By Eric Harlan
Published: October 17, 2009
Updated: October 17, 2009
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I needed to install some third party software for a client. In addition to a few others the Telerik Rad controls were among them. I went through their process a few times on my virtual image and for some reason or another, I never had much luck, either something didn’t register correctly or I did something incorrectly. I tried some other methods of getting Ajax up and running in my environment including the codeplex solution. This didn't work for me either. With a tight deadline I just figured it out.
So if you're trying to install the Telerik RadControls or Rad editor here's what I did to get there, step by step. This is kind of a hybrid between a few different methods i've found online. Some taken from Telerik's website, but not all. Its the order that got me the results.
Enjoy.
NOTE: All processes must be followed exactly as listed. It is important to take one's time to do this correctly the first time.
Prerequisites
Prerequisites for Telerik controls to work:
1. .Net 3.5 SP1 needs to be installed on all the Web Front End (WFE) servers
2. Ajax 1.0 allowed in all WFE web.config files
3. ScriptManager references in master pages
4. Editor deployed as a feature.
5. Populate web part gallery and use Rad Editor
Step 1 .Net 3.5 SP1
Install .Net 3.5 SP1 from this link http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ab99342f-5d1a-413d-8319-81da479ab0d7&displaylang=en
Step 2 Ajax configuration After ASP.NET 3.5 has been installed you need to modify the web.config file of your MOSS web site with a few Ajax specific entries. Typically, the web.config file is located in c:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\virtualdirectories\80
1)Add the following element in the tag:
type="System.Web.Configuration.SystemWebExtensionsSectionGroup,
System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35">
type="System.Web.Configuration.ScriptingSectionGroup,
System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35">
allowDefinition="MachineToApplication"/>
allowDefinition="Everywhere" />
type="System.Web.Configuration.ScriptingProfileServiceSection,
System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" requirePermission="false"
allowDefinition="MachineToApplication" />
allowDefinition="MachineToApplication" />
type="System.Web.Configuration.ScriptingRoleServiceSection,
System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" requirePermission="false"
allowDefinition="MachineToApplication" />
2) Add the following section as a child of the / tag:
3) Add the following tag to the tag, within the element:
4) Register the following HTTP handlers at the end of the section:
type="System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptHandlerFactory,
System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"/>
type="System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptHandlerFactory,
System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"/>
type="System.Web.Handlers.ScriptResourceHandler,
System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" validate="false"/>
5) Add the following HTTP module registration to the section beneath any existing modules:
type="System.Web.Handlers.ScriptModule,
System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"/>
6) Add a SafeControl entry for the System.Web.UI namespace from the System.Web.Extensions assembly within the / section:
Namespace="System.Web.UI" TypeName="*" Safe="True" />
7) Since the RadEditor dll files, which are in the wsp package, are complied for .NET 2.0 framework, you need to add the following code to the section.
8) Finally, add the following configuration tags at the bottom of web.config, just before the end of the tag:
type="System.Web.Handlers.ScriptModule,
System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"/>
preCondition="integratedMode"
type="System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptHandlerFactory,
System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"/>
path="*_AppService.axd"
preCondition="integratedMode"
type="System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptHandlerFactory,
System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"/>
verb="GET,HEAD" path="ScriptResource.axd"
type="System.Web.Handlers.ScriptResourceHandler,
System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" />
Step 3 Incorporating RadControls for ASP.Net Ajax in MOSS Once all steps from the previous articles have been performed, you can easily integrate RadControls for ASP.NET Ajax in your MOSS site.
1) Launch Office SharePoint designer and open the desired SharePoint site
2) Within the Folder List tool window expand the tree until the master pages folder is visible. A typical location is http://server_name/_catalogs/masterpage
3) Open the master page currently used by your site (e.g. default.master). If prompted to check out the file select “Yes”.
4) Since RadMenu is ASP.NET Ajax control, it requires a ScriptManager control to be present on the page. Add the following markup just after the beginning of the tag:
To leverage RadControls for ASP.NET Ajax, some required files must be deployed to each SharePoint Web Front End (WFE) server. This section outlines the required steps that need to be taken to deploy RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX prior to implementing it within an existing MOSS web site.
