Handy guides to SharePoint Server 2007
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Share 'em with your mates Books The latest version of Microsoft's popular collaboration and productivity platform, SharePoint Server, was released towards the end of last year, and this next generation of software expands on the core capabilities of the 2003 version.â¦
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A guide to Computerworld's recent coverage of Web services and service-oriented architectures, including user applications, security issues and predictions.
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Microsoft releases the next beta version of Windows Server 2008, which adds options for installing Microsoft's newest Web server.
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Matthew Turland has mentioned his article in the latest issue of php|architect magazine (the December 2007 issue) covering web scraping.   Just a quick post to announce (albeit a little late) that the December 2007 issue of php|architect, which includes my article on web scraping. Please buy a copy, give it a read, and feel free to post comments on the forum thread for the article. I'd love to hear some reader feedback!   Other articles in the issue include "Writing an Object/Relational Mapper in PHP", "Understanding CLI" and the cover story "Going native with mysqlnd".
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Our 2007 picks for the best of what's new and exciting on the Web today -- sites with exceptional style and smarts that offer new ways to enrich the on- and off-line experience
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Site Offer Save 30% on this thorough reference
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Is this the right book to introduce Microsoft power users to Linux?
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Blog: At Enterprise 2.0 conference, Microsoft releases toolkit to enhance Web 2.0 tools in SharePoint.
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InfoWorld - Windows Vista&#160;isn&#39;t the only recently released Microsoft software that will give users headaches when they upgrade their systems. Corporate users, partners, and analysts said upgrading to Exchange Server 2007 from previous versions also may be a lengthy and painful process for companies, which may want to take a wait-and-see approach to the new software.
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On the Dallas PHP Users Group site today, there's a new, quick book review from baron covering Wiley Publishing's "Beginning Web Programming with HTML, XHTML and CSS".    This is a hands on book useful as an HTML refresher and introduction to XHTML, CSS1, CSS2, JavaScript and general web related topics including; site design, page layout, hosting, and search engines.  This book contains many valuable links to external tools and sources of information such as syntax validators, browser archives, royalty-free image sites, sites with detailed CSS information and demonstrations, and much more.  The books contains a comprehensive reference section which provides a fast lookup of XHTML elements, CSS properties, special characters, mime types, etc.    His review isn't all too positive, unfortunately - there were code errors in the examples, and some subjects were just touched on too lightly. He notes that it's a good refresher/learing tool, but for anything more advanced than that, look elsewhere...
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Setting up a file server doesn't need to be complicated. read more
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(InfoWorld) - Windows VistaÂ isn't the only recently released Microsoft software that will give users headaches when they upgrade their systems. Corporate users, partners, and analysts said upgrading to Exchange Server 2007 from previous versions also may be a lengthy and painful process for companies, which may want to take a wait-and-see approach to the new software. New hardware requirements, incompatibilities with other Microsoft software, and the complexity of the product's new architecture are just a few of the issues that will make a move to Exchange 2007 from Exchange 2003 or earlier versions costly and difficult for IT administrators, said Microsoft partners and analysts. "There are about 6,000 pages of documentation that an IT administrator will have to wade through to deploy [Exchange Server 2007], said Keith McCall, a former Exchange director at Microsoft and now chief technology officer and founder of Azaleos, which offers an Exchange Server appliance and turnkey product. You need to think hard, and you need to plan your server infrastructure to add the value and new functionality of Exchange 2007." Exchange 2007 is the first major update since Exchange 2003, and it is the first version of the software that runs only on 64-bit servers. Previously, Exchange ran on 32-bit servers, so customers will not be able to just switch out their current version of Exchange to a new one. They will be required to update the hardware. To its credit, Microsoft alerted customers in November 2005 that this would be the case. But the 64-bit transition is not the only hardware headache associated with upgrading to Exchange 2007, McCall said. Because of the various server "roles" Microsoft has introduced for Exchange Server 