Ben There, Done That

There is now a signup available at http://connect.microsoft.com for the Office 2010 beta.  The direct link to the survey is: http://connect.microsoft.com/InvitationUse.aspx?ProgramID=3343&SiteID=160&InvitationID=Beta-PRJM-HVCM.  Unfortunately it doesn’t guarantee access, and if you are granted access, it won’t happy until July.  But nonetheless, it gets you into the pool of “applicants” for the beta.  From there you just wait and see if you are accepted.

Can’t wait to get my hands on it!  I’m here more and more about details, some rumors, some not, but the anticipation is building!

Ben Office 2010, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010 Beta, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010

First of all, I realize I’m a little behind on this post.  The truth is I started it over a week ago.  The day after I started it, I lost my access to TechNet.  It was a weird glitch with TechNet and I never found out what it was, but I was able to get to it again about 2 1/2 days later.  As Murphy’s law would have it, shortly after that I had computer problems that let to a format.  But finally, here it is:

Microsoft has add an stsadm reference on TechNet allowing you to “navigate through the stsadm commands with both WSS and SharePoint.  You can filter commands are not in the UI, which commands were new with SP1, SP2.  You can also view al the commands with a key that lets you see the same thing as the filters above.

The commands are also categorized so you can see which commands are available for Import and Export, General, Features and Solutions, etc.  But, enough with my babling, go check it out for yourself!!

WSS -  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/sharepoint/dd418924.aspx

MOSS – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepointserver/cc948709.aspx

Ben SharePoint MOSS, SharePoint, SharePoint 2007, SP1, SP2, stsadm, WSS

That’s right, Microsoft latest ravamp of their search engine is not available and it is called Bing.  Go check it out and www.bing.com.  First off, I’m glad they changed the name from Live to Bing.  Live Search just wasn’t unique enough.  I’m interested to hear others thoughts on the name change as well.

I haven’t had a ton of time to play with the search, but the little I have done has seemed to be pretty good.  Results from a search are similar to Google but not exact, which is to be expected.  For all I know at this point in time, they could be better.  I think a presupposition that “Google is always right” has been developed over the last few years, and who’s to say their search results will continue to be the best?  I think every “new” search that comes along should be tried and evaluated as you never know when something better might come along.  With that said, I’m definitely going to give Bing a shot.

Lastly, I do think it is rather interesting how similar the Bing interface looks to the Google interface.  This is the biggest thing I’m not a fan of…not because I don’t like the interface, but it would be nice to see MS come up with an interface unique to their own.  I understand, Google’s interface works for them, people like it, so why not model after their interface…it would just be nice to see a unique search interface some out of Microsoft as well, who knows, maybe something unique and different could be better that Google’s…you never know.

Ben Search Microsoft Search Bing

If you’ve installed SP2 into your SharePoint farm you’ll want to read this article to make sure you SharePoint license doesn’t expire on you:

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/21/attention-important-information-on-service-pack-2.aspx

Ben SharePoint Bug, MOSS, SharePoint, SP2

I was working with a client over the last few days on building a Project Workspace site template.  We were nearly finished and had to make a couple last edits to a web part when we hit the JavaScript error.  When expanding the details of the error it was similar to:

line: 2135
Char: 4
Error: ’style.display’ is null or not an object
code: 0

This error was keeping us from adding web parts and modifying current web parts (we could still delete web parts, but only by using http://url/default.aspx?contents=1 to get to our web part maintenance page).

I did some researching and thanks to this thread, I found this solution:

1)  Place page in edit mode
2)  Edit the content of the content editor web part by selecting the
‘modify web part’ drop down menu
3)  Select the Rich Text Editor and copy the text if you do not want
to lose it.
4)  Select Source Editor button, this opens the HTML source code for
the CE Web Part
5)  Remove the source code.  Our source code had a conflicting ID.
6)  Update CE web part and make sure source code does not have auto
generated code, or just add a new content editor web part.

The thread varies on what web parts people had on the page, in our case, we only had one content editor web part and then several list web parts.  Once we removed our single content editor web part, everything worked beautifully.

Ben SharePoint CEWP, Content Editor, Javascript, MOSS, SharePoint, Web Parts, WSS, WSSv3

Yesterday the Groove team announced on their blog the change to Groove.  They said, “The name makeover is in concert with the direction the product is going.  SharePoint Workspace will provide easy access to SharePoint content (or content from any server that implements the publicly documented protocols) in an effort to provide a seamless online/offline experience.”  It will also now be bundled with the Office Professional 2010 package.

I’ve used Groove some but ran into some limitations as I was running all 64 bit machines.  The post doesn’t mention anything specific about running on 64 bit, nor have I heard any other news about it, hopefully this is another thing that will be updated, the same functionality on 32 bit and 64 bit.  Stay tuned for more news about Office 2010 as it emerges.

