| Friday, May 27, 2011 | | SCVMM 2008 R2 SP1 offers Management of new Virtualization Capabilities - Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX |
The recent release of SP1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 includes two new virtualization capabilities: Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX. To take advantage of these new features, Microsoft also release Service Pack 1 for Service Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 to manage Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX on multiple Hyper-V Servers from a single interface.
To understand these capabilities in detail:
Dynamic Memory: An enhancement to Hyper-V R2, Dynamic Memory pools all the memory available on a physical host. Dynamic Memory then dynamically distributes available memory, as it is needed, to virtual machines running on that host. Then with Dynamic Memory Balancing, virtual machines will be able to receive new memory allocations, based on changes in workload, without a service interruption.
RemoteFX: Microsoft RemoteFX leverages the power of virtualized graphics resources and advanced codecs to recreate the fidelity of hardware-assisted graphics acceleration, including support for 3D content and Windows Aero, on a remote user’s device. This allows for a local-like, remote experience.
In the light of new features, service Pack 1 will also be released for SCVMM 2008 R2 to manage Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX on multiple Hyper-V Servers from a single pane of glass.
Lets understand the requirements on your Hyper-V hosts and VMs to be able to manage by SCVMM 2008 R2.
System Requirement for Manage Dynamic Memory:
- Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Host
- Supported Operating System in the VM
- Upgrade Integration Services in the VM
RemoteFX Requirements on Hosts
- CPU must support SLAT
- One or more GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) that support DirectX 10
- Enough GPU Memory available for max monitors and resolution
- RemoteFX feature enabled under the Remote Desktop Services Role
RemoteFX requirements on VMs
- Supported Operating System in the VM
- New Integration Services (part of Windows 7 SP1)
- Can be combined with Dynamic Memory
SCVMM 2008 R2 SP1 now has settings to manage Dynamic Memory setting of VMs which are as follows:
- Startup Memory (8 to 65536 MB)
- Maximum Memory (8 to 65536 MB)
- Memory Buffer (0 to 95%)
- Memory Priority
- Normal, Low, High
- Custom (0 – 10000)
To manage the RemoteFX , following settings have been added
- Default Standard video adapter
- New RemoteFX 3D video adapter
- Maximum number of monitors: 1,2,3,4
- Max monitor resolution
- 1024x768 (4 monitors max)
- 1280x1024 (4 monitors max)
- 1600x1200 (3 monitors max)
- 1920x1200 (2 monitors max)
- Additional VM property
- GPU ID (PowerShell only)
Since RemoteFX requires you to have SLAT CPU and specific GPU and available GPU memmory, SCVMM 2008 R2 SP1 will also let you identify the following on the hosts.
1. CPU Supports SLAT
2. GPU and available Memory
3. Intelligent Placement
While creating a new VM or migrating a new VM from one host to another, SCVMM 2008 R2 SP1 added new check for Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX in the Intelligent placement.
- Use Current Memory footprint for DM VMs on hosts: While doing the migration or creating new VM, VMM will check how much is the current memory the VM is running with, for E.g, you have specified startup memory as 1 GB and max memory as 6 GB but at the time of migration the VM is running at 2 GB memory. In that case, VMM will check if the other host has at least 2 GB free memory to be able to migrate this VM.
- Check for GPU-compatibility when migrating RemoteFX VMs : While migrating a RemoteFX based VM, SCVMM 2008 R2 checks if identical GPU is available on the other hosts with required memory, Remote FX should be enabled in RDS.
4. Updates to Performance and Resource Optimization
PRO ties specific Operations Manager alerts to remediation actions in VMM, VMM moves a load-balance VMs in a cluster when CPU or Memory exceed a threshold. SP1 update to VMM PRO Pack a consider Current Memory utilization and not the fixed memory for DM VMs and matches it with the memory available on the other nodes.
How do I upgrade from SCVMM 2008 R2 to SP1?
Pretty simple, just 4 steps to upgrade
- Backup VMM Database
- Launch setup and follow the Upgrade Wizard
- Repeat on each box [Console, Self-Service Web Server, Operations Manager Server]
- Remove, then import new PRO Management Pack in Operations Manager
- R2 Agents are supported in SP1, no need to re-deploy agents to Hosts and Library Servers
- Upgrade the Integration components on all the VMs.
