However, I gotta admit that their live.com maps are pretty damn cool. Especially their bird-eye view, which I’ve noticed has recently been updated to include wide swaths of the Twin Cities that weren’t there before.

It came handy today when my wife and I were chatting about the Container Store down in Edina off of France Ave. I wanted to check online for a few things but then remembered…oh, wait…it’s not called the Container Store anymore.

So, I jump on live.com and actually look at the store:

Oh yea! Storables!

So, yea, I admit it, MS can do some nice stuff too.

Seems as if most documentation out there is still focused more on DB/Server admin issues than general ‘how to design a usable portal using MOSS and the various templates and web parts that makes sense to content owners and site users’.

Anyone have any suggestions for documentation (online or off) that talk about implementing SharePoint from a more IA focused standpoint?

Anyone interested in getting together to form a SharePoint designer support group/sympathy gathering?

http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/31/switched-on-apples-brash-flash-clash-rehash/

I find my mac loyalty waning as they become a bigger player in the world of consumer electronics. Has anyone noticed that Best Buy is now an Apple Authorized Reseller? I’m sure that has something to do with CompUSA closing half it’s stores, but I digress.

I was excited when I heard about the iPhone and although it’s way outside my budget and not really a necessity, I’d been thinking that an iPhone was in my future somewhere. Now that this Flash support issue has been a present for over a month and there’s some possibility it may not get resolved anytime soon, as a flash developer I’m thinking this may not be the phone for me.

Now I’d still tell you any day of the week that Apple is on so many levels, a better company then Adobe. Don’t even get me started about Microsoft. That said, I’ve got to start to consider what (from a Flash Developer’s perspective) is the best mobile device competing with the iPhone? Any thoughts?

Unfortunately, there is very little documentation on MOSS features out there. I’ve been hunting everywhere for a guide to all the Wiki tags that MOSS’s wiki supports. After a lot of extensive research and questioning and trial and error, I now present you with the complete and concise master cheat-sheet to MOSS’s wiki syntax:

Microsoft Office Sharepoint 2007 Wiki tag syntax

• Link to another wiki page: [[Name of page]]

So, I went to open one today and realized I don’t have the SNP viewer. So, I go to MS.com to download it and install it.

If you have never used a Macintosh, then you really can’t appreciate the ease of Apple’s drag-the-app-folder-to-your-computer-and-you’re-done installation process. For some inane reason, installing an application on Windows requires at least a half-dozen clicks. If you’re lucky, the half dozen dialogue boxes use the same interface and you just whip through clicking all the [OK] buttons. But once in a while you get this:

Exit Setup? Oh, I guess it’s done. Cool. Oops. It canceled the installation? WTF? Ugh. Install again.

I think I did this twice before stopping to try and figure out this mysterious dialog box. I finally got it. It was almost as satisfying as finishing the NYT Crossword. It’s cute that MS developers put these brain teasers into their applications to keep us on our toes. You’d never see Apple being that creative, would you? ;o)

Microsoft SharePoint seems to be penetrating all areas of the web as of late. It’s been around for quite a while, but the latest version seems to have built a good amount of momentum and anyone in moderately sized organization has likely at least heard of it, if not faced it in person.

My new role is now SharePoint admin. I have mixed feelings about it, to say the least. On the plus side, I am learning something new that appears to be a highly marketable skill set. It’s just that I’m not sure if I want that particular skill set on my resume. It’s like having your boss at the ad agency find out that you know Powerpoint. Soon enough, you end up just doing Powerpoint presentations all day long for clients. ;0)

I thought I’d give a quick SharePoint primer and then point out a few links that have recently sprung up specifically about SharePoint and web standards and accessibility, since that’s typically the first question we web developer have about a given CMS.

What is SharePoint?

The biggest drawback is a lack of real documentation and whitepaper/case studies. Even talking with MS themselves gave me the impression that even they aren’t fully aware of what SharePoint really is. Not that that surprises me, as it is a rather large, versatile application and, well, this is MS we’re talking about anyways.

In my words, SharePoint is Duct Tape. It’s rarely the BEST solution for a particular need, but it’s certainly usable and you’ll find all sorts of uses for it if you have it laying around, even if it’s slightly ugly. That’s the good.

At its core, SharePoint is an excellent tool for making lists. Task lists. Lists of links. Document lists. Lists of people. Etc. This makes it a great utility for centrally organizing, sharing, and collaborating on information within your organization. It’s (of course) highly integrated with MS Office. You save documents directly to SharePoint. People can email information to SharePoint. You can subscribe to information updated on SharePoint via email or RSS. For us, out of the box, SharePoint will ultimately be a replacement for cluttered email in boxes full of attachments, shared network drives, and multiple copies of outdated documents scattered across individidual hard drives. For that alone, SharePoint seems to be a worthy purchase.

