3 V's of Big Data

Variability  (i.e., structured, semi-structured, unstructured)

Velocity (e.g., real-time)

Volume (large amounts of data)

MOSS 2007: Plan SharePoint Sites

Planning a solution based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 involve determining the types of Web sites and portal sites to implement, and a list of the features that we need to plan for each site.

Few important points to be considered for each site we plan are:

• The sets of users who will participate in the site or portal. When we know who the site serves, we can more easily determine the appropriate security settings for the site.
• Requirements for searching.
• Customization needs.
• Personalization needs.
• Features that we need to plan for each portal or site, such as business intelligence, document management, forms, or workflows.

Plan Sites

The first step in planning a solution based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is to determine the set of portal sites, Internet presence sites, team sites, and specialized sites that your organization and its customers need. Determining this affects subsequent planning decisions, such as where the sites will be implemented in your server topology, what features to plan for each site, how processes that span multiple sites are implemented, and how information is made available across one or more sites.

Plan Portal Sites

Portal sites based on Office SharePoint Server 2007 provide a focal point for finding relevant, personalized information in an organization. You can plan divisional and rollup portal sites that are based on the scale and structure of your organization and that aggregate organizational information, and you can plan interactive application portals where team members can perform tasks in your organization.

Planning portal sites by organizational hierarchy

Plan the basic portal sites you need based on the scale and structure of your organization. Each of these portal sites should contain information needed for a project or division within your larger organization, and each will link to collaboration sites relevant to that project or division. Some portal sites for larger divisions or projects will also aggregate information found on all the smaller portal sites devoted to smaller divisions or projects.

You can use the following guidelines when planning portal sites based on your organizational structure:

• Divisional or team portal sites - Plan to create one portal site for an entire small organization, or one for every division or project of 50-100 people within a medium-sized to large organization. In large organizations, there might be several levels of portal sites, with each portal site focusing on the content created and managed at its level of the organization.
  You can design a portal site for members of your organization to collaborate on content related to your business or organizational goals. These can be self-contained or they can work with other sites as part of a publishing process. Often, these portal sites will have a mixture of collaborative content used internally and content intended for publication to an audience.


• Rollup portal sites - A rollup portal site contains general cross-organization content. It lets users across divisions find information, experts, and access to organization-wide processes. It often contains subsites that are scoped to the overall organizational information architecture and are usually mapped to the structure of the divisional or project portal sites. For each organization or distinct Shared Services Provider (SSP), plan to create a centralized rollup portal site with an aggregated view of all related portal sites.

Planning application portal sites

An application portal organizes team processes and provides mechanisms for running them. Application portals often include digital dashboards and other features for viewing and manipulating data related to the portal's purpose. The information presented in an application portal site usually comes from diverse sources, such as databases or other SharePoint sites.
For example, the human resources organization in an enterprise could design an application portal site to provide employees with:

• Access to general information such as employee handbooks and career opportunities.
• Ways to do common tasks, such as submitting timecards and expense reports.
• Dashboards for viewing personalized information such as an employee's salary and benefits history.

As another example, the internal technical organization in an enterprise could design a Help Desk application portal to provide technical support to members of the enterprise. Features of the application portal could include:

• Access to a knowledge base of past support incidents and best-practices documentation.
• Ways to do common tasks, such as starting a support incident or reviewing the status of an ongoing incident.
• Integration with communications features that support online meetings and discussions.
• Personalized views of data. For example, support managers could view dashboards providing views of their team members' productivity and customer satisfaction ratings.
• Support engineers could view their current unresolved incidents.

In the Determine Sites and Portals planning worksheet, list each divisional, rollup, and application portal site that you plan to create. Be sure to identify the name and purpose of the portal site.

Plan Internet presence sites

Internet presence sites are customer-facing sites. They are usually branded and are characterized by consistent stylistic elements, such as colors, fonts, and logos in addition to structural elements such as navigation features and the structure of site pages. Although the appearance of an Internet site is tightly controlled, the content of the site may be dynamic and may change frequently.

For example, a corporate presence Internet site communicates important company information to customers, partners, investors, and potential employees, including descriptions of products and services, company news, annual reports, public filings, and job openings. As another example, an online news Internet site provides frequently updated information, along with interactive features such as stock tickers and blogs.

