The Windows Blog has created an overview of the different editions of the upcoming Windows 8 release, the latest incarnation of Microsoft’s moneymaker.

No further comment on that. I just hope, we won’t get any more editions.

Microsoft recently published the Service Pack 2 for its current Office suite for the Mac. The update is available for download in many languages.

If you are interested in what changes the update brings you, have a look at the Description of the Office for Mac 2011 14.2 update.

Microsoft highlights the following changes for Outlook:

• Sync performance with Exchange server and IMAP,
• Performance improvements while deleting multiple items,
• Displaying email message content, and sending email.

In addition you now can schedule resources in the calendar, and the Week of the year (week number) can be displayed in the calendar.

For the other programs – Word, Excel and PowerPoint – Microsoft mentions the following changes on their Mac blog:

Word, Excel, and PowerPoint have improved performance with additional modest improvements. For example, we updated PowerPoint to take advantage of full screen view in Lion, and we improved grammar checkers for Italian and German languages. We also made it easier to work with Office documents on SkyDrive and addressed several smaller issues in response to your feedback.

As (almost) always, it’s probably a good idea to just run the update as it usually also includes some minor bug fixes that have not been mentioned.

Even though this is a SharePoint oriented blog, we all can’t quite ignore the upcoming Windows 8 release. Yes, it’s “just” another operating system and by now, we know about Windows, and yet – the new user interface will ask us to rethink a few things in terms of how we work with computers.

One thing for sure is no different than with Windows’ predecessors: There will be tons of tools and little and big helpers. The guys at TechRepublic.com created a list of their top 5 apps … and more to be expected.

Beginning of this week Microsoft started the Technical Preview program for the upcoming new version, so far called Office 15. As stated:

With Office 15, for the first time ever, we will simultaneously update our cloud services, servers, and mobile and PC clients for Office, Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Project, and Visio.

The Public Beta (i.e., everyone can have it and play with it) is announced to be available in Summer this year and the final release is expected (not announced yet) in Spring 2013.

If you are a developer, you already can have a look at changes in the Object Model – Microsoft has made the SDK (for the Technical Preview!!!) available here (if you get the CHM file to work).

Another interesting aspect is the User Interface-question: Will Office 15 be Metro Style in Win 8 or not? and what impact will this have on SharePoint? Especially on customized applications?

A word of caution here: you can find “leaked screenshots” and videos all over the net. Yes, some may be close to the final product, but we really don’t know yet. As far as I’m concerned, the value of these screenshots and videos is pretty small. The most critical issue for me is compatibility with SharePoint and Office 2010.

So you believe Office 365 is a good idea for your (big, small, tiny) company? great. And you believe it’s almost the same as having SharePoint on your old inhouse server? well, almost.

Office 365 is somewhat different, and it makes sense to spend a few minutes on planning to prevent head-aches down the road (they might come anyway for other reasons). To make it a bit easier for you, Microsoft has released a planning guide for setting up your move to an infrastructure that is built on Office 365.

These days when searching for SharePoint Branding on Google you will find a lot more articles than one or two years ago. Unfortunately I have seen and heard crazy stories about big amounts of money paid for branding (reminds me of the early days of the web when only somewhat big companies could afford a website because it took qualified experts to handcraft every single page).

The situation we are talking about here, is mostly found in medium size and for sure in large corporations and organizations. If you have just one SharePoint server for 10-20 people, you probably don’t want to mess with branding anyway.

There is no question that an outside facing SharePoint site (i.e., a SharePoint site publicly accessible on the Internet) needs some kind of branding. Intranets usually have some level of branding anyway, so why not the SharePoint sites as well. The more interesting question is, why you need to brand sites used for collaboration (e.g. project teams). Let’s say you/your company/your client has such a high reputation associated with the design, that the question posed here is irrelevant.

Fine – so the really interesting question is: What kind of branding do you actually need? Michael T. Smith of SharePoint Pro Magazine posts a few points about that, which you might want to read, before signing that 5 figure+ contract just for the branding.

