Mannu Alag

Scalability IS NOT Elasticity

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In my last post about the cloud, I had left out a question discussing about scalability and elasticity. During my discussions and reading about cloud and learning more about it, I was always confused about the words “Scalability” and “Elasticity” in context of cloud. Most of the times, I had found these are being used interchangeably.

But what we need to understand is that Scalability‎ IS NOT Elasticity. Now what do you mean by that? Let’s start by examining what are the meanings of these words.

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What the hell is cloud?

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This was the question pointed right at me, while at a party, when I told a bunch of guys that I work on SharePoint solutions on cloud. It was an awkward situation to be in and somehow an image installation by Berndnaut flashed in front of my eyes.

A cloud in your room

An artist, Berndnaut Smilde, created cloud inside a room. Berndnaut Smilde creates clouds using a smoke machine, combined with indoor moisture and dramatic lighting to create an indoor cloud effect. This print is called Nimbus II, 2012 cloud in room.

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SharePoint 2010 : How to retain Document ID while moving documents

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Today’s water cooler discussion revolved around Document ID management system of SharePoint. It is a nice feature and can actually help to find the documents quickly and in a predicted manner. Basically you get a short URL in SharePoint for your document, rather than a cryptic one and SharePoint will find the document no matter where you moved it.

But there is a catch, it will be able to find it if you move it within the Site Collection. If you move it out of the site collection, a new Doc ID will be generated and assigned to the document. BOOM!! your short URL is pointing to nothing now.

So how do we move documents without changing their Doc ID?

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Nuisances of starting developing Apps for SharePoint 2013–Summarized

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Yesterday when I wrote about my experiences about starting to develop Apps for SharePoint 2013, I got some feedback to consolidate the steps. So here it goes… In nutshell, you follow the blog here at TechNet and setup you developer machine with the required tools.  Make sure you give a good read Step 4 Install … Read more

Nuisances of starting developing Apps for SharePoint 2013

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Recently I was into a SharePoint 2013 overview training. Though the theory was fine, starting the actual App Development was a major hiccup, due to few changes that an experienced SharePoint developer would not expect.

As most of you would know by know, that SharePoint 2013 app development is supported in 2 ways:

But how about the traditional way of development? Where you had SharePoint and Visual Studio and tools, everything locally and do the deployment and testing without much fuss? Remember, setting up a SharePoint developer workstation?

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Coding and life; what our kids are missing

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Wandering around the land of Facebook, came across a video (watch it above) shared by a common friend. It got me thinking back in the time when I first got access to a PC (maybe way back in 1988 or 89) with a green screen and a blinking cursor announcing proudly the DOS prompt.

I just cannot forget the rush, the excitement of running first set of commands on DOS prompt and toying around with BASIC, DBase. Document editing with WordStar and WordPerfect. Playing around with DotMatrix printers and access to first Daisy Wheel Electronic Typewriter and excitement of connecting it to a computer and watching with wide wondering eyes, as each character printed itself (without touching the keys).

So what has learning to code to do with everyone’s life?

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How to find all the websites using enterprise features in SharePoint

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A customer came up and said, we are having a large number of SharePoint Enterprise licenses and we want to know how many websites in our Farm are actually using Enterprise features of SharePoint. In SharePoint, enterprise features are available by enabling the SharePoint Feature called as “PremiumWeb” with featureID as “0806D127-06E6-447a-980E-2E90B03101B8”. A good list … Read more

Control a Windows Service from SharePoint Central Admin site

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You are a very good developer and have created a great windows service that works like a charm and your CEO likes the functionality and would love to have your SharePoint Administrator control it from the SharePoint Central Administration Site !!!! What a lovely scenario 🙂 But what also is interesting in this is, that … Read more