(Information courtesy Iftekhar Hussain)
Note: Service Pack 1 for SCVMM 2008 R2 is not a standalone download. You can get the full packaged SCVMM 2008 R2 with SP1 from the following sources:
1. From eOpen website (VL customers)
2. MSDN
3. TechNet | |
| | Tuesday, April 26, 2011 | | Provide finer control over the virtualized environment with Virtual Machine Manager 2008 |
Microsoft’s Hyper-V alone really doesn’t allow for express policy- or role-based administrative control over specific virtual machines on a virtual host (or hosts). Even with Windows 2008 Hyper-V alone, such control wasn’t possible. In effect, if the administrator of a specific virtual machine was not an administrator of that machine’s virtual host, he/she couldn’t, for example, power up an accidently shut down machine, add an ISO to the virtual DVD drive, or access the VM’s Windows PowerShell command shell.
While adding in System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2007 to Hyper-V allowed for limited self-service policies, the release of VMM 2008 (and the even more-improved VMM 2008 R2) realized role-based security to provide finer control over who can do what within the virtualized environment. This new security model supports delegated administration, which was not available in VMM 2007. Self-service user roles replace the self-service policies that were employed to administer virtual machine self-service in VMM 2007.
A user role defines a set of operations (grouped in a profile) that can be performed on a selected set of objects (defined by the user role’s scope). Within that framework, an organization can create delegated administrator roles that allow, for example, a high-level administrator to manage all operations in an Indianapolis office, a specialized administrator to manage all library servers, or an advanced user to set up complex virtual environments within a single lab. An organization also can create self-service user roles that allow users to execute a specified set of operations on their own virtual machines.
A user role consists of the following key parts:
· A profile defines the set of available operations that a role member can perform.
· The scope defines the set of objects that the operations can target.
· The membership list specifies the Active Directory user accounts and security groups that are assigned to the role.
According to Microsoft’s TechNet site, the following user role types, based on profiles of the same name, are defined for VMM :
· Administrator role—Members of the Administrator role can perform all VMM actions on all objects that are managed by the VMM server. Only one role can be associated with this profile. At least one administrator should be a member of the role.
· Delegated Administrator role—Members of a role based on the Delegated Administrator profile have full VMM administrator rights, with a few exceptions, on all objects in the scope defined by the host groups and library that are assigned to the role. A delegated administrator cannot modify VMM settings or add or remove members of the Administrator role.
· Self-Service User role—Members of a role based on the Self-Service User profile can manage their own virtual machines within a restricted environment. Self-service users use the VMM Self-Service Web Portal to manage their virtual machines. The portal provides a simplified view of only the virtual machines that the user owns and the operations that the user is allowed to perform on them. A self-service user role specifies the operations that members can perform on their own virtual machines (these can include creating virtual machines) and the templates and ISO image files that they can use to create virtual machines. The user role also can place a quota on the virtual machines that a user can deploy at any one time. Self-service users’ virtual machines are deployed transparently on the most suitable host in the host group that is assigned to the user role.
If you do have in-place, role-based administration set up in VMM 2008 and upgrade to VMM 2008 R2, VMM 2008 R2 preserves changes that you make to role definitions or role memberships in the root scope of the Hyper-V authorization store. All changes to any other scope are overwritten every half hour by the VMM user role refresher. This differs from user role processing in VMM 2008. In VMM 2008, VMM determines access to virtual machines, hosts, and resources based only on the rights and permissions associated with VMM user roles. VMM 2008 does not make any changes to Hyper-V role definitions and role memberships. It just ignores the Hyper-V authorization store while the hosts and virtual machines are under its management.
For additional information and examples please refer to Role Based Security in VMM. | |
| | Tuesday, March 22, 2011 | | BizTalk 2010 Parties & Agreements |
BizTalk 2010 introduces a new interface for maintaining parties and the agreements between parties. While this new interface is an improvement over previous versions I have experienced a couple issues. The first issue is regarding protocol settings and the other is regarding a common qualifier. This article will show some screenshots of the new interface while expanding on the aforementioned issues.
Create the first party from within the administration console in this case Contoso (fig. 1).
Figure 1.
After saving the party a profile will be created, in this case Contoso_Profile. Open the profile and select the Identities tab, Select U.S. Federal Tax Identification Number for the name and enter the appropriate value (fig. 2). Save and close the profile. Note: the qualifier will be set to 30 for this name.
