Eli Robillard's World of Blog.

How to get your SharePoint dog to hunt.

2013-04-17T17:24:00Z

[In response to a question on #SPYAM I wrote this update of an article form 2010 titled " The Relative Effort of SharePoint 2010 vs. 2007 ." -Eli.] SharePoint is the best demo-ware ever, and that is why it is a multi-billion dollar product. It’s like going to the pet store and seeing a great dog that does backflips all kinds of tricks – and it really is a smart dog and it does all those tricks – but when you get it home you realize that what you need is a dog that hunts. SharePoint can be trained...(read more)

How to Start a User Group

2013-01-02T15:23:00Z

At this year's SharePoint Conference there was an active Community Zone where people could learn more about user groups, MVPs, and current events in the SharePoint community. I answered questions in the Community Zone on Monday and the most frequent was "How do you start a User Group?" Here are my thoughts, and I'd love to hear yours so please comment. The first and only requirement is location, once you have one you can book a speaker and make your announcement. Find a location where you can get...(read more)

Our Toronto Mayor

2012-11-26T23:20:00Z

If our ex-mayor coaches football the way he runs City Hall it probably goes something like this. . . Coach: All right team, this is the league final, the game we've played so hard to get to all season. Out there are provincial and national scouts with contracts in their pockets, all you need to do is take the title. Here's the gameplan: Get out there and play the best soccer of your lives. Player: Hey coach, no disrespect but uh, we're a football team. Coach: Not tonight boys. Tonight we're mavericks...(read more)

Recent SharePoint 2010 Books [CanCon]

2012-05-18T15:37:00Z

Here in Canada, and particularly in south Ontario we're lucky to have an exceptionally strong SharePoint community. With the publication this month of Ruven Gotz's Practical SharePoint 2010 Information Architecture I count at least 6 books that were either written by, or contain contributions by our local SharePoint MVPs. Bookmark this post or watch my tweets for updates as I post reviews and add other local titles. Practical SharePoint 2010 Information Architecture by Ruven Gotz Not yet reviewed...(read more)

SharePoint Summit 2012 - Thank you!

2012-05-17T13:37:00Z

Thanks to Danny, Reza, all the speakers and the rest of the team for hosting another great SharePoint conference in Toronto. Also a shout-out to the SharePoint Blues Band for putting on a great show Tuesday night, and for the privilege of joining them on-stage to play one of my originals. It was a lot of fun, and I hope we can do it again next year or sooner! Also a big thanks to everyone who attended my session on Large-scale SharePoint Architecture . I've attached the deck to this post and added...(read more)

Search: are you willing to manage it as an application?

2012-02-03T15:58:00Z

The question was asked, "how hard is it to configure FAST and what does that effort give you?" The none-too-helpful answer is that with every search product you get what you give. FAST happens to have more substance so logically there will be more to configure than some alternatives, and you can get more out of it in the long run and continuously grow its ROI as you learn its ropes. First ask what you're searching for - know your corpus. How large is the corpus, how many users will you have in years...(read more)

Revisiting an 8 year old post on cookies and opt-in

2012-01-31T16:59:00Z

Common Sense and Opt-In: http://weblogs.asp.net/erobillard/archive/2003/05/08/6680.aspx Eight years ago I wrote a brief piece on cookie management proposing that preferences be remembered by default with an opt-out option. The part that got the most feedback was this: The act of remembering preferences in the form of cookies is not gathering information on surfing habits. If the issue is the perception of privacy, then educate your users about cookies. If you care about privacy, provide a button...(read more)

Thoughts on SharePoint Application Pools, Recycling and "JIT Lag"

2012-01-30T17:28:00Z

What are Application Pools? Application Pools are a .NET construct, and each pool represents an instance of the Common Language Runtime (CLR) executing managed .NET code. Each application pool in IIS hosts one or more web applications, and the recommendation is to stay under 10 pools per server. This recommendation was made in 32-bit days, and other considerations like 32 vs. 64-bit, available RAM, and I/O (bandwidth and disk usage) really take over as you add application pools. With some planning...(read more)

Toronto SharePoint Camp 2011 - Thank-you!

2011-11-16T21:09:00Z

The 5th Annual Toronto SharePoint Camp was last Saturday and it was another terrific success. Thanks to the TSPUG executive committee and the small army of volunteers who made it happen, and to the smiling faces of this year's 200+ attendees for making it all worthwhile. BIG Congratulations to the recipient of our first ever Toronto SharePoint Community Champion Award : Brian Lalancette . Brian was nominated by members of TSPUG and selected from all nominees by the TSPUG Executive for his tireless...(read more)

Windows Phone 7 and Canada

2011-11-09T22:39:00Z

I love my Samsung Focus and I don't know why it isn't the most popular phone in Canada. WPCentral reported today on the lacklustre support of Canadian carriers for the WP7 platform. Basically, even if you've been sold on the platform or a particular phone by a friend, review or foreign marketing (because there's none here), you're likely to be stonewalled by sales people. People who see my Focus love its speed, its easy fast UI, the fact that you can get a second battery, and the fact that you can...(read more)

SharePoint 2010 Workflow for Multiple Items (Architecture)

2011-03-16T16:14:00Z

I had the question today of whether SharePoint 2010 supports workflow on multiple items, since Groove's workflow apparently supported multiple items and that model disappeared when Groove Workspaces were amalgamated into SharePoint Sites and SharePoint Workspace (the client utility). It's a great question, the short answer is that yes, it's possible. You could brute-force it in 2007 and that strategy should still carry over to 2010, and 3 new features (that I can think of) support multi-item scenarios...(read more)

Drag and Drop for SharePoint

2010-12-02T22:54:00Z

Fellow Infusionite Oguz Demirel just published a super-cool CodePlex feature that makes any SharePoint library drag-and-droppable, introducing: Drag & Drop for SharePoint . The Codeplex page has screen shots and all that, but I have to rave about the simple coolness of it all. Just like in Explorer you can draw a box around the files to pick. Then you can either drag them: onto a folder in the library, to another library in Quick Launch, or to a Parent folder by dragging them up to the breadcrumb...(read more)

How to: Build a Server Core Domain Controller

2010-11-11T00:00:00Z

When I started putting together my standard virtual machines for development and demonstrating SharePoint 2010, I wanted to have a domain controller that I could share and use for any new image. That way I don't need to continually recreate my service accounts and test users every time, which means the effort I put into creating AD groups and populating user properties is also re-used. Why server core? Server core flavours of Windows Server don't provide a UI, and are usually used to build specialized...(read more)

This weekend: SharePoint Saturday Toronto

2010-11-09T16:07:00Z

Wow, this Saturday offers 21 sessions in 3 tracks, all for free . Given the billable rate of this speaker list, this has to be the best bargain you'll see for a while. And I'm going to go ahead and reveal a secret here - attendees at SharePoint Saturday will be eligible for a great discount on the SharePoint Summit , coming to Toronto this January 31 through February 2. The only catch? You need to attend to get the discount. But I'm sure you wnat to be there anyway, this is a world-class event and...(read more)

Fix available to protect SharePoint servers from ASP.NET vulnerability

2010-09-28T18:04:00Z

Today the fix shipped to remedy a cryptographic ASP.NET vulnerability. The update is listed as Important , and it is strongly recommended that this security update be applied to all IIS servers including those hosting SharePoint and other ASP.NET applications. Though the greater risk is to public-facing servers, all servers should be protected. The fix was announced as a Security Bulletin: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms10-sep.mspx A webcast will be held this afternoon to describe...(read more)