SharePoint 2007 Training Material Roadmap

by | Oct 16, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

 


This blog posting is a page designed to support basic feedback and management for the Training Material Roadmap that I created for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007).


(Oct 16 2007) – Training Document Now Released!
Word Document Version – Click Here
WebPage Version (Limited Formatting) – Click Here


You may use this page to:



  1. Obtain a copy of the roadmap document (not the accompanying DVD) – click here for doc version!
  2. Request additional references for particular topics
  3. Get links to supplemental blog postings


    1. Click here for webcasts for Business Decision Makers, Technical Decision Makers, and Architects

  4. Provide feedback or suggestions regarding future iterations of the roadmap

I welcome your feedback and criticism for how the materials have been organized in the roadmap.  I would like to help you navigate the massive topic of SharePoint 2007 technologies and nobody can give me more insight into your training and rampup needs than you.

Lee leaves us with a secret in BizTalk 2006 R2

by | Oct 16, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

http://blogs.msdn.com/biztalk_core_engine/archive/2007/03/31/hidden-gem-in-biztalk-2006-r2.aspx

The instances table in the msgbox has a newly added column (in R2 only) to that shows
the shape on where the Orch is blocked on.

So if there’s a stack of Dehydrated Orchs in your system, you know what they are waiting
on rather than use Orch Debugger.

Thanks Lee, you’ll be missed!

Mick.

BizTalk RFID RTM hits…and your beloved DLP device provider’s wheels fall off….

BizTalk RFID RTM hits…and your beloved DLP device provider’s wheels fall off….

by | Oct 15, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

You’ve been working away playing with the great DLP devices, reading tags and making
things go ‘beep’.

BizTalk RFID RTM-ed not too long ago (Sept 14th was public release) and with that, your
DLP provider needs to be updated – last time, I promise.

To save you the pain, Scotty and
I have been through this for you and provided the DLP
BizTalk RFID Provider assemblies for your pleasure (or is that leisure?)

Scotty is a man of many words and he explains the ‘Way of the Peaceful warriors’ path
that must be walked to achieve the goal.

Enjoy guys – I’ll be letting you in on some big announcements soon…..(I’m not pregnant! smile_regular)

Mick.

How not to do product innovation…an Open Letter to Gillette

How not to do product innovation…an Open Letter to Gillette

by | Oct 15, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Dear Gillette Corporation,

You got me. I’ll buy your products till I die. I shave everyday. I use your products every day and I have no desire to switch to a competitor product. But can you please stop with the intelligence insulting marketing???

I’m 29 years old. I’ve been buying your shaving products for 16 years. In that time I’ve seen all your product iterations, and I’ve observed all your marketing campaigns. In that time, the razor product HAS NOT CHANGED at all. At least not in ways that normal people care about. Its still a stick with metal strips on the end. One of the least interesting consumable items people use daily. But for some reason, you’re continuously trying to tell me how the new improved model is better and more exciting. Bollocks! Changing the number of metal strips in a razor IS NOT INNOVATION. Oh now it has four! Oh look a new innovation: 5 strips. Now it has 3 strips. Stop! Just stop already. Nobody cares! From what I can tell, you absolutely nailed this product category back in early 90s (maybe even earlier, but I wasn’t paying attention back then). Why do you continue to add and subtract metal strips 15 years later. Why? What conceivable value is there in iterating so often? You’re not selling computers. Razor technology is not powering forward in giant leaps and bounds: its a stick and and some metal strips!