1) First you need to install Telerik.Web.UI.dll in the GAC (Global Assembly Cache) of your SharePoint server. There are two ways to do this:
2) Drag and drop Telerik.Web.UI.dll into C:\Windows\Assembly (in Windows Explorer)
3) Next you should tell SharePoint that the controls from the Telerik.Web.UI.dll (and Telerik.Web.Design.dll) are safe to use. To do so you should add a few entries within the section in your web.config:
Step 5 Deploying Rad Editor Web Part 1) Extract the contents of RadEditorMOSS_5_1_1.zip
2) Open a command prompt window.
3) Run the stsadm.exe utility to install RadEditorMOSS solution.
By default stsadm.exe can be found in [Program Files]\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN.
Use the following syntax:
stsadm -o addsolution -filename [Path]\RadEditorMOSS.wsp
4) Open the SharePoint Central Administration site
5) Go to the Operations page and click on Solution Management.
6) You should see the radeditormoss.wsp solution in the list. Click on the name link to go to the Solution Properties page.
7) Select Deploy Solution.
8) From the next page you can choose when and to which applications to deploy the solution.
9) After a successful deployment you will see the following screen:
Note: If you see the following exception - "Request for permission of type..." when you try to open a page containing the editor, then you might need to modify the web.config of your SharePoint application and set the Trust level to at least Medium level. This can happen if you choose to deploy the editor solution to a single site (in the BIN folder) instead of to all sites (in the GAC).
Step 6 Using the web part 1) Navigate to your SharePoint site and login as the administrator
2) Navigate to the site settings and select "Web Parts"
3) Select "New" in the web part Gallery
4) Scroll to the bottom of the page and check the box next to "Telerik.SharePoint.RadEditorWebPart"
5) Once checked, scroll back up and hit the "Populate Gallery" button
6) Go back to the page you want to add the RadEditor to. Select Site Actions > Edit Page
7) Select the Telerik RadEditor for Moss Web part and hit the "add" button.
8) The web part is now on the page, hit "edit" and edit the content you want into the web part. In order for the changes to take effect you must hit "OK" or "Apply" in the Web Part properties pane. You not simply hit publish.
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Email Quick note for all you early adopters out there that are testing out the new SharePoint 2010. Since Microsoft has put out a new requirement of needing to be on a 64bit operating system. With that there are a lot of developers scrambling to find a good solid virtual environment that will allow you to run a 64bit guest on a 32bit host. At least until they can upgrade their hardware that is.
In comes Sun’s VirtualBox. VirtualBox is Sun’s FREE virtual machine software. It allows you to run 64 bit guests on 32 bit hosts (slowly, but it’s a start). Luckily for me I have a 64 bit platform so I don’t use that side of things however; I have used VirtualBox to the extent of consuming my old VirtualPC files. There is no customization needed to do this, you literally open up VirtualBox, point it to your old VHD file and you’re off and running.
However I ran into a doozy of an issue today, completely by accident. I was copying some virtuals down to my usb hard drive while trying to open up another virtual machine on my computer itself. I got the following error.
After uninstalling and reinstalling 3 times with various build releases and googling for a few mins and reading everything from manually starting VboxSVR.exe to running VirtualBox under administrator, I got fed up and yanked out my drive and started off to my client site. However, something came up and I went back to my machine and I wanted to try one more thing. It was unrelated, but still somehow I came back to trying to start my VM up. And wouldn’t you know it, it came up.
So what changed? You won’t believe this. But the USB drive was not plugged in this time. Yes you read correctly. Having my USB hard drive (Seagate) plugged in made VirtualBox not start correctly.
I tested it on both my home machine and my work laptop with the same result.
So if you get this error.... Unplug your drive.
(side note this was a Windows 7 OS 64 bit with 4 and 8 gigs of ram, and this only seemed to happen with my seagate usb hard drive, not my others)
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Email Looks like I'll be headed off to the SharePoint conference after all. A great friend and fellow SharePoint enthusiast Jonathan Wynn (who is actually speaking at SPC09) found out I was not going, pulled some strings and made some calls to the SharePoint product team.
Next thing you know, I'm booking plane tickets to Vegas. After a lot of hard work from people like @loungeflyz and all the hard work that went into putting out MySPC, I wanted to post what sessions I'll be attending. These are both first second and third choices. I'm looking forward to going very much, for so long I was accepting of the fact that I wasn't going, so it's still sinking in.
Monday 1
Monday 2
Tuesday 1
Tuesday 2
Wednesday 1
Wednesday 2
Thursday 1
Thursday 2
Side note, I seeked out if it was ok to post these schedules, I was told there should be no reason not to. If you think these are not supposed to be posted please drop me a comment.
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Email SharePoint Saturday Baltimore Recap
Awesome sponsors, selfless volunteers and months of planning have appeared to have paid off. The event went off mostly without a hitch. Very little neutral to negative feedback so that’s always good, we did however get a lot of great tips for the next one. For example, don’t under plan coffee for technology people. Next time we’ll have a lot more coffee on hand for the very reason that it was slim pickings in way of coffee most of the day (sorry already... it won’t happen again lol).
I had a core group of outstanding volunteers that kept me sane. To that point it should never be said that SharePoint Saturday Baltimore was an Eric Harlan and Shadeed Eleazer production. That sentiment isn’t even close to the truth. Buddy Weber , Al Duns , Mark McGovern , Kacey Harlan , Deana McNeil , Renee Crews, and Don Zielke. All of these folks selflessly gave up time with their families and in some cases, their personal finances just to be a key piece of this SPSBmore puzzle. To then I am eternally grateful and can only hope that when the next SharePoint Saturday comes around they would be willing to help out once again. We were organized and efficient and I think in the end as a result of the multiple conference calls and in person meetings we had a plan and we executed it.
The sponsors we had were unbelievable, all of them were great to deal with and I made sure I spent quality time with each and every one of the folks manning the booths. We got some great feedback from all of them, giving us some great ideas for improvements next time around. I said it a few times at the event but the sponsors for SPSBmore were beyond crucial. I received tons of compliments for such a well run and upscale event. News break, it was the sponsors that made all that happen. Now I’m in no way peddling company’s wares, but sometimes we take for granted the role these ISV’s play in the community. These “FREE” events aren’t really all that free. A good read is a blog post by Joel Oleson: “SharePoint Partners are Part of a Symbiotic Ecosystem Not Leeches or Mice ”.
We had an ALLSTAR line up of speakers that much can be said for sure. Three MVP’s, multiple community leaders and speakers that have made the speaking commitment before were all in attendance. We also had a few new to the SharePoint community speakers and from what I hear, knocked it out of the park! Look for more from all of these folks as day’s progress. I know quite a few of them have already signed up to speaker at other upcoming events.
Lessons Learned.
Well I can say I learned a very important lesson from this event. The drive in the Baltimore SharePoint technology community is MUCH stronger than I had expected. I'm looking forward to seeing some of these new faces at the upcoming Baltimore SharePoint Users Group meeting in September.
Thank you all that helped make this event such a great success and I look forward to doing another SPSBmore in the upcoming months! Check back to the SharePoint Saturdayd Baltimore Site in the next few days, we'll have all the presentations posted up. Sorry for the delay.
Enjoy the photos!
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Email Tech Ed Africa Recap
What a great time! TechEd Africa was a blast this year. The OFC track went extremely well with experts from all over the world and local of course coming in to share their knowledge with the good people in South Africa. The venue was at the ICC in Durban. The city was really cool, lot of character, and the sea world style water park/restaurant and bar scene was pretty wild, nothing like eating some wild seafood while a shark swims by you.
After a long drive Joel Oleson and I finally got into I got into our Hotel. He was told to proceed to the executive level on the 14th floor, to check in right away. I was in turn told to proceed to the basement (literally) and wait to check in until they cleaned up the rooms. Mind you, it was 7:30 pm. Granted I don’t really complain much but I figure a Hilton no less would have rooms ready for someone traveling as far as we did and arriving so late in the day. Oh well despite that initial snafu, the stay was great. Clean room, fluffy pillows and a clean bed, other than an on time check in, you can’t ask for much more can you?
We made our way over to the Sunday night welcome party. Wow, walking in the door right away I was taken back. Tons of people, the bar was flowing, people were dancing laughing and having a great time. The first words out of my mouth were “Man, these South African’s know how to party”. I was pretty beat and through the kindness of everyone purchasing me drinks, it was probably a good idea to go back to my room at that point, do some final prep work and get some sleep as I was pretty jet lagged still.
