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By: Radu Gavrila, President & Instructor, LANtech Training
Well, we finally have a built-in web service to display and interact with Visio diagrams and structures without having to have Office Visio installed on a user's computer. If you've seen Excel Services in SharePoint Server 2007, understanding this new service will come naturally. We're able to display Visio drawings, follow links that were attached to shapes within those drawings.
There are several elements within SharePoint that are involved with Visio functionality in one way or another:
- Visio Web Access – a new type of web part you can use on your pages
- Visio Process Repository – a new type of Site Template
- Visual representations of workflows for easy validation
- Export and import between SharePoint Designer workflow design and Office Visio 2010
Here are the steps needed to use the new Visio Web Access web part.
- Start by creating / modifying a Visio diagram, using Office Visio 2010 (you cannot create Visio drawings with the web tools). Save your Visio drawing to SharePoint as a .vdw file. In my example I am saving a file called RecruitingProcess.vdw:
 
NOTE: Avoid spaces in the file name. This file will be used exclusively for displaying visio elements on web pages, therefore it does not have to have a friendly name.
- On a web page where you want the drawing displayed, open the page in Edit Page mode (Site Actions / Edit Page) or use the ribbon buttons at the top.
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Click within a web part zone to "Add a Web Part". From the Business Data section, choose "Visio Web Access" and click "Add"
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Click the "Click here to open the tool pane" link to open the Visio Web Access web part properties on the right hand side. Browse to select the drawing you created and saved in the previous steps:
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In the Appearance section, further down, you may want to adjust the title of the web part, otherwise it will read "Visio Web Access". In my example I set the title to read "Recruiting Process at Contoso":
Click OK to save changes and close the web part properties panel.
- The Visio diagram you prepared is now displayed on the page chosen.
If you're interested, I'll add more step-by-step instructions on using other facets of Visio services. Just drop a comment and watch the blog… |
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By: Radu Gavrila, President & Instructor, LANtech Training
Is that worth the trouble? Yes, but it depends on who you are. If you're a part of IT and handling Help Desk calls, providing User Support or in charge of building and deploying your company's desktops and laptops to new users; you should be looking into Certification as part of your skill validation and career advancement path. If you are not an IT pro, Windows 7 certification is not for you but learning as much as you can about the tool you will be using every day should be your focus.
In this edition of our newsletter, I'll touch on Windows 7 Certification but if you come back soon to this blog site, I will also be addressing some of my favorite tips and tricks when it comes to using Windows 7 that can be very helpful. Stay tuned for my other two blog posts for some of those Windows 7 gems that might not have jumped at you yet. They may have you suddenly go: "Now that's pretty cool ! ".
You can also subscribe to our Blog's RSS feed.
Attend our free Windows 7 Webinar
So, about certification ... How about you take one hour out of your schedule and sit through this free webinar that has been especially crafted around the topic of Windows 7 certification. The presenter is Neil Tucker, an experienced technology instructor who also wrote the 600+ page Microsoft courseware for a five-day course M50331 you can take at LANtech. He's going to cover topics such as:
- How can Windows 7 virtualization be used to reduce the cost of upgrades and improve portability?
- What new features can be used to make laptops and portable media more secure?
- What tools allow technicians to quickly identify and diagnose problems?
To attend this webinar, here are the details:
Event Name: Why Get Windows 7 Certified?
Date / Time: 3/15/2011, 1:00 - 2:00 PM ET (one hour)
Registration URL: http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=154480
Event Cost: Free of charge
Event Topics:
1. Windows 7 Certifications
2. Getting down and dirty:
- Using the Problem Steps Recorder
- Using Virtual Hard Drives
- Benefiting from DirectAccess
- Managing Desktops with PowerShell
- Securing Desktops with Applocker
- Creating and Using Troubleshooters
- Using BitLocker
3. Training covering all of the above and much more
4. Next steps to Windows 7 Certification |
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"Forty-three percent of survey respondents report salary increases as a result of Microsoft Certification."
– Redmond magazine 2006 survey of Microsoft IT professionals’ compensation.
Let's get blunt here: Microsoft Certification is a win-win proposition for employer and employee. To the practitioner, your career prospects are enhanced by becoming MORE VALUABLE to your organization. To the employer, your staff broadens their ability to provide best-in-class technical solutions to support your organization.
