I know my own name: Bjørn Furuknap (technically, it’s Bjørn Christoffer Aulie Thorsmæhlum Furuknap).

I am currently sitting in my home office in Oslo, Norway, and it’s Monday afternoon (5ish p.m.).

So, I am not mad, at least not more than usual, but I’ll still argue that lists and libraries make no sense in SharePoint.

SharePoint Lists and Libraries as Taxonomy Features Considered Harmful!

Before we become further acquainted, let me clarify the title slightly. Lists and libraries are mandatory in SharePoint, but you should never use them to classify content. Let me elaborate on what that means.

Before the days of content management, we had file shares, with the idea of storage location as the taxonomy option of choice. After all, beyond filenames, storage location was the only option.

The idea was as simple as it was a bad idea. You created hierarchies of drives, shares, and folders to structure the content you wanted to store. Put your content inside said folders, and poof, you had an archive of sorts.

However, when you stop to think about it, this is an incredibly stupid idea. Consider the following folder structure, epitomizing the idea of location as taxonomy:

Essentially, you start at the root with a Clients folder, containing in turn one folder per client, which in turn contains folders for the various types of documents.

This isn’t a bad idea, but the implementation is horrible.

First, this structure makes it very difficult to find all the invoices for all the clients, except if you were to use filenames as an additional taxonomy element (in itself a rather ludicrous idea, but I’ll get to that in a moment). The problem is that you can only ever store a file in one location, so if a file needs two taxonomy definitions, for example being classified both by type (invoice) and by year (2010), you’re out of luck.

Granted, there are ways around these issues. You could use the created date of the file to classify it by year, hoping that nobody ever copies the file to a different location. In Windows, you can also use shortcuts, or in Linux a symlink, but basically those options force you to retain a file in a specific location forever, lest the links break loose, along with all hell.

Second, and this is the important bit, you say that “Inside this folder are invoices,” but frankly, it’s only the discipline of users that makes this true. Were I or anyone to put images of my pets inside those folders, those pictures wouldn’t turn into invoices, would they? Of course not, that’s a silly idea! Everything remains what it is, regardless of where you store it.

A Coffee Cup Is a Coffee Cup

Let me explain with another example. On my desk I usually have at least two glasses of water, and I mostly keep them together on the left side of my desk. The glasses contain water, which glasses of water usually do. Nothing magical or earth-shattering, really.

I also drink at times insane amounts of coffee, even for a Norwegian. When I’m working actively, I often drink 15 to 20 cups per day. I keep my cup of coffee on the right side of my desk, simply because drinking coffee is more of a ceremony and requires more attention than drinking water, and thus I want to interrupt whatever it is I am doing while drinking coffee. When I need to use my right hand, that means I can’t use the mouse while drinking coffee, creating a natural break, albeit only for a few seconds.

However, if I were to change this scheme, and to be honest I often do, it would not create chaos. My coffee wouldn’t suddenly turn into water simply because I put the coffee container where the water container usually resides. The break I need to take to avoid burning my lips off is still required of the coffee but not of the water. The coffee doesn’t change simply by putting it in another location. It is what it is.

That’s Why We Have Filenames!

In the previous folder example, we can assume that something is not an invoice if it was named something like “Pet Picture 0001.jpg,” even if it was stored inside the invoices folder. Similarly, we can assume that something is an invoice if it was called something like “Invoice 0001.pdf.” We’ve been doing this for decades, identifying file contents based on the names.

The use of filenames and our incredibly naïve trust of filenames as indications of content is a problem, though, because the filename isn’t at all a decisive factor in the content of the file. If I were to put a Post-it note on my coffee cup with the words “Glass of Water,” the coffee cup would still remain a coffee cup. If you name your pet pictures “Invoice 000N.jpg,” they are still pet pictures.

However, most of us would still blindly believe that the content was an invoice and happily open the file. This has been used successfully by malware authors also for decades, for example in the Anna Kournikova virus, where recipients were tricked to believe that a file with a certain name contained certain content. It did not.

Filenames, in fact, are also rather ancient and should not be necessary.

Fine, They’re Documents!

Hold your horses a bit. In SharePoint, with a team site, we get a Shared Documents library. We can create additional document libraries extremely easily. However, this is actually just as silly, once you start thinking about it.

Most organizations work to a much greater extent with logical entities than they work with documents. An employee isn’t a document nor are the lunchroom chairs or the CEO’s parking space. Our clients aren’t documents nor are the invoices we send.

“Hold on!” I hear you say, with my superhuman hearing, knowing full well that you likely didn’t even think that. “An invoice is exactly a document, and it’s what I send!”

Well, you may think you send invoices as documents, but in fact, those documents are really just manifestations of the entity that is the invoice. The invoice itself is actually defined as several metadata properties, such as the invoice number, the line items, the sum, and the due date. Those pieces of metadata are the actual invoice; the paper on which you print the invoice is simply a carrier of that metadata information.

In fact, prior to printing specific metadata information on it, the paper is simply pulp. Without the specific pieces of metadata required to make the paper an invoice, the only way you can categorize the paper is by “Paper.” Imagine the archiving nightmare if everything was simply categorized as that.

