Web Filtering is absolute  must when it comes to protecting your students and to some extent your staff and network.

Here at the academy we have an unfiltered broadband connection to the Internet via a sponsored connection to EMMAN.

When the academy first opened I decided at the time to install a Bloxx web appliance as I had used Bloxx web appliances on other networks in other schools and colleges. 

The appliance had worked well and  the Tru-View technology was also very good, anonymising proxies detection worked very well at first but started failing to detect and block our students gaining access to them.  This is clearly a big problem on school network! In saying that the support that we got from Bloxx was very good and any problems that we had with any aspect of the appliance other than the webproxy detection was resolved swiftly and effectivly.

Our Web filtering was on  a three year contract due to expire in September  2010 so with this in mind we  started to look at the whole web filtering market.  This may not be the way to go about finding the best solution but I do not like getting involved with products that charge per client or unique user so this ruled out a few products sorry Websense and the like.  I hate to say it but if you are dealing with schools and the product you are offering is over 1/2 the cost of our whole MS licensing cost then its not for schools.

This left us with a few good options:-

Bloxx even with the anonymising proxies get round issue was still a good product and they where working on a solution for the anonymising proxies detection.  Another slight let down with the the Bloxx appliance is that the reporting is not as good as some of the other products that we tested.  The user interface is clean and easy to navigate, blocking and allowing sites is straightforward and the Tru-View web categorisation allows for easy site filtering for multiple groups.

WebCritical this product was available in two forms an appliance and the software to run on your own hardware, this is a good idea as it can cut the cost of your filtering solution if you have some spare hardware that can be used.  We where sent a trial version of the product that we installed and on the whole it was a very  good filtering product, it used the Tru-Veiw technology from Bloxx and had good reporting.  The same problem also plagued this product as it also did not pick up anonymising proxies and another issue was not in functionality but was in the fact that it had not been re-branded and Bloxx error pages and the like where still visible.  Again the user interface is good and is on a par with the Bloxx appliance.

Sophos sent us a loan product WS500 we plugged this in and went throught its setup routine 10-15 minutes later it was up and running.  This has a good dashboard that shows at a glance the number of concurrent connection, throughput and added page latency. The box has some of the best reporting we have seen in a web filtering product and the user interface is straightforward and easy to use.

 SmoothWall we downloaded this product and installed it on a spare desktop we had in our office.  This is a very good product a bit rough round the edges and has some features that the others did not.  The one that shone out was the ability to give some control away to groups of users (Teachers) to allow sites for a period of time via a web page, we could see where this would save us as ICT Services time, and help teachers in the classroom.  As I said the user interface is not as polished as the others we tested this also meant that it was not the easiest to navigate around and the reporting although not as good as the Sophos box it was not the worst in the test.

Crunch time and it was between Sophos and SmoothWall this was due to what we thought was the complacency/ arrogance of Bloxx as we felt that they thought that they had our business and was not prepared to move much.  SmoothWall was bang on and we where tempted to just take them up on their offer but as we run Sophos AV products for Exchange and desktops and this was also up for renewal we decided to talk to them and the deal we got was to good to be true so we snapped their hands off! we ended up getting the WS1000 appliance from them and to be honest the more we use it the better it is, and have no problem in recommending this product to anyone in the market for a web filtering solution.

Harry

Just a quick post as I managed to find a wonderful post at DotNetMafia titled How to setup people search in SharePoint 2010 and this helped fix the problem I had with not only People search but also MetaData tagging throughout my site collection.

The steps I had not done to fix this were,

Adding SPS3://website to the content crawl.
Adding “retrieve people data for search crawlers” to the SharePoint Search Crawler account in the User Profile Service Application as detailed in the above post.

With these two things added everything went smoothly and I now have another 20,000 items in my index.

Thanks DotNetMafia and your amazing article

Matthew Hughes

So now we are going to look at creating a simple array and then iterating through it, creating sites and lists as we go.
Line 1 creates an array with 3 values, Maths, English and Science.
Line 2 says, for each value in the array do the following.
Line 3 – 15 will create the site and lists in the same way I talked about in the last two posts.
I have tried to be a little clever in the creation of the sites by using the values within the array to name the lists and the site which is what the variable $sitename is for. 

