Microsoft Office

From MIcrosoft Office Sharepoint Blog: What is Windows Live Writer?

Excerpt from Wikipedia:

Currently compatible with Windows Live Spaces, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, Wordpress, Community_Server, PBlogs.gr, JournalHome, the MetaWeblog API, the Moveable Type API, and all blogs that support RSD (Really Simple Discoverability).

Windows Live Writer introduces the Provider Customization API that enables both rich customization of Windows Live Writer’s behavior as well as the opportunity to add new functionality to the product. Currently Windows Live Spaces, WordPress, and TypePad have all taken advantage of this API to expose additional service-specific features within Windows Live Writer.

Windows Live Writer is currently available in 6 different languages.

Why Use It?
It’s easy to use, supports multiple blogging platforms, provides a good preview of the post prior to posting, and makes formatting, inserting images, and inserting inline videos much easier than coding by hand. Plus, you have the capability to use the add-in library and even write your own add-ins using the WLW API.

Since discovering WLW a year ago, it’s all I use for blogging to my own blog on Windows Live Spaces, and also a blog I maintain on the SharePoint intranet where I work.

To make my posts stand out, I frequently incorporate images and video into my posts - on occasion creating my own training videos and then inserting them into my blog posts. WLW makes this easy.

Inserting Videos:
Here is a training video I did using Windows Media Encoder for screen capture, Microsoft Media Encoder to encode and post directly to MSN SoapBox and the Silverlight Streaming Service. From Windows Live Writer I can insert a video from my Silverlight Streaming Service or MSN Soapbox - even get a preview mode of the video. Nice.

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&#038;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:1f7b5338-af13-452d-b93d-38eb293159f7&#038;showPlaylist=true&#038;from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="Using SharePoint Linked Datasources from SharePoint Designer">Video: Using SharePoint Linked Datasources from SharePoint Designer</a>

Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2007 is now a free product!

Why?

Customers are telling Microsoft that they see a significant part of SharePoint Designer’s capabilities as an extension of what SharePoint Products and Technologies already do, and they want to be able to create increasingly dynamic Web sites on SharePoint.

In response to this feedback, Microsoft is implementing a number of changes to promote and facilitate even more customization efforts on top of the SharePoint platform.

When?

Starting April 2, 2009, SharePoint Designer 2007 is available as a free download.

Where?

Start at the SharePoint Designer home page and follow the download links from there: www.microsoft.com/spd

Where can I learn more about the announcement?

Read the Letter to SharePoint Designer Customers.
Watch the interview with SharePoint Director Tom Rizzo (below).

What about licensing issues?

To learn more about licensing issues, for example, what to do if you recently purchased SharePoint Designer, see the Q&A on Licensing Changes.

Where can I learn more about SharePoint Designer?

Start with these:
Introducing Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 (article)
Introduction to building SharePoint applications (article)
A six-part video series on getting the most out of SharePoint Designer (videos)
Get SharePoint Designer training on your desktop (videos)
Can I restrict access to SharePoint Designer in my organization?

Yes! See Locking Down SharePoint Designer (blog on MSDN).

SharePoint Designerfor free interview with Tom Rizzo

From Sharepoint Designer weblog: We hope you’re as excited as we are about this announcement. Enjoy using SharePoint Designer and check back often for blog posts on using SharePoint Designer!

From the Microsoft office Sharepoint Blog:
A while back I wrote a post on how teachers are using SharePoint to manage their classroom activities. Fairly often, it seems, I come across case studies and other interesting information that demonstrate how school districts are using SharePoint to create portals and individual school sites that help teachers, students and parents stay informed about what’s going on and how their kids are doing in their respective schools.

When the Lake Washington School District - a local district where my own two sons attend school - unveiled its new district Web site last year, it received several awards and positive reviews for the portal’s design and ease of navigation. As the father of two boys who attend two different schools in the same district - one is in junior high and the other in high school - something I noticed was that different schools presented information quite differently on their respective SharePoint sites outside of the main district portal. If I needed a phone number or wanted to look at a schedule of school events, the process was different depending on the school site I was looking at.

A colleague of mine here at work shared an article with me that talked about a solution to this problem. It turns out that Laurie Pelham, Project Manager for the Lake Washington School District, began doing research on this very issue and discovered that while there was lots of good information being made available to parents and students on these individual school sites, the look and structure of the sites differed quite a bit from school to school. Out of some great research and work with staff, students and parents, Laurie facilitated a redesign of individual school sites to create a more consistent look and navigation so that parents with students in more than one school could find things in the same places across school sites.

For all you SharePoint Designer enthusiasts and aficionados out there, I just wanted to let you know that John Jansen, Test Lead for the SharePoint Designer product team, has recently published a book from Microsoft Press:

Titled “Building Web Applications with Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 Step by Step,” John covers a wide range of topics, including:

Get Started with SharePoint Designer
Customizing the SharePoint Master Page
Using ASP.NET controls with SharePoint Controls
Creating Workflows
Data Sources with ASP.NET and SharePoint
Integrating SharePoint Applications with Access
Creating Data Views in SharePoint Designer

Learn more about the book and find links to purchase it at Microsoft Learning.