Ben "Office 14", Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 Groove, Office, Office 2010, SharePoint WorkSpace

With TechEd 2009 going on this week in LA, details of SharePoint 2010 are starting to emerge.  Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend this year, however, I was able to watch the keynote live streaming online.  Between that and twitter, I was able to gain the following details on SharePoint 2010.

1. SharePoint 2010 will be only 64 bit and will require Windows Server 2008
2. More preliminarily system requirements for SharePoint 2010 can be found on the SharePoint Team blog post.
3. The SharePoint Technical Preview will be available in July, however, it will be invitation only with TechEd attendees getting priority.

Those were the SharePoint highlights that I was able to pick up today.  I’ll continue to post updates as I get them.

Ben Conferences, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010 Requirements, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010, TechEd, TechEd09, Tela

True to their word, Microsoft release SP2 for their Office suite today.  It includes SP2 for Office 2007, WSSv3 and MOSS 2007.  For a little more detail on the updates, SharePoint Joel has a great blog post.

Of, if you just prefer to go straight to the downloads the links are below:

Office 2007 SP2

Office 2007 Language Pack SP2

WSSv3 SP2

WSSv3 Language Pack SP2

MOSS 2007 SP2

MOSS 2007 Language Pack SP2 (x86)

MOSS 2007 Language Pack SP2 (x64)

Ben SharePoint MOSS, Office, Office 2007, Service Pack 2, Service Packs, SharePoint 2007, SP2, WSS, WSSv3

I’ve found myself in an interesting spot lately, I think due to a few things.  The primary point this post will revolve around is my blog.  Lately I’ve found myself posting fewer blog entries and I’ve been speculating on the reason for this.

I’ve come to the conclusion that it is two point mainly.  Those two being twitter and the state of SharePoint.  I’ll go into a little more detail below.

1. Twitter – I’ve found myself getting wrapped up in the twitterverse.  Tonight I’ve been speculating on the user of twitter.  It definitely has it’s place, and there are lots of good things about it.  I started tweeting as lots of the SharePoint blog writers I follower were jumping on the twitter bandwagon.  This user base continues to grow, however, tweets become more and more frequent, with the SharePoint tweets growing farther apart in some cases.  I’ve been guilty of this as well.  It is easy to start tweeting about SharePoint, but as you use it more and more, other topics jump in, and before you know it you are tweeting about everything.  I find the new tweets I follow growing more and more cluttered and harder and harder to keep up with and sort the quality content out of.

So…with that speculation, I find myself tweeting instead of blogging more and more, but is my content getting lost within twitter and the massive amount of tweets?  Are people missing valuable content due to just not seeing it in twitter?  Am I “slacking off” in my blogging because of twitter and not delivering to my readers the content they want to see?

2. SharePoint – I think in addition to the growth of twitter, the state of SharePoint has caused few blog posts.  Not just by me, but by the SharePoint world in general.  SharePoint has reached that point where 2007 has been out for a while and 2010 is right around the corner.  There is so much information on SharePoint 2007, that there isn’t as much new and exciting content to post on, or new discovers and methodology that needs documenting.

With SharePoint 2010 right around the corner people are just waiting to get there hands on SharePoint 2010, but because it hasn’t been publicly released yet, there isn’t anything to blog about that isn’t shared thousands of times between twitter and blogs, just because of the lack of available content available for SharePoint 2010.

So, those are my thoughts about why I have found myself blogging less, the rise in twitter and the “wait” for SharePoint 2010 and lack of topics for SharePoint 2007 to blog about.  What does every one else thing?  I would love to hear your comments.

With that said, I hope to not abandoned my blog readers and only post content on twitter.  Hopefully I can pick it up a little bit more again with my blogging and continue to share valuable SharePoint information through it.

Ben Misc, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010, Twitter Blog, MOSS, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010, Twitter, WSS

Lots of news on the Microsoft Office front today so I decided to add a blog post instead of just twittering about it.

The first items comes from a recent posting by www.microsoft-watch.com.  Service Pack 2 for Office 2007 will be release in two weeks, on April 28.  Two of the largest changes are the PDF/XPS printer will now be included automatically in SP2 rather than the separate add-on download/install that it is now.  The second improvement is the added support of ODF (Open Document Format) documents.  The list of improvements and bug fixes is long, but those are the two major ones in my opinion.

The second one is that Office “14” is going to be Office 2010.  There was a posting earlier about it, that also receive some doubt about it’s validity.  However, this posting by Mary-Jo Foley seems to confirm that the initial posting was accurate, even if the screen shot wasn’t valid.

I’m not going to go on way or the other on the validity of the screen shot, but needless to say, there were plenty of very strong indicators that the next version of Office will indeed by Office 2010.

Ben "Office 14", SharePoint "Office 14", Office 2007, Office 2010, Service Packs, SharePoint "14", SharePoint 2010, SP2