Boston is a Proud City

Boston is a proud city. We are the home of the Revolutionary War where we battled the British to win independence. We are home of the Boston Tea Party where we demanded our freedom. We are home to millions of immigrants who have made our city great. The unfortunate events this week have put the spotlight on Boston. The Boston Marathon is the world’s oldest annual marathon, a tradition dating back 490 BC when Pheidippides, a Greek messenger, was sent from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens Greece to announce that the Persians had been defeated. Beginning with Monday’s Boston Marathon, two terrorists took the lives of four people this week including one police officer, wounding almost 200 people in a horrendous attack on our liberty. Our city’s police and the police in the neighboring cities of Watertown and Cambridge responded heroically to bring our city back to the peaceful state it was in before the tragedy struck Marathon Monday on Patriots day. In Mayor Menino’s words on Friday night, what was amazing to see, were the hundreds of people from this city rushing into the debris to save the injured with makeshift tunicates plus the brilliant work of the world’s best medical professionals to treat the wounded. Menino’s encouraging words express the greatness of our proud city.

Amby Burfoot, editor-at-large of Runner’s World, and winner of the 1968 Boston Marathon was quoted by Rachel Maddow on her show and blog describes our pride and vigilance:

“We have used our public roadways for annual parades, protest marches, presidential inaugurations, marathons, and all manner of other events. The roads belong to us, and their use represents an important part of our free and democratic tradition.

"I trust and believe that will not change in the future–not in Boston, not at the Boston Marathon, and not at other important public events. Yes, we must be ever-vigilant. We can not cover our eyes and ears, and pretend violent acts don’t threaten our great institutions.

"But our institutions did not become great by following a path of timidity and cowardice. And we can only hope that, when pummeled, as the Boston Marathon was today, they will rise again, stronger than ever."

Boston is great for who we are, proud and strong. Some people have asked if this year’s SharePoint Saturday Boston will be canceled in light of the recent events. Our deepest sympathies go out to the families of the victims. Our thoughts and prayers are with those who were injured and wish them a speedy recovery. We will not cancel this event due to a terrorist act but we understand if attendees want to stay close to their families at this time. We have speakers flying in from all over the United States and some from abroad. SharePoint Saturday, which has taken place in cities all over the world, will continue to provide a free and open place for professionals and volunteers to meet together to share their professional wisdom in this industry that has an amazingly strong and open community. If you have reserved one or more tickets but have decided not to go, please cancel online via Eventbrite  or let us know through our contact page so we can free up the spot for others who were unable to reserve a spot before we sold out.

I am very proud to be a resident of this city and founder of SharePoint Saturday Boston. I look forward to seeing you on Saturday or at one of the many future SharePoint Saturday events to come.

Sincerely,

Talbott Crowell

Get Ready for Microsoft Build 2013!

Reblogged from the pluralsight blog:

Microsoft has announced that they will be holding the next Build conference on June 26th-28th in San Francisco's Moscone center.  Sure to be on tap is news on Windows "Blue", the next iteration of Windows 8 as well as Windows Phone 8, Azure, Visual Studio.  While I'm sure it won't be the same without the waterlogged treks across campus, this event looks to be as exciting as the last.

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Video: Sneak a Peak Behind The Curtain with SharePoint 2013 Central Administration

Reblogged from the pluralsight blog:

SharePoint is a great tool for building web apps, but like any significant application it takes some configuration to get it working well.  In this video excerpt from Sahil Malik's new course Understanding SharePoint 2013: Part 2 - Behind the Scenes you'll get a quick view of some of the core system settings available in the Central Administration tool for SharePoint 2013.  

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#fsharp Community Twitter Activity 2013 Q1

Reblogged from Sergey Tihon's Blog:

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It is time to show some statistics ;) . 2013 Q1 have past and we can sum up twitter activity from that time. This is not the first post with such statistics. The previous one "Rhythm of the F# Сommunity heartbeat" sparked interest, so let's continue while it is interesting.

SharePoint Saturday Austin Texas

 

What a great time in Austin!  The organizers Bruce Weatherford, Jim Bob Howard, Justin Ong, Matthew Lathrop, and Richard Calderon did an amazing job.