You can also view John’s free training videos on SharePoint Designer 2007 on Office Online:

A six-part series on getting the most out of SharePoint Designer 2007
SharePoint Designer 2007 Business Administrator Training

And there’s more SharePoint Designer 2007 training available from John via Total Training (not free):

Total Training for Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007

Synopsis
The smart way to learn Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Office SharePoint Designer 2007-one step at a time! Now you can get two popular Step By Step books in one value-packed toolkit-at a great price. You’ll work at your own pace through the easy numbered steps and skill-building practice files on CD. First, master the fundamentals with Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Step By Step-then, learn how to customize your site and make it really work for you with Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 Step By Step.

Teach yourself how to:
• Create and manage SharePoint sites, including working with lists and libraries • Work with collaboration features to create surveys, discussion boards, wikis, and blogs • Customize your site with cascading style sheets, Web parts, and data sources • Create workflows and applications with custom forms, templates, and dashboards to enhance your team’s productivity • Work with Microsoft Office Excelr 2007, Accessr 2007, InfoPathr 2007, and Outlookr 2007 in Windows SharePoint Services • Plus-get two companion CDs featuring hands-on practice files from both books

With Step By Step, you can take just the lessons you need or work from cover to cover. Either way, you drive the instruction, building and practicing the skills you need, just when you need them!

Key Book Benefits:
• Combines two beginning SharePoint books in one package at a discounted price. • Covers all the fundamentals, including building custom SharePoint sites and applications to enable collaboration and enhance productivity. • With Step By Step, you can read from cover to cover or pick just the topics you want. •Useful to both beginning-level and experienced SharePoint users. • Features easy-to-follow lessons and hands-on skill-building exercises. • Includes two companion CDs with practice files, project templates, and other resources.

The Sharepoint blog has a great intro how to access Sharepoint via Groove:

There are times when, in order to be productive and get work done, you need access to the data stored in SharePoint without access to the SharePoint server itself. Examples are: the classic “on the plane” scenario, working from home without corporate network access, and collaboration by working remotely on documents stored in a central SharePoint server when network latency is high. The productivity of people working in these situations can be dramatically improved if data can be taken offline, modified locally, and then synchronized back when network connectivity is available. Office has a great program named Groove that can be used to synchronize documents with a SharePoint server. In this post, we’ll go through the 4 steps necessary to get started with Groove and use it with SharePoint document libraries.

Step1: Start Groove
Groove is distributed with Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise. After you finish installing Office Enterprise 2007, Groove is available on the Start Menu in the Microsoft Office group. Start Groove by clicking its link (Microsoft Office Groove 2007).

Step 2: Create a New Groove Account
If you already have a Groove account set up, you can skip to step 3.

A Groove account allows you to synchronize documents in a SharePoint workspace between Groove clients even when they do not have connectivity to the SharePoint server. This is useful when you have an offline collaboration session. A Groove account is required for Groove to operate.

Usually your company will have Enterprise Groove Server installed. In this case, when you start Groove, it will retrieve your account configuration from your network domain and prompt you for your password. Keeping the account configuration in Enterprise Groove Server is convenient because it keeps track of all the Groove workspaces you are using, so it’s easier for you to use them from different computers.

To see the rest of the explanation, click the above blue link.

Like to share your working day? Thats great, just don’t share your entire life. Inside Office Blog has these tips:

Should you share your technical expertise, goals, or accomplishments at work? Yes! Share a caricature of your boss or love letter from an office romance, however, and you might soon need to share your resume.

Perhaps your team is using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 or another program to share information online.

You might have a My Site, which is a great place to track information, promote your expertise, and find others with similar interests. You can use privacy settings to control which categories of people get to see what, in case there’s information that you don’t want everyone to see.

Some files are less safe for work than others, though, so you might keep them offline or at home, especially if you think you might forget the privacy settings. Here’s a short list:

Your cover letter for another job opening
List of reasons you hate your job/boss/co-workers
Order for shoes, tunes, or whatever you buy when you should be working
Your “I’m outta here” manifesto (that you’re saving up for your last day)
The “office pool” worksheet where your buddies bet on your manager’s last day
Caricature of your boss that you doodled during a boring meeting
Latest standings in your favorite online game
Recent letter from a torrid office romance
Business plan for your other job (that you do during office hours)
Your tax return.

For tips on good information to share about yourself, see Michael Sampson’s 10 Tips on Establishing Your Profile in SharePoint My Site.

