In general terms, SharePoint Steve’s post (http://www.sharepointsteve.com/2010/02/creating-a-folder-in-a-sharepoint-list-and-adding-items-to-it-programatically/) and the useful comments cover off all the common bases, and I would recommend you to start there.

However, even with that, I could not get this to work.

I was creating a custom list that allowed new content types to be added to it (programmatically), and when a new content type was added it would automatically create a new folder for all items that were created using that particular content type. There was a bit more to it in terms of approval, security and event handlers, but those are the salient details.

I decided to use the content type name as the folder name – it was unique and made a clear link between the folder and the content type when browsing the list.

However, that was my downfall; although I can’t find it documented anywhere (any pointers here would be appreciated) you cannot have a folder in a list with the same name as a content type in that list.

The reason is that when you enable content types, SharePoint creates a hidden folder for each content type (with, you’ve guessed it, the content type name as the folder name) that contains resources associated with the content type.

In my case this was no biggy as I was in control of the folder names and simply changed the folder names slightly to make sure they were different from the content type names.

Hope this helps someone out – it took a considerable effort to figure it out and would be nice to think it helps others avoid the same pain!

With I-AM you get more functionality, faster, and at a lower cost than competitive solutions.

I-AM modular

I-AM allows you to choose how much or how little you need, and grows with you as your needs change and evolve. Whether you need only electronic document management, or a complete new financial system, I-AM is the answer. Then, in the future, if you need more, just add the modules as and when you need them.

Because each module is based on industry standard products and technologies, you have the peace of mind that your challenges have almost certainly already been addressed – whether you need to automate your accounts payable, handle tax or invoicing in over 30 countries, or give your senior managers easy to use business intelligence.

I-AM modules include the following:

I-AM industry standard

I-AM is built on some of the most widely used set of technologies in the world provided by the world’s largest software vendor: Microsoft. The core components of this integrated suite are:

By using these technologies, I-AM fits easily into your existing infrastructure and is compatible and pre-integrated with common desktop software, including Microsoft Excel, Word and Outlook.

I-AM proven

The core components of I-AM are already deployed in countries across the world, including the US, UK, Australia, Nigeria and the Czech Republic.

I-AM cost effective

By using such industry standard technologies that address the majority of local requirements and real estate specific capabilities right out of the box, I-AM can be implemented much more quickly than similar solutions from either the Mainstream ERP or traditional Property Management stables. This also saves cost twice – there is less time required but also, because these are industry standard solutions, there are far more resources available to help and so the daily rates are cheaper.

From a licence cost perspective, a complete I-AM suite is comparable to traditional Property Management solutions and typically cheaper than Mainstream ERP. But the modular nature of I-AM means that you can also implement incrementally, and so choose and pay for just the parts you need.

I-AM integrated

Rather than trying to build everything from scratch, I-AM uses existing best-of-breed solutions and brings them together in an integrated suite.

This means there aren’t compromises: each component benefits from its own focused development team, bringing unparalleled levels of functionality and ease of use. And if you need something non-standard, the extensive interfaces to I-AM make it quick and easy for us, or you, to customize or enhance the solution to meet specific requirements – and at a much lower cost than with more proprietary systems.

Calvis, one of the largest system integrators focused on the real estate sector and Microsoft partner, has used its experience and expertise to bring together this suite and pre-integrate the components to allow you to achieve these benefits faster than ever before.

I have enormous respect for both Tama and NOI. However, there were some misunderstandings in this piece that are interesting, including the following assertions:

1. Mainstream ERP have minimal or no Property Management capability;
2. Mainstream ERP have minimal or no Multi-entity Support;
3. The fundamental difference between Mainstream ERP and Real Estate ERP is that Real Estate ERP systems allow cross-entity postings (for example posting rent payments across multiple properties).

I will explain below how each of these assertions is flawed, but first I declare my own interest here: Calvis is promoting an asset and property management suite called I-AM (Integrated Asset Management) based on Microsoft’s ERP solution – and you can read more about this here http://wp.me/pVypy-3m.

The characterization of all “Mainstream ERP” systems being roughly the same misses a fundamental difference in market strategy between Microsoft and other software vendors: Microsoft have a partner-centric strategy.

