The Mossman

New Blog Location

I have moved my blog off of SharePointBlogs.com, the new URL is http://blog.drisgill.com and the RSS feed should stay the same (if you are using my FeedBurner) http://feeds.feedburner.com/themossman . SharePointBlogs is a great place to start blogging...

Published 07-10-2008 2:21 PM by mossman

Big Changes for the Mossman (Plus a New SP Book)

July 4th 2008 was Mossman independence day, in that I have left my cubicle job at a large consulting firm and have begun working with a few small dedicated SharePoint consulting companies. I will be focused on helping them with their MOSS branding efforts...

Published 07-07-2008 10:52 AM by mossman

New Article: Automated SharePoint Site Branding

My good buddy Ted Pattison just published an article with the MSDN Magazine entitled "Automated SharePoint Site Branding". He discusses many different ways to programmatically activate SharePoint branding such as master pages, images, alternate...

Published 07-07-2008 10:33 AM by mossman

Common Theme Problem: "Write Error on file _themes\"

When placing custom SharePoint themes into the 12 folder, sometimes you may run into this error when you try to select your new theme: "Write Error on file _themes\" Typically, this error happens when you are making changes to a theme and decide...

Published 06-12-2008 11:39 PM by mossman

Kivati Studio (SharePoint RAD GUI) Released

Check out this new product from Kivati, seems like they took all of the SharePoint web service API's and abstracted them out into a GUI layer that allows developers to rapidly build SharePoint applications. I'm sure the devil is in the details...

Published 05-20-2008 6:04 PM by mossman

IE8 Beta 1 with SharePoint (Revisit)

Ok, if you've read my previous post where I talk about IE8 rendering out of the box MOSS Master Pages poorly, you may have been confused by some of my results. Turns out I was using the Developer Tools to switch the Render Mode manually to IE8 which...

Published 03-06-2008 10:59 PM by mossman

IE8 Beta 1 SharePoint Screenshots

I went and grabbed the IE8 early beta and tried it out in a Vista VM. So far, the out of the box MOSS experience isn't looking so hot. Of course you could always switch it to IE7 browsing mode and everything looks great. My own MOSS designs look pretty...

Published 03-05-2008 4:42 PM by mossman

IE8 Will Render in Standards Mode by Default

As the title implies, the IE8 team has reversed their decision to have IE8 render in IE7 mode by default and instead have it render in full Acid2 confirmed standards goodness by default. Read the post here My question is, will the SharePoint team release...

Published 03-04-2008 5:38 PM by mossman

Google Sites != MOSS Killer (yet)

Just previewed the new Google Sites functionality that was released ( http://sites.google.com ) recently. It is supposedly their attempt to capture some of the collaboration market that MOSS plays in. To be fair, it's early in the lifecycle of Google...

Published 02-29-2008 1:38 PM by mossman

Mossman's Weather Web Part

I recently created a simple weather web part to enter into Iain Munro's content editor web part contest . Actually, I created two, one using the US National Weather service feeds which don't seem to have restrictions on usage, and one that worked...

Published 02-27-2008 1:58 PM by mossman

Update to my SharePoint Name.dll ActiveX Fix

Dave Ginn recently tried out my name.dll fix ( read more about it in my previous post ) and ran into a problem with some users not being able to access the Site Actions menu. Personally, I have deployed the code to several external MOSS sites and not...

Published 01-28-2008 9:05 PM by mossman

Microsoft Revamping Virtualization Strategy

According to the news wire, Microsoft is embracing virtualization full force in the coming months. This is great news for us SharePoint developers as we live in VM's. Heres some quotes from the blurb: Microsoft also said it will expand an alliance...

Published 01-22-2008 11:15 AM by mossman

Favicon's in a SharePoint Master Page

My buddy John Ross had asked me if I knew anything about adding Favicons to SharePoint branding, so this post is for him. He pointed me to this post on MindSharp Blogs . This method didn't work for him when he tried it so was wondering how I did one...

Published 01-18-2008 1:56 PM by mossman

Rumor: Microsoft to Buy Logitech?

There's a rumor around the intertubes (and apparently on wall street) that Microsoft is making a bid to become the world leader in the pc hardware accessory market. I'm a big fan of both company's mice and keyboards, so this could be an interesting...

Published 01-10-2008 4:52 PM by mossman

NewsGator's FeedDemon and NetNewsWire RSS Readers are now FREE

Mossman has always been a huge fan of NewsGator's FeedDemon, now even more so, since it has had a price drop to $0.00. Many of you may already be using Outlook for your desktop RSS reading, but I urge you to try FeedDemon for some more advanced features...

Published 01-10-2008 12:52 AM by mossman

SharePoint Designer SP1 Released

I don't normally like to repost stuff to death, but something that could be missed in the flurry of Office service pack 1's that have been released today is the SPD SP1 release. I just installed it in my local SharePoint Designer instance and...

Published 12-11-2007 4:31 PM by mossman

Lost Another One to Ditec (or should I say Apple)

The Mossman was swayed by the Mac store inside the Best Buy and is now the owner of a Macbook Pro. Don't worry too much though as I've done the Boot Camp thing and installed Vista! It works really great and runs Vista surprisingly well. You can...

Published 11-11-2007 9:57 PM by mossman

SharePoint 2007 Predicted by "Joel on Software" Back in 2004?

I was wikipedia'ing the word "Portal" today at work and stumbled across an interesting article from Joel on Software (if you have never read his blog, you might as well read up... because it full of pure gold) on how Microsoft has "Lost...

Published 11-07-2007 2:14 PM by mossman

Using Firebug to Manage CSS Effectively

I often talk about the benefits of using Firebug for Firefox in the MSDN Design and Customization Forums . Rather than try to type out a long winded article on why it rules, I found a video that should help to convince non believers that it is truly superior...

Published 10-04-2007 11:34 PM by mossman

Fixing the name.dll ActiveX Problem the Mossman Way

Have you seen this message on public facing SharePoint sites: The Web site wants to run the following add-on: 'Name ActiveX Control' from 'Microsoft Corporation'. If you trust the Web site and the add-on and want to allow it to run, click...

Published 09-13-2007 3:40 PM by mossman

Adding Prompt Text Inside of a Search Text Box

I had a client need today to make the out of the box SharePoint search box have the prompt text actually inside the box instead of before the box. I'm not sure what you call this pattern exactly but you can find it on many modern websites including...

Published 08-16-2007 1:36 PM by mossman

Take Rich Finn Out of the Dryer Cuz He's Hot ;)

If you haven't checked out his blog before, it might be time to pay him a visit. I did the other day for his post about using the PortalSiteMapProvider to make custom navigation , and I left him a comment that a real world example would be nifty....

Published 08-15-2007 9:23 PM by mossman

Virtual Machine Settings and Performance (my non scientific tests)

I recently performed some very subjective non scientific benchmark results for how my new pc runs MOSS in a VMWare virtual machine. The pc is a Dell Dimension 9200 Dual Core with 3 gigs of memory, and unless I mention it specifically the tests will have...

Published 07-18-2007 10:41 AM by mossman

New SharePoint 2007 Publishing Portal

As my friends John Ross ( on Moss ) and Andrew Connell have mentioned already today, the new web portal for Orange County Public Schools has just gone live. The team I work for was responsible for transitioning their website from a loose confederation...

Published 07-06-2007 7:02 PM by mossman

Problems Copying Virtual Machines to an External Drive?

If you are new to the world of virtualization (as I am), you may run across the same problem that I did today. While attempting to move a bunch of vm's over to my external usb harddrive I was constantly getting errors about there not being enough...

Published 06-28-2007 1:13 PM by mossman

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