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A girlfriend of mine called me up this weekend looking for a DVD copy of an older piece of software. She was rebuilding a computer for a family member who had the product key but no installation media. I’m sure many of you have similar stories trying to fix or repair computers for your family and friends.
One of the nice things about using software online or “in the cloud” so to speak is that if your computer goes belly up and you need to rebuild it, the software will be there waiting for you, as soon as you can get computer back online.
For businesses, using online services can give you greater flexibility to pursue projects or try out ideas without having large upfront costs as well as providing foundational IT infrastructure without investing in your own data center.
While a post I wrote a little while ago outlined the basics of traditional software licensing, I figured I should follow up with how to license software in the cloud since online software subscriptions are becoming more prevalent. This short video does a good job at laying things out – like why you’d want to consider using online services and some of the advantages and cost-savings of licensing software this way:
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Microsoft has several online services: Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, Windows Azure Platform, Windows Intune and others. Each service can be purchased through a volume licensing agreement or the Microsoft Online Subscription Program and then activated and managed managed through web portals:
One day I’d love there to just be one portal to manage all your online subscriptions (kind of like one ring to rule them all but much less evil) but consolidation takes time and so I make no promises but I trust this is the direction our Online Services folk are heading.
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As part of EnergizeIT 2010 we have partnered with RunAs Radio to produce some podcasts on Office 2010. The first podcast of this 4 part series was posted yesterday. If you don’t already subscribe to RunAs Radio I encourage you to do so. It is a great podcast aimed directly at IT professionals. ------------------------- In this episode Richard and Greg talk to Robert Crane from the Computer Information Agency in Sydney Australia about SharePoint 2010. The show digs into the issues that companies face when using SharePoint without careful governance to manage their data well. Check out Microsoft's Sharepoint Governance Resource Center for more information.
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The other day this blog entry came through my RSS reader and got me thinking. Security technologist and author Bruce Schneier wrote a post called Is Antivirus Dead? He summarized his post with “Bottom line: antivirus software is neither necessary nor sufficient for security, but it's still a good idea. It's not a panacea that magically makes you safe, nor is it is obsolete in the face of current threats. As countermeasures go, it's cheap, it's easy, and it's effective. I haven't dumped my antivirus program, and I have no intention of doing so anytime soon.” Reading the rest of the article, as well as some of his other articles you see that he believes in the security onion approach. 
Well more often referred to as a layered approach to security it is your best bet when looking at how to protect your organization, your home, really anything you want to secure. That is why we implement password policies, firewalls, access control lists, as well as other layers of security, including anti-virus. No single tool, policy or resource will protect you, but combined they offer a solution. That is why you see most leading anti-virus applications, like Microsoft Forefront use multiple scanning engines. While vendor X might be first out the door with signatures for today’s virus, vendor Y might be first tomorrow and vendor Z the day after. By utilizing the scanning engines from all three vendors you’d always be up to date and protected. If you are using Microsoft Forefront there is some important news you need to know! Microsoft is revising its engine mix on Dec. 1, 2009 for the Forefront and Antigen products. This change will allow customers to utilize a set of engines that help optimize detection, while also allowing us to invest in new areas for increasing overall protection for customers. The AhnLab, CA, and Sophos engines will be retired on Dec. 1, 2009. After December 1st, customers will not receive any updates for these retired engines. In order to make sure your Antigen and Forefront products continue to scan efficiently and effectively for malware, any customers running the AhnLab, CA, or Sophos engines must DISABLE these engines before Dec. 1, 2009 and select from the new set of five engines – Authentium, Kaspersky, Microsoft, Norman, and VirusBuster. There are a lot more changes coming with the ForeFront Suite of anti-virus and anti-spam tools and if you are running any of them please check out this blog post from the Forefront team! 
