Mart Muller's Weblog

Just published on MSDN, an article about improving the performance of InfoPath 2003 Forms. An in depth article by Andrew Begun and Dafina Toncheva.

Learn how to avoid performance issues when designing a Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003 form template, and how to troubleshoot existing form templates that display poor performance.

Read complete article here

I really don’t know what to think of this, but I like it anyway . Bil metioned the blog value calculator by Dane Carlson (after research by Tristan Louis), a tool to calculate the value of your blog in $. Bil made a list of sharepoint blogs and their value.

While it's completely silly and who knows what the calculation is based on, my blog showed up to be worth about $45k. Fitz came in at $44k so not sure if that's good or bad. Anyways just for kicks, I wasted 15 minutes of my life and here's the rundown on how much most of the SharePointHeads blogs are worth (in descending order of value, just so we can show up each other in our little circle of freakness).

Blog	Value
Jan Tielen	$72,825.66
Patrick Tisseghem	$52,502.22
Bil Simser	$45,727.74
Mike Fitzmaurice	$44,598.66
Daniel McPherson	$35,566.02
Andrew Connell	$33,307.86
Angus Logan	$32,743.32
Serge van den Oever	$29,356.08
Mart Muller	$27,662.46
Mads Nissen	$27,662.46
Dustin Miller	$24,275.22
Amanda Murphy	$20,887.98
Bill English	$12,984.42
Arno Nel	$10,726.26
Mike Walsh	$9,032.64
Bob Mixon	$8,468.10

Read Bil’s article

On Microsoft PressPass there is an interview with Lewin Levin, corporate VP for Office Business Applications, about BI at Microsoft.

From the interview:

“We’re announcing that Microsoft is significantly increasing, aligning and broadening our investments in business intelligence (BI). Office and the Microsoft Office System are going to play a much bigger role. Specifically, we’re shipping the newest Office system product – the Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005, and we are also previewing new Office “12” BI features, which are a big, new focus for Microsoft Excel and SharePoint. With this new product and the new Office features, Microsoft will make BI tools accessible to more people and more mainstream within organizations.”

Read the complete interview

Via Bink:

Windows Vista
Rumors are abound that the RTM date has officially been set for July 25th, 2006. Microsoft is pushing hard for this date to prepare OEM's for the Christmas season ramp-up. With all of the new sku's being released, OEM's and Microsoft have been in talks to prepare them for the madness that will follow the release. A Beta 2 of Vista is expected to be in testers hands on December 16th, 2005.

Office 12
Office 12 Beta 1 will be available on MSDN Subscriber downloads within the next few weeks. In a marketing ploy, Microsoft decided to wait in order to build interest up before releasing it to developers.

AntiSpyware Beta 2
With rumors of a merge between Windows OneCare and AntiSpyware, The Hotfix has learned that they will indeed be a Beta 2 of AntiSpyware being released. Although an exact date is not yet know, late November 2005 has been a date that has been heard over and over

Business Intelligence is boosting at Microsoft. In the Business Scorecard Manager 2005 release article they talk about the increased investment in BI. With BSM 2005 and Office 12, Microsoft is delivering a robust platform for BI and points out that Business Intelligence is hot!

Some shots from the release article to illustrate they way how BI will become part of Office:

The next generation of SharePoint Products and Technologies will make it easy to build personalized dashboards that combine data and charts from several sources and to find key reports, KPIs and spreadsheets.

SharePoint Dashboard

We’re experimenting with BSM 2005 at Tam Tam this moment so updates will follow soon.

Microsoft published a whitepaper which provides answers to some of the most frequently asked questions (FAQs) that IT professionals have about Windows SharePoint Services. The questions and answers will be of specific interest to system architects, implementers and operations staff who have deployed, are deploying or are evaluating the deployment of Windows SharePoint Services in a medium or large size organization.

Download here

eWeek is telling us that Office Communicator for mobile devices has gone to beta yesterday. From source:

“Microsoft Corp. on Thursday released to beta its Office Communicator Mobile client, which extends the instant messaging and presence awareness of its LCS to smart phones and PDAs based on the Windows Mobile operating system.

Office Communicator Mobile will also allow Live Communications Server users to make voice over IP calls from Wi-Fi-enabled Windows Mobile phones to PCs and vice versa while within the corporate network, said Paul Duffy, senior product manager for Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile, in Redmond, Wash.

The mobile client's user interface is based on the Office Communicator 2005 desktop client, which in June of this year replaced Windows Messenger as Microsoft's preferred client for LCS.

General availability of Office Communicator Mobile is slated for the first half of 2006.

