I would like to report on 2 events in one post.

First TR4, oh the great TR! Over 7,000 Microsoft Employees from all over the world gathered in Seattle to attend. Luis Camara Manoel and I gave several presentation and chalk talks around the SharePoint Template Upgrade Toolkit, and had a chance to mingle with the extremely diverse crowd.

One item of interest to me was finding out that Groove is not going away. There have been rumors on the "net" that Groove will not be present in the next Office release as a separate product. This is not true, Groove is not going away, and will be very much present in O14, and onward. I’m sure UI will change to fit better with Office UI, but product will not dissolve into other Office applications.

EMEA SharePoint conference was in Berlin, and I'd like to take this opportunity to say "thanks" to my boss for allowing me to participate. Over 2500 people attended, most of who were representatives of Microsoft Partners.

Luis and I presented on the SharePoint Template Upgrade Toolkit, and spent most of our “free” time talking to partners. That said we hardly had any time to see the city, which is on my TODO list for next time.

If you can read French, here is a recap of our session, including a few pictures.

http://blogs.developpeur.org/themit/archive/2007/02/14/sharepoint-conf-eu-day-3-upgrade-toolkit.aspx

Stay tuned for more!

I’m sure this question comes up often, why pick one over the other. WSS is free, while MOSS comes with a hefty price tag. Here is a good link; http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointtechnology/FX101758691033.aspx, but really what is it all about? In my humble opinion it’s about Search, enterprise search to be exact. I think any organization could benefit from MOSS, but with MOSS comes the price. Many times “free” of WSS is the right price, and enterprise level search is a "nice to have" along with other MOSS features. In the perfect world software would do what you need it to do, and cost what you can afford, and all search would be had by all.

http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=6013824

A little about the Solution Accelerator (from TechNet page)

“With the release of Windows® SharePoint® Services (WSS) 3.0, users who have created sites based on any of the original WSS 2.0 application templates offered on Microsoft TechNet or on other customized sites or site templates will want to upgrade them to work in the WSS 3.0 environment.

The Solution Accelerator Team (SAT) has created a solution accelerator that provides guidance and tools to enable IT Professionals to successfully upgrade their Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 custom sites and templates. The result: a set of custom sites and templates that will operate in a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 environment. This toolkit also includes a set of upgraded Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 application templates.”

I posted about this SA before; it has recently finished production and went up on TechNet. At this moment this is the only place on WWW linking to the SA TechNet page, a sneak preview if you will. The team, and me personally, are looking forward to your feedback.

This is not new, but definitely very cools, and as far as I know did not get much play. What at some point was called Mendocino has since matured and became Duet. A child of collaboration between Microsoft and SAP, in my opinion an awesome solution to bring line of business data into IW's world. Coming from someone who used SAP software alongside Microsoft offerings Duet definitely has potential to make life easier for those who use both day in and day out.

Duet’s home is at www.duet.com

Happy Holidays!

WSS 3.0 is ready for the market, and with it a new quirk for the IT folks, how to upgrade existing Site Templates (.stp) files from WSS 2.0 to 3.0. Template upgrade is not supported through the product itself, though there are a few workarounds.

My neighbors (these guys are just across the hall) released a beta toolkit to help IT Pro upgrade their existing site templates to 3.0, which includes enabling new functionality, like master pages and the recycle bin.

Solution consists of guidance and a set of Application Templates for WSS 2.0 which have been upgraded to be compatible with WSS 3.0. If you loved one of the T33 templates and would like to keep using it, all you need to do is grab the new version from the toolkit, or read the guidance on how to upgrade your own site templates to 3.0. Solution also covers custom site upgrade, since the only way to upgrade a site template is to instantiate a site from it, upgrade, and then save a new site template.

WSS team has created a new set of Application Templates for WSS 3.0, which will address many scenarios covered by the original “Thrilling 33”, so if you are looking to roll out a brand new deployment these are definitely worth a look.

There are more details on the WSS official team blog.

A little about myself.

I'm a Technical Program Manager on the SOLUTIONACCELERATORS team at Microsoft Co., working in the area of collaboration and communication technology. I hope what it means will become more clear as you read and I post.

What can you expect to find on this blog? First and foremost this is a place for me to share thoughts about what's hot in the C & C world, emerging technologies that catch my eye, tools, and products. That said, this blog is by no means a marketing portal, or a team site. I speak from my own point of view, and no one else's.

This is just the first post, and I hope to see you back for more.