Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog

More and more businesses are realizing that the key to a successful deployment of a portal, collaboration solution, records repository... you name it.  Is a plan.  If fail to plan, you plan to fail.  Not sure who"s quote that is, but it begins to tell this story about not so successful deployments.

To help you succeed we have recently published a specific Governance and Information Architecture page on TechNet to help organize these key materials.

• Information architecture in SharePoint Server 2007 - Scott Case of Interknowlogy, in this case study describes the process by which a fictitious company plans, customizes and deploys an Office SharePoint Server 2007 installation in a large organization.
• SharePoint Products and Technologies customization policy - Sean Livingston, then of MS IT, now the PM for upgrade in WSS for the next version (hint, hint).  He explains his thoughts on supportability of customizations in 3 levels of service, a plan that MS IT uses to manage it"s hosted offerings of SharePoint internally.
• Sample governance plan - Mark Wagner, MCS lays out an easy to fill out enterprise governance plan, including defining governance roles and responsibilities, operations policies, training, and resources.
• SharePoint Server 2007 governance checklist guide - this handy reference guide takes information from Robert Bogues article as well as information from Joel Oleson"s TechEd Governance talk and articles being published on this landing page in the coming weeks.  This is exactly the same as the Governance checklist given out at TechEd.
• Logical architecture model: Corporate deployment - Brenda Carter of the Technical Documentation team for TechNet SharePoint IT Pro, lays out an easy to use, fresh take on "logical architectures" which goes into examples of construction of farms, SSPs, Web Applications, and Site Collections. 
• Governance Workspace - This codeplex workspace on governance focuses on free tools and information sharing in the community.  Two tools, both from MS IT currently are available here.  The MS IT Site Delete capture, and the MS IT Site Life cycle management.  Both designed to help save the IT Pro time and money.

   Social computing is a hot topic these days, and we continue to get a lot of questions about SharePoint"s blog and wiki capabilities in particular. We will have much more to say and announce about SharePoint in the context of social computing soon, but for now, the answers to most of the FAQs can be found in the following white papers and articles:

• Using Blogs and Wikis in Business
• Tips and Tricks - Using Wikis in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
• Tips and Tricks - Using Blogs in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
• Wiki While You Work
• Bringing Web 2.0 to the Enterprise with the 2007 Office System

<Lawrence />

[Cross-posted from Bill Baer"s blog entry.]

I"m pleased to announce the availability of Microsoft IT Team Site Life Cycle Management (MSIT TSLCM) Beta 1.0 for SharePoint Products and Technologies.

Microsoft IT Team Site Life Cycle Management is a custom solution that provides lifecycle management for Windows SharePoint Services site collections and webs through write locking, backing up and recovering site collections/webs and is based on the out-of-box Site Usage and Confirmation feature.

Microsoft IT Team Site Life Cycle Management Beta 1.0 will be a community driven effort and managed under CodePlex source control.  Discussion boards and bug management will be also provided by the CodePlex workspace.  I look forward to your feedback!

To learn more about Microsoft IT Team Site Life Cycle Management Beta 1.0 visit http://www.codeplex.com/governance.

The SharePoint Governance workspace is intended provide governance and manageability samples and tools designed to help IT Professionals management SharePoint Products and Technologies deployments.  Upcoming tools include an implementation of site/web lifecycle management based on the Site Delete and Confirmation feature, the Microsoft IT Site Delete Capture 1.0 feature, and additional out-of-the-box functionality.  A sample auditing configuration solution deployment package will be introduced in the September-October timeframe that provides guidance on auditing and the management of content types across site collections.

Click on the image above or here -- very nicely done by the TechNet Australia crew! Also available separately are photos and podcasts.

<Lawrence />

Sean Livingston, a Program Manager in the Windows SharePoint Services team, was too modest to cross-post a blog entry about the very useful white paper that he had authored, which is now available for download here. So, I"m doing it for him. :-)

The SharePoint Products and Technologies 2007 Customization Policy white paper is a starting point for companies to develop their own policies for implementing and managing customizations in a SharePoint based environment. A version of this document is currently being used as a key component of the hosting policy for SharePoint customizations within Microsoft’s internal SharePoint hosting team, which manages what may be the world"s largest SharePoint environment. This document was designed to act as a bridge between system administrators and developers so that both sides could evaluate SharePoint customizations with an emphasis on administration concerns such as supportability, performance, and deployment issues. This document will be added to over time as new information and best practices become available.

