SharePoint certification exam thoughts

Overview:  I passed the 70-667 exam on Configuring SharePoint 2010.  This exam looks at installing, upgrading, deploying applications, environment menagement and basic configuration of SP2010.

Thoughts:  The exam is probably the easiest of the SP2010 certification exams I have taken so far but I scarcely  passed.  It's pretty easy passing MS exams if you use brain dumps, I downloaded a brain dump for this paper and it almost identical to the actual exam.  As a certification I think these exams don't prove the person knows SharePoint.  If a candidate for a job has experience and could be bothered to write the exams you probably are getting some degree of confirmation they know SharePoint 2010.

Personally I enjoy taking the exams to test my knowledge. It helps me identify SharePoint topics/areas I don't know well enough and it broadens my knowledge on areas within SP2010 I don't use regularly in my job. This improved my knowledge/diversity giving me better options for solving my clients solutions.  I think most people tend to use what they know well to solve problems.  Being a developer I tend to choose code as my preferred method of achieving a goal when it isn't necessarily the best option.

Microsoft offer a free retake on all their exams until the end of 2011, this is a good thing as it encourages me to do the exams without a brain dump as if you do fail it is a waste of £88.  The exam special also includes a discount for buying multiple exams.

70-573 & 70-576 Dev exams blog post

SharePoint for small companies - A Small server farm solution

Overview:  Today I met a small company looking to put in SharePoint 2010, I was surprised at the requirement for 35 users but after some review I realised such a small user base provided they are heavy usage information workers could get great benefits out of SharePoint.  BPOS is to limited and I think SharePoint 365 will be a better option but as it still in restricted public beta and therefore it's not an immediate option. 
Problem: The client needs a solution for an Intranet, collaboration and replacement of drives, phase 2 would be a couple of applications such as a new simple CRM and MySites.
Initial Hypothesis:  I refuse to put SQL on the same server as SharePoint.  Using Windows 2008 R2 I want to run SP2010 on the virtual machine, I would put SQL Server 2008 R2 on the physical machine.  This allows for a fairly easy upgrade and the ability to backup and restore data the farm.  Only 1 windows standard licence is required for the VM and the physical SQL machine.
SQL Server can be licenced in 1 of 3 methods namely: 1) per processor (most common), 2) per server plus user cals or 3) per server plus device cals.  If you use option 2, you can use multiple processors and get performance increases.  However, you need to buy additional CAL's at +-£85 each as new users join.  SQL Server Standard Edition is preferable to the SQL Server 2008 Express edition.
SharePoint 2010 needs to be for internal users only, the question is between using the paid for Standard edition or Foundation server.
Resolution: SharePoint standard edition has features that will help the client however they are leaning towards SharePoint 365 ASAP.  I recommend 1 single server containing 8GB of RAM x64 that supports hardware virtualisation.   Windows 2008 R2 standard edition will be installed on the physical server.  A single virtual machine hyper-V instance will spawn up for the SP2010 software.  SP2010 foundation will be used in the discovery phase with 4GB of dedicated RAM.  The SQL Server database could be the express edition but as the threshold is 10GB per database, really to small so the web or workgroup SQL Server editions are better but will have additional licence costs associated.  Standard edition is more common however, you do need Enterprise edition for features such PowerPivot, remote blob storage, backup compression.

Summary: You get no resilience on the small farm's discussed but there are options and each can easily be built upon at a latter stage. This approach also lends itself to disaster recovery using VM image, Acronis base image and SharePoint farm backup.

More Info: Updated 23 March 2011
SP2010 edition comparison for search
SP2010 edition comparison for composite/applications dev
Licencing calc tool

Timesheet solution for SharePoint 2010 - Part 4 Application setup guide

Part 1 - Design & data storage 
Part 2 - Building the UI
Part 3 - Installation Steps
Part 4 - Final Part (This blog post)

Overview: Once the Timesheet wasp is installed, the new Timesheet database and the web.config changes have been made as described in Part 3 (Timesheet Installation), you need to add pages for users to input there timesheets and administration.  You will need to create at least 1 client, 1 project and add a person to a project before you can submit timesheets. 

