Corey Roth [MVP] : SharePoint Online, SharePoint, Office 365

Importing Search Configurations with SharePoint Apps

CoreyRoth — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 16:21:44 GMT

The Office Developer Tools team snuck a new feature into the RTM version of the tools for Visual Studio 2012. This new feature allows you to deploy apps and actually alter the search schema on the host web. That’s right. You can deploy an app and it will directly change the search configuration on the host. They just released documentation on it a while back, but as usual, I wanted to share my experiences. That and I know you all like screenshots.

What does this feature actually do? Well let’s back up a bit. If you remember back from my post, Search is Everywhere, I mentioned the we now had the ability to export and import search settings. This works at the SSA, site collection, and site level and allows you to move everything from result sources to managed properties from one environment to another. This is big as it lets you finally promote search settings between environments and maintain a true SDLC when it comes to search. Why do we care about search configuration with apps? Well this allows the developer to package up search settings in Visual Studio 2012 and then move them to production without having to do manual steps or use PowerShell. This also means you could include search settings in an app that you would put in the Office Store. It certainly opens up possibilities.

To test this out, go to your source site collection and customize your search settings. In my example, I created a custom result source and some managed properties on our source site. In my example, I actually did this on an on-premises installation of SharePoint 2013.

This particular result source does nothing exciting. It simply limits the search to documents, but it serves as a good example. I’ve also created a managed property mapped to the Author crawled property. You may already know about this part, but I am showing it for a reason.

Now, I am going to export my search settings of my site collection, by going to Site Settings –> Search –> Configuration Export.

At this point, I could manually import the search settings using Configuration Import on another site collection. However, we want to do this from an app. Let’s get started in Visual Studio 2012. Start by creating a new SharePoint-hosted app. Once it is created, add an item to the project and choose Search Configuration.

The next step will ask for the path to your configuration XML file that you exported.

At this point the process is done. It will show you an XML editor with the contents of your search configuration. According to the MSDN documentation, you then need to edit it and set the DeployToParent element to true.

We then need to grant permissions to access the Site Collection. To do this, open AppManifest.xml and then click on Permissions. On this tab, add a scope of Site Collection and set the value to Full Control.

At this point, we are are ready to deploy. In my example, I am taking my search configuration and deploying it to an Office 365 SharePoint Online tenant. When the app deployment completes, you’ll be prompted if you want to trust the app. Trust it and then you should see your app start page.

At this point, you are just going to see you default app start page. There is nothing visible in the application. Go to the Developer Site (or the site collection you deployed to) and go to the Site Settings. Then look at the Result Sources. If everything worked correctly, you should now see your new result source there.

It was successfully deployed. Now what about the managed property? Unfortunately, it is no where to be found. If you go back to Visual Studio and look at your XML, you’ll notice that your managed property definition is no where to be found there either. If you check the source file before you imported it though, you’ll see the definition. After I noticed this particular behavior, I reached out on Twitter and @chakkaradeep reached out to me and told me that managed properties aren’t supported in this deployment model. That made me kind of sad because that’s what I want to deploy the most. I’m sure there is a technical reason though that he’ll explain to me sometime though. You can still deploy managed properties via Configuration Import though which is still a great added feature of SharePoint 2013.

You might be curious if the result source is removed when you uninstall the app. It turns out that the changes are indeed removed when you uninstall.

Aside from the managed properties not being available, this is still a pretty cool feature and it has me thinking about some new things I can do that I didn’t think were possible before. I’m pretty excited to work with it more.

Microsoft Partner Benefits: Rocking your SharePoint Online demos

CoreyRoth — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 15:51:11 GMT

If you haven’t heard, Microsoft released a new site recently that allows you to create a new Office 365 tenant that is pre-populated with users, content, and social data. It even comes with demo scripts that you can use to walk users through the new features of SharePoint Online. What’s the catch? Your Windows Live ID must be affiliated with a Microsoft Partner and you need to have plenty of time to wait for it to provision. It typically takes between 8 and 36 hours for the provisioning process to complete. Tenants are created in trial mode and you have 30 days that you can use it for free. After that, you can either pay for licenses or simply request a new tenant. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because the sample social data expires after 14 days. If you want to demonstrate social, it’s really just easier to get a new tenant.

Even if you work for a partner and a lot of you out there do, I found that a lot of people aren’t affiliated with their company’s partner Id. So if you click on the Microsoft Partner link and it gives you an error, you need to affiliate yourself with your company’s partnership. I’ve given a few colleagues this link to associate themselves and it appears to have worked for them. Let me know if you have an issue with it.

When you are ready to create a new tenant, go to the Create Demo page. This page is a bit confusing because all of the options are disabled. Just click Create Your Demo to proceed.

On this page, you specify your region, tenant name, and E-mail address. You’ll get an E-mail when the process completes with the URL and login information.

