Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog

   Since posting my blog entry about recently launched MOSS-based web sites on the Internet, I’ve received several inquiries about how to lockdown this type of web site to prevent anonymous users from accessing pages in the /_layouts vdir or any of the Form pages. Fortunately, the answer along with a comprehensive set of security guidance was published several months ago on TechNet in the following article:

Plan security for an external anonymous access environment (Office SharePoint Server)

Updated: November 16, 2006

In this article:

Security guidance for an external anonymous access environment is targeted to allow anonymous access to content while protecting back-end servers in the farm from direct user access or malicious actions targeted through front-end Web servers. In an environment where multiple farms might be deployed to support authoring, staging, and publishing, the guidance for this environment is intended for the published farm (the farm that is anonymously accessed by users).

<Lawrence />

As mentioned previously, the Community Kit for SharePoint is one of the top 3 community oriented initiatives sponsored* by the SharePoint product group. (The other two are the SharePoint Community Portal and the SharePointPedia, the latter of which will be announced with more details soon.) While the current CKS 2.0 effort has over a dozen volunteers, we can still use more in the areas of development and program management, so ping me directly if you’re interested.

CKS: User Group Edition

In the meantime, I’m very pleased to announce the availability of 3 localized versions (French, German, and Simplified Chinese) of the CKS: User Group Edition 1.0 for which the English version was released nearly 3 months ago and has over 1,700 downloads and almost 20 known implementations! The localized CKS:UGE site admin templates are available here, and the demo sites are at:

• French: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/sharepoint/cks/uge-fr
• German: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/sharepoint/cks/uge-de
• Simplified Chinese: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/sharepoint/cks/uge-cn

My sincere thanks to Gaetan Bouveret (French), Michael Greth (German), and Xi Chen (Chinese) for their efforts! A Spanish version of the CKS:UGE will also be available in the near future. If you’re interested in localizing the CKS:UGE into other languages, please ping me. The whole process takes about only 4 hours with the help of the free .STP Language Converter tool from KWizCom.

CKS: Enhanced Blog Edition

In addition, I’m announcing the availability of the RSStoBlog tool with source code, which provides an easy way to import content from any RSS 2.0 compatible feed into a SharePoint blog. This tool will be part of the upcoming CKS: Enhanced Blog Edition, but I thought that it’s useful enough to be released separately now. I’m also hoping that someone will extend the tool to support the import of associated categories and comments for a feed of blog posts. Thanks to Matt Swann, SDET in the SharePoint product group, for contributing this tool to the community. It’s available here.

A couple of other components of the CKS:EBE are being considered for ad-hoc release: 1) trackback support (for tracking references to your blog entries from someone else"s blog), and 2) anonymous comments when Integrated Windows Authentication is used (for an intranet-based anonymous Suggestion Box type of blog). If you think these features should be released immediately, please leave a comment describing how you would utilize them. If you have a feature suggestion for the CKS:EBE, please leave a comment on the CKS:EBE page on CodePlex.

<Lawrence />

* Note that "sponsored" is not equivalent to "fully supported" or "guaranteed to upgradable to SP1 or vNext." As with most other projects on CodePlex, the components of the CKS are offered "as-is,” which means that you bear the risk of using it and that the contributors, which includes Microsoft personnel, of the project give no express warranties, guarantees, or conditions.

Many have been waiting still to hear more on language pack announcements.  I highly recommend taking another look.  Some of these languages are very recent and have only been available within the past couple of days.  This is a quick list of links to the download families on download center along with links to the documentation.  Note: the application templates including group board workspace work on both WSS 3.0 and SharePoint Server while the My Site role based templates are MOSS 2007 only.

SharePoint Server 2007 x86

• Office SharePoint Server 2007 Trial (24 Languages)
• Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 (prerequiste 24 Languages)
• Office System/SharePoint Server Language Packs (Deploy SharePointServer 2007 Language Packs) (29 Languages)
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server TechCenter
• SharePoint Server Tech library (Technical Documentation)
• Role-Based Templates for SharePoint My Sites

WSS 3.0 x86

• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (23 Languages)
• Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 (prerequiste 24 Languages)
• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Language Pack
• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Application Templates: All Templates
• 20 Application Templates available in multiple languages (English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese (BR), Japanese, Korean, Hebrew, Chinese (simplified), and Chinese (traditional))
• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Document: Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Quick Reference Guide
• Windows SharePoint Services Technical Library
• GroupBoard Workspace 2007 template x86

