SharePoint Thoughts - Maurice Prather [MCM, MVP]

Evolutions Conference: SharePoint & Netduino

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 19:37:46 GMT

Over here in the skunk works division of our company... we've been busy the past few months working on some prototypes that will allow us to integrate physical data with the usefulness of SharePoint.

We're unveiling a portion of our efforts at the SharePoint Evolutions Conference 2013 in London next week. You've heard me say this before - this conference rocks. I love this conference for many reasons but the one reason that sticks out in my mind is the simple fact that I spend a lot time creating new content. This year was no different! The fact we got to use soldering irons to put a demo together made this the most exciting presentation build... :)

If you are attending the conference next week, swing by my session and check out the evolution of business data collection and management...

Title: Remote monitoring with SharePoint 2013 and making it smart!

Session: COM710 from 1500-1600 in the Rutherford room

This should be a fun session with demos, hardware with blinky lights, and hopefully some good discussion!

-Maurice

How to lose MVP status

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 04:51:26 GMT

First, the title is a tongue in cheek.

This past fall, I lost the MVP status that I had carried for the past 5 years. As everyone knows, Microsoft’s MVP status is an award bestowed to those that are actively involved in the “community”. Every year, the team looks at what you’ve done in the past 12 months to figure out if you deserve a marketing award.

The short answer to the title was that I was busy working. Last year was an absolutely dizzying year. The net result was that I wasn’t an active blogger or speaker. I had a few posts and only 2 speaking engagements. Shame!

What was I doing? Working on SharePoint and life’s other miscellaneous projects. :)

Here’s a rough breakdown…

SharePoint – Aptillon has been moving forward in leaps and bounds. Work was good. Work kept me traveling. By the end of January last year, I had already been in Jersey City, Dallas, Ft. Lauderdale, and Honolulu. 24,000 miles in 1 month. Ok, Ft. Lauderdale was not work related (more on that later). Mileage total for the year? Roughly 160,000 miles here in the US - none of that fancy travel to Europe or Australia or Antarctica.. and that was with me putting the kibosh on travel for nearly 2 months - twice. I reached Delta’s platinum level before most folks even start buckling their seat belts. SharePoint in the cloud? Just pray you don't have a screaming kid next to you. :)

Businesses – I now own a part of 3 companies. I started out owning 2 and by year’s end, my wife and I started a new venture. Running a single company takes time and effort. Running two takes patience. Running three requires medication!

Speaking - last year was the quietest year I've had since I first entered the speaking circuit. There were a couple of occasions where I just forgot to send in ideas and applications. Worse yet, I made a huge scheduling mistake when I double booked a conference with a client engagement. We got the project out the door that week, so it was a nice offset to missing the conference in Orlando.

The Boat – Sailing has been a part of my life for quite some time. My big dream in life has been to buy a boat and go around the world. Luckily, the woman I married also shares that dream. We started looking for a boat in late 2011. We entered 2012 with some serious shopping plans (it’s why I was in Ft. Lauderdale in Jan). Well, long story short. We are now the proud owners of a beautiful Catana 472. We found her in San Diego and after a super long story involving an incompetent captain and a company that literally left us (and others) high and dry in Ensenada, she came home to Tacoma in late October.

Tacoma – For those not from the Seattle area, Tacoma is roughly 35 miles south of Seattle. I’ve been in Seattle for 17+ years. In that time, I spent all of maybe a half day in Tacoma. It’s never been a destination for me. Either you’re driving through Tacoma on your way to Portlandia or taking the long route to the Olympic Peninsula. With the boat moored in Tacoma, we’ve had to learn a new city. I have to say it’s been a lot of fun learning more about the city. It’s got some hidden gems and you can definitely see where they have been trying to revitalize the city and the waterfront.

The Boat (part 2) – With the boat moored in Tacoma, we literally took on a new primary job – boat maintenance. First, we’ve had to figure out everything there is about the boat. Have you ever bought a house or rented an apartment? How much time do you spend thinking about how things work in house? Probably next to nothing. You figure out where the light switches are located and then you move in. Boats, especially the larger they get, are complex machines. You need to know where the switches are… what is connected to them (outlets)... what they are connected to (breakers)... what are the emergency shutoff points... what parts are needed in case something breaks... etc.. etc... now rinse and repeat for water - all three types, fuel, etc... in a nutshell, understanding what we have and identifying all the things that need to be fixed (especially after a 1300 nm voyage up the West Coast) has been daunting.

MCSM - even though I lost my MVP status, thankfully I didn't lose my Masters certification! To be honest, I am still having problems typing MCSM (Microsoft Certified Solutions Master) rather than MCM. You might have noticed my earlier post on how the certification program is changing things around. Not only was I excited to see these improvements make their way into production, but toward the end of year I also had a chance to work with the Masters certification team again. It was fun getting back into the frame of mind of building detailed courseware. My teammates David and Matt also helped out as we put together four different modules for the Masters program. Then I had to do double duty in late December as a student for the first rotation in the updated format.

Somewhere in there... we had family come visit twice, we hopped on planes to visit them as few times as well. Oh yeah - I even had my tonsils taken out some time in April. That was a fun drug trip that did not involve planes at all. :P

Pretty much 2012 was a whirlwind. SharePoint 24/7/365 + a boat ... and a lot of planes.

My pledge to the long time readers of this blog ... I'll actually reserve some time this year to share more stories about SharePoint and how to make it do more for us. I might even throw a few boat stories...

Have fun!

-Maurice

Reviewing the MSFT certification overhaul

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 17:49:20 GMT

Certifications. Need it? Want it? Worth it?

Those are common questions that I hear from customers and the folks on the front line. The answer in the past was often times buried in the intricacies of perceived value but for a lot of folks it comes down to the simple process of evaluating talent. Either you’re selling talent or your trying to acquire talent. Certifications are intended to provide a measurement stick. It’s like looking at a resume and figuring out if the applicant can even spell Sharepoint.

In the SharePoint space, though, the standard certifications have traditionally been too easy to obtain and thus the Worth portion of the equation was often times devalued due to the ease. Microsoft has realized that they needed to put the certify back into the certification process. Today, we’ll discuss the changes that have been made to Microsoft’s certification stack. Your answers to Need, Want, Worth will might change. Hopefully, you’ll start to see the promise of the new system.

But first, let’s take a look back in time… Starting with the 2003 SharePoint certifications, and all the way through 2010, the “core” certifications for SharePoint always involved tests that centered on admin and developer topics. Then those topics were split into a “beginner” and “advanced” sections. The model was built around an arguably sound reasoning: some people are less experienced and then grow their talents. However, there was a key problem with those tests – they really didn’t measure your ability. They measured your capability to take a test. In a nutshell, the tests didn’t validate your knowledge or experience. Put differently - If administrators walk into a developer test, having never written a single line of code, and pass the test… is that a good developer test?

Unfortunately, this gap between theoretical and actual validation caused a lot of problems. If it was too easy to get a certification, then folks that relied on certifications to measure experience were basically up the creek.

Knowing there was a serious problem in this space, Microsoft introduced the Master’s level certification for SharePoint in early 2009. The Master’s certification was designed to validate a candidate as having actually used the product in real-life scenarios in addition to having completed very rigorous training and testing regimen. It was designed to be tough – you had complete all the underlying SharePoint exams for both admin and dev (ok, that part was easy), then submit a resume outlining your body of work in the SharePoint space, then if selected you would have to navigate a phone interview before final acceptance into the program, take a 3 week course, and cap it all off by taking a hands-on qualifying lab and written test. The Master’s program was without a doubt the hardest certification to obtain. The Master’s program was designed to provide the market place with proven experts within SharePoint.

