by ·Comments Off on Big Data – 6Vs of Data

Big data involves data collection from remote sensing devices and networks, Internet-powered data streams, systems, devices and many other sources that brings massively heterogeneous and continuous big data streams. You need to design the solution to effectively handle data to store, index, and query the data sources which poses big challenges. Big Data properties are commonly referred as 6Vs that is outlined below which includes volume, velocity, variety, veracity, variability and value.

by ·Comments Off on Angular 2 – Reactive Extensions and Observables

What is reactive extensions and how is it used in Angular 2?

reactivex.io  is the web site you need to visit to learn more about Reactive extensions.Any time you are connecting to the server, the ng Team is using the classes from ReactiveX. Remember, the observer pattern from the good old days, it is coming back again with the iterator pattern throwing in functional programming 🙂

by ·Comments Off on SAP and Oracle Connectivity using Nintex Forms and Workflows – Nintex InspireX

My session will be hands on demo using Nintex Forms and Workflows to connect to SAP and Oracle. You will get to watch & listen to real case studies and demos of integrating SAP & Oracle data with SharePoint using Nintex forms and workflows. Check out the session details at

See you in Las Vegas at Nintex InspireX conference from Feb 22-24, 2016

by ·Comments Off on Best Intranet Award Worldwide

Privileged to announce that I got an opportunity to lead a talented technical team that won the Nielsen Norman Group Best Intranet Award 2016 Worldwide.

Check this out
Built on SharePoint 2013, American Cancer Society’s new intranet replaces a number of disparate sites and systems, and eliminates outdated and redundant content, helping ACS reduce the number of servers needed and their associated costs by 62%.

“ACS worked to consolidate a set of sites built on outdated technology, with the goal of increasing engagement and encouraging collaboration,” said usability expert Jakob Nielsen, principal of Nielsen Norman Group. “The team created a site with a strong structure, inclusive resource library and many opportunities for employees and volunteers alike to learn, share and communicate.”

One of the biggest complaints about ACS’s previous system of siloed intranets was how difficult it was to find documents and information. Neudesic incorporated this and other user feedback into a mobile-responsive “search first” experience that leverages SharePoint 2013 Enterprise search capabilities to drive the site’s ultimate goal of increasing adoption.

“From identifying user personas to defining strategy and IA to designing and testing prototypes, it took a well-coordinated team effort to deliver the best possible experience for ACS users,” said Sathish TK, Neudesic Senior Solution Partner, Portals & Collaboration. “This recognition by Nielsen Norman is testament to the validity of our mobile first, user-centric approach to intranet design.”

A post-launch survey revealed that 71% of ACS staff visit Society Source every day to learn the latest cancer and organizational news and connect to resources, tools and people to help them perform their jobs. The new intranet is now the “most useful” of the eight channels ACS uses for internal communications.

“Society Source helps us create a single, aligned organization, presenting the opportunity for revamped governance and security policy – with well-defined roles and responsibilities – that extends across multiple platforms, such as hardware, software, internet browsers, mobile devices, etc.,” said Amy Hadsock, Senior Director, New Channels, ACS.

Visit Society Source for more information on the design and functionality of ACS’s award-winning intranet.

by ·Comments Off on Journey into Big Data for Developers

I have been asked numerous times on how a developer can get into Big Data development space. Although there is not a single right answer, I have laid out the approach you can consider taking. Depending on when you read this post, many Big Data players are moving towards developing solutions that are very easy to use by developers using SQL like languages.

I would encourage developers to start with Hive. Move on to Pig and then Scala or Python. 
Hive — Using query language based on SQL (HiveQL), you can write SQL queries that are transformed into MapReduce tasks. This is a good transition if you are coming from the relational database world.
Pig — Creates MapReduce jobs and can be extended with Python UDFs or Java. Procedural type language. Great candidate for simple data analysis tasks.
Scala —  This is a full programming language for Big Data developers. Complex language to learn but very powerful.
Start with playing around with basic ETL tasks using Hive or Pig and then move into Scala. Python is always a strong candidate and with many libraries available in Python for data analysis and ML, you can’t go wrong with it.
But for a quick learning road map, follow the bottom up approach shown in the diagram below

by ·Comments Off on Building Single Page Applications (SPA) with AngularJS and SharePoint 2013 – Part III

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In Part 1 , and Part 2 of the series, we walked through setting up of project and App.js respectively. In this concluding post, we will look at how the html files are coded.

