• Taming SharePoint Security - Part 2
• Communicator 2007 with SharePoint/Office 2007
• SharePoint vs. Google Sites
• Taming SharePoint Security
• Issues while installing CRM 4.0
• Site is not highlighted in the top navigation bar
• StackOverflow
  

I often hear questions from a number of customers on how to update their current SharePoint installation. There are numerous updates available for SharePoint, WSS, and other products from the Office servers product line. In this post I will try to share some links I found while I was trying to sum everything up. The first and the most complete list of all updates available can be found here:

• Updates Resource Center for SharePoint Products and Technologies

As you can see from the Resource Center, the most important updates are Infrastructure Update (Released July 15th, 2008) and Service Pack 1 (Released December 8th, 2007) If you are using languages packs for Microsoft products, you can take a look at the following links:

• Language packs (Windows SharePoint Services 3.0)
• Language packs (Office SharePoint Server)

There are also SP1s for Language packs:

• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Language Pack SP1, 32-bit edition
• 2007 Office System Language Packs for SharePoint Server 2007, Forms Server 2007, Project Server 2007, and SharePoint Server 2007 for Search

Installing Shane Young has a very useful blog post about installing Service Pack 1 for WSS/MOSS. The most important thing to remember is to backup everything. This includes backing up your databases, creating a SharePoint backup and images/snapshots of your server. Time Frame to implement updates I would advise you to update your SharePoint installations regularly. However, do not rush into installing an update on a release date. From my experience, you should wait for 3-6 months. If you run into a problem with installation, chances that you will find someone who solved the problem you are facing will be better. We recently migrated a number of SharePoint systems to the latest version and we had problems with both Infrastructure update and Service Pack 1, but we were not the first ones to encounter these, so we were able to find information on the web that allowed us solve these issues quickly. Do not forget to update other system components, like Windows Server, SQL Server and Office.

In my previous posts (Part 1 and Part 2) I wrote about problems you might face when installing SharePoint 2007 for a customer who still uses Office 2003. I presumed that majority of customers is still using older versions of Office applications. At that time I could not provide any data to argument it. I finally found a research by Forrester Research.

Here are the results:

• 40% of companies adopted Office 2007,
• 60% are still using Office XP,
• and 46% of the companies included in this research are still using Office 2003.

In Part 2 I outlined the differences between Office 2007 applications and Office 2003, the diferences are probably similar for Office XP.

After 1.5 years I have decided to move this blog to another blog platform and to a separate domain. In this period number of visitors increased constantly, and I am very happy with the number of visitors that come to this blog every day.

If you are reading this blog via RSS feed, just continue to do so. If you are reading this blog from your web browser, the new address is http://www.sharepointusecases.com.
On the new site I will introduce some new services for readers. All your comments are welcomed.

I will continue to syndicate this blog on the old site also.

Thank you for reading SharePoint Use Cases Blog!

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Q: Toni, you are writing a blog about SharePoint and you are hosting it on a Wordpress platform!?

Well, this is a private, non-commercial project and I just cannot afford to pay for a MOSSfis licenses.

I must also say that Wordpress is really powerful blog platform. The product itself is great, but there are also couple of thousands of plugins and themes that you can download free of charge! When it comes to WCM, SharePoint really misses some things. There are some plugins and stuff on codeplex, but most of those I tried were not finished :(.

It will definitely be a good experience to learn about things another blogging software can do. I will try to provide some side-by-side analysis of Wordpress features.

I was happy to find out that BlogML language exists. It allowed me to easily export all the contents from my previous blog platform (Community Server) to this one. Many thanks to Aaron for the BlogML > WordPress plugin.

 In Part 1 of this post I tried to explain SharePoint editions in more detail. Last week I found very intersting shema that describes version differences on a single image. You can download the full presentation here. The complete breakdown of the features of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is available here.

When choosing the correct SharePoint edition you must also consider licensing. Some SharePoint features like Excel Services and e-Forms are great but these are only available in the most expensive Enterprise version. Please note: enterprise search is also available as a separate product Search Server 2008, and e-Forms are available as Forms Server 2007. So before advising your customer which edition is right for them, consult licensing documents carefully.

