Prashant Jadhav

What Great .NET Developers Ought To Know

prashantlink — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 04:42:11 +0000

Everyone who writes code

Describe the difference between a Thread and a Process?
What is a Windows Service and how does its lifecycle differ from a “standard” EXE?
What is the maximum amount of memory any single process on Windows can address? Is this different than the maximum virtual memory for the system? How would this affect a system design?
What is the difference between an EXE and a DLL?
What is strong-typing versus weak-typing? Which is preferred? Why?
Corillian’s product is a “Component Container.” Name at least 3 component containers that ship now with the Windows Server Family.
What is a PID? How is it useful when troubleshooting a system?
How many processes can listen on a single TCP/IP port?
What is the GAC? What problem does it solve?

Mid-Level .NET Developer

Describe the difference between Interface-oriented, Object-oriented and Aspect-oriented programming.
Describe what an Interface is and how it’s different from a Class.
What is Reflection?
What is the difference between XML Web Services using ASMX and .NET Remoting using SOAP?
Are the type system represented by XmlSchema and the CLS isomorphic?
Conceptually, what is the difference between early-binding and late-binding?
Is using Assembly.Load a static reference or dynamic reference?
When would using Assembly.LoadFrom or Assembly.LoadFile be appropriate?
What is an Asssembly Qualified Name? Is it a filename? How is it different?
Is this valid? Assembly.Load(“foo.dll”);
How is a strongly-named assembly different from one that isn’t strongly-named?
Can DateTimes be null?
What is the JIT? What is NGEN? What are limitations and benefits of each?
How does the generational garbage collector in the .NET CLR manage object lifetime? What is non-deterministic finalization?
What is the difference between Finalize() and Dispose()?
How is the using() pattern useful? What is IDisposable? How does it support deterministic finalization?
What does this useful command line do? tasklist /m “mscor*”
What is the difference between in-proc and out-of-proc?
What technology enables out-of-proc communication in .NET?
When you’re running a component within ASP.NET, what process is it running within on Windows XP? Windows 2000? Windows 2003?

Senior Developers/Architects

What’s wrong with a line like this? DateTime.Parse(myString);
What are PDBs? Where must they be located for debugging to work?
What is cyclomatic complexity and why is it important?
Write a standard lock() plus “double check” to create a critical section around a variable access.
What is FullTrust? Do GAC’ed assemblies have FullTrust?
What benefit does your code receive if you decorate it with attributes demanding specific Security permissions?
What does this do? gacutil /l | find /i “Corillian”
What does this do? sn -t foo.dll
What ports must be open for DCOM over a firewall? What is the purpose of Port 135?
Contrast OOP and SOA. What are tenets of each?
How does the XmlSerializer work? What ACL permissions does a process using it require?
Why is catch(Exception) almost always a bad idea?
What is the difference between Debug.Write and Trace.Write? When should each be used?
What is the difference between a Debug and Release build? Is there a significant speed difference? Why or why not?
Does JITting occur per-assembly or per-method? How does this affect the working set?
Contrast the use of an abstract base class against an interface?
What is the difference between a.Equals(b) and a == b?
In the context of a comparison, what is object identity versus object equivalence?
How would one do a deep copy in .NET?
Explain current thinking around IClonable.
What is boxing?
Is string a value type or a reference type?
What is the significance of the “PropertySpecified” pattern used by the XmlSerializer? What problem does it attempt to solve?
Why are out parameters a bad idea in .NET? Are they?
Can attributes be placed on specific parameters to a method? Why is this useful?

C# Component Developers

Juxtapose the use of override with new. What is shadowing?
Explain the use of virtual, sealed, override, and abstract.
Explain the importance and use of each component of this string: Foo.Bar, Version=2.0.205.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=593777ae2d274679d
Explain the differences between public, protected, private and internal.
What benefit do you get from using a Primary Interop Assembly (PIA)?
By what mechanism does NUnit know what methods to test?
What is the difference between: catch(Exception e){throw e;} and catch(Exception e){throw;}
What is the difference between typeof(foo) and myFoo.GetType()?
Explain what’s happening in the first constructor: public class c{ public c(string a) : this() {;}; public c() {;} } How is this construct useful?
What is this? Can this be used within a static method?