Microsoft is also extending its enterprise IM and presence technologies to Research In Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry users through connectivity with LCS and the BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

IBM has also teamed up with RIM to extend its Lotus Sametime enterprise IM and presence to BlackBerry devices.”

When implementing SharePoint Portal Server, there are cases that you have to create the same portal structure a few times. For example, all the developers need to have the same portal on their development machine, there is a test enviroment or a production enviroment. Then when the portal goes live, you’ll have to create an empy portal again with the same stucture and content as the test enviroment. SPS provides config files that can help you with this in a very efficient way: SPSPredefinedCategories.xml.

The SPSPredefinedCategories.xml file is located in the SPS site template directory (Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\TEMPLATE\1033\SPS\SPSConfig\) and it contains the complete structure of a clean portal. So, when you create a new portal, it contains the news area, the sites area and a topic stucture etc.. These areas are defined in this file and if you like you can create you own predefined structure easily, including webparts, lists and other content (also using the onet.xml files in site templates). I.E., the Sites area (site directory) is defined like this:

The settings like which template is used and if the area is in the public navigation are all customizable, so imagine that you can create the whole stucture, lists and other content in this file, deployment will be a matter of creating a new portal and all is set! The same for developers, when they need a new portal structure update from another developer (i.e. new custom webparts or lists) just delete the existing portal and create a new one with the updated SPSPredefinedCategories.xml file.

There are some points that must you must consider:

• There is only one template directory per server, so each additional portal will inherit the same structure.
• It takes some work to keep the xml file up to date, so be careful to consider this is appropiate for your implementation.
• When updatating you must re-create the portal, so you loose all the content in your current portal

With thanks to Arnold and Wouter

Mark says that Business Scorecard Manager 2005 is available for MSDN Subscribers to download.

UPDATE: Some interesting whitepapers about BSM (with thanks to Mauro)

Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 CFO White Paper
Achieving Compliance and Strategy Execution Using Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=e24110d5-5805-485d-a417-40f4c7c5a964&displaylang=en

By implementing a Business Scorecard Manager solution, organizations can quickly satisfy the more immediate demands for transparency in process and governance and, at the same time, develop a long-term strategy for full regulatory compliance. By tracking their critical performance and financial data in Business Scorecard Manager, organizations greatly enhance visibility and accelerate reporting. Consequently, they become more alert to material changes in their business and can quickly comply with disclosure and filing requirements.

Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 Sales White Paper
Use Scorecards and Dashboards to Measure, Monitor, and Drive Agile and Responsive Sales Performance

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=24BE0541-D2E4-483E-B244-43081BEF585C&displaylang=en

Traditional performance measures have often required sales professionals to manually provide figures to central support departments in order to inform the business process. This practice has rarely been reciprocal, leading to resentment and a pronounced dislike of paperwork in most sales departments. Because Business Scorecard Manager uses SharePoint Products and Technologies collaboration technologies, which facilitate multi-directional exchanges of information, data can now flow in any chosen direction, and the sales force can benefit from actionable insight and notifications from other departments like Manufacturing, Financial, Marketing and HR, as well as other sales channels.

Seems like Bil Simser is doing some great things! The SharePoint Builder lets you modify site definitions very easy:

Features of the tool:

• Client based editing so you can work offline
• Publish to server and reset from inside the tool to see results immediately
• Graphical editing of all nodes in ONET and SCHEMA
• Validation of nodes so your output isn't screwed up
• Context Menus so you can just add stuff without having to know all the Xml behind it
• Ability to read in ONET and SCHEMA files from existing SharePoint sites for editing
• Visible output of Xml as you build it
• Ready for V3 as it understands both 2003 and v3 versions
• Great Taste! Less Filling!

And ofcourse SPS SP2

Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 Service Pack 2 (SP2) contains significant security enhancements, in addition to stability and performance improvements. Some of the fixes included with SP2 have been previously released as separate updates. This service pack combines them into one update.

This service pack includes updates previously released for SharePoint Portal Server 2003:

• SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Service Pack 1

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 SP2 will install even if service pack 1 has already been installed on your computer.

You can get specific information about this update in the Microsoft Knowledge Base article (887623): Description of SharePoint Portal Server Service Pack 2.

Download here

I know, I’m the last one in SharePoint blogsphere, but this one is too important to skip . Also check out the fix-list.

Windows SharePoint Services SP2 will install even if a publicly available update or service pack has already been installed on your computer.

SP2 also includes stability improvements developed as a result of user input from the Microsoft Online Crash Analysis in Windows SharePoint Services and from Microsoft Product Support feedback.