The way SharePoint looks can be changed in several ways and the kind of branding I am talking about here (i.e., not just switching a logo) usually involves at least SharePoint Designer or even Visual Studio 2010. Both tools require some or a lot of knowledge from the person sitting in front of the computer.

If the targeted SharePoint environment is a two- or three tier setup, deployment also is a very important consideration that might actually eliminate SharePoint Designer as tool of choice – leaving you with Visual Studio 2010 … which is a developer’s baby (*).

Note: SharePoint branding IS in fact tricky. Yes, you need a specialist. However, that does not mean, you should not question what (s)he is telling you. When the doctor tells you to take medication X you still wanna understand, why you should take that medicine and what it does to your body. Same thing here.

Bottom line: I have seen too many branded SharePoint sites (internal and external) that were a mess to work with as a content editor, because the branding was done improperly. So only do it, if you really need to, and if at all possible, stay with ‘just’ CSS adjustments (hard enough to get those right).

—————————
(*) There are some third party tools available by now, e.g. on Codeplex or nextFLOW’s service. I have not tested and have no experience with any of them in terms of the visual results and they work in a deployment process. Make sure you get the right one for you version, as branding for MOSS 2007 and SharePoint 2010 are quite different.

In his article Microsoft has Abandoned Silverlight and All Other Plugins Jonathan Allen argues  that Microsoft has effectively made a decision against Silverlight (as well as Flash and every other plugin running in Internet Explorer today) by announcing yesterday, that Internet Explorer 10 (*) on Windows 8 will not run any plugins – in Metro mode (which is the cool name for what we will identify soon as the new Windows look). Plugins are still supported in the so-called Desktop mode, which is basically what we all look at today.

Creating and more importantly, actually placing new technology in a market always is difficult. And breaking broadly used habits even more. I remember when Apple abandoned serial and parallel interfaces and only offered USB to connect printers and other devices. I could not believe it. Magazines were full of negative comments. Many people expected this to break Apple’s neck. Today most people are very happy about this step.

Microsoft apparently is trying something similar – cutting off too old and heavy legacy technology. Stop trying to be compatible with every single age old technology … kind of. It’s a bit like Dr. Faustus in Goethe’s epic who laments to the ghosts and when the ghost finally shows up to help, Faust rather would have him go, but can’t make him go. So, just looking at my clients this one thing might turn out to be a show stopper for a short term Windows 8 upgrade.

I’m just thinking of one big migration project where Internet Explorer was a major pain in the neck, because so many applications where in some way or another dependent on some aspect of IE, so that when IE 9 came out, even the brief thought of migrating to that version was killed in an instant – the client would have to invest weeks and months of testing a few dozen applications … for what?

Will big companies just keep using old style IE like some still use IE6? Will it take another five to ten years, until Flash, Silverlight, etc. are gone? … or is this a business opportunity for some smart kid to figure out how to easily transform those plugins into HTML5?

It’s a bold step, Microsoft is taking and I am sure on the long run we all will benefit. The question just is how long and painful that run will be.

(*) Note: this link most likely is a temporary link that will either be taken down by Microsoft or will be used for other content in the future.

Branding a SharePoint Site can be pretty tricky and time consuming. If you want to give it a try, check out Celina Baginski’s 15 tips on branding SharePoint over on SharePoint Pro Magazine.

If you are even more serious, a friend of mine recommends Professional SharePoint 2010 Branding and User Interface Design (Wrox).

A bit more than a year after releasing Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010,  Microsoft is getting ready to hand out early versions of the next big version of Office along with SharePoint and Exchange to customers and partners. From what I was told, the programs start in November 2011. Microsoft has set up three distinct programs as they usually do to serve different interest groups:

• Technology Adoption Program (TAP) mainly for partners and clients who want to give their input into product development
• Enterprise Adoption Program (EAP) … as the name says
• Rapid Deployment Program (RDP) – if you want to be among the first to deploy the product in your organization

If you are interested in participating in any of these programs and you haven’t heard from your Microsoft representative, give them a call.

Microsoft Manager Eric Swift has taken a new role at Microsoft which is yet to be announced.

