Our Blogs

• SAF is released!

  Mark Jones - Wednesday, June 17, 2009

  At Last! Finally, we have released the SharePoint Action Framework (SAF) on CodePlex!! Please take a look at : http://saf.codeplex.com .

  Now that I can take a minute, I just wanted to spend a bit of time detailing why we have spent the best part of 18 months (with lots of late nights building it!) Here's a FAQ to give you some answers:

  If you are developing with SharePoint, do you suffer from any of these ?

  • Lots of Defects caused by differences in SharePoint Farms. – eg. “It works on Integration, but not on QA!” .
  • Your Development team find it time consuming telling your Release team what to do for each release. “How hard can it be to put 5 columns in a Content Type?”
  • You have release documents (notepad, word, etc) that don’t contain enough information on how to deploy, or they always miss things and are extremely time consuming to create. “By heck surely there must be a better way of telling the Operations team what I need doing ?”
  • Deployments to key farms are always late and very stressful. “I hope we don’t get a release like that again, I didn’t finish till ...

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  Category: SAF

  Tags:: SAF SharePoint

• Upgrading SharePoint Site Columns

  Mark Jones - Saturday, May 16, 2009

  Introduction

  In a previous post, I explained my findings with "Upgrading Content Types", but now I want to test out a few scenarios with upgrading Site Columns. On the whole, the test results for Site Columns were pretty similar to that of Content Types. Although, I wanted to test what we can do when it comes to updating site columns that contain data. If you don't want to read each test case, please check out the "Summary" at the end of this post.

  Test Cases – Removing a Site Column

  Can we remove a site column by deactivating the Feature that deployed it? Yes

  Test Steps:

  1.       Deploy a Site Column (via Feature and CAML)

  2.       Deactivate the Feature

  Outcome:

  1.       Site Column will be removed

  2.       Feature is deactivated

  Can we remove a site column (thats referenced by a List Column) by deactivating the Feature that deployed it? Yes

  Test Steps:

  1.       Deploy a Site Column (via Feature and CAML)

  2.       Add the Site Column to a List (as a List Column)

  3.       Deactivate the Feature

  4.       Recycle Application Pools

  Outcome:

  1.       Site Column will be removed

  2.       ...

  Full story

  Comments (3)

  Category: SAF

  Tags:: CAML Deployment SAF Best Practices

• SharePoint Lessons Learned – Clearly Define a Deployment Baseline (Part 2)

  Hugo Esperanca - Tuesday, April 28, 2009

  In part 1 of this post I’ve talked about the principles behind the creation of a Deployment Baseline during the development of SharePoint based applications. In this post I’m going to talk about how we, at Collaboris. normally group and categorise the different artefacts to create this baseline.

  This post assumes that you are familiar with the concepts of SharePoint Features, Site Definitions and Solution Packages. For a primer on these concepts please refer to this page on MSDN.

  There has always been a lot of debate around the best way to deploy SharePoint applications. Some people do not like Site Definitions or Features and prefer to use Site Templates (.stp), others prefer xcopy deployment and others like me stick with Features and Site Definitions deployed using Solution Packages. I’m not going into that debate here, I’m simply going to describe the approach that we have been taking for the last few years without any regrets.

  Like I’ve mentioned on the first post I’m strong believer in using the SharePoint Features and Solution Framework for the delivery of SharePoint applications. We normally try to deploy most of the artefacts via Features which are activated via Site Definitions and deployed using ...

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  Category:

  Tags:: Deployment SAF Best Practices SharePoint