RSS feed can be found on http://feeds.feedburner.com/sharepointology, please update your bookmarks, feedreaders, …

• 78 Sharepoint Portal Interview Questions.
• EndUserSharePoint.com posted some great Resources for Calculated Columns.
• SharePoint offers a robust and scalable content management framework and collaboration toolset with support for structured workflows. Groove, in contrast, is a collaboration toolset that allows rapid workspace deployment with little or no IT overhead. Create Powerful Connections with Groove and SharePoint.
• Microsoft made a new resource center where you can find:
  • Planning and how-to content for backup and recovery.
  • Pointers on how to use versioning and the recycle bins.
  • Content describing how to use System Center Data Protection Manager to protect Office SharePoint Server.
  • Availability content, including a great white paper and case study on using database mirroring in a single farm.
• Jopx compiled some email discussion with other MVPs about user adoption.
• A tribute to the humble “leave form” - Part 3.
• SQL Server 2008 is now released and is/should be supported soon by WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 RTM. Upgrade from 2005 to 2008 is a pretty simple process. Here are some things to be aware of when using Upgrade Advisor.
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (In.NET Frameworkstaller) and Microsoft  3.5 Service Pack 1 are released.
• Use SharePoint Designer to Email Daily Task Reminders

• Daniel Leiszen is the lead developer of LINQ4SP project. He started to write a developer series about LINQ4SP. LINQ4SP - Query Evaluation.
• Dan Neff, President of Aquent‘s IT Solutions group, is pretty straightforward about it: “SharePoint is the most installed piece of software in the whole world that’s not being used properly…people don’t really understand what they’ve got.” What Is YOUR Firm’s SharePoint Balance?
• Pragmatism and Mary-Jo Foley on SharePoint: New studies highlight the potential downsides of SharePoint.
• Branding SharePoint is not an easy task, although the assistance of tools does help ease and allow us Designers to produce beautiful solutions.
• Colligo Contributor version 3.1 has just been released. The big news in this release is more advanced support for metadata, which is particularly useful for using SharePoint in ECM applications.

• Paul Grenier has written a set of articles for EndUserSharePoint.com on performance management, The Road To Performance Management. The first article, Part 1, lays the ground work using a series of “Why” questions to setup the context for SharePoint. The section included here walks through Paul’s diagram of a SharePoint site collection hierarchy to use for Performance Management.
• In order for a web application to exist in today’s business environment, it must stand up to modern day information security standards. The purpose of this blogpost on sharepointmagazine.net is to explore the security model of MOSS and to explain how it is equipped to meet corporate security requirements.
• Why does RunWithElevatedPriviliges not work in Event Handlers?
• A new version of WSPBuilder Extensions 1.0.3 for Visual Studio has been released on codeplex.
• Steven Barden wrote a second part of his article about Developing and Deploying a SharePoint Feature. First part can be read here.
• New studies highlight the potential downsides of SharePoint.

• In this post Alex describes how to create a custom SharePoint Event Receiver using the Visual Studio Extensions for SharePoint Services.
• In this post Tony Bierman[MVP WSS] illustrates how to programmatically add sub menus to the Site Actions menu. This post has an accompanying Visual Studio 2008 solution containing all source code for the Quick Site Settings Feature as discussed below.
• Upcoming conferences with plenty of SharePoint oriented content.
• Zac Smith posts a quick script for updating all ‘Pages’ libraries to have approval turned on.
• Integrating Project Server 2007 and Team Foundation Server 2008 Sharepoint Sites - (Neil van Wyngaard).
• Windows 2008 Single Development Machine environment - A quick tip.
• Tagged Links version 1.0 released: It’s social bookmarking for SharePoint, taking the standard “Links List” to a new level via browser integration, one-click tagging, advanced graphical views and global tags that allow you to define tags across an entire site collection. Take a look at the new “Walkthrough”.
• Learn how to design a workflow that runs when a specific field changes. In this example, when the Document Owner field changes, the workflow sends the new document owner a notification that contains the status of any workflows running on that document.

