Upcoming conferences with plenty of SharePoint oriented content -

 
Hosted by MindSharp (one of the premier SharePoint training partners), sponsored by Microsoft Press (which recently published the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Best Practices book), and keynoted by Tom Rizzo (who needs no further introduction), the SharePoint Best Practices Conference in Washington D.C. on September 15-17, 2008 is the key conference for those of you, who want to learn the best ways to design, deploy, organize, and administer SharePoint-based business solutions. Presenters include Microsoft SharePoint MVPs and SharePoint experts from Microsoft and Microsoft partners. Register by August 1st and get a free copy of the MOSS 2007 Best Practices book!

 
If you missed the Microsoft TechEd conferences in Orlando, FL this past June, then the Microsoft TechEd conferences in Barcelona, Spain, on November 3-7 and 10-14, 2008 are your next opportunities to get in-depth technical information about the breadth of Microsoft products and services as well as those from our many partners. Several SharePoint team members (including me!) will be there as speakers, to man our exhibit booth, and to participate in the Ask-the-Experts session. Register by July 31st for a €300 discount!

The SharePoint Connections Conference in Las Vegas, NV on November 10-13, 2008 (yes, it overlaps with the MS TechEd Developers conference in Barcelona) is one of the few non-Microsoft hosted conferences that the SharePoint product group supports in a significant way. Aside from the sessions presented by SharePoint experts from Microsoft and the industry, a key benefit of this conference is that it's an integral part of a larger conference that includes technical deep-dive SQL Server, Visual Studio, and Exchange sessions, so you can easily hop into one of the other conference sessions and/or network with people doing interesting work with those other Microsoft products. Register by August 27th for a $100 discount!

Last, but not least, while the SharePoint team will have just a few sessions at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, CA on October 27-30, this is indeed the premier conference for developers interested in the latest and best technical information about products, services, and tools for building business solutions on Microsoft's web and application platforms. Register by August 15th for a $200 discount!

[Sharepoint Team Blog]

A much easier way to keep track of new SharePoint content published on MSDN and TechNet -

The following RSS feeds have been available for a few months now, but we still get questions on a weekly basis from people wondering how they can keep track of SharePoint oriented content that is published on TechNet and MSDN.

• Feed for new SharePoint content on MSDN: http://www.microsoft.com/feeds/msdn/en-us/sharepoint/rss.xml
• Feed for new SharePoint Services 3.0 content on TechNet: http://services.community.microsoft.com/feeds/feed/WindowsSharePointServicesNewContent
• Feed for new SharePoint Server 2007 content on TechNet: http://services.community.microsoft.com/feeds/feed/SharePointServerNewContent

All 3 feeds have been added to the Aggregated Feed: SharePoint MS team blogs, so if you're already subscribed to this feed, you'll automatically start seeing new feed items for SharePoint content published on MSDN and TechNet.

Separately, if you'd like to also keep track of SharePoint oriented Knowledgebase articles published by Microsoft Help and Support, I'd recommend the following RSS feeds from KBAlertz.com.

• Feed for new SharePoint Services 3.0 KB articles: http://kbalertz.com/rss/WindowsSharePointServices30.xml
• Feed for new SharePoint Server 2007 KB articles: http://kbalertz.com/rss/SharePointServer2007.xml

[Sharepoint Team Blog]

[Cross posted from the Enterprise Search Blog]

It’s been around 45 days since the acquisition of FAST Search and Transfer closed and we’re moving quickly to provide interoperability for Microsoft customers between FAST ESP and Microsoft SharePoint Server.

The first deliverables from this work are a set of FAST ESP Search Web Parts for quickly integrating results from FAST ESP into SharePoint Server 2007 and a FAST ESP Search site template. 

Using these Web Parts and Site Template SharePoint administrators will be able to quickly and easily build FAST ESP-based search sites inside SharePoint 2007 by simply dropping in and configuring the appropriate components.

