Hey folks - just when you wondering what to do MOSS and when should you jump on board and get cracking....

Microsoft has this great event in Sydney.

Angus Logan is chief organiser and doing a great job....here's a snippet from his blog

--------------------snip-----------------

The Conference

This exclusive Microsoft event is the third and final of three global SharePoint Conferences, following Seattle and Berlin. This world-class, two-day conference, to be held at the Hilton Hotel in Sydney from May 15-16, will showcase the latest innovations, features and functionality for the 2007 SharePoint products and technologies.

The conference will provide an unprecedented opportunity for customers and partners in the Asia Pacific region to meet and network with Microsoft Office System product development teams, fellow IT professionals and architects, and partners.

With only 500 places available, this event is not to be missed!

Expert Presenters

SharePoint experts from the Asia Pacific region and members of the SharePoint product group such as Derek Burney (General Manager), Mike Fitzmaurice and Joel Oleson (both Senior Technical Product Managers), will provide attendees with technical information and demos for the latest release of SharePoint products and technologies: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, and Office SharePoint Designer 2007.

And for the first time in Australia, information on Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 will be presented.

Brand New Deep Dive Content

Multiple tracks focused on specific solution technologies including Collaboration, Enterprise Search and Portals, Business Intelligence and Enterprise Content Management will be offered. Plus, there will be additional opportunities for attendees to learn about, and get hands on experience with, SharePoint products and technologies.

Technical “how to” breakout sessions covering subjects such as architecture, security, integration, deployment, migration, management and scalability, will help attendees develop, customise, integrate and build powerful, enterprise-ready solutions with SharePoint products and technologies.

** UPDATE - Plug about the Cabana Sessions **

Instead of just the normal "break out" sessions we will be running cabana sessions during the lunch break. These will typically be run by Microsoft partners about solutions or problems they have overcome - hopefully really cool stuff in good 30 minute sessions.

Event Details

Dates: 15-16 May 2007
Venue: Hilton Hotel in Sydney, Australia
Cost: $549.00 for two days (includes registration, Welcome Night, conference sessions, and evening entertainment event)

Save the Date

Registrations for this conference will open soon (look for an announcement on this blog), and seats will be strictly limited. Block off May 15-16 on your calendar right now, so you won’t miss out!

What about Partner Sponsorship?

** UPDATE FROM Nick Mayhew ***

"If you are an Australian Gold/Cert partner then you can contact your account manager. If you are a partner HQ'd outside Australia, and interested in hearing about sponsorship packages, then you should contact one of my team, Tina Thalmeier. Tina dot Thalmeier AT the usual microsoft.com"

Well I'm making my way back from the MVP Summit and we got to spend nearly 2 days bending the ears of the BizTalk product team - the correct term now is The Connected Services Division (CSD) which includes todays technologies of: BizTalk, WF, WCF, .NET Framework and Orcas - so all these things are just 'going' to work going forward.

Here's the things that I'm allowed to talk about....

MVP Summit Day 1 - Registration

• for the previous 4 days I had been skiing up and around Whistler in some fantastic snow with my cousin. What an experience!!! First time there.
• Seattle, cold and raining but it's fantastic to be here as there's a buzz in the air. A thought did cross my mind of "How are we going to have a conversation at this Summit if there are more than 1 MVP in the room?" - if you've ever been 'lucky' enough to have 3 or more MVPs in a room....I'm sure you'd be able to finish all your lunch before you could get a word in edgeways.
• Met up with some great fellow BizTalk MVPs (Alan Smith and Charles Young). Charles and I worked together when I was back in the UK and it's great to hear that he's stalking his 12 yr old daughter boyfriend and the deeply troubled when the words "I love you" came out during a phone call he was listening in on. :) - looks like I've got all that ahead of me :)
• Caught up with MVP Borty and the crew and we went to our APAC regional dinner that evening.
• One of the highlights of dinner was all the Korean MVPs did a Taekwondo demonstration (I'm sure it's on YouTube by now) of breaking boards. There was also some karaoke going on in Japanese (I think) - this one guy was great. It was sort of a 'Red Faces' night. We then crashed the Windows Mobile MVP Party at Gamesworks.....get's fuzzy from there

