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When you are talking to a customer about the setup of their new SharePoint site or portal, very often they have trouble visualising the structure and look and feel of the interface they will get. Of course, it is rather easy cranking up a virtual machine and prototyping in SharePoint directly, but then you risk that they will focus on the colours and fonts instead of the functionality they will get (you know, the marketing guy saying: “that’s not the blue of our house style!”).

During the SharePoint Best Practices Conference last february, I attended a workshop by Ruven Gotz, and he talked about Balsamiq Mockups as a tool to help you run requirements workshops. I tried it out today, and it really is a great application that any Information Worker consultant should have in his/her toolset.

What I like about it: 

• it is an Adobe Air application, so cross platform (I am testing on my Mac, but will use it on a pc)
• very simple and intuitive
• it produces “style independent” mockups, so nobody will complain about colours or fonts, but focus on the functionalities

If you want to know more: 

• watch my small demo movie
• visit the web site and try it yourself
• download some SharePoint components you can use immediately for your mockups

Reasons enough to give it a try. And if this would not be enough, read some more about the company behind this product. In an era of profit, shareholders value, unlimited growth, they got their priorities right.

For those who followed my SharePoint introduction session on the Microsoft SMB Roadshow, here are some links that will help you evaluate Microsoft Office SharePoint Server or Windows SharePoint Services:

• the Microsoft “Fabulous 40″ templates
• the Microsoft SharePoint Techcenter on Technet
• a comparison of the different versions of SharePoint
• a trial download of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
• a planning guide for your first SharePoint site

A lot of SharePoint users are confused about when to use Content Approval and Major/Minor versions. And indeed, some functionality seems to overlap, especially the fact that you can hide draft/pending items from users with read access to the list/library.

Scot Hillier has an interesting blog post about versioning and approval scenarios in SharePoint 2007.

Some considerations:

• Think about your user: the more advanced the options you activate, the more complicated it will be to have something published in the library. And what happens if it is complicated? Yes, the file ends up on the C: drive or in the e-mail.
• Content approval can be interesting in lists, as you do not have Major/Minor versions in lists, only in document libraries.
• If you are using Content Approval and you need to approve an item, you need manage list permissions. The Approve items is for Major/Minor versions, and has nothing to do with content approval!

A lot of users are disappointed with the search function that is in MOSS 2007. Some of them are looking for other alternatives, or just leaving SharePoint because of this. 

First, I still believe that you can get a decent user experience with the out of the box search engine. It is just not something you can turn on and forget about it. Best bets, customisation of the search results, authoritative pages, scopes… just don’t come there by themselves, you need to create, maintain and promote them. 

But for those who are still looking for a more enhanced search, there is some light in the darkness: Microsoft announced yesterday that the FAST search engine WILL be included in the next version of SharePoint, and offers an solution for customers who need the enhanced search today. Read the press release.

Adobe has released their 64-bit version of the iFilter, that allows SharePoint Search to index the content of pdf-files.

You can download it here: http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4025