Figuring out which software licensing options best suit your needs while being cost-effective can be confusing. Some businesses end up making their purchases through retail stores which means they miss out on volume licensing opportunities and others may unknowingly be using unlicensed software which means their business may be at risk. So let me help ......

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You’ve likely heard about how Office 365 and Windows Intune are great applications to get you started with Cloud Computing. Many of you emailed me asking for more info on what Cloud Computing is, including the distinction between "Public Cloud" and "Private Cloud". I want to address these questions and help you get started. Let's begin with a brief ......

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Every fall and spring, a survey goes out to a few hundred thousand IT folk in Canada asking what they think of Microsoft as a company. The information they get from this survey helps them understand what problems and issues you’re facing and how they can do better. The team at Microsoft Canada takes the input they get from this survey very seriously. ......

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A little while ago I was part of architecting and leading a project and one of my very talented ex-coworker was in charge of doing most of the branding. He incorporated the Nivo Slider as part of the rotating banner on the home page. It seems like Rotating banners are the thing to do for internet sites these days. I have to admit, done right, they can ......

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I have some basic rules when it comes to checked in code to TFS. The one at the top of the list of rules is that, any developer should get the latest code from TFS, deploy and have a working web part, workflow or any other customization in SharePoint. This means that all dependencies should be deployed with the customization. If the web part uses a ......

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A while back I was helping a client upgrade SharePoint 2007 code to SharePoint 2010 and I came across this interesting problem. I was working web parts that were created in Visual Studio 2008 using WSPBuilder extensions. The first order of business was to convert them to Visual Studio 2010 templates instead of using WSPBuilder 2010 extensions. Why Use ......

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I have been trying to put a staging environment together to upgrade from SharePoint 2007 SP1 to SharePoint 2007 SP2. Then we will run the preupgradecheck command to varify that the database wil upgrade properly. We ran into the infamous error: Issue : Content database with modified database schemas User modifications to the SharePoint content database, ......

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This post is a quick one to post some SharePoint code. This post refers to the post posted by Eric Overfield. Refer to the post to get the full background, but he explains how the OnPreInit event method overrides any MasterPage assignment you might put on your Page Layout. He eludes to the fact that you can use reflector to see that the URL to a master ......

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I have been working with power shell quite a bit lately, I thought I’d write about 3 tips that have helped me. Notice how it is titled, "Helpful"? not "Ground breaking". It includes helpful commands that I have been using and a nice little Script editor that has one feature enough to win me over. Other's have writen about the commands (most of the time ......

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I have had some time this week to try out some tools that I have been meaning to try out. This week I am trying out the SP 2010 Diagnostic Studio. I installed it successfully and tried it on my development evironment. I was able to build a report and a snapshot of the environment. I decided to turn my attention to my Employer's intranet environment. ......

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