Saturday, June 25, 2005

Weird stuff with div - thats why there is white space underneath the title

I don't know what is happening with this blogger template,... suddenly I noticed they put in a <div style="clear:both;"></div>
which forces my last posting to start underneath the right menu. Is there a way to avoid this? It seems that Blogger
puts it in there itself, so I can't remove it...
Update: Thanks to the guys, who put in the comments, I got this fixed, added an extra line in my blogger template "div { clear: none !important; }"

SharePoint and MCMS Tools Galore V3

This is already the 3d version of the SharePoint and MCMS tools Galore list - lots of interesting stuff have been released lately - go check them out,...

SharePoint toolsuites
  • Coras workplace suiteSuite with
    rollup webparts (for news,documents,tasks,...), navigation controls and full language localization (This is way cool...)

  • Syntergy Provide lots of modules such as
    replication technologies for SharePoint, bulkloader, audit for SharePoint,...

  • Tools for SharePoint from SPSDev.com - contains Pocket Portal,
    My Team OrgChart WebPart, Bulk upload


  • Search
  • Entopia K-Bus for SharePoint Portal Server: Adds extra information discovery capabilities, also allows
    SharePoint to index Documentum, Opentext,...

  • WSS PowerSearch - The developers ofthis product also have
    some other nice SharePoint tools, check out PowerRecycle and PowerNav

  • Behaviortracking from Mondosearch

  • Coveo SharePoint search

  • SharePoint Advanced Search Tools (Gotdotnet)

  • Ontolica - enhanced search interface for the SPS search engine

  • Longitude from BA-Insight - Extension on SharePoint Search



  • MCMS (Microsoft Content Management Server)
  • MCMS Manager 3.0

  • Telerik RAD controls for MCMS


  • Backup/Data Recovery/Antivirus
  • SharePoint document recovery tool : Free download from Stephane Cordonnier

  • McAfee Portal Shield Antivirus solution

  • AVG SharePoint Server Edition web site Antivirus solution

  • Sybari Antigen for SharePoint

  • TrendMicro PortalProtect Antivirus solution


  • RSS
  • Syndication Generator 2.0

  • RSS Reader webpart for SharePoint

  • RSS feed for SharePoint


  • Workflow
  • NetPoint Solutions

  • Factiva:Search and workflow tools for Office 2003

  • Captaris Teamplate: This workflow toolset even adds a module for fax based workflow "RightFax Workflow wizard

  • Skelta workflow .Net

  • K2.Net

  • Nintex smartlibrary

  • Smart workflow from LMR Solutions

  • DataLan FlowBuilder

  • ActiveSPS Workflow Solutions

  • Biztalk adapter for SharePoint


  • Document, Records and Digital Assets Management
  • Meridio: .Net software which integrates seamlessly into SharePoint and provides records management
    features needed to be compliant with standards such as Sarbanes-Oxley, US DOD 5015.2 records management standards,...

  • Towersoft

  • Wisdom

  • Mobius

  • Equilibrium MediaRich for SharePoint- digital asset management (DAM) solution to Microsoft Office Systems 2003.

  • Workshare Professional -Secure document compliance


  • Utilities & developer tools
  • SharePoint Explorer : another free tool which you can use to explore the SharePoint object model

  • Admin report kit for SPS 2003: configuration and usage reporting tool for SPS 2003

  • SharePoint site permission manager (Gotdotnet)

  • SharePoint explorer for VS.Net

  • BlueDogLimited Webpart Tool Kit

  • CAML Query Builder (U2U)

  • SharePoint Configuration analyzer

  • CAMLViewer 1.0 (Stramit)

  • James Milne's SharePoint CSS Skinner

  • Office Web Components

  • RSS Feed for SharePoint Lists (U2U)

  • SharePoint Import Export tools (Gotdotnet)

  • SPS Portal 2003 Search Web Service Tester

  • Windows SharePoint Services: Usage Blob Parser

  • Metalogix - Migration tools for SharePoint and MCMS

  • ViewPoint - SharePoint navigation and modeling tool


  • InfoPath
  • CaveDigital XML Form WebPreviewer Web Part- allows users without InfoPath to view the contents of forms on their web browser.

