Studying for the SharePoint Administrator Exam 70-668

There are 4 main areas one nees to know very well to pass this:

1. Designing a SharePoint 2010 Farm Topology (27 percent)
2. Planning SharePoint 2010 Deployment (26 percent)
3. Defining a SharePoint 2010 Operations Strategy and Business Continuity (25 percent)
4. Planning for Search and Business Solutions (22 percent)

What does this mean for my study?

It looks like I know the first 3 areas quite well and the 4ths ok except for some of the new stuff or should I say, the marketing fluff that Microsoft outputs as some of what they are asking for seems a little ambigous.
Will now go over tehir learning plan and do a few step by step SharePoint installs and configuration.


This is going to mean a little work over the next week or so.
Here's to my painful journey to dichipher and study for an exam with no real studfy book or course material except what one can glean from the requirements.

Found out that there are hundreds if not thousands of links to mini articles at technet and msdn.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/library/ff627858.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd776256%28v=office.12%29.aspx
So will go through these, plus hte help, and one of the wrox books and this will hopefully be what is required.

Marketing XMas email

Interesting discussion was had when I drafted up an emai lto go to all consulting clients in nsw.
The big question was, why are you mentioning New stuff we don't do yet?
Why don't people get it?
This is the draft as below...but need to tweak it with even more "New" stuff....
Some of the new stuff allow one to put in a picture of a parrot....better than web photos eh?

Merry Christmas ….,

We hope you’ve had a good year.

This year has been an interesting one for ###’s consulting services in the following three areas and

we do thank our clients who have worked with our consulting and development teams in the following areas.

aa)      Microsoft Office Conversions and Upgrades

bb)      Document Management (Quality Office Add-ins)

cc)      Content Management (WebSite Development)

 

Microsoft is bringing out some exciting new solutions next including Parrot for CRM (note you need SharePoint for CRM) and the new versions of Exchange and Sql Server.

So you’ll hear new terms such as ”Social Marketing” and “Digital Marketing” in a lot of their communication.

If you have any Microsoft Consulting or Development requirements call us on 02-9249-2700 or email us.

The top three points of consulting/development work above include:

a) Office Conversions:

·        The Speed testers to prevent locking and slowness issues with Excel and Access when you upgrade Microsoft Office

·        Rebranding and updating Templates and Macros in Word is always busy

·        New Charting and Reporting Solutions that use the new Excel format to output professional graphics and numbers

b) Document Management

·        MacroView DMF leading the way with more useful functionality than most traditional DM systems

·        ClauseBank enabling you to squirt in word snippets into your emails and corporate documents

·        Saving Messages to SharePoint – the hottest add-in for SharePoint world-wide.

c) Content Management (Web Site Development):

·        The SharePoint Standardiser – to bring all document libraries into a standard configuration

·        Using the new DotNetNuke Content Management System with it’s nice new editor and SmartPhone Templates

·        ASP.Net and the old Classic ASP Web Development has also kept us busy this year with clients’ websites and intranets

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SharePoint 2010 Administration exam

For the Microsoft Gold Partnership renewal coming up in 2012 this requires 4 people to do the exam below.

Exam 70-668:

PRO: Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Administrator

Designing a SharePoint 2010 Farm Topology (27 percent)

Planning SharePoint 2010 Deployment (26 percent)

Defining a SharePoint 2010 Operations Strategy and Business Continuity (25 percent)

Planning for Search and Business Solutions (22 percent)

Interesting how the farm topology is worth more than the other parts......

For SharePoint Consulting Services click this link

Microsoft Access 2007/2010 Exporting tables to Excel

Interesting question:

There is a command in access VBA that's been around for ages called TransferSpreadsheet
Funny enough there are a few variables to do with te format:

acSpreadsheetTypeExcel12 --> this is to export as .xlsb
acSpreadsheetTypeExcel12xml --> This is to export as .xlsx

e.g.:

DoCmd.TransferSpreadsheet acExport, acSpreadsheetTypeExcel12Xml, "MyTable", "c:\temp\MyTable.xlsx", True

acSpreadsheetTypeExcel9 --> This refers to Excel 2000 format . e.g. MyFile.xls


The intellisense doesn't give you a acSpreadsheetTypeExcel10 or acSpreadsheetTypeExcel11 so maybe these don't exist.

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Rotating Images on a web site

Interesting but simple request.

Three images to rotate every 10 seconds on the front page of a web site.

Well this called for an Animated PNG. We first quickly tried an Animated Gif but the 256 colours makes pictures files quite grainy.

There is a Firefox add-in but it didn't work with our latest version so we downloaded a free but useful utility called "APNG Anime Maker."

Now the client has a very nice rotating set of images on their web site.

Just waiting for the next tricky bit of logic.

Just for your information, the alternative was some groovy jquery logic and even found that DotNetNuke has a free Widget Module called the Carouselat http://dnnwidgets.com/.

Still the Animated PNG is the simplest and easiest way to go in this case, but can see us using some jquery logic in the future for Web Development.

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CSS Div Overlapping the footer area

CSS can be very tricky as well as being quite elegant.
Sometimes you wish you'd stuck to html tables, and with html 5 becoming more prevalent, everyone will soon switch back to tables.
One issue we had recently was overalapping divs.
This was caused by the heightr being set on a div on the right side so the bottom footer was appearing over the top.
It seems the div itself expanded more than it's height.
The solution was to remove any height styles in the div and everything fitted.

How to best do an online survey or questionnare

Interesting question.

This was asked by a client for whom I do asp.net and Classic asp updates for.

Said they were better off using an online program like Survey Monkey.

