The Bamboo Team Blog

Announcing the SharePoint 2010 Blog

John Anderson — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:00:00 GMT

When Microsoft makes the public Beta of SharePoint 2010 available, Bamboo Nation will be on the scene to provide you with everything you need to know about what's new, what's different, and what those changes might mean for you. Representatives of virtually every discipline at Bamboo will be contributing to our SharePoint 2010 coverage, so whether you're an administrator, end user, engineer, project manager, or CIO/CEO, our team will have you and your team covered.

Anticipation of the release of the public Beta of SharePoint 2010 runs high, but speculation is all that's available regarding the release date, as Microsoft hasn't yet announced their timeline. The earliest expected release that seems reasonable would have the Beta dropping around the time of the SharePoint Conference taking place in Las Vegas in October, but until Microsoft announces their plans, speculation is all that we can offer.

While eagerly awaiting the public Beta, we realized that there would be value in launching our dedicated SharePoint 2010 area sooner than later, by primarily leveraging SharePoint Daily to aggregate the best coverage of what we're calling "the road to SharePoint 2010." We've compiled individual pages for both press coverage and blog reactions to SharePoint 2010-related stories, and we'll be maintaining those pages daily at least until the public Beta occurs.

If you're interested in "SharePoint vNext," our goal is to provide you with a one-stop shop to keep abreast of the latest news, blog coverage, rumors, and more. While you're visiting the SharePoint 2010 area, why not take our poll on your plans for adoption, ask a question or begin a discussion in the SharePoint 2010 forum, or even consider contributing a guest blog by sending me an email with your proposed topic at john.anderson@bamboosolutions.com.

As mentioned, once the public Beta is available, you can expect a wealth of original content and analysis from Bamboo staffers as well as guest contributors. We've been working closely with Microsoft in early reviews of the next version of SharePoint in order to help ensure a smooth transition for our existing products, and to continue providing innovative products to complete your SharePoint experience. In addition to editorial offerings, SharePoint 2010-ready Beta builds of many of our products will be made available to complement the public Beta of SharePoint 2010.

That's all in the future though, so for the time being, we invite you to check out the offerings in our newest feature area, SharePoint 2010. And please don't be shy about letting us know what you think!

Need Help With Your Bamboo Download? Try a Bamboo 101 Webinar

Angela — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:57:00 GMT

If all else fails...

Purchased any products that required assembly lately?

If yes, chances are that product came with a set of detailed instructions on how to put your product together with minimal fuss, just like Bamboo's lovingly crafted Application Notes that are available online for every product.

Now, tell me honestly, did you read the directions before you started putting pieces together?

Let's face it. For many of us (and yes, I'm definitely among the guilty), reading the instruction manual before being required to do so by necessity... well, it's just not done. We want to get straight in there and get our hands dirty. We don't have time to read directions. But... as liberating as the "trial and error" approach can be (and truly great for the ego when it yields success)... there can be a downside.

You know what I'm talking about... when you find you need to go back and undo a portion of your work because your intuition and confidence took you to places that you shouldn't have gone without at least a cursory glance at the instructions.

It reminds me of something my Grandpa used to say, "When working toward a solution, it always helps if you know the answer."

With that in mind, Bamboo 101 is here for you. This new webinar series will give you a visual introduction to some of our most popular Web Parts and bolster your faith in your intuitive abilities. Sit back with a beverage, put your feet up, and watch while we walk you through installation, configuration, and show you how to make the most of Bamboo in your SharePoint environment.

Coming up this July, we'll be looking at Bamboo's Calendar Plus & List Rollup, Task Master, and Chart Plus, and watch out in August when we'll introduce the Filters Collection and take a good look at List Integrity.

June e-news from Bamboo

Lily — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:16:00 GMT

Get up to date news and information about our our latest products and what's coming soon from Bamboo. Find out where you can meet up with our team and talk to us in person. Read the hotest blog posts from our online community and learn more about our partners. All delivered to your inbox, each month. How convenient is that?

