Clint Covington: Software design, Microsoft Office Access : SharePoint

SharePoint Web 2.0 Toolkit

Clint Covington — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 08:19:00 GMT

Here are a bunch of great shared source extensions to SharePoint.

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/06/18/community-kit-for-sharepoint-2-0-pre-release-announcement.aspx

If you are doing SharePoint development--this is definitely worth checking out.

Skinning SharePoint resources

Clint Covington — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 07:35:00 GMT

One of my favorite design bloggers Cameron Moll just posted helpful links to resources for those of you tasked with changing the default SharePoint look and feel.

If I was going to leave MS and start a company, I probably would start a SharePoint consulting company. From everything I'm seeing, the SharePoint business is taking off like a rocket. My guess is, there is quite a bit of consulting business for a small talented team of capable web designer, programmer, dba/network hack, sales person, and process oriened PM. If you found a BI specialist to implement Excel Server for analysis--the team would rock.

Any ways, have a great weekend folks.

SharePoint Takes Lead in Collaboration Market - WSJ article

Clint Covington — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 22:54:00 GMT

Here is a great article by the Wall Street Journal about SharePoint adoption and scenarios where people are using it beyond corporations. Access 2007 made a big investment in working better with SharePoint. I recently blogged about Cool as Ice and Alan Cossey who built a solution on Office Live (which is built on SharePoint) to solve similar problems from a small business perspective. Here is my favorite quote:

To date, largely unheralded, Microsoft has sold 85 million licenses to the enhanced version of SharePoint across 17,000 companies. No marketing campaigns are in the works. "When we get SharePoint in there, it sells itself," says Jeff Teper, vice president of Microsoft's SharePoint Server group.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117737738757279866.html?mod=mm_main_promo_left

UA articles on SharePoint integration

Clint Covington — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 08:54:00 GMT

The end-user UA team just published three new articles on SharePoint integration.

Control which forms and reports are available on a SharePoint site

Create Access forms and reports from a SharePoint list

Track and view version information for SharePoint list items

Enjoy!

SharePoint Server Review in CRN

Clint Covington — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 20:27:00 GMT

I just came across a nice article about SharePoint on CRN.

http://www.crn.com/sections/breakingnews/dailyarchives.jhtml?articleId=193700573

They did a good job summarizing the Excel Services that are part of the MOSS server

"Users can now publish interactive spreadsheets with Excel 2007 right into SharePoint, so the tool plays a key role in the creation of business intelligence portals. For instance, users can change views with Excel output by drilling down right from a portal page by using Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. No local installation of Office is necessary. Local Excel installation is only required when editing spreadsheets. "

As a founding member of the original Web Part team here is my favorite quote:

"Microsoft has done a great job simplifying the publishing process and added many new development capabilities. Solution providers, for instance, can now build on top of a large number of filter lists. Filters are Web Parts that automate mundane tasks. "

The article misses all of the good integration to make Access and Outlook consume and use list data. Access does a nice job providing the ability to combine lists, build great printed reports and take any list data offline. Outlook does a great job surfacing list RSS feeds, mapping event list data to calendars, surfacing tasks in the new task window, and surfacing contacts in the outlook contacts UI. We both use the new GetListItemsSinceToken to minimize traffic on the server and provide richer Offline scenarios.