I remember when I was a developer (yes I really was!!!!) and it came round to TechEd and I ALWAYS wanted to go.  Eventually I did manage to persuade my boss to let me go, I actually went twice and it was one of my best conference experiences.  What has this got to do with me you're thinking. Well, it's come back round to that time of year and tickets are now available to purchase.  Your boss isn't sure about whether to send you or not and you are trying to put together a business case for them sending you. 

We thought it might be a nice and quite fun idea to create a competition with the opportunity for you to win a place at TechEd Europe or a range of prizes that could help you expand your knowledge of Microsoft tools and technologies.

What do you have to do?

1. Write how you would convince your boss to send you to TechEd Europe in the comments (please use the same name and email address for both parts of your entry so that we can easily identify your entry)
2. Sign up to Microsoft Virtual Academy between 14th March and 16th April 2012 and redeem your voucher using the voucher code:MVAUKTECHNET. (You can redeem your voucher by clicking on the Redeem your MVA Voucher link which is found on your dashboard, underneath the accumulated points. Or by using this link when logged in:  https://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/voucherRedeem.aspx )

Remember to tell your friends about your competition entry by Tweeting: "I've just submitted my top tip to convince my boss to send me to TechEd Europe http://bit.ly/ACdb0L #technetuk"

The deadline for this competition is 11am 16th April 2012 and then all entries will be reviewed by a panel of judges.

The prize list is as follows:

• First Prize - 1 x Ticket to TechEd Europe, excluding flights & accommodation and all other costs.
• Second Prize -1 x Nokia Lumia 800 Windows Phone
• Third Prize - 1 x Microsoft Branded camp bag (red) containing a Win 7 Resource Kit & Windows Server Resource Kit & some additional surprises!

We will announce the winner by 26th April 2012 on the TechNet Blog.

Terms & Conditions

If you are looking to have a book on hand whilst getting to grips with SQL Server 2012 then you’ll be interested in the free E-book currently being offered by MS Press and written by Ross Mistry (@RossMistry) and Stacia Misner (@StaciaMisner). You can download the PDF version of this title here (288 pages; 10.8 MB).

PART I DATABASE ADMINISTRATION

1. SQL Server 2012 Editions and Engine Enhancements

2. High-Availability and Disaster-Recovery Enhancements

3. Performance and Scalability

4. Security Enhancements

5. Programmability and Beyond-Relational Enhancements

PART II BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE DEVELOPMENT (by Stacia Misner)

6. Integration Services

7. Data Quality Services

8. Master Data Services

9. Analysis Services and PowerPivot

10. Reporting Services

We are releasing this title to help you learn about the new features and capabilities in SQL Server 2012, which Microsoft released to manufacturing (RTM) on March 6, 2012. You can expect general availability of the product to begin on April 1, 2012.

If you prefer a hard copy of the book, you can order it here for $14.99.

By Thomas Lee – PowerShell MVP

Thomas is a UK IT Pro, with over 40 years’ experience in the IT field. He’s presently a PowerShell MCP and is very busy doing writing, consulting and training around some of the key Microsoft technologies including PowerShell, Lync and Windows Server/client. In his spare time, he lives in a small cottage with wife, daughter, a nice wine cellar and a large collection of Grateful Dead live recordings.

Introduction

Office 365 is Microsoft’s Cloud Software-As-A-Service (SAAS) offering that provides Office 2010, Exchange 2010, SharePoint 2010, and Lync 2010. There are a variety of plans offering different aspects of these packages. Licensing and costs vary depending on what plan you take – and happily for Office 365 customers, Microsoft has just announced price reductions in the pricing! For more detailed information about Office 365 itself, see http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-enterprises/default.aspx.

One important aspect of Office 365, for IT Pros especially, is how you manage the suite. You can do the basic administration of Office 365 using a browser based GUI. The GUI is good, although doing larger scale management tasks can get tedious (and are error prone). Help is at hand in the form of a set of Windows PowerShell cmdlets you can use to perform a variety of administrative tasks with Office 365.

