suggestion at this stage is to wait for Windows 8 tablets, and hope that the policies laid down by the non-mainframe ITers will apply to them. And by then, Windows will be running on our z196 box. So everyone’s a winner!

Custom branding with SharePoint

Custom branding with SharePoint

For those of you working at new SharePoint 2007 sites, I have more of Darren Pritchard’s excellent beginner’s guides. This time he’s looking at custom branding.

There are a few different parts to custom branding a SharePoint Web application. You will need SharePoint Designer to create and change the pages. You will need to create a new master page and a CSS file to apply to the master page.

SharePoint Designer is a free application that is available from Microsoft at www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=baa3ad86-bfc1-4bd4-9812-d9e710d44f42&displaylang=en. SharePoint Designer allows you to open your SharePoint Web application to see and access all the component parts and elements of the application. You are able to navigate through the whole site, which will give you a better idea of how a SharePoint application is built. Be carefully not to change anything unless you know what it is – you could break the Web application if you remove or change the wrong thing!

SharePoint Designer also allows the pages and code to be edited, which is good news for someone new to SharePoint because everything is available within one location.

Let’s start with master pages. These are the templates that are applied to all pages on a SharePoint Web application. They are written in ASP.NET 2.0. When applying custom branding to a SharePoint Web application, this is where the majority of the development will be carried out.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are used to style the master page (just like on most Web pages). Within a SharePoint Web application, there is a ‘core.css’ file, which can be found in the ‘_styles’ folder. You won’t be able to navigate here without using SharePoint Designer. This is used by all of the master pages that come by default in a Web application. This file should not be changed. It is best practice to create a bespoke .css file and use this to override the core.css. This means that you will not affect the default master page styles that are used by other pages.

Content PlaceHolders Controls are regions of content on a master page that are predefined but customizable within SharePoint. So, for example, the PlaceHolder is in bold, which is housed within an HTML table:

<!-- Search Start-->
  <table border="0" cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 width="100%" class="customcss.class" >
    <tr>
      <td>

      <asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderSearchArea" runat="server">
      <SharePoint:DelegateControl runat="server" ControlId="SmallSearchInputBox"/>
      </asp:ContentPlaceHolder>

      </td>
    </tr>
  </table>
<!-- Search End -->

This is an example of a table that will contain the search placeholder shown below:

Any images that are referenced from within the master page must be able to be viewed by all users. Otherwise, users will be asked to log-in every time they refresh the page if the don’t have permission to the library where the image is stored.

I would suggest creating a folder for your master page within the ‘http://Your App/Style%20Library/images’ and locating all of the images there. This will use the standard image locations from the master pages, but keep them separate so that they can be identified easily during future development or maintenance.

When you’re ready to import branding into a Web application, you need to use the following guidelines.

To import a master page:

1    In SharePoint Designer open up your Web application

2    Navigate to http://your site/_catalogs/masterpage

3    Click File

4    Click Import

5    Add your master page here.

To import an image:

1    In SharePoint Designer open up your Web application

2    Navigate to http://your site/Images

3    Click File

4    Click Import

5    Add your image here.

To import a CSS file:

1    In SharePoint Designer open up your Web application

2    Navigate to http://your site/_styles

3    Click File

4    Click Import

5    Add your CSS file here.

Good luck with your modifying your branding.

All change in the office

It started with me looking for the best ‘office’ application to run under Honeycomb (Android 3) on a tablet – but I got sidetracked. It seems that Oracle has dumped OpenOffice, and Microsoft has a beta of Office 365 – it’s new cloud variant of the ubiquitous office software.

Oracle has given OpenOffice back to the user community, while at the same time strongly supporting open standards such as ODF (Open Document Format). Oracle got OpenOffice with its acquisition of Sun Microsystems a few months ago. Last September, unhappy community members set up the Document Foundation and LibreOffice. There was some talk of Oracle rewriting OpenOffice using JavaFX, but nothing seems to have come of that. There was also talk of Oracle cloud office, but again that seems to have sunk without trace. You can download the latest LibreOffice version from www.libreoffice.org/download/.

It’s worth noting that IBM is a fan of OpenOffice. IBM did try to sell the office suite it got from its Lotus acquisition. Word Pro was based on Ami Pro, which Lotus had got from acquiring Samna back in 1990. In 2007, IBM introduced Lotus Symphony, which included a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation program. Version 3 came out in October last year.