Beyond that, SharePoint can do quite a bit more. Microsoft Content Management Server is now integrated (and updated) into SharePoint. There are extensive workflow options with SharePoint to route data automatically through your organization. The Search server is quite powerful, letting you index SharePoint content, content in documents, content on your network, content in other business applications, and even content on other web sites.

At this point, I should make a quick aside and quickly explain the product line. It is confusing, to say the least:

• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS) – this is the free framework that allows you to easily set up SharePoint team sites. You will need a Windows server with IIS, and then you can install this. You can use the free MS SQL ‘lite’ DB as your back-end database as well. This is a good product and if you are running Windows Servers, you might as well give this a shot.
• Microsoft Offfice Sharepoint Server 2007 (MOSS) – this is the expensive add-on (likely 6-figures for most orgs) that provides you with the enterprise level features, namely: site-wide navigation tools, site-wide searching tools, CMS features and advanced business intelligence tools. Prior to this version, these features were found in two separate applications: SharePoint Portal 2003 and Microsoft CMS (now discontinued).
• MOSS comes in a variety of licensed flavours. The key thing to understand is that there is only one MOSS application. The differences as far as what you can/can’t do with your particular install are all based on whatever licensing agreement you come up with with Microsoft.
• If you want to run MOSS for any mission-critical purposes, realize that it is best to run it on a farm of at least 4 servers (2 redundant front-end servers, a search indexing server, and a back end DB cluster).

The Bad? Well, it’s expensive if you want the full set of features in Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007. Your 10 person non-profit is not going to want to purchase MOSS. It’s also highly tied into Microsoft Office, Microsoft Active Directory, and Microsoft SQL Server. Not a big deal if you are already a MS shop, but something to consider if you are not.

Now, the ugly. Our first major project here is going to be migrating our intranet to MOSS 2007 using a UI and IA created by an outside vendor. Fortunately, SharePoint is based on ASP.net 2.0 features such as MasterPages which will make custom UI design a lot easier than it was before. The problem is that while MS has improved the HTML output in ASP.net 2.0, it’s still quite poor relying on lots and lots of tables and still containing more than a few parsing errors. Example: “A SharePoint Server 2007 home page out of the box, has 154 HTML validation errors” This makes me sad.

As such, I’ve been doing more and more research and this past week has seen several blog posts sprout up about accessibility and standards with SP. I thought I’d compile them here for some afternoon reading for any of you looking at wrangling SharePoint yourselves.

• http://www.sharepoint2007.com/Default.aspx?tabid=23 – an article on SP’s accessibility limitations (ironically on a site using SharePoint and, as such, has a site menu that is not accessible)
• http://alastairc.ac/2007/03/sharepoint-2007-accessibility/ – Alastair Cambell shares some frustrations with SP accessibility and offers some useful links including…
  • …a link to a SP accessibility presentation by the UK SP users group.
  • …and a link to Molly.com and her quest to spread accessibility information throughout Redmond
• http://cameronmoll.com/archives/2007/05/skinning_ms_sharepoint_with_st/ – Cameron Moll shares his experiences with applying a standards based template to SP and includes many useful links, some of which are…
  • How To Create a Minimal Master Page
  • How to Override default CSS
  • A great CSS chart by Heather Soloman that that explains what all of the crazy class names refer to in Sharepoint and where to locate the style declaration to modify them.

Are you using SharePoint? If so, what do you think?

“Vista continuously spends CPU time monitoring itself, trying to figure out if you’re doing something that it thinks you shouldn’t.” – Bruce Schneier

“…the content protection technology just uses more resources while providing no benefits at all to the user…” – Karel Donk

And I thought the Mac vs PC: Security ad was a joke….not reality.

Me – I’m not planning to upgrade. CrossOver is working pretty well for the infrequency that I need something on Windows.

The guys over at Joyeur have a pretty good explanation of why this enhanced security – is in fact a major security risk.

Everything you’d expect in a comic is there; wizards, Buffy references, overall-wearing Rhinoceroses, cubicles, pie charts.

I quite like how subtle the ‘Download trial’ link…and all the non-navigational links are.

via Experientia

But, I went, and feel obligated to report SOMETHING…

For starters, Vegas appears to the single best place on earth to open up a usability testing lab. I can’t think of a place more diversely homogenous (if that makes any sense…). It appears that you could walk out onto the strip, grab any 6 people, and right there have the full range of human beings found on the planet. Fat, skinny, smart, gullible, savvy, ugly, beautiful, tall, short, and in every shade of color out there.