Additionally, if you are using Exchange within Office 365, you can perform Exchange management using PowerShell. For this, you simply use PowerShell V2’s remoting capability to remote into your Exchange server and then use implicit remoting to access a subset of the Exchange PowerShell cmdlets, as I explain in more detail later in this article. At present, unfortunately, there are no cmdlets available, directly or indirectly, for the SharePoint and Lync components of Office 365.

Office 365 Cmdlets

In order to use the Office 365 cmdlets, you must first download and install Microsoft Online Services Sign-in Assistant. Then you need to download and install the Microsoft Online Services module. Both of these software components come in both a 32-bit and a 64-bit version – choose the one that matches your OS. You can get these components via the online help page at: http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/office365-enterprises/hh124998.aspx

Once you have the cmdlets installed, using them is a breeze, assuming you know PowerShell! Like any module, you must first import it into your PowerShell runspace, using the Import-Module cmdlet. Of course, for those of you using V3, importing the module is automatically done by PowerShell. Finally, in order to use the cmdlets, you have to authenticate yourself to Office 365 using the Connect-MsolService cmdlet. You can see this here:

Sadly, the limitations of this blog post does not allow me the space to delve into all these cmdlets in detail. But they allow you to carry out the following administrative activities:

· Manage users

· Manage group and role membership

· Manage service principals

· Manage domains

· Manage single sign-on

· Manage subscriptions and licenses

· Manage company information and service

You can click on the links above to get more information about each of these administrative activities, or navigate to http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-enterprises/hh125002.aspx.

Using PowerShell to Manage Exchange OnLine

You can manage Exchange On-Line, as noted earlier, by using the Exchange cmdlets in conjunction with PowerShell remoting (a key feature of Windows PowerShell V2!). To access the Exchange cmdlets, you just connect to the Exchange server, and use the implicit remoting capability of PowerShell to import the cmdlets into your runspace then use them as proxies, like this:

# First Get credential for site
$cred = Get-Credential tfl@yourOffice365domain.onmicrosoft.com

# Next create a new PS Session
# Use a hash table to setup parameters to new-pssession
$Office365 = @{ ConfigurationName = "Microsoft.Exchange"
Connectionuri = "Https://ps.outlook.com/powershell"

Credential = $cred365
Authentication = "Basic"
AllowRedirection = $true}

$s = New-PsSession @Office365

# Note: you see the session being redirected to your site
# Next Import the remote session
$Results = Import-PsSession $s

After doing this, you have direct access to the Exchange cmdlets that ship with Exchange 2010. It’s important to note you do not have access to ALL the cmdlets. The Exchange OnLine service’s multi-tenant architecture enables Microsoft, the hoster for Office 365, to customize what cmdlets you are able to use (and what properties of those cmdlets you can use). As of now, you can access just 234 cmdlets of the over 600 cmdlets that ship with Exchange 2010. For some more detail on using these cmdlets, see: http://tfl09.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/getting-started-with-office-365.html

Getting Trained on PowerShell

As you can see, automation of Office 365 administration, both for the current version and future iterations, is increasingly reliant on PowerShell. As an IT Pro, learning PowerShell is something you really need to do sooner rather than later. But you probably know that!

For Microsoft partners that are reselling Office 365, using these PowerShell cmdlets is becoming a fundamental skill to enable you to manage your various clients’ Office 365 subscriptions in a cost efficient way. And for both partners and Office 365 users, you are almost certainly going to want to script many aspects of your management of use of Office 365, especially if you are using a hybrid (part cloud, part on premise) Office 365 architecture.

