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For two years, I experimented with other sites to host my blog. I am now back to this hosting address.
I experimented with www.canaltown.net, and wanted to mix some personal and some professional together in my blog. That didn’t seem to work so well. I had an interesting time feeling very passionate about the messaging when I was mixing the two types of posts.
I then switched over to an interim site on sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs. A fun little community, and one that I enjoyed, but one that isn’t ready to take me where I want to go next.
Last week, I accepted a new position within Microsoft as a Sr. Product Manager with the SharePoint Partner Group. I’ll start soon after Labor Day, and I am very excited about my new role.
I feel a bit of sadness leaving my customers in the Northwest US after having worked with and served them for 6 years.
I will be working with ISVs that are building software packages and solutions that integrate with SharePoint, and I anticipate some heavy blogging activity. For this reason, I’m moving back to the blogs.msdn.com site for my blog, and I hope that the disruption (for my 15 readers!?) isn’t too intense.
If I can find a way to port my postings from my two interim blog sites, into this site, I’d like to do that. We’ll see. (UPDATE: I did get the previous posts imported - Way to go, Live Writer!)
I can’t wait to see where SharePoint will pop up next, and which partner solutions will be instrumental in the next months and years in helping to carry SharePoint in new and interesting directions. I hope to comment and bring you stories about this next journey.
Please feel fee to contact me at any time using the Email link on the sidebar of this blog.
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We released two Microsoft Enterprise Search Indexing Connectors (also known as Protocol Handlers) for EMC Documentum 5.3 (Service Pack 4) and IBM FileNet P8 3.5.1 or 3.5.2.
The connectors are compatible with the 32-bit English-language versions of SharePoint Server 2007 (Service Pack 1), Search Server 2008 and Search Server 2008 Express. Both indexing connectors are fully supported by Microsoft Product Support Services.
The following resources provide details for installing and using the indexing connector for IBM FileNet:
The following resources provide details for installing and using the indexing connector for EMC Documentum:
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These new SharePoint web parts provide interoperability between FAST ESP and Microsoft SharePoint Server.
Using these Web Parts and Site Templates, SharePoint administrators will be able to quickly and easily build FAST ESP-based search sites inside SharePoint 2007 by simply dropping in and configuring the appropriate components.
Visit here (CodePlex) for more details and to download the web parts.
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We’ve heard from many partners who are interested in redistributing Search Server Express with their hardware and software solutions.
Microsoft Partners can now do so by registering for the new end-user license agreement (available here). This EULA is available in all Search Server Express product languages.
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I loved working with Robert. He was a great partner and competitor and colleague. Robert, I look forward to seeing you again one day. If any of you worked with Robert, I would love to share stories with you.
Robert John Satterwhite
http://www.legacy.com/NWclassifieds/DeathNotices.asp?Page=LifeStory&PersonId=115935640
Robert John SATTERWHITE Age 44, passed away unexpectedly Friday (Aug 15, 2008) at his home in Woodinville, Washington. He was an avid skier, soccer enthusiast and outdoor adventurer enjoying many memorable outings with his friends and wife Lene Meilvag Satterwhite. Robert and Lene although married for just a short time had the opportunity to ski & travel to many countries and enjoy their special relationship over the past eighteen years. Robert worked for twenty + years in the high technology field and for the past 6 years was a Senior Technical Evangelist with Microsoft. Robert was born in Twin Falls Idaho on December 3, 1963 and moved with his family to Tacoma, WA at the age of 5. He attended Cloverpark High School participating in soccer and other athletic activities. His college studies included computer science & information technology. These studies opened a challenging and exciting profession for him and he totally immersed himself in the industry working for a variety of companies world wide. Robert was preceded in death byhis mother, Linda Humphrey Satterwhite in 2005, his father John F.Satterwhite in 1970 and his sisterStacey in 1970. He is survived by his two brothers, Kevin Satterwhite andSteven Douglas Satterwhite, both of Tacoma. Celebration of his life & services will be Thursday 8/21 at 11:00 a.m. at Bear Creek United Methodist Church, 16530 Avondale Road NE, Woodinville, Washington 98077. Two separate memorial services will be held later in Idaho and on the ski-slopes in WA.