$sites = ("Maths", "English", "Science")
ForEach ($sitearray in $sites)
{
	$sitename = $sitearray
	$SiteTitle = $SiteName + "" #in case you want to add anything else to title add it inside "" quotes.
	$SiteUrl = "http://intranet/" + $sitename + "/"
	$SiteTemplate = "STS#1"
	Write-Host "Creating new site at" $SiteUrl
	$NewSite = New-SPWeb -URL $SiteUrl -Template $SiteTemplate -Name $SiteTitle -UseParentTopNav
	$web = Get-SPWeb $SiteUrl
	$web.Lists.Add($sitename + " Announcements", $sitename + " site announcements list", 104)
	$web.Lists.Add($sitename + " Links", $sitename + " site links list", 103)
	$web.Lists.Add($sitename + " Documents", $sitename + " site documents library", 101)
	$web.Lists.Add($sitename + " Pictures", $sitename + " site picture library", 109)
}

I hope this will help someone along with the rest of the series and is certainly a good reference for myself.

Last time we looked at creating sites and now I have looked at how we go about creating a set of lists for that site.

# This will populate the variable with the SPWeb object so you can make use of it
$web = Get-SPWeb http://mysiteurl
# This will add a new announcement list
# The format is (listname, listdescription, listtype)
$web.Lists.Add("Announcements", site announcements list", 104)
# This will add a new links list
$web.Lists.Add("Links", "site links list", 103)

You will see that the last parameter for adding both the announcements and links list is a number.
This number relates to a Template Type as specified on the Microsoft site.
As with a lot of things there may be a better way of selecting the template type but for now I am happy using the Microsoft site as a reference.
Next time I will look at creating a loop and iterating through to create 10 sites and associated lists.

Working with powershell in SharePoint is wonderful and really makes some of the more painful tasks, a doddle.

Here I am going to show you one of the simple tasks and that is creating a new subsite

New-SPWeb [-Url] <String> [-AddToQuickLaunch <SwitchParameter>] [-AddToTopNav <SwitchParameter>] [-AssignmentCollection <SPAssignmentCollection>] [-Confirm [<SwitchParameter>]] [-Description <String>] [-Language <UInt32>] [-Name <String>] [-Template <SPWebTemplatePipeBind>] [-UniquePermissions <SwitchParameter>] [-UseParentTopNav <SwitchParameter>] [-WhatIf [<SwitchParameter>]] [<CommonParameters>]

New-SpWeb

New-SpWeb -URL http://yourwebsite/subsiteaddress -template "STS#X" (where X is the template you would like to use.

New-SpWeb -URL http://yourwebsite/subsiteaddress -template "STS#X" -name "English Test" -UseParentTopNav

Myself and Chris McKinley of SharePointEdutech fame, did a session at the Microsoft HQ in Reading on branding.

The slideck isn’t the best but you get the general idea, we welcome feedback on the session and hope it was of some use to some of you.

Thanks

Matt

After just a month I have finally uploaded my slidedeck.

The Challenges in  Branding our School Site

As previously mentioned, its a live blog, there may be errors.

Made my way this morning following a late night drinking with Ben Robb, Eric Shupps, Andrew Woody and Kat from Combined Knowledge. A great laugh and thanks to those guys for making a new speaker feel welcome (loads more people to thank i’ll leave that for the last day).

#IW206 Realising Business Intelligence Dashboards and Self-Serve Reporting through SharePoint – Mark Macrae

Mark starts by letting everyone know a little bit about himself including the West Ham badge (boooo) and gets straight into explaining what BI features are in 2007 and how it changes in 2010.
The tale from the trench is the sub heading and Mark brings a real world example from the NIHR (Dept of health funded) explaining that it gives the audience “a window to the data” (nice phrase).
Problems: multiple bespoke solutions being used meaning a bigger overhead for the developers, no enterprise wide reporting due to these diseperate systems. Developers authoring reports, not a bad thing all the time sometimes its useful but there’s a time and place. Lenghy turnaround of delivery and it leads to a stale platform.