Monday came around, and I made my way to the speaker lounge where we did some last preparations, met a lot of the days speakers and shared some stories. Zlatan Dzinic was in his typical form and I was feeding off his excitement. I’m just not a morning person and with it being around 2am my time, I was struggling a good deal.
I got to my first session and began to give my presentation. I won’t lie, I felt flat. I’m not sure if it was the nerve’s the jet lag or what but I didn’t feel like I had my usual excitement or vibe. The session scored really well and with some good tips from some very knowledgeable people and decided for my next session I would certainly crank it up a notch or two.
My next three sessions, I felt I knocked out of the park. I averaged above a 4.15 for all of them and I was overall really happy with what I talked about. You can find my session recaps here. I even recorded a couple on my own. I have to talk to some folks to see if that content can be published or not since it was a paid conference.
SharePoint List Mashup's using SharePoint Designer
SharePoint's Federated Search and Social Networking
SharePoint Architecture Panel Discussion with Joel, Eric and Zlatan and Hilton Giesenow
Twitter and the SharePoint Community-TechEd Online Video Joel Oleson & Eric Harlan
(video embedding coming as soon as they post them)
The Moss Show session recorded by Hilton Giesenow Which should be up in a bit after it's edited. (I'll post the links here)
Michael O’Donovan and Amory did a freaking outstanding job. Just rolling off of putting together SharePoint Saturday Baltimore (with many other volunteers), I can’t imagine the amount of work that went into putting this one together.
I do have one regret however; I never got a good photo of myself behind the TechEd podium. I know Veronique Palmer grabbed a shot with her Iphone however. If anyone did get a shot please send it to me.
(Photo Veronique Palmer @veroniquepalmer)
Africa treated its International speakers extremely well. Scratch that, Africa treated ALL the speakers extremely well. Forget the honor and privilege it is to even speak at TechEd, it was like you were just part of the extended family and you were coming home for a family reunion or something.
I sat in on as many sessions as I could squeeze in and still feel comfortable with timing on my own sessions. I got to sit in on some PowerShell presentations, exchange and SQL sessions. I REALLY enjoyed the level of technical information given in the sessions slated as technical and the high level approach for sessions labeled as 200 for example. Everyone were pro’s they knew exactly how to say it and what to say.
I would love to go back to Africa regardless to speak at TechEd again or not. My expectations were blown clear out of the water and it was nothing like I expected. I’m ashamed to even repeat what my expectations were but regardless I was blown away both by the breath of the event and the shear professionalism of how it all came together, with of course an extensive mixture of fun thrown in there!
And with fun usually it involves Guitar Hero and Xbox!
Lastly, if im honest I couldn't have done this with out the support of Sogeti Baltimore. My GVP was beyond helpful, he'll never admit it but I couldn't have done it with out his blessing. For that I'm eternally grateful.
Ek hou baie van jou land
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Email The Regional SharePoint Conference was a lot of fun! Deanna McNeil, Gary Vaughn, and Nelson did a great job getting it all put together. Two days of speakers, food, and organization is not an easy task to pull off.
@MrShadeed and I did a joint presentation on Paperless office with InfoPath as well as InfoPath Best Practices. We had a great turn out with AWESOME participation. I'm looking forward to seeing a lot of these folks over at SharePoint Saturday Baltimore!
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Email SharePoint Saturday Baltimore opens for registration July 13th at 10am. Mark your calendars this event is sure to book up fast!
Here’s the text for the event so far. Or you can go to www.sharepointsaturday.org/baltimore
Save the Date!
Join us in welcoming the first SharePoint Saturday event to Baltimore, MD
SharePoint Saturday Baltimore will feature a lineup of heavy hitters within the SharePoint community including: Michael Noel, Joel Oleson, Dux Raymond Sy, Steve Andrews, Susan Lennon, Dan Lewis, Errin O'Connor, Russ Basiura, Paul Schaeflein, Mike Watson, and more!
When: Saturday July 25th, 2009
Where: UMBC Tech Center
1450 South Rolling Road
Halethorpe, MD 21223
More Info: http://sharepointsaturday.org/baltimore
*Registration will open on July 13th, 2009. There will be another email letting you know when registration is open on the site as well as a link to go and sign up. Register ASAP as slots tend to fill VERY quickly.
