As you may have noticed in the last couple of months or so, I've been posting new blog entries with less and less frequency.  The good news that I'm fine, my family's fine, nothing's gone wrong (knock on wood) that has prevented me from regularly updating the blog like I wanted.  The bad news is that I'm probably going to continue posting haphazardly on a reduced schedule for the next several months, due to the fact that the majority of my writing energies are being devoted to another project: the "SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide."

Becky Isserman (aka MOSSLover) was awesome enough to invite me to co-author this book with her, and we've been furiously scribbling away as we work to put together a useful and thorough resource on how to preserve and restore your SharePoint environment in the event of a calamity.  It's definitely been a learning experience for me; as a first-time author I have a whole new appreciation for everyone out there who has written a technical book before.

As you can see, the entry for the book is up on Amazon already, although we've slightly tweaked the title recently to better reflect how our work is going to encompass the entire SharePoint platform, not just MOSS 2007.  The other cool thing that happened recently is that our publisher has put together a draft of the cover design for the book, and I think it looks pretty sweet.  Between that and the Amazon entry it certainly makes the whole project feel a lot more tangible beyond the boatload of Word documents we're churning out.

And instead of just taunting you with how cool the cover looks, I figured I'd go ahead and put it out there for you to see as well.  Take a look and let me know what you think   And don't forget to bookmark that Amazon page so you can easily check back to it and find out when your pre-ordered copy is due to ship!  

A few months ago I talked about the growing community of SharePoint professionals and users who were joining the conversations at Twitter:

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/fortheuser/archive/2008/04/21/meet-me-on-twitter.aspx

I still use Twitter quite a bit (in spite of its seemingly continual technical issues and outages), and it is still a great place to interact with other people out there who use SharePoint on a regular basis.  But I wanted to take a quick second to mention another social network that I think you should definitely check out if you're looking for new sources of SharePoint information, or just information in general: FriendFeed.

FriendFeed is an interestingly versatile tool.  It's a social network, RSS feed aggregator, instant messenger, and forum all rolled up in one.  I've configured my FriendFeed page to aggregate the output of my activities on this blog, Google Reader, Twitter, and many other websites, so that it's all available in one place if someone wants to see it.

But let's face it, I'm not that interesting, and I'm certainly not writing this post to ask you to pay attention to what songs I've bookmarked on Pandora or the latest article about the Indianapolis Colts that I've shared on Google Reader, and this isn't a blog about either of those two things either.  This is a blog about SharePoint, so let's talk about how it relates to what you can find on FriendFeed.

The social networking aspects of FriendFeed means that you can subscribe to the FriendFeeds of anyone else on the site, so you can now track and see what other people on the site are reading, commenting, and sharing about SharePoint.  And yes, once you sign up for the site, you can comment on any item anyone posts and mark the posts you "Like", providing more insight and metadata about the content than you could get from a standalone RSS reader like Google Reader.  And the comments are threaded, acting as a discussion forum about the article, which is nice because the discussion is centralized on FriendFeed rather than spread across several different sites.

The real hook for FriendFeed with regards to SharePoint is the Rooms feature. There are a couple of SharePoint-specific rooms that you can participate in and see content provided that is specific to SharePoint:

SharePoint Talk: http://friendfeed.com/rooms/sharepointtalk
SharePoint River: http://friendfeed.com/rooms/sharepointriver

SharePoint Talk is the place to go when you've found a great SharePoint article that you want to share with other people or if you want to start or engage in a discussion about a post already found in the room.  Anyone who wants to can join the room and share articles in it, we only ask that the content is relevant to SharePoint in some way.

SharePoint River is a source of SharePoint content from around the Internet, aggregated from several automated sources.  It's best used to see what kind of SharePoint-specific noise is going on throughout the Internet and to find articles or sources that you might not have otherwise come across.  I would warn that if you subscribe to that room that you probably don't want to have it put its articles on your FriendFeed home page, because it generates a lot of postings in a hurry and can be hard to follow.

Additionally, you can cross-post articles from your home page to your rooms, and vice versa, with ease.  So if your normal feeds find something of interest that you want to add to the SharePoint Talk room, you can easily do that from your FriendFeed home page.

There are some drawbacks to FriendFeed, the biggest one being that you'll only see the headlines for the articles in your feeds, it doesn't give you any previews.  So you'll have to work a little harder to find out what's actually in the article, but that can be a good thing too

All in all, I've really enjoyed the experience on FriendFeed, and much like Twitter, I encourage you to check it out if you're looking for new sources of SharePoint information and interaction. Feel free to subscribe to my feed if you want, although I'm going to warn you that it's not 100% SharePoint stuff and like I said, I'm not that interesting.

http://friendfeed.com/ferringer

p.s. FriendFeed has a much better performance track record so far than Twitter does, but I don't want to make a big deal out of that or turn this into a "Twitter is down" complaint, so that's all I'm going to say on the matter.

A while back a friend of mine was getting frustrated with a news site he was trying to get set up in MOSS and asked me for some help.  His issue seemed pretty straight-forward, he wanted to add an Announcements web part to the main page of the site but couldn't find the web part anywhere in the site's web part gallery to be added.  I'm a little embarrassed to say that the solution to our problem didn't immediately come to me, but at the same time when your brain is working in a certain direction it's all too easy to overlook the simple solutions.