ASP.NET (UI) Developers

Describe how a browser-based Form POST becomes a Server-Side event like Button1_OnClick.
What is a PostBack?
What is ViewState? How is it encoded? Is it encrypted? Who uses ViewState?
What is the element and what two ASP.NET technologies is it used for?
What three Session State providers are available in ASP.NET 1.1? What are the pros and cons of each?
What is Web Gardening? How would using it affect a design?
Given one ASP.NET application, how many application objects does it have on a single proc box? A dual? A dual with Web Gardening enabled? How would this affect a design?
Are threads reused in ASP.NET between reqeusts? Does every HttpRequest get its own thread? Should you use Thread Local storage with ASP.NET?
Is the [ThreadStatic] attribute useful in ASP.NET? Are there side effects? Good or bad?
Give an example of how using an HttpHandler could simplify an existing design that serves Check Images from an .aspx page.
What kinds of events can an HttpModule subscribe to? What influence can they have on an implementation? What can be done without recompiling the ASP.NET Application?
Describe ways to present an arbitrary endpoint (URL) and route requests to that endpoint to ASP.NET.
Explain how cookies work. Give an example of Cookie abuse.
Explain the importance of HttpRequest.ValidateInput()?
What kind of data is passed via HTTP Headers?
Juxtapose the HTTP verbs GET and POST. What is HEAD?
Name and describe at least a half dozen HTTP Status Codes and what they express to the requesting client.
How does if-not-modified-since work? How can it be programmatically implemented with ASP.NET?
Explain <@OutputCache%> and the usage of VaryByParam, VaryByHeader.
How does VaryByCustom work?
How would one implement ASP.NET HTML output caching, caching outgoing versions of pages generated via all values of q= except where q=5 (as in http://localhost/page.aspx?q=5)?

Developers using XML

What is the purpose of XML Namespaces?
When is the DOM appropriate for use? When is it not? Are there size limitations?
What is the WS-I Basic Profile and why is it important?
Write a small XML document that uses a default namespace and a qualified (prefixed) namespace. Include elements from both namespace.
What is the one fundamental difference between Elements and Attributes?
What is the difference between Well-Formed XML and Valid XML?
How would you validate XML using .NET?
Why is this almost always a bad idea? When is it a good idea? myXmlDocument.SelectNodes(“//mynode”);
Describe the difference between pull-style parsers (XmlReader) and eventing-readers (Sax)
What is the difference between XPathDocument and XmlDocument? Describe situations where one should be used over the other.
What is the difference between an XML “Fragment” and an XML “Document.”
What does it meant to say “the canonical” form of XML?
Why is the XML InfoSet specification different from the Xml DOM? What does the InfoSet attempt to solve?
Contrast DTDs versus XSDs. What are their similarities and differences? Which is preferred and why?
Does System.Xml support DTDs? How?
Can any XML Schema be represented as an object graph? Vice versa?

What SharePoint Consultants Ought to Know

prashantlink — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 04:39:36 +0000

Everyone who can spell SharePoint

what is SharePoint?
what is the difference between SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services?
what is a document library?
what is a meeting workspace?
what is a document workspace?
what is a web part?

Mid-level SharePoint Consultant

what is the difference between a document library and a form library?
what is a web part zone?
how is security managed in SharePoint?
how are web parts developed?
what is a site definition?
what is a template?
how do you install web parts?
what is the difference between a site and a web?
what are the differences between web part page gallery, site gallery, virtual server gallery and online gallery?
what is the GAC?
what is a DWP?
what is CAML?
what are themes?
what is presence?
can web parts be connected? if so, how?
what is a personal view and what is a shared view?
what is an STP file?
what is an FWP file?
can you upload MP3′s to SharePoint?
how does SharePoint support MS Outlook integration?
how can you extend lists in SharePoint?
explain the document versioning in SharePoint document libraries

Senior SharePoint Consultant

where are web part resources contained?
what are the different installation methods for deploying web parts? and what are the pros/cons?
what is a ghosted/unghosted page?
how is site data stored?
where is metadata for a web stored?
what is an audience and describe the use?
what are the trust levels and what is the default trust associated with SharePoint?
what are the two logging mechanisms for usage statistics?
what functionality does owssup.dll provide for client side activities?
what is the difference between a site owner and a site administrator?
what is STSAdm and what can it be used for?
can WSS search subsites?
can you register alerts for users?
are PDFs searchable?

