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Feb29

SPC - wanna talk about BDC?

Categories: SharePoint

I'm sorting bits and pieces out before flying over to Seattle tomorrow for the SharePoint Conference next week. Really looking forward to it. Andrew Connell suggested getting some t shirts made up with BDC on the front of them after a few drinks one night and rather than forgetting about it the next day I've gone and done it! So to make it easier to find me at SPC if you wanna talk about BDC I'll be wearing one of our BDC t shirts each day!

We've got different colours made up as well!

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Feb26

BDC Meta Man : Try out Oracle, DB2, Web Services and MS Access as data sources in the developer version

Categories: SharePoint

One of the most difficult things about building and selling software is licensing. In an ideal world we could all give our software away for free and live of Google Ads but of course we all have bills to pay and wish to put more and more effort into making our software better. One of the most common questions we've had with BDC Meta Man is the wish to try out Oracle, DB2 or Web Service functionality before purchasing a license - which up until now hasn't been possible.

With today's release of BDC Meta Man however you have the ability to use the free Developer version of BDC Meta Man the same way you could with SQL Server. This means for Oracle, DB2, Web Services and MS Access you can add entities, create an association, try out the write back web parts etc etc

So shoot over to the Lightning Tools web site and get version 3.0.0.1 of BDC Meta Man.

http://www.lightningtools.com/pages/service/customerdownloads.aspx

(registration required)

Of course you do get a number of benefits when you purchase a license such as email support, ability to add as many entities to the design surface as you like, SQL Query Wizard, opening previously generated XML files.

Any questions or comments please let me know, nick@lightningtools.com

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Feb24

Manchester Technet Presentation follow-up

Categories: .NET Stuff, SharePoint

Many thanks to everyone who came along to the Manchester Technet event on Tuesday and apologies for taking a few days to post this up. The slides should have been made available to you anyway but if not you can grab them from here:

http://www.sharepointnick.com/Presentations

I can't take credit for the Capacity Planning ones as Steve Smith put these together for a presentation at SUGUK in London a few months ago, so thanks Steve!

I've a couple of questions I need to follow up on, and if I've not got back to you please do email me.

One important point I wanted to make is that there are now a lot of consultancy companies and even individual contractors getting involved in SharePoint work and projects as they see it as easy money. A number of times now I've had questions put to me which are based around very bad information provided by such companies. If you are using a consultancy company to implement SharePoint for you double check the facts and information they give you, do not presume they know what they are talking about!!!

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Feb20

SAP and the Business Data Catalog

Categories: .NET Stuff, SharePoint

We've tried to make it as easy as possible to work with BDC Meta Man so that you can generate the XML application definition files you need to use with the Business Data Catalog. This has always been easy for data sources such as Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 etc but SAP has always been very painful due to the web service methods it provides you with out of the box. For example to use the Business Data Catalog with web services you want nice methods such as:

[WebMethod]
public List<Product> GetProducts()

[WebMethod]
public Product GetProductById(int productId)

[WebMethod]
public List<int> GetProductIds()

Those among you who have been working with the BDC will notice that these web methods implement BDC type methods of Finder, SpecificFinder and IdEnumerator. If the web services you want to use aren't like this then you are going to have a hard time using them with the BDC. I know some instances of companies who have written web service wrappers around the SAP web services!

So it's been our mission to make SAP and BDC integration a lot easier and we are comfortable that we've done it! Lightning Tools together with Sitrion have partnered to bring the knowledge of SharePoint and the Business Data Catalog, and SAP together.

The first place to start is with Sitrion's iQL Studio. You can model metadata-driven from within Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 that leverage SAP functionalities like BAPIs, RFCs, Queries and Workflows.

iQL Studio allows the developer to simply drag & drop SAP functionalities to a design surface and model an abstracted and documented Business Entity. Even testing of SAP functions (like SAP transaction SE37) is integrated into iQL's toolkit. iQL also features composite methods that are able to execute calls against multiple SAP functions and also allow the usage of custom embedded .NET code.

Once an iQL Business is modelled it can be published with one single click to Microsoft's IIS as a pure .NET WebService! From here you can start using BDC Meta Man and create powerful MOSS integration scenarios.

For more information and some images of the tools in action please see our page here:

http://www.lightningtools.com/sap/business-data-catalog.aspx

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Feb18

ODC Presentation Code - Oracle/DB2 web part

Categories: .NET Stuff, SharePoint

I was asked if I could make available the small web part I wrote as part of the BDC presentation at ODC, so here it is:

http://www.sharepointnick.com/Presentations/ODCPresentation.zip

Use this as a code sample rather than being something you can run as to do that you'd need a copy of DB2 and Oracle databases I was using. The main point really is that you can use the same BDC object model to pull data from multiple Line of Business Systems rather than having to learn a native API for each one.

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Feb17

London SUGUK meeting - 27th Feb 2008

Categories: .NET Stuff, SharePoint

back in London for another user group meeting with two more fantastic topics with SharePoint MVPs Spencer Harbar and Ben Robb...

