I’m presenting at the SharePoint Evolutions Conference 2013 next week in London

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I posted about how amazing this conference is previously and i am getting excited about heading to London on Saturday.

http://www.sharepointevolutionconference.com

I am presenting two sessions next week on Monday and Tuesday on the process of building SharePoint and the other on building modern intranets using search, metadata and blending the old style of hierarchical sites with newer techniques of search based solutions.

P&M308 – Leverage the power of metadata and search driven Intranets

Learn how to take all that chaos and clutter in your organization and move it to an organized discoverable system that enables users to quickly navigate and find documents and information that is most relevant to them.  This is a soup to nuts session on the design decisions, things you need to think about and how to build a purely metadata and search driven Intranet to unlock the full power of your content.

This session is going to be all about building Intranets using the same features and functionality everyone is talking about in 2013 for building public facing internet sites. aka Web Content Management (WCM).  I’ll discuss traditionally structured intranets, hierarchy and storage systems in SharePoint, authoring considerations & a model for blending the old style hierarchical intranets with modern search driven techniques! 

Come and hear how you can leverage some of these new techniques with the old to deliver a great experience for your users whether they like to browse, search or a mixture of both 🙂

-CJ.

Nintex investment announcement and why we should all be excited about it.

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imageFirst … the news:  http://www.nintex.com/en-US/News/Pages/default.aspx#734

Often when people see a company take on an investment like Nintex announced today they scoff and wonder what luxury locations the owners will now be sunning themselves in.  They usually see it as selling out and not what that deal really represents.

I want you to take a pause for a moment and think about what something like this means for the SharePoint industry.  Think about what a deal like this says. 

These folks have decided to invest $222 million (!!  ma-ma-ma-million) in an independent SharePoint business.  They have decided that there is room for that business to grow in a huge way and to get a handsome return on their investment.

This was a business that, when I first got into SharePoint, started with a recycle bin feature for SharePoint document libraries all those many years ago and grew it into a tens of million dollar business.  Nintex Workflow is now THE singularly most widely used ISV application in SharePoint worldwide.  It’s huge.

We (the entire SharePoint community) should all be all stopped dead in our tracks and being blown away about how incredible this is.

This is awesome because it means outsiders view the space as growing and being worthwhile investing in. 

This is awesome because it means those folks out there with an idea and passion can see where it could take them.  It inspires people to make a go of it and bet on their passion and enthusiasm.

And most importantly this is awesome because it means companies like Nintex can raise money and use it to build their business with new amazing products and solve more of the tough problems facing organizations with tools like SharePoint.

Enterprise software doesn’t have the glitz, glamour and absurd hype the consumer market has … but it does have boat loads of value.  Just look at companies like Yammer being bought by Microsoft, Box taking more funding than you can shake any reasonable length stick at & companies like Splunk and WorkDay are rocking along nicely in the enterprise space.

It’s outcomes like this one for Nintex that make our space an exciting one to be in and something we should all pause, consider and congratulate the Nintex team on.  Provoke loves Nintex products and we use them to help our customers everyday.  We can’t wait to see where their next adventures takes them and look forward to being a part of that journey for many years to come.

Congrats to Brett, Brian, Steve, Mike, Ryan, Alberto and the rest of the Nintex crew!!

-Chris.

Exchange online archive awesomeness

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There are two kinds of people in this world when it comes email management:

  • Pilers (derived from pile … warning not a real word)
  • Filers

Pilers – just let their inbox grow to monumental size and rely on search etc… to find things.  There are loads of these people around.  Their inboxes grow to multiple GB and they never file or clear anything out.

Filers – once they read an email and do whatever they need to do they delete it OR file it in a folder somewhere. They rely on both folder hierarchy and search to find email.

I am a filer. I like having a folder for a particular project etc… I cant really say why … but it seems to work best for me.

Now to the point of this post 🙂 …

At Provoke we use Exchange Online for our email system. It rocks. MS look after it for us.  We get 4GM mailbox sizes.

4GB !?!?!? you might say … how on earth do you cope with only 4GB?!?!? That’s what I said. (That is about 1 yr of email for me)

In Exchange Online E3 you can get this nifty feature called an Online Archive.  It lets you stick all sorts of stuff in there and it doesn’t go towards your mailbox quota. 

I have 100GB of this archive which is awesome.

The other thing you need is a way to get mail into that archive.  Enter policy!

When you select a folder in your mailbox in Outlook you can tap the Set Folder Policy button:

image

And then set a Policy to move mail to the archive after it gets to a particular age.  Policies inherit so you don’t have to do this on every folder. 

Then you set the Online Archive setting to a time period after which you want to move email to the archive. In my case I like 6 months.

image

You access it via outlook or OWA just as you normally would.  It shows up along side your mail mailbox.

image

Another cool thing about this is that it frees up space in your offline mail store (OST) on your computer.  The Online Archive is online available online … not when you are offline.

No more email mailbox quota problems.  NICE!

-CJ.

Revisiting SharePoint development 6.5 years later…

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Way back in 2006 I wrote a blog post entitled “Application Development on MOSS 2007 & WSS V3” that discussed the various options for building apps on SharePoint. It’s been by far and away the most viewed blog post I have written. As of writing its sitting at 140,000 views.  

The main point on writing that post 6.5 years ago was to provide a simple summary of the options available for development in SharePoint 2007. At the time those were:

  • Web Parts
  • _Layouts application
  • User Controls
  • ASPX pages added to a site with code behind

Towards the end of the post I summarized the choices in a simple decision matrix (below):

image

Now fast forward to 2013 and the new release of SharePoint 2013 … Most of that matrix still holds true albeit with a couple of minor tweaks. Back when I wrote the original post there was no support for SharePoint built into Visual Studio for example.  Today instead of the Smart Part (thx again Jan Tielens) you can use a Visual WebPart (which is a user control that is compiled down to a server control by Visual Studio, but which gives you the benefits of the visual design surface at design time, unlike a standard WebPart).

Given so long has passed I thought it was about time that I revisited the choices and took a look at what has changed in the last 6.5 years!

Before I go on, I want to reiterate that this is my personal opinion. Many of you won’t agree.  So this is really just a summary of the decision matrix I use in my head when evaluating the options and deciding on the best choice for the situation.

Evolution of the matrix…

Updating this matrix is a lot trickier now we have SharePoint Online where many of the pervious on-prem options don’t exist. e.g. no full trust code.

I went back and forth on deciding what my updated matrix would include. This took a while and, given I am a big proponent of SharePoint Online, I would prefer everyone think about designing their solutions with the possibility of moving to SharePoint Online in future.

Why?  Well in a recent internal email amongst developers here is what I said (some bit snipped):

Apps should be our first choice moving forward.

The reason is simple.  There is no future in Sandbox Solutions or Full trust solutions.

Notice i said “first” .. not only 🙂 When will Sandbox Solutions go away? Shortly after the new app model supports everything you can do in a sandbox solution. MS will deprecate it as fast as they can and then turn it off after giving  everyone a year to re-write their code.

Trust me, MS wants to kill sandbox solutions as fast as they can.  Same with full trust code. It gives SharePoint a bad name when SharePoint fails … even because of code someone else wrote and deployed to it.  The sandbox is too expensive to run in Office 365 and therefore will be shot. To be clear, the goal is to remove any 3rd party code running within a SharePoint process. Doing so will improve the security, scalability and reliability of SharePoint.

Now that might sound a bit harsh … and to be fair I was trying to be … but my point is the long term vision for SharePoint is to not host other peoples code.  The new app model might not be a perfect replacement today … but given time I’m willing to bet it will get better and support more of the things you can’t do today.

Then I went on…

For now we should be thinking Apps first … and augmenting it with sandbox and full trust only when needed.  Otherwise we are painting ourselves in a corner. This is most important for 365 solutions.  Still, 2 years from now we shouldn’t be having to explain ourselves to our customers for painting them into a corner where they can’t migrate to 365 or upgrade to the latest version of SharePoint because of our recommendations. Not good.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying “no sandbox” and “no full trust” … i’m just saying we should be leading with apps first and then backing in sandbox and full trust only when needed.