What's that? You don't get our monthly e-news? Well, be sure to sign up here.

Running Windows SharePoint Services on Linux

Jonas Nilsson — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 02:36:55 GMT

Did I get your attention ;)

Why is this "impossible"...? WSS is an (ASP).NET application and you can run ASP.NET on Linux using Mono and with Apache and something like mod_mono you get ASP.NET support.

So it should be possible to port this to Linux right?

The reason this is "impossible" is that the gut of WSS is implemented in unmanaged code (good old C++). If you have ever used reflector to look at what is going on you "always" end up with a call to the SPRequest class. Hristo Pavlov has a great post about the internals of SPRequest. This transition to unmanaged code is the reason we have to call Dispose on our SPSite and SPWeb instances.

So remember; the gut of WSS and thus MOSS is "good old" COM hosted in owssrv.dll and written in C++

Happy 4th of July!

This Week in Bamboo (June 21 - June 27th, 2009)

Bamboo PM Girl — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:48:00 GMT

For this week at Bamboo, we released the patches for the following 3 products: User Profile Plus Web Part, Stock Quote Web Part and Group Email Web Part. See more details below.

User Profile Plus Web Part (HW29 R1.1.45) -

New Feature:
Checking if users belong to Active Directory Security Groups when they are added to SP Groups to grant access to SharePoint Data.

Bugs Fixed:

Reverse Proxy related issues.

Always show the scroll bar in the Web Part's tab.

Show the wrong Department view in the French Site Collection.

Stock Quote Web Part (HW52 R1.1.24) -

Bugs Fixed:

Error viewing News url.

OnChartTimePeriodClick: Input string was not in a correct format.

Group Email Web Part (HW14 R1.4.33) -

Bug Fixed:

Fixed check to see if users belong to groups specified in the tool pane. Removed AD user account in the tool pane for SharePoint Mode. There is no need for it any more.

Bamboo Welcomes Aztec Systems to the Partner Advantage Program!

JanetG — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:22:00 GMT

Aztec Systems offers Managed Services from three core practice areas: Business Solutions, Infrastructure, and Innovation (software development). By combining customer's needs with their experienced team of experts and proven methodologies, they deliver a total solution approach.

They help clients increase application flexibility, lower Total Cost of Ownership, deliver on objectives to improve ROI, and have developed custom applications as needed. Aztec is continuously striving to bring innovative ideas to their customers to help them realize the maximum return from their IT investments.

For more information about this Texas-based Microsoft Gold Partner, contact salesinfo@aztecsystems.com.

Guest Blog by Kanwal Khipple - SharePoint Saturday Toronto: Registration is Now OPEN!

Kanwal Khipple — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:00:00 GMT

If you are not familiar with SharePoint Saturday events, they are free, community-focused SharePoint events dedicated to educating and engaging members of the local technical community.

We are excited to announce that the first-ever SharePoint Saturday Toronto event is being held in Toronto on July 11th, 2009.

We are requesting that everyone interested in attending register now!

Join SharePoint architects, developers, and other professionals that work with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for ‘SharePoint Saturday’, on Saturday, July 11th, 2009 at the Microsoft Canada Conference Centre located at 1950 Meadowvale Blvd in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. SharePoint Saturday will be an educational, informative & lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & Microsoft MVPs, covering a wide variety of SharePoint-oriented topics. SharePoint Saturday is FREE, open to the public and is your local chance to immerse yourself in SharePoint! The day starts at 9:00 AM with a short introductory keynote and ends at 4:30 PM. Lunch will be provided and there will be numerous giveaways throughout the day.

There will be three primary content tracks, and each track will consist of five presentations lasting approximately one hour, and ranging from introductory, 100-level content to highly technical, 400-level "expert" sessions. Speakers will represent a broad cross-section of the community and will offer a variety of different perspectives and points of view.