  • AchieveForms

  • InfoView

  • NetXPert InfoScope


  • WebParts
  • Acar Learning Technologies - Poll webpart for SharePoint, Quiz webpart for SharePoint

  • CSEG Rollup webpart

  • FluidNature image webpart

  • Calendar webpart

  • My ChangePasswordControl Webpart for Sharepoint

  • Office Live meeting webparts

  • Omnisys Power Aggregator webpart


  • High availability
  • Neverfail for SharePoint- Replication, switchover, failover and switchback for SharePoint

  • DoubleTake


  • Business Intelligence & Reporting
  • DSP Portal Edition : Adds webparts which can display information from OLAP cubes

  • Omnisys Power Gauge - displays measurements based on various types of data sources, using dynamic and configurable gauges.

  • Crystal Reports SPS integration kit

  • BI Portal

  • SQL Server 2000 report pack for SPS


  • Miscellaneous
  • Brightwork: adds MSF (Microsoft Solution Framework) on top of SharePoint

  • Ratings & expert module for SharePoint

  • K-Wise - Migration tools

  • Factiva Modules to integrate news sources into your WSS/SPS (Factiva is a Dow Jones & Reuters company)

  • Advis site navigator Navigation and UI enhancements

  • Omnisys Probability Impact Matrix webpart - based on WSS risk list from Project Server 2003


  • Offline Portal capabilities
  • Digilink revelation Lets mobile users synchronise offline information with SPS and WSS

  • IORA Another solution for offline SharePoint usage

  • Groove - software firm that Microsoft acquired a couple of months ago, they sell amongst other Mobile workspace for SharePoint


  • Saturday, June 18, 2005

    More about SharePoint and Lotus integration/migration

    Michael Greth posted an item about SharePoint und Lotus Notes, here are some other usefull links for those of you who need to know more about migrating or integrating Lotus with SharePoint:
  • Coexistence between Lotus Domino and a SharePoint Portal Server 2003

  • Lotus Notes coexistence with Exchange and .Net (HP presentation - very marketing oriented, lots of FUD...)

  • Proposion - integrating lotus notes with Microsoft.Net

  • SharePoint webparts for Lotus

  • SharePoint migration tools (also for Lotus)

  • Microsoft Application Analyzer 2003 for Lotus Notes


  • Stuff I tried out today...

    It is a nice sunny day here in Belgium, so I'm sitting on my terrace with my portable, going through blogs and trying out new stuff that, here are 2 nice tools I tried out today:
  • NUnitAsp: Tool for automatically testing ASP.NET web pages. It's an extension to NUnit.

  • AJAX.Net: Asynchronous JavaScript with XmlHttpRequest
  • Friday, June 17, 2005

    SharePoint Portal Server V3.0 and other speculations

    Bill has put together some insights about Office 12 and SharePoint Portal Server v3.0 - of course he knows more, he just can't tell us.

    Here are some of the things I'm betting on (or hoping for ...):
  • SharePoint and CMS will merge together into one product, I guess SharePoint will be the main component and CMS will be available to plug into SharePoint. This model will more or less ressemble the model that IBM uses with their IBM workplaces

  • There will be more extensive support for workflow out of the box, my guess is that they will base it on the Biztalk rule engine - which works pretty good- and add extra webparts for administering human workflow on top. Although you can never rule out that Microsoft will finally acquire one of their workflow partners, be it K2.Net or Captaris

  • IBF will be integrated into Visual Tools for Office and will be further pushed as a way of integrating different systems - a statement I heard today "IBF is the next generation smart tags". Development with 1.5 has already become a lot easier but especially the Office side - smart tag recognizer still isn't easy enough

  • Integration of features of the newly acquired Groove product set into Office 12 - I especially like the Mobile Workspace for SharePoint. Although there are still some serious limitations which need to be solved - See Limitations in using Groove to Offline SharePoint

  • Possibility to publish InfoPath forms on your SharePoint Portal Server through InfoPath Server - clients do not need a full blown version of InfoPath anymore

  • Full localization of the SharePoint environment - it will be possible to change languages at runtime - this information will be dependent on the user who logs into your portal

  • Single document security (This is definitely a must - we have done a huge project based on SharePoint which needed single document security and I can assure you, it is not easy ...) with further enhancements to Rights Management Server

  • Lots of emphasis on charting, scorecards and data analysis - Maestro will use SharePoint as its main UI

  • Full integration with lots and lots of different Microsoft products and solutions, SQL Reporting Services, Project Server, Team Foundation Server, Biztalk,...