Google Apps free offers Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Sites (to create Web sites and group wikis), and Google Docs (for online documents, presentations, and spreadsheets). Google Apps for Business offers Google Apps Marketplace, Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office, and more.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is moving ahead with a cloud version of its Office software. You can join the beta program for Office 365 at www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/small-business/beta.aspx.

The Office 365 beta is a subscription service providing Office Web apps and online communications and collaboration services. So you get Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, plus e-mail and calendar facilities, team sites (like SharePoint), and instant messaging and online meetings. Look out for Microsoft Lync 2010, which replaces Office Communications Online and Office Live Meeting.

And remember, to sound like you know about cloud computing, say things like Software as a Service (SaaS) and Windows Azure, which is Microsoft’s cloud storage and processing platform.

If you’re tempted, Office 365 Small Business costs $6 per user per month. Google Apps for Business cost is cheaper at $60 per year or there’s a free version. On the other hand, it can be argued that the Microsoft offering is more complete and Google’s lacks Outlook integration. It all depends on how dedicated a Microsoft site you’re at or how keen you’ve been to embrace Google’s products.

Now, what am I going to put on that tablet?

Installing and removing solutions from SharePoint

I said a couple of weeks ago that I have been working with iTech-Ed Associate Darren Pritchard at a site that was fairly new to SharePoint 2007. Darren has written some beginner's guides for them and we thought other sites new to SharePoint might benefit from the information.

Here are Darren's instructions for installing a new SharePoint solution.

First locate the .wsp file that you want to install into SharePoint 2007 (SP2007), then place it (the .wsp file) into the c:\temp folder on the SP2007 server.
You'll need to create a batch (Install Solution.bat) file the first time, and then afterwards you can just edit it. The batch file looks like:

SET STSADM="c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\bin\STSADM.EXE"
%STSADM% -o addsolution -filename <WEBPART NAME>.wsp
Pause

Replace the tag '<WEBPART NAME>' with the name of your solution and save to c:\temp on the SP2007 server. Then, on the SP2007 server, run the Install Solution.bat file from within the c:\temp folder. You should then see that the solution has successfully been installed.

Next you need to deploy the solution to your Web applications. To do this, open SharePoint Central Admin and click 'Operations' and 'Solution Management'. From there you'll see your new solution, click on the solution name to enter the properties.

Click 'Deploy Solution'. Then change 'Deploy To?' to your Web application and set the 'Deploy When?' to when you wish to deploy the solution. Finally, click 'OK'. This will deploy the solution to your Web application.

Don't forget that you have to activate the solution in your Web application. To do this, click Site Actions/Site Settings/Modify All Site Settings. Then under 'Site Collection Administration' click 'Site Collection Features'. Locate your new solution and click 'Activate'.

You can now use this solution within your Web application.

In terms of house-keeping, backup the .wsp and .bat file from c:\temp and the job's done.

If you need to remove (or retract) the solution then use the following instructions.

From SharePoint Central Admin click 'Operations' then 'Solution Management'. Click on the name of the solution that you want to remove to enter the solution properties.

Click Retract solution. Make sure that 'Retract From?' is set to 'All content Web Applications'. Set the 'Retract When?' setting and click 'OK'. This will remove the solution from all the Web applications.

Create the following batch file (Remove Solution.bat):

cd c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\bin
stsadm -o deletesolution -name <SOLUTIONNAME >.wsp
pause

Replace the tag '<SOLUTIONNAME>' with the name of your solution and save to c:\temp on the SharePoint2007 (SP2007) server. Then run the Remove Solution.bat file from within the c:\temp folder. This will remove the solution from your SP2007 farm.

Delete the .bat file that you just saved in c:\temp on the SP2007 server.

The solution is now removed.

There'll be more of Darren's SharePoint hints and tips in future blogs.

How to create a custom Web Part for SharePoint

I’ve been working recently with Darren Pritchard at a site that’s fairly new to SharePoint. They came up with a number of fairly basic ‘how to’ questions and Darren has put together some basic information for them. It seemed that if these new SharePoint users and had lots of questions, then so would many other sites. So it made sense to make this information available to the SharePoint community as a whole. This site was using SharePoint 2007.

The first thing to do when creating a custom Web Part is to set up a development environment. You need to create a development SharePoint 2007 (SP2007) server and give it a name. For SharePoint 2007 you need Visual Studio 2008 (VS2008). It’s worth noting that you can’t use Visual Studio 2010 (VS2010).

Install VS2008 onto your development SP2007 server. Next install the VS2008 SharePoint plug-in called “VSeWSSv13_AMD64_Build-433.exe”. This can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=fb9d4b85-da2a-432e-91fb-d505199c49f6. This plug-in adds the Web Part project to VS2008. Once this is in place, you’ll be able to actually create a custom Web Part.