We met Eric last year when he opened the SharePoint Community‘s Collaboration Days in Lucerne. We enjoyed the time with Eric and information provided by him. Jared Spataro is going to step into Eric’s position. We wish him all the best and are looking forward to his visit to Switzerland

Mike Gannotti has compiled a great list of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Resources For IT Pro, Developer, And End Users. This list includes reading material as well as video and software (like labs and a ready to run server setup).

So if you are new to SharePoint 2010 this is a fabulous entry point.

Walt Mossberg hosted an early public demo of Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8.

Looks like Microsoft is expecting a lot more tablet PCs in their user’s hands.

… and when you look the hosts reactions on the “old” look of Office, you can tell there will be an avalanche of upgrades with a new user interface. The Ribbon was just the beginning.

Microsoft invites the technical community to another round of TechDays in Basel (CH) on 2. and 3. of May this year. I will be at the Microsoft ‘Ask the Experts’ booth representing the SharePoint Community together with Samuel Zürcher.

From the recommendations department: Randall Isenhour runs @sharepointdev – Official tweets from the SharePoint SDK team at Microsoft.

Great resource of links to resources for SharePoint developers

Silverlight is (was) Microsoft’s take on creating rich client applications on the browser (competing against Adobe Flash).

Until earlier this year, Silverlight was the technology to use if you wanted to create something more appealing using the Microsoft technology stack than just regular/simple HTML forms. Yes, JavaScript/AJAX/jQuery are valid alternatives, but since support varies between browsers and platforms (mobile devices, SharePoint, etc.) Silverlight allows for some consistency. The fact that Apple actively fights against Adobe Flash (on the iPhone) surely supports the position of Silverlight.

And then there was Summer … and silence around Silverlight. And now there is Mary Jo Foley’s ZDNet article on Microsoft’s support for HTML versus Silverlight and clearly HTML 5 is winning the game as can be concluded from her quotes of Bob Muglia (President Microsoft Servers and Tools):

Silverlight will continue to be a cross-platform solution, working on a variety of operating system/browser platforms, going forward, he said. “But HTML is the only true cross platform solution for everything, including (Apple’s) iOS platform,” Muglia said.

For sure no reason to dump your Silverlight knowledge, but if you are new to the scene and wonder what technology to use for creating rich ui applications, HTML 5 probably is your best pick as of today.

Today after many long evenings with many emails and calls and some face-to-face meetings, we finalized and published the agenda for the Collaboration Days.

We are proud to have great speakers in Lucerne – you will find excellent know-how and years of experience with SharePoint during the workshops on 30 November and then at the conference on 01 and 02 December at the Radisson Blu, right at beautiful Lake Lucerne.

The underlying theme of this conference is ‘creating hands-on value’: It’s our goal to provide knowledge that has an impact for you in your daily work – via presentations as well as knowledge sharing during breaks with colleagues and peers.

Microsoft has made Office 2011 available, the Mac version of its highly successful office suite.

Excited in anticipation I went ahead to buy the download version for USD 279.99. Unfortunately Microsoft won’t let you purchase from any other country than your home country, which in my case leads me to the Swiss site and a price of … 549.00 CHF. I don’t understand what ancient exchange rate Microsoft has chosen, but that price difference is unacceptable and I’m sure I’m not the only one thinking that way.

After all the great news I’ve heard about the product this price is a punch in the face.

Ever got an error message sounding like ‘Database response throttled. Maximum number of rows that can be read through the database system utility is 2000′ when running a BCS transaction against an external system (e.g. SAP, an external Database, etc.)?

Shane over at SharePoint Farmer’s Almanac published some headache prevention information in his article ‘BCS and SharePoint Workspaces limited to 2000 items from external list‘. He points to the BCS Team’s blog where they describe how to resolve the issue using PowerShell.

This type of error means that BCS has throttled an external system call for taking too long, or trying to transfer too much data. This feature is enabled by default to prevent Denial of Service attacks that could adversely affect SharePoint or external system health by performing huge transactions.

