Code Signing in Visual Studio 2008

I recently purchased a code signing certificate from GoDaddy.  After a great deal of trouble getting the certificate fully downloaded and installed (more about that later), I then tried to sign the assemblies for an application I had just completed.  To my surprise, I received the an error: “Error Importing Key.  Object already exists.”

After all of the trouble I encountered getting the certificate, I was sure I had the right PFX file, with the private key embedded.  I had chosen that certificate in the signing tab in the assemblies properties correctly.  I was also very sure that I supplied the right password for the private key.  Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, I kept getting the same error.

Thanks to the magic of search with Google, I found loads of articles and discussion groups where users were having similar troubles with the built-in VS signing.  Lots of different solutions were provided.  Unfortunately, none of the approaches worked.  One particular discussion within the forums on MSDN gave a good, though long, summary of all of the ways some developers have tried to fix the code signing problem in Visual Studio 2008.  If you have the patience to review the source material, you’ll find that most blogs or discussions revolve around the same sorts of options; again, none worked for me.

However, I then came across a blog article by John Robbins on code signing.  John gave useful details about a lot of aspects of his challenges, but he also mentioned something I hadn’t seen before: using the sign tool from the Windows SDK to sign the complied assemblies worked for me [NOTE: I’m developing on Windows 7; if you’re using a different version of Windows, you’ll need to download the right version of the SDK for your environment].

While I’m not much for loads of steps and external utilities, John also gave a simple post-build macro you can have VS run.  Based on this blog, this is what is in my post-build for signing the compiled assembly:

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0\Bin\signtool.exe" sign /f [CERTIFICATE PATH] /p [PASSWORD] /t http://tsa.starfieldtech.com "$(TargetPath)"

The [CERTIFICATE PATH] sequence should be replaced with the path where you stored the certificate locally (the PFX file).  The [PASSWORD] sequence should be replaced with your private key password (not the key itself, but the password you used to secure the key).  The rest of the post build event is pretty generic, except the URL parameter for the timestamp server (the stuff that follows /t).  That particular URL is GoDaddy’s timestamp server.  If you’re using a different CA, you should use the server they provide.

I hope this helps other struggling with the same issue.  If anyone has solved the problem of getting VS to handling signing through the properties dialog, I’d love to hear it. 

Nielsen/Norman Group’s 10 Best Intranets of 2010

Welcome to 2010!  I hope you had a fantastic new year! 

To start this year on a high note, I wanted to highlight Nielsen/Norman Group’s yearly 10 Best Intranets.   The 2010 edition, like past reports, provides insights into some of the best intranets across organizations of various sizes, shapes and industries.  What I like best about the report (as well as report’s like Jane McConnell’s Global Intranet Trends Report) is the chance to see how different organizations take on the challenge of improving employee productivity through content technologies.

Here are the some of the highlights I discovered:

• Intranets are getting a higher priority in the enterprise
  Better technology is enabling organization’s to produce better intranets.  NNG also notes the average increase in the size on intranet teams, giving enterprises more resources to produce and maintain these applications; in fact, the average team increased 27% to 14 people from 2009.  In Consejo’s own work, we have seen an increased focus on intranets across all of our clients; this is especially true of organization’s leveraging SharePoint, as much of those implementations involve internally facing applications.
  
• Mobile continues to garner attention
  It’s far from a widely adopted feature, but mobile access is becoming increasingly important.  Of the surveyed companies, 30% had special mobile features.  NNG made a specific point about creating unique mobile experiences instead of merely trying to adapt an existing intranet design to a mobile device.  For example, one of our clients built a specific Windows Mobile application to download list items from SharePoint.  NNG cites another client that built an iPhone app for their intranet.
  
• Social features gain real traction
  NNG called it the “year of social networking.”  Previously, NNG cautioned organizations about using the word “social” and many of our own clients refuse even use the word; one client prefers to use words like “collaborative” or “interactive” in lieu of social to avoid executive confusion with sites like Facebook.   However, as NNG points out, this trend is reversing and social media (as well as features) is gaining credibility.  For more insight into this area, take a look at the CMS Watch report on Enterprise Collaboration and Community Software.
  
