SharePoint Tools Galore v4

Time for another update of the SharePoint and MCMS tools Galore list, version 4 here it comes....

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

SharePoint word breaker update

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

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

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

SharePoint Utility Suite Release 2 and SPSiteManager 1.1

SMove for SharePoint

SharePoint analyzer - Gathers information about a SharePoint configuration - Created by Mike McIntyre, an Escalation Engineer in PSS, and is used extensively by PSS in troubleshooting customer issues

SharePoint Explorer (IE Addin)

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

InfoJet EditPart for SharePointEdit your InfoPath forms from within your browser

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

Cave Digtal XML Form webprevriewer webpart

SharePoint FAV 1.1

High availability & replication

Neverfail for SharePoint- Replication, switchover, failover and switchback for SharePoint

DoubleTake

Echo for SharePoint

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

CAHSAL ecKnowledge

KnowledgeLake Connect

Offline/Mobile 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

BerryPoint - Adapts SharePoint for display on Blackberry

sharepoint

Link cleanup

I just cleaned up some of the links I pasted in my OneNote - here's a list with some of them which are definitely worth a visit:

SharePoint BlogSearch

InfoPathDev

SharePoint Workflow libraries (Gotdotnet)

IISADMPWD Virtual Directory Is Not Created During a Default Install of IIS 6.0

On transforming WordML to HTML again

VS.Net Teamsystem presentations

Creating a serialization library for sharepoint lists using generics

How to provide self-service password management for SharePoint

Building webparts in ASP.Net 2.0

Ajax was here - autocomplete textbox

Preview of WSS templates

3-part article about CSS showcases

[Listening to: On a Plain - Nirvana - Nevermind (03:16)]

GDI+ FAQ

A couple of days ago I had to write some code to page through multipage tiff files - luckily I found the answers I needed on the GDI+ FAQ from Bob Powell. He also has a XML feed to which you can subscribe.

GDI+ is the graphics system most often associated with Windows Forms and is a more modern replacement for GDI. This frequently asked questions list contains articles and code that will help you to understand the ins and outs of GDI+.

[Listening to: Smells Like Teen Spirit - Nirvana - Nevermind (05:01)]

BIWUG - Benelux Information Worker User Group

Quite an impressive showup yesterday at the first meeting of BIWUG - here are some of them with their blogs....

Jan Tielens

Patrick Tisseghem

Hannes Decorte

David Bosschmans

... and many more. Weird enough not everyone seems to have a blog ;-)

The overall goal of the BIWUG is to provide the IW community in Belgium and Luxemburg with the necessary infrastructure and organization to enable a community meeting point for everybody who is interested in Microsoft?s Information Worker technology. A lot of community activities are happening already in Belux in the context of blogs, informal meetings, events organized by Microsoft or partners. BIWUG wants to formalize these activities and become the single point of entry for the Belux IW community to the outside world.

For more info, check out the (temporary) SharePoint site, where you can read a lot more about the things we are planning to do. You can also vote about the new logo. If you are interested do not hesitate to subscribe.
sharepoint

Drag&drop from Outlook 2003 to SharePoint 2003 document library

If you switch a SharePoint document library to explorer view, you can take an email from within Outlook 2003 and drag & drop it immediately inside the document library. There are however some things to watch out for:

The file name will be based on the subject in the e-mail message, so if this contains invalid characters you will receive an error

I have only seen it working on clients with Windows XP SP2 with Outlook 2003 SP1 - we tried it on a Windows 2000 Professional which also had Outlook 2003 SP1 and this did not work

Make sure the WebClient service is running on the client

Does anybody have more experience with it or can anybody explain why it doesn't work on the Windows 2000...
sharepoint

[Listening to: Boys Don't Cry - The Cure - Greatest Hits [Bonus CD] Disc 2 (03:04)]

Error loading image in picturebox

I got a most peculiar error last week when running a C# Windows forms project. This project contained a windows form with a picturebox for which I changed the image property to a specific image file. The error was triggered by this line this.pictureBox1.Image = ((System.Drawing.Image)(resources.GetObject("pictureBox1.Image"))); and said
"Additional information: Could not find any resources appropriate for the specified culture ( or the netrual culture ) in the given assembly. Make sure PortalCreator.resources was correctly embedded or linked in to thassembly Dolmen.SharePoint.Tools.PortalCreator"

The problem seemed to be caused because I defined an enum in the code file before the PortalCreator class. This caused the wizard generated code in InitializeComponent() to fail. So always make the form class the first class in the file.

