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Thoughts on Technology, Life, and Other Ramblings…
SharePoint Deployment Planning Services (SDPS) Released
19 May 2008 
Announced on the SharePoint Team Blog, the SharePoint Deployment Planning Services program has been launched and is geared at helping our Software Assurance (SA) customers sucessfully plan and deploy SharePoint Products & Technologies. I think this program provides a great resource for those customers who are struggling to make sense of SharePoint technologies or are trying to uncover proven “best practices” around how to properly deploy and implement SharePoint-based solutions.
During my time as a Technology Architect within the Reston, VA Microsoft Technology Center, I worked with a number of customers in definining SharePoint-based solution architectures where we covered topics such as understanding SharePoint architecture, definining portal taxonomies and physical deployment topologies/architecture, development and integration opportunities through Strategy Briefings and Architecture Design Sessions as well as “real world” implementation through Proof of Concept engagements to demonstrate the capabilties of a “live” SharePoint solution. It’s certainly great to see these getting packaged into a set of service offerings that we can make more widely available to our customers and partners.
And speaking of partners, this program is jointly managed by our partner ecosystem as well as Microsoft Consulting Services which together provides proven business and technical expertise in architecting/deploying SharePoint-based solutions for small, medium, and large organizations alike.
To learn more about the SDPS program and what it can do for you, head over to the SDPS website. Microsoft Partners having strong competency in the Microsoft Office System stack are encouraged to sign up and participate in this growing community.
OBA Composition Reference Toolkit version 2.0 Released
Version 2.0 of the OBA Composition Reference Toolkit was released to the web today, on schedule and with all the great new features promised for the release. Version 1.0 of the toolkit was released at the Office Developer’s Conference in February 2008.
Watch the OBA Composition Reference Toolkit Overview Video to get an overview of the toolkit, the motivations for creating it, and its intended use. Visit the OBA Composition Reference Toolkit site to access and explore related resources: Installers for the toolkit & sample components, Documentation – architecture, user, admin, developer, and overview video.
What’s New in Version 2.0?
- IT administration capabilities integrated into the SharePoint Central Administration portal
- A prescriptively secure user experience for OBA composition
- Support for incremental deployment of OBAs.
- Support for installing the OBA Composer on a client computer that is running the Windows Vista operating system and connecting to a remote computer that is running Office SharePoint Server.
- Spport for many new, out-of-the-box components, too, which cover scenarios that pertain to Expense Reporting, Purchase Requisition Management, Financial Services, and Health & Life Sciences solutions
- Source code (framework, tools, and sample components) of the OBA Composition Reference Toolkit to enable independent software vendors (ISVs) and solution integrators to extend and repurpose the Toolkit to suit their individual needs.
Visit the OBA Composition Reference Toolkit site for more information.
SharePoint Administration Toolkit Released
Zach Rosenfield (a Program Manager on the SharePoint Team) posted an announcment introducing the SharePoint Administration Toolkit. This promises to be a great resource for administering your MOSS and WSS v3.0 deployments. The initial version of the toolkit contains a couple of useful administrative tools, including the Batch Manager, which allows you to schedule bulk operations against site collections in a SharePoint farm, and a new command to the STSADM command-line utility called “updatealert” which will refresh all alert URLs in a specific site collection, which is important if you change the URL of a web application or after an upgrade. A full whitepaper describing the toolkit can be found here.
Check out Zach’s post of you want to have a good understanding of what the toolkit addresses and the features it contains. The toolkit is available for download for both x86 and x64 SharePoint deployment configurations.
Enjoy! I know I will! 
New Library of Congress website launches on MOSS 2007
I mentioned in a previous post the work I’ve been doing with the Library of Congress. It has been a great effort and an excellent showcase of the power and flexibility of our platform. On April 12th, we closed another chapter in this unprecendented effort by officially launching their myLOC.gov website. The website has been architected and built on top of a platform consisting of SharePoint Server 2007, Silverlight, Windows Communication Foundation, and Windows Live ID. The launch of the myLOC.gov site on this past Saturday marked the culmination of 9 months of work to deliver a compelling solution that’s geared at reshaping how Americans view American History by literally bringing many of the historical treasures contained within the walls of the Library of Congress to life and allowing not only the American people, but the entire world to experience this great treasure.
The launch of the myLOC.gov website capped off a great week for the Library of Congress and Microsoft. As a part of the revitalized digital experience, coined the “Library of Congress Experience”, is also the launch of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)-based interactive touch screen kiosks that’s running within the Library of Congress’s Thomas Jefferson Building in DC. There, US citizens, and people travelling to DC from around the world, will be able to enage within an immersive technology experience that allows people to interact with the Library’s historical collections in new and exciting ways. The myLOC.gov site takes this onsite experience and brings it to the web!
In the coming weeks, myself, in combination with our great partners, Portal Solutions and Schematic will be creating a “How We Did It” article (likely to be posted on the SharePoint Team Blog), in the same vein as the two-part article I published on another great effort with Conservation International, that’ll dive deeper into the overall solution architecture and cover specifics around logical and physical architecture as well as discuss implementation details of key features and functionality.
So stay tuned!
Library of Congress Video Case Study Posted on MIX Website
Over the past year, I’ve had the opportunity to work on some really cool and unique projects. I’m proud to add yet another project to my portfolio, which is the current work we’re doing with the Library of Congress and the delivery of what they’re calling their “New Visitors Experience”, set to launch in the next month. As the Microsoft Solutions Architect for this effort, I must say that to date we’ve produced some compelling solutions around Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight. This work has been met with a tremendous amount of press but yet is only the tip of the iceberg of what’s yet to come. We’ve recently posted a video case study on our MIX website that highlights some of our efforts to date. Stay tuned for more from this blog regarding the Library of Congress project and the really, really cool things we’re doing around Silverlight, WPF, WCF, Windows Live and SharePoint Server 2007!
