The data are stored in SharePoint custom lists and in out of the box lists like a course calendar.

.Net code running in sandbox mode transforms our course calendar to a more tabular (matrix like) calendar

The course content is based on wiki pages

Don’t forget that the publishing features are NOT supported in O365 public web site (but they work); we don’t use them –> we are leveraging SharePoint Foundation to the max with a few web parts, SharePoint Designer 2010 and the XSlListViewWeb part; Monthly cost: 10 euros with 24h support and 99.9 % SLA.

Isn’t that great ?

An easy and elegant way to solve this is to create a custom content type; in the content type definition, go to Content Type definition :

Click on the Title column, and select the option “This column is Hidden (Will not appear in forms”).

You can now associate you content type to a SharePoint List, but you won’t see the Title column anymore.

Enjoy !

To solve this kind of issue, one of the thing you have to do is to uncheck the Automatically detect settings option of Internet Explorer (In the Menu Tools-Internet Options –Connections )

Let me know if that helps you…

When we deploy to SharePoint an Excel Workbook using a PowerPivot datasource ,  an (almost hidden) instance of SQL Server Analysis services handles the server side PowerPivot request: this instance is named .\PowerPivot.

Let start from a clean situation where no PowerPivot workbook has been deployed; we launch SQL Server 2008 R2 Management Studio and select Analysis Services as the Server type and .\PowerPivot as the Server Name as illustrated in the next picture :

We get, well…nothing : no database.

Now, let’s create a PowerPivot workbook with 4 tables :

1 Excel linked table (Date) and 3 tables fetching data from SQL Server (“Sales”, “Employee” and “SalesTerritory”).

From this, let’s create a small dashboard based on a Pivot table & slicers :

When we save this workbook ( with the filename PowerpivotDemoYYYY) into a document library, no database is created in the .\PowerPivot instance.

When we click on the workbook and display it in the browser, we don’t see anything yet in the .\PowerPivot instance.

When we click on a slicer then  a database (with a name including workbook name) is created:

When we expand the databasename node, you will notice that :

• there is a datasource for each PowerPivot connected to the outside world (but not for the Excel linked table).
• there is one Cube (name = ‘Sandbox’)
• Each PowerPivot table is a measure group and a dimension :

Now if we save the workbook on the file system and if we rename it with a .zip file extension, we will find an interesting file in the internal .xl\customdata folder : item1.data which is a SQL Server Analysis Service backup file embedded into the workbook :

Indeed, if we change its extension to abf (from item1.data to item1.abf).

and if we restore it into a database named (for instance) powerpivotrestore, we get a similar cube :

Now let’s try that again with SQL Server 2012 (here I’m using the Denali CTP 3 VM provided by Microsoft).

In SQL Server 2012 the .\PowerPivot instance is decorated with a nice SharePoint icon (see picture below).

I’ve created a PowerPivot workbook with 3 tables (named “Picknic_session”) fetching data from a SQL Server database.

Same behavior: clicking on a slicer generates the Database, but this time we don’t really get a traditional cube in Analysis Services:

I also noticed that starting the (new) PowerView editor from a PowerPivot workbook also generates the database.

Indeed, according to the new SQL Server 2012 BI religion,  the BI Semantic Model (BSIM), Analysis Services can be installed in one of the following modes : tabular or multidimensional; the “PowerPivot” mode is based on the tabular mode (works with the Vertipaq engine).You will find more information about the BI Semantic model in this post.

One of the consequences is that we can use the Vertipaq engine without having to install…SharePoint (Vertipaq on SharePoint requires the Enterprise version of SharePoint).

