Daniel | zevenseas | SharePoint Blog

Mark, Joel and TunnelPoint on “This Week In SharePoint”

Daniel McPherson — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 11:07:00 GMT

Mark Miller (of the End User SharePoint blog) and Joel Oleson have combined for a weekly “This Week In SharePoint” broadcast. We were really pleased to find a discussion of TunnelPoint in their latest show.

Head on over to view/listen to it here: http://www.endusersharepoint.com/?p=1770

Updated: Search Coder

Daniel McPherson — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 11:58:40 GMT

On a recent project we worked on, we leveraged search pretty heavily, using it to do all the cross-site aggregation heavy lifting. As a result we got a lot of use out of the SearchCoder tool we released last year. We are at the point now where we are looking at driving out additional performance improvements, and to do that we decided to extend the SearchCoder with some new features.

DOWNLOAD

Support For The Search Web Service

The initial support is pretty basic, with the intention being that it provides you with a quick way to execute a Full Text SQL query against the SharePoint Web Service.

The functionality that helps you build the query graphically still needs an OM connection to a SharePoint Site, but once you have that query you can issue it via the OM or the Web Service.

The nice bit about using the Web Service is that it means that you can, with care, test various queries against the production Query Servers and Indexes. Important as often the only place you have such a big index is in production.

Performance Instrumentation

Included in the tool is a quick and dirty way to get an average query time for a specific query. Basically, you create your query, test that its working, specify over how many iterations you would like to average, and click a button. The result is something like this:

Its pretty basic, but it does the job. I’m going to do a write up on some of the very interesting results we have seen, so stay tuned (pun intended!)

Change Log Report

This version also includes a first step into providing a way to expose the SharePoint Search Change Log. The Change Log is the list used by the SharePoint indexer to determine just what work it should do. All you do is enter in a number of minutes, and it will tell you which items the indexer will think has changed in that period.

This need some serious extension to really be useful, but its a start!

See you at DevDays NL

Daniel McPherson — Wed, 27 May 2009 13:16:14 GMT

I’m lucky enough to be presenting at DevDays on Friday, my topic is:

Building a Social Computing platform with SharePoint

An in-depth, technical look, at using SharePoint to build highly scalable “Social Applications” for the Enterprise. Need a blogging solution? Want to build YouTube for your organisation? Flickr? Delicious? Like to create your own Facebook style Newsfeed? This session will case study how one organisation has done just that and the lesson they learned.

Please do drop by and say hello if you are attending as well. See you Friday.

New version of our “Assembly free” Timesheet Application

Daniel McPherson — Mon, 18 May 2009 11:40:37 GMT

I just a little more work into our original “Assembly Free” SharePoint solution designed to make it easy to complete Time Sheets in SharePoint.

Here are the additional features we have added:
1) Improved the overall look and feel
2) Selecting a client automatically pre-fills the client for the remaining days
3) Empty days are no longer posted to the Calendar
4) A check is now made to ensure you select a starting Monday in the Calendar
5) Basic validation is made before you can submit time

Install it now (remember, its only a Site Template):

Download the Site Template.
Open a site collection where you would like to create the Timesheet subsite.
Click on “Site Settings”
Click on “Site Templates” under the “Galleries” heading.
Click on the “Upload” button, and then select the previously downloaded “Timesheet.stp” file.
When you have done that, click on “Site Actions” –> “Create”
Click on “Sites and Workspaces”
Give the new site a “Title” and a “Description”, then from the “Select a Template” section click on the “Custom” Tab.
There you should find the new “Timesheet” site template, click on it an click on the “Create” button

Or we have also made an online version available for you to play with:

Demo Site: http://demo.zevenseas.com/sites/AssemblyFreeDemos/TimeSheet/default.aspx
Usernames: ZSHOSTED\teamstatus
Passwords: teamstatus

Feel free to enter in a timesheet yourself, add customers, go crazy, and don’t forget to let us know what you think!

Release version of our “Assembly free” Team status Template

Daniel McPherson — Sat, 09 May 2009 04:22:21 GMT

Finished adding a few more tweaks and bug fixes to our “Assembly Free” Team Status application. I think its solid enough to call it a V1.0, and the good news is that it now works on BPOS (Microsoft Online Services).

Remember, this is just a SharePoint Template, so anyone can install it on SharePoint anywhere! You DONT have to have access to the server.

Fixes and Enhancements:
1) Added the name of the person who made the update, and a link to reply.
2) Prevent empty status message by disabling the “Update” button if the message box is empty.
3) Supports installation on BPOS (Microsoft Online Services)
4) Added the current user to the top of the page
5) Now supports account names with a ‘.’ in them (Thanks Oskar!).

As always, you can try it out for yourself by following these instructions:

Demo Site: http://demo.zevenseas.com/sites/AssemblyFreeDemos/TeamStatus/default.aspx
Usernames: ZSHOSTED\teamstatus, ZSHOSTED\teamstatus2, ZSHOSTED\teamstatus3
Passwords: (passwords are the same as username, eg. teamstatus, teamstatus2, teamstatus3

Download the new version now. If you are interested in integrating our Team Status application with Twitter, take a look at my tutorial using TunnelPoint here.

Bringing TunnelPoint to the “Assembly Free” solution party

Daniel McPherson — Fri, 08 May 2009 06:15:41 GMT

As you may have noticed, zevenseas has been putting a lot of thought into building solutions that can be installed quickly and easily, by anyone, on SharePoint, anywhere!

Last week we released our “Assembly Free” Team Status application, thanks everyone for the feedback, there is a new version coming in the next few days with some minor tweaks. The most important of those is support for BPOS (Microsoft Online Services).

After releasing this solution I got thinking about how we could make it even better by integrating it with Twitter. I didn’t have to think for long, because this is where TunnelPoint, our “BDC for SharePoint in the Cloud”, comes in.

With TunnelPoint added to the solution I was able to publish any messages added to an instance of the Team Status application to a Twitter account, take a look at the result below:

On the left is Team Status in SharePoint, on the right is Twitter

How might this be useful? Well, imagine a team like zevenseas who wants to publish a stream of messages under a single unified Twitter account. You can use SharePoint to create your messages, and then TunnelPoint to send them over to Twitter. Nice.

The best bit of course is that the entire setup took me less than 5 minutes AND I didn’t have to go anywhere near my SharePoint server or ask anyone from the IT Department to help me! <grin>

Here is how I did it:
1) You must have an Internet Facing SharePoint site, and an account with Administrator privileges.
2) Download and Setup our “Assembly Free” twitter application, and start adding some messages.
3) Sign up for TunnelPoint here: http://account.tunnelpoint.com/Registration.aspx then activate your account.
4) Sign up for a new Twitter account, or have an existing one ready.

