From Ted Pattison:

I’m thrilled to announce the first course that focuses specifically on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 Web Content Management (WCM). That’s right… no general Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) v3 development topics, minimal admin topics, no other MOSS 2007 topics (Excel Services, BDC, Search, etc)… just four days of 100% WCM for developers! Roll up your sleeves, open Visual Studio 2005 & SharePoint Designer 2007, and great ready to sling some Publishing sites out!

I’m delivering this four-day, hands-on, developer focused course through the Ted Pattison Group starting in early July 2007. The course includes twelve (12) modules and assumes that the student has some developer knowledge of WSS v3… but those new to SharePoint are also welcome. What will you get in four days? The course will cover roughly three modules per day:

Schedule of Lectures

1. WSS Development Primer
2. Web Content Management Architecture
3. Authentication & Authorization
4. Master Pages & Navigation
5. Creating Custom Page Layouts
6. Extending the Out-Of-The-Box Authoring Experience
7. Leveraging WCM Web Parts
8. Custom Field Types & Controls
9. Performance Tuning Publishing Sites
10. Creating Custom Workflow
11. Content Deployment
12. Variations

WSS Development Primer

• Overview of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS)
• WSS Capabilities
• Working with Visual Studio 2005 and the WSS object model
• Working with WSS features & the WSS solution package framework

Web Content Management Architecture

• Overview of MOSS 2007: added value on top of WSS
• Overview of Web Content Management (WCM) and Publishing sites
• Creating Publishing sites
• Working with the Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing namespace

Authentication & Authorization

• Additional SharePoint groups and permission levels in MOSS Publishing sites
• Managing permissions
• Pluggable authentication
• Alternative Access Mappings & Zones
• Utilizing multiple authentication models

Master Pages & Navigation

• Creating & editing master pages using Office SharePoint Designer 2007
• Implications of customized & uncustomized master pages (unghosted & ghosted)
• Managing & deploying Master Pages using the structured development approach
• Navigation provider model and SharePoint’s site map data sources
• Customizing the out-of-the-box navigation controls and site map data sources

Creating Custom Page Layouts

• Creating & editing page layouts using Office SharePoint Designer 2007
• Adding and editing field controls and Web Part zones on Page Layouts
• Managing & deploying page layouts using the structured development approach
• Incorporating 3rd party components (including your custom components)

Extending the Out-Of-The-Box Authoring Experience

• Customizing and extending the SharePoint Rich HTML Editor
• Incorporating the telerik r.a.d.editor for Office SharePoint 2007
• Effectively using the edit mode panel
• Customizing and extending the Page Editing Toolbar

Leveraging WCM Web Parts

• Implementing the Table of Contents Web Part
• Implementing the Summary Links Web Part
• Implementing the Content Query Web Part
• Customizing the rendered output of Publishing Web Parts
• Creating and deploying custom Web Parts

Custom Field Types & Field Controls

• Creating custom field types
• Creating custom field controls
• Incorporating custom field controls and types into page layouts
• Deploying custom field types and field controls

Performance Tuning Publishing Sites

• Overview of MOSS WCM performance enhancements
• Implementing and customizing page output caching
• Implementing and customizing disk-based object caching
• Performance techniques when working with the object model

Creating Custom Workflows

• Creating & editing workflows using Office SharePoint Designer 2007
• Creating template sequential and state machine workflows using Visual Studio 2005
• Integrating Office InfoPath 2007 forms into Visual Studio 2005 authored workflows
• Deploying workflows created using Visual Studio 2005

Content Deployment

• Overview of MOSS content deployment
• Publishing content from one environment to another
• Configuring Content Deployment via the browser-based user interface
• Working with Content Deployment using the SharePoint object model

Variations

• Overview of Web Content Management multilingual enhancements and capabilities
• Implementing variations and labels
• Using variations to implement multilingual and multidevice sites

This course is available in both as an open enrollment offering as well as private engagements. The first date the course will be offered is July 9-12 in Tampa, FL. For more information on scheduling, dates offered, and registration, please refer to the official course page & schedule page.