Calling something paper is about as useful as calling something a document. It adds absolutely nothing of value, no more than calling something “an item.” That’s why I hate the idea of having “Shared Documents” in a team site.

Consider this: replace the word Document from use in SharePoint with the word Paper. Both are equally meaningless in a taxonomy sense. Doing so leaves you with “Shared Paper,” a “Paper Library,” “Paper Sets,” and “Paper Information Panel.” See how silly it sounds?

Granted, there is a slight different between paper and document, but the point remains; neither says anything about the contents and describes only the form or carrier.

So, What’s So Perfect Then?

The purpose of this article is primarily to show you how ridiculous the idea of location as a taxonomy feature really is and additionally show you how the default mind-set of many SharePoint installations really serves more to confuse than to clarify. We shouldn’t work with “documents” anymore; we should work with “Invoices,” “Contracts,” “Clients,” and “Employees.”

For this purpose, SharePoint has the coolest little invention called content types. In essence, content types are, you guessed it, types of content, such as “Invoices,” “Contracts,” “Clients,” and “Employees.” In fact, if you’re curious about what these weird little creatures really are, there’s already an article on SharePoint Magazine titled “SharePoint Content Types:  Why Should I Care?”

In closing, however, I would like to mention this: in most of the projects in which I am involved, I end up creating custom lists and document libraries far more than any of the other types of lists and libraries. I’ll talk more about that in a future article.

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SharePoint Magazine Issue 3 Cut-Off Date

First of all, because this is of some urgency, the cut-off date for getting issue 3 of SharePoint Magazine print is on Wednesday, July 20. That means that if you want to get print issue 3 as part of your subscription, you need to sign up before then.

Sign up here: http://spm.to/sub.

Of course, even if you miss that date (or you read this after the cut-off date has passed), you can get single issues shipped now. You can see all of our purchase option on our new Purchase page.

Oh, and that means that just after July 20, we’ll start shipping issue 3. I know, I know, it’s been two months since the previous issue, but it was always the plan to have a one-month break during the summer. We had planned to have that in July, but as mentioned, some last-minute change of plans made June that break-month.

Aspiring Authors Competition Results

In May this year, we ran a competition called Aspiring Authors Competition, in which we invited some very skilled authors to submit their articles for evaluation and judgment by the SharePoint community. And you did, so I’m happy now to present the results of the competition.

The finalists all get both publishing contracts with SharePoint Magazine as well as a scholarship at USPJ Academy. The winner gets a longer contract and scholarship and in addition inclusion in an upcoming author mentoring program that USPJA Publishing will run.

Well, I’m guessing it’s time to announce the results.

In order, from least to most votes, they are as follows:

• Josh McCarty’s “Best Practices for SharePoint Groups” (third place, 51 votes)
• Mikael Svenson’s “Three Main Reasons Why You Should Upgrade to FAST for SharePoint” (runner-up, 112 votes)
• Andrew Vevers’ “A Guide to Leaving Lotus Notes and Moving to Microsoft SharePoint” (winner, 125 votes)

Congratulations to Andrew Vevers as our Aspiring Author Competition winner for 2011 and thanks to you, the community, for helping us decide the winner.

New Column: Leading Change with Kerri Abraham

We’re also proud to announce that we have a new resident author on the team. User adoption expert Kerri Abraham joins us to write in a new column called Leading Change, where she discusses the strategies, tools, and methods she has used to create her amazing results in user adoption.

Kerri will be adding additional posts in her column on a regular basis, starting with her already published article that also gives name to the column, namely, Leading Change.

However, I know Kerri to be a person of strong convictions, so I’m sure that she’ll contribute far more than just her tasked user adoption content, and I’m sure she appreciates topic suggestions in the comments too.

Check out Leading Change with Kerri Abraham.

New Commenting System

Speaking of comments, you may notice that we’ve moved away from the forum-based commenting system to Facebook comments. Frankly, the forum commenting system didn’t work as we had hoped. Now, commenting is much quicker, and you have an easy option to post the comment to your Facebook wall too, to drive even more comments and keep the conversations going. If you’re not on Facebook, you can sign in using Hotmail, AOL, or Yahoo too.

I happen to know that Kerri is particularly fond of the new commenting system, and I’ll take her silence as agreement.

That’s actually it for this update. I hope you won’t let the new commenting system sit there all by itself but instead comment and let us know your thoughts.

And by all means, keep watching this space for more updates now that summer is if not over then at least well underway.

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As part of the celebration of USPJ Academy’s first birthday in May 2011, we are also happy to announce that this PDF issue will be cost free. You may download the issue using the link below.

