Overview

About 8 months ago, we posted a “How We Did It” guest blog entry here about Microsoft Academy Mobile, a community driven videocast/podcast solution that had been built on the SharePoint platform and continues to be used internally at Microsoft. We received a lot of feedback from customers, mostly in the form of “Hey, that’s very cool, but how can I implement it for my own organization?” as well as many inquiries from partners in terms of “Can I get the source code, so I can leverage it as a building block for my enterprise social media solution offering?”

  Well, we are very pleased to say, “Yes!” and “Yes!” to both questions by announcing the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint (PKS), available as an open source project at http://www.CodePlex.com/PKS. The PKS is an accelerator for social media, using podcasting and social networks to deliver the next generation knowledge management solution. Built on top of SharePoint Server 2007 and using Silverlight 2, the PKS delivers an integrated experience with a wide variety of devices including iPod, Zune, Windows Mobile phones, and other podcast capable devices. The PKS follows the same model and approach to open source community contributions and support as the Community Kit for SharePoint.

While the PKS is being implemented as a major upgrade to Academy Mobile within Microsoft, the following partners are ready to implement PKS-based commercially supported social media solutions for our customers.

• 3Sharp, as the primary developer of the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint, has very deep technical knowledge of the Kit and can effectively leverage it to quickly implement custom social media applications for the enterprise. 3Sharp’s specialty is to build and implement business solutions that help customers get more out SharePoint and Office.


• Accenture, the global management consulting, technology services, and outsourcing company, participated in the PKS pilot program along with several of our clients including British Telecom. Accenture is leveraging and extending SharePoint and the PKS to offer Enterprise 2.0 style learning and collaboration solutions to its clients. In addition to technology implementation, Accenture helps its clients drive measurable business value by addressing the strategy, people, and process components that are necessary to achieve high performance. For more info, contact thomas.w.hoglund [at] accenture.com.


• Nintex is an innovative provider of SharePoint value added tools and solutions. Nintex will leverage the PKS as the foundation for their next generation Podcast Server product.

Customer and Partner Excitement

 Peter Butler is the Head of Learning at British Telecom Group and chairs BT’s Learning Council, whose primary purpose is to maximize the ability of individuals, teams, and the organization as a whole to grow and transform in pursuit of the company’s strategic goals and objectives, has this to say about the PKS:

“British Telecom is very excited to be an early adopter of the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint. With Accenture’s help, we are launching a pilot project to help 4,500 program and project managers collaborate and share information. We believe these new technologies will be an important enabler to sharing knowledge, experience, and ideas across our business units and in helping our employees reach an even higher level of performance.”

 Tom Hoglund is a Partner in Accenture’s Talent & Organization Performance service line, which focuses on helping employees of client organization perform at a higher level through leveraging the tools of knowledge management, employee portals, collaboration, and learning. He has a global leadership role for Accenture’s practice in these areas and more than 25 years of consulting experience in leading numerous projects that have delivered millions of dollars of benefits to clients and touched hundreds of thousands of people. We’re very excited that someone like Tom is so excited about the potential of the PKS and has this to say about it:

“Corporate and public sector learning organizations have traditionally only addressed 20% of how employees learn. The PKS, combined with Accenture’s learning and collaboration experience, enables our clients to facilitate and accelerate learning, exactly when and where it is needed, independent of location or device. That’s a huge advantage.”

Solution Scenarios

Communications

• Corporate Communications: Stay in touch with your executives


• Multimedia Newsletters: Stay in touch with your colleagues

Training / eLearning 2.0

• Give your employees the freedom to learn relevant information on-demand- anytime, anywhere


• Allow your employees to share and learn from others

Partner Relationships

• Advertise and drive awareness about your partner relationships internally

Innovation

• Ask your most innovative people to find creative ways to share great ideas through audio and video podcasting

Digital Marketing / Advertisement

• Directly reach out to your customers and create a social networking community that will generate interest

Lectures / Courses

• Easily share, consume and publish lectures and training sessions in one centralized location


• Create a virtual classroom discussion via commenting and instant messaging

Community Building

• Stay connected with what’s new in the community to keep up-to-date


• Generate a team oriented environment

Feature Highlights

PKS Home Page

PKS Podcast Page

PKS Podcaster Page

Open Source Community Excitement

The following open source projects have already been spawned from the PKS project:

• EDEN Mobile RSS Client - Windows Mobile RSS client with podcast download queuing and resume.


