Owen Allen - The MOSS Garden : SharePoint Portal Server

Office 2007 Delay? Actually, No.

owenallen — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 19:01:00 GMT

There has been a lot of confusion over the announcement that Office 2007 would also reschedule its consumer launch date to January 2007 to match that of Vista. This marketing launch is a different animal than the development and availability date of the Office 2007 product(s).

Microsoft clarifies this with a press release that reads as follows:

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Microsoft Confirms Timeline for 2007 Microsoft Office System
Product on track for October RTM.

REDMOND, Wash. — March 24, 2006 — Yesterday, Microsoft Corp. confirmed the timeline for release and availability of its 2007 Microsoft^® Office system. The company remains on track to complete work on the 2007 Microsoft Office system in October of this year and is planning to make the product available to the business customers through the volume licensing program in October 2006. Retail and OEM availability of the product are scheduled to coincide with the retail and OEM availability of the Windows Vista™ operating system in January 2007.

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It has been stated that Beta 2 will be available in June, and the above press release specifies October as the RTM and bits available date. Rock on!

MS Office 2007 Beta 1 Technical Refresh

owenallen — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 02:01:00 GMT

As usual, I've been too busy rfeading other blog posts about the recent announcements, sleeping, or traveling to visit customers to be one of the first to talk to you about the ~~new~~ "Refresh"-ed version of Beta 1.

PC Magazine has a story about the refresh. (It's also got a slide show of images)

The Non-Disclosure period for many of the Server-side functions that have not already been announced is going to be expiring in the next week or so. It'll be great to be able to talk in more detail about the server-side pieces of SharePoint Server 2007. In the meantime, if you want to start looking up more details about the next version, you can start with this list of blog entries...

January Webcasts of Interest

owenallen — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 12:26:00 GMT

The blog has been quiet for a while. I hope that everyone had a very Merry Christmas, and best wishes for a most excellent 2006.

To start the year off the right way, here's a list of SharePoint and collaboration webcasts coming up in January...

NW SharePoint users group

owenallen — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 05:50:00 GMT

Jason Mauer and I presented the debut session of a Office Server Workshop this afternoon in Bellevue. We played to a packed house (well, there were a few empty seats) of 45 and had a good time exploring some pieces of Office "12" Server. I'd like to take a minute again to point everyone to the PDC 05 recorded content that is still available online. I think it is supposed to be available until March or so. (6 months from PDC, right?) I think that is still the best way to get an introduction to Office "12" Server. That is, if you can't make it to our Portland edition of this presentation, next week, Dec 13th... Another good way is probably to check out http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview.

WSS and SPS Admin Guides Updated for SP2

owenallen — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 05:46:00 GMT

I know this isn't the most current post, but I need to record it here for those that use this page as their home page.

Windows SharePoint Services Administrator's Guide - updated for SP2
SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Administrator's Guide - updated for SP2

SharePoint (and CMS) User Group in Pacific Northwest

owenallen — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 21:34:00 GMT

We’d like to announce the resumption of SharePoint User Group meetings in the great Pacific Northwest.

December Topic:
      Preview and Demo of the Next Version of SharePoint
      Preview and Demo of the Next Version of Content Management Server
      Preview and Demo of the Next Version of Microsoft Office
      Review of related PDC 2005 Announcements

Upcoming Schedule:

Wednesday, December 7, 2005
Microsoft Bellevue Office
205 – 108^th Ave NE, 4^th Floor, Bellevue

Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Microsoft Portland Office
10260 SW Greenburg Rd, 6^th Floor, Portland

Time: 11:30AM – 1:30PM; Lunch will be provided.
Driving directions and more information about each office is available in the above links.

Contacts:
      Chris Barnard, Portal Specialist
      Jason Mauer, Developer Evangelist
      Owen Allen, Portal Technology Specialist

Please feel free to share this information with your friends and neighbors and significant others. (?)
Demos, food, and free prizes. What’s not to love?

CorasWorks Workshop in Seattle

owenallen — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 22:02:00 GMT

CorasWorks is presenting a SharePoint "Workspace Workshop" in Seattle on November 14th. This is a hands-on workshop focusing on using their products with SharePoint. It is a free workshop, but registration is limited. Attendees will have a workstation provided for. This is part of a tour of cities for the workshop. See the CorasWorks events site for information about registration and other cities.

SPS 2003 SP2

owenallen — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 23:25:00 GMT

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Service Pack 2 was released today. Download here.