What is SharePoint Saturday?
A FREE one day conference that gathers the best SharePoint professionals from around the country for a intense day filled with education, community, and prize giveaways.
We will be offering a SharePoint 101 track as well. This track will be a very exclusive 25 person session that will last for 2 two hour sessions. This will be an option to register for separate from the normal days sessions. If you or your organization has some representatives that need very basic ground floor overview of SharePoint, this is a great opportunity.
Speaking about registration, you will be required to validate you are still able to come to the event a few days prior even after you have already registered. The reason we are doing this is to take full advantage of our limited space. We will be filling any newly opened slots from our 40 person waiting list. The event will officially be open to 150 guests as well as the 25 SharePoint 101 attendees.
Additionally, we are still fielding additional sponsors to help promote the event. If you or your organization feels this might be a good fit, please drop us a line back and we can talk specifics as well as send out information packages. As you know our sponsors and volunteers are really what make this “free” event “free”.
If you need hotel accommodations for the event, please go to the hotel page on the site, we have a group rate at Hiltons Homewood Suites hotel 10 mins from the venue. We will also be running a shuttle from the hotel to the event and back.
Last, We’ll be sure to keep you all in the loop as things progress. This is going to be a great event and hopefully something that makes it back to Baltimore many times over. We look forward to seeing you all. Tell a friend, tell a colleague. The DC event filled up in under 32 hours being a smaller capacity event we expect the same!
Thanks again,
SPSBmore Gang
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Email Writing this up as we speak,, err... type?.... as we read.. yeah!
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Email SharePoint Saturday Charlotte was a huge success. Not that we had any doubts. The trip did start off kind of rocky, some unexpected last min changes that left me and my right hand man @mrshadeed scrambling for alternate plans. I'd like to thanks @michaellotter @nassharepoint and @mosslover for ever so graciously sharing their cramped ride with us from Raleigh that took a lot of weight off my mind for sure.
The fun and games started off pretty quickly. @danlewisnet rolled into the speaker mixer and pulled out the speaker shirts. Amidst a lot of confusion and mystery about an email regarding the requirement of a white t-shirt. They speaker shirts, ended up being speaker jerseys. There were a lot of laughs but in the end, the jersey's actually looked pretty good with all the speakers wearing them. And to Dan's defense, he did send me the picture of the "shirts" prior to ordering them, and there was no thought that they could be jerseys. Either way, it all worked out in the end, as it usually does.@mikewat and @susanlennon because we had the same time slot. Sorry guys for taking all the guest for my session hahaha (47 baby, plus the handful online) @jdattis and @michaellotter's presentations (see below). I recorded mine as well but I only got 2/3's of it (forgot to hit record) and I had a pretty decent snaffu in choice of words when describing cutting off the end of an XPath string. If you were in my session, sorry. It wasn't intentional but Im glad we all got a good laugh out of it. Like I said in my opening remarks, I'll be laughing, so if you dont laugh with me...I'll just look crazy.SharePoint Saturday Baltimore . I assure you, it will be totally worth it! InfoPath Best Bets and Tips & Tricks (Link to BSPUG) *will be uploaded tonight*
Here are the prerecorded demos I gave:
InfoPath Sum Total X Is Used In a Dropdown
InfoPath 2007 Form in WebPart
Five Conditional Fomatting Limitation
(more photos coming soon)
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Email UPDATE : http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-google-wave.html
So Google Wave keynote hit the streets last week at Googles I/O, and there’s been a lot of buzz about the product. In this post I’d like to make some parallel connections to SharePoint and the new Google Wave.
What is I.T. like some sort of boring scary movie? Why is every product that comes out that does something similar as another labeled an “{Application name here} Killer”? Let’s be honest, it’s been on both sides of the road here. Ipod has its Zune, SharePoint had its Documentum, Iphone had its Android and WinMo 6.5, Google Search has Microsoft’s BING. Really the “killer” thing has to stop; nothing ends up being a killer anything. Each product has its specific audience, and those folks will always be loyal to that product. The folks on the fence are the ones that are easiest influenced.
