Fundamentals of SharePoint Performance – Disk, SQL, and Network

Robert Bogue February 11, 2009 3 Comments

I’ve run into a few customer environments of late where the performance of SharePoint was unacceptable, however, the real problem isn’t SharePoint. It’s been either disk performance or it has been network performance. So I wanted to lay out a few quick suggestions for high performance SharePoint implementations. The trick is, I’ll tell you they have nothing to do with SharePoint. It’s all about good general network performance and good SQL server performance.

Disks from the Ground Up

So if you want good performance from your system you have to get it right from the ground up. Here are some suggestions on the disk side:

Other than for a SQL Cluster … Use Direct Attached storage — All things being equal, you’re going to find that DAS is faster. I’ll point you to a SQL Team.com article “Which is Faster: SAN or Directly-Attached Storage” where they say that the generalization I’m making is bad so you can make your own decision, however, for equal performance drives, configured the same way DAS is faster. You’ll never get slowed down by anyone else and you have less infrastructure to push your way through. (But read the rest of the items for this to fit in.)
Buy smaller, faster drives — Typically we think of storage in terms of capacity. I bought 5 TB of disk or I need 10TB of disk. Rarely do we think of the number of IO operations we need to get from a disk. That’s a big mistake. For high performance systems we need to be thinking about how many operations each disk can produce. That means more, smaller, faster disks. By the way, SATA drives are MUCH slower than their SAS cousins. You’re looking for SAS drives with the fastest spin rate you can find, in sizes that are adequate for your needs.
RAID 10 is twice as good as RAID 5 (mathematically speaking) — OK, it’s hokey, but it’s true. When you’re looking for performance you want to make an array of drives with RAID10 not RAID5. RAID5 is still appropriate for long term storage. However, RAID10 is more appropriate for any system you want performance from. (No it’s not twice as good, I was playing on the 10 vs. 5)
Partition Alignment Counts — A good buddy of mine, Jimmy May has developed a reputation for being the man with the answers about partition alignment. If you’ve not seen him deliver one of his decks on partition alignment — make it a point to do that. Jimmy’s demonstrated over 30% performance improvements by just aligning the disk partition correctly. (Correctly being relative to how the controller and drives are setup.)

SQL Server is Your Friend

Once you get the disks right you’re on the right track. The next step is to configure SQL Server correctly. Here are a few helpful tips:

Memory is Good, More Memory is Better — SQL server has got to be the product at Microsoft which has got memory management right. If you feed SQL server memory it will feed you back better performance. Of course there’s the law of diminishing returns but with memory being cheap — go big.
TempDB is critical — The tempdb in SQL server is it’s workspace. If it doesn’t perform well, then the system doesn’t perform well. Look at KB 328551 about allocating many TempDB files across multiple LUNs to improve performance. Or the article Optimizing tempdb Performance.
[SharePoint Specific] Look at the Database Maintenance for Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies white paper
[SharePoint Specific] The search DB will be hot — The _SEARCH database for SharePoint will be VERY busy. It’s going to need some serious disk resources. Look at SQL File groups and Search for specifics on how file groups may help.

Network Smart

One of the other areas that tends to bite people is network performance. Whether it’s a 100MB hub in the server rack. (Meaning those 1GB NICs don’t get to go that fast) or silly requirements for switch diversity, you’ve got to be networking smart. Here’s a few tips:

All NICs in all SharePoint farm servers (SQL included) are locked at 1GB/Full. If you can’t network at 1GB per server don’t bother, you’re not going to have good performance.
Team or Link Aggregate multiple NICs in your servers — Every server should have at least 2 NICs. Those NICs should be link aggregated. For SharePoint Front End Web servers you can split them for web traffic and background traffic — but honestly, I’d link aggregate them too if you can.
Don’t do switch diversity — This is a hard one. Folks want to do switch diversity (one NIC on one switch and the other NIC on a different switch) so they can survive a switch failure. Observationally, something isn’t configured correctly and you still go down. Worse, the switches RARELY have enough bandwidth between them so all of your traffic slows down because the switches saturate their cross-connect link. It’s just not worth doing this unless you know for certain you can get it right.