To change that limit to a higher value, you need to be Farm Administrator and only can do the required changes using public APIs or PowerShell (SharePoint Designer and Central Administration UI won’t do it).

As Shane points out there is an additional issue with SharePoint Workspace (the software formerly called Groove) which is not resolved by the above mentioned throttle management changes. On each client computer that runs SharePoint Workspace you need to do the following:

1. Open RegEdit and go to [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\Business Data\Synchronization]
2. Create a dword for ‘Query Instances Limit’ and set the decimal value as needed.

Goes without saying that you need to save the registry.

PowerPivot – a technology available for Excel and for SharePoint 2010 – provides BI (Business Intelligence) functionality to end users in a familiar environment (Excel and SharePoint), i.e., giving meaning to numbers.

PowerPivot for SharePoint provides the right technology to distribute business insights to all employees helping lead to better, faster, more relevant decisions while avoiding the proliferation of spreadmarts and data silos in the enterprise.

If you are planning on installing PowerPivot and have never done it before, have a look at the step-by-step guide over on PowerPivot-info.com.

Further read:
powerpivot.com (Microsoft’s entry into PowerPivot info with lots of demos and videos)
Cristian Petculescu on Business Intelligence and the PivotViewer Extension for Reporting Services Session#1
What the Masters think about SharePoint 2010 – PowerPivot

Thanks Samuel for pointing it out.

Microsoft has announced a new addition to the Visual Studio family of tools and products. LightSwitch is meant to give powerusers and IT Pros who don’t want to get into C# programming the power to quickly create business applications.

The beta is announced to be available from Monday, 23 August 2010 for download. We will for sure have a look at it. From what I’ve read so far it sounds like filling a niche:

• Application creation without programming: People who have tasks to do, who need to produce results, who have technical understanding, but don’t want to get too deep into programming (C# and the like) seem to be getting a powerful tool.
• Tool to get the job done: So far these people mostly would use Access or Excel with VBA to get the job done – a pain to migrate and in a corporate environment usually tough to maintain as the person who created the code might have been gone by the time of the next update.
• Distribution & Release Management: The application built with LightSwitch can easily be distributed. Solutions based on Excel, Access or maybe SharePoint Designer are much more difficult to distribute and maintain – with an application if there is an update, you update the application; with Excel and Access if there is an update you also need to make sure the data connections and data in the spreadsheets work. Working with SharePoint Designer usually means doing the work on a life site.

So I’m curious to see if Microsoft can accomplish what Borland unfortunately gave up many years ago when they stopped ObjectVision.

eweek article Application Development: Microsoft LightSwitch: 15 Reasons Non-Programmers Should Try It Out.
Microsoft’s LightSwitch center
LightSwitch Developer Center

With the latest version 2010, the Ribbon interface came to SharePoint users. Microsoft learned a lot since introducing that kind of user interface to us in Office 2007 and the Ribbons are well built now.

Since many organizations have their own set of rules, links, connections people are used to, many will want to customize the ribbon. André Lage an MVP from Portugal working in Switzerland at the moment has posted some hints. He also refers to Microsoft’s example.

Additional reading:
Jonathon Frost: Adding Custom Button to the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon
Microsoft’s SharePoint Developer Center: Module 10: Creating Dialogs and Ribbon Controls for SharePoint 2010
MSDN article: Architecture of the Server Ribbon
How to Add a Tab to the Ribbon in SharePoint Foundation
MSDN article: Customizing the Server Ribbon
MSDN article: Building Block: Server Ribbon

After a time of silence here due to change of job, this is the first in a series of posts on my latest project: migrating a company of a few thousand users from Lotus Notes/Domino to Microsoft technology (Exchange and SharePoint).

If you are interested in this topic, drop me a note via the contact page. I’m interested to hear what would be most useful to you.

This is my presentation held on 27 May in Zurich at SharePoint Day set up by DigiComp.

Andy Dale from OfficeTalk probably had some fun creating this SharePoint template for the FIFA World Cup in South Africa. Best of all he made the template available for free. Thanks Andy.

With the official release of SharePoint 2010 last week, Microsoft also published several posters for supporting different aspects of planning and deployment. The posters are available in PDF, XPS and Visio file format for SharePoint Foundation and SharePoint Server as mentioned below:

Today, Microsoft’s latest major version of SharePoint is going to be made publicly available. Whether you like SharePoint or not, this launch will have an impact on many people: many company Intranets and document management systems run on SharePoint and will be updated in the months to come so that administrators, architects, engineers and consultants can make use of the new functionality and users can get their work done through better systems. If you don’t work with SharePoint directly, you most likely are connected with people who do.

This is an exciting event and I am looking forward to many great projects with our clients.

Side note: after Microsoft released the language packs this morning, my friend and colleague Samuel Zürcher upgraded the site of the SharePoint Community Switzerland to SharePoint 2010 just tonight.

Via TechNet Microsoft recently has published an alert about a possible (i.e., not yet verified) vulnerabiltity in SharePoint versions WSS 3 and MOSS 2007. As stated in the message:

The vulnerability could allow an attacker to run arbitrary script that could result in elevation of privilege within the SharePoint site, as opposed to elevation of privilege within the workstation or server environment.

Until this threat is verified and a fix is published, the suggested action to avoid any harm is to temporarily restrict access to SharePoint Help.aspx. Details on how to do this are stated in the alert.

So you have downloaded SharePoint 2010 RTM (final release) and are ready to install. If you have not yet done any preparatory actions, check out 5 Tips on Effectively Planning for SharePoint 2010 Migration and if you need or want more detail, check out What NOT to Migrate into SharePoint 2010 and In Place Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 – The Vertict? It’s better, but is it good enough? (you will see a lot of articles in this arena coming out these days).

On the CodeProject site you find a step-by-step guide leading you through the server setup: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/sharepoint/InstallSharePoint2010_asp.aspx

Note: We run SharePoint on Virtual Machines. One very big advantage is that before the migration we just create a snapshot of the VM so in case something goes wrong, we can go back to the state of the server before the migration. This is a much better situation than having to deal with software half way installed.

MSDN and TechNet subscribers can download the final release of SharePoint 2010 Server and Office 2010 Professional as of last night (European time). Office is available in 32 bit and 64 bit.

Visio and Project 2010 are available as well.

Microsoft Customers with license agreements will be able to download the software starting 27 April (US time) according to Microsoft.

“Gentlemen, boys and girls, start your engines!” – As we are getting ready to install the code that will descend upon us tomorrow at some point, Dux Raymond Sy has created a concise listing of planning steps for SharePoint migration ahead of us:

http://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-20/5-tips-on-effectively-planning-for-sharepoint-2010-migration-007305.php

Beginning of April Basel, Switzerland was home of Microsoft’s TechDays. Today Microsoft Switzerland made the presents available:

http://www.microsoft.com/switzerland/msdn/de/techdays/presentations10simple.aspx

UPDATE: I forgot to note that most of the presentations are in German. Some however are in English.

Those of you who have been using stsadm in the past for certain tasks in SharePoint 2007 (like adding a new feature to a site) will in the future (have to) use PowerShell.

For this group of people Dmitry Sotnikov has created a cheat sheet with PowerShell commands and cmdlets for many operations within SharePoint 2010.

Download the cheat sheet from PowerGui.org.

Microsoft officially announced that the new version of the flagship product Office 2010 has been released to manufacturing today.

The software had been in the wild on peer-to-peer networks for the last day or two already. Whether these were official versions or not is a different issue and I’d stay away from these downloads.

As mentioned in the announcement (bold highlighting by me):

Our Volume License customers with active Software Assurance (SA) on these products will be one of the first to receive the 2010 set of products. They will be able to download the products in English via the Volume Licensing Service Center starting April 27.

I guess members of the Microsoft Partner Network and other registered people (TechNet, etc.) will have access to the software via download either at the same time or even earlier.

UPDATE: SharePoint 2010 also has reached RTM status.

UPDATE: According to Computerworld, MSDN and TechNet subscribers will be able to download the software starting this week Thursday, 22 April 2010.