My first instinct was to check his site's Site Features and Site Collection Features in the Site Settings to see what was activated or deactivated.  His Enterprise features were enabled, as were his Standard features and Team Collaboration features.  So this wasn't a case of available functionality being disabled so that the web part couldn't be used.  Next I checked the file server of our SharePoint front end server to see if the files associated with the Announcements web part had been removed, which would prevent the web part from being in the site's gallery and could not find the files I was expecting to see.  It was at this point that I realize the folly of my actions and the fact that I was going about this situation all wrong.

See, I was forgetting that there is no such thing as an Announcements web part in SharePoint. "But John!" you're saying... "What about the Announcements web part that is automagically added to my site's home page any time I create a new team collaboration site?" And that's the crux of the problem...what appears to be a web part specifically for Announcements (or a Calendar, or Linkset, etc) is actually a pretty general web part that SharePoint makes available anytime you create a new list within your SharePoint site.  This web part is added to your gallery to provide you with a view of your list's contents, and depending on the list template you used to create the list will format the lists contents in different ways.  Links will be shown hyperlinked, Announcements will be shown with headlines and summaries in chronological order, Calendars will be shown in a standard calendar format, and so on.

My point is that to fix my friend's problem I didn't have to do anything more complex than create an Announcements list for his site; once I did that its associated web part appeared in the site's gallery and could be added to the page.  This is a pretty cool but often overlooked aspect of SharePoint, anytime you create a list SharePoint will automatically create a web part for that list which allows you to view its contents from somewhere other than the list's page itself.  And you can customize the data shown by that web part through the creation of custom views and filters for the list.  Pretty cool, huh?

"A-B-C. A-Always, B-Be, C-Closing. Always be closing, always be closing."

These are the words of Blake, Alec Baldwin's character in the movie version of "Glengarry Glen Ross" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104348), as he talks to (more like rants) a group of real estate salesmen about the art of deal.  This scene popped into my head a few days ago as I was working on a customized Internet-facing publishing site in MOSS.  Why? Because when it comes to getting new content into your publishing site, it's "A-B-P. Always Be Publishing."

Why is this important?  If you don't, your updates won't show up and your rank and file users won't be able to see them, it's just that simple.  MOSS's content management system for publishing sites is configured so that unless your content has been checked in, published, and approved it will not be visible to anyone not in your site's authoring or approval groups.

If you're editing content in a MOSS publishing site (often used for Internet facing websites), always make sure that you have published all of your updates.  This includes, but is not limited to, changes to your master pages, page layouts, pages, lists, web parts, and much more.  If you are working on items that require approval, you must confirm that workflows for those approvals have been started and completed in order for them to be visible to all of your site's users. (NOTE: with publishing sites you can also schedule content to start and end on specified dates, which also change the visibility of your content) 

How do you do that?  There are a few different techniques I recommend using; you should try to do at least one of them every time you update your site and should probably do most of them together.

• Use the MOSS Check for Unpublished Items tool:
1. Make sure the Authoring Toolbar is displayed for your site (you should see a menu across the top of the page showing the page's version, status, publication start date and some pulldown menus)
2. Click the Tools pulldown menu and select the Check for Unpublished Items option.
3. You will see a message in the Authoring Toolbar saying that it is checking for unpublished items.
4. If there are any, you will see a message stating !Unpublished items are detected on the page.  In the message, click the link full report to open a report of the items found.
5. For each item in the list, initiate the publishing process so that they can be displayed to all users
• Log in as an anonymous user, or as a user with limited rights to the site.  Then check the page for your new content.  If you don't see it, it needs to be published.  One trick I like to use is to make my updates in Internet Explorer and verify my content as an anonymous user in a different browser, like FireFox. This allows me to make sure everything's getting published and at the same time make sure that things look good in non-IE browsers as well.
• Andrew Connell's STSADM Custom Commands (http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/articles/MossStsadmWcmCommands.aspx) includes an option to publish all items in a list, which is great when you've just uploaded a ton of documents or images into a list or directory and don't want to have to go through every single workflow for every single item. Just point the tool at the list and it will publish them all for you (NOTE: you will need to be a SharePoint administrator to install and run the tool).

So the next time you're authoring your MOSS publishing site and can't figure out why your new content isn't showing up for your users, check to make sure it's published.  And put that coffee down.  Coffee's for publishers only.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to take the plunge and join up at Twitter.  If you're not familiar with it, Twitter is often referred to as a "microblogging" service.  Basically, you can post anything you want to it, as long your post consists of all text and is less than or equal to 140 characters long.  So you can't post images or videos, but you can post links to those files if you want.

So how does this relate to SharePoint?  Well, I joined Twitter at a pretty opportune time, because there really has been a large up swell in SharePoint-oriented professionals who have started "tweeting" (that's what it's called when you post something to Twitter, don't ask me ) in general and about SharePoint specifically.  I've been really impressed by the discussions I've been able to catch by being on Twitter, not to mention the ones I've gotten to be a part of.

If you are on Twitter and want to follow me, my page is posted below.  I'll also post a couple of other good links for finding SharePoint folks who are on Twitter, I highly recommend following anyone who catches your eye.  And keep in mind that this is just skimming the surface of what you can do with Twitter, there's all sorts of search engines, localizers, tag clouds, meme trackers, etc also springing up around Twitter on a near-constant basis.

http://Twitter.com/ferringer
http://twitter.com/sptweeters
http://stevepietrek.com/twitter/

Enjoy!

P.S. - I've found that Twitter is much more enjoyable via a rich desktop client.  I've used Witty and really liked it, but I'm currently using Twhirl (it has way more features and functions than Witty currently does).

