Have you ever thought about your copyright on the articles you publish on Technet Wiki, or on other Wiki platforms or other code sharing platforms like Microsoft's Codeplex or open source platform Sourceforge?
What's the consequence of using Technet Wiki for publishing code samples like powershell scripts?

Have you ever read the small print?

A while ago, the following situation happened with powershell code published on your beloved TechNet Wiki platform.
(Names have been changed and anonymized to protect the innocent.) 

An MVP posted a powershell script. A company A ("Defendant") on the other side of the ocean used it in their product.
Some time later another company B ("Plaintiff") from the other side of the world sued the company A for using their scripts.
That means that the company either used the MVPs script as well and the person who grabbed it, doesn’t want to admit it, so company thinks they created it.
Or it means that the dev and the MVP just had the same great idea (which happens a lot, to be honest).

On TechNet Wiki, copyright is handled by the TNWiki Terms of use.
You can find the small print on the footer of the TNWiki main page or any Wiki page.

"ACCEPTANCE OF TERMS OF USE

Microsoft provides you with access to a variety of resources on this web site, including documents, photographs, videos, and other graphical, textual or audio-visual content (“Content”), software and computer code, including developer tools and sample code (“Software”), and communication forums and other services ("Services").  The Content, Software, Services and all other aspects of this web site are subject to these Terms of Use.  Microsoft reserves the right to update these Terms of Use at any time without notice to you.  The applicable and most current version of the Terms of Use can be reviewed by clicking on the “Terms of Use” hypertext link located at the bottom of our web pages.

By accessing or using this web site in any way, you agree to and are bound by the terms of this Terms of Use.  If you do not agree to all of the terms and conditions contained in the Terms of Use, do not access or use this web site." 

A bit further in the Terms of Use, you'll read:

"SUBMISSIONS PROVIDED TO THIS WEB SITE

Microsoft does not claim ownership of code, content, comments, feedback, suggestions, information or materials that you provide via this web site or any Services ("Submission"). However, by providing a Submission, you are irrevocably granting Microsoft and its affiliated companies the right to make, use, modify, distribute and otherwise commercialize the Submission in any way and for any purpose (including by granting the general public the right to use your Submissions in accordance with this web site’s Terms of Use, which may change over time), and the right to publish your name, city of residence, and e-mail address in connection with your Submission.  These rights are granted under all applicable intellectual property rights you own or control.  

No compensation will be paid with respect to the use of your Submissions. Microsoft is under no obligation to post or use any Submission, and Microsoft may remove any Submission at any time.

By providing a Submission you warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to your Submission and that your Submission is not subject to any rights of a third party (including any personality or publicity rights of any person). "

And also

"2. Grant of Rights

(A) Copyright Grant - Subject to the terms of this license, including the license conditions and limitations in section 3, each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free copyright license to reproduce its contribution, prepare derivative works of its contribution, and distribute its contribution or any derivative works that you create."

Just for your reference,

• in Wikipedia, text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, which is a sligthly different approach.
• Microsoft's Codeplex
• Terms of Use
• Code of Conduct

When discussing the case with the Master TNWiki Ninja he explained it as follows.

Copyright on the TNWiki is handled just like blogs or forums. You can only publish your own content (or content owned by Microsoft).
When you do that, you’re granting Microsoft to use your content in the social context. But you aren’t losing your copyright. You’re just granting permission of use.

It seems that such a case happened a few times before...
The result was that parties were offered to reach an agreement as to what the content on the Wiki should be and in some cases the content was deleted.

How could you solve the case as described earlier?

Removing the content is an option. Legally speaking.
But that's not the end of the story. 
You could ask to have a sample of their content on the Wiki with a link back to the full article (and a note about what content was granted with permission by the author).
This can be done in the same Wiki article, or a new article can be created to do this.

We should also recommend you do not sue each other, since we are talking about a context of a social world where content belongs to everyone.

Just in case the "owner" doesn't want the code freely used, don't publish it on social or community media first of all, but alternatively it's recommended that the owner publishes the code on his own blog.
He should move his blog to his own site (versus a provider), where he can disable the ability to copy content.
Because this is the best way to prevent anyone from copying your content when you publish it online for anyone to copy.

Quoting the Master WikiNinja: "You can sue anyone over anything".
But that's not the spirit of a Wiki Ninja!

Don't forget the TNWiki is an open, social and collaborating community which requires respect for someone elses content!

[Ka-jah Shakaah!]
The Security & Identity Ninja.