I’m sure there are tons of other things to think about — these are just the ones that have bit clients in the last few months.

Don’t Return an SPWeb after you’ve disposed the SPSite

Robert Bogue February 7, 2009 1 Comment

For those of you playing the home game of “Should I dispose in SharePoint” may have noticed comments about edge cases like SPContext.Current.Site.RootWeb saying that the SPSite object automatically tracks the SPWeb objects that it creates and disposes them when it is disposed. I recently ran across some code that disposed of a SPSite object that they created and then returned the SPWeb object they created from the site to the caller. Here’s the problem with that…

The SPWeb object will already have been disposed by SPSite when it got disposed. Because of this fact that specific SPWeb that was created should never be used after calling .Dispose() on the SPSite. (You’re not supposed to use an object after having called it’s .Dispose() method.) Although the code *may* be working, it’s definitely not recommended because the object may throw an ObjectDisposed exception, it may transparently reconnect itself (meaning that it effectively ignored the dispose and starts camping out in memory), or may just start doing weird stuff.

[Edited: 2009-02-13 – Minor clarification to exactly what I meant about SPWeb being used after SPSite per comment.]

So … never dispose your SPSite until you’re sure you’re done using all of the SPWebs you’ve created from it.

Tele-Prompter-Scope

Robert Bogue February 7, 2009 No Comments

When I posted about my video studio I mentioned that I had been trying to work out a Teleprompter. I initially bought something from a guy that sold via EBay and wasn’t really happy with the results. I bought acrylic instead of a glass mirror which didn’t really work that well. It was dark on the mirror side and didn’t look very good. the software that was included in the package would do standard teleprompting (by inverting some text) but I really wanted to be able to use my PPT slides.

With the help of my friend, I was able to finally get the right result. It’s a design that utilizes a regular mirror on the bottom and a one-way mirror on the top that the camera sits behind. This periscope like design means that I don’t have to try to electronically transform the video signal at all. The video signal is straight up like normal, and the mirrors take care of everything.

Ultimately, I can use the solution (which I’m calling a Tele-Prompter-Scope for lack of a better term) with any software on the computer, and can even use it with the output of the camera as a preview monitor. We initially used the acrylic that came with the teleprompter I bought, but subsequently have swapped it out for real glass. The real glass one-way mirror that we used does have a neutral density pull down on the light coming through the glass, however, I’ve got plenty of light so this hasn’t been a problem for the camera.

I bought a LCD monitor that drives the rig with both VGA and DVI inputs — which is why I can send the camera’s HDMI output directly to the monitor. (via a $10 adapter) I can’t tell you how well it’s worked out. My initial studio tests had me looking off to the side at my notes which just looked like I was lying to people because I was constantly breaking “eye contact” with them (in this case the camera). My tests post teleprompter make it look like I’m always looking at the listener — it’s been a semi-long road to get there but the solution is perfect.

If you want one for yourself send an email to my buddy and he can quote you what it would take to make you one. Here’s what the end result looks like (the cloth keeps stray light out):

Self Publishing with Lulu.com

Robert Bogue February 7, 2009 2 Comments

A year ago now, I started publishing The SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide for End Users via Lulu.com. Lulu.com is a printer and distributor for other people’s works. In other words, they facilitate self publishing. There are a few dynamics that I wanted to talk about relative to working with lulu.com instead of working with a major publisher including some of the logistics, but first why I don’t recommend self publishing.

Self Publishing Isn’t For Everyone

I’ve published 17 books with traditional publishers and I still recommend it to my friends and colleagues. That may sound strange coming from someone who could be considered a successful self publisher. (Using profitability as the key measure of success.) However, there are a ton of things about being a self publisher that just make the process difficult for the first time user.