SharePoint Architect

what is a SharePoint farm?
describe a large deployment
how can you synchronize custom Active Directory attributes to SharePoint?
if it is anticipated that our organization would need to store 1 terrabyte of documents, what is the recommended configuration and storage requirement?
describe the implementation of SharePoint and Project Server
what are the BKMs for workflow and SharePoint?
explain how you would deploy SharePoint on an extranet
what is the BKM for maximum number of virtual servers configured for SharePoint on a single box?
what are the migration strategies for moving sites around?
what are the archiving strategies?
describe the search strategies
can you implement forms-based authentication with SharePoint?
describe how single sign-on works

Free SharePoint Web Parts

prashantlink — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 03:14:01 +0000

Free SharePoint Web Parts (3rd Party)

FrontPage Resources

Tina Clarke’s FrontPage List

HowTo’s and Tips

KBAlertz – SharePoint

MOSS Tools

MOSS Business Data Catalog (BDC) MetaData Manager

MSDN Technical Articles

Office 2007

Other Tools

SDKs & Guides

SharePoint Newsgroups

SharePoint Resources (Microsoft)

SharePoint Resources (Non-MS)

SharePoint Service Packs

SharePoint Tools

The 2007 Office System and Web 2.0

prashantlink — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 01:33:21 +0000

The set of programs, servers, and services in the 2007 Office system represents a huge breakthrough in terms of organizational productivity, data integration, and solution platform capabilities. By employing many of the Web 2.0 principles and technologies described earlier, the 2007 Office system delivers out-of-the-box solutions that enable users to leverage business data and participate in business processes through a number of easy-to-use interfaces. Whether the information and processes are exposed in commonly used tools such as Microsoft® Office Outlook®, Word, InfoPath®, or Excel®, or exposed through a Web browser connecting to a server running Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007, the 2007 Office system ensures that users can participate at the appropriate time by using the tools that make the most sense. Further, it provides a modern business application platform that prepares organizations for future opportunities by enabling them to easily adapt to rapidly changing business demands and it unlocks the ROI of existing systems.

Technology Investments

Beyond providing rich out-of-the-box solutions and a critical mass of platform technologies, the 2007 Office system provides an infrastructure on which enterprises can build, deploy, and host user-driven business applications. By building on top of the 2007 Office system, enterprises can take advantage of the services and Web 2.0 characteristics of the 2007 Office system. The goal for this release is to give users the choice of tools and give developers and IT professionals a strong, enterprise-ready, secure and extensible platform.

XML

XML is at the core of Office system 2007 spanning client and server technologies. the 2007 Office system introduces a new Open XML format that allows much easier programmatic access to Office files. Microsoft Office InfoPath uses XML for gathering information, with the flexibility to incorporate data from many sources in a single form. On the server side, XML surfaces in a variety of ways allowing enterprises to style the content in the format they want by using Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT).

XML Web Services

The 2007 Office system server technologies expose data and application interfaces through XML Web Services. By using tools and technologies such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007, the XML Web Part, the Business Data Catalog, and Forms Services, XML Web Services can be consumed with ease. There has also been a significant amount of work done with the Office client applications to interact with the server technologies by using XML Web Services as well surfacing applications and content in the client to make it easier for users to participate.

Ajax

Microsoft was one of the pioneers of Ajax applications with Outlook Web Access (OWA) 2000. Ajax development techniques have been used throughout the 2007 Office system server technologies to provide a rich, interactive browser experience. Ajax techniques have been used extensively in Office SharePoint Server features such as Excel Services and InfoPath Forms Services, OWA, and Communicator Web Access (CWA). Customers can also leverage these techniques and behaviors in their own solutions. For more information, please refer to the Basic Building Blocks: A Rich User Experience section in this white paper.

RSS

Office SharePoint Server 2007 exposes RSS feeds for data. For example, tasks, blogs, document libraries, contacts, and even search queries can be RSS enabled. On the client, Outlook 2007 includes a new feature for RSS aggregation that is integrated with Windows® Internet Explorer RSS capabilities.

Enterprise Search

Office SharePoint Server 2007 delivers a single search engine for all content types so users can find database entries, documents, Web pages, file shares, people, and more. Extensibility ensures that specific data types are well indexed and that results are displayed in a mode appropriate to your business.

Metadata Services

The 2007 Office system boasts a number of powerful metadata technologies that allow companies to more effectively categorize and reuse a wide variety of information. Content types in Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services (SharePoint Products and Technologies) allow document contents and behaviors to be specified. The Business Data Catalog allows business entities such as purchase orders and invoices in back-end databases to be defined once and then surfaced in search results, portals, and lists. Other technologies such as data connection libraries make finding important data sources possible for all types of users.

