For those who want to Share some great work they’ve been doing with Office System

Office System Solution Showcase at the next MOSSIG meeting (dec. 12th)

As we only have 5 spots available to present we ask that you could please email a short synopsis of your 15min presentation to Tim @ tim.wragg@pa.com.au
This should include
• An outline of the solution,
• technologies used & why (must have an Office System Component)
• key take-aways for MOSSIG members. - your peals of wisdom (or war stories) : so no sales pitches, we want the good stuff.

Remember: The more interesting & informative your synopsis is the better your chances of being selected in the 5 presentations for the night.
We are looking for solutions using a range of Office System technologies that are real implementations for clients.

• Entries close by COB Wednesday 5th of December whereby the Top 5 will be selected.
• All entries will have correspondence back by the 6th so the top 5 have time to prepare before the Christmas Party on the 12th Dec.
• 2 Prizes (Office 2007 Ultimate – worth $1000) will be awarded on the night for the best solution and the most informative. This will be judged by the audience.

MOSSIG Christmas Party

5.30pm on the 12th December @ Microsoft
Level 5, 4 Freshwater Place
Melbourne, Australia.

We will have drinks and nibbles over the night for a casual end to the year topped off with some great presentations of the work done by our MOSSIG members over the year.
For more information check our website at www.mossig.net or register for our monthly newsletter at register@mossig.net

Not how you want to start your Monday

So there I was minding my business and getting my coffee; I walked into my Office and I got a "Good Morning, we have a problem 'our SharePoint sites are down....'".

We got 404 errors on all our sites. After some interrogation tactics I found out one of my colleagues was in on Sunday and decided to run all security patches on the servers and go for the re-start. After that everything was black, so I started digging into event logs and log files. I noticed entries about SharePoint not being able to access the content database and schema inconsistency after running the configuration wizard. (we didn’t run that wizard but it seems some update did).

After some googling I decided to try:

Stsadm –o upgrade –inplace –url http://<...>

And that brought everything back!, Pfffff, earned myself another cuppa. And I will make sure that backup can be restored when I need it.

Have a good week!

Ed

Outlook Add-in and SharePoint: Getting Started

As some of you might know I was involved with the CA Visual Objects community in a previous life. "VO" as we passionately call it is a Win-32 bit environment with good OO-support and an xBase (Clipper) background, somewhat like Visual Foxpro. And soon there will even be a .net version called Vulcan!

In the VO forum I was requested to write some articles about how to save e-mail into SharePoint. So I've done some research and came up with a few really basic articles that explain how to create an Add-in for Outlook 2007 using VSTO 2005 SE, how to save items to SharePoint, how to add context menu items etc. All in C#.

The articles are posted here: http://www.softwareobjectives.com.au/VoConversion/Article%20Archive/Forms/HomePage.aspx (this is Part I and II, more to follow soon). The objective of the articles is to keep the code limited to a few lines, each time expanding a bit more. The first deals with how to hook up event handlers and save send mail to SharePoint automatically, the second how to add a context menu item and save incoming mail manually. Next I will add some info on how to process multiple Items, introducing the new Table/SQL queries for Outlook, add dialogs on Save and set item properties so that mail can be 'tagged' for the correct client, staffmember, order or whatever kind of context you would like to add.

If you have any questions or requests of other functionality you would like to know about just leave a comment.

Office DevCon 2007. Sydney, Australia 3rd-4th Nov 2007. Will you be there?

How about a free two day Office Developer Conference?

Check out the details quickly and register before they run out of space.

Another MOSS Site goes public

I know, it's just an out of the box site, but that's the point. With MOSS you can have a good looking fully content managed site up within a day or two. Obviously most of the time getting the content right takes a bit longer ;-) so we are still working on that.

Check out www.SoftwareObjectives.com.au .

Mossig September meeting: Enterprise Search Extravaganza

26th Sept 2007 at 5:30pm
To register for this meeting please email register@mossig.net by COB Tuesday 25th September 2007.

This month MOSSIG will be presenting a series of Enterprise Search related topics, so come along and find out how Enterprise Search can help you unlock your businesses data and improve productivity.

Show and Tell Session
Contact Selector Control in InfoPath (Ben Walters)
• Microsoft Office InfoPath

Ben Walters from Strategic Data Management will be providing a brief overview of the Contact Selector control available in InfoPath 2007.

Business Session
Search possibilities in your Enterprise (Tim Wragg)
• Windows SharePoint Services • Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

According to IDC (Content Technologies Study 2004-2005), workers spend 9.5 hours per week searching. Join Tim Wragg from Professional Advantage as he discusses the Enterprise Searching capabilities of SharePoint 2007 and what it means for business.
The presentation will include,
· positioning of the current search landscape from desktop to the web and where its going,
· search features including documents, people, business data and other sources,
· tips and tricks for an effective implementation , and
· the gotcha’s in features and licensing.

Technical Session
How to access and search business data (Matthew Cosier)

• Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 • Windows SharePoint Services
• Microsoft Business Data Catalog Definition Tool

In this half-hour session Matthew Cosier from Readify will step you through the means of integrating external data with the Business Data Catalog, and exposing it via search. In particular he will take you through the process of writing a BDC web service, generating the application definition using the new Microsoft Business Data Catalog Definition Editor tool, and finally exposing the data to SharePoint search.