Customer Care Accelerator for SharePoint

A few days ago I was in an Architecture Design Session with Microsoft Consulting and they showed me the Customer Care Accelerator (CCA) for Microsoft CRM dynamics 2011.

CCA simply allows you to maintain context between disconnected systems.  If I select a customer using my Windows application that stores my customer orders, I can take the selected CustomerId and use it directly in SharePoint to say retrieve all documents related to a customer. 

In summary, CCA allows me to use data from various desktop applications, such as web forms, crm, SharePoint or websites.  This is pretty useful for sticking together historical disparate systems.

More Info:  http://dynamics-crm.pinpoint.microsoft.com/en-GB/applications/customer-care-accelerator-for-microsoft-dynamics-crm-2011-12884914795
http://community.dynamics.com/product/crm/crmtechnical/b/crmukblog/archive/2011/05/11/getting-started-with-cca-for-crm-2011.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ukcrm/archive/2011/05/11/getting-started-with-cca-for-crm-2011.aspx

Scanning, Storage & RBS

Problem:  The client has millions of physical documents, that need to be available via SharePoint, additionally documentation still arrives in physical form and needs to be scanned and classified.

Initial Hypothesis: SP2010 can store documents in the SQL database in blob format however, it's not really made for large blob storage performance wise, additionally SQL storage is expensive (RAID, HA). Remote Blob Storage (RBS) helps with storing blobs but does not get around limitations imposed by MS guidanace.  RBS can reduce storage and improve performace if you data storage involves a lot of large blobs (over 256kb  is a good size).  My rough sums show a huge data requirement so for example 600,000 customers transact with the client.  On average each customer has 3 physical documents a year.  So we are talking 1,8 million scanned documents a year.

Documents need to be scanned in at 300 dpi so they can be printed and stored adequately.  With compression and converting these files into tiff/pdf files we are assuming an average of 1 MB per file. So our storage requirement per year would require 1.8 million scanned documents at 1MB per file meaning my storage on 1,800GB

As we have a restriction of 200GB per content database in SP2010 (threshold that MS will support up to).  So we would require 9 new site collections on a new content db per year to meet this requirement. 

Tip: Also worth considering are thresholds and bounderies provide by the SharePoint team.  Site collections max size is 100GB, this scenario has a caviet in that a single Site Collection using a single document library/site supports up to 1TB in the Content Database.  You can have subsites nested in a site collection but 2000 per view is recommended.  Max of 300 content db's per Web Applicaion.  Max 5000 site collections per content database.

Our storage cost is much higher as our disks are RAID so at a minimum we would use 3 times this in actual physical disk space.  On top of this my indexes will be about 25% of the storage requirement.  So price, performance are getting out of control pretty quickly.

Resolution: Using RBS my estimate on these blobs is will will reduce the content database by 90% however content database size is calcualte including RBS so our storage requirement will be cheaper using RBS that is resilient however the content database sizing will not be reduced by using RBS. 

Updated: 21/07/2011 - RBS sizing Calc

Scanning tips for SP:

• Tiff or pdf are the common base storage file type;
• 300dpi is good print quality most requirements can be lower;
• Black and white is far smaller then grey scale scanning.
• Pdf's if stored correctly can be indexed by the search crawler.

More Info Scanning:
http://www.psigen.com/ - scanning and capture for SP2010.
Capturx from www.adapx.com/sharepoint is a pen that automates data capture on forms.
CoSign does digital signatures and looks to have pretty decent integration with http://www.arx.com/digital-signature/sharepoint
www.kodak.com/go/sharepoint
http://www.goscan.com/connectors-sharepoint.php
http://www.kofax.com/solutions/microsoft.asp

More Info Sizing:
HP Sizer for SP2010

Capacity management for SP2010 - Sw boundries

SQL & Storage requirements

http://www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=332

http://www.azaleos.com/resources/SharePoint-Calculator

http://www.sharepointpromag.com/article/sharepoint-server-2010/sharepoint-2010-deployment-calculator-helps-future-proof-your-migration

http://tihomirignatov.blogspot.com/2010/12/sharepoint-2010-capacity-planning-and.html

Building a customers Taxonomy

Problem: I need to create a taxonmy for my client

Initial Hypothesis: Either start by interviewing stakeholders and building up a taxonomy that is offered as a Service application or
Buy an exisitng industry taxonomy http://blog.wandinc.com/2011/02/list-of-taxonomies-for-sharepoint-2010.html and offer it via a Service Application

Resolution: My prefered option would be to buy a taxonomy and try amend the taxoanmy with key stakeholders.  WAND have good taxonomys I believe: http://www.wandinc.com/

SUGUK Southampton Meet

SUGUK South Meeting - Thursday 19th May 2011 http://suguksouth.eventbrite.com/
Thanks to Ian Woodgate for arranging the user group session.  A good close nit user group.  Using Southampton universities facilities is great. On the night we did 3 developer sessions, I got some useful tips and ideas from the other presenters namely: Martin Hatch, Chris McKinley and Darren White.