Just once, I’d like to go the supermarket and see your product packaging that says something like “Gillette Razor – The same as it was last year”. I’d buy that and be satisfied for 2 reasons. One, I’d know what I was getting. My razor worked fine last year, so it will work fine this year. Two, I won’t need to be anxious that the metal strips won’t match my stick. See that’s the other thing that annoys me about your so called product innovations: You keep changing the connectors between the stick and the metal strips. Is that really necessary? I’m assuming good faith here of course. You would never maliciously stop selling one type of metal strips so you could force your customers to spend another $15 on a new stick would you? Just stop with the changing connectors. Standardise on one, make them interchangeable and then stop “innovating”. And just so you know, I hedge against you changing the connectors too often. When I buy the metal strips, I stockpile them. Sometimes as much as 24 months worth. That’s right! You heard me, I’m your worst nightmare. I stockpile so that I know that if you change the connector I wont be left high and dry like I was back when I was a broke uni student.

What’s with the marketing? I mean seriously, a jet plane? What marketing genius had the chutzpah to go from razor to mach3-jet plane? Its a STICK and some METAL STRIPS!

Jet plane: exciting, interesting, fast, expensive. Razor: boring, slow, completely and utterly mundane, expensive. At least you totally got it right on the expensive bit eh?

Heres what I think you should do. 1. Standardise the connectors. 2. Decide on the ultimate razor. 3. Call it the “Gillette Razor”. 4. Redeploy all the materials scientists to important projects and sack all the marketing people. You won’t need them when you’re only marketing message is “Gillette Razor: Still as good as it was last year and the year before that”. When I say “important projects” I don’t mean other personal grooming products and all that meaningless crap. I’m talking about, you know, things like an unbreakable hand crank mobile phone for the developing world. Or, energy efficient water purification systems that can be deployed in situ next to wells in African villages. There is an endless list of products out there to be invented and improved that could materially impact the quality of life (and the length of life) of the poorest half of the worlds population but all the worlds scientists are busying adding and subtracting metal strips.

When I say, stop “innovating”, I don’t mean stop completely, I mean just do it periodically. Like once a decade or so. You could get a couple of materials scientists and check to see if anything has changed with plastics and metals in the intervening 10 years. If there has been some improvements you should incorporate them in the Gillette Razor, and then move on.

Sincerely, Your loyal customer,

Mark

Blog readers: next weeks off-topic posting will be entitled “Why I hate all the toothpaste companies for making me choose between 84 different kinds of toothpaste”

Dynamics AX 4.0 Adapter for BizTalk Server 2006 – Message Context Properties

by | Oct 15, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

This is the third in a series of eight articles reviewing my experiences with the Dynamics AX 4.0 Adapter for BizTalk Server 2006.  This articles reviews the message context information that is required in order for Dynamics AX 4.0 to accept an inbound message.


The Dynamics AX 4.0 interface specification indicates that the actual inbound message that Dynamics AX 4.0 receives is an envelope, which contains a header and a body.  The header of the message contains five attributes, as listed below.    The body contains the actual contents of the message. 



Header Attributes
  – MessageId 
  – Action
  – SourceEndPoint
  – DestinationEndpoint
  – DestinationEndpointUser


The Dynamics AX 4.0 adapter for BizTalk Server 2006 hides the envelope implementation from the BizTalk Server solution by exposing the five attributes listed above as promoted properties.   When sending a message to Dynamics AX 4.0, the five context properties must be set.   Dynamics AX 4.0 will reject a message where any of the five properties are not initialized.   The list below shows the five properties and how each property should be set.



MessageId –  GUID with surrounding swiggly brackets “{}”
Action – Name of the action as defined in the AIF (CreateCustomer, Create Order, etc)
SourceEndPoint –  Name of the end point defined in AIF
DestinationEndpoint –  Name of the destination end point as defined in AIF
DestinationEndpointUser –  The fully qualified login that should be used to access the destination endpoint.  Should be defined in the AIF.  Usually the BizTalk Service account.


The context properties in the Dynamics AX 4.0 message may be set in one of three ways


1. By either assigning the context properties in the Message Assign shape in an orchestration, 2. By indirectly assigning the properties in a canonical messages that is associated with the Dynamics AX Property Schema and performing a mapping from the canonical format to the Dynamics AX 4.0 format within a send pipeline
3. By implementing a custom pipeline component to set and promote all five properties.


