MarkItUp

Running 3 main computers (4 if you count my Windows Mobile device) gives you a good feel for the issues with managing and synchronizing content between them.  My current solution is that I keep all of my content on servers and use clients that can connect to them.  The current solutions that I'm running are:

1. Outlook/Exchange for email (duh!).
2. VSTS/TFS for code.
3. OneNote/SharePoint for all of my notes and drawings.
4. Groove/SharePoint for all of my documents and files.

If you haven't used OneNote 2007 I would highly recommend that you give it a go.  The added flexibility gained with the addition of Notebooks is really useful as it allows you to create a Notebook for each thing/project in your life.  For example, I'm running a notebook for each project that I'm managing and one for my personal stuff (which I password protect). 

The cool part is that these Notebooks can actually be located in SharePoint - meaning that you can share them with team members.  Just like a Wiki only a very rich version with many more features than your standard web based wiki.  Some of the nicest features are:

1. I can work in both a connected and disconnected state.  This allows me to work while on a plane and sync my changes up when I hit the ground.
2. Search.  The OneNote search can even search text within images.  OneNote notebooks stored in SharePoint will also participate in SharePoint search.
3. You also get the Tag functionality to be able to mark your content with tags.  
4. Ability to embed rich content - such as files, sounds, etc.
5. Ability to Ink.

 I haven't fully digested this yet but Matty Cosier posted it on the internal Tech List today:

Link to Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Team Blog : Moving from design to reality - building HedKandi.com in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Looks very interesting.  I'm really hoping that WCM is as simple as it should be with Themes, Master Pages, and Custom Server controls.   I'd really love for these guys to produce a video of how to create a WCM site like this.

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/dustin/articles/5235.aspx

Just a reminder to myself...

     http://www.wssdemo.com/default.aspx

This is a perennial question of Sharepoint and this article does a great job of explaining it.

That's all.

OK, it's official, Eli is now my eyes and ears for Sharepoint at the PDC :-)

Yesterday he blogged an overview of the collaboration and tracking features and today he's described a new feature called "The Business Data Catalog".

Go check it out.

Here's a link to Eli's notes from todays session about Sharepoint V3.  Great stuff Eli!

SmartPart allows you (apparently, haven't tried it yet) to host any User Control as a SmartPart within Sharepoint.  This would absolutely rock! 

Between continuing with my document writing, downloading and playing with ATLAS and downloading and trying this, I can see many sleepless nights ahead.

Note to Wally... stop IM'ing me and telling me to go to bed :P

Per Eli's blog...

A nifty way to use the Page Viewer and a Dialog View to display a document library on another site from Chandima Kulathilake.

http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/server/techinfo/reskit/default.asp

Many people will tell you of their bad experiences with using Sharepoint in that they could never understand it or how to find stuff in it.  Now, if you know anything about Sharepoint then you will understand that this is actually quite a contradiction because, if there's one thing that Sharepoint is designed to do, it’s make content easy to locate.

Sharepoint suffers from being too easy to install and get to get up and running.  You can literally install Sharepoint and have it running and visible to your users within a couple hours.  Then, from the time that you’ve switched it on, users can start adding sites and content, seemingly at random.  Often companies will use this “just open the box” approach and then rely on the power of the underlying indexing service to assist people find content  This usually works for a while but really doesn’t scale beyond more than a few thousand documents.

Sharepoint offers many “hooks” on which to hang content – such as Audiences, Topics and Areas.  These are simple ways for users to either “locate” content or to have it actually targeted and pushed at a target audience.  Using things such as Areas also allow search scopes to be defined based on those structures making the search much more effective as you can search over a narrower, more focused view of your content as opposed to always sorting through the entire content.

It’s my guess that organizations which have been plagued with bad Sharepoint experiences have done poorly with planning or implementation this essential taxonomy.  For example, these sites may have merely stuck with the out of the box Areas and Topics rather than modeling them on their own business and processes.  This would be a major mistake as these are the things that allow users to find things based on how they would find them naturally within your business.

