SharePoint Daily for July 21, 2008

SharePoint in the News
Living in a Virtual World? (itbusiness.ca)
Where do you see this world in the next five to ten years? How did the last five or ten years play out for you? Like you expected? The world as we know it is constantly changing, new economic factors are affecting the way we do business, the price of energy is creating second thoughts in the minds of a lot of people, demand on an individual's time combined with many other factors are shaping the way we look at our lives and our business.

Coke's Largest Bottler Taps Microsoft for SaaS (Information Week)
Coca-Cola enterprises, Coke's largest bottling company, has faced seesawing fortunes in recent years, from a $1.1 billion loss in 2006 to a $711 million gain last year to lowered profit forecasts for this year, forcing changes across the business. In IT, one of the most visible is the company becoming Microsoft's largest software-as-a-service customer to date, contracting for 35,000 employees to get their e-mail and other collaboration capabilities via a subscription service.

Kiwi Hosters Unfazed by Microsoft’s Cloud Move (ComputerWorld)
Local hosting companies appear more positive about Microsoft’s move towards cloud computing than some of the software giant’s US partners.
Revera’s general manager of marketing, Robin Cockayne, who attended Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference, in Houston, sees the strategy as being of benefit to local hosting providers.

SBS 2008: Same Old Bundle With New Vista Wrapper (Network World)
With network-attached storage devices selling for just a few hundred bucks per terabyte, and online service providers offering e-mail and full productivity applications for a few dollars per user per month, Microsoft's Small Business Server 2008 is entering into a tougher market than its older siblings have had to endure.

Why Should You Choose Vista Over XP? (IT Voir)
XP , it seems has been shown the door to promote Vista; which has been desperately seeking the limelight. People are obviously made to switch to Vista or given the option, if they feel reluctant to do so, they can downgrade to Windows which is integrated as an option by default with Vista. So why should you to choose to step down to Vista ?

Around the Blogosphere
Use a CustomAction to Fight Blog Spam (eLumenotion Blog)
I've been really busy lately, and a minor thorn in my side has been some especially obnoxious blog spammers. To keep my readers from seeing them spam and to deny them the ability to benefit from their evil ways, I turned on approvals in my content list. One of the spammers decided to fight back by sending the same content over every few minutes. One of the downsides of using approval is that it also makes getting rid of items in bulk more difficult, so this really, really irritated me and I had to write a little feature to restore my own sanity.

A Neat Trick With the Publishing Feature (Clever Workarounds)
As I mentioned in my last post, I always security trim SharePoint. A very common issue with a security trimmed SharePoint is the "access denied" message that you receive when trying to activate the "Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure" site collection feature.

Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (Sharepointology)
Database administrators, e-mail managers, and other IT implementers and developers are looking for a better way to protect and recover data from key business applications like SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange, Windows SharePoint Services or file shares on Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. Microsoft has heard from our customers and partners and delivered a complete solution with System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2007.

Good Advice Hidden in the Infrastructure Update (Clever Workarounds)
I guess the entire SharePoint world now is aware of the post SP1 "Infrastructure updates" put out by Microsoft recently. Probably the best thing about them are that the flaky "content deployment" feature has had some serious work done on it (I have always advised to use extreme caution and avoid it, but now I will have to reassess).

Press Releases
VMware Infrastructure Wins Best of Tech Ed 2008 in Virtualization Category (Business Wire)
VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today announced that VMware Infrastructure 3, the industry-leading virtualization and management suite, was named the winner of the Best of Tech Ed 2008 IT Professional Award in the virtualization category by Penton Media’s Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Magazine. The winners were announced at the Tech Ed 2008 IT Professionals Conference in Orlando, Florida last month. More information is available at www.WindowsITPro.com/awards.

SharePoint Events*
July 21, Wellington, New Zealand, SharePoint User Group Meeting
July 22, San Jose (Santa Clara), California, SharePoint Hands-On Workshop
July 23, Iselen, New Jersey, NJ SharePoint User Group
July 24, Richmond Virginia, Richmond SharePoint User Group
July 24, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand, Bay of Plenty User Group
July 24, Los Angeles (Irvine), California, SharePoint Hands-On Workshop
July 28, Christchurch, New Zealand, Christchurch SharePoint User Group
July 28, Atlanta, Georgia, Atlanta .NET User Group Meeting

August 19, Dallas - Fort Worth, Texas, DFW SharePoint community
August 26, Tampa, Florida, Tampa Office Geeks Association

September 15-17, Washington, DC (McLean, Virginia), Best Practices SharePoint Conference
September 20/21, Waltham, Massachusetts, New England Code Camp 10

* Please contact Chris Dooley (chris.dooley@bamboosolutions.com) to include your event in our listing.

Knowledge Base
The Business Data Catalog does not support client certificates for authentication in SharePoint Server 2007 (KBAlertz)
SharePoint Server 2007 does not support Business Data Catalog application definitions that consume Web services when these Web services require a client certificate for authentication. This is a limitation of SharePoint Server 2007.

Error message when you subscribe to RSS feeds in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and in SharePoint Server 2007: Page cannot be displayed (KBAlertz)
You open a document library or a list in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. When you try to subscribe to Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds, you may experience the following symptoms:

Description of the Excel Services in SharePoint Server 2007 hotfix package: June 26, 2008 (KBAlertz)
This article describes the Excel Services in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 issue that is fixed in the hotfix package that is dated June 26, 2008.