2009/08/02Today sees the official start of the Microsoft TechED Africa 2009 event. A premier event hosted by Microsoft each year in several countries. South Africa being on of those, covers the whole of Africa, and there are delegates from all over Africa attending. Last year was the first year for the event to be hosted in Durban, and this year we are happy to see the event return to Durban. ApplyIT has been a Microsoft Gold Partner for several years now, and in keeping with our commitment to the Microsoft technology platform, several employees from ApplyIT will again be attending this prestigious event. It is events like these that help ensure that we are always kept abreast of the latest technologies ensuring these can be passed on to our customers via our product offerings and expert technical services. All ApplyIT internal systems are also kept at a high standard, ensuring our support systems and product development systems are always ready for customer demand. We will be feeding back via this blog, to promote some of these technologies, and further ensure that we are a company that is part of the leading group of IT solution providers in the market place. This event being a key instrument in this vision. 2009/05/02
The wait is over… Windows 7 RC has been released to MSDN subscribers, and this history means that it is Gold Code. From a Microsoft perspective Gold Code is the final builds the we will eventually see in retail stores.
Previously we have blogged about the compatibility and initial testing with Windows 7. With this Release Candidate, the ApplyIT Labs will continue testing ensuring that we are happy that all of our solutions will correctly run on the platform.
Stay tuned as we run through our evaluations and be assured that we will keep you up to date with the findings. 2009/04/15
As always we seem to balance hard work with the fun of technology, and always trying to find new and interesting things and see what business applications they might have and further enhance our core products. And Live Mesh is one of those technologies which we are playing with.
To take a snippet from the Live Mesh help system : “…Live Mesh puts you at the center of your digital world, seamlessly connecting you to the people, devices, programs, and information you care about – wherever you happen to be…”. And never has a truer word been spoken. If you have ever used Microsoft Office Groove, you could get a pretty good picture of what this is, except this is centrally managed, multiple device support, and a Web browser interface for those non Microsoft Operating Systems.
Many of us have a PC at work, home and “Smart” phones. We sometimes need to travel and do not always have our laptops with use, but need to get hold of some information, or would just like to share some information with colleges and business partners. This is where Live Mesh is extremely useful. It provides you with the ability to synchronise folders between devices or not. You can share with other people, and permissions are down to the folder levels, which makes it save and secure. That and the fact that is based on your Live ID.
Live Mesh is another one of the multiple new “Live” applications that Microsoft is investing a lot of time and effort in. And for a lot of people, this would really streamline their daily communications and “collaboration”. And by collaboration I do not mean multiple teams on projects, but more around social interaction.
There does seem to be some overlap with Office Live, SkyDrive and some of the other social networking sites. But I do think Live Mesh has a great part to play, and as always, we will keep an eye on these kind of developments to see where they lead, and how we can utilise these in the future.
For a closer look, go to http://www.mesh.com 2009/01/07 Followers of Microsoft CRM 4 may have missed some of the action while many of us were enjoying a break over the festive season. And those who have been eagerly monitoring the release of the solution accelerators will be pleased to learn that three additional solutions have been posted recently and are available for download. These are: eService The eService accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 provides customer self-service capabilities (via a web portal) as a configurable out-of-the-box offering. One possible application is to allow customers to create support calls through the web and to track the progress of calls. ![clip_image002[4]](/microsoft/teamblog/Lists/Posts/Attachments/16/clip_image0024_thumb.jpg)
Analytics R1 This is the first of 3 planned releases designed to provide advanced analysis capabilities on CRM data. The first release builds on the concepts in the Analytics Foundation for CRM 3.0 and is built to cater for differing business intelligence skill-sets and experience levels. 
Enterprise Search R1 R1 is the first of 2 planned releases of the enterprise search accelerator for CRM 4. Essentially if you have SharePoint Server 2007 and CRM you are able to search and view CRM data directly from the SharePoint portal. In addition you will be able to edit any CRM data such as accounts, contacts etc through SharePoint. 
These solutions are all highly relevant to customers considering Dynamics CRM, or who wish to extend the use of CRM in their businesses. Like an ice berg, CRM is a powerful platform with most of the action below the surface. These solutions leverage the power of the CRM platform to customers in the form of practical and useful solutions for end users; which after all is where the rubber hits the road in companies! These accelerators are available on www.codeplex.com/crmaccelerators Customers should contact their Microsoft Partners for advice on how to take the next step... 2008/11/01 Microsoft partners are able to download three new solution accelerators for CRM 4 from the Microsoft Partner Site. These are the CRM Notifications Accelerator, the Extended Sales Forecasting Accelerator and the Event Management Accelerator. The Extended Sales Forecasting Accelerator, in particular has been eagerly anticipated and allows you to be able to set targets by period for sales people and monitor the forecast and actual results against these targets. 
The Notifications Accelerator is another great concept, allowing you to subscribe to information changes and updates in your CRM system using RSS feeds. 
