Man, it Sure is Quiet Round These Parts

As you may have noticed in the last couple of months or so, I've been posting new blog entries with less and less frequency.  The good news that I'm fine, my family's fine, nothing's gone wrong (knock on wood) that has prevented me from regularly updating the blog like I wanted.  The bad news is that I'm probably going to continue posting haphazardly on a reduced schedule for the next several months, due to the fact that the majority of my writing energies are being devoted to another project: the "SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide."

Becky Isserman (aka MOSSLover) was awesome enough to invite me to co-author this book with her, and we've been furiously scribbling away as we work to put together a useful and thorough resource on how to preserve and restore your SharePoint environment in the event of a calamity.  It's definitely been a learning experience for me; as a first-time author I have a whole new appreciation for everyone out there who has written a technical book before.

As you can see, the entry for the book is up on Amazon already, although we've slightly tweaked the title recently to better reflect how our work is going to encompass the entire SharePoint platform, not just MOSS 2007.  The other cool thing that happened recently is that our publisher has put together a draft of the cover design for the book, and I think it looks pretty sweet.  Between that and the Amazon entry it certainly makes the whole project feel a lot more tangible beyond the boatload of Word documents we're churning out.

And instead of just taunting you with how cool the cover looks, I figured I'd go ahead and put it out there for you to see as well.  Take a look and let me know what you think   And don't forget to bookmark that Amazon page so you can easily check back to it and find out when your pre-ordered copy is due to ship!  

Looking for More SharePoint Interactions? Try FriendFeed

A few months ago I talked about the growing community of SharePoint professionals and users who were joining the conversations at Twitter:

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/fortheuser/archive/2008/04/21/meet-me-on-twitter.aspx

I still use Twitter quite a bit (in spite of its seemingly continual technical issues and outages), and it is still a great place to interact with other people out there who use SharePoint on a regular basis.  But I wanted to take a quick second to mention another social network that I think you should definitely check out if you're looking for new sources of SharePoint information, or just information in general: FriendFeed.

FriendFeed is an interestingly versatile tool.  It's a social network, RSS feed aggregator, instant messenger, and forum all rolled up in one.  I've configured my FriendFeed page to aggregate the output of my activities on this blog, Google Reader, Twitter, and many other websites, so that it's all available in one place if someone wants to see it.

But let's face it, I'm not that interesting, and I'm certainly not writing this post to ask you to pay attention to what songs I've bookmarked on Pandora or the latest article about the Indianapolis Colts that I've shared on Google Reader, and this isn't a blog about either of those two things either.  This is a blog about SharePoint, so let's talk about how it relates to what you can find on FriendFeed.

The social networking aspects of FriendFeed means that you can subscribe to the FriendFeeds of anyone else on the site, so you can now track and see what other people on the site are reading, commenting, and sharing about SharePoint.  And yes, once you sign up for the site, you can comment on any item anyone posts and mark the posts you "Like", providing more insight and metadata about the content than you could get from a standalone RSS reader like Google Reader.  And the comments are threaded, acting as a discussion forum about the article, which is nice because the discussion is centralized on FriendFeed rather than spread across several different sites.

The real hook for FriendFeed with regards to SharePoint is the Rooms feature. There are a couple of SharePoint-specific rooms that you can participate in and see content provided that is specific to SharePoint:

SharePoint Talk: http://friendfeed.com/rooms/sharepointtalk
SharePoint River: http://friendfeed.com/rooms/sharepointriver

SharePoint Talk is the place to go when you've found a great SharePoint article that you want to share with other people or if you want to start or engage in a discussion about a post already found in the room.  Anyone who wants to can join the room and share articles in it, we only ask that the content is relevant to SharePoint in some way.

SharePoint River is a source of SharePoint content from around the Internet, aggregated from several automated sources.  It's best used to see what kind of SharePoint-specific noise is going on throughout the Internet and to find articles or sources that you might not have otherwise come across.  I would warn that if you subscribe to that room that you probably don't want to have it put its articles on your FriendFeed home page, because it generates a lot of postings in a hurry and can be hard to follow.

Additionally, you can cross-post articles from your home page to your rooms, and vice versa, with ease.  So if your normal feeds find something of interest that you want to add to the SharePoint Talk room, you can easily do that from your FriendFeed home page.

There are some drawbacks to FriendFeed, the biggest one being that you'll only see the headlines for the articles in your feeds, it doesn't give you any previews.  So you'll have to work a little harder to find out what's actually in the article, but that can be a good thing too

All in all, I've really enjoyed the experience on FriendFeed, and much like Twitter, I encourage you to check it out if you're looking for new sources of SharePoint information and interaction. Feel free to subscribe to my feed if you want, although I'm going to warn you that it's not 100% SharePoint stuff and like I said, I'm not that interesting.

http://friendfeed.com/ferringer

p.s. FriendFeed has a much better performance track record so far than Twitter does, but I don't want to make a big deal out of that or turn this into a "Twitter is down" complaint, so that's all I'm going to say on the matter.

Be Vewy Vewy Quiet, We're Hunting Web Pawts...

A while back a friend of mine was getting frustrated with a news site he was trying to get set up in MOSS and asked me for some help.  His issue seemed pretty straight-forward, he wanted to add an Announcements web part to the main page of the site but couldn't find the web part anywhere in the site's web part gallery to be added.  I'm a little embarrassed to say that the solution to our problem didn't immediately come to me, but at the same time when your brain is working in a certain direction it's all too easy to overlook the simple solutions.

