Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on Wed 14 Oct 2009

This week we’ve launched the Brantas Customer Access Portal, if you are a customer with a registered support agreement you will be able to easily view and maintain your active cases. 

How have we done this?  We’ve integrated our support management system (Dynamics CRM) with the eService Accelerator for CRM from codeplex, mix that with Brantas’ knowledge of web technologies (including ASP.Net, CSS and xHTML) and the result is a fully branded, customised portal for our customers.

We’re also currently working on a SharePoint Designer Activity tutorial to go on the site later this week.

Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on Mon 27 Jul 2009

We’ve now integrated Twitter and MOSS so that users never have to leave the portal to tweet.  Sounds useless right?  I mean all it does is post a message to your twitter page and get your twitter status back. 
On MOSS/SharePoint 2007

On Twitter

Suppose though you have a tighly locked down network and dont want your users wasting their entire day on Twitter.  You can lock out access from Twitter altogether, but that means your users and staff may feel constrained at work and eventually their productivity may drop.  Why not allow them to update their Twitter using their own My Site?  It gives users apparent freedom to maintain their social circle yet because they are within your organisations MOSS Portal work is never far away.

Non-Twitter users aren’t left out as they still get to see the Twitter status on the site, even though they may not have a username or password.

Use the Brantas Tweet web part on their mysite, your users will feel they have a bit of freedom, but at the same time you can ensure that users dont spend all day on Twitter. 

Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on Tue 07 Apr 2009

Ok…so you have a perfectly good development machine and need to develop web parts or other Microsoft SharePoint items.  Microsoft have released Visual Studio extensions for WSS but we all know “you dont develop on a server”.  So you are left with two options, run a virtual machine - which when you bog down with SQL, SharePoint and Visual Studio will run slower than a sloth thats fallen asleep or try to trick the visual studio extensions to work on your pc.

Its actually a lot easier than you think to get the VSe’s working on your pc than you think.

Disclaimer: this involved working on your registry.  If you dont feel comfortable editing your registry walk away now and get yourself a virtual machine.

• Open Regedit as an administrator.
• navigate to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0] - if any of these keys dont exist then you will have to create them.
• Add a string value “Sharepoint”=”Installed”

Run the VSeWSS available from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7BF65B28-06E2-4E87-9BAD-086E32185E68&displaylang=en

You will notice that we have now tricked the VSeWSS to thinking you have WSS installed on your pc.

Now…to make things even easier, download and install WSS deploy from http://wssdeploy.codeplex.com/ which will allow you to code and deploy more easily from your desktop without having to play around copying files, installing to GAC, carry out IISResets etc.

Happy Coding.