SharePoint Server 2007 x64

• x64 Trial of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (English)
• Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 x64 (prerequiste) (see x64 version in instructions)
• x64 Trial of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (24 Languages including many new ones) 
• SharePoint Server 2007 Language Pack (x64) - ServerLanguagePack.img [NEW] - Thai, Korean, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese Simplified and Traditional)
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server TechCenter
• SharePoint Server Tech library (Technical Documentation)
• Role-Based Templates for SharePoint My Sites

WSS 3.0 x64

• x64 version of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (31 Languages! Including Hungarian, Russian, Ukranian, Slovak, Finish, Estonian, and Croatian)
• Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 (prerequiste) (see x64 version in instructions)
• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Language Pack x64 = SharePointLanguagePack.exe
• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Application Templates: All Templates (English)
• 20 Application Templates available in multiple languages (English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese (BR), Japanese, Korean, Hebrew, Chinese (simplified), and Chinese (traditional))
• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Document: Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Quick Reference Guide
• GroupBoard Workspace 2007 template x64

This recently published case study on Dell"s SharePoint Server 2007 Deployment showcases how Dell Computer is consolidating 300 SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Servers into a consolidated SharePoint Server 2007 environment with 16 SQL instances with over 35 TB of capacity.  It also showcases how this scale will be modular by simply adding additional Front Ends or SQL nodes.  The manageability aspects of this consolidation are highlighted.

They use to use File Servers and Public Folders, then they went to SPS 2003, now they are moving to a consolidated MOSS 2007 environment.  This is one customer I"m going to continue to keep my eye on. 

Joel Oleson

   While I was putting together a customer ready DVD (more details will be announced soon) that contains a VM of MOSS 2007 and Office 2007 programs along with SharePoint related technical information and content, I asked our Customer Evidence team for the Top 10 case studies for MOSS 2007, and they gave me the following 17, which have been copied onto the DVD master. I hope that you’ll find these useful even if only to send to your TDMs/BDMs as affirmation that your recommendation to use MOSS for your solution was a good one. J 

·         Mary Kay: Major Cosmetics Producer Deploys Microsoft Search Technology to Increase Efficiency

·         TUV NORD Group: Global Certification Group Improves Safety and Quality Audit Efficiency by 20 Percent

·         Del Monte Foods: Del Monte Foods Automates Formula Change Process to Reduce Cycle Time by 33 Percent

·         Monsanto Company: Agricultural Innovator Empowers Employees, Cuts Costs with Integrated Enterprise Search

·         MTV: TV Giant Automates Workflow, Boosts Data Access with Information Management System

·         Parks Canada: Government Agency Streamlines Information Management and Enhances Collaboration

·         CGI Insurance Business Services: Canadian Professional Services Firm Accelerates the Generation of Proposals

·         Ampacet: Global Manufacturer Expects $60 Million of New Revenue from Product Innovation

·         Ziba Design: Design Firm Improves Customer Relationships with New Extranet Solution

·         Statoil: Leading Oil and Gas Producer Improves Collaboration with Offline Working

·         Getronics: Solution Provider Gains Enhanced Security in Critical Collaboration Environment

·         Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton: Law Firm Increases Functionality and Reduces Costs with New Intranet

·         Enterprise Rent-A-Car: Rental Car Company Upgrades IT Environment for Increased Security, User Productivity

·         Arthur J. Gallagher & Co.: Brokerage Embraces Electronic Document Management for Better Customer Service

·         Department of Education and Training Victoria (Australia): DET Victoria Saves up to $208,000 a Year with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

·         Miami Dade County Public Schools: Collaborative Portal Improves Education for Fourth Largest U.S. School District

·         BMW: BMW Takes Employee Collaboration to New Heights with Communication Software

   If you’re looking for MOSS-based Internet web sites, here’s a fairly comprehensive list though more sites seem to be popping up every week. Listed below are some of my recent favorites:

·         Glu: Heavily customized and branded portal for mobile gamers. A “how we did it” guest blog entry from the project team will be forthcoming.

·         SendTec: Corporate web site for a multi-channel marketing company. Looks nothing like a typical SharePoint site, and they even used a custom HTTP handler to hide the "/pages" folder structure.

·         Wise Woman: A community portal for women created by The Body Shop. The site is WCAG 1.0 AA complaint, which busts the myth that MOSS-based sites cannot be compliant with accessibility standards.

·         Plymouth Hospitals: Corporate web site for a healthcare provider in the UK. The site is also WCAG 1.0 AA compliant and even provides color contrast and font size options for the visually impaired.

·         MyTalk AU: A community portal for a group of radio and TV stations in Australia. The site was migrated from Telligent’s Community Server (no offense to Telligent, who is a Microsoft ISV Partner, but the customer wanted better web content management capabilities along with community features in the same solution) and busts the other big myth about MOSS, which is that it cannot be used to implement Web 2.0 oriented solutions. A “how we did it” guest blog entry from the project team will also be forthcoming.