This is where the fun starts, you will now have a Team Status site that looks something like this:

After activating your account, Logging on to TunnelPoint and clicking on “My SharePoint” a screen that looks like this:

The next steps are (a) Telling TunnelPoint about our new Team Status site and then (b) Assigning the Twitter service to that site. Click on the “New” button to display the following screen:

After entering all the information and clicking “Save”, you will have your site registered with TunnelPoint and ready to have services assigned to it:

Click on the “MyServices” link at the top of the screen, this is where you specify the services you would like to assign:

As you can see, one of the services listed is “Sent Twitter Update from SP List”, select this service and then click on the “New” button.

Now, the standard “Team Status” list does not include all the columns you need to successfully run this service. Rather than making you do this manually, TunnelPoint can take care of it for you, click on the “Create additional fields in list for this service”. This will add two fields to the existing list “What are you doing?” and “Message Status”.

After entering in the Twitter account you want to publish to, select “Message” as the field that contains the message and “Message Status” as the field where you would like to store the Message Status.

When you are happy, click “Save”, and you are done. Head over to your Twitter account and refresh your timeline. It should look something like this:

Before you go, try it out yourself:

Demo Site: http://demo.zevenseas.com/sites/AssemblyFreeDemos/TPConnected/default.aspx
Usernames: ZSHOSTED\teamstatus, ZSHOSTED\teamstatus2, ZSHOSTED\teamstatus3
Passwords: (passwords are the same as username, eg. teamstatus, teamstatus2, teamstatus3)
Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/assemblyfree (Note: it can take up to 15 mins to publish to Twitter)

Or check out some of the other services. It would be just as simple to set it up so that you received a text message with every new message added. Have Fun!

zevenseas Tools Recap

Daniel McPherson — Mon, 04 May 2009 12:39:57 GMT

Thought it might be a good time to put a short reminder post about some of the free tools we have released over the last 12 months or so, as it has been a while since we have written about some of them. Hopefully there is something in there for you!

CodePlex Projects

First up, there are our CodePlex projects, that come complete with source code.

Web Parts

http://www.codeplex.com/zevenseas/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=15157

Filter Web Parts

Choice Filter Web Part - The zevenseas Choice Column Filter web part does three simple things: 1) It pulls the choices from a choice column, 2) Displays them in either a list of option buttons or a drop down, 3) Passes the value you select to other web parts via a connection - More Information

Web Parts

Quick Alert Web Part - The zevenseas Quick Alert web part allows a user to create an alert, on a specific list with just a single click. - More Information

AD ChangePassword Web Part - The zevenseas AD ChangePassword webparts allows users to change their Active Directory passwords. This is comes in handy when using an extranet scenario where users cannot change their password the regular way.. . - More Information

QuickTask Web Part - The zevenseas Quick Task web part allows you to complete multiple tasks from a tasklist at once. Plus you can very quickly assign a task to someone by using the context menu. - More Information

CodePlex Statistics Web Part - Allows you to quickly display the download statistics for one or more CodePlex Releases - More Information

SearchCoder

http://www.codeplex.com/MOSSSearchCoder

Tools that helps you build, test and code solutions based around the SharePoint Search API. It includes a graphical tool, and an OM which abstracts SharePoint Search SQL.

Site Lifecycle Management

http://www.codeplex.com/zsLCM

The Lifecycle Management application is based on the original LCM tool of MS-IT but then slightly modified to be more '2007'ish ;)
So what does it do?

Captures sitedeletions and makes a backup first before deleting the site or web.
Gathers sites that are unused (using the Usage info, Last Content Modified Date and Last Security Modified Date)
Actions can be taken on this "unused" sites, such actions are
- Mail the siteowner and informing them that their site is being unused
- Lock the site after a given period of time
- Delete the site after a given period time

Feature Blocker

http://www.codeplex.com/zsfeatureblocker

This is a solution that SharePoint administrators can use to block certain features (site/web/webapplication/farm) from being activated or deactivated by the user that accesses the Managefeatures.aspx page.
It adds a bit of javascript runtime on the managefeature.aspx page and disables the buttons of selected features.

Free Solutions

Free and installable solutions.

Tagged Links

http://community.zevenseas.com/Blogs/Daniel/archive/2008/04/13/tagged-links-walkthrough.aspx

Social Bookmarking for SharePoint. It takes the standard “Links List” to a new level via browser integration, one-click tagging, advanced graphical views and global tags that allow you to define tags across an entire site collection. Take a look at the new “Walkthrough”.

The Link Conductor

http://community.zevenseas.com/Blogs/Daniel/archive/2008/12/02/free-solution-link-conductor-url-management-tool.aspx

Provides a centralised link redirection service with statistics. This way you can put links like: http://<Your Site URL>/go.aspx?<Category>=<Action> and ensure that they always go to the right place.

Tags Web Part

http://community.zevenseas.com/Blogs/Daniel/archive/2008/12/24/free-solution-the-zevenseas-tags-web-parts.aspx

Does what it says, but a picture says it better:

New version of our “Assembly free” Team status Application

Daniel McPherson — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 11:24:20 GMT

Just finished making some improvements to our "Team Status” application based on some feedback we received:

Performance has now been dramatically improved. Previously I would issue 2 web service calls, for each messages (once for the username, once for the picture). I know, disaster. Tonight I changed it so that all usernames and pictures are cached upfront. Thanks to those who pointed out the performance was slow, please do try again and let me know what you think.
I solved the issue that resulted in some manual steps during installation. So now, adding members to the site is as easy as, well, adding members to the site.
Also solved a couple of smaller issues:

Now works fine with HTTPS
Now works fine on Site Collections at the root of a Web Application

I have almost got it working on BPOS (Microsoft Online Services), will have an update in the next week or so. In the mean time try it out here:

Demo Site: http://demo.zevenseas.com/sites/AssemblyFreeDemos/TeamStatus/default.aspx
Domain for all accounts:
Usernames: ZSHOSTED\teamstatus, ZSHOSTED\teamstatus2, ZSHOSTED\teamstatus3
Passwords: (passwords are the same as username, eg. teamstatus, teamstatus2, teamstatus3

Or install it yourself:

Download it
Create a new site collection, log on as Site Collection Administrator, and upload this .STP file to the “Site Templates” gallery.
Under “Site Actions”, select “Create”, then chose “Sites and Workspaces”.
Give your site a Title, URL and a Description and then click on the “Custom” tab, select “TeamStatus” and click “Create”. Note: This version currently does not support unique permissions, so you must use parent permissions.
After a few moment you will be taken to the new site, and be able to create a send messages.

