How Easy Is It To Own An Electric Vehicle?

Robert Bogue April 17, 2011 No Comments

You’d have to know my father a bit to really understand his fascination with electricity and figuring out better ways to reduce his dependence on others. He’s quite interested in the idea of putting a windmill for electric power generation up on the farm – if he could only talk my step-mother into it. Because of this it wasn’t really that much of a stretch for me to hear him say that he had purchased a fully electric vehicle – in parts. Another trait of his is to make things work. For fun – take a look at this:

This is a custom built rig for picking up and moving a barn that someone offered him for free, if he would move it. This is us taking it through a ditch and not completely understanding how much the frame of the semi-trailer would flex. We made it and the barn is comfortably sitting on the farm now, however, it did make for an interesting time. The rig by the way required a hydraulic pack, some actuators, and some bridge beam steel that he was able to purchase. It’s one of the examples that I use to explain how he will find a way to do things if he’s motivated enough.

Back to the electric car saga. He got a converted S10 pickup – so more technically he got an electric truck. It was originally converted for the department of Energy by the Solectria Corporation. His particular unit spent some time at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Of course, that makes sense given that they have large amounts of hydroelectric power production capabilities. The truck is one of 61 that were converted to better understand how electric vehicles might be used. It’s driven by a pair of three-phase industrial electric motors. It doesn’t have the same sort of acceleration as a gas powered vehicle but it does accelerate well and for his purposes it’s pretty good.

When he got it the truck wasn’t in that great of shape. There were no batteries – and it takes 36 of them – so installing them was a chore. This was particularly interesting because the exact wiring configuration wasn’t well known. There were provided photos so we did manage to put things together correctly – after some interesting moments trying to figure out why current was flowing when we didn’t expect it to be. We ended up realizing that one of the controllers for the motor was blown – some really nice char marks along the entire inside of the converter. However, my father persevered and managed to find folks who helped him restore the vehicle to like-new. It’s quite a capable little car to drive around.

However, that’s where the real fun began. He lives in Illinois which has a set of laws on the book which should have allowed him to get the truck plated with as an electric vehicle. Well, let’s just say there aren’t a lot of people doing this so it took some effort to get everyone to realize that they had to allow this to happen. One of those things that is supposed to happen to encourage electric vehicles but doesn’t happen because not enough of the activity is going on.

The next problem is the one that’s prompting me to write this blog post. He can’t find insurance for the vehicle as a daily driver. Because the car is “special” it’s processed by insurance companies like a collector’s car. That’s actually pretty accurate since there’s little reason to have the truck if you’re not really interested in electric vehicles. However, the problem is that no one wants to allow the vehicle to be driven daily – because collector car policies don’t allow that.

The truck – if considered a regular S10 – would be worth about $3,000. The vehicle is really worth over $20,000 because it’s “special.” The only way to have a defined value of the vehicle is a collector car policy. So now we’re stuck. If you drive it every day – and if you’ve got an electric car you want to –you can’t insure it. If you insure it with a regular policy you risk that it will be totaled for $3,000.

With gasoline prices on the rise folks are looking at electric vehicles again – but if you’re not buying some production version you may find it difficult to get insurance.

I’d love your thoughts as comments on this blog post – or better yet – if you know of an insurance company that will write a policy for it, I’d love to hear that via email.

Professional SharePoint Development MS TechEd Pre-Conference Session

Robert Bogue April 6, 2011 3 Comments

Eric Shupps and I’ve been talking about Professional SharePoint Development talks at many conferences these days. We’ve settled into an action packed – and funny – all day session. The session is a lot of fun for both Eric and I because we’ve both been talking about doing good development for SharePoint for years. The session draws upon our experiences with numerous SharePoint projects including the work we did on the Microsoft Patterns and Practices SharePoint Guidance and writing the Microsoft Learning 10232A course (Designing and Developing Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Applications)

There are lots of little tidbits and insights that Eric and I’ve learned over the years. To give you a quick sense for what happens in the course. I’ve posted a 2 minute video in both WMV and MP4 formats. Eric and I are talking about one aspects of large lists – large numbers of columns. Most folks don’t think much about the structure of the SQL server table under our lists but in this segment we explain what happens when you add more fields to a list than are in the underlying SQL table – and when that happens.

Take a quick look at the video and — if you can – register for our preconference session at Microsoft TechEd.

Help with the SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide

Robert Bogue February 13, 2011 No Comments

One of the things that The SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide for End Users: 2010 was specifically targeted at was getting users help when they needed it. That’s been fairly easy for our corporate licensees, if a user decided to do a search. They could search for something like adding a column and the Shepherd’s Guide topic would show up for them. However, one of the challenges has been that if the user chose to hit the help link on the page they’d get the generic SharePoint help and therefore wouldn’t have the benefit of the Shepherd’s Guide material. However, in SharePoint 2010 the help system is extensible. That means we were able to add our content into the help system and make it available via the integrated SharePoint help!

This week we’ll be delivering the help system for free to all of our corporate customers who purchased the Wiki version. We’re changing the Wiki version to be a Wiki + Help version which will include both the wiki files as well as the help system files.

There’s more news on the Shepherd’s Guide front too. We’re finalizing work on the four half-day training class materials that training centers will be able to license on a per-user basis to be able to deliver the same high-quality material as is in the book – in a classroom style format. This means that organizations that have been struggling to find the right balance between training and resources — or struggling to find the right training materials to do their internal training will have the option of using the SharePoint Shepherd’s materials to train their users.

We’re continuing to try to improve the SharePoint experience for end users. If you’ve got an idea for what your users need, feel free to drop us a line at [email protected].

Hands on Labs for the SharePoint Guidance

Robert Bogue February 5, 2011 1 Comment

I’ve mentioned before that my work on the SharePoint Guidance with the guys at Microsoft Patterns and Practices, Todd Baginski, and the entire advisory team has been one of the highlights of my professional career. While I’ve been busy so have they. They have just posted some hands on labs for the guidance. If you thought “How am I supposed to learn how to use this stuff?” – well now you have an answer. Go check it out.

Designing Solutions for Microsoft SharePoint: 2010

Robert Bogue January 12, 2011 1 Comment

I’ve previously mentioned the work that I did on the Microsoft Patterns and Practices SharePoint Guidance. However, what I didn’t mention was that the work was being converted (adapted) to book form. The book is Designing Solutions for Microsoft SharePoint 2010: Making the Right Architecture and Implementation Decisions. Although I’ve not seen my copy yet, I know the content and I know it’s an essential guide for any senior developer or architect working on a SharePoint project of any scale. You won’t find every nuance covered – no book could do that for SharePoint. However, you will find the core issues that you struggle with are there. If you’re new to SharePoint or if you’ve been doing it for a while we’re covering challenges like what sort of execution model do you want for your code and what are the implications. How should I access data? Should I keep data in lists or use BCS to get to the list data? The key decisions you need to make are covered.

I’d encourage you to buy the book – even though the content is in the publically available guidance. Why? Well, it’s not because I have anything to gain from it – I don’t get royalties on this book. I’ suggesting this because people buying this book will signal to Microsoft that the work being done here – in making it easier to develop robust, scalable solutions for SharePoint is important work to be continued. Who knows what the decisions will be over the coming year or two as they evaluate their priorities? You can, however, make sure that they can see that you’re willing to shell out a few dollars (or ask the company to shell out a few dollars) for the guidance that’s being produced.

I can’t wait until my copies arrive.

Serial AKA RS-232 and Relearning

Robert Bogue December 12, 2010 No Comments

During some of that work on my network I’ve been talking about over the last few posts, I stumbled across a realization that I wanted to share. Before I get there, I have to explain that I was turning on VLANs for my wireless network. My network has an inner ring where my files are stored and which has a site-to-site VPN to the colocation center. However, there’s an outer ring behind the U-Verse gateway. I wanted to allow guest wireless to this network – thus they could get to the Internet and I didn’t have to worry about them on my network. I setup VLAN 1 as my private network and VLAN 2 as my U-Verse (public) network. Once that was setup I went to my access point, a NetGear WAG302 which I’ve discussed before. When I turned on VLAN tagging the device became unresponsive.

These particular APs have a console port on the back so I started trying to make a console connection. I pulled out my USB to Serial adapter and tried to make a connection. Based on the day I was having I realized that this wasn’t going to be easy – and it wasn’t. The console port had 9600, N, 8, 1 under it which I knew meant 9600 baud, no parity, eight data bits, and one stop bit. I started up a communications client called Putty and tried to connect. However, that wasn’t working.

At this point I’ve got to explain how I even knew anything about the console port. You see I cut my teeth on networks of serial based terminals (like the VT100). I was used to wiring up serial cables. We’d run them through offices and wire them up ourselves with a soldering iron. Of course, since then I have installed modems that used serial connections and have connected all sorts of devices like CNC machines. That seems like a million years ago. However, there are still things that have stuck with me. Obviously, I recognized the pattern of the baud rate, parity, data bits, and stop bits. However, I also can still recall from memory the pin out of a DB25 RS-232 serial connection – I had to use it all the time for several years so it’s not exactly surprising that I remember it. You see Pins 1 and 7 are grounds. Pin 1 is a frame ground and pin 7 is a signal ground. Pins 2 and 3 are send data and receive data. Pins 4 and 5 are ready to send and clear to send – the hardware flow controls. I remember that pins 6, 8, and 20 are also signaling pins for various states including data set ready, data carrier detect, and data terminal ready. I remember them as a set because we were often jumpering the three of these together. You see the RS-232 standard was really designed to work across modems but we often were using it for connecting without modems. Don’t ask me what the pin outs are for a DB9 connection – like the ones that are used often today because I never had to make enough of those connections to remember the pin outs.

All of this is important because connecting to the console port didn’t work. I knew that the settings were right – something I only knew because of years of experience. I was struck by how this knowledge that in most cases is useless – you don’t see much RS-232 these days – was something useful. Sure I couldn’t figure out initially why it wasn’t working, but I realized that someone coming out of school today may be barely introduced into what a serial port is. No computers come with them any longer. Why would someone teach about serial ports these days? However, in this case knowing how serial works meant that I could identify that I had things right on the software side and allowed me to move quickly from that as a possible cause.

One of the common problems with RS-232 back in the day was the null modem problem. That is that RS-232 was intended for a terminal or modem to be connected to a host system. In order to do this the wires need to be crossed. One device used pin 2 to transmit and 3 to receive and the other device had those reversed. So it was a common issue that we’d have to do some pin flipping. Today you can buy some cute and tiny null modems. We used to make them in the cables. That’s a great suspicion but that suspicion doesn’t do you any good unless you’ve got a way to test it. As it turns out, I still had my RS-232 breakout box from all of those years ago. The one I have is hard to find and still relatively expensive even today. Take a look at what it:

It’s got rows of green and red LEDs which light to indicate what signals are on which lines, a set of switches down the center to allow you to open or close the connection between the two sides. This allows you to separate the two signals and if necessary remap them. The brass posts are designed to have jumpers attached to them so that you can connect various pins with others. On the bottom there’s a convenient set of switches to cross pins 2 and 3 – the most frequent need.

In this case I did in fact need to have a null modem – which I used the breakout box to accomplish since the need was very short term – just getting the device back online.

So why am I telling you this story? Well, I realized that in addition to the learning which most folks aren’t getting today there are also tools that are necessary that most folks won’t have today – a breakout box was a standard tool back then. I should say in defense of the learning that serial communications are still officially listed as a part of the objectives for the CompTIA A+ certification – so there’s some hope that the skill is being taught somewhere. Ultimately, the folks that we’re trying to teach how to use the tools today don’t necessarily have the background or tools to solve the problems we’re creating.

And I’d be the first person to kill off serial communications in a review of useful information today. I’d argue that technologies like USB and working with them is much more important than serial communications – but I’d be wrong. The problem is technicians today have to know BOTH about serial and USB. In other words, they need to know MORE and not less in order to work today. Some have argued that It professionals today have it easy. Everything just works. The argument is that you don’t have to worry about fitting drivers into 1 MB of RAM or how to get a large spreadsheet on a hybrid 8/16 bit processor. However, I’d argue that there are places where this knowledge is essential to success.

And at the same time I’d say if I were looking at learning a 30 year old technology today I’d probably turn my nose up. I’d think that I could surely ignore that technology – but again I’d be wrong. Why the long post about a long perceived dead technology? Because the point is that you never know what you’re going to need to know. I deal with SharePoint every day and I can tell you that there are tons of things that you’ll find helpful if you know – and those are the things that you don’t teach in a SharePoint course. Why not? They’re foundational. They should be known. In the Microsoft Learning 10232 course we make a point of spending the first module talking about advanced ASP.NET concepts like caching and memory management because these things are really helpful to understand for SharePoint development – but things that are often skipped or overlooked as folks try to focus on test driven design, LINQ, ORD, and other more interesting items.

In the end, knowing about serial communications – and packet sniffing – made it possible to figure out what was wrong with the access point and resolve it. I’ll explain the need for packet sniffing in another post.

Virtual Switch Loops

Robert Bogue December 12, 2010 No Comments

For some time I’ve had some issues on my network. They don’t happen very often so they’ve been hard to track down. I know for sure that one of the issues I have is that one of my Linksys SGE2024 refuses to hold on to its configuration if it loses power. This is made more difficult by the fact that the power supply in the unit has a very low capacitance. As a result of that it will appear to lose its configuration randomly. Take a look at my last post What is a UPS, Really? for the details on that.

However, I also had these weird “storms” where I’d start losing packets and despite my best efforts to diagnose it, I wouldn’t find a problem and suddenly it would be fixed. Honestly there’s nothing that’s more frustrating than a problem that fixes itself before you can put your finger on it — and then comes back later when you’re not ready.

This problem and the lack of diagnostic capabilities on the Linksys SGE2024 switches lead me to replace the switches with some new HP V1910 switches. However, immediately during the deployment of them I started seeing similar — but not identical issues. While not perfect the enhanced diagnostics of the V1910 switches allowed me to sort out that there was a problem with the connection between my virtualization server and the switch.

The virtualization server is a Dell R710 which has four 1 GB Ethernet ports on it. Since I expected that overtime I’d want to get more than 1GB of traffic to the virtual servers, I decided to team the Ethernet ports together to aggregate the total capacity of three of the four ports. The fourth port I’d used for the virtualization host. Wat is called Teaming on the windows side is known on the switch side as Link Aggregation. Generally speaking this aggregation is done through the Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) — although it doesn’t have to be done that way. It defines how the communication should happen to form up an aggregated channel.

When I looked at the LACP status on the switch it told me that the ports weren’t properly bonding together. In more research I found that the infrastructure guy that I had helping me — and a friend of mine — had used network bridging to connect the NICs together and had not in fact actually used network teaming. The teaming had to be setup with a special utility that Dell didn’t see fit to include in the latest driver package. When my friend didn’t see it he tried to do a workaround.

The problem was that each of those adapters was operating independently. The Windows was doing a software bridge of them. This means that every multicast frame that one of the adapters would get would be copied to the other two adapters. This is what a bridge does; multicast (public) traffic is sent everywhere.

So imagine a scenario where each of these three adapters is in turn bound to a virtual switch inside the server. Well the virtual switch itself will send out multicast traffic on every port. Then imagine that the physical switche which the physical network adapters are connected to is also replicating the packets. What you end up with is the same packet getting sent over and over again. I have no idea whether it was three times per iteration or six times per iteration or how many it was but I do know that as soon as I plugged in the second adapter into the physical switch I got a lot of traffic very quickly.

So the mystery was somewhat solved. The packet loss was because I was accidentally flooding the switches. I had created a wiring loop — even if part of that loop was completely virtual. Fix the teaming and the problem went away. The network started working just fine.

So why did the network ever work? Well, eventually the switches were doing flood protection and shutting down some of the ports — but this took 15 minutes or more in some cases. So about the time I’d really get into looking at the problem the switch would have solved the problem — again back to diagnostics, the relatively poor diagnostics made it impossible for me to figure out what was going on with the Linksys — that’s really disappointing for a product that’s supposed to be marketed to people that can make mistakes.

What is a UPS, Really?

Robert Bogue December 12, 2010 No Comments

What most of us believe — that uninterruptable power supplies (UPS) today are uninterruptable – isn’t exactly true. What companies advertise as UPSs are in fact standby power supplies (SPS). What’s the difference? Well, in a true UPS the power never falters when the utility power is interrupted. There are several ways to do this but sometimes it’s done with a charger and an inverter. The charger converts the alternating current (AC) that the utility provides into the direct current (DC) that the battery can store. The inverter converts the DC into AC. It’s also been done with flywheels and other approaches too but the result is the same. The problem with this approach is that it’s inefficient. You lose some of the power by doing the two sets of conversions. The benefit is the output power is “as smooth as a baby’s bottom.” Because of the efficiency loss, only the most specialized applications use UPS.

Most of the “UPS devices” that we see in the market are really SPSs. The SPS work by keeping the load (usage) on the utility power while monitoring it. It’s also running a charger to ensure that the internal battery is always fully charged and ready to deliver power. Once the utility power falls out of range because of over voltage, under voltage (brown out), or outage (black out) the SPS transfers the load to an inverter. The inverter keeps the load going while the utility power is out. After a minimum switchover time and the utility power reentering a safe zone the load is transferred back to the utility.