First, the customer.html file – Pretty straightforward
<H2> Customer Information </H2>
        <table>
            <tr>
                <th>Customer ID</th>
                <th>Customer Name</th>
                <th>Customer Address</th>
                <th>Customer State</th>
                <th>Customer Country</th>
            </tr>
            <tr ng-repeat=”customer in customers”>
                <td><a href=”#/{{customer.CustomerID1}}”>{{customer.CustomerID1}}</a></td>
                <td>{{customer.CustomerName}}</td>
                <td>{{customer.CustomerAddress}}</td>
                <td>{{customer.CustomerState}}</td>
                <td>{{customer.CustomerCountry}}</td>
            </tr>
        </table>
Look at the ng-repeat directive. This is what does all the magic here. Recollect, in Part 2 , we coded something like this,
$scope.customers = data.d.results;
$scope is the execution context for expressions. $scope is the glue between application controller and the view. In our case, the view is the HTML file, we already defined the controller, now it is a matter of connecting them together via the $scope variable.
As you would guessed, the orders.html is also simple:
<h2>Orders Page</h2>
    <table>
            <tr>
                <th>Order ID</th>
                <th>Order Name</th>
                <th>Order Date</th>
                <th>Order Ship Country</th>
            </tr>
            <tr ng-repeat=”ord in orders”>
                <td> {{ord.OrderID}}</td>
                <td>{{ord.OrderName}}</td>
                <td>{{ord.OrderDate | date : format}}</td>
                <td>{{ord.OrderShipCountry}}</td>     
            </tr>
        </table>
 
You can always add in the customer name as the header so it makes sense to list the customer and the orders. That is for you to try out since it is very straightforward 🙂
Once you are done with all this, build your project, and deploy it from Visual studio. You deploy the apps to the apps site collection and you can launch it by clicking on the app name
Happy Coding!!!

by ·Comments Off on Building Single Page Applications (SPA) with AngularJS and SharePoint 2013 – Part II

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In Part 1 of the series, we walked through the initial steps of setting up the project and adding all related files. Now, let us focus on the App.js file (remember this is just for demo purpose, you would never want to put all your controller code in one single file, separate them based on the controllers)

You first define the app that was declared in default/
‘use strict’;
var customerApp = angular.module(‘CustomerApplication‘, [‘ngRoute’]);
Now, let us work on the customer Controller
customerApp.controller(‘CustomerListCtrl’, function ($scope, $http) {
    $http({ headers: { “Accept”: “application/json; odata=verbose” }, method: ‘GET’, url: “http://tksp15:90/_api/web/lists/getByTitle(‘Customers’)/items?$select=CustomerID1,CustomerName,CustomerAddress,CustomerState,CustomerCountry” })
    .success(function (data) {
        $scope.customers = data.d.results;
    });
    console.log(“Customer Controller…”);
});

You will have to get a json back and so you set that using the $http service and relevant header.
Notice the REST API call — I am querying from customers list and getting few columns out of the list. Note that in the real world, you will also pass in authentication parameters to validate the user.
Now, Orders controller
customerApp.controller(‘OrderCtrl’, function ($scope, $routeParams, $http) {
    $scope.custID = $routeParams.customerID
    $http({ headers: { “Accept”: “application/json; odata=verbose” }, method: ‘GET’, url: “http://tksp15:90/_api/web/lists/getByTitle(‘Orders’)/items?$filter=CustomerID1 eq ” + $scope.custID + “&$select=OrderID,OrderName,OrderDate,OrderShipCountry” })
  .success(function (data) {
      $scope.orders = data.d.results;
  });
    console.log(“Order Controller…”);
});

You will notice in the REST API call, that I am passing in the CustomerID1 as a parameter. This is what filters the Orders list and pulls only Order information for that Customer.
Now that we have our controllers, how do we ensure that the routing happens.  Here is the code
customerApp.config(function ($routeProvider) {
    $routeProvider.
      when(‘/’, {
          templateUrl: ‘Templates/customer.html’,
          controller: ‘CustomerListCtrl’
      }).
      when(‘/:customerID’, {
          templateUrl: ‘Templates/orders.html’,
          controller: ‘OrderCtrl’
      }).
      otherwise({
          redirectTo: ‘/’
      });
});
Recollect, that in Part 1, we created the html files. Review how these html files are referenced here. If you are familiar with MVC concepts, this should be no brainer. My definition of AngularJS is bringing MVC to the Javascript world. Concepts are pretty much the same. angular-route.js is the brain behind this routing mechanism.
In the next part, let us write up the HTML files and wrap up the series..

by ·Comments Off on Building Single Page Applications (SPA) with AngularJS and SharePoint 2013 – Part I

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This is Part 1 of Building Single Page Applications (SPA) with AngularJS ad SharePoint 2013. We will stick with the main moving parts of building SPA with SP 2013 and AngularJS. Assumption here is that you have played a little with AngularJS before.