Here’s some news if you use Sharepoint in your business: Developers building solutions based on Microsoft’s SharePoint collaboration and business process platform will gain expanded support in the planned Visual Studio 2010 development environment, which will feature templates and an extensibility API, a Microsoft official said in a blog on Thursday.

Currently, developers can use Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 to develop for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, said S. “Soma” Somaseger, senior vice president of the Microsoft developer division, in his blog. Developers also can use Visual Studio for Windows SharePoint Services or third-party tools, he said.

A Visual Studio extensibility API will let developers build SharePoint project items, automate and extend existing SharePoint project items, enhance deployment and retraction functionality, and extend the display and actions of SharePoint nodes in Server Explorer, Somasegar said.

While Visual Studio 2008 is limited to development of supported workflow projects only for lists and document libraries, Visual Studio 2010 will enable development of list and site level workflows along with aspx association and initiation forms.

“And, as you would expect, the new Visual Studio 2010 designers can be used to create Web Parts, application pages, and user controls for a SharePoint site,” Somasegar said. Developers also will be able to navigate and browse a SharePoint site directly in Visual Studio, Somasegar said.

Visual Studio 2010 could arrive late this year, based on two-year release cycles for Visual Studio.

Office SharePoint Server features capabilities for collaboration, portals, enterprise search, content management, business process and forms, and business intelligence. Windows SharePoint Services enables collaboration and development of Web-based business applications.

From Amazon.com and Infopath Team Blog:

Product Description
Content types are a core concept used throughout the functionality and services offered in SharePoint 2007, and are designed to help users organize their SharePoint content in a more meaningful manner. A content type is a reusable collection of settings users apply to a certain category of content in order to manage the metadata and behaviors of a document or item type in a centralized, reusable way. If you have ever created or thought about creating document-centric SharePoint solutions, then this book is for you. It teaches power users, administrators, and developers how to use SharePoint content types and walks them through the process of creating one in a sample scenario. The first two chapters provide an overview of content types and can be read by anyone who has had experience with SharePoint. Chapters 3 through 8 are targeted at SharePoint power users and administrators, offering details about the components of document content types and walking readers through the process of creating a sample performance appraisal solution. The last two chapters are geared toward developers and describe how to programmatically manipulate the sample performance appraisal solution with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. Topics covered include creating columns, associating document templates, customizing the Document Information Panel, adding workflows, defining an information management policy, reusing content types within a site collection, and programmatically manipulating a content type.

From the sharepoint blog: Like many who work inside of a large organization, I frequently find myself swamped in a deluge of PowerPoint files.

You, too, can create a Slide Library
Now let me get one thing clear up front: I’m not what you might call a “SharePoint savvy” guy. But the process for setting up a Slide Library on My Site was very straight-forward.

First, I opened up my profile on the corporate intranet. Then, I clicked Site Actions and then clicked Create.

Which then led me to this page …

On the New page, I entered in a name for the slide library, whether I want the link to this library to show up in Quick Launch, and if I want to keep a version of each slide after editing.
So now I have a blank Slide Library. Yay! But I hear some of you asking the obvious question “That’s great, but how do I populate the Slide Library with slides?”

Well never fear, because you have the option to either Upload slides directly to the Slide Library from the site (see the graphic above), or you can publish slides to your Slide Library from with PowerPoint.

To do that, open the presentation that you want to publish to your Slide Library in PowerPoint 2007. Click the Office Button in the top left corner, point to Publish, and click Publish Slides. You’ll then see the Publish Slides dialog box.

Select all the slides that you want in your Slide Library, and click Publish.

Then go to your Slide Library and you will see the slides you just added.

So now that you’ve created a Slide Library and added slides to it, it’s time to take it out for a test drive. Do you remember that Reuse Slides feature in PowerPoint that I mentioned earlier? That’s where we can access the Slide Library from inside PowerPoint.

To reuse slides from your Slide Library, on the Home tab, in the Slides group, click the arrow button below New Slide, and select Reuse Slides. Then, in the Reuse Slides task pane, click Open a Slide Library, navigate to your Slide Library, and click Select.

Steven Thomas, of Inside Office Online Blog Sings the praise if Accesses ability to work with Excel files so much, he may even tempt me to transfer my Writing Submission Spreadsheet (which has taken on a life of it’s own) from Excel to Access.

In his article, he give three big steps:

System One: The things themselves

The system that held the files would give me data in comma-delimited text named as if it were an Excel file.

System Two: About those things…

Performance data about the articles was in a SQL Server database. Access talks to SQL Server, no problem.

System Three: The best-laid plans

Plans for new content live in a SharePoint list. Access, as it turns out, talks to SharePoint.

Ok, I have no idea how i’ll start my own process of transfer and whatnot, but it’d sure be nice to have a better format for that information than endless cells running sideways and up and down. With Steven’s accolades on Access and Excel working together, he gives me some interest in trying. If that is successful, I have another spreadsheet on recipes i’ve tried, with my own comments.

Think of the possibilies.