The SharePoint Hive

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As a developer of solutions for the SharePoint 2010 platform, you may on occasion find the need to determine the account identity of the SharePoint 2010 Timer Windows Service (SPTimerV4). The following method will return the service’s account name for you.

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private static string GetSPTimerJobAccountName()
{
   string retval = null;
   ServiceController[] controllers = ServiceController.GetServices();
   var cont = controllers.Where(c => c.ServiceName == "SPTimerV4");
   ServiceController svc = cont.FirstOrDefault();
   if (svc != null)
   {
       System.Management.SelectQuery query = new System.Management.SelectQuery(string.Format("select name, startname from Win32_Service where name = '{0}'", svc.ServiceName));
       using (System.Management.ManagementObjectSearcher searcher = new System.Management.ManagementObjectSearcher(query))
       {
           foreach (System.Management.ManagementObject service in searcher.Get())
           {
               retval = service["startname"] as string;
           }
       }
   }

   return retval;
}

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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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One of the most talked about capabilities since the launch of SharePoint 2010 is the Managed Metadata Service.  For those of you who aren’t already familiar with this service and the support it provides for modeling and deploying a rich corporate taxonomy, I’d recommend reading Pat’s post Introducing Enterprise Metadata Management.  For those of you who are familiar with the great taxonomy capabilities in SharePoint 2010, I’m sure many of you have spent time looking at an empty term store wondering where to start.  If you’re lucky, you already have a well defined corporate taxonomy and should by now have leveraged our import capabilities to pre load SharePoint with the vocabulary you want your users to leverage for tagging and finding content.  On the other hand, you could be like many customers I talk to who don’t even know where to start when it comes to developing a taxonomy, or have spent years in conference rooms debating what the right taxonomy should be.  You’ve probably even head someone say “I’m sure someone has already solved this problem”, and if that’s the case, that someone was the smartest person in the room for two key reasons.  The first is that there are professional taxonomists who have already modeled most business domains and the second is that the people responsible for creating content in your company have already developed a community vocabulary or folksonomy that they use extensively.

If you happen to be one of those customers who is stuck looking at an empty term store then I’ve got great news for you.  The SharePoint team have teamed up with WAND, a leading provider of Enterprise Taxonomies, to make their General Business Taxonomy available as a freely available download.  The General Business Taxonomy consists of around 500 terms describing common functional areas that exist in most businesses.  The General Business Taxonomy can be imported in to the SharePoint 2010 term store within minutes and provides a great starting point for customers looking to build a corporate vocabulary and take advantage of the Managed Metadata Service.  In addition to this freely available download, WAND provide a range of taxonomies covering a variety of domains including Products and Services, Local Search, Enterprise, Jobs, Travel, Medical, Lifecycle, Finance and Records Retention.

Download the General Business Taxonomy today and start to explore the benefits that taxonomy can bring to your business and your people. 

If you’re new to taxonomy and the benefits it can brings to your business, take a look at the following sites:

• TechNet – Managed Metadata and Taxonomy Resource Center
• Dan Kogan (Senior Lead Program Manager) – SharePoint 2010 Metadata Webinar
• WAND – Taxonomy 101
• WAND Blog

Ryan Duguid
Senior Product Manager
Microsoft Corporation

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Getting the most out of SharePoint 2010 should involve the new Managed Metadata Service. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this service and the support it provides for modeling and deploying a rich corporate taxonomy, I’d start by reading Pat’s post Introducing Enterprise Metadata Management. By knowing how the documents and concepts could be grouped together you can start shaping the user experience with your SharePoint instance. Once you decide that you want to take the organization of your enterprise content to the next level, you need to decide how to organize your documents. If you are lucky, you already have a well defined taxonomy that can be imported into the Term Store with SharePoint’s import capabilities. Even if you have something that starts to help organize your data the power of leveraging other views of the subject you already have will help find improved ways to access and organize your data for the users. If your organization hasn’t started to organize, or wants to improve their taxonomies, or wants to compare their data to make sure there aren’t areas where you haven’t covered, you now can find pre-built foundational taxonomies in a variety of fields and expertise.

The SharePoint team has teamed up with WAND, a leading provider of Enterprise Taxonomies, to provide a starting point and make their General Business Taxonomy available as a freely available download. The General Business Taxonomy consists of common functional areas that exist in most businesses. The General Business Taxonomy can be imported in to the SharePoint 2010 term store within minutes and provides a great starting point for customers looking to build out term sets and take advantage of the Managed Metadata Service. In addition to this freely available download, WAND provide a range of taxonomies covering a variety of domains including Products and Services, Jobs, Skills, Medical, Finance, Records Retention, Legal, Insurance, Manufacturing, Information Technology, and Mining

Download the General Business Taxonomy today and start to explore the benefits that taxonomy can bring to your business and your people.

