Welcome to my blog on all things SharePoint and .NET. I have a range of articles that will interest you if you've made it as far as visiting my blog. I currently live in Perth, Western Australia and am a Independent Sharepoint Consultant. I founded the SharePointDevWiki.com and help facilitate the Perth SharePoint User Group.

Whitepapers

Conferences

Solution Development in SharePoint 2007

This series was inspired by the chatter amongst SharePoint blogs on the best ways to approach customisations in SharePoint using Solutions.

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8

Leveraging the SharePoint Platform

This series was inspired by a discussion had with Andrew Coates at a Perth SharePoint User Group meeting. This then turned into a 6 part series on Arno Nell's SharePointMagazine.net web site.

Initial post - Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6

Webcasts

I have recorded various web casts that I present at User Groups or just on a specific topic by request:
How ASP.NET Developers can leverage SharePoint webcast
SPSource Webcast: Reverse engineer Lists to ListTemplates and much more
SharePoint Development with Unit Testing webcast
Perth SharePoint UG Web Cast on approaches to deploying artefacts (SPSource)
More...


Podcasts

I have been interviewed about Leveraging the SharePoint Platform by the SharePoint Pod Show: listen here .

Latest Posts

SharePoint 2007 SSP User Profile Import Connections Limitations

April 23, 2008

The organisation I am working for at the moment has an Active Directory set up of Users and Contacts. Running a ldifde query to output all Users and Contacts (below) provides me a list of 936 items. ldifde -f usersindomain.csv -r "(&(objectCategory=Person)(|(objectClass=User)(objectClass=Contact)))" If I use this query within the Import Connection in the SSP in Central Admini more...

 

My Site Creation Timeouts and managing MOSS's mess

September 17, 2007

I’ve been working in my demo VM again today and had an issue where the creation of a MySite was timing out. Interestingly it’s taken ages for it to create one (about 2 minutes)! I’ve allocated 3Gb RAM to the VM and it’s still taking too long to demo how ‘slick’ this feature is in a presentation. The MySite doesn't come up when I try and visit it so i've tried to delete it and go again. I used st more...

 

Setting up MOSS My Sites for a Enterprise 2.0 presentation

September 14, 2007

Managing Remote Desktop on Windows Server 2003   I have been working more on my demo VM and wanted to use Remote Desktop to demonstrate various users in various roles. By default Windows 2003 is pretty well locked down and I found this great article from Mitch Tulloch which explains what you have to do.   Terminal Services Licensing   I noticed that there is a limit of 2 connections by de more...

 

Setting up My Calendar on MOSS2007

September 14, 2007

I have been creating a demo VM to run some scenarios against and wanted to demonstrate the Outlook Web Access (OWA) Web Part capabilities. I installed MOSS 2007 and had it all running with POP3 and then installed Exchange 2003. I noticed that the OWA wasn’t working in the Exchange System Manager ‘Servers|<server name>|Protocols|HTTP|Exchange Virtual Server’ and instructed me to go to II more...

 

Defining a Sharepoint group for a web part

August 20, 2007

Once you've installed MOSS 2007 you'll notice there are heaps of web parts and making it easier for Portal Admins to find the web part to add can be made easier by "idiot-proof" naming and also grouping the web parts into sections. C-Dog has a great article on this which also covers how to automate what group a web part gets added to by using features and editing the .webpart manifest f more...

 

Application Development in Sharepoint

July 19, 2007

I've been looking at all the ways that you can actually create new functionality over than the base functionality of Sharepoint. Most of this is around actually displaying the content in a portal environment on a public facing web site in a way that external users are used to. Internal users of the portal will be comfortable with the Sharepoint look and feel and branding is not at the top of the more...

 

APAC Sharepoint Conference

May 10, 2007

I'm flying over to Sydney for the APAC Sharepoint Conference at the Hilton on 15th and 16th May. Will be my first trip to Sydney which is pretty poor form being as I've been living in Perth for over 4 years! I am really looking forward to meeting people who are also as passionate about Sharepoint as I am at the moment. It will be a great way to learn more about the product suite which I've mainly more...