96% of Microsoft revenue comes through its partner channels. This is largely because software developers create thousands of applications on Microsoft platforms that in turn drive Microsoft product sales.

This also distinguishes Microsoft from Yardi and MRI. Both have tried to establish some form of partner channel for solutions, but the available independent consultants or software developers in the world for these vendors numbers hundreds, not the hundreds of thousands doing the same things for Microsoft.

So, to the specific assertions above.

Mainstream ERP have minimal or no Property Management capability – FALSE

Microsoft’s partner community has produced many excellent, highly industry specific solutions. In terms of Property Management, our I-AM suite incorporates the FlexProperty solution developed by global systems integrator Logica.

FlexProperty is one of only around 60 Microsoft Dynamics AX modules that is Microsoft certified. That means you can rely on it complying with the same standards and best practices as Microsoft’s own products.

But moreover it provides rich real estate industry specific capabilities that are in line with Real Estate ERPs. In fact, in many areas, the ability to leverage similar requirements from other industry sectors means that the Microsoft Dynamics AX solution actually delivers far in excess of real estate specific competitors. A good example of this is business to business trading partner integration and supply chain management, where the needs of development and construction are powerfully enhanced by similarities with manufacturing industries.

Mainstream ERP have minimal or no Multi-entity Support – FALSE

The Microsoft Dynamics AX platform has full multi-entity support and allows both shared or entity specific configuration – for example with respect to chart of accounts, tenants or service providers.

There is also sophisticated templating capability to allow very rapid addition of entities following standard regional or portfolio based rules.

Naturally, this globally capable platform is also very well placed to consolidate across these multiple entities, taking into account variations in accounting rules (for example between local GAAP and IFRS) and also multiple currencies. In fact, this is another area where the depth and richness of the solution actually provides greater flexibility and more out-of-the-box localization to deal with specific country needs.

Just like niché Real Estate ERP solutions, Microsoft provides extensible classification rules for transactions and ledgers that allow arbitrarily sophisticated classifications for consolidation (or other) purposes.

The fundamental difference between Mainstream ERP and Real Estate ERP is that Real Estate ERP systems allow cross-entity postings – FALSE

Whilst this has been the case in the past, today it is anachronistic. Cross entity postings are of course particularly important in real estate because of the need to perform cross portfolio actions – like posting rent – when each property has a corresponding entity (and often multiple entities in more complex fund structures).

But to suggest that Microsoft Dynamics AX can’t do this is simply not true. The standard product has advanced batch processing features to allow large scale cross-entity actions like invoicing.

The FlexProperty solution further simplifies some of the most common real estate specific scenarios, and others are easily and quickly configured at implementation time. And this is a key thing to remember – even this kind of configuration is quick and easy, not a time and money consuming “change request”, and ultimately might only make its way onto some seemingly endless list of “user requests”.

Summary

We have all seen how much functionality Microsoft have put into recent product releases – be it SharePoint 2010’s plan visualization, document management or application integration capabilities, SQL Server 2008 R2’s GIS/spatial data reporting, or Excel’s PowerPivot for self-service BI.

What may be less obvious is that similar major enhancements have been made across the Microsoft portfolio – including Dynamics AX – and that as a leading Microsoft partner in the real estate industry, we recognize how these enhancements change the rules of the game.

If this blog raises any questions, please get in touch – either by replying below, or e-mailing me at chris.lees@calvis.com.

Over the years companies have taken what, at the time, were seen as major steps to understand and improve the efficiency of their organizations. These may have been through standards initiatives and industry governance to document and audit process such as ISO9001, but this never addressed a company’s process efficiency; it just provided a mechanism to audit that a process was being followed regardless of whether that process was actually efficient.

Line of business solutions in real estate are very mature and we have seen many vendors make forays into areas outside their traditional solution expertise i.e. workflow around property management, document management for appraisal/valuation and asset management. Generally these have all been proprietary and have locked companies into what appeared to be a bright and forward thinking solutions at the time but at a cost; their ability to be agile and flexible in the world of business that is changing faster than it ever has before.

