Microsoft SOA & BP Conference: What’s New in Microsoft Connected Systems

by | Oct 28, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I’m in Redmond today and tomorrow doing our 2-day preconference workshop titled What’s New in Microsoft Connected Systems. If you’re interested in the topics described here, we can deliver this content as a custom 2-day onsite course. The Microsoft SOA & BP Conference starts on Tues — I’m expecting some interesting things to happen this week.


I’m team-teaching this event with Matt and Jon so it should be a fun. Matt is up there giving his talk on WF 3.5 right now. Jon is up next with BizTalk Services, I can tell he’s crafting up a killer demo as I write this. Sam Gentile is attending and he’s been blogging about the sessions over here. If you’re attending the conference, stop by one of our talks and say hello:



  • BizTalk Adapters for WCF: Deep Dive, by Aaron Skonnard (Wed @ 8:30am)

  • Best Practices for Creating Composite Activities in WF, by Matt Milner (Wed @ 10:00am)

  • Building a Service Monitoring Infrastructure with BizTalk Business Activity Monitoring, by Jon Flanders (Wed @ 4:00pm)

I have to bail on Wed in order to make it home in time for the Skonnard family Halloween festivities (with 5 kids, Halloween isn’t something I can miss w/out major consequences) so I’ll be taking off right after my talk. 😉

Expression around the Clock

Expression around the Clock

by | Oct 28, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

It has taken me quite some time to get my summary post out for the Expression around the Clock event and part of this has been due to getting the material together to post. I am doing a wrap up on the event at the Usability Professionals Association meeting at the BNZ on Tuesday night so come along if you are interested in seeing more.

By a stroke of luck my car blew a head gasket (luck because I have insurance) and I have been catching the train to work for the last couple of weeks. During the walk I have been watching/ listening to the rest of the world’s Expression around the Clock sessions (well at the least the ones that are in English) and during the train ride I have been editing together a bit of a Remix, come highlights package featuring some of my favorite bits.

There is an overwhelming amount of video and content at http://expressionevent.com, so here is my attempt to provide my highlight package! I apologise now that it is bias towards NZ and English content but you know what they say about context 😉

First of all thanks everyone for coming along and especially to August, Nas (who even invited me to do a remix of our session at the Zamdes group in Wellington), Isha, Che, Steve, Desna, Tash, Carlos, Paul, Ryan and Taryn for their participation at the Auckland event on the day. I have never seen so much verbatim on the feedback forms! Stef and Che were telling me that the content from the Auckland sessions dominated the next Shift staff meeting in Auckland!

Also quick thanks to Adele and Pamela from yMedia for supporting the event. I spoke at their UberSavvy event at Microsoft yesterday which was a lot of fun. I like what Pamela wrote on the yMedia site… “yes, microsoft apparently DO have a ‘creative’ department. and this conference really made me start to LOVE microsoft. like actually.”

So without further ado the remix video is linked from the picture below (1hr 8 mins) enjoy…


During Nas and my session we showed a bit of footage from the Dysto media guys and I have done a separate post on that stuff here.

Also I have encoded some of my favourite sessions (had to include my own 😉 as an audio file for you to listen to. I only got as far as making them into wmv but it should be easy to convert to mp3 for all you ipod lovers (I assume itunes does that for you when you drag the files in).

Canada – Bill Buxton – Design for the Wild: Sketching Experiences – Audio Download, Streamed Video
low res video

New Zealand – August de los Reyes – SuperEmotion: Making emotions work for you – Audio Download, Streamed Video

Milan – Richard Banks – Technology and trends for Homelife – Audio Download, Streamed Video

New Zealand – Panel Discussions – Merging Cultures – Audio Download, Streamed Video

Canada – Jon Lax – 1997 is Calling – They want their Workflow Back – Audio Download, Streamed Video

New Zealand – Me and Nas – Designing with Expression Blend – Audio Download, Streamed Video

Cairo – Panel Q&A – Audio Download, Streamed Video

Oh yeah and just for fun I uploaded to youtube a short piece pulling together the Designer Developer workflow piece that came through at the conference (HUGE thanks to you Carrie)

Enjoy!