Collaborative Workspaces

Office SharePoint Server delivers an enterprise-grade, template-based workspace environment that is manageable, flexible, and powerful. Users can easily create workspaces with the right set of tools for the job by simply selecting the right template.

Common Web Application Framework

Office SharePoint Server provides a single infrastructure for business productivity Web applications for the enterprise. Through its extensive use of Web 2.0 patterns and technologies, it allows enterprises to quickly develop, deploy, and host applications; these applications then inherit the Web 2.0 characteristics themselves, creating an ever richer user experience. Beyond providing a strong self-provisioning platform, Office SharePoint Server provides rich out-of-the-box functionality in areas such as Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Portal, Enterprise Search, Forms, and Business Intelligence. Deep integration with ASP.NET 2.0 makes Office SharePoint Server a natural extension of the ASP.NET platform and enables skill transfer and software reuse. For more information on how Office SharePoint Server provides a common Web application framework for organizations looking to host rich business applications, refer to the SharePoint Products and Technologies section in the Appendix.

Workflow

While workflow is not ordinarily included in most descriptions of Web 2.0, we feel workflow is important to include in any discussion of enterprise business applications because it represents such a necessary enabling technology, streamlining how groups work together in an organization. Based on the Windows Workflow Foundation, workflow in the 2007 Office system is hosted on the server and integrates with the Office clients to allow complex business processes to be captured and repeated. Built-in workflows support common tasks while extensibility by designers or professional developers ensures flexibility, fast deployment, and future headroom.

The Elements of Web 2.0

prashantlink — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 01:27:06 +0000

Properly understood and deployed, Web 2.0 technologies, methods, and patterns can be adopted by the enterprise to great effect. They can boost overall organizational productivity and create a much stronger customer and partner connection. To capitalize on this opportunity, enterprises require an agile infrastructure with the tools and out-of-the-box solutions that allow users to interact with content, applications, and people in powerful new ways. In this section, we focus on a few of the key concepts that make this possible:

Rich User Experience

Providing users with a single place to do work increases productivity, minimizes training costs, and encourages deeper adoption and usage. Context shifts, which occur when users must switch between many different sites and applications to accomplish a task, can kill productivity and ruin any user experience. Whether they are customers, partners, or employees, users want the right tools at their fingertips at the right time. They want to access information and applications whether they are connected or disconnected, whether they are using a mobile device or a laptop, or whether they are using a thin client or a smart client. In the enterprise, a rich Web experience often means allowing users to use programs they already know to interact with new hosted services. It also means allowing them to take content offline or on the road. A rich, dynamic, responsive user interface enables people to drive the business, rather than limit them to the constraints of fixed applications and screens.

Data-Driven Architecture

Data is the fuel that powers all information technology. The new breed of applications uses technologies such as XML and Web services to allow systems of all types to exchange data with greatly reduced integration complexity. Enterprises can use these technologies to access the critical business data that exists in many different formats and locations such as line-of-business (LOB) systems, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) databases, documents, Web sites, content management systems, and archives. Metadata techniques can be used to help describe that data, making integration easier, making data more relevant to users, and streamlining reuse across many applications. Users can combine data and processes from different systems in their own “mash-ups,” creating entirely new applications.

User-Driven Business Applications

With a Web 2.0 platform, users can create applications specific to their own needs. The shift of application development to the edge of the network is perhaps the most dramatic change for many organizations used to top-down solution models. However, the new models acknowledge that organizations simply cannot anticipate all of the creative solutions that occur at the edge in business units. On the Internet, these edge-created applications have been dubbed “mash-ups.” In the enterprise, they are often called composite applications.

However, many current composite application strategies fall short by focusing on simply resurfacing applications in a new user interface (UI) and failing to provide true user enablement. To capitalize on the user-driven application opportunity, enterprises will provide departments and users with a managed environment and familiar tools that allow them to easily customize or create their own workspaces and solutions. A flexible infrastructure that provides management and control while scaling from power-user configuration to professional developer solutions is the critical enabler for this opportunity.

User Participation

Today businesses understand that individual productivity is only part of the picture. Organizational productivity is the result of users collaborating and sharing content with one another. Enterprises can boost organizational productivity by making participation in Web communities as seamless and easy as possible. This approach can help not only new Web applications but existing applications as well. Many large system deployments such as ERP and CRM have been plagued by low user adoption, resulting in low-quality information in the system and robbing companies of expected return on investments. By making input easier and streamlining reporting and analysis, this new breed of application drives user adoption and unlocks the value of existing systems.