Taking Assembly Free Solutions To The next Next Level: Team Status Site (Twitter?)

Daniel McPherson — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 12:51:10 GMT

When I started coding the “Twitter for SharePoint” application that I wrote about last week, I had two ways I could go about it:

Use the traditional approach, being the SharePoint Solutions Framework, Visual Studio and C#.
Build it “Assembly Free” using SharePoint Designer, IE8 and Javascript

I started out trying to build it “Assembly Free”, but hit a couple of roadblocks, and because of timeframes, went back to what I knew. Last Sunday was a rainy day in Amsterdam, so I decided to dig up the “Team Status” application that I had started to write, and see if I couldn’t finish it off.

The good news is, I have, and better news is, I think it works. It’s probably a better example than my original “Assembly Free” solution, a Timesheet, and to my surprise it does nearly everything my traditional “Assembly Based” solution does. Of course, there are a couple of important differences (around scale, and some functionality) which means that both approaches will always have their place, but for people with no other choice it’s perfect!

The key advantage the “Assembly Free” approach offers, is that you can deploy the solution anywhere. All you need is a browser and Site Administrator access to a SharePoint site. This means it will work on sites running in your company, hosted with a application services provider, and, we’re working on it, Microsoft Online Services too.

To be clear, this is simply a Site Template. Nothing more, nothing less.

What does the application do?

Simple, it does pretty much everything I described in my previous post except for supporting the notion of “Followers” and the integration with My Site Colleagues. This application is focused more on the publishing side, and less on the subscription side. Here is what the home page looks like:

On the left hand side you can see a stream of messages from all the members of the team site. On the top right hand side you can see a “Send Message” box, this is where you can type and submit your status messages, up to a maximum of 140 characters.

On the bottom right you can see “My Messages”, these are any messages that mention you. People do this by using the “@<username>” syntax, where "<username>” is equal to your windows account name (without the domain).

Next to each of the status updates you will see a picture, this picture comes from your “My Site” if you have MOSS installed, or it comes from a column you can add to the User Information table (more information below).

The thing to keep in mind, and I know I’m being very repetitive here, is that there’s not a single line of C# code, and nothing has to be installed on the server. Everything, and I mean everything, has been done using a humble .STP file.

So how does it work then?

I created a new blank SharePoint site, and I added one new list called “Messages”. I renamed the “Title” field to be called “Message”, and I added a new Choice field called “Mentions”.
I then dropped into SharePoint Designer (I love it), opened the default.aspx page and created a “Message” box. This is just a standard input control, with a character counter, and a button that calls a Javascript function when you click on it.
The Javascript function does the following:
1. It uses a Regex to find all the people mentioned in the message using the @<username> syntax.
2. It calls one of the SharePoint Web Services and writes the message into the “Message” field, and the people mentioned in the message, into the “Mentions” choice field, one choice each.
I then refresh the page using two javascript functions:
1. One calls a SharePoint Web Service to retrieve the last 30 messages sorted by created date. It also retrieves a users picture and works out the relative date and time. This is the “Messages” stream on the left.
2. The second one calls a SharePoint Web Services to retrieve only those messages where the currently logged on user is listed as one of the “Mentions” choices (using a CAML query). It then sorts this by created date and renders it on the page.

All very simple really. There is of course a lot more going on behind the scenes, but it’s all there in Javascript for you to take a look at (and its a little bit neater than my last attempt, I’m learning!). The key thing to note here is that I couldn’t have done it without the amazing Javascript API for SharePoint created by Darren Johnstone. You can find more information about it here:

A javascript API for the SharePoint and Office Live Web Services

Would you Like to try it?

For those that are skeptical I thought I would do two things to convince you this approach can really work.

First, I have a live site you can play with, and some accounts you can log in with:

Try and mix it up a little bit so that it looks nice, and feel free to talk amongst yourselves.

Secondly, you can download it and try it for yourself. This is a beta though, ~~and there are a couple of one-off manual steps that you need to perform in order to get it working for site members~~. I’m also not sure what sort of issues I might encounter on the various environments out there, so please give feedback.

Before I go into the installation, I’m going to repeat my call to action. If you think you can create nifty little solutions like this and are interested in hearing about how about an innovative new way to put them into the hands of customers, drop me an email daniel@zevenseas.com. We are announcing a new service within the coming weeks which will help you do just that.

Installing it Yourself

These steps just describe how to take a Site Template (.stp) file, upload it to a site collection, and then create a new site based on that template.

Download it
Create a new site collection, log on as Site Collection Administrator, and upload this .STP file to the “Site Templates” gallery.
Under “Site Actions”, select “Create”, then chose “Sites and Workspaces”.
Give your site a Title, URL and a Description and then click on the “Custom” tab, select “TeamStatus” and click “Create”. Note: This version currently does not support unique permissions, so you must use parent permissions.
After a few moment you will be taken to the new site, and, as Site Administrator, you should be able to create a send messages.

It’s that easy.

Adding Contributors

In a pevious version of this blog post I described some manual steps that you needed to perform due to an issue I had hit during development, the latest build (available via the download link on this post) now overcomes that issue. Adding members is as simple as, well, adding members!

Before you can add additional members, and let them contribute to the site, there is one small modification that needs to be made. Site members need to have “Read” access to the User Information table via the web service. Even though they have this via the UI, for some reason, this is restricted via the Web Services, but there is a simple solution. etc. etc.

Adding a picture to your messages

If you have only WSS, and want to let users add their own picture, you need to make the following adjustment. Note: If you are on MOSS, then you don’t have to do anything, it will just work.

1. Follow steps 1, 2, and 3 above, but then when presented with the “List Settings” page, click on “Create Column” instead:

2. Create the column exactly as it is shown below:

Now, all a site member needs to do, is logon to the site, and go to their “My Settings” page:

When presented with their profile, edit the item, and then enter the URL to a picture, in the new column. In fact, they could attach the picture directly onto their profile list item and reference it from there:

Finally, it seems I’m not the only one thinking about short messaging and SharePoint. Nick Boumans also published to Codeplex a nice solution. It takes the traditional Assembly Based approach, but works very nicely. Check it out: http://www.codeplex.com/SPMessaging

Twitter for SharePoint?

Daniel McPherson — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 03:33:37 GMT

I was lucky enough to be able to participate in the successful and superbly organised SharePoint Best Practices Conference in the UK a couple of weeks back. Really big thanks to Steve and the team!

Anyway, my first session was all about demonstrating how SharePoint could be transformed from mild-mannered team collaboration server, into cutting edge super-social platform for next generation knowledge management applications. (phew!)