First, you’re going to need your stuff edited. I don’t care how good a writer you are — or if your wife was formerly the author of the Chicago Manual of Style. You’re going to have to hire a traditional editor to clean your language up. This is particularly true of me, but is true of everyone. (I’ve worked on over 100 books and there’s not been a single case where I didn’t recommend an editor.) Luckily having so many friends in publishing landed me a great editor, Kathi Anderson.

Second, you need a technical editor for a technical book. Joe Mack was kind enough to do this for me. It worked well for him and for me in terms of a way to make sure that we tromped through everything in SharePoint. By the way, most folks say that I’m pretty technical and there were still things that Joe caught that was just me not focusing — and tons more where he pointed out exceptions.

Third, you need to understand instructional design and what is called “development editing.” In short this makes the book easier to read. I’ve done enough editing that I can do this for myself. I put the material away for a while and come back to edit it. If you’ve not done dozens of books — or more importantly had to do this for other folks work, you’ll need to hire this out too.

You’re also going to want a cover designer. Someone who can make the cover of your book look professional. I dabble with editing tools but I can’t make anything that looks as good as my neighbor, friend, and professional graphics artist Arnel Reynon. He’ll need a stock photo or two in order to put the cover together. I had been playing with IStockPhoto.com for selling my photos so that’s where the cover for the book came from.

One of the things I didn’t have this time around — because of the structure of the book — is an indexer. Someone who can help in the development of a useful index for the book. Because the entire book is focused on tasks, I opted to go without this for the book — and it’s the one negative thing that’s ever been said about the book.

Then you need to convert individual chapters into a single master PDF. The individual chapters mean that you can manage them through the process of editing in multiple steps, but ultimately you really want one master PDF which is the book. For that I built a set of tools that I ended up being the core of an article for MSDN magazine.

You’re also going to need tools to write the files. Microsoft Word is a good starting point, but you’re going to need Acrobat Professional. The PDF export out of Word is useful, but it is missing something (I’ll explain later with details.) You’ll also probably need a screen capture tool like Snag It.

So even if you write the book yourself, expect to spend several thousand dollars between tools and labor from outside parties.

To add insult to injury, I can write like a machine. It’s a mechanical thing for me. I don’t need deadlines. I don’t need a project manager calling me. I just get it done. However, most people aren’t like that. They need some sort of constant push to get things done. If you self publish no one is going to keep you to a schedule or delivery date. It’s on your own.

Finances

I always get the question about the financial end of self publishing. People say those publishers take too much money. You’re probably raking in the money. Um… well, let’s get back to reality. First, I self published the book for two reasons: 1) I wanted to try self-publishing to see what it was like. 2) in order to be able to sell corporate licenses.

I’ve known people that do self-publishing but mostly in smaller units, I wanted to see how it might work out to do it myself. Frankly, it’s a great topic of conversation with my publishing friends. So few people have tried to do it for real that no one really knew what to expect.

On the corporate license thing, I really wanted to get this material on corporate intranets everywhere. As a consultant I hated writing this stuff. It was always when you were ready to move on to the next thing and we never had enough budget to do it right.

So here’s the fundamentals of the math so that it makes sense. First, a publisher will typically give you a $10,000 advance for a whole technical book. Some give more, some give less but for our purposes it’s a clean round number. If you’re self publishing you’re in the hole for your out of pocket expenses plus the advance you might have received. Second, you have to understand royalty rates. Royalty rates for a publisher are paid off of their NET not GROSS. In the publishing industry the price from a publisher to a distributor is roughly half of the unit price. For my book which sells for $35 (OK, $34.99 — but I’m trying to keep the math easy) you can expect that the distributor expects to pay about $17.50 for the book. If you get a 10% royalty rate (common, and also easy math) you’ll end up making $1.75 per book that is sold.

So, you have to pay back your advance. That’s going to take selling about 5800 books using the math above. You won’t get another dime until you’ve caught up to the advance. 5,000 books is a fair number for a computer book. It might sell more but I wouldn’t expect it to.