Here is a link to an excellent blog post which discusses some thoughts around this very topic:

     http://blogs.tamtam.nl/bart/default,date,2005-04-08.aspx

Customizing Sharepoint is an extensive topic made understandable by these great articles:

These two articles give great coverage to nearly every major aspect of portal, site, template and list customization:

    http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/odc_sp2003_ta/html/ODC_SPSCustomizingSharePointSites2.asp
    http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/odc_sp2003_ta/html/ODC_SPSCustomizingSharePointSites2.asp

... the last article in that series is the mother of all references about the stylesheet and class references for SPS and WSS:

    http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/odc_sp2003_ta/html/ODC_SPSCustomizingSharePointSites3.asp

Finally, an excellent end-to-end article about how to create custom site definitions for Sharepoint:

    http://www.devx.com/dotnet/Article/27673

These are some Sharepoint bookmarks that I don't want to lose...

A page which lists the out-of-the-box web parts and what to use them for:

    http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/CH011712151033.aspx

A page which lists the various out-of-the-box list types and outlines their behaviours:

    http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/CH011712521033.aspx

A page which lists 30-odd custom application templates tailored for specific business processes:

    http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sppt/wssapps/default.mspx

A page which lists some pre-built reports for reporting over typical things such as site usage, etc

    http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=49159368-544B-4B09-8EED-4844B4E33D3D&displaylang=en

Having recently finished some work on setting up an automated build environment for a client I know how valuable it is to keep little build script snippets that you come across from time to time.  Last night Grant pointed me at an article which shows how you can build Sharepoint .ddf files from within your NAnt build.  This piece of script will create the ddf file and then fire MakeCab.exe to make the .cab file which is then ready for deployment into Sharepoint.

The article can be found here:
    http://sharepointblogs.com/cmetral/archive/2005/07/27/2975.aspx

...and, here is the working script which is linked to from that article:

<target name="build-cab" description="Creates the cab archive for a wp solution">
       
        <property name="wp.project.name" value="..." />
        <property name="wp.src.dir" value="..." />
        <property name="csproj.file" value="${wp.project.name}.csproj" />
       
       
        <mkdir if="${not directory::exists('${temp.dir}')}" dir="${temp.dir}" />
       
       
        <echo file="${temp.dir}/${wp.project.name}.ddf">.OPTION EXPLICIT
.Set CabinetNameTemplate=${wp.project.name}.cab
.set DiskDirectoryTemplate=CDROM
.Set CompressionType=MSZIP
.Set UniqueFiles="OFF"
.Set Cabinet=on
.Set DiskDirectory1=${project::get-base-directory()}/${build.dir}
        </echo>
       
        <xmlpeek property="assembly.name" file="${wp.src.dir}/${csproj.file}" xpath="//VisualStudioProject/CSHARP/Build/Settings/@AssemblyName" />
        <xmlpeek property="assembly.build.location" file="${wp.src.dir}/${csproj.file}" xpath="//VisualStudioProject/CSHARP/Build/Settings/Config[@Name='${build.conf}']/@OutputPath" />
        <copy todir="${temp.dir}" file="${wp.src.dir}/${assembly.build.location}/${assembly.name}.dll" />
        <echo append="true" file="${temp.dir}/${wp.project.name}.ddf" message="${assembly.name}.dll" />
       
       
        <xmllist property="resources.list" file="${wp.src.dir}/${csproj.file}" xpath="//VisualStudioProject/CSHARP/Files/Include/File[@BuildAction='Content']/@RelPath" />
        <foreach item="String" delim="," in="${resources.list}" property="resource.file">   
            <echo append="true" file="${temp.dir}/${wp.project.name}.ddf" message="${resource.file}" />
            <copy todir="${temp.dir}" file="${wp.src.dir}/${resource.file}" />
        </foreach>
       
       
        <exec program="makecab.exe" workingdir="${temp.dir}" commandline="/F ${wp.project.name}.ddf" />
       
       
        <delete dir="${temp.dir}" failonerror="false" />
       
</target>

I recently ordered the Microsoft Office System Developers Conference CD from Microsoft, which you can order from here:

    https://microsoft.order-5.com/IWOfficeDev/

The disk itself is free but you should account for about $30 worth of postage costs if you are getting it shipped to Australia.  It has over 50 presentations which are crammed full of Office content - and, in particular many, many great Sharepoint presentations.  The presentations are in the same format as webcasts; that is, they have talking and powerpoints mixed in with real demo's. 

Today I watched a demo titled "Best practices for developing and deploying Web Parts for SharePoint sites".  This presentation not only covers things such as typical development topologies, asynchronous work items and part rendering strategies, it also gives tips on how to set things up for effective debugging of parts.

One down.... 49 to go! :-)