Peter Geelen     
peter@fim2010.com
Premier Field Engineer - Security & Identity at Microsoft
CISSP, CISA, MCT

(*) Free interpretation of old school music

Welcome to our Monday Interview with a Wiki Ninja!

Today's interview is with Joe Davies, technical writer on the SharePoint platform and architecture, formerly on Windows Server, and a key leader in our Wiki efforts around Test Lab Guides and Learning Roadmaps.

Who are you, where are you, and what do you do? What are your specialty technologies?

I am a Principal Writer in the SharePoint Platforms and Infrastructure writing team, working on the Redmond campus of Microsoft. I am responsible for authentication and identity management content for SharePoint 2013 and 2010, including new hybrid configurations that share data between an on-premises SharePoint 2013 farm and a SharePoint farm in Office 365.

In the past I have been a writer, trainer, and instructional designer for Windows Server, where I specialized in Windows networking technologies including TCP/IP, IPv6, IPsec, virtual private networks, wireless networks, and network access protection. For a list of my Microsoft Press books, see my Amazon.com page. I also wrote The Cable Guy column from 2000-2010.

What are your big projects right now?

Two big areas of interest for me right now are the expansion and integration of more graphical elements in content and efforts to develop and define troubleshooting content.

What do you do with TechNet Wiki, and how does that fit into the rest of your job?

I primarily use the TechNet Wiki to publish articles that would either benefit from direct community collaboration or are designed to enable the community to create their own articles. For example, for the Test Lab Guides, I have published a series of template articles and examples that allow the community to more easily create Test Lab Guide content.

I also use the TechNet Wiki to publish content that serves a specific niche function—such as FAQs or specialized portals—or for content that applies to multiple versions of products.

What is it about TechNet Wiki that interests you?

As a full-time technical writer at Microsoft, there is just not enough time to learn and experience all aspects of a product or technology. By its very nature, the type of content that I have time to write and publish is somewhat theoretical, reflecting well-defined and recommended uses and configuration.

However, customers typically take our products in directions we never imagined. The TechNet Wiki allows those working in the wild to add their voice and provide input on experiences, priorities, configurations, and best practices for a more complete documentation set that reflects real-world deployments.

On what Wiki articles do you spend most of your time?

I spend most of my time on the articles in the Test Lab Guides ecosystem, which includes portal pages, templates, examples, and test lab content. I also help maintain a set of SharePoint portal pages, ensuring that they reflect the content that the SharePoint team here at Microsoft publishes and other SharePoint community content.

What are your favorite Wiki articles you’ve contributed?

Some of my favorites include the Test Lab Guides and Learning Roadmaps portals. They provide an overview of what the content is trying to accomplish, links to content, and links to template articles that allow the community to create their own content.

What does success look like for TechNet Wiki?

Success for the TechNet Wiki is broad awareness as an authoritative repository for technical content and the ongoing and active contribution of content from an engaged community. IT pros using Microsoft products should know that they have a voice and a place to easily contribute their technical knowledge and experiences.

================================

Special thanks to Joe Davies for the interview!

What do you think of Joe's articles? Do you have any additional questions for Joe? Leave a comment below!

And remember to... Wiki While You Work! (or after work)

- Ninja Ed

I tend to keep myself extra busy with pet projects. One of my pet projects is getting more and more serious, but it’s a secret. As a Wiki Ninja, I have to go double secretive about it. Shall I tell you what it is? Of course I will! I’m working on some algorithms that employ advanced statistical analysis techniques to analyze the performance of SharePoint environments. This required me to build a tool that’s able to simulate SharePoint traffic. I’ve decided to upload a basic version of this tool to the TechNet gallery (at http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/PressurePoint-Dragon-for-58648ae4) and I keep track of handy SharePoint tools like this one on a Wiki page at http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/12438.sharepoint-2013-best-practices.aspx#Top_Ten_SharePoint_Tools

About PressurePoint

When you apply enough pressure, every application you or somebody else builds has a point where it breaks. I call this point the pressure point. I’d say it’s a strong advisory positive to undertake some activities to find out where the pressure point of the application that you’re responsible for lies. Several kinds of tests are commonly used to find out about these:

• Performance testing, the umbrella term for testing applications responsiveness and stability. Following, I’ll list some more specific relevant types of performance testing.
• Load testing, makes requests of an application to simulate normal or anticipated load conditions. This kind of test helps greatly when you want to determine what your end users should expect.
• Endurance testing, tests if an application is able to hold up under continuous prolonged, but normal or expected, load. Typically looks for memory consumption and gradually decreasing performance.
• Stress testing, here, you try to find the breaking point by applying maximum application capacity and observe in what ways the application breaks. It finds bottlenecks and root causes for performance degradation.
• Spike testing, applies a sudden and dramatic increase in load and sees how the application responds to that.
• Isolation testing, tests a specific part of the application. Usually, this involves an area that has proved to be troublesome.

