NASA To Begin Training on SharePoint

NASA has engaged us to conduct on-site training at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Hunstville, AL. We will head down from Nashville week after next to train a group of IT personnel.

It never ceases to amaze us how broadly SharePoint is being adopted in government agencies in the United States. Over the past two years we have had many, many students from Federal, State and Local agencies attend our classes.

The common theme we hear from the majority of these students is that their agencies have serious problems with organizing and finding important information which is currently dispersed in multitudes of systems and document stores.

They see SharePoint as a reasonably priced solution for bringing organization to the seas of information that their agencies need to navigate.

New Training Class For SharePoint Web Developers

Over the past two years we have noticed that there are really two types of developers that are working with SharePoint: 1) .NET Developers and 2) Web Developers. Sometimes a person falls into both categories, but more often than not a developer is either one or the other.

In general, .NET Developers focus more on customizing the functionality of SharePoint 2003 by writing custom web parts and using the object model. Web Developers, on the other hand, focus more on branding and look and feel customizations and in many cases do not have .NET programming backgrounds - they work more with HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc. We have a great 5-day class for .NET Developers, but up until now we have not had a class specifically oriented towards Web Developers.

One of our instructors, Kevin Pine, is an experienced web developer. Before SharePoint, he developed numerous commercial websites. In addition to his technical skills, he has a background as a graphic artist and professional photographer, so he is able to design very visually appealing web sites.

Now, Kevin has applied his artistic and web site design talents to SharePoint 2003. Over the past year he has been working on a new course specifically targeted to professional web developers. It is now ready to go and the first offering will be May 17 - 19 in Nashville, TN.

Read about the new course at http://www.sharepointsolutions.com/advtraining.html.

New Version of SharePoint SDK Released

While I was out at the Office 2003 Developer Conference in Redmond, one of the Microsoft SPS team members made a point to let me know about the new version of the SharePoint SDK that was scheduled to release soon.

By the time I returned home, it had already been posted on Microsoft's download site. Download it here.

She said a lot of work has gone into this new version of the SDK, especially in the sections related to the Search engine.

Notes From Office System Developer Conference 2005 in Redmond

This week I am attending the inaugural Office System Developer Conference at the Microsoft Conference Center in Redmond. We've completed two of the three days and from my perspective it has been extremely valuable.

Here are some of the most important things I have learned:

1. Three back-to-back sessions were conducted on customizing SharePoint in terms of branding, site definitions and list definitions. Several Microsoft developers drilled down into what could be done easily, what is more difficult and perhaps MOST important - what can be done safely without risking problems with future upgrades to the product.

2. Two Microsoft developers conducted two excellent sessions on customizing the SharePoint Portal Server Search service. In particular, they covered A) using the Search service from applications other than SharePoint and B) customizing the out-of-the-box Search features in SharePoint Portal Server and WSS. Regarding the latter, the specific customizations they demonstrated were:

• Replacing the WSS site search box with a new search box that calls the SPS search engine and scopes the search to search the entire WSS site collection instead of just a single site
• Enhancing the drop-down search scope menu in SPS to allow for grouping of search scopes and creating cascading menus to make the search scope list easier to use
• How to add search scopes to the drop-down for portals other than the one the user is running the query from
• How to allow the users to use Boolean logic in the SPS search
• How to provide WSS List Item results in the SPS search
• Customizing the SPS Search Results Web Part to highlight hits
• Customizing SPS Search to allow the users to enter wildcards

3. An excellent (and very entertaining) session by Microsoft's John Durant titled "Bringing Corporate Data to Life with an Advanced Research Task Pane". The Research Services Task Pane in all of the Office 2003 applications is a feature that is not widely understood (IMHO). It is a very powerful feature that is incredibly extensible. In essence, it gives us a very easy way to bring all sorts of corporate data into the Office Task Pane and then easily insert that data into a Word document, Excel Spreadsheet, Outlook email message, etc. It can really improve end-user productivity when compared to the traditional approach of having multiple windows open, copy and pasting, etc.

