Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog

Recommended Reading for March and April, 2007

Recommended Reading for March and April (click here for previous recommendations).

Lots of useful content (I can hardly keep up anymore!) and tools generated by the community:

• Complete MOSS licensing info by Cornelius J. van Dyk (SharePoint MVP) -- addresses a top FAQ from customers by providing links to Microsoft's official content for MOSS's license model, feature comparison, and sample prices.
• How to Build a SharePoint Development Machine by Eli Robillard (SharePoint MVP) -- provides real world guidance and a walkthrough on building a dev box for SharePoint. And Bil Simser (SharePoint MVP) provides a good rundown of useful tools that should be installed on this machine.
• Upgrading SharePoint Site Templates and List Templates by Eli Robillard (SharePoint MVP) -- addresses an FAQ many people face during the upgrade planning process.
• Wrangling SharePoint Workflows with Visual Studio by Robert Bogue (SharePoint MVP) -- addresses an FAQ from developers by demonstrating how to create a workflow that creates tasks using content types.
• New version of SmartPart, now with "AJAX Connections" by Jan Tielens (SharePoint MVP) -- the SmartPart that provides a seamless SharePoint web part wrapper around ASP.NET 2.0 User Controls, so you can use them unchanged on a SharePoint site, has just gotten even better.
• How to use the Data View web part and XSL to customize a SharePoint blog's Post View by Mark Parsons -- a good tip that will likely make its way into the Community Kit for SharePoint: Enhanced Blog Edition.
• On being a "SharePoint expert" by Bil Simser (SharePoint MVP) -- interesting commentary that I believe affirms the growing need for a SharePoint specific Microsoft Certified Professional program. FYI, we already have the necessary certification exams here and here.
• Office SharePoint Server Developer Edition by Spencer Harbar (SharePoint MVP) -- an insightful and provocative plea for improvements to be made to the developer's SharePoint environment.
• Series on Customizing Wiki Pages by Kit Kai (SharePoint MVP) -- provides drilldown and walkthrough on how to customize the page layout of the SharePoint wiki, so you can implement a mini-Wikipedia for your intranet.
• 10 Issues and Resolutions for SharePoint Workflows by Robert Bogue (SharePoint MVP) -- Robert has probably reported more SharePoint workflow related issues and bugs than anyone outside of Microsoft, and here he shares his top 10 list for the benefit of the community.
• How To: Create a custom Windows Workflow Activity and make it available in SharePoint Designer by Todd Baginski (SharePoint MVP) -- provides a deep dive walkthrough of what lots of SharePoint developers would love to do but have no idea how to. This is a great example of how community generated content can be a perfect compliment to Microsoft published content on MSDN.
• Creating a Training Portal Using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (with screencast) by Mike Gannotti (SharePoint Technology Specialist Extraordinare) -- addresses one of the FAQs I get from customers by showing just how easy the solution can be implemented.
• SharePoint Manager 2007 by Carsten Keutmann -- reading about Carsten's progression in developing iterations of this tool is just as useful as the tool itself, which provides a comprehensive tree view of practically all of SharePoint's configurable properties as well as the ability to change them directly (but please do so with care!).
• SharePoint Solution Installer by Lars Fastrup -- a free tool for eased installation and deployment of SharePoint 2007 solution files to a SharePoint server farm. I'm pleased to see more and more professional developers (especially at MS Certified Partner ISVs) contributing quality (and free!) tools to the community.
• SharePoint 2007 Maximum Limitations and Single SignOn Error codes and what they mean by Harsh Chiplonkar (SharePoint Support) -- this kind of info will ultimately make its way into a KB article, but I'm glad that Harsh has taken the time to post it for all to see.

And a bunch of quality content developed or commissioned by Microsoft:

• Demo screencasts: A six-part series on getting the most out of SharePoint Designer 2007 -- covers topics ranging from customizing SharePoint sites to building layout pages and designing workflows to building composite applications and Integrating with Visual Studio to deploy site definitions. These cost a bundle to develop with a professional training company, and I hope that you'll agree that the quality shows through.
• Building Custom Search WebParts with Integrated SAP NetWeaver Portal Search for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 white paper by Lei Liu (Spell GmbH) and Tilo Böttcher (Microsoft) -- FYI, we will be blogging a lot more about Enterprise Search very soon, so stay tuned.
• MOSS 2007 Item-Level Auditing source code and white paper by Ted Pattison (SharePoint MVP) -- addresses another FAQ I get from so many customers.
• Securing Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 using Microsoft Forefront Security for SharePoint -- addresses the surprise lack of awareness within the community about our ForeFront security products for SharePoint.
• Office SharePoint Server 2007 Evaluation Guide (RTM complete) by Arpan Shah (my manager) -- I had authored the beta version with help from an outside vendor, and it had a surprisingly long shelf life, but Arpan practically wrote all of the updates to the RTM version himself, so he's being way too modest about what he has accomplished. [Update March 27: The Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Evaluation Guide (RTM complete) has just been published as well.]
• MOSS 2007 specific customer case studies -- there's now at least one getting published every week, which provides a great testament to the growing success of SharePoint Server in the marketplace. Most of you reading this list won't need any more convincing from us, but this is good information for you to send to your company's decision makers, so you'll get the funding for your SharePoint-based solution sooner vs. later. :-)

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