Hans | zevenseas | SharePoint Blog

Introducing - Smart SharePoint Solutions and the Financial Suite

Hans Blaauw — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 13:27:28 GMT

A few months ago we teamed up with Smart SharePoint Solutions to put their financial SharePoint solutions in ProduShare.com.

Smart SharePoint Solutions is a new company with a new product, called Financial suite © Their product replaces a traditional way of working in Planning and Control departments by a new way of working with SharePoint.

It is vital for this product that it is managed by the site administrator in the Planning and Control department. For that reason Smart SharePoint Solutions has made the strategic choice to distribute their products via the one click install method of ProduShare. This way of distribution supports one of the goals of Smart SharePoint Solutions: Bring SharePoint to the user, without the need for intensive ICT support

The users now can add value to their processes, when they discover the strength of SharePoint as a datamangement, collaboration and communication tool.

Andre Salomons of SSS says "We have looked for a web shop that enables and supports achieving our goal. In ProduShare.com we have found a solution that matches our philosophy to make SharePoint solutions easier to install and use."

Visit their website at: www.SmartSharepointSolutions.com

Changes at zevenseas as of 2010

Hans Blaauw — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 18:35:50 GMT

Hi all. This post is a short message on some changes at zevenseas as of 2010. I have decided to leave the company. Before I go on I want to make clear that this is a pure personal decision and that it has nothing to do with how zevenseas is doing, the company is still going strong!

I’m not planning to explain exactly in detail what my reasons are (they say privacy is dead but I’m still happy to have some) in this post but basically business wise there are no real reasons to leave :-)

First I want to thank Daniel, Mark and Robin for the fantastic two years, it has been great with several big moments to remember. I can still remember the first meetings with Daniel and the quality discussions we had regarding SharePoint and how to run a SharePoint business. For sure that is something I will miss but probably we will have many other discussions in the future (iPhone vs Android, Flash vs non-flash, world problems, global warming etc.).

It must say this is probably one of the toughest moments in my career and personal life for several reasons. However, I don’t regret my decision till now.

I want to thank everyone I worked with the last two years for the great experience, it was a pleasure!

For now I want to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Regards,

Hans Blaauw

How to connect your mobile device to Exchange (BPOS)

Hans Blaauw — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 13:07:30 GMT

I struggled a little to get the correct settings for my Android to connect to our BPOS Exchange, follow below links to get the details:

http://www.microsoft.com/online/help/en-us/helphowto/0932dcdb-fe09-4b47-8c94-440371124341.htm

And it works.

REST and ADO.NET services

Hans Blaauw — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:07:39 GMT

In Vegas during SPC09 I joined a session with Pablo Castro on REST and I was very very impressed! Pablo showed some samples with CURL (sorry folks, CURL indeed) and it showed how easy it is to talk to the SharePoint data services. On his blog Pablo says:

The SharePoint Data Service head is not just a side integration deal, it's a full-on REST-over-HTTP head for SharePoint. It supports browsing as well as modifying data using regular HTTP verbs (GET, PUT, DELETE, etc.), it does ETags for concurrency control, enforces business logic as part of side-effecting methods, and it handles the full range of Data Services conventions for URLs, Atom and JSON payload formats, etc. It also exposes full metadata like any other Astoria service, allowing Visual Studio and any other metadata-driven client to give you a great experience on the client side. Now if you need to get or manipulate data in SharePoint from any platform in any language, all you need is an HTTP stack.

This opens up a lot of possibilities even for PHP fans (I admit, I like unmanaged code and it is in my old set of skills). On the MSDN blogs there is a toolkit available to easy test out some REST and ADO.NET services. Till now it was almost impossible to talk to SharePoint with PHP because of the difficulties handling SOAP (you needed an external library) but that has been solved right now.

During his presentation I was also impressed with the binding of REST inside VS and that looked really great (not completely sure I got the whole picture).

The big question for the future is of course, when do you choose which interface/protocol? The SOAP services are still there and now we have REST too. And what about using the client OM, how does this all fit together?

Would be great to see some performance charts on all these different approaches in the future. My best bet is that REST will be used more and more, it is also very usable for calls from mobile devices (iPhone, WiMo and Android) and that opens up some possibilities for more vertical SharePoint apps on mobile devices (expenses, travel expenses etc.).