• MTC VBG Application - MTG VBG stands for “Microsoft Technology Center Virtual Bubblegum Application.” This Windows Vista application provides a rich 3D UI for the PKS.


• Nintex Podcast Client 2008 - Podcast client for the PKS that enables podcast recording directly from your web browser.

To ensure that there will be even more PKS sub-projects in the near future, we have put aside some funding to subsidize turning the most compelling PKS feature ideas into actual functionality. Take a look at the PKS Discussions List for the current list of feature ideas and vote for your favorite(s), or you can add your own feature idea(s) to the list.

We Welcome Your Feedback!

We are very proud to be able to share the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint as an open source project with our customers and partners. We deeply believe in the potential of social media within the enterprise. At Microsoft, we’ve witnessed the following stats for the Academy Mobile application:

• 2,100+ total podcasts and growing every day


• 3,100+ registered podcaster accounts


• 3,700+ unique visitors in May, 2008


• 1,800 page views average per day


• 80,000+ downloads since July, 2007

We would love to hear about your enterprise social media success stories as well as any feedback on how we can work with the open source community to improve the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint. Please leave your comments under this blog entry or in the PKS discussion board.

Phil Morel, Director, Microsoft Academy, and sponsor of the PKS initiative
Ludovic Fourrage, Group Program Manager, Microsoft Academy and the PKS initiative
Paolo Tosolini, New Media Business Manager, Microsoft Academy and the PKS initiative
Lawrence Liu, Senior Technical Product Manager, SharePoint Product Group liaison to the PKS initiative

Introduction

The blueKiwi Software, a leading Europen provider of enterprise social software, just announced the blueWiki SharePoint Connector along with blueKiwi OfficeAssistant. The blueWiki SharePoint Connector allows SharePoint customers to integrate blueKiwi’s complementary, highly specialised social software suite into their existing SharePoint environment, surfacing valuable social metrics, such as the most active discussions across the whole organisation, within a SharePoint portal.

SharePoint customers can also store any relevant file attachments from blueKiwi in a SharePoint Document Library or Records Center. In addition, SharePoint files can be attached to any blueKiwi blog post by browsing the SharePoint Document Library from within blueKiwi.

The blueKiwi OfficeAssistant enables blueKiwi customers to publish content directly from within the Microsoft Office 2007 client applications.

Microsoft invested considerable resources from the Emerging Business Team, which helps startups build and showcase integration with Microsoft products. We did the joint development work in the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) in Paris over a period of a few months.

Why Use blueKiwi and SharePoint

blueKiwi complements SharePoint by providing the following capabilities:

• An enterprise blogging and conversation platform that allows end users to share ideas quickly and easily, including rich text, audio, and video.


• A people-centric view of any contributions (blogs or comments on others blogs) that an employee has made within any community across the entire organisation.


• A dynamic social network that is automatically defined by the interactions between people.


• Automatic expertise classification based on the type of content that an individual contributes.


• Expertise search platform that integrates with SharePoint search, making it easy to define expertise automatically and find experts quickly.


• Rich and dynamic user profiles that can be integrated with My Sites.


• Dynamic content tag cloud, providing a visual representation of the topics that are talked about the most across multiple communities or the whole organisation.


• Dynamic social tag cloud, providing a view of which people share common interests or interact with each other the most.

Why We Did It

Many of our customers use both blueKiwi and SharePoint.

• They use blueKiwi as a social software suite for expertise identification and search, improving communication across distributed teams, reducing group emails, stimulating innovative ideas, partner communication and increasing staff satisfaction.


• They use SharePoint for collaboration, enterprise information and content management, intranet portals, enterprise search, and business intelligence dashboards.

It was important for our customers to be able to present blueKiwi information in SharePoint, add SharePoint files to blueKiwi notes, store blueKiwi file attachments in SharePoint, and search blueKiwi content from with SharePoint and vice-versa.

How We Did It

The approach that we took was to enable customers to use blueKiwi and SharePoint independently of each other, but allowing integration where required. SharePoint’s open API and adherence to open standards made this possible. We’ll describe three elements of blueWiki’s integration with SharePoint:

• Custom SharePoint Web Parts


• SharePoint Search integration


• SharePoint file storage integration

Custom SharePoint Web Parts

We have a number of features delivered through custom SharePoint Web Parts.

Figure 1: Conversation Web Parts and dynamic “drillable” tag cloud

Conversation Web Parts enable blueKiwi customers to surface secure, authenticated feeds of blueKiwi activity through a SharePoint portal. One can configure the Web Part to display blueKiwi notes from a particular community, author, or channel:

• Community – All post from a specified community.


• Author – All content from a particular author, including their own published content as well as their comments on other people’s notes across the entire organization. For example, some customers show the CEO’s post on the Intranet page, showing every conversation that the CEO is having, but those conversations from the communities that the end user belongs to.


• Channel – All communications that have been published to a specific channel are shown. blueKiwi channels reflect the organizational taxonomy, so customers typically use this for a team site or departmental Intranet. For example, the sales department could show all communications from the Sales and Marketing channel, in their team site home page.

Tag Cloud Web Parts allow you to show a tag cloud for the entire organisation, a specific community, or a specific person. This is useful for corporate intranets, departmental intranets, team sites, or My Sites.

Personal Network Web Parts allow you to show a person’s social network from blueKiwi. This is particularly useful for a My Site or team site.

Figure 2: Personal network shown as a “people tag cloud”

All Web Part content is surfaced via the blueKiwi web service API. Authentication and security are maintained either by using Active Directory or username mapping to blueKiwi, so all content is personalized and secure.

SharePoint Search Integration

We had two options for search integration: 1) we could either develop a SharePoint protocol handler for blueKiwi and a blueKiwi protocol handler for SharePoint, or 2) we could just use OpenSearch integration. As blueKiwi already ships with a highly specialized search engine that is engineered for social computing, it didn’t make sense to index everything again in SharePoint. OpenSearch is an open standard, developed by Amazon and embraced by Microsoft in Search Server 2008 and very soon in SharePoint Server 2007. It enables search queries to be made using an XML format, and search results can be federated from multiple search engines and the results returned in one page as RSS or ATOM feeds. This option provides greater flexibility and performance for customers, because they are not duplicating indexing effort, and search can be customized based on specific needs. For example, you could configure a SharePoint search site to return results from SharePoint, file servers, Flickr, blueKiwi, Wikipedia, Twitter, and even Google News all on the same page. So, if you searched for “Microsoft” you would get results from all these different locations to be displayed on a single screen. In much the same way, users can search SharePoint content from within blueKiwi. This means that people can find information easily, irrespective of where they happen to be at the time.

SharePoint File Storage Integration

People often attach files to blueKiwi conversations. Unlike email, the file size per attachment is not limited, so people are able to send large documents without affecting mailbox size limitations. For some of our customers, it is a regulatory compliance requirement that these documents be stored in their ECM (Enterprise Content Management) system, which happen to be SharePoint. We facilitated this process by calling the SharePoint API from within blueKiwi so that all file attachments sent in blueKiwi can actually be stored in a SharePoint Document Library, Document Center, or Records Center in line with corporate policies. In addition, when attaching a file to a blueKiwi conversation, the user can browse the SharePoint document library from within blueKiwi as well as open and edit a document stored in SharePoint directly from within blueKiwi.

Figure 3: Attaching a SharePoint file to a blueKiwi conversation

Office 2007 Add-In: blueKiwi OfficeAssistant

Although not specific to SharePoint, the blueKiwi OfficeAssistant add-in enables users to publish content from within Office client applications directly into blueKiwi as a blog post, a wiki page, or a file attachment to a conversation. We did this fairly easily by using Visual Studio Tools for Office and calling the blueKiwi web service APIs.
 
Figure 4: Authoring a blueKiwi post from within Word 2007 (right), choosing communities, channels, and tags (middle), and the end result in blueKiwi (left)

Investing in the SharePoint Platform

As we look towards the future, we plan on investing further in integrating with SharePoint’s records management capabilities so that any to all blueKiwi conversations can be retained as corporate records. We will also include several Community dashboards that leverage SharePoint’s KPI Web Parts and Report Center functionality as well as the integration of our social metrics into balanced scorecards built using Microsoft PerformancePoint Server.

Rob Gray, UK Country Manager
blueKiwi Software

Overview

Tomoye Ecco is a .NET-based community of practice (COP) software application. A “COP” is a venue for peers with a common set of goals or domain expertise to easily collaborate across an organization or between multiple organizations. An online COP is a place where members can ask and answer each other’s questions, find experts, and share documents and other web accessible content. A COP adds “community intelligence” to the content that gets shared as well as to the people that share it. This community intelligence includes tagging, bookmarks, most helpful and active users, the most connected people, and the highest ranked content.

