Updated technical libraries (in .chm format) for Office Servers (MOSS 2007, Performance Point Server 2007, Project Server 2007) are available from the following links. Please note that these are not the SDKs, rather these are the technical libraries which are located on the Technet Web Site.

MOSS 2007 Technical Library

Performance Point Server 2007 Technical Library

Project Server 2007 Technical Library

 

We have just released one more article @ www.techconception.com. Check it out @ http://www.techconception.com/articles/2.aspx

 

Microsoft has recently released the updated version of the WSS/SharePoint Hands on Labs and PPTs and Demos for Introductory SharePoint Developer Modules.

You can also download a WSS 3.0 SP1 VPC if you don't already have the development environment.

 

I just got an email from Ted Pattison Group about the new article which is available on their web site. This article is about implementing branding in a Publishing Site. Could you guess the author without reading the article first? Of course, it is nobody else but the WCM Guru Andrew Connell.

Check it out @ Implementing a brand in a SharePoint Publishing Site

 

I came across this jewel last week. A must have for a MOSS developer. Following is the excerpt from the download page.

Learn how to build a business solution leveraging a broad range of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise capabilities. This white paper focuses on the real-world example of an application to help consulting companies track client engagements and business performance. But the insightful lessons learned and best practices will apply wherever your next SharePoint development project takes you.

Topics include Office SharePoint Designer 2007, workflows, Excel Services 2007 and the Enterprise Search API. Whether you are a SharePoint development guru or a Microsoft .NET developer evaluating the platform, this white paper has something for you.

Check it out @ Developing Custom Applications with SharePoint Server 2007

 

After a long time I am able to launch my own technical articles' web site @ http://www.techconception.com

I have just published the very first article so check it out here

Don't forget to leave your comments and/or suggestion on this blog about the web site.

 

I am not sure if I ever got to post about this but you can view the newly published content and subscribe to the RSS feed for the Microsoft Office Products (WSS, MOSS, Project Server 2007, Forms Server 2007, etc) @ the following URLs.

Newly Published Content

WSS 3.0

MOSS 2007

Office Forms Server 2007

Office Groove Server 2007

Performance Point Server 2007

Office Project Server 2007

RSS Feeds

WSS 3.0

MOSS 2007

Office Project Server 2007

 

WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 offer many OOTB site definitions for different types of sites. More specifically, the following are OOTB categories and the site definitions available under each category. Note that some of the site definitions are only available while creating site collections.

• Collaboration
  • Team Site
  • Blank Site
  • Document Workspace
  • Wiki Site
  • Blog
  • Microsoft Office Project Workspace
• Meetings
  • Basic Meeting Workspace
  • Blank Meeting Workspace
  • Decision Meeting Workspace
  • Social Meeting Workspace
  • Multipage Meeting Workspace
• Enterprise
  • Document Center *
  • Records Center
  • Site Directory *
  • Report Center * *
  • Search Center with Tabs *
  • My Site Host
  • Search Center
• Publishing
  • Collaboration Portal *
  • Publishing Portal *
  • Publishing Site
  • Publishing Site with Workflow

* - Available while creating a site collection.

** - Available while creating a sub-site but resulted in an error. Created the same as a site-collection and it worked fine.

It's kind of difficult to remember the default look & feel of an OOTB site which requires one to create a "throw-away" site just to see the look & feel. I have done it many times! This morning I spent some time and created all of the sites on my development machine and have made the screen shots available.

Collaboration

Team Site

Blank Site

Document Workspace

Wiki Site

Blog

Microsoft Office Project Workspace

Meetings

Basic Meeting Workspace

Blank Meeting Workspace

Decision Meeting Workspace

Social Meeting Workspace

Multipage Meeting Workspace

Enterprise

Document Center

Records Center

Site Directory

Report Center

For some reason I got the following error while creating a sub-site of this type under a site-collection. Not sure what am I missing.

Creating the Report Center as a separate site collection worked like a charm!

Search Center with Tabs

My Site Host

Search Center

Publishing

Different Publishing site definitions are available depending on the context (as a site collection vs as a sub-site) in which the site is created.