 If you are trying to find correct licensing for extranet and internet scenarios take a look at the chart below. I got it from guys at Microsoft Croatia and find it to be a valuable asset in deciding which edition to purchase.

 

A client of mine decided to perform a little summer house cleaning > deleting duplicate records in the company CRM system. Having correct contact information is the key of having reliable CRM system.

In CRM 4.0 Microsoft introduced new feature called duplicate detection, which queries you database in search of duplicate records. The feature is somewhat limited but it can help you speed up the whole process. Here are some tips for running duplicate detection correctly. In this example I will describe how to setup account duplicate detection.

Two accounts are duplicates if (Figure 1):

• if they have the same name and
  
• if they have the same city/state/country

If your business operates on national or international level, you do not want subsidiaries to appear as duplicates. In different cities there will also be completely different companies with the exactly same name

• if they have the same status

This is VERY important: when you perform Merge operation of two duplicate records, one record's state will be changed to Inactive State - you do not want this one to show on your report when you run it again.

Figure 1. - Sample duplicate detection rule

When you are running the report, run it against active records. This is important because CRM never deletes your data. When you merge two accounts, one will be deactivated, so you do not want this one to appear as duplicate anymore.
As I said before, duplicate detection is not perfect but it will help you to start with this process. I already wrote some articles on how to enhance duplicate detection, so you should check Part 1 and Part 2 for more information.

Figure 2. - Sample duplicate detection wizard

In my previous post I mentioned that if you are going to use SharePoint 2007 you really should use Office 2007 with it. In this post I will try to describe differences between various versions so you can know what to expect on your implementation.

Every project is different, and you will encounter numerous combinations of Microsoft software installed. Some large corporations we work with, are still using Office 2000 and Office XP. The majority of enterprise accounts are still using Office 2003 on Windows XP. (I cannot find any hard figures on this though).

Scenario 1

Client platform: Office 2007
Server Platform: SharePoint Portal Server 2003

You might have a customer that moved to Office 2007 but who is still using SharePoint 2003. There might be a number of reasons for this. Your customer probably has a very customized  SharePoint 2003 and have decided not to upgrade it because it the solution work fine.

Feature	Office 2007 with SharePoint Portal Server 2003
Saving documents to SharePoint sites
Editing documents stored to a SharePoint site	(Edition only works for the Office 2003 formats. You cannot save a DOCX back to SharePoint 2003)
Check-out/in, version history
Updating properties	(it works but not as elegant as on SharePoint 2007)

 You will also experience the following server limitations:

• Inability to index new document formats
• Problems with using Address Books
  
  

Scenario 2

Server Platform: Office SharePoint Server 2007

In most cases you will run into this scenario. Your customer decided to implement SharePoint 2007, but they will still be using Office 2003. Here are differences between Office 2003 and Office 2007 when working with data from SharePoint sites.

Application / Feature	Office 2003	Office 2007
Saving and editing Office 2003 files from SharePoint sites
Saving and editing Office 2007 files from SharePoint sites	You must install Compatibility Pack.
Check-out/in, version history
Start a workflow
Word
Updating properties	Improved in Word 2007.
Inserting document properties for (DOC/DOCX)	(DOC file format)	(DOCX file format)
Automatically updating server properties that were inserted to document body (DOC/DOCX)
Write a blog post
Compare versions of a SharePoint document	/ (Very limited)
Outlook
Synchronize tasks/discussion boards to Outlook
Synchronizing calendars to Outlook	/ (One-way sync only; from SharePoint to Outlook)
Synchronizing contacts to Outlook	/ (One-way sync only; from SharePoint to Outlook)
Synchronize document libraries to Outlook
Excel
Publishing Excel files as web pages
Powerpoint
Working with Slide Library

 

Bear in mind that some customers will note be willing to upgrade to the new platform. During your project ask what are the key features they want to use to check if these are available for their Office version.

 

Dan from Integrated Services, Inc. asked me to share my opinions on how to maximize your SharePoint investment. I will try to focus on how to avoid some of the classic mistakes that could ruin your project.

It does not make sense to reinvent the wheel here, so I will try to reuse some the classic mistakes made on various IT projects. These mistakes are listed in "Rapid Development" by Steve McConnell. Steve is probably the greatest author when it comes to software project management. His books are "a must read" for anyone managing a software project.

