September 2007 - Posts

Sunday, September 30, 2007 9:09 PM

Toronto SharePoint Camp: Free Registration Now Open!

Toronto SharePoint Camp, Manulife Centre
200 Bloor Street East, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Saturday, October 20

Register Now!  Early-bird registration is being announced this week through TSPUG, blogs, and user groups. We expect to reach capacity in the coming weeks, so get your name in today to avoid disappointment. Note: after registering you will not see a confirmation screen, but rest assured that your registration is in there. Confirmations will be sent prior to the event.

For more information, or to find out how to become a sponsor or volunteer, head to the TSP Camp announcement posted September 7.  

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See you there!

Posted by erobillard | 7 comment(s)
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Monday, September 17, 2007 2:33 PM

Toronto SharePoint User Group: Workflow Wednesday, September 19!

K2's Black Pearl is supercool and I'm really looking forward to this one. And as mentioned last week, the Call For Speakers for the October SharePoint Camp is now on!

 

TSPUG Monthly Meeting

Please join us Wednesday, Sept 19th as we host our first monthly TSPUG meeting following the summer break!

 

Location:      2 Bloor St West, Toronto, ON  M4W 3E2 

 

Time:           6 PM Pizza dinner, presentations to start at 7 PM

 

Topic:          Rapidly Automate Complex Workflows using K2 and SharePoint Server 2007

 

Description:  Together, K2™ and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) provide a robust BPM platform for delivering solutions that involve people and processes.  With the release of K2 BlackPearl, K2 now provides multiple workflow designers targeted to different users within the organization so that they can take ownership of their automated business processes.  Demonstrating how different user roles using the K2 designers can automate complex workflows that leverage the capabilities of MOSS will be the focus of this session.

 

Demonstrations:

·  How a business user can automate a policy approval  in SharePoint using the AJAX based K2 Web Workflow

·  How a business analyst using Visio, InfoPath Form Services and K2 can automate an expense claims process Visio diagram

·  How a workflow developer in BlackPearl Studio can collaborate with and/or extend the above workflows and provide deeper integration into SharePoint through the K2 SharePoint wizards which allows interaction with:

Ø  Site — managing sites and site permissions

Ø  Library and List — managing lists and list permissions

Ø  Document Manipulation — working with documents, document permissions and document metadata

Ø  List Item — working with individual items in a list

Ø  Records Management — managing records, record permissions and record attributes

Ø  Event Process — taking action triggered by MOSS events

Ø  Publishing — streamlining collaboration and approvals for Web publishing

Ø  User Management — managing users, groups and permissions

Ø  Workflow Integration — associating K2 processes with MOSS libraries and lists

 

Speaker: Tim Knechtel is a K2 Technical Specialist who has worked at K2 since 1994.  Tim focuses on delivering custom customer demonstrations, training and proof of concepts that show how K2 can be used to automate a customer’s business processes making the customer more efficient, agile and auditable.

 

Before joining K2, Tim Knechtel worked at Microsoft for 9 years focusing on infrastructure products like SharePoint, Exchange, Active Directory and Project Server.

 

Please RSVP via email to mariettek@eidenai.ca

 
Posted by erobillard | 3 comment(s)
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Friday, September 07, 2007 2:48 PM

MOSS and Forms-Based Authentication: the Tricks

There are three great guides to configuing FBA: Andrew Connell had the best article first. Dan Attis built on this by getting My Sites and Profile imports working (Part 1, Part 2). Then Stacey Draper wrote it for people who prefer paper in his chapter of Real World SharePoint. They all configure the web application using host headers, and this is why:

If you distinguish your web application by port alone, you will receive a 403 Forbidden Error when you try to reach many (but not all) application pages stored in the _layouts folder. For example, /_layouts/sitemanager.aspx and AccessDenied.aspx will work, but settings.aspx and viewlsts.aspx will not. The solution is to instead configure the web applications with host headers.

A related issue points to a problematic ASP.NET fix (KB 928365) though the symptoms appear different - site settings remains available and only the user permission pages are unavailable. 

