SharePoint: Groove assimilated by the Borg (aka SharePoint)

Prepare to be assimilated by the Borg.

http://blogs.msdn.com/groove_development_team/archive/2009/05/13/makeover-for-groove-sharepoint-workspace-2010.aspx

...Groove is getting a new name as of the coming release of Office 2010. Please welcome SharePoint Workspace 2010!

The name makeover is in concert with the direction the product is going. SharePoint Workspace will provide easy access to SharePoint content (or content from any server that implements the publicly documented protocols) in an effort to provide a seamless online/offline experience.

Groove SharePoint Workspace and OneNote will appear in Office 2010 Professional Plus (yes that’s the name... it’s a bit ridiculous).

Regardless, Groove has always been a pretty niche product – people that have used it liked it. Other people didn’t understand what it did. Now that it gets this re-branding I think there will be a lot more interest in this product and the offline capabilities. Good move on MS.

My colleague Marlon always complains to me that he can’t get his docs from SharePoint when we put our SharePoint on maintenance...  I’m sure he’ll be happier now.

jliu

What am I looking for in SquareSpace

Going to spend this next week seriously giving SquareSpace a twirl.  I'm looking for:

• Easy maintenance
• Import from spaces.live.com without doing something really stupid
• Better traffic tracking - compared to Windows Live probably anything is better
• Comments with OpenID

 UPDATE:

Maintenance - I seem to be able to make the changes I wanted - looking for info in the FAQ / forum is awful though.

From Windows Live Spaces to SquareSpace - ended up writing my own MetaBlogAPI export for Live Spaces to MoveableType txt format, then get squarespace to import it.  Again the help dialog is bad and it wasn't clear why things weren't working - have to go back to import page to see the error.

Traffice tracking - I know it was better already

No comments with OpenID - I think in this generation if you have to force someone to create an account in your particular blogging system just to comment - there's something wrong about it.

SharePoint - service pack 2 thoughts

SharePoint service pack 2 came out a couple of days ago, for some reason I was really excited about it and even woke up checking twitter regarding any news…  It was surprisingly empty.

Anyway, over the last couple of days I’ve had a good whirl and here’s some thoughts – both mine, and heard over the grapevine.

Authentication — Improvements to forms-based authentication, authentication for Web applications, and the Business Data Catalog.

MSDN is saying that when Forms authentication is used SharePoint “should” do a better job at letting client (Browser) remember the password.

I’m hoping this means I don’t need to re-enter my password a billion times.

Database performance and integrity — Improved database performance and integrity by automatically rebuilding database indexes with a timer job. 

Self checks are good

Interoperability — Improved support for standards-based document formats and compatibility with a broader range of browsers level 1 and level 2 browser support.

IE8 enters level 1 browser support – the rich text editing should get fixed

FireFox2/3 enters level 2 browser support

Read-only content databases — Improved user experience by automatically configuring site collections as read-only when the content database is configured as read-only.

Again a good thing

Stsadm command-line tool — In addition to operations for pre-upgrade scanning and variations analysis and repair, several operations are improved and new operations added to better support farm administration.

stsadm –o backup will now issue a stsadm –o setsitelock prior to the backup, unless otherwise stated.

This means that sharepoint administrators no longer need to do this in two steps.

stsadm –o deletesite now supports a force argument that allows orphaned site collections or orphaned sites to be deleted.  Only time I’ve seen an orphan site is when we had a bad import that failed halfway.

Pre-upgrade scanning and reporting — An Stsadm operation that enables you to scan an existing farm and its servers to verify that they can be upgraded SharePoint Products and Technologies "14".

stsadm -o preupgradecheck

is only to check against future versions of SharePoint 2010.

Variations analysis and repair — An Stsadm operation that enables farm administrators to better manage and perform necessary operations against variations.

There’s a quite bit of work for variations.  This isn’t an area where I’ve had a lot of experience.

Merge Content DB bug fixed

Yay

Breaking Changes:

Areas web service removed

There’s some impact to Nintex Workflows – there’s an interim fix that they’ve released, as well as a patch coming out within a week.

IIS7 WCF .SVC 404

This is a tip for myself:

For the weird reasons I could not understand – if your IIS7/Vista doesn’t have a handler for .svc all of a sudden – you can re-register them using the following registration.

I’m still not sure why this suddenly stopped working :-(

"C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.0\Windows Communication Foundation\ServiceModelReg.exe" -r -y

SharePoint - On the verge of launching a new release of a SharePoint site

On the verge of launching a new release of a public SharePoint website and I came across this list (from shanselman’s twitter actually).

15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website

Here’s how we fared:

1. Favicon – checked and done!
2. Titles and Meta data – checked!  Actually SharePoint comes with quite a bit of baggage, but we started with a clean masterpage so this is not too bad.
3. Cross-Browser Checks – checked!  IE6, 7, 8, FireFox, Chrome, Safari + iPhone.  RichHTML editing is limited to IE for now – but there’s a release soon afterwards to upgrade to Telerik’s RadEditor Lite.
4. Proofread – not enough :-(
5. Links – checked - using both SharePoint’s internal reports and SSW Link Auditor – hopefully the content editors don’t put in bad links from now til launch…
6. Functionality Check – checked!  My biggest fears are that in the sprint until launch, if we accidentally break an existing feature that was working previously, so far my fears have been unfounded.
7. Graceful Degradation – not checked…  I think I’m going to feel guilty for saying this one, but I just don’t think it’s relevant to check for JavaScript now.  Especially on a SharePoint site.
8. Validation – no - it’s SharePoint.  This is going to be a tough one to tick off.
9. RSS Link – checked – may be.  One of the features of this release, unless we have to cut it.
10. Analytics – checked – both the SharePoint reports, as well as Google Analytics that was used for the old site
11. Sitemap – checked – SharePoint does this naturally
12. Defensive Design – checked.  SharePoint allows for 404 to be customized
13. Optimize – not enough.  We’re utilizing quite a few performance tricks we have up our sleeves, but ultimately there’s just not the level of control in SharePoint vs. say a custom ASP.NET application
14. Back Up – checked
15. Print Style Sheet – need to check again.  This was working previously but we’ve had some work done on the site in the last two releases and I’m a bit worried about our good ol’ print css.

So we scored 10/15.  Ticked off most of the easy ones.  Have quite a few really tough ones left.  Wish us luck!