MVP Summit Day 2 - KeyNote + Joint Sessions

• what an experience! Bill Gates gives a keynote on MS and all things, then opens up the keynote to 1 hour of Q&A to all the MVPs.
• Bill copped a couple of Salvos from MVPs (who I reckon wouldnt be MVPs next year :) but in true Bill style put his poker face on and smiled and answered the questions. Not flustered at all.
• The group all called him "Bill", some called him "Mr Gates" and the Japanese MVPs called him "Mr. Bill" during all the Q&A.
• He fielded questions like "What's your favourite product?", "What hasnt performed...". Something that sticks out in my mind is when a guy came to the microphone and thanked Bill for enabling him to have a career in computers so he could provide for his family (I'm thinking where's the question..). He then says "while cleaning out the garage he came across a computer manual that his dad had when he was 8" - the manual as it turned out was the very first manual for the pre-cursor to MSDos that Bill's then company had created. You could even get Bill on a support number in there! (I'm thinking that's gotta be worth a fair bit) The MVP then ASKED BILL TO SIGN his book!!!! Bill couldnt refuse and $$ just turned into $$$$$ for the book - very funny.
• For the next session I attended the Developer Division Roadmap delivered by the Program Group VP - S Somasegar (Soma). Soma spoke about Orcas, .NET 3.5 and additional plans for TFS capturing more business data/information within the process.
  Soma then talked about WPF/e and the Friction free deployment capabilities. Brian Goldfarb then jumped up and did a great demo on WPF/e with inking and working with rich content within WPF all delivered down via the browser. Some very cool things in the future are instore. One thing I will say - regardless of how it's delivered and what you do with it.....you still need good original content in the first place. Videos, Images etc. They can be manipulated easily, but originally it needs to be there.
  All in all a great session filling in alot of the medium-long term visions.
• I then caught a session on LINQ with Anders Hejlsberg. Anders then showed us some of the up and coming XML features with C# and VB.NET 9.0 - autogenerating LINQ code from XML! All very nice.
• We all then went to the Museum of Flight that night where we got to play in flight simulators and go for a walk back in time. I spent some time getting to know a fellow BTS MVP Alan Smith - he's based in the UK and does a fair bit of travel spreading the news in the land of BizTalk.

