Community Blogs

On Wednesday Bob Fox announced the launch of the ISPA and its website at http://www.sharepointpros.org/ . Bob's been putting this together for well over a year so first off, congratulations to Bob on launching and thank-you for all the hard work you do to help user groups world-wide. What does the ISPA do? Initially its goal is to support existing SharePoint user groups and help people kick-start new ones. There's a small board and a number of evangelists world-wide. Reza and I are the first two "Canadian Evangelists" and we can't wait to have counterparts in the West and East. Canada only has one SharePoint User Group ( Toronto ) but there is demand from coast-to-coast. If you've been wishing there was somewhere you...

A SharePoint Server 2007 Scalability and Performance whitepaper was recently released "to provide strategic information about designing a high-volume, high-availability enterprise solution that can easily grow." it was announced yesterday in the SharePoint Product Team blog . There is plenty of good content here, lots of good ideas, and many attractive diagrams. As for the tests, these are idyllic goals to shoot for if you want great performance – minimize (or eliminate) inserts and deletes, keep fewer than 200 files per folder (if you do the math, they appear to cap it at 130), don’t use more than 5 WFEs, and spread your databases over many physical volumes. Note that the testers assign 2 (or 3 in the case of H:) business divisions...

Toronto SharePoint User Group 2 Bloor West, Toronto Wednesday, June 25 6:00pm Registration and Social 6:30pm Meeting 7:00pm Feature Presentation (description below) 8:30pm Closing This is our last meeting of the 2007-2008 season. After June 25 , TSPUG is on summer break until September 17 . Future-Ready SharePoint Architecture: From Taxonomy to Deployment by Eli Robillard ( Infusion Development ), Ruven Gotz (Ideaca), and Craig Lussier (Torys LLP). In last month's episode (by Mindsharp , with several courses in Toronto the week of July 14 to 18 ), we learned the benefits of designing an effective taxonomy. This month we'll continue with the how-to's of designing taxonomies, and then turn our business requirements and corporate taxonomy...

Here's a nugget. At the May Toronto SharePoint User Group meeting I met Mike Maadarani who got me excited about his company's CLF 2.0 SharePoint Toolkit . Orangutech is based in our nation's capital and they've been working with a government department and Microsoft to help SharePoint meet CLF 2.0 and WCAG requirements. From the documentation: The CLF 2.0 Team Site Feature will allow departments and agencies to create SharePoint team web sites [and publishing sites] that conform to the new Common Look and Feel Standards 2.0 (CLF 2.0) that conforms to the World Wide Web (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 Priority 1 and 2 checkpoints, which are collectively known as WCAG 1.0 AA. The toolkit includes two solutions, one...

Topic: SharePoint and Silverlight – Bringing the best of both worlds together! In this session we'll explore different scenarios for integrating SharePoint 2007 and Silverlight. We’ll explore different ways on how you can leverage the SharePoint 2007 amazing framework to expose content and data in a much richer way. Speaker: Andy Nogueira (MCTS, MCPD, MCAD) has over 10 years of professional experience in the IT industry. He is the Team Lead for the Microsoft Practice Group at nonlinear creations Inc. (nonlinear.ca), a Microsoft Gold Partner. He is responsible for designing and implementing several successful technology solutions based on MOSS 2007 (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) integrated with technologies such as Enterprise Search...

At Infusion ASP.NET developers regularly ask how to easily build a web part or how to host a user control (.ascx) in SharePoint. Someone invariably replies "SmartPart!" at which point my job is to make sure they understand just what they're getting the client into. SmartPart is a cleverly coded web part by SharePoint MVP Jan Tielens . Once installed, you can drag an instance of SmartPart into a SharePoint web part zone and configure the new web part to host an .ascx file stored on disk. And like magic, you can host user controls in SharePoint. Recent versions are even AJAX-aware, and the underlying code is really quite good. But, there are drawbacks, some of which may be overcome, some of which are fixed realities. 1. SmartPart...

The first meeting of TSPUG in 2008 will feature the return of Reza. Lately he's been working on custom authentication providers for SharePoint, and next Wednesday you'll learn just how easy these are to build and deploy (when you know the tricks; there are always tricks). See you there! When : Wednesday, January 16, 6:00pm to 8:30 Where : 2 Bloor West (NW corner of Yonge and Bloor), 8th Floor Topic : Custom authentication providers in SharePoint 2007 Abstract : In ASP.NET 2.0 , there is an important concept called the authentication provider model which is used for many new features such as Membership and Role Management, Profiles, etc. Moss 2007 is built on the top WSS 3.0 which is in turn built on the top of ASP.NET 2.0. This means that both...

The long arm of TechNet Canada reached out to me to do a Q&A on their Developer blog : MVP Insider - Q & A with Eli Robillard Biggest surprises? I can eat 102 popcorn shrimp in a single sitting, and refuse to shave until Pope Benedict canonizes James Brown as a saint. Read More...

For those of you who were looking forwad to see this one at TSP Camp, Josef will be presenting at the Toronto SharePoint Users Group on Wednesday! The “Awesome Media Gallery” -- Extending SharePoint with Silverlight Josef Rogovsky, Lifeline Total IT Solutions, Inc. Based on the “SharePoint Silverlight Photoviewer WebPart” project on Codeplex, this session will provide a brief introduction to Silverlight programming with Blend and Visual Studio and then demonstrate how integrate it with SharePoint via a web part. (note that the Codeplex project is currently broken due to changes in the Silverlight 1.0 RTM. I will have working implementation ready for SharePoint Camp. Read More...

Whenever you do something it's always great to get feedback, but here's one I definitely didn't expect - Talking Chicken Reviews Toronto SharePoint Camp (YouTube video) . Thanks again to all our volunteers and speakers for making this happen, and to all the people who spent a beautiful Fall day with us at the Manulife building. Early signs would indicate that yes, Toronto's fantastic community of SharePointers will make this happen again next year! We want your feedback! How can we make TSP Camp better? Whether through the comments below or your own hand-puppet videos: if you say it, we will hear it, so go ahead and say it. Be like the chicken. Silverlight Update: For everyone who was looking forward to the Silverlight presentation, Josef had...