After you fill in your information, click Create My Account and start waiting. This is an excellent time to review some of the demo scripts out there. Click the Resources link at the top and you’ll see demo scripts broken up by product. This is also an excellent time to go ahead and stop reading this article and get your tenant provisioning. You can come back and read more once you get it started. :)

When the process completes, you will receive an e-mail with the login and password. Click on that link to begin exploring. However, for most of the demos they recommend a demo user, Garth Fort. The login for this user will be garthf@tenantname.onmicrosoft.com. The password should be the same for all accounts pass@word1. Keep that in mind. You may want to change the default passwords of your accounts. If you look at the users section, you will see a number of user accounts have been created for you. It even includes things like conference rooms. These users have pictures and completed user profiles and even social data which we’ll see later.

I’m going to focus on SharePoint content, so click on the Admin link at the top and choose SharePoint. When you go to the SharePoint Online administration tenant, you’ll see that it creates a number of site collections.

Although it’s fairly obvious. Here’s a quick summary of what’s in the site collections.

Root (/) – Demo landing page. Links to the various site assets and demo scripts for SharePoint
/Search – Search Center
/sites/BICenter – Demos using Power View and Visio Services
/sites/Communities – fully populated community sites with discussion boards
/sites/Contoso – main Intranet site
/sites/ContosoBeta – no content
/sites/eDiscovery – discovery center
/sites/KnowledgeCenter – knowledge center with custom branding

What I like about these demos is that there is a lot of examples of what SharePoint can do and a lot of the features are really highlighted. I’ll take you through some of the pages so you have an idea of what you can expect. When you go to the root of your tenant, you’ll see a landing page with links to the demo home page, assets, and scripts.

A good starting place is the Demo Home Page.

Now is a great time to start exploring the site. What I like is a lot of the sites demonstrate out-of-the-box features. Take a look at the Engineering Department site. They have an example of showing reports with Power View using Excel Services.

If we look at the Sales and Marketing site, it has some nice examples of KPIs, the PowerPoint viewer as well as documents that have been rated.

If you’re looking to tell a story about BI, click on the Report Dashboard link on the left. There is a good example of a Power View sheet with filters and maps.

One of my favorite sections of the demo is the Communities section. It’s a great example of using social and shows off the gamification concepts quite well.

Going to one of the communities, you’ll see active discussion boards with top contributors.

You can view individual discussions to show how users interact with each other.

I think the social aspects are some of the best things to demo. If you click on the Newsfeed link, you’ll find quite a bit of activity. Just keep in mind this information will expire after two weeks so it’s good to keep a fresh tenant when you’re doing a demo.

In the screenshot above, you’ll see posts from users that Garth is following as well as various things the user has posted or followed. That video can be watched directly from the newsfeed too.

Clicking on one of the tags such as #CSAT will show you all of the posts that have used that particular hash tag.

There are good examples of the user being mentioned by other people as well.

Search demos extremely well with SharePoint Online because Office Web Apps is included and running.

When doing a demonstration, you can show the hover panel on search results with the preview of the document. I especially like showing users how you can jump directly to a specific section of a document. You’ll also notice how you can filter by Tags or Content Type.

The MOD demos also provide a working eDiscovery center, but I don’t think there is a link to it so you’ll have to type the URL in yourself. This is a great way to show examples of how SharePoint can place holds on SharePoint and Exchange content. If you look at one of the open cases (i.e.: CT77A11), you can define a discovery set. You’ll need to login as the admin account to do this.

If you look at the sources, you can see I have added a few Exchange mailboxes as well as a SharePoint site. Clicking on the Preview Results button will show you content from both Exchange and SharePoint based on the filters you provided.

Everything comes back in these results, so remember your mailbox can always be seen by someone. :)

The BI Center is pretty slick as well. Take a look at the Custom Satisfaction Dashboard. This is a great example of combining graphs with Power View and adding a social aspect that people can comment on.

The last thing I will point out is the Knowledge Center. Here is a great example of how they really changed the way content looks in SharePoint.

Of course, there is plenty of content out there for you to explore. If you can’t sell someone on the value of SharePoint with these demos, you’re doing something wrong. :) Get out there and try it out today (or tomorrow when it finishes provisioning). Here’s the link again for you to get started.

MicrosoftOfficeDemos.com

Seven reasons why I prefer developing SharePoint apps with SharePoint Online

CoreyRoth — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 21:53:26 GMT

If you know me then you know I’ve been doing a lot of work with apps lately (SP2 – link, twitter). I started developing primarily with an on-premises virtual machine running SharePoint 2013, but I have recently switched to using SharePoint Online (Office 365) more.