SharePoint Saturday Toronto is a great opportunity to learn, share and network. Please join us on Saturday, July 11th, 2009 for a full day of education and excitement. A full session schedule will be posted soon. We look forward to seeing you there!

For more information, please visit www.sharepointsaturday.org/toronto.

Arpan Shah to Keynote Best Practices Conference in D.C.

John Anderson — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Here at Bamboo HQ, we were excited to get the advance word a few days ago, but we can now reveal publicly that Arpan Shah will keynote the Best Practices Conference this August in D.C. Arpan Shah is a Director at Microsoft who owns Technical Product Management for SharePoint Products and Technologies, and whose responsibilities include driving technical readiness and evangelism for SharePoint. Securing Arpan Shah as keynote speaker is not only a coup for the Conference but, following upon Tom Rizzo's keynote at the Conference in D.C. last September, continues a winning tradition of securing some of the best and the brightest from the SharePoint team to keynote the Conference in our nation's capital.

With the addition of Arpan Shah to an already compelling lineup of speakers at the Best Practices Conference, if you're a SharPoint proffessional, and you can be anywhere in the world this August 24-26, make it Washington, D.C.

Bamboo Welcomes SharePoint Authority SharePoint 911 to the Partner Advantage Program!

JanetG — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:30:00 GMT

I caught up with SharePoint 911 at SPTechCon today and had an opportunity to meet with (L to R) Shane Young, Jennifer Mason, Randy Drisgill and Ryan Keller to talk about their company's value proposition by getting a story about a specific use case.

As it turns out, SharePoint 911 just finished a client engagement with Boulder Valley School District to help them deploy their SharePoint site to the school community. (Check out Bamboo Mini-Calendar on the front page of their site!) The school district wanted to roll up multiple calendars from each school into one master calendar and SharePoint out of the box wasn't enough to support all of the functionality the school district wanted. With Bamboo List Rollup, Calendar Plus and some consulting and training from SharePoint 911, the district was on its' way to earning an 'A' in SharePoint deployment.

The school district itself was a Web application, and each school was a site collection. Then within each school, each teacher is using a calendar to communicate events and activities in a form that will allow that information to be rolled up and synched with what the other teachers in the district are doing. Parents and community members are allowed different levels of access to the calendars, and some calendars are restricted to internal use only.

Just another great example of a partner putting Bamboo in their solution!

Please contact nicola@sharepoint911.com for more information.

SharePoint Task Master: My Web Part Misses its Cache, and I Want to Help

Joe Csernik — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Planning

This is typically where "good intentions" becomes a support nightmare. Oftentimes I feel like I'm doing the right thing when I plan for capacity significantly greater than expected. Of course this is usually within budget constraints and the product of a certain amount of common sense, however, the downfall comes when attempting to push the limits of a server to the maximum. Common sense would say the best way to maximize a server's potential is to utilize memory and processor resources in parallel, thus, if I wanted to serve up pages from IIS as fast as possible I would need to remove bottlenecks and wait states to the greatest possible extent from a hardware perspective. The plan is simple - run IIS processes in parallel while allowing each to use the most memory before recycling. In theory, this approach will allow data to be stored in highly available RAM, allow multiple requests to be fulfilled at the same time, and each process will use my multiple processors more effectively.

Reality

While results vary (especially true on 32-bit platforms), the reflexive plan described above can actually cause more problems than it solves. Web Gardens cause situations where only one process can access the output cache and BLOB cache. Content served up out of the other processes may be missing information, not retain session state properly, or show error messages. We see this very well in SharePoint Task Master where we see the Cache Miss error, and Chart Plus where we see the Red 'X' instead of a nice chart.

The recommendation is to use one worker process in each IIS Application Pool and do any of the following to increase capacity: divide webs into separate SharePoint Web Applications (which also has the benefit of allowing separate backups in the same way MOSS SSP benefits from having its own Web Application); increase the number of Web Front-End servers in an intelligent traffic-based load balanced configuration (which, yes, incurs additional cost, but is an overall better return on investment when also considering up-time and other factors); use x64 architecture with more RAM to minimize Application Pool recycling. Multiple processor servers which are almost exclusively in use will still see the benefits as IIS worker processes spawn threads to complete tasks, and these threads will be load-balanced across the available processors.

