On the blog of Erol Giraudy i found a link to sample course material for SharePoint 2003 training. As stated on the SharePoint Solutions website:

"All sample course materials are property of SharePoint Solutions and subject to copyright laws. The sample course materials are provided for evaluation purposes only. They may not be copied and/or distributed to any person other than the individual registering on this page."

http://www.sharepointsolutions.com/dwnld8765cg01lpm33324.html

I got a question from Amit Vasu regarding the installation of SharePoint Portal Server 2003 with SQL Server versus MSDE. The issue was that his customer first wanted to use MSDE and if needed later on migrating to SQL Server.

This is possible and i did some investigation on MSDN and found the following. There is an article describing the migration from WMSDE to SQL Server:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/wss/2/all/adminguide/en-us/stsf17.mspx

After this you have to change the connections in SharePoint Administration of the databases. the following walkthrough describes it:

Open the SharePoint Central Administration website and go to the "Windows SharePoint Services Central Administration". You will find under "Server Configuration" the option "Set configuration database server". Here you can change the configuration database to its new location.

Go to the "SharePoint Portal Server Central Administration". You will find under "Server Configuration" the option "Configure server topology". Here you change the content, component settings and configuration database to their new location.

Mark Kruger did a great job by creating and maintaining an extensive list of 3rd Party WebParts and SharePoint Tools. My compliments!! :)

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/mkruger/archive/2005/05/05/1944.aspx

Also a large list of SharePoint bloggers can be found at his blog.

A new blogger is in town :) Here name is Jessica Gruber and she is consultant with Microsoft Consulting Services in the UK. She will present at two events:

UK Office Developer Conference (29 - 30 June at Heathrow outside London) where I'll be presenting on Developing InfoPath Forms using Managed Code and on Customizing and Branding SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services

TechEd Europe (5 - 8 July in Amsterdam) where my topic will be “Office 12” Preview: Default Open XML File Formats.  Happily my session is the first one listed if you use the search tool and search for the "Windows Client Development" track!

I will visit the TechEd Europe and will drop by at here presentation. :)

http://blogs.msdn.com/jessicagruber/archive/2005/06/14/428843.aspx

USysWare has created a free collection of Visual Studio tools called DPack which provides a lot of extra functionality to the developer:

"DPack is a FREE collection of Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 and 2005 tools. DPack is designed to greatly increase developer's productivity, automate repetitive processes and expand upon some of the Microsoft Visual Studio features.

DPack is a FREE collection of Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 and 2005 tools. DPack includes various browser tools that allow the developer to quickly narrow the search down to a particular class, method or assembly type. DPack includes greatly enhanced numbered bookmarks feature, various code navigation tools as well streamlined surround with feature, and much more. New version introduces Solution Backup feature. "

http://www.usysware.com/dpack/

Google is my number one and favorit search machine and thanks to Mark Wagner i can put it in my SharePoint environment. :)

Mark Wagner has created a custom Google WebPart for a demo SharePoint site. He has provided two downloads. One for the WebPart package and the other containing the source code. As het stated this Google seacrch WebPart is not a replacement for the search feature of SharePoint itself.

There are three search options:

• Standard Google search
• Local Site Search
• Custom Site URL search

At Microsoft there is a top 10 list of benefits using SharePoint Portal 2003. From that list i think there are some benefits which could be used as reasons for your customer for deployment of SharePoint Portal 2003. They are:

• Put relevant information at your fingertips
• Share knowledge across the organization.
• Find and make the most of organization's intellectual capital.
• Create self-service portals.
• Automate business processes.
• Reduce development time and cost with out-of-the-box portal services

A lot of us SharePoint developers know the differences of features between Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server 2003 but it never hurts to point them out again for those who don't know.

As stated in MSDN:

Windows SharePoint Services
is a collection of services for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 that you can use to share information, collaborate with other users on documents, and create lists and Web Part pages. You can also use Windows SharePoint Services as a development platform to create collaboration applications and information-sharing applications.

SharePoint Portal Server 2003
is a scalable, enterprise portal server that is built on Windows SharePoint Services. You can use SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to aggregate Windows SharePoint Services sites, information, and applications in your organization to a single portal.

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 includes all features of Windows SharePoint Services and has some additional features. The following table compares the features between the two:

This information came from the following MSDN article:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;830320

If you need more information for your decision of deployment read the following white paper: "Deciding When to Deploy Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003"

Patrick Tisseghem was going to speak about SharePoint site definitions and templates on the TechEd 2005 in Amsterdam, but his session agenda has changed. He will be speaking about another very interesting session:

Creating Dynamic Web Sites with ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts
"Drill down on the new Web Parts infrastructure in ASP.NET 2.0. Learn how you can use Web Parts to build rich Web sites-enabling end users to dynamically control the layout of pages-and customize the properties of server controls."

We already had a session internally about this subject given by Mart. I will certainly be there as SharePoint Geek! :)

http://blog.u2u.info/DottextWeb/patrick/archive/2005/06/09/4311.aspx

On the blog of Eric Javri we can read that November 7th is going to be the official launch date of Team System. The rest of the products like SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and Biztalk Server 2006 will be launched during the week of November 7th according to Paul Flessner, senior vice president of Server Applications at Microsoft.

MSDN:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/launch2005/

Presspass:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/jun05/TechEd2005Day2PR.mspx

FTPOnline:
http://www.ftponline.com/weblogger/forum.aspx?ID=1&DATE=06/07/2005&blog=#385

http://blogs.msdn.com/ejarvi/archive/2005/06/07/426490.aspx