SharePoint Daily for December 24, 2008

Happy Holidays everyone! 2009 is almost here, and in honor of the holidays I will be taking a few days off. Based on the number of Out of Office messages I receive each day it seems that many of you are taking time off to spend with your friends and families as well. There was much debating on what to do, but we finally decided to let SharePoint Daily take a rest while I am out. Both SPD and I will be back in January and ready to start the new year with a bang. Until then, have a few cookies for me and I'll see you in the new year.

Chris

Top News Stories
Sam Ramji: Open Source is Burgeoning at Microsoft (SD Times)
Microsoft has begun to realign its legal department, allowing it to work in collaboration with its engineers so that product teams can have more flexibility with open-source software. The company is evangelizing—internally—that more interoperability can be good for the bottom line. Microsoft's Sam Ramji, senior director of platform strategy, discussed with SD Times his company's evolution to a pragmatic viewpoint toward open source, and explained why the company is offering its support to some open-source projects that it feels advances its business and technology goals.

2008: The Year that Microsoft Embraced the Cloud (Windows IT Pro)
While the current view of 2008 is one of financial misery, what with the slumping economy and stagnant PC industry growth, this year will likely be remembered in tech circles for far more meaningful reasons. Microsoft, which jumpstarted and then led the current PC industry since its beginnings, finally began to abandon its traditional business model at last and compete fully in the Internet cloud this past year.

How CIOs Lost Control (Forbes)
At the end of every quarter, CFOs at public companies across America grit their teeth and sign their financial statements, knowing they are criminally liable for the accuracy of the information reported. Do the CFOs know for sure their statements are accurate? Of course not.

How Serious is the Market Share Loss of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer? (TG Daily)
Analysis – Last month, Microsoft’s market share in the browser dropped below 70% for the first time in eight years, while Mozilla broke the 20% barrier for the first time in its history. Initial data sets provided by Net Applications suggest that the Internet Explorer will drop once again significantly in December to below 69% and Mozilla will climb above 21%. IE8 is just around the corner, but current market share data suggests that Microsoft has no effective tool to stop the bleeding at this time - and Mozilla can pick up two out of every three users Microsoft surrenders.

Apple Just Killed Microsoft (The Motley Fool)
BusinessWeek's list of the world's 10 most influential companies is out, and Microsoft isn't on it. Apple is. So is Google. Hear that? It's the jeers from the iGallery: "Thanks for playing, Mr. Softy, but everybody hated Vista. You no longer matter." These are the companies that do, says BusinessWeek:

Steve Ballmer's 12 Gifts of Christmas (eWeek)
Microsoft's CEO isn't having a good year. Even automakers let down the Detroit native known for driving American cars. The Yahoo merger failed, the economic crisis drove down Microsoft's stock price, the global recession sapped software sales and only 10 percent of enterprises have adopted Windows Vista. It hasn't been a good year for Steve. Now there's the question of Santa Claus. Will he let down Steve, too, and put him on the bad boys list? Naughty and not nice means coal in the holiday stocking.

Around the Blogosphere
December SharePoint Cumulative Updates and Important Support Information (Chandima.Net)
So we've come to the end of the year and just when you though that you'd wait for a while before updating SharePoint again we have a new update. Well actually this is quite important since from January if you still have note moved to at least service pack 1 for SharePoint you'll be told by MSFT support to get your deployment upgraded.

SharePoint Saturday Over 150 Coming! (LTI Blog)
We're only two and a half weeks away from SharePoint Saturday!  Yikes!  But I think we're in good shape.  We have speakers lined up (and what a line up!!), we have the food planned, and some nice give aways.  We've also scoped out the rooms int he Va Beach ATC (www.vbatc.com) - and they're VERY nice - with lots of free (and close by) parking.  We had 137 registered last time I checked (last night - Dec 22) - with 13-15 of our speakers not registered - so we're over 150 people.

Opensource CMS is Better? (Novotronix)
On more than one occassion, I get into argument with people supporting OpenSource / FSF software. Its not that I do not approve of Free software.. on the other hand I am quite an enthusiastic supporter of sites such as SourceForge, CodeProject, CodePlex and Google Code. Its the attitude of the people I talk with, that gets to me... they seem to think that just because the software is free, it is automatically better than any paid software. Worse are the allegations that because the code is community supported, it automatically makes them more stable and robust. One such similar debate that I recently had was a comparision of Sharepoint with an Open Source CMS.