Short version

Microsoft and others state pretty clearly that using a Web Garden for SharePoint is not recommended. More RAM, x64 technology, and more servers are the best ways to serve up those pages as quickly and accurately as possible. Some references that can be used are: Microsoft Technet, Eli Robillard's blog on asp.net, and the Joel Oleson blog referenced in the previous link.

Governance Mentoring Workshop in D.C. Proposed by SharePoint Mystery Men

John Anderson — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 17:37:00 GMT

Who are the SharePoint Mystery Men? Paul Culmsee outed himself yesterday as Dr. Wicked, and revealed the secret identities of his teammates Agile Boy (Andrew Woodward), Magneto (Ruven Gotz), and Mr. Myagi (Dux Raymond Sy) in his Who wants to spend 3 days with me and the gang? post at Clever Workarounds yesterday.

These four globe-spanning SharePoint superheroes each possess their own distinct SharePoint super power, and are planning to join forces and convene a Governance Mentoring Workshop in D.C. this August. All four will be in town to speak at the Best Practices Conference, and are currently gauging the level of interest in such a Governance Mentoring Workshop to precede the Conference. The Workshop would occur August 19-21, just prior to the Best Practices Conference (August 24-26), and the cost of attendance would be $1,750 per attendee.

Please visit Clever Workarounds for more details on the proposed workshop and, if you think you might be interested in attending, please let your voice be heard by registering your interest at Dux's site. Tell 'em Bamboo Nation sent you!

This Week in Bamboo (June 14th - June 20th, 2009)

Bamboo PM Girl — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:02:00 GMT

If you love our free Web Part, World Clock and Weather Web Part, check out some new features related to this product from this blog and try it out for free. The detail related to the patch for Mini Calendar Web Part is also posted here.

World Clock and Weather Web Part (HW17 R2.1) -

Known Issues:
• Opera Brower: Cannot show Analog/Digital Clock when using Silverlight option.
• Firefox or Opera Brower : Unable to display raining special effect. Unable to use slider control in the tool part to change special effect density.

New Features:
• Check MSN web service asynchronous. Set time out in 10 seconds.
• Provide more date time format in the tool pane.

Bug Fixed:
Changed locale, the time is off.

Mini Calendar Web Part (HW22 R2.4.64) -

Bugs Fixed:
• Error Message "RenderCalendar::::Object reference not set to an instance of an object." when using a list rollup dataview of more than 4 calendar lists.
• Cannot control CSS for date associated to an event.

See you in Beantown! Bamboo Goes to SPTechCon

JanetG — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:56:00 GMT

It has been just a few short months since I joined the Partner Advantage Team and I'm on my way to my first event - SPTechCon. Taking place in Boston through Wednesday, this event is an east coast version of the popular SP Tech Con event in January in San Francisco. The event has an impressive list of speakers and exhibitors that will surely make the event wicked good.

I'll be visiting our exhibiting partners - fpweb.net is a Silver Sponsor partner and they will be in Booth 206, and SharePoint 911 is also exhibiting and will be in booth 209. These companies, along with our partners around the globe, offer SharePoint consulting services, training, hosting, complementary technologies, and the integration of Bamboo Web Parts into their offerings. (Bamboo Web Parts make them better, like jimmies on ice cream sundaes.)

I know that some of our other partners will also be attending the conference - Grace-Hunt, Project Solutions Group, Inc., and TPP Global Services just to name a few. If you're there and are a partner or interested in becoming one, please be sure to say "hello."

Cheers! (Yeah, I had to say it! )

This Week in Bamboo (June 7th - June 13th, 2009)

Bamboo PM Girl — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:54:00 GMT

This announcement gives you information about the patches that were rolled out to product from Bamboo for this week.