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A new white paper has been published to MSDN that describes some approaches to creating Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 web content management (WCM) sites that are optimized for search engines, and what to avoid to help improve search ratings.
It’s not a very long paper, but it does describe a few good tips and tricks that any WCM page designer should be aware of.
A few of the tips that are worthy of calling out here:
- Use proper semantic code (appropriate HTML elements) such as headlines. For example, use headline elements tagged as <h1> to <h6>. Use proper HTML list items; for example, ordered, unordered, or definition lists tagged with <ol>, <ul>, or <dl> tags. Use alt and title attributes with image (<img>) tags. Use a Favorites icon for bookmarking and to keep your error log clean. For more information, see How to Add a Shortcut Icon to a Web Page.
- Use the Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS) specification (see W3C and ICRA tools) to provide a signal to search engines and filter programs that your Web site is safe for children.
- Consider keyword density. Because of a general misuse of HTML keyword <meta> tags, current crawlers compare the number of times a word or a phrase appears in an HTML page to the number of times it appears in its <meta> tag to properly determine its relevancy. Using too few or too many keywords can have a negative effect.
In regard to the need for a Welcome Page Redirect to help optimize your sites for Search, here is a paragraph from the white paper.
The landing page or welcome page in Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a 302 redirect page. This can cause problems, as pages with temporary redirects can affect the page’s ranking adversely. If you must use redirection, it is always a better to use 301 permanent redirects. Unfortunately, it is not possible to change this behavior in Office SharePoint Server; however, you can use any URL rewriter and make your welcome or landing page a permanent redirect.
The paper then includes code and additional instruction to help you to write the URL redirect module for your site.
Do you have any other tips or tricks for making your WCM site work more easily with search engines?
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You'd think that I'd learn that posting on this blog is a dangerous thing, and that I'd learn to stay away from it, but I can't seem to learn that lesson. I'm back posting online again. This summer has been a hectic and interesting one, and there has been enough that has been up in the air, that adding to the blogospher via my little channel found itself lower on my priority list. I think that now that I am getting back on top of things, that the priority for the blog, and the general enrichment to the SharePoint community that it provides ;-), will come back up to the level that it deserves. (Put on your boots). Thanks for your patience. Let me know if you have any comments or suggestions.
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The good folks at the SharePoint Product Group have announced that Windows SharePoint Services v3 and SharePoint Server 2007 are now supported on SQL Server 2008. SP1 of the SharePoint product is required for this support.
New documentation describing the support for SQL Server 2008 has been released:
Have fun with SQL Server 2008!
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I ran into an interesting situation this morning with a customer. One of their internal departments has a group of technical writers that manages a lot of procedural documents and forms and they use a web site based on FrontPage to manage this. They were originally asking for some help learning Expression Web, which they had identified as the upgraded product to FrontPage. They manage a site that is almost completely read-only to their users, with a team of 6-8 who edit pages on the site. They are leveraging Dynamic Web Templates (DWT) within their page designs, so they are seeing some reusable benefits in their efforts.
I’ve spent a couple of days of time with them, explaining the benefits of SharePoint features, including collaboration and permission management, and different approaches to page editing and management.
At the end of today’s session, however, we all felt that it would still require less effort to migrate their site to an ASP.Net based site using Expression Web, than would be required to convert the pages to SharePoint. This is because the site is completely read-only to the users and there is no collaboration requirement.
They did bring to my attention a web tool for managing security on the IIS web site to support permission management for their site if they did move to Expression Web. This tool is the Web Site Administration Tool, described here on MSDN. This looks like a useful tool (although I haven’t installed it yet) to manage the last hurdle that was a firm requirement for SharePoint, that of page permissions. They need to restrict page views to specific AD groups and specific individuals.
Because I was working with only one department, there was not a way to “sell” the advantages of having a corporate environment. I think that this department could benefit in the long term from using a SharePoint platform, through content reuse and version management and collaboration for their small team, and this department could serve as one of the supporting reasons for the customer as a whole to move to a SharePoint platform for their corporate intranet.
Until the conversation can be held at the Intranet level, however, the justification for moving on a broadscale to SharePoint can’t be leveraged to help the accounting department. If we wait too long to get the corporate intranet moved over to SharePoint, this site will be converted completely to .Net and Expression Web, and it will be even more difficult to justify the page conversion cost to migrate these pages again, ultimately to SharePoint.