SharePoint 2007 Flash Animation Web Part – The Code Project – SharePoint Server

A while ago JSJR did a cool demo of integrating Flash with lists in WSS3.0. Getting the SWF to load was a pain, so here’s a Flash Web Part instead:

Here’s a description of howto create template for pretty printing contents from a list in Sharepoint. This is highly recommended reading:

Easily print SharePoint lists using your own template

And there’s an online demonstration of the functionality.

With the different authentication provider support for MOSS, there are more and more free applications that will provide user management tools integrated in the SharePoint environment.

One very good example is the Forms Based User Administration Feature, which can be downloaded from codeplex.

Featurelist:

• The Feature includes an Administrator web part to view/edit/delete and add users to the data store by an administrator.
• Self registration page for users to request access to the site.
• New functionality for self registration
• Password retrieval via email
• CAPTCHA validation on self registration
• UI Enhancements

Forms Based User Administration Feature Release Beta 1.0
Mart Muller
Tue, 06 Feb 2007 12:26:14 GMT

It seems like they have released a professional and developer version of the BDC metadata manager for MOSS 2007! Great work!

“BDC Meta Man makes generating Application Definitions easy due to the many features it offers.

• Easy to use Windows application
• Ability to connect to and browse multiple data sources
• No need to know how to write XML or SQL
• Integrated Shared Service Provider Administration Web Site
• Inspect your application definition and edit any part of it
• Saves enormous amounts of time and effort”

For a full overview of features per version, check out this document.

BDC Meta Manager Professional and Developer released
Mart Muller
Tue, 06 Feb 2007 12:16:28 GMT

Via Lars Fastrup, I ran into the SharePoint Solution Installer for SharePoint 2007.

The SharePoint Solution Installer includes the following features:

• Support for all relevant operations:
  • Add solution to the SharePoint solution store.
  • Deploy solution to one or more web applications.
  • Upgrade solution.
  • Retract and remove solution.
• Pre-install system check for the following conditions:
  • WSS V3 is installed.
  • MOSS 2007 is installed (This check can be disabled in config file),
  • User has permission to install solutions.
  • SharePoint database is online.
  • WSS Administration service is started.
  • WSS Timer service is started.
• Implements a work around for the following error conditions:
  • Another solution deployment job never finished and is now blocking for the creation of a new job. Work-around: Delete old job from the list of Timer job defnitions.
  • Timer service is not started: An attempt is made to start it (please note that timer services on other front ends will not be started).
  • Database is offline, which will yield an ugly NullreferenceException from SharePoint offering little clue to the root cause of the problem. Work around: Detect NullreferenceException and display nice error message.
• Display EULA. (Can be disabled in config file). 
• Web application list where user can select the web apps. to deploy the solution to.
• Rollback after installation errors.
• Configurable Product Title.
• Configurable banner image.
• Configurable logo image.

SharePoint Solution Installer
Mart Muller
Mon, 26 Mar 2007 14:39:43 GMT

SharePoint Solutions Software has released ‘Extranet Collaboration Manager’ for SharePOint 2007, a product for administrating extranet users in SharePoint. They have two versions:

ExCM – Standard Edition provides you with a suite of tools to Simplify SharePoint 2007 extranet user access and management. See the ExCM product page for more details.

ExCM – Enterprise Edition allows your users to submit a request when he or she would like to have a new SharePoint 2007 site provisioned. You can easily associate custom workflows with the new site requests, asking for approval prior to site creation. Once a site request is approved, ExCM – EE will automatically provision the site for you using any SharePoint 2007 site definition you have specified.”

Extranet Collaboration Manager by SharePoint Solutions is a complete solution that will:

• Simplify the provisioning and maintenance of external resources for use with your business partners
• Enable you to automate site provisioning requests through workflows
• Delegate user management tasks to your business partners
• Provide you with the capability to audit the provisioning and user maintenance activities within your collaborative environment.

Extranet Collaboration Manager for SharePoint 2007
Mart Muller
Fri, 23 Feb 2007 07:31:23 GMT

Via Tom Short :

“To help with all the MOSS Architecture diagrams I do, I have put together this fancy  Visio stencil for MOSS architecture diagrams . The Visio stencil includes the following shapes.

Thanks to Colin B for his Graphics handy work and Matt Groves for making the files available online.”

