I am looking for customers who are interested in integrating their LiveLink environment with MOSS. The Integration is in form of a Protocol Handler for LiveLink. This will allow them to search their LiveLink repositories from MOSS..

There is a  prerequisite:  you need to have the latest version of LiveLink (v9.7.1) otherwise security trimming will not work.

Please let me know if you are interested in this functionality and send me an email at marcd at microsoft dot com. If you are interested but the prerequisite is preventing you from doing the integration drop me a note indicating that.

 

This might be really obvious but nevertheless it will hit you when you test search stuff.

I was testing some search stuff in MOSS in context of document versions and I couldn't get a document to show up at all. I realized that I had just added this user and that probably the content hadn't been crawled yet to notice that this user has access this document library.

This is a small but useful reminder that the crawler not only crawls content but also also ACLs

wow...... I was browsing around trying to find some good MOSS consultants to hire and was doing a query for SharePoint job openings:

• Dice alone has 1530 SharePoint related job listings
• Monster has 1906 SharePoint related job listings
• Careerbuilder has 908 SharePoint related job listings

I guess learning SharePoint is a pretty good way to find a nice job. Of course I knew that ;-)

If you are a SharePoint superstar and want to come work at Microsoft drop me a note at marcd at microsoft dot com.

We regularly get questions on whether moss can scale to x thousand users. I know this is easily possible even on modest hardware. However now there is something better to tell our customers:

How about running one of the biggest/busiest web sites on the planet earth running on MOSS?

Yes, exactly! We are moving microsoft.com to the MOSS platform: http://www.microsoft.com/about/mspreview/en/us/abouthomepage.mspx

just in case the page changes (it might get updated with more exciting info) I will copy/paste the relevant bits here for your reading pleasure:

Some of the biggest changes are ones you don’t see. In the background we are beginning to migrate much of Microsoft.com to a new platform based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Using Office SharePoint Server 2007 will bring us a broad range of new capabilities that will help you more easily find the information, products, and services you’re looking for across our site. Microsoft.com is the 5th most visited Web site on the Internet, hosting hundreds of thousands of pages of content. Running our site on Office SharePoint Server 2007 goes a long way in demonstrating to customers worldwide that the product is reliable and provides an effective solution for managing vast amounts of content.

So ok I exaggerated; we are only the 5th most visited web site on this planet but you get the idea. If your company wants to update their public web site to be more easily manageable and improve its performance take a good look at MOSS. It has awesome performance, content management, personalization etc etc.

 

The first 20 of the promised 40 Application templates for WSS3.0 have been posted. They are all Site Admin templates. Site Admin Templates are custom templates that are easy for any SharePoint site administrator to install into the template gallery without requiring server administration access. Simply download and plug into a SharePoint site

Site Admin Templates
Board of Directors
Business Performance Reporting
Case Management for Government Agencies
Classroom Management
Clinical Trial Initiation and Management
Competitive Analysis Site
Discussion Database
Disputed Invoice Management
Employee Activities Site
Employee Self-Service Benefits
Employee Training Scheduling and Materials
Equity Research
Integrated Marketing Campaign Tracking
Manufacturing Process Management
New Store Opening
Product and Marketing Requirements Planning
Request for Proposal
Sports League
Team Work Site
Timecard Management

Have Fun!!

 

You can download the documents here:

WSS Capacity Planning

MOSS Capacity Planning

Earlier in the week Socialtext announced the release of SocialPoint. Socialtext is one of the oldest Wikis. The fact that they have chosen SharePoint as their platform going forward validates the capabilities of MOSS in the enterprise 2.0 world

Although they mention that they are used by many companies I haven't seen them yet in the market (I have probably been talking to the wrong people in my customers)

So if you know of a large Pharma in the US that uses Socialtext (or is planning on using SocialPoint) drop me a note; I am always happy to learn.

A colleague was recently asked this question and it got me thinking.

