Archives
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The Best Free SharePoint Downloads
This post will continue to be maintained to contain the best free utilities and downloads available for WSS and SharePoint 2007. Add your comments and submit your nominations!
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SharePoint for Lunch with Joel Oleson: Thanks Everyone!
I just got back from the Toronto SharePoint User Group's year-end holiday party and it was a pretty excellent experience.
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TSPUG "SharePoint for Lunch" with Joel Oleson, this Friday!
Joel Oleson joins the Toronto SharePoint User Group this Friday at 12:00 noon!
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The Best Books for SharePoint Developers
Customers often ask "what are the best books for SharePoint programmers?" and while there are a few good lists (like AC's) none contain all my favourites so I'm starting fresh.
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Secret Strategies for Successful SharePoint at the Toronto .NET User Group, Dec. 9, 2008
'Tis the season for hardcore SharePoint. I'll be doing a presentation for the Toronto .NET User Group with the understated title: Secret Strategies of Successful SharePoint Projects. This is a two-part session on designing knowledge management solutions and then implementing them in SharePoint. We'll discuss taxonomy design, infrastructure design, the mapping of knowledge domains, common mistakes, the practical limits of SharePoint, the practical limits of people, and field questions from the audience. It's going to be an exhausting bunch of fun, hope to see you there!
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TSPUG December 12: "SharePoint for Lunch" with Joel Oleson
Joel posted a teaser this morning, here's a little more to look forward to - the December meeting of the Toronto SharePoint User Group will be SharePoint for Lunch on Friday, December 12 from 11:50am to 1:30pm at a (still undisclosed) downtown restaurant. Our featured guest is none other than Joel Oleson, SharePoint mentor to many, ex-employee of the Redmond mothership, and "SharePoint Expert" at Quest Software. Seating is limited to 40, and to keep it simple but raise the quality bar for the holidays, we're aiming for a flat $15 cover charge for lunch and a drink.
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TSPUG November 19: SharePoint and Silverlight
Our next Toronto SharePoint Usergroup Meeting will take place next Wednesday, November 19, 2008.
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Mark your calendars, January 24th is the Toronto SharePoint Camp
Today we confirmed that Saturday, January 24th is the date of the 2nd Annual Toronto SharePoint Camp! For a second year, I'd like to thank Manulife Financial Corporation for generously providing the facilities that not only make this event possible, but also keep it free to all attendees.
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New Online SharePoint 2007 Development Training!
Today Microsoft's Ramp Up program launched a new track: SharePoint for Developers, Part I. This is a free, online, community-based program that only requires a Live ID to sign up and dig in.
I worked through all the learning materials for the first module (creating Web Parts) and it looks good. The module includes a Word document that describes web parts, a narrated PowerPoint ("slide-cast", ~20 min), a web-cast style Visual Studio capture ("code-cast", also ~20 min), and a Virtual Lab (up to 90 min) where you can build on a remote control box. The only downside is that all assume you're creating a web part in an IDE where "SharePoint Web Part" is an available project type (so either VSeWSS for VS 2005, or Visual Studio 2008 is installed); while these templates make good demo-ware, they are not recommended for "real" development. STSDEV is one good alternative, though my old-school beliefs say you should build your first web part in Notepad, or at least start minimal with the VS "class" project. Once you get past that, all the core ideas are there (adding attributes, creating properties, connecting web parts for master-detail views, data-binding, etc.) so these are great learning tools even if your implementation will be a little different. -
AC/DC, Excel, and You
Microsoft Excel. 80% of the world's business logic, and the top 1% of it's rock.
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New Article: Capabilities Required for Successful SharePoint
After a few months this page has about 10,000 hits but the article just a 1,000. So skip this page and Go read the article! (This was just a summary) [Feb 3, 2009]
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Capability Checklist for Successful SharePoint
Successful deployment of SharePoint is no different than any other corporate strategy or project, only the moving pieces change. The goals remain consistency, scalability, and success by whatever measures you choose. It never fails to disappoint me to see "best practises" that restate project management principles without the salt or benefit of SharePoint experience (here's an example, though I don't recommend it). Give us the goods!
So to get it out of the way, here is every "Successful Strategies for Product X" article, presentation and book in a paragraph: You need shared vision, strong leadership as high up the food chain as possible, business-oriented goals and measures, clearly-defined scope, good communication, a crisp plan including risk mitigation and capacity to change, and effective delivery and support teams. During the build, you need to balance time, scope and available resources. Also like every other project (but perhaps not as common), an effective way to begin is to list the capabilities you need to simulate your business. Brainstorm on the common complaints or bottlenecks in your processes, and the capabilities or changes that would provide relief. You do not simply need "SharePoint," you need more effective teams, or bottom-up communication, or top-down communication, or document management, or records management, or alerting, or a corporate memory, or platform integration, or a place to collaborate with external partners, or some combination of these, or something else entirely. Declare these goals. Do a spell-check, hide the leftover red and green squigglies, and there you have it, go SharePoint!