MVP Summit Day 3 - Deep Dive Sessions around BizTalk and Connected Systems

• For this day we were off the Microsoft Campus and for the most part I was based in the Adams room within building 43. We setup camp there for the day.
• The first session was delivered by Sonu Arora and Jesus Rodriguez talking about the new LOB Adapter SDK based of WCF Services. Essentially creating 'adapters' had been an exercise repeated in multiple application environments.....but!! not anymore. The adapter creation process has been pushed down into the .NET Framework and 'adapters' are available for all applications......this means.....using the LOB Adapter SDK you dont even need BizTalk to use it!!! Sonu demonstrated some great demos and one of the major differences I picked up here from a traditional WCF Service is that these new adapters have the capability to perform dynamic schema lookups. Essentially have one WCF Service that is able to return multiple contracts (many hundreds in some cases). A very good session.
• The next session was delivered by Gruia Pitigoi-Aron. He focused on extending this new adapter framework with a couple of Custom WCF Channels that BizTalk communicates to throughthe WCF Custom Adapter in R2. By controlling the WCF Channel (c.f. to a pipeline where we have an entry...then an exit) we are able to loop, correlate and send out multiple request/responses within one channel. All while BTS is calling an Adapter. I'll have to start looking into this 'out in the wild' to get the true gist of what's going on. It's a step closer for BTS to play harmoniously with WCF. One thing I do remember from the way WCF Channels are called through the custom WCF Adapter is that BTS will call the Async Channel methods of BeginRequest, EndRequest + the sync of ProcessRequest.
• The next session was given by Marty Wasznicky and advanced DR for BizTalk. He had a great setup on his laptop, 5 servers, 2 biztalk, 2 sql and an SSO. Through the demo he stopped and started various services to simulate the failing of various components within BizTalk.  At this point in the game, SQL 2005 database mirroring is not supported as this doesnt play nicely with distributed MSDTC transactions native to BTS. Some good indepth stuff on messageboxdb, how instances are locked by a MessageAgent running in various instances.
• Lunch :)
• We then had a session from Tapas Nayak demonstrating a real life implementation of the SAP Adapter based on the LOB Adapter SDK. The main take away from this was that there was over 300 different contracts that the SAP adapter could return for consumption from the client. Dynamic contract lookups and caching services came to be the focus for better flexibility and performance. Very cool adapter framework.
• Then Pravin Indurkar gave us an insight into the next Gen WF and WCF which will be part of .NET 3.5. The integration between these two technologies is made seemless now. There is a WorkflowHostService and things just get easier from there. WorkflowInstanceID is now part of the native WCF Operation Context that gets passed between the two worlds.....makes life very easy. This allows for 'conversations' to be had between WCF Services and WF workflows. Also long running WFs can find a return path back out of the service even if the channel/connection is closed. If I was a betting man I'd be saying that alot of the underlying functionality here, has been modelled off BizTalk
• Next my good friend was Paul Andrew was up, a MS product manager, spoke about WF vs BTS. It's always and either/or type message, never a 'you know what, these two technologies can live in harmony!'
• Next session was delivered by Brad Paris and Tiho Tarnavski - "WCF and WF BAM interceptor extensions in R2". The essence behind the new interceptors is that they piggyback off the WF tracking infrastructure. Which is similar to BTS and the TDDS Service controlling the movement and population of BAM information from within BizTalk. Once again to use these interceptors we dont need BizTalk. When creating a BAM EventStream using the BAM Client APIs, we usually pass a connect string to the MessageBoxDB. With these new interceptors we pass a connect string to the BAM Primary Import Database. The streams that WCF and WF use are DirectStreams and not buffered Event Streams. At this point there is no support from the TPE (or equivalent tool) so we have to hand craft a large XML file to get the Interceptor configured. I look at it and think....I reckon I'll just use the BAM APIs directly......but I suppose that's not the point :)
• When I was preparing RFID bits for the BPM Conference last year in October I got well timed help from Anush Kumar. I met Anush for the first time face to face - genuinly a great guy! He gave a great presentation on RFID and the new Microsoft RFID Services framework. He also told me that fish in Malaysia may be RFID tagged!!
• That evening I went to the MS Company Store and cash in some chips - very nice. Then we had dinner with the product team which was great to kick some tyres with the crew. Great to see all you guys.

   

The future is bright - setting up Tokens that are visible across 'The Cloud' is already done!

http://sts.labs.live.com - shared token

http://relay.labs.live.com - shared relay services

We get access to these services typically through WCF and various channels and behavior options going fwd.

What this means for us - less code and if your client and server application/service are behind firewalls at different locations.

net.relay://.....

So I think in 'yesterdays terms' we called the relay service - http tunnelling

With these services we get Policy and Metadata exchange such that if any settings change on the service, then the client is automatically re-authed and prompted for Tokens.

Go and check out the labs here - very cool stuff!

Microsoft have released a downloadable book for planning and architecting MOSS

http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/64f7f9fb-3994-477f-9e6d-570812c3d5131033.mspx?mfr=true

Here's a page snippet

 

Downloadable book: Planning and architecture for Office SharePoint Server 2007

Updated: December 14, 2006

This book provides information and guidelines to lead a team through the steps of planning the deployment of a solution based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. The audiences for this book are business application specialists, line-of-business specialists, information architects, IT generalists, program managers, and infrastructure specialists who are planning a solution based on Office SharePoint Server 2007. This book also includes links to planning worksheets for recording information related to your planning and deployment activities.

Click the following link to open a Microsoft Word .doc file that you download to your computer and print. This document contains the same information as the "Planning and architecture for Office SharePoint Server 2007" section of this TechNet Web site. The size of this document is approximately 7 MB.