Figure 2.
Create another party as done before, in this example I used Fabrikam. Open the profile for this property to set the name to ISO6523 and input a value for the identity (fig. 3).
Figure 3.
Note the qualifier for this is 30 as well. This qualifier happens to be a very popular qualifier for most EDI trading partners.
After setting up a profile you then have the option to add protocol settings. Protocol settings include parameters for EDI interchanges and transaction sets. Populating these settings saves time in setting them for every agreement between parties. These are optional and if not populated when creating an agreement (fig. 4) the protocol set combo box will not have any options.
Figure 4.
This brings me to the first issue. After creating and setting the values I was not able to save them and received a UI error (fig. 5).
Unable to cast object of type 'Microsoft.BizTalk.Administration.EdiExt.ComboItem' to type 'System.String'. (Microsoft.BizTalk.Administration.EdiExt)
I would expect this to be resolved in the first service pack. The error is not very descriptive and after spending a lot of time I was unsuccessful in resolving this issue. I decided to continue by putting the settings in the agreement.
Figure 5.
You can right click on a party for a menu to create an agreement. The first party will be the one you used to create the agreement. Select the second party. Set other general properties as needed to support your business needs (fig. 6).
Figure 6.
The interchange and transaction properties can be configured by selecting the Contoso->Fabrikam tab. As mentioned previously 30 is a common qualifier used in EDI and ISA data elements 5 and 6 are prepopulated with this information (fig. 7). However there are no options for ISA element 8. ISA 7 has 30 as a qualifier but is only represented here by the U.S. Federal Tax ID number. ISO6523 is not an option and therefore not available.
Figure 7.
In order to correct this I had to close out of the agreement without saving and go back to the party profile. In the profile you are not allowed to have duplicate qualifier/value combinations (fig 8).
Figure 8.
You cannot change the name from ISO6523 to US Federal Tax ID Number. After saving the profile and reopening it, the name is still ISO6523. There are only two ways I have found to correct the issue. One recreate the party and profile, two make the value of the ISO something other than the tax identification number.
After deleting and recreating the party and using U.S. Federal Tax Identifier I was able to successfully create and use an agreement. However I was still unable to create a protocol set for the profile so I had to enter the data at the agreement. | |
| | Thursday, March 17, 2011 | | In Virtually No Time at All... |
Believe it or not, virtualization technologies have been in use since the early 1960s. Seriously! In those days of old, the technology was sparingly utilized for large mainframes, primarily to allow those expensive, underutilized machines to multitask, thus providing a better return on investment.
Fast forward to the present, where the continual inverse relationship between cost/size and performance for technology has allowed for much broader adoptions of robust I.T. infrastructures. Consequently, even the smallest companies tend to have a mail server, a domain controller, a file server and, perhaps, a database server. Virtualization can offer a number of benefits in any such environment, key being:
-
Faster Deployment & Provisioning
In a traditional IT infrastructure, each new application requires new hardware to be requisitioned, configured and installed. In a virtual infrastructure, new virtual servers can be configured with a few mouse clicks reducing deployment time from weeks to minutes. I.T. can respond more quickly to business needs and business initiatives are not delayed by I.T. tasks.
-
Efficient Data and Service Recovery
Recovering from a natural disaster or equipment failure can be a long and worrisome process. With virtualization, backup and recovery of virtual machines is more streamlined and hardware-independent.
-
Centralized Management
Provisioning, configuring, and accessing virtual machines, hosts, data stores and networks within a single user interface allow for central management of your virtual infrastructure. I.T. can easily monitor the entire infrastructure and respond to issues when they arise. Server and storage migrations can occur with minimal disruption to users or loss of service.
See the pattern? Time savings is an overarching theme for virtualization. Time savings in deployment, time savings in managing, time savings in backup/recovery. Still, there are some procedures that take more time than we’d like.
For example, in Microsoft Hyper-V, have you noticed that if you created a fixed-size virtual hard disk of (only) 2 gigabytes or more, you probably had to wait quite a while for the disk generation process?