JQuery for Everyone: Fixing the Gantt View (EndUser SharePoint)
This question came in from Stump The Panel: Does anyone know how to freeze the Title column in Project Task list Gantt chart view? Since I want to get better using jQuery, and tweaking the UI will be easier than fixing the web part, I went after it. Instead of freezing the Title column, I decided to drop the x-axis scrollbar and add labels to the ends of each activity.

Paginating Through Your Membership Users (Reza Alirezaei’s Blog)
Almost a year ago, I wrote a post explaining how CTE (Common Table Expressions) can make your life much easier when working with your membership users in chunks and pages in SharePoint (or ASP.NET). Well, since then I have received couple emails from people asking for the UI part of that post (SPGridView) so I decided to write another follow up post here to demonstrate how to use SPGridView,  SPGridViewPager and Common Table Expression to achieve a true pagination through your membership users.

25 More SharePoint Class Documented On MSDN (SharePoint Shelter)
I finished up the community content for the following SharePoint classes:

Around Bamboo Nation
New World Clock & Weather Web Part for SharePoint ... Now with Silverlight Clocks! (Part 2/3) (SharePoint Blank)
Yesterday, I provided some background information on the special "anniversary edition" of the World Clock & Weather Web Part, Bamboo's gift to SharePoint users this holiday season, which is now available as a free download in our online store.  Today, I'll begin exploring the customization options that are available to get the most out of this nifty Web Part.

Bamboo SharePoint Analyzer Release 1.1 Update (The Bamboo Team Blog)
A quick note on the latest release of Bamboo SharePoint Analyzer beta 1.1, which is a beta product available as a free download from Bamboo Labs, our Research and Development incubator.  The initial release generates a large amount of download and positive comments.  We have included new features in this version with your feedback:

Microsoft Updates
Team up with Groove 2007 and SharePoint 2007 Technologies (Windows SharePoint Services)
Microsoft Office Groove 2007 and SharePoint 2007 technologies are complementary software products that work together to support the new virtual team environment. If you want to collaborate in a secure, efficient, and immediate way with colleagues and partners, whether they are in the next office or half-way around the world, whether they are online or offline, or whether they are inside or outside the enterprise firewall, then this article is for you.

Error message when you try to save a site as a template in SharePoint Server 2007: "Failure decompressing data from a cabinet file" (Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - KB Alertz)
This error can occur even though the template file (*.stp) is smaller than the value that was specified in the Stsadm.exe command. For example, this error can occur if the .stp file is smaller than 500 MB.

Description of the SharePoint Server 2007 hotfix package (Coreserver.msp): December 16, 2008 (Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - KB Alertz)
This article describes the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 issues that are fixed in the Office SharePoint Server 2007 hotfix package that is dated December 16, 2008.

Description of the SharePoint Server 2007 cumulative update package (MOSS server-package): December 16, 2008 (Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - KB Alertz)
Cumulative update packages for SharePoint Server 2007 contain hotfixes for the SharePoint Server 2007 issues that have been fixed since the release of SharePoint Server 2007. Note This build of the cumulative update package is also known as build 12.0.6335.5000.

SharePoint Events
December 24, Melbourne, Australia, Microsoft Office System Special Interest Group
December 30, Online, What's New from Bamboo
December 30, Online, Create a Master Calendar in SharePoint

January 7, Online, Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Webinar
January 7, Online, Bamboo SharePoint Administration Webinar
January 10, Virginia Beach, Virginia, SharePoint Saturday
January 14, Online, Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Webinar
January 14, Online, Bamboo SharePoint Administration Webinar
January 15, Online, What's New from Bamboo
January 21, New York, New York, 2009 IMAGINE Event -- SharePoint in the Real World
January 27-29, San Francisco, California, SPTechCon

February 2-4, San Diego, California, SharePoint Best Practices Conference
February 7, Kansas City, Kansas, SharePoint Saturday
February 21, New York, New York, SharePoint Saturday

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

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