• CEO Blogs
  NNG highlights that the typical “boss blog” is getting a bit of a “face lift.”  Instead of the monolithic and “talk at you” approach of historical executive blogs, more organizations are, in NNG’s words, “show[ing] executives with a ‘human face’ and [helping to] make them more approachable.”    Toby Ward at Prescient Digital wrote a terrific blog article on the “8 ingredients of a great  executive blog, ” which summarizes some of the same themes NNG found in their research, specifically the inclusion of social media and audience engagement (like comments).
  
• Focus on usability and improving features
  This point is a bit of an interpretation on my part, but NNG cites changes in the ways that organizations are encouraging use.  There’s less of the “built it and they will come” approach and more explicit, upfront research on usability and needs.  At Consejo, we typically encourage our clients to conduct surveys and in-person interviews to ensure the newly designed  intranet creates and improves productivity, as well as reducing the frustration that often accompanies change.  We also use that data to evaluate overall success of the intranet post launch, in addition to conducting post-launch surveys.
  
• Continue quality improvement
  A trend that should simply be “par for the course,” NNG cites efforts that many enterprises are taking to improve the quality of their intranets.  Interestingly (at least for a consulting firm that focuses on SharePoint) is that “frequent use of SharePoint” was the first bullet under this heading.  NNG does note that “many other technology platforms were common as well [and that] no one solution guarantees a great intranet,” but I thought it was an interesting point (especially since half of the “winning” intranets in 2009 ran on SharePoint).  As the SharePoint Report 2009 from CMS Watch points out and what we’ve learned through our SharePoint Fast Track offering, collaborative applications like Intranets are definitely a strength of SharePoint; NNG continues to reinforce this idea through their research.  Beyond SharePoint, NNG points out that search continues to be a problem (though improving), editorial workflow is more extensively used to ensure content quality, more organizations are using role-based personalization (as well as personal customization), companies are waking up to the idea that you need to measure success (Trend Micro saved $1.6 MM) and more intranets are creating consistent presentation through the use of page templates (something WCM and portal tools have long included).  All of these trends add up to a vastly different intranet and improved experience.

As 2010 offers fresh opportunities for enterprises to further improve their intranets, it will be interesting to see how the old trends continue and what new trends emerge.  And, while we have seen both successful and unsuccessful intranets in many different kinds of organizations, it’s gratifying to see the progress being made.

We wish all of our clients and potential clients a prosperous new year!  May your intranets bloom!

Getting Value from SharePoint Foundation 2010

There has been a lot of new content on the latest version version of SharePoint.  However, most (if not all) of the coverage has been on the licensed version SharePoint Server and little on SharePoint Foundation.  As one of the key factors in the overall platform success, it’s important to understand just what value you can get from the the upgrade to Windows SharePoint Services.

Like it's predecessor, SharePoint Foundation will be shipped as a free download from Microsoft’s site.  And, like WSS before it, Foundation provides all of the basic features found in the licensed SharePoint Server product.  If you work in an organization that can only take advantage of the non-licensed version, here are some of the features you get with Foundation:

• Basic document management
  You don’t need SharePoint Server to enable some of the basic document management features.  Foundation allows you to create sites, document libraries and manage the update of various types of binary files (e.g. Word docs, PowerPoint, PDFs, etc).
  
  
  Figure 1 – Working with a PowerPoint Presentation in a Document Library
  
• Blogs, Wikis and other Information Management
  The latest release of the basic SharePoint framework continues to include features like blogs, wikis and a wide array of other information types, like tasks, contacts and events.  Like the basic document management features, information management is a strength of SharePoint Foundation.
  
  
  Figure 2 – Editing a Wiki page in Firefox 3.5
  
• Integration with Office
  By far, one of the biggest strengths of SharePoint is its integration with Office.  Whether you have Office 2007 or Office 2010, you can save, edit, work with versions and manipulate metadata directly within the client.  You can also create other sites directly from the Shared Workspace task pane (Office 2007) or in the new Backstage (Office 2010), which exposes extended data about the document, the SharePoint library where it’s stored and other functions like viewing previous versions.
  
  
  Figure 3 – Backstage in Word 2010
  
• Working Offline
  In this release, SharePoint Foundation (with the help of SharePoint Workspace or Outlook) allows you to take content offline.  Whether you are connected to the web or disconnected on a plane, you can work on both documents and list items.  Editing list items is a significant upgrade from Groove 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services where only documents were available.
  
