My 24 Hours with Microsoft Surface

When Microsoft announced the preorder for the Surface, I couldn't resist it. I went ahead and ordered the Surface RT 64 Gig one. The device has a real beautiful display and the add on keyboard is wonderful. I should say that this tablet has the best support for typing hands down (I own my fair share of tablets of different kinds).

IE looks gorgeous along with Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote. The multitasking is pretty cool and so are the gestures for doing various other things. Here is a screenshot of Netflix & Facebook side by side on the Surface.



And I just love the Live Tiles (Wish Apple had something this cool).



IMHO, it would have been much more better if Microsoft had worked closely with more people on the apps side and come up with a much tighter social integration etc. But I should say that the device has a good potential in terms of hardware and when more apps get added to the store, this one should be able to offer some serious competition to the iPad and another Android based tablets.

Until this moment, not a single app has crashed on me nor has Windows itself and that is giving me a good feeling. I hope Microsoft will do its best to keep this market competitive and active.

Now it is time for me to fire up my Visual Studio to see what I can do to get something quick & dirty on the Surface. I'll keep you folks posted on what I come up with ASAP. (I am still unpacking boxes from my move to a new place over the weekend). And guess what? I wrote this whole Post on the Surface using IE.

There is something that made me feel unhappy. Silverlight doesn't run on this one. Should I say Yet? I'm quite unsure of that St this point.


Don't know how to make a screenshot on your Surface? Just hold the Windows Key down and while doing so, press and hold the Volume down key for a second and your screen shot will be saved to a folder under Pictured.

SharePoint 2013 - WCM - Incorporating Videos into Pages

A while ago I was working on a project for a client who needed to incorporate quite a few videos into their SharePoint portal. Needless to say the process wasn't easy or friendly. But with the advent of SharePoint 2013 this pain is going to go away!

 

SharePoint Conference 2012 @ Las Vegas

Hello Everyone,
I'll be along with my team at the SharePoint Conference that's happening at Las Vegas, NV. Visit The SharePoint Conference Website to get more details about the event.

Also I'll be in the conference on behalf of my employer (Microexcel Inc.) and we will be there to share our success stories on a variety of work that we've done on the SharePoint side in all these years. Feel free to drop in at Booth #237 to learn more about our service offerings & our experience in the world of SharePoint. Feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions about the event & I'd be glad to get back to you ASAP.

Testing & Consolidating Results for SharePoint 2010 Content Databases using PowerShell

One of the most common things that people do during a migration from older versions of SharePoint into the 2010 version is using the PowerShell's Test-SPContentDatabase cmdlet to see how healthy the database is. When this test is performed, the cmdlet produces some results that will be very instrumental in figuring out what is going on with the database. In environments where we have a smaller number of content databases this is a very easy thing to do, but what does one do when there are several hundred databases with terabytes of content? I ended up in a situation like this and I decided to go & write a script using PowerShell that will come to my rescue.

Deleting Inaccessible SharePoint 2010 Lists or Libraries using PowerShell

Some times it happens so that there's a custom list out there in your SharePoint 2007 environment, but for some reason you don't have the definition of the list with which the list / library was created. This will create a situation wherein you won't be able to access these lists after you migrate them to SharePoint 2010, because their definitions aren't available in the SharePoint 2010 environment. In situations like this, you will not be able to access the list and would probably want to get rid of them from the system. If that sounds something that you've been into, then read on...

Add / Remove Site Collection Administrator to All Site Collections

One fine morning, your boss could walk up to you and say that he wants a particular user to be added to all the site collections in a web application or could go one step further and say that this user needs to be added as a site collection administrator to all the site collections across all the web applications in a farm. You might think that....it shouldn't be all that difficult. There are just a handful of site collections in my web application. But well my situation was that there were not a handful but a few hundred handful of those. In fact about 700 of them in just one web application.

LDAP - FBA - SharePoint 2010 - The Missing Piece

Recently I was trying to setup a SharePoint 2010 site with FBA that uses an LDAP provider. I looked up for instructions & I was able to find a tonne  of material on how to do this and everyone had given nice snippets of the web.config stuff. But what most (every post that I checked out) people missed was that they need to put in the default role provider within the Secure Token Service's configuration file as well. And this needs to be set to the same thing that you have on the web application that uses the FBA.