A while ago I mentioned in the MSDN forums that I had some sample questions for the 70-630 and 70-631 SharePoint Admin certification exams from Microsoft, and since that time I have gotten a few requests in my inbox for those files.  So I've decided to go ahead and post them online for your downloading pleasure, if you should want them.

• For exam 70-630 (Configuring MOSS 2007) - http://drop.io/70630Qs
• For exam 70-631 (Configuring WSS v3) - http://drop.io/70631Qs

Please keep in mind that these are not brain dumps, you will not see these exact questions in the certification exam.  Instead, they contain sample questions intended to give you an idea of what the exam will contain.

If you're looking for books, there is a book specifically for the 70-630 exam that just came out on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/MCTS-SharePoint-Configuration-Technology-Certifications/dp/0470226633/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1207315086&sr=8-2

The other resource that I recommend studying to prepare for the 70-630 exam is the MOSS Administrator's Companion from MS Press:

http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft%C2%AE-Office-SharePoint%C2%AE-Administrators-Companion/dp/0735622825/ref=pd_bbs_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1207315086&sr=8-5

Unfortunately, there aren't any published resources out there yet for the 70-631 exam, which is too bad because I really thought it was the more difficult of the two.

Best of luck on the exams!

I recently received a free copy of "The SharePoint Shepherd's Guide for End Users", by SharePoint MVP Robert Bogue, and I wanted to share my thoughts with you about the book.

The lack of good end user resources for SharePoint like the Shepherd's Guide is what prompted me to start writing this blog in the first place.  SharePoint is a vast, complex, and often difficult tool to use if you're not properly introduced to it.  Time and time again I have seen SharePoint sites wither on the vine from a lack of use, not because the opportunity for collaboration was not there but because the audience could not grasp everything they could do with their SharePoint site or how to do the most basic tasks.  But educating and training your users on SharePoint can be time-consuming and expensive.

For me, this book is like the end user manual that Microsoft never shipped with SharePoint but really should have.  Rob does a great job of identifying the core functions of SharePoint that users need to know, and covers them as easily understood common tasks.  I think this is a great way to introduce information workers to SharePoint, as a user my goal is to figure out how to accomplish what I need to do with a new tool not the intimate inner workings of the tool.  By distilling SharePoint's core collaborative functions into chunks that users can easily grasp, the book makes it much easier for a new user to get up and going with the platform.

Each task is clearly laid out with a descriptive purpose, so a user can identify whether or not the task described by the book is applicable to what they are trying to accomplish in SharePoint.  Rob then walks through the steps necessary to execute the task from start to finish, and includes very useful screenshots to guide readers through the SharePoint pages they should be seeing in their environment as they complete the task.  The book also does a good job of explaining why the task is being executed in a particular way and covering any limitations or gotchas that the reader may encounter.

The book covers a wide range of topics, including basics like using a SharePoint collaboration site and integrating with Outlook and the rest of the Office stack.  Rob also goes into some Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007-specific topics such as MySites and publishing sites.  One thing I would have liked to see Rob spend a little more time on is the difference between MOSS and Windows SharePoint Services (WSS); he does mention it briefly in the initial chapters of the book but when covering MOSS-specific tasks I would have liked to see him pointing out that features like MySites require MOSS and are not included in all versions of SharePoint.  But I know from personal experience that this is not an easy topic to cover briefly and understand why he took the approach he did with WSS versus MOSS in the book.

The Shepherd's Guide also includes some outstanding resources in its appendices.  The appendices cover Site Definitions, List Definitions, Web Parts, Views, and Permissions, and provide excellent descriptions of each SharePoint component within those groupings so that users can get a good understanding of what makes them unique as well as their common use cases.  I think it makes a lot of sense to include these in appendices, rather than trying to explain the components within the book's tasks.  This way readers are not getting overwhelmed by all the information and have an easy resource to flip to when they need it.  And I really like seeing everything covered so thoroughly, because these components are key elements to successfully using SharePoint to its fullest potential.

One last thing about the book I want to touch on is the multiple and innovative ways Rob is distributing and licensing the book for sale.  If you want to purchase a single copy of The SharePoint Shepherd's Guide for End Users, you can do so from Lulu.com.  Rob also reports that the book will soon be available from Amazon.com, I have linked to its page if you want to bookmark it for future reference.  But the option Rob is offering that I think is really interesting is the availability of corporate licensing programs for companies that would like to purchase multiple copies of the book for their end users.  To me, this gives a company the opportunity to provide the Shepherd's Guide to their information workers as an actual manual for SharePoint so they have a ready resource on hand when they need it, sparing the need for costly training resources and classes.  For more information about the corporate licensing programs, I recommend sending Rob an email with your request.

For my current project at work I've been customizing SharePoint's publishing template for an Internet-facing website built on top of MOSS 2007.  All in all we're really not doing anything too crazy with the site, but I did run into one roadblock that I think is worth mentioning here.  It may not be completely end-user related, but I do think it is a good thing to keep in mind if you're sitting down with your SharePoint administrator(s) to plan how you're going to create your company's website in SharePoint.

The client wants to display an RSS feed on the main home page that outputs their most recent press releases.  Using the RSS feed will cut down on the manual upkeep required to keep the content on the home page fresh and allow them to only have to maintain their press release information in a single place.  I've been creating the master pages and page layouts for this new site on a sandbox server I built, so that I can get the finished product to where it needs to be before we deliver it to the client.  I created a web part zone in the page layout of the home page, and then loaded up the page in IE to add the RSS Viewer web part to the page.  That's where I ran into trouble.