The Web Parts and Site Template are available as a free download (both compiled code and source code) from CodePlex at www.codeplex.com/espwebparts and are part of the Search Community Toolkit.

Some of the FAST ESP search capabilities that can be exposed within SharePoint Server 2007 using these Web Parts include:

• Search Box Web Part -- Search box for query term submission and includes “did you mean” functionality for query correction

• Result List Web Part -- Displays search results and supports sorting, pagination, and navigator-based filtering

• Navigator Web Part -- Displays dynamic navigators that profile search results across a set of pre-defined dimensions and allow users to refine the search through navigation clicks

• Breadcrumb Web Part -- Displays the search term(s) and list of navigators used to obtain the current result set

The FAST ESP Web parts are designed to be open and extensible, and we’re actively encouraging customers and partners to download them, customize them to align with their branding and extend them to fit their search and user experience requirements.

Expect the features, functionality and range of ESP Web Parts to grow through contributions from the search developer community as well as further contributions from the FAST & Microsoft Search Team!

FAST & Microsoft Search Teams.

[Sharepoint Team Blog]

Belated Announcement: SharePoint Server 2007 Scalability and Performance whitepaper now available -

My name is Paul Learning, a Senior Consultant in Microsoft Consulting Services specializing in SharePoint deployments, and it's with great excitement and pride that I announce the release of the SharePoint Server 2007 Scalability and Performance whitepaper. This 90+ page whitepaper is based on a lot of hard work, dedication, and collaboration from a team of exceptional individuals; it documents the architectural design considerations and performance characteristics of a real-world, large-scale SharePoint lab implementation containing around 50 million content items, and reflects both “scale-up” and “scale-out” scenarios.

The hardware rig was provided by Fujitsu and included blade servers, rack servers, and an Eternus 4000 SAN with 10 TB of storage space. Special thanks to Greg Reuter, Jeff DeCarlo, and Brett Pierce from Fujitsu!

 KnowledgeLake, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, was responsible for blasting 50 million content items into SharePoint; they also played a key role in defining the architecture, creating and executing the system tests, and gathering the massive results. KnowlegeLake was ultimately able to use their load tool to send 50 million documents into SharePoint at a peak rate of over 7 million documents per day! Very special thanks to Russ Houberg, Gregg Smith, Bob Bueltmann, Chuck Nash, and Ron Cameron from KnowledgeLake!

Of course, I simply can’t forget to mention all the incredible Microsoft people, who assisted in making this effort a success. First and foremost, our fearless leader, Andy Hopkins, who led the effort from start to finish and constantly amazed me with his enthusiasm and perseverance. I was equally impressed with Andy’s ability to wordsmith while editing our whitepaper. Next comes the long list of other exceptional individuals who stepped up to help out: Steve Peschka, Mike Taghizadeh, Thomas Rizzo, Ryan Duguid, Joel Oleson, Mitch Prince, Doron Bar-Caspi, Simon Skaria, Ambrose Treacy, Sid Shah, Grant Morisette, and Mitch Powers.

I could never have completed this project without the generous help of the people mentioned above. It was truly a collaborative team effort!

In addition to the project that resulted in the Scalability and Performance whitepaper, the KnowledgeLake folks and I were recently involved in another very challenging proof-of-concept for a large pharmaceutical company, which represented a large-scale SharePoint implementation containing 40 TB of content (about 75 million content items) spread across two SharePoint farms.

I am absolutely confident that after these two projects, we’ve finally answered the looming question, "Can SharePoint scale?" with a resounding, "Yes!"

I hope that you'll find this whitepaper beneficial in designing your SharePoint implementations whether small, medium, or large-scale. You can open or download the appropriate format of the whitepaper from the links below. If you have any questions or suggestions, please leave a comment on this blog entry.

