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I’ve been meaning to get caught up on blogging for a while now but it seems like the need to be productive has overwhelmed the desire to get some of the challenges I’ve run into written down.  As it happens, however, I just got derailed by another issue, so it’s a perfect time to reflect upon some of the issues I found, and resolutions to them. (I’ll post the resolution to my latest issue sometime after I get it.)

2007 Office Resource Kit Beta 2 Planning and Deployment Guides

Learn what Web Parts are and how to create them. Developers can build Web Parts as ASP.NET custom controls. Administrators can install Web Parts on any site based on Windows SharePoint Services. Users can add Web Parts to pages by dragging and dropping in a browser, and they can personalize them by setting properties. Web Parts can connect to other Web Parts using standard interfaces. (43 printed pages)

A sample Visual Studio .NET solution that contains two custom Web Parts written in C# accompanies this article. With the first Web Part, users can select a customer and view configurable information about the customer. With the second Web Part, users can view the orders for a single customer. A user can add these Web Parts to a Web Part Page and connect them to each other, so that the second Web Part displays orders for the customer selected in the first Web Part.

Audiences allow organizations to target content to users based on their job or task, as defined by their membership in a Windows 2003 security group, distribution list, organizational reporting structure, or the public properties in their user profiles.

Every portal site includes content indexes that allow users to search for documents available from that portal site. These documents can be stored inside or outside the portal site. Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 updates and organizes the index so that the search function can use it. After content is included in an index, the content appears in search results on the portal site.

As a site owner, when you create the permission structure for your site or grouping of sites, you should balance ease of administration with the need to control specific permissions for individual securable objects. With any Web site, it is also important to follow the principle of least privilege when authorizing access to the site.

You can specify file types (indicated by file extensions) to include in the content index when crawling content sources. For example, you might want to include files with .abc and .def extensions in the index. The inclusion of a file type applies only to content that is stored outside the portal site and included in the content index through content sources. The inclusion of a file type does not apply to content stored in the portal site.

A fundamental responsibility concerning site security is to manage who can access resources on your site. Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 enables you, as a site owner, to control what users or groups of users can access your SharePoint sites. This effectively transfers the task of managing users from the server administrator to site owners.

A site template is a file that dictates the overall look and feel of a site. It includes all of the design information about a site.

When you create a site, you select a site template from the Select a template list. For example, to create a site for publishing a team’s Web pages, you select the Publishing Site template.

You can create server name mappings to override how Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 displays search results or how users access content after you create a content index.

The portal site offers a centralized access point for finding and managing information. You can use a Web browser with the portal site to perform tasks and search the portal. The portal site provides access to information stored inside and outside your organization, allowing users to find people, sites, documents, and other content regardless of location or format. It also facilitates people working together on documents, projects, and other efforts by using the combined collaboration features of Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies.

Learn about the different types of updates that SharePoint Portal Server performs.

After a decade of 32-bit development, you might think that Microsoft Office was finished. Despite that, Microsoft is still finding new things to put in to the Office box. In Office 2003, there's a renewed emphasis on collaborative features, centering around the newly renamed Windows SharePoint Services. In this article, Mike Gunderloy shows you how Access 2003 can work with data stored in SharePoint.

After you add form functionality to a Data View, you can quickly add built-in form actions.

Most enterprises store related data in multiple locations. For example, product information might be stored in one location, and information about product categories is stored in another location. With Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007, you can easily link data sources that contain interrelated data to one another. You can even link data sources of separate types — for example, you can link an XML file to an SQL database. By linking multiple data sources, you create a single data source that appears in the Data Source Library with all of your other data sources.

Windows® SharePoint® Services (WSS), which is part of Microsoft® SharePoint Products and Services, provides a long list of features that help improve both collaboration and workflow while protecting documents and intellectual property. While WSS features continue to improve with each release, one feature that's conspicuously missing is an easy way to back up and restore deleted files from document libraries.

In this article, we'll take advantage of the extensibility of WSS and both its server-side and client-side object models to build a restore feature that works like the Recycle Bin in Windows Explorer. We'll examine WSS document library server-side events and will develop a .NET event handler class for asynchronous server-side processing of those events. In the end, you'll have a working recycle bin for document libraries. Additionally, the lessons learned will help you write your own custom workflow applications based on the WSS document library event model.

By default, every Microsoft SharePoint list and library in a site has a corresponding data source connection in the Data Source Library. To add a SharePoint list or library to the Data Source Library, you can either create a new list or library or create a new connection to an existing list or library.

Your enterprise is storing more and more data in XML files. To make this data more accessible on your site, you want to use these XML files as data sources. With Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007, you can easily add a connection to an XML file to the Data Source Library as a data source. After you connect to the XML file, you can create a view of data in the XML file by creating a Data View. To learn more about Data Views, see the article Create a Data View.

The Data Source Library displays all of the data sources that are available in a site. You can also add a Data Source Library from another site to the current site in order to share data sources between sites without having to re-create them.

To customize the appearance of the portal site, you can add or remove Web Parts from a page.

To add or remove Web Parts from a page, you must be a member of the Administrator site group on the portal site. You can add or remove Web Parts only from some pages. You can add or remove Web Parts for the Home, News, Topics, and My Site pages. You cannot edit any of the pages in Site Settings or SharePoint Portal Server central administration, because these pages do not use Web Parts. The Sites page uses Web Parts, but can be modified only by using Web page editing tools.