Two SharePoint guys that take web services really serious :-)

Hans Blaauw — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:37:42 GMT

There are two (probably a few more) guys in the SharePoint community that do interesting stuff with SP web services, @jvossers and @sympmarc. They both work on Javascript solutions (JQuery) to make things happen inside a site(collection).

Jaap has released his LiveListData stuff and I think it is awesome. Very usable in solutions where you need to have a dashboard that shows the latest live data from updated lists, I actually think this could be something for TunnelPoint. Jaap showed it to me in Vegas and it worked very smooth.

Marc is focusing on a jQuery library for SharePoint Web Services and he tries to make it easier for (Javascript) developers to call the SP web services (correct me if I'm wrong Marc).

The solutions they provide make me think how we can use this stuff inside TunnelPoint and ProduShare, any thoughts?

New lower pricing for BPOS (significant)

Hans Blaauw — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:11:30 GMT

Microsoft has lowered the per user price for BPOS to $10 a month (from $15). I also just saw that it can be purchased from 5 seats ongoing (thought the old model was 20 seats). The standard service also offers increased mailbox storage to 25 Gb.

Request a trial here.

The future of the web, where web sites become web services

Hans Blaauw — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:59:34 GMT

SP2010 has been introduced and what we had in mind with TunnelPoint will be easier with SP2010. When companies will move to the cloud with SP2010 more public SP sites will become data providers, I'm convinced. If you ever heard of Web 3.0 and the semantic web did you ever realize that there is a big move towards web services and the data they provide?

I’m a big believer of an Internet of Services, where services are ubiquitous; an Internet of Things where in principle every physical object becomes an online addressable resource (see iPhone, persistent connection); a Mobile Internet where 24/7 seamless connectivity over multiple devices is the norm; and the need for semantics in order to meet the challenges presented by the dramatic increase in the scale of content and users.(source: Serviceweb 3.0 EU).

When talking about moving to the cloud the larger scope is always an Internet of Services IMO. Many companies are capable of producing very valuable information but not many companies are capable of producing very capable applications on desktops, mobiles or other devices. This is where the web services approach is at its best, companies approach developers to build applications around there data (I don’t believe in browsing on a device, sucks compared to native apps).

With the new capabilities of SP2010: client OM, REST, web services and storage of more items and data, a SharePoint portal becomes another online addressable resource. Some will say “oh Hans this will never happen because of security”, really? Start looking around and think about the new interfaces in SP2010, why does MS provide all this stuff? I think it has to do with the vision of Microsoft (see some old Bill G. essays), it really believes in an always connected world on different devices/products (desktop, mobile, tablet, surface, SharePoint). Sure, MS would like you to use al their software and devices :-) For me personally the interface is exchangeable, the data however, not!

The old perception is that closed data is a competitive advantage but the new reality is that open data is a competitive advantage (source: ReadWriteWeb). Personally I'm already a big believer for many years but SharePoint did not really offer much in terms of an active web service community or .NET developers that are looking for integration of external services into SharePoint (or I completely missed it). That has nothing to do with skills but more with focus.

For me the one part of Web 3.0 is really gaining attention and that is web services. Did you ever think about the fact that the iPhone is the perfect example of the usage of web services? A lot of the popular apps. use web services behind the scenes. Things like: traffic information, trip planning, Google Maps, LBS etc. Connected “Things” start happening too, ever heard of a service called Pachube or devices like the Chumby?

If we look at Enterprises and public SharePoint URLs, more will open up the coming years. Actually, a lot are already open because all web services related to SharePoint are enabled. Take BPOS, all is enabled out of the box.

So how does TunnelPoint fit into this story Hans? Well, we are aiming to be the connection to and from SharePoint. We do the heavy lifting and we take care of the data transformation. In SP2010 we can do more and we can do it easier because of REST (seen it and it is awesome). It is our goal to work together with developers that are believers of this approach, you can build a TunnelPoint connector too! Right now we transform data to SharePoint but one day in the future we will be capable of doing it the other way around (for example to serve your list as a KML file). Sure, this could all be done by building server side code but we want to stick to the cloud offering without the need to touch your very valuable and business critical SharePoint infrastructure.

You can find a lot of information about the Future of The web and the European Union has kicked off a huge investment in Web 3.0. For more information see the site. There is also a very interesting video here.

Another initiative is the European web service finder over here.

SP 2010 public BETA alert

Hans Blaauw — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:31:18 GMT

There is a special site to pre-register for the SP2010 public beta. Click here to visit it.