• Microsoft has recently released an update to the Central Administration site that makes it easy to move a Site Collection between different Content Databases. The Batch Site Manager can be very handy if you need to break up your content across multiple Content Databases – possibly sitting on different SQL Servers. The same tool also allows you to lock and delete site collections.
• In a previous article in the Exploiting or Being Exploited By SharePoint Search series, the author discussed how to create a simple Search Center that will allow you to search your team site for information. He has also discussed managed properties and scopes in previous articles. It is now time to put all of those resources together to build a more complex search center that can be used to search multiple team sites housed in their own site collections.
• E-mails and attachments contain a lot of critical project information, so it’s natural to want to store e-mails along with other documents in SharePoint document libraries.
• The Microsoft Best Practices Analyzer for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and the 2007 Microsoft Office System creates detailed reports to help administrators achieve greater performance, scalability, and uptime.
• How to: Query Search using the Web Service by Corey Roth.

• Which Microsoft search product is for you? Microsoft currently offers three distinct enterprise search solutions:

  • Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express (MSS Express)

  • Microsoft Search Server 2008 (MSS)
  • Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS)
• This morning Microsoft released three new important updates that affect SharePoint Server 2007, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Project Server 2007, Search Server 2008, Search Server 2008 Express and Project Professional 2007. Read about it on the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog.
• Microsoft SharePoint on the iPhone.
• Paul Culmsee wrote the first part of an article in sharepointmagazine.net about creating a Leave Form in SharePoint.

• The BDC is essentially a catalog of business applications that are of interest to SharePoint Server 2007 users, and it bridges the gap between the portal and business applications by bringing in key data from various applications to SharePoint sites, lists, search, and user profiles. MOSS 2007 BDC Definition Editor gotchas.
• Developing Web Parts, considerations on Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies. Web Parts as defined by MSDN are an integrated set of controls for creating Web sites that enable end-users to modify the content, appearance, and behavior of Web pages in a browser.
• Office SharePoint Server Web browser support (white paper): This downloadable white paper includes detailed information about how many Web browsers work with various features in SharePoint sites. It also offers workarounds and other tips for handling browser differences. Some of the browsers covered are Windows Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape Navigator, and Apple Safari.
• This post by Alex describes how you can create your own Custom List and connect your own Content Type to this list and lose the field “Title”.
• Search SharePoint from the Internet Explorer Toolbar Using a Custom Search Provide: Here is an easy way to search a SharePoint site from the IE toolbar without having to develop a custom add-in.
• SPDataSource - every SharePoint developer’s friend (part 1): Sooner or later, nearly every SharePoint developer needs to write code to retrieve all the items from a list and display them - either on the page, or often in a control like a dropdown list control.

Java

• Ludovic Poitou has announced the release of OpenDS 1.0. This is the first stable release of OpenDS, an Open Source LDAP Directory Server written in Java.
• In this article Babita provides a brief overview of JavaServer Faces (JSF), its components, life-cycle, and its advantages over so many frameworks and technologies like JSP, Servlet, Struts, etc.
• Apache Ant Team has released Apache ANT 1.7.1 as a maintenance release with some new features. Ant 1.7.1 is mostly a bug fix release which addresses numerous issues around Ant 1.7.0 released in December 2006.
• Add auto update and plugins to your Java application.
• RMI forms the basis for Java’s own remoting capabilities powering the platform’s domination on servers everywhere. This article attempts to see through all the frameworks, programming models and technology built on top of it, and tries to get to the lower level basics of RMI.

• For those of you attempting to use Content Deployment in MOSS there has been a significant effort on the part of the folks at Microsoft to fix the many, many issues with the feature set.
  • WSS: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952698
  • MOSS: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952704
• Madhur Ahuja describes how to build an RSS Reader Web part which supports ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX 1.0 and makes use of AJAX Control Toolkit to implement multiple RSS readers in Tab Panels.
• Showing Exchange Inbox in MOSS 2007.
• Creating clones of SharePoint VPC images (renaming SharePoint instances).
• This blog post will cover how to delete a content type and how to troubleshoot the most common error, The content type is in use.
• Sometimes it may not be possible to actually receive an alert email on your system, in this blog entry you will find an SQL that shows the alerts that web app currently has queued.