I like apps because they also mean we are not constrained to what development options SharePoint imposes like MVC or the latest improvements in the .Net framework.  Because your code runs remotely you can run it on anything you like. It could be PHP for example.

<mega tangent> PS: can we start a petition to stop calling the new model the “app  model” and call it something like the “remote code model” that “apps” happen to use. Then we can reserve “apps” for stuff that gets put in the Marketplace. I know this won’t happen but it would be nice 🙂 “Apps” was a bad idea IMHO.</mega tangent>

Back to the matrix…

After going back and forth on it for a while I came to the stark realization that a matrix was no longer required.  Dev has got simpler for a change!

So here is my new “matrix” … or the “Decision List 2013 edition” as I am now calling it:

  1. Design Manager package (on-prem or online)
  2. App for SharePoint (on-prem or online)
  3. Sandbox Web Part (on-prem or online)
  4. Full Trust Web Part (on-prem only)
  5. Full Trust everything else (on-prem only) (_layouts pages etc…)

It’s pretty straightforward when you think about it.  Start with the lightest touch possible and only step down to the next heaviest when you have to.  This might seem screamingly obvious, but it would surprise you (or not) how many developers jump for the most heavy weight option first because it’s the most powerful and they don’t have to think.

Further more option #2  above can be further expanded to:

  1. SharePoint Hosted App
  2. Provider Hosted App

You may notice the absence of the Auto Hosted app type above. This is the option where you package your application and SharePoint will automatically host the application code for you in Azure. Reasons for this are simple A) its not available (yet)  B) it’s horrid (my opinion).  Auto Hosted apps code runs in Azure space managed and controlled by SharePoint Online … not you.  I hate the thought of having to support code running in a location I have no control over and no visibility.  For example, unable to see what is going wrong when a customer calls asking for support.  For the small price you pay hosting in Azure directly via the Provider Hosted model you will reap payback many times over when you need to upgrade your app and or diagnose a support issue and can’t tell what is going on.

Summary…

Regardless of your like or dislike of the new app model there is one thing that is clear … at least to me anyway. That your code will not live inside the SharePoint process in the future. For me, that means thinking about how to start designing solutions with this in mind as to not inadvertently painting yourself into a corner that is costly and painful to get out of.  Sure, there will be situations today that mean you have no other choice to use some sandbox and full trust code.  But …

My words of advice are simple.  Think apps first and fall back to heavier options if needed.

This way over time as the new app model gets better and becomes the starting point for all SharePoint development you will already be ahead of the curve and will have an easier path to the cloud when your customers are ready.

+ ask any developer if they would rather be using MVC, Razor, SignalR etc… my bet is they say “yes”.

-CJ

New Release: Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012

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I vividly remember penning the blog post announcing the Visual Studio Extensions for WSS (VSeWSS 1.2) .  Love them or hate them VSeWSS was the first MS foray into integrated developer tooling for SharePoint developers.  In all honesty VSeWSS was a skunk works project started by some folks in the SharePoint and SPD engineering team.  I inherited them when Alex Malek moved to the IE team.  For the 2010 release I worked pretty closely with Mike Morton from the VS team on what became the SharePoint tooling that you see today.  I am sure Mike and team hit their heads on a wall with the number of times I said we needed features like a content type and list visual designer vs. just XML.  We literally had a feature list 100s of items long and only resources to do ~30 in the first version. We eventually got the list designer a release or so later 🙂

Now we have the next major iteration of those tools that have just released for SharePoint and Office 2013!

Read the announcement here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2013/03/04/now-available-office-developer-tools-for-visual-studio-2012.aspx

Randall also has a write up on them here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/officeapps/archive/2013/03/05/download-the-office-and-sharepoint-visual-studio-tools.aspx

They come complete with fancy colored icons in the new project picker!  (the preview was grey scale). I laugh … but the grey pissed me off for some reason.

Personally I love the mention about Continuous Integration workflows and new debugging features with service bus … and looking forward to getting my sticky hands and playing around some more.

Get them here: http://aka.ms/OfficeDevToolsForVS2012.

Great work @chakkaradeep!!

-CJ.