Also I thought I’d link to the short “interviews” that Isha and Taryn conducted throughout the Auckland event, these are being served off Silverlight Streaming, great work guys!


Steve and Che
Nas and Isha – Morning Tea
Muffins
Tash
Isha, Nigel and Nas post Event
August
Carlos
Desna
Sean
Chan
Student Partner
Outside Comment
Comment outside
Provoke comment

Expression around the Clock – The inside story on the Dysto/ Vorb stuff

by | Oct 28, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

So where to start… In Nas and my session at Expression around the Clock I showed the vorb video editor



and the “How About It?” (video trailer).


We introduced this work a while back at the Web On The Piste conference in Queenstown.

We were looking for a bit more than a “hello world” for the conference so we hooked up with Intergen and the Wanaka/ Dunedin local Dysto boys to throw out some cool technology in the keynote and the ride on Silverlight session.

Tim and Chris showed with their kick ass camera, film and bike gear and gave us all an insight into how they tirelessly filmed “How About It?” over the last 18 months!


I shot this one of the boys at WOTP before the guys session with Tim’s sic 10.5mm f/2.8G


These boys have skills! and Tim’s other job is photographer/ videographer for NZ Snowboarder!


So what did we do? We mashed up Dysto with the award winning Vorb website and the Intergen team in Wellington to create a prototype of an in browser video editor that was designed as a concept to allow people to make their own “How About It?” trailer.

After sign off from the corp team I provided Intergen an early view of the “Top Banana” starter kit that Scott Guthrie promised during the MIX keynote in May. (Please don’t contact me for a copy of this starter kit, I’ve been assured by the guys working on preparing it that it is not far away but I don’t have the exact dates). The Intergen boys then invested time (maybe 2 man weeks) to pull it apart skin it with their designer and create a prototype version for this conference.

The thing that I found most interesting about this little project is that it is a real mashup of technologies used.

The guys shot video and edited it in Adobe Premier and After Effects, video was encoded for Silverlight using Expression Encoder. Vector elements for the editor were created in Adobe Illustrator and exported into Expression Blend where animation and interaction was added by the designer, code was written in Visual Studio 2008 using C# and deployed into a beta environment running on a PHP web site being served off Apache on Linux for testing. The end result viewable via Silverlight 1.1 to Windows and Mac users running an array of different browsers. NICE…

Minty from Nectarine was very impressed with Tim and Chris due to his history in film production… he couldn’t believe their attention to detail for shooting golden, digging out jumps and framing shots. He commented that the only way they could have composed things better and more slowly would have been by using “stop motion animation” then Chris pulled out his stop motion sequences using blocks outdoors to introduce the riders… classic!

Minty wrote in an email to me after the conference “Congrats on the support of those young guys and their bike movie. I was hugely impressed by their tenacity, smarts and flatout film skills (sure do well slamming down the side of a mountain on two wheels too!)”

Speaking of talent here is one of Minty’s animations that played during the second day keynote of the conference!


My sister (also a Wanaka local and a washed up pro snowboarder) linked me to the dysto guy’s work from the “The Chop Washed Up Cup” (to enter you have to be over 30 and Washed Up in the snowboard scene)… yes that is a Subaru WRX rally car jumping a 60ft’er! CRAZY!

TechEd 2007 Barcelona

TechEd 2007 Barcelona

by | Oct 26, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

This year will be my 3rd presence at TechEd, this time again in Barcelona. Apparently there’s almost 80 people coming from Portugal, which is more than last year. My personal focus will be on the “SOA and Business Process” and “Architecture” tracks.

People who didn’t yet attend one of these events tend to see almost as a vacation. The reality is that there’s in general very little free time, and you get back NEEDING vacation. There are also several side events, including the mandatory networking dinners: monday, the CSD Influencers; tuesday, the MVP’s; wednesday, the country dinner. The networking is one of the most valuable aspects of these conferences, as you get to meet the people you know only from blogs or the net.

This year there are no big news expected at TechEd, although I’d bet there will probably be some announcements. Either at Somasegar’s keynote, or at the GEN01 General session in the last day, which has a vague description and is the only session at that time slot.

To those using Vista, there’s a nice TechEd countdown gadget available here.