Plan other sites

You can plan to allow portal site or Internet site users to create additional sites. For example, you can plan to give each team member who uses a portal site a My Site, which is a team site based on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with public and private views. You can also allow team members to create other sites, such as Document Workspace sites, as they collaborate. Similarly, you can give users of an Internet site access to collaboration sites as part of a Web-based service. For example, you can give them permissions to create Meeting Workspace sites and participate in online meetings as part of their experience of using your site.

In addition to portal sites and Internet sites, Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes the ability to create the following specialized sites of use in the organization:

• Document Center site This is a large-scale library useful as an enterprise-wide knowledge base or historical archive. It includes features that can help users navigate, search, and manage a large number of documents in a deep hierarchy by using a set of specialized Web Parts.
• Records Center site Records management is the management of files and documents that provide evidence of activities or transactions performed by the organization. The Records Center site is designed to implement the storage component of a records management solution based on Office SharePoint Server 2007.

MOSS 2007: Planning and Architecture

Planning a system based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 involves following steps at a high level.

• SharePoint Sites and Solution Planning




• Plan overall design


• Governance Model


• Web site structure and publishing


• Personalized Content and Sites


• Workflows


• Infopath Forms Services


• Business Intelligence


• Enterprise Search


• Plan Communication


• Document Management


• Records Management


• Site and Content Security


• Site Creation and Maintenance




• Infrastructure Planning




• System Requirements


• Server Farms and Topologies


• Logical Architecture


• Authentication


• Security Hardening


• Performance and Capacity


• Database Storage and Management


• Data Protection and Recovery


• Globally Deploying Multiple Farms





PS: I will be publishing individual tasks involved under each of these activities in the upcoming posts.

Establishing MOSS 2007 Planning Team

A well-planned solution based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 will promote better collaboration, content management, knowledge discovery, and business processes across the organization while being secure, cost-effective, and manageable for your IT department.

To satisfy this broad set of goals, it is important to identify key stakeholders across all relevant disciplines and include them in your planning team.

They include:

• Managers and other organizational leaders who understand the requirements of the business processes that Office SharePoint Server 2007 will be used to implement.
• IT professionals and business unit IT specialists who will be tasked with proposing a solution that implements the desired business processes, and with deploying and maintaining the solution across one or more server farms.
• Site designers to plan the user experience and visual design of the sites and the templates that will comprise the solution.
• Developers to determine the scope and design of required custom features, such as workflows, forms, and Web Parts.
• Testers who will ensure that the site's features are correct and that site deployment and administration function as specified.

References:
Plan Sites and Features, Part 1 from Microsoft

Examples of solutions based on MOSS 2007

Here are examples of typical solutions that can be built using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007:

• Online news magazine

A publishing organization uses Office SharePoint Server 2007 to build their branded online magazine site. Article submissions come from inside and outside the organization to be reviewed and accepted by staff editors. This Internet site has a strong community presence because users can log on for personalized information, and it has an extensive search component.

The Internet site includes subsites for current news and editorials; blogs; and regular columns about politics, business, health, people, personal finance, and science and technology. The site also enables users to sign in to interact with each other and to comment on articles published on the site.

• Controlled distribution of financial data to clients and business partners

A bank deploys a solution based on Office SharePoint Server 2007 to take advantage of Excel Services. The solution enables bank managers to communicate efficiently with clients by providing controlled access to specified workbooks that can be rendered with view-only permissions in a Web browser. The workbooks are accessible in document libraries on a portal; this enables the bank to restrict the availability of financial data to clients who have authenticated access to the portal.

• Online permit application

A local government agency uses Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 to provide permit application and approval to contractors over the Internet. Contractors use the Web site to apply for permits using an online service. Data entered into the permit application Web form is submitted to a database in the government's Department of Building Inspections network.

After the application data is submitted, a new permit request (a multi-part Office InfoPath 2007 form) is automatically populated to a workspace. When the form is opened, the requesting contractor's company and permit application data is populated into the form's fields. If the request is approved, an electrical permit (also populated with the requestor's contact data and relevant information) is rendered in HTML and posted to the Department of Building Inspections permit site, where the contractor can view and print the permit for posting at the construction site.

