SharePoint Templates: Helpful tools in Hosted SharePoint Web Sites

Providing a starting point for the developers and the partner who look forward to build deeper solutions based on SharePoint hosting, the SharePoint Templates caters to the different business process needs in organization (irrespective of the size of the organizations). Fully compatible with the Microsoft office SharePoint designer 2007, the SharePoint Templates can actually be divided into two separate groups namely server admin templates and site admin templates. Providing out-of-the-box custom scenarios, the SharePoint Templates in SharePoint WSS 3.0 hosting can be applied in certain business tasks like sales campaign tracking or managing the helpdesk. Site admin templates are custom SharePoint Templates which can be easily installed into the template gallery by a SharePoint site administrator without requiring access to server administration. Server admin SharePoint Templates are site definitions. They enable tighter integration and increased functionality within Windows SharePoint Services platform. As against the Site admin templates their installation requires a server administrator.

The Application Templates which are out-of-the-box options and are pre-created can help you to start with your hosted SharePoint web site, or pages inside SharePoint Hosting Site. Easily applicable to the new pages, the SharePoint Templates and can be easily manipulated and changed, just like you do while building a SharePoint page from right from the scratch. The application templates also help to create web based applications which are capable of increasing the overall efficiency.

There are in total 40 SharePoint Templates created by Microsoft. These templates do not only save time but also increases the overall efficiency and also helps in the manipulation of the web parts (which are used to construct the SharePoint pages). The SharePoint templates are added or removed or can be edited according to your needs. All that you need to do is to identify your needs… You have a solution to your problem!

Source:- hostreview.com/

Microsoft Launches Online Exchange, SharePoint

Microsoft on Monday officially launched hosted versions of Exchange and SharePoint, two of its biggest on-premise cash cows, and continued to drive home the message that channel partners have nothing to fear from Microsoft's plan to move all its enterprise apps to the cloud.

Exchange Online and SharePoint Online are part of Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), which also includes Live Meeting and Office Communications Server, although the latter is still in beta and won't be available until next spring.

At a launch event in San Francisco, Stephen Elop, president of the Microsoft Business Division, said companies can reap cost savings of between 10 and 50 percent by moving to Microsoft-hosted SharePoint and Exchange services.

Microsoft's launch last month of the Windows Azure cloud-based development platform marked a significant step forward for Microsoft's Software Plus Services strategy, which blends on-premise software with Microsoft-hosted apps delivered over the Web from Microsoft's data centers, Elop said.

Microsoft has already sold more that 500,000 seats of Exchange Online since making it available to enterprises last year, but has also seen "a tremendous amount of interest" in BPOS from companies of all sizes, Elop said. More than 1500 companies have signed up for the Microsoft Partner Program for Microsoft Online Services since its launch in July, he added.

In July at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference, some solution providers were upset by the commission structure for BPOS as well as by Microsoft's revelation that it would take over control of billing customers.

Exchange Online is priced at $10 per user/month, SharePoint Online per user/month is $7.25. Office Communications Server Online will be $2.50 per user/month, and LiveMeeting will be $4.50 per user/month. Microsoft will offer these services in one-year automatically renewing agreements.

At the Monday launch event, Elop insisted that Microsoft has maintained "a deliberate dependence" on its partner ecosystem by offering VARs the chance to develop recurring revenue streams.

To illustrate what Elop described as the "absolutely overwhelming" channel response to Exchange and SharePoint Online, Microsoft had several partners on hand to discuss deployment scenarios. These case studies helped underscore Microsoft's mantra that VARs can adapt their business models by focusing on value-added migration and customization services.

"The whole world is changing. It requires change, but it's representative of what's going on in the market today," said Elop.

Adam Smith, director of marketing at Phase 2 International, a Honolulu, Hawaii-based solution provider, says in the current economic environment, his customers are finding it easier to pay a monthly subscription as opposed to a major one-time capital expenditure.

Smith admits that the Microsoft's WPC announcement was initially ominous for Microsoft hosting partners, but said the practical realities of deploying on-premise Microsoft apps quickly dissolved those fears.

"We've never had a customer who was satisfied with an out-of-the-box, Microsoft application," Smith said. "Every customer, without exception, has required some level of support, training, integration, or customization."

Source:- crn.com/

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight. Office SharePoint Server 2007 supports all intranet, extranet, and Web applications across an enterprise within one integrated platform, instead of relying on separate fragmented systems. Additionally, this collaboration and content management server provides IT professionals and developers with the platform and tools they need for server administration, application extensibility, and interoperability.

Manage content and processes

Simplify compliance efforts and keep business information more secure through a comprehensive set of tools to manage and control electronic content. Streamline the everyday business processes that are a drain on organizational productivity by using electronic forms and out-of-the-box workflow processes that users can initiate, track, and participate in through familiar Microsoft Office applications, e-mail, or Web browsers.

