Adventures in home working

After you have ready my posts on Office 12 and SPS,  you might like to double check the new features by reading this excellent summary!

One of my friends (Simon) who doesn’t have a blog sent me this article which I though would be a really great post on using text to speech software….

Wondering whether to deploy office 12 beta to some of your users,  this is Microsoft’s current plan:

• Dogfood 4,  the version being demonstrated to partners at the beginning of August – 100 people in Microsoft
• Dogfood 4 plus patch, the version I think will be available at the time of the PDC in September – 2,500 users
• Beta 1, 7,500 users
• Beta 2 – Phase 1 – 20,000 users
• Beta 2 – Phase 2 – 30,000 users
• Beta 2 – Technology refresh – 50,000 users
• RTM – 70,000 users

These are a sample of statistics about SharePoint deployment in Microsoft, version 2

• Biggest deployment anywhere
• 4 Farms
• 115 servers
• 6 Million documents (not many)
• 6 tera-bytes of data (its not a file system replacement!)
• 90,000 sites – including personal sites

The main themes are:

• Easier to get started
• Adapt to your needs
• Easy to share
• Easy to manage

It’s interesting that none of these seem to address the biggest issue I see which Access usage in the corporate environment which is a concern over the following:

• Data silos being created outside of the companies main applications and databases
• Business logic being captured in departmental systems
• Individuals frittering time away creating local databases
• Interconnects being created between corporate data systems that are unknown to the data owners and architects

However I was most impressed by the fact that in this version of Access less focus seems to have been given to the addition of new features and more focus to the achievement of real business scenarios, in fact this is a trend I noticed throughout all of the Office teams.  One example of this is the creation of 30+ template applications, these applications are real functional applications and it is clear that by creating these the Access team have identified many functionality gaps that people face when trying to use Access in the wild.  Many of these gaps involve workarounds or local code being developed many thousands of times over.  This time the Access team will hopefully solve these sort of gaps at source.  The template applications focus on the following types of activity:

• Event management
• Contact management
• Issue management
• Task management
• Project management
• ….

Generically Microsoft seems to describe this area of focus as “tracking” applications.

One of the best features in Access 12 is data collection via email.  This allows HTML or Infopath forms to be distributed via email to users and the resulting data to be entered into Access when the email reply is received in Outlook 12.  This is pretty nice for ad-hoc internal and external data collection scenarios that would have previously been achieved using free text data collection and re-keying.

Core database engine improvements:

• A new database engine has been developed, that supports the same capabilities that are exposed in SharePoint lists.  This is the default database engine,  although jet is still supported but without the following capabilities:
• Multi-value fields
• Append only fields (great for change logs)
• Attachments fields (attachments are compressed and stored in the database file)

Access can now read and write to the Excel XML data format

The following useful snipits were revealed about how people work with, get access to, create data:

• Employees get between 50 and 75% of all of their data from other people
• 80% of all data is personal
• Most knowledge is still retained in peoples heads, despite a decade of “knowledge management” initiatives most of which failed

Integration with SharePoint is a big theme in Access 12,  here are some of the integration points I noticed:

• There is a new “data less” file format that can be published on SharePoint that only contains links to external tables, query definitions, report definitions etc.  Using this file format allows Access to be “launched” from SharePoint and then used to access SharePoint list data
• Access provides rich joins, queries, forms and reports that can act on SharePoint data
• Access allows bi-direction off-line working against SharePoint data
• Access allows bulk update operations against SharePoint data (this is powerful and worrying as I don’t believe any special permissions are required for Access to SharePoint via the Access client, rather than the web client)
• When taking SharePoint data off-line it’s possible to take a list and automatically all linked lists as well, to edit these off-line with validation still applied and then to sync changes back.
• Access views and reports can show up as views in SharePoint, when you click on them Access will open
• Access database tables can be stored on SharePoint and maintained as SharePoint lists but can also be accessed using Access at the same time
• Workflow tasks can be initiated or completed via Access

The following data types are supported:

• Text, single line, multi-line and rich text
• Choice single and multi-value
• Number, currency, date, time
• lookups, single, multi-value
• Booleans
• Hyperlinks
• Attachments
• Append only fields
• Folders in lists

My overall impression is that corporates concerns over Access will grow as it provides so much power to end users at the edge to get access to corporate data and to manipulate it in uncontrolled ways.  That said in the right hands, it provides very powerful tools to manipulate SharePoint data in an efficient way, to create insights from that data that would otherwise be impossible and to undertake bulk operations that will keep the data “tidy”.  With the increase in structured data that will reside in SharePoint via promotion from Office documents and InfoPath this will be of even greater benefit.