Companies are realizing that their solution infrastructure needs to be adaptable. This doesn’t mean throwing away existing line of business solutions – it means addressing how the organization uses those systems and how they use technology to interact with internal and external stakeholders during the broad lifecycle of real estate. It is now quick and easy to move past the process documents that describe how business should be conducted and on to modeling solutions that engage with the possibilities that technologies such as Microsoft SharePoint can offer to support change.

Workflow was once seen as the solution of the prosperous firm, but not now. Process and document workflow is there, ready and waiting to be exploited; business intelligence is there, ready and waiting to be exploited; frameworks for collaborative solutions with clients and partners are there, ready and waiting to be exploited.

Best practice is well defined within the Real Estate industry, providing the professional language and process for commerce within the sector. There is another pervasive language and process within the sector as well, alive within all its stakeholders: technology and the familiarity of the computer desktop and its office tools such as word processing, spreadsheets, databases and presentations. As technology has become an imperative for business in the modern world it is only now truly bridging the gap between business best practice and efficiency rather than how it has been in the past: left to the interpretation of the individual.

The introduction of InterAction for Smartphone increased the use of InterAction for recording activities from close to 0 to 10 activities per month per employee in the first quarter after deployment and to 20 activities per month per employee in the second quarter. This was a very dramatic quarter on quarter growth. At the start of the third quarter the InterAction Dashboard was deployed on employee and management computers and the levels of activity (account and team member) were tracked daily and reviewed in weekly management meetings. The recording of activities in InterAction grew steadily to a peak of 31 per month per employee in the 6th quarter and decreased to 22 in the 8th quarter. The latter consequence of new people joining the firm and their initially more limited numbers of external activities. Over the period observed, the use of InterAction expanded from just the marketing and business development staff to all members of staff, including partners.

Sandy has been pivotal in establishing Calvis, Inc., the North American operating company within the Calvis group, and his commitment and dedication has seen a very successful first year. Calvis, Inc. has contributed nearly a third of the group revenue and has been able to make a positive contribution to the group P&L from the outset. This has been in no small part to Sandy’s unique combination of real estate industry and technology skills, and his vigorous approach to serving our clients.

Calvis will be building on this great start in North America and have plans to grow the US team over the next 12 months as we expand our CIO advisory and Microsoft SharePoint services in this region. Calvis will also be broadening the RealFuse product line which provides a flexible BI solution in SharePoint, and introducing a number of other real estate solutions for SharePoint, both in the North American and European markets.

For more information, please contact either Sandy Jacolow (sandy.jacolow@calvis.com) or Chris Lees (chris.lees@calvis.com).

This used to be difficult, and involve messing around shutting down servers and mounting the vmdk virtual hard disks as secondary drives on another server to perform the resize.

Now it is as easy as it could be, without even the need to shutdown the server (yes, even when resizing system partitions!). All you need to do is:

1. Use the vSphere Client to edit the settings of the server and change the size of the hard disk(s) to the new size;
2. On the server itself (RDP/console) run the Computer Management snap-in from the Administrative Tools menu;
3. Expand Storage and select Disk Management. The drive you have increased in size will probably still be showing as the original size. This is because the virtual disk manager caches this information. On the right hand side, click More Actions and select Rescan;
4. You should now see your new unallocated space. Right click on the *allocated* partition and select Expand.

Et voila! You have an expanded hard disk, in situ, without so much as a reboot required.

I hope this saves you as much time as it has me!

I am honoured to be contributing to next year’s European SharePoint Best Practices Conference 2011 as a speaker.

The conference takes places on April 11th – 13th 2011 at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, London.

The conferences features 96 sessions , 69 speakers (includes the 15 community track speakers and sessions) and this excludes the sponsor partner sessions, It will be the SharePoint conference to attend in Europe in 2011 no other conference outside Microsoft’s in the US will have this many talented SharePoint speakers in one conference. Exhibitor Party / Conference Party / SharePint night and full set of Video Recorded,MP3 and PowerPoint DVDs sent out after the conference, We are expecting the conference to sell out so booking early is recommended.

More information at http://www.sharepointbestpractices.co.uk/index.html

The timing and theme could not have been more apposite: as the conference began with SHOW ME THE ROI emblazoned where ever you looked, so did the Government’s announcement of the Spending Review outcomes – and in particular closing the £160Bn gap between Government income and expenditure.