I spoke on Developing Provider Hosted SharePoint apps.  You can download my slides at:

• SlideShare
• SkyDrive

I got to sit on a couple of talks, Becky Isserman’s “iOS Development with SharePoint 2013” and Liam Cleary’s “Think you can hack SharePoint” (pictured to the right).  Both great talks.  If you want to learn how to secure SharePoint, you must see Liam speak.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Also great to meet the SharePoint Giant (Shaun Nichols) who lives up to his twitter handle when standing next to Richard Calderon, the amazing chief organizer of SharePoint Saturday Austin.

 

 

 

I’ll be presenting my talk again at the March 13th Boston Area SharePoint User Group, so hope to see you there.

Happy SharePointing!

Where is Yammer for Windows 8?

Yammer is now my favorite iPad app. I use it more than any other app on my iPad. I also use it heavily on my Android phone.  On Windows 7 and Mac OS, I use the browser version (web based app).  But lately, I’ve been spending much of my free time experimenting with Windows 8, but I haven’t made the transition yet to using as my primary OS.  Lately I have been visiting the Cambridge Micro Center to play with an Asus ARM based tablet called the Asus Vivo Tab RT TF600T that is the same size and weight as an iPad, and a heck of a lot lighter than the Surface RT, but since it is not an Intel based device, it won’t run Windows 8 desktop apps other than PowerPoint, Excel, and Microsoft Word which are OEM bundled on the device.  Here is a comparison on Forbes of the Microsoft Surfact RT versus the Asus VivoTab RT.

Yammer, for those who haven’t used it, is a Facebook like community that allows professionals to discuss topics (think Facebook for business).  Its value comes from the groups that you are members of, so by itself it is a dessert. I luckily am members of two awesome groups: SPYam (The SharePoint Yammer Community founded by Joel Oleson) and the Microsoft Northeast SharePoint Community (founded by Chris Bortlik).

So the other day when I was looking for a Windows RT (Windows Store) version of Yammer, I was shocked to find that it doesn’t exist!  Wait, didn’t Microsoft buy Yammer for 1.2 billion dollars just six months ago in June of 2012? Well since I was on Windows 8 running on my MacBook Air 11″ via Parallels 8, I could search for a desktop version of Yammer. Found it, an Adobe Air desktop app that runs on Mac and Windows. So I downloaded it and started using it on my Windows 8 image.

But what happens if I buy that Asus tablet I’ve been eyeing? Guess I’m stuck with the browser version.  But wait, isn’t the value of a tablet to have rich device apps right there with local cache that can access content when you don’t have a WiFi signal? I’m a Microsoft MVP and alumni, so I don’t like criticising Microsoft, but hopefully this is constructive criticism that my former employer will take to light. Build a Window RT app for Yammer now! Don’t wait. Eat your own dogfood. The one thing that Windows 8 sorely lacks today in comparison with Android and iOS is a store full of high quality apps. Please, Microsoft, if you have 1.2 billion dollars to spend on Yammer, just spend a tiny itsy bitsy fraction of that, $120,000 for example can easily launch a first release. That is one percent of one percent.

I used to say that Windows 8 will enter mainstream when Angry Birds makes it into the Windows 8 Store. Now that we have Angry Birds, let’s continue to prove that Windows 8 is the right place to market apps starting with Microsoft acquisitions like Yammer.

SharePoint 2013 Shredded Storage Test Results

In this blog post, I’m going to share some test results when using SharePoint to store multiple versions of a file. As you can see in Test Results section at the end, the new Shredded Storage feature in SharePoint 2013 can mean significant improvement in efficiencies of storage requirements for specific use cases.

Shredded Storage Overview

Shredded Storage is a wonderful new aspect of SharePoint 2013 that lives under the hood and silently runs invisibly performing great feats. What it does is for each version of a document, instead of storing the whole document and all the metadata, it only stores the deltas (or differences). This is a grand improvement for architects, system administrators, and business users who need to store many versions of the same file but with minor changes. I decided to run a few tests and document the results so people can see the benefits of this new feature of SharePoint 2013.

Test #1

SharePoint 2007 versus SharePoint 2013

PowerPoint Document Metadata Changes Impact

In my first test, I measure the impact of changes to metadata for a single document in both SharePoint 2007 (also known as MOSS) and SharePoint 2013. I created two single server farms in CloudShare, created a single document library in each, and added a single metadata field (list column). I then made snapshot of both so I could go back and retest under the same conditions.