The reason makes sense when you consider the difference between dynamic disks and fixed disks. Unlike a dynamic disk that only occupies physical disk space when data is written, fixed virtual disks already occupy the hard disk’s space prior to the virtual machine writing data to it; thus, it is technically possible to recover data that has been stored on the hard disk before the space was assigned to the VHD file. To avoid this potential risk, when Hyper-V creates a new fixed-size virtual hard disk, it explicitly zeros-out all of the disk space that is being assigned to the new file.
In many environments, however, virtual machines are only created and/or relocated to hosts where the same administrators are responsible, and the concern over ‘existing data’ is negligible. For these scenarios, a helpful time-saving instrument exists, called (appropriately) VHD tool. This tool allows you to create VHDs without having to suffer through the slow wiping of the corresponding hard disk space. Furthermore, the latest version (currently 2.0) can quickly extend, convert, and/or repair existing VHDs, providing additional time savings. Usage syntax with examples is available on the site.
As a matter of fact, VHD Tool can generate (and modify) fixed disk VHD files in virtually no time at all!
John Suit, Infrastructure Manager
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| | Wednesday, November 10, 2010 | | SharePoint 2010 as a ECM Platform |
SharePoint 2007 had numerous deficiencies for content and enterprise records management, many of which are addressed in SharePoint 2010 making it a viable platform for ECM & RM. SharePoint 2007 (WSS 3.0 or MOSS) was the merger of two previous Microsoft products, WSS 2.0 and Content Management Server, meaning MOSS now had a whole bunch of ECM features that it came nowhere close to having before. This included advanced document types and web publishing capabilities, and a records center.
The problem with MOSS’ record center was that you could only have one per installation (or farm) and it was very difficult to configure. This meant that the solution was not very scalable and realistically could not be setup for large ECM solutions. Compounding the issue was that the only way to declare something as a record meant moving it to the record center location, rather than leaving it in its own place. These, and other difficulties caused many companies to forego using SharePoint as a platform for records management.
In 2010 this changes. Microsoft introduced some exiting features for SharePoint 2010 that makes it a viable records management platform for many more organizations.
Easy Configuration
First, the configuration is much easier. Configuring information management policies doesn’t require code or tricky XML. You can still do it with code, or extend the policies with code, but for most organizations much more of your functionality, if not all of it, will be able to be achieved without writing code.
In Place Records Management
In place records management allows a record to be declared as such without requiring it to be moved to a different location. This means that documents will remain in the context of where they are being used. It makes it easier for a user to employ records management by clicking “Declare as record” and not be inconvenienced by having their document be moved.
Scalability
The record center is also much more scalable. For the technically inclined, Microsoft changed it service provider model, which allows farms to share resources. This means that a records center can be shared across farms, or multiple records centers can exist within a single farm.
2010, with SQL Server 2008 R2 gives the ability to store content on disk, and not in the database. This means your fast database storage can be saved for the meta-data and “database” applications and the actual content stored elsewhere. This is still a bit difficult to configure but will reduce the database size dramatically.
Document Repository
Also, there were strict size restrictions on SharePoint lists and libraries in 2007. This meant that “creative” approaches had to be used to create storage solutions suitable for large amounts of documents. Now, the limits are effectively gone and millions of documents can be stored without compromising performance.
This means a document repository can be created. Combining new metadata navigation features and auto document can create a very powerful ECM solution. Metadata navigation allows users to browse by meta-data. Folders don’t have to exist, and instead the navigation structure is more focused at browsing by topic than browsing by some arbitrary document hierarchy. It means documents are easier to find because they follow your organizations taxonomy and how your company agrees to refer to things.
It’s Not Just Documents Hundreds of additional new features also contribute to the usefulness of SharePoint 2010 as a content management platform. Many of these features apply not only to documents but also to other types of information stored in SharePoint 2010. This platform has made major improvements as a social media platform. Blogs, Wikis, My Sites, Micro Blogging (aka status updates), tagging and rating are all features that are considered “social media” and SharePoint 2010 has introduced or made improvements to all of these areas. If you use SharePoint as a social media platform, then you can also apply the great new record management features to this type of content as well. | |
| | Tuesday, February 16, 2010 | | Microsoft Morning Perk Presentation Recap |
Earlier this morning I presented a revised version of my Social Computing with SharePoint 2010 presentation at the local Microsoft office as part of their "Morning Perk" series which highlights new technology paired with customer case studies. I had the honor of once again sharing the stage with long-time customer and friend Dr. Ron Thieme, VP and CIO of AIT Laboratories.