There are a variety of ways to learn more about PowerShell – as I blogged last month. You can go on the official Microsoft 5-Day PowerShell introduction, for example. At the risk of repeating myself, a great way to get up to speed quickly is to come on one of my PowerShell weekend PowerCamps - the next PowerCamp will be on April 21/22 and will be held at Microsoft’s Cardinal Place offices in London. For more information about this event, and to sign up, see http://tfl09.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/powershell-powercamp-weekendlondonapril.html. The event will be a lot of fun, you’ll go home knowing tons more, and with a bunch of goodies and, no doubt, a head ready to explode!

Office 365 is a pretty awesome product for both small/medium businesses as an alternative to running servers on premise and for large business running a hybrid (part Cloud, part on-premise) environment. So no matter how you are going to be using Office 365, there’s good PowerShell support. Just a few more cmdlets to use, and the ability to master PowerShell’s remoting capability. Enjoy Office 365!

Microsoft Partner PointBeyond have just released a new whitepaper about SharePoint which details the strategic approaches for getting the most out of this technology.

IT decision makers are under pressure to deliver more with fewer resources. At the same time, many are struggling to cope with a backlog of applications awaiting delivery. A strategic approach to the delivery of business applications is therefore required to help decision makers achieve their goals. This article explains why SharePoint 2010 should be seriously considered when defining an application strategy.

Download your copy here

If you would like to find out more about becoming a Microsoft Partner please take a look at the Microsoft Partner Website for more information.

This is a complimentary Windows Server 2008 R2 & Hyper-V - Virtual Exam Cram (70-659) designed to help experienced Microsoft Server Virtualisation professionals prepare for exam 70-659 TS: Windows Server 2008 R2 Virtualisation. Delivered in two days via 4 x 2.5 hour training sessions from 17th – 20th April 2012.

To support your careers, Microsoft will be giving a free certification voucher for Exam 70-659: Windows Server 2008 R2, Server Virtualisation to the first 100 delegates to register and complete the questions at the end of each of the 4 sessions.

Geoff is a SharePoint MVP, and likes to be known as a “Hands on” Technical Evangelist and works as a SharePoint Solutions Architect. He has published many articles, guides and books about SharePoint. With over 25 years of experience in information systems, he is a Fellow of the Institute of the Analysts and Programmers, a Fellow of the Institute of Computer Technology, a Member of the Institute of Management Information Systems, a Prince 2 Practitioner, with MCDST, MCSD, MCTS, MCITP Microsoft certifications and is M.O.S (Microsoft Office Specialist) Certified.

Geoff specialises in SharePoint Architecture, Design, Implementation and Automation. He also focuses on Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, Service Delivery, Migration, Network Architecture, Software Management and Development – all in the land of SharePoint. When not playing the saxophone, riding horses or even flying, Geoff enjoys writing articles, speaking at conferences and aiding organisations get SharePoint – properly.

Blog: http://www.sharepointgeoff.com  Twitter: @geoffeve

As a SharePoint specialist charged with building SharePoint solutions for a client, you may have heard statements like these:

• 'I need a good return on my investment of SharePoint'
• 'I am paying a lot of money for SharePoint and people, what is it there to do?'
• 'I need to know what to do and what not to do with this technology'

To answer these questions, and to optimise the decision making when building SharePoint Solution and ensure quality is defined you could use the Value Management methods described in this article.

According to the Business Dictionary Value Management is:

"The Application of value analysis (value engineering) techniques for improvement of business effectiveness and efficiency."

And, if you want to get really scientific about it, try this site: http://www.value-eng.org/pdf_docs/monographs/FAbasics.pdf

The very same methods described can be applied to SharePoint when analysing system requirements with the business. The objective when delivering any SharePoint solution is to optimise the use of the platform and its resources. Whilst much of determine the best solution to go for in terms of establishing effective decision making and control, managing value focuses on selecting the best option. This is irrespective of whether the plan is to build a SharePoint farm, determine the best site taxonomy, or building a site solution for a client to ensure user productivity is at its optimum - in other words, optimising the solution to deliver value for money.

