Mart Muller's Weblog

To collaborate on building a Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS) 2002 Web site, developers share a central build computer to store their work, and use their own computers to develop and test new features. The build computer hosts the master copy of the source files, and runs Microsoft Visual SourceSafe and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. The developers' client computers run MCMS 2002, Visual SourceSafe client, and Visual Studio .NET.

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Found this article via VNUNet.com, where Richard Glew talks about the second birthday of Office 2003.

Richard Glew, director of the partner marketing information worker business group at Microsoft, said: "It's been 20 months since Office 2003 shipped and it is reaching the tipping point in terms of customer demand. We are feeling very bullish. It has evolved from a personal tool to a solution development platform."

...

"We pair the Office system with Windows SharePoint services, and it is the first version of the software that we can go to customers with and say truthfully that it's a compelling reason to upgrade," he said.

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Via JOPX and The Register:

“According to Microsoft, Office 2003 is ahead of XP after one year in every segment it tracks. Office revenue grew 17 per cent in financial year 2003 to $10.8bn. SharePoint Portal Server is the firm's fastest growing product, with 30m licencees.“

Tariq wrote this usefull app for executing CAML against a Sharepoint list.

 

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Maurice mentioned me about the MCMS Console that he created for Tam Tam, which contains:

• Drag and drop (also in Mozilla)
• No bullshit HTML
• CSS layout
• Windows toolbar look
• Uses class behaviours for mouse events

There is an update available for web folders on the Microsoft site. So if you use Sharepoint and its webfolders, this might be usefull.

Overview

List of issues that the update fixes

This update fixes the following issues that were not previously documented in the Microsoft Knowledge Base.

The names of folders or files are missing characters after you use Web folders to connect to a WebDAV server and move or copy the folders or files to your client computer

You use a network place shortcut to connect to a shared folder on a server that supports WebDAV. The network place shortcut to the shared folder uses a URL that is similar to the following:

You move or copy a folder or file in the shared folder from the server to your client computer. When you view the folder or file on your client computer, the name of the folder of file is missing the first three characters. For example, if the name of the folder on the server is Folder1, the name of the folder after you copy the subfolder to your client computer is Der1.

You receive error messages when you use Web folders to connect to a WebDAV server and try to open a folder or file in a shared folder

You use a network place shortcut to connect to a shared folder on a server that supports WebDAV. The network place shortcut to the shared folder uses a URL that is similar to the following:

You experience the following symptoms when you try to open a folder or file in the shared folder:

•	When you try to open a folder in the shared folder, you receive an error message that is similar to the following: Documents in this folder are not available. The folder may have been moved or deleted, or network problems may be preventing a connection to the server This problem occurs if the name of the subfolder contains one or more high ASCII characters.
•	When you try to open an Office document in the shared folder, the Office program stops responding (hangs). Additionally, you may receive an error message that is similar to the following: The document name or path is not valid. This problem occurs if the name of the document contains one or more high ASCII characters.

Overview
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From c|net:

“Convincing businesses to upgrade to new versions of Office is a perennial challenge for Microsoft, but the company hopes a new Elixir might speed things up.

An effort, code-named Project Elixir, will take shape later this year as a way to promote Microsoft's Outlook e-mail and contact program, with some additional fields, as a tool for viewing customer relationship data. Eventually, the plan could help the software giant elbow its way further into the customer relationship management market, where Siebel Systems, Oracle and SAP dominate.”

http://news.com.com/2100-1012_3-5545640.html

 

Last week, Jan wrote a review about Reporting Services SP2. This SP contains webparts that can be used within Sharepoint to show reports.

“I must admit that I'm a little bit disappointed in the Reporting Services Web Parts. The integration is accomplished by using IFrames, why not use the Reporting Services web service? IMHO the web service is build for this kind of stuff, in fact some time ago I showed some web parts during a TechNet session that just did this.”

 

 

There have been some questions lately about document level restore from Sharepoint databases. There are some options doing that with different approaches. Mike Walsh discusses some of them in his WSS FAQ.