Here is a list of content in issue #2:

• Take 2 – Action!
• The end of an Era: Joel Oleson Retires
• New Series: Silverlight in SharePoint
• Basics of “Hello World!”
• The Silverlight Client Object Model
• Dean’s Corner: Training as Employee Perks
• Is SharePoint ready for Enterprise-Strength Applications?
• A jQuery Primer for SharePoint: Selectors, Attributes, Traversing – Oh My!
• Aspiring Authors Competition 2011 Finalists
• Best Practices for SharePoint Groups
• A Guide to Leaving Lotus and Moving to SharePoint
• Three Main Reasons Why You Should Upgrade to FAST for SharePoint
• SharePoint 2010 Backup and Recovery – Configuring Backup
• Custom Auditing in SharePoint 2010
• Working with ULS Logs and Event Logs
• From the Archives: 10 Steps to Successful SharePoint Deployments

Further, if you want the print edition of this issue, you may now purchase this issue only, without signing up for a subscription.

If you would like a subscription to SharePoint Magazine, you may get that from the subscriptions page.

You can also download the free PDF version SharePoint Magazine issue #2.

As you may have heard, we’re celebrating by giving away gifts and great offers throughout the organization, and SharePoint Magazine is giving out over $8,000.00 worth of prizes this week. I’m sure you’ll want to check out the Egg Hunt competition if you want a piece of that action.

If you’re looking for more extensive training, you may want to check out the anniversary offer from USPJ Academy too, where you can study for two months for just $297, a discount of more than 70% off the regular tuition.

However, we have other cool news too.

SharePoint Magazine Print Issue #2

First of all, to answer a number of impatient readers, we are now in the process of shipping the second SharePoint Magazine issue. It seems that these things always take longer than we anticipate, so please excuse the delay we’ve had. You should have your copy in the mail within a few days.

That also means we’ll be putting out the second PDF issue shortly, and I have some great news related to that. Many readers have contacted us to ask for previews of the PDF and print issues  before buying a regular subscription.

Of course we want to address those questions, so I am happy to announce that the full PDF issue #2 will be available free from this site as soon as it is ready for distribution. Watch the premium section of the site (or subscribe to our newsletter, follow the RSS feed, or follow us on Twitter) to learn when that issue is available.

Single Print Issues

We also want to provide an alternative for those who want to see a print issue before subscribing. We’re faced with a bit of a challenge here. If you know one thing about us, it is that we never compromise the quality of our products, whether that is the content or, in this case, the quality of the print issues. We want the issues to look stunning and also be durable, which means that we need to use heavy paper, leading to a higher shipping cost.

Already, the first Phoenix issue has become a collector’s item, and we’ve had readers calling almost with tears in their eyes because their Phoenix issues have been damaged, asking for a replacement copy. As far as we can, we try to accommodate those requests, but we only have a few reserve copies ourselves. But, I digress.

What I wanted to say was that both the shipping and the price we pay for printing these issues make it impossible for us to simply give away sample print issues. However, we will now launch the option of purchasing single copies and have those shipped to both US and international destinations. The shipping will be somewhat costly, but I can assure you it’s exactly the same as we pay.

Single issues will be available for purchase starting from issue #2, so sorry, no Phoenix issues available for single purchase. You will find the link to buy single issues when we set up the issue page in a day or two. Again, keep your eyes open and follow along for the announcements.

But this isn’t the only piece of news we have.

Quick Courses

Being part of a learning organization has its benefits, among which is access to learning resources and technology that SharePoint Magazine can utilize.

We’re happy to announce what we call Quick Courses, which are learning content that aims to expand on articles and series in SharePoint Magazine and give you extended and hands-on training on the topics covered. These quick courses are meant to be a few hours long, and some of the will include lab time where you can practice what you learn in a safe environment without having to set up local installations. These courses will help you get started with the technologies or provide you with additional material without asking you to commit to a long training program. Think of them as, well, quick courses.

The first two quick courses are a Silverlight course, authored by Karine Bosch, and a SharePoint Designer 2010 Workflow course, authored by myself. More courses are planned, and we want to invite our authors to add such courses as part of their work for us.

We will also invite external partners to showcase their products and solutions. This will allow you to learn about and evaluate products, set up in an environment by the people who know how.

The first Quick Courses will be available in a couple of weeks, and, well, you know what to do if you want to know when that happens, right?

And one more thing.

Today’s egg hunt code (May 19, 2011) is 1456AF31FF

You may also want to follow us on twitter, especially tomorrow.

Talk soon!

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In this slightly cheeky article, I’ve adapted five passages from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War to a more modern age and made SharePoint the main star of the story. Ideally, this will give you a bit of insight into how to achieve more success with your SharePoint implementations.

Therefore, just as water retains no constant shape, so in SharePoint there are no constant conditions

OK, Sun Tzu may have said warfare rather than SharePoint, but had he been around these days, I’m sure that he’d agree that his ideas applies to SharePoint as much as warfare.

SharePoint’s greatest feature is its ability to adapt and become what you or your client needs. When faced with challenges that you need to resolve, your greatest tool is to adapt to the problem rather than trying to change the problem.

SharePoint allows you to do just that. Do you need a different data model? Fine! It’s as easy as changing the columns of your content types. Need a more appealing or efficient visual interface? If you can implement it in a browser, SharePoint can handle what you need.

However, before you rush out and start applying SharePoint to anything you can see, read on because…

He will win who knows when to implement SharePoint and when not to implement SharePoint

Although SharePoint is a brilliant product that can be adapted to virtually any situation, that doesn’t mean it is a good idea to use it in every situation.

