Bill Baer /bɛːr/

The next three (3) weeks will indeed be busy for me, first traveling to Amsterdam to meet with customers and returning to Redmond the following week to speak at TechReady6 on securing and protecting SharePoint Products and Technologies deployments; however, with that will come some compelling content I hope to publish toward the end of the month and early February. Next week I am focused on performance, particularly, discussions on Garbage Collection (GC) and GC management on 64-bit Web servers.

The Microsoft Office Developers Conference 2008 is less than one month away. The Microsoft Office Developers Conference is the premier event for both Microsoft Office and SharePoint Products and Technologies developers. Visit https://microsoft.crgevents.com/ODC2008/Content/default.aspx?p=UC3HYF to learn more or register for the event which runs between February 10th - 13th, 2008 in San Jose, CA at the San Jose Convention Center. The Microsoft Office Developers Conference 2008 will include a set of keynotes by senior Microsoft executives, five (5) technical tracks, 90 break-out sessions and hands-on labs in addition to an Executive Track where analysts, Microsoft and industry executives can learn the how and why of Office applications and their respective competive advantages.

Adding Code-Behind Files to Master Pages and Page Layouts in SharePoint Server 2007 http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb986729.aspx Adding Custom Quick Access Buttons to the Page Editing Toolbar in SharePoint Server 2007 http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb986730.aspx

I’ve spent the past two months in various locations across the West coast speaking on governance in SharePoint Products and Technologies and one of the most common points of discussion is enabling a consistent look and feel across sites and Webs. While most commonly this is achieved through employing a master page, many organizations either limit the distribution of Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 or do not use Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 in their organizations, while there are many articles across numerous blogs providing prescriptive guidance on master page development, Feature stapling, and other variations to support the implementation of master pages, I’ve yet to find a complete tutorial on implementing master pages using a combination of Feature stapling and a Feature Receiver.

For those internal readers attending TR6, I’ve confirmed as a speaker/presenter for the following topics (dates and locations TDB) - as dates/times and locations are finalized, I’ll make them available here. OFC322 SharePoint Backup and Restore OFC321 Securing SharePoint OFCIL300 R1 and R2 Upgrading to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 from Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 *Instructor Led Lab co-presenting with Rick Taylor [You’ll enjoy this one!]

I was recently asked a question regarding moving sites between Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Web applications and whether or not there are any prerequisites associated with such a move. While moving sites can be an arduous and on occasion, a complicated task, moving between variations in platform only adds to the complexities associated with site-level moves. Many of the Features available to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 sites are not available to Windows SharePoint Services 3.

The Microsoft Filter Pack for search has been released enabling critical search scenarios across a variety of Microsoft Search products including SharePoint Portal Server 2003, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Search Server 2008, Search Server 2008 Express Edition, Exchange Server 2005, SQL Server 2005/2008, and Windows Desktop Search 3.1/4.0. The Microsoft Filter Pack provides iFilters for the following file type extensions: .docx (Microsoft Office 2007 Word Document) .

I’ve spent the past several days in Portland, Oregon speaking at a SharePoint Products and Technologies governance event and completely neglected to post any information on the now released Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Service Pack 1. For more information visit: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/12/11/announcing-the-release-of-wss-3-0-sp1-and-office-sharepoint-server-2007-sp1.aspx.

The SharePoint Monitoring Toolkit enables administrators and IT Pros to manage SharePoint Products and Technologies deployments, both large and small, by introducing two (2) new management packs for System Center Operations Manager 2007. Both the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 management packs replace the existing management packs and have been engineered to leverage the rich features of System Center Operations Manager 2007. Improvements include: Additional rules to include performace rules Improved and new reports and views Backwards compatible dependencies have been removed Increased overall reliability Tuning and event supression reducing redundancy and more… To download the Solution Accelerator visit: http://go.

After several months of work and very little sleep in between we are pleased to announce general availability of the SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool (Beta). The SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool (Beta) provides a wealth of helpful information when planning a SharePoint Products and Technologies deployment; helping administrators, consultants, and IT Pros determine the potential required hardware investment(s) and topologies to support and meet requirements for availability and performance or even the affect of introducing additonal offices with their own unique bandwidth and latency constraints.