While creating a site-collection, the following site definitions are available:

• Collaboration Portal
• Publishing Portal

While creating a sub-site under a site-collection, the following site definitions are available:

• Publishing Site
• Publishing Site with Workflow

Collaboration Portal

Publishing Portal

Publishing Site

Publishing Site with Workflow

 

WSS/MOSS deployment packages are nothing but the CAB files which are created by the MakeCAB tool. We have been using MakeCAB for creating the WSP file for our project and it works like a charm.

Today, I recreated the WSP package for the project we are working on and realized that instead of generating one of each of the output files (.inf, .rpt and .wsp file) it generated more than one .wsp files; all in all, I ended up having the following files in the output folder.

Figure 1. More than one .wsp files generated by MakCAB.

The folder named 681984000 was also created with another .wsp file in it which was around 1300 KB in size!

Before going further, let's see the output files generated by the MakeCAB. The MakeCAB generates different files but the two important files are setup.rpt and setup.inf.

The setup.rpt contains the information about the total files included in the cab files, how much data was compressed, time taken to compress the data, and so on. The following is the setup.rpt file which was created on my development machine.

Figure 2. setup.rpt generated by MakCAB.

The setup.inf file contains information about the disks and the cabinet files which were created and also contains the list of all of the files which were included in each cabinet file. See below.

Figure 3. setup.inf generated by MakCAB.

The above setup.inf specifies that there were two disks/cabinet files created. Similarly each and every file which was included in the cabinet file has the numbers like 1,1 and 2,2 prefixed to it. That specifies which disk/cabinet file contains that particular file! In this case, some of the files went into first cabinet file whereas the other files (including the manifest.xml) went into the second cabinet file.

So going back to my problem of having more than one .wsp files, in the past the same project generated one .wsp file! I was wondering why it generated more than one files this time around and even if it did, how more than one wsp files would play with WSS/MOSS.

I gave it a whirl anyways! Running the addsolution command against stsadm returned the following error. Obviously it was looking for the manifest.xml file in the root Project.wsp but it could not find manifest.xml in that file because the manifest.xml file was included in the second .wsp file which in turn was in the 68198400 folder! – This happened because MakeCAB places files on disks (and in cabinets) in the order they are specified in the directive file(s).

Figure 4. Adding the Project.wsp to MOSS failed!

I changed the Project.ddf file and listed the manifest.xml file @ the top of the list of files to make it go in the first .wsp file, re-created the WSP package again; again it generated more than one files (which was expected) but this time around the manifest.xml file was included in the root Project.wsp file! I ran the above stsadm command again to see how it works this time but it generated the same error even though the manifest.xml file was part of the root Project.wsp!

So that means WSS/MOSS don't play well with more than .wsp files!

What should we do? First we need to find out why MakeCAB was generating more than one file and then somehow make it to generate only one .wsp file with all of the project files in it.

CAB Directives

I dig around the makecab SDK and found the "Make Cab User Guide" which explained how to use the MakeCAB and most importantly how to customize its behavior. While reading through the user guide, I found the following statement in it: The MakeCAB defaults are configured for a floppy disk layout ….

That was it! It did not take me long to realize that the first of the two .wsp files generated by the MakeCAB was around 1.4 MB (See Figure 1 above), which is the maximum size supported by a floppy disk! That means while processing the .ddf file of the project, MakeCAB created the first .wsp file and when the size limit reached, it started to create the next file!

I had the answer to my first question. More than one file was generated because the output cabinet file size was more than the default size of 1.44 MB.

How to fix it? Read on.

The CAB files are driven by the "CAB Directives" which are listed @ the top of the .ddf file and which govern the behavior of MakeCAB. Since we did not use any specific CAB directive in our .ddf file except the CabinetNameTemplate and DiskDirectory1 that means the MakeCAB used default values for the other settings. Which CAB directive to change?

Some of the important CAB directives are listed below along with their purpose and the default value.