Don’t invest in SharePoint social…

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(I think I am getting better at outrageous headlines to drag you in to read the post! … please don’t leave)

I recently read Jeremy’s post about picking SharePoint social over Yammer “for right now” and wanted to weigh in on why I think they are not making the call I would have.  It’s all just personal opinion of course and Jeremy and I are close friends and no doubt he will attempt to convince me otherwise over a few beers shortly 🙂

In my humble opinion the only reason you should consider using SharePoint 2013’s social features over Yammer is if your organization is 100% unable to use a cloud based service.

Why?

Because there isn’t a future in SharePoint on-prem social features.  It’s just not what Microsoft does when it changes direction.

When Microsoft takes a bet on something big there are never two options to pick from. There is only one option and the rest is dead to them.  Rightly or wrongly, whether you like it or not, for good or bad … that’s just the way it works.  This basically means that after that speed it approximately takes for one synapse to fire Microsoft and all its muscle (sales and otherwise) stopped selling on-prem social and started selling the new cloud social story like it was never any other way.  You won’t hear anything pitching on-prem social over Yammer and it will only be used as a fall back position if the organization cant use the cloud for whatever reason.

“What should I use for social?  Yammer or the SharePoint newsfeed?”  My answer has been clear: Go Yammer!  Yammer is our big bet for enterprise social, and we’re committed to making it the underlying social layer for all of our products.” – Jared Spataro, Senior Director – SharePoint, Microsoft Corp – 19th March 2013

Update 19th March 2013:  If you want more of a nail in coffin then look no further then Jared’s latest update on the Enterprise Social Roadmap. The quote above is from this post Yammer and SharePoint: Enterprise Social Roadmap Update. If you read that 90% of the post is dedicated to Yammer with a fraction dedicated to “If you are old and clunky and stay on-prem then here is a skinny bone to chew on”.

“Cool” you might say.  “That doesn’t change what you can and can’t do with the product.  On-Prem is still my bag baby!”

If you look at the features, pros and cons and line them up side by side on-prem SharePoint social will win the sprint today … by quite a long margin.

But mark my words … it won’t win the marathon.

Here is my prediction for the next couple of years.  SharePoint on-prem social features might be lucky to get a few new features. Maybe a some in the next update, maybe a few the one after.  But where we really quit the crap and bring on the meat will be in SharePoint + Yammer integration. This is obviously not rocket science given MS just spent $1B+ dollars on it. Everything social in SharePoint Online will be ripped out and replaced/backed by Yammer with deep integrations that don’t exist today.  100% effort will be put into this experience as a first class citizen vs. the on-prem story… sad face … I like on-prem too … but like I mentioned above on-prems dead baby.

Eventually there will be no Yammer. It will just be SharePoint Online with a lot more rocking social features built by a team that deeply understand Enterprise social.  MS didn’t buy Yammer for their customers (they were mostly already SharePoint customers anyway) … they bought them for the kudos in enterprise social and the team of people who get it. Microsoft needs to win enterprise social big time and Yammer are the A game.

So why would I say don’t invest in on-prem social with the SharePoint features you get in 2013 if you can at all help it?

I would put money on there not being a great upgrade story on-prem to whatever comes next in the cloud … if at all. There could be one IF you are using SharePoint social features in 365 today … maybe.

Maybe I will have to eat my hat some day when I look back at these words … but if I were made to pick a winning horse today I would be betting on Yammer and having a smoother path to niceness with future releases.

Sure, this might mean having a muddled and semi painful story now as Jeremy points out in his post. This might mean you need to educate users around using Yammer, doing some work to federate for authentication purposes so you don’t have two logins, doing some integration work to make it easier to post stuff to Yammer from SharePoint etc.…   at least until MS pull the next round of SharePoint integrations with Yammer out of the hat and make things a lot less confusing etc.…

But at the end of the day I would be ok with that vs. being backed into a corner that you cant get out of or have a harder time getting out of.  Even if that means living with a less integrated experience today.

Who knows … I could be 100% totally wrong (in some ways I wish I will be) but maybe I wont and I hope to have saved a few of you from writing a kilotonne of migration code trying to get all those posts, likes and follows moved over to Yammer … but having said that I am sure AvePoint will have a nice migration tool ready for that eventuality anyway … so maybe all this is moot 🙂 PS: AvePoint migration tools rock by the way.

