Excellent product!! Highly recommended.
Useful Sharepoint Designer Activities 0.5.0 Alpha
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This project takes aim at making it easier to create advanced workflows using Sharepoint Designer by providing a set of custom workflow activities.For more info go to http://www.codeplex.com/SPDActivities/
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For those of you who have not attended a workshop with Bob Mixon, this is a great opportunity to do so. I had the pleasure of attending one of his workshops back in January and cannot stress enough how much I learned from it. Bob’s training is not only all about the technology; his areas of expertise are Knowledge Management and Information Architecture. If you are a Knowledge Manger, Information Architect or a Project Manager in charge of implementing SharePoint, you need the knowledge from this workshop to deliver Real World SharePoint Solutions.
See workshop details below:
Learn to Build "Real World" SharePoint Solutions with, 3-Time SharePoint MVP, Bob Mixon
Online - All from the Comfort of your Home or Office
This course is designed for developers, architects and professionals (IA, KM and PM) who want to optimize their implementation skills for SharePoint-based solutions.
With helpful and proven tips, techniques and processes you will be armed with the tools your organization needs to achieve the full benefit of SharePoint. By using real world examples (and mistakes), Bob will save you many hours of wasted time and disappointments.
Learn To:
- Build "Real World" Solutions using SharePoint out-of-box features, without Visual Studio.
- Create site and navigation structures that can be used by both the contributor and consumer.
- Build a Taxonomy and learn how to Apply it to SharePoint.
- Reduce, if not eliminate, Document Duplication.
- Configure Search so it Delivers Relevant Results.
- Understand security, how it works and techniques for correctly applying it.
- Automate business processes with workflow.
- Create a Request and Site Provisioning Solution.
- Utilize SharePoint to manage your implementation.
- Increase confidence in your ability to successfully create solutions that will be adopted by users.
- Understand key factors in making a build versus buy decision.
- Much more...
Don’t miss this opportunity to learn how to do SharePoint right the first time - Next class starts 9/16.
Save $100 when you register before Friday, September 12, 2008
Register Here!
For complete workshop details, click here.
I don't know about other users here, but this is good news for me and my environment. See highlighted below.
Note from the Editor
Just Released
Windows Small Business Server 2008 has been released to manufacturing. As announced on the Small Business Server blog, both SBS Standard and Premium have RTM’d, and will be widely available by our November 12 launch. Stay tuned for more information about the launch.
Also just released, the Service Level Dashboard for Operations Manager 2007 v1.1 is an updated Solution Accelerator with new reports and an attractive graphical display of the service level compliance of your line-of-business (LOB) applications.
Easing the Path to Virtualization
Microsoft recently updated its software licensing terms for 41 server applications, and updated its technical support policy for 31 server applications so that customers can receive technical support when deploying those applications on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server, or any validated third-party virtualization platform.
With the new licensing terms, Microsoft is waiving its previous 90-day reassignment rule, allowing customers to reassign licenses from one server to another within a server farm as frequently as needed. For scenarios around how the licensing terms might work for you, check out the Virtualization Team blog.
With the new support policies, customers get the same level of product support in a virtualized environment that they are accustomed to with non-virtual environments. To enable this support policy, Microsoft launched the Server Virtualization Validation Program in June 2008. The program is open to any software vendor to test and validate its virtualization software to run Windows Server 2008 and previous versions of Windows Server. More information is available on the Microsoft Support Web site.
And don’t forget, on September 8, Microsoft will launch its new virtualization products. Register to attend the launch event in Bellevue, WA and receive a free Microsoft Virtualization evaluation software kit.
Speaking of evaluations, Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is now available. Download IE8 Beta 2 and get access to the IE Deployment Guide and the Application Compatibility Toolkit. Why should an IT pro care about IE8 Beta 2? Watch an interview / screencast / demo on TechNet Edge and find out, or read the InformationWeek article to find out about the new security features.
A quick note on a couple new additions to your TechNet Flash this issue: On the right rail we are now highlighting TechNet Magazine content from the current issue. You will now find links to premium technical content in this location in every newsletter. We also have a new IT Management section with higher-level content that couples the technology and business considerations of IT planning.