• Departmental portal site

A product development department within a medium-sized company uses Office SharePoint Server 2007 to take advantage of its search, content aggregation, business application integration, collaboration, and personalization features. The department develops a portal site that becomes an essential part of the product development process, hosting their knowledge base, product specifications, an organization chart, individual My Sites for team members, and a home page that broadcasts schedule information, product success stories, and other important news. The installation grows from an isolated small server farm into a well-developed medium server farm implementation that uses a combination of intra-farm and inter-farm shared services within a larger deployment across the entire company.

• Equity research

A large investment bank uses Office SharePoint Server 2007 to develop a set of Web sites that facilitate quickly developing, reviewing, and publishing equities research notes, reports, and models in a variety of formats. Using the integrated Office SharePoint Server 2007 platform, the solution designers implement a portal site for authoring and reviewing research notes and models; an Internet site for presenting the content to customers; a staging site to test the Internet site; and a records repository site for retaining models and research notes to meet regulatory requirements. Using custom features, the set of sites (distributed over multiple server farms) supports the rapid and automated flow of content from site to site and from team member to team member as content moves through its stages toward publication.

• Records management

An appliance manufacturer's legal division implements a records management solution using the Office SharePoint Server 2007 Record Repository site template. Based on their file plan, the division implements and configures policies, content types, and document libraries to retain each type of record the division manages. The records managers adjust easily to the record repository site's familiar SharePoint interface while taking advantage of its built-in records management features. These features support properly storing incoming records, retaining each type of record for the legally mandated period, putting records on hold, and approving of their disposition. The records management programmable interface let teams in the organization integrate their document management and e-mail systems with the record repository site using the Web service APIs.

• Corporate Internet presence site

An international automobile manufacturer has headquarters in Germany; a major subsidiary in Michigan serving the North American market; and regional offices throughout Europe, Asia, and North America. The products are sold internationally, and distinct manufacturing operations serve each regional market. The company's Internet presence Web site is built, administered, and authored using Office SharePoint Server 2007. It is the focal point for the corporate marketing efforts, and it includes subsites for each product line along with areas for press releases, investment information, company information, and career opportunities.

Each corporate brand has its own marketing department with individuals responsible for writing that brand's content and updating it on the Web site. The corporate communication department controls the look and feel of the site to make sure the branding and messaging are consistent. The site includes site variations that tailor its content to different languages, cultures, markets, and geographic regions.

Using Office SharePoint Server 2007 Web sites, the writers for each brand author the site's content and route it for review and approval while managing the creation of multilingual content versions. Using scheduled workflows, the approved and localized content is copied to staging sites where it is tested and ultimately deployed to the public site.

References:

Plan Sites and Features, Part 1 from Microsoft

Implementing Single Sign On (SSO) in MOSS 2007

There are number of instances when we need to design an enterprise wide MOSS 2007 portal that would integrate some of the existing Line Of Business (LOB) applications. We also need to use SSO, because some of the existing applications are not necessarily AD-enabled.

To use SSO in MOSS 2007, you can create your own custom web part and connect to the SSO services through there.

Enabling SSO

To enable SSO, you need to start the Microsoft Single Sign-On Service in the Services-tool of Windows. You can also do this on the command-line with "net start ssosrv". Keep in mind the service needs to run under an account that has access to the SQL hosting your SSO database.

For demonstrational purposes you can use administrator, otherwise create a dedicated account.Next, go to MOSS Central Admin at http://localhost:port/, where port is whatever you specified when installing MOSS. Select Operations-tab, and navigate to Manage settings for single sign-on.
If you get this error:
Failed to connect to Microsoft Single Sign-on Service. To configure, please ensure the service is running.

It means your SSO service is not running. Go and doublecheck the settings on that. Then, select Manage server settings, and fill out the fields. Default values are normally ok for those fields that have been prepopulated. Click OK - the database and settings for your SSO service should now be created.

Configuring applications for SSO

Now that you have SSO running, you need to configure which applications are going to take advantage of it. Go to Manage settings for enterprise application definitions (http://localhost:port/_admin/sso/ManageApps.aspx) and click New Item. Enter a display name, application name and contact email address. The important thing here is to enter an application name that is easy to remember and describes the integrated application, such as "Asp3Tools" or "FinanceApp". Fill out rest of the fields as you see fit.

If you're wondering what the five fields under logon account information are for, you can use those to send a maximum of 5 custom fields to your LOB application upon user authentication. Normally you'd use 2, one for username and one for password. MOSS uses these field names and settings to render the authentication form dynamically for you, when logging into the the LOB application for the first time (via SSO).