LINQ to SharePoint Sandbox solution development demo presentation

Ian Woodgate's blog & summary of the evening - http://blog.pointbeyond.com/2011/05/21/sharepoint-uk-user-group-southampton-19-may/
Martin Hatch's blog is: http://www.martinhatch.com/
Chris McKinley's blog: http://crmckinley.sharepointspace.com

Demo Code Download

VS project - create lists & set up referential integrity.

VS project - deploy a visual user control web part via a sandbox solution.
Slide Deck - More detailed

SharePoint Retreat Roundup

Summary of the day:  "Here is my feedback from the SharePoint Retreat meeting on Saturday 14th of May 2011.   9 people were at the retreat. We did 5 hours work and were really pushed for time - the day covered too many areas and needed more time to use the SPRetreat format properly. Venue was good - not exactly central but definately happy with the venue. I thought my presentation went well - only 1 other guy had used LINQ to SP in practice so a good topic choice, the practice exercise went well with everyone sharing however, we ran out of the time and Ashraf was left about an hour to present which he did very well on Info Path 2010 - a lot of the guys knew Infopath 2007 and I think they got a lot out of Ash's session.

My general feeling was the attendees were all glad they came and I believe we all walked away with good information. I think all the guys want to have more of these on a Saturday and guys are volunteering to do sessions. I like the coding katas format but it takes a long time and the day should only address 1 topic. All the guys that attended liked having 1 practice session per topic and the retrospective is great. Doing 2 topics worked well for 5 odd hours which allowed us all to only use up our day to lunch time. But i guess it really depends how in depth one goes on each topic.  

I'm going to open up a dialog with all the attendees and look to do another event in July."

Please post comments on your thoughts of the day - pls suggest topics, format for a July day.   thanks

paul

http://blog.sharepointsite.co.uk/2011/05/sharepoint-retreat-south-west-london.html

The videos I recorded came out very poorly, try get better light and equipement next time. 

Video of the slides explaining LINQ to SharePoint on YouTube

SPLINQ - Parameter.xml to show hidden fields

Problem:  I can never remember the syntax for the parameters files and need to lookup how to include hidden SP 2010 fields in the LINQ to SharePoint Proxy.

Initial Hypothesis:  Use a Parameters.xml file to get SPMetal to generate the proxy with hidden fields.  You can use the IncludeHiddenColumns element within the ContentType element to include all hidden fields or as I have done in the resolution example, specify the fields to include using the element Column.

Resolution:
1.> Create a parameters.xml (name it for you specific project) and add it to the 14\bin directory.

2.> Use the dos cmd prompt to generate the LINQ to SharePoint Proxy.

3.> Add the generate LINQ to SharePoint proxy code to your Visual Studio project. 
4.> Add the query to show 1 of the hidden fields that is now part of your proxy.

The code above uses the default Microsoft.SharePoint.Linq.DataContext class to retrieve the data, it is easier to use your own DataContext class created when you build your LINQ to SharePoint proxy code.  Code below shows how to use the proxy generate data context.

More Info: You can use the same technique for custom site columns however, you will need to manually edit the proxy to perform the appropriate casting.  I would still use the iCustomMapping interface for custom site columns.

Wes Hacket gave me this tip - Using CKSDev you can create a new SPI template that generate the proxy.  With the proxy comes a parameter file, a custom code file and you can regenerate the proxy by right clicking on the proxy and running the SharEPoint Generator tool.  Screent shot to come!

SPMetal Code Generation Rules - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee537010.aspx 

SharePoint Designer Filter using Contains Operator

Problem:  I converted a List View web part that shows a document library into a Data View Web Part.  I tried to add a filter based on a query string.  The query string is only part of the field so I need to use a contains statement.

Resolution: The "Contains" operator is missing, by switching into code view I can use the contains operator in my xslt as shown below.

Data view xslt Tip: Retrieve a column named Kno and intermingle with xHtml