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Introducing Team Mud Pointers!

It is very exciting to introduce you all to our team the Mud Pointers!

This is a team I started putting together for the Mud Challenger event happening on Saturday, August 17th. This will be an awesome day, especially because it benefits the wounded warriors who have risked everything to protect our freedom! Also, make new friends in the SharePoint Community.

The Mud Challenger is the ultimate obstacle course challenge, featuring a 2-4 mile mud-trodden course with grueling, unpredictable obstacles, designed by Navy Seals and Black Ops. MudChallenger is more than just a mud run, it’s the ultimate challenge that encourages teamwork and demands endurance. Not to mention, the entire course and obstacles are a secret.

So who wants to join me?

I am hoping to grow the team along within the Houston SharePoint community and to have a glorious time with everybody! I also plan to lose 20 lbs. as I train and add healthy years back into my life.

If you are interested, please join the Mud Pointers registration here>>  and once you have registered, please order your Awesome Mud Pointer Tee right here>>

Make sure you order your Mud Pointers Team T-shirt by July 15 so you can benefit from the free shipping!

Please see the instructions on how to order and personalize your t-shirt below. We have set it all up so you can join us very easily 🙂

You can also have these instructions handy by downloading them here>>

1. Click design link
2. Click on ‘Edit This Design’

3. Once in the design lab click ‘rotate’ to the upper left hand side of the lab next to ‘sleeve print’

4. Click on ‘LAST NAME’ so that a blue text box shows up around the text

5. To the left of the lab under ‘new text | edit text” and place your name, then click on “update”

6. Once you enter your last name click ‘save/send’ at the bottom of the lab right next to ‘get quote’

7. Name your design and enter your email address, then click ‘Save Design’

8. Once your design is saved go back into the lab and click ‘get quote’

9. Enter the size you would like then click ‘Get Quote’

10. Follow the instructions once you enter your zip code

11. Once you see your quote click ‘Buy Now’ and then follow the instructions to check out for your shirt

12. If you have any questions about placing this order then please contact Amanda Werth at CustomInk.  She can be reached at 1-800-293-4232 and ask for Amanda Werth.

Let’s do this!!!

SharePoint Fest DC August 2013

I am very excited to be participating in the Sharepoint Fest DC in August 2013! I hope the attendance is great and look forward to learning and sharing knowledge with different audiences!
I invite all of you to register for the event early since the prices will increase on May 31/2013 –> register here!, who wouldn’t want to do an early bird registration for this great event? 🙂

Enter the code Culver100DC when you register for an extra $100 off !  Please make sure you enter it exactly as it is here (pesky spaces will cause for it not to work)

Some of my sessions include topics such as:

SharePoint 2013 Extranets: How will SharePoint 2013 connect you to your partners?
How will SharePoint 2013 allow organizations to collaborate and share knowledge with clients and partners? SharePoint empowers organization to build extranet sites and partner portals inexpensively and securely. Learn about the Product Catalog site template and how you can to use it. Learn about the new improvements in SharePoint 2013 regarding extranets. Learn how SharePoint 2013 can help your organization open its doors to its clients and partners securely.

Build scalable SharePoint 2013 Staged Workflows to run locally and in the Cloud
SharePoint 2013 now supports two workflow platforms. We will walk through using the two workflow platforms and how they are different. We will configure the SharePoint 2013 Workflow Manager and build a workflow that can run locally and in the Azure cloud seamlessly.

You will be able to attend technical classes and seminars (view full agenda here>>) – taught by Microsoft Certified Trainers, Microsoft engineers and Microsoft MVPs where there will be sessions created for SharePoint administrators, software developers, information architects and knowledge workers which will guarantee to truly help you leverage SharePoint in your current environment.

SharePoint 2013 Extranets: How will SharePoint 2013 connect you to your partners?

This SharePoint Saturday in Houston was one of the best so far, we even trended on twitter (#SPSHOU trending on Twitter and that Fox 26 News picked it up).  The audience was great with excellent questions.  I had a great time.  Here are my slides for my session:

SharePoint 2013 Extranets: How will SharePoint 2013 connect you to your partners?

Learn how SharePoint 2013  will allow organizations to collaborate and share knowledge with clients and partners:

• SharePoint empowers organization to build extranet sites and partner portals inexpensively and securely.
• Learn about the Product Catalog site template and how you can to use it.
• Learn about the new improvements in SharePoint 2013 regarding extranets.
• Learn how SharePoint 2013 can help your organization open its doors to its clients and partners securely.

For a detail schedule of the event, visit the SharePoint User Group Schedule

View PDF here>>

Some topics discussed in  my session include:

• Extranet Definition
• Extranet Design Considerations & Challenges
• Common Extranet Scenarios and Topologies
• SharePoint Authentication
• Mixed Mode vs. Multi-Authentication
• Extranet Portal Structures
• Mobile and Device Channels

SharePoint Fest 2013 Denver Presentations

Wow, this year attendance was great.  Everyone has been asking outstanding questions and seem to be exactly the right audience.  I appreciate everyone who has attended my sessions.  Please find the slide decks and files here. I also have posted the slides over on slideshare.com.

wf102 – Build scalable SharePoint 2013 Staged Workflows to run locally and in the Cloud

SharePoint 2013 now supports two workflow platforms. We will walk through using the two workflow platforms and how they are different. We will configure the SharePoint 2013 Workflow Manager and build a workflow that can run locally and in the Azure cloud seamlessly.