Update on the Dolphins

Hans Blaauw — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 10:08:37 GMT

It has been a while that I wrote a small post on the Dolphins we adopted. I think it is important sometimes to report on non-work stuff and this is the perfect excuse for me to do so :-)

All the sightings are done by the Sea Watch Foundation, a very special group of people that keep an eye on the sea for us! Photos are also supplied by them (copyright).

Below some reports from the Sea Watch Foundation. Remember, our adopted dolphins are Nic Nic and Splash.

We came across Nic Nic next when she and Rip Torn came to visit us in New Quay Bay around the middle of the month. Nic Nic and Rip Torn appeared to be taking it easy in the shallow waters around New Quay, just slowly swimming around with no clear destination in mind, occasionally leaping right out of the water and then continuing on their way. There was also a juvenile dolphin in the area which may have been Nic Nic’s calf, Splash, but we’re not entirely sure.
Splash is about five years old now and over the winter has become much more independent, often swimming far away from Nic Nic and doing his own thing. It is likely that he was in the area somewhere, but unfortunately when we last saw him he didn’t have any scars or nicks that we could identify him by, so now that he is spending less and less time with Nic Nic we are not sure which juvenile he is!
August 2009 4
Interestingly, Nic Nic and Rip Torn were also found together last June as well! Rip Torn is an adult male dolphin who is looking pretty battered now. He has a very large number of markings and each time we see him he seems to have a new scar or nick on his dorsal fin making his appearance quite changeable! Luckily, all of his old scars still remain and he is one of our most distinctive dolphins making it very easy to identify him even with the regular additions to his markings. Hopefully he’s not being too rough with Nic Nic!!!

And yes we have some pictures.

Nintex - Major Sponsor of the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009

Hans Blaauw — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 09:42:02 GMT

Copy from their site:

Nintex is proud to sponsor the fifth global Microsoft SharePoint Conference to be held in Las Vegas from 19th – 22nd October, 2009.

Nintex will unveil its 2010 products at this event. We invite delegates to come and see us at the Nintex exhibit booth 415, and let us show you our exciting new products.

This is the first conference to showcase the SharePoint 2010 platform features and functionality. The conference will feature many examples of real world deployments and scenarios in sessions delivered by the most experienced SharePoint experts in the industry. Nintex are one of a select number of partners who will be presenting sessions at this conference. On Wednesday October 21st at 9am Nintex’s VP of Technology, Mike Fitzmaurice, will be presenting on Nintex’s upcoming 2010 products in room Surf 1. Make sure you add this to your must-see-sessions list.

If you want to meet Nintex please ping me on hans@zevenseas.com.

SharePoint Conference 2009 sessions and events

Hans Blaauw — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 09:39:28 GMT

A few people requested this and I decided to create it, a total overview of the sessions and social events during the SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas.

Click the picture to open it. You can easily copy stuff to your calendar with one click (if you use Google).

New service for TunnelPoint in progress (soon to be released)

Hans Blaauw — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:21:26 GMT

Last days we have been working on a new service for TunnelPoint that could prove very handy for people that need to monitor sites from within SharePoint. As you probably already know by now, we want you to use SharePoint as your main interface all day:-)

We use a third party monitoring service for this (our focus is not to build the external services) to put site response information in a SP list. Putting the monitoring results inside SharePoint gives you suddenly more capabilities because you can also add a workflow to do stuff based on the result (if site is down send a Tweet). On top of that you can write a simple DataView web part to show a custom report.

We teamed with Zoho and integrated their Site24x7 service (which has an API).

How will it work?

Well, that is easy. You first need to add the service to your MyServices inside TunnelPoint:

After configuring the parameters (mapping SP list columns to the Site24x7 responses) you will see the following result in your SP list after a while:

In this list you can see the following important results: CurrentStatus and ResponseTime. You can tweak the poll interval, this interval is used by Site24x7 and is not our interval.

When released we will open up a demo site that features:

A special DataView web part connected to the Site24x7 list;
A workflow that Tweets when the site is up or down.

ProduShare non-assembly contest

Hans Blaauw — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 13:41:14 GMT

This contest is a challenge for anyone involved in SharePoint. We want to encourage the development of small powerful SharePoint solutions that can be deployed without doing any server side coding.

So if you know SharePoint and how to develop an assembly free solution inside SharePoint please drop your solution in my mailbox hans at zevenseas.com.

The prizewinner will get a EUR 500,- prize for their solution.