MOSS Architecture Diagrams – Visio Server Stencils
Mart Muller
Tue, 27 Mar 2007 06:33:41 GMT

Just found the Dubbelbock tool.

It implements a feature, that tools like Subversion offers today and we dind’t have. The possibility to do all source control action just right away out of the Windows Explorer. This means CheckOut, CheckIn, Version compare… is available from Windows Explorer Right Click menu. Excactly this features are now also available for TFS:

In the picture above you can see the whole functionality and it is really super easy to use. Commands like CheckIn use normal Dialogs with all TFS funcionality.

Administration, Operations & Setup

• Share Point 2007 support
• Enable use of Sharepoint on any server and any port
• Support for MOSS 2007
• Enable support for Reporting Services on any server and any port (new) (RTM)
• Support for SQL Named Instances – This will allow customers to share a SQL server between multiple TFS instances, or with other applications.  This has been a commonly requested feature by enterprises.
• “Longhorn” server support – TFS will support the next version of the server (and corresponding new version of IIS) that is currently under development.
• Sync Large Groups – This is a set of work to improve the performance and robustness of TFS’s handling large groups of users (~30,000 or more) granted permission to a TFS instance.  Today this can result in a support call to recover from it.
• Non-default ports – We’ve gotten a bunch of feedback from enterprise customers about TFS’s limited support for alternate web sites and ports running afoul of data center policies.  We are going to be improving TFS’s configurability in this respect in Orcas.
• Simplify installation – In Orcas, we will be doing a variety of things to attempt to make installing TFS easier and quicker than it is now.  Improvements include eliminating the separate data-tier installation, simplifying the requirements around required domain accounts by supporting the built in machine accounts (like Network Service) where we can, etc.
• Official testing and support for more configurations – This includes clustering, mirroring, log shipping, Virtual machine deployment, and more.
• Support for client certificates
• Upgrade from TFS 2005
• Support for SQL 2008 (aka Katmai) (new) (RTM)
• TFSDeleteProject now permanently deletes (destroys) version control content (new) (RTM)
• New role for many operations activities (new) (RTM) – You don’t have to be server administrator to run many of the admin utilities any longer.
• Enhancements to tfsadminutil (new) (RTM) – New capability to configure accounts, connections, etc on both TFS and the TFS proxy.

Build (more detail)

• Support multi-threaded builds with the new MSBuild.
• Continuous Integration – There are many components to this, including build queuing and queue management, drop management (so that users can set policies for when builds should be automatically deleted), and build triggers that allows configuration of exactly how when CI builds should be triggered, for example – every checkin, rolling build (completion of one build starts the next), etc.
• Improved ability to specify what source, versions of source, and other build properties.
• Improved extensibility of the build targets – such as ability to easily execute targets before and after each solution/project is built.
• Improved ability to manage multiple build machines.
• Stop and delete builds from within VS.
• .NET Object model for programming against the build server.
• Simplified ability to specify what tests get run as part of a build.
• The ability to store build definitions anywhere in the version control hierarchy.
• Scheduled builds – You can schedule builds to happen at specified times.
• Improved build agent communication – We replaced .NET binary remoting with WCF web services, simplifying some configuration and security aspects.
• Ability to run GUI tests as part of a build – Automated builds used to run tests in such a way as to prevent access to a GUI desktop.
• New checkin policy for broken CI builds – Preventing checkin while the CI build is broken.
• Support for HTTPS communication to the TFS server (new)
• Continuous Integration build checkin policy (new)
• Support for incremental gets and builds (new)

Data Warehouse

• Add support for checkin policy overrides to the warehouse – an oversight from V1.

Migration

• Migration toolkit – A toolkit for building conversion and mirroring solutions between TFS and other systems.  In addition, we will release one or more new tools to integrate with popular alternative systems. 