However, there was still one core problem… the program when looked at as a whole was imbalanced. The underlying exams were too easy and the Master’s program, being the next jump up, was too almost too deep for most people. There was no in between. We needed an in-between. It was like going from grade school to graduate school in one leap. The changed introduced by Microsoft in the last half of 2012 have been designed to update the process. We know have a defined path of increasing difficulty that is better tied to the components of the platform *and* allows candidates to grow their experience at their pace.

We now have the opportunity from grade school to high school to undergrad and beyond. First, let’s take a look at what it takes to become the Certified Solutions Master. The program requirements are available at http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/mcsm-sharepoint-certification.aspx. Digging deeper we find that administrator and developer certifications are truly geared toward testing your knowledge of the technologies (see also http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification-overview.aspx).

A quick read reveals a few key changes:

SharePoint certification is no longer focused solely on SharePoint

I love to tell folks that SharePoint is an ecosystem. If you treat as an application, you’ll fail. SharePoint has many components, all of which have different characteristics. Certification should be no different. Both the administrator and developer tracks now incorporate facets that live outside of SharePoint. This makes a ton of sense. I can’t be an administrator of a SharePoint farm without understanding the operating system, active directory, etc. and likewise, I can’t be a good developer without understanding other common development technologies and techniques that live outside of SharePoint.

Commonalities make it easier to grow and cultivate your experience

SharePoint certification now relies on tests that are validated, refined, and used by other segments of the technology stack. Think about this way, do you want SharePoint testing you on how to be server administrator or would you rather have the Windows team test you? Also, by leveraging the courseware in other technologies, a candidate has the opportunity to spend time in other areas without worrying about digging themselves into a hole.

Courseware improvements reestablish the value of certification

From the Master’s perspective, because the course is now spread out across the different segments of the platform, the SharePoint certification team can focus on teaching rather than trying to go through a laborious process involving interviews and resumes. The MCSM certification pre-requisites ensure the candidates actually fit the bill of a Master’s candidate.

Keep on learning

Digging deeper into the certification changes, you’ll also find that certifications are no longer static. This means that certifications will expire unless you go back and recertify. At first, I didn’t like this idea because it felt like a forced learning process. However, it makes sense. Technologies change and the platforms are ever evolving. The tests themselves will change. This is brilliant as complex platforms such as SharePoint will be incorporate field experience and other improvements into the tests. As SharePoint grows, the test will improve and the *next* time you have to take a SharePoint exam, the student will be able to validate new skillsets. Put differently – if you want to keep the shiny little badge of honor on your resume, you should be up to speed on the product and technology space.

It’s worth noting the developer track hasn’t been fully announced but if initial talks are any indication, you will find that the developer courses will be heavily influenced by content from existing developer courses in other areas. Again, the concept is leverage knowledge as much as possible.

In general, the retooling of Microsoft’s certification process is a welcomed change. Need it, Want it, and Worth it? As you grow with SharePoint, I think the answer takes on a vastly different outlook than it did in the past. The courseware is more extensive and tests are shaping up to be much better than in the past. We’re no longer jumping from grade school over to doctoral work – there’s a middle ground and you get to figure out how to best tailor that experience for yourself.

-Maurice

Be sure to specify a category ID for a custom SPDiagnosticsCategory

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 03:21:26 GMT

Every once and while you run into a silly bug that actually takes you a long time to figure out. Some time ago I ran into a problem with a custom SPDiagnosticServiceBase class that only surfaced via PowerShell.

Let’s take a closer look at the problem...

First, we start out by creating a custom diagnostic logging class that contains multiple categories. When it’s properly deployed, we’d see custom area ("Test Area") and all of the categories in Central Admin. Through the Diagnostic Logging page, you’d find you can change the throttle limits like any other out of box category.

Now, let’s open up a PowerShell console and try to change one of the categories using Set-SPLogLevel.