• Word 2007 format: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=120881
• Word 2000-2003 format: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=120890
• PDF format: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=120891

 [Sharepoint Team Blog]

Cross posted from the Sharepoint Team Blog...

Overview

About 8 months ago, we posted a "How We Did It" guest blog entry here about Microsoft Academy Mobile, a community driven videocast/podcast solution that had been built on the SharePoint platform and continues to be used internally at Microsoft. We received a lot of feedback from customers, mostly in the form of "Hey, that's very cool, but how can I implement it for my own organization?" as well as many inquiries from partners in terms of "Can I get the source code, so I can leverage it as a building block for my enterprise social media solution offering?"

  Well, we are very pleased to say, "Yes!" and "Yes!" to both questions by announcing the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint (PKS), available as an open source project at http://www.CodePlex.com/PKS. The PKS is an accelerator for social media, using podcasting and social networks to deliver the next generation knowledge management solution. Built on top of SharePoint Server 2007 and using Silverlight 2, the PKS delivers an integrated experience with a wide variety of devices including iPod, Zune, Windows Mobile phones, and other podcast capable devices. The PKS follows the same model and approach to open source community contributions and support as the Community Kit for SharePoint.

While the PKS is being implemented as a major upgrade to Academy Mobile within Microsoft, the following partners are ready to implement PKS-based commercially supported social media solutions for our customers.

• 3Sharp, as the primary developer of the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint, has very deep technical knowledge of the Kit and can effectively leverage it to quickly implement custom social media applications for the enterprise. 3Sharp's specialty is to build and implement business solutions that help customers get more out SharePoint and Office.
• Accenture, the global management consulting, technology services, and outsourcing company, participated in the PKS pilot program along with several of our clients including British Telecom. Accenture is leveraging and extending SharePoint and the PKS to offer Enterprise 2.0 style learning and collaboration solutions to its clients. In addition to technology implementation, Accenture helps its clients drive measurable business value by addressing the strategy, people, and process components that are necessary to achieve high performance. For more info, contact thomas.w.hoglund [at] accenture.com.
• Nintex is an innovative provider of SharePoint value added tools and solutions. Nintex will leverage the PKS as the foundation for their next generation Podcast Server product.

Customer and Partner Excitement

 Peter Butler is the Head of Learning at British Telecom Group and chairs BT’s Learning Council, whose primary purpose is to maximize the ability of individuals, teams, and the organization as a whole to grow and transform in pursuit of the company’s strategic goals and objectives, has this to say about the PKS:

"British Telecom is very excited to be an early adopter of the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint. With Accenture’s help, we are launching a pilot project to help 4,500 program and project managers collaborate and share information. We believe these new technologies will be an important enabler to sharing knowledge, experience, and ideas across our business units and in helping our employees reach an even higher level of performance."

 Tom Hoglund is a Partner in Accenture’s Talent & Organization Performance service line, which focuses on helping employees of client organization perform at a higher level through leveraging the tools of knowledge management, employee portals, collaboration, and learning. He has a global leadership role for Accenture’s practice in these areas and more than 25 years of consulting experience in leading numerous projects that have delivered millions of dollars of benefits to clients and touched hundreds of thousands of people. We're very excited that someone like Tom is so excited about the potential of the PKS and has this to say about it:

"Corporate and public sector learning organizations have traditionally only addressed 20% of how employees learn. The PKS, combined with Accenture’s learning and collaboration experience, enables our clients to facilitate and accelerate learning, exactly when and where it is needed, independent of location or device. That’s a huge advantage."