On the publisher side, doing the self publishing route you look at your production costs which vary based how you want to buy. Lulu.com is a print-on-demand type printer. They get an order they print the order and they ship it. That leads to higher per-unit costs but means that you never carry any inventory to speak of. (As a technical matter they could if they wanted but they don’t generally.) So on a book like mine which is 380ish black and white pages at 7.34×9.68 … that is roughly $12.00. If you buy from printers that print small runs for individual publishers you can buy that down to about $8.00 — but you have to buy 300 units to do that. So you would have to sell about 200 units to get your production costs to even out. Unless you have a marketing vehicle already worked out — it’s a lot of risk ($2,400 in my example).

When we sell to Amazon.com or another online distributer, I make roughly $4/book. That’s because there’s yet another party involved. That also doesn’t include the costs for an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) or review copies that Lulu.com requires you buy to have it listed on Amazon.com. Basically, when everything nets out I make 2-3x what I’d make with a publisher contract. That sounds good — right? Well, yea, on the same volume it certainly does.

I should also mention that books sold through lulu.com net me about $16.00 a book because there’s no third party and there’s no distributor taking half the profit. However, unit sales through lulu.com are REALLY low. That’s because it’s only what I drive and only those people that feel comfortable with buying from them.

Marketing

I’ll say, arrogantly, but with confidence that my book is the best end user SharePoint book on the market today. However, it doesn’t sell even a fraction of the top two selling “end user” books for SharePoint. The … Dummies book easily sells 10x the number of books that I do — despite the fact it’s more of an IT Pro book than an end user book. The APress (relatively small publisher) book sells in excess of 5x my units. How do I know? Well, you can work your way backwards from the Amazon.com sales rank if you want. You can occasionally sync that up with someone who reads the bookscan data. (Think TV/Radio ratings for books.)

So even though my per unit revenue is better — ultimately I’m making less money than had I gone with a traditional publisher — at least on the book. I should inject here that I don’t even try to make money with the book itself. As I mentioned above, that wasn’t the point for me. The point was the corporate sales, which is where all the real money is coming from.

So how do you market the book? Well, I have the great pleasure to be able to associate with Microsoft SharePoint MVPs. There are 100ish SharePoint MVPs from all over the globe. We’ve developed a relationship and because of that many of them provided a mention on their blogs. I’ve also managed to get placement in MSDN magazine as a part of my articles, I’ve got a set of links from my blog, I’ve got Office Online posting some of the content, etc. I didn’t do any real hard dollar spend on marketing. Despite what I feel has been an impressive community marketing effort, I’m simply not driving the kind of activity the book should support.

I did some direct marketing in January and saw a nice uptick in sales but honestly, I spent more on marketing that I made back in book sales. (That’s OK because it drove some interest in corporate licenses, however, if you’re trying to make it via books alone– it’s probably not going to pay for itself.) So even if I knew the right things to do with marketing money, it’s unlikely that I’d be able to be profitable on marketing the book. On the other hand larger publishers have sales reps and marketing funds, etc. They have an infrastructure that can drive book sales. I can tell you it doesn’t always work but when it does it can be amazing.

Oh, and thus far, I’ve only been talking about online outlets. The book stores won’t ever get my book in stock. Having books available in physical stores will cause more units to sell. Another little quirk of the publishing business. Unsold books are returned to the publisher for credit. That practice is why you see publishers have reserves in your royalty statements. Effectively they’re trying to estimate how many books they’re going to get back.

Net It Out For Me

OK, if I didn’t want to do the corporate sales, I’d never self publish a book. Sure it’s an added ego boost over working with a publisher, but honestly most folks go “oh, I see” when you tell them you self-published. It makes it somehow less real. I can respond that I’ve done the traditional publisher thing too which restores some of the mystic around being published — but if you can’t say you’ve been published by a traditional publisher, expect that in your own mind being self published is more prestigious but in some other folks minds it may not be.