Collective Intelligence

Enterprises with large employee, partner, and customer bases are beginning to realize the value of collective intelligence: the knowledge found in employees’ heads and in the databases and unstructured documents found across the organization. Search and collaboration are at the heart of this opportunity. When people can quickly find critical information and subject-matter experts, and then work seamlessly together, productivity can soar. New technologies such as dynamic workspaces, wikis, and enterprise search for people and data deliver a platform for collaborating on complex and creative tasks. Increased access to information enables valuable analysis, while easy publishing of insights ensures that others can benefit from these insights. The result is a positive feedback loop that amplifies the power of many people working together.

Low Cost Deployment and Management

The concepts behind Web 2.0 strike a new balance between the control and administrative ease of centralized systems and the flexibility and user empowerment of distributed systems. Web applications are by nature centrally deployed, so central services can manage applications and entire desktops automatically. While this style has always appealed to central IT organizations, it now becomes more appealing to users because they can reassemble the services available to them in the ways that suit them best. It also offers the potential to host or outsource applications and still manage them by allowing users to “pull” the applications to their desktop.

Technology Components

Beyond these high-level concepts, Web 2.0 includes some key technologies that successful companies should evaluate as a central part of their infrastructure.

XML

XML is a self-describing data format that is easily understood by many applications and systems. XML provides the ability to define specific vocabularies to describe your organization’s information, enabling nearly seamless data interchange. For example, if every system throughout your organization and partner value chain describes purchase orders by using the same language and format, all the systems and applications that process expense-related information can seamlessly share data, vastly reducing integration complexity.

XML Web Services

XML Web services are interoperable software components that support computer-to-computer interaction over a network. XML Web Services can expose content and application interfaces to other systems, enabling dynamic scenarios such as mash-up or composite applications. Web services are a core component of solutions that integrate multiple applications, platforms, and databases.

Ajax

Ajax is a term coined in recent years that stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Ajax development techniques can be used to build Web applications that function like desktop applications, without the slow, tedious page refreshes of early Web applications. This ultimately results in a much smoother user experience, which boosts productivity and user acceptance.

Rich Site Summary/Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

As its name implies, RSS delivers content through the use of syndication services, which provide an easy way to broadly publish information inside and outside of the organization. With the exploding amount of content and applications, syndication is an important step in obtaining maximum exposure and stickiness.

Search

As demonstrated by the Internet search engines, search has become a first-class entry point for many types of tasks and is often the user’s first tool when trying to answer questions. Organizations can capitalize on this natural behavior by providing users with high-quality enterprise search results that are relevant and include multiple data types such as databases, documents, and people in a single search.

Metadata Services

Metadata is literally “data about data.” It is a set of information that describes the rest of the information in an organization. It may describe business entities such as purchase orders, invoices, and expense reports, or it may describe database records and document structures to make them more reusable. Metadata helps with discovery of data sources and enables data reuse across applications and services by providing a common, central description of data structures and their behavior.

Collaborative Workspaces

Collaborative workspaces are places for groups to meet, talk, share information, and keep a record of members and activities. They provide a selection of configurable tools for storage, communication, display, item tracking, and so forth. These dynamic workspaces allow new group members to quickly come up to speed and provide the ongoing context tasks for projects.

Common Web Application Framework

Due to its sheer size, the Internet is rife with different application frameworks. Enterprises, however, cannot afford this kind of infrastructure fragmentation. To maximize return on investment (ROI), enterprises must standardize on a common Web application framework for easy application creation and deployment. A strong building-block approach to application design allows users to quickly create business applications based on reusable components.

Sharepoint 2007 native Web Services

prashantlink — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 01:16:32 +0000

Web Services

Administration Web Service
Alerts Web Service
Authentication Web Service
Copy Web Service
Document Workspace Web Service
Forms Web Service
Imaging Web Service
List Data Retrieval Web Service
Lists Web Service
Meetings Web Service
People Web Service
Permissions Web Service
SharePoint Directory Management Web Service
Site Data Web Service
Sites Web Service
Search Web Service
Users and Groups Web Service
Versions Web Service
Views Web Service
Web Part Pages Web Service
Webs Web Service

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Related Technologies pricing

prashantlink — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:33:42 +0000

Servers	Estimated Price
Office SharePoint Server 2007	$4424
Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search Standard	$8213
Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search Enterprise	$57,670
Office Forms Server 2007	$4424

Client Access Licenses	Estimated Price
Office SharePoint Server 2007 Standard CAL	$94
Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise CAL¹	$75
Office Forms Server 2007 CAL	$54
Office SharePoint Designer 2007	$187

Internet Facing Sites	Estimated Price
Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet sites	$40,943
Office Forms Server 2007 for Internet sites	$22,118

To be licensed for the Enterprise Edition functionality of Office SharePoint Server 2007, both the Standard and Enterprise client access licenses are required.