One of the thing that is interesting with the BSIM is that you can  import a PowerPivot workbook from BIDS (Business Intelligence Development Studio), which is now hosted in Visual Studio 2010: indeed, Visual Studio 2010 provides several new project templates like the new  “Import from PowerPivot Business Intelligence”  :

After importing the PowerPivot workbook into Visual Studio 2010, you get the PowerPivot functionalities of Excel-PowerPivot in your favorite environment (which also provides team functionalities like source control and much more)

The BIDS project & Solution looks like this

The project property page provide a bunch of interesting options, like the Server location and the Query Mode, which is Vertipaq by default (but can also be switched to DirectQuery,…)

This (Tabular) project must be deployed to a Tabular instance of Analysis Service :

It looks like the project cannot be deployed (from BIDS) to the ( default) SharePoint instance of Analysis Services (.\powerpivot).If you try it, you will get the following error message:

This message is obviously strange ; we believe that we cannot deploy the tabular project to this instance because the instance is protected/reserved to SharePoint.

Having a separate tabular instance of Analysis service makes sense if someone wants to use the VertiPaq engine without having to rely on the (expensive) SharePoint 2010 Enterprise or if a company want to move from a Team BI model (based on SharePoint) into a Corporate BI model (with or without SharePoint). To be honest, I believe that most companies will adopt the SharePoint approach.

Using PowerView to access a BISM located in a tabular instance of Analysis Service.

Now that our BISM has been deployed to a separate instance of Analysis Service, it can still be accessed by PowerView (formerly know as Crescent) a new very powerful tools for end users & power users (we won’t describe PowerView in this post, we can easily start PowerView from a PowerPivot workbook stored in a document library).

To achieve this, we need to create BSIM connection file pointing the tabular database: from a standard document library we have to provide the BSIM content type which is available in the site collection by activating the following site collection feature  PowerPivot feature integration for Site Collections.

In my case I created a connection to my Tabularpoject21 Tabular database (the one deployed earlier from BIDS)

When the BISM connection file is created, we can start PowerView (Crescent) :

In the released of SQL Server 2012, PowerView (which is part or Reporting Services) will only be able to create reports from Tabular databases and not multidimensional databases; this last functionality will be provided later…

The BI semantic Model is not yet fully unified…

So yes, you will still need a tool like PerformancePoint which allows us to quickly navigate from one dimension to another via the Decomposition Tree as illustrated below :

Even if PowerView allows you to create dynamic reports from external instances of Analysis Services, don’t forget that SharePoint 2010 (Enterprise) is still required…

Same story with the new Reporting Services Data Alerts (which allows more efficient reports subscriptions based on data value) : SharePoint 2010 (Enterprise) is required.

The BISM tabular models can be queried in Reporting Services with MDX. That can be  a way to bypass the SharePoint 2010 requirement and integrate Reporting Services in native mode to other portals. Excel 2010 is also supported as a client and Excel also uses MDX to query BISM tabular models.

We covered the following topics :

• Introduction
• PowerPivot v2
• PowerView
• Reporting Services 2012 & SharePoint 2010
• BI Semantic Data Model

As a SharePoint guy, my first reflex was to use SharePoint as a web content management tool, but we didn’t have the budget to buy, to set up and to maintain a SharePoint farm.

Moving to the cloud (Azure or Office 365) was the obvious option; Azure didn’t provide any real web content management functionalities so I turned my attention to SharePoint online (the SharePoint component of Office 365).

Office 365 provides both an intranet (several Site Collections) and a public web site (one public site collection).

Branding the public web site is possible by creating a custom master page (don’t try to modify the default master page!); I did it by following this MSDN tutorial  that I recommend . That works very well and you can completely change the ugly look & feel of the default Office 365 public web site.

I was very glad to be able to achieve it for my customer for only 25 €/month; I also noticed that the publishing features were available, so I thought I could leverage the very handy Page Layout stuff until I discovered in the Office 365 forums that even if they work the publishing features of Office 365 are not supported on the public web site !!! And an Office 365 program manager confirmed it afterwards at the SPC 2011.

That was a real problem for me –> I decided to leverage the SharePoint Foundation wiki pages (very flexible) with web parts (web parts properties are now versioned on SharePoint Foundation 2010)

I had to remove all publishing controls from my custom master page.

