Newsletter – Various topics

I am pleased to receive a wonderful newsletter from an internal MSFT employee. He aggregates a ton of informative articles and various bits. I thought I would share…

Office SharePoint Technologies

· SharePoint Diagnostics Tool v1.0 (SPDiag) Released There is a new GUI utility published today to Microsoft.com/downloads for x32 and x64 environments which should help cut down the ping pong performance related troubleshooting discussions between IT staff, support, and developers regarding the SharePoint farm itself. Use the tool to collect data from performance counters, ULS log files, IIS log files, event logs, and WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation), and then display and analyze the data in snapshots and custom reports.

· Microsoft SharePoint Developer Challenge Here is an opportunity for you to win great prizes by sharing your knowledge and breadth of experience with Developers in the SharePoint Developer Forum.

· SharePoint + PowerShell Those of you who read my blog know that I am a huge fan of PowerShell and on occasion talk about various ways to use PowerShell for managing SharePoint deployments.  Additionally I’ve seen projects and people around the web discuss it.  However, it wasn’t until learning about some of the most in-depth inner-workings of PowerShell did an important realization come about.

· Microsoft Unveils New Enterprise Search Road Map Microsoft Corp. today disclosed a detailed road map for its enterprise search products, including the introduction of FAST Search for SharePoint and FAST Search for Internet Business.

· Analyzing Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Usage Mike Wise who works on the Customer Advisory Team specializes in SharePoint capacity planning and architecture and his goal is to make SharePoint capacity planning more of a science and less of an art.  His whitepaper is the first step, concentrating on the descriptive side of the task and showing one powerful technique that can be used today to make SharePoint performance and capacity measurable.  You can count on seeing more papers, reports, and calculation methods building off his technique in the coming months.

· Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog

· SharePoint Toolbox

· SharePointPedia is the very first custom developed Internet facing SharePoint based application hosted by the MSCOM Operations team that has support for Windows Live ID authentication and integration with Microsoft's "RegSys" user profile system that is used across all Microsoft.com properties

Microsoft Office System

· OCS: OCS 2007 installation with SQL 2005 SP3 SQL 2005 SP3 has an update that changes a return code that the OCS 2007 install was not designed to handle.   If you are having to install a new OCS 2007 pool and are using SQL 2005 SP3 here are two possible workarounds to complete the install.

· Office Communications Server R2 Launch Check out the new Virtual launch site of Office Communications Server 2007 R2 at http://www.ocsr2launch.com/.  The site is packed with useful and entertaining content for you to explore

· Access: Automate data collection forms using VBA Access 2007 has a nifty feature that allows you to collect data via email. There isn’t a straight-forward way to do this and it isn’t officially supported. It’s possible if you don’t mind a little reverse engineering…

· What self-taught users do with Access It is amazing what self-taught users are able to accomplish. There is a interesting thread What do you use Microsoft Access for? on UtterAccess. Here is an interesting Wordle tag cloud of the thread.

· Excel:  How to Create a Professional Chart using Excel 2007 As a new program manager in Excel one of my first tasks was to understand what problems users encounter when building professional charts in Excel. I defined professional as following the principles of Edward Tufte by reducing the amount of non-data ink on a chart.

· Quick and Easy Data Access with Excel Services I have seen a lot of great blog posts that tell folks how to do great things with refreshed data in an Excel spreadsheet using Excel Services. I’ve seen posts about slicing dashboard pages, about using .odc files to manage data, and more. One thing that continues to be an issue is how to get connected to that data in the first place, in way that will work on Excel Services. The key is all about ‘telling the server’ what user identity to use when connecting to your data source.

· Project: Project Conference 2009 - Early Bird Registration is Live!!! Join us to celebrate the successes of Microsoft Project and to see what's coming, as we exclusively unveil the powerful capabilities included in the next release. At this year's conference, you will learn how Project is helping customers today to save money, enhance efficiency and drive growth, as well as obtain unique insights into how the next release will continue to support your business tomorrow.

· Administrative Time Explained It’s time again for another posting on some best practice use of Project Server.  This time the author will go in depth about the Administrative Time feature in Project Server 2007.

· Outlook: Announcing the February Cumulative Update for Outlook 2007 The Outlook team is proud to announce the release of the February Cumulative Update for Outlook 2007, a series of performance and reliability improvements that have been consolidated into a single package for our customers. To get detailed information regarding which specific issues have been addressed please read the February Cumulative Update Whitepaper.

· Outlook Connector and migration to Windows Live Calendar As previously announced, the Windows Live Calendar service will start migrating existing MSN Calendar users to the new Windows Live Calendar service as early as March 2009. The migration process will ensure that all the supported user data on the MSN Calendar is moved to the Windows Live Calendar without any action required for the user.