Java

• Referencing Multiple Web Services From An Application Client by Bhakti Mehta.
• This article by Dmitry Bondarenko describes a feature that allows creating applications with translucent and shaped windows.
• While there are indeed several advantages to using GlassFish vs. Tomcat, it’s probably useful to know that Sun is the original creator of Tomcat and that any application running today on Tomcat should run just fine (no modification whatsoever) on GlassFish. Tomcat Today, GlassFish Tomorrow?
• Apache POI 3.1-FINAL: Apache POI is well-known in the Java field as a library for reading and writing OLE2 office file formats, such as Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Word. See http://poi.apache.org.
• Geertjan Wielenga wrote 2 nice articles about programming in Spring RCP, Getting Started with Spring RCP and Getting Further with Spring RCP.
• Have you ever wanted to program a game for mobile phones, but found the introductions provided by SUN, Nokia and other more confusing than enlighting? This course takes you through every single step required to program your own J2ME game.

• User Profile related SharePoint Designer Activities - a solution package that contains the following activities: Get user title, Find manager of the use, Find display name of the use, Find department of the use. Includes the VS 2005 project.
• Jon published a quick how-to on creating a simple bar graph of your data by using CSS and the Data View features of SharePoint Designer 2007.
• Running out of disk space? Check WSS_AdminService.log.

Java

• Eclipse Delivers Its Annual Release Train: The Eclipse Foundation and the entire Eclipse community are pleased to announce the availability of the Ganymede Release, the annual release train developed by the Eclipse community. The Ganymede Release is a coordinated release of 23 different Eclipse project teams that represents over 18 million lines of code. New features in the Platform, New features for Java developers, New APIs in the platform and SWT, New features for plug-in developers.
• The Mylyn team is very pleased to announce today’s release of Mylyn 3.0 along with the Eclipse Ganymede release train. This occasion marks a big step in the evolution of the task-focused interface.
• Through parts 1, 2, and 3 we have discovered JasperReports architecture, declarative file construction, integration with live parameters, and finally working with iReport as designing tool. In Part 4 you can read about using Charts in a report.
• Are you looking to learn what is C# and you already know Java? Then this article is for you.
• ECF version 2.0.0 includes a plugin called DocShare (org.eclipse.ecf.docshare) that implements real-time shared editing.

• A lot of people have been asking how to move their databases to a new server and to do this the way most people are prescribing you’ve got a lot of reading and a lot of steps to perform. Gary Lapointe shows you how to move your database the easy way.
• SharePoint Server 2007 Scalability and Performance whitepaper: it documents the architectural design considerations and performance characteristics of a real-world, large-scale SharePoint lab implementation containing around 50 million content items, and reflects both “scale-up” and “scale-out” scenarios.
• Billy Bear talks about renaming a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 content database.
• EndUserSharePoint.com: Taming the Elusive “Calculated Column” - Customizing a Task List: A good place to start with learning how to work with calculated columns is to start with an existing list and see what additional functionality you can add to give it more “value” (and make it worth using).
• How do I make our SharePoint site stop asking me to login? This was one of the most common user requests Eric Eaton got during his system admin days.
• You have a document library with a required column on it. One of your users is about to leave for vacation and uploads some documents to the library. She is in a rush and forgets to enter the required metadata. The documents remain checked out to her. Unfortunately, no one else can see the documents because they have never been checked in. Even the site owner can’t see the documents. Ricky Spears shows you a way to see new documents checked out to someone else.
• Learn about the steps that are necessary to successfully deliver a workflow into a customer or partner environment using SharePoint Products and Technologies.

Java

• Through the previous articles (Part 1 and Part 2) we’ve covered the Jasper introduction, architecture, environment, and finally we managed to run a sample report. Today, in Part 3, we’re going to work with visual report design tools and enhance our sample application to receive run-time parameters.

