Ok, for those of you that haven't picked up on it yet, I have moved out of the DotnetNuke world and square into the SharePoint World. Not that I don't have great respect for DNN and all that it can do, I merely saw the value of SharePoint as a platform and decided that will be a better investment long term (check out my SharePoint Architecture Site for more info there :-))

But really, if you haven't seen it yet, check out the Community Kit For SharePoint out on CodePlex (and if you don't know what CodePlex is, check that out while you are there... Microsoft does SourceForge.. Team Foundation server Style ;-) ) )

There are LOTS of good nuggets of source code out there for SharePoiont and there are starting to be a slew of projects for lots of different things... I am feeling a MUCH bigger buzz much earlier on than I did with DotnetNuke and I am sure that with the platform Microsoft has prod ...

We had a great Turnout to the First Meeting of the SharePoint Study Group in Tulsa today. Many thanks to Heidi at Mesa for providing the facilites for the study group... I was a bit surprised that we filled the conference room !! It's a good thing and I look for great things to come of this study group. We have some great conversation and If I can keep on track and not try to jump too far ahead, I think we'll be ok :-)

Stay Tuned for more in regards to how many people we get Certified !!!!

The PC-based software industry today is about 30 years old. But if you look carefully at all the products that have been released, you will soon find that most of them are different variations of a basic theme. For example, consider the most popular word processor today, MS Word. It still basically does the same thing WordStar did in 1978-that is, it allows you to write text documents. Or think about MS Excel, which is just a fancy version of VisiCalc, released in 1978. Not much is really new in the software industry.

The focus today is more on making all this sophisticated software interact with each other.

What SharePoint does is help you gather this information together, regardless of what type of file or information it is. SharePoint also helps you find information, even when you don't know where it is stored, and SharePoint helps you keep track of updated information. In other words, SharePoint does no invent any new information typ ...

I apologize for my lack of involvement in the site the last couple of months... Life altering events have a way of doing that (sucking up all of your free time :-) )

I am embarking on a project at my current employer that has me very excited. I am the Platform Architect for our systems and have a lot of work to do to get us ready to deploy our MOSS Server for internal and external collaboration.

First step (and those that know me can guess what this one is) is to get our Network Infrastructure in order. Ad / Exchange / DNS / ... etc... I am a HUGE proponent of getting that house in order before you begin to build systems on top !

We are kicking that project off today and should move fairly rapidly (we are a smallre organization that manages quite a few hosted applications that we have developed. This is a slightly different environment than I am used to working in. The previous AD design and deployment projects that I have done were ...

OakTree Software is hosting another Microsoft Sharepoint class the week of October 23 - 27. This training is a combination of two courses - Designing, Planning, and Managing a Windows SharePoint Services Infrastructure and a SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Infrastructure (course #2552 & 2553). Contact Bill Becker at (918) 584-7900 or bill.becker@oaktreesoftware.com for course outlines and further information.

One of the nice features in WSS v3 and MOSS is the ability to have SharePoint automatically e-mail people when you assign them a task. One of the first things you have to do for this to work is assign your SMTP server to handle outbound e-mails for SharePoint. If you did not do this while installing SharePoint, you can do it now by going to the SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration page. Select the Application Management tab and then select E-mail Settings. Enter your e-mail server in the Outbound SMTP Server field and select OK.

Okay, we're half way there.

Open your SharePoint site and go to your Task page.

1.  From the Tasks page, select the down arrow beside Settings

2.  Select List Settings

3.  On the Customize Tasks page, select Advanced Settings

For those that haven't seen it, Microsoft has released an add on for outlook that allows you to integrate with local.live.com. Download it here; http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=4876660 

This is interesting as Ihave said before that microsoft is looking to leverage the dominant position that they hold on the desktop / office front to bring web2.0 to users through the applications that they already use. i love this stuff !!