TSPUG tonight, and downloads galore

Tonight's TSPUG meeting brings us the long-awaited SharePoint Backup, Restore, and Disaster Recovery presentation by Radu Vaduva. As usual we'll spend some time before the presentation talking about what's new and answering questions.

And what's new? Lots. The Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) Service Pack 2 for starters. This is a roll-up of WSS SP1 and subsequent fixes (i.e. it's the only update you need to add to a fresh installation). The improvements are significant - WSS now runs under ASP.NET v2 (note: not SPS yet!) and supports SQL Server 2005. For those using the language template packs, a separate download is available to update the templates. What else? You can now use SSL on more than one virtual server with WSS now, and Kerberos support is now an option. You can read all about the changes in the overview.

What else? How about two new Recycle Bins that blow away previous solutions. Check out this great Recycle Bin for SharePoint by Andreh, Naveen, and Joel (of Microsoft IT), which intercepts the request to delete with an ISAPI filter and sends the file to a network share where your help desk can easily restore it. [Read Joel's original Recycle Bin announcement] There's also a new Recycle Bin by Todd Bleeker at MindSharp, which allows users to restore their own deleted files and throws in a bonus of allowing more than one document template in a DocLib. Todd's post contains plenty of screenshots, this is cool stuff.

MS IT also posted a Cross-forest People Picker for setting site membership, which pulls eligible users directly from the SPS Profile datastore. Say goodbye to the Outlook pop-up!

And last but not least, another answer to a chronic question: check out this simple solution for synchronizing offline files with SharePoint, a nice concise answer for those who live by laptop.