Mossig and SharePoint certification and training

Last Wednesday night we had another good user group meeting hosted by Microsoft and Mossig.
Topics covered where an interesting Office Add-in by one of the group members, Kevin Ramsey who demonstrated how the Custom Task Pane in various Office application can be utilised to show Line of Business Data and provide users with customised actions. For example quickly creating Outlook tasks relating to specific Business Data. Marc Dimmick gave us some good reasons to consider using Groove from a business perspective and Elaine van Bergen presented the low-down on WSS and Office Server developer exams.

Mentioned was the fact that MS just released a new Developer portal on MSDN for Groove so here's a link in case you are looking for it.

I would like to add to Elaine's information that there is now a great offer for e-Learning for WSS available (6 courses for under 200 $US) which will be of good value if you are preparing for the WSS-development exam.

Some more news from the Office Development front:

Maybe a bit late, last week the release version of Visual Studio 2005 extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 was made avalable for download.

Also of interest to MOSS-developers will be the VSTA SDK that Paul Stubbs bLogs about.

BTW, I'm reading VSTO for Mere Mortals at the at the moment and it is very refreshing to see that there is now an entry-level book available for those of you who just get started looking at VSTO or want to move from VBA-programming into VSTO. My compliments to Kathleen and Paul on releasing this great resource, I like it a lot.

Note that we have decided to move the next Mossig meeting to the 2nd of May because of a publi holiday on our regular meeting date.

Eating your own Dogfood

Would you like to see a big, live SharePoint site?
Here's one Microsoft is running:

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/sharepoint/default.aspx they state it's an experiment. Let's see where they go with this. I've only had a quick look, is that a SharePoint page with a newsgroup/forum interface on the Forums tab, or just heaps of links?
And what's that Live QnA thing?

Certainly looks like a site I'm going to explore and a good aggregation of what's hot in SharePoint 3.0.

Another site built using WSS 3.0

Introducing www.VOConversion.com.au

Geoff Schaller and I are offering VO’ers a new and comprehensive resource to help launch themselves into the Dot Net world. Through the resources of Software Objectives and our user group community we are providing, white papers, blogs and RSS feeds for a range of key conversion and integration topics:

• DBF to SQL
• VO to C#
• VO with Visual Source Safe
• VO and MS Office and MS Sharepoint
• Web services
• RSS feeds
  
  The basis for this material is for developer who needs to keep VO for the long haul but must get into Dot Net now. Our aim is to migrate your mind, not your code, so the implicit objective of this material is to get your VO apps working right now with many aspects of the Dot Net framework. We don’t care what Dot Net language you choose to use: SQL C#, VB or Vulcan, the aim is to show you how you can leverage your existing application code with this new environment.
  
  Many of the articles and papers describe the underlying Dot Net or Microsoft product and many provide coded samples to show you how to implement some feature directly from VO right now. For example, one of the first candidates is how to deploy or consume RSS feeds. Not only will you learn the XML involved, write a C# web service to manage it, you will also have all the VO implementation code to integrate RSS right into your VO apps immediately. The SQL material comes heavily referenced to our SQL classes but practical sample code is also provided.
  
  Our aim is to prove to VO’ers that they are capable of utilising the latest tools and features of SQL, Dot Net, MS Office and MS Sharepoint right now. You don’t have to wait to give all these great goodies to your clients.
  
  The website is new and we are using it as a learning experience ourselves so there may be bugs and issues with it. For instance, site searching is not yet enabled. If you have comments or suggestions, please email them to me. We are keen to provide the best resource possible.

Content Types are everwhere

You might have noticed, there's a lot of buzz around Content Types in Word and SharePoint 2007. Now they have made it to MSDN: Have a look at this great new Content Type on MSDN about.... you guessed it, Content Types :-), well actually its about Content Controls, but you wouldn't use them if it wasn't in the context of a Content Type now would you?

Read more about what's coming up in these Visual How Tos on Erika's blog.

Very nice work Erika, Lisa and Brian !

SharePoint on-line 'support'

Important news for SharePoint implementors and developers. This was posted on the SharePoint Team bLog which was sometimes used as a communication channel to the Dev. Team:

" I hope that you’ll agree with me that once a blog entry gets beyond 15 or so comments, the conversation becomes difficult to follow. Yes, we’ve long had newsgroups as a channel for these types of conversations, but their lack of scoped/filtered search, moderation, HTML support, and tagging has limited their usefulness. Hence, following the lead of other product groups such as SQL Server and Exchange Server, I’m pleased to announce the SharePoint Products and Technologies forums on MSDN, which are mirrored on TechNet. As I mentioned in one of my “Welcome” messages, these forums are being positioned and managed (with MVP and product group participation) as the de facto channel for community Q&A and discussion going forward. The newsgroups will continue to exist for the benefit of those who simply cannot give up the 2-way offline synchronization functionality, which is the only significant shortcoming of forums. "

Clippy is back

No more Clippy in Office 2007. It seems that Microsoft gave Clippy the sack (if you want to know why, read this or the more graphic version.) , the good news is that he (or is it a she?) has bounced back and started a life without Microsoft. Here's the new home. Lots of tips and good introductions to Office 2007 features. This site also looks like a good starting point when you are looking for books. It seems to focus on the Client applications.

To bLog or not 2bLog

Now that WSS 3.0 is RTM a lot more people are exposing SharePoint sites anonymously. Chris Hewitt actually decided to run his new bLog on WSS. This got me thinking, I will try to find as many bLogs running on WSS as I can and post them here.

So Chris is first: http://endintiers.com/default.aspx BTW, great post on Forms Authentication in WSS by him. Definetely worth a read.

And here's another: http://www.wssdemo.com/blog/default.aspx and one more for today: http://www.pptspaces.com/sharepointreporterblog/default.aspx

We plan on offering bLogs on our MOSSIG SharePoint server in the near future, keep tuned.
Cheers,
Ed