Creating skeleton web part for SSO

Now that you've successfully configured SSO for MOSS, it's time to create your web part. I'll provide the basic RenderContents() -method for you that walks through the basic step when using SSO:

protected override void RenderContents(HtmlTextWriter output) {
string[] rgGetCredentialData = null;
try {
Credentials.GetCredentials(1, "AppName", ref rgGetCredentialData);
ISsoProvider provider = SsoProviderFactory.GetSsoProvider();
SsoCredentials creds = provider.GetCredentials("AppName");
creds.Evidence = new System.Security.SecureString[2];
try { // your implementation of accessing the LOB app }
catch (Exception e) { // catch exceptions}
}
catch (SingleSignonException ssoex)
{
if (SSOReturnCodes.SSO_E_CREDS_NOT_FOUND == ssoex.LastErrorCode)
{ string strSSOLogonFormUrl = SingleSignonLocator.GetCredentialEntryUrl("AppName");
output.Write("Click here to save your credentials for the Enterprise Application."); }}

You can do a HttpWebRequest to your application, parse the HttpWebResponse and render out your application. The important thing is to use the correct application name (AppName) and catch the SSO_E_CREDS_NOT_FOUND exception for first time users. MOSS will then create the initial authentication page for you, hiding possible other authentication pages you have in your LOB system.

Responsibilities of an Operating System

An Operating System has three main responsibilities:

1. Perform basic tasks, such as recognizing input from the keyboard, sending output to the display screen, keeping track of files and directories on the disk, and controlling peripheral devices such as disk drives and printers.
2. Ensure that different programs and users running at the same time do not interfere with each other.
3. Provide a software platform on top of which other programs (i.e., application software) can run.

The first two responsibilities address the need for managing the computer hardware and the application programs that use the hardware. The third responsibility focuses on providing an interface between application software and hardware so that application software can be efficiently developed. Since the operating system is already responsible for managing the hardware, it should provide a programming interface for application developers.

Computer Software

Computer software can be divided in to two main categories:

• Application Software
• System Software

Application Software

Application software consists of the programs for performing tasks particular to the machine's utilization. Examples of application software include spreadsheets, database systems, desktop publishing systems, program development software, and games.

Application software is generally what we think of when someone speaks of computer programs. This software is designed to solve a particular problem for users.

System Software

System software is more transparent and less noticed by the typical computer user. This software provides a general programming environment in which programmers can create specific applications to suit their needs. This environment provides new functions that are not available at the hardware level and performs tasks related to executing the application program.

System software acts as an interface between the hardware of the computer and the application software that users need to run on the computer.

WSS 3.0: Permission To Add Users to SharePoint Groups

General information

• The Group Owner of a SharePoint group has permission to add / remove users from a group.
• The Site Collection Administrator has permission to add / remove users from a group.
• Only one person (or group) can be assigned as the Group Owner.
• SharePoint Groups belong to the Site Collection.

Set an individual as the Group Owner

• Navigate to the Change Group Settings page. One way to do this is:

1. Browse to any site within the site collection.
2. On the Quick Launch Click People and Groups.
3. On the Quick Launch Click on the group you wish to modify.
4. Click Settings – Group Settings

• Change the Group Owner to the desired individual.

Set a group as the Group Owner

• Create a SharePoint Group for all individuals that will have the Group Owner permissions (such as MySite Group Owner).
• Add individuals to this group.
• Follow the steps for setting an individual, but enter the SharePoint group name. HINT: You can use the address lookup to help find (and insure correct spelling) the desired group.

MOSS 2007 - How To: Edit default.aspx for a Site Collection

Imagine that you don't have Frontpage or SharePoint Designer installed in an environment and you have to make changes to web pages that are stored in the content database. This is a very natural scenario in a production environment but we normally don't make changes directly in production. However if this scenario arises there is a really neat and quick way to do this by using Internet Explorer and Notepad (a very handy tool...reminds me of 10 years back my initial days Java coding using Textpad) . So, here goes simple steps to achieve this:

1. Open the site using web folder in Internet Explorer (File->Open...) and check "Open as Web Folder" checkbox.




2. Download the required on the local filesystem.



3. Make the required changes and upload it back to server.