Free Office 365 Developer Site – The first benefit is that you can sign up for a free Office 365 Developer Site. This is a great way to get your feet wet with SharePoint 2013 without having to worry about installation and configuration. You can create a developer site collection and publish your apps here and get started very quickly. Especially if you use the “Napa” Office 365 Development Tools.
Less setup – setting up SharePoint 2013 has a fair amount of complexity, but nothing that most of you can’t handle. However, setting up apps is even harder as you have to set up a wildcard DNS entry to do it correctly. Office 365 takes care of all of this for you. Your subdomains are automatically provisioned for your apps, all you have to do is publish and you’re good to go. If you plan on using provider hosted or auto-hosted apps, SharePoint Online is easier as well.
You don’t have to set up Workflow – Setting up workflow is hard. I messed it up on my last attempt on my SharePoint 2013 virtual machine and I haven’t bothered to go back and fix it. When I needed to build an app that used workflow, I started publishing to SharePoint Online. It just works here and you don’t have to worry about installing Workflow manager and all of the related items.
Seller Dashboard team tests here – I discovered this when one of my apps was failed a while back and the issue only occurred on my SharePoint Online tenant. The nice thing about apps is that once everything is configured they work in both on-premises and in the cloud (depending on the type of course).
You don’t need SharePoint 2013 installed – You can develop SharePoint apps without having SharePoint 2013 installed. This means you can do the development directly from your host OS.
Test Licensing App – If you are doing license validation (and you should), the Test Licensing App helps you test this much easier. It allows you to generate a test license for free, paid, and trial apps. I believe this app is self-hosted (or maybe auto-hosted) which means it is much easier to get running with SharePoint Online. When you do install it, be sure and wait several minutes before trying it because it takes some time before it will work. If you don’t use this app, you have to create XML files to represent the test license and install them with PowerShell.
Testing with latency – some of your users are likely to use SharePoint Online. When running in the cloud, things have more latency than on-premises as you know. As a result, some JavaScript that you write may perform greatly on-premises but not so well in the cloud. This is a great way to test for this and see if you need to make any adjustments or add caching.

I have also found that publishing to SharePoint Online really doesn’t seem to take any more time that it does locally (most of the time). The biggest drawback here is that you can’t debug workflows. That may be a deal breaker at some point, but hasn’t been a problem for me yet. You can debug your JavaScript using Visual Studio just fine though.

Follow me on twitter: @coreyroth.

How to: Use PowerShell with SharePoint Online Preview

CoreyRoth — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 13:59:00 GMT

I recently spoke about PowerShell at SharePoint Conference 2012 (SPC195). It turns out PowerShell support slipped into SharePoint Online Preview without a lot of people noticing. In my session at SPC12, I walked users through a lot of common scenarios of using PowerShell with SPO that I wanted to share with you. This post will show you how to get connected to your SharePoint Online tenant and how to do work with sites. In a follow-up post, I’ll show you how to work with users and groups. Keep in mind this only work with SharePoint Online Preview right now. When your existing V14 tenants get upgraded to V15, you will be able to use it then.

To get started, you need to install the SharePoint Online Management Shell. Since this is based on PowerShell 3.0, you need to have that installed. If you have Windows 8 or you are running this on a machine with SharePoint 2013 already, you’re ready to go. However, if you are running Windows 7, you’ll need to install Windows Management Framework 3.0. After you have installed it, simply launch SharePoint Online Management Shell from the start menu. You shouldn’t need to run it as Administrator.

Connecting to SharePoint Online

Before you connect to SharePoint Online, you’ll need to have the username and password for an account with global administrator permissions. You’ll also need to know your tenant admin URL (i.e.: https://mytenant-admin.sharepoint.com). When connecting to SharePoint Online, don’t forget to reference all URLs securely using https. If you try and use http, you will get an error.

To connect to SharePoint Online, use the Connect-SPOService command. It takes the URL to your tenant admin and a username. When you connect, you’ll be prompted for your password.

Connect-SPOService –Url https://mytenant-admin.sharepoint.com –Credential admin@mytenant.onmicrosoft.com

If you connect successfully, you will be returned to the command prompt without error. To see what commands are available, we can use Get-Command and pass it the module Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell.dll. You can get the full list on TechNet.

Get-Command –Module Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell

Getting Site Collections

To work with Site Collections, use Get-SPOSite (TechNet). It can return a single site with the –Identity parameter or it can filter a list of them with the –Filter parameter. The Filter parameter does server side filtering and can be used with the case sensitive operators (-like, –notlike, –eq, and –ne). You can also run it without any parameters to return all site collections.

Get-SPOSite

This doesn’t return the data in the greatest format though. It would be nice to see the full URL and when thinking about upgrades it would nice to see the CompatibilityLevel (either 14 or 15). We can do this by piping the output to Format-Table (ft) and specifying the desired fields.

Get-SPOSite | ft Url, CompatibilityLevel

You’ll notice that the CompatibilityLevel came back as 0 here. This is because, Get-SPOSite uses CSOM under the hood and it does not request all values by default. To get this data, you need to add the –Detailed parameter.