Steve calls these mistakes - Classic mistakes, and I will try to review those that might be related to a SharePoint project.

Classic mistake No 1. Undermined motivation
As I wrote before SharePoint is a tool for end-users. They will resist anything new. Your goal is to motivate them from the day one. There are no recipes how to do that, it all depends on your project. But you must have a business problem you are trying to solve with SharePoint implementation and you will probably need to start from that. Try to see how solving your business problem might also help your end-users to solve theirs.

Classic mistake No 2. Weak personnel
I wrote on building a SharePoint team before. Educate your people properly before you start a SharePoint project.

Classic mistake No 4. Heroics
A hero in a SharePoint project is usually a developer who thinks he can build his own version of SharePoint. SharePoint frontend looks simple, but it took Microsoft 6-8 years to build it, so a hero cannot do that on his own. In a SharePoint team you do not need heroes, you need a team of developers that can read documentation, blogs and troubleshoot problems.

Although developers like to write code, take a look at 3rd party solutions like Nintex Workflow or Bamboo Solutions. These guys did a great job of building the cool software that can help you solve your business problem.

Classic mistake No 7. Friction between developers and customers
When building a SharePoint team you need a project manager (consultant) to handle customers and developers. Customers wishes on these project might be "fuzzy" so you need a person that can translate them to your development team.

Classic mistake No 19. Wasted time during the fuzzy front end
Fuzzy front ends? There should not be fuzzy front ends on SharePoint projects. There are books, seminars, blogs, articles etc. If your developers/system engineers would like to be best in bread they must educate themselves all the time. If they know everything about SharePoint, maybe they should learn more about Project Server, Groove, Performance Point, you name it.

Classic mistake No 21. Inadequate design / site planning
The worst thing you can do on a SharePoint project is to transform demo environment to the production. Once you educate your end-users on how to use SharePoint, establish a demo environment for them. The best approach is to use a virtual machine. Microsoft already prepared these for you, and you can download them here.

You should motivate end-users to play with demo environment as much as they can. Their experiences will be very useful and you will be able to learn from these experiences and incorporate them into your production portal. 

Classic mistake No 25. Omitting necessary tasks from estimates
SharePoint is flexible but that does not mean you do not need to plan your project properly. You can download a sample SharePoint project plan here. Also review other articles about Planning and architecture for Office SharePoint Server 2007 on Technet. You will not be able to use these guides on every project but they are very good to start with.

Classic mistake No 28. Requirements gold-plating
Stay agile, expect change! If you did the motivation properly your end-users will have 1000 ideas on how to improve their SharePoint portal. These requests will probably be coming late in project lifecycle. Be prepared to fulfill them.

Classic mistake No 30. Developer gold-plating
Once your developers get use to SharePoint they will also have 1000 ideas how to use latest-cutting-edge-technology in your SharePoint implementation. Yes, I know Silverlight 7.0 sounds cools, but do you really need it? The primary goal of a typical SharePoint project is to increase day-to-day productivity. For that you need reliable tools that are easy to use.

Classic mistake No 33. Silver-bullet syndrome
Yes, SharePoint is cool and great. But it not a silver bullet. Analyze business problem very carefully and propose the proper solution. As previously mentioned you need a good consultant that can map these problems to SharePoint features that can solve them. Do not promise what you cannot deliver! If you are not 100% secure you can do that with SharePoint ask someone to help you before you promise anything to your customer.

Classic mistake No 36. Lack of automated source-code control
Developing custom code for SharePoint is usually done in Virtual Machine. Do not forget to backup your code to a physical machine and backup device. VMs are great, but sometimes get corrupted and you might loose everything.

 

Every project is unique but I hope you will find some valuable advices here.

 

When I am advising customers about potential SharePoint to implementation I often hear questions like this one:

Q: Toni, we would like to use SharePoint 2007 but we are still using Office 2003, what should we do?

If you ask our friends at Microsoft the easy answer is: Upgrade to the latest version now!

Bear in mind, that although this is the correct answer will probably encounter many problems along the way. Office is used by end users; they are not IT guys so most of them hate new versions of any program.

