The recent announcement about the general availability of Windows Azure IaaS comes with the following key enhancements:
These enhancements make it easy to deploy a SharePoint Farm in an automated manner using PowerShell scripts.
The goal of this blog post is to walk you through such a script. Read More…
AIS is planning a second presentation of our newest SharePoint 2013 seminar in Reston, VA on May 15th. Last month’s seminar in Chevy Chase was a great, informative morning and we’re pleased to offer it again at a different DC metro area location for a wider audience. (Non-DC readers stay tuned; we plan to take this show on the road to other cities soon!)
After more than two years of early adoption research, analysis and technical readiness, AIS has determined that SharePoint 2013 has game-changing functionality as an application platform. This free half-day session will touch on all the new, compelling features of SharePoint and detail exactly how it can help you do more…with less.
AIS bloggers and team members Jason Storch and Chris Miller will be presenting and on-hand to answer any questions you have about SharePoint and how it can meet the specialized needs of your company or organization.
For more background, you can read our full SharePoint 2013 blog coverage by clicking here. We also have a short whitepaper available on The Top Reasons Your Business Will Love the New SharePoint.
Click here to register for this event. We look forward to seeing you there!
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:
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.
We’ve reached the end of this series. In part one, we discussed the basics of PowerShell. Part two showed some of the ways to interact with SharePoint via PowerShell. Today we’ll look at parts of a script I compiled to build out a SharePoint 2013 development virtual machine.
I want to start off with some notes about the assumptions I took and the configuration I used. First, this VM is running in Hyper-V on Windows 8 and uses Windows Server 2012 which was installed through the GUI. (I’ll try to figure out PowerShell remoting and Hyper-V at a later date, but that wasn’t in the cards for this post.) Second, I’ve configured two virtual networks, one internal with a static IP and one external with a dynamic IP. I configured those through the GUI as well. However, almost everything else has been built using PowerShell. While we’ll only highlight some of the script in this post, you can find the full script at my CodePlex Project: Useful PowerShell Cmdlets.
The first post in this series covered the basics of PowerShell including variables, loops, and decisions. It also introduced a few scripts I’ve used over the last several weeks. In this post, we’ll discuss how to use PowerShell in a SharePoint farm, some of the more useful capabilities (especially to developers), and a few more scripts that I’ve written to bring the topics covered together.
PowerShell has been natively supported in SharePoint since SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010. When SharePoint is installed, in addition to the Product Configuration Wizard and Central Administration shortcuts, a shortcut for the SharePoint Management Shell is available. This application is a PowerShell console with a blue background and the SharePoint Snap-in loaded. The PowerShell Snap-in is a PowerShell version 1 object that, when loaded, makes additional functions (or cmdlets) available to call in the current PowerShell session. To do this, simply execute the following:
Add-PSSnapin "Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell"
This will allow you to access the SharePoint cmdlets in any PowerShell session. It’s also important to run the PowerShell or SharePoint Management Shell console as administrator as the logged-in user may only have limited access to the SharePoint farm.
SharePoint adoption is widespread in most organizations today, and a very common use case for SharePoint is as the core technology for an intranet. There are many features of SharePoint 2010 that make it an excellent choice for an intranet, including web content management, workflow, publishing and search. SharePoint offers a secure, scalable technology that empowers content owners to create, approve and publish pages in an easy-to-use, Microsoft Office-like user interface. With SharePoint, you get a great looking, high-functioning intranet that’s secure and easy to use. (In Jakob Nielsen’s “10 Best Intranets of 2013”, he notes 70% of the awardees are using SharePoint.)
With the release of SharePoint 2013, however, there are several new features that are worth noting if you’re thinking of upgrading your intranet from a previous version of SharePoint, or migrating from another product. If your organization is considering a redesign or a technology update of their intranet, SharePoint’s newest release is more compelling than ever as the platform of choice.
If you have been following any of the news about SharePoint 2013, you already know that the workflow capability has been enhanced significantly. The most important change is that workflows now execute outside SharePoint. Please refer to the diagram below. (This diagram is taken from MSDN with some annotations.) 
As you can see, workflows are hosted externally. The external host for workflows can either be Windows Azure or customer-provided infrastructure. Why is this change so important? Recall all the knobs and switches we had to turn as SharePoint developers to prevent workflow execution from overwhelming the SharePoint farm. Read More…
Have you taken a look at the new SharePoint yet?
If you’ve spent any time reading our blog, you know by now that SharePoint 2013 introduces extraordinary new features to change the way you work, share, discover, organize and build sites. And now we’ve put together a quick guide highlighting the top features that may inpact your business.
Download The Top Reasons Why Your Business Will Love the New SharePoint now! (No form required,)
The Top Reasons Why Your Business Will Love the New SharePoint guide provides you with an overview of the latest and greatest that comes with SharePoint 2013, including:
And if you’re in the DC area, AIS is hosting an “Introduction to SharePoint 2013″ event at the Microsoft office in Chevy Chase, MD on March 20th. Click here to learn more and register.
(UPDATED! Please note the new date. We’ll be presenting this session on March 20th, at 9:30 am to noon at Microsoft’s office in Chevy Chase, MD. We hope you can join us, as it’s shaping up to be a lively and very informative event!)
Reduced budgets, economic pressures and competition require our commercial and public sector clients to accomplish more with less these days.
After more than two years of early adoption research, analysis and technical readiness, AIS has determined that SharePoint 2013 has game-changing functionality as an application platform. We leverage it because we can build great applications more quickly — and at reduced cost because we write much less code.
Most organizations own the product. But few truly leverage it as an application platform. This free half-day session will present the major new capabilities of SharePoint 2013 and how they can be used for a new generation of applications, including:
This seminar will highlight the many reasons to aggressively migrate to SharePoint 2013 by reviewing the many new and enhanced features, while providing context and insight into the new generation of application they enable.
AIS bloggers and team members Vishwas Lele, Jason Storch and Chris Miller will be presenting. For more background, you can read our full SharePoint 2013 blog coverage by clicking here. In particular, be sure not to miss Vishwas Lele’s entry on the SharePoint App Dev Platform: The Journey So Far & the Road Ahead.
When: March 20, 2013, 9:30 am to noon
Where: Microsoft Corporation, 5404 Wisconsin Avenue, Chevy Chase MD (map)
Please click here to register for this event, or feel free to email me directly. We hope to see you there!
It should come as no surprise that Microsoft’s strategy for SharePoint 2013 is cloud-based, SaaS, Hosted Services or whatever you want to call it. Whatever the name, the outcome is that custom, server-side code is no longer the way to go in the SharePoint world. This brings into question the fate of one of the workhorses of SharePoint since 2003: the Event Receiver. Microsoft has done a great job of exposing web services and creating the Client Side Object Model to enable scripting, but that doesn’t work when your application needs to react to an event that occurs in SharePoint.
SharePoint workflow could provide some of that functionality, but there is an overhead cost to workflow. When architecting a SharePoint-based solution and the question “Workflow or Event Receiver?” comes up, I always prefer event receivers until it’s proven that the process needs a workflow. If all the process needs to do is fire off an e-mail or update a field in another list or database, then why incur the overhead of a workflow when an event receiver will do the job with minimal management and overhead? But that doesn’t work in an app for SharePoint or in a hosted environment that doesn’t allow custom code…or does it?
I’m guessing you can tell from the title of this post what the answer to that is — yes, with remote event receivers.