·         Direct Energy: Corporate web site for one of North America"s leading integrated energy companies. The site uses MOSS"s Site Variations capability to implement English and Spanish versions of the content.

·         PD NET: Large professional traning and e-commerce site with lots of content in English and French, enabled by MOSS"s Site Variations capability.

 

 

<Lawrence />

I wanted to point you to some recent content on upgrade and introduce you to some partners that otherwise you may not think of in the Upgrade/Migration space.

• Upgrading Large Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Intranet Portals to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 by Eric Charran
• How to Upgrade an Area based on a Custom Site Definition - Boxin Li
• A note of caution around In Place upgrade: 5 Reasons NOT to Use In Place Upgrade (Joel Oleson Blog)
• Prescan.exe: Don"t be afraid of Prescan - Part 1 & Your Friend, Prescan.exe - How to Get it & What it Does - Part 2 and by Bill Baer: Prescan Errors, What They Mean 
• Upgrade Toolkit for Windows SharePoint Services Sites and Templates Guide (give it another look even if you don"t have custom templates)

And a couple of things to look forward to, featured upgrade chapter(s) from Office SharePoint Server 2007 Admin Companion, and a TechNet landing page for Upgrade.

As always MSDN is a great resource for upgrade information: 

• Migration and Upgrade Center

Partners:

In addition to the partners listed on the migration and upgrade center... 

• Recently I saw an impressive demo of CorasWorks Design Migrator.  A tool to help you migrate your unghosted pages, quickly revert hundreds of sites, quickly deploy web parts across site collections, and apply customizations post upgrade saving valuable time.
• A customer explained to me they were using AvePoint"s DocAve 4.1 Migrator to migrate their data from SPS 2003/WSS 3.0 to MOSS 2007 thus removing dependencies on custom site definitions and reducing their migration timeline and more quickly able to take advantage of the features and using no site definition, but leveraging the new masterpages and page layouts for look and feel and consistency.
• Syntergy has told me they have a customer using their replicator product replicating lists between a 2003 Portal and a SharePoint Server 2007 portal.  Given not all features such as granular security are available in 2003, but that"s impressive.

Those of you going to the APAC SharePoint Conference in Sydney, I"ll be doing a session on upgrade.  See you there.  If I don"t see you there, I hope to see you at TechEd in Orlando!

Joel Oleson

Looking for more information or data on server performance with Office SharePoint Server?  You"ll be pleased to know that HP has recently published a document showing server performance with their hardware to help you size your hardware appropriately.  Jimi Ibbett of HP, the author of the document, did a great job of demonstrating the real performance characteristics so you can make well informed decisions.

From HP... "This document provides details on HP"s performance recommendations, example configurations and details on the new features for Microsoft® Office SharePoint Portal Server 2007.  Several example configurations are provided ranging for those appropriate for a small business to highly available configurations (high availability is deemed mandatory) and application optimized configurations (where high performance and continuity of business is a requirement).  HP Solutions Alliances Engineering (SAE) Performance Labs has characterized a typical business scenario (as was used to test SharePoint Portal Server 2003) to provide performance results.  Additionally, comparison is provided for customers migrating from SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to Office SharePoint Server 2007."

• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 on HP ProLiant Servers - Performance Summary

This paper among other detail are posted on http://www.hp.com/solutions/activeanswers/sharepoint.  I recommend bookmarking this page for quick reference.

I"m pleased to announce the availability of a tool coming out of Microsoft IT.  Over the past few weeks I"ve (Joel Oleson) been working with Bill Baer to pull together a tool that started as a simple example of an event receiver to show that someone could write an app that would capture deleted sites or site collection.  It has since slowly developed into that full fledged functionality and something that IT has been slowly rolling out.

As with all codeplex apps, these are community supported applications and are provided "as is."  The source is provided as well as the full package ready to install with instructions.  Please don"t throw this into production or call product support for this.  If you decide to use this in production it is at your own risk with community support.  Note: The application itself does simply use the event receiver to capture the delete request and queue the backup to disk before deletion.

http://www.codeplex.com/governance

This CodePlex governance workspace was created to showcase tools that enhance the governance and manageability of WSS 3.0 and SharePoint Server 2007.

Enjoy.  If this works well, we plan to release more samples as they mature.

Joel Oleson

[Cross-posted from Andrew May’s blog entry at http://blogs.msdn.com/andrew_may/archive/2007/04/26/SharePointWSS3SDKAprilUpdateNowLive.aspx]

I’m happy to announce that the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SDK has been updated online on MSDN!