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This week was a busy one not only because of the fact that Windows 7and Windows Server 2008 R2 hit the streets, but also because many details surrounding Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 were announced at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas which just ended. Many of you that attended TechDays in Toronto and Vancouver have asked me questions about SharePoint 2010 and what some of the new features will be, and, to be quite honest, I did not have a good answer as I was not privy to many of the details. This Monday, at the Microsoft Mississauga office you can learn about SharePoint 2010 at the inaugural meeting of the Mississauga SharePoint User Group. Rob Windsor from ObjectSharp will take you through what’s new in SharePoint 2010. The session will provide an overview of the product with a particular focus on what’s new for developers. You will learn about the new designers, explorers and templates and overall developer experience for SharePoint 2010. Along the way you’ll see several of the enhancements to the end-user experience including the ribbon, in-place editing, and the new page and dialog interface model. To register for the event, please go to https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=142514.
Damir 
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 Office 2007 Service Pack 2 was released today and aside from rolling up all the hotfixes released since SP1 there are some additional changes provided by this update. There are three key changes in Office 2007 with SP2.
- Interoperability – Office 2007 SP2 adds support for read, write and save capabilities for the ODF 1.1 file format. There is a great blog post on Working with ODF in Office 2007 SP2 you should check out, as well as these resources for more specific information on what Word, Excel and PowerPoint support.
Performance – Office 2007 SP2 also adds increased performance and reliability to Office client applications and servers. Outlook 2007 SP2 as an example, includes improved calendaring reliability and performance enhancements which has been a pain for users and administrators. I’ve noticed a significant improvement in performance since I installed SP2. Converter API – Office 2007 SP2 adds a new API, called the Converter API, which will allow Office developers to include support and conversion options for the ODF 1.1 file format in their Office add-ons and applications. The Office Sustained Engineering blog has a list of all the changes to the Office client applications and servers posted on their blog but I pulled out a few I think will be of interest to most.. - Save as PDF or XPS add-in has been built in to SP2
- Outlook startup, shutdown, view rendering, and folder switching performance has been improved
- WSS and SharePoint add support for FireFox 2.x and 3.x
Office 2007 SP2 will support Vista SP2, Windows Server 2008 SP2, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 once they are released as well. For more information on Office 2007 SP2 please see the following links: 
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Project: K-12 Network Overhaul The Challenge Describe the situation, challenge or problem you or your team faced. A private K-12 school was running on a Windows Server 2000 network with an infrastructure that had been neglected and was falling apart. Viruses, spyware, 10mb hubs, and lack of backups plagued the system. The schools data was at risk. The old server (P4 1.6 white box workstation) had bad sector and disk write errors filling the event log every 30 minutes. Users had almost full rights, and there was no internet filtering. Teacher data was accessible to students due to poor security. The school only receives partial funding from the government, and had minimal budget for IT, so I and a few others volunteered to do a comprehensive analysis on the computer systems. Recommendations turned into implementation plans and I ended up the project lead and primary implementer. The Solution Describe how your solution helped overcome the challenge. Tell us about the innovative ways you used technology to create this solution.
