As all of us are aware of the importance of reports at various levels and this feature in SQL Server 2008 is no exception. This feature helps in achieving and analyzing our targets based on the records available. Reporting services are embedded with SQL Server and we have interface to design reports flexibly and produce them on time.

Reporting Services:

This is very simple and all you need to do is take the following steps:

1. First, check the configuration of the reporting service.
2. Secondly, design Reports
3. Thirdly, deploy Reports
4. At last, view Reports in a click

While installing Reporting Services (SQL SERVER), we need to choose the default configuration which can automate the entire configuration process for reporting services. But sometime, we may need to add or change Reporting Services configuration options.

So before going into designing report aspects, the following figure helps administrators to perform each of the tasks required to configure the Reporting Service Deployment which results in reduced downtime and faster delivery of reporting solutions.

• Start the Service
• Configure Web Service URL
• Configure Report Manager URL
• Configure Email Settings if needed

We have a wonderful feature of Report Viewer in designing reports as we expected. Perform the following steps:

• Create a Solution (Business Intelligence Development Studio)
• Configure Data Source (as usual)
• Click Next
• In the Query Designer, Enter the T-SQL / View (as per your report)
• Verify the Query entered using “Run Query” option

Once the configuration of data source is over,

• Click Finish, which would generate the design automatically for the selected data source
• Modify your designs (add additional controls text box, line etc.)

Once your design is over,

• Set Report Server URL
• Right-click on the solution in the Solution Explorer and click on Properties.

You will see the below dialog.

• Change the “TargetReportFolder” value http://myserver/reportserver (not just /report!).
• Press save.

Right-click on the solution again and select Deploy.

Once you deploy successfully without any error,

• Browse the URL http://myserver/report (not /reportserver!)
• You will find the below page
• Click on the report and test it

The steps are very simple to follow and we can produce difference sorts of reports with features like list, chart, table, matrix, tablix etc., Apart from these we have parameters (as like other reporting control), interactive sorting features, actions, document maps, image embedding, sub reports, export option to pdf / xls / doc.

Hope this post has offered a comprehensive view of the simplicity of Reporting services which would help us in analyzing and producing on-time reports with desired formats.

The below picture provides us the detailed view of the architecture.

From the diagram it is clear that the SharePoint Enterprise Search Engine in itself has got several components and each one has its own responsibilities during searching process. We will entail them one by one here:


Index Engine:
This engine forms the backbone of the search by filtering out the text and the properties from the content that is gathered during enterprise search and indexes them for faster search.

Query Engine:
This engine takes the responsibility of determining whether to apply keyword-based search or SQL-based search and executes those queries and renders the result for the search data in appropriate format.

Protocol Handlers & IFilters:
As the name of the component suggest, this engine opens up the content and document by checking their respective format and filter the documents based on the search request.

Content Index:
This engine extracts the words and other details from the content item, indexes, and stores them. It actually maintains a property store that is used to store a table of details and its corresponding values.

Search Configuration Data:
This part of the enterprise search architecture actually provides best bets, keywords, and property schema information to the query engine and gets scopes and crawler logs from the protocol handler. Thus this engine maintains all the configuration information for the content and aids in servicing the enterprise search for rendering the results.

Wordbreakers & Stemmers:
The wordbreakers and stemmers do language-specific analysis for finding out the boundaries of words based on the specific rules of that language on lexicon. Then, these lengthy compound words are split up and indexed in order to reduce the size and helps in better querying. The stemmers are actually there to store the words in its inflectional forms. If no word breakers are specified for a particular language, then by default punctuational symbol or white space would be used for word breaking.

Let us all stay tuned for more details as there are yet more to come on SharePoint Server Enterprise Search.

]]> http://www.dotcominfoway.com/blog/microsoft-sharepoint-server-part-v-2/feed 0 http://www.dotcominfoway.com/blog/microsoft-sharepoint-server-part-iv http://www.dotcominfoway.com/blog/microsoft-sharepoint-server-part-iv#comments Tue, 27 Jul 2010 13:16:51 +0000 Software Development http://www.dotcominfoway.com/blog/?p=2919 We would like to dedicate this blog article to searching capabilities of Microsoft SharePoint and we will however briefly overview the searching feature with its architectural pattern reviewed in the forthcoming blog for its elaborateness.

