SharePoint 2010 Visio Services

Visio Services in SharePoint 2010 is making Data-Driven visualizations easier to create than ever before. Dave McMahon has generously provided an excellent introduction to get us up to speed, complete with a step-by-step guide to getting started.

Complete article: http://bit.ly/dCVmMx

Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 VMs

2010 Information Worker Demonstration Virtual Machine (Beta) is a set of Virtual Machines focused on Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. Although the VMs bring to the table a range of technologies, fact is that the downloads are intended to simplify the evaluation and demonstration of the next iteration of Office and SharePoint. 


“Virtual machine “a” contains the following pre-configured software: 

1. Windows Server 2008 SP2 Standard Edition x64, running as an Active Directory Domain Controller for the “CONTOSO.COM” domain with DNS and WINS 
2. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 SP2 Enterprise Edition with Analysis, Notification, and Reporting Services 
3. Microsoft Office Communication Server 2007 R2 
4. Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Ultimate Edition 
5. Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Edition Beta 2 
6. Microsoft Office Web Applications Beta 2 
7. FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 
8. Microsoft Project Server 2010 Beta 2 
9. Microsoft Office 2010 Beta 2 
10. Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2,” Microsoft revealed. 

“Virtual machine “b” contains the following pre-configured software: 

1. Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Evaluation Edition x64, joined to the “CONTOSO.COM” domain 
2. Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Active directory has been preconfigured over 200 “demo” users with metadata in an organizational structure. All of these user profiles have been imported and indexed for search within SharePoint Server 2010, with “contoso\administrator” granted administrator permissions. SharePoint Server 2010 has been configured in a “Complete” farm using Kerberos authentication and the default SQL Server 2008 instance for data, and has a site collection created using the Team Site template and a FAST Search Center,” the company added. 

Downloads link: http://bit.ly/bM3TjF

Self Service BI in Excel 2010 and Sharepoint

Excel is no doubt a great tool in large and small bussinesses. Excel’s ease of use lets users build their own tool, with or without the help of a IT expert. In my organization, Excel spreadsheets play essential role in the day-to-day functions of the business, such as trading in the stock market and managing their portfolios, calculating complex financial formulae, etc. However, these spreadsheets are fragile, do not adopt to changing business requirements, and need constant maintenance. And the scary thing is that only one person (in most cases) — the spreadsheet’s creator—really understand how the application works. Sometimes this might make the creator a bottleneck to the business workflow. In worst case scenarios, business function could halt if the creator were unavailable for some reason or if the application were corrupted or accidentally deleted, and could be very serious, especially if there were a major problem restoring the application.


PowerPivot for Excel 2010 in SQL Server 2008 R2 managed self-service business intelligence (BI)  (formerly known by its code name “Gemini”) [ more about PowerPivot at http://www.powerpivot.com ] can handle such situations. It empowers both IT and business users - the business users get to solve business problems with his/her familiar Excel and the IT team has the ability to centrally store, secure, and distribute the Excel spreadsheets throughout the organization using SharePoint.


The Excel component in Office 2010 uses a new storage engine which is built on the SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) OLAP engine. The new engine uses extreme data compression, and it enables Excel to work with hundreds of millions of rows with subsecond response time. 


The following blog post describes how to use PowerPivot in Excel 2010.
http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2009/10/23/using-powerpivot-with-excel-2010.aspx

Building a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment

Originally posted in Tristan Watkins blog, a very useful series of write-ups for building a sharepoint environment, here all in one place.

• Part I: Introduction and Objectives
• Part II: Design
• Part III: Host image build and performance benchmarks
• Part IV: Automated deployment
• Part V: Guest Build
• Part VI: Issues and Results

Sharepoint 2010 How To's and Tutorials

A great collection of resources for Sharepoint 2010 developers.

• How to -- Sharepoint 2010 (http://howtosharepoint.blogspot.com/)
• Sharepoint video tutorials (http://howtosharepointvideos.blogspot.com/)

Forms Based Authentication (FBA) for SharePoint on IIS 7

A very nice guide to enable Form Based Authentication in Sharepoint.

Click get to the post.