To the SharePoint : Resource Center

Facelift!

Margo Crandall — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 00:30:00 GMT

Have you noticed the redesign of our Office SharePoint Server TechCenter? It’s the TechNet landing page for SharePoint IT Pro-focused content and the home of our Resource Centers—the pages we build to expose content for top customer issues and key product themes.

Based on customer feedback, we’ve done the following:

Moved the Resource Center links to the most prominent area (left side).
Added organizational pivots around lifecycle and role to help you find groups of content.

Here's a screenshot of the newest version, so you can see what we've changed.

We’d love more feedback about the TechCenter. Here are some of the things we’re wondering:

Have you been to the TechCenter before? If you have, what were you looking for, and did you find it?
Now that you’ve seen it, what did you like best and least? Is there any information missing? Should we remove something from the page?
Would you come back to the TechCenter? What for?

P.S. Here's the design we started with, just in case you're curious.

Best Practices--good, better, best?

Margo Crandall — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 11:59:00 GMT

Hi there—we’re wondering if you've got feedback on the Best Practices Resources Center that we blogged about a couple of weeks ago.

Which is your favorite article?

· Operational Excellence

· Team Collaboration Sites

· Publishing Portals

· Search

· My Sites

Are there any more topics that you’d really like to see a group of best practices developed for?

And, of course, do you have any feedback on what we could do to make the information more discoverable or useful?

Thanks!

Document Management Operations Procedures and Resource Center

clake — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 21:22:00 GMT

Earlier this year, we published operations procedures and resource centers for Records Management and Web Content Management. This week, we completed the Enterprise Content Management operations content and resource centers by publishing the Document Management operations procedures for both MOSS and WSS, and the Document Management resource center.

What’s covered?

The Document Management operations procedures include procedures for managing document libraries, managing content types and permissions for a document library, and describe how to configure Information Rights Management settings.

The Document Management resource center lists resources you can use to evaluate, plan, deploy, and operate a document management system using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Here you will also find community resources, case studies, Webcasts and podcasts which provide you with additional resources to help you get the most out of your Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 document management system.

Feedback welcome!

Have you ever wished you could have a say in the way documentation is written here at Microsoft? Well, now’s your chance. We welcome your feedback on the new Managing Documents procedures and the new Document Management resource center and will do our best to make the improvements you suggest. What would we like to know? We’d like to know things like: Is this content useful? Is it detailed enough? Did we leave something out that you feel would be helpful? Did we include something that you feel has no value? We’re also interested in hearing what you like about this content so we can keep doing it. Anything you feel we should know about the Managing Documents content or the Document Management resource center is very important to us. Let us know what you think!

There are three ways that you can provide feedback about the new Managing Documents procedures and the new Document Management resource center:

The upper-right corner of each page has a Click to Rate and Give Feedback section. Click a star to rate the page and optionally provide feedback.
You can e-mail us at uablog at Microsoft.com.
You can use the “Leave a Comment” feature in this blog to provide comments, either about this blog post, the Managing Documents procedures or about the Document Management resource center.

We look forward to hearing from you and to working with you to make our content the best it can be.

-- Claudia Lake
SharePoint IT Pro documentation team

NEW! Best Practices Resource Center for MOSS; WSS CHM Download

samanro — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 23:54:00 GMT

Many issues that customers run into with Office SharePoint Server 2007 can be traced back to a small set of specific design problems. The SharePoint Customer Advisory Team and the Microsoft Consulting Services team for SharePoint have collaborated to bring you a set of guidelines that lay out the best practices for success with Office SharePoint Server 2007. Following these practices will help you avoid some of the common deployment pitfalls and keep your SharePoint environments available and performing well. Get the details now from the Best Practices Resource Center.

Also, by popular demand, we've created a CHM download for the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Technical Library. Enjoy!

-- Samantha Robertson

Using alternate access mappings

Douglas Goodwin — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 04:15:00 GMT

Alternate access mappings enable multiple internal URLs to be mapped to a single public URL. An internal URL is the URL of a Web request as it is received by Office SharePoint Server 2007 or Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. A public URL is the URL of an externally accessible Web site.

The public URL is the base URL that Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 use in the pages that they return in response to Web requests. Alternate access mappings support Internet deployment scenarios in which the URL of a Web request is not the same as the URL that was typed by an end user because the URL has been modified by a reverse proxy.

A reverse proxy sits between end users and Web servers. Requests to a Web server are first received by the reverse proxy and, if those requests pass the proxy's security filtering, the proxy forwards the requests to the Web server. Reverse proxies can be configured to receive a Web request over the Internet by using HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol over Secure Socket Layer), and then forward the request to a Web server by using HTTP. This is referred to as off-box SSL termination.

