by community-syndication | Apr 23, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Call to action – What parts of governance for SharePoint do you want to hear about? I’ll post new topics based on user requests. Just create requests by posting comments at the bottom of this blog. (request it again, even if others have already asked for it. Its kind of like voting and the most votes gets a post first)
This is the first of many rants on Governance. I’m definitely trying to socialize many facets of Governance with Customers and Partners. It is essential to success and (evidently) easily overlooked.
What is Governance?
Structured Control.
What if you don’t have any Governance?
You don’t have control.
Do you need Governance for a successful SharePoint installation?
YES!
What should be in a Governance Plan? (minimal list)
- Hosting model – Central IT or delegated to business units?
- Service model – Central service owners or delegated to business units?
- Taxonomy – What is the structure of the systems that SharePoint will implement? (formal division sites, mysites, collaboration spaces?)
- Architecture- Sizing, Capacity, Growth Strategy, Logical Architecture
- Operations – Who runs the infrastructure and what tools/processes to they have? What standards to they have to meet?
- Availability, DR, and Business Continuity –
- Service Management – SLA’s, monitoring, uptime, service tiers (commodity vs. customized applications)
- Provisioning – Central vs. Self Service. What can users do on their own? How can you create big picture policies while still allowing freedom and removing strain on IT departments and help desks?
- Information management policies – Retention, Disposal, Labeling, Bar coding, Auditing, Records Management, Rights Management
- Security Policies – Authentication providers, Remote users, External Users, etc.
- Finance Policies – Do you have a chargeback model? How is cost distributed
- Users – How do you support them? How do your garner adoption?
- Communication plan – What do you tell the organization? and when?
What if you don’t Govern?
- Site sprawl – sites proliferate like wildfire and you will be without ways to reign them in without upsetting users (who thought they had unlimited storage forever)
- Technology proliferation – Users don’t know where to put content so it ends up replicated all over file shares, public folders, etc.
- Server Proliferation – Groups are unwilling to consume centralized service so they install their own SharePoint (and probably do it poorly due to lack of budget/mandate/experience)
- Waste – Content and systems overlap and are needlessly redundant or repetitious wasting tons of money on hardware and software.
- Inconsistent – Everybody does things differently so everything from backups to site branding is all over the map. Creating a poor and ill managed user experience.
- Damage – “Home grown” SharePoint installations often lack the rigor of setting up data recovery or other essential items. This often leads to data loss or compromise
- Poor user adoption – If you don’t articulate how they should use it and how you will support them, user adoption will suffer.
What are the Goals of Governance? (no particular order)
- Drive Consistency
- Assigning responsibility to qualified parties (IT, Service Owner, etc.)
- Operational Excellence
- Mitigate conflict and provide a framework for Decision making
- Manage hardware and software assets strategically
- Set clear expectations of service with users
- Lower costs
- Reduce Risk
- Provide “Roadmap” for approach to intentionally and deliberately plan rollouts
Some Resources
by community-syndication | Apr 23, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
There is a great little post on this morning's IEBlog that talks about the (relatively) new Consolas font and how to enable it for use in a command prompt!
Here's an excerpt from the post…
Bryn Spears on the Internet Explorer team gave me the following simple instructions to turn on Consolas in the CMD Window:
reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Console\TrueTypeFont" /v 00 /d Consolas
logoff
Note: In Windows Vista, you need to run the reg command from an elevated command prompt.
When you log back in, Consolas will be an option in the “Command Prompt” Properties. (n.b., Bryn tells me it actually shows up before you relog, but it won’t work.)
You can install Consolas on your Windows system even if you don’t have Vista or Office 2007 with a free download from Microsoft.com
Being an old fart, I've really come to appreciate the little things in life, like a 22" wide-screen monitor and the new Consolas font in Visual Studio 2008.
Thanks to the IE team for explaining how to enable this in a command prompt!
Jeff
by community-syndication | Apr 23, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
BizTalk 2006 R3 was announced today! This answers the frequently recurring question
of “When will BizTalk live inside of Visual Studio 2008?”
Well, this release will make that happen…In addition, R3 will provide support
for Windows Server 2008 and Sql Server 2008. You can expect a release after
general availability of Sql Server 2008…
Like R2, this is a pretty incremental release. Steven
Martin indicates that releasing fresh bits is a better user experience than a
“large Service Pack”…well, at any rate, it always seems like a
good idea to avoid delivering new features in a service pack. Expected to see
some new (and updated) LOB, legacy, and database adapters – in addition to a
mobile RFID piece…
by community-syndication | Apr 23, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Steve Martin, director of product management for Microsoft’s Connected Systems Division (CSD), just announced their plans for the next version of BizTalk Server on his blog. It will be called BizTalk Server 2006 R3.
This new version will be updated to work with Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Visual Studio 2008. It will also be updated with the following SOA-related features:
- New web service registry capabilities with support for UDDI v3.0
- Enhanced service enablement of applications through new and enhanced adapters
- Enhanced service enablement of “edge” devices through BizTalk RFID Mobile
- Enhanced interoperability and connectivity support for B2B protocols (like SWIFT, EDI, etc)
- SOA patterns and best practices guidance to assist our customer’s implementations
From reading his blog, it doesn’t look like they’ll be adding official support for hosting WF workflows in this particular release. It looks like we may have to wait for that until Oslo.
by community-syndication | Apr 22, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Official news about the next release of BizTalk Server has been released on Steve Martins blog here with follow ups on the BizTalk Server Team Blog here and of course followed by other comments around the connected systems blogosphere. It's been expected…(read more)
by community-syndication | Apr 22, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
The SCOM 2007 BizTalk Management Pack has finally been released. The Management Pack is a complete rewrite and covers BizTalk 2006, BizTalk R2 as well as the new features of R2 including RFID and the EDI functionality. You can download the Management Pack here.