 

Sharepoint 2007 cost

November 27, 2006

Just found this article which shows that a 1000 user license approx. is about AUD$11,000 and is AUD$107,000 for Internet access which doesn't need CALs. Pretty competitive against Hummingbird DM/RedDot and Interwoven Worksite/Teamsite combinations. Be interesting to see how the market picks up in Perth on this stuff and how soon. This Microsoft page covers what you need to buy product set wise. more...

 

Sharepoint 2007 B2TR upgrade error

September 19, 2006

I followed Amanda's instructions to the letter and got results as described, but for some reason got this error on Step 11!"Windows could not start the Office Sharepoint Server Search on Local Computer. For more information, review the System Event Log. If this is a non-Microsoft service, contact the service vendor, and refer to service-specific error code -2147467262." Oh yeah..." more...

 

Sharepoint 2007 B2TR

September 18, 2006

Finally got round to downloading the new B2TR patches for MOSS and Office client. An awesome set of screenshots for installing WSS 2007 B2TR...very impressed, must have taken a while...but every man and his dog will be linking to it...good way of getting traffic ;-) From reading blogs over the last week, there appears to be a lot of new stuff in there. Be good to have a good look round it all.  more...

 

Sharepoint University

August 23, 2006

Stumbled across these forums at Sharepoint University today, has a nice feature of an RSS feed for each room which I've not come across before. Extremely handy! more...

 

M$ Sharepoint 2007 Learning Portal

August 22, 2006

Found this link to some free eLearning material available from Microsoft. The courses are pretty basic but have some good presales material on what M$ percieves are it's selling points in the market. more...

 

Sharepoint 2007 Web Content Pages

August 21, 2006

I've been having a bit of an experiment with Sharepoint 2007 and creating a Site of 'Publishing Site' type. The best thing to do is make it a top level site and that way it's master pages are used when you create Pages and it uses the Page Layouts etc. within that Site (unless you really want to share Page Layouts across different web sites).Changing the Page LayoutYou can change the Page Layout more...

 

MOSS 2007 research

August 15, 2006

I've been researching WSS v3.0 and MOSS 2007. Here are some useful links to kick start you off:ArticlesList of Web Parts available for WSS and MOSSSites Microsoft Office Online Beta MSDN SharepointMicrosoft Sharepoint Community Sharepoint KicksBlogs Andrew Connell SharepointBlogs Westin’s Patrick Tisseghem’s MNissen LauraJ JanT SharepointThoughtsSamplesWSS Demo You can also hit more...

 

2007 Office System Video: Enterprise Content Management

August 3, 2006

Microsoft have done a great job of putting up some recordings of a recent conference which has some great demos of Sharepoint 2007 in action showing how you would implement a CMS system into this.EditorFirst impressions are that I like the fact that you can edit templates in Visual Studio or the FrontPage replacement. One thing about working in RedDot was that EVERYTHING is in a browser so you ca more...

 

Sharepoint 2007 beta 2

May 10, 2006

Well it's be stated to be publically released in beta on May 23rd. It'll be interesting to get under the covers and take a look at this. I found this article which talks about how they are blending asp.net and Sharepoint technologies into one so that components such as web parts can be used in both situations.I've still yet to see any concrete evidence of the CMS side of things competing against more...

 

MOSS Deployment

May 7, 2006

I read a good article about the new Deployment features on MOSS (M$ Office Sharepoint Server) by Tyler Butler. I am extremely interested to see where M$ see themselves against the likes of RedDot and Teamsite. There main flaw for a Enterprise level CMS is the lack of deploying content out through a firewall to an external facing server as Tyler explains. The article basically explains that MOSS w more...

 

M$ Web Content Management

March 28, 2006

Just seen that Andrew Connell is going to be doing a web cast on M$ new CMS on 18th April (public holiday in Aus!). Sounds like there is a lot of interest about the CMS as well as Sharepoint 2007. Andrew mentioned that Ryan Rogers also noticed the interest.The Sharepoint bloggers have been busy also.I believe it when I see it, but so far the features they are talking about are very impressive. more...