SharePoint Random Technical Thoughts: April 2014

Thursday, April 10, 2014

SharePoint solutions, and focus on the areas of requirements.

SharePoint solutions, and focus on the areas of requirements. In fact, stop
reading after finding and understanding the requirements. That’s where you’ll
spend most of your architect time in any case.
Then, based on the usually limited requirement information you find in those
case studies, start architecting the solution. If you are stuck in one area, for
example the scale of servers, read the requirements again, and see whether
there are other factors you can address. These may reveal clues that can help
you solve your original problem of scale.
After a while, you’ll be stuck for good, and you won’t be able to go further.
That’s OK, because at this point, you have a ton of questions you need to ask
and get answered to move on. You also have, and this is why you’ll want to
use a case study, the solution so that you can verify your own suggestions and
learn from what the organization in the case study chose to do.
In addition, the questions you have are important because you’ll find the
same problems in other real-life situations. By knowing in advance what
questions you need answered, you also know more about what you need for
your next project.

About the Author
Bjørn Christoffer Thorsmæhlum Furuknap is a senior solutions
architect, published author, speaker, and passionate
SharePointaholic. He has been doing software development
professionally since 1993 for small companies as well as
multinational corporations.
About Understanding SharePoint Journal
Understanding SharePoint Journal is a periodical published by USPJA Publishing LLC. The
journal covers few topics in each issue, focusing to teach a deeper understanding of each topic
while showing how to use SharePoint in real-life scenarios.
You can read more about USP Journal, as well as get other issues and sign up for regular
updates, discounts, and previews of upcoming issues, at http://www.uspjournal.com/ .

You can download whole book on the following link http://sharepoint-career.com/

I Have No Projects!

Eventually, you’ll start working on larger projects (if your organization is
satisfied with the work you did for your department and want to do a larger
SharePoint deployment). By the time you get to this point, you should have
architected several smaller installations already, you’ll have joined the
SharePoint community to have a peer network from which to learn, and
you’ll have confidence in your own abilities.
The point, though, is that at no part of the path is there a stop that says “Now,
go be a SharePoint developer for a few years” or “Now, manage your servers
for a couple of years to build experience.” You don’t build experience as an
architect by working as a developer or administrator no more than you build
experience as a chef by eating a lot or selling food at a convenience store.
Granted, these are related tasks, but if you want to be a better chef, you need
to cook, and if you want to be a better architect, you need to architect.
Similarly, there’s no “exit” path after you’ve reached a certain skill level.
You don’t naturally “advance” from being the world’s greatest food eater to
being a great chef or from being a chef to a grocery store manager, even if all
of these are related to food. Great developers don’t become great solutions
architects by advancement; a developer who wants to become an architect
starts from the bottom, just like anyone else. You don’t become a business
analyst as a natural progression from an architect role; if you want to become
a business analyst, you start from the bottom, just like anyone else.
Your path of advancement in your career is usually within that discipline, so
your advancement path as an architect is to become a great architect, and the
advancement path as a developer is to become a great developer.
I Have No Projects!
If you work for a single organization and as an architect primarily for that
organization, you might end up with spare time where you don’t get to
practice your skills.
Here’s an exercise I did in my early days as an aspiring SharePoint
infrastructure architect (and if you didn’t know, I originally started out on the
path toward SharePoint administration). Look through case studies posted for

You can download whole book on the following link http://sharepoint-career.com/

Advancing Your Architecture Skills

If your time and job description allows, don’t waste time after a project, but
immediately start to think about the next steps in a more complex scenario,
even if you know for a fact that a more complex scenario will never happen
for this project. What would your solution look like if it were scaled to five
times its current size? What if you had three times the number of document
types? What if there was a need for external user access? What if you had to
support a rapid restore after a critical breakdown?
As an architect, your skill set includes thinking two or three stages ahead of
your current project, so after you’ve completed your first and simpler
projects, start practicing on the thought pattern. By doing so, even if the
project never moves ahead, you will see your simpler project in a new light.
Perhaps you didn’t take into account that when you add three new
departments to your solution, your chosen solution isn’t scalable enough.
Good! You’ve just gained experience that will help you in your next project.
Perhaps you didn’t consider changing document requirements in your
taxonomy solution. Great! You won’t make the same mistake again.
The next time you are asked to create a new department site or document
taxonomy, you’ll have these new and imaginary experiences to help you
along, and you’ll architect a solution that is better than your first one.
Congratulations, you’ve improved.

You can download whole book on the following link http://sharepoint-career.com/

The Path of Becoming an Architect

Note
This all comes down to another problem with IT, the ambiguity of titles, but
I’ll leave that for a separate issue.
The Path of Becoming an Architect
I sometimes hear SharePoint professionals say that you cannot have junior
architects, because all architects are in senior roles. This may be correct, but
probably not in the way you think.
Many current architects have extensive experience. They moved into their
new career after having spent years doing other disciplines, such as
development, infrastructure, security, or similar technical professions.
However, there’s nothing preventing you from starting out in a career as an
architect from scratch.
When moving into a new career, experience may be a good thing because it
usually means you are older and have been exposed to more situations from
which you can learn. This isn’t unique to architects; for an experienced
administrator to move into development, for example, their life experience
means they will have a head start on many of their younger and less
experienced colleagues.
You become an architect just like any other profession. You start with the
architect’s version of your first “Hello World” solution, and from that point
on, you are an architect, albeit not more than a developer would be a
developer after creating their first “Hello World” application or an
administrator would be an administrator after doing their first spouse-mode
install (and adds a “Hello World” web part to their wizard-created site).
Architects, like developers and administrators, start out by doing simple tasks
to build their experience and confidence, such as setting up a site for your

You can download whole book on the following link http://sharepoint-career.com/

The Role of an Architect

SharePoint and even other platforms such as Office, Exchange, Lync, and so
on. This is a massive undertaking, and to be good at it or for it to yield an
actual return on investment for the training you need, you need to focus.
If in addition you start to work as an information architect, where your tasks
will be to understand the business taxonomies and architect information
management system to support those tasks, you’ll find a completely new
discipline that will take attention away from your solutions architecture
practice. You won’t excel in all disciplines, or even many. Like developers or
administrators, if you want to become an expert, you need to focus.
In short, however, think of architects not as advanced developers or
administrators but rather as breadth-first practitioners within those
disciplines, who know a massive number of topics to only a small extent.
This means that there are “developer” discipline architects who essentially
architect building and development, and there are “administrator” discipline
architects who essentially architect management and operations.
Finally, keep in mind that we are talking only about SharePoint architects so
far. However, there are many architect roles that are not SharePoint specific
but are still relevant to SharePoint professionals.
For example, a solutions architect (not to be confused with a SharePoint
solutions architect) focuses on solutions in general, where SharePoint is just
one option. These solution architects pick SharePoint as a tool but don’t
necessarily know SharePoint features or components in detail. They then
hand over the architecture and requirements to a SharePoint architect who
can then pick the required features and components.

You can download whole book on the following link http://sharepoint-career.com/

The Role of an Architect

For this reason, an architect is a horizontal role in that their greatest strength
comes from breadth of knowledge rather than depth of expertise. An architect
needs to weigh countless options against each other and pick the ones that
best solve the requirements.
Architects work on finding out what to do rather than how to do it. They
work from a set of requirements or goals and then pick the components
required to reach that goal. They work in close company with soft-skill
professionals such as business analysts, project managers, and so on, but also
with technical performers such as pure developers and administrators. Once
architects have completed their work, they hand over a design or architecture
to technical performers who them implement that design.
An architect needs to be able to construct massively complex grids of
capabilities. Every selected feature has both opportunities and challenges, and
these need to match not just the requirements but all other selected features as
well. Knowing all the capabilities of all available features and components is
in itself a huge challenge, but being able to put them all together to solve the
requirements without causing too many side effects is the task of a master.
Note
My argument against going from a technical role to an architect role is in
short that a technical role is a role that focuses on few areas or one area in
depth, which is exactly the opposite of what an architect should do. A
previously technical-role architect will likely tend to prefer the methods and
options with which they are familiar, making them bad architects.
IT architects come in many flavors, even in SharePoint. Saying you’re a
SharePoint architect means about as much as saying you’re a SharePoint
developer. Sure, I know you design or architect things, but do you architect
solutions, infrastructure, security, information, or what?
Although you’ll find architects who work in multiple disciplines, keep in
mind that, as with all professions, if you split your profession over multiple
disciplines, you will not be able to go as deep into each area.
For example, a SharePoint solutions architect specializes in knowing as much
as possible about the capabilities of various features and components in

You can download whole book on the following link http://sharepoint-career.com/

Understanding the Architect Role

In SharePoint an architect is not necessarily a technical role at all. Many of
the greatest architects I’ve known have little or no hands-on technical
experience at all. Rather than knowing how to do something, what they know
is what is possible and what makes sense.

You can download whole book on the following link http://sharepoint-career.com/

Vault Sharepoint 2010 Integration Sharepoint Site Administrator Tasks

Sharepoint Site Administrator Tasks

Autodesk Vault provides an engineering data management solution that ensures the integrity of design relationships and supports revision control, while SharePoint provides a simplified and familiar interface for other users within a design organization.

Vault Sharepoint 2010 Integration

The Sharepoint 2010 integration is achieved with Microsoft Business Data Connectivity Services (BDC) by using Autodesk Vault Professional with Microsoft SharePoint 2010.

SharePoint users can search, list, link, and download visualization files from Autodesk Vault using the SharePoint interface.

The SharePoint site administrator can configure aspects of the Vault SharePoint integration to streamline workflows. Administrators can create Vault File Lists, configure Vault Search sites, customize search settings, and expose user-defined properties to Sharepoint.

Manage Vault File Lists

Administrators can create and customize Vault File lists to meet their data management needs.

Create a List

Follow these steps to create a new list.

Go to: <WebSite>/_layouts/Autodesk.Vault.BCSConnect/addVaultlist.aspx
Enter a list name, specify the type, and select Create List.

Customize a Vault List

Multiple lists may be configured with unique vault parameters.

Navigate to the list that you wish to customize.
Select the List tab under List Tools.
Select Modify View.
In the Columns section the columns can be enabled or disabled and reordered. Additional columns can be added using the BDCModelEditor.
Data Source Filters allow you to filter the incoming data from a vault.
- Category allows filtering by Vault Category.
- State supports filtering by Vault object life cycle.
- Vault Folder supports limiting the scope to a specific folder branch. The correct format is:
  $/FirstLevelFolderName/SecondLevelFolderName
- Limit specifies the number of returned objects from Vault.

Configure Vault Search Sites and Search Settings

Administrators can establish search settings and customize search sites to streamline data searches.

Configure a Search Site

You must configure a search site for Vault to be able to locate files in a vault.

Log into a SharePoint site.
Select Site Actions and More Options.
Click Basic Search Center. This view requires Microsoft Silverlight. These options are available without Silverlight but the interface looks different than the image below.
Title it Vault Search.
Enter VaultSearch in the URL field.
Click Create.
The new search page opens.
Enter any random value and perform a simple search. No results will be returned but you are taken to the Search Results Page.
On the search results page, click on the Page tab at the top and click Edit Page.
Scroll down to Bottom Zone and click Add Web part.
At the top menu click Search and then Federated Results. Click Add.
Scroll down to the new Federated Results part. Click the menu arrow and select Edit Web Part.
Scroll to the top right corner of the page and locate the Federated Results setting.
Under Location select Vault Search.
Expand Display Properties and set Results.
Click Save.
At the bottom of the edit menu click OK.
At the top left click Stop Editing to save your changes.

Add Vault as a Search Source

Follow these instructions to add Vault as an alternate search source on another page in your site.

Open the site to which you wish to add Vault as a search source.
Under Site Actions select Site Settings.
Select Search Settings in the Site Collection Administration section.
Select Enable custom scopes (such as “All Sites”) by connecting this site collection with the following Search Center.
Enter your search site name preceded by a forward slash. If you used the site name in the previous step enter /VaultSearch.
You can customize the search experience by specifying the drop-down mode for Searches.
Select OK at the bottom.
Return to your home page and click Refresh. Notice the new search drop-down. Selecting All Sites will now search Vault in addition to other configured sources.

Logging

SharePoint can keep a log of Vault errors. These logs can be created by setting the Product field in the message logs to the value Autodesk Vault BCS Connector. Microsoft provides a free utility ULS Viewer that allows filtering by specific product at http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/ULSViewer.

Add Vault as a Search Source

Follow these instructions to add Vault as an alternate search source on another page in your site.

Manage Thumbnails

Add thumbnails to a site to help manage data.

Add Thumbnails to Lists

If you choose to manually create a SharePoint list that accesses Vault, you must modify the aspx page containing the list. Copy and paste the highlighted section detailed below.

Copy:
```
disable‐output‐escaping=”yes”
```
Paste three lines down as shown here. The correct result is two instances of the specified line.