The minimum switchover time is designed to prevent rapid transitions between utility power and inverter if the utility power isn’t stable. That’s important when you consider that during the transition to the inverter and back to utility power there’s a small gap in power. Most devices today can handle a small gap every now and then but they can’t take many of them in a small period of time.

Most devices (as opposed to lights or machines) today are actually internally running on DC current. From the computer to the DVD player internally they’re converting the AC power back into DC power for consumption. This can be done a few different ways but for the most part this is done through a switching power supply (sometimes called a switched mode power supply). This type of design has a small amount of capacitance depending upon the specific design. Capacitance is like a small battery. It’s the ability to keep the output side going with small fluctuations in the input power.

Some switching power supplies have a large amount of capacitance and others have a smaller capacitance. The problem is that sometimes when you couple a SPS with a switching power supply you can have a problem when you have a switching power supply with a low capacitance and a SPS with a high switching time you can run out of power before the SPS has made it to transfer the load to the inverter.

The impact of this is the device has a short power outage and reboots. If the process of rebooting is quick you may not even notice it. However, if your device takes a while to reboot it will be frustrating — and very hard to find the source of the problem. Most of the SPSs in use today don’t have monitoring or logging. Without monitoring or logging you don’t really know that the SPS switched the load to the inverter — and caused the momentary power outage. Larger units typically have this sort of logging like the RU2200 with the network management (Ethernet) card in it that I use to keep my virtual machine host operational. Take a look at the output of an event earlier this year.

You’ll see that several times the system transitioned to battery power for two seconds – the minimum switching time. You’ll also notice that even on these devices it’s somewhat frustrating because the events are scattered in with other messages – like the DHCP release being renewed. I’ve blogged before that many issues with technology are the result of bad power. That’s true even when you’re trying to ensure that the power is good.

In the case of the virtualization server I’ve got plenty of capacitance in the power supplies (they’re oversized for the load on them which tends to increase capacitance) and the RU2200 has a relatively quick switching time so I’m good. However, my Linksys/Cisco SGE2000 connected to a CyberPower CPS1500AVR doesn’t work so well. It has a tendency to reboot – and lose its configuration but that’s another story… I can figure out what happened because I check the other SPSs to see that they transferred – and I can infer that the CyberPower transferred power since they’re on the same power source.

Keep an eye out when you’re buying a SPS in the clothing (or branding) of a UPS.

Just How Hard is it? (To Find SharePoint Skills)

Robert Bogue December 1, 2010 4 Comments

I’ve been watching an interesting discussion about the Shortage of SharePoint Skills based on a blog post by Nadir Kamdar and followed up by Doug Ware. The conversation has been brewing for a few months and I wanted to provide five of my thoughts on how easy or hard it is to find SharePoint skills.

First, SharePoint is a big product. It’s a product that no one person can really expect to know completely. I run in some circles with really smart folks and folks who’ve been on SharePoint for a long time. We’ll all admit that we learn something new about SharePoint all the time. For some of us it’s daily, some of us it’s weekly – but we’re always learning something new about SharePoint. Here’s an analogy that I think helps the business to understand how they have to think about SharePoint as a platform.

The other platform most organizations have is Microsoft Windows. Sure it’s an operating system but it’s also a platform. The organization doesn’t expect one person to know everything about Windows. Sure mid-sized and smaller organizations ask one person to know everything but everyone knows at some level that this isn’t realistic. There are specialists around Active Directory including Kerberos and Federation. There are specialists around storage including quotas, DFS, file replication, quotas, file classification infrastructure, etc. There are specialists around networking including DNS, DHCP, etc.

Expecting any one person to know every aspect of Windows deeply isn’t really realistic. There are a handful of people I know – including the Microsoft Certified Masters for SharePoint that come close to this but in general expecting to find that one expert isn’t something every organization can expect. Instead of hiring one expert, hire a few.

