SharePoint Daily for October 10, 2008

Top News Stories
11 Fixes Expected for Patch Tuesday (RedmondMag)
Microsoft's October patch release cycle promises to be a busy one as Redmond announced plans to roll out 11 security bulletins in its Tuesday security release. Four are "critical," six are deemed "important" and one received a "moderate" rating.

Firms' Fortunes 'Vary With SharePoint' (OneStopClick)
Over the past year, web content management systems (CMS) vendors have had mixed fortunes in implementing SharePoint integration, it has been claimed. Research carried out by IT analyst CMS Watch found many vendors have installed updated connectors that enable web publishers to access documents in SharePoint's repository, although these vary in scope and functionality.

Can Crappy Intranets Be Saved By Web 2.0 and Social Software? (CIO)
During the past year, many IT departments came to a grim conclusion: corporate intranets had become irrelevant and useless. In an attempt to depart from boring phone directories and web-pages that only IT could update, we saw an uptick in the corporate adoption of web-based social software such as wikis, blogs and social networking profiles, all brought in to make intranets better by empowering employees to contribute user generated content.

Data Protection With Software as a Service (NewsFactor)
One reason to consider SaaS: increased pressure to retain data longer in accordance with corporate compliance regulations. As information typically exists in different formats and different applications, determining the best way to provide access and respond to compliance requests can be daunting, due to hidden costs and complications.

Putting Your Trust in the Cloud (LinuxInsider)
Richard Stallman famously voiced his mistrust of cloud computing as "marketing hype," while Larry Ellison dismissed it as simply a fashionable name for stuff we already do. IBM's Harold Moss seems to agree more with Ellison, saying it's an evolution of existing technologies, and companies should be mindful of just what they're putting up there.

Clickjacking: Any Click Could be the Fatal Click (Heise Online)
An apparently harmless click in a browser window is all it takes to allow criminals to access your computer. Flash developer Guy Aharonovsky has released a demo with which users can unknowingly change their Flash Player settings, allowing attackers to access their microphone and webcam. The demo exploits weaknesses in current browser versions and Adobe’s Flash Player Settings Manager.

Around the Blogosphere
Customizing the User Experience: Overview of the Default Interface (Part 1 of 6) (SharePoint Magazine)
Have you ever wondered how the built in interface actually works? Why is a list item shown the way it is? How are the input forms built and how can you change how they work and look?

Estimate Performance and Capacity Requirements for InfoPath Forms Services Environments (Shared Points for SharePoint...)
New document on performance published on Technet; gives good guidance and recommendations for use of Forms Server and dataconnections. In this article: Key characteristics, Test environment, Test results, Recommendations.

Jazz Up Your SharePoint Dashboards With Graphical Indicators (WorkerThread Blog)
Many SharePoint users have variants of the out of the box Team Site for the bulk of their collaborative efforts, and many of these end up with a landing page displaying web parts such as “Tasks Assigned to Me”,  “Overdue Tasks”,  “Project Status” or similar.  Where possible it’s good to make the status pages a little more interesting by providing some form of graphical representation of the current state of play.

SharePoint at the Microsoft PDC 2008 (Paul Andrew)
I'll be at the Microsoft PDC 2008 and I hope to see you there. if you're going, please come to some of our SharePoint talks. In fact, go and add them to your My Sessions now and make us more popular.

Whole Farm is Down Because Timer Jobs Are Not Running (The SharePoint Farmer's Almanac)
One of my clients this week managed to take his entire farm offline this week by upsetting the timer service. First a little background – currently they are scrambling to get SharePoint back to a happy state. Why? Well, as happens with lots of customers, SharePoint is too successful. When we originally setup their farm and upgraded from SPS2003 to MOSS 2007 they had about 20 GB of content that was growing at a very controlled pace. Fast forward a little more than a year and their content database is about 320 GB. YIKES! Even scarier most of their data is in one site collection. This is bad, very bad! Typical guidance is your content databases should be less than 100 GB.

Publishing Sites: Field Controls or Web Parts... That is the Question (Andrew Connell)
One of the most common problems I see with people developing Publishing sites stems from the lack of understanding in the core differences between Web Parts & Field Controls and when to use them. Many a consultant have dug a deep hole in this area. My goal in this post is to make you aware of the differences to make educated decisions when selecting one over the other.

Functional SharePoint Branding Style Guide (SharePoint Branding & Design)
As part of our normal delivery on branding projects we usually supply a SharePoint style guide. This document is intended to be used by site owners/developers to support the branding once the project is complete. I have created many variations of this type of document, What I find really helpful for the consumers of this document is to provide some of the following:

Sharepoint English Version VS Regional Versions (Tech Talk PT)
For anyone that works in a country that officially doesn’t speak English the more probable choice of Sharepoint version would be the specific regional one. It has all options and labels translated, the back-office and out of the box front-office are also in the specific language, so why should we even consider to choose the English version?

Adding Breadcrumb Navigation to Application Pages in SharePoint Central Administration (Jan Tielens' Bloggings)
It is great to find out people like the articles you write on your blog, and it's even more fun when people actually contribute to your blog as well. That's how I received an update to a blog post I wrote some time ago, about adding breadcrumb navigation to Application Pages. Bart Snyckers explained that the mechanism described in my post worked a little bit different if you want to add Application Pages to the Central Administration site. Bart doesn't have a development blog yet (but he told me he's working on one, and he's running a photo blog already), so I'm posting Bart's findings below. Thanks Bart!

Around Bamboo Nation
The Content Query Web Part (SharePoint Blank)
Another standard Web Part that I learned about at the Mindsharp Power End User summit was the Content Query Web Part.  I was reminded of this Web Part while thinking further about yesterday's site-wide alert conundrum.  What's the connection between the two, you ask?