Deadline: The deadline for all entries is November 30, 2009.

1. Contest goal

zevenseas is holding a contest for the design and development of assembly free solutions for SharePoint. The competition is open for creative people or companies who, with their ideas, are able to improve the capabilities of SharePoint without developing server side code.

2. Terms of the contest

The contest is open to all nationalities and aimed at SharePoint power users, content developers or product specialists.
Groups of people can participate in the competition but there must be a group leader that will take the responsibility and represent the group.

3. The judges

The jury will be made up of 4 people with the right to vote on solutions. The majority of votes will determine the final decision.
The President of the jury will be one of the founders of zevenseas.

4. Prizes

The winner of the contest wins a prize of € 500,00 that will be paid out through paypal (you need a paypal account). zevenseas will also collaborate with the winner for the development of the final product to be launched inside ProduShare. Besides that zevenseas will promote the application as much as possible through their website, Google Adwords and other online media.

5. Registration and expiry terms

We don’t need very detailed registration details, all entries submitted by email to hans at zevenseas.com before November 30,2009 will be seen as official entries.

6. The projects

All submitted solutions must be accompanied by:

1. A detailed description of the solution:

a. A Title for the solutions;

b. A detailed descirption of the solution and which problem it solves;

2. A bio of the participant and the following disclaimer "I authorize zevenseas to use my personal details on her websites produshare.com and zevenseas.com for the purpose of marketing the solution”.

3. The solution needs to be submitted in a .zip file and must not contain viruses or other malicious code, otherwise the entry will not be allowed.

4. A solution can be in one of the following forms:

a. A list template;

b. A site template;

c. A DataView web part;

d. Branding package;

e. Anything else that adds smart things to SharePoint.

Some sample solutions could be:

· A way to inject jQuery into a masterpage (we can help to integrate inside ProduShare);

· A DataView web part based on a TunnelPoint service;

· A vertical solution for a specific department (HRM, Financial etc.);

· A weather site;

· A stock site.

7. Rights of use

Every idea that is entered into the contest belongs exclusively to the participants.
In entering the contest the participants declare that their ideas and source code are not covered by intellectual ownership of third parties.

8. Information and results publication

The final competition results (we will show the project title, name, surname and nationality of the participants) will be published on produshare.com or zevenseas.com within 1 month from the expiry date.
By entering the contest participants authorize zevenseas to publish their names and project online.

9. Change to the rules

zevenseas can change or modify the present rules when needed (for example extending the deadline) and will inform the participants of the contest immediately.

10. No right of appeal

The decisions of the Jury are not subject to any judicial review. There is no right of appeal.

The Jury is entitled to dismiss any participant during and at any stage of the contest at their own discretion.

Getting a BPOS trial account through us

Hans Blaauw — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 16:09:21 GMT

We can help you with a trial account for BPOS, please use below links to request a trial and get started fast!

Business Productivity Online Standard Suite
Sign up for a 30-day trial! This trial includes 20 user licenses for Exchange Online, SharePoint online, Office Live Meeting and Office Communications Online.

Request trial

Business Productivity Online Deskless Worker Suite
Sign up for a 30 day trial that includes 20 user licenses. This low-cost solution includes a simpler feature set for Exchange Online and SharePoint Online.

Request trial

You can use BPOS in combination with TunnelPoint and ProduShare, see for yourself and register here.

How far can we stretch our service offering with TunnelPoint and SharePoint?

Hans Blaauw — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 15:35:02 GMT

Our problem is not what services we can build but more which ones get a priority. I have always been a big believer of data/content providers and APIs and combining these with SharePoint and the fast grow of different offerings prove that we are really on the right track. An announcement that for example Microsoft is supporting the Simple Cloud API says a lot to me. This means that the different Cloud storage options will be available through one simple and easy to use API.

We can stretch our offering very far because we have basically created our own infrastructure to subscribe receivers to the different providers. I see no real limitations in terms of technical possibilities but I see a challenge in handling thousands of calls and connections, however this would be a good problem to have :-)

Sure, we need to make improvements but the good thing is we can make these improvements because there is enough technology out there that we can use to improve. Technologies like RSSCloud, Pubhubsub, Comet (push with persistent connections), MQTT (IBM) etc. all deliver a solutions for almost the same problem and are very interesting to investigate. However, the whole Pull/Push discussion is not that important to me (except to save battery life on mobiles because polling eats batteries, server polling is cheaper). In the end the offered solution to the user is important, how easy is it to get the information he needs, that is the key factor to success!