* Control documents through detailed, extensible policy management. Define customized document management policies to control access rights at a per-item level, specify retention period and expiration actions, and track content through document-auditing settings. Policy integration with familiar client applications makes compliance transparent and easy for employees. Integration with Information Rights Management helps ensure that proprietary and confidential information is better protected even if it is not connected to a server.
* Centrally store, manage, and access documents across the enterprise. Organizations can store and organize all business documents and content in one central location, and users have a consistent mechanism to navigate and find relevant information. Default repository settings can be modified to add workflow, define retention policies, and add new templates and content types.
* Simplify Web content management. Provide easy-to-use functionality to create, approve, and publish Web content. Master Pages and Page Layouts provide reusable templates for a consistent look and feel. New functionality enables enterprises to publish content from one area to another (for example, from a collaborative site to a portal), or to cost-effectively manage multilingual delivery of content on multiple intranet, extranet, and Internet sites.
* Extend business processes across the organization. Forms Services–driven solutions make it possible to more securely and accurately collect information both inside and outside the organization without coding any custom applications. This information can then be integrated easily into line-of-business systems, stored in document libraries, used to start workflow processes, or submitted to Web services, thus avoiding duplicate effort and costly errors resulting from manual data entry.
* Streamline everyday business activities. Take advantage of workflows to automate and gain more visibility into common business activities such as document review and approval, issue tracking, and signature collection. Integration with familiar Microsoft Office client applications, e-mail, and Web browsers simplifies the user experience. Organizations can easily modify the out-of-the-box processes or define their own processes using familiar Microsoft tools such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 (the next generation Microsoft Office FrontPage) or Microsoft Visual Studio development system.

source:- office.microsoft.com/

Microsoft SharePoint gets search, file sharing features

Data capture vendor Captaris and security software developer Epok have developed add-ons to Microsoft's SharePoint Server 2007 that let users search on document images and securely extend file creation and sharing across corporate boundaries.

Captaris, best known for its RightFax software for distributing faxes, recently introduced the TIFF iFilter for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

The iFilter takes an image, scans it using optical character recognition (OCR) technology, and then stores it in SharePoint along with all its meta data. The resulting file is then available for discovery by SharePoint’s search engine.

IFilter components are used by Microsoft Indexing Service and other Microsoft Search-based products, such as SharePoint Portal Server, Windows SharePoint Services, Exchange Full Text Search and SQL Server FTS.

Captaris, which is in the process of being acquired by OpenText, thinks paper-centric industries benefit the most from its TIFF iFilter such as insurance, governments, health care and financial services.

The iFilter supports Windows Server 2003 and 2008 and works on both 32- and 64-bit versions of the Windows OS, SharePoint Server, and SQL Server.

The Captaris TIFF iFilter comes in three editions: Standard (for two core systems), Pro (four core systems) and Enterprise (unlimited cores).

Standard is priced starting at $299. Pro starts at $499, and Enterprise pricing will be announced before the end of the year.

SharePoint is Microsoft’s fastest growing enterprise software in its history and the company counts 100 million licenses and more than a $1 billion in revenue, according to figures released this summer. The platform also is attracting third-party vendors driven to plug some of the gaps in the platform.

Earlier versions of SharePoint had support for TIFF images, but it was dropped in the 2007 version of SharePoint. Microsoft released a Filter Pack for SharePoint in Dec. 2007, and specifically made apologies for the absence of the TIFF filter in the release.

Experts have also said that SharePoint has gaps in its access control story.

Epok in particular is attacking that need with an update to its cross-organization access management software called Epok Edition for SharePoint version 2.4. The platform extends user authentication to a company’s partners.

The 2.4 version breaks the restriction that only a user within a SharePoint domain can use Microsoft Office to create, edit, and then save documents directly into SharePoint.

Epok extends that capability to any Office user in any domain as long as they have the needed access rights.

The upgrades also include a reporting system that can show such facts as who has access to a document and when the document expires. And a mouse over feature on user icons shows additional access details and expiration dates.

Epok can automatically enforce those expiration data on a user’s access to certain documents while maintaining the user’s overall access rights.

“SharePoint is creating a control problem and what we see is a huge demand wave for extranet access,” says Nigel Simmons, vice president of product management.

Epok also takes maintenance of permissions for access controls out of the hands of IT and put them in the hands of business users.

In addition, the system can be configured to require users to view and/or acknowledge certain contractual obligations related to data such as non-disclosure agreements.

The Epok Edition for SharePoint version 2.4 is priced at $25,000 per server.

Source:- networkworld.com/

Tips for using Microsoft Excel Services with SharePoint Server

One of the most interesting developments in the Excel 2007 release was the Excel Services module that made it possible to load spreadsheets and run calculations on a central server. This feature theoretically makes it possible to impose much better controls on who accesses and alters important data.