Planning and architecture for Office SharePoint Server 2007 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=79552&clcid=0x409)

I'm currently at the MVP Summit at Redmond and ran into a fellow MVP Alan Smith - he had a nice technique *which is untested in production*. He did stress it was mainly for a developer machine.

He referred to it a 'BizTalk Co-Hosting' which I had not heard it referenced to before.

Co-Hosting (as described by Alan)

What it is:
- condensing the BizTalk databases down to 2 (a BizTalkDB and a SSODB)
- simplier management/backup etc.
NOTE: performance may be an issue here so keep that in mind.

How to do it:
- during the BizTlak Configuration stage, specify the same Database name for all the databases except SSO (as it doesnt play the game yet)
- this means Management, MsgBoxDB, BAM etc etc etc....
- optionally set the RecoveryModel to simple on the BizTalk Database such that there are no log files to worry about :)

When to use:
- my bet would be on a developer machine where you want to simplify the BizTalk setup and problems that may arise from multiple distributed transactions with Business Processes from BizTalk.

Note: We dont need to have ONE BizTalkDB either, we could have TWO or what ever number you want. e.g. ManagementDB + MsgBoxDB in one, and Tracking + BAM in the other.

Enjoy,

Mick.

Off for a 'conference' which involves checking out Vancouver and being drawn to 3 days skiing at Whistler.

I've met more Aussies here than I do in Bondi!

The snow....about the snow.........HOW GOOD!!!

Oh...the conference yes - very dedicated and will be dining with the product team to talk about using the XBOX 360 as a 'HAT extender' That way all biztalk people need xbox360's......it's getting some traction :)

See you when I return......*IF*....

Nice comprehensive list of features that you can look at to determine whether your existing spreadsheet will make it all the way to published....or fall short along the way.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms496823....

After a heavy training schedule last week (collectively we trained nearly 60 students around Australia) one of the frequent questions I got was -
"You know that excel services presentation you had, can I get a copy?"

Well folks it's all available from MS - Have fun and enjoy. Thanks for the great interaction last week!

Getting Up and Running with Excel Services
Step through the process of configuring Excel Services so that you can publish an Excel spreadsheet to a Windows SharePoint Services V3 site.

Get it while it's hot folks - some very nice tips in there.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=cb944b27-9d6b-4a1f-b3e1-778efda07df8&displaylang=en&tm

This has been one of the toughest assignments for a while due to the lack of error details. No eventlog and no AD or MOSS Logs.

Basically setting up In-coming Emails works like this:
1) the MOSS Server in the farm will poll a SMTP 'drop' directory (usually c:\inetpub\mailroot\drop). So mail has to find its way to that drop directory.

2) The Sharepoint Directory Management Service will (if told to) go and automatically create 'entities' (contacts) and assign them email addresses in the OU specified below. That's the theory!!

The DM causes a couple of issues - you've got to run the site under an acct. that has access to the OU (you may need to assign assign the appropriate permissions to the OU in AD for this user)

The DM creates these Contacts by supplying a Schema full of info and this inturn creates the Contact. Problem - what if your AD schema doesnt match what DM expects....."Error in Application!"

(This took me the longest - as I had this running in 5 mins on a client site and then on a different site....no go)

The schema 'additions needed' for the DM to work 'seemlessly' are added when you install Exchange2003/2007 - the initial parts of the install are ForestPrep and DomainPrep - I ran these on their own without installing Exchange and the DM worked a treat!!!
(I'm sure you'd be able to add the appropriate schema extensions 1 by 1 without the need for Exchange and then be able to run any mail server - but which ones?)

3) Within Central Operations setup the incoming emails to be something like this:

My server is called MOSS and it's part of the LITWAREINC Domain

3) Now under site settings you can easily enable Incoming emails

 

 

 

Examining BAM and BAM APIs 

Wednesday, 28th February 2007
6:00 PM Food and Drinks, 6:30 PM Kick Off
1 Epping Road, Microsoft
North Ryde, Sydney

Hi all, we're back at Microsoft North Ryde this month with a great presentation on BAM - Business Activity Monitoring. What information are you getting out of your running Business Processes? Averages, durations and things like Mins and Maximums? You should be and it's all relatively easy and quick.
I've provided a calendar appointment for your calendars so join me.

