The next meeting of the Swiss SharePoint Club will take place in Basel. The topics will be around workflows and projects management.

For more information and registration, it is here : http://clubsps.wordpress.com/

Title : Foundations of BizTalk Server 2006

Author : Daniel Woolston

Summary :
BizTalk Server 2006 was until last year, the latest version of the middleware product from Microsoft. Since, the new version, BizTalk Server 2009, has been released. Despite BizTalk Server 2006 is not the first or second version of the product, it really needs documentation on how to use and develop on this platform as it is absolutely difficult or impossible to start on such product like this.
The book is structured around the different component or pieces of BizTalk : Messaging, Schemas, Maps, Ports, Orchestrations. It covers all the aspects of the product even tackling the application deployment.
It is full of useful screenshots and the explanations are clear enough even if you don't have the software at hand.

Review :
Working with BizTalk since couple of years, I found the book quite basic. Ok, the title contains "Foundations", so don't expect advanced explanation but rather take it as a first look at BizTalk. A good example is to read it before an intermediate or advanced training. At the end, it gives an excellent overview of what can be done and how can specific problems can be solved with BizTalk Server 2006. Another good point is that it is not a big pad to read and can be absorbed in a week-end

Since a bit of time now, the Azure Platform pricing has been released by Microsoft. It has the merit of being published, but sounds difficult to estimate what is needed when starting a project or the implementation of a solution. Hopefully, this will become clearer with the time and usage...

On the other side, MSDN susbcribers have some benefits we can see here.

Start date : 1st of January and available in Switzerland !

If you encounter the "Unrecognized attribute 'allowInsecureTransport..." error when you want to display the properties of a SharePoint 2010 Application Service (like the "Managed Metadata Service"), it is likely that it is a known issue of the WCF framework.

Microsoft has just published few days ago the hotfix KB976462 available on the connect site that solves the issue and enables the edition of the Application Services properties.

After the PowerShell issue, the HotFix KB971831 available here has to be applied in order to enable the SharePoint 2010 setup to perform....

Next...

When installing SharePoint 2010 Beta, an error will occur during the pre-requisites install. Indeed, PowerShell V2 CTP3 will be unable to install because a previous version is already installed.

So, in the setup of SharePoint 2010 Beta setup check-list, add : remove PowerShell V1 (Server Manager => Features => Remove Features and click Next to start the wizard)

For its 14th meeting, the Swiss SharePoint Club made it really well. According to the president, more than 150 people are attending the event, the achievement of 3 months of organization.
The keynote is done by Nicolette Du Toit, SharePoint Product Manager for Switzerland, who has a nice surprise for all the attendees : a pass to get access to all the presentations of the SharePoint Conference 2009. She also announces the setup of a community website around SharePoint : http://www.sharepointcommunity.ch/. It should be live around January 2010. Then, she gives the availability dates for the SharePoint 2010 public beta :
   18th of November for everyone
   16th of November for the MSDN and TechNet subscribers

The event has been split in 6 different presentation of about 20 minutes. As some of the information were already give during the SPC09 event, only the first three presentations are summarized with the occasion to precise or add other informatio.

Search :
With the acquisition of FAST 18 month ago, Microsoft stays now in the upper right of the Gartner magic quadrant. One of the things FAST adds to SharePoint is the ability to extract the keywords from the content and proposing them to the user in the search refinements bar on the left of the window. In a search result, as an example, PPTX preview will be available without having to download and open the file. On the other side, a user can specify keywords for which he wants to appear in the people search result.

Communities :
This presentation was explaining that people needed more than just wikis, blogs, people search and mysites. They now want to have access to pictures, videos, the person’s hobbies, interests or other job information. This is what offers SharePoint 2010 among a lot of other things.
A feature I missed in the previous post is that now, in a document library, it is possible to select more than one files and to do a multiple check-in / check-out

Composites :
Demo on creating lists with the new SharePoint Designer. By the way, SharePoint Designer 2007 will not be able to connect a SharePoint 2010 server and vice-and-versa. The demo also showed the creation of an InfoPath form with validation rules. The interesting thing is the possibility, with SharePoint workspace, to take these forms offline with the validation rules. Also, during the definition of a workflow, the designer supports the “Intellisense”, proposing activities starting with the characters already typed in the activity name field.

Tomorrow, for its 14th meeting, the Swiss SharePoint Club will unveil the new SharePoint 2010 to people of the french part of Switzerland. This event is sponsored by Microsoft Suisse

Different talks about Search, Sites, Communities and the other functional areas described here will be presented.

See you there !

The SharePoint Conference 2009 was full of interesting information. This post give a high-level overview of the new features and what is coming in SharePoint 2010. More posts are coming with more precise information.

While I was in Vegas, I could not resist getting a Zune. I was quite used to my Ipod, but I needed a player with the possibility of viewing wmv videos without needing to convert the format. Yes, what a pain to convert wmv with a tool and getting a video with sound totally desynchronized ! Seems that the Ipod format is a specialist in such annoying behavior.

So, just a stop at Fry's to get the 16GB Zune HD and enjoy

The screen is great with a excellent quality, and the navigation as simple as on my Ipod.

That is unfortunate that it is not sold in Europe, but this will probably be the case soon and the consequence is that Marketplace is not available for me and the name of the radio stations are the ones coming from the US. Oh, and it also needs the power adapter and converter but not a problem if you charge it on the USB...

Definitely my new mp3 player...