MOSS 2007 - Integrate Information Rights Management into SharePoint

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 ships with protectors based on the Information Rights Management (IRM) framework. These provide Microsoft Office users with the benefit of SharePoint integration with Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS). Unfortunately, Windows SharePoint Services ( WSS ) 3.0 does not include IRM protectors out of the box. However, there is a solution. If you browse the sample applications and code snippets on the MSDN Code Gallery, among the gems you'll find is the Microsoft Office File Format Protectors source code, which Microsoft published in August 2008. The source code comes with a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free "as-is" Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL). This is a great find because it means you can compile the source code and add these components to WSS 3.0 as well. In this way, you can benefit from AD RMS-based security and compliance features in any SharePoint environment.More>>

Quick overview of Master Pages in SharePoint 2010

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Microsoft Announces Public Beta of SharePoint 2010

Microsoft Corp. (www.microsoft.com) announced the public beta of SharePoint Server 2010. New features include a ribbon user interface for customization of SharePoint sites, enhanced Office integration via social tagging and document life-cycle management, web content management capabilities with multilingual support and one-click page layout, SharePoint tools in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, and new APIs and support for Silverlight, representational state transfer (REST), and language-integrated query (LINQ) for application development.
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is part of the next wave of Microsoft Office-related products, which includes Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft Project 2010, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, and Microsoft Visio 2010. These are designed to give people the best productivity experience across PCs, cell phones, and browsers.
The public betas of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, Office 2010, Project 2010, and Visio 2010 will become available in November 2009; more information is available at http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9689707.
Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 will be available in the first half of 2010. More information about Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 can be found at www.microsoft.com/sharepoint.
Source: Microsoft Corp.

How SharePoint and SOA Fit Together

What do you get when you take SharePoint, a wildly popular product, and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), a widely misunderstood but sought after technique for improving the agility of an IT department, and put them into a single article? Hopefully you get a popular article where people poke their heads in to learn if this is another combination like peanut butter and chocolate, or if it's more akin to spinach and strawberries.

Top 10 Benefits of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 provides an integrated suite of easy-to-use server applications that boost organizational effectiveness and optimize the way that people, content, processes, and business applications interact. Here are the top 10 ways Office SharePoint Server 2007 can help your organization:

1. Provide a simple, familiar, and consistent user experience.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is tightly integrated with familiar client applications, e-mail, and Web browsers to provide a consistent user experience that simplifies how people interact with content, processes, and business data. Employees can easily use services to accomplish business activities without having to depend on IT staff.

2. Boost employee productivity by simplifying everyday business activities.
Take advantage of OOB workflows for initiating, tracking, and reporting common business processes such as document review and approval, issue tracking, and signature collection—without any coding. Modifying and extending these OOB processes is made easy through tools like Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005/2008 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007.

3. Help meet regulatory requirements through comprehensive control over content.
Help ensure your sensitive business information can be controlled and managed effectively—and reduce litigation risk for your organization—by specifying retention and auditing policies for business records in accordance with compliance regulations. IRM and the content control mechanisms help protect proprietary and confidential information, even when users aren’t connected to a server.

4. Effectively manage and repurpose content to gain increased business value.
Business users can easily author content for Web sites and submit it for approval and scheduled deployment to the Internet. Managing multilingual content is simplified in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 through new document library templates specifically designed to maintain a relationship between the original and translated versions of a document.

5. Simplify organization-wide access to structured and unstructured information across disparate systems.
Give users access to business data in common LOB systems like SAP and Siebel through OOB connectors in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Users can also create personalized interactions with business systems by dragging predefined, configurable back-end connections. Managed document repositories help organizations store and organize business documents in one central location.

6. Connect people with information and expertise.
SharePoint Enterprise Search incorporates business data with information about people, documents, and Web pages to produce comprehensive, relevant results. Rich search functionality like duplicate collapsing, spelling correction, and alerts improves the relevance of the results and helps users easily find what they need within the search results.

7. Accelerate business processes and maintain control of your electronic forms environment.
Use smart, electronic forms-driven solutions to collect critical business information from customers, partners, and suppliers through a Web browser without coding any custom applications. Built-in data validation rules help you accurately and consistently gather data that can be directly integrated into back-end systems, avoiding redundancy and errors resulting from manual data re-entry.

8. Share business data while preserving its consistency and helping to protect sensitive information.
Give employees access to real-time, interactive Office Excel spreadsheets from a Web browser through Excel Services running on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Use these spreadsheets to maintain and efficiently share one central, up-to-date version while helping to protect any proprietary information embedded in the documents.

9. Facilitate better-informed decisions by presenting business-critical information in one central location.
Make it easy to create live, interactive BI portals that assemble and display business-critical information from disparate sources, using integrated BI capabilities such as dashboards, Web Parts, scorecards, KPIs, and business data connectivity technologies. Centralized Report Center sites give users a single place for locating the latest reports, spreadsheets, or KPIs.

10. Provide a single, integrated platform to manage intranet, extranet, and Internet applications across the enterprise.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 has an open, scalable, services-oriented architecture that provides support for interoperability standards including XML and SOAP, which makes it easier to integrate with existing processes and applications. You also get powerful, IT-focused tools and templates for building and extending applications that incorporate business system information and integrated workflow.

Managing team based SharePoint development scenarios

If you are starting on a SharePoint development you will need to start thinking about how you will manage and provide a team based development environment for building and deploying solutions for SharePoint. Even in a scenario where you are about to deploy a medium SharePoint environment then you will need to address the following points in order to cater for a team based development approach. If you are a jack of all trades developer who does everything you can stop reading now. But in most cases organisations will have a number of developers working together to build and develop solutions to be deployed to SharePoint.

Team-Based Development in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Summary: Learn to properly conduct team-environment development of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 sites and assemblies (Web Parts, site templates, custom list templates), as well as develop Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer artifacts (master pages, workflows, CSS sheets). (13 printed pages)