Right now we are working on a few small ideas (one almost finished) and we will implement these the coming weeks, all related to new services.

From the content side of things we have no worries, there are a lot of providers (through web services / API’s) and the possibilities grow every day.

However, for our success there are two important factors:

how easy is it for users to get to our services and use them;
when will a big chunk of SharePoint sites be available on public reachable URLs;

I think we already did a lot regarding the first point but we have a challenge to improve it in terms of usability. The second point has a lot to do with SharePoint Online and other SP hosted solutions, we are too small to push this on our own :-)

Last weeks we have done multiple demos and feedback was great overall! Questions like: “so where is the SharePoint server side code” proves also to me that not everyone is aware of the possibilities that SharePoint offers through the web services. That is good for us because we know how to use these services in a very powerful way :-)

Trying to solve the problem of deploying a workflow created in SharePoint Designer

Hans Blaauw — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:15:52 GMT

I really want to solve this problem for everyone that needs to deploy a Workflow designed in SharePoint Designer to another site (without doing a site template). I know different people have blogged about this before but it isn’t the solution I have in mind. We want to solve it once and for all by putting it inside ProduShare and I have the feeling it is doable. I’m investigating a one click (or two clicks) solution that can be deployed from our catalog onto a SharePoint online site. And before all the devs start sending me emails, no server side code please (my dev skills are out of date, before you know it I delete it).

What I want to accomplish is to find a way to:

create the Workflows library (is it a special library?);
dynamically bind the new GUIDs to the workflow;
“push” the workflow files into the site.

The last two is a piece of cake I think (from within ProduShare) but I have no idea if we can create a Workflow library that is actually seen by SharePoint as a Workflows library. On top of that, we need to do this through the web services.

If you have an idea on how to do it, just let me know. Maybe we can solve this problem once and for all!

Dutch version of Nintex Workflow is available

Hans Blaauw — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:59:03 GMT

Finally it is there (on top of all other languages) and we are happy to welcome a Dutch version of Nintex Workflow. We have been involved in the first translations but we will not take credits for finalizing because another Dutch partner was involved in that.

We have had some requests for a Dutch version in the past and if you read our blog don’t hesitate to download the Dutch trial here.

So it’s time to talk about “werkstromen” instead of workflows :-)

Coolness for SharePoint – samples (geocoding, weather and corporate Twitpic, Mobypicture)

Hans Blaauw — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 09:47:45 GMT

Yes, this works with BPOS too.

Update: make sure to check out http://demo.zevenseas.com/sites/tunnelpoint

Last week I was a little bit nasty with my post on the SharePoint eco system and my complaints about “boring” applications. Immediately after that post I was thinking about my own “cool” apps for SharePoint and I could not remember my last cool app in a developer role (not developing myself anymore) for SharePoint. This weekend I had some thoughts on that and because of the availability of TunnelPoint and some stuff that we are testing internally, I have come up with some cool stuff.

First however, I need to tell you about two new Google services we are adding (or have already been adding) to TunnelPoint, Geocoding and Weather. With the Geocoding service you can easily add Latitude and Longitude to any entry in a list that contains an address, city and country (like your contact list). This service is live now on TunnelPoint. See a screenshot below:

The second service is weather provided by TunnelPoint and the Google Weather API. I must confess, the weather API isn’t a fully documented one but we use it either way because it is easy and fast. Right now we are testing it but we are on track for releasing it somewhere this week. I think a weather service speaks for itself and I show you the screenshot below:

I think it is awesome and because all data is in a list you can do your own magic with it (DataView web part or workflow).

These two services in one week prove that TunnelPoint is flexible and easy to extend and that was our goal in the first place.

So, now some more cool stuff!

I still have some skills in mobile development (using a very simple tool called Basic4PPC, it creates native WM solutions) and I wanted to create something that connects my mobile to SharePoint by using some internal TunnelPoint services. It took me around 24 hours this weekend to built a demo that can post information (message, Latitude, Longitude and picture from camera) to a SharePoint list by leveraging something that we are testing inside TunnelPoint. By no means it is something that we are selling right now but the direct connection to TunnelPoint could be something that we are going to open up in the future. Maybe someone wants to pickup the challenge with an Android or iPhone application?

The end result is a small mobile app. and you can see the result below:

The biggest challenge was of course the mobile application but I'm happy to say that it works on my HTC and Omnia. Luckily I had some old code lying around to deal with the GPS and it all works nicely.

