You’ve been asking (dare I say begging) for the Service Pack. Well, it’s finally here!

• Windows SharePoint Services V3 SP1
• MOSS 2007 Service Pack 1
• SharePoint Designer 2007 Service Pack 1
• Microsoft Office Suite SP1
• Microsoft Office Visio 2007

PLEASE: Read the directions carefully and review the guidance in Deploy Software Updates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. For example the MOSS Service Pack depends on the WSS Service Pack.

Microsoft has released the first edition of SharePoint 2007 training. It comes in two flavors, the “Standalone Edition” for desktop playback and the “Portal Edition” for installation on your SharePoint Server.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA102488011033.aspx

The Portal Edition installs as a solution and comes a 30 page installation guide…read the guide before you begin your installation! The content can be tailored to meet the needs of your organization and is SCORM compliant. This means that if you wish to customize or add content you need to use one of the SCORM compliant authoring tools listed in the Installation Guide.

Recently I was working on a method to get a Flash file to read from a SharePoint list (more on that later…). I had a working solution, so I created my solution package and deployed it to our test servers. Rather than seeing my spiffy new application page (_layouts/catapult/spiffy.aspx) I received the following error:

"Could not load type."

Without going into all of the other solutions I tried, I found this post. I sat there for a minute and thought, how am I going to do that in a solution? I am almost done…it’s almost Happy Hour!

Topic: Show and Tell: A Guided Tour of a Successful SharePoint Installation

Please join us for the third meeting on Wednesday, December 12th, for a Show and Tell: a guided tour of a successful SharePoint installation (whose installation to be disclosed at the meeting, but it is a place you’ve heard of if you live in Texas!).

Registration and More Information

Fixing the RSS Feed

You may or may not have noticed that the RSS feed for our rollup does not work the way RSS should. The Body and Author fields are missing.

This post will address how to fix the RSS feed. All the work in this post is based on the post: How to: Customize RSS for the Content Query Web Part.

Prepare a new RSS definition

1. Navigate to the Style Library and open the XSL Style Sheets folder. Make a copy of the Rss.xsl file and call it BlogSummaryRss.xsl.

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I hate spam, though I love getting comments on my blog. CKS:EBE has a feature for spam prevention using CAPTCHA which works well, though months ago I read this post and loved the concept that spam prevention could be socially beneficial. According to the reCAPTCHA site:

“About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.”

Read More →

In the previous post we created a web application to host our blog sites and built a Table of Contents with the TOC web part. We still have work to do to finish our home page. Our home page wireframe calls for a Recent Posts web part. In this post we’ll cover the configuration of the web part and CSS to make it pretty. The summary of the steps are:

In the previous post we created a web application to host our blog sites. We created the blog sites and have added a few posts to each to prepare for the creation of our blog host home page. Now our designer has provided the requirements for the home page and we are ready to go. The summary of steps is:

1. Create a new home page layout
2. Configure a TOC web part for the “Who blogs with us” section
3. Create a “Recent Posts” rollup
4. Create a custom CSS for the site
5. Configure the RSS feed for the web part

Wireframe for home page

Microsoft has announced the dates for the SharePoint Conference 2008. I know this is old news to many of you but just in case it is being held in Seattle March 3-6, 2008. More information is available through www.mssharepointconference.com .

I will be attending along with many of my team mates. If this conference is as good as last years it will be GREAT, though I think it will be BETTER! (More on that later)

Topic: Panel Discussion on Migration

Date: Wednesday, November 14^th, 2007

Please join us for our second meeting on Wednesday, November 14th, as industry executives and subject matter authorities join us to discuss best practices and expertise in migrating to MOSS 2007.

Click here to register!

A core group Austin companies has established this User Group as a forum for SharePoint pros to share ideas and learning about this hot technology. Similar groups in Dallas and Houston have seen rapid growth and tremendous popularity, and we want to make this important resource available locally.