One of the cool aspects of working at Microsoft is the opportunity to work on some fantastic projects.  It’s truly been a pleasure working on some great internet facing SharePoint websites that showcase the platform’s ability to service some of the internet’s most demanding websites and show it’s effectiveness as a web content management platform. 

Today, the newly redesigned/re-architected Recovery.gov website that’s running completely on SharePoint Server 2007 was launched!

Recovery.gov is a government website designed to provide transparency in to how stimulus funds provided by the federal government are being allocated and spent on various stimulus related projects across the US.  On February 13, 2009, Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, who’s main goals are to:

1. Create and save jobs
2. Spur economic activity and invest in long-term economic growth
3. Foster unprecedented levels of accountability and transparency in government spending

To that end, SharePoint Server 2007 was chosen as the platform to deliver on the requirements for the Recovery.gov site and will deliver compelling features and functionality that provides deep insight into how stimulus funds are being spent.  Head on over to Recovery.gov and check it out!

The Patterns & Practices team has recently released new guidance around building collaborative applications on the SharePoint platform.

The goal of this release is to help customers understand how to develop large scale, content-driven SharePoint applications that extend the value of existing line of business systems.  It essentially focuses on three primary objectives:

1. Large Scale – Show customers how to build a large scale SharePoint application.  This includes guidance on building in the manageability, configurability, and performance expected from large scale applications.
2. Content Driven – More advanced SharePoint applications often include many sites and combine custom coded logic with created content.  The guidance demonstrates areas like custom navigation and publishing, composing web parts with published information, and managing a consistent UI.
3. Extend LOB Systems – SharePoint can aggregate and extend information from Line of Business systems to end users, enhancing structured business process with informal processes through collaboration.  The guidance shows how to integrate security considerations into business services, and demonstrate how to create collaborative sites that help manage business events like incident escalations and order exceptions.

This release integrates new guidance with the original release of the SharePoint Guidance – November 2008 guidance (now retired) into a single download.

The guidance package contains the following components:

To download this release, click here.

The final March 2009 CTP for the Visual Studio 2008 Extensions for SharePoint (v1.3) has now been recently released.  Head on over to Paul Andrew's Blog (Paul is a Technical Product Manager on the SharePoint Team) for a rundown of the new capabilities available in this CTP.  Also with this release, we released a set of ten fresh new themes for SharePoint built as VSeWSS projects. Here’s a thumbnail of the new designs available to VSeWSS SharePoint Developers now.

Hi Software and Microsoft recently released version 2.0 of the Accessibility Toolkit for SharePoint. The intent of this solution is to provide a accessible development framework for Office SharePoint Server environments.

Key features of AKS v2.0 include:

• Smart Control adapters which greatly reduce the amount of custom configuration previously required for AKS control adapters.
• The Web Part Zone Control Adapter, a special Smart Adapter that modifies the output of SharePoint so that it does not use tables for layout of the Web parts.
• HiSoftware’s Compliant Code Engine (HCCE) to assist organizations in creating code that is compliant to standards-based HTML or XHTML.
• Additional requirements under Canadian Common Look and Feel 2.0 (CLF 2.0) guidelines.
• Examples of remediation to comply with WCAG 2.0 Level AA.
• French language version of AKS components.

The toolkit is freely available through the Microsoft Public License through CodePlex and can be downloaded at https://aks.hisoftware.com.

The SharePoint Conference is a great event to attend.  This year's conference will be especially good as we begin to unveil a lot of great information around the next version of SharePoint (codenamed SharePoint "14").  You don't want to miss this one.  Here's an excerpt (below) from an e-mail that's circulating to the SharePoint community.

Just posted this morning over on the SharePoint Team Blog, we've just released a Community Technology Preview of v1.3 of the Visual Studio 2008 Extensions for SharePoint.

The CTP is available at: https://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=428

To learn more about what's available in the 1.3 release, head over to the SharePoint Team Blog.

Microsoft has recently released the Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) Toolkit for SharePoint.  For those of you out there who are "knee deep" in SharePoint and are facing challenges around data integration with 3rd party portal platforms like BEA AquaLogic Portal, IBM WebSphere Portal, and SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Portal, then this toolkit is for you!

