I’m not sure 5 days is enough this week.  -  Dooley

Top News Stories
35,000 Foot View of SharePoint 2013 for Administrators (CMSWire)
Are you ready for SharePoint 2013? Microsoft recently released the public beta of SharePoint 2013, and with so many changes it can be difficult to keep up. This is the first of a four-part series that provides a 35,000-foot overview of some expected updates and how they will affect various roles within your organization. The series specifically focuses on major changes and how they will impact administrators, developers, designers and end users.

Microsoft Opens Office and SharePoint Up to Web Developers (GigaOM)
In the run up to the Office 15 release, Microsoft execs are talking up a key goal: Making it easy for non-Windows web developers to build add-ons and enhancements to both Office and SharePoint. This is a shift in strategy — Microsoft is trying to make Office — the company’s undisputed cash cow —  cloud-worthy while also ensuring that it remains the center of most workers’ computing worlds.

There is a Lot Wrong with SharePoint: Q&A with Huddle (Computer Business Review)
Steve Evans talks to Alastair Mitchell, co-founder and CEO of collaboration start-up Huddle, about why they are not a social enterprise vendor and what exactly is wrong with Microsoft’s SharePoint. Let’s start with a bit of background on Huddle. We’re just over 4 years old and are VC backed. We’ve raised $40m to date, the most recent round was $24m. So we’re very well-funded, especially for a UK business and we’re growing fast. We’ve tripled in size every year since we launched. This year parts of the business will grow by almost 800%.

14 Cloud Outages in 7 Months, Who is Next? (CIOL)
Cloud outages are not new, neither should one fret when it happens as it is part-and-parcel of the game called computing over the cloud. Having said that we do not negate the fact that it does affect users and businesses alike causing even financial damages. Since January this year we have seen over 10 outages, wherein cloud providers were forced to eat their own words (read as claims) with regards to 99.999 per cent uptime and availability.

Living with Office 2013 (PCMagazine)
Not that I’d recommend that any normal user do this yet, but I’ve spent the last couple of weeks using the pre-release version of Office 2013 on the consumer preview version of Windows 8 as my primary computing environment. While Windows 8 does take some getting used to—I’ll focus more on that after I get my hands on the RTM version later this week—what mostly surprised me about Office 2013 is that it is merely a subtle change in the way it works. There are plenty of ways to use it differently than the existing versions of Office, and you can buy it in different configurations, but I think most traditional desktop and laptop users of Office will be pleasantly surprised. It certainly doesn’t come across as the big change in usage patterns that the introduction of the “ribbon” menu was for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in Office 2007 and for Outlook and other components in Office 2010.

Microsoft is Mixing Social and SaaS (Cloud Times)
Microsoft’s MS Office Suite is one of the oldest and most used software in the industry. Many of us spend our days in front of the suite, even people who don’t work in an office still has a use for at least Microsoft Word. Last May, Microsoft provided industry people with a sneak peek of their prototypes of their new Microsoft Office product, and it’s a refreshing and bold step in a new direction.

Internet Explorer 10 New Privacy Settings Welcomed (ITPro)
Microsoft has been applauded by privacy campaigners for making end users opt in to have their online activities tracked by advertisers in the next version of the Internet Explorer browser. The software giant confirmed this week that Internet Explorer 10 will come with a default Do Not Track (DNT) setting to prevent advertisers and websites snooping on users’ online activities.

Windows 8 Makes You Relearn How to Use Your PC (CNNMoney)
Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 brings a batch of bold updates to the antiquated PC interface, with one big drawback: Users will have to learn how to use a PC all over again. The operating system introduces three new and essential gesture-based commands: swipe down, swipe left, and swipe right. They sound simple enough, but in practice, there’s a learning curve in overcoming muscle memory.

Microsoft Suspends Windows Phone App Publications Due to ‘Hiccup’ (ZDNet)
Microsoft has had to stop new apps being published to the Windows Phone Marketplace, due to a digital certificate problem. The problem hit during the rollout of the new Windows Phone Dev Center, a repository for developer tools. At some point, an issue with digital certificates arose that stopped some phones from installing recently-published apps. Marketplace chief Todd Brix described the problem as a “hiccup” that had to do with the store’s back-end infrastructure being changed over.

 

Around the Blogosphere
Introducing the Distributed Cache Service in SharePoint Server 2013 Preview (SharePoint IT Pro Blog)
This blog post is to increase awareness of a new service in SharePoint Server 2013 Preview called the Distributed Cache service. The Distributed Cache service provides caching functionality to features (not to be confused with site features) in SharePoint Server 2013. The Distributed Cache service is either required by or improves performance of the following features:

Copy-and-Paste Support in SharePoint Designer 2013 (Microsoft SharePoint Designer Team Blog)
Hello, fans of SPD. I am JongHwa Lim, a Program Manager of SharePoint Designer (aka. SPD). I’d like to introduce a new feature within the workflow designer in SharePoint Designer 2013. This new feature is the ability to Copy-and-Paste within the text-based designer. The Copy-And-Paste feature was one of the biggest asks we got for the old SPD versions. We received tons of feedback from customers saying that they had to spend far too many meaningless hours and even days to recreate logic that they had already created once. This repetitive work was commonly needed for ‘Else’ branches within If statements, and for when processes required ‘Repetition’. Well, that’s now in the past thanks to the new Copy-Paste feature.

Strategize Claims Based Authentication In SharePoint 2013 (ARB Security Solutions)
The process of validation of a user’s identity against the set of authentication values that a provider has given is known as user authentication. There is a database or directory that contains the credentials of the user and can be used to confirm that the user has submitted them correctly. Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) is the most commonly used type of authentication. However, you may also hear it referred to as the user directory and attribute store.

SharePoint 2013: Business Connectivity Services (BCS) Improvements – Introduction (Tobias Zimmergren)
As most if not all of you already know, SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013 has been released to preview/beta and is available for download from Microsoft’s download centers. In this article I will briefly introduce some exciting changes that has been made to the SharePoint 2013 Business Connectivity Services framework. I’ve written a bunch of articles on BCS for SharePoint 2010, and now it’s time to continue that track and introduce the new features available in SharePoint 2013.

Configuring the SharePoint 2013 Managed Metadata Service for Navigation (Todd Klindt’s SharePoint Admin Blog)
One of the new features of SharePoint 2013 is the ability to save your custom navigation in the Managed Metadata Service Application. Some of my coworkers were playing with it and noticed it worked fine on farms set up with the Farm Configuration Wizard (Booooo!) but did not work on Farms where the service applications had been lovingly created by hand. With the help of the very fashionably bearded Randy Drisgill, we were able to find the difference and fix it. I would tell you how now, but I’m building up for the big reveal at the end. Big reveals are the hallmark of great storytelling.

How to Deploy Apps Remotely to the Office 365 Preview (SharePoint 2013)
As a developer, one must be aware of the limitations in SharePoint 2010 when developing and deploying SharePoint solutions, namely, the requirement that Visual Studio and SharePoint coexist on the same box. Luckily, with app development for the Office365 Preview (and SharePoint 2013 Preview), developer tools such as Visual Studio are no longer required to be on the same box as the SharePoint server. In this post, we will demonstrate the ways to remotely deploy apps to the Office 365 Preview and SharePoint 2013 Preview using the tools listed below: Visual Studio 2012 RC Preview; “Napa” Office 365 Development Tools.

 

SharePoint Job Listings*
SharePoint Team Lead – Downers Grove, IL
The SharePoint Team Lead will manage and support a small team of developers. These developers will be from a variety of areas, including Data Access, Web Services, Mobile Application development, as well as Application Integration, User Interface design and Security. The Lead will manage the SharePoint 2010 farm and servers, while implementing development standards, including frameworks and libraries. This person will also plan, design, and implement SharePoint 2010 solutions.

SharePoint Developer (Federal) – Washington, DC
The Microsoft SharePoint developer will be responsible for designing, building, and testing high quality solutions built on the SharePoint Server platform.   The SharePoint developer will be expected to develop and customize components of a SharePoint solution (i.e. Web Parts, Master Pages, Event Handlers, etc..). Additionally, the SharePoint developer will be responsible for generating SDLC artifacts such as detailed design documents and deployment scripts.

 

Microsoft Updates
New SharePoint Technical Content (SharePoint IT Pro Blog)
These are indeed exciting times for the Microsoft Office Division as a whole, and definitely for those of us who work on the technical content. First off, we hope you like the refreshed look and feel of this blog. Look for more design evolutions as time goes on, and of course, lots of SharePoint IT pro content! Check out the TechNet home page and feature package that launched today. They cover top-level IT professional content for new Office, Office 365, SharePoint, Exchange, Lync, and Project and even include an Editor’s note by yours truly.