Although breakfast was late, we ended up with a full house and overall a great event. As I promised in my session, you can grab a full sized copy of my mindmap by clicking on the thumbnail below.
I think I also mentioned in the presentation, that for those that would prefer a more traditional presentation of this information, you can find a PDF of my slides that I used at SharePoint Saturday a few weeks back in this blog post (scroll to the bottom, and click on the title slide image).
 Ron's presentation can be downloaded (in PDF form) by clicking on his title slide to the right. You can also visit AIT Labs corporate website to find out more about this dynamic and growing company.
Thanks again to all that attended and those that helped in organizing the event. As always, please feel free to contact me with questions/comments or if you are interested learning more about these topics and how Ambassador Solutions can help, we're ready and waiting. | |
| | Friday, February 05, 2010 | | SharePoint Saturday Indianapolis Recap |
We also had a great group of volunteers that really helped with all the logistics of the day including: Andy Bradley, Tuong Do, Keith Oswalt, Karyn Williams, John Boomershine, and Mike Ticker. The folks at our facility, the Gene Glick Junior Achievement Center, were also great all day long!
I also heard from all the sponsors that they really felt appreciated by both the organizers and the attendees and were looking forward to future opportunities to be involved in similar community events in Indianapolis! Support these folks because without them “free” events just can’t happen!
For my part, in addition to having a speaking slot (more on that below), I was put in charge of speaker management and service. This was certainly the most rewarding part of the entire experience for me as I got to meet and interact with a lot of great folks from the SharePoint community, both local and from other regions. In addition to the event on Saturday, we all had a great time out at Scotty’s Brewhouse for the speaker dinner on Friday night. I have a few pictures from that here. All the speakers did an outstanding job, both inside the walls of their sessions, as well as outside in the hallways. I saw numerous side conversations going on as our expert community played good-will ambassadors to all. Please join me in thanking all the speakers including: Andy Hoffman, Chris Geier, Daniel Galant, Darrin Bishop, David Petersen, Enrique Lima, Fabian Williams, Hope Foley, James Curtis, Jeff Willinger, Jennifer Martinez, Jennifer Mason, Jim Grabinski, Joe Mack, John Ferringer, Kevin Dostalek, Marcy Kellar, Ram Gopinathan, Rob Wilson, Sean McDonough, Steve Pietrek, and Woody Windischman. If you want to follow all these fine SharePoint experts easily on Twitter, I’ve created a Twitter list that you can follow here. A few statistics that we have about the event:
- Registrations – 372
- Attendees - 250
- Sponsors – 10
- Speakers – 22
- Sessions – 20 (in 4 tracks of 5 each, then we also had a welcome and closing session)
My Session:
So I presented “Social Computing with SharePoint 2010”. Unlike my nSpin presentation from a few weeks ago which was developer focused, this presentation was in the “Business and End User Track” and so was a bit less technical. I had a pretty experienced SharePoint audience, however not very experienced when it came to “social” especially inside the enterprise. I love this topic because it virtually presents itself and demo’s very well. To add a little bit of fun to the demos I mocked up the Dunder Mifflin corporate organization, complete with about 30 of “The Office” profiles as employees (all under the Fair Use Copyright exemption for Educational use only of course :) This was pretty well appreciated by the audience, but it also made putting in all those status updates, social tags, and comments much more self-entertaining as well [that’s what she said].
 Thank you to everyone that attended the session. For those that missed it, I’m doing a slightly altered version of it along with a customer on February 16th at the Microsoft offices. Go here for more information. If you’d like a copy of my slides, you can download them by clicking on the thumbnail on the right- although about 50% of the presentation was demo.
Do you have a favorite memory from SPSIndy or any other feedback for the organizing committee? If so, please post it below!