Alternate access mapping collections can contain up to five authentication zones, but each zone can only have a single public URL. Mapping collections correspond to the following authentication zones:

Default
Intranet
Internet
Custom
Extranet

Administrators need to make sure that alternate access mappings are configured correctly for every SharePoint deployment, no matter how simple or complex. For more information about alternate access mappings, see:

Plan alternate access mappings (Windows SharePoint Services)

Plan alternate access mappings (Office SharePoint Server)

For more information about authentication for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server 2007, see the Authentication Resource Center for SharePoint Products and Technologies.

Douglas Goodwin, Writer
SharePoint Server UA team

Introducing the Performance and Capacity Planning Resource Center for SharePoint Server 2007

Kelley Vice — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 23:40:00 GMT

There is a tremendous wealth of technical performance and capacity–related information available for Office SharePoint Server 2007 on TechNet. I know, because I wrote quite a lot of it. However, the greater the volume of content that becomes available, the harder it can be to find.

Yes; I can hear you now. “Kelley,” you’re saying, “thank you so much for sharing with us this valuable piece of information, that is in no way extremely obvious and well-known by every sentient being in existence, and even some non-sentient ones, such as fruit flies.”

You’re welcome.

And now, allow me to introduce the (begin drum roll here) Performance and Capacity Planning Resource Center for SharePoint Server 2007 (cue trumpet flourishes and fireworks)! We’ve rigorously reviewed, analyzed, folded, starched, ironed, and consolidated every existing bit of performance and capacity planning content available today in one easy-to-use page.

Some highlights include:

· Topics organized into meaningful categories:

o Planning

o Recommendations

o Estimate performance based on test results

· Sections listing available resources:

o Demos

o Tools from Microsoft

o Tools from partners and the SharePoint community

o Community resources

We hope you’ll find this resource center helpful, and that it will save you time, money and precious, precious tears. We would like to hear from you if there’s anything we can do better. We actually do read customer comments and suggestions, and in fact, a large part of our work is improving our content based on your input.

Enjoy!

-- Kelley Vice

SharePoint IT Pro Writer

New SharePoint governance content

oscarblog — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 20:06:00 GMT

Hi. I’m Rob Silver – one of the writers covering SharePoint Products and Technologies for the IT pro audience at Microsoft. I’m excited to announce two new articles that we are publishing this week. They are both related to SharePoint governance. Governance is the set of roles, responsibilities, and processes that you put in place in an enterprise to guide the development, adoption, and use of a solution based on SharePoint Products and Technologies. We know that this is an area of concern for our IT audiences and we will continue adding content to enhance our coverage of SharePoint governance.

Here are the articles we are publishing this week:

· Increasing SharePoint engagement (white paper): SharePoint MVP Robert Bogue has written many popular white papers. His new paper defines the problem of increasing Office SharePoint Server 2007 engagement in an organization, identifies typical engagement-blockers, and suggests strategies to increase engagement at the team, departmental, and enterprise levels.

· Sample code acceptance checklist for IT organizations: The ability to customize sites by adding custom solutions gives Office SharePoint Server 2007 power and flexibility. However, a poorly designed or implemented executable module that runs in a SharePoint farm can do harm even beyond the scope of the Web application for which it was intended. To help you ensure that the solutions that you deploy provide the intended benefits without exposing the enterprise to unnecessary risk, you can require developers to submit a checklist to verify that their solutions have been coded and tested according to best practices. Use this sample code acceptance checklist as a starting point for your own checklist to help verify the quality of solutions that are submitted for deployment.

I hope you find both these articles useful as you work out your approach to governing SharePoint and increasing SharePoint engagement. If you are interested in governance, be sure to visit our Governance Resource Center for more governance articles and tools.

Thanks,
Rob

Web content deployment walkthrough and TechNet topics

cmcatee — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 20:23:00 GMT

Hi, I'm Cern McAtee, a technical writer for Office SharePoint Server 2007. I'm pleased to announce that the Office SharePoint Server 2007 content team and the Global Readiness team have combined efforts to write and publish a new walkthrough guide for...(read more)

Announcing: Administering Records Management in Office SharePoint Server 2007

clake — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 11:42:00 GMT

Hi, my name is Claudia Lake. I am a technical writer on the SharePoint IT Pro documentation team. In response to feedback from users, we have created Administering Records Management , which is a new set of IT Pro documentation on TechNet about records...(read more)