It’s spring and the December post of upcoming conferences has been updated.

Also, many in the SharePoint community have sent me local events such as Code Camps, SharePoint Saturdays, etc.  Let’s put it this way – I would be in the CEO/platinum awards program with any airline if I started to travel around the world to visit all these deep dive events!  If you are interested in attending, then please reach out to a local SharePoint user group - the International SharePoint Professionals Association is a good starting point to find SharePoint user groups.

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/12/08/list-of-upcoming-sharepoint-conferences.aspx

Cheers!

Dave Pae
SPTechnicalProductManager

Continue reading " List of upcoming SharePoint conferences - UPDATED "

Over on the e-commerce blog (owned by the Commerce Server team), they announced the availability of Commerce Server 2009 on MSDN.  Excellent!

So why is this so relevant to the SharePoint audience?

Commerce Server 2009 delivers an out-of-the-box shopping site that leverages SharePoint Commerce Services which provides a gallery of 35 web parts and controls that can be assembled within SharePoint.

Here’s a list of some of the functionality provided by SharePoint Commerce Services:

· Virtual Earth Store Locator, which integrates with Virtual Earth mapping software so that shopping sites have detailed maps of store locations.

· Attract a larger consumer base by using Live™ ID, allowing single sign-on to your shopping site.

· Search that searches both the e-commerce site and static content seamlessly.

· Display reviews and ratings for individual products, and ability for shoppers to submit their own reviews and ratings, with administrative workflow for management discretion.

· Display advertisements and discounts that are relevant to both the current shopper and current site context, and that work in conjunction with Marketing Manager and campaigns.

· Shoppers and managers can take advantage of Profile Administration features, including the ability to add and edit addresses, view and launch credit card information, a registration wizard, and the ability to reset passwords.

Continue reading " Microsoft® Commerce Server 2009 is Now Available on MSDN! "

Gartner has posted a report for SharePoint that features a prominent customer, Pfizer.  It highlights the benefits that SharePoint has brought to Pfizer and notes how agile and easy it was to deploy and use in the company. 

As a result of the deployment, the report notes that Pfizer has more than 41,000 active SharePoint users, supports external collaboration sites accessible to authorized non-Pfizer employees, and “has fostered information sharing and collaboration within Pfizer.”

Link to the report: http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/microsoft/vol6/article8/article8.html

Continue reading " Case Study: Pfizer Takes a Two-Pronged Approach to Content Management "

Under certain circumstances, the mergecontentdb Stsadm operation may fail. These circumstances include combinations of significant site collection size, user traffic, and SQL Server load. When the command fails, both the source and destination databases can be corrupted.

If you use mergecontentdb, make sure that you:

· Always back up both the source and target databases before using this operation.

· Refrain from cancelling the operation (either on the front-end Web server or the server running SQL Server).

· Run the command during off-peak hours, because mergecontentdb places significant additional load on the server running SQL Server.

Alternatively, consider using Batch Site Manager and the method described here. Because the Batch Site Manager works with site collections by using the Stsadm backup and restore operations with the –url parameter, we recommend that you not use Batch Site Manager for site collections larger than 15 GB.

The Batch Site Manager is included in the SharePoint Administration Toolkit:

· Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit v3.0 x86

· Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit v3.0 x64

Related KB:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/969242

A fix is about to be released in the coming months to address this issue, we will update once it becomes available.

Continue reading " Possible Issue with mergecontentdb STSADM Operation "

There has been a steady growth in 3rd Party tools to provide either enhancements to weak functionality provided by out of the box WSS/MOSS or new functionality to complement existing functionality.

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Using third party tools in SharePoint

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This series of articles is intended to help you getting ramped up with SharePoint programming. It’s about writing, troubleshooting and debugging SharePoint code.

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Simplifying SharePoint debugging by creating the troubleshooting toolbox

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In our everyday work we all use several Line-of-Business systems as well as all of us know well the Office client applications. Although the integration between them is not too common yet, I’d like to show you the advantaged and disadvantages, pros and cons of the integration, and give some useful tips and tricks if you decide to make some OBAs.

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The World of Office Business Applications (OBAs) - Part 2

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You may have been waiting anxiously for the uber packages because of your scheduled patch time window. Yeah, we heard from you.  Now here they are:

Download Information

February Cumulative Update Uber Package for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (Version: 12.0.6341.5000)

http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=961755 

February Cumulative Update Uber Package for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (Version: 12.0.6341.5002)

http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=961756

Can’t see the version you want on download page? Check out download instruction from James Blackwell:

http://blogs.msdn.com/jb/archive/2009/03/09/downloading-hotfixes-for-multiple-platforms.aspx 

Detail description

Description of the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 cumulative update package: February 24, 2009

Description of the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 cumulative update package: February 24, 2009

Installation Recommendation for a fresh SharePoint Server

To keep all files in a SharePoint installation up-to-date, the following sequence is recommended.

1. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Service Pack 1


2. The 2007 Microsoft Office Servers Service Pack 1


3. February Cumulative Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0


4. February Cumulative Update for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Meanwhile, if customer need to index Visio files, there is a Visio iFilter hotfix which is not a part of the uber package.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/960502

After applying the preceding updates, run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard or “psconfig –cmd upgrade –inplace b2b -wait” in command line. This needs to be done on every server in the farm with SharePoint installed. 

The version of content databases should be 12.0.6341.5000 after successfully applying these updates.

For more in-depth guidance for the update process, we recommend that customers refer to the following articles. These articles provide a correct way to deploy updates, identify known issues (and resolutions), and provide information about creating slipstream builds.

Deploy software updates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288269.aspx

Deploy software updates for Office SharePoint Server 2007

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263467.aspx

How to create a SharePoint slipstream using the latest updates (Updated for FEB CU!)

Jie Li

Technical Product Manager, SharePoint

Continue reading " Uber Packages of February Cumulative Update are Ready "

We are coming near the end of this 6 part series, but don’t worry, it’s not the last you’ll hear of me! This part focuses on ‘Why develop leveraging the SharePoint Platform?’. This is really targeted at ASP.NET developers specifically, but also other web application developers from other walks of life also. Or anyone currently working with Vanilla SharePoint and wanting to dig a little deeper!

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Leveraging the SharePoint Platform (Part 5) - Why use SharePoint as a Development Platform?

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Today, Microsoft and HiSoftware are pleased to announce the release of the Accessibility Kit for SharePoint (AKS) v2.0.  The AKS v2.0 provides an accessible development framework and significantly reduces the level of effort and knowledge needed by customers and partners to improve the accessibility of SharePoint based sites and applications.

The AKS v2.0 follows on from the success of the AKS v1.0 and v1.1 which have been downloaded by more than 4000 organizations in fifty countries.  The AKS v2.0 is intended to be a community based project which other individuals and organizations can contribute to and is released today under the Microsoft Public License.

Key Features in the AKS v2.0

The AKS v2.0 introduces the following:

• 
  
  Smart Control adapters which greatly reduce the amount of custom configuration previously required for AKS control adapters.


• 
  
  The Web Part Zone Control Adapter, a special Smart Adapter that modifies the output of SharePoint so that it does not use tables for layout of the Web parts.


• 
  
  HiSoftware’s Compliant Code Engine (HCCE) to assist organizations in creating code that is compliant to standards-based HTML or XHTML.


• 
  
  Additional requirements under Canadian Common Look and Feel 2.0 (CLF 2.0) guidelines.


• 
  
  Examples of remediation to comply with WCAG 2.0 Level AA.


• 
  
  French language version of AKS 1.0 components.

Microsoft is focused on accessibility and is committed to supporting standards.  By working with HiSoftware to develop the AKS v2.0 we are reinforcing our commitment to addressing accessibility within SharePoint and providing customers with a framework to meet their accessibility requirements between now and the release of the next version of SharePoint.  Download the AKS v2.0 today and let us know what you think.

Ryan Duguid
Senior Product Manager
Microsoft Corp

Continue reading " Announcing the Accessibility Kit for SharePoint (AKS) v2.0 "

In a one-on-one interview, Arpan Shah was able to clearly explain the key SharePoint messages around content management, collaboration and enterprise search.  Also, Arpan touched on SharePoint security and governance and provided resources for users to locate information to keep up-to-date.

Here’s the link to the article:

http://www.fiercecontentmanagement.com/story/one-one-arpan-shah-microsoft-sharepoint/2009-03-04

Continue reading " One on One with Arpan Shah of Microsoft Sharepoint "

In this article, we will be focusing on BDC Search. Specifically we’ll be focusing on how to enable BDC Search, how to enable full and incremental crawls of BDC data sources, and how to create a search content source and search scopes.

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Everything You Need to Know about BDC: Part 5 of 8

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