Attendee Takeaways:

1. Understanding both of the SharePoint 2013 Workflow architectures.
2. Learn to setup and configure the SharePoint 2013 Workflow Manager.
3. Learn to build staged workflows and run them in the local or the Microsoft Azure cloud

Slides as Slideshare

Slides Here

sia203 – Boost the Performance of SharePoint Today!

Is your farm struggling to server your organization? How long is it taking between page requests? Where is your bottleneck in your farm? Is your SQL Server tuned properly? Worried about upgrading due to poor performance? We will look at various tools for analyzing and measuring performance of your farm. We will look at simple SharePoint and IIS configuration options to instantly improve performance. I will discuss advanced approaches for analyzing, measuring and implementing optimizations in your farm as well as Performance Improvements in SharePoint 2013.

Slides as Slideshare

Slides Here

SharePoint Fest 2012 Chicago Presentations Delivered

I just finished my sessions at SharePoint Fest Chicago 2012. I want to thank everyone who came. There where many great questions which I will follow up with on this blog post. Feel free to ask additional questions and I will reply as quickly as I can.

Here are my slides and supporting code/scripts:

SIA 102 – SharePoint 2010 Extranets and Authentication: How will SharePoint 2010 connect you to your partners?

How will SharePoint 2010 allow organizations to collaborate and share knowledge with clients and partners? SharePoint empowers organization to build extranet sites and partner portals inexpensively and securely. Learn what exactly is Claims Based Authentication and how can to use it. Learn about the new multi-authentication mode in SharePoint 2010. Learn how SharePoint 2010 can help your organization open its doors to its clients and partners securely.

SPFest2012Chicago-Extranets & Claims Authentication

 

SIA 202 – Boost the Performance of SharePoint Today!

Is your farm struggling to server your organization? How long is it taking between page requests? Where is your bottleneck in your farm? Is your SQL Server tuned properly? Worried about upgrading due to poor performance? We will look at various tools for analyzing and measuring performance of your farm. We will look at simple SharePoint and IIS configuration options to instantly improve performance. I will discuss advanced approaches for analyzing, measuring and implementing optimizations in your farm.

SPFest2012Chicago-SP2010 Performance

 

The Executive Governance Primer

The last couple of months, I have spent significant amounts of time working on helping organizations improve their governance over SharePoint.  Some companies have failed many times over and spent very large amounts of money with no real “value” to demonstrate.   I have been looking for a book that I could hand to key executives and stakeholders to understand the magnitude of the task at hand, but also provide a roadmap towards implementing it.  So I ran into this book, “Microsoft SharePoint for Business Executives Guide”, which provides an excellent book to provide to help everyone get on the same page.  Here is my summary from Amazon:

“This is a great book for executives, directors, managers and other key decision makers working on building a roadmap around SharePoint governance and strategy. The question and answer format is used to organize the sections around key challenges, but it also focuses on prescribing an actionable response. The various sections offer high level guidance in several key areas, such SharePoint in the cloud to on-site hosting, understanding roles and responsibilities to growing proper SharePoint teams, and maintaining and supporting the platform. Most importantly, this book emphasizes on leveraging the capabilities of SharePoint, and supporting this robust and complex platform. I recommend this book for everyone who has a SharePoint environment and is looking to mature the platform properly.”

This guide is a great start and roadmap for any organization looking to use SharePoint fully.

http://www.packtpub.com/microsoft-sharepoint-for-business-executives-guide/book

BCS Column Limit

This is not new news, but I couldn’t find information on it at first.  Most BCS examples and implementations tend to be small so you don’t see this often:

 

[box type=”info”] Application definition import failed. The following error occurred: Cannot create more than ’20’ IIdentifier objects per IEntity object. Error was encountered at or just before Line: ‘199’ and Position: ’14’. [/box]

In a nutshell, you cannot load more than 20 identifiers per the BCS specification (even if the BCS tools allow you to add more).

SharePoint 2010 BCS Identifier Element

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.office.server.applicationregistry.metadatamodel.entity.aspx

SharePoint 2007 BDC Identifier Element

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms567126%28v=office.12%29.aspx

Hope this helps someone.

Office 365 and Outlook 2010: Handle various email addresses

Thought I would share a piece of useful information regarding the use “other emails” in Exchange online.  Traditionally, an account is created with an email address for handling public and shared email accounts.  In Office 365, you can add “other emails” to an account to save the cost of adding additional accounts.  In order to identify the emails coming in from the difference email addresses, you can use a server rule looking into the internet header information.

In my case, the email I am looking for is info@myemail.com.  I created a new blank rule and use the condition “with <specific words> in the message header”.  Then you can create whatever action is deemed proper.

Done!

SharePoint Saturday The Conference in Washington, DC on Aug 11-13, 2011 Slides

Here are my slides and demo scripts/code for my two presentations at the SharePoint Saturday The Conference in Washington, DC on Aug 11-13, 2011

• SharePoint 2010 Extranets and Authentication: How will SharePoint 2010 connect you to your partners?
  
  http://www.spstc.org/SitePages/Sessions.aspx?SessionID=11

Here is the Extranet FBA Scripts and Code:
SPSTC2011 – Extranets & Claims Authentication_Demo

• Boost the Performance of SharePoint Today!
  
  http://www.spstc.org/SitePages/Sessions.aspx?SessionID=12

SharePoint Saturday The Conference 2011 – SP2010 Performance

View more presentations from Brian Culver

Here is the Performance Scripts and Code:
SPSTC2011-SP2010 Performance Scripts