Microsoft Certification Track is an integral, intertwined part of the IT community with good reason ... but when was the last time you really looked at the track and how it can affect you and your organization? DOWNLOAD THIS PDF in order to see where you or your employees stand in the process (please pay special attention to the pages with flow charts - they are clickable for more information). Whether you are starting as a MCTS for Windows 7 Configuration or well on the road to MCITP: Enterprise Architect, Microsoft certifications are the best bet to ensure true technology and career advancement.
Once certified, the practitioner joins a community of Microsoft development resources with access to vaults of support.
Check out this page regarding the BENEFITS OF MS CERTIFICATION.
LANtech Training is your source for all Microsoft Certification programs. CONTACT US today or simply check out our SCHEDULE to hop on the road to advancement!
PS: We do CompTIA, CISCO, VMWare and other certifications, too (CISSP to be added in 2011). Which one is right for you? |
| Radu Gavrila of LANtech Training presented a lunch session at SPIN, geared around Records Management as implemented in SharePoint Server 2010.
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By: Jeffrey Hall, Operations Manager at VMTraining
(see Jeffrey's LinkedIn profile here)
Those who invest in VMware education courses for their people will see a return on this investment that is almost immediate when you consider the cost of the education versus the cost of downtime. How so? Those who have formal training are much more effective in defining the symptoms of problems and then are able to resolve the underlying issues faster. In addition, I would argue that those who have training are able to prevent downtime due to knowing how to properly setup and maximize the potential of their environment versus those that have a “self-taught” education.
We have found this to be especially true with our VMware courses. Our vSphere 4.1 Ultimate Bootcamp course is designed to be comprehensive course that will take the student from A-Z in establishing their virtualization environment. Many times we get comments from individuals who have worked with VMware for years saying “I didn’t know you could do that.” Our classes are designed to maximize those training dollars and have people get the best training experience available. We believe that hands on labs are the best way to learn and our courses always have over 50% of class time as labs and many classes are closer to 60%. We want the students to have the ability to work on the labs during class but also to have the ability to review or redo labs after the class as well. Therefore, the students will get their own dedicated server to work on during the class with 24 hour access to the server. This is important as with many other training (Authorized included) students have to share servers and are limited to class room hours only. In addition, we cover topics (like best practices) and 3rd party tools that will enhance the student’s ability and make them more efficient in using VMware.
What we like to see are students who are ready when the class is over to go back to their workplace and put all the new found knowledge to work immediately. After the training is complete the student’s will be able to become more efficient in performing their duties and therefore helping their company run more smoothly. This allows the company to then focus on providing better services and/or products, as well. In the end, everyone wins!
Jeffrey Hall
Operations Manager, VMTraining
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First of all, let me clarify: I am not a VMWare expert. The experts who teach our VMWare classes are the likes of Duane Anderson, from VMTraining, who presented at a recent seminar we held at the Pyramids, in Indianapolis, around Hacking, or better yet, Securing VMWare against getting hacked. For those of you who were not able to attend the seminar, here's the summary of what went down that half-day, here at the LANtech Conference Center.
I'll ignore the first part of the presentation, where I went over some basics of virtualization and presented some of the new classes we have at LANtech, in association with VMTraining. Who wants to hear me talking when there's an expert in VMWare security about to show you why you should worry and how you should protect your network from the bad guys:
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Duane Andreson is one of the top VMWare security experts, teaching classes for VMTraining, as well as consulting with various large organizations, such as the European Community headquarters in Brussels, performing penetration testing and mitigation for those clients. |
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The topics discussed during the seminar |
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Cost of an infrastructure hack (average among very large organizations) is around $ 200,000.
80% of the hacks are coming from the inside of the network. |
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Overall security is about as strong as the "weakest link".
"Lazy Admins" in this context, we mean that by keeping default permissions, some users can engineer URL's and enter common admin interfaces. |
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Virtual switch differences between the two flavors of VMWare ESX. ESX's Service Console is insulated by the virtual switch firewall. ESXi uses a "linux busy box" (the POSIX shell) to administer the guest O.S.'es. there is not firewall protecting this console. |
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Famous attack that originated in the Check Republic |
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Penetration Testing Methodology |
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Using a dedicated site like SHODANHQ.com with a simple query of ESX reveals ESX hosts that are ready to be logged onto:
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Web interfaces can have easy to duplicate addresses |
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ARP Cache poisoning can reveal passwords in clear text through session logging: |
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VMWare ver 3.0 is much more vulnerable to attacks through url engineering (Guest Stealer) |
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LANtech & VMTraning – VMWare training offering:
- vSphere 4 training and certification
- VMWare Advanced Security Bootcamp
- VMWare view
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Advantages of training in a LANtech / VMTraining program. |
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Certifications from VMTraining. Advantages when compared to VMWare's VCP:
- Real World training,
- 3rd party tools,
- Less time spent, accelerated learning
- Labs accessible 24 x 7 during class and even afterwards, if requested (based on availability)
- 1 year re-sit (audit) at no cost
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Article by Keith Ward, technology journalist, on vendor-neutral certifications, such as CVE and CVSE |
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Cost difference as compared to VMWare's official program |
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Check out our upcoming VMWare courses and Bootcamps, especially the Advanced VMWare Security Bootcamp, coming up on Nov. 29th, 2010
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| Sometimes you have a need to delete multiple rows from a spreadsheet when they all match a certain condition (e.g. the e-mail address field is blank OR they all contain the word Total, etc.). I just discovered that there's an easy way to do that without writing a macro, which is what I was doing before.