Last night Microsoft published number 4 of Silverlight. The software is available for download for Windows and the Mac (yes, it works with Safari and FireFox as well).

If you don’t know what Silverlight is:

• It’s a technology that allows software developers to build websites and business applications that give end users a richer experience than standard web technologies (*).
• Silverlight is Microsoft’s competition to Adobe‘s Flash. If you don’t know what that is – you probably are using it a lot without knowing: whenever you see things moving on a website, chances are that (part of the) website has either been created with Flash or … (drumroll) … Silverlight.

(*) What that means is a separate blog post in itself. If you are interested in more detail, either drop me a comment here (I read the comments!) or read some of Microsoft’s case studies. And if you really want to get into it, read the features list and check out the resources.

Today the latest version of Microsoft’s most essential development environment Visual Studio 2010 will be released in Las Vegas. So we should see the downloads later today (or latest tomorrow) on TechNet and MSDN.

The product is available in three different flavors: Professional, Premium and Ultimate. The difference in functionality and pricing between the three editions is displayed here. The major difference between Ultimate and Premium seems to be Test Management and UML integration. If either of these is of any concern to you, you might want to upgrade. Last week at a conferenceI saw an excellent presentation of the Test Management. This is some brilliant piece of technology and if you work in large software projects that money is well spent.

If you want to understand why you should upgrade to that version (and if you need to), Microsoft’s Whitepaper on the topic might help.

What has been your experience with Visual Studio 2010 (Beta) compared to the 2008 or 2005 version?

A few days ago Microsoft announced 12-May 2010 to be the official Launch Date of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. RTM (Release to Manufacturing) will be in April.

For Swiss clients the X.Days, coming up this week in Interlaken, are a great opportunity to learn about Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 from a business perspective (CIOs and IT Managers are the main X.Days audience). Microsoft is offering a series of hands-on workshops: rather than showing the latest greatest features from a technical perspective, these workshops are set up for you to understand the value of Office 2010 in the business process.

I will be running the booth of the SharePoint Community. See you there.

Mind Mapping is used a lot these days in many situations – from setting up projects to emergency solution finding. One of the leading commercial products in this area is MindManager which I’ve been using in a very early version years ago and I loved it.

One of the features missing in most Mind Mapping software is the ability to collaborate. This is where SharePoint comes into the picture: Mindjet, the company behind MindManager, just announced MindManager for SharePoint.

Download a trial using the above link and share your experience here. We are Interested to hear what you think of the product and how it goes with SharePoint. We will update here with our own experience in a few weeks time.

This is not related to SharePoint but to the Microsoft Office suite: The Mac Business Unit at Microsoft has announced the new Mac Office version 2011. The software is expected to be available in late fall of this year (2010). As it is the tradition in the Mac BU, they don’t plan a public beta. Instead there will be a private beta on invitation only. However, from the publicity seen so far I’d expect a lot of information ahead of release time from Microsoft about their new product (they have improved a lot in that respect in the recent SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 launch preparation).

Major highlights of the new version:

1) Outlook is back on the Mac, retiring Entourage Mail and Calendar. Among other things this means Mac users are welcomed back to the Exchange user community.

2) Visual Basic is back as well, closing a gap between PC and Mac users created in the 2008 Mac Office version, and giving Mac developers (and users) the opportunity to extend the product on both platforms.

3) Compatibility increase between Mac and PC Office documents and functionality. This is big.

“Noting that roughly three quarters of their Mac users use Windows at least occasionally, Microsoft’s Mac team says it’s also working to make the new Office for the Mac more functionally compatible with the Windows edition.”

4) Collaboration improved by integration with SharePoint and other platforms, including real time online collaboration on documents (co-authoring).

5) User Interface – Ribbon Mac-like. As stated in PC World Microsoft’s Sr. Product Manager Microsoft’s Han-Yi Shaw said

“…that the Mac team at Microsoft worked hard to adopt Apple technologies while also making sure their product was recognizably Microsoft Office.”