The first issue I encountered was that the RSS Viewer web part was not available in the web part gallery as I expected.  So I fired up a separate web application on that sandbox server, opened up one of its sites that did not use the publishing site template in IE, and checked the site's web part gallery.  Sure enough, the RSS Viewer web part was available.  That told me it wasn't a problem with the SharePoint install on the server.

Next, after some serious digging at SearchForSharePoint.com (sorry about the gratuitous plug), I went back to my publishing site and took a look at the XML Web Part.  My thinking was that I could still point that web part at the RSS feed, and then apply an XSLT stylesheet to it for formatting.  In fact, I went back to the RSS Viewer web part in my other site, copied out its XSLT and applied it to my XML web part.  This resulted in an error being displayed in the web part.  After checking online, the errors I was seeing in the browser and SharePoint's logs indicated that it was an issue with a proxy server not being configured for the server, which makes no sense because this sandbox server can reach the internet without the use of a proxy.

After ruling out the XML Web Part, I opened up the publishing site's Site Settings and took a look at the Web Part gallery list for the site.  I decided to see if it was possible to manually add the RSS Viewer web part to the site's gallery so I could put it on the page.  When I took a look at the list of available web parts I didn't see the RSS Viewer, but I did see a web part called "RSS Aggregator", which I had never heard of before.  I went ahead and added it to my site's gallery, then added it to the site's home page.  Once I configured it for the RSS feed, I saw pretty much the same errors as I did with the XML Web Part, ending that thread of investigation.

I then remembered that there are third party web parts out there, such as the Feed Reader Web Part from Smiling Goat, which I hoped would resolve my issue.  So I grabbed the installer from Smiling Goat and ran it on my server (I know there's a newer version of the web part out on CodePlex, but this version has worked for me in the past so I went with it), but ran into the same problems again and the feed would not render.

A coworker of mine has been doing a lot of work for a different client who is building several custom MOSS publishing sites, so I pinged him to see if he could duplicate my problem.  He opened up one of his sandbox publishing sites, checked the web part gallery and lo and behold, there's the RSS Viewer Web Part.  He added it to the page, pointed it at my RSS feed, and it rendered without a hiccup.  Needless to say I was puzzled and frustrated.

So we started looking at the configuration of his site, and immediately I noticed that he had some features enabled that I didn't in my publishing site, specifically the ones relating to Enterprise licensed functionality.  So I went back into my publishing site and enabled the following two Features:

• Office SharePoint Server Enterprise Site Collection features - this is enabled in the Site Collection Features link located in the Site Collection Administration section.  Enabling this feature is what put the RSS Viewer web part in my publishing site's web part gallery.
• Office SharePoint Server Enterprise Site features - this is enabled in the Site features link located in the Site Administration section.  You do not need to enable this feature to add the web part to the top-level publishing site, but I think it is a good idea to enable both of these features in tandem.

Once I had the RSS Viewer web part in my gallery, it was smooth sailing.  The feed displayed, and I tweaked the XSLT in the web part to customize its output to meet my design requirements.

I'm having a hard time understanding why I need the Enterprise features to get the RSS Viewer web part, but that's the case.  It just seems strange, since that web part is available in other Standard license site templates, that you can't get it in the publishing site template.  The only thing I can figure out is that it is assumed you'll be enabling the Enterprise features as a standard practice for publishing sites, which I guess I'll be doing in the future as a standard configuration step.

I just wanted to take a quick second to direct you to a post published today by Robert Bogue, a SharePoint MVP:

http://thorprojects.com/blog/archive/2008/02/12/737.aspx

The article covers Rob's views on the proper usage of SharePoint Designer (SPD) and how that usage should be governed by SharePoint administrators.  SPD is a great tool for the customization and modification of SharePoint, but when not used properly it can really generate some heartburn for you.  I highly recommend checking out Rob's article and taking his advice to heart; it may not be directly applicable to your situation but hopefully at least it will get you thinking about what kind of limits your organization needs around tools such as SPD.

Wikipedia defines Disaster Recovery (DR) as "the process, policies and procedures of restoring operations critical to the resumption of business, including regaining access to data (records, hardware, software, etc.), communications (incoming, outgoing, toll-free, fax, etc.), workspace, and other business processes after a natural or human-induced disaster."

In the world of IT, DR usually involves redundant hardware such as web server load-balancing or server clustering and data duplication via the creation and restoration of backup files.  Some companies will spend millions of dollars purchasing, developing, and testing a DR infrastructure that they fervently hope that they will never have to use.  All too many organizations risk the loss of crucial business information and capital by not having any sort of DR plans in place at all.

Often DR falls under the jurisdiction of your IT administrators, the same people who installed, configured, and keep your SharePoint system up and running.  But one fact about SharePoint that often gets overlooked is that out of the box it provides two tools to its users that can be used to save your content in the event that something unfortunate happens to it.  Granted, it may be a bit of a stretch to put these tools in the same category as enterprise-caliber tape backup hardware, but when used properly they can provide very similar capabilities with little IT professional intervention

First, let's talk about the Recycle Bin.  If you haven't spent a lot of time poking around a SharePoint site, the only Recycle Bin you're probably familiar with is on your Windows desktop.  But with the latest release of SharePoint, Recycle Bins are included and activated by default in every SharePoint site you create.  And they act very similarly to the local Recycle Bin on your desktop.  If you delete a file in your SharePoint site it is not gone forever only to be retrieved via some arcane voodoo act performed by your SharePoint administrator.  Instead, it is automatically sent to your site's Recycle Bin until the Bin is emptied.  The Recycle Bin can hold not only deleted documents, but also document libraries, list items, and lists that are deleted from a SharePoint site.