What obstacles or roadblocks were overcome? Is the solution reusable elsewhere? Be specific! I replaced the whole domain and file system with multiple Windows 2008 servers running virtualized on a Dell 2900. We made heavy use of GPO's, folder redirection, automation, and role based access control. Utilizing a product called USBDLM combined with software restriction policies, we were able to restrict usage of USB flash drives. Automated scripts were setup to create AD accounts, profiles, and group memberships based on user data from the enrollment system. Utilizing MDT with WDS we built HW independent desktop image (that took some digging!). Windows Server Backup was utilized along with Symantec to backup all data to one tape. A Barracuda AD integrated web filter system protects kids/teachers on the web. 150+ hours of my time later, it was done. The Results What positive impact did your solution have in the workplace, the community, or at home? The school immediately benefited from increased stability, security, and sustainability. We were pleased by very thankful teachers, administration, and school society. Some unhappy students (no more games!). Protection from spyware, malware and pornography/violence on the web ensures compliance with government policies and confident parents. A solid backup solution for servers and administration PC's has released nerves and tension about data loss. Users were very excited with Office 2007, and other software upgrades. Other Information Feel free to let the community know about any interesting or humorous tidbits you feel will add to your submission. In the analysis report, I made a note that the current server room was very dusty and that the old backup tapes were not standing upright. This got a laugh at the school board presentation, as it was a random tidbit between things like: Drive's failing, and Impending failure. While fine tuning the software restriction policies, I wanted to prevent users from storing executables in various profile locations. Not realizing that .lnk (shortcut) was in the default executable policy, I ended up with students not being able to launch Word from their start menus. Oops! The big highlight was creating a custom policy and profile for a student with visual (among other) impairments. When the student logged on the new system the first time. he was so excited, and it made all the hours feel worth it. Products Used To help the community understand the scope of your project, please select the technologies utilized. Windows/Web Client Web Technologies Collaboration Management Platform Security Systems 2008 Server, IIS7, FSRM, WDS, WSUS, MDT Submission Hyperlink http://www.microsoft.com/canada/igniteit-awards/view_submissiondetails.aspx?id=236
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Project: Elderly (Alzheimer) mental fitness The Challenge Describe the situation, challenge or problem you or your team faced. My mother have major stroke major, leave her right side of body total unmovable. She needs total care. I see my mom can feels and think except she can't move. Then I wonder how good her consciousness? I asked neurologist how medical/psychology to measure our consciousness . She said no real magic number or chart to define our consciousness, even in if MRI couldn't tell; instead of ask her what is your name, where you are .. etc. The worst moment come, she is not using her brain and getting worst when months. no medicine yet can slow down. mental deteriorate. I felt terrible and knowing my mother can still feel and see. Now, but she just sit slowly sad and wait her brain cell slowly die away. The Solution Describe how your solution helped overcome the challenge. Tell us about the innovative ways you used technology to create this solution.
What obstacles or roadblocks were overcome? Is the solution reusable elsewhere? Be specific! (1)Neuroplascity and CTI concept, exercise/use it or loss it. (2)Get her brain exercise and find magic number(baseline)! Same concept medical professional to measure our body and and blood pressure in the hospital, they take daily measure and average out. for my mental exercise, it takes 30-40 counts or a week counts, to have Mental Cognitive Index as baseline. These magic number can be used as guideline to measure her mental performance. This mental exercise is focus on memory, attention and spatial vision in our brain, very similar Mini Mental State Exam(MMST in US), I found out later. only difference MMST takes 10-15 mins,The mental exercise take 1 week or 30-40 counts The Results What positive impact did your solution have in the workplace, the community, or at home? It gives sign of release and encouragement for caregiver when they see actual work can be done for Alzheimer or stroke patient. especially when they see patients sign of consciousness recovery and they can express their owm feeling to doctors on his own without any help. it is a pride and dignity by patient. (1)there is another version as demand for people already have mild Alzheimer, The system will shows family pictures instead. (2)Coming work: use multi-touch web cam to stimulate Alzheimer patient from old memory