Skip to main content

SharePoint 2013 Development and Consulting - Laptop & Conferencing Experience with Lync

Have just jumped on a brand new SharePoint 2013 massive Intranet project and because of specific working conditions have found some items that required addressing almost immediately in order to continue the job.

Maybe this will be interesting to someone else who is about to start SharePoint 2013 development to have an idea of what might be necessary.

I started working with SharePoint using my own infrastructure in 2009. I used iMac with 320GB HDD and 4GB RAM running VMWare Fusion to virtualise Windows environment (SQL Server 2008, standalone SharePoint 2007, Visual Studio 2008, Office 2007).
It was all-in-one virtual machine. A bit slow, but enough for any SharePoint work that I had at that time.

For communication with colleagues and partners we used GoToMeeting. Great tool that worked (and still works) without any problems. Voice, video, screen-sharing - all worked well using built-in audio/video hardware.

In 2010 I got a MacBook Pro with 500GB HDD and 8GB RAM. Same VMWare Fusion to run SharePoint 2010 farm - Web Server, SQL Server and Domain Controller.
Office for Mac 2011 was installed and I used it very often for work and presentations.
GoToMeeting and Skype have been used for conferencing without any problems.

So up to now I have been very well with Apple infrastructure and OS which allowed my to work, test SharePoint stuff on Mac, present, communicate etc.
But here came SharePoint 2013.

From the very first look at the requirements it became obvious that even 16GB wouldn't be enough on the machine for comfortable run of SharePoint/Office development environment. I created a 6GB RAM virtual machine with all-in-one installation of SQL, SharePoint, Office and Visual Studio, but it is incredibly slow.
So it appears that Apple can't help anymore with the laptop that would hold more than 16GB of RAM.

But it's not the only problem. Second issue I faced was Lync. Specifically conferencing using Lync on a MacBook is an issue.
First, Lync conference call application couldn't pick up the audio properly. My peers couldn't hear me and I couldn't hear them.
Second, I wasn't able to type in the call dialog. I suspect that's the problem with Silverlight. I could type in text editor and then paste into the chat dialog window, but it's not the best way of communicating.

I had no idea about those limitations before and it took some time during the conference call to try and figure out the fix. By chance I got a separate laptop with me that had Windows 7 installed. I quickly fired it up, executed the meeting invite - same problem with audio, but i could type in the dialog that time.
15-20 minutes of the conference were spent trying to make the things just work.

I know that other alternatives could be used, but my peers have got a requirement to use Office 365 and Lync for communication.

So the solution is to get: 24+ GB RAM environment, Windows 8, Lync client and USB headset to use with it for communication.    

Here's what I have got at the end: http://traveloga.blogspot.com/2013/01/work-laptop.html
 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Setting up External Content Type for SQL Server database using SQL Server authentication - SharePoint 2010 Foundation

This post is a follow up on the issues that I have got setting up External Content Type (ECT) on SharePoint 2010 Foundation that was going to connect to remote SQL Server database for information. I cannot use my SharePoint user accounts to access SQL Server. According to the information I have discovered ECT and Business Connectivity Services are available in the SharePoint 2010 Foundation, but there are some issues if you want to use authentication methods in your external connections that are different from Windows Identity or Current User Identity. This is because there is no Secure Store Service in SharePoint 2010 Foundation which serves as an impersonation hub and is only available in SharePoint 2010 Server edition. The issues are coming from the fact that you can actually create ECT in SharePoint Designer 2010 providing just Secure Store ID and system would ask you for credentials and here you go, but when you try to use your ECT in External Lists or as a lookup columns you w

InfoPath 2013 Preview - URL not valid error when publishing

In InfoPath 2010 there is a problem when you try to publish a Form to a SharePoint site that doesn't have root site collection. You will get an error message "The following url is not valid". It's described here:   http://support.microsoft.com/kb/981854 The solution is to create root site collection for the Web application. Same problem is with InfoPath 2013: In my situation I didn't create the root site collection initially, but used "/sites" managed path instead for all site collections. To solve the problem with InfoPath I had to create it. Used a new site template "Project Site". Will get a chance to research that too. :)  

Document Sets - SharePoint 2010 - Part 1

Hi again, in this post I am going to demonstrate how set up and start using Document Sets in SharePoint 2010. In Beta version there was a little problem when working with Document Sets. You could see the discussion around it here: Document Set content type issue . Now it is fixed and I will show you how to set up Document Sets properly to also use Keywords. 1. Activate two site collection features - Document Sets and Document ID Service: 2. Select a document library settings where you want to implement Document Sets. In my case it is Shared Documents. When you have selected the settings go to Advanced settings and then allow content types management: 3. Add an existing content type called Document Set: 4. Now I want to create a new Document Set. I have a sales opportunity and I have two documents related to this sales opportunity. So first I select New Document -> Document Set command, then provide name and description and there it is: 5. To check if our Document ID