I have decided to move my blogging to https://www.looselytyped.net

where things will stay much the same but with a slightly more personal twist.

My last day at Microsoft will be November the 1st 2011.

Starting November 2nd I will be moving to open Provoke Solution’s brand new branch/subsidiary in Seattle, WA, USA.  (Press Release here: https://www.provoke.co.nz/about/13-10-11.html)

Provoke are are Microsoft Gold Partner headquartered in my home country New Zealand.  I will lead their expansion in the US with the first office in Seattle, Washington and aim to grow their US business into a highly successful and vibrant Microsoft partner focusing on systems integration (SI) and packaged software (ISV). 

I’m not leaving SharePoint.  Not by a long way!  The new venture will focus will be on SharePoint implementations and custom development projects.

This was one of the toughest decisions of my professional career, but I am sure it wont be the last.

Microsoft has provided me with phenomenal opportunities over the last 9 years and I have grown personally and professionally in ways I never would have imagined when I joined.

Some memories of my time here….

I joined Microsoft New Zealand in Aug 2002 as a dev consultant helping customers build solutions on our stack.  Not long after that I started working on Content Management Server 2002 projects, which naturally led me to SharePoint.  (all roads lead to SharePoint after all!)  At that time the two were very separate products and customers wanted to build Intranets like sites they did with CMS02, but they wanted SharePoint collab capabilities at the same time.  There were lots of “creative” ways of doing this.  Needless to say I am glad the products came together eventually and Intranets around the world rejoiced :)

I got to travel the world for various projects and training events.  I will never forget my first MGB event in New Orleans with Bill Gates.  Steve B came out swinging to Eye of the Tiger and ran around chest bumping and high fiving people for about 20mins.  I honestly thought he was going to die on stage he looked so exhausted.  I just loved the passion and commitment and enjoyed it a lot.   This was officially my first proper Kool-Aid moment … and ill never forget it.

(MGB pics … 25,000 ppl strong)

After some time in New Zealand I started doing some work around the Asia-Pacific region around the Office and SharePoint 2007 launch.  This was awesome and got to visit Japan, Korea, Australia, Singapore and India in a mega 3 week training tour.  It was a really fun product launch and people were lapping up the new stuff.  I joined the SharePoint Ranger team covering the APAC area and got to work on some really gnarly deployments that we needed to ensure worked out right.  This team is sponsored and paid for by the SharePoint Product Management Group (PMG) in Redmond, and this is what ultimately led me to Redmond.

I moved with my wife Vicki to Redmond in May 2007 to join the SharePoint engineering team working on O14, what became SharePoint 2010.  It was great fun and I was able to work on our “Virtual Lists” that got named functionality aka External Lists built on Business Connectivity Services or the BDC at the time.  I also got to work on things like allowing devs to install SharePoint on Windows 7, the Client Side Object Model, Visual Studio tooling efforts with amazing people like Mike Morton, VSeWSS tools and a few other things.  It was an incredible learning experience see an engineering engine that is part of the overall Office group produce and support software used by literally 100s of millions of people.  Its very hard to explain the scale of the operation and its hard to truly appreciate the effort put in by the people that work on the project unless you have seen it in motion.

Not long after we hit code complete on O14 (about 20 months after I joined) I moved to the SharePoint Marketing team.  In my field role I had worked with Arpan and Richard and new it was the right place for me.  I started in early 2009 and got the opportunity to help launch SharePoint 2010 through efforts ranging from training to press to keynote demos to all the things we build to help partners and MS field to sell SharePoint all over the world.  Its staggering the monumental effort a billion+ dollar product launch is and its amazing to see the whole group working feverishly on making sure it’s a success.  Again, being part of it is something I will never forget.

The Next Phase…

Now it’s time to jump into the next phase of my career, building a business.  I want to build on the wonderful experiences I have had with SharePoint to date and become part of the most vibrant ecosystem around any product I have ever seen.

I’ll definitely be a part of the SharePoint community via various SharePoint events and on @LoungeFlyZ via Twitter of course.  I hope to bump into all my friends and acquaintances … and of course I will be at SharePoint Conference 2012 !!!!,. but in a slightly more relaxed mode as an attendee this time :)

I have made some great friends as part of this journey and I have been very fortunate to have had the opportunities I have had here. 