4. At a lunch with one of the SharePoint Program Managers, I learned that even more emphasis will be put on SharePoint as a "development platform" in the next version (which he refers to as Version 3). This is great news for everybody (again, IMHO) and will even further distinguish SharePoint from other portal and collaboration offerings in the marketplace.

I am looking forward to the final day and then getting back and putting some of this information to use in our SharePoint training classes.

SharePoint: Microsoft's Number One Product?

Stephen Cummins noted that Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer speaking to reporters in India:

"SharePoint is the number one product at this point in the history of Microsoft," he said in a presentation to software professionals in Bangalore, India's IT capital.

"We expect $400 million revenue from that product line, faster than any other product in Microsoft's history."

Got to like that...

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Service Pack 1

WSS and SPS 2003 Service Pack 1 now available:

Description of SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Service Pack 1
Download SPS 2003 Service Pack 1

Description of Windows SharePoint Services Service Pack 1
Download WSS Service Pack 1

U.S. Army Special Operations Command Begins Training on SharePoint 2003

The U.S. Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) located at Fort Bragg, N.C. has begun a five-week training regimen as part of its plans to implement SharePoint Portal Server 2003. SharePoint Solutions was selected as the provider of this training.

USASOC believes that the Command will recognize signficant benefits from SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services. Key objectives include providing a central place where personnel can go to find USASOC news and documents and providing an environment that empowers the end user to author and publish their own content without the assistance of a webmaster.

Approximately 60 management and development personnel will receive the training in Fayetteville, NC. USASOC plans to implement the new portal in 2005. When fully deployed, the SharePoint portal will be used by approximately 20,000 end users.

SharePoint, Microsoft's number one focus?

A couple of days ago, CRN interviewed Jeff Raikes, group vice president for the Information Worker Business at Microsoft. The conversation revolved mainly around issues important to Micorsoft partners and solution providers.

When asked if Microsoft's message was to both "specialize" and "get many competencies", this is how Jeff began his answer:

"Well, the No. 1 focus we have right now is this connected productivity go-to-market--in particular, team collaboration. That's a very broad area, if someone really gets the expertise in Windows SharePoint Services, document workspaces and meeting sites, or I should say team sites."

Jeff also talked a lot about Randy Shilling of Quilogy and how he "has built a multimillion-dollar business doing Information Worker solutions, whereas three years ago he didn't have that at all. He'll be the first to tell you that what he is doing has gone from focusing on the IT infrastructure guys to focusing on the business decision guys."

Also

"Last night, he was talking about how Quilogy has 45 people who passed the SharePoint test, and the next highest partner had half. He was using that fact to promote the Quilogy learning platform. He has taken SharePoint as the foundation for a learning system that they use internally to train their folks, and now he's talking to customers about using it for their people."

Read the full interview here: CRN | Breaking News | CRN Interview: Jeff Raikes, Microsoft

Getting Usage Statistics on Sharepoint Portal 2003 Areas

There are pages available in Windows SharePoint Services that will allow you to obtain usage statistics for WSS Sites. However, this is not the case for Areas in SharePoint Portal Server 2003. There are no built-in hyperlinks in the Admin pages for viewing usage statistics for a give Area.

Does this mean that usage statistics are not available for Areas in SPS 2003? No, it just means that you have to know a backdoor URL to get to the pages that display the stats. Here is the format of the URL:

http://{your portal name}/_layouts/1033/usageDetails.aspx

This URL will take you to a usage statistics page for the Home Area of your portal. (Note: the 1003 is the designator for you language, so it will be different if not using U.S. English).

If you want to look at usage statistics for a Subarea, for instance, News, you would modify the URL to look as follows:

http://{your portal name}/News/_layouts/1033/usageDetails.aspx

Happy analysis!

SharePoint Solutions Blog Launches

The official blog of the SharePoint Solutions team is here!