Open VS2008, then click ‘File/New/Project’. Find the ‘Visual C#’ list and expand that. Next click ‘SharePoint’, and in the right-hand box click ‘Web Part’. Give your new project a name. The naming convention is og.wp.%Name%, where:
og = your organization (abbreviated, eg use gs if you’re company is called ‘Great Shoes’, etc.)
wp = Web Part
.%Name% = the name of the Web Part.

Make sure you tick ‘Create directory for solution’ – see Figure below.

Next you’ll see a trust level box. Make sure that it looks like this:

And click ‘OK’.

You can now go ahead and write your Web Part using Visual C#.

The next stage shouldn’t be missed – it’s testing your custom Web Part. You need to tell VS2008 where to deploy the Web Part. Click ‘Project’, ‘%PROJECT NAME% Properties’. On the tabs click ‘Debug’ and change the ‘Start browsers with URL’ box to point to your test site, eg http://yourdevelopmentserver:5003/. Click the cross in the right hand corner to save the changes.

To deploy your Web Part, click ‘Build’, ‘Deploy %PROJECT NAME%’. This will add the solution to SharePoint central admin and deploy the solution to your test site. You can add your Web Part to your test site in the same way that you would add any other Web Parts, and now you can test it.

It’s useful to know how to retract a test Web Part. Open your project in VS2008, click ‘Build’ and then ‘Retract Solution’. This will retract the solution from your test site and remove it from SharePoint central admin. You now need to manually remove the pointer from your test site. To do this open your test site and click ‘Site Actions/Site Settings/Modify All Site Settings’. Under Galleries click ‘Web Parts’ and delete your development Web Part.

Assuming that your Web Part worked as planned (finally!), you’ll want to deploy your solution into your live environment. Firstly, locate your project, eg ‘C:\Users\%USERNAME%\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Projects’, then double-click on your new project, and locate the debug folder. Within this you should find %PROJECT NAME%.wsp. Finally copy this .wsp file onto your Live SharePoint Server.

I’ll share Darren’s full instructions for installing a solution another time.

SharePoint software enhancements

Sometimes SharePoint 2010 isn’t quite as easy to use as perhaps its users would like. Not to worry though, there are a number of useful software products out there that are free and can plug those gaps. Let’s have a look at some of them.

The first I want to mention is .NET Reflector V6.5 from Cambridge UK-based Red Gate Software (www.red-gate.com). There is a paid for Pro version, but most times, the free one will do. It explores and analyses compiled .NET assemblies, allowing users to view them in C#, Visual Basic, and IL (Intermediate Language). It supports all .NET assemblies including 4.0 (at the moment you’re probably using it with 3.5 with SharePoint). The list of things it can do is quite long, but here are just some: it find usages of classes and methods, including virtual method overrides; it finds where types are exposed or instantiated; it supports Linq query expressions, Lambda expressions, and anonymous methods; it provides code URL support; users can jump to a class or method straight from their code in Visual Studio. You can download a copy from reflector.red-gate.com/download.aspx.

The second one on my list is CAML Query Builder from Brussels, Belgium-based U2U. You can download the software from www.u2u.net/res/Tools/SharePointCamlQueryBuilder.aspx. What you get is an application page where you can build a CAML query. The CAML query itself is stored in a list from where you can further work with it. CAML (Collaborative Application Mark-up Language) is an XML-based query language that helps users query, build, and customize Web sites based on Windows SharePoint Services. The XML elements define various aspects of a WSS (Windows SharePoint Services) site. This tool helps users build their CAML Queries.

Number three on my list is Fiddler2. This is a Web debugging proxy that logs all HTTP(S) traffic between a computer and the Internet. The software allows users to inspect all HTTP(S) traffic, set breakpoints, and generally ‘fiddle’ with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler includes an event-based scripting subsystem, and can be extended using any .NET language. Fiddler can be downloaded from www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/version.asp.

In order to get things done to SharePoint 2010, a knowledge of PowerShell can be quite important. PowerShell is a scripting language that uses cmdlets to get things done. Cmdlets perform an action and usually return a Microsoft .NET Framework object, which can then be piped (connected) to another command in the pipeline. This way, quite complicated commands can be created from simple building blocks. To make life easier, users can download PowerGUI Script Editor – a graphical user interface and script editor. The latest version is 2.1.1, and it can be download from www.powergui.org/downloads.jspa.