Presenter:

Mick Badran, BizTalk MVP who specialises in Microsoft Technologies as a Solutions Architect/Developer. With over 15 years consulting experience and 11 years as a Microsoft Certified Trainer provides in depth real world knowledge.

Session Details

Using BAM is something that can be vital to the business and even BizTalk operators to identify within the context of a business process - "How is the BizTalk process going?", "How long does it on average take for an Order to be fulfilled?" etc.
How hard or easy is it to extract this from your current system?
We will cover exposing your business data from your running business processes.
This session will cover the setting up of BAM but more importantly focuses on BAM Relationships and Continuations tying together various separate units of work that relate to the overall business process. The session will also cover BAM APIs and the new BAM interceptors within Windows Workflow Foundation.
Non BizTalk can also take advantage of BAM through the BAM APIs, giving a comprehensive view of all the subprocesses within a busness process.
Mick will cover the following aspects:

1. BAM and BAM fundamentals
2. BAM enabling your BizTalk processes
3. Event streams and Interceptors - is this BAM or Star wars?
4. Using the BAM APIs both internally within BizTalk and from external applications/services.
5. Automating BAM deployments.

As always love to hear from you and what's been getting you excited at work.

Who Should Attend?

If you're looking to get additional business related information out of your Biztalk processes then this session is for you.
This session is technically focused for Biztalk developers and Application Architects.
Please be sure that you RSVP so we know how many to expect. Reply with a yea or ney to mickb.NOSPAMFORME@NOSPAMbreezetraining.com.au
Looking forward to seeing you there at Microsoft Premises - North Ryde
Mick and Mark 
Ph: 0404 842 833 (Mick's mobile)
SydBiz.Org

I thought I'd share some terminology changes for those of you that are MCMS descendants.

MCMS Term -> Now we Say....
Channels -> Windows Sharepoint Sites
Postings  -> Pages
Templates -> Page Layouts or Master Pages
Placeholder -> Field Control
Template Definition -> Content Type
Template Gallery -> Master Page and Page Layout Gallery
Resources Gallery -> Images, document, site collection images, or Site Collection document Library
Resources -> Images or Reusable Documents

Stay tuned for more....

Hi all I could start telling you about how great this bootcamp is and how you're going to get so much out of it, but I wont.
I could fluff on about different technologies you'll learn and integrate with such as WinWF and WCF as well as CBR within BizTalk 2006 R2. Not stuff from text books but real world experience - we know what works and doesnt.

I could talk about the 'bigger' question - "What makes a good/great design?", "Is that a 'good' solution?"...or does it just limp by?
I dont even want to talk about how when you come out you'll know why and where you'll be using WinWF and what BizTalk does for you. You'll also be very excited about the huge range of different messaging options available to you implementing WCF Services....but hang on! Doesnt BizTalk 2006 R2 expose WCF Services? Why should we host our WCF Service in BizTalk versus hand coding? When to hand code?

You'll also get a solid understanding of the BizTalk environment and we'll chat about pipelines, when a promoted property is not a promoted property. How Biztalk processes messages and performance, also let's have a crack at developing custom functoids, pipeline components and even adapters.

We're Business Process and Integration experts let's kick some tyres together.
Through these bootcamps, we're going to share that knowledge with you .....the big question is: Are you ready for it?

Overview:
This 4-day workshop provides developers with the tools to upgrade their 2002/4 skills and perform advanced orchestrations and training partner management.
You will learn to use BAS and SSO, practice developing, managing and customizing adapters and creating custom pipeline components, all within BizTalk rules.
This workshop also explores the new features of BizTalk 2006 R2 including developing & consuming WCF Services (Windows Communication foundation) for BizTalk.

Target Audience:
Developers and IT professionals with previous experience working with BizTalk 2002/2004 .Net development. (Level 300/400)

Prerequisites:
Before attending this workshop, students should have some experience with previous versions of BizTalk and .Net development skills.

