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SharePoint Deployment Planning Services

We’re excited to tell you about SharePoint Deployment Planning Services, an offering designed to help you effectively plan your Office SharePoint Server 2007 deployment to transform and manage your current collaborative strategies.  Available to Microsoft customers participating in the Software Assurance Program, our offering for the Deployment Planning Service centers around a 1-day engagement delivered by certified partners like ourselves.  As certified partners, our team has the skills to deliver this offer to you, as well as access to tools and templates specifically developed by Microsoft for this offer. 

Through the engagement, we will provide you with:
* a comprehensive introduction to SharePoint 2007,
* an understanding of how you can leverage the platform to drive your business initiatives, and
* a well-integrated deployment plan.

A well-integrated deployment plan can help lower costs, optimize your business productivity infrastructure, and help you plan a more secure and well-managed collaborative infrastructure that supports the key capabilities of Office SharePoint Server 2007:
* Portals and Collaboration 
* Web and Enterprise Content Management
* Enterprise Search
* Workflow
* Business Intelligence

We look forward to the conversation of how SharePoint Deployment Planning Services can help your organization transform your content management, collaboration, and search strategy to reach your highest business potential. 

Let us help you take the first step on the ROAD TO SUCCESS in planning your organization’s SharePoint deployment.  More info...

p.s., this program offering is paid for out of your existing Software Assurance Benefits Training Vouchers, which would be converted to Packaged Service Vouchers (3:1 ratio for one-day planning session), by your Software Assurance benefits administrator.

What is SharePoint?  Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight.

Sean Condron Gains SharePoint Certification, 70-630

A typical candidate for this exam has a minimum of one year of experience in configuring Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and related technologies.  In addition, the candidate should have general knowledge of configuring or administering the following technologies.

• Internet Information Server—administration and configuration
• Windows Server 2003 Active Directory administration
• Networking infrastructure services, including TCP/IP and clustering
• Microsoft .NET 2.0, as it relates to Office SharePoint Server 2007
• Internet Security and Acceleration Server
• Network load-balancing for applications
• Microsoft SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server 2005, as it relates to Office SharePoint Server 2007—administration
• Security, as it relates to Office SharePoint Server 2007
• Back-up restoration of data

The Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) certification highlights your area of expertise and validates that you have the knowledge and skills required to deploy and administer an enterprise Office SharePoint Server environment.

Nice job, Sean!  Take the next two days off!!!

List Web Part for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

The List Web Part for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 provides a way to view and update Microsoft Dynamics CRM records using a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP1 or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 SP1 Web site. Microsoft Dynamics CRM users can create shared or personal List Web Parts of Microsoft Dynamics CRM records from a SharePoint Web site, open records in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 from the List Web Part, and create connected List Web Parts.

http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?familyid=3B6EB884-EC15-4288-A2A3-D0B47E057458&displaylang=en

PerformancePoint merging with SharePoint

  As of April 1, 2009, this server will no longer be available for purchase. When the next version of Microsoft Office is released, the Monitoring and Analytics capabilities will be included with SharePoint Server Enterprise. Microsoft will continue to support PerformancePoint, including “Service Pack 3” later this year.

Microsoft has unveiled changes to the company’s business intelligence strategy, including the consolidation of capabilities found within Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 into Microsoft Office SharePoint Server Enterprise and now branding them as PerformancePoint Services for SharePoint.

Basically, what this means is that Performance Point is becoming a part of Office SharePoint Server (Enterprise Edition).  All SharePoint users that access that functionality will need enterprise CALs.  Also, noting that this will be imminent in the next release of Office, you may now think of the the Office SharePoint Server being the Office Server counterpart to your familiar Office desktop applications.

Here's a nice little article on some Microsoft Business Intelligence choices from a CRM perspective, but which could be applied more generally too.

Saving Documents to A SharePoint Document Library

I love the idea of saving documents to a SharePoint Document Library.  Their are several great things about it:

• You only have to keep one document name - not a different document name for every revision you create.  Just make sure that you turn "versioning" on in your Document Library if you want to take advantage of this.
• Everybody knows where to find the document.  Network Shares can be all over the place.  If you have a pretty logical structure for your SharePoint Site, you will always know where to find certain types of documents.  For example, if you have a Site for each customer or client, and just have one Document Library per customer, then you know that's where you save documents for that customer, and that's where you look for documents for that client.
• You can e-mail the documents (especially internally) to fellow employees by simply copying the shortcut of the document (right-click and "copy shortcut", then paste the link in your e-mail instead of attaching document).  This way, "rogue" versions aren't floating around everywhere; and your inbox won't get bloated with attachments.
• Make your Document Library into a Network Place, so that you can easily save documents to it on the fly.  (But, please see one word of advice on this below.)

One word of advice when creating document libraries: don't use spaces.  Some programs (a lot of programs) won't be able to "Save to your document library" if that document library has spaces in the path.  The program will convert the spaces to %20 (you've all seen it), and it will get all confused, and tell you that you can't save the document to your document library, bummer.  Note that Office 2007 can handle this "blank-spaces-in-the-document-library-URL-path-problem," but again, lots of other software can't.

Office SharePoint Designer 2007 is Now Free

As of April 1, 2009, Office SharePoint Designer 2007 is a free download for all SharePoint customers.  It is available at http://www.microsoft.com/spd

SharePoint is a top-tier Microsoft product with huge adoption by the I.T. community.  SharePoint can be used to consolidate disparate I.T. investments onto a common application development platform for enterprise content management, portal, and rich collaborative apps. Think of it as a super-platform that you can use to develop all your applications.

Office SharePoint Designer 2007 is a standards-based Web design tool.  It has a rich out-of-the-box workflox designer, and also allows power users to build and customize their own sites.

An example of the usefulness of Office SharePoint Designer 2007 is in creation of Workflow for use on your SharePoint site.