Search Results for “excel” – Page 25

Connection Limitations using BCS With SharePoint Foundation and a Workaround

Published August 26, 2010

When SharePoint 2010 was publicly revealed at the SharePoint conference in October 2009, one of the biggest “wow” announcement was the fact that Business Connectivity Services (BCS) would now be included with SharePoint Foundation (the free version of SharePoint). The feature set that BCS not only replaced, but significantly enhanced was know as Business Data Connectivity (BDC), and in the 2007 version, it was only available with the Enterprise SKU. From Enterprise to Free? It seemed too good to be true. Unfortunately in a few cases, it is.

BCS is surfaced to users primarily as External Lists, which essentially makes back end data look to SharePoint users (and some services) like simple SharePoint list data. An external list uses external content types, which are created using SharePoint Designer 2010.

The first step in creating an external content type is creating a data connection. The data connection can connect to one of three back end sources; a .NET Type, a SQL Server connection, or a WCF Service. A .NET Type can behave however the developer wants it to, but both the SQL server connection and the WCF type run into the same issue very quickly – identity.

These connection don’t use the typical connection strings that most people are used to with Excel or .NET. You specify a server and a database, but your identity options are limited to the 3 choices shown below:

The default option “Connect with User’s Identity” will use the identity of the user at run time to connect to the source data. However,if the source data is on a different server than the one hosting SharePoint,we run immediately into the “double hop” problem. Essentially the server can’t just forward the user’s credentials on to another server at run time. If your organization is using Kerberos, this isn’t a problem for you (which is good, because you probably have many others…), but if not, then your only option is impersonation.

Impersonation is essentially telling the server to use a specific set of credentials (some proxy account) whenever it connects to the back end systems. Typical data connection strings that embed a user ID and password are an example of this. Storing credentials directly in strings is a huge security risk, and SharePoint 2010 has a very good secure store service that will manage these proxy accounts in a highly secure manner. BCS data sources are designed to take advantage of this service, and selecting either of the two impersonation options above will prompt for the Secure Store Application ID to use. Great solution right?

The problem is, SharePoint Foundation doesn’t include the Secure Store Service.

That means that if you’re not using Kerberos, and your data is on a different server, your BCS options are very limited when using SharePoint Foundation. You’re either going to have to write a .NET data type, or pony up the $$ for a SharePoint standard licence if you want to use the BCS features.

I will mention one quick sort of “low rent” approach that may circumvent the need for BCS. The data view web part has been a nice way to show related data or external data in SharePoint going back to SharePoint 2003. What many don’t know is that it’s actually bidirectional, which means that you can do the standard CrUD operations.

It’s actually very easy to use. Using SharePoint designer, first move to the Data Sources node and create a new data source. These sources will allow standard connection strings, so impersonation becomes possible (if less secure – make sure that you use least privilege accounts!). Then create a new web part page. Move to the Insert tab and select the drop down tab below the Data View button, and select your data source.

You will immediately be presented with a read only grid of the data. The ribbon should now also be displaying the Data View Tools tab group, with the Options tab selected. From that tab select the inline editing drop down, and choose the CrUD options that you want used.

There are many options around formatting, what columns are displayed, paging etc. that you can play with, but at this point you’re ready to go.

Finally, if you want a good comparison of what features are included in which editions of SharePoint, you’ll find it here

UPDATE – Sept 23 2010

As I’ve just learned, Search Server Express 2010 (SSE) comes with the Secure Store Service. SSE 2010 is a free add on to SharePoint Foundation. So if you’re in this situation, go grab it and install it. That will solve the problem.

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Windows Live Essentials “Wave 4” And Windows Phone 7 – Why You Should Care

Published July 23, 2010

A few weeks ago Microsoft made available the latest Beta version of Live Essentials. Most people I know use Windows Live Messenger (formerly MSN Messenger), and that’s all that Windows Live is to them. However, it’s much more than that. If you’ve installed Windows 7, you may have noticed that it no longer ships with a number of productivity applications (for example Movie Maker), All of the missing applications are available through Windows Live. There is a big difference though, in that these applications are all very much “Live Aware”, which is to say that they’re tightly coupled with your Windows Live profile and Live ID. I’ll dive into why that’s a good thing below.