Solution Scenarios

Communications

• Corporate Communications: Stay in touch with your executives
• Multimedia Newsletters: Stay in touch with your colleagues

Training / eLearning 2.0

• Give your employees the freedom to learn relevant information on-demand- anytime, anywhere
• Allow your employees to share and learn from others

Partner Relationships

• Advertise and drive awareness about your partner relationships internally

Innovation

• Ask your most innovative people to find creative ways to share great ideas through audio and video podcasting

Digital Marketing / Advertisement

• Directly reach out to your customers and create a social networking community that will generate interest

Lectures / Courses

• Easily share, consume and publish lectures and training sessions in one centralized location
• Create a virtual classroom discussion via commenting and instant messaging

Community Building

• Stay connected with what’s new in the community to keep up-to-date
• Generate a team oriented environment

Feature Highlights

PKS Home Page

PKS Podcast Page

PKS Podcaster Page

Open Source Community Excitement

The following open source projects have already been spawned from the PKS project:

• EDEN Mobile RSS Client - Windows Mobile RSS client with podcast download queuing and resume.
• MTC VBG Application - MTG VBG stands for "Microsoft Technology Center Virtual Bubblegum Application." This Windows Vista application provides a rich 3D UI for the PKS.
• Nintex Podcast Client 2008 - Podcast client for the PKS that enables podcast recording directly from your web browser.

To ensure that there will be even more PKS sub-projects in the near future, we have put aside some funding to subsidize turning the most compelling PKS feature ideas into actual functionality. Take a look at the PKS Discussions List for the current list of feature ideas and vote for your favorite(s), or you can add your own feature idea(s) to the list.

We Welcome Your Feedback!

We are very proud to be able to share the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint as an open source project with our customers and partners. We deeply believe in the potential of social media within the enterprise. At Microsoft, we've witnessed the following stats for the Academy Mobile application:

• 2,100+ total podcasts and growing every day
• 3,100+ registered podcaster accounts
• 3,700+ unique visitors in May, 2008
• 1,800 page views average per day
• 80,000+ downloads since July, 2007

We would love to hear about your enterprise social media success stories as well as any feedback on how we can work with the open source community to improve the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint. Please leave your comments under this blog entry or in the PKS discussion board.

Phil Morel, Director, Microsoft Academy, and sponsor of the PKS initiative
Ludovic Fourrage, Group Program Manager, Microsoft Academy and the PKS initiative
Paolo Tosolini, New Media Business Manager, Microsoft Academy and the PKS initiative
Lawrence Liu, Senior Technical Product Manager, SharePoint Product Group liaison to the PKS initiative

[Sharepoint Team Blog]

Announcing the VSeWSS version 1.2! -

Hi everyone, Chris Johnson from the WSS PM team here.  We are really excited and pleased to announce that Version 1.2 of the Visual Studio extensions for WSS is now available for download!

This version adds Visual Studio 2008 support to the extensions.  This is something many of you have been asking for.

Download VSeWSS 1.2 right here.

Today we are releasing the English edition of the Version 1.2 extensions.  We will be releasing the German, French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Chinese Traditional, Chinese Simplified, and Korean language versions shortly.

We know many of you have been eagerly awaiting VS2008 support, so we hope this release will help you build fantastic SharePoint solutions with the latest Visual Studio toolset.

Note:  Version 1.2 is only for Visual Studio 2008.  If you use Visual Studio 2005, you should still use Version 1.1 (download).

Also, I'm very excited to introduce: http://www.MSSharePointDeveloper.com! If you want to learn about SharePoint development, we designed this website to be the best place for you to get started. It has links to whitepapers, virtual labs, webcasts, screencasts, quickstarts, and other useful resources.  You can also download a virtual machine that has been optimized for SharePoint development and includes all the tools you need to get started. So, go to http://www.MSSharePointDeveloper.com now! It's an easy URL to remember, so pass it along to your friends!

VSeWSS User Guide

In case you have not seen our User Guide for VSeWSS, you can download it here.  It is a great resource that explains how you can use VSeWSS in many common SharePoint development scenarios.

What's in VSeWSS?