This tip from the master of warfare doesn’t just apply to SharePoint, but it is absolutely important to SharePoint implementers. You need to know when SharePoint makes sense and will yield the most benefit for the least effort.

A typical example of bad usage is trying to get SharePoint to replace a traditional and moderately trafficked relational database service like SQL Server or MySQL. Yeah, SharePoint can be used like that, but you’ll be putting far more effort into getting SharePoint to perform and behave in the same way that it would likely be cheaper to go with other tools.

Learn the strengths and weaknesses of SharePoint and don’t try to force it to do something for which it is not suited.

To see victory only when it is within the ken of the common herd is not the acme of excellence

Hah! I didn’t even have to modify that for it to make sense, although I had to look up the meaning of ken.

Basically, what Sun Tzu means is that easy victories are not great victories, nor will they win any battles. It is very easy to impress people with SharePoint, showing them how easy it is to create lists, libraries, surveys, sites, and workflows. People may be so impressed that they’ll hire you just because you can quickly show off some random tricks.

That doesn’t mean SharePoint success! SharePoint is a massively complex beast, and if you want to harness its full potential, that will take massive efforts and resources. Don’t pretend like it’s going to be easy to get a SharePoint solution successful just because you can reap easy victories during the sales presentation.

The control of a large farm is the same principle as the control of a few sites: it is merely a question of dividing up their numbers

When it comes to governance of large sites, Sun Tzu shines as ever. It takes the same amount of effort to maintain 10,000 site collections as it does one site collection, scaled. So, if you require one editor to maintain a single site collection, you require 10,000 editors to maintain 10,000 site collections.

You’ll hear people say that managing a massive farm takes a whole different team. That may be true for some roles, but in general, SharePoint scales quite well and predictably up to very large installations.

What most people forget, however, is that content is always king, especially in SharePoint. To maintain that content, you need real manpower, or womanpower as it may be. Straining your editorial resources leads to decline in content quality, and that leads to dissatisfied users.

Plan your content maintenance early, and ensure you have sufficient resources to keep content up-to-date and properly maintained. Then, whether you have 5 or 50 site collections is merely a matter of scale.

Do not repeat the tactics which have gained you one victory, but let your methods be regulated by the infinite variety of circumstances

SharePoint isn’t about doing what everyone else does, nor doing the same thing over and over. SharePoint’s true beauty is in its ability to adapt and to handle almost any conceivable situation.

Organizations are unique, just as their requirements. Projects may look similar, but most often, you’ll find that after doing the initial research, projects are unique too. If you use a solution that you like because you know it, you are asking the users to learn how that solution works, rather than harnessing SharePoint’s ability to adapt to how they want to work.

You should, of course, apply past experience to new situations, but it is always wrong to assume that your next client, organization, or project will have just the same needs and just the same parameters as anything you’ve seen before. Perhaps they are similar, but it is always wrong to force users to adapt your way of thinking rather than adapting SharePoint to their way of thinking.

So, as ancient as Sun Tzu may be, he had a thing or two to say about modern software too. I never cease to be amazed at how much I can learn from this ancient guru.

I particularly hope you’re enjoying the new Silverlight in SharePoint series by Karine Bosch. We have some pretty nifty things coming up in that series, both in the form of content and in features, to help you master this incredibly cool topic.

The past few weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time on the Aspiring Authors competition, and we’re just about ready to reveal the three finalists. That has taught me, and us, a lot about how we interact with authors, especially considering the plans we have for the yet-to-be-announced Author Mentoring program.

Entering in a competition is one thing, however, but on a daily basis, we work with a range of authors on getting their knowledge out to our audience. Almost all of that work happens ‘behind the scenes’ and what you see in the magazine is just the end result and not all the hard work that goes into each and every article we publish.

So what’s it like to write for SharePoint Magazine? Why is it different from just blogging your heart out? And why should you even care?

Life as a SharePoint Magazine Author

First of all, SharePoint Magazine has a very strong sense of integrity. When we put our name on something, we want it to be the absolute best we can offer. That means that we work with every author on a one-on-one level to ensure that their articles are easy to read, addresses the right audience, has the right amount of content, moves ahead in a clear direction, and so on.

As an author, that means that you will spend a lot more time working on your article than you would normally do in a less rigorous environment such as your own blog. Quite often, your article will go through three or four stages of editing, focusing on the article content, the language, and the layout.

Throughout that process, you’ll work directly with a lead editor, which right now usually means me. Beyond offering advice, I’ll also keep your article on track through the editing process and hand the article off to the other editors as it reaches the various stages.

Now that SharePoint Magazine is also available in print, the editing phase is even more important. Previously, we could get away with making minor changes to the articles after they go live, but once you commit something to print, it’s more or less eternal.

Speaking of the print edition, most articles we publish end up in the print magazine too. It’s something special to see an article on which you’ve worked diligently for weeks shine at you in a physical paper magazine.

Opening Doors

One important thing about SharePoint Magazine is this: We’re not an isolated publication. SharePoint Magazine is part of the USPJA family, which means that an article in SharePoint Magazine can be the start of something much more.