To start with, Essentials Wave 4 consists of 9 Primary Components:

Messenger – This is of course the one most are familiar with. However, it’s very much new and improved, and I’ll talk about this in a bit more detail below.
Photo Gallery – Photo Gallery is the Microsoft application for organizing, tagging and cleaning up photos. This, to me is the absolute standout product of the suite,and I’ll explain why below
Mail – This replaces Windows Mail,which no longer ships with Windows. It allows you to hook in multiple email boxes (of course Hotmail is one option). If you currently use Outlook, you likely won’t use this, but it does work well, and it’s free for the non Office users.
Movie Maker – This application allows you to put together pictures and videos into a video presentation. It’s rudimentary (I personally use Premiere Pro from Adobe – but that’s WAY overkill for most users, not to mention difficult). It’s easy, slick, and will do the job in most cases.
Writer – This is the best blog authoring tool that I’ve come across. I’m using it right now to write this. It can author blog content for a very wide variety of blog providers, and this version brings in the (now) familiar ribbon interface. Connecting to Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, etc is an absolute snap now, as it benefits from the new integrated features of your Live profile.
Family Safety – From the site: “Manage and monitor your children”s Internet activity so they can surf the web more safely”. I personally don’t use it, so I have no comment, but it’s there.
Bing Toolbar – I hate toolbars – they’re allowed nowhere near my PC. If you like them, I’m sure this one is wonderful, but I wouldn’t know.
Messenger Companion – This is a little plug in to IE that lets you know when any of your friends share a link (they don’t need to be Messenger or Live friends). It’s also a quick way of sharing a page that you happen to be viewing.
Sync – If you’ve ever hear of Live Mesh, this is it. This allows you to take a folder on your PC, and keep it synchronized with a SkyDrive folder and/or a folder on another PC that you may use. This works seamlessly in the background, and is excellent for sharing with teams, working with multiple computers, or just making sure that you always have access to current data wherever you are. It is however limited to 2 GB, which to me, is pretty low. I would expect to see that increased in the future. SkyDrive itself allows for 25 GB, so why can’t I use some of that allocation?

These applications are great, in and of themselves, but the real power lies with their tight integration with your live account, and correspondingly, its tight integration with other social networks. Windows Live is Microsoft’s consumer facing social networking offering, but they seem to have taken a different approach than you may have expected from them in the past. They know that they’ll never get as many subscriptions as Facebook, and that the value of a network lies primarily with the number of its nodes, so they seem to have taken an “embrace, not replace strategy. Sure, all of the basic social network capabilities are there, a friends list, news feed, photos, etc. However if your friends use Facebook, no problem – we’ll just incorporate them. MySpace? Flickr, Linked in? No problem, they’ll come in too, and you get one big friends list, and feed that is relatively source agnostic.

Windows Messenger hooks right into that list. So now, instead of a relatively dead list of names, here’s what the new Messenger screen looks like:

You can seen that your friends news feed is there, from every network that you are connected to. You can update your status, which again gets broadcast to all connected networks. You have access to all of your Live content via the Social menu at the top, and all of your friends are brought in on the right, and if they use Live Messenger, you can see their status or initiate an IM session, just like you used to.

Another stand out application is the new Photo Gallery. Yes it gets the nice ribbon interface, but it’s got a few VERY nice features. I’ve always struggles with getting my photos tagged with people efficiently (I’m currently working with a base of about 10,000 pictures), but this makes it a snap. Photo Gallery contains built in facial recognition algorithms, so that it can detect that a picture has faces in it, and that they need to be tagged. It will then extract the faces, and prompt you for who those people are.