Get-SPOSite –Detailed | ft Url, CompatibilityLevel

The syntax of the server side filtering can be a bit tricky. The key thing to remember is that the operators are case sensitive so they must be lower-case. In the example, below I do a server-side filter looking for any site with the word “Contoso” in the URL. Put the expression you are searching for in braces.

Get-SPOSite –Filter {Url -like “*term*} | Ft Url

One thing you may have noticed is that there are not any commands to create subsites. Currently only site collections are supported.

Creating Site Collections

Site Collections can be created using the New-SPOSite (TechNet) cmdlet. This cmdlet takes a heap of parameters. Note that you still have to use the preset managed paths available to you in SharePoint Online.

-Url – full URL of the site collection (don’t forget to use https)
-Owner – full user name of site owner (i.e.: admin@mytenant.onmicrosoft.com)
-StorageQuota – in MB
-ResourceQuota – number of resources to allocate
-Template (Optional) – i.e.: STS#0 – Use Get-SPOWebTemplate to view a list of available templates
-Title (Optional) – name of site collection
-NoWait – instructs PowerShell not to wait until the cmdlet is finished

New-SPOSite -Url https://mytenant.sharepoint.com/sites/sitename -Owner "admin@mytenant.onmicrosoft.com" -StorageQuota "500" -NoWait -ResourceQuota "500" -Template "STS#0" -Title "Site Title"

As mentioned above, you can run Get-SPOWebTemplate to return a list of available site templates.

Get-SPOWebTemplate

Deleting Site Collections

To delete a site collection simply, use Remove-SPOSite (TechNet) and pass it the URL in the Identity parameter. It can also optionally take the –NoWait parameter was well.

Remove-SPOSite –Identity https://mytenant.sharepoint.com/sites/sitename –NoWait

Restoring Site Collections

Deleted site collections get moved to the site collection recycle bin. To restore a site collection that you have deleted, use Restore-SPODeletedSite (TechNet). It takes the same parameters as Remove-SPOSite.

Restore-SPODeletedSite –Identity https://mytenant.sharepoint.com/sites/sitename –NoWait

Upgrading Site Collections

SharePoint Online also has the concept of deferred site collection upgrades. This means you can upgrade the site collections one-by-one or in batch using PowerShell. To run the Site Collection health check first, use Test-SPOSite (TechNet) and pass it the URL in the identity parameter. Once you are ready to upgrade use Upgrade-SPOSite (TechNet). Be sure and pass the –V2VUpgrade parameter or it won’t upgrade it.

Test-SPOSite -Identity http://mytenant.sharepoint.com/sites/sitename

Upgrade-SPOSite -Identity http://mytenant.sharepoint.com/sites/sitename -V2VUpgrade

Unfortunately, I don’t have a tenant that can be upgraded yet, so I can’t provide a screenshot of this procedure.

Hopefully, you found these PowerShell cmdlets useful. I think they will help a lot when it comes to working with SharePoint Online. In the next post, we’ll cover how to work with users and groups.

Licensing Changes for Extranets with SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online

CoreyRoth — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 19:40:07 GMT

In the past, licensing for Extranets proved to be quite confusing. Many people including myself weren’t always sure what to recommend. I found this useful information in the slide deck for SPC181 and I thought it was worth sharing since I know not everyone got to attend SPC. Ultimately in SharePoint 2010, you had two choices:

Purchase a SharePoint Server license plus one CAL for every user (whether internal or external)
Purchase a SharePoint for Internet Sites license (FIS)

In SharePoint 2013, this has radically changed. The FIS license is now gone and you just use a regular SharePoint Server license for Internet (or Extranet sites). This simplifies things quite a bit. For extranets, you still need a CAL for each internal user. The good news is that Client Access Licenses (CALs) are not longer required for external users. If you have an extranet on SharePoint today this might mean you can save some money. Now what does external user mean? Let me quote it exactly so that there is no confusion.

External users means users that are not either your or your affiliates’ employees, or your or your affiliates’ onsite contractors or onsite agents.

My interpretation of this now is that this basically refers to people outside of your company (but not your contractors). This would be people like vendors and partners. I guess technically, according to the statement, a contractor who never comes on-site is considered external. This statement is a bit fuzzy, but I think the gray area is not as big as it was before.

For those running your extranets in the cloud, we also got quite a bit of good news here as well for Office 365 / SharePoint Online. In the first release of SPO, external users were kind of in a gray area. Basically, it stated that Microsoft will give you 50 external users for free but they reserve the right to charge you for any additional users you have in the future. This has now been solidified. If you are on a SharePoint Online P plan, you get 500 external users free. For the E plans (or SharePoint Online Plan 1 and 2), you get up to 10,000 external users. That should last most of you for a while which I think makes SharePoint Online a very viable Extranet solution.