Till next time…

-CJ.

We just released a new version 2010-10. 

In a nutshell here are the big changes over the 2010-7 VM set we published previously:

• Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1
• Office and SharePoint SP1's
• Lync 2010 (Client and Server)
• Exchange Server 2010 SP1
• Project Server SP1

Download:  2010 Information Worker Demonstration and Evaluation Virtual Machine (SP1)

Enjoy!

-CJ.

Here are the winners (in no particular order):

• CA Callahan
• Gary Payne
• Joy Earles
• Nele Lekens
• Wes Hackett
• Alon Havivi
• Bonnie Surma
• Kerri Abraham
• Maron Man
• Cathy Dew
• Lori Gowin
• Dan Usher
• Victor Chataboon

We have contacted each of the winners and will be offering them one SharePoint Conference 2011 general registration conference pass (Approximate Retail Value: $1,199.00). 

Additionally, these folks will be helping out in the Hands on Labs area of the conference, so if see them make sure you congratulate them and show them your appreciation for all the work they do in the SharePoint Community.

Congratulations to all the winners!! and we cant wait to see you at the conference!!

-Chris.

unsung hero

Part of Speech:   n
Definition:   a person who makes a substantive yet unrecognized contribution

We have 10 full SharePoint Conference 2011 (SPC) passes (valued at $1,199.00!!! each) to give to deserving individuals who would like to attend SPC 2011 and who are prepared to help the conference in a small way in return (some hours helping attendees in the Hands on Lab room).

We want you to nominate someone you know who has made a substantive yet unrecognized contribution and been going the extra mile for the SharePoint community.  This should be someone thinking of others always, someone keen to go the extra distance and someone you feel never asks for anything in return.

We want to thank your unsung hero!

Here is how you enter:

• Email spc@microsoft.com with the subject “My Unsung Hero Nomination” by 11:59 p.m. on the 31^st of July 2011.
• Describe why the unsung hero deserves this prize in 100 words or less.
• Your Unsung hero’s Name
• Your Unsung hero’s Email address
  

We will judge the entries and pick 10 individuals who we will ask if they would like a full conference pass to SPC11.  In return we will ask them for 2 hours of time per day at the event to help attendees with hands on labs. 

We want dedicated and passionate individuals who love to help others.  We want to reward them with the chance to attend SPC in person and see for themselves the spectacle that is the SharePoint community in full swing.

You can Nominate up to 5 of your unsung heroes! (separate email entries for each please)

Here are the Official Contest Rules

Thanks & have fun nominating those who you think help our community and don’t get rewarded for their efforts.

-CJ.

I had a chat with @jthake yesterday on Twitter about the process we go through when planning content for the SharePoint Conference later this year. Based on that I decided to do this post to help give insight into how we go about planning for a conference of this magnitude.  I hope this is interesting and that you come away not thinking that we ask for some sessions, throw them in a list & call it done :)

With over 240 breakout sessions + Hands on Labs etc. There is A LOT of preparation that goes into putting on an event like this for thousands and thousands of attendees.

I promised Jeremy I would blog out some of the process we go through to help folks get an understanding of how something like this works.

There are really two main high level factors that influence the content at a conference like this, I’ll chat about how we think about these below:

• Attendee interests and needs
• Conference Goals

Attendee interests and needs
When you plan an event this size for a product as diverse as SharePoint its important to realize that the attendees that come to the show are from all walks of life, professions, countries, disciplines, and backgrounds.  Some are experts and some come to find out about what SharePoint is.  We get both ends of the product knowledge spectrum and we strive to keep that in mind throughout the content planning process.  This is paramount in ensuring we meet attendees needs.

Conference Goals
At the beginning of the process we sit down and work out what the goals for the conference are.  What do we want people to walk away thinking about when they leave? What do we need to ensure attendees learn about to be successful? 

A lot of these are distilled from the many channels of feedback and input we get from people around the world.  Here is a sampling of the channels we are constantly monitoring:  Customer feedback (we have lots of channels for this), partner feedback, our Support group feedback, MS account team feedback, Microsoft Consulting Services & the internet (blogs, wikis, social media etc…)  We sit down and look at what is common across all of these channels and work out what are the common themes amongst all of these.

