C5 Insight Will Be At CRMUG Summit Next Week Talking About CRM and Collaboration Failure

Next week, both of C5 Insight’s Managing Partners will be at CRMUG Summit in Reno, NV discussing both CRM and Collaboration failure. The truth is, over the last 5 years or so, we have become somewhat obsessed with failure, not necessarily by choice, but because nearly 60% of all new client work for us is what we call CPR work - in other words, project rescue. 

Create a Simple Time-Based Email Reminder for SharePoint Calendar Events

See if this sounds familiar:
Someone asks you “Can I get an email reminder for these events on the team calendar?”.  You think well, we can set alerts, so you go look into the alert settings, so you go look into the alert settings, and quickly realize that alerts don’t work like that.  The alert mechanism in SharePoint will send the alert subscriber an email based on an action happening on the item (it is being created, edited, etc).  We need the trigger to be based on a date.  So what to do? 

Convergence Report 1: The Future is Collaborative at #CONV12

After concluding the first day at the Microsoft Convergence 2012 event here in Houston, TX, I can summarize my feelings in one sentence, “It is a great time to be alive and working on collaboration!”  Why do I say that?  Here are a few brief insights:

 

Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011–Day 4

Well, today’s the last day of the conference. I know, it’s very sad, but a great time was had by all. This was my first big conference, and I really enjoyed the experience. There were 3 breakout sessions today back to back with the day closing out with lunch in the early afternoon. It’s hard to believe they crammed 240 sessions in 3 and a half days! I got to rub elbows with some of the greats in the industry, bloggers, authors, MVPs and lots of folks from Microsoft. If there’s one tip I can give, it’s to stay in a hotel close to the conference! It was awesome to be able to be in 1 minute walking distance. You have to be able to drop off all the freebies in your room.

Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011–Days 2 and 3

Whew what a wild couple of days! I didn’t get to blog last night so I figured I would combine yesterday and today. The sessions have been really good.

 

Tuesday – Day 2

Tuesday started with the Todd Carter’s session about Extending SharePoint Health & Monitoring. He put on a good show, giving details on web analytics and diagnostic logging, and how to extend them using custom providers to get detailed reports. Very cool stuff! Then I attended one of the more popular sessions of the day by Microsoft Certified Master Scott Jamison, Best Practices Around SharePoint 2010 User Profiles. Now this topic is very near and dear to my heart. I’ve laughed, I’ve cried, but I’ve come to a place where I accept the UPA for what it is, even with its shortcomings. He got a volunteer from the crowd (a fellow MCM and MCA Spence Harbar) to configure the UPA live. This was really more of a part 1 of 2, where Spence would take it deeper under the covers and show how to implement it via the UI and PowerShell.

Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011–Day 1

The first day started with the big keynote with all of the about 7500 attendees! That’s a lot of people lovin’ some SharePoint in one place! Well, let me back up. On my way into the convention center for breakfast before the keynote, I noticed there was all this noise outside. Turns out a software vendor and SharePoint competitor called Huddle had hired a marching band to play a few tunes right outside the conference and march through. In my opinion, quite childish. Anyway, on the good stuff …

Walked into the keynote speech, and was entertained by the sweet sounds of DJ Keenan Kameleon. He’s a Senior Product Manager with the SharePoint Team at Microsoft. I’m told you can listen to his music mix from the keynote online here. Jared Spataro, Senior Director of SharePoint Product Management was up first, and gave some updates on some numbers. Can you say 62 million licenses sold of SharePoint with 125 million users? The overall theme for the conference is Productivity Delivered, which celebrates all the excellent work and solutions that customers and partners have developed on the platform. I won’t bore you with all the details, but you can read more on the MS SharePoint Team blog.

Join us at Decisions Spring 2011 (Virtual Conference)

I'll be presenting a session for CRM administrators at the upcoming Decisions Spring 2011 virtual conference on June 17, hosted by MSDynamicsWorld.com: What CRM Administrators Need to Know About CRM 2011. I'll cover the most important technical considerations that administrators need to be familiar with when considering implementing or upgrading to CRM 2011. MSDynamicsWorld.com has been hosting these semiannual events for a couple of years now, and they are tremendous, ...

Upcoming Cloud Computing Event

I wanted to let all of our readers know about a cloud computing event that will be held in 4 cities along the East coast.  I admit, it is my company that is hosting the “4-City Tour” but this really is a going to be a good way to see many cloud platforms at work.

Highlights:

    Parallel sessions on Microsoft CRM, Salesforce.com, SharePoint, and Unified Communications
    Integration luncheon showing a live demo of integration between CRM, SharePoint, and UC
    Exclusive research on the top cloud challenges from CFOs and CIOs
    Exclusive demos of SharePoint 2010
    Exclusive session showing Microsoft CRM and Salesforce.com in a live side-by-side comparison

Cities:

    May 4 – Charlotte, NC
    May 6 – Washington, DC
    May 11 – Raleigh, NC
    May 13 – Atlanta, GA

SharePoint 2010 Ignite Virtual Training – Day 5: Business Connectivity Services (BCS)

Many of you may be familiar with the Business Data Catalog (BDC) feature of MOSS 2007 that allowed for the integration of SharePoint with various line-of-business (LOB) systems on a read-only basis.  In SharePoint 2010, the BDC has become the BCS – Business Connectivity Services.  The BCS has it’s own dedicated database and runs as it’s own service application (as do many of the other services in SharePoint 2010) that can be enabled at the Web Application level.

With Microsoft Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 capabilities, people are now empowered with read and write access to LOB applications and external data sources (such as SQL, Oracle, SAP, CRM, Siebel, Web services, and custom applications), whether they are online or offline.  An entire site can be taken offline by using Microsoft Office Workspace and then users can resynchronize when they’re reconnected to the network.

