Next week I’m going to post something that explains the relative merits of efforts like IBuySpy Portal, DotNetNuke, etc., compared to Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server. We’re getting asked that question a lot. We also...

Someone sent me a comment to one of last week’s postings lamented the trouble with indexing ASPX files , particularly because MS product support says that we don’t recommend searching them. This person’s company has a lot of content...

I get asked “how many Web Parts exist” all the time. The question drives me crazy. I understand why. Portal vendors cite the list of available portlets they have on hand as strategic selling points. They want to cite the equivalent number...

To say “Web Parts are Microsoft’s ASP.NET technology for implementing portlets” would be correct, but grossly incomplete. One key facet of Web Part technology is that we do not intend for them to be for portals and portals alone. Our...

ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts rock. We in SharePoint-land love them. We’re building “v3” on ASP.NET 2.0. But none of that matters right now if you have to deliver code for today’s SharePoint sites and portals. And this advice comes from...

There’s a nice article on TheServerSide.NET entitled Integrating 3rd Party Single Sign On in Sharepoint Portal Server that explains how to write a custom (unsupported by Microsoft) forms authentication layer that sits in front of SPS and WSS. But...

Gregory MacBeth provides a nice enumeration of the skills you need to be a “SharePoint developer”. It’s a good list. I endorse it. But examine it closely, and I hope you’ll come to the conclusion that the way to be successful when...

Just about every presentation we did in the area of SharePoint Products and Technologies at last month’s Microsoft Office Developer Conference is being redelivered as a MSDN Webcast . If you attend live, you can post questions that will be answered...

The majority of my posts are for developer issues (not — normally — developer techniques, as many other blogs do that), but I’ll make an exception here since I just brought up Groove a few minutes ago. We still love iOra. They were...

Microsoft has a large number of internal distribution lists for discussing specific topics (more like listservs than newsgroups). On the morning the plan to acquire Groove was announced, I saw questions from our sales force demanding to know what the...

A number of times, people have said that we can solve the problem of confusion around the word “SharePoint” by just getting rid of the word. For example, we could just have “Portal Server” stand on it’s own, and we could...

Renaud Comte made a great observation on my CAML comments (see CAML ? Stay for long time dixit Mike Fitzmaurice ). If CAML is here to stay, how about more than just reference info (which we have) and examples (which we’re going to provide — and if you...

If you’ve been at a talk delivered by me, Bryan Jeffries, or Richard Mareno entitled something like “Programming with Windows SharePoint Services’ Lists and Document Libraries”, you’ll have heard the following explanation...

I’d add one extra item to Tim Heuer’s fantastic article on what a good sharepoint subject matter expert ought to know... Somewhere between “mid-level consultant” and “SharePoint Architect”, there needs to be an extra...

I did three presentations at last week's Book Publisher's Summit, talking to publishers and authors on topics that would be great for developer-focused books on SharePoint Products, namely (a) programming with lists and libraries, (b) site definitions...