Windows Azure

When I first heard about SharePoint Online at the PDC 2008 I was a bit disappointed that you could not use custom code but had to rely on the built-in functionality and the things you could do with SharePoint Designer (which is quite powerful anyway, especially with jQuery). To read more about SharePoint online, head over to Tobias Zimmergrens blog. But with some clever techniques you can take advantage of the Windows Azure Hosted Services and create your custom code. I will show you how to create some custom code, which normally is done by SharePoint event receivers or timer jobs, using a Worker Role in Windows Azure.

A year and a half ago I posted the Visual guide to Windows Live ID authentication with SharePoint 2010 series, a post that got a tremendously amount of hits (and still gets) and tons of comments (and new ones still coming in). It showed quite a cumbersome way to Live ID enable your SharePoint 2010 Web Applications using the Microsoft Service Manager, MSM, (which works some times and some times not). Although it did/do work it is not the best way to enable Live ID authentication to your SharePoint 2010 web site. The MSM required you to first test in their INT environment and get approval before putting it into production, and you had to follow a set of guidelines on how to use Live ID logos etc etc, not mentioning all the manual configuration.

A couple of days ago I started the migration of my blog to the new and shiny Windows Azure Web Sites (AWS - I don’t think that acronym is a co-incidence) and the Orchard CMS platform. The whole reason behind doing this migration is that I felt the need for a more modern (and stable) platform than the one I’ve built from scratch, years ago, and of course that I want to fiddle with some new toys. So, here is a short story on how I did the migration.

YES! I’m finally alive with a new hosting provider - this time it’s Microsoft (who could have guessed that!). Thanks to the just released Azure Web Sites I have now moved my blog from my old custom blog implementation (that has been a fun project though), to running Orchard on Azure Web Sites using SQL Azure. This finalizes my cloud migrations - last year I moved e-mail and everything but the site to Office 365 and started with a hosted service for this site, but for running this little blog that was a bit to expensive (you’re not clicking the ads enough).

Another post you think! Does this guy have a life? Well, actually I do. But once you get me started , I’m hard to stop… This sixth post in the Visual guide to Azure Access Controls Services authentication with SharePoint 2010 is going to show you how to leverage some of the features that Azure ACS provides you with when using Facebook as Identity Provider. I’m going to show you how to use the Facebook Graph API and retrieve information about the user (and possible his/hers friends) - this is of interest if you’re going to build a community or something similar on top of SharePoint 2010. For instance we can use the information from Facebook and push into the SharePoint 2010 User Profile service once the user has signed up..

This is the fifth post in the Visual guide to Azure Access Control Services authentication with SharePoint 2010 and this time it is time to augment some claims using the Azure ACS. We’ll do this to prepare for the next exciting part. For this post I assume you have configured at least one Web Application to use Facebook login using Azure ACS - make sure that you’ve followed post 1 and post 3 and optionally post 4 thoroughly.

This post serves as an index for all the articles in the Visual guide to Azure Access Controls Services authentication with SharePoint 2010. This series is a set [not yet determined amount] of articles where I show you how to leverage the Azure Access Controls Services (ACS) in combination with SharePoint 2010 to make it easier for you to use identity providers such as Google ID, Windows Live ID, Facebook AuthN etc.

Back with another promised post in the Visual guide to Azure Access Controls Services authentication with SharePoint 2010. This time I’m going to show you how to work with multiple web applications. We’re going to use the stuff we configured in part 1 (basic setup) and part 3 (Facebook setup), and hopefully we’re avoiding the problems discussed in part 2 (common problems). Scenario In this article I would like to show you how to use Azure ACS and SharePoint 2010 when we have multiple Web Applications in SharePoint. The sample will assume the same web application as used in the previous posts, but now with a dedicated My Site Host Web Application (called http://my). If we just enable the same Trusted Identity Provider to the “My” Web Application, the user will be redirected to the Azure ACS log in page, but when he/she is redirected back it will redirect back to the other web application (called http://sp2010 in the previous posts), because that’s the web application we configured in the Return URL in Azure ACS.

Welcome back to a third post in the Visual Guide to Azure Access Control Services authentication with SharePoint 2010. In the first part I showed you how to do the basic configuration of Azure ACS and SharePoint 2010 and log in using a Google Id. The second part discussed the most common problems I’ve seen so far. In this post we’ll continue extending the ACS Relying Party to support another Identity Provider - namely Facebook! Depending on what type of site/community you’re trying to build with your SharePoint 2010 site it might be of interest to use Facebook login (they have like a gazillion of users or something). The Facebook AuthN parts are a bit different than the others OOB IP’s in Azure ACS - but not complicated at all, so let’s get started…

This is a the second part of the Visual guide to Azure Access Control Services authentication with SharePoint 2010. I hope you’ve read part 1 which showed you how to configure SharePoint 2010 to use Windows Azure Access Control Services, ACS, as the federated Identity Provider, IP. In this post I’ll go through the most common errors that you might stumble upon (most likely due to the fact that you didn’t follow part 1 thoroughly). These errors are also applicable to other providers such as ADFS.

Back in the saddle from another TechDays event here in Sweden. This year it was all about the cloud! It was as always a great show and an awesome party. Thank you Microsoft, all presenters, all attendees and sponsors. I did two sessions - or actually one session divided into two segments about Office 365 and Windows Azure. I tried to squeeze in as much cloud technology as I could in a one big demo. For those who attended - I hope you enjoyed it. If you want to go back to the slides or take a look at the demo code you can find them below. The sessions were also recorded so you can enjoy them in full glory (keep an eye on the TechDays site for more information).

Introduction Microsoft SharePoint contains functionality for Records Management, which essentially is a storage for documents that you would like to store and manage in a separate records center to meet certain legal or other requirements or just to make backups of certain document revisions. To be able to create a Records Center you need to have Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS). On the other hand you only need Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS) to send documents to the Records Center.

Now sitting here at LAX and reflecting over what we have experienced during the PDC 2008 the last few days. We learned a lot about technical stuff and what’s growing up in Redmond, but I think the most important stuff is what’s happening to the software business in large. With Windows Azure as the first large scale service host and with the number of online services that Microsoft will release in the upcoming years we have a real challenge to adapt to these new business models. Not only Microsoft is running this way, just look at Amazon and others, but Microsoft have such an effect on a large number of users.