  • SharePoint will be RSS enabled out of the box - it will possible to create RSS driven alerts on all items in SharePoint

  • More consistency in the way that SharePoint uses site definitions - admin and user facing pages should both rely on the same server controls to render their content. For those of you who have been playing with AlternateCSS and AlternateHeader now what I'm talking about

  • A plugin for VS.Net to edit site definitions - we know that CAML isn't going away, but at least provide us with better tools...

  • Better integration of WSS and SPS - it would be quite nice that when a site gets deleted it also automatically gets unlisted from the site directory

  • More options to troubleshoot SharePoint search - this is one huge black box for the moment and quite troublesome if you encounter problems

  • Support for 64-bit (of course since this is a common engineering criteria)
  • Update 23 june:I just read this article by Kay Slagman and it pointed me to another thing - mobile support for SharePoint. I don't think this is a must however, ...

  • Update 23 june:Support for database replication - especially when you have SharePoint Portal Servers in different locations, this is a must


  • For those of you who have more ideas, just leave a comment ... I guess everybody who has done or is doing a SharePoint project still has a list of "most wanted" features...

    More SharePoint and CMS stuff

  • Telerik has released r.a.d. Editor WebPart - you can download the beta version

  • Creating a localized webpart

  • Dataview webpart and date fields

  • Developer project kick start for SharePoint products and technologies on Gotdotnet - also take a look at these instructions Developer Project Kick Start for SharePoint : Beware of the install process and the Nant Nunit Version

  • Action CAML Queries with the CAML Query Builder

  • Adding an additional search to the WSS search page

  • SharePad project on Gotdotnet

  • Getting Back to Normal: SharePoint Backup and Disaster Recovery

  • TechEd Braindump: SharePoint Portal Server 2003: Best Practices for an Implementation



  • Thursday, June 16, 2005

    Microsoft common engineering criteria

    I followed a presentation about Biztalk 2004/2006 when I first heard about the Microsoft Common Engineering Criteria, these are a common set of guidelines and requirements that each infrastructure server must meet. They also give a pretty good idea about what to expect from future releases of MSCMS, SharePoint and Biztalk, I especially like the following:
  • 64-bit support

  • .NET Connected

  • MOM management pack support at launch

  • Virtual Server support

  • There are of course a lot more, read more about it.

    Tuesday, June 14, 2005

    AlternateCSS, SharePoint:CssLink control and FrontPage 2003

    Todd wrote an article a while ago about how you can get the AlternateCSS attribute of the project element in ONET.XML to work - basically you have to replace the hard coded stylesheet link in the aspx pages with the <SharePoint:CssLink DefaultUrl="/_layouts/1033/styles/ows.css" runat="server"/> control. Remember always create a new custom site definition when doing this - see Creating a site definition from an existing site definition. Unfortunately when you open a site based on the altered aspx file in FrontPage 2003, the stylesheet is not shown correctly (... or not at all for that matter)

    Add a SharePoint document library to the "My Places bar"

    A very easy but usefull trick:
    In Office XP and Office 2003, the My Places bar appears in the left pane of the Open and Save As dialog boxes in Office XP programs. If you open a word document from a document library and you click File>Save As... the Save As dialog opens. Now you can click in top of the Save as dialog Tools > "Add to My Places". From now on you can immediately save a document to this document library by selecting the appropriate icon in the My Places bar without having to go through the list of Network Places

    Friday, June 10, 2005

    How to determine if a Microsoft CMS user has administrator rights

    Excellent posting from Stefan about how to determine if a Microsoft CMS user has administrator rights (Update : it seems that the idea originally came from Chester)

    The CmsHttpContext has a UserCacheKey property which is used by ASP.NET output caching with MCMS in combination with the VaryByCustom="cmsrole" method to ensure that content can be varied for different user roles.