 

It was a no brainer once I read the above directives; I had to increase the MaxCabinetSize; since the default value of MaxCabinetSize is same as that of the MaxDiskSize, then I decided to change the MaxDiskSize directive instead and added the following line in the .ddf file of the project.

.Set MaxDiskSize=CDROM

This time around the output of the MakeCAB was only one .wsp file with all of the project files inside it. See below – note the size of the .wsp file; it is more than 1.4 MB which means it contains all of the project files.

Figure 5. Only one .wsp file generated by MakeCAB after changing the .ddf file

 

Use the following resources for training your organization's business users and/or Information workers on SharePoint and SharePoint Designer. Note that these are not the hard-core developer training resources but these can be a good start for a developer to start learning about the general concepts of SharePoint and how to perform certain tasks in SharePoint.

The very first resource is the training that comes in two flavors; the Standalone Edition, which can be installed directly on the end user's machine and the Portal Edition which can be installed on a common MOSS site which is accessible by all of the end users.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 Training (Standalone Edition)

Office SharePoint Server 2007 Training (Portal Edition)

Office SharePoint Designer 2007 Training (Standalone Edition)

Office SharePoint Designer 2007 Training (Portal Edition)

Apart from the above training, check out the training for more advanced business users @ SharePoint Designer 2007 Business Administrator Training and the Six-Part Series for getting the most out of the SharePoint Designer.

Road maps

Since WSS/SharePoint is huge and has so many areas for one to learn, hence it would be good to have some kind of guided learning approach (or focused training) where one particular area of SharePoint is targeted, learned and explored in detail and then move on to the next area.

Microsoft has done a good job coming up with the road maps for such training. Following are some of the road maps that I found; there could be more, but I am not sure.

Roadmap to using SharePoint Server 2007

Roadmap for creating and managing sites

Roadmap for creating and configuring libraries

Roadmap for creating and customizing Web Part Pages

Roadmap for giving users access to sites and site content

Roadmap for managing navigation

The following articles provide some of the important concepts and training that a power user should have or better yet have your end users go through the training material located @ Help for SharePoint Server 2007

Understand groups and permissions on a site

Enable anonymous access

Give users access to a site

Manage permission levels

Introduction to sites, workspaces, and pages

Manage sites and site collections

Work with site content and structure

 

Download the Excel Services Step by Step Guides from the following URL: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263430.aspx

Following guides are available for your reading pleasure.

Setting up the Server - Step 1: Creating a Trusted Location with Excel Services

Setting up the Server - Step 2: Configuring Single Sign-On for Excel Services

Setting up the Server - Step 3: Creating a Trusted Data Connection Library with Excel Services

Building a Report Based on Cube Functions for Excel Web Access

Protecting Workbook Intellectual Property (IP) with View Item Rights

Using OLAP Formulas, Conditional Formatting, and Charts

Building an OLAP PivotTable Report with Excel Services

Building a Relational PivotTable Report with Excel Services

Building a Report with a Chart for Excel Web Access Based on Cube Functions

Creating a Multi-Report Summary Page of Reseller Sales Data

See this demo to learn how to enable Excel services and data connections for a SharePoint team site.

 

Last week end I found out the following videos and white papers about SharePoint configurations and operations. Check them out @ Advanced lectures and white papers

 

I came across Software +Services Blueprints (aka S+S Blueprints) which is a good initiative from Microsoft. As the name implies, the blue prints consist of the guidance and sample implementations that have been developed using those guidance.

The most exciting S+S Blueprint is the one for SharePoint and can be found @ http://www.ssblueprints.net/sharepoint/; as of writing this post, the full blue print source code was not available, but you can still download code for the six artifacts shown on the home page.

Check out http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel9.SoftwarePlusServicesBlueprints for general information about S+S Blueprint.

 

I have been exploring WSS and MOSS 2007 on Windows Server 2008 and have been using the following resource extensively for the installation and troubleshooting.

Check it out @ Windows Server 2008 Resource Center for SharePoint Products and Technologies

 

Microsoft has included the SP1 changes to the WSS and MOSS SDKs and the same can be downloaded from the following URLs:

WSS SDK

MOSS SDK