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!