ShareCamp – born2share.

the SharePoint Community Germany is conducting a first-of-its-kind BarCamp format on SharePoint, coined ShareCamp.

Our slogan is “born2share.” (spoken born to share point ;)

ShareCamp will be a two-day BarCamp event. BarCamps, also called non-conferences, that is looking for active contributors rather than passive consumers. There is no fixed, up-front agenda, but all participants are invited to present – contents will be decided upon among the participants. Spontaneous sessions replace the pre-prepared presentations found at traditional conferences. Developing ideas freely and mutual interaction are not only allowed, but explicitly encouraged.

ShareCamp addresses technical issues (installation, administration, migration, …) as well as social aspects of collaboration and their effects on company cultures. Best practices, helpful tools and add-ons – all topics of interest to the participants are welcomed, in particular special interest topics.
We expect a mixed audience of up to 200 SharePoint administrators, developers, end users, Microsoft staff and solution providers.

ShareCamp takes place April 10/11 at the Microsoft headquarters in Unterschleissheim (Munich); Microsoft will also serve as a diamant sponsor of the event.

Participation and catering is free of charge for all participants.

ShareCamp is non-profit oriented, but an independent event organized by volunteers from within the SharePoint community. ShareCamps are only made possible by the kind contribution of sponsors that allow for a such an event to be free of charge and to cover expenses for event site, infrastructure, and catering.
The idea a BarCamp about SharePoint was born at TechEd Europe by Michael Greth and myself. Here we go!

SharePoint 2010, PowerShell and Disposing

When you are already familiar with the SharePoint object model, you might know that SPSite and SPWeb allocate large amounts of memory and adequate memory management and disposing is essential. To make life easier the SharePoint team introduced two Cmdlets dealing with this in SharePoint 2010:

• Start-SPAssignment
• Stop-SPAssignment

By default, all Get commands dispose of these objects immediately after the pipeline finishes, but using SPAssignment, you can assign the list of objects to a variable and dispose of the objects after they are no longer needed. You can also ensure that the objects will remain as long as you need them, even throughout multiple iterations of commands
There are three levels of assignment:

No Assignment

The object is not assigned to a variable and is disposed after each iteration of the command.

Get-SPWeb http://server/sites/* |
     foreach { $_.Title | out-host } 

Simple Assignment

All objects are assigned to the global assignment store. This is done by using the Global parameter. When using this level, all objects are assigned to a global store and are disposed of when the Stop-SPAssignment command is called.

Start-SPAssignment -GlobalGlobal
$web = Get-SPWeb "http://server/sites/web"
$web.Title = "Greetings from PowerShell"
$web.Update()
Stop-SPAssignment -Global
# $web will be disposed

Note: Use global assignment with caution! For example, if you use Start-SPAssignment – Global with and then call Get-SPSite –Limit ALL, every site collection object will be loaded, every site collection object will be loaded into memory. In a live server farm, this is likely to cause to cause serious performance issues

Advanced Assignment

Objects are assigned to named stores for disposal. You can dispose of objects by using the -Identity parameter with the Stop-SPAssignment command.

$siteScope = Start-SPAssignment
foreach($site in ($siteScope | Get-SPSite "http://server/*"))
{
   $webScope = Start-SPAssignment
   $web = $webScope | Get-SPWeb $site.RootWeb.Url
   $web.Title = "Greetings from PowerShell"
   $web.Update()
   Stop-SPAssignment $webScope
}
Stop-SPAssignment $siteScope

Regardless of the level used, all objects are disposed of when the PowerShell runspace is closed.

Preview - Wikis in SharePoint 2010

Refers to build 14.0.4006.1010

Wiki functionality in SharePoint 2007 was kind of spartan. In this post I’ll have a look what will come with SharePoint 2010.

The Wiki Homepage Feature

When you create a blank site in SharePoint 2010 the homepage (default.aspx) will be a web part page as usual. But now there’s a new feature called “Wiki Page Home Page”.

When you activate the feature it creates a document library called “SitePages”, adds a wiki page named “default.aspx” and set it as the new homepage for the site.

The feature transforms your whole site to a wiki. Every time you create a new page it will create a new wiki page and store it in the “SitePages” lib (similar to the publishing features in 2007).

For sure you can tag Wiki pages as any other page as described in my previous post Managing Metadata in SharePoint 2010.

Content

While in SharePoint you could only write some rich text, you now could upload files (will be stored as a separate file) and add Web Parts.

No joke, you can now add Web Parts at any place within the wiki rich text!

[[Wiki Linking]]

In SharePoint 2010 you will get an intellisense like linking experience. That’s kind of cool :-) Just an enter [[ and press ctrl+space

You can now link easily pages, lists, items, documents and views.

Enterprise Wiki Layouts

Additionally there’s a new Site Collection feature called “Enterprise Wiki Layouts” for creating a large-scale wiki with categories and page layouts.

Seems to be correlated with the publishing infrastructure, because the feature add a new page layout content type. This means you can create wiki page layouts with SharePoint Designer 2010.

Click and see the beautiful new SharePoint 2010 error message.

Never mind this a technical preview and lot of things already work great. Can’t await to continue with the beta in November…