There are lots of changes to the data storage services in SharePoint 3, ie Office 12 System, these are the ones I noticed:

• Everything in WSS now seems to be built on the list type,  this is really important as it means that all of the services and UI created for lists can now be leveraged everywhere in WSS
• Wide lists, lists in SharePoint 2 used to be limited to 60 columns, they are now unlimited
• All types of list now support folders
• Folders can now have properties
• Custom columns can now be indexed,  this is useful because it allows views to be created to aid in the navigation of large lists,  Microsoft recommend that although lists can have millions of entries,  views are used to trim these large lists down to less than 2000 items when presented for visualisation in the UI
• Ability to create cross list queries, for example this capability is used to query across all of the lists on a site to find “my documents” and “my tasks”
• Support for bulk uploading
• If items are bulk uploaded without mandatory properties being populated, these items will be left in the checked out state.  When documents are checked in you will be prompted to enter the mandatory properties
• Content types can be defined, which can then be used/reused when you create custom columns.  These are defined at site level.  if custom content types are created based on these optionally they can inherit changes made to their parents

Administration:

• Administration is generally simpler and more consistent
• The UI is more extensible by third party applications,  the standard UI no longer needs to be replaced in order to be extended
• The Admin UI supports more delegation of administration

Extranet:

• Much improved support for Extranet deployment
• Improved resource management
• Ability to isolate different customers environments deployed on the same system
• Reverse proxy support, via web front ends in the DMZ with application servers and database servers in the Intranet,  Intranet facing web front ends can also be deployed in the Intranet
• Pluggable authentication providers

Three tier model:

• Web front ends, stateless, can be in Intranet or DMZ or both
• Application servers, for example, Excel Server, Index server, Search server, Project server etc
• Database server
• All of the above can be deployed on the same server for small environments or functional testing
• SSL between web front ends and application servers

All Project Server functions are exposed as a set of web services.  Just like Office Client interacts with WSS,  Project Professionals integration with Project Server as also completely achieved via these web services,  which means other clients or server solutions can also be integrated using these web service interfaces.

These are some notes from the demo:

• All project data is cached.  Project only interacts with the cache,  the cache handles all interactions with the server.  I have a concern in that how is the project manager confident that all changes that they have made have been uploaded from the cache to the server before they – for example – shut down their laptop to leave the office.
• The project plan is no longer immediately published to the server every time it is saved,  ie uploading to the server is under the project managers control
• With this version project server is built on top of native WSS v3,  not the special version of WSS that was used with Project server v2.
• Team members no longer need to download an Active X control – YES!!
• The team members web view is just a standard web part that can be added to for example a person mySite
• Team member updates can be submitted via the web.  The project manager can review, preview and accept then from the web interface, ie he doesn’t need to use Project Professional to execute the plan,  only to change it.
• The project manager can optionally set the plan to accept auto-approval of team member updates, these also get queued for acceptance if the plan is checked out.  Once it gets checked in the team member updates get applied.