Version 1.2 of the Visual Studio 2008 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services contains the following tools to aid developers in building SharePoint applications:

Visual Studio 2008 Project Templates

• Web Part
• Team Site Definition
• Blank Site Definition
• List Definition
• Empty SharePoint Project

Visual Studio 2008 Item Templates (items that can be added into an existing project)

• Web Part
• Custom Field
• List Definition (with optional Event Receiver)
• Content Type (with optional Event Receiver
• Module
• List Instance
• List Event Handler
• Template

SharePoint Solution Generator

This stand-alone program generates a Site Definition project from an existing SharePoint site. The program enables developers to use the browser and Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer to customize the content of their sites before creating code by using Visual Studio.

Frequently Asked Questions and Answers

• Q: Does VSeWSS 1.2 support Visual Studio 2008?
  A: Yes.

• Q: Does VSeWSS 1.2 support Visual Stuido 2005?
  A: No,  you must use Version 1.1 with Visual Studio 2005.

• Q: What additional features are in Version 1.2?
  A: For Version 1.2 we focussed on Visual Studio 2008 support only.

• Q: Does VSeWSS support Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
  A: Yes, VSeWSS supports both Windows SharePoint Services and Office SharePoint Server.

• Q: Does VSeWSS support Windows XP or "remote debugging"?
  A: No, VSeWSS only works against local SharePoint installations.

Thanks!

Chris Johnson
Program Manager – SharePoint

[Sharepoint Team Blog]

Announcing: SharePoint WCM book available at TechEd 2008 -

It's exciting to see customers using SharePoint for their Internet sites.  We've seen some great success stories and big companies choosing SharePoint for their web content management solution.  While SharePoint offers a rich set of capabilities out-of-the-box, customers want to add new functionality, customize the look and feel and add business specific logic.  This requires a deep understanding of the SharePoint web content management (WCM) capabilities.

I'm happy to announce that Andrew Connell, a SharePoint MVP, has written a book titled "Professional SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007", the first of its kind to cover design, development and deployment of SharePoint WCM solutions.  I've known Andrew for several years now so when he asked me to write the foreword, I said yes immediately - I knew Andrew would deliver high quality content that would benefit the SharePoint community.  He's a well-known expert in the field and has created some great content for the community.  One of his most popular WCM blog postings is where he consolidated SharePoint WCM resources.  We will also be posting a couple chapters from the book on MSDN to give you a sneak peak!  While the book will be available shortly after this TechEd, we will have the first 1400 copies of the book at TechEd that we'll be giving away.

So keep your eyes open when the book releases!  If you're coming to TechEd, swing by the SharePoint booth for a chance to get a copy and have Andrew sign it for you! See you at TechEd.

Arpan Shah

[Sharepoint Team Blog]

Topics discussing Sharepoint Governance

Here are some topics to help you determine the aspects of your SharePoint deployment to govern and the methods to use:

• What is governance? defines governance and introduces two key areas to govern: IT services and information architecture.
• Establishing and governing a SharePoint service describes typical elements of an IT service hosting Office SharePoint Server 2007, suggests key success factors in governing the service, and provides an example of a three-tiered service.
• Implementing and governing information architecture introduces the concept of information architecture, recommends how to govern it, and presents an information architecture case study.
• Governance features in Office SharePoint Server 2007 reviews a set of Office SharePoint Server 2007 features that your organization can use to help govern your Office SharePoint Server deployment.

[Sharepoint Team Blog]

Below I have two separate videos available for viewing that demonstrate how to configure either of these tools for use against a SharePoint based blog.

• Microsoft Office Word 2007 Blog Publishing Setup
  (WMV duration 00:03:58 resolution 1024X768)
• Microsoft Live Writer Blog Publishing Setup
  (WMV duration 00:05:05 resolution 1024X768)

If you don't have Windows Media Player (running a Mac for example) you can view a lower resolution version of the file via one of the links below.

• Microsoft Office Word 2007 Blog Publishing Setup
• Microsoft Live Writer Blog Publishing Setup

[Sharepoint Team Blog]

Cross posted from the Microsoft Sharepoint Team Blog...

