Planet MOSSPlanet MOSSSharePoint 2007 tips, tricks, and news. Also covers K2 BlackPearl, CRM, InfoPath, and related technologies. 
Articles
Colligo: SharePoint Unplugged
2008-03-21 00:37:00 One of the bigger issues with SharePoint is how to make it available to offline or remote users, such as frequent business travellers. There are many vendors working in this space including iOra (now... More About: Unplugged , Sharepoint
Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint
2008-03-16 12:59:00 The Silverlight blueprint for SharePoint is being released by Microsoft to make it easy for SharePoint developers to figure out how to embed Silverlight in their portals. The link to the blueprint... More About: Blueprint , Sharepoint
MOSS: Microsoft Online SharePoint Server
2008-03-10 10:34:00 Awhile ago I blogged about the experiment Microsoft was making providing SharePoint managed services to some of its biggest clients, what I called "SharePoint + Services". I guess the... More About: Online , Server , Moss , Sharepoint
Data In, Data Out
2008-03-02 06:18:00 An important emerging web development initiative concerns "data portability", or how openly and transparently a website or application consumes and provides data. In a world of mashups, web... More About: Data
Starlight Day SharePoint Site
2008-02-17 07:38:00 Starlight Day is an annual event when volunteers from across Australia donate their time and money to give sick children a wish. This year Dimension Data Australia worked with Starlight Children's... More About: Site , Sharepoint
Microsoft Developer Roadmap Documentation
2008-01-29 10:04:00 On Saturday Microsoft released documentation outlining step-by-step roadmaps for some common SharePoint tasks. So far these include the following activities: Setting up SharePoint servers ... More About: Developer , Documentation
Anonymously Searching User Profiles in MOSS
2008-01-13 04:00:00 I had a requirement the other day to enable anonymous access on an internal portal and allow users to search across the user profile database - to create what was essentially a corporate directory. ... More About: Profiles , User , Searching , Moss , Profil
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
2007-12-23 12:25:00 2007 is almost over, and I hope it's been productive, successful, and happy for you. Best wishes for a great holiday season, and good luck in 2008! Cheers, Nick More About: Christmas , New Year , Happy , Happy New Year , Merry Christmas
Multilingual MOSS
2007-12-18 11:55:00 I investigated MOSS variants briefly in the Beta days but the language packs weren't out so I never had a chance to really play with them, until today. I'm still learning about the feature set but... More About: Moss
"Our World" - Free Environmental Site Templates
2007-12-16 10:21:00 I thought it might be fun to create an environmental initiatives site template for MOSS 2007. The goal is to help organizations track the impact their policies have on the environment, in the hope of... More About: World , Environmental , Templates , Free , Site
SharePoint Service Pack 1 Released
2007-12-12 13:05:00 SharePoint Service Pack 1 was released yesterday. Joel Oleson has a detailed post on the update at... More About: Released , Sharepoint , Service Pack
Quick and Dirty Web Parts
2007-12-11 11:43:00 SharePoint is a joy for Rapid Application Development and prototyping. It's great fun to sit with clients and run up site hierarchy or document taxonomy on the fly, in response to their direct... More About: Dirty , Quick , Parts
SharePoint Kits
2007-12-01 11:12:00 There's some cool pre-Christmas SharePoint gifts here or almost here: First off, SharePoint Service Pack 1 is on the way. There are some new stsadm commands, a rollup of the various hotfixes that... More About: Kits , Sharepoint
Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Release
2007-11-23 08:17:00 This week Microsoft released Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5. Over the past month I've been running the Beta 2 in the Virtual PC Microsoft provided. This was an excellent way to evaluate... More About: Release , Visual Studio 2008
SharePointPedia Is Live
2007-11-18 13:01:00 The Microsoft SharePoint group has launched SharePointPedia, which is intended to be a community site for sharing knowledge around SharePoint. Although the name might imply a Wikipedia style wiki... More About: Live
SharePoint Migration With MetaLogix
2007-11-12 10:29:00 I recently had the chance to evaluate a number of SharePoint content and site migration tools. Past migrations I've done have been performed using the out-of-the-box content migration using... More About: Sharepoint , Logi
Microsoft Announces Search Server Express
2007-11-07 12:13:00 Today Microsoft announced that it will be releasing a free search tool for enterprises based on SharePoint and SQL Server . Search Server Express for organizations can be installed on a... More About: Anno
SharePoint As a Development Platform Debate
2007-10-31 11:00:00 There's a very heartfelt debate raging at CodeBetter.com over whether SharePoint is a good development platform. The breakdown seems to be between "developers" and "SPs" or "SharePoint People".... More About: Development , Debate , Platform , Sharepoint
Don't Panic! The MOSS Market Opportunity
2007-10-29 08:42:00 Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 was released nearly a year ago now, and over the last few months I've started to hear people in the industry say things like "there is a 6-month window of... More About: Market , Opportunity , Moss , Panic , Unit
OneNote and SharePoint: Better Together!