I think these are some pretty exciting changes for Extranets for both on-premises and with Office 365. What do you think?

How to: Take your SharePoint Online Preview Public Web Site Online

CoreyRoth — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 22:32:23 GMT

Maybe, this was more obvious to other people but it took me a while to figure out. When you first provision your Office 365 Preview Enterprise account, a public site collection is created. It took me a while to find it at first because I was used to finding my public site collection at -web.sharepoint.com">http://<name>-web.sharepoint.com. However, that didn’t work. I went back to the site collections page and noticed that the public site collection is now at -public.sharepoint.com">http://<name>-public.sharepoint.com.

I tried that URL by clicking on it through the Site Collections page using http as opposed to https and what did I get?

Now, I thought that was odd because I don’t remember things working that way. I finally posted something and got a response from Microsoft. The public web site collection run in offline mode by default and you must take it online for it to work. To do that you must visit your URL using https as in -public.sharepoint.com">https://<name>-public.sharepoint.com. Once, you do that, you will be prompted for authentication and you still see the starter site that looks like this.

You’ll notice in the top there is a link that says WEBSITE OFFLINE. Click on that and it will tell you about taking your site online.

When you click MAKE WEBSITE ONLINE, your site will get a confirmation screen.

Click Make online and your site will be exposed via http and anonymous users will be able to access the site.

Note, the new Blog link. People have been wanting that feature for a while with SPO sites. I think we’ll see a lot of blog sites moving to SPO now. You’ll also notice a search box right in the master page. No longer do you need to use hacks to get it to work. If you can’t figure out how to get your public web site going with SharePoint Online Preview, hopefully these steps have helped.

A TechEd Guide for SharePoint People

CoreyRoth — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 16:30:38 GMT

It’s true. I admit it. I have a sickness. I am a SharePoint person and proud of it. I’m attending Microsoft TechEd in Orlando next week (and in Amsterdam at the end of the month) for the first time. Although I am a noob to this conference, I thought I would share my thoughts on what you can do to maximize your SharePoint experience. TechEd covers all sorts of Microsoft technologies but there are plenty of SharePoint things to do.

Be sure and check out my TechEd Readiness Checklist as well.

There are over fifty sessions and hands-on-labs about SharePoint being offered. Take a look at some of these sessions:

Building Federated External Access for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 (Pre-conference Sunday 6/10 10:00a – S210A) – If you happen to be around for the pre-conference this session looks really exciting. Unfortunately, I won’t be arriving in time to see this session.
Advanced Architectures for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 (Monday 6/11 1:15p – S329) – This is a Bird of a Feather (BoF) session that goes deep talking about service applications, cross-farm services and search.
36 Terabytes: How Microsoft IT Manages SharePoint in the Enterprise (Monday 6/11 4:45p – S330A) – I always find it interesting to see how Microsoft is managing SharePoint internally.
Exploring the Power of Page Layouts in SharePoint 2010 WCM Sites (Tuesday 6/12 10:15a - S210E) – MVPs John Ross and Randy Drisgill will teach how to do great things with page layouts.
Advanced Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Troubleshooting (Tuesday 3:15p – S210A) – MVPs Shane Young and Todd Klindt explain how to get past common upgrade issues. That and the fact that Todd gave me crap on twitter. :)
Why Microsoft SharePoint and Windows Azure are Just Plain Better Together (Wednesday 6/13 8:30a – S230A) – I’ve seen Steve Fox speak a number of times and it always entertaining.
Code vs. "No-Code": Exactly Who Gets to Call Themselves a SharePoint Developer? (Wednesday 6/13 10:15a – S319) – This is always an interest debate and this BoF is sure to provide a great discussion.
Building and Customizing My Sites with Microsoft SharePoint 2010 (Wednesday 6/13 1:30p – S220G) – Another session with Ross and Drisgill showing you how to make your My Sites look better.
Making the Most of Search in SharePoint Online (Wednesday 6/13 3:15p – S210E) – The guy that is giving this session is awesome. I of course have to plug my own personal session. :) Come see how you can make search in SharePoint Online rock.
Configuring Kerberos for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 BI in 7 Steps (SQL Server 2012) (Wednesday 6/13 5:00p – S331A) – Configuring Kerberos can always be a challenge. This session can help.
I’m a SharePoint Developer in an Enterprise World! (Thursday 6/14 8:30a – S319) – I’m a fan of all of the Birds of a Feather sessions.
Step-by-Step: Building Search Driven Applications That Matter (Thursday 6/14 2:45p – N220A) – Great session on how to build SharePoint applications built around Search.

If I didn’t list your session, no offense. I can’t cover them all. That and I wanted to actually get this post out before the end of the conference. :)

TechEd has some great opportunities for certification. If you are looking to get certified, be sure to check out the following session.