by touching object and rewire his/her brain. Hope in 3 months, prototype demo ready (3) Will create SharePoint WSS 3.0 version for rehab center and elderly home for management control by nurses or social worker , It is 80% done (4)Rehab center or home rehab, can also be benefit and very cost effective Other Information Feel free to let the community know about any interesting or humorous tidbits you feel will add to your submission. Hope it leads to another alternative or pre-test for people family have Alzheimer, can regularly use the system to alert abnormal change in his mental state, MRI image smallest area is one mm of brain area which contains thousands of neurons and synapses , and mental state detect those synapses respond, hope the system can detect those change and alert the user. . (this still need more research ..) (2)In addition, our body shrunk by 10%-30% after 65 years old and increase when we getting older? Can we do anything about it. as old saying, we only use 1/10 of our brain daily, 9/10 of the brain just waiting! Could neuroplascity helps, rewire our brain? At present I have 1 user who have brain tumor last year, after operation, his memory significantly loss for first 3 months. then he tried this mental exercise everyday for 2 months, his MCI gain 30%, also from the latest MRI image shows his brain have brighter color than before. Please visit www.neuroplasticitylab.com. Products Used To help the community understand the scope of your project, please select the technologies utilized. Database Management Development Platform/Tools Web Technologies Collaboration SQL 2008 express, Silverlight 2, Blend2, WCF, vs 2008 web developer Submission Hyperlink http://www.microsoft.com/canada/igniteit-awards/view_submissiondetails.aspx?id=395
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Project: The Community Caregiver Portal Solution by Navantis - Social Networking in Action The Challenge Describe the situation, challenge or problem you or your team faced. Have you ever had a family member or loved one with a chronic disease or an acute condition that relied on you as the main source of constant care? If you have, you may understand the difficulties that a caregiver faces. Caregivers have great difficulty finding services to assist them, finding people that understand their experience, and finding resources to help them better understand what their family member or loved is experiencing. VON understood these difficulties caregivers face and selected Navantis to build an online solution that would alleviate these issues. Navantis faced a difficult challenge: We needed to create a bilingual, collaborative, user-friendly, and informative social networking platform to serve 3 million caregivers across Canada. The portal needed to provide caregivers with valuable resources and a network of support. The Solution Describe how your solution helped overcome the challenge. Tell us about the innovative ways you used technology to create this solution.
What obstacles or roadblocks were overcome? Is the solution reusable elsewhere? Be specific! Navantis built a bilingual social networking platform using MOSS 2007. The platform allowed the Canadian caregiver community to: •Connect with other caregivers across Canada, for information sharing and moral support •Create highly customizable features specific to the caregiver and make a profile visible to other users •Quickly and easily update the portal with information on new diseases and condition-related content •Ask health questions to a team of experts •Access features to create an eHealth record based on the caregiver’s observations and understanding of a patient’s conditions •Communicate a patient’s health conditions directly to doctors and nurses through the discussion board and other Web 2.0 features •Experience a sense of belonging through collaboration and support The goal of Caregiver Connect was to enhance autonomy, independence, and quality of life for caregivers and their patients. This goal was achieved thanks to the dedicated Navantis team. The Results What positive impact did your solution have in the workplace, the community, or at home? It is estimated that caregivers provide over $5 billion in savings on healthcare costs every year. As such, they are essential to the Canadian healthcare system. However, caregivers often feel isolated due to the sustained challenges of caring for a loved one with an illness or disability over a long duration. Our solution has addressed this problem by providing an interactive link between caregivers and patients, doctors, and nurses. Our portal gives these caregivers a voice, and alleviates their burden by providing a network of support. Now over three million caregivers across Canada have access to a site that allows direct communication with doctors, nurses, and patients. The portal is fully bilingual, and provides access to information and resources that caregivers need to care for themselves, to provide better quality care to their family members and/or friends, and to connect and share with other caregivers through a virtual discussion forum. Other Information Feel free to let the