If you’re new to taxonomy and the benefits it can bring to your business, take a look at the following sites:

• TechNet – Managed Metadata and Taxonomy Resource Center
• WAND Inc. Website
• WAND Blog

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There are some exciting things happening around Microsoft cloud services. One of the services is Windows Azure marketplace DataMarket, a cloud service that helps end users who need data for business analysis and decision making. You can conveniently consume the data you subscribe to directly in such Microsoft Office applications as Microsoft Excel 2010 and Microsoft business intelligence tools as PowerPivot and SQL Server Reporting Services. Then you can share the reports and visualization you create in SharePoint. To learn more, see the DataMarket_Whitepaper.

There are some end-to-end scenarios where Office draws data from the cloud through DataMaket, then shares it in SharePoint Server 2010 through Excel Services and perhaps from there to a PerformancePoint Services dashboard. The following diagram is a specific scenario where data is drawn from the DataMarket, then saved to your desktop, then shared on SharePoint Server 2010 through Excel Services.

Note: Office365 is included in the image only to give the big picture, in that there are three major offerings and DataMarket is a result of what is offered in Windows Azure and SQL Azure.

This post highlights the DataMarket Add-In for Excel, which is a free application that allows discovering and importing data from Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket into Microsoft Office Excel. I also give a brief description of each cloud offering.

DataMarket Add-In for Excel (how it works)

The DataMarket Add-in for Excel (CTP1) gives you a simple experience allowing you to discover datasets published on the Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket. You can browse and search for a rich set of datasets from content publishers within a tool you’re already familiar with, Excel. Here is how:

1. Download the add-in here, open the folder (or save to your machine), and double-click the Windows Installer Package.

Note: You may be asked to download Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 Client Profile. The 4.0 framework installs the WCF Data Services, which is a component of the .NET Framework that enables you to create REST-based services and applications that use the Open Data Protocol (OData) to expose and consume data over the Web.

2. Open Excel and click the Data tab to see that the add-in was installed as extension to Excel. You should see a button named Import data from DataMarket in the Excel ribbon, as follows:

3. Click the Import data from DataMarket button. The sign-in dialog box opens:

This dialog box introduces the DataMarket and lets you:

• Browse the marketplace: Clicking this link opens a new browser window where you can browse the datasets exposed by the DataMarket.
• Sign up for DataMarket: Opens the browser with the sign-up page for the DataMarket. Signing up is free!
• Privacy statement: Opens the browser showing the privacy statement for this add-in.

The main purpose of this dialog box is to help you sign in to your list of subscribed datasets. To sign in, you need to provide an account key. An account key is your password to access all the datasets in the DataMarket and it can be found at https://datamarket.azure.com/account/keys. Because the account key is your password (tied to your DataMarket account), you need to sign up with the DataMarket to get access to it.

Copy the account key from the account key page (https://datamarket.azure.com/account/keys) and paste it into the Account key field. Additionally, you can specify whether the account key is being saved for further use by checking the Remember my account key check box.

If you have signed up, copy your account key and click Sign-In to load your subscribed datasets.

The following screeshot shows the three datasets I signed up for. Some datasets, such as STATS, charge a fee. Other datasets are free but may have limitations on the data you can view. For example, Zillow gives you 3,000 transaction per month for free. The other data providers offer a various number of transactions.

For next steps see:

Excel Services overview (SharePoint Server 2010)

Publish a workbook to Excel Services

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For any customers who might be using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search, this is a reminder that in 2008, it was replaced with Microsoft Search Server 2008. At that time, Microsoft discontinued support for Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search. This is especially important to note if you plan to install Service Pack 2 (SP2) for SharePoint Products and Technologies on a server that is running Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search. This can cause Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search to incorrectly register as a trial version.

We recommend that you do one of the following instead:  

• Install Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. For information about SharePoint Server 2010, see the Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Resource Center on TechNet. For information about search in SharePoint Server 2010, see Getting started with enterprise search in SharePoint 2010 Products (white paper).
• Install Search Server 2010 or Search Server 2010 Express. For information about Search Server 2010, see What’s new in enterprise search (Search Server 2010). For information about installation, see Install Search Server 2010 or Search Server 2010 Express.
• Install Search Server 2008 or Search Server 2008 Express, and then install SP 2 for SharePoint Products and Technologies. For information about supported upgrade paths, see Upgrade Paths (Search Server 2008). For information about installation, see Install Search Server 2008 or Search Server 2008 Express. For information about SP 2, see Service Pack 2 for SharePoint Products and Technologies (white paper).

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After months of planning and hard work, Service Pack 1 for SharePoint 2010 Products is live and available for download. Service Pack 1 provides additional functionality and specific fixes, such as the ability to recover site collections and sites from the Recycle Bin, granular management and insight into storage using StorMan.aspx (Storage Space Allocation), and many others.

The SharePoint documentation team has published new and updated articles that were available as of June 28. For more information about these articles, as well as to learn what’s new in this service pack, download the Service Pack 1 for SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 white paper.

The following SharePoint team blog post provides more information about the contents of the service pack, such as its contents, how to download it, and FAQs: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blog/Pages/BlogPost.aspx?pID=984. 

You can also visit the Updates for SharePoint 2010 Products Resource Center (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/ff800847.aspx) to get detailed information about installing the service pack.

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