Key scenarios for Project 12, managing programmes:

• When you create a new activity in Project Server, you can create a Project in Project Pro,  define some maintenance activities or define a proposal
• When you get started with a new programme you can create a Project server workspace and start to capture high level meta-data about the project and high level commitments and dates that define the overall scope and time-line for the project
• a resource plan can also be created in project server,  this shows the number of resources with specific role types that are going to be required over time.  I have always done this in Excel and think I would continue to do so as the Project 12 function is very simplistic.  Anyway if you do use it you can get simple resource profile graphs
• Only once the project gets going is it necessary to start working in project professional
• Commitments defined in project server can be used to model dependencies between different projects in a programme.  When commitment dates change the project manager gets notified that a commitment he depends on has changed,  but his project does not just automatically change.
• visual studio is integrated with project server,  the tasks from project server can be imported into project server.  As tasks get completed in project server he can automatically update project server with the new task status
• the project server home page for a project can act as a rich dashboard integrating lots of different web parts, some derived from project server and some from other systems, for example bug report tracking from Excel server
• a web based time sheet application is available to allow team members to book their time on a collection of different projects
• the time sheet data can be reported on, typical reports are analysis of time spent planned and un-planned, billable not billable, variance from plan, actual work, remaining work
• higher level roll-ups are also available that allow costs to be analysed
• project server will have a very comprehensive MOM pack,  this will be an issue for anyone who doesn’t have MOM,  as more and more Microsoft application servers begin to depend on it.

I use OneNote now and then and have never really become convinced about its utility as a universal Note Taking solution,  for the following main reasons:

• Layout controls are limited
• Nervousness about use on two or more machines
• Difficulty sharing notes with other people who don’t use OneNote

I am not sure these issues are solved for me by the next version,  however here they are make up your own mind:

• Support for multiple Notebooks
• Drag and drop everywhere, (re-arranging your notebook used to be much more complicated via menu options)
• OCR of images pasted into OneNote, the demo’s of this were good,  for example taking a photo of a business card and then importing into OneNote,  it was then possible to find a person via the OCR of the text on the business card.  Even better the text that matched on the business card was highlighted!
• A SmartPhone (windows) client was available that allowed content to be captured and uploaded to OneNote.  The main use I saw for this was to upload images from your camera phone that would then be OCRed and available for searching
• Support for multi-user editing without locks,  ie you could store a file on a file share and multiple people could edit the file concurrently,  this was pretty impressive
• Improved integration with Outlook, for example the ability to link OneNote content to Outlook contacts
• Automatic off-line working,  I think this means (don’t remember the details) that OneNote has an Outlook 2003 like Offline working experience
• 2 way synchronisation with Outlook tasks
• Very easy to construct tables, just using tabs
• Drawing tools,  but I don’t think these included automatic shape recognition
• Lasso select – like Journal
• Faster searching

FrontPage investments

• professional web design
• SharePoint no-code applications
• great integration with the rest of the Microsoft web authoring platform

Front page has made big improvements in compliance with web standards

Dataview web part, used to integrate diverse data sources and present them through SharePoint

• WYSIWYG design experience
• conditional formatting
• static and ad-hoc sorting filtering and grouping
• integrate data from SQL server, OLEDB, XML, SOAP, server scripts, RSS, business data catalogue and combine them into single views
• integration with all the different types of lists in SharePoint
• the demonstrations showed very simple creation of views and forms from tables and joined tables without any code

Workflow

• rule based designer for no code workflows
• composes workflows from pre-existing workflow components and custom actions
• workflows modelled as events, conditions and actions
• workflows are associated with specific lists,  I think this means not with a template,  ie the association is with a specific provisioned instance of a list
• rapid application development and deployment
• positioned for minor variations to the simple standard workflows
• visual studio is for complex workflows

example workflow actions

• assign a custom task
• send an email
• create, update or delete a list item
• collect feedback
• send for approval
• wait for a timer
• wait for a data change
• custom actions can be written and installed on the SharePoint server, the front page client can they see this and include it in new workflows
• more actions are being developed

Workflow demo, key points:

• first it seems a real shame that the workflow designer is not a web application that is provided as part of WSS itself, rather than the overly complex FrontPage which many enterprises will not want users to go anywhere near
• all of the workflow capabilities that you expect would be there for simple workflows,  particularly nice is the way to extract data from other WSS lists, or AD queries based on condition data that is extracted from the current list item that the workflow is acting on
• to build more complex workflows though I can image a rats nest of additional list items being created and then further workflows acting on them etc. 
• as with all of these extensions that you would expect to be implemented many thousands of times,  there is always a concern that upgrades might break them, or at least they create a significant testing burden.