PS: The real moment I will freak out about Social in the enterprise will be when Facebook finally gets around to releasing an Enterprise offering walled garden style social experience for organizations.  I have thought for a while now that it would be “any moment now” … but nada so far.  If that happened and they offered light weight document collab etc.… it would be a game changer.  But maybe zuck is holding off while him and Steve continue their wee love fest while trying to stiff Google. Time will tell I guess.

-CJ.

My first book: Beginning SharePoint 2013 Development

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It was a long time coming and I have wanted to do this for quite some time … but I have just heard that the book I co-wrote with Steve Fox, Donovan Follette and tech edited by Andrew Connell has just been sent to the printers!

As the name suggests … It’s all about starting development on SharePoint 2013.  As you may have read or heard there is quite a bit of new stuff for developers in 2013 and this book aims to serve as a guide for those looking to grapple with those changes.

Topics include …  the new app model, developer tools, Azure, building and packaging apps, publishing in the SharePoint Store, distributing them internal to an organization, OAuth, Client Side OM, REST APIs, integrated SP + Office apps, Remote Event Receivers, Business Connectivity Services, Office Services & Workflow.

A core theme throughout the book is learning about the new development options available in 2013 and how and when to take advantage of them.

I wrote five of the fifteen chapters …

  • Developing, Integrating, and Building Applications
    in SharePoint 2013
  • Packaging, and Deploying SharePoint 2013 Apps
  • Distributing SharePoint 2013 Apps
  • Overview of the Client-Side Object Model and REST APIs
  • Overview of OAuth in SharePoint 2013

Like I mentioned above, writing a book was something I have wanted to do for a while now but never got around to it.  I really have to thank Steve Fox for giving me the opportunity to collaborate on this.

It should be available soon and is already available for pre-order on Amazon:

Get it while its HOT!

-CJ.

My first Windows 8 app

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Logo.scale-80Some of you may know that I make a Windows Phone app called My Trips. It’s a popular companion application for the awesome TripIt.com service.  If you don’t use TripIt to manage your travel plans you are missing out!  You just forward your booking tripit_proPDF or document from your travel agent, hotel, airline or whatever to [email protected] and they magically (nerd alert: read awesome search based entity extraction) parse out all the data and put it into a far for useful format that is accessible on the internet for you.

My Trips lets you sync those plans down to your phone or PC and take them with you when you travel.  As awesome as the world is these days its highly likely you will be stuck without an internet connection at the most inopportune time 🙂

I wrote the first version of My Trips as an experiment when I wanted to take a look at building a phone app for Windows Phone… one thing led to another and nek minnit everyone wants it and I had to make it into a real app and publish it. 

Long story short … it’s used by more people than I had ever hoped 🙂

So when Windows 8 came around people started asking when I would release My Trips for it.  Of course it didn’t take much convincing and I really wanted to try my hand at Win8 development.

So it was a sweet moment last night when I finally finished version 1 of My Trips for Windows and submitted it for certification.  Hopefully nothing major will come up in certification and it will be in the Windows Store soon!

Did you just port the phone version?

To answer the question, no it wasn’t a smooth port at all. In fact I would say 85% of the code is new.  I want to write a few posts about the experience of the move to Windows 8, but for now it is fair to say that the way I built the phone application didn’t exactly lend itself to code sharing.  The phone app wasn’t built with a  nice separation of concerns using something like a pattern like MVVM.  I decided that rather than continue building on the mess I would start almost from scratch and build up with Win8 version using the (excellent) Caliburn Micro framework to facilitate a clean MVVM pattern.

The resultant code is a wonder of cleanliness, maintainability and extensibility that should make it a lot easier to port to other places if needed and maintain more simply.  If you are into clean code I highly recommend taking a look at Caliburn.

So given all I really managed to reuse code wise were a few TripIt API classes and some data model classes it really was quite a bit of work to get the rest written up.  All new Views, View Models, some Models and lots of ancillary code for caching, settings etc…Hence why it took a while longer than I had hoped.