For the SharePoint Conference 2011 we distilled this all down into three simple themes:

• Best Practices
• Cloud
• Core Learning

Best Practices:  SharePoint 2010 has been in the market for quite a while now, we are throwing a 10th Birthday for SharePoint at Disneyland at SPC11 and there are a lot of things about every facet of SharePoint that everyone has learnt about how to best plan, implement and manage it.  We want to make sure we share as much of these real world best practices are shared as much as possible to ensure everyone is successful.

Cloud:  Whether you like it or not cloud computing is a hot topic and even if you or your organization isn't planning on moving to the cloud for a while there is a lot of demand from folks who want to understand how to  get ready for it.  Then there are the folks that are actually doing it and want to know about how they should take advantage of it now etc…  This goal isn't just about Office 365, but cloud computing across all sorts of products.

Core Learning:  SharePoint is an expansive product and I personally learn something about it everyday.  There are a lot of people who come to the SharePoint Conference purely to learn about how to do various things with SharePoint.  We have a lot of people who want the raw nuts and bolts content of how something works or how to plan, build, deploy or manage SharePoint. 

Ok, so you have conference goals what’s next?
Now we form a group (v-team) across the SharePoint, Office, DPE & Project teams that “own” the content.  We do this because everyone has their area of expertise and knows how to meet the conference goals for their area.  Internally we divide up into focus areas such as Developer, IT Pro, Business User, Search, BI etc… and start working on what the goals are for that area given the overall goals.  We work out a heat map of relative priorities stack up for the conference goals applicable to that area and this gives us a reference point to work with throughout the rest of the process.  For example we might decide that in the Developer focus group we are going to do roughly 30% Cloud, 50% Best Practices and 20% Core Learning content (these are not the actual number BTW).  This varies by focus area.

At this point the team starts working on what high level goals are for their area and how they map to the conference goals.  At the end of this process you typically have a list of high-level topics you need to address in order to meet those goals.  For example in the Developer area we know we need to talk about Application Lifecycle Management because it is a big topic of interest from our customers and partners.  Another example might be Internet Site scalability, because our customers are using SharePoint more and more for delivering massive scale internet sites.

So now we have a high level topic list for each area, what's next?

Session Planning
This is when we start to formulate actual sessions.  Typically this starts by working out what sessions we need for each topic.  For example:  we might decide we need an “Introduction to Developing for SharePoint” session. 

We do this for each topic until we have a fully fleshed out list of sessions we think we need in order to meet the goals. 

This is harder than it sounds.  There are other factors like session allocation numbers.  As the content owner for the conference I get to also work out how many breakouts we can have based on lots of things like conference space, seating arrangements, attendee numbers, attendee profile etc etc etc.…   At the end of this I give each area owner an allocation number of the number of sessions they are allowed.

Right!  So now we have a list of the sessions we think we need in order to meet our goals.  What’s next?

At this point we turn to our experts to help us with sessions.  There are three major groups we call upon for this:

• External experts
• Microsoft
• Customers

External experts: For SPC we run what we call a private External Call for Content.  This where we invite experts and trusted advisors to submit ideas on various topics.  For SPC11 we invited MVPs, MCMs and select other subject matter experts that our content team identified.   We ask them to submit topics via a form on the internet and all those submissions go into a database.

Microsoft:  We also run an internal call for content where we invite experts from Microsoft around the world to also submit ideas.  We also talk with our engineering and support teams to submit session ideas on hot button topics that they are seeing from customer and partner support calls etc… 

Customers:  We have someone on our content team who is specifically tasked with finding customers who have great examples of projects or things they are doing with SharePoint to tell their story.  Again, that all tie back to our overall goals for the conference.

Once this “gathering” phase of the process is complete we have a HUGE database of session ideas.  Each tagged and with metadata indicating how it bubbles up to the overall goals for the conference.  At this point I like to pull it all into Excel and use Pivot Tables and Slicers to slice and dice the data into all sorts of interesting facts and figures.  This gives us a good view into content we received.

