Entries for the 'Consulting Services' Category

SharePoint 2013 uses the AppFabric Caching Service to centralize all caches that are used by SharePoint. The distributed cache is used by many features including Authentication, Newsfeed, Security, Page Loading, Workflows, and more. While Microsoft claims that SharePoint’s use of the Distributed Cache greatly increases performance, the service is also quite unreliable and difficult to troubleshoot. Hopefully they will write more documentation and improve the product with the release of SP1...

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DMC has earned the status of Microsoft CRM Certified Software Advisor. This certification recognizes DMC’s investment and dedication to implementing a superior CRM application while providing knowledge and support to its CRM customers. This new competency demonstrates DMC’s expertise in planning and implementing a CRM solution through customization of the CRM application to fit the needs of its customers. Microsoft awards Software Advisor Certifications to partners who have demons...

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Have you considered moving some of your business systems into the cloud? This year our Microsoft Consulting Services practice has seen a significant increase in Office 365 projects. A move from on-premise Exchange to Exchange Online or choosing one of the Office 365 bundled cloud offerings is especially compelling for small and medium size businesses. To help you better understand Microsoft's cloud offerings and decide if a move to the cloud is right for your business, DMC has created a v...

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Reporting is almost a universal requirement for new projects coming into DMC these days. As part of an HMI we developed for a customer we also installed SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) on a Siemens PLC. This is used to generate reports for production batches run on that PLC. The customer desired these reports to be in PDF format, which after some investigation was easy to do with SSRS. A little background on SSRS... SSRS is a web application that generates nice graphical reports from SQL...

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If you missed this Webinar, DMC has created an Office 365 Video Series that explains some of the benefits & drawbacks and allows you to see Office 365 in action. DMC will be hosting a complimentary webinar on Wednesday, August 14th (10am - 11am CDT) for organizations who are interested in learning more about Microsoft's Office 365 cloud offerings - Office Pro Plus, Office Web Apps, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, and CRM. Is your business facing any of these scenarios? Growing in...

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Recently, I encountered a very frustrating issue with SharePoint 2013. I had a working web application and everything was running fine. After configuring a few sites in my web application, I started getting emails from other users of the site saying that they were getting Access Denied errors whenever they tried to access the root site collection (ex. https://sharepoint2013/). I went to that path and was very surprised to find that I, a site collection administrator with Full Control permissi...

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What is different between the SharePoint 2010 and 2013 workflow engines?  Here are a few new features we find most relevant to our clients.  With the 2013 designer, we can now:  Query almost anything:   The addition of Call HTTP web service as a designer action extends the reach of workflows without resorting to custom code.  Within SharePoint, an HTTP call can query or change list data even on other sites.  Externally, we can interface with other...

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I am very excited to announce that DMC has achieved Microsoft Cloud Accelerate Partner status, a distinction shared with only one percent of Microsoft partners worldwide.  The Microsoft Cloud Accelerate Partner Program is designed to recognize and reward high performing partners that have a proven track record of delivering Microsoft cloud solutions to their customers. DMC’s cloud services focus on Office 365, which includes SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, CRM Online,...

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If you missed this event, DMC has created an Office 365 Video Series that explains some of the benefits & drawbacks and allows you to see Office 365 in action.  DMC will be hosting complimentary breakfast events on June 18 and June 19 for organizations interested in taking advantage of Microsoft's Office 365 cloud offerings.   Is your business facing any of these scenarios?   1.  Growing in size and looking for technology to help meet your bus...

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Microsoft's "New Office 365" plan lineup for 2013 is pretty extensive, providing customers with many choices to consider. Since you cannot change plan families (more on this later), it is critical to be aware of a few subtle, but key details that differentiate the new plans from one another. If you are unsure if moving to the Office 365 cloud is a good move for your organization, here are a few scenarios that often drive businesses to move to the Office ...

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SharePoint offers a little-known but incredibly useful feature allowing for bulk adds, updates, and deletes of list items via the SPWeb.ProcessBatchData method. The usage is a bit complex because you need to pass CAML markup to the method to perform the operation on multiple list items. This CAML must contain the list item ID, list GUID, and relevant column names and values in an XML collection. There are numerous examples throughout the web showing how to write this CAML for manipulating list i...

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As DMC's Marketing Coordinator, I'm proud to announce the relaunch of DMC's website. The enhanced website contains a host of new and improved features that better reflect the needs and experience of our visitors. Aiming for a more navigable and aesthetically pleasing user experience, we've employed a Metro-style (think Windows 8) layout throughout the site. Our new video library provides quick and compelling information on everything from DMC customer projects to company outin...

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Have you heard about the new SharePoint 2013 but not quite sure if you are ready to take the plunge? Here is a glimpse of what’s new that may help swing your decision.   Look and Feel  The SharePoint user interface has overall been revamped in 2013. The user interface is very graphic and updated. Graphic tiles are now used in lieu of text to display the options when visiting a page.           User Interface   Use...

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DMC is proud to announce that it has achieved Gold Partner status within the Microsoft Partner Network for the ninth consecutive year.  Microsoft uses Gold Status Competencies to identify top partners in specific solution areas.  DMC earned gold status this year for the Application Development (custom .NET application development) and Collaboration and Content (SharePoint solutions). DMC ranks among the top 3% of more than 64,000 Microsoft partners worldwide who have ...

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Anyone that has worked with SharePoint 2010 workflows knows what a valuable tool they can be for a variety of tasks. However, list workflows in particular suffer from a reusability problem. While site and reusable workflows are by design (and definition) reusable, list workflows are tied to a specific list. That does not mean that there are cases when copying or moving the workflow to a different site is a desired action. I recently ran into an issue when I wanted to ...

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Today I had to restore user authentication on a SharePoint farm. The farm had been functional yesterday, but upon arriving into work this morning users would get a low-level error message when trying to log in. Microsoft pushed out some security patches yesterday for Windows Server 2008 R2. A discussion of some of the problems encountered by users can be found here. I found that on this farm, the Forefront Identity Manager Synchronization Service failed to start, which in turn broke the Us...

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As I explained in a previous post, a client had need of copying appointments from an Exchange shared calendar to a SharePoint calendar. I recently encountered a bug in calendar lists that I thought I should share. The task was to populate a SharePoint calendar with appointments from Exchange. Exchange appointments have a unique ID that I was using in SharePoint, but this ID is re-used for instances of a recurring appointment. In order to differentiate instances of recurring appointments, I wo...

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At DMC, we have been using Microsoft CRM for quite some time.  The Outlook client makes using CRM much simpler and allows for many features to be readily accessible. It is easy to look up contacts, track emails in CRM, and see CRM tasks in the Outlook task bar, among many other great features. My one complaint was that emails tracked in CRM were displayed with a CRM icon:  This feature was nice, since it let me know when emails were b...

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 SharePoint 2013 RTM was released recently to MSDN subscribers, and I have been reading up on some of its features since then. I'll provide an overview of what to expect from SharePoint 2013. In-place upgrades from SharePoint 2010 are not supported. This means that a new farm will have to be created, and 2010 content upgraded by the database attach method. The database attach method supports both content databases and service application databases now. Web parts can be h...

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SharePoint external data columns are an invaluable tool when drawing data from sources outside SharePoint, as I reported in previous blog entries. Whether the data exist in SQL Server, a WCF web service, or elsewhere, external data columns can integrate this data with out-of-the-box SharePoint lists. External data columns do however have one major disadvantage. Unlike external lists, external data columns cache the information drawn from the external content type within SharePoint. While the ...

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