    The MCMS help gives the following statement for this property:

    UserCacheKey is guaranteed to be the same for two users, of those two users are both members of all the same MCMS rights groups. UserCacheKey will also be the same for two users if both users are MCMS administrators. In contrast, UserCacheKey is different for two users if those two users do not meet either of the above two requirements.

    Looking at the value returned for this property for MCMS administrators shows that always "A" is returned!

    So a simple check for this property for the string "A" is sufficient to identify if the current user is a MCMS administrator or not!

    Actually there is no guarantee that this property value will be the same with the next service pack. But the chance that this gets changed is very low.


    The way I always did it was creating a CMS channel where only an administrator had rights on, next you just tried to read in this channel. Off course non-admins would have no access. I guess the way of working described above is a lot cleaner...



    Microsoft announces Acrylic - a new professional graphics software

    Microsoft is going for some Adobe market share, you can now download a beta of a new professional graphics software, called Acrylic

    See what other bloggers have to say about it:
  • Acrylic - for Professional Designers

  • Hot - Microsoft Code Named Acrylic

  • Microsoft release public beta of Acrylic - a new graphics app
  • Thursday, June 09, 2005

    IBF vs VSTO 2005

    Some interesting statements from Carlo Poli - he states that using IBF - even IBF 1.5 - is way to difficult especially the smart tag part. A demo video of VSTO 2005 with smart parts shows how easy it is with VSTO... so if IBF 1.5 doesn't get integrated into the next version of Visual Tools for Office, it seems dead in the water. I wonder what the IBF guru has to say about it ...

    MCMS vNext and MCMS SP2 info

    Interesting info from Andrew Connell (MCMS News from TechEd USA 2005 :: Day 2 (Yes, there's more!!!))

    MCMS 2002 Service Pack 2: Expect this to be released after the .NET 2.0 Framwork is released (BTW: today’s keynote at TechEd announced that Visual Studio .NET 2005 and SQL Server 2005 will be released to manufacturing [RTM] the week of November 7, 2005). The primary focus of SP2 will be to add .NET 2.0 Framework and SQL Server 2005 support to MCMS. Yes, you how have access to using master pages (just no placeholders within the master pages… that’s not supported) and all the other great features that are provided by the next generation of ASP.NET 2.0. This does not mean I’m not saying that you can touch the MCMS database, you just can host your database on the new platform. The only thing that isn’t supported is using the new ASP.NET 2.0 web parts within MCMS templates.

    MCMS vNext aka: futures: Yes, speculation can now end in the newsgroups and blogs that it's now confirmed there is a new version of MCMS in the works. When will it be available? MCMS is now part of the Office System. At the recent CEO Summit, Bill Gates announced that Office 12 will ship at the end of 2006 and you can expect a beta at the end of 2005/beginning of 2006. Because MCMS is in now part of the Office System, it will fall in line with those dates. Packaging & licensing is still being hashed out so no details on that. Again, just stay tuned for news in the coming months.



    Office 12 Preview site released

    The buzz volume surrounding Office 12 is going up... an Office 12 preview site has been released (Source:
    Office 12 Preview Site online

    SharePoint - to support or not to support...

    Interesting to see how much discussion there is about customizing SharePoint and about what is considered to be supported and what not... I guess the problem is that SharePoint has been released for almost 1.5 years now and still the documentation is being written. In the meanwhile developers had create actual solutions for customers using lots of tricks and workaround, because lets face it, developing on the SharePoint platform is not very easy.

    Well, enough whining, here's an overview of articles about supported or not:
  • Supported… not!!

  • More tunes in the "unsupported" blues... adding web parts to Forms pages unsupported!

  • Modifying site definitions, changes in Onet.xml, adding AllUsersWebPart element

  • About Site Definitions and making waves inside Microsoft walls;-)



  • Wednesday, June 08, 2005