For example:  We had over 700 content submission ideas (external + internal) in total.  700!!  Its an amazing number and just goes to show the interest and passion people have for this stuff.  It was amazing to see.

Now the real work begins :)

Once we have all our session submissions we pull them into a SharePoint list (naturally :) who wouldn’t?!?!).  Then our content team can slice and dice those as they wish to see what kinds of things people have submitted.

Each person works slightly differently at this point.  Some (like me) to go through the sessions submissions and bucket them into my high level topics for my area.  Others like to go the other way and scan for sessions of interest.

This is A LOT of work.   We read the title and abstract for every session and evaluate it.  Will it be a good session? Does it map to the conference and area goals?  Is the speaker good?  What has the reaction been to a session like this at past conferences?  Is it new content or old?  There are lots of things we think about when evaluating them. 

After a lot of work we end up with an idea of what sessions from the call for content will be suitable given our goals. 

We also end up with a LOT of gaps.  These are sessions we know we need but we didn’t get input on.  This typically happens because it is a new topic, something only we are seeing via our support channels or something that doesn’t typically jump to mind. We need to go and work out what that sesssion will look like and who might be a good expert on that to deliver it.

Ok, so now we have a rough session list for the conference.

Review!, Review!, Review!
Next we start reviewing all the sessions and scrutinize everyone one in horrifying detail :) 

We do an all day meeting with everyone in one room for the day where we have each area owner present information about their area, the goals and the sessions they have.  This is where everyone in the room gets to critique the sessions, ask questions & provide feedback.  This is where we start to see overlaps, duplicates and, most importantly, gaps that are not covered across the conference.

We sit back and make sure that the content makes sense when seen together as a whole.  We fiercely critique our sessions, do they meet the goals, are they going to resonate with attendees, are the speakers the best experts we can find for that specific topic, are they great speakers & most importantly will the attendee get ultimate value from it?  etc…  It’s a brutal process and after the all day meeting I personally felt totally fried and ready to go to bed, my brain was spinning :)

Once we have our content review complete we ask people to work on the sessions based on the feedback they have received.

Scrub, Scrub, Scrub
Usually at this point we are pretty close to having a final list of sessions.  But there is a lot of work to do yet.  We obsess over the details at this point.  Finding speakers, tweaking titles, tweaking abstracts etc… We work as a team to make sure we still have the right coverage of sessions and topics.  We also look for speakers who have too many sessions.  We don’t want someone delivering too many and not doing a great job on all of them, so this is important too.

(Note: This is the step we are at in the SPC 11 content planning right now … we are close to finishing the scrubbing)

Finalize
Once each area owner is certain they have the right content I get to sit down and take one final look over all the content plans.  I make sure every session bubbles up to our goals, makes sense in the context of the other content at the conference & most importantly will the attendee love it?

Invite speakers
Next we invite speakers.  Sometimes if the session was originally from the call for content we invite that speaker to talk on the subject (usually the abstract and title are different at this point given the iterations and scrubbing done).  Sometimes we invite speakers who didn’t submit a session on that topic because we know they are the best person to speak for that session. 

At this point there is usually some speaker churn.  Some can’t make it or have other commitments for example.

Session development
I wont get into this topic in this post, but its worth mentioning that there is a whole other process for working with speakers to develop their content, review it, refine it and make sure it meets the goals of the sessions.   This is another huge amount of work multiplied by ~240 :)

Finally … we get to deliver the session at the conference :) 

Summary

I hope this gives you some insight into the process we have chosen to plan and build out the content for the SharePoint Conference 2011.  There is a lot that goes on behind closed doors and I hope this has unveiled that in an enlightening way :)

So … in summary … We start at the overall needs of our audience, we work towards goals for the conference, we build a team of people responsible for delivering content for their area to those goals, we ask experts internally and externally what session they think would work & then we work REALLY hard on working out what actual sessions will deliver on the goals & meet the attendees needs.

It’s all an incredible amount of work that really is not very visible from the outside.  But there is one thing that is very very visible on Oct 3rd – 6th 2011 … the conference & the content.  We the content team can’t wait to see everyone at the conference enjoying the fruits of our endless planning.

We cant wait for SPC… and hope to see you there too :)

Thanks,

-Chris.