Now remember: I am not saying that if you had 10 rows in a worksheet you have to open a training manual to figure out how to delete a few rows, Ctrl-click works just fine. Take this mentally to a sheet that has 10,000 rows and maybe there are hundreds of rows that should be deleted. The example below is simplified.
For example, if you had the following worksheet:
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STEP 1: Select the column containing the values you want to search for, in this case Column A
STEP 2: Press
Ctrl+F to search within that column. Type the word you're looking for, in this case Total and click Find All
NOTICE that you could Look In: Values, Formulas or Comments. In this case, Formulas or Values is the same thing since those cells contain text.
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STEP 3: In the search results, at the bottom, where all the rows are listed, click once and then press Ctrl+A, to select them all, then click Close.
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STEP 4: Click the Home tab at the top, then click the arrow underneath the Delete button, then click
Delete Cells.
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From the dialog opening up, select Entire Row, then click OK.
The offending rows disappear, as needed.
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AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO STEP 2, instead of looking for cells that have a certain word, you could be looking for cells that match a certain special criteria, such as Blank cells, Cells with comments, Cells with conditional formatting, etc.
Instead of starting a Search interface with Ctrl+F, click Home tab and from the Find and Select button in the ribbon area, choose Go To, then click Special:
Continue with STEP 4 to delete all the rows matching the criteria chosen above. |
| By: Radu Gavrila, President & Instructor, LANtech Training
Two of the improvements in SharePoint 2010 having to do with security are the "Check Permissions" interface and the Permission Tools page, with visual indicators of selective security being used somewhere out there beneath the surface.
As far as the "Check Permissions" interface goes, one of the most requested features that never made it into SharePoint 2007 (or WSS 3.0 – the free version) was the ability to generate a report of the effective permissions for a person or group, to a document, list, folder or entire site. In SharePoint 2010, we are finally able to do that.
What you have to do in order to use this new interface is:
Navigate to a security-related page at Site, List/Library or item level:
Click the "Check Permissions" button in the top Ribbon and enter the user or group name for which you want to check effective permissions and click "Check Now":
- Observe the permissions of the user/group selected in the bottom section.
REMEMBER: permissions in SharePoint are cumulative. In other words, the user has a sum of all the permissions given through all the group memberships she/he belongs to and permissions granted directly to their user account.
- In the same Permission Tools interface mentioned above, we'll find the second improvement in security tools: visual indicators of security information.
If the site or list/library inherits permissions from a higher level, the yellow bar at the top makes that obvious:
OR
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If inheritance has been removed, the level where inheritance of permissions was changed shows:
In addition, the higher level container, in this case the parent site displays a notification to that effect:
Clicking the "Show me uniquely secured content" displays a list of child items with permission inheritance removed:
Using the two new security features is likely to eliminate some of the frustration and confusion that has surrounded SharePoint security and make our administrators, as well as Power Users' lives a little easier.
The next step it to wait for Microsoft to give us a tool that produces a report about which sites, libraries, files, etc. a user has access to, across sites, site collections and, why not, entire server farms and portals. Roll up your sleeves, Microsoft … |
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By: Radu Gavrila, President & Instructor, LANtech Training
In this post, I am going to continue covering (Business) Social Media tools, as implemented with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. This version of SharePoint takes the concept of media interaction and community involvement (all be it within your enterprise only), to a much higher level than its predecessors, SharePoint Server 2003 and 2007.
First of all, if you're used to the "My Site", as implemented with SharePoint 2007, the new interface is completely different:
- In order to access "My Site", you click your name in the top drop-down and select "My Site". There is no direct link to "My Site" on the pages of your company's portal, by default.
