SharePoint BUZZ

With the different authentication provider support for MOSS, there are more and more free applications that will provide user management tools integrated in the SharePoint environment. One very good example is the Forms Based User Administration Feature, which can be downloaded from codeplex. Feature list: Administrator web part to view/edit/delete and add users to the data store by an administrator. Self registration page for users to request access to the site. New functionality for self registration Password retrieval via email CAPTCHA validation on self registration UI Enhancements

Chris Beiter has posted some helpful video links on his blog about developing on Office Live. Currently available videos are: Office Live Workflows - a helpful introduction to using Workflows in Office Live. Also like the Data Form Web Part, Office Live allows you to configure Workflows using SharePoint Designer's Workflow Designer. You can execute a variety of powerful actions when events (insert, update, manual) fire on lists that you designate. Office Live with SharePoint Designer - High level overview of how to work with Office Live & SPD. This is a great place to start. Using the Data Form Web Part - sometimes also called the Data View Web Part, this is a powerful tool that lives on the Office Live servers. SharePoint Designer lets you configure it to access data sources in a variety of ways, and even lets you mash-up multiple data sources. This rocks! Paul Anderson has posted a listing of Office Live developer resources, with information on what you can do on the Office Live platform and how you can go about doing it. Here's an excerpt: There are lots of powerful new tools that you can use when building your apps, including: Galleries full of application templates Data Sharing to link your public-facing web site to your workspaces & business applications New webparts such as the list roll-up web part to aggregate data of similar type from across your applications Powerful integration with Office 2007 & 2003 Workflow rules (requires SharePoint Designer 2007) Use of the Windows SharePoint Services v3 Web Services

So you read Michael Gannotti's posting on Photosynth and installed and thought "what next?" Well seeing as how he believes everything cool should be turned in to a web part he has taken the Page Viewer part and set it up as a pre-configured Photosynth web part. Now imagine instead of vacation pics a collection of corporate campus shots and being able to navigate through them or learn your way around a building before you arrive and get yourself lost. So if you want to show off a big wow in SharePoint try the Photosynth web part (*keep in mind Photosynth has to be installed on the viewing machine to work. Also this part is provided without guarantee or warranty… sounds like a car sales commercial ;-)

Daniel has written a nice post titled, "Getting a Named Resource from your assembly: HTML templates for Web Parts". An excerpt of it follows: One of my favorite methods for Web Part development is using Javascript, Xml/XSLT, or HTML templates for script and UI elements when there is a need for ...

Ishai Sagi has a great developer related post on how to create a "Search Results Web Part" that searches on parts of the words. Here is an excerpt: My customer wanted a prefix search so that searching for the beggining will return all people begining with the letters. Also, searching for parts of other properties such as job description should do the same (example - searching for "cons" will return anyone who is a consultant) After much research, here is my solution: Basically, what I do is override the built-in search result web part, and then modify the search query it runs. The only downside for this is that the default web part doesnt use XSL to format the results and doesnt have all the cool properties that the "PeopleCoreResultsWebPart" have. But with some work you can add the needed properties yourself.

If you are still considering the switch to Sharepoint 2007, go on over and download the latest beta offered by Microsoft. If that doesn't wet your appetite then consider this list of features that Kevin Hoffman compiled, here's an excerpt: Team Collaboration Review Workflows Slide Library (splits a PPT presentation into individually viewable slides on the site without breaking the PPT file open) Transaction Management Library Global Web Parts - stock set of web parts that can be used at any scope Enhanced Search Spell Checking Signatures Workflow - standard workflow for getting "sign off" on documents Reporting Publishing Web - not sure, but I'm pretty sure this is what enables the Wiki functionality Translation Workflow - workflow for sending a document through rounds of translation into multiple languages Excel Server - I could write an entire chapter on..oh wait, I did... Search Web Parts Issue Tracking Workflow - That's right... the "Issue Tracking" list that comes with SharePoint is workflow enabled.C

SharepointHQ.com just launched and already is given back to the community. They are giving away 9 FREE Sharepoint web parts for use on your Sharepoint sites. Here is the list of web parts Utility Components Banner Frame Skinner Rate It Marquee Scroller Hide Elements Log Out Quick Launch FlyOut Quick Launch Show/Hide Quick Launch