Mylearning.be

Recently, I bumped in to some interesting fixes for problems Office 2003 users have when working with SharePoint:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;950292: if you are using Office 2003 to save documents to a SharePoint library that has multiple content types enabled, this fixes a script error when selecting the content type: ‘length’ is null or not an object. Also, in the web file properties screen, the content type you selected, is also selected in the web file properties dialog.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941422: if you are exporting a list to Excel, you get “cannot get the list schema column property from the sharepoint list”.

Please note that these all require SP1 to be installed.

In a meeting with Luk and Wim

Today, I noticed a SharePoint Search feature I did not  know yet: I was looking for the meaning of an abbreviation using the SharePoint Search center, and at the bottom of the first page of my search results a link showed up: What people are saying. After clicking the link, it showed me a perfect definition, and links to the documents were it was found. Cool!

This is what I can find in the Microsoft documentation: the Definition Extraction feature finds definitions for candidate terms and identifies acronyms and their expansions by examining the grammatical structure of sentences that have been indexed (for example, NASA, radar, modem, and so on). It is only available for English.

This means that during the crawling, the MOSS indexer is checking content for sentences like “X is ….”, and recognises them as a definition. It does not seem to be very configurable, but you can turn it off in the settings of the Search Core Results web part. Just uncheck Display Discovered Definition.

I have been testing the new Office Live Workspace, of course I wanted to check how this tool can be positioned in relation to Windows SharePoint Services or even MOSS.

A quick feature overview:

• sites and subsites: you can create different workspaces, based on a template (class workspace, household workspace, job search workspace).
• new documents can be created directly from a workspace, but the list is limited to Word, Excel, PowerPoint.
• built-in lists: tasks, contacts, events.
  
• custom lists: you can create your own list, but the available columns are fairly limited:
  
• interface: is very cool and easy to use. Unfortunately, Safari for Mac is not supported. You can uses Firefox 2 though.
• Office integration: you can install an add-in that adds the option to save or open files directly from Office. It did not work on Vista immediately, I had to install an additional update to get it to work.  
  Some of the lists can be exported to Excel, and calendars and contacts can be synced with Outlook. For the calendar, I encountered some issues with time zones and/or daylight savings, but that seems normal as the service has not been “localized” yet.
  
• Storage: you get 500 MB of storage. Not very much, but the purpose is not to distribute your divx movies .
• Alerts: there is a nice Activity pane that shows you recent changes to the list; you can specify if you want to receive activity mails, but you don’t have all the options you have in SharePoint for configuring the mail frequency.
• Sharing: you can share a workspace with up to 100 people; two security levels: viewer and editor. That’s it.

Check out the Frequently Asked Questions for the service. Or watch the demo.

It seems like a small version of Windows SharePoint Services Team sites. The interface is much slicker and easier to use, integration with Office is very good. A great service for occasional collaboration. There is even an option to collaborate in real time on documents (with SharedView ) but I haven’t tried that one yet.

I made a tough decision today. I decided to abandon SharePoint as a blogging tool, and I am switching to WordPress.

Why this move?

• the standard site template for blogs in SharePoint is rather limited, especially for the typical web 2.0 features (pingbacks, comments, tagging…)
• writing content is sometimes very painful. Ever tried embedding a Youtube video?
• there are some nice extensions (tag cloud, Enhanced blog Edition) but my hosting provider did not manage to install them properly
• SharePoint hosting costs me money
• I am using WordPress for our family blog and it is working great
• my friend Gert is giving great service for the php hosting.

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