SharePoint 2010 Ignite Virtual Training – Day 4: “Search Gone Social”

There are many new improvements to Search within SharePoint 2010 including the new FAST Search application which further extends the out-of-box SharePoint search capability.  One exciting new FAST feature is “Visual Best Bets” within your search results.  Visual best bets show you a thumbnail image of each document found in the search results.  For certain file types such as PowerPoint, it even goes as far as allowing you to scroll through a PowerPoint presentation all while staying within your search results page.  Very impressive!

SharePoint 2010 Ignite Virtual Training – Day 3: SharePoint Designer 2010

WOW!  That is my first impression of seeing SharePoint Designer 2010 demonstrated in today’s ignite training.  It is absolutely revolutionary!

The instructor basically called the product a complete re-write over the previous 2007 version and you will easily see why. 

You can now connect to SharePoint Designer through the ribbon directly from your SharePoint 2010 site, or you can open the site directly in the client. 

SharePoint 2010 Ignite Virtual Training - Day 2: Windows PowerShell

During today’s SharePoint 2010 Ignite training, it was apparent that Microsoft is now turning to Windows PowerShell as the primary command line tool for interaction with SharePoint. 

I learned about many of the advantages that are obtained by utilizing the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell to script administrative tasks in SharePoint Server 2010. Windows PowerShell cmdlets go far beyond the capabilities of previous command-line tools such as STSADM.  Windows PowerShell is not a replacement for STSADM, but it certainly seems to be more flexible and powerful.

The Hands-On labs gave me a test drive into the following areas:

•        How to use Windows PowerShell scripting techniques, such as pipes, filters, wildcards, and enumerations, for SharePoint Server 2010 administration.

• How to assign variables and use the SharePoint object model from Windows PowerShell.

SharePoint 2010 Ignite Virtual Training - Day 1: SharePoint 2010 Overview

This week I have the privilege of attending Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 Ignite Virtual training course.  SharePoint 2010 Ignite is deep technical training for SharePoint 2007 professionals who are looking to upgrade their skills to the new version of SharePoint.  I am excited to learn more about the new features and functionalities of SharePoint Server 2010.

The first day included an overview of the following:

• New User Interface (the Ribbon)
• Architectural Changes
• Introduction to the new Service Application model (no more Shared Service Provider - SSP)
• Business Continuity Management

Success Accelerators 2009 Live Event - Microsoft Campus

I wanted to write a quick note to let everyone know that StreamLogic will be partnering with Customer Connect to present a FREE, live event this Thursday, October 29, 2009, at the Microsoft campus in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Event Details:

When? Thursday, October 29th, 8:45 AM -  1:30 PM
Attend all day, or just choose the sessions that apply to you
Where? Microsoft Campus - Charlotte, NC

SharePoint Conference 2009: Day 4

Today was the fourth and final day for the exceptional 2009 SharePoint Conference.  Today was a deviation from the norm, in that we did not spend the day in the typical SharePoint 2010 sessions.  We actually spent the day with the Microsoft Partner Team, attending back-to-back sessions learning how we, as partners, can leverage the SharePoint 2010 platform to create even more value for our clients. 

Anyone that knows me knows that our clients are more than just “customers.”  I firmly believe in aligning with our clients, understanding their business, understanding what pains they are feeling, and creating long-lasting, trust-based relationships with them – they are my friends.  So, when I have the opportunity to learn ways that we can add even more value than we already do, I am definitely on-board...

SharePoint Conference 2009: Day 3

Today started with a very good session on Governance.  This session was not only applicable to SharePoint 2010, but also to MOSS 2007. 

A few good takeaways from this session were:

• Users find workarounds to SharePoint, so it must be easy and your users must be trained
• Start with the intended business outcome and let that drive your governance plan
• The SharePoint culture needs to be evangelized ‘top-down’ in the organization
• One size does not fit all - governance plans should be tailored and can contain multiple levels

SharePoint Conference 2009: Day 2

 Day 2 started with a session on xRM and SharePoint.  It was somewhat ironic that this session was very similar, in terms of content, to the session we do at live events and in our webinars at Success Accelerators.  There were a few custom tools that I had not seen before, but overall this was a good session for anyone looking to determine if they can leverage CRM with SharePoint.  We work closely with Customer Connect in this area, and have done quite a few integration and xRM implementations, so this is all exciting stuff, and goes back to our motto of ‘SharePoint as a platform.’

Here are a few more highlights from Day 2:

• SharePoint Server 2010 is now better equipped to handle multi-tenancy
• Service Applications (formerly SSP) can now be grouped and multiple (many) can co-exist

 

SharePoint Conference 2009: Day 1

 

We are at the Worldwide SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas this week, and all I can really say at this point is “WOW!”  The talented team at StreamLogic works with our clients on SharePoint implementations every day, so we definitely understand its popularity and what a great tool it is.  But walking into the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, I was overwhelmed and surprised; my thought…SharePoint is HUGE!

Day 1 started with keynote speeches from Steve Ballmer, Jeff Teper and Tom Rizzo.  Honestly, I would call this a pep-rally rather than a keynote address, as it had more of a ‘rock concert’ feel than a technology conference.  Overall, I sensed an emphasis on the concept of SharePoint as a ‘platform’, which is a concept we have been promoting for quite some time to our clients and via our live and web events.  This really hit-home when I attended the first ‘developer’ session of the day and there were over 3,000 (I assume developers) attending this one session!  In fact, one of the first demos that Tom Rizzo showed in the keynote was a more technical demo using the BCS (Business Connectivity Services – currently BDC in MOSS 2007) and web part development.

SPC 2009 - Bamboo Solutions Booth

SPC 2009 Keynote address will be streamed live online