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SharePoint Magazine

SharePoint Magazine is an online Magazine dedicated to the world of SharePoint

SharePoint Magazine chats with Paul CulmseeDecember 16 2008

Tell us about your career history.

My first IT job was part-time in 1989 assembling IBM XT PC’s so I am officially old. I remember seeing a 30MB hard disk (about the size of a brick) and thinking, wow how will you fill that’!  I also knew life before this world of Windows that we now live in.

After graduating university, I left home to work for a mining company in tech support in 1991, before returning to Perth working in various roles moving from support to sysadmin to infrastructure manager. Got my MCSE in NT4 in 1998 and subsequently Win2k. Also in 1998 put in the PCDOCS document management system for a mid-sized company of 600 staff. In 2000 I working for an ISP so was heavily into Cisco (CCNP) and discovered the joys of the Debian linux distro. Also during this time I decided it was time I learned to code so I wrote a freeware program called EZ-Rent for Australian property investors. Later I worked for a company that owned a security and web hosting business so I certified CISSP and got to perform fun things like pen-testing network and systems.

That’s a pretty wide ranging background - how did it lead you to SharePoint?

The first version of SharePoint 2001 I skipped because I thought it was laughable, but you have to remember I put in PCDOCS (now Hummingbird) a couple of years prior. SharePoint 2003 I did work on extensively for an organisation that managed to throw away the file server. Additio

Everything You Need to Know about BDC: Part 3 of 8December 14 2008

Welcome to part three of our BDC series.  In this article our focus will be on consuming Web Services from BDC.  It will cover the value of Web Services, how to develop the Web Services to be BDC capable, and introduce how the Application Definition File describes these Web Services.  We will building on what we learned in the first two articles, so if you’re still learning BDC and haven’t gone through those yet, you are encouraged to go back and read them.  Since this article covers the programming of Web Services, it will be more developer-oriented.

Why Web Services

While relational databases have proliferated greatly over the last 20 years, there are some inherent difficulties with them.  For starters, they are often proprietary.  While structured query language (SQL) is an ANSI-standard language, vendors choose to develop their own flavor of SQL such as PL-SQL with Oracle or T-SQL with Microsoft.  In order to query from a database, you need a vendor-specific driver, making integration between systems difficult.  Furthermore, the network connection is often based on remote procedure calls (or RPCs) that won’t typically work over an HTTP connection.  This makes connecting to them over the Internet or through firewalls a challenge.

Web Services have matured in the last few years as the de-facto way of integrating systems together.  Service-oriented architecture (SOA

Archiving: Not Just for Emails AnymoreDecember 9 2008

Just as companies have implemented email archiving systems to better manage their ever-growing volumes of email records, an increasing number are doing the same for their SharePoint records.  SEC Rule 17a-4, HIPAA and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act are just a few of the laws and regulations requiring companies to actively monitor employee communications.  That includes SharePoint, which has grown into a $1 billion business for Microsoft as organizations discover it can be a much better employee collaboration tool than trading attachments via email.  However, moving intellectual property into SharePoint libraries creates the same operational risks exploding Exchange email volumes do, as well as a new set of challenges.  This article is the first of a three-part series that will examine why organizations should implement archiving for SharePoint, just as many have done for their email systems.  Today, we’ll examine the storage optimization benefits of archiving SharePoint.

Records created, managed and stored in SharePoint constitute electronic communications that fall under the same compliance rules requiring the retention and availability of communications records organizations must apply to email.  There is not only limited space for storing such unstructured content but there’s also more than a little confusion about exactly what should be stored and for how long. To make matters even more confusing, those same SharePoint records cannot simply be dumped onto back

Incorporating a Master Page into a SharePoint site definitionDecember 8 2008

Introduction

This is the sixth article in a six-part series on ASP.NET Master Pages and SharePoint.

1. Introduction to Master Pages.
2. Examining the out of the box Master Pages in SharePoint.
3. Developing a custom Master Page for SharePoint.
4. Deploy a Master Page for a production ready system.
5. Customizing the Application.master Page.
6. Incorporating a Master Page into a SharePoint site definition

In the previous article of this series we discussed how to build a customized master page and deploy it with a feature. However, the manual process of deploying the feature to each server in the farm and activating it isn’t as seamless as most developers would like. It would be nice to have the features automatically activate themselves when a new site in SharePoint is created from a template.

This article will discuss the c

Critical Success Factors When Building a Knowledge Management SystemDecember 3 2008

Overview

In today’s business climate, competitive pressures are greater than ever. Organizations must leverage any competitive advantage to gain or maintain an edge. Or, in the midst of a shrinking economy, there is always a need to do more with less. Recently, many organizations have turned to knowledge management (KM) systems like SharePoint to create new knowledge. Some experts consider knowledge to be perhaps the only sustainable competitive advantage. With knowledge come better decisions, more efficient teams, and a commitment to learning. However, the high risk of failure is well documented which compels us to study why and then define critical success factors that are found within successful implementations.

Working in the researcher’s favor is the overwhelming consistency found when researching these critical success factors (CSF). Furthermore, in a study of thirty-one KM projects1 across twenty-four companies, researchers found that successful projects “had virtually the same indicators.” Additionally, the study concluded that “the unsuccessful or not yet successful projects had few or none of the characteristics.” These findings give us a high degree of confidence in the factors that are provided here. These factors have been selected based on the frequency found in journal