I didn’t end up getting 100% feature parity with the phone application just yet.  That will take a bit more time.  The basics are there however, syncing your trips to your device and viewing them. Additionally things like support for Snapped view in Win8 and “Fill” view (that is the opposite side of the screen to snap view).

Here are a few screenshots of v1:

Splash screen…
1		 Trip list…
2
A flight…
5		 A hotel…
6
Snapped view with another app on the right…
7		  

For the devs reading I chose to write the app in C# and XAML over JS/HTML.  I personally find the C# XAML experience a LOT more productive … especially when you add in tools and frameworks like Caliburn Micro.

Like I said above, I hope to follow up with a few posts about the experience in more detail and about Win 8 development in general. 

Also … drop me a note in the comments or the contact section of the blog if you need any Windows 8 development done.  I know some people 🙂

Thanks,

-Chris Johnson.

New SharePoint Online / SharePoint 2013 version feature comparison matrix…

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The always timely and astute Andrew Connell just alerted me to the new SharePoint Online / SharePoint 2013 feature comparison matrix that MS published.

Here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj819267.aspx

Nothing too surprising … the E3 plan is the plan to buy still if you want a “full” online SharePoint Online experience. Nothing has changed in that regard.

Notable things you will notice missing if you don’t go with an E3 or higher:

  • Business Connectivity Services (BCS), External Lists etc…, BCS Web Parts
  • InfoPath Form Services
  • eDiscovery features, holds, exchange integration etc…
  • Office Pro Plus
  • Video Search
  • All BI features

(the list above is not exhaustive and are really the ones I noticed and felt were interesting)

What is of real note is what is missing from SharePoint Online all together. This isn’t news to anyone who has been playing around with the preview … but for a lot of people I speak to these are not well known.

The biggest thing (IMHO) missing are around WCM features. Things like Content By Search Web Part, Catalogs, Topic Pages, Faceted navigation and Image Renditions are all pretty critical new features in SharePoint 2013 that are not currently available online. (they might be turned on later on at some point no doubt). This is a bit of a disappointment for those looking to build out search driven web sites.

For on SharePoint 2013 on premises the biggest “ouch” worth mentioning in my view is again WCM. 

Pretty much all the new search driven WCM features are only included in SharePoint 2013 Enterprise.  WCM Catalog, Facted Navigation, Image Renditions, Multiple Domains, Topic Pages, Content by Search etc…

Another odd thing I noticed was that Site Definitions were marked as not being included in Standard.  This is weird and I suspect is wrong … but I have not checked it for myself yet.

Side Note: External Lists anomaly.  For those with a keen eye might have seen that External Lists are included in the Foundation edition. Where as a lot of the other BCS related features are not.  Reason: This is because of where the plumbing for External Lists sits.  When we implemented this (I was the program manager who owned the external lists feature for 2010) we changed the SPList object so that you could access data in an External List the with the same SPList object model calls as you would with a regular list. Because this is a fairly deeply rooted object in the OM it’s part of the Foundation edition … and therefore in the 2010 release of SharePoint a lot of the BCS engine and core plumbing was moved to SharePoint Foundation from SharePoint Server to enable this SPList OM over external lists scenario. Bit of background for those still reading 🙂

-CJ.

PS: the fact that MS have published this means General Avalability and announcements around SharePoint Online upgrades should be coming soon … hopefully Smile

WordPress and SharePoint architecture similarities and … who moved my blog?

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Other than WordPress and SharePoint sharing similar a capitalization strategy I noticed some other similarities…

When I left MS just over a year ago I decided that I would move from my older (and far more popular) MSDN blog. It was on an old blog engine that wasn’t great and didn’t offer the stuff the new cool kids were doing.  So I started looselytyped.net and hosted it on wordpress.com.  It was super simple to set up and wordpress.com did a lot of it for me.

WordPress.com is like SharePoint Online in many respects. It’s a hosted version of WordPress and because it is hosted there are things that the hoster lets you fiddle with and things they don’t let you fiddle with. Much like in SharePoint Online you don’t get to poke around under the covers of SharePoint like you can with SharePoint on-prem.