In many aspects Office 2007 is superior to Office 2003. It uses new formats, it is easy to use, it gives you numerous new features… It also poses a big problem for an end user. The biggest problem is the new interface (ribbons). End user got used to classic menus so they will hate (will not use properly) new interface for months.

Here are some advices for companies that are going to implement SharePoint 2007:

• If you are going to implement SharePoint you should also upgrade your current Office to the latest version.
  
• There are some 3rd party solutions that can make your Office 2007 look a like Office 2003. I would strongly advise you against these solutions. Old Office is history and your users will face even more problems with Office 2010 if they do not get use to the new interface. Ribbons are becoming standard part of various office suites like MindManager and others. Ribbons are here to stay 
• Prepare your end users for the upgrade; invest time in educating and supporting end users. Period after migration will be stressful and hard for them so plan some time for learning and adjustments.

In the following posts I will try to explain what are the potential problems is you stick to Office 2003 (or older).

In my last post I tried to explain what are the limitations of SharePoint versioning and things you need to know when you are planning and configuring a SharePoint site. In this post I will try to prepare you for the questions you will be asked on SharePoint end-user training. As in last post, the topic is document versioning.

Versioning Level 0. - No versioning

If you decide to implement SharePoint without versioning support end users will probably ask you why they need to learn a new technology without real benefits. SharePoint without versioning is only a web-based file share.

 

Versioning Level 1 - Major versions

Major versions are good and end-users will love to play with them, but you will be asked the following questions:

- Toni, can I control the next version number?
- Toni, I do not want other people to see my drafts, what can I do?

It is time to move to the level 2.

 

Versioning Level 2 - Minor-Major versioning

When you turn on minor-major versioning your customer will just love you, however be prepared for:

- End users do not count versions from 0, this might be a problem
- Minor and major version numbering (Major.Minor) is not a clear concept for an end-user. It might be too complex for them to understand, so be patient and prepared for dummy questions
- Minor and major versioning is too hard for the end users

Questions:
- Toni, while I am working in Word I like to save documents every two seconds. I do not want to have 1000 versions of one document. (As you remember for the part 1 you cannot limit the number of minor versions)
- Toni, I was just reading my document and someone else managed to change it before me...

It is time to go to the level 3.

 

Versioning Level 3 -  Check-in/Check-out

At this level most of your problems is solved and end users are able to do a lot of things new things. What is the problem with this concept then? Well... it is toooooo complicated. In an ideal situation customer is using Word 2007 (Although in Word 2007 check-in/check-out is not so simple.) and SharePoint 2007, but that can only happen in an IT company. If your customer is a large bank or a government agency it might take years before they decide to upgrade to Office 2007. At best they are using Office 2003 and SharePoint 2007 and that is far from ideal combination. Check-in / Check-out is not an easy concept, and when you have to use web browser and Office client to achieve all that, it is complicated.

 

Conclusion

The moral of this story is: Do not underestimate problems you might encounter on a SharePoint implementation. SharePoint project is not just installing SharePoint and developing web parts. The key of successful SharePoint implementation is the adoption of the end users. Plan additional consultant/traniner effort to traing the end users to work with the solution. With good training and detailed and tailored user manuals and the end your users will be able to work with all these features just fine.

In part 3 I will describe infrastructure implications of versioning.

One of the key features of SharePoint is versioning. But if not planned correctly versions can become your nightmare on a SharePoint project.  During project planning phase perform requirements analysis on versions and once implemented educate end-users on how to use versioning correctly.

Versioning is a very good feature but Office documents can be huge so it is a good plan to limit the number of versions you want to keep in your document libraries.

Lesson 1 – Setting versioning limits

This lesson is very important, and, as a SharePoint consultant, you must know this by heart . It will also be useful for the following posts in this series.

You can restrict number of versions in following ways:
1)    You can limit the number of major versions
2)    You can limit a number of major version that will have minor versions
3)    You CANNOT limit a number of minor versions to keep for a major version

 

Lesson 2 – Reaching version limit

When you hit your version limit the oldest version will be deleted. If major version limitation is set to 3, the following will happen when you publish version 5.0

Before

After

 In next post I will try to explain the most common questions you will be asked about versioning by end-users on a SharePoint training.