Add pages to the Timesheet application within SharePoint 2010:
I create a "new publishing site" called "Timesheet" with the following url http://intranet.dev/timesheets/Pages/default.aspx.
I then added the following web parts to the page:

All the web parts are connected web parts (To connect the web parts, when the page is in edit mode,click the button to edit).

Create the popup page that is linked to on the page just created.

Ensure that the "New task" & Edit task links are working.

Create a new Administrators page, add the "Admin - Main" web part to the page.

Check the following 3 web.config settings and create the appropriate pages, each page has 1 web part as shown below.

Ensure all the popups work from the main administration page.

Part 1 - Design & data storage 
Part 2 - Building the UI
Part 3 - Installation Steps
Part 4 - Final Part (This blog post)

Timesheet solution for SharePoint 2010 - Part 3 Installation

Overview:  Download the visual studio 2010 solution.  This contains the code to implement the timesheet application within SharePoint 2010.  The instructions give step by step actions to get the full timesheet application working.

Related posts in this series:
Part 1 - Design & data storage
Part 2 - Building the UI
Part 3 - Installation Steps  (This blog post)
Part 4 - Final Part

Simple Instructions for Timesheet deployment
==================================
You require a web application that contains a site definition, I used a new web application (http://intranet.dev/) with a Publishing Site as the site template for the root site collection.
1. Download PaulB-Timesheet.wsp (save it to the server/local machine, I put PaulB-Timesheet.wsp on the e drive for this post)
2. Open Powershell with SharePoint commands:

3. Install the wsp and activate the feature using Powershell (PS) as shown below (text version of the PS commands)

4. Check the feature has been installed correctly on your site
5. Create a new database and popluate it with tables, download the SQL script.

6. Ensure the Timesheet database is created and ensure an account has permissions to access the table for read/write opterations.

7. Edit the web.config files on each Web Front End SP2010 Server (this should be changed to a feature receiver).  The connection string below uses windows trusted and will pass through each users Windows identity, it will generally be easier to user a dedicated connection string account as it saves on SQL Server permions being required for each user.

To complete your setup you need to configure your timesheet application per part 4 - Seed data & page creation.

Summary:
This will be sufficient for most standard requirments however, it is preferable to implement logging to the ULS and your own logging mechanism if it exists.

The areas I would customise on a SharePoint custom deployment would be:

1. Assemly and wsp solution naming;
2. Add logging to error handling;
3. Rename lables;
4. Potentially add custom fields or logic to the application to meet specific business requirements.

Instructions for Timesheet deployment using Visual Studio 2010 (Advanced option)

===============================================

Download the Visual Studio 2010 project:
PaulBeck.Timesheet.zip (version 1 - 820 KB), unzip the files and place on you development machine.
1.> Build and deploy solution to SharePoint farm.  The Visual Studio 2010 project has the following structure.

2.> Run the Script\timesheet-script.sql file in a SQL instance (Creates the db).
3.> Change the web.config to contain the app setting connection info for timesheets.

Configure your Timesheet Application
4.> Add the "Timesheet - Consultant", "Week", "Timesheet - UserProjects" & "Timesheet - BookTime" web parts to a new page.
5.> Connect "Timesheet - Consultant" to "Timesheet - Week" & "Timesheet - UserProjects", then connect "Timesheet - Week" to "Timesheet - BookTime" web part.
6.> Create another page called "Timesheet Add or Edit" i.e. "Timesheet-Add-or-Edit.aspx" (set in the web.config) and add the "Timesheet - BookTimeItem" web part to the page.
7.> Add the Admin screens by:
7.1.> Create a new page named "Timesheet Admin Main", add the following web part to the page "Admin Main".
7.2.> Create a new page named "Timesheet Admin Client", add the web part "Admin - Client" to the page.
7.3.> Create a new page named "Timesheet Admin Project", add the web part "Admin - Project" to the page.
7.4.> Create a new page named "Timesheet Admin Project Resources", add the web part "Admin Resource Allocation" to the page.

Part 1 - Design & data storage
Part 2 - Building the UI
Part 3 - Installation Steps  (This blog post)
Part 4 - Final Part

Timesheet solution for SharePoint 2010 - Part 2 UI

Problem: Using the database design from Part 1, I need to create the UI for users to submit timesheets.  The screen to capture the users timesheet looks like this:

Related posts in this series:
Part 1 - Design & data storage
Part 2 - Building the UI(This blog post)
Part 3 - Installation Steps 
Part 4 - Final Part

Part 2 Continued...