 

Third Party

 

He points at some third party products for item level restore:

 

AvePoint 
“DocAve 2.5 Backup can backup and restore almost ALL the items, including SharePoint sites, documents, and lists.”

and CommVault
“CommVault Galaxy software makes sure that jobs are running efficiently, so that data is accessible. Full backups can be made of portal site (all databases, indexes and site collection), webstorage system database, single sign-on database and teamsite databases. Self-healing processes safeguard data. Right-click functions let administrators perform essential tasks quickly. The result: smaller backup windows and faster data recovery.”

SPExport

However there are other ways as well to restore documents. James Edelen talks about restoring portals in a new environment and copy paste documents form there. A setup with nightly backup and restore, an UNC path that backups documents and scripts could be a solution. However this might cause (many) problems. He also wrote an application (SPExport), including source code, that can get documents from portals, which is very usefull.

SMigrate.EXE

Then there is another way to restore items. SMigrate is a tool voor backup and restore Sharepoint webs. It stores the content, including documents, in an assigned backup file. This file, with the extension .fwp can be restored with this tool as well. Also FrontPage 2003 can restore the site. From the restored site, the filed can be found and copied.

For this restore method, you’ll have to restore a complete site before you have access to the page. There is a quicker way to get you documents back.

First create a backup with the SMigrate.exe tool. Rename the backup and change the extension from .fwp to .cab. Now the file an be opened within the windows explorer. You’ll see lots of files, including a manifest.xml file.

Find the document name that has to be recovered in the manifest file. (simply use textpad and look for the name). In the tag where the document name is stored, find the file that represents it, for example “60000000.000”.

Now, just copy the file and rename it back to its original name. The document had been recovered.

Of course, you’ll have to write a script that backups all sites every night or so. But when you have to restore a document quickly (without any expensive tool), this method could be very usefull.

Citeknet offers some free IFilters for cabinet (.cab), compiled html (.chm), help (.hlp), mhtml (.mht) and compressed zip folders (.zip). I might also be worth to look at the IFilter tool, which shows the IFilters that are used by, for example Sharepoint.

Thanks for the tip Stef!

From Tangible Thoughts:

When I first started with SharePoint I was pretty much surprised that the ability to create tabs was only available on meeting workspaces. I have no explanation as to why there is such a limitation. I am also currently unaware of a hack to make that system available across all WSS Sites, but here is something that I was able hooked up, and I am actually pleased with it (the main reason I am pleased with it, is because it’s nothing more than a DataView WebPart).

Not really Sharepoint related, but I would like to share this:

The next version of Commerce Server, scheduled for release in early 2006, is being developed for enterprises to accelerate and automate the delivery of online services and products to drive their revenue growth and reduce operational costs. Microsoft will continue to provide the enterprise scalability and reliability that customers have come to rely on. The next version of Commerce Server will build on 10 years experience of combining catalog and customer management, merchandising, and analytics into a flexible business-to-exchange (B2X) sell-side commerce platform.

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On EWeek.com, I found this article about the problem of spam messages in weblogs. Google, MSN, Six Apart and Yahoo plan to support an HTML tag to keep comment-spam postings out of search engines.

There's also a posting on Google Blog, talking about this new tag.

“If you're a blogger (or a blog reader), you're painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites' search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like "Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site." This is called comment spam, we don't like it either, and we've been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn't a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it's just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.“

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.

Tim's blog points to an article about creating webparts in Asp.Net 2.0.

WebParts are only a small part of the total product, but they're exciting because they allow your users to completely customize the Web pages you've created for them. For example, let's say your Web application needs to display various kinds of company data. Instead of grabbing everything-or-nothing, you can customize what is shown and how it's accomplished. If the user doesn't care to see a list of employees on the department page, he can remove it from the Web page. The information still exists on the server, but the user doesn't have to bother with it. If he wants that list back again, later on, he can use the tools you include in your Web application to re-add it. The user can also move items around and customize the Web page in other ways.

I will visit the Microsoft Office Developer Conference 2005 in Redmond from Feb. 2nd - 4th 2005. I hope to see lots of cool Office and Sharepoint stuff there which will be blogged here ofcourse.