Session 1
Kerberos and SharePoint: no ticket touting here. Does SharePoint add another head?
·         Overview of Kerberos and the benefits it offers in a SharePoint 2007 deployment.
·         Discussion of whether your SharePoint deployment needs Kerberos.
·         Tour of the required pre-requisites and configuration settings.
·         Approaches to automating configuration in a SharePoint Farm.
·         Preview of the SharePoint Farm Kerberos Configuration Utility.
·         Q&A/Discussion.

Session2
Dealing with Change: How to Manage Deployment for Multi-Project MOSS Solutions

If you are planning on using SharePoint to run a large intranet or public-facing website that has ongoing maintenance and multiple projects with different release cycles, you will be faced with challenges around how to successfully manage this in a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server environment. Learn how to leverage industry-standard processes for continuous integration and automated builds to streamline your deployment process between different environments, using MSBuild, Team Foundation Server and the SharePoint Solution, Feature and Content Deployment frameworks.

To attend please post your full name on the following forum topic:

http://suguk.org/forums/thread/8229.aspx

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Feb15

BDC Mapper Web Part new release

Categories: SharePoint

We've just released a new version of the BDC Mapper Web Part that has two main improvements, one we can take credit for, one we can't!

1, This new release is now using v6 of the Virtual Earth control. The VE guys have done a great job with this control and the performance for plotting points with address data has been sped up greatly.

2, If you have got Latitude/Longitude data in your Line of Business system you can now use that to plot points with the BDC Mapper Web Part. Using Lat/Long values is always going to be quicker than addresses as the Virtual Earth control doesn't have to do a lookup for each one, it can just plot it using the co-ords.

We've released a trial version of the web part which will be valid until March 15th. If you want get hold of it visit the following page:

http://www.lightningtools.com/pages/bdc-mapper-web-part.aspx

Of course BDC Meta Man purchasers get a free license of the web part!

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Feb14

BDC Chart Web Part

Categories: SharePoint

We've got a new BDC web part to release on the world today - the BDC Chart Web Part. This web part lets you take your Line of Business Data that you have made available to MOSS through the BDC and presenting it in a graphical format your users will find useful.

We are only currently releasing this as a trial web part (valid for 30 days) as we have developed it but now require some feedback! We could have spent months working on this web part developing different charting options and settings but we decided it would be a better decision to get the basics done, release it, then find out what you all want out of it. So we have some basic charts for you...

Line Chart:

Bar Chart:

Pie Chart:

You can get the trial of the chart web part from here:

http://www.lightningtools.com/Pages/bdc-chart-web-part.aspx

In the web part properties tool bar you'll find various options to configure each of these types of chart. Please download the web part, give it a try out, then let me know your feedback and ideas on how we can improve it. For people who provide us with good feedback we'll give you a free license to the full version once we release it. Please send any comments and suggestions to nick@lightningtools.com

Just as a FYI, when we release the web part we will price it at $400.00.

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Feb13

BDC Meta Man - Web Service Associations

Categories: SharePoint, .NET Stuff

Today we've quietly released a new version of BDC Meta Man, version 2.0.0.9. Quiet due to the fact we aren't sending out a email newsletter about it yet as we have a number of other BDC web parts to release over the next days before we let everyone know about them all together. We've added a number of interesting features in this release but the one I want to quickly tell you about now is web service associations. Previously you could create entities based off web methods but there was no way in BDC Meta Man to be able to associate them together. This meant cracking open the XML file and doing this by hand - well my friends, no longer!!!

As with other web service methods you create for the BDC, you are going to need to create a web method fit for purpose that can implement your association. For example if you've got two entities Product and Order and you want to get back the orders for a particular product, you are going to have to implement a web method such as:

[WebMethod]
public List<Orders> GetOrdersByProductId(int productId)

To use this in BDC Meta Man you need to create your two entities on the design surface:

Then we can drag and drop an association line between our two entities, upon doing this a dialog box pops up asking us which web method we want to use to implement the association:

Our web method is GetOrdersByProductId so we pick that one. Finally we are asked to match the input parameters of our web method against the identifiers of our parent entity. In this case it is easy as the identifier of Product (ProductId) simply maps to the single input parameter of our web method. Once we are happy we can generate our app def file, import it into our SSP and pick the BDC List and Related List web parts to display our data!

Another new feature of BDC Meta Man is the easy ability to delete associations once they are created. Simply select the line on the design surface, then hit the 'delete' button.

I'll get a new screen cast up on the site very soon, and post a note here when it's done.

Just a quick note, Web Service functionality is only available in the Professional version of BDC Meta Man.

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Feb12

ODC presentation slides - Customizing the BDC

Categories: SharePoint, .NET Stuff

Many thanks to everyone who came along to my presentation yesterday at the Office Developer Conference on the Business Data Catalog. Great to see a full room with people standing at the back - lots of interest in the BDC!!!

I promised to post up the slides I used yesterday so here they are:

http://www.sharepointnick.com/Presentations/ODCpresentation.pptx

A lot of the demo's I did yesterday you can also see screen casts in the support section of the Lightning Tools web site:

http://support.lighteningtools.com/default.asp?W1

I'm sitting in the keynote on Tuesday at the moment, but as soon as I get a chance to fire up my virtual machine I'll post the code I used to create the web part that displayed data from Oracle and DB2.

Any follow up questions from yesterday feel free to send me an email nick@lightningtools.com

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