If you’re involved with SharePoint in some way, either as a customer or partner, I think that you'll be excited to learn about a new program we're announcing today called SharePoint Deployment Planning Services (SDPS). SDPS is a partner and Microsoft Consulting Services delivered offering designed to help our Software Assurance (SA) customers successfully plan and deploy SharePoint. Using field proven business and technical guidance, the program provides best practices and well defined results through 1, 3, 5, 10 or 15 day deployment planning sessions. The number of Packaged Service days that a customer can receive is determined by a combination of the number of qualifying Office licenses and the number of Core CAL (Client Access License) Suites and Enterprise CAL Suites. So, no additional investment is needed by the customer to take advantage of this tremendous program.

While the length of the deployment planning engagement will be dependent on the customer’s SA benefit level, the types of services delivered as listed below will depend on the length of  the engagement:

• A Strategy Briefing defines the vision for achieving technical and business goals and is part of all engagements,
• An Architectural Design Session introduces SharePoint technologies, solutions and concepts and is added in a 3 Day engagement,
• A Deployment Planning Session covers a specific SharePoint capability in depth and is added in a 5 Day engagement, and
• A Proof of Concept demonstrates the solution in the customer’s environment and is added in a 10 and 15 day engagement.

What is the value of SDPS to customers and partners?

For Customers

• SDPS enables customers to obtain a roadmap to understand how to effectively deploy SharePoint within their Organization and helps remove the customer perceived risk and cost of planning for a SharePoint deployment. 
• SDPS offers an engagement that is customized for each customer, addressing their specific business or technical challenges.
• SDPS enables customers to get more value out of their existing Software Assurance investment, and it's available to them at no additional cost. 

For Partners

• Partners receive the SDPS tools, training, and support to help customers deploy SharePoint and increase their revenue in the process. 
• Microsoft pays qualified partners to deliver SDPS services.   
• Microsoft partners that currently have Competencies in Information Worker Portals and Collaboration, Enterprise Content Management (ECM), or Search specializations can now advance their skills and become certified to participate in the SDPS offering. In addition, SDPS certified partners will be able to participate in a new online community which Microsoft has established to enable collaboration and information sharing among partners on SharePoint deployment best practices. This private site gives partners an overview of the program, suggested tools for engaging with customers on SDPS, as well as examples of specific content that they will offer to customers in SDPS engagements of differing lengths.  Partners can register to be part of SDPS at http://www.microsoftSDPS.com. 

Here's the screenshot of what a Microsoft partner would see on the SDPS Partner Center website for a 10 day engagement:

A fantastic team consisting of people from MCS and the SharePoint Product Management Group were so passionate about this new program that they dedicated many hours even in their "off time" to ensure we had the most useful best practices and other collateral for our pilot this past January as well as the full release today. I’d like to thank them (and they know who they are!) for their efforts in helping me launch this important program to customers and partners! I hope many of our customers will take advantage of this tremendous opportunity to jump start their SharePoint deployment. For more details, see the program's FAQ at http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/prodinfo/features/sdps_faq.mspx.

Deb Bannon
Senior Product Manager, Microsoft SharePoint

[Sharepoint Team Blog]

Cross posted from the Sharepoint Team Blog and certainly of interest for all involved in MOSS development...

Introduction to SharePoint for .NET Developers Live Webcast

In this 10 part series, you will receive practical technical information from Robert Bogue and Andrew Connell, both SharePoint MVPs, covering 10 fundamental developer topics on SharePoint via Live Meeting webcast.

About the series:

• Every Tuesday and Wednesday from May 20 to June 18
• Starts at 9:00AM PST
• Each session is 60 minutes long
• Level 200 with intro, demo, and coding

Register today by clicking on the registration links below. In case you miss any, each webcast will be recorded for later viewing via the same respective registration link.

[Sharepoint Team Blog]