In my implementation, the actions, the SourceEndPoint, and the Destination EndPoint settings were stored in a custom section in the BizTalk Server configuration file.  Other options includes storing the data in a database or in the SSO configuration store.

Would you buy a car without an engine temperature sensor?

Would you buy a car without an engine temperature sensor?

by | Oct 14, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Lets say you were looking to buy a new car. You visit a car dealer to look at your options. You tell the sales guy the type of car you’re after and he directs you to a red one. You like red so you open the door and sit behind the wheel. As you cast your eye over the interior your intelligent brain registers an incongruence. THERES NO DASHBOARD! The steering wheel, gear shift, pedals are all there, the things looks like a car should except there are no gauges, dials, or dash lights. In a state of confusion you turn to the sales guy and blurt out “what the hell?” The sales guy smirks at you, puts his hand on his chin in a thoughtful pose and says “We ran out of budget when we were engineering this model of car, so we went into production without the usual dashboard”. “But how would I know if the engine is overheating and about to cook itself?” The sales guys shrugs. “What about oil pressure. Surely you have a sensor for that?” The sales guys shrugs again.

In a state of disbelief, you quickly decide to put some distance between yourself and such an misconceived infernal machine just incase its evilness somehow infects you while in close proximity.

So obviously no car manufacturer would do such a bizarre thing, but how is then that sometimes, people put a complicated piece of server software (such as BizTalk) into production without the ability to see what’s going on “under the hood”? It, of course, depends on how critical the application is, but if you know it will cost $$$ if your application is down, you need a good level of application level monitoring.

What I see quite often is customers who have OS level monitoring of the BizTalk boxes. This is typically a product like Tivoli or BMC Patrol. Maybe they have configured their OS monitoring tool to monitor whether the BizTalk host process is in the started state or not. That is about the equivalent of having a light on the dashboard of your car telling you if the engine is running or not. Not very helpful. (But I might add, it is better than nothing at all).

The problem with OS level monitoring is that none of these tools have visibility into the health, stability or performance of the application level (BizTalk) processes. As we know, BizTalk is a complicated beast. There is a lot going on under the hood. Don’t you think it makes sense to have maximum knowledge of what’s going on so you can fix problems before they become critical? Isn’t that why we have engine diagnostics in our cars these days?

Take a look at the BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Microsoft Operations Manager Management Pack list of contents. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-au/library/aa561939.aspx. Isn’t that the kind of list that you’d really want to have monitored for your production application?

Here’s how it is: OS level monitoring is not enough. If you care at all about best practices you need to know what’s going on in BizTalk. The more visibility you have the better prepared you will be for the production down critical situations. The only product that does this out of the box is Microsoft Operations Manager 2005/System Center Operations Manager 2007 with the BizTalk management pack.

For more information on this topic, go here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-au/library/aa577973.aspx

Mark

Something to experience – which way does she go?

by | Oct 14, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Which
one are you??

 

This
is cool-have some one watch this with you-you may see her spin one way and the other
person may see her spin the other way……or….look away and look back and she may
change direction….

Scroll
down to make heads or tails out of this……

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If clockwise,
then you use more of the right side of your brain.

If anti-clockwise,
then you use more of the left side of your brain.

 

It
is possible to focus and change the direction of the dancer; see if you can do it.

LEFT
BRAIN FUNCTIONS

RIGHT
BRAIN FUNCTIONS

uses
logic

uses
feeling

detail
oriented

“big
picture” oriented

facts
rule

imagination
rules

words
and language

symbols
and images

present
and past

present
and future

math
and science

philosophy
& religion

can
comprehend

can
“get it” (i.e. meaning)

knowing

believes

acknowledges

appreciates

order/pattern
perception

Spatial
perception

knows
object name

Knows
object function

reality
based

fantasy
based

forms
strategies

presents
possibilities

practical

impetuous

safe

risk
taking