Version Control

• Annotate – This is based on the TFS Annotate Power Tool but includes numerous improvements.
• Folder Diff – Also based on the TFS Tree Diff Power Tool with numerous improvements.
• Destroy – The ability to permanently delete version control files/folders from TFS.  It can also be used to destroy the file contents while preserving the change set history.
• Get Latest On Checkout – There have been many requests for this feature (which was a change in behavior from SourceSafe).  There is now an option that allows you to specify that you want TFS to download the latest version of files when you check them out.
• Workspace improvements – Workspaces will now support mapping a folder or file under a cloaked folder and wildcard mappings so that you can map all files in a folder without mapping sub folders.  Based on experience with large projects, this will simplify workspace definitions for many people.
• Performance improvements – A variety of Version Control performance enhancements that will improve virtually all aspects of version control performance.  The gains for smaller servers/projects (< 10,000 files) will be modest.  The gains for larger projects (particularly where the file count approaches 100,000’s) will be substantial.
• Scale improvements – Fixed out of memory problems on the server when operating on more than a few hundred thousand files at a time.
• Offline improvements – We’ve signficantly improved the experience going offline and integrated the tfpt online capability into the IDE for going back online.
• Extranet support for the TFS Proxy – allowing you to access a local TFS proxy with a different set of credentials than the TFS server.
• Command line help – You can now type “tf command /help” and get a console dump of the usage of that command.  This is much more convenient than always being launched into the richer GUI hypertext help when you just want to remember what the options for a command are.  You can still launch the GUI help by running “tf msdn”.  You can get a console dump of available commands by just typing “tf help”.
• Source Control Explorer refresh improvements – This includes less redrawing and reloading but even more important it enables updates based on changes made in other instances of TeamExploror or the command line.  That’s right, if you checkout a file from the command line, any instances of TeamExplorer you have running on the same machine will automatically refresh.
• Async loading of the Source Control Explorer (new)
• The SCE local path can now be selected and copied (new)
• Merge improvements (new) – Improved the logic that detects merge conflicts to generate fewer false positives and handle more scenarios.

Work Item Tracking

• Performance & Scale improvements – A variety of improvements that will make both the work item server and client faster and able to handle larger servers.
• Query builder usability improvements – Drop down filtering based on current project, better MRU lists, column drag & drop, shift-click mouse based multi-column sorting, etc.
• Attachments improvements – Save button, drag & drop for adding an attachment, multi-select for attaching files.
• Tooltips on field names contain the field name used for querying
• Server side support for deleting work items & work item types – We didn’t have time to do client UI support for it but we plan to release a Power Tool that will take advantage of the new server side feature.
• Support for security on the iteration hierarchy (new)

Web Access

• Adding Web Access UI to TFS – As you’ve seen many places, we acquired devBiz and their TeamPlain Web Access product.  We are releasing it as a Power Tool in the next few months and plan to release it as an official product in the Orcas timeframe.  We have not figured out how the release date will line up with the Orcas date but it will be in the same general timeframe.

Bug fixes

• In addition to all of the feature work, we’ve spent months testing the product and fixing any bugs we’ve found.  We expect Orcas will have even better stability and robustness than TFS 2005.

Compatibility (no change since last time)

As Orcas is an adoption focused release, we have put a lot of emphasis on compatibility with VS2005.  We are striving for near 100% compatibility.  The Orcas client will be able to work with a VS2005 server and a VS2005 client will be able to work with an Orcas server.  There are only a few compatibility issues.

• Client side VS add-ins will need to be recompiled (or have policy changed) because the TFS OM assembly versions will change and add-ins will need to bind to the new assemblies.  The APIs themselves are generally not changing, so we don’t expect much in the way of code changes – just recompilation.
• Build is the only area where we plan to have some compatibility disconnects.  In general, most build operations – listing build definitions, starting and stopping builds, examining build reports, etc. will work both with 2005 client -> Orcas server and Orcas client -> 2005 server.  However, here are a few caveats:

1. An Orcas TFS server will only work with an Orcas build server – so you’ll need to upgrade your build server when you upgrade your TFS server.
2. For an VS2005 client to start a build on an Orcas server, the build definition needs to be stored at $/<TeamProject>/TeamBuildTypes/<name>.  In Orcas, you have more flexibility as to where to put them.
3. Changes made to properties in the .proj file that are in the database in Orcas will not be updated in the database and will no longer be in sync.
4. VS2005 will be able to start a build, but it can’t queue a build, see the list of builds in the queue, see the list of build agents, etc.
5. An Orcas client will not be able to create a new build definition on a TFS2005 server.
6. When starting a build, an Orcas client will not be able to change any parameters in the dialog for a TFS2005 Server.