I’m working at a client that is developing a highly complex application which is using SharePoint to store some of its content.  The application is written in C# and contains a lot of CAML to go grab content from SharePoint, of course. We realized the other day that while the developers are working in an…

Try to use English column names (like "Finding Filed By" rather than "FindingBy").  It’ll make your UI nicer to look at.  Also beware of the fact (you’ve no doubt noticed this) that there are actually two names for each column, the display name and the internal name. For instance, if you create a column called…

There’s an interesting article on SharePoint over at the Computerworld Web site:SharePoint challenges IT as the Excel, Access of the day. The most interesting part to me is the is the unflattering comparison between the evolution of SharePoint and Lotus Notes usage in the enterprise: "Departmental users used those tools to build applications that collect…

Paul Galvin has written a very nice article over at the new SharePoint Magazine about how to set up daily email task reminders just using SharePoint Designer.  The article is well written and shows how you can get something done that you might have been sure you needed to go to Visual Studio to accomplish….

There’s a new forum over at EndUserSharePoint.com called Stump the Panel.  The goal is to answer questions from real end users — no fancy coding allowed, just "out of the box" functionality available through the UI (they acknowledge that a little XSLT is OK). If you like brain teasers of the SharePoint variety, check it…

My colleague Mauro Cardarelli posted a simple code snippet yesterday to determine the GUID for an SSP.  It worked, and he accomplished what he wanted to accomplish, but my first thought was: STSADM command extension. If you’ve worked with SharePoint much at all on the server, you’re very familiar with STSADM.  It’s the command line…

Do you regularly look at your search logs?  If you don’t, you are missing a significantly valuable source of information.  The search logs tell you what people really want, not what you’ve provided them "easy" access to. Some insights you will be able to glean include: Ways to tailor your navigation to provide access to…

Last week, Microsoft announced three updates which affect SharePoint Server 2007, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Project Server 2007, Search Server 2008, Search Server 2008 Express and Project Professional 2007. These updates are explained on the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog: Announcing: Availability of Infrastructure Updates. The Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers contains the new Enterprise…

There’s a post over the SharePoint Solutions Blog which describes the benefits of Microsoft’s new Search Server Express 2008 well. One key benefit: You can search across Site Collections in WSS! An excerpt: So the scenario is that you have deployed WSS in your company and you do not have a need for most of…

Over at the Microsoft SharePoint Designer Team Blog, there’s a nice post from Jon Campbell about how to plot your data using Virtual Earth. The first step is to get your data into nice shape using some geocoding service.  There are many of these out there these days, but Yahoo’s service has been many people’s…