My goal was to create a combination of a corporate Twitter mobile client and a Twitpic or Mobypicture service for SharePoint. It turned out to be easy because of the TunnelPoint technology. TunnelPoint provides the transparent connection to the list and the Twitter service in TunnelPoint can even publish my internal messages to Twitter.

When selecting the camera icon I get the following screen:

In this screen I can do two things: fill out a message and hookup a image from my camera. If I click on the camera it will open up my camera and I can take a shot. After the shot the image is saved. When I click the check button it will send the picture to a temporary storage location (for now outside SharePoint) but the message will be saved in a SharePoint list together with the Latitude and Longitude and the picture URL. See below screen:

Basically this mimics services like yFrog, Mobypicture, Twitpic etc. But this time inside your SharePoint environment.

Even President Obama uses the same web services that are used by TunnelPoint

Hans Blaauw — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 09:01:42 GMT

Am I kidding? Not really and I'm not drunk either :-) Our SMS service partner Clickatell provides SMS on a global scale and the US Department of State decided to use their services to receive SMS highlights of Obama’s speech in Cairo. Click here for more information on this solution on the TunnelPoint blog.

The status of the SharePoint eco system and how we can help

Hans Blaauw — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 19:13:26 GMT

One of the things we talked a lot about when I was partnering with Skype (many years ago) was the eco system. For Skype it was important and it contained the users, partners, the core platform and extra’s. It was functioning really well and everyone profited from it (although there have been discussions about that).

For any product such an eco system is important because it keeps the vibe alive.

My questions is if there is a SharePoint eco system? I’m actually not sure because in my opinion something is missing, the needed dynamic interaction with end users! Let me explain a little more.

When I look around there are a lot of solutions for SharePoint, stuff like: generic web parts (better versions of what SP offers), backup tools, collaboration+ tools, enhanced versions of out of the box sites etc. Most are useful but IMO, a lot of times boring for end users. Boring? Yes, boring and not specifically tailored for what they need in their daily work. Don’t get me wrong, we need all these tools too!

We, the technical people, expect them to “get” web parts and how to use them without a proper education but in the back of our mind we all know that user adoption isn’t probably that great in the end. Do we really know that many end users that mix and match web parts and build their own useful site? I know a few but that’s it. If I'm wrong please correct me because I'm trying to tease a little to get a good open discussion on this subject.

SharePoint has all the potential to become the most important Enterprise collaboration platform of the last 10 years and all partners make good money with it (we too). But that is not what I’m talking about. What am I talking about? I talk about end users that buy vertical SharePoint solutions that are tailored for their needs. Right now this is missing IMO. There is no dynamic marketplace where people take a look to see if it can solve their daily problem. And if they would see something they would need to go through their IT department to purchase it because most of the solutions need to be installed on the front end web server. End users don’t have much freedom when it comes to buying SP solutions. Is that a big problem? You bet! IT departments are busy running all their systems and new functionality can be a pain because you also need to know how to support it (what if the installation on the server goes wrong).

Now I’m going to do what you probably expected, I’m going to plug our own products :-) But, I do this with the best intentions because I want to give end users choices and solutions for their problems without overloading the IT department! It is a win-win for everyone in the end!

We think we can help to create a better eco system by offering a platform that brings flexibility but also binds groups of people. The end result is different type of solutions (think out of the box) that are available in two tastes:

no-assembly installable solutions
services (dynamic data, API’s) that connect to SharePoint lists.

The first one is done by using ProduShare (produce and share) and its framework to install things easily. A vertical solution can be something very simple like a list that contains very important information for a financial department. Period ending tasks for a financial period could be something like that. Sure you can create it yourself but why would you, it takes time. I can come up with plenty of other examples for this. Another one could be a branding package. Your site looks ugly when you create it? Download and install a branding package and voila a better looking site.

The second one, services, is done by using TunnelPoint. TunnelPoint is the middleman and it makes sure that interesting and up-to-date information can be seen inside your SharePoint site. This information is offered by calling web services/APIs (very abstract and difficult to understand for end users) and transforming that to information that can be offered to lists inside a SharePoint site. We have developed several services and we are planning to develop much more the coming months.

For both products we believe in the eco system. A system that has: partners that co-develop new services, solution builders and end users that buy it from us (subscription or one time payment).

