Posted on 24 December 2012 by Spade
See Me at Tech EdHappy May!
I’ll be changing over to my new server soon. Just to keep things simple, I’m turning off CKS:EBE during the transition.
In the mean time, I’ll be working the TLC booth at Microsoft Tech Ed 2011 in Atlanta this month. I hope to see you there!
Posted on 15 July 2012 by Spade
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Posted on 08 April 2012 by Tony
Over the last few years one of my colleagues, Jim O’Farrell, has done some excellent work in terms of working with Winshuttle customers and calculating the ROI of business process acceleration. Part of this work includes looking at customers’ logs in the SAP Workload Monitor (ST03N). These logs keep a tally of all transactions handled in the system and provide valuable insights into usage patterns in SAP. Usage logs from individual customers are highly confidential, but analysing the data in aggregate is quite interesting. For example, the table below lists the top 20 transactions based on actual usage data aggregated from more than 250 SAP customers worldwide.
| Rank | Tcode | Description |
| 1 | VA02 | Change Sales Order |
| 2 | IQ02 | Change Material Serial Number |
| 3 | CAT2 | Time Sheet: Maintain Times |
| 4 | VA01 | Create Sales Order |
| 5 | FBL5N | Display Customer Line Items |
| 6 | ME23N | Display Purchase Order |
| 7 | IQ01 | Create Material Serial Number |
| 8 | VL02N | Change Outbound Delivery |
| 9 | FBL1N | Display Vendor Line Items |
| 10 | MD04 | Display Stock/Requirements Situation |
| 11 | LM13 | Put Away Clustered |
| 12 | MIGO | Goods Movement |
| 13 | ME21N | Create Purchase Order |
| 14 | FBL3N | Display G/L Account Line Items |
| 15 | VA03 | Display Sales Order |
| 16 | MIRO | Enter Incoming Invoice |
| 17 | QE51N | Results Recording Work List |
| 18 | IW32 | Change Order |
| 19 | VL03N | Display Outbound Delivery |
| 20 | FB03 | Display Document |
A really interesting aspect of this list is that it includes eight display transactions. In other words, some of the most frequent use of the SAP GUI is simply to retrieve information and not perform any updates on the system. We are all familiar with the well-known usability issues of the SAP GUI. Having to navigate and master this generic interface for quick lookups and retrieval of business data, often while performing work in other tools, is an unnecessary burden on productivity.
I am often asked about how to qualify business scenarios for SAP/SharePoint solutions, which is primarily focused on extending the reach of SAP and serving casual users in their tools of choice. Building such solutions involves various degrees of complexity and effort, but the table above helps you identify the quick wins. There is obviously a lot less complexity and effort involved in creating an interface in SharePoint that is merely reading information from SAP. These eight frequently used display transactions is a good place to start when considering how to realise productivity gains by surfacing SAP through SharePoint.
Posted on 20 January 2012 by Tony
As most people know by now, Service Pack 1 for SharePoint 2010 was released to the public today. There’s already been a lot of hype over some of the new capabilities such as the site recycle bin and some folks have documented/demonstrated some of the new PowerShell cmdlets that are available to manage this new [...]
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Posted on 06 January 2012 by Tony
Which Way did They Go?One of the big attractions (and honestly, biggest fears) of SharePoint for overworked Network Administrators is its ability to delegate permissions management to site collection owners. For purposes of this article, I’m going to gloss over the details of where users are coming from. Suffice to say that they can come from Active directory, or any number of other sources. I’m also not going to talk about breaking inheritance, or anything like that. Instead, I’m going to show you where to find a very useful tool.
Generally speaking, if you have groups available, you want to use them to apply permissions in SharePoint. For example, you might put a network (Active Directory) group into one of the default SharePoint groups. Although it isn’t an ideal practice, on an Intranet, it is common to apply a base level of permissions to anyone who has logged into your network: 
Once users log in and start doing things, they leave a trail of things they have touched, and thus show up as users in SharePoint. On SharePoint 2007, you had an easy to see option to list who had actually done things on your site. This was the "All Users" view. Unfortunately, in SharePoint 2010, there is no obvious way to access this same information. In fact, there are several types of users who you can’t readily see:
The good news is, the information is still there. To get to it, open any group in People and Groups:
Then, in the URL, change the "MembershipGroupId" to zero:
This will result in the classic "All People" view showing up, including every user who has made updates to your site!
Although this view is very useful, there are probably good reasons that it was suppressed in SharePoint 2010. The most likely has to do with a classic SharePoint foible – the so-called"2000 item limit". While that is not (and never was) truly a "limit", the fact is that when lists grow to many thousands of items, rendering views can get pretty slow.
SharePoint 2010 has made great strides in working around this issue compared to SharePoint 2007, but there are still some performance constraints when rendering large lists. Given the importance of the Users list, having it locked during a large read could be "a very bad thing." In a large environment, you could have tens (or hundreds) of thousands of people accessing a singe site collection, meaning tens (or hundreds) of thousands of items in the Users list. Attempting to render an unfiltered view of "All People" in such a case could be disastrous.
So, now that you know how to find the All People view, you need to treat it like a sharp knife or a power tool. Handle with Care!