community know about any interesting or humorous tidbits you feel will add to your submission. VON is a not-for-profit, national health care organization and registered charity offering a wide range of community health care solutions, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Navantis was commissioned to build an integrated health services web-based caregiver community portal, using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, to provide a medium where communication between doctors, nurses, and patients is possible. The portal was needed to improve access and provide caregivers with up-to-date, accessible, community specific health information. To access the Community Caregiver Portal, visit www.caregiver-connect.ca. Products Used To help the community understand the scope of your project, please select the technologies utilized. Development Platform/Tools Web Technologies Collaboration Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Submission Hyperlink http://www.microsoft.com/canada/igniteit-awards/view_submissiondetails.aspx?id=332
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A while back Ruth did an interview with Cameron McKay about an upcoming infrastructure project he was in the planning stages on. While the planning is done and the implementation also complete, I thought it was time to revisit with Cameron and talk about how things went. Turns out Cam was one step ahead and posted an entry on his blog which we are cross posting here. ------------------------- And here we are.... it's March 15th, I'm now 25 Years old, and the largest infrastructure project of my career to date is wrapping up. Now, I originally planned to have all work completed in a weekend... I may have been off by a week or two. Not a result of unknown factors, but delays in setting up systems and the occasional hour or two of sleep. February 27th at 10PM my Team and I started by redirecting all web facing sites to the ubiquitous "planned downtime" graphic to alert clients that the geeks are hard at work somewhere... :) First up on the task list was to modify our Cisco switches and firewalls and setup 10 new VLAN's. The tricky part here is that the Cisco VOIP servers also need to be re-IP addressed and this is where we had to take our time. While our contractors were busy checking everything with the telephony systems, our team was busy setting up the base AD Infrastructure (DNS, DHCP) and getting ready to deploy all our new servers. What servers exactly? - Windows Server 2008 /w Hyper-V
- Exchange Server 2007 SP1
- SQL Server 2008
- IIS7
- Team Foundation Server 2008
- Office Communications Server 2008 R2
- Groove Server
- ForeFront Client Security
- SharePoint Office Server 2007
Not to mention: - WSUS
- NAP
- Certificate Services
- Rights Management
- File Screening
And if that wasn't enough... We rolled out Vista Enterprise and Office 2007 to 100 workstations and also deployed the latest Blackberry Enterprise Server. I also felt the need to deploy the latest version of GFI Faxmaker to handle our some 300 faxes a day at the office. And of course, it's all managed by System Center. So around 2am on Saturday morning all the network changes were completed and the base AD deployment completed. At this point, we have taken a flat network and diced it up into 10 VLAN's, a DMZ, and 4 Windows domains. I'm still pretty excited and pushing through the night. Next up was taking all our existing physical and virtual servers and switching the IP's. This took us until around 6am... We took a coffee break and then moved onto deploying Exchange Server 2007. About this time I realized that I haven't slept yet and shrugged it off... I'm an IT Pro. At 9am we brought our SQL Servers online and IIS 7 web farm. My network team was working on all the ACL's and settings for the DMZ to make sure that we were ultra secure, as this is a Fortune 18 we work for and information security is paramount. Our developers came in around 10am to start migrating content from the old network and get the business up and running again. One challenge here is that there was no connectivity from the old LAN to the new network, so terabyte hard drives were used to move all the files. This took the better part of the day to get all the files over and onto the new servers. Once this was done, the Dev's could start configuring all the new database servers and IIS sites. I had our network team leave the edge network accessible from the internal LAN to make it as easy as possible for the development team to get access and complete the migration. Around 6pm on Saturday evening the Boss realized that I hadn't been to sleep yet and "suggested" that I go over to the hotel and get a few hours sleep. I slept from 7 until 11 and then showed back up at the office to continue working on the deployment. Sunday morning we started our LT deployment of Vista and Office 2007 to all the desktops. I was left configuring Exchange 2007 and the Blackberry Server and a half dozen other servers. We were having some issues with migrating the data. As it turns out, moving everything onto SQL 2008 and IIS7 is a big deal. Who would have thought? At this