And the best part? You really wouldn’t need to pay them anything. Just offer them half price tickets to Carrot Top and you’re good to go. Yes, you’d have to compete with the time share folks, but just cut your testing time by a half hour and you’ll have the upper hand.

Another benefit of having your testing lab in Vegas is people walking in will have a clean palet. I know that sounds odd, but in a way, Vegas will completely ‘sterilize’ them to any notions of how anything should be. Vegas is so over-the-top absurd that it pretty much wipes the mind clean of any preconceived idea of what good design is.

So, there’s my sales pitch for some prime usability testing real estate.

On to the conference…

I honestly don’t have much to report. Mainly for two reasons: There wasn’t a whole lot of broad-interest things to report about and, well, people really aren’t THAT interested in Sharepoint news.

That said, I’ll sum up the conference for those that are interested:

• Microsoft REALLY likes AJAX. Atlas is close to being finished up and MS is really pitching it. In fact, 90% of the ASP.net 2.0 sessions were focused on AJAX. To be fair, it appears that MS has done wonders with Atlas. For once, they are literal and honest when they say you can ‘ajaxify’ your site with merely a few drag and drops. Unfortunately, it seems that most people at MS believe that AJAX’s sole purpose is to ‘prevent that annoying flicker when the page reloads’
• Sharepoint ’07 is only half as evil as the current version. We’re moving to Sharepoint here at work. I’ve been dreading it. It looks like a nightmare. I must say, however, that ’07 doesn’t look that awful. At least not as bad as any other commercial CMS I’ve looked at. Yes, there’s still a lot of overhead, but they have done some nice things. The CMS portion of sharepoint is much improved. The templating/branding elements are much easier to maintain. They’re embracing community tools like WIKI integration and the like. And it’s all ASP.net 2.0, so you can work directly with ASP.net.
• Upgrade, upgrade, upgrade. Want to maintain Sharepoint? Well, get VS.net ’07. And pick up Sharepoint Designer. And you’ll probably want MS Expression as well. Using ASP.net? Upgrade to the Team suite. Oh, and of course you’ll want to be running the new SQL. And you might as well grab Vista while you’re at it, right? Well, nothing surprising there, I guess.

And, finally, one last item that I just found odd. During the keynote, they brought up a web designer from a team to present their site and how ‘cool’ it was. Just like they did in the days of the dot-com bubble conference era. Turns out, the person was from Burton. Huh. Burton…just like the snowboard company! Odd that Burton would let a ASP.net dev shop use the same name.

Well, surprise, surprise, it’s actually Burton…the ‘cool’ snowboarding company. That was the first oddity (what, a hip x-sports gen-x product company has decided to be a MS shop?) but the bigger oddity was this:

Yep. That’s a custom designed, AJAX-themed, ASP.net snowboard that they gave away at the conference. Hand signed by Jake Burton himself. As well as Bill Gates. Is that cool? Or dorky beyond belief? I can’t really tell.

Apparently not. MS decided to cripple Windows 2000 and XP and only let you run one site at a time. If you want that feature, well, go buy yourself a license for Windows Server I guess. Thanks MS, you really make it easy to put up with your crap as a developer. *sigh*

Anyways, after many hours on google and tossing out questions to a variety of newsgroups, I found a couple of solutions. Fortunately, there’s always someone out there who’s fed up enough with a particular product that they’ll create a fix for it.

Since these solutions don’t seem heavily promoted out there on the web, I thought it’d be good to make yet another record of them for Google to find:

IIsAdmin.net is a little application that pretty much replaces your IIS manager. From here you can create and delete sites and switch amongst them. You can only have one site running at a time, but switching amongst them is quite painless. A quick how-to set up (from my own trial and error):

• within your WWWRoot folder, create a new one for this new site.
• Open up IIsAdmin.net and create a new site, having it point at this folder. Start up this site.
• Launch VS.net and create a new project having it go into localhost/projectfolder
• Open up the original folder you created and see that there is now a new ‘projectfolder’ within it. Open this folder, and drag all of the files VS.net created out of it and up a level. This puts the files into the root of your new site.
• Open your vbproj.webinfo file in a text editor and adjust the URL path so it points at the proper file (which will be localhost/projectname.vbproj)
• Now, whenever you want to work on this site, start the site up from IIsAdmin.net and double-click your vbproj file to launch it in VS.net

Multisite DLL is another option. I haven’t personally tried this one, but it appears to offer the additional advantage of being able to use subdomains to run multpile sites at the same time.