You can get specific information about this update in the Microsoft Knowledge Base article (887624): Description of Windows SharePoint Services Service Pack 2.

To install when using a Windows SharePoint Services Language Template Pack

For complete Windows SharePoint Services SP2 functionality if you are using a Windows SharePoint Server Language Template Pack, you will need to install both of the following:

• Windows SharePoint Services Service Pack 2 (this download)
• Windows SharePoint Services Language Template Pack Service Pack 2

Download here

From Chris Vidotto's blog:

Summary of Windows Workflow Foundation Collateral

Want to know more about our exciting new Windows Workflow Foundation technology? Check these out:

• For a superb high level introduction read David Chappell's whitepaper.  This is on the MSDN Library
• There is lots of collateral including the SDK download at http://msdn.microsoft.com/workflow
• We have a Community peer support and discussion site at http://www.windowsworkflow.net
• There is a book available on Windows Workflow Foundation from Barnes and Noble.
• For an audio introduction replay the introduction WebCast.

SP2 will install even if a publicly available update has already been installed on your computer.

SP2 also includes stability improvements developed as a result of user input from the Microsoft Online Crash Analysis in Office 2003 and from Microsoft Product Support feedback.

You can get specific information about this update in the Microsoft Knowledge Base article (887616): Description of Office 2003 Service Pack 2.

Microsoft Office Communicator 2005 and Office 2003 SP2
If you are using Office Communicator 2005, you should exit Office Communicator by right-clicking on the Communicator icon in the system tray and choosing "Exit" prior to installing Office 2003 SP2. If you do not exit Communicator, you will be required to reboot your computer after Office 2003 SP2 has been installed. For more information, see the Microsoft Knowledge Base article (905726): You are prompted to restart the computer when you install an update to the Mso.dll file on a computer that is running Microsoft Office Communicator.


Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 Phishing Protection and Junk E-mail Filter
SP2 contains a new Phishing Protection feature to be used with the Outlook Junk Email Filter. Phishing is the luring of sensitive information through e-mail, such as passwords and other personal information, by an attacker masquerading as someone trustworthy. Phishing attacks can result in a user divulging sensitive information, including financial information, that can result in a loss of privacy or money. Phishing e-mail is hard to identify, because attackers make their e-mail appear genuine and often mimic recognizable e-mail sent out routinely by legitimate organizations such as banks and credit card companies.

To enable phishing protection, you need both Office 2003 SP2 and the latest Outlook 2003 Junk E-mail Filter Update. Once both are installed, Office 2003 SP2 has phishing protection turned on by default.

For best results, we recommend you regularly download the latest version of the Outlook 2003 Junk E-mail Filter Update. To determine whether you need this update, see the Microsoft Knowledge Base article (872976): How to obtain the latest Outlook 2003 Junk E-mail Filter.

Request for source
If you have downloaded and run the file Office2003SP2-kb887616-client-enu.exe and are being asked to insert the product CD, the Local Installation Source may have been removed or corrupted. You may need to repair your Local Installation Source. For instructions on repairing the Local Installation Source, see the article Change the Local Installation Source After the Installation. You should also try downloading and running the file Office2003SP2-kb887616-fullfile-enu.exe. Installation of this file may be successful even if the Local Installation Source is missing or corrupt.

To install when using an Office 2003 Multilingual User Interface Pack
For complete Office 2003 SP2 functionality if you are using an Office 2003 Multilingual User Interface Pack (MUI), you will need to install both of the following:

• Office 2003 SP2 (this download)
• Office 2003 SP2 for Multilingual User Interface Pack

Download here

A nice tip from my colleague Arnold about the use of MySite with users with Reader rights only. It is possible to give them a MySite by turning on the 'use personal features' right for the Reader group in SPS. Nothing exciting there, but MySite will appear as some sort of light version.

Available features on private page:

• My calendar
• News for you
• My links summary
• Links for you
• My alerts summary
• Edit my profile
• Manage my alerts

Available features on public page:

• Information
• Shared links
• Recent documents
• Edit my profile

Disabled features:

• Shared Document Library
• Private Document Library
• Any other list

I've had a vacation the last 3 weeks and did not touch a computer, so you've probably noticed that it has been very quiet on my blog. It has been almost a year that we've been on vacation, so we really needed to catch it up. :) Anyway, Mallorca is a nice island and we've a lot of nice things there.

So, I probably missed a lot on the SharePoint area since the PDC. I will read my way though emails and posting and post a summary quickly. Oh and some pics will follow soon ;)