Here are a couple of things to keep in mind about SharePoint Recycle Bins:

• Although they are enabled by default in SharePoint, they can be turned off.  So if you don't see one in your site, ask your SharePoint administrator about its status.
• The items in your site's Recycle Bin will count against your site's storage quota.  So if your site is running out of space, check your Recycle Bin to make sure you're not tying up a bunch of storage with unneeded items.
• By default items will be deleted from the Recycle Bin once they've been in there for 30 days, but this value can be modified by your SharePoint administrator.

Finally, the SharePoint Recycle Bin is referred to as a "two-stage" Recycle Bin.  This means that when you empty your Recycle Bin, or an item is removed from it because its been in there for a while, it still is not gone forever.  In Windows, when you empty your Recycle Bin the items in it are gone forever (barring the use of a specialized recovery tool and some fervent hoping that the affected disk sectors have not be overwritten).  But in SharePoint when you empty a Recycle Bin, the items in it are moved to its parent Site Collection's top-level Recycle Bin, just in case you didn't really mean to delete it.  This means that while the item is in the Site Collection's Recycle Bin it can be restored by a site collection administrator.

Like the first-stage site Recycle Bin, items will be removed from the Site Collection's Recycle Bin once they have been in it past the Bin's retention period.  And, just like the first-stage Bin, by default that value is set to 30 days but it can be modified by a SharePoint administrator.  Once an item has been removed from the Site Collection's Recycle Bin, it's pretty much gone; the only way it can be retrieved is via a restore of a backup for the site (if such a backup has been made).

Since this post is already plenty long, I'll cover document versioning in a subsequent post.

I highly recommend taking a look at this post from the Joining Dots blog on how to add custom end user help information to web parts.  Extending your SharePoint environment with instructive content like this can go a long way towards improving your users experiences and increasing participation.

http://www.joiningdots.net/blog/2008/01/user-help-within-sharepoint.html

EDIT: My bad, I had a copy/paste error in the original post.  Thank you Joe for helping me get this fixed.

This is the first post in a running series I'm going to be doing titled "Sharing Links".  The premise is pretty straightforward: I'm sharing with you a list of SharePoint links on a variety of topics.  I figured that since I read so many SharePoint-related posts in a given day (upwards of 100 a day according to Google Reader) that I ought to share my observations on some of the best sources available for the various types of SharePoint information out there.

And since this blog is targeted towards the End User, I'll be kicking things off with a list of End User Resources for SharePoint.  Please feel free to add any of your own sources in the comment section, the more the merrier! 

• This blog - duh! 
• Get the Point - an End User-oriented blog from Microsoft, featuring contributions from both the SharePoint product team and featured guest bloggers.  Heavily focused on the use of metadata in SharePoint.
• EndUserSharePoint.com - An outstanding End User blog from Mark Miller.  I really like the running Question of the Day series and Mark's observations from his training classes are really insightful.
• Agnes Molnar's blog - Agnes has done a good job of consistently posting on a variety of topics, as well as dabbling in a few administrative topics like backup/restore activities.
• Office.microsoft.com's MOSS resources - Surprisingly, Microsoft has quite a few good articles posted for MOSS users, this site is definitely worth a check when you're looking for information.
• Office.microsoft.com's WSS resources - Similar to the previous link, if you're looking for WSS end user information, there's good knowledge to be found here.
• My End User SharePoint feed - A lot of the items from the sources above will probably be duplicated here, but the good thing about this source is that you can subscribe to it via a feed reader such as Google Reader and get it all in one location.  Plus if I see any articles from any of my normal sources that I think is end user-relevant, I'll tag it so that it will show up here.
• The SharePoint End User Training Kit - As I've mentioned before in this blog, Microsoft has created a free SharePoint end user-oriented training kit for use within SharePoint based on the SharePoint Learning Kit.  It may not be a comprehensive training option for your users, but it's a good starting place and you can't beat its price: free.

So what do you think?  Have you found any other good End User SharePoint resources out there worth sharing?

Youtube.  Yep, that's right.  A coworker of mine sent me a link today to a funny SharePoint video hosted at Youtube, and I couldn't help but notice the number of other similar videos that were being displayed in the Related Videos section.  And rather than humorous, they looked pretty useful.

So I did a quick search and found over 150 videos currently on Youtube related to SharePoint.  Granted, not all of those are probably on topic, but still!  On a site I think of as a source for horrendous car wrecks, Chad Vader, and other viral videos, there are actually a surprising number of videos and screencasts available on some pretty interesting SharePoint topics like:

• Linking SharePoint 2007 with Outlook 2007
• Content Management with EMC Documentum and SharePoint 2007
• Building Master Pages for WSS v3

I definitely encourage you to check it out for yourself; you may find something worth your time.  I know there are several other excellent sources out there for SharePoint video content, but it's hard to argue with Youtube ease of use and wide reach.  Here's the link to the initial search I ran: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Sharepoint

And here's the linke for that funny video, if you need a laugh:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P9QlojtrWs

For the last six months or so I've been using Google Reader to collect and read my RSS news feeds, and they've recently rolled out a new feature that I think is pretty interesting.  You can now add friends through Gmail and gTalk, and allow those friends to see your shared items within Google Reader, as well as see the items shared by those friends.  I've added a couple of friends so far, and like what I see.  And as a self-professed information junkie, I'm always on the lookout for new nuggets of information.  If you want to find out more about friends in Google Reader, I would recommend checking out the Google Reader blog:

http://googlereader.blogspot.com/

And if you are using Google Reader and would like to add me as a friend, send me an invitation (ferringer  --  at  -- gmail  -- dot  -- com).