SP2 introduces support for the following:

· Support for running on 64-bit machines in 32-bit emulation mode

· Support for Reverse Proxy and Alternate URL support

· Support for IP-Bound virtual servers

· Support for off-box SSL termination

· Support for SQL Server 2005

Lastly, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 with SP2 will be Kerberos-enabled by default.

Sharepoint Discovery Kit (Hands-On Labs)

owenallen — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 04:25:00 GMT

Hey look! - More hands-on lab goodness from the SharePoint folks! Download here, and go get all "hands-on" and stuff.

Scenarios included are: (Yes, I know you can see the list by following the link)

building a divisional portal site
deploying custom web apps that integrate with the portal
using SQL2000 Reporting Services to track portal usage
customizing the portal user interface

CorasWorks workshop for Sharepoint Development

owenallen — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 19:35:00 GMT

CorasWorks is coming to the Seattle area to deliver a workshop about SharePoint development using their webparts. This is a full day workshop covering design patterns and bext practices for SharePoint development. Check the web site for more details.

Wrapping up July

owenallen — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 20:35:00 GMT

What a great month July was. I was away with the family for the past two weeks, and a lot has happened. I missed the BizTalk Server 2006 Beta 1 release and the Windows Vista Beta 1 release. Wow. Hopefully, it won't take me too long to catch up on email so that I can play with these bits.

It was a great vacation. We took the long way to a family reunion, and spent a couple of days at each tour stop. Newport, Oregon (the Oregon beach), the Redwood Forests (camping in Grizzly Creek State Park - apparently, this is where the ewok and speeder scenes of the forest moon of Endor were shot...?), San Francisco, Las Vegas, and then Fremont, UT for the reunion. Lots of driving. You learn a lot about the members of your family on a trip like this! (It was all good!)

My role at Microsoft is changing slightly with the new season. I'm going to focus more on Content Management Server and the Sharepoint products and lessen my emphasis on BizTalk Server. We will be hiring a BizTalk specialist for the Pacwest District. I kind of had to make a choice between BizTalk and content management and portals, and I chose the portal path. I am looking forward to it. I think that my experience with BizTalk and Indigo and Web Services, combined with the upcoming Office 12, will help my customers enjoy some incredible portal functionality.

It's good to be back. See you around!

TechEd 2005 Sessions and Slides

owenallen — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 23:27:00 GMT

Even while sitting at Gnomedex, (on a Saturday), I have to keep up with my day job. This looks like a great way to view the slides and watch the sessions from Tech-Ed 2005 a month ago. http://microsoft.sitestream.com/teched2005/

Tech-Ed Sweetness... (Find the BizTalk Stuff in the "Connected Systems" track)...

Update: This site now requires a password - so it is now for attendees only. (Which I wasn't this year... Shucks).

Eli's SharePoint Resources

owenallen — Mon, 05 Jul 2004 08:11:00 GMT

Eli's SharePoint Resources - If you are working with SharePoint, you should take note of Eli's page of links, etc. It is great to see so many resources for SharePoint.

http://weblogs.asp.net/erobillard/archive/2004/06/17/158311.aspx

SharePoint, BizTalk, and CMS Overview pages

owenallen — Tue, 04 May 2004 15:27:00 GMT

Keep bookmarks to these three pages handy - (if you know of others, please let me know...) - these are good reference pages for product information. Thanks to the people who maintain these pages!

SharePoint 2003 Overview
(Lamont Harrington)

BizTalk Server 2004 Overview
(Darrell Norton)

MCMS 2002 Overview
(Stefan Gossner)

MSIB v2.5 Released

owenallen — Thu, 29 Apr 2004 00:19:00 GMT

Well, it's good to have another version of the Microsoft Solution for Internet Business available. This one has been anticipated for a while, now.

The link to download is here.

MSIB addresses emerging business models that have evolved from relatively simple structures of linked HTML pages to complex, feature-rich applications. MSIB provides content management, automates business processes such as selling and purchasing, and facilitates personalization and data collection for analysis. MSIB supports a range of deployment scenarios, ranging from government tourism portal sites with multicultural content to transactional corporate portal sites, complete with personalization, authentication, content management, structured catalog data, analysis, and retail checkout.

Updates for the new version include:

Prescriptive guidance for deploying on Windows Server 2003
Prescriptive guidance to also include BTS 2004 installations
Support for recent Service Packs for underlying products (CMS, CS, SPS, BTS)
A search provider for SPS 2003
MOM packs for CMS and CS