2007-10-25 15:27:00 OneNote 2007 is great for note-taking. My colleagues and I have been using it for the last little while and we love it. There's always something new to learn about it. After many months of using it... More About: Sharepoint
Application Virtualization In The Cloud
2007-10-22 14:46:00 Right now there are a couple of big industry trends I'd like to talk about: virtualization, and services "in the Cloud ". Virtualization is basically a shell in which to run applications: the... More About: Application , The Cloud
Public Facing WSS Sites + Silverlight
2007-10-17 15:06:00 Last night was another interesting Sydney SharePoint User Group. There were two presentations, one on using Windows SharePoint Services as a public facing CMS site given by Jon Matthes, and another by Michael Kordahi on Silverlight (+ SharePoint!). Jon gave a very interesting talk about using WSS to rewrite a legacy web application for The Scottish Banner, an online community newsletter for Scots abroad. His aim was to improve on the old PHP website, retain its general design, allow online feedback forms, and produce minimal impact on end users in a cost effective way. He also hoped it would be an opportunity to learn about WSS 3. The way he approached the site migration was to replicate as much of the existing structure as he could, with the only exception being the addition of the WSS administration area. He created anonymous access to a list to allow people to make submissions to the site while not logged in. An additional feature was the use of image libraries to serve as a simp... More About: Public , Sites , Facing
Microsoft Releases End User Training Kit For SharePoint
2007-10-15 10:44:00 Microsoft's SharePoint team is releasing a SharePoint End User Training Kit. This will be a helpful offering to clients who may not have lined up full training plans, or for use in self-service scenarios. All of this content has been written by Microsoft's Office Online User Assistance team, evidently after some real-world experience responding to customers' questions. The SharePoint Learning Kit version of the Training Kit is SCORM 2004 compliant and allows an organization to brand and customize the content delivery experience. A follow-up standalone deployment version will be available for individual use. It's quite easy to convince end users of the power and convenience of SharePoint, but they may still feel overwhelmed by the options once they are sitting in front of the browser. Therefore user support and training is a key part of SharePoint governance and this training kit will be a welcome addition in the toolbox. The SCORM version of the kit can be downloaded from the n... More About: Microsoft , Sharepoint , TRAI
October Sydney SharePoint Usergroup and Office DevCon
2007-10-11 13:27:00 Next Tuesday will be this month's SharePoint Usergroup. The main presentation will be given by Microsoft's SilverLight Evangelist, Micheal Kordahi. He'll be demonstrating SilverLight and talk about how it can be incorporated in SharePoint portals. This should be really interesting as it can probably add a lot of pizzazz to any SharePoint site. Another presentation will discuss how to use WSS sites for public websites. On a related note, the SSUG now has its own dedicated website, at http://SharePointUsers.org.au/sydney. It is a SharePoint site that uses the slick-looking Community Kit. Finally, Microsoft will be hosting Office DevCon at their Ryde campus on Saturday November 3 and Sunday November 4. There will be many speakers and sessions covering all aspects of Office 2007 and the intended audience is developers and power users. The conference is free and you can register at http://www.block.net.au/devcon/index.htm. More About: Sydney , Sharepoint , October
SharePoint + Services
2007-10-06 08:16:00 Microsoft has a new Software + Services vision, so this can't be much of a surprise: they are now offering hosted SharePoint "in the cloud". Currently it's limited to organizations with "more than 5,000 employees" (so if you only have 4,950 you should top up) and includes hosted Exchange, Communications, and SharePoint all in a bundle called the "Business Productivity Infrastructure Online Services Offer". It's definitely a good idea. I've had some involvement trying to come up with a managed SharePoint offering and the complexities of SharePoint administration and development make it a hard thing to price and support. Microsoft looks to be avoiding that by making it largely self service, thereby placing their hosting effort on reducing the infrastructure and licensing burden which is I think a fair call and well within their control. I imagine they can also leverage their Fantastic 40 templates and the like to give customers some customization options. Although... More About: Sharepoint
Attack Of The Blob!
