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August 27 Sydney SharePoint User Group Presentation - 21st AugustHi to everyone who attended the Sydney SharePoint user group in August - it was great to be able to present and share information with people interested in the "application development" side of SharePoint 2007, particularly in the Business Data Catalog. For those of you that missed it, I have the Slide deck here. I'll be up at the Australian Partner Conference this week, so if you are there as well, give me a call and we'll have a chat over a beer or 2. While thinking through the demonstrations of the BDC I've seen in the past, I feel that I've seen too many BDC demos connecting to a SQL Adventureworks database and present information on Bicycle sales. I believe that that while this is a way of accessing data, the ability to extract and present data from a SQL database thru a system that runs on a SQL database is not much of a stretch... and there aren't many people who have made their fortunes selling bikes. When doing a technology demonstration I always try to build a plausible scenario that has applications in most businesses... so I went with a: VPC running 2003 Server, SQL 2005 standard, MOSS 2007 Enterprise, Office 2007 Pro Plus and a HR database on an Oracle Database server (yes and with all that stuff on a VPC it still went reasonably quick). Using BDC Meta Man (an excellent program which is sure to save you the cost of the application in time even if you use it once!) I queried the Oracle HR database and pulled out information that allowed me to look at the company's departments that were located in a particular geographic location and the staff members for each department (like 3-stage drill-down). As part of the presentation I also highlighted that you could add metadata from the BDC into lists (say, writing invoices for a customer, you just pick the customer name and add all customer information to the document as metadata - and with some InfoPath forms designer work on the document information panel you can even link the BDC metadata into the word document) as well as search on it, build in custom security access controls as part of the BDC's extensibility, supplement data into your MOSS user profiles and a few other nifty things it can do but may not be immediately apparent. Anyway, if you came along and you are interested in hearing more about a particular aspect of the BDC please contact me. If you have some ideas for other presentations relating to MOSS at the SharePoint user group, please let me know. At this stage I'll either do 2005 mirroring failover (and look at automation of the failover process) or InfoPath forms tricks & tips. If you are interested in the tools I used during the demonstration (or that I talked about here) you can find more information at:
***BDC Meta Man Update*** - it looks like Microsoft have released an application that also builds BDC application definition files as part of the SDK for free - however, it is lacking some key features such as the ability to create App def files that include the XML to write data back to the data source, an easy to use drag & drop UI or Support for SQL Stored Procedures. Nick (Tha man for BDC Meta Man) sums the release of this Microsoft product up in his blog. Lastly, having first-hand experienced the support that comes with BDC Meta Man (support for how to hook up Oracle databases to the BDC that is, not even on his own product) vs what you'll get support-wise for a free sdk mini-app... I'll be surprised if he sees any significant shift in sales. August 20 Virtual Server 2005 & Virtual PC Management ScriptsMicrosoft have released some VB scripts that allow administrators to manage virtual servers using batch files / scheduled tasks. This would come in handy if (for example) you had a demo site on a virtual server that you wanted to reset every 48 hours - or if you were running some online training environments, you could use it and interact with it using asp or .NET. The scripts cover: Access rights & Security, including:
Virtual Machine & Virtual Server properties, including:
Virtual Server Client Information, including:
Virtual Disk Drive Management, including:
and Virtual Network management:
w00t! File Storage Outside SQL!I have lost count of the amount of people from enterprise customers that ask me "is there a way to store the files outside SQL and only store the metadata and site logic inside sql? The answer used to be:
Well, goodbye 3rd party products and hello Microsoft Supported API for storing files outside SQL! Yes, it's finally here - there is a hotfix that can be requested from here which provides minimal details, but if you're not keen on a hotfix to implement added functionality then you'll have to wait for the first service pack to come along. But at least you now know it's on its way, right! The hotfix came out at the end of May, so it's been around for a little while. If someone has had a shot at using it, feel free to post a comment on how you found the API featureset. I imagine that an API .chm file or some online help will venture out around the same time as the service pack is released. August 03 Bad Request (Request Header too long)Saw this error pop up irregularly at a client's site recently. It appeared as though something in Excel Calculation Services (ECS) was causing the Internet Explorer Request header to grow to a size that was larger than what the Web Front End server was prepared to handle. I did not get an opportunity to investigate the root cause (deadlines were looming) but I believe the error was Kerberos-related (as it appeared after we enabled Kerberos) and that it had something to do with the 20-odd windows open to related ECS pages from the same site (perhaps the Kerberos ticket grew to a size that stopped it from working). The problem went away by using a new browser window, so the issue was session-based as well. After adjusting both of these registry values from 32767 to 65534 (FFFE) the problem went away. The 2 registry keys to fix this issue are: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\HTTP\Parameters\ MaxFieldLength MaxRequestBytes Have a great weekend! |
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