Have you ever tried to find that elusive command line argument for STSADM, well Ian Morrish has created a great little resource that provides a list of the command line arguments grouped by category.
http://www.wssdemo.com/Lists/stsadm/AllItems.aspx
This is the son of a friend of mine Chris O'Connor (GrumpyWookie). It is very funny how the sons of nerd become nerds (my son is also a chip of my shoulder)...I also like the way he promotes SharePoint and C#.
The Australian TechEd 2008 web site has been launched. Check it out for information on the agenda. It has RSS feeds to keep you up to date and also uses Silverlight. I will also be presenting at TechEd this year. Don't forget to register early to save $250.
You can also shape the conference by voting for what the closing party theme should be, Gladiators, Comedy or Carnivale. I personally am not sure which one I would rather see!
The Melbourne based Office System / SharePoint usergroup MOSSIG are running the Office System Forum on the 2nd May 2008 at the LaTrobe Microsoft Centre at LaTrobe University Research & Development Park.
The Office System Forum is a unique chance to discuss and be informed on the present and future of the Office System as a platform in small and large companies.
Industry experts from Microsoft (Mike Fitzmaurice from Microsoft Redmond and myself) and the Melbourne IT community (Brian Cook, CEO OBS and Karim Erradi, Readify) will be presenting and available during breaks and networking sessions. As an Office users, IT-Pro or Developer this is an event you can’t afford to miss out on.
Attendance is free but due to space constraints strictly limited to 75 seats, so hurry up and register at http://www.sharepointusers.org.au/MOSSIG/OOSF2008/default.aspx
I finally got a chance to upload some of the photos I took while I was in the US attending Tech Ready 6 and decided to make it a bit fancier by using
Rock You. Next time I will try using Microsoft Silverlight.
I have been really busy over the past few weeks and something I missed last week I thought was worth mentioning. Lawrence Liu of the product team wrote an excellent article describing the difficulties on providing accessible web sites using MOSS. It is no secret that Microsoft have been working with HiSoftware to create an addition to SharePoint to provide accessible capabilities and I have blogged about it here before. What is great to hear is that there is definite support for this direction for the immediate future and also the next version of SharePoint. Lawrence describes the recent update of the Accessibility Kit for SharePoint (AKS 1.1) and goes on to talk about the next version AKS 2.0 and a new Accessible Rich Text Editor (aRTE). In addition he makes reference to SharePoint vNext (which internally is being call SharePoint 14 - we skipped 13, I think someone is superstitious).
So check out Lawrence's post on the Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/03/12/announcing-accessibility-kit-for-sharepoint-1-1-and-future-roadmap.aspx
Just got some time to catch up on my blog reading and noticed that the SharePoint Product Team has released a slipstreamed version of WSS and MOSS with SP1 for both x36 and x64 platforms.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 with SP1 (32 bit)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=2E6E5A9C-EBF6-4F7F-8467-F4DE6BD6B831&displaylang=en
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 with SP1 (64 bit)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=3015FDE4-85F6-4CBC-812D-55701FBFB563&displaylang=en
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with SP1 (32 bit)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=EF93E453-75F1-45DF-8C6F-4565E8549C2A&displaylang=en
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with SP1 (64 bit)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=9FB41E51-CB03-4B47-B89A-396786492CBA&displaylang=en
This is great news for those that are wanting to install MOSS or WSS on the new Windows Server 2008 which requires an SP1 install.
For more information regarding this read the post on the product teams blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/03/07/moss-2007-with-sp1-slipstream-officeserverwithsp1-exe-released.aspx
A group of Adelaide-based Microsoft technologists has launched the Adelaide SharePoint Users Group as a forum to share good ideas about how to benefit from Microsoft’s outstanding Intranet/Internet collaboration offering.
Microsoft SharePoint is the collective name for a range of Microsoft products that dramatically simplify the process of sharing, collaborating and managing large amounts of information. The biggest challenge of SharePoint is turning its technology potential into actual business value.
The Adelaide SharePoint Users Group has been launched to provide opportunities to meet other people willing to share good ideas and skills about how they have extracted value from SharePoint. . People of all skill levels are welcome to attend events where they can meet key industry individuals in a relaxed environment.
The Adelaide SharePoint User Group’s next networking event is at 6.30pm on March 18, 2008.
Organiser Daniel Brown said the Adelaide SharePoint User Group was intended to do much more than just discuss how to use the technology. “It’s a forum where you can share and learn good ideas, tips and experiences about how you’re really making SharePoint excel in your organisation,” he said.
