brantcarter

Sharepoint : The worst branding ever.

2006-04-22T09:24:00.000-07:00

Sharepoint is the perfect example of why you need to be careful in branding. Microsoft has made this mistake before (think .NET) so you think they would have learnt their lesson; but apparently not.

http://blogs.technet.com/lliu/archive/2006/03/22/422916.aspx

Instead of leveraging the Sharepoint name; they now want you to call it MOSS (I kid you not). IMO this ends up doing more harm than good; you end up hurting not only the Office brand but the SharePoint brand becomes a horrible mess.

Initial (formal) mention: Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007

Initial (informal) mention: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Second mention (lengthy content: more than 250 words): Office SharePoint Server 2007

Second mention (short content: e-mails, etc. – though having the “Office” prefix is still strongly preferred): SharePoint Server 2007

Acronym (long form – must be defined in conjunction with initial mention of the product name): MOSS 2007

Acronym (short form – must be defined in conjunction with initial mention of the product name): MOSS

I thought that the whole Sharepoint Portal Services (SPS) vs the Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) thing was terribly confusing; not only from a naming but also from a feature perspective.

Sharepoint : Business Data Catalog

2006-04-21T12:24:00.000-07:00

I must have missed the announcement from PDC (that can happen when you don't actually go to the conference); so I was quite pleasantly pleased to learn about this little nugget that Microsoft is adding to SharePoint.

The Business Data Catalog is an integration component that allows business to expose business schemas to Sharepoint. Sharepoint can then index and display that data in various lists and entities. It looks pretty sweet.

BUT

1. The configuration of this beast is a total nightmare. To get a fairly simple schema requires thousands of lines of XML code to be HAND WRITTEN. At the conference I after watching them insert "snippets" I had to call out the emperor as having no clothes. The response was they were hoping for ISVs to "take the challenge" of writing their own tools. Oh brother.

2. The indexer / search doesn't work for enterprise data. I guess I shouldn't be suprised given this is a hard problem to solve.

BizTalk 2006 : Install

2006-04-19T07:42:00.000-07:00

Since the BizTalk 2004 install seemed a bit complex I figured I would just skip to 2006 and start from there. Here is a synopsis of how things went.

- Total time was about 3 hours
- I had a major SNAFU with my virtual image; some of the SQL files that needed to get run somehow got corrupted (this took me a while to figure out)
- I had to install SQL 2005 since it won't run on SQL-2000 without SP3
- The installation is fairly painless PROVIDED you get all the pre-requisites correct.
- I am not 100% convinced I still know what I got installed; since I picked the defaults for almost everything. There are probably a half-dozen components that I need to get familiar with.

Google takes on hard problems

2006-04-19T07:12:00.000-07:00

I posted some reasons why Enterprise Search is hard; it looks like Google is going to try and tackle this problem as well.

Enterprise search is hard.

2006-04-17T20:33:00.000-07:00

Searching ERP systems seems pretty easy on the surface; just point your search engine at your data and presto-chango you have a search app. Google even sells a product that is designed for this. The big problem is that you often don't want people looking at data they aren't supposed to; and filtering out their security rights is often a complex endeavour.

The simpliest approach is to let the indexer look at everthing in your database and then filter out when the user tries to open the record. This works well except that this can lead to a poor user experience and can even expose sensitive information.

Consider this scenario:
You have 10,000 contracts you want to index; you point your indexer at it and it indexes the whole lot. Then you have a user; who only has permissionto see 100 of those contracts and he/she wants to do a search. The search results display the entire list and only when the user clicks on it to open it does it do the check.

Problem 1: The first 100 results could all be contracts the user can't see; now the user has to filter through the result list.

Problem 2: The user could determine certain contract qualities by searching for $1,000,000 and now see all the contracts worth that amount. This is a pretty serious violation of the application level security checks.

One product that seems to get this is Automony. They can integrate your applications "ACL" into their search engine and filter out results prior to displaying them to the user.

I was disapointed to learn at Office DevCon that the new fancy search that is shipping with Sharepoint 2007 WON'T be able to handle this type of filtering. This severly limits is usefullness for enterprise application integration. For a list of feature they are including you can look here

BizTalk 2004 : Install

2006-04-13T18:42:00.000-07:00

I was all setup to install BizTalk 2004 in a new playground area; then I went and dowloaded the Quick Start Guide then read the first paragraph:

You will go from FDISK to a “Hello World“ BizTalk Orchestration Sample In just about 5 hours

Ya, just 5 hours! no thanks. On to BizTalk 2006

Excel : Ranges

2006-04-07T11:24:00.000-07:00

I use Excel a fair bit in the solutions I develop for our customers; a couple of weeks ago a co-worker finally cracked a mystery that had been dogging us for a while. As with many mysteries the problem seems obvious when you know the solution and I thought I would share it here.

Problem: When creating Excel List Validations; the drop-down will often show blank lines.

Example:

As you can see the list from Item2 has blank rows in it.

Solution: The solution to the problem is two fold; first in this case I defined the ranges for both these lookups on the same sheet (which is very common); and the way I defined then was to just click on the row header and name the entire column as a range. The problem is that Excel will default the size to the largest range defined on that sheet. The solution is to resize your range after you populate it. Resizing a range isn't trivial process either!