Also, If you were familiar with the Management Pack for MOM 2005 you will notice a number of changes. The biggest is the change to the alerting functionality. In SCOM you create subscriptions which will provide you with alerts for all of the events. If you are looking for the alerting functionality that MOM 2005 had (the ability to pick a rule and provide an alert based only on that rule) you can find a Powershell script on the Manageability Team Blog titled: OpsMgr 2007: Creating a subscription for future occurrences of an alert. The script takes two parameters; the RMS server address and e-mail address you want notifications sent to. After you follow the steps outlined you will see a specific notification for that problem and SCOM will send e-mails to the e-mail address you entered in the script.
by community-syndication | Apr 22, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Today in Steven Martin’s blog, we announced our plans to deliver BizTalk Server 2006 R3 to take advantage of the latest versions of 08 wave of products (Windows Server 2008, .Net framework 3.5, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008). This will enable us to continue to take advantage of the improvements in our latest platform releases. Furthermore, we will include additional investments in this release to deliver customer-requested capabilities in the following areas:
%u00b7 New web service registry capabilities with support for UDDI version 3.0
%u00b7 Service enablement of applications (through new and enhanced adapters for LOB applications, databases, and legacy/host systems)
%u00b7 Service enablement of “edge” devices through BizTalk RFID Mobile
%u00b7 Enhanced interoperability and connectivity support for industry protocols (such as SWIFT and EDI)
%u00b7 SOA patterns and practices guidance
We have also launched the BizTalk Server 2006 R3 TAP program. If you have any customers that would be interested in this program, please visit our Connect site to sign-up.
TAP Sign-up Instructions:
%u00b7 Please log on to Connect
%u00b7 Under Categories select Server
%u00b7 Look for BizTalk TAP Programs and select the “apply” link next to BizTalk Server 2006 R3
%u00b7 Download and complete the BizTalk Server 2006 R3 TAP Nomination form and click the select button
Regards,
Marjan Kalantar
by community-syndication | Apr 22, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
At the RFID Journal Live event, we announced launch of our BizTalk RFID Mobile TAP program.
BizTalk RFID Mobile is an RFID platform for Windows Mobile and CE. BizTalk RFID Mobile consists of a runtime engine, tools, and components to develop, deploy, and manage RFID solutions on mobile devices. In combination with BizTalk Server RFID, the mobility release provides a platform for real-time decision making. BizTalk RFID Mobile extends management and event processing to mobile devices and allows communication between the server and mobile platforms.
Media outlets covering the news include Ars Technica, CRN, CXO Today, eChannel Line, InformationWeek, Network World, Red Herring, Redmond Developer News, RFID Journal, RFID News, RFID Update, SD Times and VNUnet.
More information about this launch can be found at the following sites:
%u00b7 Keynote: http://www.youtube.com/biztalkrfid
%u00b7 Website: http://www.microsoft.com/rfid
%u00b7 Blogs: http://blogs.msdn.com/sudhir and http://blogs.msdn.com/biztalkrfid
%u00b7 Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/biztalkrfid/
%u00b7 Press Release: http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2008/apr08/04-17RealTimeRFIDPR.mspx
Regards,
Marjan Kalantar
by community-syndication | Apr 22, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Over the past few months we’ve seen an incredible wave of new platform products and technologies including Windows Server 2008, .NET Framework 3.5, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008. You may remember that in the past BizTalk Server has updated features to support the most recent platform releases. With BizTalk Server 2006 once the RTM versions of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 were released, we did final testing and sent a new version of BizTalk Server out the door.
Based on feedback from customers and partners, we are planning to do the same thing this time around to follow closely on the heels of this latest platform wave. Once SQL Server 2008 (the final of the three to be released) becomes generally available, we will follow with an updated version of BizTalk Server designed for the latest versions of Windows Server, the .NET Framework, Visual Studio, and SQL Server. This will mean that BizTalk Server customers will continue to take full advantage of the platform’s latest improvements including: scalability for mission-critical workloads, improved support for next-generation web and service oriented applications, improved virtualization support and better business insight through Office.
We are also taking the opportunity as part of this BizTalk Server release to deliver additional customer-requested capabilities for our core SOA infrastructure. We will give more updates on specific features in the coming months, but at a high level we are planning some new investments in the release that includes:
- New web service registry capabilities with support for UDDI (Universal Description Discovery and Integration) version 3.0
- Enhanced service enablement of applications (through new and enhanced adapters for LOB applications, databases, and legacy/host systems)
- Enhanced service enablement of “edge” devices through BizTalk RFID Mobile
- Enhanced interoperability and connectivity support for B2B protocols (like SWIFT, EDI, etc)
- SOA patterns and best practices guidance to assist our customer’s implementations
To ensure existing BTS applications continue to run without changes, we are taking an incremental approach and limiting the changes to the items listed above. Because this release build on existing bits, the name of this release will be BizTalk Server 2006 R3. Refreshing the bits (instead of applying a large Service Pack) provides for the best update experience. You should expect to see a CTP of BizTalk Server 2006 R3 later this year (with an RTM planned in H1 CY09).
Stay tuned for an update in the coming weeks! See you @ TechEd.
by community-syndication | Apr 22, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Today, Steve Martin announced a few details about the next version of BizTalk that will be available in early 2009. Called BizTalk Server 2006 R3, this amounts to an incremental release of the product that does NOT correspond to the Oslo wave. The “headline” for this release is compatibility with the latest version of the […]