Now, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, SharePoint of course being born before the Social boom which is now upon us, but this is something I’ve long been interested in and something that I’ve been working hard on, with a large enterprise, for the last 18 months or more. So, I had a fair bit of experience under my belt, and could bring with me some solid real-world examples.

Our new blogging platform, which is available for demo here http://demo.zevenseas.com (and available for purchase, contact hans@zevenseas.com) was where I started. I’ve really enjoyed watching this solution grow at the customer I’m working with, and there is real business value to be gained by making publishing to your intranet as quick and easy as writing an email. But, I wanted to try and do something a little cooler.

Twitter is all the rage right now (even Oprah is on board now), and for good reason, its a great community tool. A great way to connect to people interested in the same things you are, great way to get questions answered and find links shared. While I’m sure there is a lot of skepticism out there, I’m convinced that there is a real place for a service like Twitter inside the firewall.

So, with that in mind, and given the similarities between Twitter (essentially a micro-blogging service) and our existing Blogging Platform, I decided the second part of my demo was going to be (Drum-Roll) “Twitter for SharePoint”!

Escape Clauses

Before we get into it, there are a couple of things I would like to point out:

This is a proof of concept, not working live production code.
I’m not sure this will ever “get into the wild” as I’m still not convinced SharePoint can handle it. Remember, be careful of the “If you are a hammer, then everything looks like a nail” syndrome.
It does work. I demoed it live on stage, and even under those bright lights, it did actually send little messages.

I’m going to spend time in a follow-up post talking about some of the possible business benefits that a solution like this could deliver, but for now, I’m just going to share some screenshots.

How it works

It integrates with the “My Colleagues” functionality which you can find on your MOSS “My site”. This integration means that you “Follow” anyone you make your “Colleague”.
When you want to send someone a message you use the normal “@<person>” syntax. The current version defaults to using your Windows Account Name (without the domain)
Its a “Site” based feature which you can activate wherever you like. So it could be part of your “My Site” or it could sit on a “Twitter hub” in its own dedicated Web Application.

This is what it looks like

Long time readers will already know I’m not much of a designer, but here is what it looks like:

The pictures come from your “My Site” profile, replies are any messages that contain an “@<your account name>” and the “Colleagues” view show all the messages posted by anyone listed in your colleagues list.

Writing a new message is as simple as entering it into the “Chatbox” and clicking “Send Message”, of course you are restricted to just 140 characters.

To reply to someone you just need to click on their picture to have their “Address” automatically entered into the text box.

And that’s it! All pretty simple really, although there are a number of technical challenges under the covers. If you think this solution looks interesting drop me an email, daniel@zevenseas.com and I will keep you informed of our progress.

Sample App Download: Taking Assembly Free Solutions to the Next Level

Daniel McPherson — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 09:22:01 GMT

It took me a little longer than planned, but as a promised in my previous post, you can now download the “Proof of Concept” timesheet application that demonstrates an assembly free solution that perform both read AND write operations with SharePoint. All using the magic of Javascript and Web Services.

This solution will work anywhere SharePoint does, even, if you are running SharePoint in a hosted environment (for example Microsoft Online Services (BPOS)). “Installation” is done entirely through your browser, and you don’t have to ask anyone for permission.

DOWNLOAD

How can you install it?

That is my favourite question. It’s just a Site Template. This means all you need to do is upload it to your site template gallery, and then create a new site. Just like this:

Download the Site Template.
Open a site collection where you would like to create the Timesheet subsite.
Click on “Site Settings”
Click on “Site Templates” under the “Galleries” heading.
Click on the “Upload” button, and then select the previously downloaded “Timesheet.stp” file.
When you have done that, click on “Site Actions” –> “Create”
Click on “Sites and Workspaces”
Give the new site a “Title” and a “Description”, then from the “Select a Template” section click on the “Custom” Tab.
There you should find the new “Timesheet” site template, click on it an click on the “Create” button.

You are done!

Call To Action

If you look at the code, and I recommend you do, please be aware that….I’m totally embarrassed by it. Remember two things: (a) This really is JUST a cool little proof of concept and (b) that I have done very, very little javascript programming in the past. The whole application took me 5 hours to put together, and I’m open to anyone who wants to improve it! Criticism is welcome!

As I mentioned in my previous post, we are working on an innovative new service which launches very soon and makes solutions just like this even more accessible to people who want to do more with SharePoint but who don’t have the technical know-how or luxury of installing assembly based solutions.

TunnelPoint gets its first review!

Daniel McPherson — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 14:19:57 GMT

I’m sitting in an Edinburgh Hotel with Mark and Robin right now, in our post-UK Best Practices road trip. I have lots to write about the conference (it was fantastic) but before I do, I just wanted to get this up on my blog.

We were lucky enough to randomly run into, and have dinner with Jaap Vossers, and we spent just a little time with him talking about our new TunnelPoint solution. Well, he was kind enough to take a look at it, and today blogged his thoughts.

If that bores you though, at least head over to checkout his unique way of explaining things!

TunnelPoint: A BDC for SharePoint in the Cloud

Daniel McPherson — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 03:45:00 GMT

After a long period of research and development, this week, Hans announced the official launch (really worth a read) of our first ever hosted solution, TunnelPoint. We are pretty excited about it.

So what is it? Well, if I were to summarise for an audience like the one that reads this blog, then I would say that its the BDC for SharePoint in the Cloud.

What does that mean? Well, it means that through the TunnelPoint service you can connect internet based Web Services to SharePoint lists. For example, you can connect a Stock Quote service to a list that stores stock tickers, and automatically have the price updated for you, on a schedule. We have SMS, Stock Quotes, Twitter, Currency, Driving Directions, ShortURLs, and more, with more coming!

Its been designed with simplicity in mind (though we know we have a way to go) with the whole process taking less than 5 clicks. You tell us about your site (must be internet accessible, for example Microsoft Online (BPOS) sites), you select which service you want, TunnelPoint will configure the site with the necessary list and columns, and then after saving, do all rest for you!

Here’s a screenshot of a TunnelPoint enabled site, you can take a look yourself here: http://demo.zevenseas.com/sites/tunnelpoint/stockquote/default.aspx

I have highlighted the bits that TunnelPoint is busily updating for us (note the modified date), but what we also show is other functionality built on this Live update. For example a Twitter message if the price drops too far (could also be an SMS).

All this is built on a platform (we are calling SP-RIF, SharePoint Remote Integration Framework) designed to make really creative use of the power of SharePoint web services. Its incredible just how much you can achieve without having to go anywhere near the server.

Anyway, we are really keen to get feedback.

