CTRL+ALT+JOPX

Sunday, July 31, 2005

Talkdigger

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

Friday, July 29, 2005

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

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

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.
mscms sharepoint

[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)]

Monday, July 25, 2005

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

Thursday, July 14, 2005

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

Monday, July 11, 2005

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)]

Sunday, July 10, 2005

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

Friday, July 08, 2005

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)]

Tuesday, July 05, 2005

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...

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

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

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

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

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...
sharepoint