Sources:

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/189123/microsoft_announces_office_for_mac_2011.html

http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=10812

http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/entdev/article.php/3864736/Microsoft-Demos-Mac-Office-2011-at-Macworld-2010.htm

http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/microsoft_news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222900108

As Joel Oleson says in a recent blog post:

You hear about all the new features in SharePoint 2010, but what isn’t there?

The SharePoint Team at Microsoft not only has added functionality, but also has retired features and code from the upcoming SharePoint 2010. Microsoft has published the list on MSDN.

As an administrator you might want to know the current space used by individual SharePoint sites, or you might need that information for planning purposes. For cases like this, Quest offers the Site Administrator Reporter in a free version. The setup installs a plugin on your computer (Silverlight, in case you are interested) and a service. The report generation then happens on a Quest server.

The reports gives detailled information on the space used for example by each site or by file types.

Note: At this point of time the setup cannot install the service on my main computer (Vista 32bit, Swiss German). It runs fine on a Win XP VM as well as on a colleague’s machine that is running Vista 32bit, US-English. I am working with Quest development on that issue and will update here as soon as the problem is resolved.

Update: The issue has been resolved.

Source: Joel Oleson’s Free SharePoint Reports with No Server Install

SharePoint Connections offer a one-day online conference for developers and administrators – SharePoint 2010: Bits from the Edge.

Two dates are available:

For participants in the U.S.: 16-February, 09:00am – 05:30pm EST (i.e., 15:00 – 23:30 CET).

For participants in Europe: 18-February, 09:00 – 17:30 GMT (i.e., 08:00 – 16:30 CET).

Check out the program and register. Thanks to the guys from SharePoint Connections.

The Microsoft SharePoint Team has published a clarification for which Operating System versions SharePoint 2010 runs on. So if you are wondering which of your (old) machines can take SharePoint 2010 without change, take a look at the Operating System Requirements of SharePoint 2010.

Branding of SharePoint sites (changing the design to make it look unique and fit the purpose of the site) is one of those topics you can (and need to) read a lot about. Part of the process (which this posting is about) is changing a design, in other words: you have created a page layout and it has been published, and now you need to make changes.

Heather Solomon published a very good write-up about the big trap involved and what to do about it: when you apply your custom design to a site, SharePoint takes the style folder with yourCustom.css file and creates a copy yourCustom.css file in the SQL DB for each site it is applied on. So when you have made changes to the original yourCustom.css file you need to replace its copies on each of those customized sites with the updated file.

The easiest way to accomplish updates is using the following setup from the beginning:

1) Place yourCustom.css file in a folder that is accessible from all sites, e.g.,
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\1031\styles\yourCustom.css.

NOTE: This would be the setup for a German speaking site. For U.S. replace 1031 by 1033.

2) In the folder containing your customized design (and which will be copied), i.e.,
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\THEMES\YourTheme\
place a theme.css file with the following content only (yes, just this one line):

@import “/_layouts/1031/styles/yourCustom.css”;

The bottom line is: You don’t have to worry about any SharePoint mechanics here – you use standard CSS technology by importing an external css file each time a pages is called. This way any design change is applied the moment you update the one original css file.

If you haven’t started using PowerShell yet, it’s time to get going: Microsoft not only has retired stsadm for SharePoint 2010 administration tasks (and replaced it with PowerShell), but also builds on PowerShell in Windows 7 and Windows 2008 Server (with more to come).

SharePointChick (her name, not my idea) Mirjam van Olst has written up a few tricks you probably won’t find in training materials like that and that are very useful. Thanks for that Mirjam.

Highly recommended: Download and install PowerGUI which makes creating PowerShell scripts so much easier by providing intellisense and debugging capabilities. Check out the basic tutorial (and find more on their website).

Further resources:

• Some handy PowerShell commands to deal with Windows (not SharePoint related)
• Top 25 Windows PowerShell commands for administrators by Jonathan Hassell
• Detailled technical information on Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) (note: navigation sidebar does not open in Firefox)
• http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/ Windows PowerShell blog
• http://www.pwrshell.net/ – PowerShell community

The beta versions of the 2010 Office and SharePoint product range have been out for a few weeks now and people start running into issues (that’s what a public beta phase is for).