Solutions: reporting services which doesn’t require an enterprise licence good for WSS users, looked at report builder, performance point and of course SharePoint.
Improving the data layer, create a data warehouse for reporting, consolidate data sources (ssis) using SQL and using OLAP cubes (no idea what that is). They took daily snapshots of data for data warehouse as they looked at how often the data changed and this was acceptable in this particular case, issues arise in other cases when daily is not good enough.
2008 and 2008R2 are much better to get everything installed and setup.

Now demoing the site that was created, users were good at creating reports but not developers. (This all just makes me realise how little I know about some of the great features within SharePoint, I am sure the reporting could be very useful within the Academy).
Report builder very office 2007 like, Marks now showing us connecting to a data source and some real life reports.

The reports look amazing and Mark’s just made creating a simple report look dead simple and straight forward. The performance point charts look great can definately see the use for these in various projects I have, not sure where I will find the time to get into reporting.

Mark uses notes within his PowerPoints as I did, hope there wasn’t anything daft in mine, will have to see on the DVD
So if I have got this right, you can create reports in performance point and with a web part for SharePoint, you can point that web part straight to your report. Looks groovy.

SQL Server 2008 R2 allows you to create reports based on SharePoint lists. Interesting especially given my planned install of SP2010 as clearly will need to make use of SQL Server 2008 R2.

Mark making use of Camtasia to show a different VM and show some of the features of SharePoint 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2 with the geography data. Report Builder 3 has a map wizard allowing you to plot points within your data and place them on bing maps.

Brining things to a close now a great inspirational and informative session wish I had some data to report on now haha.

#COM107 – Enterpise 2.0: putting the social media to work – Richard Sedley and Ben Robb

Clearly Ben’s not feeling the effects of last night like I was this morning.
Starting the session off with getting an understanding of what engagement is physical and psychological.

Average uninterrupted time for users is (I think Richard said) two and a half minutes.
New communities being created online in facebook for businesses to use to talk to each other.

Expectation for users is very high, now more then ever. If you don’t deliver quickly, they are off.

New forms of authority stepping in and taking over, Jamie Oliver and Martin Lewis used in the examples with Trip Advisor and WikiPedia used as online examples.
Benefits of engagement, improved customer loyalty, increased revenue, enhanced public standing, reduced marketing costs bigger market share, improved employee satisfaction, improved business predictability.

Some really useful stats about engagement coming from this session showing the benefits of engagement.

Businesses happy to adopt social networks and social technologies within the enterprise much more now then previously. Example of Richard running a social media course twice a year, two years ago and now runs it twice a month.
Aviva internal site looks amazing and so very engaging.

Turn your haters in to your advocates, those people that don’t like the system when it changes, get them on board and help them appreciate it.
If it doesn’t look right it won’t work.
Most important page on your website – The thank you page.

Ben Robb is now up and mentions the fact that most companies block social networking sites yet the same users have access via their phones.
Showing some of the cool features within SharePoint from the changes to the profiles to the changes with search.

#IW208 – What does Web 2.0 and social networking mean to the user – Matt Groves

Session started before I got a chance to start writing but Matts covered the important things such as the useless term that is web 2.0 and how people have predefined views of what is web 2.0 so you have to be careful not to throw the term around.
High number of people using the social tools within their workplace.
Information is too readily available, need to find the right info amongst all the wrong info.

SharePoint has everything you need, no need to go and buy in the tools any more.
Folksonomy is not centrally managed, its what the user creates. This can be moved from the folksonomy into the official Taxonomy of a company.

Now looking at Tagging in document libraries and its use as well as ratings.
Looks like Matt may be using these tools within his presentation, very nice looking tools.

The real world advantage of the wall, not two way communication its 1 and the rest of the company communication, anyone can jump in on it and add value to the conversation. Very nice point.
Matt demo’d tagging an external site using the javascript out of the box function.

Avoid control but do have governance, if you control too much you will not succeed with the social features in your organisation.
Excellent stuff again from Matt

#IW109 – What’s new for end users in SharePoint search 2010. Mirjam Van Olst

I am sitting in on Mirjam although not going to go into any detail for this session as my brain hurts from listening and typing in the other sessions. Will try and summarise at the end.