Exam Cram Session on Exams 667 and 668: Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 (Tuesday 6/12 1:30p) – MCM Shannon Bray will be there to help you study for the exams.

There’s a whole heap of Hands-on-Labs (HoL) for SharePoint. This is a great way to work through a scenario in SharePoint while being able to raise your hand for help. Here are a few examples (see the link above for the complete list):

Of course there are a lot of other non-SharePoint things you should consider attending as well:

Opening Keynote (Monday 6/11 9:00a – N. Hall A1) – Of course you don’t want to miss the keynote
Windows Azure Today and Tomorrow (Monday 6/11 11:00a – N310) – When Scott Guthrie talks, you listen.
What’s New in Visual Studio 2012 (Monday 6/11 1:15p – N210) – If you are a developer, you need to know what’s coming in Visual Studio 2012. Be sure and check out my Visual Studio 2012 series for SharePoint as well.
PowerShell Remoting in Depth (Monday 6/11 3:00p – S320E) – We use a lot of PowerShell in SharePoint.
Tuesday Keynote (Tuesday 6/12 – 8:30a – N. Hal A1)

Hopefully this is a good list to get you started. Is there anything that I missed that should be on here? Leave a comment and I’ll get it added. Also keep an eye our for my TechEd Readiness Checklist post as well as a similar post for TechEd Europe. I look forward to seeing everyone there next week! Have a good TechEd!

Excited to be speaking at TechEd this year

CoreyRoth — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 17:48:29 GMT

I am excited to say that I’ll be speaking at both TechEd North America and TechEd Europe. This is my first time to even attend a TechEd so I am looking forward to see what is in store. Both events are sure to be exciting but I am particularly excited to be going to Amsterdam for TechEd Europe since I haven’t been in 10+ years. If you’re at either event, be sure and check out my session on Making the most of Search with SharePoint Online. There you will learn some great tricks on how to get more out of your search experience in the cloud. Links to my sessions are below.

TechEd North America

TechEd Europe

If you’re going to be at either event let me know. I am looking forward to seeing old friends and meeting some new people.

Follow me on twitter: @coreyroth

What are your options for a test environment with SharePoint Online (Office 365)?

CoreyRoth — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 03:17:22 GMT

I’ve seen this conversation come up a few times. Deploying code to SharePoint Online is not like deploying code to your test and production environments back on-premises. I thought I would give my thoughts on it and that will help you make a better decision. Office 365 is not like Azure in the fact that you can simply spin up another web role for testing. Nor do we have the ability to deploy code to one role and then swap it into production like we can with Azure either. That means we have to get more creative. Sure, you can develop code locally on a local SharePoint 2010 server and deploy it. You can even use Visual Studio 11 to help you publish the solutions to the cloud faster. However, this isn’t necessarily a good “test” environment since SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint Online have a lot of differences.

Effectively, the way I see it, we have two options for a test environment.

Create a new site collection
Create a new Office 365 account (tenant)

I know what you are thinking. As a traditional developer building on-premises solutions, neither of these sound ideal. Maybe they are not, but they actually make a lot of sense when we start thinking about it. Let’s look at each option in detail.

New Site Collection

Now when this may not make sense for your on-premises farm solution. It actually makes quite a bit of sense at the site collection level. Think about it. Our goal is providing a separate environment. Well, pretty much everything you do with SharePoint Online operates within the sandbox of the site collection. This includes solution packages which are published to the site collection’s solution gallery. This makes it an ideal way to test customizations such as web parts, lists, content types, and more. Simply create a new site collection, publish your customizations, test it out. When you are done, you can even delete the site collection and create a new one when you need to test again. Your code will not affect anything in the other site collections.

When will this not work? When your code requires you to make changes at things at the tenant level. For example, if you are testing some new term sets in the Managed Metadata Service or your solution is querying search. If you were making use of the BCS, this might not be a good option either. In essence, it works well for testing things like web parts and the use of the Client Object Model, but not so well for tenant based features. For those features, it’s time to start looking at spinning up another Office 365 account.

New Office 365 account (tenant)

When you need to ensure that everything is absolutely separate in the cloud, the only way to do it is with another Office 365 account. Go to try.office365.com and create a new account with a new prefix. I’d recommend using a prefix that is easy to remember and indicates you are on the test environment. For example, if your main domain is company.sharepoint.com, create something like companytest.sharepoint.com. The benefit of creating a new account is that your service applications such as search, BCS, and the Managed Metadata service are truly separate. You can also rest assure that nothing you do on this account, will affect your production account.

Probably the biggest drawback of this approach is that you have to maintain completely separate user accounts. This can prove to be an inconvenience but it’s not terrible. There may be some risk if you are testing permissions within your application, but you just have to deal with that. Another drawback of this approach is that none of your data from your “production” SharePoint Online site will be present. You’ll have to either manually upload it, deploy it with code, or look at a third party migration tool.