Last week I read a great book by Scott Rosenberg (founder of Salon). If you ever worked on a serious software project, you will probably experience a deja-vu (like I did ). The book is a real-life story about a company founded by Mitchell Kapor and a team of developers who tried to develop a new PIM software called Chandler.

This book is great material for anyone planing to start a big software project.

A friend of mine asked me a very good question: How do you form a SharePoint team?

All development teams are similar, but SharePoint projects are not a pure development effort so slightly different team members will be required. I will try to compare my idea of a SharePoint team with existing roles in MSF. Roles in MSF are complex and you should consult MSF Team Model Overview for more details.

The key person in your SharePoint team is a consultant. Consultant should be familiar with the complete Microsoft platform offering. SharePoint solutions are built on various Microsoft infrastructure products so in order to deliver the best solution to your customer you must choose proper Microsoft products, licensing models etc.

Consultant's key abilities should be: the ability to recognize customer's key business challenges and map these to SharePoint feature areas. Your consultant will also be a part of pre-sales process; making presentations and delivering various sales documents. In small teams consultant will also handle project management and education activities and in some cases development. In your team consultant knows most about SharePoint, but he can also consult your customer about collaboration, document management, records management, enterprise search etc.

In the following table I outlined some differences of the basic MSF team model and roles in a SharePoint team. Please note: for smaller teams you do not need 7 roles because some team members can be in more than one role. Please consult MSF for details on this.

MSF Role Cluster	MSF Goal	In a SharePoint Team
Product Management	Satisfied customer	When selling services you need an account manager. AM is responsible to find open new sales opportunities, he needs only basic knowledge of technology but a fair knowledge about business processes surrounding it.
Program Management	Delivering a solution within project constraints	Similar to MSF, but your program manager must know his way around SharePoint very well! Managing a SharePoint project is not an easy job for a PM that is not familiar with the product itself.
Development	Build to specification	A SharePoint developer is not a regular .NET developer, this guy needs to know some additional "tricks". Patrick did a great job outlining requirements for a SharePoint developer. If you plan to hire a newby please note that it takes 3-6 months for an ASP.NET developer to become completely productive in a SharePoint environment.
Test	Approve for release only after all product quality issues are identified and addressed	For a larger project you should definitely hire a QA Lead. Consider unit tests, continuous integration, daily build and smoke test. Testing SharePoint solutions automatically is hard but is not impossible! It is a must have for a larger project.
User Experience	Enhanced user effectiveness	If you are building a SharePoint solution that includes custom design you will need a designer. Designer should have advanced knowledge of HTML and CSS and he should be familiar with ASP.NET. In order to produce some work he will have to learn SharePoint Designer, the key tool for adapting SharePoint design. It will take some time for a newbie to learn the tool and SharePoint in order to modify the design properly. Give a newbie enough time since design customization is not easy. For larger projects will need a trainer to conduct education of the end users.
Release Management	Smooth deployment and ongoing operations	It is a good practice to add a system engineer to your team. This guy should know his way around IIS, SQL, ISA and other core infrastructure server components. Although most customizations will be done by developers having a good system engineer will ease the deployment customizations of production environments.

 So, the ideal SharePoint team is:

1. Consultant
2. Account Manager
3. Project Manager
4. Developers
5. QA Lead (QA engineers)
6. Designer
7. Trainer
   
8. System engineer
   

In my previous post I tried to explain how can you forbid your end users to delete files from document libraries. I did not provide much details on how to setup this and some visitors raised additional questions about that.
In this blog series I will provide step-by-step description how to achieve this.

Creating custom permission levels
In order to achieve our goal we will need to create custom permission levels. Permission levels allow you to define what a user can do. Default permission levels are not sufficient for our case so we will have to customize them.

1. Create a new WSS site with custom permissions

2. Select Site Actions > Site Settings

3. Under User and Permission select Advanced Permissions
 

 4. From the permissions toolbar choose Settings > Permission levels

Your permission levels are inherited from the top level site. In order to achieve our task we need custom permission so:

5. Click on "Edit Permission Levels" and then confirm that you want to create custom permission levels

6. For the purpose of this article we are going to modify Contribute permission level.
Click on Contribute
 

7. To disallow deleting de-select Delete items under delete permission.

 8. Save your changes.

By default members of "Your site members group" have Contribute permission level. Add an user to that group in order to test the changes you made. If you follow these steps correctly members will be able to create and modify document but they will not be able to delete documents.