Other huge problem : we cannot remotely debug an Office 365 SharePoint application (this didn’t surprise me)

–>I decided to create the 4 following environments :

DEV environment :

my HyperV virtual machine, with Visual Studio 2010 & TFS source control. I always start by using the SharePoint 2010 Microsoft Information worker VM. In my Visual Studio project I have a mixture of CAML Code & sandboxed .net code that I deploy & debug on my local SharePoint.No problem so far.

I quickly discovered that I couldn’t create a form that would send information by e-mail because one of the methods that is explicitly blocked in the sandbox is SPUtility.SendEmail. As far as I know, there is no alternate method provided in SharePoint.

TEST environment  :

I created a (free) trial Office 365 account and I manually uploaded & activate my sandbox solution over there. Here I noticed several problems :

1..Net Code that worked very well in my on premise sandbox didn’t always work in the cloud. I was surprised; I even created an empty web part that didn’t work in O365…and other people experimented the same issue.

2.Sometime I couldn’t even update my solution package in the cloud, it looks like the User Code Service couldn’t unpack and deploy my solution package.Even deploying the solution to another (private here) site collection didn’t work (which didn’t surprise me : the User Code service is Shared across the farm).

STAGING environment

I created another (free) trial Office 365 account with another public site collection where I deployed  my solution package in such way that some key beta testers could test it and report some problems & suggestions.

PRODUCTION environment

I created yet another (free) trial Office 365 account where I deployed the tested solution package; eventually I paid the subscription.

My advices : the SharePoint component of Office 365 looks promising even in public web sites where the publishing features work, but are not supported; stay away from .Net code as much as you can and code in CAML or use the (javascript) client object model. Don’t try to upgrade your sandbox solutions too often. As usual, try to use out of the box features as much as possible (like XsltListViews), leverage SharePoint Designer 2010 and the data view web part.Always test your application with anonymous and authenticated users : indeed some list views don’t work as expected with anonymous users (specially when you specify a group by statement and a sort statement). And more than on premise : test, test, test…

More details here.

1.1 lab.introduction to Powershell

In this lab, you will work out a number of exercises that have to do with Powershell.

In Lab1 you will discover the main Powershell concepts; in Lab 2, you will apply these concepts.

1.1.1 Lab 1.discovering Powershell

1. Start the Sharepoint 2010 Management Shell.

2. To get help, type:

Get-help

3. To see all the commands available, type :

Get-Command

4. To see how to use Get-Command, type get-help get-Command; you will notice the Noun option:

5. To get the list of all Sharepoint commands, type:

Get-Command –Noun SP*

You will notice familiar cmdlets like Get-SPUser, Get- SPWeb, Get- SPSite,…

Sharepoint commands are organized as verb-noun like Enable-SPFeature.

You can type Get-Command –Noun SPFeature* or Get-Command –verb Enable.

6. In Powershell, there is a cmdlet that give you the object size :Measure-Object; to get the number of Sharepoint commands, just type :

Get-Command –Noun SP* |Measure-Object –line

There are 560 Sharepoint Cmdlets.

7. If you type:

Get-Command –noun SPSite

8. Instead of using the Sharepoint Powershell, start the default Powershell console (In Accessories) :

9. At the console, type :

Get-Command –noun SP*

You get nothing because the SharePoint module is not loaded.

10. To get the list of Powershell Snapins available (not loaded), type:

Get-PSSNapin –registered

11. To Load the SharePoint Snapin , type:

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.Sharepoint.Powershell

12. To make sure the Sharepoint Cmdlets are now available, type:

Get-Command –Noun SP*

13. To illustrate auto completion, type:

Get-SP (followed by Tab)

Get-SPW (followed by Tab)

14. To get all site collections in the farm, type:

Get-SPSite

15. To find a way to manipulate or to get more information about objects, type:

Get-Help

16. Notice in the Remarks, the Get-member cmd :

17. Type:

Get-SPSite | get-member

You can notice for instance the Url and the Owner.