It helps a lot if such tests are repeated throughout development/test/staging/production environments. This allows you to get a feel for your application. During these tests, you’ll typically look at server response time (instead of rendering time), the time it takes the client to make the request and get the final response back. Because of this, I can advise to execute performance tests as close to the server or server farm as possible to eliminate network latency issues. Most of the times, as an application developer or admin you don’t have much or any control over the network and you’ll be more interested how the specific application holds up.

Also, but this is quite obvious, if you can avoid it don’t place test clients on the server or server farm itself, or on the host hosting the virtual machines containing server or server farms. This can have quite the effect on the test outcome, although I have to say that in my experience the effect is limited enough to be able to undertake meaningful performance tests launched from the server or server farm. Other quick tips: it typically works better if you execute performance tests using multiple client computers and you should preferably execute performance tests using multiple user accounts.

Whatever types of tests you’re planning to do, please remember that forgetting to do any type of performance testing will result in an interesting product release experience. Lately, I can’t keep track anymore of the number of times companies contact me wishing they would have spent some time doing performance testing.

Lots of Tools

There are lots of tools out there that can help you do performance testing, but in my experience (and I have looked at 100+ of these tools) there are two types of tools: tools that are just a preview of a commercial version and too limited to do anything useful without buying the license and then there are tools that are insanely complex to use. See my blog post at http://sharepointdragons.com/2012/12/26/the-great-free-performance-load-and-stress-testing-tools-that-can-be-used-with-sharepoint-verdict/ for more information. The following overview at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_tool is also nice and more objective (well, it would be more accurate to say that it refrains from giving any opinion).

So, it depends on your situation how to proceed. If you have budget, you can buy a great performance test tool and use that. I found myself in situations where I had to do performance testing in companies that didn’t have a budget to invest in performance tooling. There was also another issue…

About SharePoint 

As I mainly work in SharePoint environments, I prefer to use a tool that is able to do performance testing specifically targeted towards SharePoint. I found none. During my SharePoint testing, uhm, dare I say, adventures, I found that SharePoint page requests are typically handled just fine and it’s hard to get a SharePoint environment to
its knees just doing that. Request times tend to increase linearly, which is a good sign for an application. On top, SharePoint handles excessive page requests gracefully, without falling back in throwing all kinds of errors. Things get a lot more interesting and dangerous when you do one of the following things:

• Execute custom code
• Upload and retrieve documents of various sizes and batch sizes
• Work with custom SharePoint Services, such as Search, Forms Services or SQL Server Reporting Services (let’s just say I picked out these as examples for no particular reason)

When using a testing tool that doesn’t have knowledge about SharePoint, it will be quite hard to test these aspects.

My conclusion

It may come as no surprise that eventually I decided that it was easier to build my own tool that has specific knowledge about SharePoint, can be extended by me at will, and is easy to use. Making extensive use of the .NET parallel programming capabilities, I found it was quite easy to do. When I was done, I decided that I wanted to share the basic version of it (basic, since I build custom extensions in it dedicated to the projects I’m doing) with the community. Later, I’m planning to add a specific version dedicated to SharePoint 2013, but I’m not quite there yet.

What to look for?

Doing performance testing in SharePoint environments without knowing what to look for is not the most useful thing one can do with one’s time. There are specific performance counters you should look out for on SharePoint WFE’s and different ones to check out on the back-end databases server. Depending on your needs, you might also need to spend some time coming up with the right set of performance counters you need for monitoring dedicated application servers. If you want to learn more about this topic, I can definitely recommend my gallery contribution at: http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/PowerShell-script-for-59cf3f70  I'd also recommend the use of my SharePoint Flavored Weblog Reader (SFWR) tool at http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/The-SharePoint-Flavored-5b03f323 which helps to analyze IIS log files.

Whether you use these tools or not: bear in mind that running a performance test tool without analyzing what happens on the server is absolutely useless!

Quick tips for constructing performance test cases

The following link contains interesting information about the typical type of use of a SharePoint environment: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-sharepoint-services-it/capacity-planning-for-windows-sharepoint-services-HA001160774.aspx. The quick take away is this:

• Light usage: the end user makes 20 requests per hour.
• Typical usage: the end user makes 36 requests per hour.
• Heavy usage: the end user makes 60 requests per hour.
• Extreme usage: the end usermakes 120 requests per hour.