Funny enough when looking, there are quite a few programs out there.

wufoo also looks good.

So for Online Surveys or questionnaires there are three things to look for.

1. Is the audience internal or external?
2. How important is the security of the information?
3. What kind of reporting do you want from this afterwards?

Of course there are other minor items, like are there numbers? Are there lost of answeres requiring an unknown number of lines or tables rows to to generated? etc

Let's first look at the top three components and how the online and inhouse software can meet your needs.

1) If the audience is internal and the company is using Microsoft Office 2003 onwards, then the infopath tool is brilliant.
Once the audience goes external, then this becoimes a more expensive option and you would look at some online tools instead.
Noting not much comes close to the ability to add multiple lines with numbers and calcs as easily as infopath does.

2) If security is important, then that also needs to be checked and locked down. Emailing may not be the best option etc

3) Reporting always comes after and should be specified up front. What's trickier is reporting on open ending questions or multi-lined questions. This might even effect the way the questions are phrased

There you go, online surveys are go....There's lot of otehr components in successful surveys, but these three points cover the more technical aspects.

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Tom Bizannes has a Business Degree and specializes in Microsoft Office and Web Solutions (Including SharePoint).

What's the perfect size Company for IT work?

Interesting discussion I had today with a new employee at one of my middle sized clients.

She said, that this employer was just right. Smaller firms had too much putting out fires, little tasks to do etc, whilst big firms had too many processes and fixed ideas.

When I mentioned the Six Sigma with it's massive failure rate in industry, she mentioned a very large IT firm that uses it. No wonder they've tried to outsource so much work from india, because there are too many processes to get anything done.

This kind of changes the way one looks at what companies you'd want to work for.

The whole industry is changing at the moment due to cost cutting, so even the sizes and types of firms that are good to work for are changing.

Even one company that aggressively promotes that it was voted a top firm to work for a few years ago, now with it's Six Sigma implementation and other processes, everyone there seems under the gun and not the most pleasant workplace.

As for me, as long as the company makes sure it's employees have access to plenty of Moccona Coffee, they are ok.

Microsoft Access Upgrade Issues

Had someone yesterday said it was too hard to upgrade a Microsoft Access Application to the 2007 or 2010 version.
Where do people get this idea?
Ignorance is not good.

My answer was simply, "We've done it quite a few times".
There are a few issues and googling Microsoft Access Upgrade quieries brings up 35 million results.

And "MsAccess Upgrade Issues" brings up just under 10 million results. (Pros like me refer to Microsoft Access as MsAccess and if you are googling for help, this is useful to know).

The main issues with upgrading access that I know are:

• Moving the data, schema and logic to a 2007 or 2010 version, when you have access security set.
• Dealing with hard-coded references to Excel, Word or Outlook
• Some file manipulation macros
• Generally dealing with really badly written code
• ADO References caused by Windows 7 Service pack
• New APIis if you are also using the new 64 bit of office
• File Searching / handling functionality
• Making the toolbars apepar in the ribbon

The one major item from a coding perspective is that the new versions of access are "fussier".
This means bad code is more likely to cause issues than ever before.

Also, Windows 7 running MsAccess 2007 or MsAccess 2010 can have issues which weren't there with MsAccess 2003 on an XP PC running applications on the network file share.
To prevent this, my Excel Speed app can show up some network issues, and one often needs to tweak the network and the PCs via some group policies and registry settings to fix.

Also one often raised question, is why not move the backend into sql. That's ok if you are using sql 2000, but from sql 2005 onwards, Microsoft SQL Server locks a chunk of rows at a time. So a well behaving multi-user application will start locking up when you move the data into SQL.
To get around this, ASP.Net is one solution, as it copies the record to memory and releases and lock and only writes back when it detects you have made a change.
Why they couldn't just build this into MsAccess is quite silly, as it would promote more use of Sql Server which can only be a good thing for someone qualified in Sql Server like me.

Converting your MsAccess Applications to newer versions is not tricky if you use a professional. ###

Microsoft Office Migrations

Thinking of upgrading to Microsoft Office 2010?

A quick search in Google Insights shows a very interesting trend:
Searching on the words "microsoft office upgrade":
The top five in order are:

1. United States
2. Australia
3. United Kingdom
4. Canda
5. Germany

In the last 90 days, it's just the United states followed by the United Kingdom.

Does this mean that the US and the UK have put off their upgrades until now in order to reduce costs etc?


Then looking at just Australia, you get QLD followed by NSW and then VIC.
Does this mean the floods put QLD off and that NSW is just trying to cut costs?

There are a few pain points, especially in Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access or (MsAccess) as it's commonly referred to in web searches.
There's a conversion tool aimed at MsAccess, from a mob called converter technology. They don't seem to have a handle on Excel or even a way to check the network is optimized for the combination of Windows 7 and Office 2010.


We even developed a network speed/locking tester written in excel that can show up issues before Office goes into production. Now to write one in MsAccess that covers issues with DAO/ADO connections taking forever.
One of the most interseting outcomes of the Excel Speed Tester is that a good network environment can read and write your file fastger than alot of PC hard disks can. This means that having your files on an optimized network can be faster in some cases than on your hard disk. We do say quite carefully, "In some cases", because once a network gets busy, most of us can feel if not see the effects.
For more information on the Speed tester email me via http://www.macroview.com.au.

The whole migration story gets murkier when Office 2007 is also thrown in as this is a nightmare version in terms of upgrading/coverting macro driven applications.

Unfortunately for us Excel and MsAccess Developers, Office 2007 will plague us for years, and even now, companies are migrating to Office 2007, because some ignorant adviser said this was less risky than office 2010. They obviously haven't consulted us!

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