From experiences in the field, I've witnessed the results of SharePoint solutions put in place because (a) there were licences to be used and money to be spent (b) there was no alternatives addressed and the product was rush deployed (c) no objectives were defined so that what was put in place did not meet client need.

Building a solution to meet client requirements means carrying out requirements gathering, usage, design and agreement on constraints. Whilst analysing and detailing requirements, alternative solutions are identified and assessed before agreeing the final framework of the solution to put in place. For the technically minded, they may refer to this practice as Solutions Architecture - in reality, it is simply managing the value of the solution - Value Management.

There are two key analytical methods that can be used:

• Value Management - selecting the solution that provides best value for money.
• Value Engineering - optimising the value for money delivered by a chosen solution.

Value Management can be used during the initial investigation stage to test the business requirements and at the start of the feasibility and definition stage to assess alternative options. It is primarily concerned with ensuring that the needs concerning a solution is clearly defined, and that those involved know what is going to be produced. The primary objective is to create an understanding, and a common one, that covers the design problem, identifies the design objectives, and gets a group consensus about various courses of action. By working with Value Management techniques in SharePoint, it will help falsify a notion for both sides (the technical camp and business camp involved) that deploying SharePoint is a ‘click here, then click that and it’s done’ exercise, and bring clarity to how the SharePoint solution should involve and why the SharePoint solution should be built.

Value management is a key part of helping you determine a Return of Investment (ROI). Remember that question at the top of this guide? ‘'I am paying a lot of money for SharePoint and people, what is it there to do?'’ Value Management gives you that answer when applied to a specific solution that is going to be designed and delivered. It will inspire confidence that (a) the business understands and agrees the decisions made to deliver the solution and that (b) the technical requirements of the components being delivered by SharePoint can meet those requirements.

• It will increase your understanding of the customer’s challenges
• It will help establish solution requirements based on the customer’s business drivers and infrastructure maturity capabilities
• It will help remove technical objections, obstacles, and risks (real and perceived) that may keep the customer from deploying SharePoint.
• It will transform the customer’s business challenges into design decisions that result in a value-based proposed solution.

Steps to apply Value Management to your SharePoint solutions:

1. Workshop the ideas
2. Assign importance weightings
3. Evaluate each option
4. Assess Value
5. Check sensitivity

More information on how to do this is detailed in this blog post:http://www.sharepointgeoff.com/value-management-in-sharepoint-part-2-2/

Applying Value Engineering techniques to SharePoint solutions

Value Engineering is all about how the decisions we make are based on meeting objectives and how they can be structured in an easily understood fashion.

Typically, the decisions we make to meet any SharePoint objective can be boiled down to a number of situations.

• The business requires SharePoint to meet a specific business objective which in turn will make their staff more productive in managing and creating content.
• The business has a large number of requirements using SharePoint, but it’s difficult to see the wood for the trees in determining what should be done first.
• The business has a clear set of requirements using SharePoint, but it’s difficult to see what feature will provide the best functionality.

For each of these scenarios, you could apply Value Engineering to help analyse, record and prioritise requirements.

The objective of Value Engineering is to refine a selected solution to optimise the value for money. This can be achieved by:

• Removing unnecessary functionality and cost
• Increasing functionality at no extra cost
• Maintaining functionality at lower cost

If you work in delivering SharePoint solutions, whether you are an analyst, administrator, architect or project/programme manager you will continually have to make decisions user experience, adoption, sustainability, availability and configuration management of the platform.

Value Engineering helps by providing a method to structure these decisions, to plant priorities and thereby determine which alternatives and solutions best optimises the decisions you take. As said earlier, the client gains from this since there is a historical, audited approach and knows that the cost (and benefits) associated with each solutions agreed upon can be measured.

