Mart Muller_s Sharepoint Weblog

The Microsoft Best Practices Analyzer for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and the 2007 Microsoft Office System Best Practices Analyzer programmatically collects settings and values from data repositories such as MS SQL, registry, metabase and performance monitor. Once collected, a set of comprehensive ‘best practice’ rules are applied to the topology.

Administrators running this tool will get a detailed report listing the recommendations that can be made to the environment to achieve greater performance, scalability and uptime.

Download here

Check out the licence pricing model for MOSS 2007 (finally). These are the US prices, but it gives a good impression.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/FX102176831033.aspx

¹To be licensed for the Enterprise Edition functionality of Office SharePoint Server 2007, both the Standard and Enterprise client access licenses are required.

Sometimes I get questions about how much time it takes to crawl a document. Joel posted an article about the crawl time factors in SharePoint, which can help you estimate this.

"So in a nutshell what are some broad estimates?

• If it’s 10s to hundreds of MBs – measure it in minutes
• If it’s 10s to hundreds of GBs – measure it in hours
• If it’s 1-10TB+ - measure it in days to a week
• 10-100TB – measure it in weeks"

Interesting figures especially when you want to set op the indexing schedules.

For the Dutch readers of my blog, I will do a session during the Software Developer Event (SDE) in March. The title of the session is "ECM in MOSS 2007: Site Columns en Content Types" and will be part of the VB track.

The whole day will be about "Office Stuff", so a good reason to attend ;)

Also mention some of the Information worker session (in collaboration with DIWUG) which will be interesting:

• MOSS 2007 & features - Dirk Zekveld & Mirjam van Olst
• MOSS 2007 & Word 2007 - Rolf Eleveld & Marianne van Wanrooij

See the (almost) complete agenda here

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

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.

Today I was thrilled to hear that my blog (yes, this one) is nominated for the Dutch Bloggies 2007 in the category "best corporate weblog"!

Let the voting begin! :)

Like a while ago for WSS 2.0, Microsoft released application templates for WSS 3.0 also. Download them all here or separately:

• Board of Directors
• Business Performance Reporting
• Case Management for Government Agencies
• Classroom Management
• Clinical Trial Initiation and Management
• Competitive Analysis Site
• Discussion Database
• Disputed Invoice Management
• Employee Activities Site
• Employee Self-Service Benefits
• Employee Training Scheduling and Materials
• Equity Research
• Integrated Marketing Campaign Tracking
• Manufacturing Process Management
• New Store Opening
• Product and Marketing Requirements Planning
• Request for Proposal
• Sports League
• Team Work Site
• Timecard Management

Via Mark, I ran into an article of Daniel Larson talking about the SharePoint Ajax toolkit on codeplex.

"So now that ASP.NET AJAX has hit the RTM, a lot of SharePoint developers are looking at using Atlas in SharePoint. Officially though, it"s not supported in WSS or MOSS. But that doesn"t mean you shouldn"t use it, there are just Atlas components that you should realize are NOT compatible with WSS.

But there *ARE* ASP.NET AJAX technologies that are compatible and that you should use. So here is my guidelines on using Atlas within WSS or MOSS. I"ve probably said this before, so this may be redundant, but wanted to lay out some guidelines now that everything has hit RTM. "

..

"The SharePoint Ajax Toolkit is available now in source code as well as the WSP solution package. I forgot to check in this morning when I built the release, so if you grabbed source this morning the code won"t run against the RTM Atlas build (although the WSP will, that is the latest available.) Be sure to grab change set 16960 or newer.  

Source code: http://www.codeplex.com/sharepointajax/SourceControl/ListDownloadableCommits.aspx

Releases: http://www.codeplex.com/sharepointajax/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx"

read more here

Heather has done some great work again when it comes to CSS and SharePoint (V3). Check out her reference chart for the classes and property overview.

"The following CSS reference guide highlights the major styles used in MOSS and WSS v3 sites. The guide is organized by area of the page and include the style name, function, CSS file name and approximate line number and a sample screenshot of the style location on the screen. Use these guides to identify styles that can be overridden for your custom branding and installation or to quickly reference style name and CSS information for customization."