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| | Wednesday, September 23, 2009 | | Benefits of Micro-Blogging in the Enterprise |
It’s been about a year since I first wrote about micro-blogging within the context of Web 2.0 technologies that could provide value on the corporate intranet portal. Since that time, the explosion of platforms such as Twitter have highlighted the value of this type of communication in an open public context. Other major platforms such as Facebook have revamped their primary information aggregation user interfaces (the “wall”) to be decidedly more micro-blogging-like, proving that this type of rich “status update” stream can be valuable within smaller communities as well. Niche players have emerged such as Yammer and Present.ly to fill the micro-blogging gap in the current best-of-breed intranet portal solutions. I’ve decided to take many of the lessons learned in the past year, primarily from our corporate use of both Twitter and Yammer to describe some of the benefits that micro-blogging can allow an enterprise to realize and capitalize upon.
Before I get ahead of myself, for those of you that may not be familiar with micro-blogging, it is essentially a way of sharing small bits of information usually from one-to-many (think of an email distribution list). Most micro-blogging platforms represent these “small bits of content” in streams. There is generally an author’s stream (everything you’ve posted) and also your aggregated stream which will be a filtered view of everyone else’s streams. Many platforms, like Twitter, use the concept of “following” that provides the main filtering mechanism on your twitter stream, but other filtering concepts such as by keyword, group, hashtag, etc. can be used. Note here the main difference between a micro-blog and an email system: in the email system it is the author that decides who will receive the messages; in a micro-blogging system, it is primarily the recipients that have control over what they receive. This plays an interesting role in the dynamics of spam, relevancy, and attention—but that is a post for another time. One of the best introductions to micro-blogging may be Common Craft’s “ Twitter in Plain English” (note that this is not enterprise-focused).
The rest of this article will cover some of the benefits of micro-blogging in the enterprise including:
- Mass Content Distribution
- Expert/Connector Location
- Trust Building / Culture
- Knowledge Management / Relevancy
- Training / Information Radiation
- Idea Exchange / Suggestion Box / Employee Voice
Mass Content Distribution
There are many times within an enterprise when you want to get a piece of information out to either all of the employees or a subset group of employees quickly. Today the primary way of accomplishing this task would be an email distribution list (either company-wide or a department list). This works fine, except today our email boxes are overwhelmed with chatter both from the inside and certainly from outside (even with modern spam filters). It is quite possible that a critical email sent from the CEO company-wide may not get read by some for hours or days. This is not to say that a micro-blog will fix this problem completely or eliminate the need for “author-based recipient control” that an email provides, however, the fact that recipients have greater control over what they choose to listen to also means that will pay special attention to what they’ve opted into.
Micro-blogging also has a distinct advantage over group emails when the intent of the communiqué is to elicit a discussion amongst the recipients. Email “reply-to-all’s” are incredibly difficult to follow, especially as the replies create split branches and varying “quoted” chains below them. In fact, the next version of Outlook even contains a feature to “mute” an email thread you’ve been placed on so that you don’t have to bother reading them :)
Expert/Connector Location
By reading about what people are talking about in a stream you can start to get a better feel for what they are expert in. This might include knowing who would make a good target for your pick-up game of basketball tomorrow evening, but more importantly, it will tell you who is knowledgeable, helpful, and passionate about various areas you need to complete your job! Most micro-blogging systems also let each author create self-edited profiles that are searchable for areas of expertise, experience, and interests. Some also have creative features that tag users (either by system analysis of posts, or by other users opinions of them) and track various “reputation” scores allowing those searching for expertise to get potentially more relevant and unbiased filter criteria for the so-called experts.
Connectors are people within the enterprise that connect people to others. While the gist of the above paragraph is that a micro-blogging platform may reduce the need for these individuals making it easier to find experts within the enterprise, it will never eliminate it. This is because as most seasoned networkers will tell you, these connections are built upon shared trust, which takes time to establish (see next section and also my article “ Discovering Your Relationship Topology”). These connectors play a critical role in how your business gets done and should be the targets of both succession planning and process optimization strategies. Micro-blogging platforms easily expose these individuals through follower counts, interaction counts, and reputation scores.
Trust Building / Culture
At first the idea of micro-blogging is crazy to people. I hear “why would anybody care about what I’m eating for lunch?” when explaining twitter to first time users (note of course a typical prompt in an enterprise micro-blog is “what are you currently working on?” not “what are you currently doing?” like with Twitter). However, think about how you interact with people in real life. When you see a colleague on a Monday morning do you immediately ask them “what’s our revenue forecast for the week?” or do you ask them if they did anything interesting over the weekend? Oh you went downtown to that new restaurant with your wife? How was it? What did you have to eat?