18. To display the site collection Url and owner , type :

Get-SPSite | select url,owner

Get-SPSite | select *

19. To display service applications, their id and name, type:

Get-SPServiceApplication |select id, name

20. Parameter auto completion

Type:

Get-SPServiceApplication –id (followed by Tab)

You will get:

21. Now, by copying & pasting an Id from the previous command (or by using an Id from a log file), you can provide the identity:

22. To get a list of all features in the farm, type:

Get-SPFeature

23. To get a list of all features in a site collection, type:

Get-SPfeature –site http://litware

24. Modification of an object’s property

For most Get-SP* cmdlet you have a Set-SP* equivalent;

For instance, if we want to modify a web site description, we can type:

Set-SPWeb –identity http://litware –description blablabla

25. If you type:

Get-SPWeb -identity http://litware | select description

you will get:

26. Create a new Site collection with new-SPSite

Type:

get-help new-SPSite

Type:

New-SpSite –url http://litware/sites/demo1

Powershell will ask you to provide other parameters

For ownerAlias, type:

contoso\Administrator

27. To make sure the site collection has been created, type:

Get-SPSite | select url, owner

28. Create 2 other site collections (and the template used for the root sites will be a “Team site” defined in Caml as STS#0)

New-SPSite –url http://litware/sites/demo2 -owneralias contoso\administrator-name “powershell demo2” –template STS#0

New-SPSite –url http://litware/sites/demo3 -owneralias contoso\administrator -name “powershell demo3” –template STS#0

29. Alias

Some commands have aliases (shortcuts); to get a list of aliases, just type:

alias

30. The | (“pipe”) character can be used to pass the output from one cmdlet to another.

Scripts can be created by using variables and piping output to other cmdlets.

Using the ForEach attribute can quickly get all values or set all properties that match condition set.

It is also possible to filter and to use wildcards *.To illustrate this, we are going to create a blog site in every demo site collection we previously did;

To get the list of site collection, type:

Get-SPSite http://litware/sites/demo*

Now we will try to create 1 blog site (template is BLOG#0) in each demo site collection; type:

Get-SPSite http://litware/sites/demo* -limit all | foreach { new-SPWeb –url ($_.url+”/blog”) –template BLOG#0 }

31. To add a secondary owner to all demo sites, type:

Get-SPSite http://litware/sites/demo* -limit all | set-spsite –secondaryowneralias contoso\brianc

To check this out, type:

Get-SPSite http://litware/sites/demo1 | select url, owner, secondarycontact

32. To discover action related to features like activating, installing, deactivating,…, type

Get-Command -noun SPfeature*

To illustrate Enable-SPFeature, type :

Get-help Enable-SPfeature -examples

1.1.2 Lab 2.Creating a small Powershell application

1. Write a batch file that will create a new site collection and that will provision the root site with the template “team site” (STS#0); the web site title must be “Web Site Powershell”.

2. If the site collection already exists, delete it. Don’t forget to load the Sharepoint snapin if it is not already loaded…

3. When the site is successfully created, display:

Make sure the console stays open.

33. To make sure the console stays open, create a batch file and use the –noexit option

Create an empty file named SetupLab.bat.

34. In this batch file, type :

powershell -Command "& {.\SetupLab.ps1}" -NoExit

pause

35. Create a file named SetupLab.ps1.

36. Define 3 variables:

# define variables for script

$SiteTitle = "Web Site-Powershell"

$SiteUrl = "http://litware/sites/powershell"

$SiteTemplate = "STS#0"

37. Check to make sure the Sharepoint snapin is not loaded:

# check to ensure Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell is loaded

$snapin = Get-PSSnapin | Where-Object {$_.Name -eq ‘Microsoft.SharePoint.Powershell’}

if ($snapin -eq $null) {

Write-Host "Loading SharePoint Powershell Snapin"

Add-PSSnapin "Microsoft.SharePoint.Powershell"

}

It is good to know that if the snapin is already loaded and if you try to load it again, you will get errors.