#IW210 – SharePoint 2010 Document Sets – Rob Pratt

In with Rob a very positive start he assures us it will be a nice and easy going session.

Document sets are a feature in SharePoint 2010 so you need to activate it for the site.
What’s new with SharePoint 2010. you can set meta data on the parent item and then any sub items will inherit that meta data. (correct me if im wrong, thats how I understood it.) You can run workflows based on document sets. Document sets can have visioning enabled.

Rob is now going into demo’s.
Go to document set settings not advanced settings when associating a document with the content type.
Before you can use the content type you have to allow management of content types in the document library.

Content types look real good think I should look into that.
Approving document sets does not approve the documents within it, can achieve this using work flows but doesn’t do it out of the box.

Thats a wrap here, nice overview of document sets.

After a long walk down the Thames I arrived at spevo, collected my badge and headed up to floor 3 into a very familiar looking exhibitor / networking room. Sat down to watch the keynote with Steve Smith, Brett Lonsdale, Eric Schupps and Spencer Harbar.

The keynote started by letting us know about some of the events that are happening over the next 3 days and that the agenda changes following ash cloud issues.
A great idea for the keynote, Steve showed us the evolution of Sharepoint and started with SharePoint 2001, horrible and something I had not seen before. We then moved fairly swiftly on to 2003 something I am more familiar with but had never used. Brett went into a little detail regarding the dev side of 2003 and admitted that the code that was written for 2003 just isn’t useable in 2007 and onwards.
Now to where I got onto the SharePoint train with SharePoint 2007, I never had the issue of trying to upgrade from 2003 to 2007 but have felt the pain of 2007 – 2010 something which Eric and everyone else, seems to think is easy. Maybe it was just my lack of testing which made it hard.

Anyway, Spencer is showing some CMS stuff with forms based auth and web content management (I think).

Steve is now wrapping up the keynote now and I am going to go see Sharon Richardsons session upstairs.

#IW101 – What’s new for information workers – Sharon Richardson

Sat next to Sharon in the War Room yesterday and she seems like a lovely woman, on first impressions she seems very straight to the point and doesn’t hold much back as she admits, to her credit, in my opinion.

Sharon doesn’t see the point in “I Like It” within a professional organisation, I guess it could be used on a more social based site but I also tend to hide it on public sites, at the moment anyway.
The demo moves onto search and already I am seeing some of the new features I have missed in my own personal experience, it seems the end user interface for search really has been overhauled and looks great.
People search now has View recent content great to see what people are working  on at the moment, very useful.
Question about the recent content being security trimmed which we are assured that it is as you would imagine.
People search also included on the standard search page on the right hand side as a web part so it can be moved around etc.

How many people will be using the status updates within an organisation? ME: Good opportunity for schools, communities, volunteer sector to keep social networking within their own organisation and control.

Now looking at the organisation chart one of Alex Pearce’ favourite things if I remember rightly, I am glad Sharon has this working as I couldn’t get this working. A bit of a demo on tags and related activities and a general overview of social features within 2010.

Showing the my content area, its worth noting that the shared docs will show in the outlook SharePoint connector, great feature. A great little demo on managed keywords and taxonomy.  SharePoint 2010 Calendars now are not fixed width and will grow and shrink to your browser size.
You can now overlay calendars in an Outlook style allowing for a single view of multiple calendars. Excellent.

New site demo, shows the nice silverlight view when creating new sites and why its important to click more options to add the extra options which you used to be able to in SharePoint 2007.
We are now looking at the changes with the ribbon and how to add new / upload documents.
Upload multiple documents, no tick box per document like in 2007 (will this be in RTM) but does have a nice silverlight UI allowing you to have a good visual confirmation before uploading and more importantly with filesizes.

To create a new list etc go to Site Actions > More options and this will open up the silverlight interface again with a nice way to create the list etc.
Going into some more detail with calendar overlays and the settings involved with adding these.

More details on the Ribbon, Make homepage Sharon pointing out that it allows you to make this your homepage. Is this not making it the homepage for the site collection or have I got that confused there? Can anyone clarify this?
How to edit content, wiki based content editing so you can now edit directly without the page refreshes.
Adding webparts now opens in the ribbon with a very different UI.