The event management accelerator allows you to publish CRM campaigns as events through a registration portal. You can then track invitees, respondents, event details etc. We will be investigating this some more in the next few months - initially for in-house training and then to manage our customer facing events in ApplyIT. General availability for CRM customers on the Microsoft Website is anticipated very soon. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Partner link to accelerators 2008/10/16
These days building security into your website architecture is paramount, especially when it comes to collaboration and content management systems. And the new version of Sharepoint is no different.
With all the new enhancements that Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 brings to the enterprise, security had to be stepped up a few notches to cater for these. But at what price?
For a while now we have been planning a face lift for this site, and one of the existing features we wanted to bring to the community, was our blogs. We felt that we had some information to share, and that the blogging facility provided with Sharepoint would do the trick.
And from previous experience, allowing anonymous access to the site seemed straight forward, and as always one thinks that what a great feature this is, and how easy Microsoft has made it. However, the practical deployment has proven a lot more difficult than anticipated.
I have been battling with allowing anonymous access to certain of our blog sites for the past 12 hours, and only after removing numerous eye candy, and resetting IIS more times than I care to remember, have I been able to bring our thoughts to a wider audience.
This now raises a serious question in my mind. Was this overlooked my Microsoft. All the articles I have read suggests that the security models are great, and that they do try and avoid the ill informed from accidently exposing too much, but do we really need degrees in computer science to enable such a "basic" feature for public consumption... Could they not have made this a little simpler, for certain "Content Types"?
I'll follow this post up with some general tips and tricks, all collated from several hundred other bog and technet entries, to try and further demistify the issues around opening up Sharepoint security when deployed as a combined web site and intranet portal. 2008/09/18It's been almost 7 years since I last really worked with XSL, and back then I designed and coded a complete web site, with an accompanying shopping cart, only using ASP, XML and XSL / XSLT. And what a challenge that was. It was new technology, and our remit was to stay abreast of the most cutting edge technology, and ensuring that we showcase this in all of our development efforts. Recently I have been involved in several SharePoint customizations, and have rediscovered the joys of XSL. Now SharePoint has several ways for you to style it, but from a pure developers perspective, I have found XSL to be the ultimate in styling tools / technologies. And with the multitude of tools available these days, this kind of styling is also in clear reach of the designers. One of my favourite news tricks for providing details / content of sub sites, and any other federations services, has been the Search Core Results webpart. I have found this to be the most versatile webpart, without needing to consider opening up Visual Studio. Now without turning this into a developer post, I will provide some details on the flexibility using standard tools, that all SharePoint developers will have in their tool belt. The first thing you would need to know is that during webpart configuration, is that you have a button that clearly indicates the ability to modify the XSL. From there on, all you need is an example of the resulting XML, and there are several articles out there containing a 10 line XSL snippet which you use in the webpart to produce the desired XML output. Using SharePoint designer, all you need to do is import the XML as a datasource, and drag and drop the data onto a new ASPX page. From there you have all the controls and styles you need to radically change the output of the results. The last step is to simply view the source of the ASPX page, and copy the generated XSL into your webpart, and Bobs your uncle. Now the only limitation you would be faced with, is you imagine and creativity, which for most developers (From a graphical perspective), could be a bit of a problem. But that's what Designers are there for. 2008/08/29With Microsoft just launching the public availability of Internet Explorer Beta 2, I decided it was time to investigate and see what new innovations are waiting for the masses to consume. The first thing I noticed was the suggestion features built into the search facility on the toolbar. Historically suggestive features in my experience has been poor, and very slow. This time around, I must say that I am very impressed. Even with google as your default search provider, it works as expected, and better. The responsiveness is also first class, and with this being Beta, I know it will only improve. The other new feature I find exciting is the Accelerators. This enables you to highlight something on the web page, and then select from a list of tasks. Some of these include a translation service, Blogging into Live Spaces, Find on ebay etc. My mind is already racing with the potential of integrating into this feature, from a product perspective, and I am looking forward to other vendors building on top of this. With all new things come compatibility issues, but Microsoft have taken this into consideration. The guys at Redmond have added a compatibility view button. IE 8 will detect that there might be issues with displaying the page correctly, and it will then give you the ability to display it in a Internet Explorer 7 mode. Great for people that are testing their existing products, and providing the ability to still be productive by switching to something that works and have been tested. The other nice feature for me is the Web Slices addition. This will allow developers to add this into areas of a website that will update frequently. The visitor can then simply click on the area, and the Web Slice feature will enable them to subscribe to that portion of the site, and a link will be created in your Favorites bar. This seems to almost behave like an RSS feed, but will pull down the item as displayed on the website. Overall there has been various other enhancements. This mainly around compatibility, standards, and security. Looking forward to testing more sites, and internally ensure that our products works well with these new features. 2008/08/06With the new release of Windows Server 2008 Microsoft has made some significant enhancements to several areas within the management / administration environments. What might be of significance to most developers is the following areas... Windows Eventing (Event Viewer) The Windows Event Management system has undergone some serious changes, but the great thing about these changes, is that Microsoft has exposed them to the developer community. Below is a screen shot of just how much more advanced the event viewer has become. 
