Balendran's Blogs

  The Situation: If you are in the Software Development space you would have been at some stage, part of a long and winding CRM project. Also the reasons for the lengthy CRM projects range from requirements changing through the course of the project, lack of strong vendor selection process to strong leadership to make critical decisions. There is no silver bullet that can get you through the project without any of the above simply because projects are established and executed by people. How do we tackle a CRM project without much fuss.?   The Solution discussion: Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides the basic building blocks and the tools to extend it to meet your custom requirements. It is also easier to deliver a successful Dynamics CRM project faster by Combining Agile and rapid prototyping. This is exactly the approach being demonstrated here. This approach may not work if you don’t have enough experience within delivery team to estimate work effort accurately and execute variou

External Authentication providers for SharePoint 2010: Thank you for continuing to read my blogs. It is a Sunday afternoon and the Roosters are leading Panthers 10 points to 6 in NRL, by the look of it, it has all the signs of turning into a one sided match in the second half. I thought I might write a blog about SharePoint and Single Sign On with Non-Microsoft Technologies. The Problem: Often Organisations would like to utilise their existing stack of technologies with SharePoint. This is due to the popularity of SharePoint as a platform to consolidate and provide a range of application services either to replace an existing set of tools or compliment an existing applications suite. We fall under the latter. I am working within a truly heterogeneous environment at the moment, the extranet applications are built on a mix of technologies such as OpenText Livelink for DMS, Java and JBPM for for workflow and front end portals, Sun Directory and Oracle for User data and other DB La

  If you are running SharePoint farms then you would have come across this requirement at least once, which is to replicate a production site or site collection into Development, Test or Staging environment. There are a number of blog posts and articles on how to copy down the site or site collection without much trouble but I have not found one which worked as expected. The Database back-up and restore method is a quick and easy method or cheaper solution than commercial tools available in the market. This method works well if you would like to quickly copy content. With the content database attach method the key is to be aware that the following items which are farm related attributes, need attention as they are not copied across. Search scope and Indexes, User accounts and Managed Metadata.  There are easier ways to overcome these. Search scope and indexes have to be redone and it does not take too much of your time. If your DTS environments have different users than the producti