The toolkit provides sample code for producging WSRP conformant data from SharePoint lists and libraries.  In addition to the sample code, also included in the toolkit is a whitepaper that provides details on the different architectural approaches taken with the samples, as well as screencasts showing the samples in action.

Read the full announcement of the release over on the SharePoint Team Blog.

Click here to download the toolkit.

Quick Links

• MSDN Site: SharePoint Guidance
• Future Friendly URL: http://www.microsoft.com/spg
• Download: SharePoint Guidance - November 2008
• CodePle Site: http://www.codeplex.com/spg
• Community Forum: http://www.codeplex.com/spg/thread/list.aspx

Guidance at a Glance

This guidance helps architects and developers build SharePoint intranet applications.  The guidance contains a reference implementation that demonstrates solutions to common architectural, development, and lifecycle management challenges.  This guidance discusses the following:

• Architectural decisions about patterns, feature factoring, and packaging
• Design tradeoffs for comon decisions many developers encounter
• Implementation examples demonstrated in the reference implementation and in the QuickStarts
• How to design for testability, create unit tests, and run continuous integration
• Set up of development, build, test, staging, and production environments
• Managing the application life cycle including upgrade
• Team-based intranet application development

The following areas are not discussed in this version of the guidance:

• Content-oriented sites that use web content management
• Internet and enterprise-scale SharePoint applications
• Multilingual SharePoint applications
• Scale or security testing of SharePoint applications

A lot of exciting things came out of day #1 at the PDC.  I’m sure you’ve already started to see/hear about the great technology that we are unveiling.  During the keynote, I saw laptops being pulled out and I’m quite sure there are tons of blogging going on in the blogosphere

Today, Ray Ozzie kicked off the 2008 PDC with a keynote that basically laid the foundation of our software plus services strategy and highlighted the key investments we've been making over the last few years in bringing our cloud platform to fruition.  In his talk, he focused on the landscape as we see it in 3 tiers:

• Experience Tier – The experience tier focuses on the end-user and their user experiences with the desktop/mobile device
• Enterprise Tier – The enterprise tier focuses on people interaction with enterprise systems and system-to-system interaction within the enterprise
• Web Tier – The web tier focuses on leveraging the web as the backbone for next generation computing.  Our cloud computing initiative is focused on leveraging the web through providing scalable hosting services for applications services.

Windows Strata becomes Windows Azure

During the keynote, Ray made the "formal" announcement of the name of our new cloud platform.  For those of you who knew this as codename "Windows Strata", the platform has now been officially branded as Windows Azure.

Windows Azure provides a hypervisor-based model for providing secure and scalable hosting services.  It separates the application/service being hosted from the underlying operating system.  It is also important to note that Azure is not only for managing server infrastructure, but also web services as well and provides an end-to-end approach for accomplishing this.  At the heart of Azure is a "Fabric controller" which dynamically manages resources within the data center to preserve the health of services/applications that are deployed to the Azure Platform.

Windows Azure will provide support for both managed (.NET) and unmanaged code which essentially allows you to host non-.NET applications within this cloud fabric.  From a developer perspective, developers will be able to take advantage of this platform locally, through the Azure SDK and supporting tools for Visual Studio, that'll provide facilities to support the development/debugging of cloud-based applications.  Through a "publish" operation in Visual Studio, developers will be able to publish their solution to the Azure services Developer Portal.

The Azure Services Platform consists of the following platform technologies:

• Windows Live Services
• Microsoft .NET Services
• Microsoft SQL Services
• Microsoft SharePoint Services (this is not to be confused with WSS)
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services

The Azure platform should also not be confused as a replacement of our one-premise offerings, but rather a complementary, cloud-based equivalent.  our on-premise offerings as a part of our strategy include:

• SQL Server 2008
• BizTalk Server
• SharePoint Server
• Dynamics CRM
• Windows Server
• Systems Center

The platform will provide capabilities that allow developers to model the services deployed on the platform.  Service modeling consists of:

• Roles and Groups (e.g. who has access to the services that are being published and what operations/actions they can perform
• Channels and Endpoints (e.g. defining how the services will be exposed and over what transport protocols)
• Interfaces
• Configuration Settings

During the keynote, there were partner demonstrations of solutions that are already taking advantage of the Azure Services Platform.  Jonathan Greensted, CEO of Sentient, gave a demonstration of a solution that his company has been working on called, Bluehoo.com (http://m.bluehoo.com) that integrates cloud-based services with mobile devices.  You can download and starting playing with the solution from http://m.bluehoo.com.  In addition, Shawn Davison, VP of RedPrairie, a Supply-chain manufacturing solutions firm, demoed a "one button" product recall orchestration running on Windows Azure and leveraging .NET services like workflow.

Bob Muglia came on stage and discussed our roadmap leading into 2009+.  He focused on the theme of the "5th generation computing".  In his discussion, he highlighted where we've been and where we're going

• 1970s - Monolithic
• 1980s - Client-server
• 1990s - Web
• Today - SOA
• 2009+ - Services

Bob’s “evolutionary” discussion provided additional context to what Ray covered in his keynote and further solidified our messaging around the Windows Azure platform and the investments that we’ll be making from now, until we ship.

What's in Microsoft .NET Services?
.NET Services (formerly known as BizTalk Services) are a set of Microsoft hosted, scalable, developer-oriented services that provide key building blocks upon which developers can create cloud-based or cloud-aware applications.  Essentially, it breaks down into the following 3 components:

• A full end-to-end service bus solution – Makes it easy to connect disparate applications over the internet
• Facilities that support Identity/Access Control – Provides an easy way to control web applications and services using standards-based identity providers, including enterprise directory services such as Active Directory and web-based identity stores such as Windows Live ID
• Workflow Services – Provides a highly scalable host for running workflows in the cloud. 

What's in SQL Services?
SQL Data services extend the capabilities of SQL Server to the cloud as web-based services, which enable you to store your data in a highly-scalable and internet-facing distributed database service infrastructure.  It contains the following key components:

• Database
• Data Sync
• Reporting
• Data Mining
• ETL
• Reference Data

What about Microsoft Online?
Our Microsoft Online Strategy still remains intact and will take advantage of the new Windows Azure platform as it evolves.  The Microsoft Online platform is geared at addressing many customer challenges we've heard, including:

• Best in class collaboration
• Staying up-to-date with software versions/patches/updates
• Lower, predictable costs
• Scarce IT resources
• High Security
• High Availability

NOTE: It is important to note that the current version of Microsoft Online IS NOT built on the Windows Azure platform.  Over time, it will take advantage of our investments in Windows Azure.

Can customers host Windows Azure within their own data centers?
This question was asked several times within today’s breakout sessions.  The answer to this is that as the features/capabilities of Windows Azure evolve, we (Microsoft) will take a look at the capability stack and identify key features of Windows Azure and roll it into our enterprise server products.  There is still significant value within our enterprise server platform and overtime, those products will benefit from the rich investments being made in Windows Azure.

When are we going to ship Windows Azure?
Answer: When it’s ready. :-)  

Essentially, we’re targeting some time in calendar year 2009, however, we’re largely basing our release on when our customers think that it’s ready to be released, and not a moment sooner.  We will follow a similar process that we’ve followed with CTP services we’ve already released and will be doing frequent updates.  However, the final ship date was not disclosed.

Are there any resources available to learn more about Windows Azure?
You can find more information about the Azure Services Platform, including whitepapers, SDK and tool downloads, datasheets, and a link to sign-up for a test/dev account to the Windows Azure cloud platform at the Azure Services Platform website.

That about sums up day #1.  I hope you find this recap helpful.

The Best Practices Resource Center for SharePoint Server 2007 has been recently launched on our TechNet site.  The intent of the site is to provide a resource for guidance and best practices in efforts to avoid common pitfalls and keep your Office SharePoint Server 2007 environment available and performing well.  The best practices cited within the resource center is based on real-world experience from Microsoft Consulting Services and the SharePoint Product Team.