Steps to apply Value Management to your SharePoint solutions:

1. The FAST Value Engineering method
2. How to identify cost savings

More detail on how to follow these steps are in this blog post: http://www.sharepointgeoff.com/value-engineering-in-sharepoint-part-3/

Critical Success factors:

• Senior management support and input - you need to make sure that at your workshops that decision makers are there to identify the priority of the objectives.
• Appropriate level of management so that the results are not undermined.
• Effective facilitation - make sure you have the right people to provide knowledge, ensure that you have a strong SharePoint specialist to answer queries and to help make decisions.
• Sufficient information available - when looking at the alternatives, make sure you have the right information available that allows you to understand how the product meets requirements.

Demonstrating HOW something will be achieved and WHY it is going to be achieved is one of the most compelling ways in which as a SharePoint specialist can convince the client to understand why a decision to apply a feature, component or set of processes will help solve a business requirement. Particularly, it will also show where it will save capital, improve ROI and act as a measurement to demonstrate where decisions have been successful (or even unsuccessful) in the long run.

In conclusion, Value Engineering is vitally important in aiding your decision making so that you can optimise the required solution, and at the same time measure the cost and resources needed to deliver that solution.

As a SharePoint specialist, the key points to remember are:

• Check the proposed functionality is really needed
• Determine where the money is spent
• Identify alternative approaches for high cost aspects
• Test your assumptions

Useful Resources

• Microsoft SharePoint Site
• Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Resources for IT Professionals
• Whitepaper: The Business Value of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Insights
• DataSheet: SharePoint 2010 Insights​

The UK government generate an innovation report every year and I thought now would be a great time to share some insights from 2010 report.  Along side the insights I’ve also put together some simple steps to help kick start your innovation strategy.

Innovation drives economic growth - it has accounted for 63 per cent of annual labour productivity growth since 2000, with investments in intangibles accounting for 23 per cent of productivity growth. Investment in intangibles in 2008 also helped reduce the negative impact on productivity of the start of the recession.

On this basis innovation is not only key to business growth but also to the UK’s economic growth, so both ways round it quite simply makes sense to have a growth strategy which includes innovation.  But how do you go about it?

Let’s start with the basics, why would you want to do this? Well there are all sorts of reasons such as the ability to identify new products which provide additional revenue streams and routes to market. You may find that your product requires new features, or just a refresh to keep ahead of the market.

1. Commit your company to innovate
2. Decide the areas that you want to innovate in.
3. Set aside resources to work on innovation projects
4. Select a leader to take charge of projects and drive them forward

This should put you in good stead for getting something up and running but if you’d also like some support that helps you build and implement your strategy then read on.

Microsoft are running something called the Microsoft Innovation Program (MIPS) and helps software companies create a planned window for innovation.  A program to draw out the creativity and inventiveness in your greatest assets, your people.  As Albert Einstein once said “Ideas and innovation are the bedrock that technology is built on”. By signing on to this program you will get to:

• Identify potential new products / revenue streams
• Drives new features / improvements into existing products
• Deliver your technology roadmap
• Gain training on the latest software tools & training on user interface creation
• Get input from your commercial team to create revenue driving technology

What else?

• Most importantly the program is free
• There will be a Prize for Best use of Technology / Certificate to winning developers for excellence in innovation.
• Improves staff engagement with products, motivates, increases morale

So how do you get involved in this? Well that’s simple… We have 3 steps!

1. Let Adrian Clarke know that you are interested in the program and send him your company profile.
2. Appoint a project manager to work with us.
3. Set aside a few days for training and development

That’s it! It really is as simple as that… and here’s what can come out of it at the other end!

The graph below is a comparison of business expenditure on R&D as a percentage of GDP, 2000 and 2008.  As you can see the UK certainly doesn’t look as competitive as it’s foreign counterparts and with a little investment comes great return, so let’s make sure our GDP percentage is up when the next one of these reports comes out.

If you’d like to find out more about the program then email Adrian and pop over to MSDN to hear about this program in action!