This commandlet allows you to specify the area and category using a very simple Area:Category format. In a simpler fashion, if you specify a string with no colon, the value you provide is treated as a category.

In the next screenshot, you can see that I am trying to set the TraceSeverity to Verbose for category "dddd". Note the error that is returned!

Huh?! Didn’t I just see that category in Central Admin? How about if I try the more generic Area:Category format with a wildcard? Same result!

I shot an email off to my teammate Gary Lapointe, who knows all things PowerShell, and a group of SharePoint Masters. No luck. No one apparently has seen this problem. This was going to be just one of those days...

The biggest clue popped out when I tried using the most generic form of Set-SPLogLevel. If you don’t specify an Identity parameter (for example: "Set-SPLogLevel -TraceSeverity Verbose"), Set-SPLogLevel sets the provided value to all categories. However, for our custom diagnostic class, what do you see?

SP was seriously getting confused. Three problems jumped out: Trace Severity was set to the wrong value (None instead of Verbose), Event Severity was improperly changed to "Error", and finally only the first category was updated.

To make a long debugging story short, I finally was able to isolate and fix the problem!

Core problem:

My problems all arose from how I initialized the categories themselves. If you call the simplest constructor (as I did and most likely a lot of other folks!), your code would look like ...

The real tricky part to isolating the problem is that you need to set the log levels via PowerShell first. If you set the log level via Central Admin, the problem is mostly hidden.

The fix:

Use the SPDiagnosticsCategory constructor that takes four parameters.

In particular, specify a value for the category id. The updated initialization block looks like...

In my example, the id value is coming from an enum that is used for categorization of the items written to the diagnostic service. This could have easily been as simple as an incrementing counter (0, 1, 2, etc).

Be sure to start the value sequence at 0. I eventually found that if you want to start your ID values at something other than 0, you’ll eventually run into the same problem.

With the SPDiagnosticCategory initialized in this fashion, setting the log levels via PowerShell will work as expected.

Log away!

-Maurice

Using PowerShell to create new sites based on site-scoped WebTemplates

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 04:32:00 GMT

WebTemplates are definitely a powerful new construct in our SharePoint 2010 toolbox. WebTemplates definitely come in handy as they can be deployed as sandbox-compatible features.

Creating a site based on a web template is pretty straightforward via the UI. Basically it just shows up as another site template option. As a user creating a site, you’d never the know the difference between a farm-scoped or site-scoped WebTemplate. However, if you want to use PowerShell, you will notice that your PS scripts will take on a slightly different shape based on how the WebTemplate is scoped.

If the WebTemplate is deployed as a farm-scoped feature, then you can easily use New-SPWeb in the following manner:

new-spweb $url –template “{GUID}#WebTemplateName”

where GUID represents the parent feature ID.

If the WebTemplate is deployed as a site-scoped feature, then your PowerShell needs to be adjusted. Otherwise, if you attempt to use new-spweb, you’ll get the following error message: Template is not found and is not applied. This effectively means the cmdlet could not locate a farm-level template to apply to the new site.

For example...

There are two ways to circumvent this problem:

Once the site is created, call ApplyWebTemplate
Before the site created, grab a reference to the appropriate WebTemplate and provide it as a value to the SPWebCollection.Add method on the parent site.

Examples

Calling ApplyWebTemplate

$url = "http://sitecollection/site1"

$w = new-spweb $url

$w.ApplyWebTemplate("{GUID}#WebTemplateName")

Calling SPWebCollection.Add

$url = "http://sitecollection"

$w = get-spweb $url

$template = $w.GetAvailableWebTemplates(1033) | ? { $_.name -eq "{GUID}#WebTemplateName" }

$w.Webs.Add("site1", "sample site 1", "sample description", 1033, $template, $false, $false)

The difference between the two methods basically boils down to the language selection for the new site. With the simple call to ApplyWebTemplate, the new site uses the same language as the parent. By grabbing the reference to the web template beforehand, you have more control.

-Maurice