Okay, time to get back to reality and be productive. The guidance below describes capabilities required to give good SharePoint. Many are expanded to list the moving parts or the choices for providing the capability. Your plan is complete when every point below is accounted for. -
TSPUG October 22 Meeting: Distributed SharePoint Deployments
Our next Toronto SharePoint User Group meeting will take place on Wednesday, October 22, 2008. This month’s speaker Jeffrey Wolff, Technical Director, Infonic, will discuss the benefits of deploying a distributed SharePoint environment, factors to consider when planning your environment, and possible problems distributed organizations faces as they architect an enterprise-wide SharePoint infrastructure. He will also review third-party solutions that can address these problems as well as the pros and cons of each.
Jeffrey Wolff has been in the IT industry for the past 15 years and has spent the last three with Infonic. He mainly works with large enterprises primarily based in the US, such as the US Navy, in designing and implementing global and distributed SharePoint deployments.
When: 6:00 pm, Wednesday, October 22, 2008.
Where: Nexient Learning, 8th Floor, 2 Bloor Street West, Toronto, ON -
TechDays early registration ends today
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From Wall Street to Dubai: How Infusion is evolving
When the Wall Street herd began to stumble over their own their mortgage inventory, there were signs of rockier times ahead. Now that several giants lay collapsed, people like our CEO Greg Brill are writing about what it was like to watch the race to self-destruction unfold, and how they read the signs that clearly said, "now is a good time to evolve."
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TSPUG Fall Session Starts Tonight (2008-09-28)
Members received an update last week, I just wanted to mention here that summer's over and meetings start back up tonight, Wednesday, September 28!
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SharePoint Security: Hard limits and recommended practices
This summarizes the hard limits and recommended guidance for Groups, Access Control Lists (ACLs) and securable objects in SharePoint 2007.
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Why care about Google Chrome?
In the last 24 hours there's been a lot of conversation about Chrome. When Safari was released for Windows, why was so little written about Safari's SharePoint compatibility? I used Opera for years, but why never a post about Opera and SharePoint (summary: it stinks, even drop-down menus fail to render)? What's the big deal about Chrome? Web developers certainly don't need another browser to support, unless this is the one that finally gets it right, and the odds of that are way high against. So why did I bother?
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Google Chrome works for SharePoint users, less so for administrators
Today I downloaded and installed the just-released Google Chrome browser, ran it through some preliminary tests with SharePoint 2007 and so far, acceptable but missing a few key things. Chrome supports NTLM authentication, uploads (though not multiple uploads), renders all the usual menus correctly, and generally does a good job of rendering SharePoint pages. And it's screaming fast.
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SharePoint WFE memory allocation on 32-bit Windows Server
How much memory can my SharePoint web front-end (WFE) servers use? It's a common question, and this post is an attempt to answer it for common scenarios. Briefly: 4 GB is the maximum recommended for most scenarios, though you may be able to use more if you're hosting other applications on the same server, including other web applications.
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SharePoint Trace Logs and the Unified Logging Service (ULS)
This is to explain what the ULS logs are, why they exist, and how to read and write 'em. In a nutshell, the Unified Logging Service (ULS) writes WSS 3.0 and MOSS events to SharePoint’s Trace Logs, and these are stored in the file system in ...\12\LOGS. Collectively this location and its files are commonly referred to as the “ULS Logs” though MSDN calls them the Trace Logs.
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International SharePoint Professionals Association: It's alive!
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Readers Guide to the SharePoint Scalability White Paper
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.
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TSPUG June 25: Future-Ready SharePoint From Taxonomy to Deployment
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WCAG and CLF 2.0 Compliance for SharePoint
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:
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The rule of good technology
Technology provides value to business by simulating and automating business processes. The measure of business software, whether client or web-based, is its ability to transform Business State A into Goal State B with the least amount of human intervention. Done right, it's about process engineering, not decoration. Business fundamentals haven't changed in ten thousand years, but they're accelerating as we automate. This rule never breaks.
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Toronto SharePoint User Group Tonight (and next month)
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What to know about SmartPart, and LoadControl()
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 what they're getting into.
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"How to build a SharePoint dev box" updated
I've updated the article on how to build a development machine for SharePoint 2007.
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Recent News
I've been head-down, full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes, coding like it's 1999, interrupted only by the 5-day odyssey that was the Worst Move Ever. Every other day it seems I've had a search that returned 5 or fewer hits, so obscure problems were encountered, and solutions and more will be blogged in the weeks ahead.
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Will you be at Toronto CodeCamp this Saturday, March 1?
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Translated solution to SPListItem CopyTo bug
Problem: The SPListItem.CopyTo() method doesn't seem to work on a custom list or custom properties. When called, CopyTo() returns the error "Source item cannot be found. Verify that the item exists and that you have permission to read it."
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TO SharePoint User Group January Speaker: Reza Alirezai
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!
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Hey, I'm an MSDN Q&A
The long arm of MSDN Canada reached out to me to do a Q&A on their Developer blog: