August 2008 - Posts

• The State Of Microsoft Office 2007 Desktop Adoption

  This blog has moved. Click here to open the new site. In my previous posts (Part 1 and Part 2) I wrote about problems you might face when installing SharePoint 2007 for a customer who still uses Office 2003. I presumed that majority of customers is still using older versions of Office applications. At that time I could not provide any data to argument it. I finally found a research by Forrester Research. Here are the results: 40% of companies adopted Office 2007, 60% are still using Office XP, and 46% of the companies included in this research are still using Office 2003. In Part 2 I outlined the differences between Office 2007 applications and Office 2003, the diferences are probably similar for Office XP. Posted Aug 22 2008, 08:13 PM by toni with no comments Filed under: upgrading, office 2007, office 2003

• Moving to a new blog platform

  This blog has moved. Click here to open the new site. After 1.5 years I have decided to move this blog to another blog platform and to a separate domain. In this period number of visitors increased constantly, and I am very happy with the number of visitors that come to this blog every day. If you are reading this blog via RSS feed, just continue to do so. If you are reading this blog from your web browser, the new address is http://www.sharepointusecases.com. On the new site I will introduce some new services for readers. All your comments are welcomed. I will continue to syndicate this blog on the old site also. Thank you for reading SharePoint Use Cases Blog! Q: Toni, you are writing a blog about SharePoint and you are hosting it on a Wordpress platform!? Well, this is a private, non-commercial project and I just cannot afford to pay for a MOSSfis licenses. I must also say that Wordpress is really powerful blog platform. The product itself is great, but there are also couple of thousands of plugins and themes that you can download free of charge! When it comes to WCM, SharePoint really misses some things. There are some plugins and stuff on codeplex, but most of those I tried were not finished :(. It will definitely be a good experience to learn about things another blogging software can do. I will try to provide some side-by-side analysis of Wordpress features. I was happy to find out that BlogML language exists. It allowed me to easily export all the contents from my previous blog platform (Community Server) to this one. Many thanks to Aaron for the BlogML > WordPress plugin. Posted Aug 21 2008, 10:22 AM by toni with no comments Filed under: blogging

• Which SharePoint edition is right for you? - Part 2

  In Part 1 of this post I tried to explain SharePoint editions in more detail. Last week I found very intersting shema that describes version differences on a single image. You can download the full presentation here. The complete breakdown of the features of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is available here. When choosing the correct SharePoint edition you must also consider licensing. Some SharePoint features like Excel Services and e-Forms are great but these are only available in the most expensive Enterprise version. Please note: enterprise search is also available as a separate product Search Server 2008, and e-Forms are available as Forms Server 2007. So before advising your customer which edition is right for them, consult licensing documents carefully.  If you are trying to find correct licensing for extranet and internet scenarios take a look at the chart below. I got it from guys at Microsoft Croatia and find it to be a valuable asset in deciding which edition to purchase.   Posted Aug 12 2008, 07:14 PM by toni with 2 comment(s) Filed under: pricing, licensing, sharepoint editions

• Running duplicate detection in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

  A client of mine decided to perform a little summer house cleaning > deleting duplicate records in the company CRM system. Having correct contact information is the key of having reliable CRM system. In CRM 4.0 Microsoft introduced new feature called duplicate detection, which queries you database in search of duplicate records. The feature is somewhat limited but it can help you speed up the whole process. Here are some tips for running duplicate detection correctly. In this example I will describe how to setup account duplicate detection. Two accounts are duplicates if (Figure 1): if they have the same name and if they have the same city/state/country If your business operates on national or international level, you do not want subsidiaries to appear as duplicates. In different cities there will also be completely different companies with the exactly same name if they have the same status This is VERY important: when you perform Merge operation of two duplicate records, one record's state will be changed to Inactive State - you do not want this one to show on your report when you run it again. Figure 1. - Sample duplicate detection rule When you are running the report, run it against active records. This is important because CRM never deletes your data. When you merge two accounts, one will be deactivated, so you do not want this one to appear as duplicate anymore. As I said before, duplicate detection is not perfect but it will help you to start with this process. I already wrote some articles on how to enhance duplicate detection, so you should check Part 1 and Part 2 for more information. Figure 2. - Sample duplicate detection wizard Posted Aug 11 2008, 08:17 PM by toni with no comments Filed under: crm, duplicate detection

• Office 2003 and SharePoint 2007 - comparision

  This blog has moved. Click here to open the new site. In my previous post I mentioned that if you are going to use SharePoint 2007 you really should use Office 2007 with it. In this post I will try to describe differences between various versions so you can know what to expect on your implementation. Every project is different, and you will encounter numerous combinations of Microsoft software installed. Some large corporations we work with, are still using Office 2000 and Office XP. The majority of enterprise accounts are still using Office 2003 on Windows XP. (I cannot find any hard figures on this though). Scenario 1 Client platform: Office 2007 Server Platform: SharePoint Portal Server 2003 You might have a customer that moved to Office 2007 but who is still using SharePoint 2003. There might be a number of reasons for this. Your customer probably has a very customized  SharePoint 2003 and have decided not to upgrade it because it the solution work fine. Feature Office 2007 with SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Saving documents to SharePoint sites Editing documents stored to a SharePoint site (Edition only works for the Office 2003 formats. You cannot save a DOCX back to SharePoint 2003) Check-out/in, version history Updating properties (it works but not as elegant as on SharePoint 2007)  You will also experience the following server limitations: Inability to index new document formats Problems with using Address Books Scenario 2 Server Platform: Office SharePoint Server 2007 In most cases you will run into this scenario. Your customer decided to implement SharePoint 2007, but they will still be using Office 2003. Here are differences between Office 2003 and Office 2007 when working with data from SharePoint sites. Application / Feature Office 2003 Office 2007 Saving and editing Office 2003 files from SharePoint sites Saving and editing Office 2007 files from SharePoint sites You must install Compatibility Pack. Check-out/in, version history Start a workflow Word Updating properties Improved in Word 2007. Inserting document properties for (DOC/DOCX) (DOC file format) (DOCX file format) Automatically updating server properties that were inserted to document body (DOC/DOCX) Write a blog post Compare versions of a SharePoint document / (Very limited) Outlook Synchronize tasks/discussion boards to Outlook Synchronizing calendars to Outlook / (One-way sync only; from SharePoint to Outlook) Synchronizing contacts to Outlook / (One-way sync only; from SharePoint to Outlook) Synchronize document libraries to Outlook Excel Publishing Excel files as web pages Powerpoint Working with Slide Library   Bear in mind that some customers will note be willing to upgrade to the new platform. During your project ask what are the key features they want to use to check if these are available for their Office version.   This blog has moved. Click here to post a comment. Posted Aug 03 2008, 06:26 PM by toni with 5 comment(s) Filed under: upgrading, office 2007, office 2003, versions