One other benefit of this approach is that you can just use a trial account. Trial accounts are good for 30 days before you have to start paying. This very well may be long enough to get you through your test cycle. If your test cycle runs longer than that you can always just purchase a few licenses. Keep in mind that Enterprise plans have a one-year term though.

Summary

These are the options I have came up with for testing customizations in the “cloud”. I tend to go with just creating a new site collection, but I am sure I will find a change that warrants creating a completely separate account. Have you come up with any other techniques for testing with SharePoint Online? Post them here in the comments.

Follow me on twitter: @coreyroth.

Slides from my SharePoint Online and Visual Studio 11 talks

CoreyRoth — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 02:53:42 GMT

It’s been a busy month for speaking (among other things). Last month, I spoke about getting started with SharePoint Online development at SharePoint Saturday New Orleans. The New Orleans crew (Cherie, Beth, and Tiffany) did a great job putting the event together. Here are the slides that I referred to in that talk.

Office 365 – Introduction to SharePoint Online Development

Last week, I made the trip over to San Antonio to see Tom Resing (@resing) and the fine folks there. There I presented to a full room of people looking to learn more about the new SharePoint development features in Visual Studio 11. If you have been following my blog lately, you know I have been posting a lot about the new features lately. As promised, here are the slides from that talk.

New Development Features in Visual Studio 11

For my next presentation, I’ll be speaking this week at the Houston Cloud Tech Symposium on 4/4. This is a new event for me so I’m not sure what it will be like. I’ll be talking about how you can use SharePoint Online for Extranets. If you are in Houston this week and are attending the event, come see me.

Finally, I’ll be presenting my Visual Studio 11 talk at SharePoint Saturday Houston later this month on 4/28. That event is always no less than epic so you need to be there.

Speaking at Office 365 Saturday Redmond!

CoreyRoth — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 21:45:29 GMT

I’m excited to be speaking at the first Office 365 Saturday in Redmond on 2/25. This new event will be an exciting display of all things Office 365. I’ll be talking about all of the cool things you can do with Search in SharePoint Online. I gave this talk at SPC11, but I gave the talk an upgrade with the use of Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview. We’ll look at what you can do out-of-the-box with search and then write a custom Silverlight application to query search web services. If you’re looking to get more out of search be sure to stop by and check out my session.

How to: Use the Silverlight web part with Visual Studio 11

CoreyRoth — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:11:14 GMT

Visual Studio 11 adds a new feature that makes working with Silverlight in SharePoint 2010 a bit easier. The new Silverlight Web Part feature automates deploying your Silverlight applications to SharePoint and can really save you a bit of time. We took a look at how the Visual Web Part works in VS11 a while back. Now, let’s see what happens when we use Silverlight.

To work with Silverlight,you can either create a new project or simply add a new item to an existing project. I’ll start by creating a new project by choosing the item SharePoint 2010 Silverlight Web Part. Remember the number of project types has been reduced in VS11.

After you provide the usual SharePoint specific information, a new screen will prompt you for information on your Silverlight application. You can use an existing application or let it create a new project for you.

You have a choice of Silverlight version 4.0 or 5.0. Once you finish, you’ll have two new projects to work with. The designer opens up and then we’ll just create a simple Silverlight application.

Now, let’s take a look at the files. They prove to be a lot simpler than you might think.

If we click on the web part itself, we actually see the contents of the .webpart file. Taking a quick look at it, reveals its simplicity.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<webParts>
  <webPart xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebPart/v3">
    <metaData>
      <type name="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.SilverlightWebPart, Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c, processorArchitecture=MSIL" />
      <importErrorMessage>$Resources:core,ImportErrorMessage;</importErrorMessage>
    </metaData>
    <data>
      <properties>
        <property name="Title" type="string">SilverlightWebPartProject1 - SilverlightWebPart1</property>
        <property name="Description" type="string">My Silverlight Web Part</property>
        <property name="Height" type="unit">300px</property>
        <property name="Width" type="unit">400px</property>
        <property name="Url" type="string">/SiteAssets/SilverlightWebPartProject1/SilverlightWebPart1/SilverlightProject1.xap</property>
      </properties>
    </data>
  </webPart>
</webParts>

It simply has a reference to the existing SilverlightWebPart included in SharePoint 2010. It sets a few properties such as Title, Description, Height, Width, and Url. Here you will notice that it’s actually copying the .xap file from your Silverlight project into the SiteAssets library. Note, that this is the only place to set the dimensions of your web part.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/" >
  <Module Name="SilverlightWebPart1" List="113" Url="_catalogs/wp">
    <File Path="SilverlightWebPart1\SilverlightWebPart1.webpart" Url="SilverlightWebPartProject1_SilverlightWebPart1.webpart" Type="GhostableInLibrary" >
      <Property Name="Group" Value="Custom" />
    </File>
  </Module>
  <Module Name="SilverlightWebPart1">
    <File Path="SilverlightWebPart1\SilverlightProject1.xap" Url="SiteAssets/SilverlightWebPartProject1/SilverlightWebPart1/SilverlightProject1.xap" />
  </Module>
</Elements>

If we take a look at the Elements.xml file, we see that it deploys both the .webpart file and the .xap file using a Module element.