Posted on 27 November 2011 by Tony
SharePoint 2010 provides the ability to connect to backend business systems, surface business data in SharePoint and make it accessible by, and useful to, employees across the organization. Almost every company of significant size uses ERP and CRM solutions to run core business processes. Over time, companies have developed detailed practices around using such systems to support vertical disciplines within the organization (e.g. product planning, financial performance management, supply-chain management, etc.), yet challenges remain with regard to driving visibility and collaboration, based on business data, across different disciplines and teams. These challenges stem from the fact that only a fraction of employees are licensed and trained to use those backend systems, and from the high cost and complexity of integrating such systems across different functions and teams.
To learn more about the benefits related to enable business-critical solutions with SharePoint and SQL, click here.
Posted on 02 October 2011 by
Posted on 15 May 2011 by
Author: Tobias Zimmergren http://www.zimmergren.net | http://www.tozit.com | @zimmergren Introduction The summer is over, and businesses around the globe are waking up again – and with that, we’ve got a ton of great events to look forward to this fall. SharePoint Conference, Las Vegas (yeah b … (More)
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Posted on 14 May 2011 by Tony
Author: Tobias Zimmergren http://www.zimmergren.net | http://www.tozit.com | @zimmergren
Introduction
Now after the SharePoint Conference 2009 is over, we’re free to publish and disclose a lot of content around SharePoint 2010.
The first thing that I’ll do is to link to these awesome Hands-On-La … (More)
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Posted on 10 May 2011 by Tony
I’m sometimes reminded that there is still a lot of debate over how to position file shares and SharePoint in an organization. There are still many people drinking the file share Kool-Aid and that’s fine. I blogged about this a little over a year ago and it generated more than 5000 views and 8 comments/trackbacks which is about 8 more than usual. Apparently, Joel has to talk about this a lot as he posted about this again recently. (I would link you there, but his new blog is down again. Somebody please fix this! Joel’s blog is too important to be down. I joked with him when he was putting together his new site that he needed a hot standby failover solution.)
Anyways, after I posted my latest entry on geo-redundancy in SharePoint I’ve been enjoying some great debate through comments with TBA. I thought that conversation would be interesting for the rest of you. Here’s it is:
# re: More Clarification Needed? Geographic Separation of SharePoint Farm Components.
What strikes me is that due to these limitations, SharePoint cannot be easily configured to replace DFS for file storage ! SharePoint is marketed as the “file server of the future” yet it lacks the DFS’s feature of maintaining local copies of files in environments that span continents/remote locations.
If I am to store all my files in SharePoint I have to store them all in one primary data center. Obviously users from different continents are better off having the data locally…. I would think this will be the major upgrade to the next SharePoint…
Monday, April 07, 2008 12:41 PM by TBA
# re: More Clarification Needed? Geographic Separation of SharePoint Farm Components.
SharePoint and file shares co-exist, not replace one another. Each have their own merits. SharePoint makes traditional file share data usable. DFS is one of the few technologies that allow multi-master replication. You are right that users prefer data to be local for performance reasons. However, http traffic is much better than CIFS over the WAN and SharePoint supports numerous acceleration vendors to make consolidated deployments seem local.
http://blogs.msdn.com/mikewat/archive/2006/12/09/file-shares-vs-sharepoint.aspx
Monday, April 07, 2008 12:52 PM by Michael Watson
# re: More Clarification Needed? Geographic Separation of SharePoint Farm Components.
You say “SharePoint makes traditional share data usable”. Ok, I have 250 Gigs of project “Delta” files located on a file share that is DFS replicated for fault-toleration and localization. I have people using that data from all-over the world. Due to SharePoint’s architectural limitation ( lack of file replication support ) I can’t migrate out of DFS.
Right, I have created a team-space in SharePoint called “Delta” – great – the team members now can use discussions / calendars / etc. However the 250 Gigs of related-files are still in DFS and people cannot use Sharepoint’t s doc management features due to this. The only way around this would be to ask people move files between SharePoint ans DFS which is silly and is up to them really – leaving you out of control.
So how exactly is SharePoint making my data usable , again ?
Tuesday, April 08, 2008 4:46 AM by TBA
# re: More Clarification Needed? Geographic Separation of SharePoint Farm Components.
Thanks for the great debate. It brings the blog to life.
Your file share data in SharePoint becomes “usable” because of the rich metadata definition, context, and most importantly, search. File Share data exists in its raw form without much context. It becomes an island, unknown outside of its most ardent users. It will most likely be duplicated by others since they are unaware it exists.
To improve upon the file share experience while still enjoying its benefits, you could link to the existing data in DFS from SharePoint or simply index the content for search. However, most organizations will prefer to simply migrate the collaboration-ready data to SharePoint. Since data usually has a preferred location it should be moved to the nearest regional SharePoint farm. This ensures the primary users of that data enjoy great performance while still providing access to users outside of the region. If the scenarios truly require it, consider using network acceleration technologies for remote collaborators or one of the SharePoint data replication solutions. We have a lot of great partners in this space and the solutions are probably much cheaper than most realize.
The bottom-line is SharePoint is part of a robust information architecture that improves upon the traditional file share experience with rich metadata, better context, and consolidated and scoped search. While there are certain scenarios were file shares are still the a great solution I’m confident that an organization will be best served by moving the majority of its collaboration to SharePoint.
Tuesday, April 08, 2008 1:43 PM by Michael Watson…(read more)
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