This will help you build test cases that are more realistic; especially in situations where the customer isn’t really sure how much the application will be used.  Concerning this topic, I’ve also found the following topic to be quite interesting: http://blogs.technet.com/b/wbaer/archive/2007/07/06/requests-per-second-required-for-sharepoint-products-and-technologies.aspx

As a final guideline, I’ve also worked with the following rule of thumb that may help you: in a typical enterprise application, 1% of the users makes a request per second during peak time, in an enterprise application that is used extremely, 3% of the users makes a request per second during peak time.

What's going on under the covers?

Use the Resource Monitor tool (resmon.exe) to “check the heartbeat” of PressurePoint, since the tool is a bit of a black box to you and watching it doing its work can be a boring experience. Resource Monitor clearly shows how PressurePoint is building up to the point where it can simulate the load you require to simulate the number of different users and sessions you need. PressurePoint executes each session in a separate thread and Resource Monitor will show an increase of the PressurePoint thread counter until it approximates the intended load.

The System image normally, as you’d expect, has the highest number of active threads (a couple of 100s), but once you’re simulating loads of 100s or even 1000s of end users, PressurePoint surpasses this. One of the things that I found interesting was that it can take quite a long time until you get to the point where you can actually run 100s or even 1000s of separate threads in a single application (on the environments I’ve tested it on, it can take 1 hour or more to reach those kinds of numbers). It makes sense, since those are a lot of threads, other threads finish their work, and your system has other tasks to take care of. But still, before building the tool, I didn’t anticipate this.

Finally

You can get the tool here: http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/PressurePoint-Dragon-for-58648ae4 

2/5 UPDATE: We have a winner! It's... SharePoint 2010 Best Practices: Choosing Between AD Groups or SharePoint Groups - by Margriet. This article was featured on the home page of TechNet Wiki on 2/5.

================

Welcome to Thursday's Community Win! For our community collaboration this week, I want you to pick the next TechNet Wiki Featured Article!

On the home page of TechNet Wiki, we feature four articles:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/

Well, now you get to pick the next one!

Simply reply with a comment and let me know which article you want featured. Everybody gets one vote.

Your deadline is 2PM PST, Monday, 2/4/13.

Here are your five candidates to choose from:

BizTalk: List of Errors and Warnings, Causes and Solutions - by Sandro

How to Update PowerShell Help - by Tony

MSDN and TechNet Forum Support - by Ed 

Outlook, Outlook for Mac, and Entourage Version and Features Comparison Chart - by Henrik 

SharePoint 2010 Best Practices: Choosing Between AD Groups or SharePoint Groups - by Margriet

Which one do you think we should feature? Leave a comment! One vote per person.

Here's the tag of the previously featured Wiki articles. That's basically a list sorted by most recently edited. Or for lists sorted by technology or chronologically when it was featured, read the list at the bottom of the TechNet Wiki Featured Article Nominees article.

The options were pulled from the list of nominations. Do you want to nominate an article to get featured? Simply add it as a nominee in the Nominees section of the TechNet Wiki Featured Article Nominees article.

Wiki Wiki Wiki Wiki,

   - Ninja Ed

Hello and welcome everybody to our Monday Interview with a Wiki Ninja post.

Before beginning my post, I wanted to thanks Ana Paula de Almeida to creating my own avatar .. I'm proud to present you "the SharePoint Ninja who brokes 2 vases with a book and mouse in hand" .. :^)

Today it is a pleasure for me to hold my first interview with a Wiki Ninja.  Today's ninja is Craig Lussier. For those who don't know, Craig you always can check his blog http://craiglussier.com/ or TechNet Profil http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Profile/craig%20lussier

Why Craig? Because he uses SharePoint. Everybody who uses SharePoint is my eternal guru :-) !! ( big hugs to Margriet and Dmitry)

Who are you, where are you, and what do you do? What are your specialty technologies?

I am the father of a beautiful daughter and am fortunate that my better half, Terri, is very supportive of my career and related endeavors.  I am a student for life, inquisitive and analytical by nature. I enjoy music, live theatre and sports - specifically hockey and volleyball. We are originally from Toronto, Canada and currently reside in Bermuda. 

As a Senior Systems Engineer and SharePoint Architect, I have the pleasure of working with a great team at Applied Computer Technologies where I provide and contribute to SharePoint solutions for clients in many different verticals in the local and international business community.

My specialty disciplines include information and document management, collaborative team workflows and search. These disciplines naturally surface technologically through my work within the SharePoint platform, .NET Development and PowerShell.