Communities often span project teams, and team content is often referenced within the community of practice. Since these teams are most often utilizing SharePoint sites for collaboration and content management, a COP solution must support the following:

• Publish content to and from the Ecco community and SharePoint team sites


• Reference SharePoint team sites from within Ecco community sites


• Single sign-on support across Ecco community and SharePoint team sites


• RSS feeds to provide Ecco community awareness within SharePoint team sites


• Index and search across Ecco community and SharePoint team sites

Much of what we did wasn’t particularly complex but does add tremendous value to our customers. Some of the integration features described below come for free with SharePoint but add value to customers nonetheless.

How We Did It

Publish content to and from the Ecco community and SharePoint sites

In order to publish content from SharePoint into Ecco, we created an application page that is accessed from a custom menu action on SharePoint list items. The application page and custom action are deployed using a SharePoint solution (.WSP) file and then activated as a Feature. The application page uses SharePoint’s object model to gather information about the selected list item and uses an HTTP redirect to a page located in Tomoye Ecco where the list item information is added to Ecco. Once the item has been added to Ecco the user is taken back to the SharePoint page.

In a similar manner, we added another custom action that allows users to bookmark SharePoint content. These bookmarks are displayed as part of the user’s community profile.

Figure 1: Publish to Ecco community from SharePoint site

To reference SharePoint documents in Ecco, we developed another application page that allows a user to navigate through site collections and then to select the file to reference. Once a document is referenced, the user has a link to the document from Ecco. A user can also elect to copy the document’s content into Ecco.

Figure 2: Select a file in a SharePoint site to be referenced from an Ecco community.

Reference SharePoint sites within the Ecco community

Within the community context, members want to be aware of relevant team sites. They want references to team sites to appear within relevant communities and community topics. They also want relevant team sites to come up when searching for communities or community-based content.

Figure 3: Surfacing SharePoint sites from within Ecco

Single sign-on support across the Ecco community and SharePoint sites

Ecco has a custom pluggable authentication framework. In order to support single-sign on with SharePoint, we developed an authentication module for Ecco to support Windows (Active Directory) Authentication. This module is very simple and uses the Windows Authentication support built into the ASP.NET platform.

RSS feeds to provide Ecco community awareness within SharePoint sites

Teams want to have visibility into new community content without having to leave their SharePoint sites, so we provided feeds throughout Ecco that can be easily syndicate into SharePoint sites using the built-in RSS Viewer web part.

Figure 4: Tomoye Ecco community RSS feed in SharePoint site

Index and search across Ecco community and SharePoint sites

In order to enable SharePoint to index Ecco community content, we created a “crawler start page.” This page generates a list of all pages which should be crawled by SharePoint Search. Ecco administrators can also configure what parts of the UI are rendered when it is crawled. Using this facility, administrators can ensure that repetitive content, such as UI chrome and branding elements, does not become part of the search index.

Figure 5: SharePoint Search results from indexed Ecco community content

What We Will Do Next

Deploy Ecco as a “SharePoint Feature”

Since Ecco is a pure 100% ASP.NET 2.0 application with lots of business logic, we are experimenting with porting our application straight into SharePoint as a “_layouts application.” This will allow us to keep leveraging our existing code as we transition to using more and more of the capabilities in the SharePoint platform such as Lists, Document and Picture Libraries, User Profiles, and the Business Data Catalog. So far, this approach has been easier than expected. Within only 3 days, we were able to deploy our application as a _layouts application and to run as-is with very little code changes!

Separately, our current version of Ecco has services that are used to schedule off hours operations. As we move to the SharePoint platform, we plan to eliminate that extra service dependency and to use custom SharePoint timer jobs to do it for us. We are very excited about leveraging the SharePoint platform to provide seamlessly integrated community of practice solutions to our customers.

Eric Sauve
CEO and Co-Founder, Tomoye

Those of you attending the TechEd IT Pro Conference in Orlando or the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston next week, please stop by the SharePoint booth in the respective exhibit halls to see SharePoint in action, ask us your toughest questions, and tell us about cool and useful applications of SharePoint and what areas you’d like us to improve on. But come early because given what we saw during the TechEd Developer Conference this past week, you’d likely run into a crowd at our booth.
 