SPC Content Owner 2011

Part 1 tackled how to authenticate and get data from SharePoint Online (SPO) in a client application like a Windows application.  This included popping up a browser in a dialog window where the user could enter their Office 365 credentials, and then attaching the authentication cookies Office 365 issued to the SharePoint Client Side Object Model (CSOM) to query to your SPO site.

This works great for when a user is involved, but its not a good solution if you client code is a service or another application where a user isn’t present. 

To deal with this scenario the code needs to effectively BE the user and login on their behalf.

To do this this sample queries the Office 365 STS directly using the Windows Identity Foundation (WIF).  WIF helps with managing the security tokens and requests to the STS. 

Note: To run this sample you need to have the WIF runtime installed from here.

At a high level this sample:

• Uses WIF to login the user with the Office 365 STS
• Extracts the Authentication Cookies from the response (“FedAuth” and “rtfa”)
• Constructs a CookieContainer with those cookies
• Attaches the CookieContainer to the CSOM web request
• Calls your SPO site and returns the Title property of the site

Usage:  Compile the project and then run the ExampleCmdLine.exe like this:

ExampleCmdLine.exe <spo site url> <spo username> <spo password>

e.g. ExampleCmdLine.exe https://chjohn.sharepoint.com cj@chjohn.onmicrosoft.com pass@word1

PS: those are not really my credentials … don’t bother trying to run that example :)

Note:  Its important you use HTTPS in your site url.  It wont work otherwise.

Credits:  I am not clever enough to work this stuff out.  I need all the help I can get.  There were two people instrumental in putting this together.  I simply took from their examples and put it into  a simple example/package and tweaked a few things.

• Steve Peschka.  Excellent posts on this topic, here here and here
• Wictor Wilén.  Did a talk on this topic a while back, and who’s presentation and sample code is here

Before you can run this you will need to install:

• WIF Runtime
• CSOM Redistributable

Unzip, compile and run from a command prompt.  All things going well it will return you the title of your SPO site.

Download:

Thanks,

-Chris.

However, one of the topics not addressed directly in that paper is how you can use the Client Side Object Model (CSOM) to interact with SharePoint Online.  You might want to do this if you are writing an application that wants to store or talk with data stored in SharePoint Online for example.

The CSOM allows you to do this in an easy to use manner by providing a library you can use to make calls to SharePoint, however, by default the CSOM doesn’t handle SharePoint Online’s authentication system. 

To address this gap we have published a paper and accompanying code sample projects to assist with showing how to accomplish this.

WhitePaper: Remote Authentication in SharePoint Online Using Claims-Based Authentication

Code Sample: https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Remote-Authentication-in-b7b6f43c

In short, the code sample does the following:

Note:  If you want to use SharePoint web services then you would need to do almost the exact same thing, except attach the auth cookies to the web request instead.  Below is some code snippets to help with this:

// get the cookie collection
CookieCollection authCookie = ClaimClientContext.GetAuthenticatedCookies(targetSite, 925, 525);

listWS.Lists list = new listWS.Lists();

// attach the cookies to the List WS request
list.CookieContainer = new CookieContainer();
list.CookieContainer.Add(authCookie);

<go about setting up the rest of your List WS query here>

// execute the query
System.Xml.XmlNode nodes = list.GetListItems(listName, viewName, query, viewFields, rowLimit, null, string.Empty);

We hope this helps!

Thanks,

-Chris.

In particular is the SharePoint Online General Reference topic.

Additionally the SDK is now marked up with “Available in SharePoint Online” tags so you can see if a particular feature is available in SPO.  Not everything is tagged this way during the SPO Beta … so stay tuned as we get more detailed in future releases of the SDK.

E.g:

Big ups to AJ and team for getting this out.  Very very useful!

-CJ.

A newly released Whitepaper from Andrew Connell and Randy Drisgill provides and end to end, step by step walk through of how to go about planning, designing and implementing your project.

This is a fantastic resource for everyone going SP WCM development, written by two of the most experienced MVPs we have.

Real World Branding with SharePoint 2010 Publishing Sites

Written in Windows PowerShell these scripts will install and configure all the pre-requisites & products to get you up and running with SharePoint development.