USPJA is all about learning SharePoint. The products and services we offer range from the freely available SharePoint Magazine website, through newsletters, journals, webcasts, course authoring, all the way up to college level education in SharePoint.

When we invest the time we do in getting you on board as an author, it is with the knowledge that you may want to expand beyond that initial article. If your articles are good, you may find yourself with an offer for authoring a full journal on your topic, or perhaps designing training material for self-paced courses.

Earning Money

One major difference from your own personal blog is that SharePoint Magazine pays you for writing. How much depends on many factors, what type of article you write, whether you already have a name in the community, and so on. Most new authors start at around $100 per article but we have paid as much as $500 for particularly good articles. We have also asked some authors to write an article without pay as a trial, usually only if authors are completely fresh to writing or we’d need to do extensive work to get the article good enough.

However, you can also get paid if we use your article for other purposes, for example if your article is part of a series and that series can form the foundation for a USP Journal or parts of the content for a self-paced course at USPJ Academy. When you combine what you make writing for SharePoint Magazine with income from other channels, you can make a nice amount from your knowledge, and likely far more than you’d make from your own blog, of course depending on .

Audience

There are several sites online in the SharePoint space that has more readers than SharePoint Magazine.

However, only a few SharePoint sites out there can rival the readership and reputation for quality that SharePoint Magazine has. Our audience knows that we publish only quality content and that when they read something here, it can be trusted as a reputable source.

We are desperate to keep that reputation so when your article comes out in SharePoint Magazine, you can be sure that we have done everything we can to make sure it’s the best it can be.

When our readers see your name on an article, it is very easy for them to transfer the trust they already have in SharePoint Magazine to you. Because of that, publishing with us means your reputation as a valuable resource also increases.

In the end, it’s not just about number of readers, but how those readers perceive you.

Want to Be Part of Our Family?

We’re always looking for skilled authors, or even unskilled but passionate authors. If you want to join us in producing the best quality content on SharePoint, you need to jump through a few hoops, though.

First, read through our article content guidelines to understand what kind of content we want. Then, if you have a specific article idea, submit an article pitch.

If you don’t have an idea yet, but want to connect with us anyway, we can help you come up with good ideas. If so, connect through our SharePoint Authors page. However, if you do, it is important that you tell us what you have done before so we get a better understanding of what type of content we can ask from you.

After you’ve contacted us, we’ll get back to you to discuss the details. In busy times, this may take a few days, but if you haven’t heard from us in a week, feel free to email me at pubeditor@uspja.com, and I’ll at least verify whether we have received your information.

That’s it for now, let me know in the comments below if you have questions.

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This isn’t your typical SharePoint Magazine article. In fact, this is an entirely new section of SharePoint Magazine, and its just one of many new features we’re adding. I’ll get back to these new features in a moment, but first I’d like to mention what’s going on.

You may have noticed that we’ve not been publishing as many articles recently as we used to. The reason for this the print edition of SharePoint Magazine. The print edition takes about one month to produce, so we want to slow down the pace of new articles for a while to allow the print edition articles to catch up. Right now, we have several articles in Karine Bosch’s series on Silverlight in SharePoint in final editing, a new series from BCS mastermind Fabian Williams, as well as several other stand-alone articles that are ready for release.

You will see these on the web edition of the magazine over the coming weeks as we put them into the print edition of the magazine.

Aspiring Authors Competition 2011

I would like to remind you that our Aspiring Authors Competition deadline is approaching rapidly. You need to submit your entry by April 15, which is just a few days away. This could be a great career booster for you and a chance to get your articles published in the leading online and print magazine in the SharePoint community.

However, right now, I’d like to talk a bit about two of the new features we’re launching now.

Blogs

Since SharePoint Magazine relaunched back in December 2010, we’ve received tons of good suggestions, feedback, emails, and comments, and from that, we’ve done some adjustments and made some new features available. What you are reading right now, for example, is the first “Letter from the Editor”, and these letters are part of a new section on the magazine, the Blog section.

SharePoint Magazine has always focused on providing top-quality content from the best authors in the business. However, we realize that the amount of work we put into each article means we can only put out so many articles each month and there is so many interesting things going on in SharePoint these days, we’ve had to come up with a more rapid way of getting that information out to you.

Thus the Blog section was born. The Blog section will contain… Well, blogs. The Letters from the Editor is one of these blogs, but we want to bring in additional authors too. The content in the Blog section won’t necessarily go through the same rigorous editing process as our regular articles, but will be looser in form.

In the Letters from the Editor, I, or whoever is the editor in the future, will update you on what’s going on at the magazine and in the SharePoint world. The print subscribers have already read the first Letter from the Editor in the first issue of SharePoint Magazine print, but web readers will now get their own letter too.

eSubscriptions

One of the biggest changes we’ve done in the history of SharePoint Magazine is to launch the print edition of the magazine. We always intended to include a PDF version of the print edition, but originally we wanted to include this only as part of the regular print subscriptions.