CloudShare is an affordable cloud based development tool I use to do experimental work. At times it can be much more convenient than doing things locally since there are templates to build a farm really quickly, and I don’t have to free storage space or RAM on my local machine. If you haven’t checked it out yet, you should sign up for a 14 day trial and give it a spin.

The Test Document

The document is a single large PowerPoint document that is 10 MB in size (10,085 KB). Before uploading the document, I made sure that versioning was turned on in both SharePoint 2007 and 2013. Below is a screen capture of 2013, which hasn’t changed much since 2007 except for CSS styling.

To view the version history, in SharePoint 2013, you need to click the ellipsis (…) next to the document, then in the pop-up window click another ellipsis, and then you will get the version history menu option.

The version history will display the versions of the documents. Below in the SharePoint 2007 screen capture you can see the three versions of the document. Note that the only change I made was to the Metadata field which I used to store “v1″ in the original, “v2″ in the second version, and “v3″ in the third version. Note that that was the only thing I changed on both 2013 and 2007. I did not make any changes to the document.

In order to make the changes, after the initial upload, I used “Edit Properties” to make changes to the metadata only:

You can see in the example below that the metadata displays “v3″ which is after I had made the third change. After each change, I captured the database changes using SQL Server Management Studio.

SQL Server Management Studio

Using SQL Server Management Studio, I reported on all of the databases and their sizes using the Object Explorer Details View.

When you click on the “Databases” node on the left tree in the Object Explorer window, the Object Explorer Details window will display details. The ones I needed include Data Space Used (KB) and other database size related fields. By right-clicking the column header, you can add or remove the fields you need.

Once you have the columns you need, simply select the rows you need and use Ctrl-C to copy the rows. Then simply paste into Excel.

For my test, the important database was the SP2007-MOSS_Portal_Content, which is the content database that stores my document that I’m testing. To be thorough, I captured the changes in all the databases.

I captured the results in an Excel file and crunched the numbers to see the differences.

At first, I calculated the differences in database size by comparing the total used space in all databases. Then to isolate just the document (and exclude any database growth due to search engine gathering jobs for example), I only calculated the differences in the database size by comparing the used space in just the content database that stored my test document.

Test Results

The results were what I expected, actually even more efficient in 2013 than expected. As you can see below, the overhead of just changing the metadata for SharePoint 2007 (and also SharePoint 2010) is significant because pre-SharePoint 2013, SharePoint stores the entire document over again even if you just change one of the list column field values:

	SharePoint 2007	SharePoint 2013
start	0	0
v1	10,312	10,416
v2	20,624	10,504
v3	30,928	10,576

For the full spreadsheets, download them from my SkyDrive folder.

For SharePoint 2013, you can see that only about 80 KB difference for each version versus 10,300 KB. So for a 10 MB document, that is 12,800% more efficient or to put it another way, each document takes up 128 times less space. Over time this is significant, just look at the growth rate in pre 2013 versions versus 2013 in the graph below:

Imagine if this document’s metadata was changed 100 times. In SharePoint 2007 and 2010, the document would require 1GB to store a 10 MB file, but in SharePoint 2013 it would only require around 20 MB.

Future Tests

In the future, I plan on testing making partial changes to the document, such as adding a slide to a PowerPoint deck.

More Information on Shredded Storage

For more information on Shredded Storage, I recommend the following other blog posts:

• Shredded Storage in SharePoint 2013 Preview (Dan Holme’s Viewpoint on SharePoint Blog)
• SharePoint 2013 Shredded Storage and The End of the World (Dan Holme’s Viewpoint on SharePoint Blog)
• Introduction to Shredded Storage in SharePoint 2013 (Bill Baer, Microsoft SharePoint Senior Product Marketing Manager)
• How Shredded Storage REALLY works in SP2013 (ACS Blogs, CJD)
• The Truth behind Shredded Storage in SharePoint 2013 (Jeremy Thake’s musings)

To learn more about CloudShare, which I used to do this testing, visit CloudShare on the web at http://www.cloudshare.com and see how easy it is to build a SharePoint 2013 farm in minutes.