My first instinct was to check his site's Site Features and Site Collection Features in the Site Settings to see what was activated or deactivated.  His Enterprise features were enabled, as were his Standard features and Team Collaboration features.  So this wasn't a case of available functionality being disabled so that the web part couldn't be used.  Next I checked the file server of our SharePoint front end server to see if the files associated with the Announcements web part had been removed, which would prevent the web part from being in the site's gallery and could not find the files I was expecting to see.  It was at this point that I realize the folly of my actions and the fact that I was going about this situation all wrong.

See, I was forgetting that there is no such thing as an Announcements web part in SharePoint. "But John!" you're saying... "What about the Announcements web part that is automagically added to my site's home page any time I create a new team collaboration site?" And that's the crux of the problem...what appears to be a web part specifically for Announcements (or a Calendar, or Linkset, etc) is actually a pretty general web part that SharePoint makes available anytime you create a new list within your SharePoint site.  This web part is added to your gallery to provide you with a view of your list's contents, and depending on the list template you used to create the list will format the lists contents in different ways.  Links will be shown hyperlinked, Announcements will be shown with headlines and summaries in chronological order, Calendars will be shown in a standard calendar format, and so on.

My point is that to fix my friend's problem I didn't have to do anything more complex than create an Announcements list for his site; once I did that its associated web part appeared in the site's gallery and could be added to the page.  This is a pretty cool but often overlooked aspect of SharePoint, anytime you create a list SharePoint will automatically create a web part for that list which allows you to view its contents from somewhere other than the list's page itself.  And you can customize the data shown by that web part through the creation of custom views and filters for the list.  Pretty cool, huh?

A-B-P. Always Be Publishing

"A-B-C. A-Always, B-Be, C-Closing. Always be closing, always be closing."

These are the words of Blake, Alec Baldwin's character in the movie version of "Glengarry Glen Ross" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104348), as he talks to (more like rants) a group of real estate salesmen about the art of deal.  This scene popped into my head a few days ago as I was working on a customized Internet-facing publishing site in MOSS.  Why? Because when it comes to getting new content into your publishing site, it's "A-B-P. Always Be Publishing."

Why is this important?  If you don't, your updates won't show up and your rank and file users won't be able to see them, it's just that simple.  MOSS's content management system for publishing sites is configured so that unless your content has been checked in, published, and approved it will not be visible to anyone not in your site's authoring or approval groups.

If you're editing content in a MOSS publishing site (often used for Internet facing websites), always make sure that you have published all of your updates.  This includes, but is not limited to, changes to your master pages, page layouts, pages, lists, web parts, and much more.  If you are working on items that require approval, you must confirm that workflows for those approvals have been started and completed in order for them to be visible to all of your site's users. (NOTE: with publishing sites you can also schedule content to start and end on specified dates, which also change the visibility of your content) 

How do you do that?  There are a few different techniques I recommend using; you should try to do at least one of them every time you update your site and should probably do most of them together.

• Use the MOSS Check for Unpublished Items tool:
• 1. Make sure the Authoring Toolbar is displayed for your site (you should see a menu across the top of the page showing the page's version, status, publication start date and some pulldown menus)
  2. Click the Tools pulldown menu and select the Check for Unpublished Items option.
  3. You will see a message in the Authoring Toolbar saying that it is checking for unpublished items.
  4. If there are any, you will see a message stating !Unpublished items are detected on the page.  In the message, click the link full report to open a report of the items found.
  5. For each item in the list, initiate the publishing process so that they can be displayed to all users
• Log in as an anonymous user, or as a user with limited rights to the site.  Then check the page for your new content.  If you don't see it, it needs to be published.  One trick I like to use is to make my updates in Internet Explorer and verify my content as an anonymous user in a different browser, like FireFox. This allows me to make sure everything's getting published and at the same time make sure that things look good in non-IE browsers as well.
• Andrew Connell's STSADM Custom Commands (http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/articles/MossStsadmWcmCommands.aspx) includes an option to publish all items in a list, which is great when you've just uploaded a ton of documents or images into a list or directory and don't want to have to go through every single workflow for every single item. Just point the tool at the list and it will publish them all for you (NOTE: you will need to be a SharePoint administrator to install and run the tool).

So the next time you're authoring your MOSS publishing site and can't figure out why your new content isn't showing up for your users, check to make sure it's published.  And put that coffee down.  Coffee's for publishers only.

Meet me on Twitter...

A couple of weeks ago I decided to take the plunge and join up at Twitter.  If you're not familiar with it, Twitter is often referred to as a "microblogging" service.  Basically, you can post anything you want to it, as long your post consists of all text and is less than or equal to 140 characters long.  So you can't post images or videos, but you can post links to those files if you want.

So how does this relate to SharePoint?  Well, I joined Twitter at a pretty opportune time, because there really has been a large up swell in SharePoint-oriented professionals who have started "tweeting" (that's what it's called when you post something to Twitter, don't ask me ) in general and about SharePoint specifically.  I've been really impressed by the discussions I've been able to catch by being on Twitter, not to mention the ones I've gotten to be a part of.

If you are on Twitter and want to follow me, my page is posted below.  I'll also post a couple of other good links for finding SharePoint folks who are on Twitter, I highly recommend following anyone who catches your eye.  And keep in mind that this is just skimming the surface of what you can do with Twitter, there's all sorts of search engines, localizers, tag clouds, meme trackers, etc also springing up around Twitter on a near-constant basis.

http://Twitter.com/ferringer
http://twitter.com/sptweeters
http://stevepietrek.com/twitter/

Enjoy!

P.S. - I've found that Twitter is much more enjoyable via a rich desktop client.  I've used Witty and really liked it, but I'm currently using Twhirl (it has way more features and functions than Witty currently does).