Freeware and Self Service User Management Solutions and SharePoint Extranets (Part 2/3) (The Bamboo Team Blog)
In the first post in this series on SharePoint extranets and User management we walked through the authentication and authorization challenges with a bit on pricing and licensing.  In this post we'll explore the free samples and freeware solutions along with cheaper point solutions for self service and in the next post we'll walk through more fully featured off the shelf extranet and management solutions, suites and packs.

User Management Challenges and Solutions for SharePoint Extranets (Part 1/3) (The Bamboo Team Blog)
SharePoint Joel here on a new guest post... I plan to put together a series of posts to walk through the challenges of extranets.  The first challenge is getting the authentication and secure infrastructure deployment put together, second is the actual service provisioning which *very* often is some type of workflow or portal for provisioning sites, and third is user management.  I've found that often there are free point solutions for say things like delete capture, or a simple site creation workflow, but the full management solutions which have thought through it end-to-end are in management suites.

Announcing List Print -- Possibly Our Most Aptly Named Product Yet (The Bamboo Team Blog)
Web browsers are great -- they do a lot of things really well. They display data, they accept user input; they can even motivate you with a repetitive barrage of inspirational quotes. One thing they don't do particularly well is print. It's not so much the fault of the browser as much as it is the contents of the browser, though. Web pages, in general, weren't designed to be printed -- they have buttons and dialogs, advertisements and links. Imagine if printing from Microsoft Word resulted in a page with a giant menu bar on it... it's kind of like that.

How Does Person Or Group Column Really Work? (The Bamboo Team Blog)
Disclaimer mumbo jumbo: The following has been discovered based on sheer brute force and trial and error. Have you ever wondered what the people picker control for Person Or Group column performs its check against?  Ever wonder what happens if you specify a SharePoint Group?  What about that search window that appears when you click on the address book icon?

SharePoint Events
October 9-10, Tulsa Oklahoma, Tulsa TechFest
October 14, Southfield, Michigan, Southeastern Michigan SharePoint User's Group
October 14, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Philly Office Geeks
October 15, Iselin, New Jersey, NJ SharePoint User Group
October 15, San Diego, California, Southern California SharePoint User Group
October 16, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand, Bay of Plenty User Group
October 16, Columbus, Ohio, Central Ohio SharePoint User Group
October 16, London, England, SharePoint User Group UK
October 16, Louisville, Kentucky, Kentucky SharePoint Users Group
October 16, Virginia Beach, Virginia, Hampton Roads SQL Server and SharePoint User Group
October 21, Adelaide, Australia, Adelaide SharePoint Usergroup
October 21, Irving, Texas, DFW SharePoint Server Community
October 21, Perth, Australia, Perth SharePoint Users Group
October 21, Tampa, Florida, Tampa Office Geeks Association
October 22, Cleveland, Ohio, Cleveland SharePoint User Group
October 22, Melbourne, Australia, Microsoft Office System Special Interest Group
October 22, Roanoke, Virginia, Roanoke Valley SharePoint Users Group
October 23, Phoenix, Arizona, Arizona SharePoint Professionals Group
October 23, Richmond, Virginia, Richmond SharePoint User Group
October 25, Puget Sound, Washington, Puget Sound SharePoint Users Group: SharePoint Sprint
October 25-26, Los Angeles, California, SoCal Code Camp
October 25, Orlando, Florida, MOSSmosis Orlando
October 25, Puget Sound, Washington, Puget Sound SharePoint Users Group
October 27-30, Los Angeles, California, Microsoft Professional Developers Conference

November 3-7 and 10-14, Barcelona, Spain, Microsoft TechEd
November 4, Chicago, Illinois, The Chicago Microsoft SharePoint Business Strategies Group November Meetup
November 4, Grand Rapids, Michigan, West Michigan SharePoint User Group
November 6, Kansas City, Kansas, Office Developer User Group of Kansas City
November 10-13, Las Vegas, Nevada, SharePoint Connections Conference
November 12, Bloomington, Minnesota, Minnesota SharePoint User Group
November 12, Colorado Springs, Colorado, Colorado Springs SharePoint User Group
November 13, Atlanta, Georgia, MOSSmosis Atlanta
November 13, San Francisco, California, San Fransico SharePoint Users Group
November 20, Jacksonville, Florida, Jacksonville Office Geeks

January 27-29, San Francisco, California, SPTechCon

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

Microsoft Updates
A Preview of Office SharePoint Server Site Templates (Get the Point)
My name is Tom, and I write for Office Online. I'm a new guest blogger on Get the Point, and today I'd like to discuss the default site templates included in Office SharePoint Server 2007. When you create a new Office SharePoint Server site, you can start by using a site template, which you can later customize. There are four categories of site templates from which you can choose: Collaboration, Meetings, Enterprise, and Publishing. In each category, there are several site templates provided.

Use a “Flat” View to Avoid Fishing for Files in Folders (Get the Point)
Are your files submerged in a deep folder structure in your libraries? Are you always fishing for files in folders? Are you over your frustration limit? By using a flat view, you can surface files from folders into a single view. Whenever you need to see all the files together, you can switch to the newly created custom view.

Create a Custom Site Theme and Make it Available to Others (Get the Point)
A theme in Office SharePoint Server is a set of fonts, colors, graphics, and other decorative elements that provide a consistent appearance to your site. A site comes with a set of themes that enable you to quickly change the appearance, based on your organization's needs. (For more information, see the article Change the site colors or theme on Office Online.)

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