The math, in most cases, isn’t going to work out. If you can get a deal with a traditional publisher they’re likely going to be able to account for more sales. There are a handful of exceptions because they don’t have very good distribution and marketing, but fundamentally you should expect to see more units with publishers than on your own.

Some Details About Lulu.com

Before I end this post, I’ve got to say that Lulu.com has been great to work with. Despite the occasional glitch, I get paid on time each month. (publishers generally pay quarterly or twice a year). Once the book is online I can mostly ignore it. (Except for marketing). However, I’ll say that getting a book on their site, and particularly listed for distribution is a bit of a maze. First, let’s talk about uploading the book.

The book gets uploaded in several stages. You set a title, and the type of pages and binding you want. You then upload the contents. (I recommend via PDF). They process the PDF and convert it to a press-ready file. For PDFs this isn’t doing that much work. However, this is a phase which kills me every time. If I print via the Acrobat Pro PDF printer I can never get the page size to stick — even if I go back in and trim the pages later. If I use the MS Word export to PDF, I end up missing the Arial font. The funny thing is that I don’t really use the Arial font, there’s just something that needs it. However, you can preflight your PDF in Adobe Acrobat Pro and embed fonts in them. I ended up doing this to make my PDF work. So out of Word and then preflight with Acrobat Pro.

The next stage is the cover. You can opt for a standard cover — but I want it to look professional. So I have to upload another PDF, this time with precise dimensions. Because the spine of the book changes size with the number of pages, I do mean you need a precise PDF. Luckily Arnel and I were able to get this working.

There are a few other steps but essentially the book will be available.

If you want to put it up for distribution, you have to pay for the service, order a copy of the book, get the ISBN, update the cover, order another copy of the book (with the ISBN), and push the button to let it go into distribution. Several weeks later the book will start to show up on Amazon.com and other online book sellers. I can tell you this waiting feels like an eternity. The process itself feels clunky because it’s a few days of waiting then a little action, a few more days of waiting then a little action, etc. Be prepared to be patient if you go this route.

Full Color Edition of The SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide for End Users

Robert Bogue February 7, 2009 No Comments

In the last week I got a note from someone commenting on the fact that the samples on the SharePointShepherd.com web site showed the screen shots in full color but the book itself is printed in black and white. I honestly hadn’t really thought about it. We see it in electronic form for corporate licenses so often it didn’t occur to me that there would be any confusion here. Because the person we were talking with was a small organization (<10 people), the corporate licensing options didn’t really fit the need. However, we hadn’t made a full color edition of the book available. So, I placed a new, full color version up on lulu.com for purchase. I should provide a warning that the cost is nearly $100/book. (Ouch.) To be perfectly candid, I make less on the color version of the book than the black and white version, however, I wanted to make it available for those who absolutely had to have color. So, if you have to have color you can get it now. Or if you buy the corporate license you’ll get a full color set of electronic files.

Two SharePoint Experts in a Room — Can they agree?

Robert Bogue February 4, 2009 1 Comment

One of the interesting comments I heard yesterday after I sat on both an information worker panel and a developer panel at the SharePoint Best Practices Conference in San Diego was that getting two MVPs (or experts) in a room and getting the same answer is sort of like getting two economists in the same room and getting the same answer. The implication of this is that two SharePoint experts won’t agree on the best practice. Having been involved in many situations where two experts are commenting, I’d say that the appearance is that the two may be in disagreement — but the truth is they aren’t.

In my work with the advisory board for the Patterns and Practices team’s SharePoint Guidance we ran across the topic of Site Definitions and Site Templates. I’m not saying there’s 100% agreement on this topic — but when we initially covered it, it sounded like we were worlds apart. Ultimately we settled on some relatively simple principles that most could accept…

Use a Site Definition if you need to have a specific ID that you can target later
If you create a site definition, don’t put anything in it directly, create features that you activate via dependencies or via stapling.
Don’t use site definitions to customize business problems — use globally deployed site templates for that.