Second, Build Don’t Buy. Rob LaMear of FPWeb.net commented (in a Linked in group) that FPWeb.net “bake” their own engineers and developers. I’ve pretty universally recommended this strategy to customers for the last several years. I generally offer a few hours a week to review their new SharePoint folks progress whether that’s a new developer or IT Pro. It works out well because they get an employee that’s well trained – over time – based on the same apprenticeship model that’s worked for hundreds of years. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t look to hire SharePoint folks if you can find them – I’m saying, I don’t expect that you’ll be able to find them. You have to be prepared to build your SharePoint professionals when you can’t buy them.

Third, you don’t need a developer for every SharePoint project. When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail. That is, a developer always wants to develop. Ignore the business need. Ignore the platform’s capabilities. They want to develop. This isn’t always in the business’ best interests. I advocate the Value of Imperfect SharePoint Solutions. I believe that you can get a ton of value with out of the box functionality. SharePoint is a platform. Find the right resource to leverage the platform – that’s often a business analyst.

Fourth, SharePoint is more restrictive than ASP.NET. I sometimes use the Statue of Liberty as an illustration about developing for SharePoint. I use this illustration because SharePoint is all about leveraging what you’ve got. If you look at the Statue of Liberty there are really three distinct layers. There’s a relatively large star shaped platform that the pedestal sits on. In the analogy this large star platform is .NET – or more specifically ASP.NET. There’s a ton you can do – but the relative height or what you can do out of the box is relatively small. In other words, .NET is broad but not deep. The pedestal is SharePoint. It’s relatively speaking tall. In fact in the Statue of Liberty’s case the pedestal is roughly 40 percent of the total height – think about that 40% the total height. On top of this sits Eiffel’s infrastructure and Frédéric Bartholdi’s sculpture – what everyone thinks of as the Statue of Liberty. In the analogy the sculpture is the work that you build on the SharePoint platform. It’s got all of the quirks, intricacies, and wrinkles of the business problems that it solves. When you compare this with something like the Eiffel tower which stands more than 4 times the height of the Statue of Liberty you could say that you want the flexibility to build an Eiffel tower.

However, you’ll note that the architect (or structural engineer if you prefer) for both projects was Gustave Eiffel. Both are appropriate at different times. It’s true that SharePoint is more restrictive than ASP.NET. However, it’s also true that for workloads that SharePoint is good at, I can build a solution faster, cheaper, and I dare say better – than I could build in ASP.NET – because I have a great advantage in the platform that I’m building on top of. I don’t have to figure out document storage, versioning, workflows, navigation, security, etc. I get to use all of that stuff for free. All I have to do is build on the platform.

Fifth, Training is possible! I have spent a lot of effort over the last few years to augment the training opportunities that specialized training companies like Critical Path Training and Mindsharp offer with more standardized offerings that anyone can get. I’ve released the SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide for End Users including corporate licensing options and coming soon I’ll have classes that any Microsoft training center can teach. I was indirectly involved in Microsoft Learning’s 10175 course for SharePoint Development (corresponding to the 70-573 exam) and was the lead author for Microsoft Learning’s 10232 course for Professional SharePoint Development (corresponding to the 70-576 exam). Yea, the MS learning courses are for-pay resources but they’re scalable – you can get them from your local training provider. Historically the SharePoint courses from Microsoft hadn’t been very well regarded – on the developer side I can say that they’re much better. For that matter I can say that the exams are more focused on important skills rather than minutia as the 2007 exams were sometimes accused of. I also spent a great deal of time working with Microsoft Patterns and Practices on the SharePoint Guidance – free guidance on the best way to build SharePoint applications. In 2008, I helped launch www.mssharepointdeveloper.com which has been updated for developing on SharePoint 2010 – all free content on how to develop with Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010. I know the folks that worked on the exams and courses on the IT Pro side as well – it is solid content like wasn’t available for SharePoint 2007. I’m also working on some other courses that will make their way out to the public in 2011 that will cover more specialized workloads for SharePoint.

I should say that I take issue with some of Nadir’s initial post because there are some technical inaccuracies and some things which are misleading. There’s a focus on some of the details about navigation. The platform is actually quite extensible in this respect. It supports multiple navigation providers and any menu control that works with navigation providers. I’m not saying everything is possible out of the box but the areas he picked on are quite easy to extend. That’s what’s great about the SharePoint platform – it is extensible.

Why SharePoint? Seven reasons why a business user cares about SharePoint

Robert Bogue November 16, 2010 No Comments

Continuing in my video series, I’ve got a short video about why an end user or business user might be interested in SharePoint. Please feel free to forward this link to the folks inside your organization who don’t understand why they care about SharePoint.

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