So, if you are using SharePoint, these four free applications will make your life easier.
I’d be interested to hear of any others that users would recommend.

A look at SharePoint

Let me start with an apology for talking about a non-mainframe technology. I suppose my justification is that this a major piece of software in data centres running Windows. I’ve recently completed two weeks of training on SharePoint 2010 for administration and design – and, I suppose, that’s why it’s on my mind.

Microsoft SharePoint has been around for a while and 2010 is probably the most sophisticated version there is, but what is it? I thought in some ways it was a bit like CICS – but definitely not CICS. And I thought it was a bit like Lotus Notes – but, again, not Notes. It’s difficult to encapsulate easily because it’s software that needs other pieces of software to work (more on that in a moment). It’s far more feature-rich than a simple intranet. In fact, in many ways, it provides a new way of working – a new paradigm – for organizations that might purchase it.

Let’s start off with why businesses might be tempted to buy SharePoint. I suppose that once you get above 20 staff, it gets harder to have that immediacy of information that small sites benefit from. With 50 staff, let alone 200+ it can be days (if ever) that news reaches you about other staff (weddings, baby photos, etc) or corporate news (shortlisted for prizes or being mentioned in trade papers). The natural consequence is that people start e-mailling all staff – so rather than just three 4MB pictures of the new baby (or whatever) needing to be backed up, there are suddenly 200+ versions of the same thing in everyone’s Outlook in-box. Using SharePoint gives you an easy way of sharing news and offering items for sale. It’s also incredibly easy to pick up RSS feeds – like the BBC news and weather.

But if that’s all you’re doing with SharePoint, you’re definitely missing a trick.

Before I look at that, let me just talk about how SharePoint links with other Microsoft products. You need to have Active Directory (AD) and Internet Information Services (IIS) which you probably do. You also need SQL Server, which you may not already have installed. And then you need Microsoft Office and Outlook. You also need to know how to use Visual Studio and SharePoint Designer, and to make life easier there’s about half a dozen non-Microsoft tools that can be used. (I’ll talk about them in a future blog).

The reason I said it’s a paradigm shift is because many organizations will welcome some easy way of sharing news etc, but many won’t realize that they have a problem for which SharePoint is the solution. It’s too easy to continue working in the same old way and not take advantage of things like workflows and sharing.

What made Notes and Domino so powerful was collaborative working. And the word ‘collaboration’ appears right at the top of any list of SharePoint features. Yet many people still have a view of computing in which small individual islands work away, perhaps printing off a copy of a document for final checking before it is sent out. This is the way we worked in the 80s and 90s, but in 2010, we can share documents. Word has given us the ability to track changes for at least 10 years, and yet many people seem unwilling to collaborate in this way.

Workflows are hidden gems. People often complain to me about documents not getting to the right people for checking or not knowing who has a draft version of a document – or, even worse, not knowing whether the version in front of them is the latest one. Built-in to SharePoint 2010 is the ability to define parallel as well as serial workflows. So your document can be checked by two people at the same time before being sent on to a third person for final checking. No more problems with important people not seeing the document or any other procedural failure.

I’ll just quickly mention My Sites. These are replacements for My Documents or Documents (depending on which version of Windows you’re familiar with) plus they are like your own little home page of information.

Users get to SharePoint through their browser. You can add all sorts of things to the pages they see using what are called Web parts. This could include bits of JavaScript, Youtube videos, Twitter feeds, etc.

SharePoint 2010 works properly with Internet Explorer (of course), but also Firefox and other browsers – I think it’s great that Microsoft are becoming browser agnostic (you might mention EU case law!).

You can set up SharePoint to provide your own internal intranet (if that isn’t tautology) and act as an external internet server – so you are hosting your own Web pages.

Also, you can use SharePoint to front-end your applications. The advantage of this is users have to go to your intranet – so they see your corporate news and personal items of interest – and from there they launch their usual applications (such as finance or whatever’s specialized for their organization). There’s no need to run SharePoint in parallel with Citrix or anything else.

On the downside, licences for all the products can be very expensive. And it all works so much better if you’re using 2010 versions of everything (or the latest where there isn’t a 2010 version). You will need someone who speaks C# and can use PowerShell commands to maintain SharePoint and push its usage forward amongst members of staff who are perfectly happy working the way they always have.

But if you can’t have a mainframe, and you’re a moderate to large organization, then there are lots of benefits to be had from using SharePoint. There’s certainly more features than I’ve had space to mention here.

Now all I need to know is how to become an MVP!