[Listening to: Kinderfeld - Marilyn Manson - Antichrist Superstar (04:54)]

Add MSN Messenger presence within your blog

This is a very cool tip from Mark Kruger - Add MSN Messenger Presence Within Your Blog or Any Plain HTML Page

[Listening to: Irresponsible Hate Anthem - Marilyn Manson - Antichrist Superstar (04:20)]

Using FrontPage RPCs and SharePoint

If you really want to learn about FrontPage Server Extensions RPCs and SharePoint, you should take a look at the code for SharePad on GotDotnet. I have used it in a project and have extended it a little bit. This is definitely an excellent resource for everybody. Underneath is the code I added to create a folder in a SharePoint document library.

/// <summary> /// Creates a folder in a document library, if the folder already exists no error occurs /// </summary> /// <param name="destinationUri"></param> /// <param name="sFolderName"></param> public void CreateUrlDirectory(string destinationUri, string sFolderName) { WebUrl webUrl = UrlToWebUrl(destinationUri);   System.Collections.Specialized.NameValueCollection methodData = new System.Collections.Specialized.NameValueCollection();   // Add general request to stream methodData.Add("method","create url-directory:" + GetServerExtensionsVersion(webUrl.SiteUrl)); methodData.Add("service_name",""); //e.g. postin/demosubfolder creates demosubfolder in documentlibrary postin //parentfolders have to exist before creating a child folder methodData.Add("url",sFolderName); methodData.Add("executable","false");   HttpWebRequest req = StartWebRequest(GetAuthorURL(webUrl.SiteUrl), methodData); System.IO.Stream reqStream = req.GetRequestStream(); reqStream.Flush(); reqStream.Close();   HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)req.GetResponse(); string sResponseString = GetResponseString(response); //Debug.Write(sResponseString);   }

 

sharepoint

[Listening to: Petty Thug - Millionaire - Outside the Simian Flock (05:19)]

New SharePoint blog postings

A short overview of new SharePoint related blog postings:

Custom Search Results

Using Ajax.NET under SharePoint (doesn't play by default)

Will Windows SharePoint Services Work With SQL Server 2005? Yes it will ...

Podcast on SharePoint Advisor Live Conference

Options for Aggregating Sharepoint Sub-site content

Connected Page Viewer Web Part

Create multiple lists on a WSS site using the ONET.XML template

Use IRuntimeFilter to Show and Hide WebParts

How to: Size / Maximize a multiline TextBox in a WebPart

Create multiple lists on a WSS site using the ONET.XML template

Enable Breadcrumb Navigation in SharePoint

How to: Programatically add a history item in an issue list

SharePoint URL Quick List

Custom Menus (not just Menu Items) in SharePoint

Add a Custom List to SharePoint - a foray into CAML

SharePoint CAML Schema definition (Gotdotnet)

Applications for Windows SharePoint Services

[SharePoint Tip] How to get rid of the '!New' tag in SharePoint

Google webpart (Tool)

Document library Browser 1.2

MCMS apppool recycling, SPARK and operations

CSEGSearch webpart (Tool)

Knowledgelake connect (Tool)

Teched SharePoint sessions

Using iWay adapters for BizTalk to enable SharePoint integration

Biztalk WSS adapter

SharePoint NewItem, Upload form0 and pre-setting values through JavaScript.

sharepoint

[Listening to: Body Experience Revue - Millionaire - Outside the Simian Flock (06:08)]

Full Source - Internet Explorer extension

I got a nice tip from a real SharePoint guru, Benoit (Definitely check out his site Citeknet, he wrote some cool iFilters). This is something usefull when doing SharePoint development:

Full Source is an Internet Explorer menu extension which displays the source Internet Explorer is displaying, directly from the Internet Explorer object model. This is useful wherever javascript is dynamically writing HTML into the DOM, or where XSLT has been used to generate HTML. Download it

[Listening to: Sunburn - Muse - Showbiz (03:55)]

ASP.Net 2.0 and MCMS

Stefan Gossner has written some very nifty articles about ASP.Net 2.0 and MCMS:

ASP.NET 2.0 and MCMS - glitches with navigation controls when switching between
modes

HttpModule to register a stream filter to enforce compatibilty between MCMS and ASP.NET 2.0 Themes

ASP.NET 2.0 and MCMS - glitches with themes

ASP.NET 2.0 and MCMS - Try it out - Now even in Authoring Mode!