If you only want FBA, and do not want Active Directory at all (as the walk throughs do for the internal-facing site), you can. It works. You do not need to set up two sites as Andrew, Dan and Stacey do. However, the Index service will not crawl an FBA-only MOSS site. This is why it is recommended that you set up multiple authentication -- Windows from the internal-facing site, FBA on the internet-facing site -- index server will work. The workaround would be to crawl only the anonymously-accessible pages of the FBA site, indexing it as you would any public internet site.

If configuring multiple authentication, it does not matter whether the default site is configured for FBA or Windows authentication. Andrew and Dan do it different from each other, and both work.

To manage users get the Community Kit Extranet Edition, it adds great login and forgot password web parts, FBA user management and more. The SP&T team's announcement contains screenshots and more. It was based on Stacy's Forms Based Authentication Tools project on Codeplex and takes that great idea a long ways further. 

[Updated 2007-11-19 with the CSK Extranet Edition for Forms-based Authentication] 

Posted by erobillard | 5 comment(s)
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Friday, September 07, 2007 12:00 PM

Toronto SharePoint Camp: Saturday, October 20, 2007

Mark your calendar! The first ever SharePoint Camp will be in Toronto, and registration will be absolutely free.

Toronto SharePoint Camp, Manulife Centre
200 Bloor Street East
Saturday, October 20

The event will be hosted by the Toronto SharePoint User Group with a supporting cast of many fantastic volunteers and guest speakers.

We're planning three tracks: Developer, Administrator, and Champion/Architect. There will be 15-18 presentations total in 3 to 5 theatres. The space should comfortably accomodate 200 to 300 attendees. We'll follow the CodeCamp manifesto: free, volunteer-run, brand-agnostic, less talk, more rock. 

Call for speakers: We need speakers! All submissions must be delivered by September 21, 2007. Presentations and demo code is due by October 12, 2007. Read more about how you can contribute and apply by downloading the Call For Speakers today!

Call for Volunteers: We need volunteers! If you'd like to help out, mark your calendar for October 17 and 20 today. Then, watch this blog for link to the sign-up sheet as soon as the site goes live. On Wednesday, October 17th at 6:pm we'll have a pizza meeting for about an hour at 2 Bloor Street West (Nexient) to get organized. Note that this is the regular time and location of the SharePoint User Group meeting which will be replaced in October by the Organizer's Meeting (note: in September TSPUG will have a great workflow presentation by K2).

Registration: The website will be up asap, watch this blog for the announcement to be the first in line. I can't wait to see you there!

Posted by erobillard | 6 comment(s)
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Friday, September 07, 2007 11:25 AM

When to use a database, SharePoint, or wiki.

"My client asked me to come up with a presentation of whether to use to Sharepoint or Wiki or both and how. Our team is an international team with members in New York, Singapore and London. Currently we have a wiki and Sharepoint set up but there is no clear guide/structure of how or when to use each."
 
This describes how databases, SharePoint, and Wikis should operate. Real life varies. Always remember that we're building processes, not temples.
 
A database stores structured data. The structure is typically designed and owned by an individual. Politically, it's a dictatorship. Line-of-business applications which gather and distribute raw data are typically associated with databases.
 
SharePoint provides webs to store lists and documents. Think of this as loosely-structured data. SharePoint lets you control this data with versioning, backup and recovery, workflow, security, policies and auditing. The structure might be seeded by an individual, but ownership is distributed. SharePoint should be designed to unfold according to to will of the distributed owners. Politically, SharePoint provides representative leadership like a parliamentary system though the leaders are typically appointed rather than elected. SharePoint is used by "information workers" to create, manage, and publish information typically stored in lists and documents. SharePoint is used as an interface to databases. SharePoint is a social tool used to recognize and reinforce relationships among people. Through either SharePoint's business intelligence capabilities or its integration with Reporting Services, SharePoint can report on data from structured and loosely structured data stores. SharePoint can index and provide search for structures, loosely structured, and unstructured data stores.
 
A wiki provides webs to store text with embedded references to media. This is unstructured data. Wiki content can be seeded with the intention to unfold acording to some master design, but politically, it's anarchy. A wiki allow control through versioning and moderation. A wiki is well-suited for collaborative documentation.
 
Cheers,
-Eli.
 
Posted by erobillard | 7 comment(s)
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