One of the issues with SharePoint Designer 2010 is that this version will not allow editing of SharePoint sites running on WSS 3 or MOSS 2007. That is very unfortunate but it seems there is no way around it.

So the next question is what you need to do so that you can continue working in both environments WSS 3/MOSS 2007 as well as SharePoint 2010. Matt Groves read the documentation and found out what Microsoft has to say:

SharePoint Designer 2010 only connects to SharePoint 2010. To connect to SharePoint 2007 and earlier sites you must continue to use SPD 2007. If you elect to install both applications side-by-side, you must download the 32-bit version of SPD 2010. Please also note that 64 bit Office applications will not run if SPD 2007 is installed; 64bit Office 2010 applications should only be used if not connecting to SharePoint 2007 servers.

Note to self: We are moving from a 32-Bit into a 64-Bit world and installing new software from now will take some more planning than just download and start Setup.exe.

Further ressource: The Microsoft SharePoint Designer Team Blog

Microsoft has done a lot within the last few years in several of their products to increase security and at the same time maintaining a stable environment. This also is true for SharePoint 2010 expected to be released in the first quarter of 2010: The developers have added what’s called a ‘Sandbox’ so that SharePoint Web Parts cannot interfere with the rest of the SharePoint environment.

Say a section of your Intranet  is experimental only (but you want to run in production environment) or if you are an administrator and you want to make sure that there is no connection between that section and other parts of the Intranet, you can have that section (e.g., a Web Part) run in its own little universe, called a Sandbox.

Corey Roth gives us a straight forward report of his troubles in getting the sandbox to work in the first place and what he did to fix the problems. Thanks Corey.

This is a personal post – to let you know that you should not expect any new posts here over the next week or so.

Over the last few months I have been busy setting up a conference together with my wife and a few friends in Rotterdam, the Netherlands for this coming weekend. Social Entrepreneurs and Change Makers are coming from all over the world and we are all very excited. If you are interested and want to find out more, pls visit http://www.EuropeanSummit.org and if you want to chip in a few $ you can help us bring eight young African women to Rotterdam who at the moment are on a six month Fellowship at King’s College, London – every dollar is appreciated.

One of the great changes coming with SharePoint 2010 to the end user is a wider choice in browsers and platforms. Next to its latest Internet Explorer 7 and 8, Microsoft now supports Firefox 3 and Safari 4 – and not only on Windows, but also on the Mac (and as far as I know Firefox on Linux is supposed to work as well).

If you are developing SharePoint interfaces or you are an administrator responsible for your company’s SharePoint environment, here is one thing to consider when planning the upgrade: SharePoint 2010 and Internet Explorer 6 don’t go together well – or as Microsoft puts it: this combination is not supported.

If for some reason you want to leave the (initiation of the) browser upgrade in the hands of the users, Randi Disgrill has an easy way to show users a message that makes them aware of the need to upgrade. Two words of caution though: I recommend not using this solution, when the users actually cannot upgrade the browsers themselves (huge potential for massive frustration knocking at your door), and I definitely would add a “do not show this warning anymore” option or show the message only once a day.

When you are a web designer or programmer asked to make design changes to make the presentation a bit more interesting, one of the not so good things about WSS 3/MOSS 2007 is the HTML code generated. The point is that the code exists of a long list of nested tables – not the best setup for easy manipulation by programmers and designers.

When word about SharePoint 2010 came out earlier this year, this was one of the things I was hoping to be addressed … and it is. Andrew Connell confirms that in SP 2010 there are no tables. We’ll see in the final product (remember that Andrew’s post is based on beta code!), if there actually are no tables anymore anywhere.

So maybe we will see something similar to one of my favourite web projects (CSS Zen Garden).

If you are in a transition phase from one world to the other (Lotus Notes to SharePoint or the other way ’round) or you have co-existence of both, you often will need to access one world from within the other.

Rishi shows a relatively easy way to access SharePoint lists from within a Lotus Notes application. This is a one-way option only via SharePoint’s RSS option.