The Sharepoint Adventure – Part III

A while ago, I wrote about the plans we had in my office for the move from Lotus Domino to MS Share point as a database driven application platform.

This was quite a while back, but it looks like we will get some kind of approval soon.

This is great, especially after it took me about a year to have senior management listen to me. Up until now, that has been my greatest headache. Mainly because I believe that applications we build here are a vital part of the organisation. If you can have them developed in-house,  you save a lot of money and you are sure they are fit for pourpose!

Management, however could not see through the first layer, and somehow wanted applications to “just be there”. When I learnt how they thought about this, it was a lot easier to convince them. I spent the last months walking around, trying to sell applications that did not exist yet. Finally they saw want I meant.

I can see now that there is a huge gap to bridge, because all this time I have been running around selling my big plans… I did not have a lot of time to continue training myself in this platform.

o-oh!

My manager, who lately is finding out what I’m busy with, signed me up with the company training system to start the MS course Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS): .NET Framework 2.0 Web Application. This, as it looks from the Lesson 1 viewpoint, will take me quite some time.

To give some more details on the environment we will be working with, here it is. Be aware, this is not the company’s main Share point server landscape, nor it is part of it. This is purely for our 300 person office.

We decided to go virtual, as the demands on the system where pretty low and the cost was a lot lower since we only pay for the licenses and had no hardware cost.

Finally well go for one Virtual 2003 Server, running IIS, ASP.Net and WSS (I did try to get the full MOSS, but the licence cost was a bit too high ) and a virtual SQL server.

To be honest I believe that this is fit for purpose, as the amount of usage (users / contents) will not be too high and if we exceed expectations the virtual servers can be upgraded quite easily.

The next step will be planning the contents. I already presented some in the plans I’ve put forward, but these now need to be worked on. A lot!

The most important plan is to re-design the Knowledge-management strategy within our office, and possibly within the whole company.  As I am also lecturing Knowledge Management internally, I really feel like being involved in this. I have been building the different knowledge bases we are using here, but this is a chance to setup the complete shop!

We already had a couple of meetings to look at how we are going to approach this. Still pretty high-level, as this is something we will  have to convince management…. Again! However, in the IT Support business, I believe the case is quickly made. Especially looking at our current KM organisation, in which every account team runs its own K Base and the teams do not comunicate with each other. I think this is where WSS can make the biggest difference!

Probably in one of my next posts, Ill explain a bit more about that!

The Idea, The Challenge…

Good, even though I am just starting to have a look at the development of web based applications I received a comment on one of my previous posts that maybe comparing Domino development against ASP/.NET could have interesting results.

I believe this to be a good Idea, but my only worry is that my lack of knowledge, as a .NET starter will bias the outcome of this “test” a bit. However, if I choose to make something really simple, this should not be that much of a problem.

I am looking into developing the same project twice. Once in Domino, and once in VWD (Visual Web Developer), the tool I am using at the moment to learn more about the development in ASP and SQL.

This is a bit of extra work, but I believe I can make the time to do this, and that it would  be very valuable, especially to see where major differences create delays, or make things slower (or faster, probably in rare occasions). Therefore I will try the following:

An application (I am thinking about one I have to make soon anyways, which will be an IT Asset Management Tool), Web based,containing:

* Standard Navigation
* 1 Form
* 1 View for reporting

There are a few things I cannot really test yet. For example, the (ASP/SQL)environment I use now @ work is purely local, and I cannot query Active Directory for user management. Therefore, Ill skip the whole access and security part (which usually takes quite a bit of planning and work), also, I cannot use Mail functionality, as our development environment does not have Domino, nor an Exchange server.

The aspects I will look at are:
- Time spent on each part
- Effort/Knowledge required to finish each part
- General Overview of differences/problems encountered

As mentioned before, I will have to find time for this, and I will probably post it all bit by bit, and join all bits together at the end. Stay posted!

Learning…..

lately I do not post that often. Well, to be honest Ive never been a very frequent poster. My problem is, if you can call it a problem, is that I prefer to do that to write about what I could be doing. Luckily enough, there are some gaps at work, in which I can dedicate some time to update this blog.

Last time I was excited about the speed in which it is possible to, from no knowledge whatsoever, build a decent database based web application. Now, a couple of weeks later, I started the Visual Web Developer again to see if I still manage.

The result is surprisingly Yes, I manage!! Still on a very basic level, but I had no time in the last two weeks to study, read or watch any of the training materials out there. I had to work on a couple of domino projects. To be fair, its very hard to work on both platforms simultaneously. I get too confused by the different terminologies etc.

Today, I will start to have a look at what I am capable of building without using the help or alike. This is a technique I often use to learn something and allows me to know exactly in what areas I still lack some knowledge. Also I would really like to know if there are any other Domino app designers that had to make this switch to MS. I guess there must be loads, mainly because in Europe I believe the businesses are more and more moving towards a non-domino environment. Soon I will explain my findings. However if there is anyone out there that can help me draw up my “road map to MS”, I welcome your comments/hints/help!

The Sharepoint Adventure – Part III

For a couple of weeks I did not have any spare time to look into the share-point Implementation project. Last week, however, I managed to get some days free to look into the plans.
I am working with another technical lead on this, and he is taking some pressure of our back, so we can really study this well.

Last Thursday, I decided to take a look at the technology behind it… ASP of course!

I used to (more that years ago) build websites as a freelancer. As a freelancer, my budget was limited (budget : = @Number(“0″) + @Text(“€”)!) and I learned to develop using PHP, ans MySQL. This worked more than fine for me. Also Learning PHP to a level you can use it to connect to databases, insert data, retrieve etc. is not too hard.
And the best of all… It´s all Free!!

Now however, in the office I am working, the price of legal software is not important anymore, and on top of that, we receive the Microsoft Action-pack, with new releases and training licences. This opened up all kind of experimentation with MS technologies.

Last Thursday I installed a copy of Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Express, with SQL Server 2008. Biggest surprise of all… Its a Free download! Combining that with the standard IIS Server which comes free with most windows systems, you have a pretty nice Web development platform.

Since the interface confused me a bit, coming from Domino Designer, I started watching the MS Training videos , and over the weekend I followed a couple of tutorials.

I found myself building a complete application by Saturday! To be very honest, I have always been advocating Open Source and Free software. However It looks like Microsoft is taking care of their low budget developers and it works! There are quite some similarities with Domino Developer (v7), even though VWD looks much more web-facing and using the toolbox is a real joy! also the whole data-layer architecture, makes connections with databases something I understand!!

Well… Ill stop now, before I sound like an Uncle Bill add.