SharePoint Architect’s Workspace & Thoughts on Microsoft’s Leadership, Today & Beyond

Content Management Problem? That May Be A Good Sign (InformationWeek)

Microsoft Releases Toolkit for Reusing SharePoint Portlets (PCWorld)

Virtual data center brings efficiency to Kronos (ComputerWorld)

Cost and convenience key to Microsoft’s Online onslaught in Europe (WindowsITPro)

Pepsi bottler saves big bucks with virtualization (ITBusiness)

Tomoye Communities Connect to SharePoint (TheAppGap)

Cheap Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Unleashed – Find Suitable Deal For Your Needs (PeopleSoftGuys)

Steps To Install WSP file in STSADM (littletalk)

When the going gets tough, the tough get going…to the SharePoint Best Practices Conference (SPInsiders)

Using scripts to automate SharePoint Server 2007 installation (Gill ITPro)

Davy Brion made a post titled “What It Takes To Be A Great Technical Lead?” In an excerpt:

You obviously need strong technical skills. You are responsible for the final result, so you better make sure that there is a solid technical foundation for the team to build upon. This doesn’t mean that you should build this foundation entirely yourself. Preferably, you involve your teammates into this as much as possible. You’re also responsible for fixing technical issues that your teammates can’t solve. You either fix it, or when that’s not possible you should figure out an acceptable workaround. Be sure that your teammates are fully aware of the details of the solution or the workaround.

His main points are—
1. You obviously need strong technical skills, You have to be able to teach your teammates. I agree on this point and I don’t think I would ever stop developing my technical skills regardless of how high-up the ladder I go. If you are in the I.T. industry make it a responsibility to value and develop your technical skills whether you’re a tec. I just don’t have any respect for managers who spend all day doing metrics, operations, variances and stuff. My projects have done well, and at the very least survived because of strong technical leadership and not drooling over pages and pages of metrics and analysis. Who needs them when you are always on target? Who needs complex variances to determine whether you are on target?

2. You need to trust your teammates. I have no problem on this. I did go through that stage before and got over it eventually.

3. Stimulate self-organization. I have everything organized in a SharePoint portal right from the start of the project (tasks, calendars, milestones, knowledge base, workflows, alerts, etc.) and organization plays by itself. I can’t remember the last time I called a team meeting. Yah, I know project management school tells you to conduct weekly and monthly meetings; I think it’s a waste of time, and it has always been. We are in the digital world and I exhaust SharePoint to the limits.

4. Don’t keep the coolest technical tasks for yourself. I’d usually keep (non-exclusive) the hardest technical tasks and roadblocks the team encounters that may jeopardize the deadline.

5. Try to prevent overtime as much as possible. Overtime is a result of mismanagement and miscalculation from the early stages down to deployment.

6. Remember that you are responsible for the final result. No problem with this.

7. Give credit where credit is due. Everyone reports their own milestones, achievements, etc. I let them market themselves; just make sure they can back it up.

8. Finally, you need to realize that your teammates are not your developers. They are my developers but I do not explicitly say that. I take full responsibility for their actions through good and bad times and when decisions need to be made, I am the superior who decided which is which; and again, whatever the outcome, I take full responsibility. Period.

If I may add my own points:

1. Do a lot of thinking on the planning stage. One of the valuable things my Architect mentor taught me before is to do major thinking during the planning stage. Plan your design, infrastructure, skills roadmap, skills gap, etc.

2. Skills assessment. This is BIG. Before the project begins and when I already have an idea of the skills required for the deliverable, I do a skills assessment and create the necessary roadmap to prepare them for the task.

3. Forecasting of technical roadblocks. I make it a point to identify the technical challenges or roadblocks we may encounter throughout the duration of the project. I do a lot of research, download scripts, read case studies, proof of concept, etc. to make like easier for the roadblocks ahead.

4. Project Management. Every technical lead should have project management training. You need not turn over pages and pages of metrics and variances on a daily basis. I do not like that either. I keep things as simple as possible and maximize SharePoint. Simplify, simplify, simplify.

5. Self-empowerment. I read in “Why we want you to be rich” by Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki about one of Donald’s favorite quote from George Patton:

—Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity

I realized I have been doing that for quite sometime.

Go and read the post by Davy Brion here.

My stomach turned upside down when I learned about a project doing proof of concept on simple SharePoint workflows being implemented. What the…

I have done a lot of proof of concepts in the past and they were technologies that were not yet publicly available. One example in mind was the Tag clouds we created back in 2006 for SharePoint 2007 while the server application was still in beta release and the tag cloud concept was just starting to hit blog sites. To note, the tag cloud was actually demoed by our CTO in a conference that had Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in the audience.

Anyways, I would suggest to spend time (which of course means money on a per hour basis) doing proof of concepts on things that no one has done yet. SharePoint 2007 Workflows has been up and running since it’s beta days in 2006 and for almost three years, there are so many projects and materials related to SharePoint workflows that would jumpstart your development right away. I would instead allocate the hours on “training on target” to what the project needs and the only documents I would produce are my status report for items I have already covered.

Virtual Sales Team Unified with SharePoint Server (Pr Inside)

Using the SharePoint BDC to access SAP data (Kalsing)

70-282 Exam Cram: Upgrading SharePoint [Microsoft Small Business Specialist Primer book] (HarryBrelsford)

Developing a Deployable App to Access SharePoint Information – Part Two (SharePointBlogs)

The SharePoint (MOSS) for Communicators Online Workshop (PrescientDigital)

Mainsoft and Polymorph introduce SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes in UK and Ireland (TradingMarkets)

Tool Gives Lotus Notes Users Integrated Access to SharePoint (IT Business Edge)

Microsoft has just released Oxite which is their open-source blogging platform targeted for developers and designers. The following features are included:

1. Standards-compliant

2. Extensible content-management system that supports either blogs or larger Web sites

3. Support for pingbacks, trackbacks, anonymous or authenticated commenting, gravatars (globally recognized avatars), and RSS feeds at any page level.

4. Create and edit a set of pages on a site

5. Ability to add customized HTML into pages

6. Support multiple blogs on a single site.

7. Integration with Microsoft ASP.Net MVC, Visual Studio Team Suite, and Background Services Architecture.

I believe that downplaying its role to “developer use” and not as a competition to Wordpress and Moveable Type lessen the expectations from the product, and creates a positive adoption among Microsoft developers, improve upon it and hopefully make it a full pledged blogging platform for large scale usage. But then again, there is SharePoint blogs and DotNetBlogEngine.net which could compete with Oxite on Microsoft market share.

I think it would be tempting to try this out; but I don’t see myself taking this seriously. I would rather spend time on DotNetBlogEngine and SharePoint blogs than learning another architecture base.

Anyways, you can download the source code from CodePlex here.

In one of my last projects we needed to create a calculated field and present an average value. Unfortunately SharePoint totaling calculated fields was not possible out of the box and getting the correct average value was even challenging.

This was an easy tasks if we had the option to put code behind and deploy .NET dll binaries; but one of the client requirements did not allow code behind because of SLAs.

We were able to get the average of the calculated fields nonetheless without code behind binaries. The following are the out of the box and non-binary approach components we used to achieve it.

1. Data view webpart
2. XSLT
3. SharePoint Designer
4. Javascript
5. HTML

In the coming weeks, I’d find time to put in detail how to achieve this. But in any case, you may do research on the things above to be able to correctly total calculated fields and present it in whatever way you want.