To be able to answer this question we need to create some context. Companies don't get value from MOSS by it self. They cannot install a few servers and expect their share price to go up. Instead MOSS needs to do one of the following:

1. reduce cost
2. improve productivity
3. shorten time to market for new products
4. improve compliance

All these are ways to create value for a company and directly or  indirectly positively influence its share price on the Wall Street.

I know of a company where they recently replaced a number of BEA Weblogic portals with SharePoint. As a result of that they are saving several million dollar on a yearly basis in licensing costs and operating cost. The ROI turned positive in a few months after project completion.

Often when people leave a company a lot of information dies or leaves with them. You can not easily prevent losing information when it is only in the brain of the person who leaves. However you can minimize loss of information that is stored in his email. Email is usually a goldmine of information. If you store documents in MOSS and just email links you will not only save money on storage costs you will also retain it after the person is gone.(usually email accounts are retired when a person leaves)

From a productivity perspective the same scenario applies. A lot of time is spend and lost by looking for information. Information that is stored in SharePoint is discoverable. Information that is stored in your colleagues email box is hidden. MOSS even takes care of preventing information that is not meant for your eyes to show up on search results. MOSS can also help you find information that is not stored in MOSS but instead stored in a Oracle database.

A year or so ago I did a project at a large pharma. They found that writing clinical protocols took very long time. Protocols are required to be able to do a clinical trial. and clinical trials are required to provide the FDA with information that your drug is safe and to get approval. Additionally patents for drugs only hold so many years and this starts counting from the day you find the compound/file the patent. This means that if you can reduce the time it takes to write the protocol you directly increase the amount of time you can sell the drug. If you have a blockbuster that produces $2 Billion of revenue yearly that means $38.5 Million a week. By using SharePoint (and Office Smart documents) they were able to bring the time it took to write a protocol from 10 weeks to 6 weeks. I am sure you can do the math on how valuable that is.

In the pharmaceutical industry if you are out of compliance usually you get quickly hit with large fines or even suspension of operations in your manufacturing facilities. MOSS can make it easier for you to stay compliant by providing auditing trails, workflow. MOSS can make it much easier for you to gather the right set of information that you need to supply to the FDA. Using the new Office XML document formats you can create complex documents that get automatically updated if a piece of information somewhere else in your enterprise changes.

 

Using these thought patterns I am sure you can think of many more scenarios. If you have questions on how MOSS can help you with a particular business problem drop me a note at marcd at microsoft dot com or leave a comment and I will give it some thought.

This is my favorite quote from my colleague Gabor Fari. I am not sure if he made it up (I guess I should ask him) but I sure like it.

Gabor authored a whitepaper that talks about a Single Version of the Corporate Truth in context of Microsoft Technology. The paper is called

Enterprise Content Management in Regulated Industries

Go take a look at it and let me know what you think about it. I will refer to it a few times in the next few posts that I currently writing.

Update: I just emailed with Gabor and he got the quote from a person at Pfizer a few years ago. I also updated the title as I had missed the word corporate in the quote

As you probably know by know MOSS2007 has Records Management capabilities. I just ran into the team blog of the Microsoft Records Management team that has great information on this:

http://blogs.msdn.com/recman/default.aspx

Their latest article is on Physical Records Management which allows you to deal with paper and other kinds of physical records.

 

Microsoft now offers Virtual labs that allow you to test driver many aspects of MOSS 2007 and Office System 2007

you can find the RSS feed to the labs here. There are 22 labs in total introduce you to all parts of MOSS and Office System 2007.

these labs give you access to a Virtual Server running MOSS 2007 and all related software

here is a screen shot:

as you might be able to see in the right bottom you can even chat with other people who are doing the lab (nobody was yet in the lab when I was doing it)

The labs come with lab manual and all other things you require.

Have fun!!

Sometimes SharePoint 2007 seems to think you are the system account when you logon and. this might look a bit strange as this you are not logged on as SYSTEM.

The reason for this is that you are logged on to MOSS 2007 with the same userid as you have used for the IIS application pool that is used by MOSS

This will also show up in "modified by" fields etc