  
  Figure 4 – SharePoint Workspace showing a SharePoint Site offline
  
• Connection to External Data
  In the SharePoint 2007 timeframe, connection to external data was only available in the Enterprise version of MOSS.  In 2010, SharePoint Foundation has a basic version of Business Connectivity Services.  This means that Foundation users can take advantage of external data in SharePoint just like its server brethren.   All you need is SharePoint Designer 2010 (which is free) to create the connection and define what you want to expose.  Once defined, the data can be used to add content to columns or you can even manipulate the data through the familiar SharePoint list interface (if the data source supports that functionality).
  
  
  Figure 5 – Defining a new external content type in SharePoint Designer 2010

While these five features are not the whole of the new SharePoint Foundation product, it’s important to note that the latest release provides quite a bit more functionality than the previous version.  It also important to mention (again) that there’s no license fee for these features.  NOTE:  You must have a licensed copy of Windows 2008 R2 (64 bit) and you will need SQL Server (though you can use the Express version for no fee).

If you’re looking for a basic collaboration platform that is inexpensive and can be deployed inside your organization, you would do well to review what SharePoint Foundation offers.  If you need help with that deployment, Consejo offers a Fast Track to SharePoint solution that will help you get you running in about a week.

SharePoint 2010 Metadata and Taxonomy Management Overview

 

Stephanie Lemieux wrote a terrific article on metadata and taxonomy management in SharePoint 2010.  In fact, she’s referring to one of the new, key Service Applications that ships with the new product.

Like Stephanie, I’m interested in getting deeper into the details of how SharePoint handles metadata.  However, it’s clear that Microsoft did hear the challenges customers were facing and invested significantly in the new service.  It was one of the key areas of improvement I wrote about in the CMS Watch advisory paper on SharePoint 2010.

If you’re interested in learning more about managing taxonomy in SharePoint (either 2007 or 2010), be sure to check out the KM World 2009 pre-conference workshop that Stephanie and I are presenting.

What are the 10 most notorious pitfalls when developing a web strategy

 

Dorthe Raakjaer Jespersen (sorry for the “English” character translation), wrote an excellent blog entry on the 10 most notorious pitfalls when developing a web strategy.  If you’re developing any sort of web application, I would highly recommend taking a look. 

If you happen to be in or near Aarhus, Denmark next week, you can also catch an expanded version she’s presenting at the J Boye conference where I’ll also be presenting two sessions: “Managing a SharePoint project” and “Finding Content inside of SharePoint” (with Stephanie Lemieux).

SharePoint 2010: Service Applications

Freshly back from the SharePoint conference in Vegas, I was slightly overwhelmed with the new content come from the product team.  While there’s much of 2010 that remained fundamentally the same from 2007, there are also a lot of new concepts.  Of particular interest to me and a number of my clients is the new Service Application architecture.

In the “old days” of SharePoint 2007, you had Shared Services Providers (SSP).  SSPs contained a number of common “services” that were used by Office SharePoint Server (not WSS), like profile import, search and the business data catalog.  It was an interesting concept at the time and got hyped initially, but most SharePoint farms ended up with simple implementations.

In the 2010 timeframe, SSPs go away and you now have Service Applications and Proxy Groups.  Service applications are the atomic equivalent of  individual services within the historical SSP.  For example, there’s a profile service application as well as one for search.  In addition, there are Service Applications for other new functions like metadata management, word services and access services.  Each service application stands on its own, has its own database and can be deployed separately across one or more servers (load balancing for service applications is built in for scalability).

If you’re interested in getting a bit deeper, take a look at Spencer Harbar’s blog post: SharePoint 2010: Service Applications Part One: Model Overview.  You can also refer to the new Technet content on 2010; here’s a page on how SharePoint 2010 works.

Conference Appearances through 2009

It’s  been a busy year for conference attendances and speaking engagements.  However, as 2009 winds down, there are still great conferences coming up.   Here is a list of conferences I’ll be attending or speaking at through the end of 2009:

• Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 (attending)
  Las Vegas, NV
  19 to 22 October 2009
  
• J Boye International Conference (presenting)
  Aarhus, Denmark
  3 to 5 November 2009
  
• KM World (presenting)
  San Jose, CA
  17 to 19 November 2009
  
• Gilbane Boston (presenting)
  Boston, MA
  1 to 3 December 2009

If you happen to be attending or presenting at any of these conferences and want to connect, send me an e-mail (shawn_shell<at>consejoinc.com) or a tweet (@shawnshell).