point, the comment of "backing out" came up. I didn't like the sound of that... and the discussion became a pow-wow a couple hours later. I'll spare everyone the discussion, but we decided to push forward and not roll back. Forgetting that all the workstations were already converted to Vista and on the new network, it would of been about 6 hours work to bring the old LAN back up. Around 2am on Monday morning I had my first real challenge of the deployment. The Exchange Hub Transport and Edge Servers suddenly stopped working. The EdgeSync connectors were all there and all the settings were correct and by-the-book.... but still, I couldn't send or receive email. So, 6 hours from the start of business, email was down. This was my worse nightmare. After a couple hours of troubleshooting and rebuilding the EdgeSync, I had email working again. Come Monday morning, we had core systems online and our CRM application was functional but none of the file shares or printers were up. Throughout the day we were busy assisting the developers, as their apps are all client facing and most of my Infrastructure changes were completed. Again, sent over to the hotel late Monday afternoon for a few hours sleep. Back at the office come 2AM. At this period, I'm feeling like the biggest geek in the world... and loving it. Tuesday I had the file shares and printers online. The task for the next couple days was to import all the old email from our 5.5 server and load it into each users new mailbox. This was a tedious task that took us until Friday to complete. Why? Lot's of old email... Over the weekend we brought ForeFront Client Security online. This is probably my most favorite piece of the new Infrastructure. All workstations and servers were now protected. The following week we were tweaking group policies and completing the configuration of all our web portals and databases. Fast forward to today. It's Sunday March 15th... and we have the most modern network in the company. Built for High Availability and Security from the ground up using the latest Microsoft technologies. I am very proud to say that I was apart of this great project and it has definitely been a fun and exciting ride. The best part is that 90% of the Datacenter is virtualized on Hyper-V. I'm a huge fan of the technology, and the benefits it provides our business in the DR / BC areas. It was interesting to see the entire IT Team, all 9 of us, pull together and stand unified behind this project. Sure, it's difficult and I've only had 20 hours total sleep in two weeks, but this is what I live for. We now have a platform to work off of that will drive the business for the next 6 Years. Was it as easy as I thought? NO. Would I do it again knowing what I know now? YES. Why? Because it had to be done. Our business is very competitive and we were working off technology that was 10 to 15 years old. More time was spent on maintenance and workarounds, then innovation. And how do I feel? Great. I slept in this morning and looking forward to getting back into the office tomorrow to work on my new state-of-the-art Infrastructure. All 100% Microsoft software based. ------------------------------ You can read more about the project at Cameron’s blog! 
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On Wednesday, we launched Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, and SQL Server 2008 at the first Heroes Happen Here event in Toronto. As the next few weeks go by we will be visiting other cities across the country to allow you to learn more about how these products can help your organization and continue your technical journey. As we travel across the country we invite you to share your experiences and thoughts about the Heroes Happen Here events with others in the IT community through your pictures on Flickr, blog posts, and Twitter tweets. Through the work of four talented individuals from the Toronto SharePoint User Group, doing this is as easy as tagging your photos on Flickr, Twitter tweets or blog posts with the HHH_CA tag. Welcome to the www.heroeshappenhere.ca site!! _thumb.jpg)
Thanks to the work of the four individual pictured above at the Toronto event - (from left) Mark Zanoski, Bill Brockbank, Kanwal Khipple (project lead), and Muhsin Shahid - you have a site where your pictures, blog posts, and Twitter tweets will automatically be aggregated and shared with your peers and all you need to do is remember to include the HHH_CA tag to make it happen. On top of that, the Register link on the www.heroeshappenhere.ca site will allow you to sign up for your own @heroeshappenhere.ca Windows Live Hotmail email address (and Windows Live ID) with a full 5GB of space!! Remember to sign out of any other Windows Live ID before clicking the Sign-Up link on the Register page. One thing I find cool about the site is that it uses some really great new technologies like Silverlight and PopFly to deliver the content. The picture carousel displaying all of the HHH_CA tagged photos, a PopFly component, is really cool so check it out at www.heroeshappenhere.ca. We will be posting a video interview with the team in the next little while so stay tuned!! 