 The picture below shows contributor's interface. The delete option is missing from the context menu.

In part two I will describe how to create a workflow to delete these documents.

Running more than one Microsoft server product on the same machine is always tricky. If you really do not need them on the same machine you should consider running all these machines as VMs.

We usually advise our customers to use virtual infrastructure instead of physical machines. VMs are cheaper to implement and easier to manage. Our usual infrastructure setup is one (or more) physical machines and storage cluster. On physical machines we are running every Microsoft server product (CRM, MOSS, PerformancePoint, Project Server) on a single machine.

If virtual machine approach is not acceptable, and you really need to run MOSS and Project server on the same machine, take a look at following article. 

 

Selling SharePoint  (document management system / collaboration platform) to customers is not easy.
There are two approaches you can take when selling SharePoint:

• It works the way you business does  - Microsoft’s approach
  I believe that SharePoint really is very good platform but it is not an out-of-box solution. If you are experienced partner, you will be able to create added value for your customer, and your SharePoint project might be a success even with “it can do everything you need” approach.
  
  
• Keep it simple - Toni’s approach
  Potential customer for SharePoint solution is every company with two or more employees. (Look for companies using Windows operating systems and Microsoft Office). Each company is different, so I am trying to approach each customer with unique approach.
  

1) The first meeting is usually just an interview: we sit down and discuss customers problems in areas of collaboration, working with documents, information etc. Customer is the actor in leading role, you are just asking smart questions while trying to focus on problems that you can solve with SharePoint.

2) From information gathered I prepare a presentation/demo that focuses on problems emphasized by the customer. With focused presentation you can really show the real benefits of SharePoint platform.

Usually customers have similar problems, so we have a set of predefined solutions for them. (Microsoft has done great ground work for you so you should check their WSS application templates).

Usual problems are:

• Inability to track documentation
  I usually propose standard Windows SharePoint services / document libraries, calendars, contact lists etc. The key here is to focus on added benefits of SharePoint sites over standard file shares
  
  
• Paper based HR processes(Vacation approval, Education needs, Various requests)
  I usually propose tracking all these requests using WSS. In case of complex processes we are implementing Nintex Workflow.
  
  
• Help Desk request are not centralized
  Solution is based on combination of Issue Tracking, Wiki library and workflow that follows their business process. If there is no process defined, you should try to recommend one, take look at ITIL for more details.
  
  
• Legal department spends too much time to generate contracts
  In a large organization majority of contracts is based on a template. So you can save a lot of time by integrating process of contract generation into a SharePoint list/document library
  
  
• Paper based processes to route and approve incoming documents
  Proposed solution is storing your scanned documents to a SharePoint document library. With combination of proper tagging and workflows you can completely eliminate the need for paper based approvals and routings
  
  
• Inability to find documents
  Recommendation is based on company size and it may vary from WSS Search, Microsoft Search Server 2008 or full blown Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Enterprise. Microsoft solutions are really good because they are built on existing IT infrastructure
  

So, keep it simple. Your first step is to find a business problem you can solve with SharePoint. The first project will show your customers how to use SharePoint and what are the real benefits of SharePoint implementation.

 

For about two years we have been testing Groove internally. My first impressions were great. Groove offers the ability to share files and collaborate among various teams, inside and outside your organization.

Groove key advantages:

• File sharing / Collaboration
• Unlimited extensibility
• It works on any network connection (it knows how to use it optimally)
• It allows you to take your files anywhere with you
• You do not need an IT guy to set it up, it requires no infrastructure (Please note: There is Groove Server but it is not required for simple deployments)
• It can be integrated with Windows SharePoint Services
• It works for inside teams, but it is also very convenient for teams that are not part of the same company / not having common infrastructure
  
  

During last nine months I have been trying to evangelize Groove inside our company as great tool for ad-hoc collaboration on very small projects and similar ventures. However nine months later the verdict is: Groove 2007 is not ready!