What’s new in the April update of the WSS 3.0 Online SDK:

New conceptual sections:

·         Content Migration

·         Change Log and Synchronizing Applications

·         Creating Declarative, No-Code Workflow Editors

Procedural topics:

·         How to: Create a Custom Field Type and Field Control

·         How To: Extend the STSADM Utility

Schema reference topics for the following schemas:

·         Content Migration XML Schema Reference: Contains over 180 element topics that detail the eight migration schemas

·         Workflow Configuration Schema

Greatly expanded reference material for over 300 types in the following namespaces:

·         Microsoft.SharePoint

·         Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration

·         Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment

·         Microsoft.SharePoint.EmailIntegration

·         Microsoft.SharePoint.Navigation

·         Microsoft.SharePoint.MobileControls

·         Microsoft.SharePoint.StsAdmin

·         Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages

·         Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls

·         Microsoft.SharePoint.Workflow

As well as expanded reference material for the following Web Services:

·         Authentication Web Service

·         Copy Web Service

This update also includes numerous updates and revisions to existing SDK content.

Note: The WSS 3.0 SDK download will be updated with the next online update, currently scheduled for the end of June.

I want to thank everyone who contributed their time and effort to making this update possible. We’ve added an immense amount of  detailed technical content, with more to come. Check it out!

Andrew May

Answers to some FAQs about WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 Language Packs.

What are MOSS Language Packs?

MOSS Language packs enable site owners and site collection administrators to create SharePoint sites and site collections in multiple languages without requiring separate installations of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. You install language packs, which contain language-specific site templates, on your front-end Web servers. When an administrator creates a site or a site collection based on a language-specific site template, the text that appears on the site or the site collection is displayed in the site template"s language. Language Packs are typically used in multinational deployments where a single server farm supports people in different locations or in situations where sites and Web pages must be duplicated in one or more languages. Application of a Language Pack will not change the language of the installed Office server product SKU.

What’s the difference between WSS Language Packs and MOSS language Packs?

·         WSS Language Packs are for WSS stand-alone installations and enable the creation of SharePoint sites in different languages; multiple language packs can be installed on the same server.

·         MOSS Language Packs are for MOSS, MOSS for Search, Forms Server, and Project Server installations and enable the creation of SharePoint sites in different languages; multiple language packs can be installed on the same server.

What’s the difference between a MOSS Language Pack and a fully localized version of MOSS?

Microsoft’s 2007 Office server products are localized into languages in two different ways: 1) fully translated SKUs and 2) Language Packs. A language-specific SKU delivers the respective Office server product localized into a given language. A Language Pack may be applied to an installed Office server product to create sites or site collections in other languages. Application of a Language Pack will not change the language of the installed Office server product SKU, or the language of the admin features.

How does a customer license them?

MOSS Language Packs can be downloaded and installed on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 servers free of charge. If the Language Packs deployed fall within your “listed languages” then your Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Standard and Enterprise CALs license your desktops/devices for those Language Packs. If Language Packs deployed fall outside of your “listed languages” then you will need to consider modifying your CAL to a multi-language option (for Select/Open agreements) or an “all languages” option (for Enterprise Agreements).

What’s the pricing?

There is no cost for MOSS Language Packs; however, there may be additional CAL costs associated with licensing for languages outside your listed languages.

Where can I find information on deploying MOSS Language Packs?

The following TechNet articles relate to MOSS Language Pack deployment:

• Deploy language packs - http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/26c07867-0150-463d-b21a-a6d42aecf05a1033.mspx
• Install available language template packs - http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/5a2be738-df29-43cd-b361-84b7822164e31033.mspx
• Plan for multilingual sites - http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/22d5dc9c-66bd-40d7-8c60-2a2a066db2241033.mspx

I heard that there are issues related to specific server language packs. What is this about?

For certain languages (Arabic, Hindi and Thai), spellers were not included in either the fully localized version of MOSS or the MOSS Language Pack. (Spellers for Basque and Galician are also absent from the Spanish MOSS and Spanish MOSS Language Pack). These spellers, as well as instructions for installing them, will be made available to customers via the MOSS Server Multi-Language Pack (SMLP). The SMLP will be downloadable from the Microsoft Download Center and MVLS/eOpen web sites. The SMLP is expected to be available towards the end of May 2007. Note: while a customer can obtain any MOSS Language Pack or the SMLP free of charge, they are not necessarily licensed to use all of the languages. They should consult their listed languages for more clarification on which languages they are licensed to use.

   <Lawrence />