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!

The Sharepoint Adventure – Part II

Well, some more things got clear to us this week. By the end of this year the company will start to implement a new environment based on Office 2007 and a full MOSS implementation. We are not sure yet if our branch office here in Barcelona will get its own server, or if we will depend on our UK main offices.

I certainly hope we will get our own server, as we have a very strong need for ad-hoc development of small database driven and workflow applications. If we would depend on the UK, we will have to pay for each small request, and beeing a branch office, well be at the end of the queue.

Therefore we, after submiting a businesscase that supports the above, we have been given green light by the Branch manager to go ahead and develop a Sharepoint learning environment, but keeping in mind that a part of this learning environment could be used for production eventually.

Since we have opened a test-lab last month. Set-up by both me and my collegue tech-lead we have squatted a meetingroom and set up 12 pc´s running a Virtual windows XP workstation ans a PC running 2003 Server. The server runs as DC, SQL Server and Exchange. I can imagine you must think we have a beast of a box there, but it´s nothing out of the extraordinary. With a Dual core P4 and 2GB of ram, it´s not the fastest server but it does the job. It is a great help for training newcomers, often new to IT.

The server however will not be able to run either WSS or MOSS properly. therefore we have asked to use a server we moved from an abandoned DR Site as the box for sharepoint. We will patch it from our comms´-room to the lab and…Play! This one is a older G3, but runs a quad core Xeon processor, and we´ve ordered 5GB of RAM to get to a total of 8. now that is something we can play with!

Sharepoint!

After some time in the dark, I finally have some time to write something about what I am up to lately.

The company I work for is moving slowly, very slowly from a 100% Lotus Domino environment to a MS one.

Personally, I am not sure if I am happy or unhappy with this. I am certified in Domino application design, and have been working in notes for more than 3 years now. The applications I develop are not too complicated, but satify the needs we have in our company for ad-hoc development. Since I started here, I used to do a lot of Lotus Notes Client troubleshooting too. It is safe to say, that I now know what I am working with.

Now, for some reason, somebody making decisions decided MS would be better. (I believe that MS has got a very effective sales dept.). The problems for us here in Barcelona start by beeing a dependance of a large UK based company. Basically, we are told this will happen, and just have to live with it. However, teh plan is not as clear as I would like yet. For the moment, the migration is planned in several steps.

The First step will be the migration of all email to exchange. This is the part I can really live with, because supporting the notes client in a 200+ employee office by yourself is not fun. I will miss all the extra functionality I managed to find in notes over time, but I am sure that with time, I can come up with an equivalent in the outlook client.

When this has been done, we will, according to the last and only company communication regarding this whole thing, “Move to Sharepoint“. This is Great, I thought.
As explained before, I am a technical lead in this office, and my job consists in knowing our infrastructure, our tools, and our people, and link these together to complete projects. So when this news came out, I was pretty enthousiastic about it. A new platform, new things to learn, etcetera!

However my enthusiasm went away quickly on my first “sharepoint google“, to my big surprise, there are may different ways to implement sharepoint technology, and the best one all depends on the organisations’ needs.
In our case, they (the UK people running this migration) will implement a full MOSS environment.
This is where my trouble starts. I would like to start studying as soon as possible, and think that starting with the basics, which is WSS 3.0 would be the best idea. We have a small Lab environment, and I would like to use that to build and study this.

MOSS however, the full server, has enormous hardware requirements. Our lab consist of 11 workstations, all running a windows XP Client, and one running a 2003 Server. the machines all have 1 gig of memory, and the server 1.5. Looking at the specs for MOSS, we would have to upgrade the server. harddisk, memory etc.
I am not sure how my supervisors, and my supervisors’ supervisors would look at me, after I submit them the business case to request this upgrade.

Please, if anyone reading this has any ideas experience with this, please let me know how you tackled this problem, and started learning. (As we have a microsoft Actionpack subscription, licencing is not a problem).