But practical applications are still a little thin on the ground. To help users along, boffins at the Microsoft Office Developer Center have published a raft of technical guides about Excel Services and how it can work in tandem with Microsoft's SharePoint Server web portal system.

The company's Microsoft Excel blog recently highlighted a new guide, Tips for Using SharePoint Server 2007 with Excel Services that deal with common pitfalls experienced by Excel users. The advice covers:

• Making an Excel workbook compatible with Excel Services


• Configuring external data connections


• Configuring Excel Services to work with Kerberos


• Saving an Excel workbook to a SharePoint document library programmatically


• Avoiding exceptions in a UDF when accessing the caller's identity


• Handling dimension issues for UDFs that return arrays


• Calling 32-bit native DLLs from UDFs on 64-Bit operating systems


• Quick tips for common Excel Services issues.

The article explains that some features and functions within will not work within Excel Services - including VBA and shared workbooks. In some of these cases, a workbook will fail to load in Excel Services. There are also complications surrounding connections to external data sources, which can be avoided by using the Excel Data Connection Wizard to configure links when the workbook is opened on the server.


Source:- accountingweb.co.uk/

Independents Seize On Success Of Microsoft's SharePoint

SharePoint is finding a growing role in offices and departments as a collaboration tool for small business units.

Swiss software supplier Day Software announced Wednesday that it is opening SharePoint to the larger world of Java applications in the enterprise. It has produced CQ Connector for SharePoint, which is based on the Content Repository standard for Java. The connector can tie SharePoint into an enterprise portal, swap information from the portal to SharePoint, or vice versa.

With Day's connector, SharePoint becomes "much more enterprise ready than it tends to be on its own," said Santi Pierini, senior VP of marketing.

Day is a little-known implementer of Java standards and offers the Communique suite of enterprise portal and Web content management applications. It has a large library of connectors to enterprise software, including one toSAP (NYSE: SAP)'s NetWeaver API for connecting to SAP applications. Its CTO is Roy Fielding, a co-founder of the Apache Software Foundation and one of the originators of the Apache Web Server. Day has headquarters in Basel, Switzerland, and Newport Beach, Calif., where Fielding works.

Its CQ Connector for SharePoint, built following the Java community's JSR 170 repository standard, can exchange information between Communique's repository used to store Web site content and a departmental SharePoint repository.

The connector can search the content of a SharePoint repository, using either SQL query language or Xpath, which allows relevant data to be extracted without necessarily retrieving the whole document. It can observe changes in SharePoint content, restrict access to a SharePoint repository by imposing certain views, and impose an Access Control List to enforce enterprise security restrictions.

"We're seeing high demand to make SharePoint more effective for global, enterprise-scale companies," Pierini said.

Day also makes connectors to Vignette, OpenText LiveLink, Interwoven, EMC (NYSE: EMC) Documentum, FileNet P8, and IBM (NYSE: IBM) Lotus Notes Domino.

A second product, from Alfresco Software, implements Microsoft's SharePoint protocol to produce a compatible collaboration server, but one that it also says functions on more of an enterprise scale.

Alfresco already offers an open source content management system and it's making Alfresco Labs 3, its SharePoint-compatible collaboration server, available as open source code as well. Labs 3 was announced July 31. The Labs 3 repository can extract information from SharePoint and Office applications and manage content on a more enterprise level, said John Newton, chairman and CTO, in an interview.

"Microsoft was forced to release the protocols under European Union agreement," he said, referring to the March 2004 European Commission ruling. Newton said Alfresco is the first independent vendor to implement both the SharePoint and Office application protocols, as allowed under the ruling.

In the Alfresco Labs 3 implementation, however, customers can use the SharePoint protocol with non-Microsoft databases, operating systems, and portal products, he noted.

source:- informationweek.com/

Microsoft SharePoint update released

Companies using Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 could be interested to discover an update to improve the application has been launched, it has been reported.

Microsoft has released an update to bolster the search functionality of SharePoint, fixing a long-term bugbear with the program, according to CMS Wire.

Noting the search features in Microsoft SharePoint have been know to frustrate users, the news provider reveals the recent update provides a federated search function and performance improvements to querying and indexing capabilities.

Furthermore, the infrastructure update for Microsoft Office Server delivers a unified administration dashboard to SharePoint.

"Some additional improvements include a greater granularity for crawl source history and list that shows all running crawls and durations," the publication explains.

The update also includes content deployment and infrastructure fixes for Windows SharePoint Services, MS Project and MS Servers.

A new study from Forrester Research suggests large companies are adopting Microsoft Office SharePoint Server at an increasing rate.


source:- onestopclick.com/