The point is that to build trust between individuals (which collectively can be extrapolated to an entire corporate culture) we absolutely MUST have these types of trust-building small-talk conversations to establish personal connections which can then lead to more meaningful relationships and deeper discussions. For more details on this idea of trust building, pick up Chris Brogan’s new book Trust Agents or Shel Israel’s Twitterville.
Knowledge Management / Relevancy
Since micro-blogs are content streams themselves, they by default become a knowledge repository, which as long as items of interest can be located, either by keyword or metadata search, then this alone qualifies it as a viable knowledge management strategy. However, this is not really the main way micro-blogging can benefit a larger knowledge management strategy. We already have big huge systems with taxonomies and formalized metadata for capturing and archiving documents. And we also have big huge systems that capture our structured line of business data. These two pillars are certainly enough to capture any and all data – sometimes to the point at which it has no chance of ever escaping (snark).
These systems do a good job of storing the information, and some are even pretty good at helping you find it again. However, once you start amassing a lot of it, relevancy becomes a problem. That is, how quickly can I find the piece of information that is most relevant *to me* based on my specific need and ability level to consume the information? Be honest, if you could, you’d probably just go ask the internal subject matter expert and have them direct you to the best information. What micro-blogs allow (as well as other social media technologies like social-tagging and folksonomies) is that it provides a way for individuals to point at (with a hyperlink) subjectively high quality content which provides a means to store “tacit relevancy” metadata about the most important topics within your enterprise.
Micro-blogs also do a better job of capturing conversation context (the who, when, what aspects) around content than many other mechanisms, thus shedding light on the sometimes elusive “why” or intent questions. A very important point to micro-blogs and knowledge management that I want to underscore is that sometimes the content IS the conversation, but often the conversion is about OTHER content (hyperlinked in the post) and thus serves an important role in a larger enterprise content management strategy.
Training / Information Radiation
New hire training can be accelerated by Micro-blogs especially in the realm of “how we do things around here”. Often we find that it takes longer for new folks to internalize this aspect of their job than the actual technical or business skills required to execute the mechanics of their job. This is especially true if you have either a unique culture (positive) or a dysfunctional one (and lord help you if you have a uniquely dysfunctional one).
Seeing folks from across the enterprise share their content and helpful “finds” will also aid in the continuous learning and training for all employees. In Alistair Cockburn’s Agile Software Development he describes information radiation and osmotic communication as the natural and efficient way knowledge travels across a co-located project team performing software development. Micro-blogging platforms extend this concept so that the co-located aspect (both physical and temporal proximity) is no longer a necessary component for this knowledge sharing.
Idea Exchange / Suggestion Box / Employee Voice
Micro-blogging has the effect of giving all employees a voice and you’d be surprised at the wonderful ideas and tips some have to share that otherwise would not be surfaced either due to their personality or perceived “place”. Employers are sometimes afraid of giving their employees this voice, but most of the fears are not well founded. One of these fears is that employees will use the platform to spread negative thoughts to their peers. Generally, if these ideas are not based in truth, you will see other employees “setting the record straight” in a much more transparent fashion than you would get in hallway/water cooler talks. Also, people will generally not be dramatically nasty in a micro-blogging setting since their comments are recorded, attributed to them, and usable against them if disciplinary action is called for. If the ideas are based in truth, then you can be thankful that you have an early warning mechanism for problems in time to take proactive measures to address them.
Another fear employers often have is that it feels like they
are giving up some measure of control. This is actually true to a degree, but it is only by giving up control that you gain trust. This is the crux of the cultural change happening right now both inside and outside the enterprise. The shift from traditional advertising (corporate controlled) to social media (consumer controlled) epitomizes this statement. Those new employees that have grown up in the digital age are now starting to move into high level leadership positions within many organizations and fill out the majority of the workforce. They understand and demand this change in dynamic so companies would do well to embrace it. For more reading on this topic, please pick up Dan Tapscott’s Grown Up Digital.
There are probably other areas of benefit that I’ve missed here (let me hear about them), but I based these 6 primary areas on actual observations over the past year. For each of the above areas I have more specific anecdotes I can share, and may do that over the next few months. Other than mentioning a few platforms at the beginning of this article, I tried to stay away from a technical/tools discussion, but obviously once you are sold on the need for micro-blogging within the enterprise or at least willing to experiment, there are a universe of choices in the form of platforms and add-on products to platforms to consider.