However, we know that many may not have the option of getting print subscriptions and also that shipping to some parts of the world would be prohibitively expensive. These readers would not have any option except for the web site, so we decided to make the PDF edition a separate subscription.

As such, from today, you can now get the electronic subscription from our normal subscription page at http://spm.to/sub. These eSubscriptions cost $77 for a year (12 issues), which is roughly the price of a normal subscription without the print and shipping costs. eSubscriptions are of course available anywhere in the world, so if you live in a country to which we cannot ship print subscriptions, you now have a chance to get the PDF version.

The PDF edition is exactly the same content as we put in the print version, only optimized for web and screen viewing. The PDF issues in the eSubscriptions will be available around the time when print subscribers get their physical copy of the magazine.

We shipped the first issue of SharePoint Magazine print in early April and with an estimated week in transit, the first PDF issue will be available in mid-April. However, we’ve encoutered a few issues with the solution for distributing these editions, so we’re a few days away from making the first issue available still. Subscribers will be notified when they can download the first issue.

What Else?

We’re not stopping here, though, but I’m not ready to reveal all the new things we have planned just yet. However, I want to mention one thing, due for release very shortly.

We’ll be launching an extended exercise feature, based on USPJA’s recently released self-paced course offering (check the News section if you want to know more). You’ll be able to further expand into the topics of selected articles through short courses, including access to a lab environment in which you can practice.

Keep your eyes open for other new features. Of course, if you have further suggestions for us, you should add them to the Suggestions Thread in the forum.

Talk soon!

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USPJ Academy, the world’s first SharePoint college (http://uspja.com/), announced today that it is making its self-paced SharePoint training courses available for single purchase.

The need for skilled SharePoint professionals is growing at a rapid rate. Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer predicted a need for one million SharePoint professionals by 2013, and the training industry faces serious challenges in providing enough quality training capacity.

USPJ Academy takes this challenge on and has already launched its college level SharePoint education through its online academy, and more than a hundred students from all over the world have attended over the past 12 months.

Now USPJA is also making parts of that training available to students who are not paying full Academy tuition through a new self-paced training offering. The self-paced training options that USPJA has now made available is based on the same high-value content that regular students at the school have used for a year.

Authored by industry leaders and adhering to the rigorous accreditation standards required by the Distance Education Training Council, the courses allow students to learn SharePoint at their own pace and at a rate that is unparalleled in the industry.

“The majority of current market offerings cost hundreds of dollars for a few days of training and force employees to take valuable time off work” says USPJA acting Dean Bjørn Furuknap. “This is unacceptable for many employees and organizations and we provide a better alternative”.

With the new USPJA offering, users can get access to full course content for $97 per course and can decide themselves at what pace they want to go through that training.

Matt Bramer, one of the USPJA students who got a new SharePoint job after just a few months at the academy, says this about the self-paced training he has taken: “Being able to learn when I want, how I want, and at a comfortable pace, is a win-win all around. The USPJA crew has never ceased to amaze me with the curriculum, talent, and exceptional service”

The self-paced training also includes access to USPJA’s virtual lab environment, where users can perform assignments, do exercises, and otherwise experiment with SharePoint without having to install local software. “The USPJA Labs save our users hours every week by allowing them to quickly test and explore features that would require a complete lab rebuild if done locally” says Furuknap.

USPJA self-paced training options are available from this page:
http://www.uspja.com/studying-at-uspja/self-paced-sharepoint-training/

Because I consider Joel a personal friend, who has on several occasions offered his guidance and support both in public and in private, I’ve chosen to write this eulogy not as a simple list of Joel’s accomplishments, but as an expression of what I personally feel at this moment.

Joel Who?

I realize there are billions of rocks in the world, and if you’re just emerging from underneath one of those rocks, or from some cave completely void of internet access, you may not know who SharePoint Joel is. Let me explain.

In days yonder, I started exploring SharePoint and as everyone else, literally had Google search for SharePoint topics as my start up page. More often than not, however, I found myself staring at one particular person’s face, that of some guy called Joel Oleson, whenever I needed something really thorough and well explained.

When Twitter came around and started becoming the de facto standard for community interaction, Joel Oleson quickly became the most followed SharePoint superstars out there. It’s not that he manically followed everyone who followed him, like some people do to increase their followers. In fact, it took me almost a year of hard work before I finally got an email saying that “@joeloleson is following you”.

No, Joel became as popular as he is by being there for the community. By responding to questions, by speaking at events, by providing valuable information in his blog, and by taking an active part in the community that he loved and still loves. Joel has done an amazing job, bringing SharePoint knowledge to the masses, and doing so in an entertaining fashion, making him perhaps the world’s most popular speaker at SharePoint events.

But It Can’t Be All Good, Right?

You don’t get as many fans as Joel has without stepping on some toes every now and then. Joel has fought several battles in the community, but what distinguishes Joel’s battles from most of the other petty fights we see sometimes, is that Joel always fights for what he believes is best for that community. When he launched the idea of the SharePoint knights, for example, he got the wrath of a large group of influential people thrown in his lap.

However, Joel didn’t launch the idea because he himself needed a title; he already was the most popular SharePoint guy in the world. He thoroughly believed that an independent system of community recognition would benefit that community and thus championed the idea. He fought valiantly, but in the end saw that the fight split the community and lay his idea to rest.