2007, the software can no longer be set up for high availability on two servers -- one for the roles and one for failover, he said. There are five different server roles for Exchange 2007 -- mailbox, client access, unified messaging, routing and hub transport, and edge transport, which filters e-mail before it hits the mail store. "If you want to run all of the three primary Exchange 2007 roles (mailbox server, hub transport, and client access) with high availability, you need at least four servers, twice as many as you needed in Exchange 2003," he said. "If you want to add the unified message and edge transport roles, you need six servers." If you don't want high availability, you can run all the roles of Exchange Server 2007 on one server, except for the edge transport server, which requires its own, according to Jeff Ressler, director of the Exchange Server Group at Microsoft. He said Microsoft created Exchange 2007 with these new roles clearly defined because it is easier for administrators to proactively choose which role they want Exchange to play in a network. Previously, they had to go in and turn off the roles they didn't want. "In the new world, you would choose, 'I want that to be a client access server,' and just install those components," Ressler said. Hardware is not the only pain point for customers upgrading to the new version of Exchange. Duncan Greatwood, CEO of PostPath, in Mountain View, Calif., said there are some incompatibilities between Exchange Server 2007 and Windows Vista, the new version of Windows that was released to business customers in November and to consumers earlier this week. PostPath has a mail and messaging server that runs on Linux and can connect seamlessly with Exchange Servers on a network. A key problem is that the management tools for Exchange Server 2007 don't run on Vista, Greatwood said. Typically, an IT administrator will deploy Exchange and its management tools on a server and then deploy the tools on his or her own desktop machine so the server can be maintained from there, he said. However, if an administrator's desktop is running Vista, that desktop can't run the tools, Greatwood said. PostPath developed its software by figuring out Exchange's proprietary network protocols and building them into its product to enable the migration, Greatwood said. Microsoft also licenses some of Exchange's networking protocols to third parties, Ressler said. "If you have an Outlook desktop, in a completely unmodified way you can use PostPath just like Exchange," Greatwood said. "Outlook doesn't know it's talking to PostPath; it thinks it's talking to Exchange." For some companies, this could be a good alternative if they don't want to undertake the task of upgrading to Exchange Server 2007, said Maurene Grey, founder, and principal analyst of Grey Consulting. She said the move from Exchange 2003, which many people are running, to Exchange 2007 is the same as the leap from Exchange 5.5 to 2000, when Microsoft made a similar overhaul in the product's architecture. For some companies that are diehard Microsoft loyalists, however, the question of upgrading to Exchange Server 2007 is not one of if but when, Grey said. "When an organization made their last major upgrade will determine to a great extent when they'll make this upgrade," she said. "If a company just spent $2 million two years ago to upgrade from 5.5 to 2003, the CFO isn't going to be that eager to give them the money to make this upgrade."
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Based off of a previous article from Mike Willbanks, Stuart Herbert has posted some of his own thoughts on tuning and tweaking your applications for the best performance you can get out of them.   There's some good advice in there, and I thought it'd be a good idea to quickly add a bit more detail about the separate approaches that Mike raises.   He goes over the APC caching, memcache, the "gzip trick", the "Not Modified" header and optimized SQL statements.   He also mentions one thing that Mike didn't mention - a split between static files (no PHP needed) and their dynamic cousins. Having a more pure Apache (no PHP installed) can help give a minute jump in speed that, depending on the size of the site, could really add up from a user's perspective.
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When hard a work coding, browser windows with manual entries have a nasty habit of multiplying (at least when I work). So, neededless to say, I was happy to find GotAPI.com, a site that compiles the reference materials for several different web development languages into one handy browser window.  The page, by default, searches HTML resources, including the W3C specs and Microsoft's MSDN materials. Those and the w3schools website show up often in the other languages available - CSS, XSL, XML, and XPath. The PHP manual that's referenced is just pulled from the PHP.net site, but it's still nice to have it all right there.  When searching, a "suggeted terms" box pops up to help you narrow down the search faster. It searches not only the beginnings of the words for your term, but it looks inside them as well, matching anywhere.   It would be nice if the site had some kind of bookmarking system built into it - then you could keep a reference and just flip back and forth between the pages with a single click of the mouse.
