harbar.net component based software & platform hygiene
February 2007 Blog Posts

MIIS Provisioning with WSS 3.0

Via Craig Martin, aka Identity Hero. Alex Tcherniakhovski has posted an utterly awesome screencast on using WSS 3.0's workflow to help with your MIIS solution's provisioning. For those of you who have implemented MIIS solutions you will know that the provisioning side of things get a bit dicey, especially given the average Identity Management Kinda Guy tends not to know too much about code. This screencast shows how to merge the WSS 3 workflow capabilities into MIIS's provisioning and syncronisation bits.

Office SharePoint Server Developer Edition

This post has been a long time coming and a long time in draft. It all started about a year ago with an angry customer, some newsgroup queries and a discussion with a long time friend. Since then I've discused the "idea" with some Program Managers and MVPs on and off. At the SPC in Berlin earlier this month, Fitz also mentioned the topic, so it's now time to unleash the rant... No (unfortunately) this is not me letting the cat out of the bag on a as yet to be announced new product from Redmond, but simply a rambling discourse on...

ReadyBoost and VMs

Love it! Frank just posted the common sense view on ReadyBoost and Virtual Machines with a nice graphic demonstrating the, as we say here, 'bleedin' obvious' :) Of course the problem with "common sense" is that it's stated far too infrequently and therefore is not 'common' enough. Lot's of people have blogged about using ReadyBoost to "speed up" thier VM expierence. Yeah right!! It's of no help to ya whatsoever (when in the VM). Get yourself a nice fast hard disk and some real memory, oh and a few more cores or procs :) A trip back to the reality of...

In a nutshell: Reporting Services Addin for SharePoint 2007

There's been a lot of interest in the enhanced integration between SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services and SharePoint 2007 delivered by SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2. This truly is some awesome functionality and useful to anyone looking at Report Center in MOSS, or indeed those who currently have a bespoke Web UI for their reports and are looking for something a bit more robust and feature rich. This integration is yet another example of the seamless integration opportunities available in SharePoint 2007, and it's place within the enterprise as a platform providing super rich frameworks on which to base composite applications. From a...

SharePoint related books

I'm often asked about which books I'd recommend, especially when it comes to SharePoint development and the wide variance in quality of a lot of the web resources out there in this realm. To avoid repeating this stuff over and over again I'm going to post reasonably regularly here my thoughts - mini reviews if you like. Please bear in mind I will focus the reviews from a corporate development perspective - i.e. building for real solutions, deployed in real environments with proper topologies, security policies and so forth - rather than simply hacking things out that work, but could...

About Spencer Harbar

  Spencer Harbar is widely recognised as one of the world’s foremost Identity Management, Information Security, Office 365 and SharePoint authorities. With over twenty years of commercial experience in the architecture, development , deployment and operational service management of Web based applications and hosting platforms, his broad base of fundamental skills routinely enables the world’s largest organizations to succeed with Office 365 and SharePoint. Spencer delivers enterprise collaboration, content management and identity management architecture, design, development and deployment solutions, application security best practices, threat modeling and the implementation of highly available hosting platforms. He is also pretty...

SharePoint Designer and Expression Web

Over the last month or so I've been asked numerous times by customers and partners about SharePoint Designer and Expression Web. These queries have mostly fallen into two buckets: 1. Isn't SharePoint Designer just FrontPage and therefore is it rubbish?Well, yes it is sort of the "new version" of FrontPage, but no it isn't rubbish. Really, it is rather good.Firstly, FrontPage got a bad rap for mangling your markup and inserting it's own stuff over the years - at one point that was very true and very annoying - but this wasn't true of the previous version (2003) and SharePoint...

PNG transparency in IE6 part 2

As I mentioned previoulsy, I went ahead and made my new Subtext skin without testing it on IE6. It wasn't until I browsed the site on a customer machine running IE6 that the horror of its lame support for PNG transparency, coupled with my site design became obvious. This was my fault, not just for ignoring the testing, but because I (obviously) ripped off the site design and did so from IE7 so didn't catch the detection/fix markup that was present in the original. Duh! So I did a search and found some "fixes", but none as good as the...

Totally awesome

No more moaning regarding claims aware SharePoint please. What you need to know is right here. Configure Web SSO authentication by using ADFS (Office SharePoint Server). http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/61799f9a-da01-4c11-b930-52e5114324451033.mspx?mfr=true Oh and by the way, if you were considing a third party "SSO" solution for SharePoint.... ahh, no perhaps this is not the place for such a sentiment... :)

MOSS Navigation Deep Dive

Chris Richard has posted an excellent walk through of navigation in Office SharePoint Server, which is of particular interest to those building "publishing" sites, aka WCM sites. Chris covers the out of the box nav, and then goes into more detail on the Menu control, the PortalSiteMapDataSource and the PortalSiteMapProvider.

eXPired and Cisco VPN Client

Wubba! My office is now certified XP free! I am very happy... Since Vista hit late last year it's been a somewhat rocky road to becoming free of XP. First up the various drivers for the gadgets on Sony laptops (I have three) were very late and only became possible last week. Even now the european site doesn't have them based on model number etc. It's quite a challenge to get these all playing nice - requiring obtaining them for other models and such. Anyways these are all now sorted. Even the HDD protection util which is very troublesome. The second problem...

Windows Mobile Device Center Driver for Windows Vista

For those of us who use PocketPC, err, Windows Mobile the replacement for ActiveSync, Windows Mobile Device Center has finally made it outta beta and is available at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=83d513ea-9df9-4920-af33-3a0e2e4e7beb&DisplayLang=en Note this only supports PocketPC 2003 and above - so if you have an older device you are outta luck on Vista. Looking forward to Windows Mobile 6 and wondering if i'll be able to update my Axim...