Another example is his periodical stabs at Steve Ballmer. In short, and as he himself publically says, he wants Steve Ballmer to step down. In less politically correct terms, he’s saying Steve Ballmer is bad news and doesn’t do his job very well.

However, Joel isn’t asking Steve Ballmer to step down because Joel wants to be the CEO of Microsoft. In his arguments, he always focuses on how communities, not just that of SharePoint, would benefit from having fresh blood in the Microsoft leadership.

It is not even only SharePoint that’s on Joel’s mind. Whenever there is a disaster somewhere in the world, or when people are in jeopardy, or fighting to claim their rights against oppressive dictators, Joel is among the very first to offer whatever support he can, even if that is just changing his Twitter avatar or mentioning a prayer for his friends in need.

It is no coincidence that when Joel now steps down from his role in Quest and from the public eye of the SharePoint community, he moves on to work for a non-profit organization where he can further help and contribute in his own way to a better world.

So, Why Is He Leaving If He Loves The Community?

Only a few people in the world can even be compared with Joel when it comes to single-handedly building and nourishing the SharePoint community. Joel has spent the last few years traveling around the world to speak at everything from small user groups to huge conferences. He never forgets to bring his experiences and stories out to his blog or his Twitter followers and thus contributing to bringing people from around the world together in a common interest.

What he seems to have forgotten though, is that all his dedication has had a price, and a steep one. In the previous three years, Joel has been traveling for 300 days, most of the time away from his family. As he says is himself, they have been getting the short side of the stick, which, I believe, means they’ve been the ones to suffer from his community dedication.

I have no problems understanding that. I don’t think anyone will. Now, it’s time for those even closer to Joel to benefit from his kindness, wisdom, and presence. Now, it’s time for those who have sacrificed access to their father and husband so that we could enjoy Joel, to get their well-deserved rewards.

Joel will receive plenty of thanks. I’m confident the community will not squander our chances to express that gratitude.

However, I’d like to take this chance to thank Joel’s family.

Virginia, thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for letting us spend so much time with your beloved husband.

Dean, Scott, and Jared, you have a father of which you should be very proud, and you should know there are thousands of people in the world who owe your father a great debt of gratitude.

Thank you.

.b

One participant in the ensuing discussion took the time to point out the weaknesses of the solution, and I thought it would be interesting to show how to solve many of the issues mentioned in that response.

The first problem related to auditing, so I though it made sense to start by showing how to add some custom auditing in SharePoint 2010.

Only SharePoint 2010?

The logging framework in SharePoint 2007 was less than perfect. Simply put, you were often much better off writing your own logging framework than to use what you got from SharePoint.

Those days are now over, however, with the new logging framework in SharePoint 2010. The upgraded SPDiagnosticsService class provides, compared to SharePoint 2007, a very easy interface for logging events and leave an audit trail.

As such, the examples shown in this article are targeted at SharePoint 2010 only.

ULS and Event Logging

Our goal for this article is to see how we can add events to either the ULS log or the Windows Event log. This is an important skill for SharePoint developers as it allows you to provide feedback to administrators and others about important or informative events in your code.

However, you also need to understand what these two logging destinations are and how best to utilize them.

SharePoint normally provides two types of logging types, the USL log and the Windows event logs. Although you’re certainly free to add additional custom logging functionality, we’re not going to discuss that now.

The ULS log is what you get in the [SPRoot]\LOGS folder, and is often the first place you search for debugging problems with your solutions. These logs normally contain the bulk of the logging information provided by SharePoint.

The benefit of logging to the ULS log is that you can dump much more data there than you would normally want in the Windows event logs. The ULS log is also dedicated to SharePoint so you’ll find only SharePoint information there.

The drawback of the ULS logs is that it is an additional log for administrators to monitor. Even with excellent tools like the ULS Log Viewer, administrators still need to monitor the log in addition to everything else they need to do.

If you do not have dedicated SharePoint administrators, you’ll likely find that normal system administrators have more than enough to monitor and adding additional burdens to them may not be welcomed.

The other logging destination is the Windows event log, which you’ll find on the server, usually viewable from Administrative tools. This is the monitoring and reporting facility that most administrators use to keep apprised of events on a system.

The benefit of the event logs is that it is an established form of reporting events. Administrators are used to working with the event viewer and there is a range of products designed to help monitor these logs already.

The drawback of the Windows event logs is the lack of detail. Granted, you can add as much as you want to the event logs, but chances are, you’ll be very unpopular if you put hundreds of event log entries every hour, as you could easily do in the ULS logs.

So, which logging destination do you chose? Well, the good news is that you don’t have to chose. You can have your cake and eat IT to.

In fact, you’re probably best off by combining the two logging destinations. For detailed logging with massive amounts of data, use the ULS logs. However, for critical events that require the attention of an administrator, use the Windows event logs.

SharePoint Diagnostics Service

What’s even better is that you don’t need to change the way you log to switch between the two modes of logging. All of the functionality you need to write to the ULS log and the Windows event logs are exposed through the SharePoint diagnostic service.