ASP.NET 2.0 and MCMS - creating a custom membership provider for MCMS

ASP.NET 2.0 and MCMS - implementing page summary controls using a custom SiteMapProvider and a TreeView control

mscms

[Listening to: A Thousand Lies - Machine Head - Burn My Eyes (06:16)]

Corporate blogging

Interesting audio report about corporate blogging - featuring blog celebs such as Scoble and Chris Pirillo
blogs

[Listening to: i sit on acid 2000 - LORDS OF ACID - PRIVATE PARTS (02:37)]

SharePoint Site Directory listing

Did you know that the SharePoint Site Directory is actually based on a list definition as well - just take a look at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\TEMPLATE\1033\SPSSITES\LISTS\SITESLST. Well I tried hiding some of the standard fields displayed on it - Region and Division - so I modified SCHEMA.XML and changed the Hidden attribute to TRUE. And it worked the fields were not visible anymore when creating a site.

But then I took a look at the site directory page - on the middle of this page there is a "Browse sites by"-webpart (SPSWC:BrowseSites) and this webpart still displayed the fields which were hidden - I guess this is definitely YASQ (Yet Another SharePoint Quirk... )

Update: I decided to delete the fields from the SCHEMA.XML - but quickly noticed that this is not a good idea, ... if you delete these fields in the site definition - the "Manage Sites" webpage will not work anymore. Ain't SharePoint fun .... ;-)

sharepoint

[Listening to: Twist - Korn - Life Is Peachy (00:49)]

Problems with formsauthentication and sessions - check your cookies

I had an interesting problem last week when installing an ASP.Net webapplication - this webapplications uses formsauthentication but when a user tried to login, it didn't work, he just got immediately redirected to the login page. But wait, ... it gets even weirder, the formsauthentication did work when surfing locally (with http://localhost) and also when surfing to the website with IP address. After a while I found the problem - the server had an underscore in its name and in combination with security patch MS01-55 for Internet Explorer this result in the fact that the cookies were not recognized as valid. After removing the underscore in the server name everything worked just fine.

For more info, read http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;316112

[Listening to: Voices - Disturbed - The Sickness [UK] (03:13)]

Talkdigger

I just tried out Talk Digger - nice web page which can show people who are linking to you. Wicked...

SharePoint DevKickStart

A while ago Mike Fitzmaurice pointed to a great resource on GotDotNet, SharePoint DevKick Start. I first took a look at it last week, but could not get it working - I always got this error in the post build step

C:\WSS Developer Project KickStart\SiteDefinitionQuickStart\Contoso.SharePoint\SiteDefinitions\Contoso-STS\contoso-sts.build(24,4):
Invalid element . Unknown task or datatype.

Thanks to Kris Syverstadt for making clear that you also need to download the SharePoint Nant tasks to get it working.

Summary of required downloads for SharePoint DevKick Start:

NAnt 0.85 rc3

NUnit 2.2 latest stable version

SharePoint DevKick Start

SharePoint Nant Tasks

sharepoint

MSCMS and SharePoint architectures merging

It seems that there is not a lot of really new news about Microsoft plans with CMS and SharePoint (See previously Rumors about CMS and SPS merging (february 2005). Although some statements have been made:

MS CMS and MS SharePoint Merging Architectures

Microsoft To Ease Integration Of SharePoint Portal, Content Management Servers

PS I'm actually working on a set of webparts and webservices to integrate CMS and SPS through the use of RSS feeds.
mscmssharepoint

[Listening to: Til the Clouds Clear - Lamb - The Best Kept Secrets: The Best of Lamb 1996-2004 [Bonus DVD] Disc 1 (04:27)]

How to show file extensions in a SharePoint document library

Nice tip from Fabian Moritz - how to show file extensions in a SharePoint document library (Unfortunately... it took me a while to understand "Dateierweiterungen" although Dutch and German are pretty similar) - here's a quick translation. There are actually 2 ways to show file extensions in a SharePoint document library:

Convert the document library listviewwebpart to a XSLT dataview - Open the documentlibrary with FrontPage, rightclick and convert to dataview. Modify the XSLT to add <xsl:value-of select="@File_x0020_Type"/>

Modify the display pattern in ONET.XML - add <HTML><![CDATA[.]]></HTML><Field HTMLEncode="FALSE" Name="File_x0020_Type"/> before <HTML><![CDATA[</A>]]></HTML><IfNew Name="Created_x0020_Date"> . After making a change to ONET.XML you have to do IISRESET.

sharepoint

[Listening to: Til the Clouds Clear - Lamb - The Best Kept Secrets: The Best of Lamb 1996-2004 [Bonus DVD] Disc 1 (04:27)]

One year of blogging about SharePoint, MSCMS, Office 2003,...

