A Farewell to Groove

I've been trying to keep an eye on the Office 15 rollout. Less concern in mind over the new applications and more about the implications they have for SharePoint. I'd heard from Becky Isserman that my trusty old friend InfoPath was getting barely a manicure, let alone a full makeover, but it seems that this is not quite correct.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/aa947697(v=office.15)

Lots of new web controls supported, sandboxing, full support for Visual Studio. Heck, all we really need is support for Managed Metadata and we're golden. I can't imagine why we're dragging our feet for so long on that, but c'est la vie.

Now then, as Redmond giveth, Redmond taketh away...

http://www.brainlitter.com/2012/07/28/rip-sharepoint-workspace-in-2013-we-hardly-knew-ye/

Groove is finally dead. A single tear rolls down Ray Ozzie's cheek. Apparently this functionality is to be replaced with SkyDrive and SP2013 integration. We'll have to see how that works exactly, but if the offline support is as-advertised (because that always happens!), then we might just be hurrying to SP2013 sooner rather than later.

Visual Basic for Applications?!

Just finished a bunch of VBA (of all things) to do some dynamic chart coloring based on values in a table being loaded from a SharePoint list. The chart will be hosted in SharePoint. Unfortunately I can't use UDF to do a dynamic refreshing of the chart since Excel Services doesn't support running VBA in Excel workbooks. Pity.

From the other side of the fence

Well, should've had our SP2010 upgrade done by now, but some delays with our setup of the User Profile Service caused us to miss our deadline for determining go-live, so we pushed it back by a couple of weeks. In the mean time, it turns out that this decision was for the best, because it turns out that our branding effort being made by the consultant team didn't cover all the SharePoint pages we'd be using (such as the special layout used for the Thumbnail view in an Asset Library).

Regarding the User Profile Service, we were having one of the consultants work on that, but he left a huge mess of extra application pools in his wake, and now the service isn't even running because of a permissions problem, so I've got to sort that out.

In the mean time, I've learned a ton about setup recommendations and application pool sharing from Todd Klindt's blogposts here and here. My setup isn't completely out of whack, but it's nice to know the reasoning behind these decisions that I'm reading other people recommend. I had to consolidate a couple of service pools on our app server, but I won't be consolidating the web apps since they're all SSL-only and thus answering on separate IPs.

After that, I just need to work around an Edit Control Block (ECB) issue in this one document library (which will be moved to an Asset Library after our migration), and then I think we've pretty much got this one in the bag. I've spent a good amount of time in the last week doing performance tuning and fixing issues on the servers, so I'm looking forward to abnormally good performance in our new environment.

Now if only IPFS would be cooperative...(but that is for a future post, guess I'll start that one right now!)

Back in the saddle

So, it's been a while, both at the fingertips of this stream-of-consciousness, and also at the helm of a SP farm. I've been doing a number of things since my last update, but I now have a promising new position in a new place and I'm ready to start tackling and being tackled by the Ouroboros that is SharePoint.

The company where I work at now is still on SP2007 but we will be pursuing the 2010 upgrade very shortly. I'm looking forward to catching up with the rest of the business world!

Certified! (or certifiable!)

I took MS 70-542 yesterday and passed it, so now I've passed both the WSS and MOSS development exams. I've not really found either of them to be tremendously relevant to what I already do in SharePoint, but that can be just misapplication of the tech. A lot of what is covered on 70-542 I would normally do in Central Admin. Yes, it is a *development* exam, but still - the "every problem is a nail when you only have a hammer" truism applies here.

Grand opening

In general, I've always had good opinions about tech blogs. Especially in my dealings with SharePoint. The documentation behind MOSS 2007 is almost non-existent, to the point where developing without Internet access is an exercise in futility.

I've just never really felt like I had anything of substance to say on the matter, and then finally I had a task recently which I felt merited writing about, and so it has pushed me to going through the trouble of creating a site to chronicle all the misanthropic adventures I have while working with the development hydra known as SharePoint.

I haven't had the opportunity to work with SP2010 yet, so I'll make no guarantee that any of this content will be timely or relevant, but hey, you never know.