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What’s happening at SharePoint Forum 2008?

 If you can't make the event, watch the key note via Microsoft Live Meeting! Add this event to your Outlook!

http://www.microsoftsharepoint.com/strategy/agenda/Pages/default.aspx

National Native Title Tribunal goes live with MOSS

National Native Title Tribunal went live with MOSS yesterday. Its very cool site that support

·         Web accessibility standards

·         Online forms

·         BDC search with MOSS Search

·         Customer data management with MS CRM (email subscription via SharePoint and add data to the MS CRM)

·          AGLS (Australian Government Locator Service) metadata

The Vivid Group guys done a fantastic job on delivering this project.

Experience the possibilities with SharePoint , Microsoft SharePoint Forum 2008

OBA Sample Application Kit for PeopleSoft Released to Web

So, with the above in hand what is this OBA Sample Application Kit for PeopleSoft?

In many cases, developers don't have the knowledge on how to programmatically integrate Office applications with LOB systems. What this kit provides is guidance on how you can integrate with Web services that have been generated from within PeopleSoft and then consume those services within a .NET and managed code environment. The OBA Sample Application Kit for PeopleSoft (one in a series of kits) includes a whitepaper, installation document, source code, and client-side binaries (server-side (MOSS) code is discussed in the documents how to deploy) for you to use and learn how you integrate PeopleSoft programmatically into your Office system.

The goal of the kit is to provide developers with some information on how they can go ahead and learn how to programmatically integrate PeopleSoft with Office (specifically Outlook 2007 and MOSS 2007), thus providing you with specific knowledge around Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) - a component technology within Visual Studio 2008 that enables you to build Office solutions, the MOSS 2007 BDC and the integration with Web services, and more generically the use of Web services developed using PeopleTool within .NET and the Visual Studio IDE.

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/obapsftsak

Hardware virtualization support for SharePoint products and technologies

I have been asked few times last week what is the hardware virtualisation support for SharePoint technologies. Following some information from the original MS support article listed below, 

Currently, you can use the following products together with hardware virtualization software products only for testing:

When you use Virtual Server 2005 R2 or a later version of Virtual Server, the following products are supported for production use:

 Read the full article at,

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/909840/en-us

Sydney SharePoint User Group is pleased to bring back Mike Fitzmaurice to Australia– Monday May 5th 2008

Visit http://www.sharepointusers.org.au/sydney for further information.

Mike Fitzmaurice is an Enterprise Technology Strategist at Microsoft, advising customers, partners, and Microsoft teams on portal, collaboration, and search technology. He spent the past five years as a Technical Product Manager for Windows® SharePoint® Services and Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server, focused on developer evangelism and interoperability issues. He joined Microsoft Corp. in December 1997 as a senior consultant for Microsoft Consulting Services, overseeing several development initiatives involving Exchange Server and SharePoint technology for a wide range of customers. Before joining Microsoft, Fitzmaurice served as Director of Research and Development at Advanced Paradigms Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based Microsoft Solution Provider Partner, as well as a five-year tenure as IT Director of the National Association of Broadcasters.

AGL goes live with MOSS

Check out the AGL internet site went live last Friday in MOSS.

www.agl.com.au

The site is

·         Completely build using the WCM capabilities within MOSS.

·         Using OOTB RSS Web Parts to show Stock Data from 3^rd Party Sources as well as provides RSS list subscriptions for search and page updates.

·         Using build in MOSS search capabilities to provide search results for the site. Search has been heavily customised to show relevant public facing results only.

·          Has a custom subscriptions engine using WSS API support. This allows users to subscribe to notifications via email.

Unique World guys did the work.

Content deployment in WCM

Content deployment copies only content, such as Web pages and resources used by the copied pages. When a Web page is deployed, any items in the content database that the page depends on, such as images, style sheets, or layout pages, are also deployed.

Content deployment does not deploy any of the following file types:

• Programs
• Assemblies
• Features
• Configuration information, such as Web.config files
• In progress workflows, such as workflows designed with SharePoint Designer
• Items in the recycle bin

Note: Content deployment deploys only the last major and the last minor version of each item where versioning is enabled.

Information Rights Management with SharePoint

Information Rights Management (IRM) provides an additional layer of content security over that provided by more traditional access control lists (ACLs). IRM establishes usage limitations on a file rather than limiting access. For example, you may grant a user access to a file but you may not want them to change the file on the client computer or forward it to someone else. IRM provides this additional level of security.

Implementing IRM security in SharePoint Products and Technologies requires additional software that is not shipped with either Windows SharePoint Server 3.0 or Office SharePoint Server 2007. You must install the Microsoft Windows Rights Management Services Client, version 1, on every Web front-end server in your server farm. In addition,Microsoft Windows Rights Management Services (RMS) for Microsoft Windows Server® 2003, service pack 1.0 or later, must be available on your network.

You can implement IRM on document libraries. When IRM is enabled on a document library, and a document of a type that can be rights-managed is downloaded from the server to a client application, the SharePoint Products and Technologies server encrypts the document and adds an issuance license. When the document is uploaded back to the server, the SharePoint Products and Technologies server decrypts the file and stores it in the library in unencrypted form, as content is not encrypted in the SQL Server database. This enables features such as search and indexing to operate as usual on the files in the IRM-protected document library. The IRM permissions that are applied to a document when users upload it to a document library are based on each user's permissions for the content in the SharePoint Products and Technologies server security settings.

Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 does not have the Microsoft® Office protector files that are required to automatically rights-protect a document when it is uploaded. You must use Office SharePoint Server 2007 to do this.

Changing Passwords for Office SharePoint Server Accounts with STSADM

Server Farm Account

To update the server farm account, run the following stsadm command on the server that hosts the Central Administration Web site.

stsadm –o updatefarmcredentials –userlogin <domain/username> -password <new password>

You must then run the iisreset /noforce command to restart the application pool.

If you encounter a Service Unavailable error when you try to access the Central Administration Web site, you must also run the following stsadm command on every other server in your server farm.

stsadm –o updatefarmcredentials –userlogin <domain/username> -password <new password> -local

Other Application Pool Accounts

To update the application pool account, run the following stsadm command on the server that hosts the Central Administration Web site.

stsadm –o updateaccountpassword –userlogin <domain/username> -password <new password> -noadmin

You must then run the iisreset /noforce command to restart the application pool.

Search Service Accounts

You can use the following stsadm command to update the password for the Office SharePoint Server Search service.

stsadm –o osearch –farmserviceaccount <domain/username> -farmservicepassword <password>

Alternatively, you can reconfigure these accounts by using the Shared Services Administration section of the Central Administration Web site.

Shared Services Provider Accounts

If you change the password for an SSP account, you must update the account details by using either the Central Administration Web site or the stsadm command-line tool. You can use the following stsadm command to update an SSP account.

stsadm –o editssp –title <SSP name> -ssplogin <domain/username> -ssppassword <password>

You must then run the iisreset /noforce command to restart the SSP service.

Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 (DPM)

Maximizing Protection of Microsoft SharePoint with Data Protection Manager

DPM 2007 is designed for the SharePoint Administrator or the IT generalist and uses wizards and workflows to help ensure that you can protect your data – without requiring an advanced degree, training or certification in storage and backup technologies.

DPM presents the data to be protected in the same context as users access it. In DPM 2007, platform owners can manage backups from the perspective of the application. SharePoint administrators simply select the farm to be protected; DPM understands what components need to be backed up

Similarly, SQL Server administrators choose databases, Exchange administrators select storage groups, and managers of virtual environments choose virtual machines and file server owners choose file shares.

Reasons to do a full crawl

Reasons for an SSP administrator to do a full crawl include:

• One or more QFE or service pack was installed on servers in the farm.
• An SSP administrator added a new managed property.
• To re-index ASPX pages on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or Office SharePoint Server 2007 sites.

                 Note:

                The crawler cannot discover when ASPX pages on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or Office SharePoint Server 2007 sites have changed. Because of this, incremental crawls do not re-index views or home pages when individual list items are deleted. We recommend that you periodically do full crawls of sites that contain ASPX files to ensure that these pages are re-indexed. 

• To resolve consecutive incremental crawl failures. In rare cases, if an incremental crawl fails one hundred consecutive times at any level in a repository, the index server removes the affected content from the index.
• One or more crawl rules have been added or modified.
• To repair a corrupted index.

The system does a full crawl even when an incremental crawl is requested under the following circumstances:

• An SSP administrator stopped the previous crawl.
• A content database was restored.
• A full crawl of the site has never been done.
• To repair a corrupted index. Depending upon the severity of the corruption, the system might attempt to perform a full crawl if corruption is detected in the index.

I am getting famous!!!!

Check out my acting at  US SharePoint Conference 2008

It’s the Day 3 video from “A Piece of the Action” - http://www.mssharepointconference.com/pages/news.aspx

Best practices for the local, stand-alone SharePoint development environment

1.       Plan ahead. Do not let the ease of use of SharePoint Products and Technologies guide your development.

2.       Until your code is running as expected, avoid using production components (such as Active Directory) in development environments.

3.       Document your code with good comments for future problem solving.

4.       Avoid logging events in the operating system event files, because in case of a problem – it is hard to detect operating system issues. General logging practices are provided in the Patterns and Practices reference at the end of the article.

5.       Clean up/dispose of SPWeb and SPSite objects (for more information, see Best Practices: Using Disposable Windows SharePoint Services Objects).

6.       Avoid using the SPWeb.AllowUnsafeUpdate property, as setting this property to true can leave your code open to security risks, potentially introducing cross-site scripting vulnerabilities.

7.       Avoid any direct access to the SharePoint databases. (For more information, see Support for changes to the databases that are used by Office server products and by Windows SharePoint Services).Accessing these databases programmatically or manually can cause unexpected locking within Microsoft SQL Server that can result in overall performance problems.

8.       For code access security, use the following table to help you determine where to install your assemblies, either in the Bin directory or global assembly cache.

Building SharePoint 2007 Solutions Master Class -

Readify's latest Industrial Strength Series event is U2U's intensive Building SharePoint 2007 Solutions Master Class, delivered by Patrick Tisseghem 14-18 April 2008 in Canberra. This Master Class is designed for experienced .NET developers to get up to speed with building solutions with both WSS3.0 and MOSS 2007.

.NET development skills and power user knowledge of WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 are pre-requisites for this intensive course.