Here is the code that does the trick: I found the code here

The key point is that range.Resize returns a new range; it doesn't resize the range you speficy; thus you need to add it back to the Names collection of your workbook.


Protected Sub ResizeRange(ByVal SheetName As String, _ 
                          ByVal RangeName As String, _
                 Optional ByVal NewRowCount As Long = 0, _
                 Optional ByVal NewColumnCount As Long = 0)
   Dim sheet As Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.Worksheet = ThisWorkbook.Worksheets(SheetName)
   Dim range As Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.Range = sheet.Range(RangeName)
   If NewRowCount = 0 Then
      NewRowCount = range.Rows.Count
   End If
   If NewColumnCount = 0 Then
      NewColumnCount = range.Columns.Count
   End If

   ThisWorkbook.Names.Add(Name:=RangeName, _
                          RefersTo:="=" & SheetName & "!" & _
                          range.Resize(NewRowCount, NewColumnCount).Address, _
                          Visible:=True)
End Sub

Excel : Names

2006-04-06T15:31:00.000-07:00

This has to be one of the most confusing features. Have you ever tried to delete a named range that you defined? I have and it took me forever to find out how to do it.

Normally when I define a range I just type the name in on the worksheet as below:

However Excel won't allow you to delete the range without hunting through the menu items; and it is hidden under Insert | Names | Define (as you probably didn't guess; to delete a range you need to "Insert it".

This takes you to a dialog where you can delete the range.

Note I also found this nifty little tool for managing names in Excel. Named ranges are very handy for lots of reasons; one of the most common uses I run into is when I want to validate a cell against a list of items. I will cover that in a future post.

Technology Stack

2006-04-05T10:26:00.000-07:00

The amount of technology options available to learn right now is truely amazing. Architects / Developers are being asked to navigate an increasingly diverse stack. Here is the stack that I spend most of my time monitoring.

BizTalk

Office (Excel / Outlook)

WebServices

Sharepoint

I have a long list of blogs that I follow, I try to keep up to date with the latest releases; features; patterns but it is difficult. I will be blogging about my trials / tribulations with these technologies over the comming weeks.

Office DevCon

2006-04-03T11:57:00.000-07:00

I just got back from the Office Developer Conference; here are some of my high level observations.

Sharepoint is finally starting to get useful

Core office apps are getting a facelift and new file-formats

Office Live strategy seems a bit scattered

Of all the technologies Microsoft is refreshing; I am most impressed with the changes they made to Sharepoint. I will be blogging about each of these in the comming weeks.

JotSpot Wiki

2004-10-08T16:30:00.000-07:00

Jotspot

This looks really nice.

b

Whitehouse secrets?

2004-09-30T21:31:00.000-07:00

Interesting to see all the stuff they are hiding from the search engines.

b

WebServices to grow to 6.2B by 2008

2004-09-28T19:50:00.000-07:00

The growing popularity of Web services is reflected in Radicati's market projections. The analyst firm expects sales to reach $6.2 billion in 2008 from $950 million this year. The market defined by Radicati includes software tools and products related to management, integration and security.

Yahoo! News - Web Services Adoption Spreads Globally

b

Another reason to switch to GMail.

2004-09-28T19:34:00.000-07:00

MSN, citing spam-abuse concerns, has decided to end free access to Hotmail via Outlook and Outlook Express.

No More Free Hotmail Lunch For Outlook Users

The Hotmail web interface sucks, having a thick client was one of the only reasons to stay.

b

Canon EOS-1D Mark II, wireless

2004-09-28T19:31:00.000-07:00

Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II, wireless: Digital Photography Review

16.7 megapixel; $8K US Ouch! Storage is going to start becomming a problem again.

b

FlexWiki goes open source

2004-09-28T19:26:00.000-07:00

FlexWiki posted to SourceForge.net

I personally prefer OpenWiki as it is much simpler and very easy to customize; and oh ya its been open source since the start.

b

MSDN goes REST

2004-09-19T09:23:00.000-07:00

File Class

Sort of anyway, this "should" make it easy to find things; that said Google already does a great job without the RESTFul interface. (I actually find the Google search to be better than the internal MSDN Search)

b

Google Origins.

2004-09-05T13:30:00.000-07:00

The Anatomy of a Search Engine: " a multi-word search"

I stumbled across this this link today. Its a complete description of the original Google search engine. Very detailed.

b

Longhorn fall out

2004-09-03T14:15:00.000-07:00

http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/archive/2004/Sep-01.html

I think the big driver for Avalon would be MS-Office. As soon as that comes out with Avalon support you will see lots of other apps built.

b

PS: Who are the 16% still running Windows 98?

Microsoft @ OOPSLA

2004-09-03T13:27:00.000-07:00

http://devhawk.net/PermaLink.aspx?guid=ad410e9f-27e0-4226-b9c4-ef579939012b

I didn't know Steve McConnell was on the agenda. Looks like a lot of the big hitters are going to be there.

Martin Fowler
Ward Cunningham
Jack Greenfield
Steve McConnel
Anders Hejsberg
Don Box

Start

2002-08-21T23:12:00.000-07:00

This is my first entry in the blog.