One of the most significant changes is that you can now pass serialized objects as part of a collection to the event viewer. Seria.. what? Well, you can take your variables at the time that the exception occurs in your code, and pass them (Event the objects) as part of the exception. The event viewer will then convert these objects to XML and display them in the event viewer. This will then enable the support team to pass this "state" information to the development team for further testing. You can now also create custom view based on search criteria, to quickly get a handle of what exactly is happening on the server. The have also Introduced the ability to add a task to the task scheduler. This means that you can mark a specific event, add send it to the Task Scheduler. Task Scheduler The task scheduler has also undergone some major surgery. Below is a screen shot of the new enhanced task scheduler. 
On the left you can now see that most of the windows back end processes run through the task scheduler. You can now also create different groups under which tasks can be executed. Standard built in email facilities are also available. Not to mention the fact that this is all accessible via a programming model. Application Recovery and Restart Ever seen word crash on you, and then a nice little window appearing asking you to recover from the crash and restart the application?!? Well, in the past this was only available for tings like Word and Excel. You, as a programmer, can now utilise this feature in windows. When your application crashes, windows will let you know that it is about to restart your application, and will give you some time to save the state or do a clean up process. Then it will gracefully close you application, and restart it, informing your application that it has restarted it, providing you with some time to reload the previous state. Transactions Now as a developer we are all aware of the fact that you can execute some data against a database within a transaction. And what that means is that if anything goes wrong before the end of this transaction, you can roll back all changes without affecting the database. With the new Windows Server and Vista, this is now possible on a NTFS file system, not to mention the Registry. Imagine the power this provides you. The actual implementation will ensure that during the transaction, written files are only visible to the executing application as well as the registry keys. And if you get a I/O error due to permissions, no problem, just roll back the transaction. These are just some of the new features, but what a difference these could make to our day to day development.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM4 is indeed a great solution, and a platform thrown in as well. But what lies ahead? Well, for those who know CRM well, the next 8 weeks are indeed going to be exciting! Microsoft will be releasing (in the form of solution accelerators) the following enhancements:
Analytics and reports: All those missing statistics, pipeline funnel charts, sales analytics and scorecards are coming, and can be deployed via SharePoint
Event management: Ever wondered how to track all invitees, respondents to an event? The new solution accelerator will include web based registration capability to ensure that events are well coordinated. And the great thing is that these additional features are ideally suited to in-house events such as training courses.
Web based access allowing customers to access their service centre customers can now log service requests (cases), read the knowledge base and get updates to calls all through the web - this dramatically improves the customer experience when interacting with the help desk! And showing the power of good application security architecture, your customers can be securely allowed right into your CRM system! Note that this requires an additional licence for the customer component.
Sales forecasting - significantly enhanced, so throw away those spreadsheets! You can forecast and track the accuracy of forecasting to any level of detail apply weightings and detailed financial metrics.
The timing of these enhancements are Q3 2008 - i.e. before October. So if you have in-house development underway to fill some of these requirements you may be advised to hold on a short while... | Edit in Browser | /_layouts/images/icxddoc.gif | /microsoft/teamblog/_layouts/formserver.aspx?XsnLocation={ItemUrl}&OpenIn=Browser | 0x0 | 0x1 | FileType | xsn | 255 | | Edit in Browser | /_layouts/images/icxddoc.gif | /microsoft/teamblog/_layouts/formserver.aspx?XmlLocation={ItemUrl}&OpenIn=Browser | 0x0 | 0x1 | ProgId | InfoPath.Document | 255 | | Edit in Browser | /_layouts/images/icxddoc.gif | /microsoft/teamblog/_layouts/formserver.aspx?XmlLocation={ItemUrl}&OpenIn=Browser | 0x0 | 0x1 | ProgId | InfoPath.Document.2 | 255 | | Edit in Browser | /_layouts/images/icxddoc.gif | /microsoft/teamblog/_layouts/formserver.aspx?XmlLocation={ItemUrl}&OpenIn=Browser | 0x0 | 0x1 | ProgId | InfoPath.Document.3 | 255 | | Edit in Browser | /_layouts/images/icxddoc.gif | /microsoft/teamblog/_layouts/formserver.aspx?XmlLocation={ItemUrl}&OpenIn=Browser | 0x0 | 0x1 | ProgId | InfoPath.Document.4 | 255 | | View in Web Browser | /_layouts/images/ichtmxls.gif | /microsoft/teamblog/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?listguid={ListId}&itemid={ItemId}&DefaultItemOpen=1 | 0x0 | 0x1 | FileType | xlsx | 255 | | View in Web Browser | /_layouts/images/ichtmxls.gif | /microsoft/teamblog/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?listguid={ListId}&itemid={ItemId}&DefaultItemOpen=1 | 0x0 | 0x1 | FileType | xlsb | 255 | | Snapshot in Excel | /_layouts/images/ewr134.gif | /microsoft/teamblog/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?listguid={ListId}&itemid={ItemId}&Snapshot=1 | 0x0 | 0x1 | FileType | xlsx | 256 | | Snapshot in Excel | /_layouts/images/ewr134.gif | /microsoft/teamblog/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?listguid={ListId}&itemid={ItemId}&Snapshot=1 | 0x0 | 0x1 | FileType | xlsb | 256 |
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