Office 2003 and SharePoint 2007 – comparision

prashantlink — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:25:51 +0000

In my previous post I mentioned that if you are going to use SharePoint 2007 you really should use Office 2007 with it. In this post I will try to describe differences between various versions so you can know what to expect on your implementation.

Every project is different, and you will encounter numerous combinations of Microsoft software installed. Some large corporations we work with, are still using Office 2000 and Office XP. The majority of enterprise accounts are still using Office 2003 on Windows XP. (I cannot find any hard figures on this though).

Scenario 1

Client platform: Office 2007
Server Platform: SharePoint Portal Server 2003

You might have a customer that moved to Office 2007 but who is still using SharePoint 2003. There might be a number of reasons for this. Your customer probably has a very customized SharePoint 2003 and have decided not to upgrade it because it the solution work fine.

Feature	Office 2007 with SharePoint Portal Server 2003
Saving documents to SharePoint sites	Yes
Editing documents stored to a SharePoint site	No (Edition only works for the Office 2003 formats. You cannot save a DOCX back to SharePoint 2003)
Check-out/in, version history	Yes
Updating properties	Yes (it works but not as elegant as on SharePoint 2007)

You will also experience the following server limitations:

· Inability to index new document formats

· Problems with using Address Books

Scenario 2

Server Platform: Office SharePoint Server 2007

In most cases you will run into this scenario. Your customer decided to implement SharePoint 2007, but they will still be using Office 2003. Here are differences between Office 2003 and Office 2007 when working with data from SharePoint sites.

Application / Feature	Office 2003	Office 2007
Saving and editing Office 2003 files from SharePoint sites	Yes	Yes
Saving and editing Office 2007 files from SharePoint sites	Yes You must install Compatibility Pack.	Yes
Check-out/in, version history	Yes	Yes
Start a workflow	No	Yes
Word
Updating properties	Yes Improved in Word 2007.	Yes
Inserting document properties for (DOC/DOCX)	No (DOC file format)	Yes (DOCX file format)
Automatically updating server properties that were inserted to document body (DOC/DOCX)	No	Yes
Write a blog post	No	Yes
Compare versions of a SharePoint document	No / Yes (Very limited)	Yes
Outlook
Synchronize tasks/discussion boards to Outlook	No	Yes
Synchronizing calendars to Outlook	No / Yes (One-way sync only; from SharePoint to Outlook)	Yes
Synchronizing contacts to Outlook	No / Yes (One-way sync only; from SharePoint to Outlook)	Yes
Synchronize document libraries to Outlook	No	Yes
Excel
Publishing Excel files as web pages	No	Yes
PowerPoint
Working with Slide Library	No	Yes

Bear in mind that some customers will note be willing to upgrade to the new platform. During your project ask what are the key features they want to use to check if these are available for their Office version.

Web 2.0 : Your corporate intranet ?

prashantlink — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:14:45 +0000

When talking about intranet portals from end users perspective, the most important “feature” for them is content. Yes, a Silverlight photo gallery is very cool but employees are visiting intranet to find more information about company, to perform their jobs better etc…

While consulting customers on intranet solution architecture, I always advise them Web 2.0 concepts. When you are building intranet solution on SharePoint 2007 (or any other CMS solution); you should allow maximum number of employees to create content. In such a case your intranet site will become like Wikipedia. The key for Wikipedia’s success was the ability to have virtually unlimited number of authors from all over the globe.

You might ask: “How many is many, and how many is too many?“ Well, it all depends on your company’s profile and internal organization, but anyone who has a computer and knows how to use Word is a potential contributor to an intranet site.

What are key benefits of this Web2.0/open approach? Instead of having just a small percentage of employees contributing, you will allow anyone that has something to say to be creative. On some sites like: policies, procedures, quality control, legal, etc. you will retain control, but when we are talking about general news, projects, information, events – what could go wrong?