Apart from the above features, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 and above comes up with a new model called Search Administration object model. This model allows to create custom application and we can administer the Enterprise Search feature programmatically. We can implement this model in console application, custom search web parts hosted on a SharePoint server, aspx pages, and windows forms client application.
Using this object in our Enterprise Search, we can manage the content, maintain the changes in contents, and include the metadata for enterprise search and managing the properties of the content. Using this object model, we can also set the scope of search and manage the keywords for the Enterprise Search. Click for more SharePoint Development Services

My Site – Personalized Version:
SharePoint actually comes up with a site called My Site that provides with the following rich set of features and these features are specifically available in SharePoint 2007 and above:

• Social Networking
• Privacy Controls
• SharePoint Sites and Documents roll-up Web Parts
• Colleagues and Memberships Web Parts

Social Networking: This can happen in two ways namely,

• Public My Site Pages with Social networking Web parts: People can simply identify users’ information and share their interest with their connection. It also produces more search results.
• Personal Connection: In social networking, it helps to establish connection and increase the users’ communities. Users can create group using the same information like theirs.

Privacy Controls: It provides a more secured information visibility in My Site Public view. This is provided by way of setting view authorizations such as My Manager, My Colleagues, and Everyone.

SharePoint Sites and Documents roll-up Web Parts: This is used for storing the published collection of SharePoint sites. It also provides more support for filtering capabilities while querying up for a document that is stored in SharePoint sites.

Colleagues and Memberships Web Parts: This actually provides the users with a list of people who they know, have common interests, and belong to common distribution lists and groups.
The above discussed points are some basic features provided by SharePoint portal management system and we conclude this by saying that more and more features are awaiting to be discussed in the upcoming blog. Check our Microsoft SharePoint Server Part II and Microsoft SharePoint Server Part I

For this, Microsoft SharePoint Server provides integrated approach for the content management via familiar tools like Microsoft Office system. Thus, it becomes easy for people to manage any type of content tracking through its origin and life cycle.

Generally, content management is used for versioning, locking up documents, tracking work flow for a document, setting up content based policies and content type based polices, and auditing in an organization.

Following are the goals of any organization regarding content management system and this is satisfied by SharePoint Server.

1. Document Management
2. Record Management
3. Web Content Management

Document Management:
In view of increasing the productivity and provide secured access to documents in an organization, document management contains the following three subdivisions in itself:

• InfoPath Workflow Forms: InfoPath enables us to add forms to workflows to make our workflow more dynamic and flexible. InfoPath provides us the ability to build a form that can be hosted on Microsoft office System client and server and look and operate the same way on both interfaces. It adds more workflow development frameworks in it and provides us with more rights for the entire work flow development by which a workflow developed can be interacted from the client application itself rather than switching to SharePoint Server web interface.
• Document Information Panel: Document Information Panel originally comes up with Microsoft Office 2007 as its integral part that enables us to update the properties of a business document that are technically termed as metadata of the document file. From SharePoint Server, we are not only able to view or edit the document properties but also customize the document properties that can validate our requirements.
• Document Converters: This is an extensible framework available in SharePoint Server that provides a converter program in an executable file to convert file in one format to another format based on our business needs.

Record Management:
SharePoint record management provides a secured way of managing an organization’s records and it well supports the capabilities of record management system in any type of organization. A record is built upon policies of an organization and the record management system should be able to collect, manage, and dispose company’s polices. The features provided in SharePoint record management system are as follows:

• Policy and Auditing: Policies can be set via actions to schedule keeping up and expiration of a document. Support for labeling and bar code is provided without actually modifying the document physically. The SharePoint record management system can be integrated with Windows Rights Management Services for policy and auditing purposes in order safeguard from unauthorized usage.
• Records Repository: With the help of SharePoint, we can build and maintain an efficient repository system for our records. Using Windows SharePoint Services, we can build site templates as well as label and audit our records as enforced by record management. We can also do automated record routing based on content type.
• Web Content Management: The web content management system of a SharePoint provides the following features:
  1. Customization for site navigation, master page creation with minimal functionality, and editing toolbar components.
  2. HTML field editor control and custom properties for content query web parts.
  3. Variation tool for creating and deploying multilingual websites.
     Build the web presence site for global usages.
  4. Custom content deployment across the different servers.
     Automatically generate a publishing page with respect to client side web application and author.
  5. Support for environment where distinct authoring, staging, and part of the formal Web publishing processes are involved.

With this, we end up exploring the supportive features of content management system available in SharePoint and our future blog will focus on other features that comes up with SharePoint Server.  Contact for SharePoint development services

Microsoft SharePoint Server comes up with a number of new features that is built around the concept of team collaboration such as personalized portal business intelligence, content management, and work flow integration capabilities using Windows Workflow Foundation.