That said, in this nerds opinion, Google has only come up with a handful of “killer” apps and services. The first killer app of course being Google Search. They have had the market on search for years, when your product becomes a verb you know you hit the big time (“go Google it”), now that Microsoft has “BING” will that take hold of some of that space, probably. It is a good search engine and as the algorithms grow and mature the searches will be 10 fold better. I just don’t see myself saying “Go Bing that”. The second killer app, in my opinion was Google Maps. It far and wide replaced any usage of MapQuest for me and it seems MapQuest has been unable to keep up ever since. Street view was the clincher for me, even though I have been using it long before street view.
Now onto the meat of the blog post. A fellow twitter’r (@mrackley) said so eloquently in a twitter post. “Anyone who thinks Google Wave is a SharePoint killer does not understand SharePoint or Large organizations for that matter”. I couldn’t agree more Google Wave (as it sits right now because it’s open source) is not a SharePoint killer. I think it’s a very cool tool to use in small organizations (like windows live office) or in a design firm or something but there is no context to compare the two applications.
Now I’m not saying that Google Wave isn’t really cool, I love the seamless integration of the user experience. But as it’s been said, it seems to gear more towards a match up against WSS than it does MOSS as a whole. It has to be recognized that it doesn’t look like Google isn’t aiming this thing at the corporate level intranet space (yet anyway), this is like an ad hock workspace collaboration tool. Again, right now. Who is to say that in 3 years when this gains steam and moves forward with user participation it won’t be awesome, right now it’s just in its infancy. See the theme on that disclaimer?
A few feature comparisons between SharePoint and Google Wave. If you don’t care about this feel free to skim or skip it all together and go to the summary.
Hosted conversation
Google Wave: The ability to pick a spot in a conversation and reply to that specific line of text, almost like commenting to a sentence or paragraph in a larger bulletin board entry. The typing and injection of that reply is shown in real time for whoever is sharing that wave. Pretty cool
The SharePoint Response: Other than a very few instances where I could see this being useful in a corporate enterprise, I can’t think of only a few instances to use something like this. Real time communication in different geographical locations, or just working on a project together in different cubes. So SharePoint doesn’t really do this; however it can keep track of specific comments made on either a collaboration workspace document or a bulletin board style setup. Would this be cool to have? Of course but I think we can expect to see some really neat things come out of Groove (SharePoint WorkSpace) 2010. So stay tuned to that portion of things.
Uploading Images into a Wave by drag and dropping
Google Wave: Uploading pictures by drag and drop right into a works space that’s neat. The ability to drag photos right into a “Wave” and have them viewable in real time (while the actual photo is being uploaded)
The SharePoint Response: Again the context doesn’t really apply; I don’t know why you’d really want to do this in the enterprise. Maybe if you are part of the design portion of a company and you’re collaborating on a project in real time.
I think this would be a great addition to MySites. There are a good bit of changes coming to Mysites in 2010 as well. I don’t have that much information on it but, I still don’t see a real need for this functionality in the workplace outside of the novelty of having it. Currently you can already upload multiple images by drag and drop or by multiple checkbox selection.
I would like to see the SharePoint image area’s cleaned up a little, maybe injected into a silverlight album or something.
Embedding API
Google Wave: Being able to drop Waves, search boxes etc onto existing web sites. Cool idea but “Simpsons did it” I mean “SharePoint did it”.
The SharePoint Response: The use of dragging and dropping or importing web parts onto pages has been one of SharePoints biggest features. Granted this doesn’t apply outside of the farm. So you can’t just have a snippit of code that you can drop onto an existing web page (for example, I can’t go into the Sogeti internal SharePoint farm and push a contacts web part onto this blog site). But that’s probably good you can’t do this there is a huge security issue with being able to do this.
Besides that, you can always expose areas of your SharePoint environment external and push content via standard XML/RSS to your existing sites.
Playback Editing Content
Google Wave: Ok I have to admit the merged like play back of all edits made to a “Wave” is really cool. To my knowledge SharePoint or Word doesn’t really do this haha, I guess we have “comments”. I don’t know how viable this would be to a large document, wiki or blog. I guess the screen would have to jump around to show that area of change.
The SharePoint Response: Bupkis well, granted you can see merged versions of a doc but its kind of hard to follow.
Collaborative Editing
Google Wave: Again a cool feature that isn’t native to SharePoint. I can see it very useful for meetings or like a client proposal everyone on the proposing team to be able to keep fast paced collective notes.