WordPress Plugins … aka full trust solutions

WordPress has a concept of plugins.  In SharePoint land this is the equivalent of full trust solutions being installed on your farm.  Obviously (like SharePoint Online) WordPress.com doesn’t let you add these since they could do anything to the server they like and effect other customers. SharePoint Online is the same, Microsoft want to preserve the stability and security of the system for everyone hosted there.

SNAGHTML39eed8c

See the similarities between WordPress and SharePoint now? 🙂

Where SharePoint is evolving is in how we get around this limitation of not being able to add functionality in a pluggable but secure and manageable manner.

Step 1: A more secure plugin model … aka Sandboxed Solutions

In SharePoint 2010 Sandboxed Solutions were introduced to offer a sandboxed execution environment for your code. This was far more limited in what you could do in there, but at least it offered some form of online friendly pluggable system.  I was working on the team that owned Sandboxed Solutions in the SharePoint 2010 release & at the time it seemed like a great solution. Remember this was before Azure existed. This was 2.5 years prior to 2010 releasing and “the cloud” was still being called “servers in a datacenter” by most people.

Step 2: An even more secure and flexible plugin model … aka SharePoint Apps

Hindsight is a wonderful thing and looking back Sandboxed Solutions is the wrong model long term. Hosting other peoples code is hard and there are better places to do that than in SharePoint i.e. Azure.

The new SharePoint App model offering remotely hosted code is a far better model going forward in my opinion.  It’s not that I am deeply into “apps” as such … it’s more that this new model offers interesting new plumbing and APIs that developers can use (see SharePoint’s new Plumbing, great for developer).

Where to from here?

Back to WordPress … it doesn’t yet offer a solutions like this (AFAIK). Plugins are full trust solutions that are installed.  In a similar vein Microsoft CRM offers a sandbox where code can run etc…

I wonder when we will see more products like WordPress and MS CRM move to the same architectural model as SharePoint 2013 for custom code and plugins?

I expect to see the new SharePoint App model, or more correctly, the plumbing and APIs that support the app model to evolve in the coming releases fairly rapidly. Allowing us to do more than is possible today and build solutions that integrate with SharePoint in new and interesting ways. The Sandbox has turned out to be a dead end and the new way forward is getting code out of the host process and into better suited places like Azure.

So what is your point Chris?

Oh … well I started writing this post to fill you in on my blog moving. Its still WordPress … but I decided I wanted plugins and all the stuff WordPress.com doesn’t offer.

So I moved my blog to run on WordPress on Azure Web Sites.

Yes I know this sounds like I am advocating for full trust solutions in SharePoint … really I’m not 🙂 SharePoint has a better long term solution for those now 🙂

I wanted the ability to add plugins and get at features in WordPress not offered in the WordPress.com hosted option.

+ I am a big Azure fan … keep up the great work @ScottGu

I won’t regurgitate all the steps to get WP running in Azure … but will point to a couple of helpful posts from John Papa who recently did a similar move.

http://www.johnpapa.net/wordpress-on-azure/
http://www.johnpapa.net/azurecleardbmysql/

One thing I will mention is that I had a hard time getting Azure configured to serve my site on both looselytyped.net and www.looselytyped.net.  Azure Web Sites recently added support for “naked domains” aka… domains without the “www” on the front.  I found it a wee bit tricky to set up due to the requirement to set up a dummy CNAME DNS record so that Azure can check the DNS settings … so in case you are wondering how to do this I have a few screen shots below.

My DNS is hosted with GoDaddy … and the first thing you need to do is add a special CNAME DNS record that Azure checks for.

You need to create an alias for “awverify” and point it at “awverify.<your azure name>.azurewebsites.net … see below…

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Then in the Azure management portal click the manage domains button to map domain names to your web site

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Here is my setup…

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In order for Azure to allow me to add www.looselytyped.net I needed to set up a CNAME record that pointed at looselytyped.azurewebsites.net

In the same vein … Azure would only allow me to add the “naked domain” (looselytyped.net) once I had added the CNAME for “awverify” and point it at “awverify.<your azure name>.azurewebsites.net.

Anyway … I hope this helps the next person who gets stuck trying to get their Azure web site running on a root “naked” domain.  It stumped me for a while and the documentation wasn’t 100% clear.

Thanks,

-CJ.