However, SharePoint did not evolve just as a collaboration tool but also as a portal server targeting the needs of a small team, project, and an organization. Actually, SharePoint Portal is built upon the Windows SharePoint Services (WSS). Thus merging together the collaboration and development tool, the SharePoint can now be termed SharePoint Products and Technologies. The product part of it is SharePoint Portal Server and the technology part is governed by Windows SharePoint Services (WSS). We can develop web-based business applications on WSS platform and host the applications on our portal server. The ease of collaborating the development effort is taken care by SharePoint Portal Server. We can maintain the task list by sharing the document and other types of information using SharePoint even though the developers are working at different locations and thus can work towards accomplishing the common goal.

While WSS is mainly concerned with collaboration, Microsoft SharePoint Server is for site administration, customization, etc.

It is impossible for us to limit the scope and advantages of the Microsoft SharePoint Server with just this blog article and what we have made is an attempt towards exploring the features one by one in series of articles. The following are some among those features that we are covering in this blog article:

1. Site Creation/Administration: SharePoint helps us to overcome the difficulty of creating and maintaining sites by allowing anyone to create the sites for use within their organization (company’s intranet) that could be of any types such as document libraries, discussion boards, or meeting sites.

2. Content Management:SharePoint provides an excellent content management capabilities by allowing users to create and submit the content for approval and new document library templates have been provided to manage multilingual content. The template actually works on maintaining the relationship between the original content and the translated contents.

3. Information Tracking: The tracking information that is in the form of documents and its location is now made easy with SharePoint by enabling centralized storage point. We can even make wide searches to locate the documents and access them with ease. With this in mind, let us all stay tune for the upcoming blog articles that would provide us much insight into the new features of SharePoint that are left undiscussed in this blog article. Contact us for Sharepoint Development Services

While speaking about similarities or differences, we understand that ADO.NET Entity Framework’s LINQ to Entities can be considered as superset of LINQ to SQL and that, ADO.NET Entity Framework is much more than LINQ to Entities.

LINQ to SQL can be used for rapid application development while ADO.NET Entity Framework can be used for enterprise application development.

LINQ to SQL can only support MS SQL Server database (also its compact version) however, external vendors are developing data providers for MySQL, Oracle, Postgres, etc. ADO.NET Entity Framework is built on top of ADO.NET data provider model and thus supports all existing ADO.NET data providers.

LINQ to SQL allows developers to generate .NET classes that directly map respective database tables or views. This leads to 1:1 mapping between class and table. This means that it looses the flexibility of an object representing a part of table or one object representing data from multiple tables. On the other hand, ADO.NET Entity Framework allows developers to generate .NET classes that map to conceptual data model. This leads to m:n mapping between classes and tables and thus has the flexibility of an object representing a part of table or one object representing data from multiple tables. Due to this flexibility, DBA can make changes to the database for improving performance, partitioning, etc. without affecting business logic.

Thus LINQ to SQL is targeted for developing rapid applications which can support MS SQL database and have simple mapping of business objects to relational data while ADO.NET Entity Framework is targeted for developing Enterprise applications which can support MS SQL databases as well as other databases through extended ADO.NET data provider and also have complex mapping of business objects to the persistent data.

Here’s our head-on with the problem:

Problem Statement: Our requirement was to create a WCF Service application in Visual Studio 2010 (.NET Framework 4.0) and host it in Windows 7 IIS 7.5 in a local machine. While testing this service on the browser by calling its *.svc file, an error occured as stated below:
“The page you are requesting cannot be served because of the extension configuration. If the page is a script, add a handler. If the file should be downloaded, add a MIME map in windows 7”

Reason: Reason is more descriptive in the error message itself. The possible reasons could be missing MIME Type and Handler Mapping.

Work Around: Though the error message was more descriptive, we first tried manually including the MIME type as .svc (Extension) – application/octet-stream (MIME Type) and browsed the *.svc file, which popped up a “Open/Save” dialog. Then, upon removing the extension and next examinig the handler mapping, it was found that handlers script “svc-Integrated-4.0″ and “svc-ISAPI-4.0_32bit / svc-ISAPI-4.0_64bit” were missing.

To map handler script, do the following: Run aspnet_regiis.exe -i in Visual Studio 2010 command prompt. This file could be located in the %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319. This will  install ASP.NET 4.0 and add script maps to the Applicationhost.Config file in the IIS metabase.

Then, point out the application pool to use framework 4.0 and try browsing *.svc file. This resolves the problem.