So, we will build a SharePoint Hosted Apps that will display customer and their order information. This is what the final output looks like
Customer Information:
So, when you click on the CustomerID, it will take you to the Order screen without any refresh following the model of SPA. The snipped screen shot below shows Orders for CustomerID 1

There are plenty of resources to read upon SPA and how it works. So, let us stick with SharePoint and AngularJS.
Here are the high level steps:
1) Create a SharePoint Hosted Apps. 
2) Add the angularjs files to your Scripts folder.
3) Add these script tags to your default/ page
    <script type=”text/javascript” src=”../Scripts/jquery-1.8.2.min.js”></script>
    <script type=”text/javascript” src=”../Scripts/angular.js”></script>
     <script type=”text/javascript” src=”../Scripts/angular-route.js”></script>
angular.js is the core AngularJS file  and angular-route is using for routing between pages.
4) Verify a script file App.js exists under Scripts folder. If not, create one. This is where all our angularJS scripting will take place. In real world, I would recommend that you split script files based on the number of controllers you have.
5) Under Pages folder, create a folder named Templates, and create 2 blank html files. customer.html and orders.html. This is where the angular ng-repeat commands go in.
6) Next, on the default/, add these lines, 

<div ng-app=”CustomerApplication” ng-view>
        <div style=”text-align: center;”>

<img src=”../images/ajax_loader.gif” alt=”Loading…” title=”Loading..” style=”height: 50px;” />

        </div>
 </div>
As you can see, the above lines reference the ng-view and is pointed to the CustomerApplication angular APP.
In the next part, let us get into building the angularJS commands in App.js

by ·Comments Off on Consume SharePoint 2013 REST API using AngularJS

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The code below shows you how to invoke a SharePoint 2013 REST API. Understand this code is listed just for you to understand how to invoke REST API. In the real world, you would want to separate the script file into its own .js file. Recommended practice is to have an individual file for each controller. Also, http service is asynchronous here, so should always have on success and on failure events.

 

I have a list called Customers in SP 2013, so the REST API call would look something like this:

http://webapp/_api/web/lists/getByTitle(‘Customers’)/items?$select=CustomerID1,CustomerName,CustomerAddress,CustomerState,CustomerCountry

Also, to note is that I am getting back the REST API output as JSON, with the following statement:  application/json; odata=verbose

If you examine JSON output from SP, the informatio you need resides within the details structure, so that is the reason you see that I am storing my customer data by accessing <dataoutputfromJSON>.d.details

 

Here is the complete HTML file to access SharePoint 2013 list via REST API using AngularJS

 

<html ng-app=”tkCustomerApp”>

 <head>

    <title>SharePoint REST API Call </title>

    <script src=”scripts/angular.js”></script>

 

    <script>

      var tkCustomerApp= angular.module(‘tkCustomerApp’, []);

      tkCustomerApp.controller(‘CustomerCtrl’, function ($scope, $http){

        $http({headers: { “Accept”: “application/json; odata=verbose” }, method: ‘GET’, url:”http://tksp15:90/_api/web/lists/getByTitle(‘Customers’)/items?$select=CustomerID1,CustomerName,CustomerAddress,CustomerState,CustomerCountry”})

.success(function(data) {

          $scope.customers = data.d.results;

        });

      });

    </script>

</head>

  <body ng-controller=”CustomerCtrl”>

 

   <div> Search:<input ng-model=”query” type=”text”/> </div>

   <br />

     <table>

      <tr>

        <th>Customer ID</th>

        <th>Customer Name</th>

<th>Customer Address</th>

<th>Customer State</th>

<th>Customer Country</th>

      </tr>

      <tr ng-repeat=”cust in customers | filter:query”>

        <td>{{cust.CustomerID1}}</td>

        <td>{{cust.CustomerName}}</td>

<td>{{cust.CustomerAddress}}</td>

<td>{{cust.CustomerState}}</td>

<td>{{cust.CustomerCountry}}</td>

      </tr>

    </table>

  </body>

</html>