Where does the list of available people come from? Why your amalgamated friends list of course. One interesting thing to note is that internally, if your friends names are slightly different between networks, it maintains an internal map to keep everything straight, so when you post to pictures to Facebook for example, users are all tagged correctly.

The real power though comes from the fact that not only does it recognize faces, it recognizes particular faces. Once you tag the same name a few times, the software can offer suggestions, if you go into batch people tagging mode

The recognition is amazing, and while not perfect, it nails it most of the time. It’s interesting to see it recognize the same face over a number of ages, or to see it get confused by look alike relatives.

Tagging is a breeze this way, and all of the tags are respected when sending to any of the social networks. Which networks? Well, any of the ones that you have linked your Live profile to that support pictures. You can really see the power of the integration features here, and the addition of another service will only bring that much more value to th
e platform. This is the beauty of the embrace not replace philosophy. Windows Live is really a solid social mashup platform, filling in gaps where any exist.

To take it one step further, Microsoft will be introducing its new Windows Phone 7 platform later this year. It promises to be an innovative product that changes the way we work with our content, and the way that your personal and business lives integrate. Many of the same concepts discussed above apply to the way that the Windows Phone 7 operates, and its primary means of integration will be your Windows Live profile. Paul Thurott of the SuperSite for Windows is currently writing a book on Windows Phone 7, and has shared his experiences of working with a development prototype. Simply logging in with your Windows Live ID brings all of the content discussed above right down to your phone, no muss, no fuss.

I don’t think that the new Live features, and the new Phone capabilities are a coincidence.I really like what I see developing in this space, and I’m very excited about trying out one of these new phones as soon as I can. In the meantime though, I have a few photos to tag and to post.

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Storing Data In The Cloud

Published June 21, 2010

Last week, my colleague Ed Senez posted a very good article about cloud computing, and it’s benefits.Our company has been making moves toward the cloud for a couple of years now, with both Microsoft’s BPOS offering, and our own SharePoint Extranet Accelerator. While companies struggle with the benefits and risks of moving pieces of their business to the cloud, I can see a huge role for the cloud in the consumer space, primarily because it is so cost effective. I have been moving a lot of my personal data to the cloud for the past little while, and I thought that I would share my current observations.

Photos and Videos

Almost any Facebook user is familiar with posting pictures. The social functionality is great – tagging people lets all their friends know that they are in a new picture (maybe not so great if you don’t like the picture, but I digress….). YouTube is of course great for uploading and sharing videos, but both of these services have one drawback – they convert the files on upload resulting in a loss of fidelity. If you care about the quality of your source content, you can’t rely on these services for backup.

This fact led me a few months back to Flickr. At first look, Flickr had a lot of limitations too – a maximum file size,and a maximum upload rate per month,which initially caused me to dismiss it. What I found out was that with the subscriber version there are no limits at all – you can upload to your hearts content, and it will store the images in their true source format. I have been doing just that when I could for the past few weeks, and currently have over 2000 pictures in my photostream. Just 8000 or so to go.

Flickr also allows you to share your pictures publicly, with family and friends, or just keep them private. However, Flickr doesn’t have Facebook’s ubiquity, so I use it for purely public pictures only, and continue to rely on Facebook primarily for sharing and people tagging. Flickr does allow for videos as well, but it does have some size limits, so I will be relying on YouTube for sharing my videos, along with a separate backup strategy (see below) as I get my videos organized.

So how much does this cost? For $25 per year, I know that all of my personal pictures are backed up. Pictures are quite literally irreplaceable. Documents can be recreated, but you’ll never have a chance to capture those precise moments again. The fact that I can use the services to share picture (in full source quality) is really just a bonus.

Simple Storage with SkyDrive

Did you know that you have 25 GB of storage in the cloud that you can use free of charge? If you have a Windows Live ID (also free..) then you do. It’s called Sky Drive, and it’s extremely handy. Simply upload the files you wish to private, shared, or public folders and they’re safely secured away and accessible from any machine with a web browser. Because SkyDrive also uses WebDAV, you can map your SkyDrive folders directly to folders on your computer.