<Lawrence />

It"s official! The SharePoint Conference 2008 will be held on March 2-6, 2008 in Seattle at the Washington State Trade and Convention Center.

What You Can Expect:

• Keynote sessions by senior Microsoft executives
• 60+ sessions across several diverse tracks  
• Hands-on and instructor led labs

Go to http://www.mssharepointconference.com and submit your e-mail address, so you can be notified with important updates like when the conference website goes live on MOSS 2007.

<Lawrence />

The TechEd 2007 conference in Orlando kicked off this morning with an unprecedented number of SharePoint focused sessions. For more info, go to http://www.microsoft.com/events/teched2007. For most of you, that should not be a surprise given the tremendous success that SharePoint has had in the marketplace since being released just over 6 months ago and the ever growing demand for SharePoint technical information.

But you might be pleasantly surprised that the VirtualTechEd.com website designed to extend the TechEd experience online is powered by MOSS 2007. The project team had less than 2 months to implement the site, and with the help of one of our key MOSS-based solution development and hosting partners, Avitiva, the team was able to do it successfully. [Update: The project lead, Zaakera Stratman, would like to also thank Captus Solutions for their efforts as tech/dev leads and especially in getting Silverlight to work on the website.] You can expect much more from the VirtualTechEd site in the coming year as the team leverages other capabilities of MOSS to implement exciting features and enhancements. If you have ideas or suggestions for the team to consider, please leave a comment here.

If you want to stay up-to-date with the SharePoint related activities at TechEd Orlando, take a look at http://technorati.com/posts/tag/teched+sharepoint (though the RSS feed is currently not working).

<Lawrence />

Since the widely referenced Improvements in Accessibility blog entry was posted here over a year, we have received numerous inquiries about how to further improve accessibility of SharePoint based websites up to the point of being fully compliant with standards such as the U.S. government’s Section 508 and the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0. Although we don’t have any updates beyond the aforementioned blog entry to announce right now, a few of our partners have been successful in helping customers implement accessibility compliant websites such as Wise Woman, and Plymouth Hospitals.

The SharePoint product group recognizes the importance of accessibility, especially for Internet facing public websites that have been built with SharePoint technology. To provide a channel for dialogue between our customers and partners with us as well as amongst themselves, I’m pleased to announce the creation of the Microsoft hosted SharePoint – Accessibility online forum.

With HiSoftware’s announcement last week of AccRepair for SharePoint Designer and in conjunction with AccMonitor, many customers will be able to design and implement accessibility compliant SharePoint based websites without costly consulting services or development resources. The following guest blog entry is written by Robert B. Yonaitis, Chief Technology Officer at HiSoftware.

<Lawrence />

Approximately one-fifth of the people in the United States have one or more forms of legal disability, and that ratio is fairly consistent for the developed nations throughout the world. The Web can be a great enabler for people with disabilities, who use assistive technologies such as screen readers along with their computers to find and access information and applications on a website, but only if the website had been designed with accessibility in mind. This has become such an important issue that many countries, such as the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Australia in addition to the U.S., have legislated requirements for accessible website design.

Now with HiSoftware’s AccRepair software fully integrated into SharePoint Designer, designers and developers can build accessible content and entire websites whether or not they are experienced in the accessibility guidelines or have a technical background in this area.

HiSoftware also provides an accessibility testing portal at http://www.cynthiasays.com. The engine behind CynthiaSays drives all of HiSoftware’s commercial products. The CynthiaSays testing portal has been widely used and trusted by the website developer community with over 15 million tests completed. AccRepair for SharePoint Designer brings this functionality to SharePoint-based website designers and developers.

So, how does AccRepair for SharePoint Designer work?

AccRepair for SharePoint Designer is a user driven interactive desktop tool-that allows SharePoint Designer users to test and remediate content for accessibility compliance as part of their website design and build process. This means you design, test, and fix in a single simple process, minimizing work and effort and most importantly, “doing it right the first time”, which is much easier than fixing something after it has already been built and deployed. AccRepair provides built-in tests for statutory rules and regulations according to worldwide accessibility guidelines (e.g. W3C WCAG 1.0, Section 508, CLF, etc.), but it also allows users to configure the tests to match and meet their development practices and accessibility goals.