SharePoint Navigators (HW55 R1.0.25) -

New:
Ability to expand or collapse Bamboo Tree Menu.

List Search Simple Web Part (HW11A R1.5.9) -

Bugs Fixed:
• ArgumentOutOfRangeException error.
• Search results show extra data when column is a multi-select lookup and when search using the "Search in All Columns for".
• System.Data.DataRowView when using All columns search.

Cross List Web Part (HW09 R1.2.13) –

New:
Ability to link lists based on Bamboo Lookup Selector.

Bugs Fixed:
When multiple Web Parts on the same page, export to Excel pulls the wrong Web Part details.
Unable to limit total number of items returned.

SharePoint Team Calendar (HW34 R1.2.53) –

Bug Fixed:
Fixed reverse proxy issue.

Guest Blog by BlueThread's Rob D'Oria - Feet on the Ground with My Head (and BLOBs) in the Cloud

Rob D'Oria — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:05:00 GMT

Windows Azure BLOB Storage, EMC Atmos Online, and other hosted storage platforms are changing the way we, and others, look at implementing SharePoint in companies of all sizes; the small company that wants the benefits of high availability storage, but can't afford it, or the large company that wants different storage solutions for different classifications (age, SLA, isolation level, etc.) of content but doesn't want to invest in the infrastructure and human capital to manage a multitude of platforms.

The small to medium-sized company value proposition is pretty straightforward. IT budgets are constrained, but business demands aren't. These companies need cost-effective and approachable (i.e., easily implemented) options and Cloud-based storage delivers that.

The larger company value proposition is a little harder to come by, as most large companies have the resources to implement this technology for themselves. That being said, it is often hard for departments or groups within these organizations to provision storage for their own data and content without overly complicated procurement processes and politics. I've seen projects that have clear and tangible business benefit die because storage was not and could not be made available. That's crazy, and quite frustrating if you're on the receiving end of that message.

I also see opportunities for this type of service when it comes to specialized storage requirements for certain classifications of content within organizations of any size. No company can look at all their content and develop a cost-effective, yet requirements-driven approach to storing it. You're either going cheap and risking the integrity of mission critical/sensitive content, or you're swinging hard the other way and going the expensive and highly secure route for all content. The former creates compliance, retention and discovery challenges and the latter likely breaks the bank. The right approach is to have different storage solutions for different classifications of content, whether that endpoint be a SAN sitting in my data center or a storage location in the Cloud. You have options.

Our solution, StoragePoint, enables all of this in a couple ways. First and foremost, it separates (externalizes) the content BLOBs from the SharePoint Content Database. Free from the database, the BLOBs can sit on a local SAN or float up into the Cloud, compressed, encrypted or both. They can be partitioned by SLA, isolation requirements, retention policies, or any other distinguishable set of characteristics. The product ships with a generic File System (i.e., Local, Domain, Network, and CIFS Share) Adapter, but adapters for other storage platforms (i.e., EMC Centera and Hitachi HCAP) are available. We've also built a StoragePoint adapter for Windows Azure BLOB Storage and are in the process of building one for EMC Atmos Online (stay tuned). I'd like to give a shout-out to Shad Philips at the Dallas MTC as the inspiration behind the Azure adapter. We were working on a StoragePoint POC with him last month and he just kind of matter-of-factly threw out, "you guys outta build a Azure BLOB Storage adapter for this". So we did (NOTE: As a group, we're not always this agreeable and accommodating). Thanks Shad! We're adapter crazy right now, so feel free to e-mail me if you have an idea for another one.

We're also talking to companies that host SharePoint in the Cloud and want to go the other way with the content...back down to the client's local storage platform or ship it off to another Cloud. We'll have a post on the concepts, opportunities, and benefits of this in the near future.

Also by Rob D'Oria: Why is that BLOB in My SharePoint Database?