When you are navigating through your SkyDrive, you also have access to the recently released Office Web Applications. These are light, browser only versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and One Note, and they’re completely free of charge. You can create a new document using these apps, or edit anything that you upload. These apps are very handy for occasional use, for viewing purposes, or just for accessing an Office document that may have been sent to you when you don’t have the Office applications readily available.

Sky drive should pretty much eliminate the need for FTP servers, certainly for personal use. Given the cost of the service ($0.00), I really don’t see why someone wouldn’t want to take advantage of it.

Backup

I think that everyone that has used a computer for any amount of time has at some point lost data. Afterwards, there is a mad rush to back up the systems, and then make sure that there is a system in place to back everything up. Corporations typically have solid backup strategies in place (that aren’t tested frequently enough, in my opinion), but personal users are often too busy to ensure that their data is backed up in a timely fashion. There are a ton of consumer backup product out there, but they all often have one fatal flaw. They require the user to actually do something to make it work.

This is where the cloud can be of great help. If we can assume that the machine will typically have a connection to the internet, then for all intents and purposes, our backup destination is always available. All that is needed is a good service to make this painless and automatic for the end user. There are a number of such providers out there, and I’m going to briefly discuss the one that I’ve settled on – Carbonite.

With Carbonite, you download a small application that runs in the background, and is constantly ensuring that your files are being backed up. For most users it is as simple as a next – next install, which will backup all standard data folders. If you want to back up a non standard folder, just right click on it and choose to add it to the backup. You can always see what the backup status is from the console, but carbonite also (optionally) places a small indicator over the icon for each file that you have to let you know its backup status. The backed up files are also browser accessible from any internet connected PC, allowing you to access your files in a pinch, and one of the nicest features is that it not only keeps a mirror image of your system off site, it maintains file versioning, so when you make a change to a file and later decide that it wasn’t such a good idea, you can retrieve a previous version.

Given most end users’ bandwidth constraints, the initial backup can take a little while. Mine took two weeks, but that’s me. After initial backup, it all goes very rapidly. So what’s the cost of all of this storage? You can back up as much as you want from a single machine for $55 US per year. To me, that’s a no-brainer.

I spend about 5-10% of my time inside my company firewall. Tools to help with remote connectivity are crucial, and I really see a place for cloud based services to provide a lot of these tools. They’re safe, they’re easy, they’re useful, and they’re highly cost effective. In storage alone, I now back up all of my important personal data (redundantly I might add) and enhance my convenience in accessing it. All for less than $100/year.

I’m sold.

How to Completely Remove All Traces of Office 2010 From Your System

Published May 4, 2010

I’ve just made it through a pretty nasty problem with Office. I had been running the beta version, and had updated it to the RTM version available on MSDN. Yesterday I got a message saying that it was going to expire in 2 days. I tried changing my product key, but it wouldn’t accept my (legitimate) key. I did notice one odd thing that the version numbers were mismatched at various areas of the system – both 14.0.0460 and 14.0.0463 were showing. As it turns out, that had nothing to do with it, as this is expected behaviour, but I decided to do a full uninstall and reinstall.

After reinstalling, every one of my Office applications wanted to run through configuration every time they started. This problem, as it turns out is not new, and there are unfortunately many possible causes, and as many solutions. I tried many of them. I did have the registry permissions problem with HKEY_CLASSES, and walked through the solution outlined here. It helped me with OneNote and Outlook, but Word and Excel were still problems. Uninstalling and reinstalling (multiple times) didn’t help at all.

Luckily,(for me) a colleague had some really nasty problems last year that required him completely removing Office 2007 from his computer. After speaking with Microsoft support,he received a utility that was to do the job, and it worked well. I thought I’d give it a whirl. Unfortunately, it only wiped 2007 not 2010, but luckily, it’s a vbs file and therefore editable.