Let me share one thing with you before I end this post. It is a sample of the status of SharePoint. Sometimes people ask me what I do and when I say Enterprise Collaboration portals with SharePoint people gaze and then turn their head to talk to other cool people :-) This could mean a few things:

they never heard of SharePoint
they don’t like collaboration (probably a lot);
they use folders and network shares;
they just ignore me because they don’t like me :-)
they think I'm an alien from a planet far far away.

But what if I could have said, “I have built an awesome social application for SharePoint, just like Facebook”. Probably that would have caught their attention.

Overall I think we need much more exciting and useful applications for end users to increase user adoption. We are ready to help all people in the eco system to fulfill this!

Nintex Workflow 2007 v1.10 is now available

Hans Blaauw — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 10:17:03 GMT

Upgraded or new functionality:

Flexible Task Options
Nintex Workflow 2007 now provides the ability to create any number of task outcomes, such as Approve, Deny, Hold, Rework, More Info, etc. This action also provides built-in reminder and escalation settings.

Exchange Server Actions in Enterprise Edition
Nintex Workflow 2007 Enterprise Edition now includes two new actions for Exchange Server 2007 – Create Outlook Task, and Create Outlook Appointment. For example, a leave approval workflow could add the approved leave to the applicant’s and their manager’s calendars. Because the Exchange 2007 web service APIs are used, this method is also suited to various on-premise, hosted, and hybrid architectures.

Assign SharePoint Tasks
This action allows the standard SharePoint ToDo Task to be created and assigned to a user by a workflow. The workflow will wait for the Task item to be set to “completed” before continuing. By utilizing the out-of-the-box Outlook/SharePoint integration features, this provides the ability to use the Outlook client as an alternative way to interact with Nintex Workflow processes.

Work the Web
The new Web Request can gather data from any web URL source using the RESTful architecture approach. This provides the ability to use Nintex Workflow to collect data from a wide range of web sources, create mash-ups, access RSS feeds, proprietary web service protocols, web page scraping, etc.

Request Data with Attachments
The Request Data action now supports attaching files to the response. The attachment can then be published using the Copy to SharePoint or Copy to Fileshare actions.

Update XML Action
The new Update XML action allows workflows to dynamically modify XML documents. With the ever-increasing adoption of XML data representation, this powerful feature opens up a broad range of data integration and document handling and manipulation capabilities.

Create and edit Discussions
The Create List Item action now handles Discussion List content types correctly, allowing you to dynamically create a new Discussion, Thread, or Message item.

Create/Decommission Site Collections
Create Site Collection and Decommission Site Collection actions have been added. The available Decommissioning options include the ability to Delete the site collection, or alternatively set it to Read Only, or No Access.

Richer process information
The Verbose Logging option provides detailed information about the workflow execution. This can be useful for developers and also business process managers.

Easier Administration
Several enhancements have been made to improve administration and management of workflows, including workflow log purging, and additional schema information in export files to make export and import of workflows between environments easier.

For more information click here. For pricing please contact me.

Fulfilling SharePoint dreams, including yours!

Hans Blaauw — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 10:41:43 GMT

So here we are, a very specialized company that tries to fulfill its dreams. When Daniel and I set down for the first time late 2007 we talked a lot about SharePoint and what was good about it or was missing. During lunchtime we had some lively discussions on all issues related to SharePoint. Other people like Mark, Bram, and people from our team joined these discussions sometimes too and basically Daniel and I decided there to grab the opportunity and get zevenseas started.

Our first goal was to startup the consultancy activity to get a sustainable business and to build up relationships with companies and SharePoint experts. On top of our list was also the community aspect of our company, the blogs and Twitter (or any other social networking tool). However, consultancy wasn’t our ultimate dream! Our real passion and dream is product development. My history is in product development (mobile, speech recognition, Skype) and Daniel always loved to do product development (Internet Address Book) so for us it is a logical step.

This step is our dream and in my opinion dreams are important when you start a business, especially in SharePoint! So our next step is fulfilling our own dream but also the dream of people that have a SharePoint product dream!

The last couple of months we have been initiating the development of three our products (part through a partnership with an Indian company) and the last few months we have decided to setup our own company overseas (not overzeas).

Our overseas company is operational and together with our friends and passionate developers over there we have been working hard on the release of our products. The next phase will be extending our products TunnelPoint and ProduShare. For me it is great ride!