I just noticed that it's my blog first anniversary, ... thanks for all the people who gave feedback or helped me with solving some of the problems I have blogged about. Off course, the SharePoint bloggers community has been a source of information and inspiration for a lot of postings. Here's an overview of the most popular postings of the previous year:

SharePoint and MSCMS Tool Galore

SharePoint and Lotus integration/migration

SharePoint V3.0 and other speculations

InfoPath - third party tools

SharePoint issue list reports and Office 2003 webparts

Consuming stored procedures with the dataview webpart and sharepoint

Alerts in SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services

SharePoint Portal Server alerts not send by e-mail

Coveo Enterprise Search

Musings about search - Search on the server

Microsoft Content Management Server Standard Edition - 15 user limit

Migrating to SharePoint 2003

Update: Mart Muller's SharePoint blog is one year old as well. Congrats to you too ...

[Listening to: Pts. Of. Athrty - Linkin Park feat. Jay Gordon - Reanimation (03:46)]

sharepoint

Going to PDC 2005 in LA

I get to go to PDC2005, great news especially since a lot of info will be given about the next version of SharePoint and about Office 12. Check out the full session list on the PDC site. For all of you SharePoint bloggers, leave a comment maybe we can get together in LA. It would be interesting to finally meet some people whose blog I read.

.

Other people who are going:

Mart Muller

Bob Mixons list of PDCers

List of people going to PDC on MSBeluxForums

Peter Himschoot

PS There also is a PDC2005 blog

VSTO 2005 resources

Personal reminder- definitely have to check out the resources listed below:

VSTO on MSDN

Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Beta 2 Intellisense code snippets

Smart Document Framework for VSTO 2005

VSTO zone on OfficeZealot

Visual Studio Tools For Office - 2003 and 2005 Side-by-Side

Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Hands-on Labs for Excel 2003

Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Hands-on Labs for Word 2003

Ken Getz blog

IntelliSense Code Snippets in Visual Studio Tools for Office (MSDN documentation)

Adding Outlook support in VSTO 2005

Creating a Capital Expenditure Model with Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office and Excel 2003 Using Visual Basic and C#

June CTP Drop: An easier way to attach a VSTO customization for WordML and WordML XLST scenarios

vsto

[Listening to: My Last Breath - Evanescence - Fallen (04:07)]

Five things wrong about SharePoint - my 2 cents

You probably have read the article on Informit - Five things wrong with SharePoint. The author actually states that SharePoint is a piece of crap for the following reasons:

It's a crappy mish-mash of multiple technologies. - Stop whining and get over it, SharePoint is web-based and therefore uses what you call "a crappy mish-mash" of technologies. The best point he actually makes is the last sentence "Good SharePoint programming practices require expert level capability in each of these areas, as SharePoint is very unforgiving, relative to undoing programming changes."

The development team is playing the Longhorn card - Don't think so, a lot of speculation has been going on about the next version of SharePoint, and it seems that the next version will be launched together with Office 12

There are two SharePoint products, which is confusing. I think he has a point here, let us spell the full names of the products in all of our writings - Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server.... mmm, that's quite a mouthfull... let us NOT ;-)

Support for SharePoint is lacking I actually like the SharePoint newsgroups on MSDN and I actually respond to quite a few questions on them. I don't think that they are better or worse than the average newsgroup. And Mike Walsh's "you are in the wrong newsgroup", does help people making the distinction between WSS and SPS. Thanks for mentionning the SharePoint bloggers - I do think that they are an invaluable source of information. Oh, and yes we do have some critique about the product (See supported and unsupported scenarios...) and have great expectations of the next version

Microsoft has not stated a strategic direction for SharePoint - I guess when you read between the lines you will see that this product isn't going away soon and that it will be the centerpiece in Microsoft collaboration strategy for the coming years.

Other bloggers who have commented about it:

Things wrong about five things wrong about SharePoint (Paul Schaeflein)

RE: Things Wrong about "Five Things Wrong With SharePoint"

Mike Drip is getting slammed over his SharePoint slam article

Mr. Drips, please call 732-5489

Mike Drip's entertaining article on "SharePoint"

Sharepoint blogs talking about what's wrong with Sharepoint- Whow, Scoble added his opinion,...

Five things worth mentioning
sharepoint

Update:

Ed Brills (IBM) opionion about how SharePoint bloggers react to the original article.