After removing all 2007 and 2010 applications from control panel, I ran the 2007 utility, which found and removed lots of stuff. I copied the file and then edited it to be relevant for Office 2010. I then ran it, and it did its magic, with a few errors related to the removal of unrelated temp files. A reboot, a reinstall, and I’m up and running again. Nice – I wasn’t looking forward to the idea of repaving my system.

I”ve included both of these removal utilities here. No warranties are expressed or implied, they may help or hurt, they may make your system catch on fire, and if they do, don’t blame me. All I can say is that they worked really well for me.

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Truly Great Software – JRiver Media Center

Published May 3, 2010

Anyone that knows me knows that I like my media. Books, music, movies, you name it, and the more that I can get digitally, the better. Years ago, when I was amassing MP3 files at a pretty good clip, it became pretty obvious that I was going to need a good tool to keep them organized. I used a few tools, and then happened upon a product from JRiver called Media Jukebox that completely fit the bill, and I pounced on it. At the time, it was Version 8.

Over the years, my requirements changed,and the product changed along with me,becoming renamed Media Center for its version 11 release. I started using lossless files, and lossless support was added. Digital photos became a big deal, and they offered incredible support for digital pictures. I acquired a portable music player, and of course sync support for that was baked right in, along with excellent support for podcasts, both audio and video.

I originally gravitated to Media Center as a tagging tool. It makes tagging music, images, movies, whatever a breeze, adhering to all published standards while allowing you to extend its schema as you see fit. However, it’s also a full featured player. While some of the other market players are just figuring out a client/server model, I’ve been able to stream content from my collection at home to my JRiver client since 2003, simply by turning on its Media Server feature.

In the current version, it can do not only that, but you can control your player using and browser enabled device, or ever stream music straight to a handheld device using only that devices built in tools to play the stream. It’s also a fully fledged DLNA (the successor to UPnP) device, both as a client and a server.

I recently began a project of getting my photos tagged and organized, and shared out to the web. I of course turned to Media Center, which has not let me down. Not only can I leverage its powerful tagging features, but it also allows sharing out to social networking sites like Facebook and Flickr, or online storage systems like Gallery, and they even host a photo sharing server should you wish to use that. All of the photos posted to my Flickr account get their through Media Center, with all keywords intact.

To underscore all of this, I bought my son an iPod Touch for Christmas. I was a little shocked to learn that I was FORCED to install and use iTunes in order to even turn this thing on. Once done, I was struck with how limited and limiting it was. Surely Apple, the “king” of UI could come up with a decent experience. The device itself is fine, but about half of my collection is rendered useless. Why? Because about half of my collection uses the standard FLAC file format which iTunes doesn’t support.

I have an iPod Classic 160 GB that’s never seen iTunes – it’s the way I like it. JRiver’s iPod support is unparalleled (they can’t support the iPod touch or the iPhone because Apple won’t let them). It syncs both my audio and video, no matter what the format with ease, and gives me a complete set of options for auto conversion, including which encoders to use, and how to do the conversion. My synchronization lists are my playlists so I don’t even need to think about it – it just works.

Finally, I can output to more than one sound card simultaneously. In my case, I have a Russound 6.6 distributed sound system. Which distributes audio through the house. Two of the Russound inputs are fed from Media Center, which has a “his” and “her” zone set up. Another zone is set to play in the main living room. Everyone is happy…..

Support is also fantastic. They use a discussion board for this purpose, and you often get answers to questions within the day, either from JRiver staff, or by other users. It’s also an avenue for feature requests. When the library server was in development I wound up in a fair bit of back and forth with their engineer who ultimately implemented everything that I needed to make it work.

It does all of this for a price tag of $50. I honestly don’t know how they make this viable as a software company, but I’m really glad that they do. It’s really my Swiss Army knife of media tools. I strongly urge you to visit their web site and give it a try. They have a fully functional 30 day try and buy program. If you try it, you’ll but it.