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

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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

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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

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...
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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

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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.

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)sharepoint

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 Placessharepoint

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...

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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

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.

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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;-)

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VS.Net 2005 - out 7th november 2005

It seems that VS.Net 2005 will be actually released in 2005 - Source: VSTS Tip: Mark November 7th on your calendar ....

SharePoint - interesting stuff

RSS extensions for SharePoint

Sharepoint Web Part caching

Using the 3 GB switch with SharePoint

A Quick Way To Change The Look Of The Web Part Title Bars For Your Sharepoint Environment

SharePoint statistics: the sources

Retrieving SharePoint Site Information in an ASP.NET Web Application

Packaging and deploying webparts

Tzunami SharePoint designer tool

WebCast - SharePoint performance and capacity planning -Best practices and lessons learned

Blogparts for download and Documentation in pdf format

CAML Builder 2.0.0.1, whats new in this version CAML Query Builder V2

Adjusting the displaysize of your fields in SharePoint

SharePad - add full SharePoint document library support for your own document editor with FrontPage RPCs

SharePoint utility suite

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