Here are some problems when implementing Groove, and possible solutions. (RayO I know you are reading this ). Some might argue that we should integrate Groove client with Groove server but at this point I see it just as overkill.

Current situation	What should Microsoft do to correct it?
People do not like yet another program that sits in their task bar.	Integrate Groove with Outlook
It’s interface is… well it is hard to say, but it looks funny…	Integrate Groove with Outlook, use the same interface
People do not like to have yet another account, and they tend to forget passwords for it	Integrate it with LiveID
In case of hard disk error you cannot restore your Groove account if you do not have a backup copy of it	Users should be able to login to Groove without backup file, using their LiveID
Restoring your backuped account might not work if it is older than 60 days. (Error: Saved account for name is too old and cannot be used)	Microsoft corrected this issue, check kb article.
It does not support file versioning / check-in & check-out, document properties (only when integrated with SharePoint)	should be there out of box
Process of inviting people might get to complicated when you have a number of people with same names and duplicate accounts (they lost backup, password etc.)	Integrate it with LiveID
Groove freezes my computer. Groove slows down my computer. (I did not have any problems with it, but numerous people reported similar issues)	This might be related with something else, but they should check it out…
You cannot use Groove with a customer that does not have it	Well it would like to see Groove Web Access, maybe Live Mash will be something similar.

When talking about intranet portals from end users perspective, the most important “feature” for them is content. Yes, a Silverlight photo gallery is very cool but employees are visiting intranet to find more information about company, to perform their jobs better (), etc…

While consulting customers on intranet solution architecture, I always advise them Web 2.0 concepts. When you are building intranet solution on SharePoint 2007 (or any other CMS solution); you should allow maximum number of employees to create content. In such a case your intranet site will become like Wikipedia. The key for Wikipedia’s success was the ability to have virtually unlimited number of authors from all over the globe.

You might ask: “How many is many, and how many is too many?“ Well, it all depends on your company’s profile and internal organization, but anyone who has a computer and knows how to use Word is a potential contributor to an intranet site.

What are key benefits of this Web2.0/open approach? Instead of having just a small percentage of employees contributing, you will allow anyone that has something to say to be creative. On some sites like: policies, procedures, quality control, legal, etc. you will retain control, but when we are talking about general news, projects, information, events – what could go wrong?

If you are using SharePoint 2007 as your intranet platform, you can enjoy benefits of SharePoint platform to establish content approval, versioning, alerts and identity integration to track all modifications. I already wrote about using blogs as infrastructure for your intranet portal, but you can also use wikis, integration with email or regular pages to achieve the same result.
 

I already wrote how trilled I am with the ability to publish SharePoint content directly from Word 2007.

If are looking to create a blog site that will allow all users to contribute you will need to setup user permissions correctly. By default, Blog Posts list requires approval, but contributors are not allowed to approve. That issue will result in their inability to publish posts from Word directly. They will receive an error: “Word cannot publish this post” and their post will not be saved.

In order to resolve this issue, you will need to:
1)    Disable content approval for blog posts list
2)    Allow contributors to create and approve content

In my next post I will try to provide some ideas on how to increase adoption of your intranet portal.
 

Few months ago I blogged about great piece of software called MindManger. I really like the concept of mind mapping, but I was missing the ability to easily collaborate with other users of MM. Posting mindmaps in a SharePoint library sounds fine, but MM does not know how to work with files stored in a document library.

Two days ago I was very happy to read a newsletter from MindJet announcing their new service called Mindjet Connect. It offers the ability to host your files “in a cloud”. You can use your favorite client software like MindManager or MS Word to read/modify these files. Workspace manager reminds me of Groove, but it has some cool features like versioning and Office interface (see below).

It is still in beta, but my first impressions are very good. It seems that more and more vendors are moving into SaaS arena and we will definitely see software market changing from grounds up. Keep in mind that few months ago Google introduced Google Sites (SharePoint competitor for SMBs); Microsoft introduced Office Live Workspaces (Hosted SharePoint targeted for individuals and SMBs) and CRM Online (Hosted version of Dynamics CRM 4.0)


 

While doing deployments, we have a number of virtual machines that we use as copies of customer production environment; for testing; learning etc. We installed one such machine using a trial key from Microsoft site. As key is only valid for 90 days, it expired, but we still wanted to use that VM for demonstration.
We applied partner MSDN key instead of trial key but once we did that CRM informed us that we reached user limit.