The primary focus of Microsoft Dynamics ERP has been to create an ERP based application that could suffice the needs of medium-sized organizations as well as larger ones. Microsoft Dynamics ERP provides solutions for sales order processing, purchase order processing, inventory, financial, bank reconciliation, human resource, manufacturing  module, supply chain, etc. It in itself contains the following four products:

1) Microsoft Dynamics GP (formerly Great Plains Software)
2) Microsoft Dynamics NAV (formerly Navision)
3) Microsoft Dynamics AX (formerly Axapta)
4) Microsoft Dynamics SL (formerly Solomon IV)

Microsoft Dynamics ERP also provides retail solutions in the form of,

1) Microsoft Dynamics RMS – This provides a complete point-of-sale solution for both small and medium sized retailers.
2) Microsoft Dynamics POS 2009 – This actually comes up with a set of tools for a retailer that enables them to manage and monitor their business and thus make appropriate decisions for improving their retail business.

MS Dynamics GP can be customized by the following Tools:

• Dexterity
• VBA
• MS Visual Studio Toolkit & Web services
• E connect.

MS Dynamics  AX can be customized by the  the following Tools:

• X++
• Morph X(IDE)

MS Dynamics NAV can be customized by the  the following Tools:

• C/SIDE Customization Tool
• .NET

MS Dynamics SL can be customized by the  the following Tools:

• Customization Manager
• VB

MS Dynamics RMS can be customized by  the following Tools:

• Dexterity
• VBA
• .NET

Most of the  MS Dynamics Products supports FRX Report and crystal report.

The main objective of Microsoft Dynamics CRM is to enable people to create a customer relationship management applications with multi-lingual support. It actually provides support for sales, service, and marketing. It has come up with Microsoft Dynamics CRM online to help businesses to expand their market potentials.

MS Dynamics CRM can be customized by .NET. The competitors for MS Dynamics are SAP, PeopleSoft, and Oracle APPS.  Mostly, MS Dynamics satisfies the business needs across any organization.

Dynamic Development: Dynamic Development includes the following new features in SQL Server 2008:

New Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) extension to .NET framework – We can use same development syntax for accessing data stored in either SQL Server or XML by using LINQ rather T-SQL in our application languages.

New data types and data storage capabilities beyond the traditional relational data – Earlier in SQL 2005 user defined data types are restricted to the size of 8000 bytes but in SQL Server 2008, there is no such limitation imposed upon. Two new data types such Date and Time are introduced that stores date alone and time alone respectively. SQL functions such as triggers, backup restore, full text search can be applied to binary data types also. Full text search could include thesaurus files that is stored in the form of meta data. We can store new spatial data such as information about a particular geographical area, longitude, latitude, and global positioning system (GPS) related information that conforms to the standard of Open Geospatial Consortium.

Entity data services – Using SQL Server 2008 along with ADO.NET, we can create entity objects that corresponds to real world business objects such as Employee, Account, etc, and the methods of those business objects can be used for returning the entities rather than as rows and tables. Entity data services are well supported by way of Line-of-Business (LOB) framework and the Entity framework query language (eSQL) available in ADO.NET framework.

Data synchronization –This is the most remarkable feature available in SQL Server 2008 that cooperatively works with Visual Studio and ADO.NET. Frequently disconnected applications can be easily synchronized with a central database. Though this feature is made available in SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008 provides a more optimized approach for this scenario.

Pervasive Insight:

The main goals of SQL Server 2008′s Pervasive Insight:

1.To integrate data at the enterprise level
2.To have the ability to reach all users
3.Each user to be provided with actionable insights of the database.

In SQL Server 2008, database changes can be tracked and captured via a component called Changed Data Capture and consumers can easily be made aware of the changes and use T-SQL or other data access methods to get the changed data.

Merge statement is one of the new statements introduced in SQL Server 2008 in which developers and a database administrator can write single statement that can do insert, update, or delete operations on the tables by using some conditional matching. Internally, the SQL Server 2008 process has a separate insert, update, or delete statements. All one has to provide is source and target tables or query which should be merged together.

The above features are the enhancements available in T-SQL and on the business front, the major improvement is done on reporting services in SQL Server 2008 compared to SQL Server 2005.

Rendering of the report and memory management has been greatly improved on reporting services of SQL Server 2008. SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services allows us to render our reports in various formats such as TIFF, PNG, PDF, CSV, or even plain HTML.

The reports can be hosted without IIS.

On the visualization capabilities, chart controls and gauges are newly introduced for enhanced graphical appeal of the report and soon, we can expect calenders and maps that can be placed in the report using SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services (SSRS). With SSRS, we can now set our data sources from SharePoint lists and PowerPivot models. SQL Azure is also well supported by SSRS. We can provide role-based security access to our reports, folders, and resources. We can even embed our reports generated via SSRS into our ASP.NET projects using report controls or publish them into Microsoft Office SharePoint report library.

SQL Server 2008 reporting service provides a complete solution to cater the various reporting needs of an organization at an enterprise level. On the whole, SQL Server 2008 serves us from the development stage and continues its services on the business platform, up to the enterprise level.