38. Delete the existing site collection if any:

# delete any existing site found at target URL

$targetUrl = Get-SPSite | Where-Object {$_.Url -eq $SiteUrl}

if ($targetUrl -ne $null) {

Write-Host "Deleting existing site at" $SiteUrl

Remove-SPSite -Identity $SiteUrl -Confirm:$false

}

39. Create a Site collection:

# create new site at target URL

Write-Host "Creating new site at" $SiteUrl

$NewSite = New-SPSite -URL $SiteUrl -OwnerAlias Administrator –Template $SiteTemplate -Name $SiteTitle

$RootWeb = $NewSite.RootWeb

40. Display Site info:

# display site info

Write-Host

Write-Host "Site created successfully" -foregroundcolor Green

Write-Host "————————————-" -foregroundcolor Green

Write-Host "URL:" $RootWeb.Url -foregroundcolor Yellow

Write-Host "ID:" $RootWeb.Id.ToString() -foregroundcolor Yellow

Write-Host "Title:" $RootWeb.Title -foregroundcolor Yellow

Write-Host "——-

For your info, it is also possible to create functions with parameters in Powershell and to invoke them; a nice example in Sharepoint is illustrated in the following post : http://stefvanhooijdonk.com/2010/03/02/power-of-powershell-and-the-sharepoint-snap-in

1.1.3 Lab 3.Create a Custom Powershell Cmdlet.

In this lab, you will create a Powershell Cmdlet that will download a Sharepoint Solution package from the Sharepoint Solution store.

1. Start Visual Studio 2010 and create a new Class Library; delete the Class1.cs; name the project DownloadWsp.

2. Make sure the .Net framework 3.5 is selected and that the platform target in the project properties is Any CPU.

3. Add a reference to the Microsoft.Sharepoint assembly.

4. We need to add a reference to the System.Management.Automation assembly which is installed in the Gac, but not available in Visual Studio by default. Add a reference to System.Management (which is showing in the reference list).Save the project. Edit the project file with notepad and change "<Reference Include="System.Management" />" to "<Reference Include="System.Management.Automation" />.

5. Now we will create our custom Cmdlet : add a new public class (it is not public by default) , name it DownloadWspCmdlet and derived it from PSCmdlet; resolve the namespace:

4. Define 2 public properties WspFileName and StoreTo that will become the Cmdlet parameters by decorating them with the Parameter attribute:

5. Override the function ProcessRecord is the code that will run when the Cmdlet will be invoked:

6. Resolve the namespace Microsoft.Sharepoint.Administration.

7. We can also define the verb and the noun to use in order to invoke our Cmdlet :decorate the class with a Cmdlet attribute :

8. Now we need to create a SnapIn which is a class derived from PSSnapin :create a public class named DownloadWspSnapin, derive it from PSSnapIn and decorate it with the attribute RunInstaller:

9. RunInstaller is defined in the assembly System.Configuration.Install, ad a reference to this assembly.

10. PSSnapIn is an abstract class, implement its members:

11. Rebuild the project, add the generated dll into the Gac.

12. Run InstallUtil.exe against your dll; you will find InstallUtil.exe in the following folder :

13. Start a Powershell console and add the new snapin:

14. Test your Cmdlet by invoking Download-SPSolution in the Powershell console:

Here is how I explain it in 1 page

//myDelegate is a type pointer on a function that takes
//an int and returns an int

    delegate int  myDelegate (int x);

    class Program
    {  
        static int Test(int x)
        {
           return  x+1;
        }
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            myDelegate f = new myDelegate(Test);  \\C#1.0
            f(10);
            myDelegate f1 = Test;   \\C#2.0
            f1(10);
            myDelegate f2 = delegate(int x) { return x + 1; };  \\C#2.0 anonymous method
            f2(10);
            myDelegate f3 = ((int x) => {return x + 1 ;}); \\C#3.0 lambda
            f3(10);
            myDelegate f4 = (( x) => { return x + 1; });
            f4(10);
           
        }
    }