Initial Hypothesis:  Create 4 connect web parts to allow users to submit their timesheets weekly.  Also allow site collection administrators to submit timesheets for users.  The web parts will also allow administrators to approve or reject the timesheet.
Resolution: Create 4 connected web parts to display user timesheets on a page.  Use the dialog framework to add and edit tasks.  The ability to add a new task is done in another web part on a separate page.  The edit task allows users to edit or delete and existing task, this is another custom web part place on a separate page within the site collection.

Create a web parts to perform basic administration options.  I have create 3 administration web parts within Visual studio to allow administrators to update key timesheet information such as adding new client or projects or assigning people to a project.

Reporting for the timesheet can be created using either: Reporting Services and integrated into SharePoint, BCS to query data, or custom web parts.

Part 1 - Design & data storage
Part 2 - Building the UI (This blog post)
Part 3 - Installation Steps 

Part 4 - Final Part

Timesheet solution for SharePoint 2010 - Part 1

Part 1 - Design & data storage (This blog post)
Part 2 - Building the UI
Part 3 - Installation Steps
Part 4 - Final Part

Problem:  A common requirement on Intranets is to have a timesheet template on SharePoint.  There are solution for company timesheets.  I wanted to build a timesheet application that was scalable, reportable and friendly for SharePoint. 

Initial Hypothesis:  There are timesheet solutions for SharePoint and most are portable to SharePoint 2010.  Often the timesheet solutions integrate with Outlook as well.  If you have outlook this is often the best solution as users seem to accept Outlook based solutions fairly easily.

I came across http://www.pointbeyond.com/, there timesheet solution was built for WSS3/MOSS, this looks like a solid solution based on SQL Server so their is no real reliance on SharePoint lists however, SharePoint surfaces the timesheets, administration and reporting requirements.  I have not implement the solution but it appears solid and expandable.

In WSS3 I think it would be very difficult to build a detailed timesheet application based on SharePoint lists due to the list size issue and the list relationship complexity required for a timesheet application.

Resolution:  I want a SharePoint Foundations solution that can be used on all SharePoint 2010 farms that can capture and administer timesheets for a business.  SPMetal has greatly improved application development when using SharePoint lists to store data in SP2010 however, due to the number of relational lists and the support for transactional CRUD operations I believe it is better to use SQL Server and store the data in relational tables.  Custom connected web parts will allow users to enter their weekly timesheets.  The solution allows for the use of BCS and External Content Type (ECT) in SP2010 for administration and reporting.

The data access technology choice is between Linq to SQL and using the Entity framework 4.0.  As SharePoint 2010 supports .NET 3.5, a separate Visual studio project/business layer would be required.  Additionally my take on these 2 competing Data access technologies is, if it's simple then use Linq to SQL, if it's complex and could change down the line use the entity framework.  I choose to use LINQ to SharePoint as I am using 7 tables to store all my timesheet task related data.  Below is the Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) for the timesheet application.

Part 1 - Design & data storage (This blog post)
Part 2 - Building the UI
Part 3 - Installation Steps
Part 4 - Final Part

More Info:
Updated: 25/02/2011 Laura Rogers wrote this article on the time card that is useful.
http://www.sharepoint911.com/blogs/laura/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=113

Microsoft Certified Professional Developer

I have been working on 2 CodePlex projects over the Christmas break.  I have been meaning to do the SharePoint 2010 exams for the last 6 months but with project deadlines this is the 1st chance I have really had.  I managed to pass the 70-573 & 70-576 this week.  They were actually quiet fun especially the 70-576 exam that was far more challenging.

I found the 70-573 (Application developer) exam much easier as the answers are more cut and dry whereas the architecture exam is fluffy in that multiple answers would work and I tend to lean towards the areas I would use to implement a solution, my method may not be optimal so i think i got stuck there a bit.  I found some of the terminology/wording confusing but overall they are good examinations of SharePoint knowledge.

Blog post after the 70-667 SP2010 Configuration exam blog post