2007-09-13 12:18:00 (Image taken from WikiPedia's entry on The Blob!) Yesterday I had a frustrating day trying to modify a CSS file for a SharePoint look and feel task. For some reason, no matter what I did, the CSS never refreshed in the browser. When viewed in SharePoint Designer it did show the updated version, but no amount of IIS resets, file deletion, or browser cache clearing prevented my web browsers (both Internet Explorer and Firefox) from rendering the old version. Eventually I happened to look on the file system and notice a folder on the root called "blobcache". Aha! I was using a new Virtual Machine and unbeknownst to me Blob Caching had been enabled to improve performance. Inside this blob cache folder I found my css file with a .cache file extension on the end of it. I tried to delete manually but it then started to show "File Not Found." errors. The solution was to flush the blob cache. The option is on the site collection's Site Settings. Select "Site Collection Object Cache" and t... More About: Attack , Atta
Bottlenecks and Headaches
2007-09-08 13:14:00 A new article on Computer World suggests that IT is a "key barrier to corporate Web 2.0 adoption", according to speakers at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco. An example of how the IT team were slow to facilitate Web.20 projects: [The] head of digital media at the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) in London, noted that she first had to bypass IT to get Web 2.0 technologies to the group's end users. Once she started the effort, she said, "IT started to realize it was happening without them anyway. They weren't interested until they started to get multiple requests from around the business. Eventually, they came on board." The Pendulum Swings Information Technology trends swing along a pendulum from complete decentralization to centralization. With Web 2.0 the pendulum is currently swinging away from central IT control. In general I think this is a good trend, since the pool of "developers" will deepen if it starts t... More About: Lene , Headache , Neck
SharePoint Accessibility
2007-09-05 14:24:00 One of the most painstaking web programming tasks is achieving web accessibility. Although estimates vary, between 5 and 10% of web users have some sort of accessibility need. There are several standards, and determining which ones to support depends largely on your business needs and location. The US Government for instance has Section 508 compliance while the Canadian Government has Common Look And Feel 2.0 Accessibility standards. Generally all of these standards build upon the specifications of the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, specifically the Priority 1 and 2 requirements. Some examples of WCAG requirements are that all web pages must have valid HTML and CSS code, images must have alternative descriptive text, and there must be alternative methods of viewing data or accessing page functionality. Accessible browsers such as JAWS cannot interpret client scripts or view images in the way that a regular brows... More About: Sharepoint
Hotfix City
2007-08-30 12:37:00 I was cleaning up a portal today and ran into a wide variety of errors. Several of them turned out to have the same root cause. The symptoms were wildly varying event errors like this: Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.Ap plicationServerAdministrationServiceJob threw an exception: "Message: Old format or invalid type library" Or Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.Ap plicationServerAdministrationServiceJob threw an exception: "Message: Not Enough Storage" The resolution required not one but two hotfixes, both of which target the .NET 2.0 framework. I applied the first hotfix, KB 923028, after reading about it on Gayan Peiris' blog. After rebooting I started getting another error which read: Unable to open shim database version registry key - v2.0.50727.00000 Err....what? Speculating wildly here (something I'm good at), I'm guessing the "shim database" was holding some key in the windows registry that the Timer job wanted to know about but couldn't get a... More About: City
LINQ To SQL ? N-Tier Architecture?
More articles from this author:2007-08-28 11:14:00 Ok, LINQ seems pretty wonderful, and I can see the utility of it - and with regards to SharePoint we'll probably end up using it when Microsoft comes out with an official LINQ to SharePoint, or the community does. Heck, it may even replace (or at least abstract) the dreaded CAML code.... With LINQ, you get: Design-time type checking of data queries Code syntax that is consistent across objects, XML, and relational databases (and, really, anything else) Queries are integrated right into the .NET code frameworks Full IntelliSense support when coding what used to be a bunch of string values All good stuff. But what I don't understand is how it fits with traditional N-Tier architecture. Is this more of the same old "you can write 70% less code if you don't mind your web page directly accessing your database" trend, or can we actually use this in a properly architected application? I've been following along on Scott Guthrie's blog; he has a detailed series of posts a... More About: Architecture , Architect 1, 2, 3 |
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