• This post explains how to use Visual Studio 2008 & the Visual Studio 2008 Extensions, Version 1.2 to build a very simple 2 page ASP.Net page based application and deploy & run it in SharePoint.
• This paper provides an overview of the content deployment feature in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for the IT pro audience, and describes an end-to-end scenario for how to create and successfully perform a content deployment between two site collections.
• Effective debugging and logging can turn into being a developers best friend and get them out of a bind.
• If you are deploying SharePoint you should take some time and read the following WSS/MOSS Content Deployment article series from Stefan. He covers the WSS/MOSS Content Migration API in depth and what you need to know when moving content between your server farms.
• Jan Tielens just uploaded a new extensions to the SmartTools for SharePoint project on CodePlex. This extension adds Copy and Paste functionality to SharePoint Document Libraries.
• Custom list with Content Type and Site Column implemented with a Lookup field - A Walkthrough.
• Examine the options, process, and benefits of adding support for SharePoint workflows to your application, and for breaking that support into components that clients can use to build their own workflows. (part 1, part 2).
• Web Part for Wildcard Search in Enterprise Search.
• This is a simple application that touches each site and site collection on a Sharepoint or WSS server to rebuild the IIS cache.
• In Central Admin, you can state the numbers of days items are to be retained in the Recycle Bin. The first stage and the second stage (site collection) are both part of the Recycle Bin. Therefore, items in either the first stage or the second stage will be deleted after the number of days set for the web application. However, an additional size limit can be placed on the second stage recycle bin by using a percentage of the site collection quota to limit it.

Java

• JFreeChart 1.0.10 is now available to download from JFree.org. For the latest changes, please see the NEWS file. To see what JFreeChart can do, view the samples page and/or the WebStart demo.
• Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) is a popular choice for exchanging documents over the Internet, but how do you access and present PDF files in your Java applications? Jeff Friesen introduces this month’s Open Source Java Project: a PDF rendering tool that you can easily integrate with your Java applications, SwingLabs PDF Renderer.
• Java Reporting: JasperReports (part 1 / part 2 / part 3).
• Java Registry Wrapper is a free pure java library for performing common windows registry functions.
• It is a general concern that java applications run slower that C and C++ applications. Which this concern is partly true; there are some things that you can do to make your applications faster, Compiler Optimizations, General Optimization Techniques, Variables and Arrays and Methods, Synchronization, Instantiation, Casting, Exceptions and Threads.

• http://mssharepointdeveloper.com/ has 8 new online MSDN Virtual Labs.
• One of the most common document management questions is “how can I get multiple document templates in the ‘new’ drop-down menu of a document library?” this blog will walk you through step-by-step for the entire process.
• Did you know the default autogrow (filegrowth) settings for SQL Server is 1MB at a shot? Here is a sample script that changes the default autogrow.
• Reporting in SharePoint can be very helpful for all types of scenarios, storage growth projection, weekly service reviews, operational tracking for backups / restores and more. Here are a few scripts that Cory Burns has wrote for MOSS 2007 / WSS3.0.
• I’ve built a Feature. What should I give to my SharePoint Farm Admin?
• Recently, one of Adam Toth’s clients had a requirement to filter data on the MySite profile page (person.aspx) based on the user whose profile page you were viewing. It turns out this was quite easy.
• If you’re like most, you don’t install the Office client on your servers. In order for the Index server to have the Office 2007 IFilters, you’ll need to download this filter pack and install it on your Index server.
• Google has hundreds of gadgets that you can be added to any web page. Many of these can be integrated into SharePoint using the Content Editor Web Part or the XML Web Part.

