A blog by Pilothouse Consulting
Archive for June, 2010
SharePoint Integration Looks Promising on Windows Phone 7
Jun 25th
Windows Phone 7 will have some interesting integration with SharePoint. The demo below focuses on Word. I would be curious to see exactly how InfoPath integration works because it is going be a killer app for business use. Instead of writing custom apps, business users will be able to create forms linked to SharePoint and collect data via mobile devices (probably offline too).
I am not sure that Windows Phone 7 will take off on the consumer side right away (too much competition), but for business, it’s going to make a case.
They just need to get rid of white and blue text on the black background. Google has proved that black text on white background works better.
SharePoint 2010 requirements are ahead of most laptops for training purposes
Jun 21st
In the last public SharePoint 2010 class we had to provide preconfigured laptops to about 70% of the students. Surprisingly many laptops with 4GB of RAM and Intel processors do not support virtualization on the chip and many come with 32 bit OS which wastes about 1 GB of RAM.
I am still surprised that Microsoft is pretty much killing Virtual PC by not allowing guest 64 bit operating systems when many of its new products are 64 bit only. We’ve used Virtual PC since 2003, but now it’s all VMWare as it’s the only viable solution for training. Sure MS recommends other options that we ruled out after spending enough time to realize that they would be a nightmare in a classroom environment.
- Booting from a VHD. If you do it right it works well. If you mess it up (and don’t back up the boot record), you are in real trouble
- Using Hyper-V. Well, how many people do you know that run Server 2008 on their laptops?
- Installation of all software on Windows 7 is possible, but not something that you should expect from a student before class.
Setting up VMWare image takes 10-20 minutes which is about how much time you have before someone gets frustrated with setup. Hopefully, people will keep upgrading their laptops to processors that support virtualization, solid state drives, and 64 bit operating systems. This way we don’t have to ship big boxes to/from DC.
Intuit – when cloud computing does not work
Jun 16th
As a company, we rely on a number of Intuit services as well as their accounting software. Generally, we like to host our own applications if we believe that we can do a better job than the external provider. In the case of Intuit, they have been decent with their online services but not that great. I believe a big part of it is that they outsource too much themselves.
It’s amazing that most of their sites have been down for 20 hours now. This situation gives a bad reputation to online/cloud services.
Designer Workflows and Event Handlers
Jun 16th
A savvy student in a SharePoint 2010 class today asked about event handlers and Designer workflows. As I am wont to do, I just “did it” to see exactly what happened.
When having a Designer workflow (associated with a list) kick off automatically, an ItemAdded and ItemUpdated event handler are attached to the list in question to handle said kickoff. If you want to have some code run via event handler before the workflow starts, your best bet is to use ItemAdding, as ItemAdded won’t be guaranteed to run before the workflow starts.
This is one of those cases where the term “asynchronous” with regard to the ItemAdded event handler can be taken to mean what the actual word means, instead of as a substitute for “after.”
Top Five Improvements in SharePoint 2010
Jun 14th
- Using InfoPath to edit list forms – no longer there is a need for a developer to design form layout, logic, and conditional formatting.
- List navigation based on metadata – the best of both worlds: hierarchical navigation by folder, or metadata navigation based on column values.
- More consistent terminology and cleaner pages – for example, permissions management pages are no longer confusing.
- Clean and fast SharePoint Designer – it’s easier to make improvements when you start from scratch and that’s what SharePoint team did here. Better workflows and ability to create external lists and content types are a great plus.
- Cleaner Central Administration and PowerShell – No need to develop .net console applications, script anything using PowerShell
Overall the trend continues to configuring more out of box and only developing functions that add immediate value.