Only Five Things Wrong with SharePoint

Right/Wrong conversation update (Paul Schaefleins synopsis)

SharePoint - Vision Not Included

Thread de la semaine

sharepoint

[Listening to: Skinburns - Magnapop - Hot Boxing (04:25)]

SharePoint and AJAX

I was planning on writing something about AJAX and SharePoint but it seems that Angus beat me to it... interesting tip of how to use SharePoint and AJAX
sharepoint

[Listening to: Plump - Hole - Live Through This (02:36)]

SharePoint alerts not send when content is changed

A while ago I wrote a posting SharePoint alerts not send by e-mail, this Microsoft KB points to another cause,, You do not receive e-mail notifications after you configure an alert to notify you when Web site content is changed in SharePoint Portal Server 2003 or in Windows SharePoint Services.sharepoint

First glimpse of Office 12

Read Microsoft offers a first glimp of Office 12... I especially like this sentence:
"Chris Caposella, a corporate vice president with Microsoft's Information Worker Product Management Group, offered a brief demonstration of a distributed forms capability designed to help users submit XML-based forms using only a browser. Users can submit forms without the need to have Microsoft's InfoPath present on their system, and will have the ability to share the form through e-mail."

More info:

Microsoft Reveals New Longhorn, Office 12 Features

Microsoft Sketches Scenarios for Office 12

Office 12 gets a new look

[Listening to: Lightning Is My Girl - Melissa Auf Der Maur - Auf Der Maur (04:11)]

Live Communication Server 2005 and Office Communicator 2005 - web based instant messaging

I found an interesting series of links on this blog - Simplicité - la présence bientôt disponible au travers d'un client web - for non-french speaking people, it talks about how Microsoft will web-enable Office Communicator. Office communicator is the front-end for Live Communication Server 2005 - there is an interesting posting on Channel9 about Office communicator. Definitely take a look at,

Microsoft preps Web front-end to IM server

Office Communicator 2005 IM to be web based

Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005 with Service Pack 1 Capacity Planning Toolkit

Live Communications Server 2005 with Service Pack 1 Resource Kit

For more links check out Simplicité - la présence bientôt disponible au travers d'un client web

SharePoint Tools Galore v3 updated

I got some feedback from 3d party vendors of SharePoint solutions, so I added them to the list - go check them out Metalogix , ActiveSPS Workflow Solutions and Ontolica

SharePoint,Office 2003 and CMS blogroll

Underneath is a listing of all blogs about SharePoint, Office 2003 and MSCMS I'm currently tracking - thanks to Bloglines for providing this nice feature to share my blogroll...

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

sharepoint

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

sharepoint

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...
sharepoint

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

sharepoint

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...

mscms

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.

mscms

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;-)

sharepoint

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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Supported and unsupported scenarios for working with custom site definitions and custom area definitions in SharePoint

I don't really like this Microsoft KB - it is amazing how limiting it is - Supported and unsupported scenarios for working with custom site definitions and custom area definitions in SharePoint. It seems that Modifying site definitions - changes in Onet.xml , adding AllUsersWebPart element is an unsupported scenario as well... too bad. PS It seems that some people share my opinion - see SharePoint custom site definitions... I'm lost...sharepoint

WSRP .Net Framework and SharePoint

Netunity is a solution vendor which has build WSRP .NET Framework The WSRP .NET Framework is a comprehensive portlet development framework supporting the WSRP 1.0 specification for building compliant applications and content solutions based on XML standards and a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Verified against the major portal vendors, the framework includes an extensive class library and Visual Studio Wizards to help you easily create WSRP producers and portlets. The framework does not require the installation of a portal or employ the use of proprietary services and content management systems.


I wonder if this also works with SharePoint - I haven't seen a lot of talk about WSRP and SharePoint except for some projects on GotDotNet - WSRP webpart toolkit for SharePoint and the WSRP web service toolkit. And what about webparts in the next version of SharePoint or webparts developed in ASP.Net 2.0

sharepoint

InfoPath - third party tools

One of the major shortcomings of InfoPath is the fact that you need a full blown InfoPath on every client which needs to fill in a form. I guess that this is one of the major reasons why InfoPath hasn't really taken of as a new electronic forms solution. There are however some vendors which sell solutions to solve the full client problem:

AchieveForms

InfoView

NetXPert InfoScope

There is also a nice article from Microsoft called Sharing InfoPath forms with users who do not have InfoPath...