Tell us about the SharePoint communities on TechNet Wiki. How did it start? What’s it like? Is it growing?

I feel that the SharePoint community is well represented on the TechNet Wiki. With this said, we are always looking for more quality contributions! Now that SharePoint 2013 is available for production environments, help us make the TechNet Wiki the best online portal and resource for SharePoint.

There are individuals from all over the world who contribute Wiki articles with their experiences from the field in many different languages and this is truly awesome. I believe this represents the essence of what the SharePoint platform and community is all about – collaboration and connecting people with information.

I’ve been a participant in the Wiki for a few years now. SharePoint contributions to the Wiki precede my participation, however one interesting element to note is the article growth seen during each SharePoint release cycle. We are still early in the SharePoint 2013 cycle and there are articles contributed and/or edited daily. We all benefit from each other’s efforts and I know many others feel this way.

What are your big projects right now?

At this time I am preparing to update my Microsoft Certifications for SharePoint, .NET Development and Windows Server. I am always working to expand my working knowledge of Microsoft technologies so this is an extension of my never ending learning plan.

I am presently working on client projects that include the expansion of current SharePoint 2010 deployments and am also engaged in implementing SharePoint 2013 (both installations and upgrades). Due to client confidentiality agreements, I am unable to digest any specifics.

In terms of the Wiki, I published the SharePoint 2013 Portal at the beginning of the SharePoint 2013 Preview along with many related Wiki posts. With the help of the community, I hope to expand these resources as they help me and others catalog what I have found to be useful. I am working on many new Wiki posts and will publish them when they are just right for consumption and additional collaboration.

Besides your work on TechNet Wiki, where do you contribute?

In addition to the TechNet Wiki, I contribute to the MSDN/TechNet Forums, to Twitter and to my blog. I wish I had more time to answer questions and to publish articles. There must be work-life balance. Although I have a passion for technology and for the SharePoint platform, it is very important for me to spend quality time with my family and to sing the ABC’s with my daughter.

Regarding my offline community work, I founded and am a current leader of the Bermuda SharePoint Users Group. Ongoing, the group will meet on the last Wednesday of every month. I have submitted presentation sessions for conferences in 2013 and look forward to multiple speaking engagements this year outside of Bermuda.

What is TechNet Wiki for? Who is it for?

The TechNet Wiki is for everyone who is in some way involved with any Microsoft Technology. In my opinion, it is a living online resource and an invaluable tool for the community to consume, post and collaborate on Microsoft related content. The best part is that it’s a free platform where everyone can
contribute to and learn from other experiences.

What do you do with TechNet Wiki, and how does that fit into the rest of your job?

I use the TechNet Wiki to share my experiences and to catalog useful information for future reference. I also attempt to make it easier for everyone else to find SharePoint related information by tagging articles appropriately and to promote language filtering.

All of my contributions to the TechNet Wiki are done on my own personal time and in  no way are directly related to my work responsibilities. With this said, the set of resources available for SharePoint on the TechNet Wiki directly assist me with tasks for which I am responsible on a regular basis.

What does success look like for TechNet Wiki?

To me, a successful Wiki helps others achieve their goals whatever they may be. The community spirit on the TechNet Wiki ensures ongoing quality contributions. I encourage all of my colleagues and clients to use the TechNet Wiki as a resource and to post obtained knowledge from the field. It is great to see when a post is made better through edits from multiple individuals. Although success is a subjective perception, the reality of the TechNet Wiki is that it provides support and assistance to individuals in the field from those in the field – this is success.

Do you have any comments for product groups about TechNet Wiki?

Firstly, thank you to all who are involved in the ongoing development and maintenance of the TechNet Wiki. Great work!

One item I’d personally like to see is page view statistics for posts. I know this has already been suggested many times. I believe this information would be valuable to article readers in addition to who wrote an article, who contributed to it and how many edits were made. Wiki contributors get page view milestone notifications via email and I use this as a gauge for the demand of a particular topic and its utility for others. Knowing how many page views a post has (in addition to already published contribution information) would help to promote a reader’s confidence in the content in the post. It would also allow all Wiki contributors to evaluate where improvements to articles can be made and which topics may require additional development.

The idea is to make the TechNet Wiki the best it can be from a consumption and contribution perspective and I believe that making page view statistics available will make the Wiki even better.

===========================================

Thank you Craig for your SharePoint Passion and contributions! Continue any questions for Craig in the comments!

Turkish Ninja Gokan

blog: http://gknzcfc.net

twitter: @gokanozcifci

SharePoint Community Expert, MCC