Adelaide SharePoint User group – March Networking Event – when are where:
For more information, please contact Keith Zerna on 0414 28 1701 or email keith@sanrez.com.
Mike Duhne, Brach Manager of Microsoft in South Australia will be in attendance, which will give you a networking opportunity to meet Mike along with other key figures of the industry showing their support for the Adelaide SharePoint User group.
About the Adelaide SharePoint User Group
The Adelaide SharePoint User Group is a non-profit organisation with a focus on the Microsoft SharePoint environment and technology covering administration, development, governance and infrastructure. Its focus will be providing a network with other people who have dealings with SharePoint and Microsoft office and to have regular monthly meetings.
As well as being a networking group, the Adelaide SharePoint user group will be a great way for new members to quickly build the a support group and increase their resources by meeting other members in the local community who share similar skills and resources.
http://www.aspug.org.au
In late January I posted a article about the External Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint being released into Beta. Just thought I would update to let you know that a full version has now been released.
Check it out here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc268155.aspx.
From internal correspondance regarding the announcement of Sliverlight Blueprint for SharePoint.
Today Microsoft announced the Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint at the SharePoint Conference in Seattle. This will allow SharePoint Developers building web parts to take advantage of Silverlight user interface components.
The Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint is source code and guidance for developers describing how to use Microsoft Silverlight and Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies together in business applications and Internet Web sites. SharePoint applications that use Web Parts can now be built using Silverlight user interface elements. This capability enables a fresh look at data exposed through SharePoint Products and Technologies using the modern graphics capability in Silverlight.
It’s important to note that this is not a new supported Microsoft product and doesn’t necessarily represent future product direction it works with Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Silverlight 2.0. However we think it will be extremely useful for customers building the latest generation of SharePoint sites. It’s a sample that directly enables the use of Silverlight with SharePoint. This is being implemented as more than a sample since Blueprints also include guidance for developers that is integrated into Visual Studio and the completed blueprint will be released on CodePlex soon.
You can read about it on the MSDN Library here which includes a link to the downloads including screencasts and examples of Web Parts build with Silverlight. This is also included in the press release with the SharePoint Conference and will be announced in the keynote tomorrow. There is also a Channel 9 video and a few other cool resources if you check out the link.
While I was in Seattle last week I spent time talking with the Product team, during this time I managed to talk with Michal Gideoni who looks after field readiness. Michal mentioned that the product team was working on a new website that would provide a centralised location for a lot of different types of resources, including downloads, technical whitepapers, articles, community forums, etc pertaining to WSSv3 and MOSS 2007.
Last night the product team blogged about the launch of this site.
This will prove to be a great resource and is definitely one to bookmark, check it out at:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepointserver/default.aspx.
Something that I am asked quite often is around how to establish solutions in MOSS and WSS using best practices for multi team development, integration testing, authoring and production. Also how to manage content deployments between these environments. On the 25th January, the Microsoft SharePoint product team published a whitepaper (Implementing Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 and Windows® SharePoint® Services 3.0 Solutions)
This document outlines a methodology for team SharePoint development combining custom code and content, with the aim of accelerating implementation and mitigating production risks. To form the methodology, the document describes implementation scenarios, tools, and development environments. The document does not detail specific implementations (such as "how to write a Web Part" or "how to manage work items"), but describes the overall needs and techniques for the stated goal, and provides several references to topics for more information.
The whitepaper have a lot of information and contain a heap of links to other prescriptive guidance documents such as Content Deployment / Migration, Dev Tools, Patterns and Practices, Features, Packaging Tools and Hotfixes. This is a MUST read for any SharePoint developer or IT Pro.
I was at Microsoft campus today and I had a chance to catch up with Michal Gideoni to discuss SharePoint field readiness. We chatted about certification exams, SharePoint documentation, whitepapers and instructional videos. We also discussed the latest post she wrote for the SharePoint Team blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/02/18/advanced-sharepoint-videos-and-whitepapers.aspx). This post provides a good list of whitepapers and videos relating to several advanced topics. It is well worth a bookmark.
Today and tomorrow I am in Seattle attending internal Advanced SharePoint training for Microsoft Technical Specialists. The morning sessions have been really interesting covering capacity planning and high reliability implementation modelling. Later today we will be covering Backup and Disaster Recovery and Excel Services which should generate interesting discussions also.
This week Monday-Friday I am also attending the Internal Microsoft TechReady event, can't wait for the keynotes from Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates.
Great news, both Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 have been released to manufacture today. Check out this blog by Mike Nash from the Windows Product Management group at Microsoft, he talk a great length about Windows Vista SP1.
