For one of our customers we build a Portal used as a Company Management System. It is a management system for internal documents needed at several indoor as outdoor locations. This Portal is a very good example of creating a design for customers. Together with a designer it only took 5 days manhour to accomplish this. It involves changing styles, adding new styles and adding new images. Some changes in custom WebParts was needed.

I got this from a collegea: Steve Ballmer in action. This Remix is made of two earlier movie clips of presentations of Steve Balmer.

Fun to watch :)

http://www.flamingmailbox.com/maccomedy/movies/balmer.html

Thanks to Dustin an overview of the features found in SharePoint v3.

UI / UX

• WSS will have an entirely new user interface that includes better navigation controls and built-in breadcrumb trails.
• Pages will derive from “master pages“, meaning that you could re-skin an entire SharePoint site by modifying just one template file
• More professional out of the box themes
• FrontPage can directly edit each site's CSS file(s)
• Workflow built-in all over SharePoint, with tight integration with Outlook 12 tasks
• Individual documents can have document-specific workflows
• Item-level security on lists and libraries
• FrontPage has evolved further into a SharePoint designer tool (I read that as: the only SharePoint designer tool), and apparently, ghosted/unghosted pages won't be a problem any longer
• Recycle bin with user and administrator restore features for document libraries and list items
• InfoPath forms can be filled out with only a browser when published as (to?) a SharePoint site (even with FireFox)
• Customizable and extensible search (and search API), including “did you mean“-type search term corrections
• Lists can be viewed on mobile devices

Integration

• All lists and libraries have RSS feeds, and each list's feed can be customized to include whatever fields you'd like
• Event list RSS feeds include iCal files as enclosures
• Each site has a master “aggregating“ RSS feed
• Outlook 12 can perform 2-way online/offline syncronization of the following list types:
  • Contacts
  • Events
  • Tasks
  • Discussion Lists
  • Document Libraries (!)
• Discussion lists can create their own e-mail alias in Active Directory, allowing you to e-mail that alias to automatically archive that e-mail (and its attachments) to a SharePoint discussion list
• ALL lists and libraries have version history capability, and only “diffs“ are stored (differences from one change to the next)
• Access treats SharePoint sites as honest-to-goodness data sources

Developer-oriented news

• Existing web parts will “just work“ in the new SharePoint web part page framework
• Site definitions/templates will ship in the box for blogs and wikis (blogs can be built directly on your “My Site“!)
• All lists and libraries will have synchronous event handlers (not sure how these work with other interfaces to SharePoint data, like OM, WEBDAV, SOAP, etc., if the event handler has to raise an exception)
• List/library version history is exposed programmatically by way of the OM
• Multiple “content types” (sets of metadata, or “metadata templates“, if you will) for document libraries and lists, that include view information, workflows, bound events.
• FrontPage can edit workflows
• Business Data Catalog (datasource catalog on steroids, apparently).  This doesn't seem all that new to me, so I'll reserve commentary until more details emerge after the expected PDC sessions)

Service Pack 2 has been released for Windows SharePoint Services. Is includes updates previously released for Windows SharePoint Services:

• Windows SharePoint Services Service Pack 1
• Security Update for Windows SharePoint Services: KB887981

ServicePack 2 also includes stability improvements developed as a result of user input from the Microsoft Online Crash Analysis in Windows SharePoint Services and from Microsoft Product Support feedback.

You can get specific information about this update in the Microsoft Knowledge Base article (887624): Description of Windows SharePoint Services Service Pack 2.

Have fun :)

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9c552114-dc9a-43ee-9281-b080b7c280b4&DisplayLang=en

A good friend of mine, Pedro Serrano of CaveDigital, just started recently his own blog. Just have a look. His company specialises also in SharePoint and he has some nifty, cool things built.

I installed locally commerce server 2002 sp3 on Windows 2002 in a domain. When I try to connect to BizDesk as local or domain administrator, I got the following error:

"An error occurred while accessing the Business Desk. Contact your system administrator."

It seems that in IIS 6.0 Active Server Pages (ASP) was prohibited. Just go into "Internet Information Server Manager" and look under "Web server extensions". Change the "Active Server Pages" to Allowed.

I just started with Microsoft Commerce Server and my first problem was that after installation of the product, including the service packs and feature pack 1 my MSCS_Admin database was not found in SQL Server.

After googling i found out that this is easily resolved by doing the following:

• Create a database with the name MSCS_Admin
• Open the SQL Query Analyser in this new database
• Start the admin_schema.sql script found in the folder c:\Program Files\Microsoft Commerce Server 2002
• Make sure that the login credentials are correct by starting the Commerce Server Manager and right-click properties on the "Commerce Server Manager" node.

Microsoft has a toolbar introduced which is helpfull to web developers. They can check compatiblity with W3C standards for html and CSS. As stated on their website:

"The IE Developer Toolbar provides several features for deeply exploring and understanding Web pages.

• Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a web page.
• Locate and select specific elements on a web page through a variety of techniques.
• Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings.
• View HTML object class names, ID's, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys.
• Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
• Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS web feed links.
• Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text.
• Immediately resize the browser window to 800x600 or a custom size.
• Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain.
• Choose direct links to W3C specification references, the Internet Explorer team weblog (blog), and other resources.
• Display a fully featured design ruler to help accurately align objects on your pages"

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=E59C3964-672D-4511-BB3E-2D5E1DB91038&displaylang=en

I get a lot of questions of starting SharePoint developers that when setting up their development area and try to test their newly created WebParts they often get the error message "Not registered as safe on this website...".

This message can mean anything because it is a standard message from SharePoint. But in most cases the following will work. So here a simple but handy walkthrough when you are developing WebParts.

• Set your debug output folder of your WebPart Library development to the bin folder of your Portal
• Make sure that there is a <SafeControl .... /> tag placed in the web.config
• Use a tool like InstallAssemblies to generate your dwp files and add them to your Portal
• Set the trust level to "Full" in the web.config

Important!!
Keep in mind that taking these steps will give you full control of all API stuff in SharePoint. But a lot of it is under CAS (Code Access Security) which means that if you do not have sufficient rights the method or property will throw an exception.

So always test your WebParts in a test environment when they are for example signed and try to access it with a SharePoint user not having the same role as the Administrator does. (in most cases when you are developing you have Administrator rights)

Have you ever wondering who designed the look and feel of SharePoint? I have... sometimes i wonder why they did the look of SharePoint as it is today. One of the things i really don't like is that when you create a new site with a name and description the following look and feel is presented:

As you can see the description is below the line, means it takes up space of a table row where WebParts are normally displayed. The "Home" text has a ridiculous size in comparison with the title i just entered. So after some changes to the default.aspx file you get the following:

This is more like it :) So how did i do this? It is very easy. Just open the default.aspx file in an editor (or use Frontpage if you want), and look for the following:

<SharePoint:ProjectProperty Property="Description" runat="server"/>

This part will produce the description of the site. We are gonna move it to the position of the "Home" text. The home text can be found under the section <!-- Title -->. Just replace it and remove the description from its original place (don't forget to through away the <tr><td>....</td></tr>)

Now look for the following:

<SharePoint:ProjectProperty Property="Title" runat="server"/>

You will see that this is found in the same section <!-- Title --> just before the "Home"text. Notice the styles used in the <td> ... </td> elements for both parts.

The property title uses the style ms-titlearea, and the moved property description is using the ms-pagetitle. Now swap both styles.

This is everything we have todo. :)