Archive for January, 2005

Bil Simser had a great post today about George Tsiokos’ service that will accept a RSS feed url and compile a dwp file that a site manager (anyone with permission to add web parts) could drop onto their site.

This is an awesome service for many people who may manage their team or company site but do not have permission or experience to install web parts on to the server.

Nice!

I often get asked where someone should go to start learning about web part development. Recently Serge van den Oever had a pretty good post on just that. Well that’s a pretty good answer to use from now on.

Wow so much great stuff happening over the next month or so here in St. John’s, Newfoundland (if you are a geek like me)!

February 10, 2005 – 7:00pm
Engineering Building, Memorial University, EN-2006

Our .NET User Group will be having its regular monthly meeting featuring a presentation from Adam Gallant on Code Access Security. For More details and to sign up – please go here.

February 22, 2005 – 7:00pm
Engineering Building, Memorial University, EN-2006

The MSDN Canada User Group Tour hits town with a special focus on Interoperability. Again we will be joined by Adam Gallant from Microsoft. More details here.

February 22, 2005 – 9:00am
Studio 12, Avalon Mall

The TechNet Winter Tour 2005 hits town featuring best practice information and tips for managing change and securing your IT environment. For more information on this event and to sign up – go here.

March 1, 2005 – 8:30am
Studio 12, Avalon Mall

MSDN Deep Dives is coming to town (FINALLY!!) as part of a National campaign to spread the good word on ASP.NET 2.0 and VS 2005. For more information on this event and to sign up – go here.

And if you are in town and going to any of these events – drop me a line – I will be at each of these.

An odd thing happened today…

I was replying to an email that came in asking how one could use Pivot Tables, Charts and Spreadsheets on a SharePoint site to display data from an external datasource (ie Access / SQL DB, SharePoint Lists etc…) – so of course I suggested the Office Web Component Web Parts. To help illustrate what I was referring to I grabbed a couple of quick screenshots and dropped them in my reply along with a link.

I then figured that since I had most of the work already done I should write a blog post about it when I got home from work. The components are actually quite helpful even though they have been around for ages and most experienced SharePoint users probably already know about them. Besides – the key is getting information out there for the non-experienced users isn’t it?

Of course then I look and see that Daniel McPherson also posted about them…Today! Daniel are you watching my email? Just kidding – great to see someone else is thinking on the same track. But just a little freaky too.

In late breaking news yesterday (actually early for my time zone), Jan Tielens reported that screenshots of an application he is developing were leaked onto his desktop in a very strange and unexpected series of events…umm wait that don’t make sense. Cute approach though Jan!

Possibly one of my favorite uses of RSS is for syndicating SharePoint content into Outlook (through Newsgator). It is just convenient for me since that is the one application I always have open on my desktop.

That is why it is no surprise that I am quite eager to see Jan’s application. My favorite feature is the fact (according to the screenshots) that you can select which views you wish to syndicate. This will be very nice for personalized views such as My Issues or Due Today items.

Looking forward to seeing the final product Jan – let me know if a Beta release gets discovered on this mysterious desktop of yours.

In related RSS news…

Daniel McPherson lists some of the other SharePoint Syndication web parts that exist. I have tried almost all of these in the past and found them quite good as well. Especially Addy Santo’s Feature Rich Blogwave!

Tariq wrote a new tool for running Caml queries against a SharePoint list. I love how says he couldn’t find the tool he was looking for so he wrote one himself. Great stuff Tariq!

Now here was an interesting post today from Mauro Cardarelli on the next version of SharePoint Portal Server. I’d have to say I am pretty comfortable with his predictions:

(1) There will be no SPS 2005. The timing doesn’t make sense. I think a more reasonable timeframe is (late) 2006.

(2) SPS 2005 will support both SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2000. You won’t be required to upgrade your database servers.

(3) The underlying technology will be the next version of the .NET Framework (2.0). The core functionality will be improved (i.e. tighter integration with the next version of Exchange and Office) but not radically different.

I’d also say I would agree with some of his wishlist items for next version.

(1) Late-Bound Security – people hate seeing links that they don’t have privileges for

(2) Better Search Interface – the SPS search engine is great; the interface for entering queries and seeing results is terrible

(3) Better Customization Tools – You shouldn’t have to manually alter CSS and XML files to expose additional functionality

(4) No more DOS – template publishing should be cleaner… the current generation doesn’t know how to use DOS…

Although I would say on number 4 that I can’t personally see the command-line tools going anywhere but who knows.

If you don’t like the command-line for stsadm tasks – you can do a lot through Frontpage already and there is always the little windows app for it that I haven’t tried before.

Thanks for the post Mauro – it’s always nice to think about what’s ahead. I’d post some of my wishlist items but most of them are items my team is developing now for the current version so I must stay hush for now.

You can never have too many SharePoint bloggers out there. Arno Nel posted a couple of links today to a bunch of SharePoint / .NET Development sites from Africa – great stuff Arno!! Keep it up!

The register reported yesterday in an article that SharePoint Portal Server has nearly 30,000,000 Licencees. That’s a lot of potential user group members!! Did I ever mention that I love SharePoint?