 

SharePoint Events*

• August 15, Online – Five Ways to Prepare for SharePoint 2013 – Establish Governance Today
• August 15, Online – Striking a Balance Between SharePoint Governance and User Engagement
• August 16, Online – Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Central Webinar
• August 21, Online – Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Central Webinar
• August 21, Online – Make Your SharePoint Social
• August 22, Online – SharePoint No Code Solutions
• August 23, Online – Bamboo SharePoint Time Tracking & Management Webinar
• August 23, Online – Governance Automation in SharePoint
• August 28, Online – SharePoint Training Best Practices
• September 7, Johannesburg, South Africa – Sharing the Point
• September 8, Cape Town, South Africa – Sharing the Point
• September 8, Cape Town, South Africa – SharePoint Saturday
• September 8, Branson, Missouri – SharePoint Saturday
• September 12, Online – Five Ways to Prepare for SharePoint 2013 – Choose Code-Free Customization
• September 15, Nairobi, Kenya – Sharing the Point
• September 15, Nairobi, Kenya – SharePoint Saturday
• September 17, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania – Sharing the Point
• September 22, Manchester, New Hampshire – SharePoint Saturday
• September 22, Redmond, Washington – SharePoint Saturday
• September 25-27, Chicago, Illinois – SharePoint Fest
• September 29, Troy, Michigan – SharePoint Saturday
• October 3, Online – Five Ways to Prepare for SharePoint 2013 – Perform Inventory and Analysis
• October 6, Bend, Oregon – SharePoint Saturday
• October 13, Sacramento, California – SharePoint Saturday
• October 27, Cincinnati, Ohio – SharePoint Saturday
• November 3, Bloomington, Minnesota – SharePoint Saturday
• November 7, Online – Five Ways to Prepare for SharePoint 2013 – Implement Data Externalization
• December 5, Online – Five Ways to Prepare for SharePoint 2013 – Consolidate Content
• December 8, Nottingham, UK – SharePoint Saturday

 

SharePoint Training*

• August 21-23, Nashville, Tennessee – Introduction to SharePoint 2010 for Server Administrators – SharePoint Solutions
• August 22, Online – Project Management Central (3.0) Application Administrative Training – Bamboo Solutions
• August 24, Online – Bamboo Select – Bamboo Solutions
• August 28, Online – Project Management Central End User Training – Bamboo Solutions
• August 28-30, Toronto, ON – SharePoint Information Architecture – How to Optimize Findability in SharePoint – Earley & Associates
• August 28-31, Chicago, Illinois – InfoPath 2010/SharePoint 2010 Workflow Deep Dive – SharePoint Solutions
• September 4, Online – Workflow Conductor Designer Training – Bamboo Solutions
• September 11-12, Nashville, Tennessee – Introduction to SharePoint Foundation 2010 – SharePoint Solutions
• September 11-14, Nashville, Tennessee – Introduction to SharePoint Server 2010 – SharePoint Solutions
• September 12-13, Online – Nintex Workflow 2010 Online Training – SusQtech
• September 14, Online – Bamboo Select – Bamboo Solutions
• September 17-21, Dulles, Virginia – SharePoint 2010 Super User Week Training – SusQtech
• September 18-21, Dallas, Texas – InfoPath 2010/SharePoint 2010 Workflow Deep Dive – SharePoint Solutions
• September 19, Online – Project Management Central (3.0) Application Administrative Training – Part 1 – Bamboo Solutions
• September 25, Online – Project Management Central End User Training – Bamboo Solutions
• October 2, Online – Workflow Conductor Designer Training – Bamboo Solutions
• October 9-12, Nashville, Tennessee – InfoPath 2010/SharePoint 2010 Workflow Deep Dive – SharePoint Solutions
• October 12, Online – Bamboo Select – Bamboo Solutions
• October 17, Online – Project Management Central (3.0) Application Administrative Training – Part 1 – Bamboo Solutions
• October 23, Online – Project Management Central End User Training – Bamboo Solutions

* Please contact Chris Dooley (chris.dooley@bamboosolutions.com) to be included in SharePoint Daily™.

 

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