If you are using SharePoint 2007 as your intranet platform, you can enjoy benefits of SharePoint platform to establish content approval, versioning, alerts and identity integration to track all modifications. I already wrote about using blogs as infrastructure for your intranet portal, but you can also use wikis, integration with email or regular pages to achieve the same result.

Use of Web 2.0 in business emerge

prashantlink — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 04:00:39 +0000

The last few weeks have seen a series of interesting new reports, studies, and papers on the past, present, and future of Web 2.0 concepts and applications as applied to businesses. Most notable for many industry watchers have been fairly rigorous new works by McKinsey & Company as well as Forrester, whom have each released the results of broad surveys of executives in various industries. The focus of both surveys was to capture a picture of the interests, activities, motivators for Web 2.0 adoption of several thousand C-level executives in medium to large companies.

While both the McKinsey study and Forrester report have summaries online — and you can read a detailed breakdown of the fascinating adoption numbers in Nick Carr’s excellent roll-up of many of the key numbers in the reports — what stands out clearly from the state of Web 2.0 in business last year is the almost surprisingly high levels interest in some of the more advanced, and powerful, concepts in the Web 2.0 practice set.

Gartner, for its part, had its own take on things last year with their widely covered hype cycle report on Web 2.0, indicating the things like collective intelligence (ostensibly the core principle of Web 2.0) would be a long term, transformational business strategy that they felt at the time would take at least 5 to 10 years for broad industry uptake. However, the report from McKinsey intriguing suggests something much different may be taking place.

The numbers McKinsey provides from actual business leaders seems to indicate that broad, active interest in collective intelligence is rapidly forming in the offices of many company’s CIOs, CTOs, and other executives. McKinsey cites that fully 48% of the nearly 3,000 leading executives surveyed are actively investing in collective intelligence approaches. What makes this interesting is that this number is a good bit more than executives are currently reporting that they are investing in other well known Web 2.0 approaches including social networking, RSS, podcasting, and even wikis and blogs, which come in about 1/3 lower in overall interest. In fact, out of all the Web 2.0 trends surveyed, only Web services has a bigger footprint than collective intelligence in terms of current investment. This strongly suggests some kind of sea change in business thinking since last year.

This is a fascinating outcome since at a grassroots level in the enterprise, and certainly out on the Web, the rise of wikis and in particular blogs, are a much more common phenomenon than apps that focus on collective intelligence, the latter which would manifest itself as any software which aggregates the combined user created input of employees and/or customers, partners, and suppliers en masse to create better knowledge and decisions. And although both wikis and blogs both accumulate collective intelligence (albeit relatively unstructured) via user participation — open group editing of content in the case of wikis, and conversations via comments and trackbacks in blogs — it’s probably the more formal, more structured, and centrally driven collective intelligence model that respondents were likely referring to since blogs and wikis were already represented in the survey.

Collective intelligence leads blogs and wikis in terms of business interest?

Taking a look at these results in general reminds us that many of the outcomes that Web 2.0 technologies enable — the free flow of information, emergent structure, higher levels of social activity, and decentralized do-it-yourself peer production — are sometimes subversive and even somewhat disruptive to traditional corporate structures and management processes. Because I suspect that a survey of these same items taken of the general user community — and not management — would find a different set of answers, and one that would likely emphasize the Web 2.0 platforms that are under more end user control. By this I mean the aforementioned blogs and wikis, but probably social networking applications as well.

Why is this an important distinction? This question takes us to the actual changes that the consumer Web appears to be imposing increasingly on our organization from the bottom up. The diagram I have above shows which aspects of Web 2.0 tools and technologies are primarily created and controlled with relative democratization by users (which is why they’re called peers in this case), and which ones are primarily enabled, in fact are made possible at all, by centralized IT. Web services, APIs, and mashups are classic examples of centrally created things which need governance and management, not to mention good design and architecture, something that is still just not very DIY, at least yet. On the other hand, blogs and wikis are simple, elemental Web 2.0 platforms for self-expression and participation and are as simple to create by anyone — along with the latest best practices — as spending 30 seconds in the setup pages of your favorite enterprise blog or wiki hosting site.