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Once you accessed your "My Site", you don't get to look at the content of your site but instead, you get to see what others are doing and saying. This is the "My Newsfeed" page.
The emphasis is now placed on interaction with others rather than building or accessing our own content. Therefore, the page you are looking at is "My Newsfeed". Basically, you are getting updated with news about others in the organization, with which you have established a "Colleague" relationship.
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One of the more impressive interfaces in SharePoint 2010 is the organization view. In a very impactful fashion, you get to see how someone relates to others within the organizational hierarchy:
- In order to access the content of your "My Site", you click on "My content". Now you have finally arrived to the home page of your actual content site. I will cover the actual "My Site" content in a future post.
For now, I'd like to focus a little more on the profile creation and maintenance:
In order to start building your enterprise's Social Network, you will start by entering information in your SharePoint profile. For the most part, this is very intuitive. You enter information about yourself, including a picture, skills, past projects. Besides entering this information you should:
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Upload one picture (preferably high quality, square-format, about 300x300px) and SharePoint automatically prepares three smaller formats of this picture (96x96, 48x48 and 32x32), as needed on pages across the portal. If you want to see the three pictures prepared by SharePoint, navigate to the central Photo Library of your portal, located at:
http://My_Site_Portal_Name/My/_layouts/viewlsts.aspx
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Choose which e-mail notifications to receive when certain events occur:
- Someone leaves a note on your profile (similar to the Wall on Facebook)
- Someone added you as colleague (you may want to watch what you're saying: you actions are going into their feed …)
- SharePoint suggests you add people as your colleagues (based on your colleagues extending their colleague network. (Think "Connect To" in LinkedIn)
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You can more easily choose what kind of information you want to see in your "Feed" from colleagues you've connected with. Options include turning on/off incoming feeds for:
- Ratings (entered by others on SharePoint content)
- Changes in profile information, etc.
That's it for now. I'll continue this series soon, by covering topics such as:
- Tags, Notes and the "Tag Cloud"
- Adding and securing content in your "My Site"
- Enterprise Search for People in SharePoint Server 2010
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By: Kyle Lacy, CEO of Brandswag
There is a massively argumentative and substantially humorous conversation circling the steel and glass of corporate culture.
1. When should we jump into social media? Loaded question.
2. Should the CEO have a blog? Should upper management have a blog? Maybe even the peons? Yes. Yes. Yes.
3. Should the blog be Internal or External or BOTH!? This is all dependent on your strategy.
4. How do we combine a work tool with a social tool? Check out Social Media Tool’s for Work and Learning and also Best Buy’s Blue Shirt Nation.
5. How do we manage and protect proprietary information on social media platforms? You can’t. Unless you control the social media platform (refer to question 4). It is extremely important to start building out policies that relate to the use of social media for internal communication (as well as external)
There are, of course, hundreds of questions that follow the simple ones listed above. The biggest problem corporate America has with social media is not necessarily managing and building of the platform… it is the beginning. How do we get in and utilize social media? What is the best way to enter the information flow? Should it be a corporate strategy or a marketing strategy?
Douglas Karr does a great job at answering this question:
I advise that social media and blogging are not a marketing strategy, they’re a corporate strategy. It’s not simply putting yourself out on the market to jump on the latest band wagon and consumers will flock to you. Social media takes time, a strategy and the right resources (both tools and people).
As one of the leading GENIUSES behind Corporate Social Media, Douglas knows what he is talking about. Both Douglas and I have written extensively about being authentic when writing a blog or getting involved in a social media community.
Also from Doug: You must involve all the leaders in your company – those who own the strategy of the corporation.
Strategy and Marketing should go hand-in-hand when debating whether to enter the social media world. This message is not only catered to corporations it should also be the focus for small businesses. Do not throw yourself into social media (whether blogging or networking) if you do not have a sound strategy. Without a social media plan/goals your productivity will plummet! You will be inundated with thousands of pieces of information and overwhelmed (as will your employees)
Strategy. Content. Participation. Authenticity.
Social media can be a fragile world, an extremely narrow path, proceed with care.
Most of all, HAVE FUN! This isn’t a corporate board meeting with Fiji water bottles. This is the information highway BABY! Take your time, hit it hard, and reap the benefits of open-communication!
(Kyle Lacy is a partner of LANtech Training, CEO of Brandswag and author of Twitter Marketing for Dummies from Wiley Publishing. He is one of the nation’s most visible authorities on social media and was recently voted in the Forty-under-40 Business Pros in Indianapolis by the Indianapolis Business Journal.)
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