User limit
You have reached the maximum number of users.

It turns out that our partner key supports only 10 users, and we had about 25 users in that system. Since you cannot access the CRM interface we had to play with database a little bit to disable the extra users.

The following procedure is probably not supported!!!

You can administer user accounts directly in CRM database. Users are located in table SystemUserBase. There are two columns that control status for each user:
IsDisabled (bool) – should be True for all disabled users
AccessMode (int) – 0 for full access;  1 for administrative access; 2 for read-only access

Modify these to match your license and your CRM will be operational again…
 

As we are preparing for a local CRM event, I took some time to play with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Demonstration Tools, a set of tools for easier demonstrations.

For each CRM presentation I am using CRM VPC image prepared by Microsoft. It is already pre-populated with data. However this set of tools might help you to generate some additional data and to shift existing dates.

There are two tools in the set that are really GREAT and useful, not just for demonstrations but also for administration of production CRMs:
-    Site Map Editor – allows you to edit and republish site map without looking inside XML file
-    Dependent Picklist – generates javascript code to create two or more dependent picklists
 

In my previous posts about blogging from Word I mentioned that Word 2007 and SharePoint are great when working together. But in SharePoint blog is not available as a feature but as a site so you need to create one site per each blog. That’s fine if you are using a blog site for blogging, but since it is a great feature I wanted to use it for content production in general.

We started our intranet using the default “Collaboration Portal“ template and modified it according to our needs (see figure below).

Our home page displayed newly created pages (news) in standard news format like simplified version of BBC News web site. The biggest problem for our team was very complex and time consuming procedure for formatting texts and adding pictures to news pages.

Therefore I decided to replace standard MOSS Pages concept with a blog site. We created a new subsite below the root site using the blog template. This site is hidden from main navigation so users do not see it. (Blog site is displayed on figure below and titled "News")

Then we modified ItemStyle.xsl and used the newly created template for Content query web part. CQWP was placed on the home page.

Key benefits in this scenario:
•    Ease of use for content editors (easy to use formatting, automatic picture storing…)
•    Users do not need training to create new posts
•    Visitors can post comments

You will need to change CommonViewFileds property of CQWP:
<property name="CommonViewFields" type="string">Title,Text;Body,RichHTML;Author,User;PostCategory,Lookup;NumComments,Lookup;PublishedDate,Date;LinkUrl,Text</property>

Modified template for ItemStyle.xsl is:

 <xsl:template name="BLOG" match="Row[@Style='BLOG']" mode="itemstyle">
    <xsl:variable name="SafeLinkUrl">
        <xsl:call-template name="OuterTemplate.GetSafeLink">
            <xsl:with-param name="UrlColumnName" select="'LinkUrl'"/>
        </xsl:call-template>
    </xsl:variable>

    <xsl:variable name="LinkTarget">
        <xsl:if test="@OpenInNewWindow = 'True'" >_blank</xsl:if>
    </xsl:variable>
    <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0" style="width:100%;border-bottom:1px black solid;background-color:#DEE0E2;font-size:small;padding:5px; margin-top:16px;">
        <tr>
            <td width="80%" style="font-size:x-small;font-weight:bold">
                <xsl:value-of select="@Title" />
            </td>
            <td width="20%" align="right">
                <xsl:value-of select="msxsl:format-date(substring-before(@PublishedDate, ' '), 'dd.MM.yyyy')" />
            </td>
        </tr>
    </table>

    <span style="float:right"></span><br /><br />

    <xsl:value-of select="@Body" disable-output-escaping="yes"/><br />

    Published by: <a>
        <xsl:attribute name="href">
            http://YOUR_MOSS_SITE/searchcenter/Pages/peopleresults.aspx?k=<xsl:value-of select="@Author"></xsl:value-of>
        </xsl:attribute>

        <xsl:value-of select="@Author"></xsl:value-of>
    </a> |
    Categories: <xsl:valu