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Well, there have been a lot of blog posts in the area around Mesh, a technology recently released by Microsoft to leverage The Cloud. I’m a big believer in The Cloud, and while Mesh
may not be the ultimate platform that wins the cloud, it certainly could be, and it looks to me like it’s got some great potential. I’m a huge fan.
For a basic introduction to Mesh, see the First Look whitepaper that has been published.
To track the news about Mesh, use the Mesh-blog.
Mesh is a platform. Currently, the first application to be released on Mesh is a file and folder sharing application. This functionality has been delivered via other technologies (i.e. FolderShare and somewhat by Groove) before, so, in itself, file and folder sharing isn’t revolutionary.
Oh, yeah, and it includes Remote Desktop. That’s kind of cool, although, didn’t we already have that? well, yeah, but this one is a little different in that it’s RDP-Meshified.
The development side of Mesh, and the vision that the team has described so far, makes it very useful to developers of the next great applications.
Is this based on Groove? No, it’s actually based on a derivative of Feed Sync, but it provides a platform for some, if not all, of what Groove provides today.
For some idea of what is coming, you have to watch Ori Amiga’s video showing some sample apps and try to follow his vision on this thing. He sold me.
Because the beta system has a limited scope right now, the invitations to participate are already sold out. Watch for more soon. Sign up early and often.
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Wow. Mother’s Day is coming up… Do you think that if I bought this for Kris, that she’d let me use it once in a while?
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/05/02/review_lenovo_thinkpad_x300/
And – watch this YouTube video…is the X300 the New MacBook Air?
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Puget Sound SharePoint Users Group
The next Puget Sound SharePoint Users Group meeting is scheduled for May 15th, 6:30PM – 8:30PM, in Bellevue, WA. Join us at 6PM for pizza and networking.
Topics include:
- echoTechnology -- Managing the SharePoint Environment and Dev/Test/Production Scenarios
- Arpan Shah, Director of Technical Product Marketing for SharePoint, as he presents the "Top Ten Things You May Not Know About SharePoint"
Bring your ideas and join us for a fun evening of SharePoint! More details about the group and the meeting can be found at http://www.psspug.org.
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MindSharp is holding a SharePoint Summit and will be delivering 5 different training classes in SeaTac during the week of May 19-23, 2008.
See the Mindsharp SharePoint Summit page for details. Mention that you were referred by Owen Allen when you register for a 15% discount.
Courses include:
- Implement, Customize, and Manage Search Server 2008
- Office SharePoint Server 2007 Power End User
- Core Technologies in Office SharePoint Server 2007
- Customize SharePoint Sites without writing Code Using SharePoint Designer 2007
- Developer's Guide to Web Content Management
Please note that this is a great chance to take these classes from the professional instructors of MindSharp in a LOCAL (to Western Washington) setting! Now's the time to plan ahead and invest in yourself and in your team to prepare to deliver on your SharePoint projects.
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I may have mentioned this before, but Robert Bogue has published a book dedicated to SharePoint End User training. This book includes steps for over 100 tasks and actions within SharePoint. He also is licensing the soft copy version of this book so your internal training groups can incorporate portions of his book directly into your corporate training guides. This would be well worth the price of the licenses for the word documents.
See Robert’s blog entry for details: http://www.thorprojects.com/blog/archive/2008/04/12/progress-on-quote-the-sharepoint-shepherds-guide-for-end-users-quote.aspx
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You may remember Joel Oleson, who until recently was a Technical Product Manager with the SharePoint Product Team at Microsoft.
Joel has moved on to other ventures, but he is continuing his great blogging efforts about SharePoint. Visit his new blog at http://www.sharepointjoel.com.
One of the topics that Joel Oleson has visited our NorthWest District for is SharePoint Governance. Joel has published a new slide deck covering Governance. If you’ve been in one of his (or my cheap knock off) presentations on Governance, then you will recognize some of the slides.
Review Joel’s blog entry and grab the slide deck from here: http://www.sharepointjoel.com/archive/2008/04/21/sharepoint-governance-and-burton-group-workshop.aspx
(Clarification: Because my job role focuses on the Microsoft Northwest District, sometimes I'll address those customers when writing these posts... Hence the "You may remember..." at the top of this post.)