The only unfortunate thing is that Microsoft decided to stack up conferences: the SOA & Business Process Conference happens next week in Seattle (just check the speaker list), and TechEd right after that.  There will probably be sessions at SOA&BP that will not happen at TechEd because they’re back to back, which is unfortunate (and UNFAIR!).

See you in Barcelona.

Dallas and Houston BizTalk 2006 R2 Launch Events

by | Oct 26, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

If you attended either of the launch events in Dallas or Houston this week for BizTalk

2006 R2 and you’d like the slides for the content presented there, then

you can find those herewhich contains content from:

  • Dustin Hicks of Microsoft presenting an Overview of BizTalk 2006 R2

  • Tim Rayburn of Sogeti on BizTalk 2006 R2 and EDI/HIPAA transactions

  • Leigh Sperberg of Sogeti on the Enterprise Service Bus guidance

Unfortunately I do not currently have Jake’s deck on AmberPoint, but if I can get

a copy I’ll update this post.

SharePoint 2007 – Incoming Email

by | Oct 26, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

There are many little “gotchas” with setting up incoming email for MOSS.  Just nit picky little things, normally they are all about email infrastructure, SMTP, etc. My advice below is to help you avoid taking your heart medication, it can be easy to set this up, but it can also be a hair pulling, eye rolling, staying up all night and getting no results kind of affair as well.


I promise, this technology does actually work, but if you deviate from the standard build (see list item 3 below for “standard build” as defined by me) you will fall off a cliff unless really understand what you are doing.


I’m not an exchange guru, just a humble BizTalk/Moss guy.


Don’t just do this trial and error and play with settings until it works. It won’t work. Be deliberate and intentional, setup the standard way and then slowly change things, each time checking to see if the forwarding still works.


This is where I recommend you start, read all this stuff first, before you race off back to your Virtual Machines.



  1. Plan incoming e-mail (Office SharePoint Server) <link updated – August 2009>

  2. Configure incoming e-mail settings (Office SharePoint Server)<link updated – August 2009>

  3. In addition to the technet site, a very good place to start is


    1. How to configure email enabled lists in Moss2007 using Exchange 2003

    2. How to configure email enabled lists in Moss2007 using Exchange 2007

  4. Read these documents and set it up in a lab exactly as described until it works

  5. Now introduce incremental changes to the infrastructure and after each one, verify that email is still getting through, or not.

Gotchas and Advice



  1. Trust me, for the first run, just make the FQDN of the moss server (SMTP server) the same as the @domain that you are trying to send to

    Clarification
    AD domain = example.com,
    moss server name = MOSS2K7
    moss FQDN = MOSS2K7.example.com
    email domain = MOSS2K7.example.com
    example address = myemail@moss2k7.example.com



  2. Trust me, for the first run, start off by actually allowing MOSS to own an OU and manage it’s own contacts, don’t be a cowboy and hope to configure them manually on the first try.

  3. Just do everything the default way the first time, use a lab environment if you have to

  4. Use the OWA website on your lab email server (or a local instance of Outlook conntected to that server)  to send emails around, don’t try to hook-up external MX-Records and send from external emails.

  5. Keep and eye out for .eml files showing up in the Queue folder on the MOSS box. This is a sign that the SMTP server is forwarding them elsewhere and that is a sign that there is a fundamental problem with the email coming in.  Most likely the SMTP sever does not recognize that it is the utlimate destination for emails with that @domainname address.

 


If you try to read from the SMTP queue on the MOSS server, you will get

A critical error occurred while processing the incoming e-mail file C:\Inetpub\mailroot\Queue\NTFS_cab371a601c8166600000011.EML. The error was: The process cannot access the file ‘C:\Inetpub\mailroot\Queue\NTFS_cab371a601c8166600000011.EML’ because it is being used by another process..

The solution to this is “DON’T READ FROM THE QUEUE”. If the emails are in the SMTP queue on your Moss server then your email/smtp settings are probably messed up.  (Perhaps you did not take my advice on keeping the FQDN of the MOSS server the same as the @domain name that you are sending mail to?)