Also, many people have asked us about the SharePoint IT Pro and Developer Training Resources Sheet that we had passed out last week at the TechEd Developer Conference, so we’re making it available for download here (310KB in PDF format). Enjoy! 

<Lawrence />

Hi everyone, Chris Johnson from the WSS PM team here.  We are really excited and pleased to announce that Version 1.2 of the Visual Studio extensions for WSS is now available for download!

This version adds Visual Studio 2008 support to the extensions.  This is something many of you have been asking for.

Download VSeWSS 1.2 right here.

Today we are releasing the English edition of the Version 1.2 extensions.  We will be releasing the German, French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Chinese Traditional, Chinese Simplified, and Korean language versions shortly.

We know many of you have been eagerly awaiting VS2008 support, so we hope this release will help you build fantastic SharePoint solutions with the latest Visual Studio toolset.

Note:  Version 1.2 is only for Visual Studio 2008.  If you use Visual Studio 2005, you should still use Version 1.1 (download).

Also, I’m very excited to introduce: http://www.MSSharePointDeveloper.com! If you want to learn about SharePoint development, we designed this website to be the best place for you to get started. It has links to whitepapers, virtual labs, webcasts, screencasts, quickstarts, and other useful resources.  You can also download a virtual machine that has been optimized for SharePoint development and includes all the tools you need to get started. So, go to http://www.MSSharePointDeveloper.com now! It’s an easy URL to remember, so pass it along to your friends!

VSeWSS User Guide

In case you have not seen our User Guide for VSeWSS, you can download it here.  It is a great resource that explains how you can use VSeWSS in many common SharePoint development scenarios.

What’s in VSeWSS?

Version 1.2 of the Visual Studio 2008 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services contains the following tools to aid developers in building SharePoint applications:

Visual Studio 2008 Project Templates

• Web Part


• Team Site Definition


• Blank Site Definition


• List Definition


• Empty SharePoint Project

Visual Studio 2008 Item Templates (items that can be added into an existing project)

• Web Part


• Custom Field


• List Definition (with optional Event Receiver)


• Content Type (with optional Event Receiver


• Module


• List Instance


• List Event Handler


• Template

SharePoint Solution Generator

This stand-alone program generates a Site Definition project from an existing SharePoint site. The program enables developers to use the browser and Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer to customize the content of their sites before creating code by using Visual Studio.

Frequently Asked Questions and Answers

• 
  

  Q: Does VSeWSS 1.2 support Visual Studio 2008?
  A: Yes.



• 
  

  Q: Does VSeWSS 1.2 support Visual Stuido 2005?
  A: No,  you must use Version 1.1 with Visual Studio 2005.



• 
  

  Q: What additional features are in Version 1.2?
  A: For Version 1.2 we focussed on Visual Studio 2008 support only.



• 
  

  Q: Does VSeWSS support Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
  A: Yes, VSeWSS supports both Windows SharePoint Services and Office SharePoint Server.



• 
  

  Q: Does VSeWSS support Windows XP or “remote debugging”?
  A: No, VSeWSS only works against local SharePoint installations.

Thanks!

Chris Johnson
Program Manager – SharePoint

if you are running VMware and need to expand the virtual disk size, here is the simply way to do it.

in windows Start - - > Run - -> CMD

cd C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Server\

vmware-vdiskmanager.exe -x 30Gb “C:\path where your virtual disk is stored\name of your virtual disk.vmdk”

lets break this down.

vmware-vdiskmanager.exe -x (how large you want the disk to be)Gb “where the virtual disk is located, dont point this to the -flat file”

example (this is exactly what i put in the DOS prompt, including the quotation marks ” ” )

vmware-vdiskmanager.exe -x 99Gb “C:\VMstuff\myDisk.vmdk”

During the past several months, we’ve seen a lot of questions about developing custom SharePoint workflows in the comments of various posts on this blog as well as in the SharePoint Workflow community forum. Many of the answers can be found in a recently published MSDN technical article written by a couple of senior consultants (Daniel Odievich and Alireza Etemad Mazaheri) in Microsoft Consulting Services. If you have any questions about developing workflows in SharePoint, please read the article first, and if you still have any questions, then post them in the forum referenced above.

<Lawrence />

if you want to view the Web Part Page Maintenance page simply do the following:

add ?contents=1 to the site URL.

example

http://intranet/?contents=1