SharePoint Daily for August 1, 2008

Top News Stories
Alfresco Launches Full Frontal SharePoint (MOSS) Assault (CMS Wire)
Brava! Alfresco Labs 3 is striving to be a viable open source alternative to Microsoft’s SharePoint MOSS enterprise content management offering. As of today, Alfresco Labs v3 — the application formerly known as Alfresco Community — offers potential SharePoint customers a different option, providing them with what they claim is the first fully-compatible open source SharePoint repository.

Microsoft Prepares for End of Windows with Midori (Infoworld)
With the Internet increasingly taking on the role of the PC operating system and the growing prevalence of virtualization technologies, there will be a day when the Microsoft Windows client OS as it's been developed for the past 20-odd years becomes obsolete. Microsoft seems to be preparing for that day with an incubation project code-named Midori, which seeks to create a componentized, non-Windows OS that will take advantage of technologies not available when Windows first was conceived, according to published reports.

IBM Growth in Emerging Markets Fuels Lotus Momentum (MarketWatch)
Led by strong sales of IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8 in the second quarter of 2008, IBM's Lotus software business outgrew Microsoft by winning millions of customer seats worldwide in direct competition with Microsoft, aided by key wins over its Redmond-based rival in emerging markets.

How to Win Over End-users (ComputerWeekly.com)
When Telent implemented a scheduling system last summer, the telecoms company was confident the technology would mean it could offer more competitive Service Level Agreements to customers. However, the response from its 1,500 workers was less than enthusiastic.

This Just In: Microsoft's Annual 10-K Report (SeattlePI.com)
Microsoft this afternoon filed its Form 10-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission. This is the annual report in which the company offers a broad update on its business. I'm sifting through it now and will be posting anything new or notable. In the meantime, feel free to read along with me and post your own notes in the comments below.

Not Another SharePoint Lesson (CMSWire)
Not tired of hearing about SharePoint training? Good, because here’s another one that crossed our path. Tony Byrne of CMS Watch will be conducting a SharePoint Symposium, a Satellite Event at KMWorld & Intranets 2008 on September 26, 2008 in San Jose McEnery, CA.

Around the Blogosphere
ISPA Update (Bob Fox's SharePoint Blog)
So we launched the ISPA web site back on the 16th of July.   We have seen a tremendous outpouring of emails and it appears our goals were in line with the community.  We were a bit rushed to get the site up and thanks to some quick and great branding work from Heather Waterman we were able to put out something that was pleasing to the eye.  Most of you that know me well know I strongly lack any artistic or creative talents when it comes to this stuff so I want to personally thank Heather for her work.

Turning on Detailed Error Messages in SharePoint 2007 (The Mossman)
This post is not really that novel but I link to other peoples blogs for this topic constantly, so I might as well make my own post with this information: When customizing SharePoint its fairly easy to make an error or omit something… if and when you do, an out-of-the-box SharePoint site will simply respond by displaying a page that says “An unexpected error has occurred”.

Microsoft Sharepoint “Tips of the Day” (SharePoint Solutions Blog)
Want a great place to get general Sharepoint tips and tricks? How about your Outlook mailbox? Microsoft has made available a list of tips and how-tos for SharePoint, Sharepoint Designer, and InfoPath and of course, all the other Office products as well. Best of all, they are available by RSS feed, so you can have them delivered right to your Outlook mailbox.

If I Only Had 5 Questions... (Mauro Cardarelli)
I had an interesting challenge posed to me recently.  I was asked to offer design assistance on a new collaboration environment for a collection of virtual teams.  The goal was to provide each team with a SharePoint site where they could post content and use native SharePoint tools for collaboration and communication.  The challenge was the environment needed to be built very quickly so there was no time for information architecture design sessions.

SharePoint IT Pro Documentation Team Blog (Matthew McDermott)
There is a new TechNet blog specifically focused on IT Pro Content for SharePoint. http://blogs.technet.com/tothesharepoint/ provides notification and updates for the SharePoint related TechNet content and a vehicle for you to request topics and provide feedback to the Documentation Team. Next time you find yourself struggling to find content you can bounce to this blog and let them know!

The Sharepoint Delegate Control (SharePointResource.com)
Having just gone through with Dave on using an alternative navigation in a master page I thought it useful to post on the Sharepoint Delegate Control. Andrew Connell has a great explaination on this in his Web Content Book & of course there is some information in the SDK.

Press Releases
New Xerox Desktop Document Scanner Boosts Productivity (BusinessWire)
Xerox Corporation (NYSE: XRX) today announced a new, easy-to-use document scanner that help users be more productive by scanning, e-mailing and copying their documents at the touch of a single button.

SharePoint Events
August 5, Chicago, Illinois, The Chicago Microsoft SharePoint Business Strategies Group August Meetup
August 6, New York, NY, NYC SharePoint User Group
August 7, Kansas City, Kansas, Kansas City Office Geeks
August 7, Washington, DC, Federal & Military SharePoint Users Group of Washington D.C.
August 7, Arlington, VA, The SharePoint Users Group
August 13, Jordan, Jordan SharePoint User Group
August 14, Bellevue, WA, Puget Sound SharePoint Users Group
August 19, Dallas - Fort Worth, Texas, DFW SharePoint community
August 20, Iselin, New Jersey, NJ SharePoint User Group
August 21, Columbus, Ohio, COSPUG Meeting
August 21, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand, Bay of Plenty User Group
August 21, Baltimore, MD, Baltimore SharePoint Users Group
August 25-29, Sydney, Australia, SharePoint August Training Summit
August 26, Tampa, Florida, Tampa Office Geeks Association
August 27, Cleveland, Ohio, Cleveland SharePoint User Group
August 27, Melbourne, Australia, MOSSIG

September 4, Washington, DC, Federal & Military SharePoint Users Group of Washington D.C.
September 15-17, Washington, DC (McLean, Virginia), Best Practices SharePoint Conference
September 20/21, Waltham, Massachusetts, New England Code Camp 10

October 27-30, Los Angeles, California, Microsoft Professional Developers Conference

November 3-7 and 10-14, Barcelona, Spain, Microsoft TechEd
November 10-13, Las Vegas, Nevada, SharePoint Connections Conference

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

Microsoft Knowledge Base
You receive alerts for every file that is uploaded to a document library in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or in SharePoint Server 2007, although you set up alerts by using a filter for the custom view (KBAlertz)
Although you set up alerts by using a filter for the custom view on a SharePoint document library in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, you receive alerts for every file that is uploaded to the document library. You expect to receive alerts for only the files that match the filter criteria.

You cannot change the master page that is associated with a specific page layout in SharePoint Designer 2007 (KBAlertz)
In Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007, you try to change the master page that is associated with a specific page layout. To do this, you try to click Master Page on the Format menu. However, the commands on the Format menu are unavailable. Therefore, you cannot change the master page that is associated with a specific page layout.

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