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Will Craddock is the president of the Regina IT Professionals group and is part of the IT team at SaskEnergy. SaskEnergy is Saskatchewan's natural gas distribution company, a provincial Crown corporation with roots of more than half a century in Saskatchewan. About 8 months ago Will mentioned the SharePoint 2007 deployment they we planning and I got him registered with the IT Pro Momentum program which is a program aimed at supporting early adopters. Recently I asked Will how the project was going and he said SharePoint had been deployed and agreed to share the experience. ------------------------------ How is SaskEnergy using MOSS 2007? We are using MOSS as a presentation layer for our internal communications with employees at this time. Our first utilization of the product was to build a proof of concept application to collect employee’s time, attendance, expense, and mileage information for a specific pay period and interact with our ERP (JD Edwards Enterprise One) in the collecting, displaying and posting of this information. This POC was done as part of the Momentum program for early adopters at Microsoft. After successfully building this POC, utilizing custom web services to interact with JDE, we moved on to investigating production solutions that fit the SharePoint development path. Our intranet is now being redesigned and will be deployed in small pieces over the next couple of years based on MOSS. This allows us to take advantage of the content management, document management and workflows native to MOSS 2007 to enhance the user experience. Our first production solution based on MOSS was deployed in December; it took student applications submitted from our external facing website via a form and through a SharePoint timer process, grabs them and moves them to SharePoint for internal review. Here is a brief view of what we accomplished: - Created an ASP.NET application to accept new student applications.
- Created a WCF JobApplication service using the Web Services Software Factory that:
- Accepts new job applications and stores them into a SQLServer 2005 database
- Returns all job applications that have been submitted as of a certain date/time. The reason for having an intermediate SQLServer is due to a one-way-trust relationship between the web domain and internal corporate domain
- Created a MOSS job applicant document library within a Human Resources portal complete with custom views so that staffing advisors can quickly discover eligible job applicants, and organize applications by experience level, interest, and diversity candidates.
- Created custom content type for the job application library.
- Created a MOSS timer job that requests job application data from the JobApplication service and stores the data in the document library.
- Created a WCF service proxy used by both the ASP.NET and MOSS timer job further providing reuse between tiers.
- Used Enterprise Services security and logging code blocks in the WCF service, ASP.NET, and MOSS applications.
- Created a MOSS solution package to easily deploy the portal, library and timer job to dev, test, and production. This was key, especially during testing when there were a lot of changes taking place.
- Use MSF4ASD and Visual Studio Team System 2005 and MS Project 2007 as the philosophy and toolsets for running the project.
This was the first time SaskEnergy deployed all of these technologies into production. Elapsed time took about 2 months. I'd guess that if we were to condense all of the development and testing time, we'd be able to say that a team of 3 guys took 3 weeks. Not bad considering we also had to come up with a bunch of our development process and toolsets. The XML data architecture, service layer, and MOSS pieces will be easily reused as HR expands their need from student job applications to general job applications. The driving approach to the design was trying to keep as much SOA thinking as possible. There's not a way we could have created this solution in that time frame with our 'old' toolsets - not even close. What was the driving force (technically) for deploying MOSS 2007? The driving force for us technically is the quickness to delivery SharePoint provides in developing and delivering solutions. In a common and repeatable interface we are able to deliver so many different functional features that allow portals to be delivered any number of initiatives. From a development perspective this is a very big thing for us as we have standardized around building .net applications and this just becomes another tool in the box for us. The great thing from a technical perspective is the ease of implementation. We have put in a farmed solution in separate environments (DEV, UAT, and PRD) all on a virtual platform (VMWare). What were some challenges you faced before deploying MOSS 2007 and how were they addressed? In the creation of the DEV environment, we experienced issues around the establishment of the farm. Specifically the issues were around Security, Kerberos, and the certificate server within the SharePoint environment. We worked through many of these issues with the aid of the SharePoint Administrators Guide written by Bill English as we refined out Architecture in an iterative fashion until we were satisfied it was working correctly. After implementing the certificates and the certificate server, we were not able to pass the tokens back and forth as some of the services would not start or stop. We engaged Microsoft through the Premier Support area to help us resolve this issue. We provided them all the information on the issue, documentation and etc and they provided various product experts as we rebuilt the environment with their input as