For The User

I’m Still Alive and I’m Here to Prove it

ferringer — Fri, 01 May 2009 21:47:00 GMT

Did that get your attention? Good.

I’m just going to do a quick post before I head out for the weekend to let you know about a few things I’ve got going on out there in the meatspace (you know, that place away from your computer monitor with the bright yellow ball in the sky and the incredible resolution…). Think of it as Proof of Life, since I’ve been so remiss in posting here in the last month or so.

In a little less than two weeks on May 12th I’ll be giving a presentation at the St. Louis SharePoint User Group and participating in a panel discussion after the presentation. My talk is titled “Saving SharePoint”, and I’ll be covering SharePoint Disaster Recovery, focusing not only on the tools available for backup and restore but also DR as an overall strategy. I’m pretty excited about the topic, since I spent so much time researching and diving into it for the SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Reference Guide. Plus it will be great to actually meet IRL all the great STL SharePoint people I’ve met on Twitter so far (and @ToddKitta).

For more information on the event, you should definitely check out the St. Louis SharePoint User Group’s site, it’s got all the details on the location and start times for the event. If you can make it, make sure to register so I know how many people are coming to heckle me ;) And if you’ve got any recommendations on things to do in STL, let me know in the comments. My wife and I are planning on doing it as a family vacation for us and our toddler (she’ll be two in July), so we’re going to visit the Arch, the St Louis Zoo, and The Magic House but are always looking for other good suggestions of things to do and see.

In June I’ll be speaking at the Evansville SharePoint User Group on June 11th. The topic for that one is still a little undetermined, it will either be Saving SharePoint, SharePoint Online as an Extranet, or both. I’m also really looking forward to this, for a multitude of reasons. The big one is again the opportunity to meet some great SharePoint people that I’ve connected with online, namely Rob Wilson and Jill Epperson of KellerSchroeder. My wife is originally from about an hour away from Evansville and I always enjoy visiting her family. I’m hoping we can also turn that into a nice vacation, hopefully relaxing somewhere down on the Ohio River.

I’ll put up more info on the Evansville UG as I have it, and will be making an effort to return to consistent blogging next week as well. Until then, everyone have a great weekend, I’m off to see Wolverine!

SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide: The Giveaway

ferringer — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 18:44:41 GMT

Work is kicking my butt right now, so I’m going to take care of this now so I can get this information up and give everyone a chance to win a free copy of my book.

I’m doing two different types of giveaways for the SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Reference Guide, with two copies each for each method available. All entries must be posted either here on my blog or on Twitter by 2 PM EST on Friday, February 6th, 2009. At that time I will draw the two winner’s names at random and post the results on this here blog.

The first way you can win is by posting a comment on my previous blog post (the book’s Table of Contents Preview) with a suggestion for additional material that could go into a subsequent re-write or supplemental material for the book (keep in mind this is simply hypothetical, there’s no current plans to do such a thing, I just would love to know your feedback on what we missed). I know that the list may not give you a full idea of what’s in the book, but it should give you a general idea of what we’ve got. Please make sure to include at least your name when you post a comment so that I know who it can be attributed to.
The second way you can will is a little bit more goofy, but I wanted to have some fun and use Twitter. So here’s the deal: make a post on Twitter as a reply to me (@ferringer) with these two pieces of data: your estimate of how many years I’ve been shaving my head and the month I started doing it. The number of years will be used to determine the winners, and if there are more than two people who guess the correct amount of time I’ll use the month as a tiebreaker. If that still doesn’t break the tie, I’m considering either a basket-weaving or macramé competition (it’s all about the arts and crafts!). Please make sure to make the Tweet as a reply to me, otherwise I might not see it. As a not-so-special but added bonus, I’ll also start following/stalking everyone on Twitter who participates ;)
If you don’t win those, there will be a special second chance drawing for all entrants for one last book.

If you’re related to me, work with me, or married to me, you are not eligible for this contest (sorry). Winners will have their names (and/or Twitter accounts) posted here. If I am unable to contact the winners for a viable mailing address, a runner-up will assume the duties of the winner if for some reason he or she cannot fulfill those responsibilities. Void where prohibited, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera /The King and I

Ok, best of luck to everyone, I’m looking forward to your ideas and guesses.

SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide: Table of Contents Preview

ferringer — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 18:05:00 GMT

Below is the Table of Contents (ToC) for the SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Reference Guide along with my personal descriptions and commentary. You can also see the book’s ToC on Amazon for a complete outline of each chapter right here.

NOTE: I’ll be firing off an additional blog post shortly detailing how I’ll be giving away five copies of our book. I recommend reading through this list and maybe even checking out the ToC link on Amazon, as it will be useful for you if you’re interesting in winning one of those copies. :)

Getting Started with SharePoint Disaster Recovery – To quote Rage Against the Machine, “It has to start somewhere. It has to start sometime. What better place than here, what better time than now?”
End User Resources – In this chapter we cover some of the ways end users can help themselves preserve critical resources, documents, and data with functionality built right into SharePoint. The two big topics are Recycle Bins and Version Control, but we also talk about exporting list templates, WebDAV, and the Explorer View option.
SharePoint Designer’s Backup and Restore Tools – Now we’re starting to move away somewhat from SharePoint’s end user Disaster Recovery (DR) resources, but not completely. SharePoint Designer (SPD) sits in an interesting place, positioned as a tool that can be used by end users, developers, designers, and administrators. The chapter covers the mechanics of the various ways a site can be backed up and restored via SPD and discusses the advantages and drawbacks to those approaches.
The Central Administration Site’s Backup and Restore Tools – Now we’re getting into the administrative experience for SharePoint DR. Chapter 4 provides information on the Central Administration (CA) site, prerequisites for using it’s DR tools, detailed steps for how to backup and restore SharePoint through the CA site, and the pros and cons of its use.
STSADM’s Backup and Restore Operations – This chapter is very similar in its approach to the CA site’s chapter, except that now we’re covering the STSADM.exe command line tool for SharePoint administration. It dives into the differences between using it for site collection backups and restores versus catastrophic backups and restores, and the pros and cons section also details with the differences between STSADM’s backup/restore and export/import operations.
Tips and Tricks for SharePoint’s Built-In Backup and Restore Tools – This chapter rolls up quite a few best practices, gotchas, tips, and tricks that you may encounter when using the CA site or STSADM for DR. A lot of them are pretty self-contained, but the chapter is basically divided into two sections, one dealing with specific common problems and one for SharePoint DR administrative best practices.
Custom Development and Scripting for SharePoint Disaster Recovery – Chapter 7 covers the groundwork you need to understand before developing your own custom solution for SharePoint DR. This can fall into two main categories: scripting and full application development. We didn’t really get into a lot of specific code for this topic, because there are so many different directions you can go in to accomplish your goals for SharePoint DR. Instead, we show you some of the options available as well as the various implications your decision may have.
SQL Server 2005 Backup and Restore – The name of this chapter pretty much says it all: it details how to backup and restore databases in SQL Server 2005. We do discuss the other database options for SharePoint, but at the time we wrote this chapter we felt that the 2005 release was the one most likely to be in wide use and our time was best spent focusing on it. While the actual procedures shown in this chapter can really be used with any SQL Server 2005 database, we also spend a good amount of time discussing their implications in a SharePoint environment and how SharePoint’s specific needs and configuration can impact your approach.
SQL Server 2005 High Availability – A comprehensive DR approach goes way beyond simply backing up and restoring your data, files, and environment; you also need to design it to stay up and running in the face of adversity, known as High Availability (HA). Chapter 9 covers the three methods available for making SQL Server 2005 highly available and weighs the pros and cons of each with regards to SharePoint.
Windows Server 2003 Backup and Restore – Much like SQL Server 2005, we decided to focus on backing up and restoring Windows Server 2003 and SharePoint’s crucial supporting platforms that run on it. Specific resources to backup such as the 12 Hive, IIS, the Global Assembly Cache, etc are discussed, as well as how to use Server 2003’s built-in backup and restore tool
Windows Server 2003 High Availability – The two main topics here are load balancing your SharePoint servers (discussing both software- and hardware-based load balancers) and other targets for HA design (storage, server clusters, infrastructure redundancy).
SharePoint Disaster Recovery Planning and Key Concepts – This is where we start to move away from the technical aspects of SharePoint DR and start to deal with the concepts and procedures of a comprehensive SharePoint DR approach. DR Planning is not unique to SharePoint, and this chapter is intended to give you an introduction to some of the terminology and activities that go into creating a well-design DR plan for SharePoint.
SharePoint Disaster Recovery Design and Implementation – Chapter 13 walks you through the key aspects of creating and implementing a SharePoint DR plan. It is intended to get you thinking about what you should include in your plan, what it’s goals are, and what resources you will need to have to be successful.
SharePoint Disaster Recovery Testing and Maintenance – It isn’t enough to just write a SharePoint DR plan, if you think that’s all you have to do you will be painfully disappointed the first time you need to implement it. We walk you through how to test your plan to make sure it is effective and can be successful, as well as the crucial need to continually maintain that plan once its in place. These aren’t necessarily easy things to do, but can make or break a SharePoint DR plan.
Conclusion – To quote Ferris Bueller, “You're still here? It's over!”

We also included two appendices for the book, but because of printing constraints they're available online as opposed to being printed in the book:

Appendix A - This is a summary of a wide variety of Backup/Restore and DR tools available for SharePoint. Most of them are offered by third party vendors, some are free, and all of them require an additional install beyond SharePoint. We really tried not to show any favoritism (especially since we really don't have much experience with any of the tools), but still give you some idea of what each tool's vendor says it is capable of.
Appendix B - At the end of each chapter we have several review questions designed to test your understanding of the material we covered in the chapter. This appendix has our answers to those questions, just like your old grade school math book. ;)

As an aside, we really tried to make a point to detail pros and cons for each SharePoint DR task, tool, or approach that is covered in the book.What we found is that there's a lot of different tools, approaches, and methods that you can use as a part of your SharePoint DR plan, and they each can make sense to a wide variety of audiences. Which one is best for you largely depending on your specific needs, requirements, and resources. We really tried to give you the best perspective possible to make that decision, but ultimately its your call.

SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide: Acknowledgements

ferringer — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 16:05:54 GMT

I had planned on posting this next week because I expected a little more lead time before our book was actually published, but it turns out that Amazon is now shipping the SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide, which is a very good thing :)

I wanted to post my acknowledgements from the book, so I can once again call attention to all the people played such an important role in helping me make our book a reality. Writing the book last year was an incredible challenge and it was very satisfying to finish it, but I didn’t do it alone and I was set on the path that led to this book a long time ago. With that being said, I’d like to profusely thank the following people:

Becky Isserman, for giving me this opportunity.
David Zinsmeister, for asking me all those years ago if I had ever considered writing something of my own; it’s a question I never forgot.
Ben Frame, Kelly Pfledderer, and all my coworkers at Apparatus for the encouragement and support throughout this process.
Jeremy Gunter, for starting me down this road in so many ways. I miss you man.
All the folks on Twitter who chipped in with great advice, information, and verifications: @autosponge, @emilysc, @greenearings, @greghughes, @hipslu, @itchysanchez, @JDWade, @joeloleson, and @Sadalit. That’s right, Twitter played a nice big role in helping me getting this book to print. If you’re not on Twitter yet, why the heck not?!?
Steve Pietrek, for all the helpful resources and one unbelievable referral. I’m not sure I’d have finished the book if it wasn’t for Steve’s input and assistance :)
Jennifer Blaney, for her patience and support of a first-time writer.
Karen Gill, for making it look like I write so purty, offering encouragement, and laughing at all my terrible jokes. I can’t say enough good things about Karen and her work. She’s a great editor; she’s flexible, educates rather than pontificates, has a wonderful sense of humor, and is oh so thorough.
Sean McDonough, for being a great mentor, keeping me sane, providing great feedback, encouraging my terrible jokes, writing like a madman, and going above and beyond at all times. Words cannot convey how much I appreciate and am thankful for Sean’s contributions to this project; it probably would have never seen the light of day if it wasn’t for the incredible sacrifices he and his family made for it.
The two amazing women in my life every day. Piper for making all the late nights, headaches, and long hours that much easier with every smile, giggle, and laugh; and my beautiful wife Gretchen, for suffering through the late nights, headaches, and long hours with me and providing so much encouragement, strength, support, and love.
I’m going to say it again, although I know that I can never say it enough, thank you Gretchen. Thank you so much. Thank you for supporting me in this endeavor. Thank you for putting up with my tired, grumpy, irrational, moody butt. Thank you for motivating me. Thank you for distracting me. Thank you for everything.

To everyone else I forgot to thank, thank you. To our readers, thank you so much for your purchase, I hope you find the book useful and worth your hard earned money. I hope we show you something you didn’t know or didn’t consider. And above all else, I hope you’re able to take what we’ve written in this book and begin to ensure the long-term viability of your SharePoint environment.

Integrating Office: OneNote and SharePoint

ferringer — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 03:31:00 GMT

One thing I realized as I started writing the book (the SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Reference Guide in case you’ve missed my other posts) was that I was going to be taken a lot of notes and referring to them on a regular basis. While taking notes with pen and paper is still something I do for my job, it doesn’t tend to happen with the volume or frequency I understood was going to be needed for this project. For this it was going to be important for me to be able to store a lot of information from a variety of sources (such as files, notes, websites, etc) in a central location where I could categorize, annotate, and discover them easily. Luckily I’ve installed the Office 2007 Ultimate suite, which includes Microsoft OneNote 2007 (its also available as a standalone purchase or in the Office 2007 Home and Student suite).

Briefly, OneNote 2007 is described by Microsoft as “A digital notebook solution, allowing you to gather notes and information in one place.” I’m not going to go into too much more detail about OneNote’s features, suffice it to say that it met all of my needs for the book perfectly. I could store items, group and categorize them efficiently, and make updates and notes as I needed throughout each item. Not to mention the feature I used more than anything else in the tool: search. By the time I was done with the writing process for the book I had well over 15 sections within the OneNote notebook I created for it, and each section had anywhere from 3 to 30 or more pages within in it. Searching through this large amount of data saved me countless hours because I could quickly find the topic or note I was covering and incorporate that information right into my chapter in Word.

The other aspect of OneNote that was perfect for my needs was how it integrates with SharePoint. Just like the other members of the Office 2007 suite, OneNote 2007 notebooks can be uploaded into a SharePoint list as documents. But OneNote behaves (in my opinion) just a little differently than Word or Excel when you hook it up to SharePoint. Using SharePoint with OneNote allowed me to access, read, update, and add to my notes from multiple computers without having to worry about keeping multiple versions in sync or possibly overwriting previous updates. Since I was often working on the book from different locations (at a client site over my lunch break, from my work laptop when I’d take it home, or from my personal home computer) I needed to be able to easily access my data from a central location, but didn’t want to have to deal with manually synchronizing my files or downloading new updates. The cool thing is that OneNote 2007 does all this for you.

Here’s the crazy part. When I started writing this post, I began to outline the steps necessary to connect a OneNote Notebook to a SharePoint document library to create a shared notebook. Fortunately, I didn’t get too far into it, because as I was wrapping things up for the evening I was tweeting w/ @MaryCanady and @MrIsaacabout using OneNote and SharePoint. That’s when @danlewisnet pointed out that someone had beaten me to the punch with a post detailing exactly that process. (NOTE: for information Twitter, I highly recommend checking out this post I made last year about Twitter and Joel Oleson’s post about 101+ SharePoint people to follow on Twitter)

So I cannot strongly enough encourage you to read this post by the Norwegian Microsoft Consulting Services Information Worker team on their MSDN blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/mcsnoiwb/archive/2008/12/03/onenote-and-sharepoint-the-basics.aspx

It’s a great post, showing you exactly how to connect your OneNote notebook to SharePoint. The cool thing is that once you make that connection you can view all your OneNote data within SharePoint, meaning you can apply metadata, search it from your SharePoint site, and share it with anyone else who has access to your document library. Plus, OneNote automatically synchronizes its notebooks with SharePoint once you configure the connection (don’t worry, you can configure the timing and frequency of the syncing), so you don’t have to manually run it to keep things linked up. Its a great way to keep both an offline and online copy of your data in a collaborative environment, which is my book is a great example of effective SharePoint usage.

Integrating Office: An Introduction

ferringer — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 20:51:59 GMT

The first time I installed SharePoint, it made my head hurt. I was going through a whole lot of “newness” in my life at that point. New job (only the second one I’d ever had since college), new teammates, new responsibilities (I had been a developer in my previous life, now I was an administrator), and now this new software, SharePoint. It was hard enough coming to terms with being the enemy (as a developer I always thought that IT admins were there to thwart me, as an admin I’ve gleefully confirmed that), but on top of that I had to get my head around an unbelievably complex platform. But I was able to successfully install SharePoint Portal Server 2003 on my first try, and more importantly get a portal created and running without error.

When I started to dig into my new SharePoint portal and see what it was all about, I was immediately struck by something that made me a believer in its viability and long-term success: SharePoint’s cohesive integration with the Office suite. It just made sense. Microsoft Office is by the far the most widely used office suite in the world, and here was a product that allowed you to store, collaborate, and search on all the documents you created with those tools. To me it was a huge selling point, and I think SharePoint’s success over the years has proven that out, especially once Microsoft updated SharePoint with the WSS v3/MOSS 2007 release.

Which brings me to the point of this post: I’m introducing a new theme here at ForTheUser, “Integrating Office” which will highlight how SharePoint can be integrated with the various tools and programs found within the Office suite. Just to warn you, I’m going to try and focus more on the less talked about components and features, to try and expose you to some topics you hadn’t considered before. If you’re looking for how to upload a document through Word into a SharePoint site, it probably won’t be here (unless you ask for it). And I’m going to be kicking things off with how you can use Microsoft’s OneNote with SharePoint.

I had originally intended to do that in this post, but I went into the whole preface for this theme a little more than I expected, so I’m going to wrap it up and devote the whole post to OneNote and SharePoint.

Is This Thing Still On?

ferringer — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 02:08:00 GMT

Well, it's been a while since I've been able to put up something new here, but hopefully that will be changing now that I've wrapped up that tiny little book project I'd been working on. I'm sure I'll be talking more about the book in the near future as its release date becomes more of a reality, so I'm just going to briefly touch on it right now as I take care of some general housekeeping items and summarize some of the things that I'm going to be talking about in the coming month or two as I try to get back into the blogging habit.

First of all, the book: SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide. Writing the book was an excellent, tiring, challenging experience. I really enjoyed digging into the content and feel great about coming out of it with such a comprehensive treatment. There were several hiccups along the way to completion, some minor and some otherwise, but I'm proud of the finished product and hope its useful. I'm eagerly nervous about its release, part of me is excited to see how it's received and part of me dreads it. As you'll see in the list below, I'll be covering quite a bit more about the book in the weeks ahead, so I won't spend too much more time talking about it, but I will say this: based on the price it's listed for at Amazon ($27 US), I think you're getting a ridiculous value. Yes, I'm biased, but this book is 432 printed pages (plus two online appendices) on SharePoint's backup and restore tools (seriously, the STSADM chapter is over 40 pages!), SQL Server backup, restore, and high availability, Windows Server backup, restore, and high availability, as well as introduces you to Disaster Recovery concepts and best practices.

Regardless, if you decide to check the book out, I hope you like it. Either way, please make sure to let me know what you think, I live for feedback of all shapes, sizes, and colors. If I ever choose to do write another, or to revise this one, I'd love to know what I need to do to get better.

The next item on the agenda: I need to do some housecleaning around here. I logged in yesterday and realized that I've had several comments pile up that I need to approve. But instead of just approving them all, I'm going to address them one by one so I can make sure to respond to anything that may require it. I apologize for the delay, it wasn't intentional. I simply made the decision to put blogging on hold while the book was in process (trust me, it wasn't the only thing I put on hold) and never logged in, so I didn't even realize I had the comments coming in. So over the next week (with a pause for the Christmas holiday here in the States) I'll be approving and responding to the comments.

Finally, here's a few of the topics I plan on addressing in the next month. If you have any thoughts, requests, or suggestions please post them as a comment, I'd love to hear them. They're listed in no particular order.

SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide Preview - quick run through of the Table of Contents and overview of each chapter)
Book acknowledgments - this will also be printed in the book, but I want to make sure to thank the people who helped make this possible (and throw around some link love as well)
Book giveaway - I'm going to get some copies of the book from the publisher to distribute, so I'll be giving a couple away here (or maybe at Twitter, not sure yet. might want to keep an eye on http://twitter.com/ferringer just to be sure )
Document Versioning intro - we cover this in the book, so I won't go too deeply here to avoid duplicating content, but I do want to pick back up on this thread from my previous end user DR post
One or more posts on site administration - the great thing about SharePoint is that it allows business end users to administrate and manage their own sites, but often that's a lot of rope to hang one's self with. So I'm going to be tackling some common administrative activities end users need to know about.
Review Microsoft's End User Training Kit. It's been out for a while, let's see where the kit is at right now.
Review Microsoft's GearUp materials for SharePoint from an end user perspective
Discuss SharePoint integration with various pieces of the Office 2007 suite, such as Outlook, OneNote, and Access
Your suggestions?

Ok, well this post is too long as it is, so I'm going to wrap it up. It's good to be back, hopefully I remember how this all works and fail to suck at it. And here's to a great 2009!

John

Man, it Sure is Quiet Round These Parts

ferringer — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:23:00 GMT

As you may have noticed in the last couple of months or so, I've been posting new blog entries with less and less frequency. The good news that I'm fine, my family's fine, nothing's gone wrong (knock on wood) that has prevented me from regularly updating the blog like I wanted. The bad news is that I'm probably going to continue posting haphazardly on a reduced schedule for the next several months, due to the fact that the majority of my writing energies are being devoted to another project: the "SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide."

Becky Isserman (aka MOSSLover) was awesome enough to invite me to co-author this book with her, and we've been furiously scribbling away as we work to put together a useful and thorough resource on how to preserve and restore your SharePoint environment in the event of a calamity. It's definitely been a learning experience for me; as a first-time author I have a whole new appreciation for everyone out there who has written a technical book before.

As you can see, the entry for the book is up on Amazon already, although we've slightly tweaked the title recently to better reflect how our work is going to encompass the entire SharePoint platform, not just MOSS 2007. The other cool thing that happened recently is that our publisher has put together a draft of the cover design for the book, and I think it looks pretty sweet. Between that and the Amazon entry it certainly makes the whole project feel a lot more tangible beyond the boatload of Word documents we're churning out.

And instead of just taunting you with how cool the cover looks, I figured I'd go ahead and put it out there for you to see as well. Take a look and let me know what you think And don't forget to bookmark that Amazon page so you can easily check back to it and find out when your pre-ordered copy is due to ship!

Looking for More SharePoint Interactions? Try FriendFeed

ferringer — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:16:00 GMT

A few months ago I talked about the growing community of SharePoint professionals and users who were joining the conversations at Twitter:

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/fortheuser/archive/2008/04/21/meet-me-on-twitter.aspx

I still use Twitter quite a bit (in spite of its seemingly continual technical issues and outages), and it is still a great place to interact with other people out there who use SharePoint on a regular basis. But I wanted to take a quick second to mention another social network that I think you should definitely check out if you're looking for new sources of SharePoint information, or just information in general: FriendFeed.

FriendFeed is an interestingly versatile tool. It's a social network, RSS feed aggregator, instant messenger, and forum all rolled up in one. I've configured my FriendFeed page to aggregate the output of my activities on this blog, Google Reader, Twitter, and many other websites, so that it's all available in one place if someone wants to see it.

But let's face it, I'm not that interesting, and I'm certainly not writing this post to ask you to pay attention to what songs I've bookmarked on Pandora or the latest article about the Indianapolis Colts that I've shared on Google Reader, and this isn't a blog about either of those two things either. This is a blog about SharePoint, so let's talk about how it relates to what you can find on FriendFeed.

The social networking aspects of FriendFeed means that you can subscribe to the FriendFeeds of anyone else on the site, so you can now track and see what other people on the site are reading, commenting, and sharing about SharePoint. And yes, once you sign up for the site, you can comment on any item anyone posts and mark the posts you "Like", providing more insight and metadata about the content than you could get from a standalone RSS reader like Google Reader. And the comments are threaded, acting as a discussion forum about the article, which is nice because the discussion is centralized on FriendFeed rather than spread across several different sites.

The real hook for FriendFeed with regards to SharePoint is the Rooms feature. There are a couple of SharePoint-specific rooms that you can participate in and see content provided that is specific to SharePoint:

SharePoint Talk: http://friendfeed.com/rooms/sharepointtalk
SharePoint River: http://friendfeed.com/rooms/sharepointriver

SharePoint Talk is the place to go when you've found a great SharePoint article that you want to share with other people or if you want to start or engage in a discussion about a post already found in the room. Anyone who wants to can join the room and share articles in it, we only ask that the content is relevant to SharePoint in some way.

SharePoint River is a source of SharePoint content from around the Internet, aggregated from several automated sources. It's best used to see what kind of SharePoint-specific noise is going on throughout the Internet and to find articles or sources that you might not have otherwise come across. I would warn that if you subscribe to that room that you probably don't want to have it put its articles on your FriendFeed home page, because it generates a lot of postings in a hurry and can be hard to follow.

Additionally, you can cross-post articles from your home page to your rooms, and vice versa, with ease. So if your normal feeds find something of interest that you want to add to the SharePoint Talk room, you can easily do that from your FriendFeed home page.

There are some drawbacks to FriendFeed, the biggest one being that you'll only see the headlines for the articles in your feeds, it doesn't give you any previews. So you'll have to work a little harder to find out what's actually in the article, but that can be a good thing too

All in all, I've really enjoyed the experience on FriendFeed, and much like Twitter, I encourage you to check it out if you're looking for new sources of SharePoint information and interaction. Feel free to subscribe to my feed if you want, although I'm going to warn you that it's not 100% SharePoint stuff and like I said, I'm not that interesting.

http://friendfeed.com/ferringer

p.s. FriendFeed has a much better performance track record so far than Twitter does, but I don't want to make a big deal out of that or turn this into a "Twitter is down" complaint, so that's all I'm going to say on the matter.

Be Vewy Vewy Quiet, We're Hunting Web Pawts...

ferringer — Fri, 30 May 2008 20:13:00 GMT

A while back a friend of mine was getting frustrated with a news site he was trying to get set up in MOSS and asked me for some help. His issue seemed pretty straight-forward, he wanted to add an Announcements web part to the main page of the site but couldn't find the web part anywhere in the site's web part gallery to be added. I'm a little embarrassed to say that the solution to our problem didn't immediately come to me, but at the same time when your brain is working in a certain direction it's all too easy to overlook the simple solutions.

My first instinct was to check his site's Site Features and Site Collection Features in the Site Settings to see what was activated or deactivated. His Enterprise features were enabled, as were his Standard features and Team Collaboration features. So this wasn't a case of available functionality being disabled so that the web part couldn't be used. Next I checked the file server of our SharePoint front end server to see if the files associated with the Announcements web part had been removed, which would prevent the web part from being in the site's gallery and could not find the files I was expecting to see. It was at this point that I realize the folly of my actions and the fact that I was going about this situation all wrong.

See, I was forgetting that there is no such thing as an Announcements web part in SharePoint. "But John!" you're saying... "What about the Announcements web part that is automagically added to my site's home page any time I create a new team collaboration site?" And that's the crux of the problem...what appears to be a web part specifically for Announcements (or a Calendar, or Linkset, etc) is actually a pretty general web part that SharePoint makes available anytime you create a new list within your SharePoint site. This web part is added to your gallery to provide you with a view of your list's contents, and depending on the list template you used to create the list will format the lists contents in different ways. Links will be shown hyperlinked, Announcements will be shown with headlines and summaries in chronological order, Calendars will be shown in a standard calendar format, and so on.

My point is that to fix my friend's problem I didn't have to do anything more complex than create an Announcements list for his site; once I did that its associated web part appeared in the site's gallery and could be added to the page. This is a pretty cool but often overlooked aspect of SharePoint, anytime you create a list SharePoint will automatically create a web part for that list which allows you to view its contents from somewhere other than the list's page itself. And you can customize the data shown by that web part through the creation of custom views and filters for the list. Pretty cool, huh?

A-B-P. Always Be Publishing

ferringer — Mon, 12 May 2008 14:30:00 GMT

"A-B-C. A-Always, B-Be, C-Closing. Always be closing, always be closing."

These are the words of Blake, Alec Baldwin's character in the movie version of "Glengarry Glen Ross" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104348), as he talks to (more like rants) a group of real estate salesmen about the art of deal. This scene popped into my head a few days ago as I was working on a customized Internet-facing publishing site in MOSS. Why? Because when it comes to getting new content into your publishing site, it's "A-B-P. Always Be Publishing."

Why is this important? If you don't, your updates won't show up and your rank and file users won't be able to see them, it's just that simple. MOSS's content management system for publishing sites is configured so that unless your content has been checked in, published, and approved it will not be visible to anyone not in your site's authoring or approval groups.

If you're editing content in a MOSS publishing site (often used for Internet facing websites), always make sure that you have published all of your updates. This includes, but is not limited to, changes to your master pages, page layouts, pages, lists, web parts, and much more. If you are working on items that require approval, you must confirm that workflows for those approvals have been started and completed in order for them to be visible to all of your site's users. (NOTE: with publishing sites you can also schedule content to start and end on specified dates, which also change the visibility of your content)

How do you do that? There are a few different techniques I recommend using; you should try to do at least one of them every time you update your site and should probably do most of them together.

Use the MOSS Check for Unpublished Items tool:

Make sure the Authoring Toolbar is displayed for your site (you should see a menu across the top of the page showing the page's version, status, publication start date and some pulldown menus)
Click the Tools pulldown menu and select the Check for Unpublished Items option.
You will see a message in the Authoring Toolbar saying that it is checking for unpublished items.
If there are any, you will see a message stating !Unpublished items are detected on the page. In the message, click the link full report to open a report of the items found.
For each item in the list, initiate the publishing process so that they can be displayed to all users

Log in as an anonymous user, or as a user with limited rights to the site. Then check the page for your new content. If you don't see it, it needs to be published. One trick I like to use is to make my updates in Internet Explorer and verify my content as an anonymous user in a different browser, like FireFox. This allows me to make sure everything's getting published and at the same time make sure that things look good in non-IE browsers as well.
Andrew Connell's STSADM Custom Commands (http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/articles/MossStsadmWcmCommands.aspx) includes an option to publish all items in a list, which is great when you've just uploaded a ton of documents or images into a list or directory and don't want to have to go through every single workflow for every single item. Just point the tool at the list and it will publish them all for you (NOTE: you will need to be a SharePoint administrator to install and run the tool).

So the next time you're authoring your MOSS publishing site and can't figure out why your new content isn't showing up for your users, check to make sure it's published. And put that coffee down. Coffee's for publishers only.

Meet me on Twitter...

ferringer — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 20:43:00 GMT

A couple of weeks ago I decided to take the plunge and join up at Twitter. If you're not familiar with it, Twitter is often referred to as a "microblogging" service. Basically, you can post anything you want to it, as long your post consists of all text and is less than or equal to 140 characters long. So you can't post images or videos, but you can post links to those files if you want.

So how does this relate to SharePoint? Well, I joined Twitter at a pretty opportune time, because there really has been a large up swell in SharePoint-oriented professionals who have started "tweeting" (that's what it's called when you post something to Twitter, don't ask me ) in general and about SharePoint specifically. I've been really impressed by the discussions I've been able to catch by being on Twitter, not to mention the ones I've gotten to be a part of.

If you are on Twitter and want to follow me, my page is posted below. I'll also post a couple of other good links for finding SharePoint folks who are on Twitter, I highly recommend following anyone who catches your eye. And keep in mind that this is just skimming the surface of what you can do with Twitter, there's all sorts of search engines, localizers, tag clouds, meme trackers, etc also springing up around Twitter on a near-constant basis.

http://Twitter.com/ferringer
http://twitter.com/sptweeters
http://stevepietrek.com/twitter/

Enjoy!

P.S. - I've found that Twitter is much more enjoyable via a rich desktop client. I've used Witty and really liked it, but I'm currently using Twhirl (it has way more features and functions than Witty currently does).

Sample Questions for SharePoint Admin Certification Exams

ferringer — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:17:00 GMT

A while ago I mentioned in the MSDN forums that I had some sample questions for the 70-630 and 70-631 SharePoint Admin certification exams from Microsoft, and since that time I have gotten a few requests in my inbox for those files. So I've decided to go ahead and post them online for your downloading pleasure, if you should want them.

For exam 70-630 (Configuring MOSS 2007) - http://drop.io/70630Qs
For exam 70-631 (Configuring WSS v3) - http://drop.io/70631Qs

Please keep in mind that these are not brain dumps, you will not see these exact questions in the certification exam. Instead, they contain sample questions intended to give you an idea of what the exam will contain.

If you're looking for books, there is a book specifically for the 70-630 exam that just came out on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/MCTS-SharePoint-Configuration-Technology-Certifications/dp/0470226633/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1207315086&sr=8-2

The other resource that I recommend studying to prepare for the 70-630 exam is the MOSS Administrator's Companion from MS Press:

http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft%C2%AE-Office-SharePoint%C2%AE-Administrators-Companion/dp/0735622825/ref=pd_bbs_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1207315086&sr=8-5

Unfortunately, there aren't any published resources out there yet for the 70-631 exam, which is too bad because I really thought it was the more difficult of the two.

Best of luck on the exams!

Book Review: The SharePoint Shepherd's Guide for End Users

ferringer — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 19:23:00 GMT

I recently received a free copy of "The SharePoint Shepherd's Guide for End Users", by SharePoint MVP Robert Bogue, and I wanted to share my thoughts with you about the book.

The lack of good end user resources for SharePoint like the Shepherd's Guide is what prompted me to start writing this blog in the first place. SharePoint is a vast, complex, and often difficult tool to use if you're not properly introduced to it. Time and time again I have seen SharePoint sites wither on the vine from a lack of use, not because the opportunity for collaboration was not there but because the audience could not grasp everything they could do with their SharePoint site or how to do the most basic tasks. But educating and training your users on SharePoint can be time-consuming and expensive.

For me, this book is like the end user manual that Microsoft never shipped with SharePoint but really should have. Rob does a great job of identifying the core functions of SharePoint that users need to know, and covers them as easily understood common tasks. I think this is a great way to introduce information workers to SharePoint, as a user my goal is to figure out how to accomplish what I need to do with a new tool not the intimate inner workings of the tool. By distilling SharePoint's core collaborative functions into chunks that users can easily grasp, the book makes it much easier for a new user to get up and going with the platform.

Each task is clearly laid out with a descriptive purpose, so a user can identify whether or not the task described by the book is applicable to what they are trying to accomplish in SharePoint. Rob then walks through the steps necessary to execute the task from start to finish, and includes very useful screenshots to guide readers through the SharePoint pages they should be seeing in their environment as they complete the task. The book also does a good job of explaining why the task is being executed in a particular way and covering any limitations or gotchas that the reader may encounter.

The book covers a wide range of topics, including basics like using a SharePoint collaboration site and integrating with Outlook and the rest of the Office stack. Rob also goes into some Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007-specific topics such as MySites and publishing sites. One thing I would have liked to see Rob spend a little more time on is the difference between MOSS and Windows SharePoint Services (WSS); he does mention it briefly in the initial chapters of the book but when covering MOSS-specific tasks I would have liked to see him pointing out that features like MySites require MOSS and are not included in all versions of SharePoint. But I know from personal experience that this is not an easy topic to cover briefly and understand why he took the approach he did with WSS versus MOSS in the book.

The Shepherd's Guide also includes some outstanding resources in its appendices. The appendices cover Site Definitions, List Definitions, Web Parts, Views, and Permissions, and provide excellent descriptions of each SharePoint component within those groupings so that users can get a good understanding of what makes them unique as well as their common use cases. I think it makes a lot of sense to include these in appendices, rather than trying to explain the components within the book's tasks. This way readers are not getting overwhelmed by all the information and have an easy resource to flip to when they need it. And I really like seeing everything covered so thoroughly, because these components are key elements to successfully using SharePoint to its fullest potential.

One last thing about the book I want to touch on is the multiple and innovative ways Rob is distributing and licensing the book for sale. If you want to purchase a single copy of The SharePoint Shepherd's Guide for End Users, you can do so from Lulu.com. Rob also reports that the book will soon be available from Amazon.com, I have linked to its page if you want to bookmark it for future reference. But the option Rob is offering that I think is really interesting is the availability of corporate licensing programs for companies that would like to purchase multiple copies of the book for their end users. To me, this gives a company the opportunity to provide the Shepherd's Guide to their information workers as an actual manual for SharePoint so they have a ready resource on hand when they need it, sparing the need for costly training resources and classes. For more information about the corporate licensing programs, I recommend sending Rob an email with your request.

Displaying an RSS Feed Within a MOSS Publishing Site

ferringer — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 13:08:00 GMT

For my current project at work I've been customizing SharePoint's publishing template for an Internet-facing website built on top of MOSS 2007. All in all we're really not doing anything too crazy with the site, but I did run into one roadblock that I think is worth mentioning here. It may not be completely end-user related, but I do think it is a good thing to keep in mind if you're sitting down with your SharePoint administrator(s) to plan how you're going to create your company's website in SharePoint.

The client wants to display an RSS feed on the main home page that outputs their most recent press releases. Using the RSS feed will cut down on the manual upkeep required to keep the content on the home page fresh and allow them to only have to maintain their press release information in a single place. I've been creating the master pages and page layouts for this new site on a sandbox server I built, so that I can get the finished product to where it needs to be before we deliver it to the client. I created a web part zone in the page layout of the home page, and then loaded up the page in IE to add the RSS Viewer web part to the page. That's where I ran into trouble.

The first issue I encountered was that the RSS Viewer web part was not available in the web part gallery as I expected. So I fired up a separate web application on that sandbox server, opened up one of its sites that did not use the publishing site template in IE, and checked the site's web part gallery. Sure enough, the RSS Viewer web part was available. That told me it wasn't a problem with the SharePoint install on the server.

Next, after some serious digging at SearchForSharePoint.com (sorry about the gratuitous plug), I went back to my publishing site and took a look at the XML Web Part. My thinking was that I could still point that web part at the RSS feed, and then apply an XSLT stylesheet to it for formatting. In fact, I went back to the RSS Viewer web part in my other site, copied out its XSLT and applied it to my XML web part. This resulted in an error being displayed in the web part. After checking online, the errors I was seeing in the browser and SharePoint's logs indicated that it was an issue with a proxy server not being configured for the server, which makes no sense because this sandbox server can reach the internet without the use of a proxy.

After ruling out the XML Web Part, I opened up the publishing site's Site Settings and took a look at the Web Part gallery list for the site. I decided to see if it was possible to manually add the RSS Viewer web part to the site's gallery so I could put it on the page. When I took a look at the list of available web parts I didn't see the RSS Viewer, but I did see a web part called "RSS Aggregator", which I had never heard of before. I went ahead and added it to my site's gallery, then added it to the site's home page. Once I configured it for the RSS feed, I saw pretty much the same errors as I did with the XML Web Part, ending that thread of investigation.

I then remembered that there are third party web parts out there, such as the Feed Reader Web Part from Smiling Goat, which I hoped would resolve my issue. So I grabbed the installer from Smiling Goat and ran it on my server (I know there's a newer version of the web part out on CodePlex, but this version has worked for me in the past so I went with it), but ran into the same problems again and the feed would not render.

A coworker of mine has been doing a lot of work for a different client who is building several custom MOSS publishing sites, so I pinged him to see if he could duplicate my problem. He opened up one of his sandbox publishing sites, checked the web part gallery and lo and behold, there's the RSS Viewer Web Part. He added it to the page, pointed it at my RSS feed, and it rendered without a hiccup. Needless to say I was puzzled and frustrated.

So we started looking at the configuration of his site, and immediately I noticed that he had some features enabled that I didn't in my publishing site, specifically the ones relating to Enterprise licensed functionality. So I went back into my publishing site and enabled the following two Features:

Office SharePoint Server Enterprise Site Collection features - this is enabled in the Site Collection Features link located in the Site Collection Administration section. Enabling this feature is what put the RSS Viewer web part in my publishing site's web part gallery.
Office SharePoint Server Enterprise Site features - this is enabled in the Site features link located in the Site Administration section. You do not need to enable this feature to add the web part to the top-level publishing site, but I think it is a good idea to enable both of these features in tandem.

Once I had the RSS Viewer web part in my gallery, it was smooth sailing. The feed displayed, and I tweaked the XSLT in the web part to customize its output to meet my design requirements.

I'm having a hard time understanding why I need the Enterprise features to get the RSS Viewer web part, but that's the case. It just seems strange, since that web part is available in other Standard license site templates, that you can't get it in the publishing site template. The only thing I can figure out is that it is assumed you'll be enabling the Enterprise features as a standard practice for publishing sites, which I guess I'll be doing in the future as a standard configuration step.

Sharing Links: SharePoint Designer Governance

ferringer — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 18:03:00 GMT

I just wanted to take a quick second to direct you to a post published today by Robert Bogue, a SharePoint MVP:

http://thorprojects.com/blog/archive/2008/02/12/737.aspx

The article covers Rob's views on the proper usage of SharePoint Designer (SPD) and how that usage should be governed by SharePoint administrators. SPD is a great tool for the customization and modification of SharePoint, but when not used properly it can really generate some heartburn for you. I highly recommend checking out Rob's article and taking his advice to heart; it may not be directly applicable to your situation but hopefully at least it will get you thinking about what kind of limits your organization needs around tools such as SPD.

Disaster Recovery for the End User

ferringer — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Wikipedia defines Disaster Recovery (DR) as "the process, policies and procedures of restoring operations critical to the resumption of business, including regaining access to data (records, hardware, software, etc.), communications (incoming, outgoing, toll-free, fax, etc.), workspace, and other business processes after a natural or human-induced disaster."

In the world of IT, DR usually involves redundant hardware such as web server load-balancing or server clustering and data duplication via the creation and restoration of backup files. Some companies will spend millions of dollars purchasing, developing, and testing a DR infrastructure that they fervently hope that they will never have to use. All too many organizations risk the loss of crucial business information and capital by not having any sort of DR plans in place at all.

Often DR falls under the jurisdiction of your IT administrators, the same people who installed, configured, and keep your SharePoint system up and running. But one fact about SharePoint that often gets overlooked is that out of the box it provides two tools to its users that can be used to save your content in the event that something unfortunate happens to it. Granted, it may be a bit of a stretch to put these tools in the same category as enterprise-caliber tape backup hardware, but when used properly they can provide very similar capabilities with little IT professional intervention

First, let's talk about the Recycle Bin. If you haven't spent a lot of time poking around a SharePoint site, the only Recycle Bin you're probably familiar with is on your Windows desktop. But with the latest release of SharePoint, Recycle Bins are included and activated by default in every SharePoint site you create. And they act very similarly to the local Recycle Bin on your desktop. If you delete a file in your SharePoint site it is not gone forever only to be retrieved via some arcane voodoo act performed by your SharePoint administrator. Instead, it is automatically sent to your site's Recycle Bin until the Bin is emptied. The Recycle Bin can hold not only deleted documents, but also document libraries, list items, and lists that are deleted from a SharePoint site.

Here are a couple of things to keep in mind about SharePoint Recycle Bins:

Although they are enabled by default in SharePoint, they can be turned off. So if you don't see one in your site, ask your SharePoint administrator about its status.
The items in your site's Recycle Bin will count against your site's storage quota. So if your site is running out of space, check your Recycle Bin to make sure you're not tying up a bunch of storage with unneeded items.
By default items will be deleted from the Recycle Bin once they've been in there for 30 days, but this value can be modified by your SharePoint administrator.

Finally, the SharePoint Recycle Bin is referred to as a "two-stage" Recycle Bin. This means that when you empty your Recycle Bin, or an item is removed from it because its been in there for a while, it still is not gone forever. In Windows, when you empty your Recycle Bin the items in it are gone forever (barring the use of a specialized recovery tool and some fervent hoping that the affected disk sectors have not be overwritten). But in SharePoint when you empty a Recycle Bin, the items in it are moved to its parent Site Collection's top-level Recycle Bin, just in case you didn't really mean to delete it. This means that while the item is in the Site Collection's Recycle Bin it can be restored by a site collection administrator.

Like the first-stage site Recycle Bin, items will be removed from the Site Collection's Recycle Bin once they have been in it past the Bin's retention period. And, just like the first-stage Bin, by default that value is set to 30 days but it can be modified by a SharePoint administrator. Once an item has been removed from the Site Collection's Recycle Bin, it's pretty much gone; the only way it can be retrieved is via a restore of a backup for the site (if such a backup has been made).

Since this post is already plenty long, I'll cover document versioning in a subsequent post.

Sharing Links: Adding User Help to Web Parts

ferringer — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 14:36:00 GMT

I highly recommend taking a look at this post from the Joining Dots blog on how to add custom end user help information to web parts. Extending your SharePoint environment with instructive content like this can go a long way towards improving your users experiences and increasing participation.

http://www.joiningdots.net/blog/2008/01/user-help-within-sharepoint.html

EDIT: My bad, I had a copy/paste error in the original post. Thank you Joe for helping me get this fixed.

Sharing Links: End User Resources

ferringer — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 20:45:00 GMT

This is the first post in a running series I'm going to be doing titled "Sharing Links". The premise is pretty straightforward: I'm sharing with you a list of SharePoint links on a variety of topics. I figured that since I read so many SharePoint-related posts in a given day (upwards of 100 a day according to Google Reader) that I ought to share my observations on some of the best sources available for the various types of SharePoint information out there.

And since this blog is targeted towards the End User, I'll be kicking things off with a list of End User Resources for SharePoint. Please feel free to add any of your own sources in the comment section, the more the merrier!

This blog - duh!
Get the Point - an End User-oriented blog from Microsoft, featuring contributions from both the SharePoint product team and featured guest bloggers. Heavily focused on the use of metadata in SharePoint.
EndUserSharePoint.com - An outstanding End User blog from Mark Miller. I really like the running Question of the Day series and Mark's observations from his training classes are really insightful.
Agnes Molnar's blog - Agnes has done a good job of consistently posting on a variety of topics, as well as dabbling in a few administrative topics like backup/restore activities.
Office.microsoft.com's MOSS resources - Surprisingly, Microsoft has quite a few good articles posted for MOSS users, this site is definitely worth a check when you're looking for information.
Office.microsoft.com's WSS resources - Similar to the previous link, if you're looking for WSS end user information, there's good knowledge to be found here.
My End User SharePoint feed - A lot of the items from the sources above will probably be duplicated here, but the good thing about this source is that you can subscribe to it via a feed reader such as Google Reader and get it all in one location. Plus if I see any articles from any of my normal sources that I think is end user-relevant, I'll tag it so that it will show up here.
The SharePoint End User Training Kit - As I've mentioned before in this blog, Microsoft has created a free SharePoint end user-oriented training kit for use within SharePoint based on the SharePoint Learning Kit. It may not be a comprehensive training option for your users, but it's a good starting place and you can't beat its price: free.

So what do you think? Have you found any other good End User SharePoint resources out there worth sharing?

Surprising (at Least to Me) Place to Find SharePoint Videos

ferringer — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 19:55:00 GMT

Youtube. Yep, that's right. A coworker of mine sent me a link today to a funny SharePoint video hosted at Youtube, and I couldn't help but notice the number of other similar videos that were being displayed in the Related Videos section. And rather than humorous, they looked pretty useful.

So I did a quick search and found over 150 videos currently on Youtube related to SharePoint. Granted, not all of those are probably on topic, but still! On a site I think of as a source for horrendous car wrecks, Chad Vader, and other viral videos, there are actually a surprising number of videos and screencasts available on some pretty interesting SharePoint topics like:

I definitely encourage you to check it out for yourself; you may find something worth your time. I know there are several other excellent sources out there for SharePoint video content, but it's hard to argue with Youtube ease of use and wide reach. Here's the link to the initial search I ran: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Sharepoint

And here's the linke for that funny video, if you need a laugh: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P9QlojtrWs

If You Use Google Reader...

ferringer — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 15:21:00 GMT

For the last six months or so I've been using Google Reader to collect and read my RSS news feeds, and they've recently rolled out a new feature that I think is pretty interesting. You can now add friends through Gmail and gTalk, and allow those friends to see your shared items within Google Reader, as well as see the items shared by those friends. I've added a couple of friends so far, and like what I see. And as a self-professed information junkie, I'm always on the lookout for new nuggets of information. If you want to find out more about friends in Google Reader, I would recommend checking out the Google Reader blog:

http://googlereader.blogspot.com/

And if you are using Google Reader and would like to add me as a friend, send me an invitation (ferringer -- at -- gmail -- dot -- com).

As a final note, you should be aware that there are some privacy concerns around the Friends function in Reader. The following links detail the problems people have with it, as well as how you can configure Reader to address some of these concerns:

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9838017-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
http://searchengineland.com/071227-085442.php

If You Build it, Will They Come?

ferringer — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 19:11:00 GMT

My wife got a new cell phone last night, a Palm Centro. It's her first PDA, and definitely the most advanced handset she's ever had. Not that my wife is a total Luddite or anything, she's just not...as entranced by technology and gadgets as I am; basically I'm a geek and she isn't.

But I was struck by how much she was enjoying the experience of taking her shiny new phone out of the box, turning it on, and playing with it. Heck, I think she enjoyed manually copying her contacts from her old phone to her new one (at least the first 10 or so...). I bet she also noticed me enviously watching her out of the corner of my eye, and if she did I'm sure she enjoyed that . I found myself thinking about how I love it when I get a new toy like that, whether its a new laptop, a new piece of software (here I come Visual Studio 2008!), or even a new BBQ recipe (don't get me started).

Here's the interesting thing: all too often when I get a new toy, I'm surprised by how soon the allure and appeal of it wears off on me. All too often I get tired of the item, and either start taking it for granted or stop using it all together. I would say that the only non-work new shiny item I've gotten in a while that has continued to hold my attention and keep being used is my iPod. This doesn’t really surprise me, because it is an incredibly well-engineered item and I find it very useful and engaging. I can always put new music or podcasts (90% of what I listen to now is podcasts) on it, and even though it’s an old 20GB model, it still works like a charm and is easy to use

I know, I know. What's this got to do with SharePoint? Well, to me this is important because your SharePoint sites mean nothing if they're not being used. Sure, once you install it and send out an announcement to your users that it’s open for business you'll have a nice number of logins because people are curious and want to see the new shiny site. But what happens after that?

It's important to not just think about how you're going to implement this new powerful tool, but also about how you want your audience to use it and how you will motivate them to do so. What compelling reasons do your users to not only view your SharePoint site, but use it and continue to use it? What information will you keep in your environment that your users can not find in any other location? What behaviors or activities will your encourage or require? What tools will you make available in SharePoint that will keep users coming back to use them time and time again?

Some of what you'll be fighting is engrained behavior. For example, one of SharePoint's best features is its ability to foster document hosting and collaboration. It allows you to store a document in a single central location and let multiple access it, rather than sending individual copies to each member of your audience. But the problem is that most users are too used to sending a document out via email, rather than distributing a link to it. Believe me; I'm as guilty of this as the next person.

So as you roll out your new SharePoint environment (or any new platform, application, or service for that matter), don't count on the fact that your users will use it simply because it's the new kid on the block. While my wife loves her brand new toy in her favorite color (red), that she can put dates in, store reminders, and play games with it, she's going to keep using it because it’s a cell phone and she can't live without one of those anymore.

What aspect of your SharePoint farm will your users be unable to live without?

Sharing Links: SharePoint Service Pack 1

ferringer — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 21:22:00 GMT

Thought I'd get up a quick post with some links to articles and postings I've seen this week about the new WSS v3 and MOSS 2007 Service Pack 1 releases. From what I'm seeing, it looks like there's some good, some bad, right now.

The Good:

Chris Johnson's blog not only has links to downloads for the service packs, but also to the Fixlists for each pack. Definitely a good thing to read: http://blogs.msdn.com/cjohnson/archive/2007/12/12/microsoft-office-system-servers-service-pack-1-is-out.aspx
Shane Young has a great step by step rundown on how to apply the patches. Consider this a must read: http://msmvps.com/blogs/shane/archive/2007/12/14/how-to-install-wss-and-moss-sp1.aspx
Rich Finn is a WSS/MOSS success story : http://blog.richfinn.net/2007/12/13/WSS3MOSSServicePack1AppliedSuccessfully.aspx

The Bad (mostly MSDN forum postings):

I'll try to post more as I find them. Definitely check out the MSDN postings; although people are having problems, they are getting solutions from the community in some instances.

Free SharePoint eLearning classes available from Microsoft

ferringer — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 15:05:00 GMT

Please note that these classes are not completely targeted at SharePoint end users, but if you're at all curious about how to get started building your own custom web parts or applications using SharePoint these are worth taking a look at. My experience with these courses in the past is that they are a good way to introduce you to some of the tools and concepts involved in SharePoint development. You shouldn't expect to be a fully proficient developer after completing the courses, but you'll have your feet wet and you can't beat the price.

One thing I've noticed with the SharePoint end user experience is that once people get comfortable in the environment, their thoughts often turn to how they can customize their sites and tune them to meet their specific needs. That often leads to some gnashing of teeth when they come up against limitations of the platform out of the box. The great thing about the latest versions of SharePoint is that its much easier to develop against, but the learning curve is still pretty steep.

If you're an experienced SharePoint developer, I highly doubt there's going to be any great revelations for you in this training. However, if you're a new or novice developer, definitely check them out.

With Great Power: Beware the New Shiny Precious

ferringer — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 02:38:00 GMT

If you're like me and read over 100 SharePoint blog posts a day (and I hope you're not, because you need to get a life!), you're probably aware that Microsoft has released service packs for WSS v3, MOSS 2007, and Office 2007. So I'm not going to go through the motions of posting links to the download pages for those files, or run through the list of what's included in these updates. That's been done quite well by far more competent bloggers before me.

If you don't know what a service pack is, here's a quick summary. Since the latest versions of Office and SharePoint were released last year, Microsoft has been publishing patches and updates to the platform. These updates are intended to fix bugs, patch security holes, and correct functional errors that have been found post-release in SharePoint, and they are a very normal part of the process for commercial software. If you have Windows Update enabled on your workstation, you've seen Windows download similar patches and updates for the programs installed on your computer. At intervals throughout a product's life cycle, Microsoft releases service packs as a way to roll all of those updates up into one package, to catch up anyone who might have not applied any of those smaller updates. Often, new functionality is often included in the service pack, as an additional incentive to apply the update, such as the Security Center functionality included in Windows XP Service Pack 2. So in this round of SharePoint service packs we have the addition of AJAX compatibility as an example of new functionality.

So service packs are a good thing, right? I should have my SharePoint admin rush right out, download them, and slap them on my production SharePoint farms, right? Nope!

With the great power of these service packs, comes great responsibility. Don't rush into implementing these services packs. Definitely plan on installing them, but not until you've fully tested and evaluated them in a testing environment. These things make big and often irreversible changes to your SharePoint servers. They not only change your file systems and the application files on your server used to run SharePoint, but they also change your SharePoint configuration and content databases. And they change the way SharePoint functions.

So when you decide you want to take a look at these service packs, I would recommend the following steps:

Find out what's in the service packs. Understand what's being updated, and what's being added. Look for things that may impact customizations or modifications you've made to your SharePoint farm. Look for things that you'll want to test. Look for things that aren't being updated, so you can confirm that they still work as expected. I recommend starting at the Microsoft SharePoint team's blog, but don't limit yourself to only Microsoft sources.
See what people are saying about the service packs. Look for blog posts about the special tricks that people had to use to get the service packs installed in their environment. Check the forums at SharePointU.com and the SharePoint forums at MSDN to see if anyone is posting questions or issues about the service packs. Don't make the same mistakes that other people are making.
Download the service packs.
If you don't have one already, set up a test environment that replicates your production SharePoint farm. Virtualization is very helpful here, because you can rollback your servers if you want to try the process again. Examine your production farm and determine what you want to test. If you have any system or integration tests available from when you initially implemented SharePoint, re-run them against the service packs. If you've customized your SharePoint farm in any way, test those updates to confirm that your custom code still works.
Once you finished testing and are confident that you are ready for primetime, start backing up your production environment. Back up your SharePoint servers and your SQL servers. If you haven't tested your back up and recovery process, you should do so before you apply the service packs! Trust me, you don't want your first restore to also be the first test of your process.
(NOTE: this tip is more for Admins) Do not apply the service packs to more than one SharePoint server in your farm at the same time. I learned this one the hard way. SharePoint updates (service packs included) often make changes to columns and tables in the back-end SQL databases. Running a patch like that on more than one SharePoint server at the same time can cause concurrency issues and get your database way out of sync.
After you've applied the service packs, test your production environment to make sure that everything is good to go.

Your process may have a few more steps, depending on how your environment looks and what sort of processes you have in place for patching and updates. But if you don't have a process, please definitely take a look at my suggestions above; while it may add some time to your roll out of the new SharePoint service packs, I can promise you that it will definitely increase your chances for success.