Now having a quick look at Central Administration and Sharon mentions how its a little more difficult to find what you need. Hopefully better by RTM?
Managed META data service is where you can see the keywords that people have used and move keywords into your taxonomy hairachy allowing you not to have to put a lot of effort into the term store from the start but instead bring in those commonly used terms when people are using SP.

That wraps it up, excellent session created within 24 hours of being asked to present. wow.

#IT102 – The SharePoint 2010 Architecture and Service applications model for IT Pro’s

Couldn’t get into the community track as it was packed so I am now sitting on Steve’s session although I am actually still prepping my session so now updates for this session.

Lunch

#IW103 – Encouraging User Adoption and Quick Wins in SharePoint 2010 – Steve Smith

Now sitting in on Steve’s session on adoption and quick wins.
Defining the term user adoption, made to sound like a singular linear approach. Its Not!
There is no one size fits all, it’s different for each business. What are the business requirements?
What’s the vision, what’s the goals? What will you define as a success?

Find out what the little things are that people want and then give it to them. Simple but on a lot of occasions quick wins. SharePoint provides all these little quick wins.
Change the mentality, break out from departments define the groups of users by function or operation.
Define measuring success, clear and precise. If it’s not how will you know you have succeed. User adoption is not just using SharePoint.

What can you do out of the box, don’t enter SharePoint designer if you don’t need to.
Create simple forms to do quick things. Holiday requests, petty cash etc etc

Got slightly lost here trying to catch up with presentation :s sorry for anyone still with me at this point.

#IS104 – Utilizing Roll up Web Parts in SharePoint 2010. Brett Lonsdale

Interested to see how this session will help my work and find out more about CQWP and my new favourite DVWP.

CQWP – Available in 2007 and 2010. Can now view multiple columns.  Brett explains a little about the CQWP and jumps into a demo.

Showing the multi column options, link to item and author. Explaining some of the basic features of the CQWP

In a list you can create target audiences and when you use the CQWP only the relevant items within the list are displayed.

Every List has its own RSS feed. Is this new to 2010 or did this exist before?

XSL styles which are included within the style library gives you a set of useable XSL out of the box in SharePoint 2010.

More advice on using conditional formatting and how you can export the XSL and create your own with some fancy conditional formatting.

DVWP is more flexible as you can edit the XSL as you like etc.

We have moved onto relevant docs and showing how much more flexible it is including a nice option to show docs that are modified by “me” the current user. Docs check out by “me”.

RSS viewer webpart which is AJAX enables and Brett mentioned the BBC news site which must be the most used RSS feed within the RSS viewer web part haha. Demo of aggregating a document library using the RSS viewer which has an XSL editor within the web part so you can customise to your needs.

My session was on after Bretts and the feedback was fairly good with Mark Macrae stating that “@mattmoo2 so chilled and laid back hes horizontal!” and Chris Mckinley saying “really loving the brutal honesty from @mattmoo2 no smoke and mirrors just tales from the trenches! #spevo” so I am fairly happy with how it went.

Link to the pics used here via @chandimak

This week started with the news that a Volcano had erupted and all major European airlines were closing, with that in mind today was set to be interesting as Steve and co were left trying to fill sessions which were empty due to some of the presenters being unable to attend.

However, ashtag as it has been dubbed on twitter, did not halt the proceedings with the SharePoint Evolution footie game which took place between 4pm and 6pm.
I  managed to end up on the USA team due to a few that couldn’t attend (pictures of my skin tight top to follow) and we were well and truly destroyed in our two games leaving us to lick our wounds and watch the England team beat the rest of the world team to take the spevo football champions title.

After the two hours I headed over to the hotel for a quick shower and then headed to the war room in the Crown Plaza, a room full of SharePoint royalty steadily perfecting their slidedecks for tomorrows opening day.

Its a strange situation to be on the other side of the fence after attending the best practices conference but one which is proving more enjoyable as time passes. Wish me luck with my presentation tomorrow and thanks for those people who have reassured me directly or indirectly, that preparing presentations isn’t really easy for anyone.

Thanks

Matthew Hughes