Operations And Support | Applied Information Sciences Blog

Good question. And we’ve got the answer.

Here at AIS, we’ve spent hundreds of thousands of hours envisioning, designing and constructing SharePoint-based solutions for our clients. With each new version of SharePoint, we make additional investments to deeply understand the new release’s capabilities.

We’ve taken a look at all the changes and enhancements in the latest version — and you just have to look at our blog archives to realize that a LOT has changed in 2013 — and put together a short, easy-to-read whitepaper that highlights the top new features that make SharePoint 2013 a must-have for your business, including:

Smarter Search
Simpler and Mobile-Ready UI
The game-changing SharePoint App Store Model
Better Workflow
Social SharePoint
Easy Migration Tools
Lower Costs
And much more!

Please CLICK HERE to download your free copy.

Not familiar with SharePoint as a business solution? Take a look at our SharePoint solutions on our website and contact us to learn more about how SharePoint can transform your organization.

Lindagrace De la Cruz

Have you ever attended a technical training event, and three days later, couldn’t really remember what you were trained on? In trying to recall what you just sat through, your mind comes up with the mental equivalent of a desolate Wild Wild West ghost town, perhaps with a sad tumbleweed or two passing through. You are not alone! At one point or another, we’ve all fallen victim to a training presentation that simply does not stick.

Training is an opportunity to engender a self-propelling domino effect of learning that can better humanity.

As a training developer, it’s my job to prevent students from walking away empty-minded. Come to think of it, this is also the goal for most sales people. You want your presentation to make a lasting impression: You want something to hit home — to stick —for the other person, in order to produce results. Whether those results are improved on-the-job performance or the President’s Club Award for Outstanding Sales, it doesn’t matter. Recognize that training is so much more than a stand-alone event: It is an opportunity to engender a self-propelling domino effect of learning that can better humanity. “Well, when you put it that way, serving as a Trainer is an honor and a privilege!” my colleague said to me. Yes, indeed it is! Read More…

Andrew Bassett

I was recently working on an automation task that involved opening an XML document, reading the values its contents, and passing them as arguments to install a variety of processes, etc., etc. All rather routine and mundane. Of course, my XML document was littered with environment variables and other special monikers that would be replaced after the file had been loaded. So I reached for my PowerShell editor and started putting together a solution. Then I got to thinking…why don’t I just embed PowerShell variables directly in the file?

Well, why not indeed. The problem was as PowerShell read the file in, it simply ignored my variables and I was stuck with an XML attribute value of something like $Domain\$User. It didn’t help me one whit. Surely there must be some way to convince PowerShell to evaluate that.

As luck would have it, there is! Or I should say, there are! Because it turns out there are multiple ways to do this, none of which are specific to XML (that was just my target data). So, let’s review the options…

Vishwas Lele

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@vlele

With the SharePoint Conference 2012 behind us, I have been reflecting on our SharePoint journey so far…and on the road ahead. And what an incredible journey it has been! SharePoint has allowed AIS to build mission-critical applications for various large federal government agencies and commercial organizations. And not just ECM or document management systems (which are great workloads enabled by SharePoint) but enterprise-class applications for tens of thousands users (such as the FBI’s Delta Project), built using SharePoint platform elements such as workflows, lists, libraries, search, etc.

This blog entry is comprised of two parts. The first part will focus on the SharePoint journey so far. Through a series of short video clips, I will present some of the key insights we have derived over the many years of building custom applications on SharePoint. We will end this the first part with a short demonstration of SharePoint-based Case Management application that brings together many of the key concepts. The second part will focus on the road ahead and the most important enhancements made in SharePoint 2013. Read More…

Tim Larson

I’ve been working with Powershell lately, and I wrote a couple of functions to help verify server permissions in Microsoft SQL Server.

Why would I want to verify server permissions instead of verifying server roles? In my case, I’m interested in knowing if a particular user is able to create a database on a SQL Server. While the dbcreator role does allow a user to create a database, there are other roles that will also allow a user to create a database, such as sysadmin. Additionally, if a user is a member of an AD Group that has the role assigned, then the role is not directly assigned to the user. In the end, I found it simplest to check for the actual CREATE ANY DATABASE permission.

In this post, we will see how to check if the current AD user has a specific server permission and how to check if an AD account other than the current user has a specific server permission.

Chris Miller

Like the rest of the AIS team, I’d thought I’d share one of the most interesting sessions I attended during SPC12. It was called SharePoint Center of Excellence: Why you need one. Those IT Pro and Dev guys/gals might have missed this one because it was in the basement (politely known as the conference’s Business Section), but I found it extremely valuable.

The session was run by Andrew Woodward from App 21 on the usefulness of (and strategies for) successfully operating a Center of Excellence within an organization. For those that have never had the pleasure of actively participating in the evangelizing/educating/promoting of technology in reshaping workforce processes, Centers of Excellence serve as visible and real recognition by organizational leadership on the commitment of the investment. In other words, they help put weight behind the words.

Craig Swain

This week, many AIS team members are attending the Microsoft SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. We’ll be posting blog posts from each of them as they learn what’s new and what’s exciting during sessions, demonstrations and other conference highlights.

During yesterday’s breakout sessions, I attended Sean Livingston’s session on SharePoint 2013 Upgrade. A few minutes into the presentation, Sean offered up a quip that is certainly true across any platform level migration: “Upgrades lead to unpleasant feelings between the users and the IT staff.”

To be fair, upgrades bring “new stuff,” which often the users are clamoring for. However the process of designing, engineering, implementing and provisioning the upgrade tends to be long running, particularly where large blocks of content must be migrated from one version to another. Upgrade plans must carefully balance the run times required to upgrade the content, training time for users and other background tasks against the need to keep serving up content through the transition. Migrations can be a headache from start to finish. However, several features in SharePoint 2013 aim to ease the upgrade process, if not completely avoid all headaches.