this error had never been seen given the architecture was following the Microsoft best practices. During the installation and configuration of the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 platform at SaskEnergy, a couple major problems arose. Because SharePoint 2007 is a very new product, there was little or no Microsoft documentation or tools available to troubleshoot the problems we were having. The Microsoft website had no solutions for the problems and a search of popular SharePoint blogs showed that other people in the world were running into the same issues. In order to learn more about SharePoint, Jereme Watts (SaskEnergy’s SharePoint Admin onsite through Solvera Solutions) attended a SharePoint conference in Las Vegas. While there, he learned that our SharePoint architecture at SaskEnergy was considered to be excellent and far more advanced in comparison to many other installations. Unfortunately, he was not able to determine the reasons for the problems being experienced with SaskEnergy’s multi-server SharePoint environment. After returning, Vance Petriew (SaskEnergy DEV Network Support and SQL Admin onsite through EDS Canada) and Jereme Watts spent many hours narrowing down the issues and documenting the test procedures. Progress was made but no solutions were found. In the mean time, SaskEnergy called upon Microsoft and utilized a Premier Support call to help speed up resolution to our problems. Upon being contacted by Microsoft within a day of placing the call, we were asked to provide our server documentation and troubleshooting steps used to arrive at our analysis of the problem. The Microsoft consultants were very impressed with our thorough documentation and methodical testing procedures. Because they could easily see that we had done our homework, they did not hesitate to bring in the real Microsoft Engineers who wrote SharePoint, Kerberos and Windows Server to help find us a solution. During the 20+ hours on the phone with the various Microsoft Engineers, we methodically worked through the different divisions in Microsoft responsible for certain aspects of their products. We gathered many network traces to analyze how each server request and response was being handled between the different products. During the troubleshooting with the Microsoft engineers we learned a few key points that are not written in any book or documentation. These points were key factors in finding a solution. When one Service Principal Name is configured to point at two service accounts, Kerberos authentication reverts back to NTLM authentication.
DNS records for SharePoint sites need to be defined at the root of the DNS tree in order to have SharePoint crawl websites properly. This is due to the way SharePoint handles and truncates DNS entries inside the application. In addition to the undocumented features listed above, there were a few other very useful results we learned during troubleshooting. - The entry point for crawling a site needs to be defined by a wildcard.
- Reliable Kerberos authentication only works when Kerberos is forced to use TCP communications instead of UDP.
- Kerberos Service Principal Names are only defined on IIS Application Pool service accounts.
One of the comments we heard from the Microsoft consultant made us smile. The consultant had tried getting Kerberos authentication to work with his SharePoint installation and couldn’t do it. His configuration kept reverting back to NTLM authentication. This confirmed in our mind that configuring SharePoint 2007 to use Kerberos authentication was a very difficult task which is also echoed across the many SharePoint blogs on the web. SaskEnergy is now one of the few places that have been able to make this work. Overall, working methodically through this issue with Microsoft was beneficial on both sides. They were obviously as interested in our problem as we were since they brought in their highest level engineers to find a solution. During the process, the Microsoft engineers identified a couple items to take back to their teams to improve. On the SaskEnergy side, we learned that our configuration was very close to being correct and that our architecture design is solid. Also of note is how pleasant the Microsoft support team was to work with over the phone. They were always courteous and answered our questions politely even after 20+ hours of collaboration. When we finally figured out the last piece to the puzzle (the DNS issue), Microsoft was very generous in their praise towards our team and confirmed that the solution made sense. The whole experience with the Microsoft premier support was excellent and worthy of very high ratings. What were some issues you faced with the actual deployment and how did you address them? Our deployment to production has been very smooth as we were able to take care of all the issues in the DEV and UAT areas. This speaks to how this methodology works as effectively in the IT Pro world as it does in the Development world. What is the “killer feature” that you found in MOSS 2007? We love all the features of SharePoint, consistent information management, template driven, document management, workflow, enterprise search, the speed to deliver a product but what really is the killer feature is the product suite. We can find many products that do one or two of these things well, but none that covered the entire suite well. I admit that other products are stronger at the niche specifics, but dollar for dollar they do not compare when you are looking at the price for an entire solution. So the killer feature in SharePoint is “SharePoint”…it is the plumbing for the house in a box; you just need to add the fixtures for it to work 
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