______________________

If you try to “drag and drop” from queue to the drop folder manually, you will get

A critical error occurred while processing the incoming e-mail file C:\Inetpub\mailroot\drop\NTFS_db489bee01c8166600000012.EML. The error was: Bad senders or recipients..

Don’t tell me, let me guess.  You copied the .eml files from the Queue folder to the Drop folder and then saw sharepoint delete them. Same point as above, If the emails are in the SMTP queue on your Moss server then your email/smtp settings are probably messed up.  (Perhaps you did not take my advice on keeping the FQDN of the MOSS server the same as the @domain name that you are sending mail to?)

_______________________

SharePoint 2007 – Incoming Email

by | Oct 26, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

There are many little “gotchas” with setting up incoming email for MOSS.  Just nit picky little things, normally they are all about email infrastructure, SMTP, etc. My advice below is to help you avoid taking your heart medication, it can be easy to set this up, but it can also be a hair pulling, eye rolling, staying up all night and getting no results kind of affair as well.


I promise, this technology does actually work, but if you deviate from the standard build (see list item 3 below for “standard build” as defined by me) you will fall off a cliff unless really understand what you are doing.


I’m not an exchange guru, just a humble BizTalk/Moss guy.


Don’t just do this trial and error and play with settings until it works. It won’t work. Be deliberate and intentional, setup the standard way and then slowly change things, each time checking to see if the forwarding still works.


This is where I recommend you start, read all this stuff first, before you race off back to your Virtual Machines.



  1. Plan incoming e-mail (Office SharePoint Server)

  2. Configure incoming e-mail settings (Office SharePoint Server)

  3. In addition to the technet site, a very good place to start is


    1. How to configure email enabled lists in Moss2007 using Exchange 2003

    2. How to configure email enabled lists in Moss2007 using Exchange 2007

  4. Read these documents and set it up in a lab exactly as described until it works

  5. Now introduce incremental changes to the infrastructure and after each one, verify that email is still getting through, or not.

Gotchas and Advice



  1. Trust me, for the first run, just make the FQDN of the moss server (SMTP server) the same as the @domain that you are trying to send to

    Clarification
    AD domain = example.com,
    moss server name = MOSS2K7
    moss FQDN = MOSS2K7.example.com
    email domain = MOSS2K7.example.com
    example address = myemail@moss2k7.example.com



  2. Trust me, for the first run, start off by actually allowing MOSS to own an OU and manage it’s own contacts, don’t be a cowboy and hope to configure them manually on the first try.

  3. Just do everything the default way the first time, use a lab environment if you have to

  4. Use the OWA website on your lab email server (or a local instance of Outlook conntected to that server)  to send emails around, don’t try to hook-up external MX-Recors and send from external emails.

  5. Keep and eye out for eml files showing up in the Queue folder on the MOSS box. This is a sign that the SMTP server is forwarding them elsewhere and that is a sign that there is a fundamental problem with the email coming in.  Most likely the SMTP sever does not recognize that it is the utlimate destination for emails with that @domainname address.

 


If you try to read from the SMTP queue on the MOSS server, you will get

A critical error occurred while processing the incoming e-mail file C:\Inetpub\mailroot\Queue\NTFS_cab371a601c8166600000011.EML. The error was: The process cannot access the file ‘C:\Inetpub\mailroot\Queue\NTFS_cab371a601c8166600000011.EML’ because it is being used by another process..

The solution to this is “DON’T READ FROM THE QUEUE”. If the emails are in the SMTP queue on your Moss server then your email/smtp settings are probably messed up.  (Perhaps you did not take my advice on keeping the FQDN of the MOSS server the same as the @domain name that you are sending mail to?)

______________________

If you try to “drag and drop” from queue to the drop folder manually, you will get

A critical error occurred while processing the incoming e-mail file C:\Inetpub\mailroot\drop\NTFS_db489bee01c8166600000012.EML. The error was: Bad senders or recipients..

Don’t tell me, let me guess.  You copied the .eml files from the Queue folder to the Drop folder and then saw sharepoint delete them. Same point as above, If the emails are in the SMTP queue on your Moss server then your email/smtp settings are probably messed up.  (Perhaps you did not take my advice on keeping the FQDN of the MOSS server the same as the @domain name that you are sending mail to?)

_______________________