And finally, read about the upcoming availability of the new social bookmarking application for the TechNet, MSDN, and Expression sites in the ComputerWorld article Microsoft Details Plans for New Social Bookmarking Tool. Then try out the Social Bookmarks Preview for yourself. For more on how Microsoft is opening up its technical sites to the community, read John Martin’s blog.
Mitch Irsfeld
Editor, TechNet Flash
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Try Expression Studio 2 for Free
Download a trial and explore five great creative products for free. Whether you are designing standards-based Web sites, rich user experiences for the desktop and Silverlight, or managing digital assets and content, Expression Studio 2 takes your creativity to the next level.
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Video: Windows PowerShell Introduction
Windows PowerShell is one of the most important tools for administrators. In this screencast, Jeff Alexander goes through the basics to get you started.
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Video: Vista Shims and Application Compatibility
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Download the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers
32-bit | 64-bit
This update includes several new enterprise search features for SharePoint Server 2007, and the latest performance updates and fixes for the Microsoft Office Servers.
If you have to migrate InfoPath forms to a MOSS site, you should know about a new default view called Relink Documents. This view allows you to select migrated (submitted) forms and to relink them to the template in the new site. This view is automatically created when you publish and InfoPath form to a MOSS site.
Why do you need to do this? Submitted InfoPath forms contain XML, which contains the path of the XSN template that the forms uses to load. When you migrate forms from one site to the other, the XML will point to the old location. The Relink Documents feature allows you to select submitted forms and change them to reflect the new location path.
I'm sure you've come across a description or comments (multiple line of text) field in a task or issue list that goes blank when you go to edit it - the previous text entry is added as history/version. The setting for this can be turned on or off by going to the column settings and changing the "Append Changes to Existing Text"
In order to enable this feature, you must enable versioning. If you have it enabled and want to disable it be very cautious as you will lose all the previous history entries.
Hello, and welcome to my Mastering SharePoint blog! In this blog I will be sharing best practices, tips, how to's and other information for others members to read and hopefully learn from my experiences. Stay tuned....
A SharePoint colleague asked me how was I planning to address general site navigation, mainly the quick launch menu (menu bar located on the left side of a SharePoint site) to better organize the content at a departmental site level.
The issue, in his case, is that he is migrating from SharePoint v.2 to MOSS and is using a custom web part (in the old version) that allows collapsing and expanding the quick launch menu items. Some of the sites have a great amount of lists and libraries, so he's looking for a "flexible and compelling solution for navigation/menus" without having to re-architect the content of each site.
I could not really offer him a solution that, in my opinion, fits the "flexible and compelling" requirement. My experience with webparts that replace the quick launch menu are everything but flexible and typically require a person with some coding or scripting experience to create and maintain. I would also think that by customizing the launch menu, you would lose the security properties (not sure but feel free to comment on this) that come with MOSS.
The only advice I could offer him was to take this as an opportunity to work with each department/site administrator to plan for a new site navigation. In my case, I'm moving to a centralized model (true departmental sites, as opposed to everything under the root), so it's almost a requirement, which I welcome with open arms.
So... here is my plan (in a nutshell):
First and foremost, establish site owners and meet with each individually to take a look at their content. I know this seems like a no-brainer, but I'm amazed how many companies do not have defined roles for SharePoint sites.
Come up with site taxonomy. I'm adding to this blog a screenshot of our Maintenance department home page. This is not the most technical group, yet the biggest users of SharePoint. For this particular group, I wanted to make things very simple to access so we created topics. I created easy graphical shortcuts on the home page for each topic (see attached), which are linked to a corresponding "topic" page that has relevant content - we are using audiences to determine relevance. An entry to each topic page has been added to the quick launch menu. Links to lists and libraries (filtered by topic) are added to each topic page and security is applied to the list or library.
This is still a proof of concept. As I work with the content, I would have a better idea of how this will work for my users.
I welcome any comments, ideas or suggestions. I would like to learn how other users have approached navigation for their sites and what they are doing with the Quick Launch Menu.