The early bird discount offer for TechEd Europe tickets is close to an end.  In fact we stop the early bird offer this Saturday (31st March 2012) so if you are still trying to convince your boss or haven’t yet decided if you are going to come along then now is a good time to make that decision.

If you are managing a team of developers or IT professionals and want to know why you should send one or more of your team to TechEd Europe just take a look at the different reasons that some of our community have come up with in our recent competition. (suggestions are in the comments section)

You can find the agenda and all the details on pricing and speakers on the TechEd Europe website here and find out what others are saying about TechEd Europe on the Facebook page and on Twitter.

For added value, alongside the event there will be a series of opportunities to catch up on a one to one basis with Microsoft experts through the following additional events:

You can find out more about these opportunities on the social pages. (These are at no additional cost so if you’re coming to TechEd Europe make sure you come along!)

What are you waiting for? Register now to save €300.

Last week we had quite a bit of SharePoint content including a Whitepaper on business value and strategy for Sharepoint and a guest article that featured in our recent TechNet Flash newsletter.  We also featured a case study, popped up a few events and launched a new competition for you to win a place to TechEd.

• Learn how to remove your App Compat woes with Citrix AppDNA next week
• Guest Article: Applying Value Management techniques to SharePoint solutions
• Case Study: Retailer Avoids Tens of Millions in Growth Costs, Eases Innovation, and Boosts Security
• Competition: How to convince your boss to send you to TechEd?
• Register Now for The App Compat Sessions
• Webcast with Microsoft and Quest: Fast, Automated Application Readiness for Windows 7, and Office 2010 IE 8 or 9 and Virtualization
• Whitepaper: Delivering Maximum Business Value With A SharePoint Based Application Strategy

With just a few days left to go with the early bird offer (which expires at the end of this week…) we’ve just had word about who the keynote speakers will be for TechEd Europe 2012… they are key strategic decision makers in the business.

Jason Zander, Corporate Vice President, Visual Studio.

Jason Zander is the corporate vice president of the Visual Studio Team in the Developer Division at Microsoft. Zander's responsibilities include the Visual Studio family of products, which covers a range of technologies: programming languages; JavaScript runtime and tools; integrated development environment and ecosystem; Microsoft Office, SharePoint and cloud tooling integration; source control and work item tracking; and advanced architecture, developer, and testing tools.

As one of the original developers of the Common Language Runtime (CLR), Zander's primary technical areas of contribution include file formats, metadata, compilers, debugging and profiling, and integration of the system into key platforms such as operating systems and databases. Before joining the Visual Studio Team, Zander was the general manager for the .NET Framework Team. He has worked on numerous products at Microsoft, including the first several releases of the CLR and .NET Framework, Silverlight, SourceSafe, and ODBC. Before joining Microsoft in 1992, Zander worked at IBM Corp. on distributed SQL and SQL/400 at the Rochester lab.

Brad Anderson, Corporate Vice President, Management & Security Division

Brad Anderson is the corporate vice president of the Management and Security Division (MSD) at Microsoft. In that capacity, he leads a global team committed to helping organizations reduce their costs and drive their businesses forward with the MSD suite of products and services. These technologies include the System Center family of products, Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, Windows Update/Microsoft Update, management infrastructure components in Windows Client and Windows Server, and delivering Software + Services as Windows Intune.

Across all of the keynotes and sessions you can expect to hear the latest about Microsoft technology with tracks covering Windows Client, Windows Azure, Windows Phone, Windows Server, Architecture & Practices, Database & Business Intelligence, Office, Security & Identity, Developer Tools and more.

In addition, TechEd presents a unique opportunity to meet face-to-face with Microsoft experts, technology partners, and industry peers. We hope you’ll join us for this year’s festivities. Stay tuned for more session and content information in the coming weeks!

Get involved with our TechEd Europe competition to be in with a chance to win a ticket to attend!