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Attendees at the Microsoft 2008 Office System Developer Conference this week are leveraging development capabilities in Office System, but cite issues such as getting used to the new ribbon-based Fluent UI in the 2007 Office release.A sampling of attendees at the San Jose, Calif. event revealed mostly satisfaction with Office System. Most were Microsoft business partners developing applications for Microsoft's SharePoint platform for collaboration and business processes."I bought into it. I'm drinking the KoolAid," said Jeff Modzel, technical architect for SunGard Higher Education."Our customers are colleges and universities and their constituents, which are students. Kids very much want collaborative environments for their classes. SharePoint's an easy solution to that problem," Modzel said.He described Office System as an "excellent" development platform, although he noted difficulties in writing an Excel 2007 add-in prior to getting the newly released Visual Studio 2008 platform.The new ribbon-based Fluent UI in the Office package takes some getting used to, Modzel said. "The first handful of times I used it, I did not like it and the more I used it the more I liked it," he said.Consultants at developer OTB Solutions also mentioned issues with the ribbon. The people who hate it the most are the people who are very familiar with the old Office platform, said Dick Federle, consultant at OTB.? But he still likes the feature. "The neat thing about the ribbon is since it?s context-sensitive, you're only seeing what's important for what you're looking at, at the time, said Federle.Another consultant at OTB gave the ribbon a thumbs-up. "It's become familiar. You can use it and extend it," said OTB consultant Jen Glass.OTB has been using SharePoint as an application development platform. "We saw with the new SharePoint platform that it was actually ready for enterprise applications," Federle said. For example, OTB has developed a health insurance claims auditing system that processes more than 1.5 million transactions a month, he said.Developers, though, must adapt to using configuration capabilities in SharePoint rather than resort to coding, Federle said. "There are a lot of capabilities and a lot of problems you can solve with SharePoint through configuration without having to write any code," he said.At FirstBank, the company is currently running Office XP and is looking to migrate to Visual Studio Tools for Office and Office 2007, said Greg Mestas, distributed applications manager at the company.While features such as the ribbon UI in Office 2007 may make things easier for developers, Mestas is not so sure what the benefit is for end users."Most of our people use Word and Excel, and Word and Excel are still Word and Excel," Mestas said. "They've had a lot of the same features release over release. So the biggest benefit for us [in migrating] is staying on a supported platform, to put it bluntly," he said.The bank is starting a pilot project on SharePoint for office automation. "We're trying to get rid of all that paper and all that manual process and create some workflows and InfoPath forms as a replacement," Mestas said.An official at SharePoint applications developer Consejo applauded Microsoft's Open XML document initiative as a benefit for Office application development."Their whole Open XML is proving to be very comforting to most developers because in the old days, when it was binary, that not necessarily ideal," said Virgil Pate, development manager at Consejo.Also, the ribbon UI makes it simpler to modify the user interface, he said. But Microsoft could have done a better job in migrating users to the ribbon, Pate stressed.Recalling his company's experience with SharePoint, Pate said it is easy to get started developing extensions, but support has been slow, he said.Pate expressed caution about the Office Live platform, in which Microsoft offers online versions of software. While calling Office Live a great idea, Pate wondered about its security and reliability. "If they ever start to go down or start to have lag time, it's going to hurt them," he said.Another developer, Marcin Geborik, of developer Computer Plus of Krakow, Poland, cited good experiences in developing for SharePoint but found difficulty in working with Microsoft Office Project Server."As a matter of fact, Project Server's API is just not good," Geborik said.Meanwhile, Microsoft with version 2 of Office Live Small Business this week restructured the offering, providing users with a free domain for the first year as well as a free Web site. After the first year, the domain costs $14.95.?Subscribers get 100 free e-mail accounts each with 2-2.5GB of storage, as well as services such as contact management.Also, Microsoft with its Unified Communications platform plans to bulk it up with instant messaging capabilities that can find persons linked in a workflow chain.
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The party is on for February 27th, as Microsoft confirms its star attraction, Windows Server 2008, will be released on time. Admins everywhere may now be breathing a sigh of relief.
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Enterprise developers looking for a guide to test applications against the new Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) are getting some help from Microsoft (Quote, Chart).