Source: JOPX

Last week I was in Moncton, NB and got caught in the middle of a blizzard. It wasn’t too bad because the place where my meetings were was directly across the street from my hotel.

Yesterday we got hammered with 60 cm of snow (piled 5 feet high in some places due to drifting). Now they are saying another 20-30 could come between now and tomorrow morning.

I need a vacation…somewhere HOT!!

Disclaimer: I know better than to complain about weather with all the nasty things taking place in the world these days – I’m just a little crabby until my feet thaw out from shoveling.

Tariq had a great post this week on how you can create tabstrips for your SharePoint sites (Like you would see in a meeting workspace). I’ve done something somewhat similar in the past using dataviews and a document library for navigational enhancements but his solution seems very cool.

As always great stuff Tariq!

Looks like Jim Edelen managed to reappear briefly this week to share some links for the source code to his very popular database explorer tool and spexport. Welcome back Jim and congrads on the new job in September.

For those of you looking to develop a SharePoint Portal Server disaster recovery strategy in the near future (I hope you have something already!!) – check out the new sample released by MSDN.

The SPSBackupSample in this download (SPSBackupSample.exe) includes programmatic steps and code to demonstrate how to backup and restore all SharePoint Portal Server 2003 or Microsoft Windows® SharePoint Services sites in the server farm. The code shows how to write a backup and restore application for SharePoint Portal Server 2003, and to perform Web Storage System backup for backwards-compatible Microsoft Exchange Server document libraries.

Link via Patrick Tisseghem

Arpan Shah had a great post last week called “Why Choose Microsoft for Your Portal” – it’s a must read for anyone considering the rollout of a portal in addition to anyone in a position to help someone with the decision of what portal platform to use. He does a great job at outlining some precautions to take when making such decisions and then he goes on to highlight some of the great features available through Microsoft’s portal offering.

Arpan makes solid reference to the things that need to be considered regardless of your typical platform preference. Whenever you are offering an opinion or guidance on a technical purchase for a company, it is imperative that you know what the company’s roadmap / vision is.

Over the past few years I have developed some great relationships with some of our clients because I have taken the time to recognize the solution that supported their organizational roadmap. In the end the client feels great because they are one step closer to their long term vision and I feel awesome because I am helping them get there and that feels pretty darn good.

Congrads to Eric Schnoonver (and Maxim Karpov of course) on his new article that will be featured on the Front page of February’s MSDN mag. Eric has been doing a lot of great writing on SharePoint over on his blog and is a great and very enthusiastic member of the community. Keep up the good work Eric!

Patrick Tisseghem, one of my fave SharePoint / Office bloggers pointed to 5 new IBF webcasts last week. The Information Bridge Framework was on my 2005 “need to do more with this” list so I guess someone read my mind.

I was quite disappointed when Apple launched their music store last year and I raced to the site only to find out I was denied purchasing power because I didn’t have a US billing address. Major Bummer!

But I was just on the Apple site and found out that I can now buy songs too. Woot! Not sure when that happened but I am pretty pleased.

A pleasant re-discovery for me recently was when I stumbled back upon Michael Wolf’s weblog after a few months. Apparently my RSS Feed hadn’t been updating properly because I hadn’t realized he was posting again. In fact he isn’t just posting he is podcasting. It’s a great little show that features a variety of topics including of course gaming and electronics. Check it out!

Thanks to John for the reminder. Great to see John back blogging again! Always an awesome source for inspiration and good reading.

After nearly 8 months of paying for 2 web hosting accounts because I was too lazy (well busy) to transfer our various sites and projects to the new hosting provider – my blog finally has a new home.

I still have about 4 months worth of posts to import and I need to restore my blogroll – which was in serious need of some updating anyhow. For now I am just using one of the standard MovableType stylesheets / templates but I am sure before long I will be poking away at that as well. Unfortunately for the short term I need to disable the comments – 400+ bogus comments a day have rendered the system useless for me. Sorry to anyone who wanted to offer their input on anything I write – please drop me an email and I will get back to you. It’s always a pleasure to hear from you.

Of course not only does my weblog have a new home but so do I. Shane and I moved into our new house on December 20th. It is our first house and while the whole construction process was a royal pain in the %#% – it feels great to be “home”. We took a couple of weeks off work for Christmas and finally have just about every thing unpacked.

Another plus of the new house is the fact that it is 6 minutes from work. No kidding – we can come home for lunch, prepare lunch, eat and then play Xbox for 20 minutes. Does it get any better than that? So if anyone sees me sign in via Xbox alerts in the middle of the day – I’m on lunch.

For those of you that signed up for the Virtual SharePoint User Group – expect to hear from me very soon on how to log into our website and how things are going to get started. I’ve been spending a lot of time “listening” to the community lately and it’s given me some new insight on where some of the needs really exist. Thanks to Shane and Tariq for all your great ideas and support so far.

It’s been a while since my last post. I pulled my weblog offline for a short while due to a change I had to make in hosting providers and some issues I was experiencing with my previous configuration. I am currently in the processing of restoring my old posts and will then be back to posting as normal.

Lots to write about…