When you are ready to deploy just use the Deploy command in Visual Studio. It will build the Silverlight application, the .wsp file and send it to SharePoint. You no longer have to manually upload the .xap file (or add it manually to your package). Now, we can just add the web part to a page from the Insert ribbon.

Then you’ll have your Silverlight application on your page. Don’t be jealous of how great this one looks. :)

What about SharePoint Online? Does it work there too? Indeed it does. Just use the Publish feature I talked about earlier to deploy that solution to the cloud. One issue I did notice is that the path configured in the SilverlightWebPart is absolute. If you publish into a site collection not on the root, you’ll need to modify the path. I need to look at this one more since it might be based off of the local SharePoint site URL that you specified originally. Still it’s nice to know that it works. I tried it with an E3 account and I’m pretty sure it will work with P accounts as well.

How to: Query sites and site collections using SharePoint Search

CoreyRoth — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 19:41:21 GMT

I often refer to my Handy Keywords in SharePoint Search because it forms the building blocks you need to become a rock star at writing SharePoint keyword queries. Today, I want to expand upon that post on how you can use search to return a list of sites or site collections. This is useful when you want to quickly inspect a SharePoint farm using the Search Center. The secret behind returning sites with Search is use of the contentclass managed property. You just have to know what value to specify. To return a list of all sites in the search index, we specify a value of STS_Web (remember our translation guide). Here is what it looks like.

contentclass:"STS_Web"

This works pretty well. However, if you inspect the results on your own server, you might quickly notice one thing missing. The root web of all the site collections is not present in the search results. To get the site collections, we specify STS_Site instead.

contentclass:"STS_Site"

Notice, I now have all of the site collections on my particular tenant. If you want the results combined, you simply combine the queries.

contentclass:"STS_Site" contentclass:"STS_Web"

Now you might be thinking this is great, but you don’t want every site and site collection on the farm. You want to restrict it to a particular web application. That’s actually pretty easy, just refer back to the handy keywords post and use the Site managed property. In my case, I’ll restrict the URL to my main web application.

contentclass:"STS_Site" contentclass:"STS_Web" site:https://dotnetmafia.sharepoint.com

There are lots of ways to get lists of sites in SharePoint, but I find this one works well since it doesn’t require a line of code for you to try. Of course, as a developer, you can make use of this with the KeywordQuery class inside your own application. This works with SharePoint on-premises as well as SharePoint Online. All screenshots were from my personal SPO site.

Slides from my talk at SharePoint Saturday Denver

CoreyRoth — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 15:13:57 GMT

I had the honor of speaking at SharePoint Saturday Denver this weekend. Clayton Cobb (@warrtalon) and the people from Denver did a great job putting together this event. I spoke about how to improve your SharePoint Search experience. I’ve uploaded my slides to SlideShare at the link below. Denver was fun, but I have learned this weekend that the mountains aren’t for me. :) This was a great event and certainly one I will remember.

Making the most of SharePoint Search

The code for the advanced search application I demoed can be found in this post. The customization you can make to add a View Folder link to your search results, can be found in this post.

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Speaking at SharePoint Conference 2011 (#SPC11)

CoreyRoth — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 04:02:47 GMT

Since I first stepped foot at #SPC09, I knew I wanted to speak at a SharePoint Conference some day.. This year that dream has finally become a reality. I have the honor to present two different sessions at SharePoint Conference 2011. I am speaking on subjects that are both old and new to me and I am excited to see how they turn out.

My first talk is #SPC348 – Extending SharePoint 2010 for your customers and partners will cover everything you wanted to know about creating an Extranet with SharePoint 2010. Although, this topic is nothing new, this is a great talk for people just now looking to consider an extranet for his or her organization.

My second talk is #SPC364 – Making the most of Search in SharePoint Online. I am beyond excited about this talk because I get to talk about Search and SharePoint Online in the same talk. You might just be amazed at what you can do with Search in the cloud. I’ve got some great demos built using Silverlight and the Search API that you will want to see whether you want to extend search off-premises or on-premises.

I’m looking forward to giving my sessions and seeing all of my friends out there in the SharePoint community. I’m excited to meet some new friends out there as well. If you’re going to be in Anaheim this year for the conference, feel free to say hi and check out my sessions. Thanks for all of your support especially for all my friends at the Houston SharePoint Users Group (#HSPUG) I’ll see you all in Cali.