Microsoft Application Analyzer 2003 for Lotus Notes

Microsoft Application Analyzer 2003 for Lotus Notes has been made available - this tool helps in determining the size and scope of Lotus Notes application migration projects. The Analyzer consists of two parts: the Data Collector and the Data Processor. The Data Processor interprets the data from the Data Collector and creates detailed reports that indicate the complexity and scale of the application and recommendations on how to most efficiently migrate applications to Microsoft platform application environment. The tool is used in the pre-sales and sales phases and is the foundation for an implementation plan.

Quite a nice tool, when you are considering a migration from Lotus to SharePoint.

MSN Search toolbar released

MSN Search Toolbar has finally been released,... I have been using the beta for a couple of months and I have to say I'm quite impressed especially with Windows Desktop Search ....
Go download it

SOA - more then just hype

It is amazing how much talk there is from different vendors about Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Unfortunately I have to agree with Richard Turner - most of the it is just marketing talk. SOA is an abstract notion - it is not linked to products or vendors, it should be generally applicable to any given distributed systems platform.

Richard puts it even a little bit harsher "The whole SOA/ESB thing is all hype, people! Once you come to realize and accept that, the world becomes clearer. You don’t believe me? Define what SOA is. Then try and find one other person that agrees with you wholeheartedly. If you’re lucky enough to manage this, try and apply your definition of SOA across more than one platform / technology. Repeat for ESB. Good luck!" (See

Does SOA Exist?

) but he also sees the advantages of Service Orientation.

I think the general concept is quite interesting but I'm not really sure when I will ever see an actual implementation of SO design. I recently took a look at FABRIQ recently - which combines service principles, one-way multi-transport messaging, queuing networks and ideas from autonomous agents into a single framework. Fabriq is no services framework but does show the complexities involved when creating a complete SO design. The Microsoft Patterns & Practices group has also published an “Enterprise Development Reference Architecture” which also provides some interesting guidance but which I think is quite complex as well.

If you want to know more, check out these interesting postings about SOA lately:

On SOA, Indigo and Services

Just what is an ESB, anyway? Part II

Web services standards can sometimes inhibit SOA development, some say

Radovan responds re SOA

SOA revisited (again)

Call increases for SOA clarity

Does ESB Exist?

Does SOA Exist?

The SOA reference model

What does SOA really mean? One big hype machine

"SOA" doesn't really exist, does it?

Maestro - Microsoft Realtime Reporting Server

Found this on Mauro's blog - "Planned Microsoft Realtime Reporting Server Could Rock Analytics World", ... It seems that Microsoft is going to launch a private beta of Microsoft Realtime reporting server codename "Maestro" this summer. Most of the BI tools which exists at the moment are mainly working on snapshots of data - realtime or near realtime reporting would be a very important move. A full article about it can be found at http://ie.bizintelligencepipeline.com/159907104 . Maestro will be based on a combination of technologies - SQL Reporting Services, SQL Notification Services and the Business Scorecard accelerator... I'm however wondering if it will use SQL 2005 as well as SQL 2000. And what about SharePoint since it builds on the Scorecard accelerator.

sharepoint

SharePoint Portal Server e-mail alerts not send

It seems that I already published this before - but I got some emails about it so here's the link again

SharePoint Portal Server e-mail alerts not send...

sharepoint

Internet explorer and PDFs

Did you ever notice that PDFs seem to open slow in Internet Explorer? I just found out why... it seems that there are in fact multiple requests to your webserver when trying to open a PDF. In IE 4.x and 5 it uses three requests. For IE 5.5+ it uses two. For a complete reference goto http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q293792

SharePoint issue list reports and Office 2003 web parts

Windows SharePoint Services contains out of the box an issue list which you can use to track change request or problem reports about your product. If you go to the issue list you will also notice that there are some reports available for these issue lists. The great thing about these reports is that if Microsoft Office 2003 English Web Parts and Components (Freely downloadable) is installed on the server, the report generator for an issues list creates rich charts for report types. When a user clicks one of the report types on the Report page (reporthome.aspx), the user is directed to reportrich.aspx, which displays the chart. If the package is not installed, the user is instead directed to report.aspx and a rich chart is not displayed.

The page which actually generates these reports is quite interesting as well, it is located in the Local_Drive:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\60\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\1033 folder and gives an interesting example about how you can use a sharepoint list as a basis for a graph generated with Office 2003 web components. One of the greatest flaws about the Office 2003 webparts is that you can only use ODBC datasources, it would have been a lot better if they used the data source catalog like the dataview webpart. I guess that if you take a look at the code in reportrich.aspx, you will get some nice guidelines about how to accomplish this.