Sure, not everyone who is a SharePoint “expert” (MVP or not) agrees with these principles — but most do. When we were talking about who should create a site definition the answers ranged from everyone to no one. But the trick to that was we were evaluating situations from our experience — instead of getting to the core guiding principles. So on the surface it looks like we’re disagreeing wildly — but in truth, we just had different experiences.

The example I like to use is branding. If you go back in time you’ll see that we’ve had 5 or so stops on what might be the best practice for branding. Same thing, there are some that will disagree but mostly we’ve settled on:

Site Definition to create a unique ID (that we can staple to)
Custom Master Page (deployed via feature)
Custom Theme (deployed via feature)
Theme references a page in _layouts (so we don’t run into the customized file problem)
Page Layouts should be about the arrangement of metadata not branding

For the most part, if you talk to someone about SharePoint Branding, you’re likely going to get an answer similar to this. If you ask a slightly different question you can get radically different answers. “How do you START branding SharePoint?” For me, it’s a theme because that cuts a wide path. I can then go back and fine tune with master pages. Other folks start with the master pages (and site definitions) and do themes later — if at all. We agree on the principles just not always the approach.

Why does this matter? Well, it matters within the context of what’s the right answer for an organization. In the IW panel we were asked how one might find a good SharePoint consultant. The answer was hire another one to audit. (Financial people have been doing this forever.) What we didn’t cover is what happens if the auditor disagrees with the primary consultant?

I get into this reasonably frequently because I do a ton of these sorts of audits of projects, approaches, etc. Invariably we’ll have a disagreement about something. From my perspective that’s completely fine. All we have to do is talk about the core principles and figure out what’s the best answer for the customer (and if a change is worth the cost.)

Announcing The SharePoint Shepherd’s Video Academy for Planning and Governance

Robert Bogue February 3, 2009 No Comments

I’ve been pretty transparent that I’ve been working on a video studio. What I’ve not been transparent about is why. For several months, I’ve been developing and refining a set of content around planning and governance. The intent is to deliver this content as a DVD or set of DVDs which will be sold to individuals who feel like they need more help with planning and governance but don’t have a huge budget to hire in an army of consultants to help them. I made this decision because I realized that most organizations are struggling to do their governance and planning in usable chunks. Today we have to be focused on what we can return to the business quickly.

Because of that I didn’t feel like doing an online class is the best answer. I felt like a DVD set would be the best way to get the content to everyone struggling with this issue while allowing folks to consume the content on their time and schedule. However, I didn’t want to make just another DVD with some monotone content delivered without any emotion or timbre. I wanted to produce a tool that would be nearly as value as me being there.

In order to facilitate the use of the material, I’ve had a Silverlight player developed. That player has a set of key features including a hierarchy of content that you can select and automatically be positioned to the correct spot in the video. This helps you navigate so that you can get or review just the content that you want. It also provides links to other content that relates to the current topic both inside the video as well as external reference links like white papers, articles, and blog posts that relate to the current topic. The video itself is designed so that you see both the slide text and graphics as well as my “talking head” so that you can see the emotion on my face (and in my arm movements.)

So what’s in the DVDs? Well there are seven key modules: An Introduction and Orientation to Governance, Project Management, Operational Management, Infrastructure, Development and Configuration, Information Architecture, and Education and Training. How much content are we talking about? I have over 1,000 nodes in my outline (mind map) of the content. I have over 250 slides of content. I don’t have a specific amount of video that it will be — yet. I haven’t finished shooting and doing post production.

When will it be available? My intent was to be able to announce availability of the project today, I just ran into too many production issues. My current estimate is that it will be available in 30 days. (Around March 1) I’ve got completely produced models and I believe that all of the production issues have been identified and resolved. I’ve still got a ton of video to repack as well as the XML to stitch the outline to the video but those should be achievable in the next 30 days.

What will it cost and where will you be able to buy it? I’ll be offering the video academy for planning and governance on the SharePoint Shepherd web site. It will be offered for a price of $995. That’s the best value for this kind of content you’ll fine. While you can get training on these topics, you’ll not find any training (online or face-to-face) for less than $1,450.