The SharePoint Response: This can be done currently in Groove (Workspace 2010) as well as keeping blogs or wiki’s, however it wouldn’t’ be real time, needing a check in and check out. However placing something like live blog on a SharePoint page, (something like Cover it live) would cover the same functionality. Is it exactly built in? No, but give it time.
Spell Checking
Google Wave: Context spell correction in the browser. Pretty cool. However I’m not sure I dig the auto correction of context words, that could be bad when you mean to say a word that Google Wave wants to correct.
The SharePoint Response: Most if not all of Microsoft Office application has context spell checking. Word 2007 has gotten very good with it (I am a perfect bad spelling example). I haven’t used IE 8 too much but I'm pretty sure they have built in spell checking in the browser fields (like firefox) does.
Extensions (just web parts renamed)
Google Wave: Spellie, Linkie, Searchie, Bugie, Twaves lot of funny names but do they do the job. Of course, but SharePoint has already been to this point. Nothing really new or “killer”
The SharePoint Response: With the community outreach of CodePlex in place and a lot of free third party web parts available on top of the modular model of features and solutions SharePoint is extremely extendable and adaptable. No upper hand gained here
Workflow
Google Wave: Very infant workflow (bug tracking workflow). Granted this is all that was demonstrated in the keynote but it doesn’t seem like workflow more than task management and tagging
The SharePoint Response: If you don’t know what SharePoint can do in the workflow space by now feel free to dive into the hundreds of thousands of write ups and descriptions of what can be done in the out of the box workflows, SharePoint Designer workflows, Windows workflow foundations, and all the third party providers of workflow.
Rosy
Google Wave: Freaking. Cool! Translating in 40+ languages on the fly.
The SharePoint Response: Yes SharePoint KIND OF does this with its language packs and different versions of the same site in different languages that are updatable by pushing through a single change. Again the context of the feature is real time communication. This would be a area for Live communication server to look at, as are most of the real flashy feature sets we’ve seen in their initial demo of Google Wave.
Summary
Google Wave is cool, no doubt about that. I would certainly install it/sign up for it and give it a try, I could see this being very useful for small startup companies that want to keep costs low, but still want to be able to collaborate possibly over distance and time differences. But this is Ad Hoc style collaboration, this isn’t structured content, this isn’t Enterprise level Intranet material. There is no front facing web site applications, there is not publishing and management of content and text.
Really what I get from the product (and Michael Lotter would agree) is that it’s twitter, email, IM etc mashed together to streamline the collaboration space in real time. That’s not to be taken lightly, that’s a cool toolset, however it’s just not the same as SharePoint, you can’t make the correlation. Google Wave is really cluttered in my opinion, very busy and has a lot of stuff going on without a real clean line of distinction between areas and content. That’s a hard sell to get past business folks that have a linear frame of mind and a linear way of providing content.
In fact Lars says specifically and I quote “We’re building this thing with live concurrent editing, and chatting and instant messaging and email and pictures and all that stuff…” that just goes to the point of where the scope and context of this application is at. It is real time conversation and collaboration, not enterprise level content management, archiving, workflow, forms etc etc etc. It also makes me understand why Google was shopping for Twitter for a while there.
They only displayed search briefly, they showed it being very powerful but no real information behind it. And what about all those Waves they were creating, where are all those stored, how are they managed. How does search work across those Waves. I think there is a lot to be figured out and explored on this side of the Wave, I would think a search company would have talked more about this.
So again, the “Killer” apps references hardly ever hold water, have you ever looked at Google’s tools? There are like 43 tools, I use 4 and think only half a dozen are even worth having (btw hey Google can you increase the Picasa web limit to higher than a gig? Seriously). I think Google has been stretching itself thin for sure, I just can’t see where some of these apps are going to produce revenue. Maybe there just going for the claim that you can do just about anything with Google regardless if you need to or not.
Lastly, I think it’s important to note that this is a beta product just announced, as we see more user interaction and development this will grow (think Apples App Store, there’s a freakin app to do everything). I’ll be watching to see if this takes the place of my Microsoft Office Live Small Business instance for sure. But will it replace SharePoint? I doubt it, maybe if I “BING it” I can find a more definitive answer.
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