As a final note, you should be aware that there are some privacy concerns around the Friends function in Reader.  The following links detail the problems people have with it, as well as how you can configure Reader to address some of these concerns:

• http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9838017-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
• http://searchengineland.com/071227-085442.php 

My wife got a new cell phone last night, a Palm Centro.  It's her first PDA, and definitely the most advanced handset she's ever had.  Not that my wife is a total Luddite or anything, she's just not...as entranced by technology and gadgets as I am; basically I'm a geek and she isn't.

But I was struck by how much she was enjoying the experience of taking her shiny new phone out of the box, turning it on, and playing with it.  Heck, I think she enjoyed manually copying her contacts from her old phone to her new one (at least the first 10 or so...). I bet she also noticed me enviously watching her out of the corner of my eye, and if she did I'm sure she enjoyed that . I found myself thinking about how I love it when I get a new toy like that, whether its a new laptop, a new piece of software (here I come Visual Studio 2008!), or even a new BBQ recipe (don't get me started).

Here's the interesting thing: all too often when I get a new toy, I'm surprised by how soon the allure and appeal of it wears off on me.  All too often I get tired of the item, and either start taking it for granted or stop using it all together. I would say that the only non-work new shiny item I've gotten in a while that has continued to hold my attention and keep being used is my iPod.  This doesn’t really surprise me, because it is an incredibly well-engineered item and I find it very useful and engaging.  I can always put new music or podcasts (90% of what I listen to now is podcasts) on it, and even though it’s an old 20GB model, it still works like a charm and is easy to use

I know, I know.  What's this got to do with SharePoint? Well, to me this is important because your SharePoint sites mean nothing if they're not being used.  Sure, once you install it and send out an announcement to your users that it’s open for business you'll have a nice number of logins because people are curious and want to see the new shiny site.  But what happens after that?

It's important to not just think about how you're going to implement this new powerful tool, but also about how you want your audience to use it and how you will motivate them to do so. What compelling reasons do your users to not only view your SharePoint site, but use it and continue to use it? What information will you keep in your environment that your users can not find in any other location? What behaviors or activities will your encourage or require? What tools will you make available in SharePoint that will keep users coming back to use them time and time again?

Some of what you'll be fighting is engrained behavior. For example, one of SharePoint's best features is its ability to foster document hosting and collaboration. It allows you to store a document in a single central location and let multiple access it, rather than sending individual copies to each member of your audience.  But the problem is that most users are too used to sending a document out via email, rather than distributing a link to it. Believe me; I'm as guilty of this as the next person.

So as you roll out your new SharePoint environment (or any new platform, application, or service for that matter), don't count on the fact that your users will use it simply because it's the new kid on the block.  While my wife loves her brand new toy in her favorite color (red), that she can put dates in, store reminders, and play games with it, she's going to keep using it because it’s a cell phone and she can't live without one of those anymore. 

What aspect of your SharePoint farm will your users be unable to live without?

Thought I'd get up a quick post with some links to articles and postings I've seen this week about the new WSS v3 and MOSS 2007 Service Pack 1 releases.  From what I'm seeing, it looks like there's some good, some bad, right now. 

The Good:

• Chris Johnson's blog not only has links to downloads for the service packs, but also to the Fixlists for each pack.  Definitely a good thing to read: http://blogs.msdn.com/cjohnson/archive/2007/12/12/microsoft-office-system-servers-service-pack-1-is-out.aspx
• Shane Young has a great step by step rundown on how to apply the patches. Consider this a must read: http://msmvps.com/blogs/shane/archive/2007/12/14/how-to-install-wss-and-moss-sp1.aspx
• Rich Finn is a WSS/MOSS success story : http://blog.richfinn.net/2007/12/13/WSS3MOSSServicePack1AppliedSuccessfully.aspx

The Bad (mostly MSDN forum postings):

• http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2555770&SiteID=1
• http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2554595&SiteID=1
• https://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2553306&SiteID=1
• http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2553306&SiteID=1

I'll try to post more as I find them.  Definitely check out the MSDN postings; although people are having problems, they are getting solutions from the community in some instances.

Please note that these classes are not completely targeted at SharePoint end users, but if you're at all curious about how to get started building your own custom web parts or applications using SharePoint these are worth taking a look at.  My experience with these courses in the past is that they are a good way to introduce you to some of the tools and concepts involved in SharePoint development.  You shouldn't expect to be a fully proficient developer after completing the courses, but you'll have your feet wet and you can't beat the price.

One thing I've noticed with the SharePoint end user experience is that once people get comfortable in the environment, their thoughts often turn to how they can customize their sites and tune them to meet their specific needs.  That often leads to some gnashing of teeth when they come up against limitations of the platform out of the box.  The great thing about the latest versions of SharePoint is that its much easier to develop against, but the learning curve is still pretty steep. 

If you're an experienced SharePoint developer, I highly doubt there's going to be any great revelations for you in this training.  However, if you're a new or novice developer, definitely check them out.

• Clinic 5045: Inside Look at Developing with Microsoft® Windows® SharePoint® Services 3.0
• Clinic 5046: Inside Look at Building and Developing Solutions with Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007

If you're like me and read over 100 SharePoint blog posts a day (and I hope you're not, because you need to get a life!), you're probably aware that Microsoft has released service packs for WSS v3, MOSS 2007, and Office 2007.  So I'm not going to go through the motions of posting links to the download pages for those files, or run through the list of what's included in these updates.  That's been done quite well by far more competent bloggers before me.