Here’s what I need from you today. If you think that you are interested — and you believe you can scrounge up the budget — please email me. I need to know how many copies of the DVD I should make in the initial run and I also need a small number of beta testers who can commit to watching the video and making sure that the tree and video sync up correctly. As a way of saying thank you — I’ll give you 30 minutes of one-on-one time to talk through your specific planning and governance needs. (If I select you to beta test, I’ve got a much better deal for you.) That’s all if you contact me before the general availability of the product on the web site.

Vegas: Video Text

Robert Bogue January 25, 2009 No Comments

I’ve mentioned that I’m building my video studio and that I’m using Sony Vegas as my primary video editor. While working on my text display issue, I ended up stumbling along a way to make text play a video. I wanted to outline the process so I don’t forget. By the way, the technique should work for anything that you can use the chroma keyer on.

Here’s what you need to do.

Add three video tracks.
Right click in the first track and select Insert Text Media
Edit the text as desired. (I edited mine to say “This is a test” — not original but it works.)
Change the compositing mode to Multiply (Mask).

On the second track Click on make a compositing child.

Drag the video you want to show where the text is into the second video track
Drag the video you want in the background into track 3.

In my case, I just put a show rolling gradient behind the text, the following snippet shows the gradient rolling through the “this” word. (I know this is really boring but I’m working on some “sparkle” for my text, not a full out video.)

In the end my video tracks look like this:

Exporting Microsoft PowerPoint Slides into Sony Vegas

Robert Bogue January 23, 2009 No Comments

I mentioned in my post about my video studio, I thought I had my conversion of PowerPoint slides to Vegas licked. As it turns out, I decided that I wanted to spend a bit more time on it. Certainly driving up the resolution (to a ridiculous amount) made the text work, but it still wasn’t quite there. I didn’t relish the idea of using the chroma keyer to drop out the background of the slide (as this technique required) and was just generally not happy with how “hackish” it seemed. So I took a new approach, which ended up with very good results.

First, I exported PowerPoint to Enhanced Windows Metafile (EMF) again. Then I took them into Adobe Illustrator and exported them as PSD files. Why didn’t I use SnagIt any longer? Well, SnagIt — as nice as it is — exports a white background even if there’s nothing there. Once I exported to PSD with Illustrator I could import into Vegas — with transparency. Thus I didn’t have to rely upon the chroma keyer in Vegas any longer.

There were a few more bumps along the way. First, I had to set the background to transparent. I did that by going to the master and setting the background to a solid fill that was 100% transparent. The net effect is that it didn’t get exported in the EMF

Second, the exports I got were of varying sizes. Basically, they were the bounding box that fix around the text on the slides. So to resolve that I put lines on the edges of the slide master and then set their transparency to 99%. The net effect was that every slide had the same dimension and therefore I could import them into Vegas and they didn’t shift sizes or move around. Yea, technically the outermost pixel on each slide is shifted slightly by my nearly transparent line, but as a practical matter that doesn’t really hurt anything.

So the end result is that I have a clean looking import that doesn’t rely on chroma keying (so it will render faster and cleaner). I’d love to say that there was a more straight forward way to do this — but if there is, I’ve not found it.

Patterns and Practices Champion

Robert Bogue January 21, 2009 1 Comment

A few months ago I was introduced to a program that the Patterns and Practices team has — Patterns and Practices Champions. The idea is that you have a place you can go to find people who have worked with the Patterns and Practices guidance. I’m happy to say that I’ve been added to this distinguished list.

Sidebar: I didn’t announce earlier that I was re-awarded for my 6th year as a Microsoft MVP and that I’ve retained the award category of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). (1/1/2009) I didn’t mention it because although I’m personally honored to again be recognized, I didn’t think many people besides me would care. I’ve mentioned this recognition (Patterns and Practices Champion) because I think the program is a great program for people who are looking to implement the guidance from the Patterns and Practices team.

Public Speaking