Skills Gained:

This four day workshop will focus on:
1. Upgrading your skills from 2002/2004 to BizTalk Server 2006 R2. Connected Systems Roadmap to BizTalk 2006 R2.
2. Perform advanced orchestrations.
3. Gain an understanding of Workflow with in-depth hands-on scenario labs. Assess the difference between Windows Workflow and BizTalk orchestration engine.
4. Take advantage of Trading Partner Management using BAS.
5. Utilise SSO – store sensitive configuration data securely.
6. Develop and manage adapters (e.g. WCF adapters)
7. Create custom pipeline components.
8. Create custom adapters. (e.g. Split messages)
9. Create and work with Rules for the BizTalk Rules Engine.

Key Topics:

Module 1: Create and perform advanced orchestrations
This module covers:-
• Creating Correlated Orchestrations (e.g singletons, serial/parallel convoys)
• Creating and utilising Message Context Based Promoted Properties
• Creating Messages based on advanced classes/types.
• Creating Direct Bound Orchestrations and exploring the relationship with the MessageBox Database.
• Creating Generic Content Based Routed Orchestrations
• Utilising Dynamic Ports and Role Link Shapes – the easy way.

Module 2: Creating Rules, Trading Partners and SSO
This module shows you how to create rules based on:
• Schemas, static classes and databases.
• Rules Engine comprehensively explained, including the difference to Windows Workflow Rules Engine.
• Calling Rules from Orchestrations and Custom Applications
• Registry keys that control Rule/Rules Engine Performance
Explore the relationship with Trading Partner Management and BizTalk Server 2006 R2. Including:
• Setting up and creating Partners.
• Creating custom Partner Parameters used in Processes
• Utilising Partners Inbox/Outbox from within BizTalk 2006
• Further Trading Partner integration – RoleLinks explained.
Taking advantage of SSO within solutions.
• SSO under the covers.
• Using SSO and the SSO APIs to store/retrieve secure configuration information.

Module 3: Exploring and Creating Adapters - Advanced
This module will take you through exploring and creating adapters out of the box as well as how to create your own. A lap around WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) and customising WCF adapters.
Working with the provided Adapters (e.g. MSMQ, Sharepoint, SQL & SOAP Port)
Working with some community Adapters
• Integrating with SQL Server 2005 Service Broker

Module 4: Creating custom pipeline components
This module will examine pipelines and take you through creating your own custom pipeline components.

Module 5: Windows Workflow Foundation
This module will introduce Windows Workflow and take you through the architectural concepts right through to building a workflow. Includes extending workflows with custom activities, why custom activities are important, when to write and how to build. In-depth hands-on scenario labs in this module.

Module 6: Investigating BAM and BAM APIs
This module examines Business Acitivity Monitor (BAM). We look at BAM enabling your BizTalk Solutions including Related Activities. We cover setting up BAM Observation Models and working with the BAM APIs to “BAM Enable” your non-BizTalk Applications (e.g. WebServices)

Module 7: Optimising Performance & Deployment
We look at examining your performance and creating the optimum environment.
• Determining the maximum throughput of your BizTalk Solution
• Configuring your BizTalk environment for maximum performance
• Troubleshooting – where to start, examining & resolving issues.
• Creating deployment scripts to fully deploy your BizTalk Solutions

Always handy info to keep at an arms length, especially when doing upgrades of BizTalk 2004 to 2006 or building/migrating Sharepoint webparts from v2.0 to v3.0.

Msdn article found here: Breaking Changes

Enjoy - Mick.

Always great to find some good articles on the workings of BizTalk.

Lee Graber has given some outlines and numbers behind some decisions in his post:

Have you ever thought of using a Send Port Group?
Why? - because 1 subscription is evaluated for all Send Ports in the group, hence reducing the load for the BizTalk Messagebox DB.

Lee mentions that if you have 8+ identical subscriptions(filter expressions) on individual Send Ports, then consider creating a Send Port Group and adding the Send Ports to it.

http://blogs.msdn.com/biztalk_core_engine/archive/2004/07/22/191888.aspx
(check out the last paragraph)