Jeremy's World of Random Stuff : SharePoint

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server - Monthly Partner Live Meeting

jpalmer — Thu, 29 May 2008 16:37:22 GMT

We're trailing a monthly event to update our partner channel on what's new in the world of Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management. To attend you must be a Microsoft Certified or Gold Certified Partner holding the Information Worker competency. To register, visit the Partner Learning Centre.

I look forward to seeing you online soon!

Install Windows SharePoint Services on Windows Vista

jpalmer — Thu, 29 May 2008 10:15:39 GMT

There have been a few gumbles over the years about the fact that you're unable to run Windows SharePoint Services on Windows Vista. Personally, it doesn't present too much of an issue for me, I just run any server applications that I need to run on my laptop in Microsoft Virtual PC.

If you're a SharePoint Developer perhaps, and you want to have a go at installing Windows SharePoint Services on Windows Vista, you can find a setup helper and full instructions over at Bamboo Solutions.

Please note that this isn't supported by Microsoft. Enjoy at your own peril!

Developers Guide to Web Content Management Training

jpalmer — Mon, 19 May 2008 11:52:38 GMT

The Partner Readiness Team is pleased to announce the release of the “The Developers Guide to Web Content Management” course. This five day training course is designed to provide SharePoint developers with the basic and intermediate information and skills they need to extend, customize, and deploy a Web content management (WCM) publishing site implementation. The primary audience for this course is SharePoint developers who are responsible for the successful implementation of a WCM site.

Deliveries will take place on the 16^th June and the 30^th June, at Combined Knowledge in Leicestershire.

For more information or to enrol, please use this link: https://training.partner.microsoft.com/plc/search_adv.aspx?ssid=6d49d9f3-a95c-4f4d-8a30-da2c3299bec0&site=UK&lang=en-uk

If you have any problems enrolling, please contact our helpdesk on 0870 8509442, or by email on ukplcsup@microsoft.com.

Microsoft SharePoint is Taking Business By Storm

jpalmer — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:43:05 GMT

There’s a really interesting article published over at Network World about how Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is becoming the IT industry’s must have technology.

Search Project Server Data using SharePoint BDC and Enterprise Search

jpalmer — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 01:56:23 GMT

Do you ever wonder how many projects are in a specific phase? Would you like to know the attributes of a specific resource? Are you looking when a specific milestone ends? Do you have users in your organization that are not part of the Project Server resource pool but still need to access the data? Being able to easily search valuable information is becoming a key feature in any organization.

This solution starter demonstrates how to leverage SharePoint Server’s Business Data Catalog (BDC) to index project server data and enable users to search the different objects (projects, tasks, resources, lookup tables…) using SharePoint Server’s Enterprise Search, and give you answers to all the questions above. Out of the box the Project Server data is not indexed (only the SharePoint objects are indexed for instance Issues, Risks, Documents…) and thus users cannot search the content contained in the Reporting database. This solution starter will thus enable you to mine the PS 2007 gold mine and find the nuggets you were looking for very easily!

http://www.codeplex.com/EPMBDC

Calling UK SharePoint MCTs

jpalmer — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 02:11:00 GMT

I'm trying to form a community for Microsoft Certified Trainers (MCT) in the UK that deliver training on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and / or Windows SharePoint Services. Having actively worked as a Microsoft Certified Trainer in the past, I know how important it is to be armed with the right information for those knowledge hungry delegates! I hope to kick this off with regular Microsoft Office Live Meeting events. If you are a UK based MCT please contact me if you want to find out more.

Project Server and InfoPath 2007

jpalmer — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 12:49:30 GMT

You can now find on CodePlex a solution starter that demonstrates how to integrate Microsoft Office InfoPath and Forms Services to create a custom project initiation phase and approval process.

The goal of this solution starter is thus to provide the following two code samples:

InfoPath Form with managed code that issues Project Server Interface calls to populate and submit form data
SharePoint sequential workflow that leverages the form created earlier to create a custom workflow

This solution starter requires Project Server 2007, InfoPath and Forms Services 2007, and Visual Studio 2008.

Other references:

EPM 2007 SDK http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2672F6F9-7028-4B30-99A2-18CB1EED1ABE&displaylang=en
Project Developer Portal http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa905469.aspx
Project Programmability Blog http://blogs.msdn.com/project_programmability/
Building Simple Custom Approval Workflows with InfoPath 2007 Forms http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb629921.aspx
Walkthrough: Creating Office SharePoint Server 2007 Workflows in Visual Studio 2005 http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms564355.aspx

SharePoint Cross-site Configurator

jpalmer — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 22:46:58 GMT

Do you need a way to offer consistency across your site collections? Well look no further than the SharePoint Cross-site Configurator.

The tool automates the process of deploying the SharePoint site settings in all or selected sites in a server farm as shown in the following list:
Note The Tool also enables IT administrators to customize the site settings to be deployed.