The diagnostic service is responsible for all aspects of logging and monitoring in SharePoint. By utilizing that service, you don’t need to know any of the internal dealings of working with Windows event logs or anything like that.

Instead, you simply ask the local SharePoint diagnostic service to write the events or traces that you want, and the service will take care of the rest for you. That includes making sure that wonderful new SharePoint 2010 feature, the correlation token, gets added to any event you add to the ULS logs so that it is easier for the administrators to find entries related to your event.

Solution Walkthrough

We’ll start with one of the examples from the Delegate Control article mentioned earlier. To make it easy, let’s just pick the first example, the one that redirect anonymous users to an error page if they try to access an application page. So, we’ll start out with a delegate control with an onload method looking something like this:

protected override void OnLoad(EventArgs e)
{
    if (Context.Request.Url.PathAndQuery.IndexOf("_layouts/", StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase)>0)
    {
        if (SPContext.Current.Web.CurrentUser == null)
        {
            // Anonymous user, prevent access
            SPUtility.TransferToErrorPage("Anonymous users have no access to this page");
        }
    }
}

Now, what we want to do is to additionally log what has happened. Let’s first just add the method call, which should be fairly simple, just before transferring to the error page:

LogToULS(string.Format("Anonymous user attempted to access {0}.", Context.Request.Url.ToString()));
// Anonymous user, prevent access
SPUtility.TransferToErrorPage("Anonymous users have no access to this page");

The LogToULS method is deceptively simple, but also holds they keys to the proverbial kingdom. The simplicity shows the elegance of the SPDiagnosticsService.

private void LogToULS(string message)
{
    SPDiagnosticsService diagnosticsService = SPDiagnosticsService.Local;
    SPDiagnosticsCategory category = diagnosticsService.Areas["SharePoint Foundation"].Categories["General"];
    diagnosticsService.WriteTrace(93, category, TraceSeverity.High, message, null);
}

This code really is all you need to write both to the ULS log and to the Windows event logs. Told you it was simple! Let’s examine what goes on here.

SPDiagnosticsService diagnosticsService = SPDiagnosticsService.Local;

The first line gives us access to the local SharePoint diagnostics service. From this object, we have full access to do virtually anything we want, at least from a logging perspective. We can, although not show in this article, configure how the logging should happen, basically anything that you can do through the Diagnostic Logging configuration in Central Administration.

SPDiagnosticsCategory category = diagnosticsService.Areas["SharePoint Foundation"].Categories["General"];

The next line is where we find the category for our log entry, and requires a bit of explaining, most easily done with a screenshot of the Diagnostic Logging configuration in Central Administration.

Categories are organized in areas. Areas are the upper most level shown in the list of in Event Throttling, like Business Connectivity Services and SharePoint Foundation shown in the image. Inside each area are one or more categories, and we need to pick the category where we want our ULS log entry to appear.

The SPDiagnosticsService object conveniently exposes these areas and categories in two collections titled, you guessed it, Areas and Categories, thus explaining our retrieval of the SPDiagnosticsCategory object.

We’ll need this object in the next line, so let’s look at that.

diagnosticsService.WriteTrace(93, category, TraceSeverity.High, message, null);

We’re still utilizing the SPDiagnosticsService object we created earlier. The SPDiagnosticsService class also existed in SharePoint 2007, but what didn’t exist was the two methods WriteTrace and WriteEvent. Now, with SharePoint 2010, we have those two methods, saving us tons of code and hardship.

The signature of the WriteTrace method is simple as well. We provide at least

• an ID, which is an arbitrary number we can decide ourselves
• the category we retrieved from the second line
• the severity of the low entry, defined by the TraceSeverity enumeration
• the message to be logged

In addition, we can provide additional data to be inserted into the message. This may be useful to enter dynamic data created in the logging method, but in this case, I’ve just sent a null parameter.

So, this really wasn’t too hard, but working with the Windows event logs surely must be more complex, right? Wrong!

Try adding the following line to your method:

diagnosticsService.WriteEvent(93, category, EventSeverity.Information, message, null);

That’s it! The same syntax, granted with an EventSeverity enumeration instead, and with a slightly different method name, and you’re done. Easy as… Well, I never got the hang of pie, but feel free to think of something easy.

Testing

Now that we’ve set up this rather simplistic logging method, we can test it. Deploy your solution, activate it, and log in to your site as an anonymous user before trying to access any application page, such as the All Site Content page.

As shown in the previous article, you’ll get an error message, but our interest is in what appears in the logs. Although you can open these log files to find your entry, I find using the ULS log viewer a much easier approach.

Your result may look something like this:

Note that the WriteEvent method call also adds a ULS log entry.

If you check your Windows event viewer, you may find something like this:

Now that you know how easily you can add logging support to your application, I’m sure your next project will include much better information to those poor administrators who must operate your solutions for years to come.

I also hope that this shows you how you can add auditing trails, and thus answer at least one of the criticisms raise after the previous DelegateControl article. I’ll address others in future articles, so stay tuned

Happy auditing!

.b