Java

• Office 2007 features enhanced tooltips. In swing you can customize the way tooltips are displayed with a PopupFactory. In this blog post you can learn how to make your own enhanced tooltip.
• Tips and Tricks for JTree, JList and JCombobox. Continuation tips in JTrees and JLists, horizontal scrollbar in a JCombobox and a wider combo box popup are explained.
• Introduction to Java Concurrency / Multithreading.
• Java applications throw “OutOfMemoryError” when the java virtual machine does not have sufficient memory for creating new objects. There are different types of “OutOfMemoryError” that can occur in your java applications.
• One can use the private code of Sun’s Preferences API to access values of type REG_SZ in the Windows Registry.

Version 1.2 of the Visual Studio 2008 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services contains the following tools to aid developers in building SharePoint applications:

Visual Studio 2008 Project Templates

• Web Part
• Team Site Definition
• Blank Site Definition
• List Definition
• Empty SharePoint Project

Visual Studio 2008 Item Templates (items that can be added into an existing project)

• Web Part
• Custom Field
• List Definition (with optional Event Receiver)
• Content Type (with optional Event Receiver
• Module
• List Instance
• List Event Handler
• Template

SharePoint Solution Generator

This stand-alone program generates a Site Definition project from an existing SharePoint site.

You can get everything from this brand new site that just went live: http://www.MsSharePointDeveloper.com.

• This is a list of the post Service Pack 1 hotfix packages for SharePoint 2007.
• Guidance for deploying enterprise Search with MOSS (part 1, part 2 and part 3).
• Karin Bosch released version 3.1.0.0 of her windows version of the U2U Caml Query Builder.
• If you are a developer for SharePoint your best friend has been Virtual PC or VMWare. It’s time to introduce a new friend, Bamboo Nation’s SharePointOnVista. How to install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP1 on Vista x64/x86.
• I’ve built a SharePoint Feature. What should I give to my SharePoint Farm Admin so he can deploy that feature?
• Here is a great post on how to conduct a large scale service-based SharePoint implementation.

Java

• This article provides a high-level overview of the MigLayout Swing/SWT layout manager and provides an example to demonstrate its power.
• As in the last years many of the 2008 JavaOne sessions and hands-on labs are being posted online at SDN so you can catch up with or revisit sessions. They are freely accessible even if without a JavaOne registration.
• This article describes a feature that allows creating applications with translucent and shaped windows.
• How many times have you said “What version is in production?” or “Can we rebuild production to fix a bug and release an update?”. Day-to-day with Subversion.

• Joel’s Top 100 SharePoint Blogs with Technorati, Bloglines, and Google Reader. An even more complete list of over 300 blogs can be found here.
• Alex is getting a lot of questions about how you can easily give users or groups rights to access some particular list without giving them rights to the whole site (SPWeb). Between SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and MOSS 2007 the rights management environment is completly changed.
• One of most underestimated things within placing a SharePoint Portal at a customer is governance. Governance is a set of roles, responsibilities, processes and rules which are defined within the enterprise to guide the enterprise in using the Portal and al its functionality (standard or non-standard).
• Change Top BreadCrumb into a Nice Menu: By default SharePoint comes with global navigation menu at the top left corner of your master page. The limited point of this menu is you can not see everything thru it within entire site collection.
• Anytime your developing something in SharePoint, you’ll get to a point where you load a SharePoint page, and it says “An unknown error has occurred.” or “An unexpected error has occurred.”. There are two things you can do about this. Turn custom errors off, and turn up the verbosity on the logging.

Java

• XML data format can be hard to search, but with the fairly recent introduction of the XQuery API, XML searches are now flexible and easy to perform. For Java™ programmers who work with XML documents using SAX, DOM, JDOM, JAXP, and more, the XQuery API for Java is a welcome addition to the programmer’s toolkit.
• JasperReports: 3.0.0 released - New XLS features and enhanced XML export. JasperReports is a Java reporting library. XML report templates are used to generate ready to print documents using data from customizable data sources, including JDBC. The output can be delivered to the screen, printer, or stored in PDF, HTML, XLS, RTF, CSV, and XML format.
• Learn 10 good XML usage habits, improve your effectiveness and efficiency for working with XML.
• Java SE 6u10-b24 is now available for download. For a list of fixes in b24, please see the summary of changes.