Please tell me about your experiences with micro-blogging within your enterprise either in comments below, on my blog, or catch me on twitter! | |
| | Thursday, August 20, 2009 | | DevLink 2009 Thanks! |
 Well I attended DevLink down in Nashville, TN last week. It was my first time, but certainly won't be my last. John Kellar and all the volunteers did a great job pulling off a super conference that felt more like a huge extended community code camp than what I traditional think of as an "industry conference" (e.g. TechEd, SxSW, PDC, etc...). Don't read that as a negative in any way- it was a great experience, and by far one of the best values all year (it was $100).
The sessions were great and they had even added a SharePoint track this year, so there was no shortage of good stuff happening each day. One thing that I do regret is not checking out the Open Spaces stuff (sorry Alan, the timing just never worked out). As is often the case with conferences though, it was the networking that happens informally in the evenings that really provides the incalculable value. From the quiet lobby-bar chats to the loud parties out at the Honky Tonks ( Tootsie's Orchid Lounge was a favorite) I made a ton of new friends that I'm sure I'll keep in touch with and see again and again.
Lastly, let me post a quick soundbite from the closing panel. It's Richard Campbell telling his Goliath story. Seriously, this guy is a great story-teller- I can just imagine him on NPR or something listening to this. | |
| | Tuesday, August 18, 2009 | | SharePoint Search Crawler Content Access Issue |
I just recently had a bout with my MOSS search service. After a couple faithful years of service our SSP got a tick and so we decided the best thing to do was rebuild it (pretty easy really, only a few BDC apps to port, etc...) Unfortunately once everything was done we could not get the search service to crawl the "All Local Sites" content source. Here were the symptoms:
- Crawler Log indicated "Access Denied" when it tried to crawl the root of our intranet or mysites.
- Crawling of the sps:// people content source was fine.
- Content Access account had the proper policy (Read All), and actually even had rights to the site. You could log in as that user and browse all around the site from another computer.
- When a crawl was started (and thus ended very quickly with the one access denied log event) you could no longer open up the content source edit page in search administration (returned a .net "object not found" error).
- If you cleared all indexed content, then you could get back into the content source edit page, so long as you didn't actually attempt a crawl.
- Nothing else really significant in the windows logs (except a failure audit).
- Trying to navigate to the intranet root from the server with the content access account returned a 403 error <--- WHOA... BIG RED FLAG / HINT HERE.
So after searching around (sorry I'd link the blogs here, but the search was quite far and wide and I didn't properly keep track) I discovered that in Windows Server 2003 SP1 they introduced this new feature called "Loopback Check Security Feature". Essentially this means that any attempt by that machine to access an FQDN from the console (or apparently from services running on the box) will fail if it resolves back to itself. I presume the little scriptkiddie hack goes something like this: 1) trick an admin into installing your worm, 2) modify the hosts file or proxy settings so that some official site, say Paypal or your HR payrole system for example, gets redirected back to a local hacked up version of the site, 3) continue with man-in-middle attack, except without the middle man....
Anyway, you may be wonder why FQDN's were involved here since SharePoint by default pops in http://servername as the default "All Local Sites" content source. Well apparently we had changed the default access mapping for these sites a while back (typical) to their FQDN's. When we went to recreate the new SSP it just picked these up and used them.
SO-- the solution can be found at this KB article. Rather than turning off this loopback check (method 2) even though the scenario that it protects against seems pretty far fetched to me, I decided to use method 1, which worked great and didn't require a server reboot :) I've reproduced it below:
Method 1: Specify host names
Note We recommend that you use this method.
To specify the host names that are mapped to the loopback address and can connect to Web sites on your computer, follow these steps:
- Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
- In Registry Editor, locate and then click the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\MSV1_0
- Right-click MSV1_0, point to New, and then click Multi-String Value.
- Type BackConnectionHostNames, and then press ENTER.
- Right-click BackConnectionHostNames, and then click Modify.
- In the Value data box, type the host name or the host names for the sites that are on the local computer, and then click OK.
- Quit Registry Editor, and then restart the IISAdmin service.
And that dear friends concludes this edition of "why is search not working...today (there is hope!)" | |
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