If you don't know what a service pack is, here's a quick summary.  Since the latest versions of Office and SharePoint were released last year, Microsoft has been publishing patches and updates to the platform.  These updates are intended to fix bugs, patch security holes, and correct functional errors that have been found post-release in SharePoint, and they are a very normal part of the process for commercial software.  If you have Windows Update enabled on your workstation, you've seen Windows download similar patches and updates for the programs installed on your computer.  At intervals throughout a product's life cycle, Microsoft releases service packs as a way to roll all of those updates up into one package, to catch up anyone who might have not applied any of those smaller updates.  Often, new functionality is often included in the service pack, as an additional incentive to apply the update, such as the Security Center functionality included in Windows XP Service Pack 2.  So in this round of SharePoint service packs we have the addition of AJAX compatibility as an example of new functionality.

So service packs are a good thing, right?  I should have my SharePoint admin rush right out, download them, and slap them on my production SharePoint farms, right?  Nope!

With the great power of these service packs, comes great responsibility.  Don't rush into implementing these services packs.  Definitely plan on installing them, but not until you've fully tested and evaluated them in a testing environment.  These things make big and often irreversible changes to your SharePoint servers.  They not only change your file systems and the application files on your server used to run SharePoint, but they also change your SharePoint configuration and content databases.  And they change the way SharePoint functions.

So when you decide you want to take a look at these service packs, I would recommend the following steps:

1. Find out what's in the service packs.  Understand what's being updated, and what's being added.  Look for things that may impact customizations or modifications you've made to your SharePoint farm.  Look for things that you'll want to test.  Look for things that aren't being updated, so you can confirm that they still work as expected.  I recommend starting at the Microsoft SharePoint team's blog, but don't limit yourself to only Microsoft sources.
   
2. See what people are saying about the service packs.  Look for blog posts about the special tricks that people had to use to get the service packs installed in their environment.  Check the forums at SharePointU.com and the SharePoint forums at MSDN to see if anyone is posting questions or issues about the service packs.  Don't make the same mistakes that other people are making.
3. Download the service packs.
4. If you don't have one already, set up a test environment that replicates your production SharePoint farm.  Virtualization is very helpful here, because you can rollback your servers if you want to try the process again.  Examine your production farm and determine what you want to test.  If you have any system or integration tests available from when you initially implemented SharePoint, re-run them against the service packs.  If you've customized your SharePoint farm in any way, test those updates to confirm that your custom code still works.
   
5. Once you finished testing and are confident that you are ready for primetime, start backing up your production environment.  Back up your SharePoint servers and your SQL servers.  If you haven't tested your back up and recovery process, you should do so before you apply the service packs!  Trust me, you don't want your first restore to also be the first test of your process.
6. (NOTE: this tip is more for Admins) Do not apply the service packs to more than one SharePoint server in your farm at the same time.  I learned this one the hard way.  SharePoint updates (service packs included) often make changes to columns and tables in the back-end SQL databases.  Running a patch like that on more than one SharePoint server at the same time can cause concurrency issues and get your database way out of sync.
7. After you've applied the service packs, test your production environment to make sure that everything is good to go.
   

In the process of working on some other topics for posting, I've noticed a couple of small details that you'll want to keep in mind when working with Features in SharePoint. I realize they may be kind of nit-picky, but I work in a world where not paying attention to the tiniest of details can lead to days or weeks of re-work. 

NOTE: Please read my previous post if you need some background on the difference between features and Features in WSS v3 and MOSS 2007.

The first is that when you're in the Site Settings pages, the links for administrating your Site Features and your Site Collection Features use the term "feature" in all lowercase.  Don't be alarmed, these are the admin pages you'll want to check out if you need to activate or deactivate Features in your site or site collection.

The other thing I noticed was that when you open one of those Feature administration pages, the list of features displayed has some icons showing up to the left of each available Feature.  I've opened these pages quite a few times in the past, and this was the first time that I've noticed that there are some difference between some of these icons. 

The most common one appears to be this: .  This is the Generic Feature icon.  It shows up next to basic Features like "Office SharePoint Server Publishing" and "Reporting".

Another icon you'll see is ; the Workflow Solution Feature icon.  This icon appears next to all the out of the box workflow-related features, such as "Group Approval" and "Collect Signatures Workflow".

The last icon that I found in a stock MOSS install is the WSS Team Collaboration Feature icon: .  This icon can be found next to the Team Collaboration Lists feature, and I would imagine that its purpose is pretty self-explanatory.

One aspect of custom-developed Features is that the developer can specify his or her own icon to be displayed with the Feature when it is deployed.  This can be helpful if you want to continue the practice of grouping Features according to their function or if you want to easily differentiate your custom Features from the stock ones. 

In the next few posts, I'm going to start going through some of the out of the box Features and what they do.  I apologize for not having written anything in a while, but my daughter got sick right before the Thanksgiving holiday, and those two items kept me pretty busy and it's been tough to get back into the swing of things.

Hopefully it isn't any sort of a great revelation to anyone that the latest versions of SharePoint (WSS v3 and MOSS 2007) have a lot of great new features, such as blogs, wikis, Excel Services, and many more.  I also hope that almost a year after their release, that you've gotten a chance to experience and use some of these new features.  But there is one item in the update feature sets for SharePoint that may be a cause for some confusion: Features.