Search keywords and Best Bets enable you to provide two important features to help your users get the search results they need.

Add a content source to enable users to search for content that is not stored in the portal site.

You can add file types to be included in the content index. All files with a file extension in the list will be included in the index.

Add a server name mapping to override how Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 displays search results or how users access content after you create a content index.

Search scopes appear in a list next to the search box on the portal site. By default, there is a scope for All sources. Other search scopes can be added by site administrators.

Welcome to the Administrator's Guide for Windows SharePoint Services. Use the following topics to learn more about installing and managing Windows SharePoint Services.

Code view is a page view in Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 where you can view the code of a page in your site. With Code view, you can work with page elements directly in the code, in contrast to Design view, which is a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) user interface.

These application templates are tailored to address the needs and requirements for specific business processes or sets of tasks for organizations of any size. The applications are the first out-of-box custom scenarios for the Windows SharePoint Services platform, though they also provide a starting point for partners and developers looking to build deeper Windows SharePoint Services solutions.

With conditional formatting, you can easily create a Data View that applies a style to a selected HTML tag or data value when the data meets criteria that you specify. You can also set conditions that change the visibility of an HTML tag or data value, so you can show or hide data altogether.

Sites are not automatically crawled even if you select the option to include the sites in search when you add a link to the site directory. Before sites are included in the content source for the site directory, they must be approved before their content will appear in search results.

Examine the architecture implemented in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services. Learn what happens on the server when users issue page requests, and how Windows SharePoint Services responds. Understand the role of managed code in relation to unmanaged code in Windows SharePoint Services, and the Windows SharePoint Services database schema. (13 printed pages)

Source groups are used during updates to crawl only content on sites that are associated with each source group. The sites that portal site administrators associate with source groups are crawled when that source group is updated. During updates, the source group property is added, and this property can be used in search scopes and advanced searches to search for content in sites that are associated with the source group.

Authentication is the process of validating client identity to establish that a user who is trying to access Web site resources can be verified as an authenticated entity. SharePoint Products and Technologies are logically divided into three distributed tiers: the front-end Web server tier, the application server tier, and the back-end database tier. Each tier is a trusted subsystem and authentication can be configured to restrict or allow access to each tier.

What is a Windows SharePoint Services workflow? Fundamentally, it consists of two things: the forms a workflow uses to interact with its users and the logic that defines the workflow’s behavior. Understanding how Windows SharePoint Services workflows are created requires knowing something about both.

Disaster recovery, data protection, and high availability for SharePoint Server.  This page contains resources to help you protect and recover a SharePoint Server deployment. Choose the level of protection and the solution that meets your business goals.

Using the programming model behind Windows SharePoint Services, you can create your own Web Parts that provide new functionality to enhance your Web Part Pages. Learn best practices to improve performance and usability of Web Parts, and ways to create Web Parts that integrate well with other components of a Web Part Page. (15 printed pages)

Revisit key Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Software Development Kit (SDK) information to know best practices for writing code that will be optimally reusable when software updates, upgrades, or security updates are applied to a deployment. (6 printed pages)

The first of two companion articles. Learn what it means to "brand" a SharePoint Portal Server site, and about the different types of branding you can apply to a portal site to reflect an organization's identity. Go on for a step-by-step example of branding in Branding a SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Site: Part 2, How to Apply Your Own Corporate Brand. (24 printed pages)

Learn how to create a Web Part gallery as a central location for deploying Web Parts to multiple servers that run Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services. (4 printed pages)

by Lei Liu (Spell GmbH) and Tilo Böttcher (Microsoft)

Business intelligence portal sample application for Microsoft Office 2003 is an integrated, web-based OLAP solution that enables employees in an organization to create and share OLAP/Relational/XML based views, using SharePoint Portal Server, SQL Server Reporting Services, and Office Web components.

Plan for maximum capacity storage by implementing the suggestions in this TechNet white paper about how to maintain optimal performance and identify technical boundaries.

As a member of the Administrator site group, you can change the layout of pages on the portal site. You can change the layout for the Home, News, Topics, Sites, and My Sites pages.

You can customize your site by changing the images that appear on the home page of your site.

The default portal site owner is the administrator who creates the portal site. You might want to designate additional portal site owners, or you might need to designate a different portal site owner when your organization changes.

The primary navigation areas are the areas that appear in the navigation bar on portal site pages. You can view a primary navigation area simply by clicking its link in the navigation bar.

The Welcome page defines the page that is loaded when a user navigates to a site.

When you create a SharePoint Portal Server portal site, you specify a site owner. You can change the owner of the site by using the SharePoint Portal Server Central Administration page or by using the command line.

Early 1994 marked a time when business and home computer users were upgrading their hardware and software, making “what you see is what you get,” or WYSIWYG, creation of documents, spreadsheets, and presentations not only mainstream, but the standard. At the same time, the vast majority of people had never heard of the world wide Web, and even fewer had ever created a Web page, which required hand-coding pages in an unfamiliar language called HTML. 1994 was also when a team of people at a small Internet start-up company called Vermeer Technologies Inc. began working on a tool called FrontPage. Little did they know at the time, but because of its easy WYSIWYG user interface, FrontPage would make creation of Web sites and pages a reality for the average small business and home user.