Applying Master Pages across a SharePoint server farm.
Setting up Web Titles for all or selected site collections across the farm.
Applying audit control settings to all or selected sites.
Adding advanced settings such as “Allow content type management” to all types of lists.
Adding a new Expiration Policy at the site collection level.
Adding a new Expiration Policy to content types, lists, and documents.

SharePoint Goodies on CodePlex

jpalmer — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 12:30:25 GMT

There are plenty of excellent SharePoint projects available to download over at CodePlex including a Community Kit, a SharePoint Learning Kit with full SCORM 2004 compliance and Faceted Search.

Thanks to Westie for the info.

Plan for Software Boundaries (Office SharePoint Server)

jpalmer — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 12:07:09 GMT

I'm often asked questions about the capacity limits of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. If you're also interested to find out how many Sites can be supported by a Site Collection, have a look at Plan for software boundaries (Office SharePoint Server) over at the TechNet site.

SharePoint and Silverlight

jpalmer — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 01:11:45 GMT

A few partners have been doing some very cool work with SharePoint and Silverlight, Microsoft's platform for building rich web experiences. Over the last couple of days, I've stumbled across a couple of great web parts for SharePoint that harness this new technology.

Firstly, from my colleague John Westworth's blog I found the SharePoint Silverlight Photoviewer WebPart that uses Silverlight to display the contents of a SharePoint image library list.

Next, the SharePoint Silverlight Browser (Beta 1) which displays documents and pictures in a "flow" format. I had this idea last week that it would be amazing to have a SharePoint list or document library viewable in this way.

Hopefully these web parts will give you some ideas of what you can do with SharePoint and Silverlight.

Microsoft Transporter Suite for Lotus Domino

jpalmer — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:41:56 GMT

Yesterday we released an updated version of the Transporter Suite for Lotus Domino or Generic POP / IMAP servers. This toolset can help you migrate from Lotus Domino to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and SharePoint. Users, groups, personal address lists, mailboxes, personal mail archives, and applications can all be migrated from Lotus Domino 5, 6 or 7.

More resources can be found over at TechNet.

Admnistrative & Service Accounts for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS) & Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

jpalmer — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 14:19:24 GMT

Throughout my career working with Microsoft products and technologies, I've often been asked about best practices for the configuration of administrative and service accounts. Carefully planning your administrative and service account strategy can help you deploy a more secure environment by ensuring that you follow the principle of "least privilege". This means that you want your service accounts to have the least amount of access required to do its job and nothing more. So don't use domain/administrator for all of your service/administrative accounts!

Some excellent background reading is the Services and Service Accounts Security Planning Guide over at TechNet.

To find out which administrative and service accounts are required for WSS, their purpose and required rights, you can use the Windows SharePoint Services security account requirements planning tool along with the related TechNet article. There is a similar planning tool for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and, again, a TechNet article.

Hopefully these tools and articles will help demystify what administrative and service accounts you need to help you secure your SharePoint deployment!

Free 2007 Microsoft Office System Training for IW, MBS and ISV Partners

jpalmer — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 13:14:39 GMT

We've launched a new initiative to help Microsoft Certified Partners holding the Information Worker, Microsoft Business Solutions or Independent Software Vendor competencies get up to speed on the new Office platform. Microsoft is investing an incremental US$5 million to get this initiative off the ground.

For more information visit http://iwaccelerator.com.

Integrating Line of Business Applications with SharePoint

jpalmer — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 15:54:02 GMT

It's incredibly powerful to be able to search all of your organisations information assets from a single location. One of the benefits of the Business Data Catalog (part of the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server). The BDC is a simple way to integrate line of business (LOB) applications, such as Microsoft Dynamics with the Office SharePoint Server 2007. You can find out more about the Business Data Catalog at the Office Developer Center and Search in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server at Office Online

I was asked this morning the question "How can I efficiently allow enquiry access to data stored in Microsoft Dynamics NAV" - the Business Data Catalog would be one of the ways to achieve this with the benefit that it uses SharePoint. In essence, you can search for "The Cannon Group PLC" and you'll get search results from all SharePoint data sources and the information that you choose to expose from Microsoft Dynamics or another LOB application (or even multiple LOB applications!!) in a single set of search results.

I've spent plenty of time authoring metadata to expose Microsoft Dynamics NAV to Business Data Catalog and if you want to take the manual approach all of the information you need is online at the Office Developer Center.

Recently I've come across a tool called BDC MetaMan that can make integration with the BDC so much easier. With a couple of mouse clicks you can point the tool at the SQL Server database or an XML web service and build the application metadata. So if you need to expose your customers and make them searchable via Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, you literally just point it at the table, choose the fields and select the actions. You can find full information, demos and downloads on the BDC MetaMan website. I hope to share some examples of my work with Microsoft Dynamics and the BDC soon.

BDC MetaMan have just released the beta of version 2.0 of their product which also offers updates - watch this space!