I'm wondering which of you will be there as well? It might be interesting to meet...

Arpan wrote an article about why to choose for Microsoft instead of other vendors when it comes to Portal technology. It might be worth reading, especially when you're into sales...

I found this Resource Kit for LCS 2005 which might be helpful with deployment.

The Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005 Resource Kit provides a set of deployment and technical reference information for Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005. The set of tools and documentation in the Resource Kit can be used as a complement to the Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005 Deployment and Reference Guides available on Office Online Deployment Center.

This release of the Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005 Resource Kit contains tools and documentation to simplify deployment, provide you with increased knowledge and best practices for Active Directory directory services integration, and improve your ability to manage the configuration and maintenance of the Live Communications Server 2005 technologies.

This solution provides guidance that can be used to plan, build, deploy, and operate collaboration services in the medium IT environment. It provides guidance on deploying Windows® SharePoint™ Services-based intranet and extranet Web sites and publishing the Web sites to the Internet. This enables users to remotely access these Web sites over the Internet using a Web browser.

Via JOPX, I found this article about WinOE (Windows Orchestration).

The Windows orchestration (WinOE) code, built from the ground up by Microsoft's BizTalk team, is a set of high level XML schemas, .NET classes, application programming interfaces (APIs) and workflow components that will allow Visual Studio 2005 developers create business processes and human-to-human workflow processes.

Sounds very interesting. It seems to be that all kind of MS applications will work together with WinOE, which will probably be the next step on system integration taken by Microsoft.

Office 12 and the next SharePoint Portal Server are targeted to be the first two "WinOE-aware" applications available in 2006 and are designed to work together. yet many other Microsoft client and server applications in the Longhorn era -- including Content Management Server, CRM, Microsoft Business Solutions applications and BizTalk -- will also be WinOE-enabled, the sources said.

Google has introduced a search engine called Google Mini for small or medium sized companies. This search engine, which only costs about $5000 (included hardware) can index public websites or intranets with the following specs:
- Indexes and searches up to 50,000 documents.
- Works with more than 220 different file types, including HTML, PDF, Microsoft Office and WordPerfect.
- Is easy to set up and requires minimal ongoing administration.
- Costs $4,995 for all hardware and software, including a year of support and hardware replacement coverage.

This might be a direct Sharepoint Search competitor, which is also used as searchengine for external websites.
The Google Mini doesn't come with a search API. However, Google Mini can deliver search results in XML, enabling you to integrate the results into content management systems or custom built applications.

Mention two Office Developer webcast coming up at Wednesday January 26th and Wednesday January 2nd.
- MSDN Webcast: Building Microsoft Office Information Bridge Framework Solutions – Metadata (Level 300)
- MSDN Webcast: Building Microsoft Office Information Bridge Framework Solutions - UI Development (Level 300)

Microsoft today lifted the lid off its latest hosted software offering: the Solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration 3.0. The service is a hosted version of the firm's family of server products: Microsoft Exchange 2003, Live Communications Server 2005 and Windows SharePoint Services.

Business intelligence portal sample application for Microsoft Office 2003 is an integrated, web-based OLAP solution that enables employees in an organization to create and share OLAP/Relational/XML based views, using SharePoint Portal Server, SQL Server Reporting Services, and Office Web components.

Interesting article about the next version of MCMS (and Office).. via Mark's weblog

Two articles about Sharepoint and ISA Server

- SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Document: Deploying on an Extranet by Using ISA Server 2000 and ISA Server 2004
- Reverse Proxy Configurations for Windows SharePoint Services and Internet Security and Acceleration Server

There is some discussion going on based on an article at Bink.nu showing Microsofts new releases in 2005. The list in this article contains Sharepoint 2005. The releases are based on as well facts as assumptions, which is in this case probably an assumption that is not valid?

Ever wanted to create a WSS site called 'images'? It didn't probably work out.

The error "Cannot create a Web at "/[path]/images" because a folder already exists at this location. Please choose another location for your new Web." will appear while there is no web called 'images' at all. Not in the Sharepoint database or in IIS.