Head over and Try TunnelPoint.

The service is in Beta, and I mean REALLY beta (not as in Gmail beta). So please have a play, and let us know what you think! I’m always here: daniel@zevenseas.com

Pint2Share in Amsterdam on Friday

Daniel McPherson — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 06:04:14 GMT

I’m pleased to be able to announce the first ever Pint2Share (ok, ok, SharePint) in Amsterdam this Friday, details as follows:

De Veranda
Amstelveenseweg 764
Amsterdam
http://www.deveranda.nl/ (in Dutch)

Sponsorship is provided by Sparked, SDN and zevenseas.

There will be an excellent crowd coming along, including Joel Oleson, Mike Watson, Robin Meuré and Ton Stegeman (MOSS MVP) and Waldek Mastykarz

This will follow a great day of SharePoint sessions at the “SharePoint Day with the Experts: Amsterdam” which has a new venue and some really good numbers.

NOTE: You need to register for this event.

Congrescentrum Amstelveen
Sandbergplein 24
1181 ZX Amstelveen
(map)

See you there!

Site Definition Customisation – The Controversy Returns!

Daniel McPherson — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 02:46:31 GMT

Waldek did a post today titled: Did you know- Changing existing Site Definitions is unsupported

Which is a good read for every SharePoint developer, as it really is something we developers should all know. I had a wry smile creep across my face as I read it, as I remember the day this advice came into existence.

For that reason, I went back through some of my old blog posts, to try and find the original controversy, and how the bloggers alive then tried to sort through it, here is what I found:

Joris was there: SharePoint - to support or not to support
Serge of course was there: SharePoint custom site definitions... I'm lost
I came in late to the party wanted to make sure I understood this all pretty carefully: The post I was trying write

The post I was referring to, by the great Ryan Rogers, is sadly is not longer available on the MSDN blogs platform. Bit of a loss! So anyway, I went and found it on Archive.org, and it is really worth spending a little time reading:

On Site Definitions, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love KB 898631
I’m actually tempted to quote it all here so that it is not lost forever.

Anyway, I sure there have been a few changes since this discussion back in 2005, but I also think the core problems are still the same.

Sometimes I feel old. <grin>

European best Practices Conference, almost there!

Daniel McPherson — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 02:13:36 GMT

Next week I’ve dedicated the whole week to preparing for the European SharePoint Best Practices Conference in the UK, if you haven’t got your ticket yet GET A MOVE ON!

I’m presenting:

BA404 - SharePoint, the Social Computing Platform - Daniel McPherson
An in-depth look at using SharePoint to build “Social Applications”. Want to build YouTube for your organisation? Flickr? Delicious? Want to create your own Facebook style Newsfeed? This session will demonstrate how one company has done just that, and how you can do it inside your organisation.

BA408 - How can your organisation create an online community around its products and services - Daniel McPherson
This question is one of the most important an organisation can ask itself today. The unprecedented audience of the Internet, and its infinite diversity, means that there are people out there who are truly passionate about the product or service your organisation provides. Finding them can be difficult, but it's not impossible. In fact they are probably looking for a way to connect to you already. Do you know who they are? Have you established a connection with them already? Are you helping them find each other? Are you helping them connect with others who share the same interest? Have they already done all this themselves? We will help you answer many of these questions.

Have really appreciated the emails from old friends (like, Andy (no blog) and Justin (time to write your second post mate) from the days at the bank) letting me know they will be there. We (zevenseas) will all be at the SharePint, which I think will be a really good opportunity to catch up.

See you there!

Taking Assembly Free Solutions to the Next Level

Daniel McPherson — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:03:00 GMT

I love solutions. I love understanding the problems a business is facing, and then applying deep thought, creativity and pragmatism, to the process of building a great solution. The keyword in that sentence of course, is pragmatism, and it has meant that despite a love for writing good code, I also like not writing good code. In it’s place, bending the out-of-the-box features to my will, and deriving extra value out of the platform that is SharePoint.

Where am I heading? Well, around 6 months ago Hans came to the office with a cool demo. Now, he is no longer a hard core developer, but the demo left us developer-sorts pretty impressed. What made us even more impressed was that he had built the solution without touching the server. In other words, he did it entirely without an assembly.

This got us all thinking, and along with the emergence of some excellent articles also covering this topic (see below in further reading), we began to wonder just how far we could take this “Assembly Free” approach to solutions.

Our conclusion is, that actually, you can take them very far indeed.

Now, why would I call it the “Next Level”? Because up until now, (big apologies if I have missed anything) I’ve only seen examples that perform “read” operations on SharePoint, solutions that are mostly focused on improving the user experience. While I have loved every one of them, what I really wanted to see, was an entire solution. Something that actually met a complete business requirement. Again, apologies if I have missed something, the blogosphere is big these days, please ping me if you have a demo, would love to take a look (daniel@zevenseas.com).

All of this got me thinking about the way we do timesheets at zevenseas. Like a lot of small businesses we use SharePoint. We grabbed a calendar list, added a few fields, and away we went. It works, its a little clumsy (helped by Access integration) but the bottom line is, it’s a very good value solution for our modest company.

But What if?

What if we could make SharePoint just a little bit better at doing Timesheets? And what if this could be used by anyone with a SharePoint teamsite, regardless of whether or not they had access to the command prompt on their servers. With this problem,we went to work on a solution, and this is the proof of concept we came up with.

This is the first screen you see after creating a new instance of the Timesheet site:

The first task you have is to setup your client list, done by clicking on the “Create a new client” link:

With the clients created, pretty standard stuff, I can now go about entering my timesheet information, to do this, I return to the homepage and click on the “Complete your timesheet” link, which opens a page like this:

This is a page that I customised using SharePoint Designer, and it sits inside a “Calendar” list. As you can see, this already “looks” a lot more like a classic Timesheet application.

Clicking on the “Click here to select start date” field pops up a calendar:

Selecting a starting day, a Monday, means I can start completing my Timesheet:

The interesting but here, is that the “Client” dropdown is being populated by a Web Service call to the “Clients” list. Selecting a customer also pre-populates the rest of the fields, as at zevenseas, we usually work with one customer a week.

Next, I complete a description, the start time, end time and any breaks, the hours are automatically calculated for me. Here is a timesheet fully completed:

To me, this is where it gets interesting. What we need to do is convert this list of daily timesheets entries, into individual list items inside the calendar. Clicking on the “Submit Time” button does just that.

Here is what it looks like from the “Calendar” perspective:

When you click the “Submit Time” button, we make a Web Service call which populates the Calendar, so we are doing not just “Reads” against SharePoint from the browser, but “Write” operations too. The result is a very basic solution, installed and ready, without having to touch the server. There are zero assemblies, zero C#, zero admins, its just the site owner.

Now, a couple of important points, this is absolutely a “proof of concept” (albeit one that works for us). I’m not very good at javascript or JQuery, the code is awful. Of course the person completing the timesheet doesn’t care about that, all they care about is that it makes filling in their weekly time that little bit easier.

How do we do it?

Here are the key elements in the solution:

SharePoint Designer – Great tool for building these solutions, which eventually boil down to a Site or List Template.
Javascript – Meaning plain old javascript or your favourite library (JQuery, Scriptalicious, etc)
SharePoint Web Services – This is your API, or OM, this is how you do stuff. Sure there are limitations, but focus less on what you can’t do, and more on what you can. Its impressive when you dig into it.

An additional, and very important component is the amazing SharePoint JS API released by Darren Johnstone (thanks Darren) over here: Download- Javascript web service API for Office Live and SharePoint (1.0.1)

With this set of tools, and some browser side debugging helpers (IE8 is excellent) you are well on the way to delivering solutions for customers without the overhead and risk of assemblies. In fact, it opens up the possibility of solutions to a whole range of customers who can’t install custom solutions.

Don’t get me wrong, this is in no way a replacement to Features and Solutions, it compliments them, providing you with another technique in your kitbag for solving problems.

Call to Action

If you are interested in building small, focused solutions with SharePoint, just like this one, then drop me an email at daniel@zevenseas.com. We are looking for partners who want to participate in a new and innovative way of bringing SharePoint solutions to market, unlocking enormous value for a rapidly growing number of SharePoint customers.

Nasty Bug: stsadm can inadvertently delete a root site collection if erroneous URL path used

Daniel McPherson — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 07:05:00 GMT

Thought this was nasty enough that it was worth pointing out here, and come to mention it, it could explain weirdness I have run into in the past:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968474

After using stsadm -o restore with the -overwrite parameter and getting an error you notice a site one level up from the site you were trying to restore is deleted. The root level site http://servername is deleted.

ERROR:
No content databases are available for this operation. Create a content database , and then try the operation again. To create a content database, click "Content databases" on the Application Management page, select the Web application to use, and then click "Add a content database".

Going to the now dead root site you get:
404 FILE NOT FOUND

Five Important Tests Before You Go Live

Daniel McPherson — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 03:34:00 GMT

Originally posted on SharePoint Magazine

Before going into detail concerning each of the tests, I would like to point out two things about this list:

These are not in any particular order.
These are “Five Important Tests” not “The Five Most Important Tests”.

I have put them together for two main reasons:

To compliment the existing test regime that I’m sure you already have in place.
As a reminder (sure you never forget!) because these are the main reasons I see SharePoint solutions fail.

This is not a “How-To” article, but I have tried to include examples of “real world” experiences I’ve encountered along the way. Now, without further delay, lets take a stroll through Five Important Tests you should perform before “Go Live” with your SharePoint solution.

1. Fill ‘Er Up!

Add lots of data to your solution. SharePoint, fundamentally, is a data driven application. By that I mean, the application changes and adapts based on the data it is filled with. Most of the SharePoint solutions you build will be driven less by HTML and code, and more by data, including navigation, document libraries, lists, web parts and the list goes on. The result of this is that your solution will inevitably behave differently when it has lots of data in it, and at the risk of stating the obvious, it will rarely perform better!

SharePoint compounds this problem by having some serious limitations on the amount of data that it promises to perform well with. These are outlined in the "Planning for Software Boundaries” documentation (that every SharePoint developer should know by heart).

Of course, our development environments never have much data in them, which means that “everything works fine on my machine”. Unfortunately, problems related to data volumes often fail to show up until months after the solution has been deployed, and by that time, it can be very difficult to go back and “Fix it”.

One final note, back in my RRE (Rapid Response Engineer) days, the #1 reason for a CritSit (critical situation/server down) were custom Site Navigation controls. This was usually a web part that built out a tree control using a recursive loop of all sites. When you have hundreds of sites, combined with the need to dispose (which almost no one did), you have an application pool recycle problem on your hands!

Resources:
Working with large lists in Office SharePoint Server 2007 (must read)
SharePoint 2007 Test Data Population Tool
Plan for software boundaries (Office SharePoint Server)
Plan for software boundaries (Windows SharePoint Services)
SharePoint Dispose Checker Tool

Bottom Line:
Load up with data until you know when you’re creaking.

2. You entered what?!?

Sometimes it feels like the people using the solutions I build have completely different keyboards to the one I have. They are always entering the weirdest characters, in the weirdest places, leaving me with the most infuriating bugs. Infuriating because they are so easy to fix, and I know, deep down, that I really, really should have picked it up. This of course is vastly more complicated in an international environment.

Resources:
21 Apps Blog – Andrew Woodward has some great resources on Unit Testing and SharePoint
TypeMock for SharePoint

Bottom line:
Have some testing resources (automated or otherwise) dedicated to entering the strangest characters you can imagine, into the strangest places you can imagine.

3. Are you allowed to do that?

I couldn’t imagine a solution built on SharePoint that has only a single permission level. SharePoint is a collaboration platform, so by its nature, it brings people together, safely, by ensuring everyone can do only what they should be able to do. The custom solutions we build are no different.

With that said, developers are typically running with every permissions available (rightly or wrongly!). The problem of course is that running with all these permissions makes it very difficult to use the system exactly as an end user would. This problem is amplified by the SharePoint Object Model which, thankfully, will always respect a users permissions and in whose context much of our code will later run. The classic symptom of code that works when logged on as an administrator, but not as a “normal” user, is an authentication box when trying to access a site they otherwise have permission to access.

Another aspect of this is giving deep thought to exactly what rights a user should really have as an “Administrator”. For example, initially, our blogging solution made the person who owned the blog a Site Collection administrator. We very quickly realised that this was a bad idea. Why would the owner of a blog need to activate new features? Modify the navigation? This just ended up confusing people, so now, a blog owner gets a reduced set of permissions tuned specifically to the solution we have built for them, simplifying things, which after all, is our job as solution designers.

Resources:
Best Practices for Elevated Privilege in SharePoint and Elevated Privilege with SPSite by Daniel Larson
Elegant SPSite Elevation by Keith Dahlby

Bottom Line:
Make sure you are testing the system using the roles you have defined, and make sure you are giving people only the permissions they really need.

4. Two Servers are better than one

SharePoint, through its Solution Framework, does a great job of making it easy to install solutions across a farm. That is of course if you have one, many customers don’t need need either the scale or the availability to warrant one. However, in my mind, this doesn’t excuse developers from worrying about whether our solutions will work in a farm environment. You never know what the future holds.

So, what can go wrong? Well, let me tell you a little story. Many years ago, in the SPS2003 days, I was part of a team that put together a solution that stored navigation information for SharePoint sites in an XML file (that’s another story). The solution worked great “on the developers machine”, but on our medium server farm we had a problem, when someone updated the navigation on one front-end, that change was not reflected on the other front end. Obvious when you think about it, but you will be amazed how often you don’t.

The solution of course was also obvious, move the XML file onto shared storage, somewhere both machines could access it. We tested away, and again, on our development environment it worked. We went ahead and made the change, only to find that in production, nothing worked. The problem of course, was that we were hitting that classic of all issues, the NTLM Double Hop problem (to date I have lost around 6.3 days of my life to that this issue).

Now, that had a relatively simple solution too, impersonation, but the important bit is not how simple the solution is, but what it ended up doing to our timelines, and how embarrassed I felt! <grin>

Anyway, double hop, resource storage, state management (potentially) and Web.Config modifications are just a few of the issues you can encounter once you move to a farm environment.

Resources:
How To: Modify the web.config file in SharePoint using SPWebConfigModification by Mark Wagner

Bottom Line:
Test on a multi-server environment sooner rather than later.

5. Baseline it!

Your application works, job well done. You have completed all the testing you possibly can, everyone has signed everything off. You are ready to go into production.

Wait, before you do, there is one more thing!

Create a baseline. That is, an accurate representation of exactly how your application performs under a controlled set of parameters. Its critical to ensuring that the future upgrades you make are safe.

This is actually simpler than it sounds (which is not to say its simple), for example it could be:

A virtual machine that includes your application, fully configured, and with a complete set of sample data. Ensure that it is representative of what you will find when it does go into production.
Visual Studio Test Edition suite, or basically any load testing tool (see resources).

Then, pick your metrics, rinse, record and repeat. You need to get to a point where you have a pretty good grasp of how the system you are testing behaves while operational.

With this in hand, and before your next release, before going live, upgrade the environment and repeat exactly the same steps. The important thing then is to look for variation. If you suddenly find an unexpected increase of 50% in memory consumption, then you know something isn’t right. In this case, its the performance relative to the baseline that’s important, not the actual numbers.

Resources:
MOSS2007 – Visual Studio 2008 Testing (Load Test) by Liam Cleary
MS Web Application Stress Tool

Bottom Line:
Baseline the performance of your solution so that you can compare it to future releases.

Conclusion

As I said in my opening, there are many, many other important tests that should be performed. So lets start a discussion, what test do you perform before “Go Live”, and what do you think are the most important?

Free Seminar in Amsterdam, April 3rd 2009

Daniel McPherson — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 11:30:00 GMT

We are really looking forward to presenting with international visitors Joel Oleson and Mike Watson, and locals Waldek Mastykarz, Matthijs Hoekstra and our very own Robin Meure, Amsterdam 3rd of April.

We will then be heading on over with the guys to the main event, the Best Practices conference held in London, if you are not signed up yet you had better jump to it.

Full details below, be sure to head over to register. Big thanks to Quest Software for putting it on.

Join international and local SharePoint experts in Amsterdam and learn how to master your SharePoint environment. Sponsored by Quest Software and Microsoft.

Date: Friday, April 3rd, 2009
Time: 10.30 - 16.30 (Registration begins at 10.00)
Location: Auditorium, Microsoft Netherlands (map)
Cost: Free (Lunch is included)

Agenda:

10:00 Registration

10:30 Welcome and Introductions

10:40 SharePoint Successful Deployments in 10 Steps
Joel Oleson, Quest Software

11:30 SharePoint, the Social Computing Platform (Business Strategy and Adoption)
Daniel McPherson, zevenseas

12:30 Lunch

1:30 SharePoint Logical and Physical Infrastructure Fundamentals
Joel Oleson, Quest Software & Robin Meure, zevenseas

2:30 Backup Demystified
Mike Watson, Quest Software

3:30 Experts Panel and Q&A

4:30 Wrap Up

Meet the Experts:

Joel Oleson
SharePoint Expert, Quest Software

Joel is a senior product manager and SharePoint evangelist at Quest where he is responsible for product direction and strategy. He is well known in the SharePoint community as an enthusiastic trainer, evangelist and architect and he maintains a popular blog. Prior to Quest, Joel worked at Microsoft and was a part of the first Microsoft global deployment of SharePoint. During his Microsoft tenure Joel helped various customers achieve the critical governance they needed to upgrade and achieve scale with SharePoint 2007. He would later design the extranet and hosted SharePoint deployments. http://www.sharepointjoel.com

Mike Watson
SharePoint Expert, Quest Software
Mike Watson (MCSE, MCSA) is a senior product manager at Quest specializing in SharePoint manageability, scalability and availability. Before moving to Quest Software, Mike was instrumental in planning and deploying Microsoft Managed Services and Microsoft Online, as well as Microsoft Services efforts such as MOSSRAP (MOSS Risk Assessment Program) and SLM (Service Level Manager). http://www.sharepointmadscientist.com

Daniel McPherson
SharePoint Business Consultant and Co-Founder, zevenseas

Daniel has been involved in SharePoint since attending the first public announcement of project “Tahoe” at the Microsoft Technical Briefing in January 1999. It has had a profound impact on his career, taking him to the doorstep of hundreds of companies, of all shapes and sizes, in a range of industries,and in over 25 different countries. After 10 years at Microsoft, spent mostly in Microsoft Consulting Services, he is a co-founder and business consultant. http://community.zevenseas.com/Blogs/Daniel

Robin Meure
SharePoint Technical Consultant, zevenseas

Robin joined Atos Origin in 2004 and was immediately introduced to the rapidly emerging Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies At Zevenseas, Robin helps customers plan, deploy and build solutions on SharePoint, and participates actively in the broader SharePoint community though his blog and many contributions to Codeplex. He is a founding member of the Elite SharePoint Black Belts established by Microsoft in Holland to promote skills sharing among its partners. http://community.zevenseas.com/blogs/robin

Matthijs Hoekstra
Developer Evangelist, Microsoft Netherlands

Waldek Mastykarz
SharePoint MVP
Waldek Mastykarz is a Dutch SharePoint MVP specialized in Web Content Management solutions in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, web standards and accessibility. Waldek Mastykarz is a Dutch SharePoint MVP specialized in Web Content Management solutions in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, web standards and accessibility. http://blog.mastykarz.nl

Matthijs is a Developer Evangelist at Microsoft in The Netherlands. He joined Microsoft in 2002, worked 6.5 years as a consultant for Microsoft Services working with customers in the areas Information Worker, Portals and e-business. Matthijs mostly works with products as: SharePoint Portal Server, Windows SharePoint Services, Office, Unified Communications and .NET. http://blogs.microsoft.nl/blogs/mhoekstra

Love Fridays AND Mondays at zevenseas. Time for a change?