Additionally they will download evaluation copies of the products it installs (or use fully licensed product bits you supply), install them either locally or in a user supplied Windows 7 VHD & set that VHD up for dual boot using the Windows 7 VHD native boot feature.  It also allows you to configure what products are installed via a configuration file, so you can add or remove products.

All the source is included for your use.  If a particular aspect of the setup isn’t right for your requirements then you have the ability to change it.  A good example of this might be to configure the SharePoint installation to fit your organizations standard deployment.

Out of the box it will help you install:

• SharePoint Server 2010 + pre-requisites (Standalone)
• Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Edition
• Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio
• Expression Studio 4 Ultimate
• Open XML SDK
• Visual Studio SDK
• Visual Studio SharePoint Power Tools
• Office 2010 Professional Plus
• SharePoint Designer 2010
• Visio 2010

Download the kit

Walk Through Guide

I did this just now and here is how it works…

After installation of the kit you will see a introduction screen like the one below:

The kit also installed the set of scripts in the following location:

C:\SPEasySetup\Labs\GettingStarted\Source  (This is the default install location)

Before continuing review the Config.xml file.

The Config.xml file specifies 3 main things:

• The type of SharePoint product to install
• Any other applications to install
• VHD locations (if you want to set up VHD boot)
  

In my case I have set the location to a Windows 7 Ultimate sys-prepped VHD file I supplied. This is the source VHD that will be used.  The script makes a copy of the source VHD at a location you choose. I specified I want my copy of the VHD to boot into at d:\Win7.VHD

For more information on the Config.xml file, refer to the “GettingStarted.docx” included in the kit.

Once you are happy with your Config.xml setup you can kick off the build of your machine.

Right click Run.bat and choose Run as Administrator

The first thing the script will do is download all the pre-reqs and applications needed for the installation.  This can take quite a while depending on your connection.  Hey, we said it was an easy script … not a fast one :)  Note: Running the script a second time wont download the products again.

Once everything is downloaded you will need to specify if you want to install on your current host [H] or a new VHD [V].  If you pick [H]ost then it will attempt to install all the products locally on your machine.  If you pick [V]HD then it will make a copy of the VHD you specified in the Config.xml file, mount it, copy all the source installation bits & setup your boot options to add “SP Easy” as an additional Boot option.

I picked the [V]HD option.

Once this is complete you are prompted to reboot your PC and pick the “SP Easy” boot option.  It wont be your default option, so make sure you pick it before the timer runs out and you are booted into your default installation.

This is where you will be booting into your newly created VHD.  Its worth noting that because you provide the VHD for this there is the potential for things to go wrong.  The best way to ensure this all works correctly is to provide a sys-prepped/generalized VHD.  This will ensure the correct drivers etc… are installed on first boot for your specific hardware.  When in doubt about this step go and have a chat with your most friendly IT-Pro Windows deployment person :)

Once your new machine has booted (potentially with a reboot after driver installation etc… ) the SP Easy script will start off again.

You might be prompted to reboot after the script turns of UAC.

Again, after the reboot the scripts will continue.  This is the point at which the Windows components will be added & the products will be installed.  Time to sit back and watch or go and get a coffee.  Again, this will take a considerable amount of time, depending on the products being installed.  I leave this running and go and do some other work for a few hours.

You might see some red text like below during the install.  Don’t panic, it is the script just checking if a reboot is required after installing a product.  If a reboot is needed the script will pick back up where it left off in the installation cycle.

TIP: If for some reason you get a product that fails to install, it could be that there are Windows Updates that are pending and a restart is needed.  Try rebooting & the script will try the installation again.

If everything works as expected then you will see a message stating “Setup has completed”.

Open IE and put navigate to SharePoint using your PCs name e.g. https://Chris-PC

You will be prompted to pick a template for the default site.  I picked Team Site.

Once that is complete you should see your shiny new SharePoint 2010 site.

There you have it.  An easy way to provision your Win 7 machine with all the stuff you need to get started with SharePoint 2010 development.

Be sure to hit up the SharePoint Developer Center on MSDN to learn about what you can start building. https://www.msdn.com/sharepoint

Thanks,

-Chris Johnson