To make this all happen in a very professional matter we have setup a separate entity in our country Holland under the name codezeven B.V. This company will initiate and manage all product development efforts in Europe and anywhere else (yes, global is part of the dream).

However, we also want to help you to fulfill your dreams! You can use our expertise and international team (European management) to build brilliant SharePoint products that you can promote and sell. Do you have and idea for a cool web part? Or a complete solution? Don’t hesitate, let us fulfill your dream and make it happen together!

Send and email to myspdream@zevenseas.com and we make sure your dream gets the attention it needs!

Nobody is excluded here, if you are a company with a cool product idea or you see a way to build and sell a great product, let us know!

SharePoint 2010 and the ribbon bar

Hans Blaauw — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:54:53 GMT

I have a hate-love relationship with the ribbon bar. I think it is the greatest improvement that Microsoft added to Office 2007 but I also get lost many times. I have a better suggestion, add a tag cloud to it with the most used options.

Anyway, we get ribbons in SharePoint 2010 (I checked it and MS disclosed this here). My question is if this will work out for all users. In my opinion SharePoint cannot be compared with applications like Word and Excel because a SharePoint page consist of many types of content and functionality (web parts, list content, document). In Word you know you work on a document and you know all actions are related to that document but in SharePoint it is a different story. People already see it as a portal and not as an application, right now when you click on a document you open an application with the document you selected. When you click on a web part the experience is different.

I have my doubts on how you can always present the best possible ribbon bar to a user when you switch to the several different types of content and functionality on a page. My first feeling says it could be tricky and confusing. SharePoint behaved like a portal and now it suddenly starts behaving like an application (something we probably wanted years ago). The whole thing here is expectations and trained/learned behavior. Logically speaking it could be a smooth new experience because all interfaces get consistent among all applications (is SharePoint a portal, platform or application?).

However, I'm still not sure. Besides that, the ribbon bar occupies a lot of space. I know we had this discussion before when 2007 arrived and again I think it was a needed step forward.

Overall there are a few very good UI improvements in SharePoint (reduces post-backs and waiting time) and probably the ribbon bar will be a successful addition. While saying that I still have doubts :-) It is funny, in several projects or meetings people told me SharePoint has a clunky interface and that it is so different from Office and now you hear me complain about it.

Maybe you should just ignore this post till we know the outcome.

Visio 2010 workflow seems to be great but…

Hans Blaauw — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:20:40 GMT

I wanted to post something here on Vision 2010 and the great way to build workflows but reading the Technical Preview overview it confused me what I can publish. It is clear that I can publish stuff on Office 2010 but I cannot publish stuff on server-specific features and capabilities. That means I could show you the new Office 2010 interface features for Visio but I’m probably not allowed to show you the Workflow conditions and actions because they are server-specific and also expose some of the new workflow activities and conditions?

I have no clue anymore and sometimes I have the feeling they hire too much legal firms :-)

So below you see some screenshots of…, yeah what actually?

SharePoint workflow conditions

Well, you get the point :-) I think it is saver to wait when we are 100% sure what we can write about.

P.S. Nothing in this post is to offend anyone or to be negative on a MS product. We just like to play around with new toys and tell the world. Mam, I have a new toy!

Overall I think using Visio 2010 as a workflow tool for SharePoint is an awesome idea!

SharePoint 2010: Do you upgrade?

Hans Blaauw — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 14:14:57 GMT

Microsoft is not completely there yet with the release of SharePoint 2010 but it is coming. More and more blogs are posting on new features (although we are limited in what we post) and this brings up the question which companies are going to upgrade immediately. My personal opinion is that it will take a while. There are several reasons for that:

The new SharePoint is 64 bit only running on Windows Server 2008;
We still have a recession;
User adoption is not very high on SharePoint 2007 (before you get upset by this remark, by user adoption I don’t mean installed on servers and available on PC’s.);
There are a lot of very advanced customizations out there;
SharePoint 2007 is a very very good product.

Of course I could be totally wrong and I hope I am totally wrong (no misunderstanding on that). Practically it could mean some headaches for companies like us, we need to keep the knowledge on two different versions up-to-date. Sure, we had to do that when changing from 2003 to 2007 but reality was that we moved forward with 2007 (like all our customers). This time it is different, 2007 is a much better product and more people will stick to it. On top of that Office 2007 is very good too!

Of course we wish most people will move to SharePoint 2010 (we are like boys in a toy store) but we are also happy to provide 2007 services.

Let’s wait and see what happens!