Many of the rules provide guidance along the line of “you must have this…” or “if you have this, then you must do that…” AccRepair allows you to tweak its XML based rules engine so that you can be sure you are integrating these rules into what you actually do. That way, you can validate your appropriate use of skip navigation, metadata, data tables, and define form handling and for requirements amongst other things. If you are not an accessibility guru, the software provides simple and easy to follow instructions, guideline and tutorials to bring accessibility into the grasp of any website designer/developer or content creator.

Once you have fully configured AccRepair with all of the necessary rules, it is important to recognize that accessibility testing and remediation cannot be totally automated even by the best of software products. This is because many of the rules will trigger questions that can only be answered by a human tester. AccRepair addresses this with a unique Accessibility Interview Wizard (pictured below), which steps the user through a small set of validation issues, allowing questions to be answered in an interactive fashion. The manual test results are incorporated into the automated results-giving the SharePoint Designer user a comprehensive analysis, record, and audit trail of the accessibility testing results.
 

Repairing forms and tables

When working in the SharePoint Designer environment, you can use the AccRepair form repair utility to quickly and easily mark up your forms – from simple or complex – to make them accessible and to do so without any knowledge of accessibility or of HTML or XHTML coding. The integrated AccRepair table repair utility (pictured below) provides automated markup for simple data tables based on accessibility guidelines and best practices, and it simplifies the repair of complex and sophisticated data tables through a wizard guided process. What could take hours to accomplish manually can instead be done in minutes through the wizard driven repair utilities.

Repairing images

One of the biggest challenges with accessibility is alternative text for images and all other non-text based content elements. AccRepair for SharePoint Designer integrates an image repair utility (pictured below), which allows users to define alternative text for images, replicate the fixes across shared images or shared libraries, and even optionally collaborate with other team members and other users for consistence and “common look and feel” across a multi-tiered development environment. AccRepair can take a fix and replicate it across an entire website in a matter of seconds.

The complete solution

AccRepair for SharePoint Designer provides the ability to handle many more remediation issues such as image maps, but the key to accessibility is to understand what you need to do because you can’t fix something if you don’t know it’s broken. While AccRepair is a client-side application that helps individual website designers/developers, AccMonitor is a server-side application that provides over 170 accessibility checks based on Section 508 and WCAG 1.0 guidelines and can be integrated with SharePoint Server’s content authoring workflow. For more information about how HiSoftware’s products and services can help you achieve accessibility compliance for your SharePoint based website, please contact us by clicking here.

Robert B. Yonaitis
Chief Technology Officer, HiSoftware
ryonaitis@hisoftware.com

The Windows Live Writer team just announced the availability of Beta 2 of their excellent offline blog writing tool, which now has support for the blog functionality in WSS 3.0 and consequently MOSS 2007. I’ve been using a pre-Beta 2 build of the tool to write and post blog entries here (a Community Server based blog) as well as my own blog (a MOSS based blog) for a few weeks now, and it has worked very well.

While Windows Live Writer’s support for SharePoint may be a good reason for you to seriously consider using SharePoint as your blog solution, an even better reason is coming very soon in the form of a public beta for the Community Kit for SharePoint: Enhanced Blog Edition. The CKS:EBE team of volunteer shared source developers will leverage the innovative work done by Vincent Rothwell for which you can see a functional demo at http://demo.wssblogs.com. One of the key features will be the “Modular Themes Framework” (MTF), which enables practically anyone to easily create and quickly deploy and instantly change a theme that will make a SharePoint based blog look totally different from what you’d expect a SharePoint blog to look like! You can try out some of the sample themes on the demo site. Stay tuned here for upcoming announcements about the CKS:EBE and other CKS editions that will showcase the power of SharePoint as a social computing platform.

<Lawrence />

Since we posted the status update back in mid March about our pursuit of the DoD 5012.2 certification, many of you have become very anxious to find out whether or not we"ve passed the test that we had been scheduled to take on May 14th. Well, I"m extremely pleased to announce that we have indeed passed the test! So, MOSS 2007 is now officially DoD 5015.2 certified!

The summary and detailed test reports are still being finalized by the U.S. Joint Interoperability Test Command and will soon be available for download at http://jitc.fhu.disa.mil/recmgt/mcmosps/index.html.

Later this year, we will release a free add-on pack that extends MOSS 2007"s records management capabilities in appropriate ways so that customers and partners can deploy DoD 5015.2 compliant solutions in production environments.

<Lawrence />