However, as we’ve seen with things like IBM’s promising QEDWiki platform that allows wikis to be the front end of an SOA, the world of end-user powered Web 2.0 platforms like blogs/wikis and the world of enterprise IT infrastructure and SOA — the latter which organizations world-wide have been pouring billions and billions into the last few years — are not separate worlds at all. In fact, it’s increasingly apparent that the Web 2.0 technologies which emphasize the most user control are also the very tools that can unleash the investments the business world has been making in information technology for almost a decade, particularly around interoperability and reuse based on the open Web services model. The best way to exploit and leverage our businesses is increasingly likely to use the combined power, reach, and ease-of-use of platforms such as blogs and wikis to tap into and make use of our vast, and all-too-often underutilized islands of data and IT infrastructure.

And as I discussed in my previous post, effective Web 2.0 in the enterprise, whether that’s basic Enterprise 2.0 or a much broader and expansive view of Web 2.0 design patterns and business models which I’ve called Product Development 2.0 for lack of a better term, actually requires the active support of both the users on the ground as well as the top levels of an organization to really take off. Business are structured much differently that the consumer Web and major impediments to use of Web 2.0 production and consumption scenarios exist. This include lack of good enterprise search, mountains of closed legacy systems, the challenge of securing highly open, deeply integrated applications, and conflicting data models (XML, relational data, rich media, and more.) These are all challenges to the ultimate success of Web 2.0 in the enterprise, even to the point that some organizations are increasingly at risk of IT users doing so much themselves that the IT department can begin to lose control. That is, unless they jump into the trenches with their users and help guide the application of Web 2.0 tools without significantly hindering forward progress.

More and more Web 2.0 tools and techniques studies become available

But the true story of what is happening is still very much emerging. Fresh results from organizations like Edelman, Dartmouth, and many others have all been published recently.. To get a sense of the full body of knowledge on the use of Web 2.0 platforms in business (as well as the curiousity driving it), Bill Ives recently did an excellent job summarizing many of the Web 2.0 related studies in the last year alone. Here’s the list, with thanks:

Edelman Internal Communications Channels Study (2006)

Makovsky 2006 State of Corporate Blogging Survey (May 2006)

Northeastern University & Backbone Media Blogging Success Study (November 2006)

Corporate Blogging Survey 2005: Is It Worth The Hype? (Backbone Media)

Cymfony and Porter Novelli Corporate Blog Survey (July 2006)

Weblogs and Employee Communication: Ethical Questions for Corporate Blogging (Institute for Public Relations, June 2006)

Organizational Blogs and the Human Voice: Relational Strategies and Relational Outcomes (Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, January 2006)

2006 Workplace E-Mail, Instant Messaging & Blog Survey (American Management Association and e-Policy Institute, July 2006)

Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki (Socialtext, last updated in October 2006)

Fortune 500 Blog Project Wiki (Directed by Teresa Valdez Klein of Blog Business Summit and Easton Ellsworth of Know More Media)

The Hype is Real: Social Media Invades the Inc. 500 (University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research, January 2007)

The Voice of the Blog: The Attitudes and Experiences of Small Business Bloggers Using Blogs as a Marketing and Communications Tool. (Jeffrey Hill, unpublished master’s thesis, University of Liverpool, 2005)

NewPR Wiki (contains lists of corporate blogs and executive bloggers, ongoing)

Socialtext Customer Stories (case studies of wiki use from companies such as Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, Nokia, Ziff Davis and Kodak, ongoing)

Note that with lack of well-known success stories or famous industry examples, documents such as these become the meat upon which executive decision makers feast to drive and justify their decisions on new technologies and innovation in general, sometimes even betting their careers. And while we don’t have enough information yet to satisfy many that are on the fence, it’s clear that the conventional wisdom is beginning to shift from the wait-and-see of 2006 to the beginning of the adoption cycle in earnest this year.

I cited the list of studies above both as useful information for readers here but also as an example that further shows the contrast between studies like McKinsey’s and the trends in the general public uptake of social media platforms like blogs and wikis. In particular, I’m referring to the wealth of studies around the rise of social media in contrast with general, corporate collective intelligence projects and initiatives, which doesn’t seem to have anywhere near the same grassroots interest. Finally and somewhat surprisingly, being another example of the wide variety we’re finding in early results, even mashups — a very exciting DIY phenomenon on the Web — are not particularly well represented (10-20% investment/interest) both in terms of studies of top down activity by business executives or by the studies coming out. It is better forms of collaboration, knowledge retention, organizational intelligence, and open, interoperable IT systems that currently seem to rule the discussion of Web 2.0 for business at present.