SharePoint User Group 16th September 2008

Adam Cogan showed us what ssw did to WorleyParsons to build the largest public facing SharePoint website in the world!
Very nice css…will need to figure out the css in the groovy menu!

http://www.worleyparsons.com

He said the whole team would have been in Hawaii enjoying the good life if the profits hadn’t been wiped out by the deployment time.
They had eight .net guys for nine weeks working around the clock to do this!

You have to laugh knowing how hard SharePoint is, and then hear a story like Adam’s to see how a smartass like him thought it would be a piece of cake because he didn’t know any better!

They re-engineered web parts disabling many of the features in the content editor one so that users could only pick styles they had made.
They wrote their own navigation extension using divs not tables, because the out of the box one has tables inside tables everywhere and divs are more elegant, more powerful and load faster!

They removed references to the name active x control from loading….so users wouldn’t get active x warnings.

When one copies from word into a content editor is is really screwy so they got their users to copy to notepad first.
One audience member suggested PureText to solve this.

They used jquery so that it would be cross browser compliant…need to look into this…..

They ending up with 7 layout pages and one master…
The javascript was placed in the layout pages.

Three web parts were re-engineered and made available for use – the Data View Web Part, Content Editor and Content Query Web Part.

Funny enough they learnt most things the hard way.
When he talked about problems they tried to solve, some of the other guys had other solutions,
e.g using rss output and input to feed information into the data view web part etc.
Or copying virtuals when loaded with SharePoint and SQL caused issues as he could sysprep them, so as to not cause network issues.
Funny enough you can do so with SharePoint and Sql 2008 I think as they other guys mentioned it works with only SharePoint and I found out that sql 2008 works fine when you rename the pc, so still need to test this.
He also had debugging issues.
Yes it is hard if you don’t know how and one person pointed out you can debug in vs2008 which I’ve seen done as well.
Also he was advised to look at SharePoint logging Spy on codeplex…

Also, they wanted a test, staging and production server and to have a script that rolled out changes.
Not easy.
They did 90% with a script and the rest by hand….
One guy mentioned echo for the SharePoint designer changes to be rolled out!

Also for speed they were looking at the as1000 device from strange loop as this speeds up web sites running .net…So probably more applicable to a public site where everyone is the one user – anonymous.

They also overrode the render method via the .browser file to strip out stuff for performance.

What was funny was that he didn’t know that one could have multiple site collections when this was asked…

They are still learning…..

Regards,
Tom Bizannes
Solutions in Office and SharePoint