It was in this economic climate that CIOs, CFOs, COOs and professionals from leading firms dedicated their time to come together and discuss some of the challenges and opportunities facing us all, and looking for their own ROI.

Howard Berger kicked off the event and introduced Jim Young (Realcomm’s CEO) who joined via Skype video call from his home in Carlsbad, California. This exemplified in many ways some of the ideas to come later – exploiting technology to save time and money of course, but then going further and using the time and money that has been saved to raise the bar.

Both Howard and Jim expressed special thanks to the sponsors – Lutron, EnOcean, LECG, Calvis, Yardi, Tridium and Pacific Controls – without whom the event would not have been possible.

The clear theme to come out of all the sessions was the importance of the information lifecycle – collecting data, managing data, reporting data – and its relationship to the building lifecycle.

Shaun O’Callaghan (Calvis) and I led the first session and showcased a range of the new capabilities in SharePoint 2010 (released in May) together with SQL2008 R2 and Microsoft Office 2010. These showed how sophisticated data analytics and visualization that were previously very expensive to achieve were now part of Microsoft’s platform suite and accessible to almost all companies at little or no cost.

We heard from Lionel Prodgers (Agents4FM) and William Box (Carnego Systems, also via Skype video call) how connected buildings – those whose systems are truly able to communicate, provide information and be controlled remotely – are becoming more common and the technology providers maturing. Market forces – particularly the issue of service charges and Landlord versus Tenant benefits – are undoubtedly slowing adoption in some geographies (including the UK).

Several speakers through the day provided great examples of how these systems can deliver comprehensive real time information about the performance of a building and allow the building to be tuned – whether that’s varying parameters for efficiency (e.g. moving the temperature point 1 degree closer to ambient) or responding to offers from a smart grid.

Matt Burnham (CBRE) and Matt Richardson (FIL) discussed the challenges in getting data from the perspective of property, asset and fund management. Their challenges were often founded in the number of different systems involved – either because of the range of countries involved, or the number of companies in the supply chain. They also discussed the difficulty of moving information between systems and organizations, but were clear that the bigger challenges were about getting the right people in place, and then developing effective processes.

Stephen Spooner (OSCRE) followed this with a timely reminder of the work being done to simplify the movement of this information. He explained the benefits in time saved and improvements in data quality through not having repeated rekeying of property information. This sparked some lively debate in the audience: why should owners change anything when their managing agents already deliver just what they need (often by entering the data directly into the owners system)?

This question was really at the heart of the information lifecycle theme, highlighting an on-going struggle in improving efficiency: the truth is that one owner changing their processes and technologies to follow, for example, OSCRE standards, in many cases probably isn’t a big win for them.

However, to overturn the built-in inefficiencies of information management – in this example the duplication and data manipulation that all managing agents have to undertake (and hence price into their engagements) – individual owners will have to take this first step. It will take strong leaders to recognize that driving these inefficiencies out requires looking outside the artificial boundaries of a single organization and taking a holistic view of our industry’s processes.

This theme was reinforced in the final session of the day, when Paul Sutcliffe (DTZ), Mark Davenport (Distech Controls), Matthew de Villiers (Greenstone Carbon Management) and Nigel Mackenzie (Pacific Controls) discussed the Carbon Reduction Commitment. Apart from the entertaining way in which the CRC framework changed during the afternoon as the details of the Government Spending Review became clearer, this discussion highlighted the disconnect between a client commissioning a building and the individual contractors with smart building technologies. Main contractors, continually driven by price, often force subcontractors to go for least-cost options, instead of discussing with the client the operational and maintenance savings that can be made by installing more sophisticated systems & controls – not to mention countless environmental benefits.

Both these questions highlight the need for the industry to act together and breakdown the historically insular mentality.

As the sessions came to an end, everyone made their way to the drinks reception and conversations stimulated by the day’s events continued late into the night, no doubt developing further some of the countless ideas that emerged from having such a high quality group of people together in one place… and I’m certainly looking forward to hearing how some of these have progressed at the next Realcomm event.

REPRODUCED FROM ARTICLE FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE REALCOMM ADVISORY: http://www.realcomm.com/advisoryweb.asp?aid=447

Customers should start planning to roll these updates into their existing patching and maintenance schedules.

More information can be found at: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms10-oct.mspx