Troubleshoot Thumbnail Displays

When Create/Upgrade is invoked on the AdskVaultFile (shown below) the profile pages are overwritten and the thumbnails may not display properly. To restore proper display of the thumbnails the profile page XSL must be manually updated. There are a couple of methods to achieve the update. All methods require familiarity with profile pages and XSL configuration. The process outlined below requires Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010 which is available online from Microsoft.

Execute a vault search that returns Vault files with thumbnails. Select one of the results to show the profile page. Notice the thumbnail is displayed as a string.
Click Page Expand Edit page command and select Edit page in SharePoint Designer.
SharePoint Designer opens the profile page in an edit mode. Select the Thumbnail cell.
At the bottom of the screen select Code. If the following view does not appear, switch back to Design and then select Code again. The Design button is located just to the left of Code.
Delete the following two highlighted sections.
Insert
```
disable-output-escaping=”yes”
```
after “@Thumbnail”on the line that was not deleted.
Select Save then close SharePoint Designer and refresh the profile page in the browser.

The thumbnails should display now.

Add Vault User-Defined Properties in SharePoint

The Autodesk.BDCModelEditor application located in the deployment folder allows you to modify the list of Vault properties that are exposed to SharePoint. All Vault User-Defined Properties (UDPs) may be exposed in SharePoint. Here are the default properties and the display settings for list and profile pages.

See Properties Administration for more information.

Learn About BCS Properties

File Properties
List View Columns
Profile Page

BDC Identity

Category Name
X
X

Checked Out
X

Checked In
X

Checked Out By
X

Comment
X

ControlledByChangeOrder
X

DateVersionCreated
X

File Size

Lifecycle Definition

Name
X
X

Revision
X
X

State
X
X

Thumbnail
X
X

Version
X

Note: Links are available on the profile page to download source and visualization files.

Item Properties
List View Columns
Profile Page

BCS Identity

Title (Item, CO)
X
X

Name
X

Number
X
X

Revision
X
X

Version
X

State
X
X

Comment

Description (Item, CO)
X

Effectivity End

Effectivity Start

Effectivity
X

Property Compliance
X

Equivalence
X

Controlled by Change Order
X

Category Name
X
X

Units
X

Last Updated By
X

Last Updated
X

Note: A link is available on the profile page to download a visualization of the Primary Associated File.

Change Order Properties
List View Columns
Profile Page

BCS Identity

Title (Item, CO)
X
X

Name
X

Number
X
X

Number of Items
X

Created By
X

Submitted By
X
X

Date Created
X

Date Modified
X

Date Submitted
X
X

Due Date
X

Review Status
X

Stae
X
X

Description (Item, CO)
X
X

Last Updated By
X

Leased Until
X

Export the AdskVaultModel.bdcm File from SharePoint

Follow these steps to export the AdskVaultModel.bdcm file from SharePoint.

Start SharePoint 2010 Central Administration.
Under Application Management click Manage service applications.
Click Business Data Connectivity Service.
Ensure that BDC Models is selected in the View section of the toolbar.
Select Export for the AdskVaultModel.

Edit the BCS Model

Drag and drop the three Autodesk.Connectivity DLLs from the deployment directory into the Windows\Assembly folder. This step requires local administrator permissions.
Double click Autodesk.BDCModelEditor.exe.
Log in using the Vault credentials. The server may be the machine name or IP address.
Drag the AdskVaultModel.bdcm onto the editor.
Select the desired Vault properties and Add‐> to the right column. Ensure that any property that you want to remove from the BCS model is removed from the display of all lists and profile pages prior to removal from the BCS model.
Save and Close.

Replace Existing Model

The modified AdskVultModel.bdcm must be reimported to SharePoint to repalce the existing model.

Note: If updating an existing deployment of Vault Connector, delete the existing instance of AdskVaultModel before loading the updated connector.

Start SharePoint 2010 Central Administration.
Under Application Management click Manage service applications.
Click Business Data Connectivity Service.
Ensure that BDC Models is selected in the View section of the toolbar.
Delete the existing AdskVaultModel.
Click Import on the toolbar.
In the BDC Model File field browse to and open your updated version of the exported file: AdskVaultModel.xml.
Click Import at the bottom of the screen.
Click OK on the message dialog indicating that the import was successful.
Repeat the steps detailed above in the sections Set Access Permission and Configure Profile Page. The new properties are available for use on existing lists but do not appear until enabled.