The 2007 Microsoft Office system already provides support for 20 different document formats within Microsoft Office Word, Office Excel and Office PowerPoint. With the release of Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) scheduled for the first half of 2009, the list will grow to include support for XML Paper Specification (XPS), Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.5, PDF/A and Open Document Format (ODF) v1.1.

• More then 17 hours of Free SharePoint Search training online
  • Module 1: Workshop Overview
  • Module 2: Enterprise Search Overview
  • Module 3: SharePoint Search 2007 Walkthrough
  • Module 4: Search Architecture and Deployment Scenarios
  • Module 5: Crawl and Query Processes
  • Module 6: Relevance Ranking
  • Module 7: Customizing the End-User Experience
  • Module 8: Developing Search Solutions
  • Module 9: Business Data Catalog Search
  • Module 10: Extensibility and Integration for Search
  • Module 11: Search Administration
  • Module 12: Security for Search
  • Module 13: Performance Scalability and Capacity Planning for Search
  • Module 14: Search Operations
• Ian Morrish has created a great little resource that provides a list of the STSADM command line arguments grouped by category.
• This is the User Guide, Samples and Walkthroughs for the tools for developing custom SharePoint applications with the Visual Studio 2005 extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, version 1.1 (VSeWSS 1.1).
• Here you can find the schedule for a series of MSDN web casts on 10 introductory SharePoint development topics for .NET developers.

Java

• When it comes to reading Microsoft Office Word document Java does not have any in build classes to handle this but Apache POI Package developed by Apache Foundation gives you the power of reading Microsoft Word document in Java. You can find a nice example here.
• This example demonstrates how to create a user interface that displays a table with frozen columns. Frozen means it is not effected by the horizontal scrolling of the rest of the table.
• Java to get a new WebKit-based browser component.

• A very useful summary of Sharepoint list webservices.
• Security covers a number of topics when it comes to software. Everything from locking down a system to end user security. There is absolutely no doubt that security is extremely important and should be taken seriously.
• How can you identify specific requirements for Search in an Intranet deployment
• A new version of the U2U CAML Query Builder is released today!
• Windows Sharepoint Server (WSS) and Sharepoint Portal Server (SPS) both ship with several built-in themes, giving you the ability to change the look and feel of a site quite dramatically, but what if you want to create your own theme.
• EndUserSharePoint.com: How do I import my calendar into SharePoint?
• Setsitelock: Stsadm operation (Office SharePoint Server): Sets a value that specifies whether the site collection is locked and unavailable for read or write access.
• How to make the calendar webpart width smaller.

• This article describes how you can add an ability to convert DOC to PDF (DOC2PDF) to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) using Aspose.Words and Aspose.Pdf.

Java

• Date manipulation.
• A nice touch in the Java 6 offensive to the desktop is giving Java applications the ability to add icons to the system tray in a pretty consistent way across platforms using the JDIC project.

You can use Content Types to do this. A Content Type is a sort of template for types of documents you store in a library.

We use the Content Type “Link to a Document” to link to a document that could be stored in another document library.

If the document library where you want to use the “Link to a Document” hasn’t been setup to use Content Types, you’ll have to click Settings, Document Library Settings, there you’ll need to access the Advanced Settings.

We need to add a Content Type, but before we can do this we’ll have to tell our Document Library that it can make use of different Content Types. Select “Yes” for the “Allow management of Content Types“.

When you return to the Document Library Settings, you’ll see a new section called Content Types, this is where we’ll add a new Content Type, click “Add from exisiting Content Type“.

The content type we need is “Link to a Document“, add it here.

When you return to your Document Library and click new, you’ll see that you have a new option to choose from, “Link to a Document“.

Let’s make a link to a Document in another Document Library, click “Link to a Document”. You’ll have to enter a name for the Link and enter the path to the Document you want to link to.

After confirming this is what your link looks like.

We made link to a document that’s saved in another document library, whenever you make a change to the master document, you don’t need to worry about the link, it will point to the changed document.