Huh?  What kind of recursive nightmare am I trying to perpetuate? Features are a feature?  That doesn't make any sense, does it?

Well, in SharePoint it does.  One of the new features in the latest version of SharePoint is a piece of functionality titled "Features."  Please don't hate me for this confusing wordplay; I didn't come up with it.  And I would go so far as to encourage you not to hate on the SharePoint product team for this either; I've wracked my brain to try and come up with an alternative name for this and failed.  I'm not here to criticize (this time ), I'm here to edjamakate you.

Once you get beyond the name, Features are great.  Out of the box they provide an easy way for site admins and farm admins to turn on and off different components of a SharePoint site.  Depending on your version of SharePoint, you'll find stock Features that determine what web parts or workflows are available for use within a site.  You don't have to install any applications or run an administrative process on a server to make these components available; you just have to enable the Feature you want to use.

<cue Ron Popiel>But wait! There's more! </Ron>

While the Features included with SharePoint are pretty nice, the best feature of Features (sorry, I'm in a weird mood today) is how useful they can be to developers.  You can develop your own Feature and deploy them in your SharePoint environment so that they can be used within sites, allowing you to attach your own web parts, workflows, lists, etc. to your site collections for optional deployment.  Additionally, you can require that a Feature be deployed to a site, if you want to enforce it usage at all times.

Use of a technique called Feature Stapling allows you to add new functionality to a site definition (the underlying template physical files SharePoint uses to create a site) without actually modifying the site definition itself.  Feature Stapling occurs when you create Feature containing your new functionality, and then create a second Feature responsible for applying (or stapling) the first Feature to a site definition.  It's a little complicated, but trust me, it's definitely developer- and administrator-friendly.

So to review: in the world of SharePoint the word "feature" has two different meanings.  When using a lowercase "f", the term refers to the vast array of functionality offered by the platform.  When using a capital "F", it is referring to a specific component of SharePoint that can be used to selectively enable and disable functionality within sites.

For more information, check out the following links:

• For an overview of Features (albeit somewhat developer-oriented) - http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/05/OfficeSpace/
• For a description of Feature Stapling (definitely developer-oriented) - http://blogs.msdn.com/cjohnson/archive/2006/11/01/feature-stapling-in-wss-v3.aspx

I haven't gotten a chance to play with this yet, but if you're looking for something to help you change the look and feel of your SharePoint installation's user interface, you might want to take a look at the SharePoint Skinner:

http://www.elumenotion.com/default.aspx

This tool was recently released by Elumenotion, and it looks like it is free to use (it's also posted on CodePlex, so I'm betting that it is indeed free).  I've downloaded the zip file, but haven't gotten a chance to install it and work with it yet. 

From what I'm seeing on Elumenotion's site, the tool is intended to help you manipulate the CSS styles of your SharePoint site, meaning you can easily update the colors and images displayed on the site. I like the approach, but just keep in mind that if you're looking for something that will make your SharePoint site not look like a SharePoint site it doesn't look like the SharePoint Skinner going to do it for you on its own.  But, it could be a pretty handy auxiliary tool in your site design toolkit.

I've added yet another new section in the right-hand column of this blog titled "My Toolbox," and added two initial links to it.  I've found myself using both of them on a pretty regular basis recently, and highly recommend that you take a look at them.

The first item is a link to a website that I just setup to display a Google custom search engine that I've been working on for the last year or so, http://searchforsharepoint.com.  Google's custom search engine offering is a great way for you to create a custom search engine (leveraging all the stuff Google has done that makes their normal search engine so great) built on a specific set of web sites that you provide.  So over time I've been working to add pretty much any site I come across that has any sort of postings, articles, or information regarding SharePoint in all its incarnations to my own custom search engine.  Somehow I've managed to come across over 750 sites out there and add them all into my engine (I suppose some might term that obsession... ).  And I've finally been able to get the site up on its own URL, which makes me feel like its ready for public consumption.  Let me know what you think!

NOTE: The site doesn't work in FireFox; I need to take a look at my JavaScript and figure out what's breaking.  Sorry!

UPDATE: I've corrected the error for FireFox, so the site should now work in all browsers.  Enjoy!

The other link I've added to My Toolbox is http://sharepointpedia.com.  This is a great new social news site (similar to digg.com, reddit.com, and dotnetkicks.com) centered completely around content for SharePoint, provided by Microsoft.  It just debuted last week, but content is flying in.  I highly encourage you to take a look around and see what you think, it;s a pretty good place to check for help and hopefully the community will continue to support and nurture it.

I just got an email about this in my inbox, and figured I'd go ahead and put it out there for your viewing pleasure.

SharePoint Solutions is hosting a SharePoint Information Worker conference in Nashville, TN on February 4-6, 2008.  There's quite a few technology- and SharePoint-oriented conferences out there, such as SharePointConnections and TechEd, but I thought this one was worthy of calling to your attention because it is touted as the world's only 100% non-technical SharePoint conference.

That means it will be three days of content and presentations geared towards the SharePoint end user and business professional, rather than focusing on the administrative and development aspects of the platform.  Which sounds pretty good if living in the SharePoint object model or running STSADM commands isn't quite your cup of tea.

I will warn you, I have never attended previous iterations of this conference, and am not very familiar with SharePoint Solutions' offerings, so please do not view this as a full-on, "you must attend!" endorsement of this conference.  I'm just putting this out there so you can take a look at the conference, review its scheduled speakers and sessions, and determine for yourself whether or not you need to be there.  You can click on the link below for the conference's website and full details.

http://shar