Daniel McPherson — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 13:31:00 GMT

I think I speak for the whole zevenseas team when I say that we absolutely love Mondays and Fridays.

On Monday mornings we get to work with some of the worlds biggest and best companies, on projects that push collaboration and SharePoint to the limits. Friday mornings start with breakfast at our local cafe, time where we can share our week over coffee, learning and solving each others problems as we go. We then head to the office where we spend the rest of the day trying to impress each other with our latest demos or get to work on our next cool tool.

Making sure we enjoy what we do was one of the most important goals we set ourselves when we began this boutique consultancy way back in Jan 2008. We have succeed by focusing not just on the Mondays and Fridays, but by taking a long term view. We all have the best equipment, we have the time to share and build knowledge, and through conference attendance and community engagement, we’ve built a network of experts that help us to stay up to date.

I have to say, our first year has gone better than we could ever have expected, except for one thing. We would really like to (carefully) grow our team here in the Netherlands.

If you love SharePoint (its all we do), care about the community (blog, twitter, tools), want to create innovative solutions for great clients and want to be part of a team that is committed to making consulting the high value profession it once was. Then drop me a line daniel@zevenseas.com.

Its time you started loving Mondays and Fridays too (and of course all the days in between).

Free Solution: LifeCycle Management Tool for SharePoint

Daniel McPherson — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 11:44:00 GMT

Last Friday Robin released a project that is has been a long term labour of love, and one that I believe contributes some significant value to the community.

zevenseas LCM.. it’s finally here!

Here is a brief summary of its capabilities:

Captures sitedeletions and makes a backup first before deleting the site or web.

Gathers sites that are unused (using the Usage info, Last Content Modified Date and Last Security Modified Date)

Actions can be taken on this "unused" sites, such actions are

Mail the siteowner and informing them that their site is being unused

Lock the site after a given period of time

Delete the site after a given period time

Now, this is a Beta for a reason, and we are releasing it so that we can get your feedback and bugs so that we can move it to an official release. Please install this only on a test environment, and then please pass on your feedback!

Congrats Robin!

Five Important Tests Before You Go Live

Daniel McPherson — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 08:11:00 GMT

That’s the title of an article I published over on SharePoint Magazine today, just thought you might be interested:

Fill ‘Er Up - Load up with data until you know when you’re creaking.
You entered what?!? - Have some testing resources (automated or otherwise) dedicated to entering the strangest characters you can imagine, into the strangest places you can imagine.
Are you allowed to do that? - Make sure you are testing the system using the roles you have defined, and make sure you are giving people only the permissions they really need.
Two Servers are better than one - Test on a multi-server environment sooner rather than later.
Baseline it! - Baseline the performance of your solution so that you can compare it to future releases.

So head on over for the full scoop.

Hans is Delivering Training and Workshops

Daniel McPherson — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 10:21:00 GMT

This year Hans has been working with Computrain to bring his wealth of SharePoint experience to a roster of training courses, specifically:

He is also looking to broaden this out to more free-flowing workshops. So, if your organisation is looking for some quality training, or to workshop some specific ideas, drop him an email: hans@zevenseas.com

OfficeRocker is Rocking Again

Daniel McPherson — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 07:54:00 GMT

My old mate Darren Strange aka OfficeRocker (Off-His-Rocker, get it? get it? Oh man he was proud of that blog name) has returned to his blog after roughly an 8 month absence. Really great to have his insights on the world of Office popping back into my feed reader.

His return post, titled “How to stop blogging and how to start again” is one I can really relate to, as most of 2007 was a blogging wasteland for me. I really enjoyed myself from 2004 to 2006, and then something happened, I got blocked, and only after some time out did the fun return. The readers of course can take a little longer! <grin>

To get an idea of what you can expect from the OfficeRocker blog check out some of his hits (and misses!):

Death by PowerPoint - Giving better presentations
Go SharePoint and good things happen
When presentations go wrong and how to recover afterwards

Anyway, Darren, great to have you back in the blog world, but of course things never stand still, I expect to see you in Twitter very soon, and following me at http://twitter.com/danmc.

Lets keep in touch.

Daniel | zevenseas | SharePoint Blog

Mark, Joel and TunnelPoint on “This Week In SharePoint”

Updated: Search Coder

DOWNLOAD

Support For The Search Web Service

Performance Instrumentation

Change Log Report

See you at DevDays NL

Building a Social Computing platform with SharePoint

New version of our “Assembly free” Timesheet Application

Release version of our “Assembly free” Team status Template

Bringing TunnelPoint to the “Assembly Free” solution party

zevenseas Tools Recap

CodePlex Projects

Web Parts

SearchCoder

Site Lifecycle Management

Feature Blocker

Free Solutions

Tagged Links

The Link Conductor

Tags Web Part

New version of our “Assembly free” Team status Application

Taking Assembly Free Solutions To The next Next Level: Team Status Site (Twitter?)

What does the application do?

So how does it work then?

A javascript API for the SharePoint and Office Live Web Services

Would you Like to try it?

Installing it Yourself

Adding Contributors

Adding a picture to your messages

Twitter for SharePoint?

Escape Clauses

How it works

This is what it looks like

Sample App Download: Taking Assembly Free Solutions to the Next Level

DOWNLOAD

How can you install it?

Call To Action

TunnelPoint gets its first review!

TunnelPoint: A BDC for SharePoint in the Cloud

Pint2Share in Amsterdam on Friday

Site Definition Customisation – The Controversy Returns!

European best Practices Conference, almost there!

Taking Assembly Free Solutions to the Next Level

But What if?

How do we do it?

Call to Action

Further Reading

Nasty Bug: stsadm can inadvertently delete a root site collection if erroneous URL path used

Five Important Tests Before You Go Live

1. Fill ‘Er Up!

2. You entered what?!?

3. Are you allowed to do that?

4. Two Servers are better than one

5. Baseline it!

Conclusion

Free Seminar in Amsterdam, April 3rd 2009

Agenda:

Meet the Experts:

Love Fridays AND Mondays at zevenseas. Time for a change?

Free Solution: LifeCycle Management Tool for SharePoint

Five Important Tests Before You Go Live

Hans is Delivering Training and Workshops

OfficeRocker is Rocking Again