Office Service Pack 2 was released on April 28th. Details of the Service Pack are available here: http://blogs.technet.com/office_sustained_engineering/archive/2009/04/16/service-pack-2-for-the-2007-microsoft-office-system-due-to-ship-april-28th.aspx

This Service Pack impacts the full suite of Office products but where SharePoint is concerned….“Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP2 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server SP2 include fixes and enhancements designed to improve performance, availability, and stability in your server farms. SP2 provides the groundwork for future major releases of SharePoint Products and Technologies”

The download links for the SharePoint updates are:

MOSS: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=b7816d90-5fc6-4347-89b0-a80deb27a082

WSS: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=79bada82-c13f-44c1-bdc1-d0447337051b

One interesting benefit of SP2 is the increased backup/restore limit in SharePoint Designer. Here’s what the TechNet article on SharePoint Designer site backup (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc706870.aspx) says “If you have not installed Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with Service Pack 2 (SP2), backups that are performed by using Office SharePoint Designer are limited to 25 megabytes (MB). After you install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with SP2, the limit is increased to 2 gigabytes (GB).”

The big news today in the SharePoint world is that the next version of SharePoint Server has been announced and will be called “Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010″ – without Office in the name.

For further information on the announcement as well as the rationale behind dropping Office from the name, check the post on the Microsoft SharePoint Product Group Blog – http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/04/14/microsoft-sharepoint-14-is-now-microsoft-sharepoint-2010.aspx

No details as yet on the next version of WSS.

With the Irish launch of the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), Microsoft Ireland invited a number of partners to attain accreditation as a Microsoft Online Services Partner. We are pleased to announce that Central Solutions are now an accredited partner.

As a Microsoft Partner with a proven track record in delivering projects with Microsoft Enterprise technologies (e.g. Exchange, Dynamics CRM, SharePoint), Central Solutions are in a great position to help you and your organisation benefit from BPOS.

Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite is a set of messaging and collaboration solutions hosted by Microsoft and consists of Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting and Office Communications. These online services are designed to give your business streamlined communication with high availability, comprehensive security and simplified IT management. Your business benefits from always up-to-date technologies that are deployed rapidly, maximising your valuable IT resources and reducing your need for infrastructure investments. For further information, see http://www.microsoft.com/online

We are delighted to announce our recent certification as a Microsoft SDPS (SharePoint Deployment Planning Services) provider.

Companies with Microsoft SA (Software Assurance) can avail of SPDS services with Central Solutions at no extra charge. SDPS is designed to help organisations plan an effective deployment of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. SDPS includes a broad range of planning tools and services that help optimize the effectiveness of SharePoint’s core capabilities, and help lower the cost of deployment and adoption.

Through a range of 1, 3, 5, 10 or 15-day programmatic planning sessions, Central Solutions will conduct a highly effective planning process for deploying or getting more out of a customers’ SharePoint investment. An SDPS engagement focuses on three main MSSP sections: Qualify and Develop, Solution, Proof, mapping these to Solution Development, Strategy Briefing and Architecture Design, and Proof of Concept and Production Pilot respectively. Not all SDPS engagements include all of these sections. For example, only the 10-and 15-day engagements provide a Proof-of-Concept. A summary of the deliverables are provided in the table below.

Our consultants will work with your decision makers, stakeholders and subject matter experts during the engagement to build a business case and deliver an effective solution.

Further information is available here: http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/sa/benefits/packagedservices.mspx

Microsoft have released 10 new SharePoint themes – screenshots below.

The templates can be downloaded from here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=0a87658f-20b8-4dcc-ad7a-09ad22641f3a

We are delighted to announce our recent certification as a Microsoft BVPS (Business Value Planning Services) provider.

Companies with Microsoft SA (Software Assurance) can avail of BVPS services with a certified provider at no extra charge. BVPS helps unlock the strategic value of a company’s investment in the Microsoft IW (Information Worker) platform by identifying eligible business processes that can be improved or changed with Microsoft Office.

Our consultants will work with your decision makers, stakeholders and subject matter experts during the engagement to build a business case and deliver an effective solution.

Further information is available here: http://www.central-solutions.com/BVPS.htm

Many of us are faced with the challenge of doing more with less in these turbulent times. This year in particular will see a tightening of corporate purse strings across the board. To drive crucial projects forward, it’s important that business groups and IT teams make the most of what they have.

Along with speakers from Microsoft, Intel and Dell, Central Solutions were delighted to be have been invited to speak at this breakfast seminar where we explore how to leverage Microsoft SharePoint to meet these challenges.

For further details, please see http://www.central-solutions.com/SharePoint_Seminar.pdf

Looking for a charting solution for SharePoint list data within your site? Here’s a quick summary of some options:

Dundas Chart for SharePoint
http://www.dundas.com/Products/Chart/SharePoint/index.aspx
$1999 server licence *

Bamboo Chart Plus
http://store.bamboosolutions.com/pc-57-1-chart-plus-web-part-release-22.aspx
$400 server licence *

LiteSuite LiteChart
http://www.litesuite.com/pages/litechart.aspx
$100 per Site Collection *

ChartPart
http://www.codeplex.com/ChartPart
Requires Microsoft .NET 3.5 Framework SP1 and the Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET 3.5 installed.

Excel Services
Excel Services is one of the Business Intelligence features that comes as part of MOSS Enterprise Licence – see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms561082.aspx. Luis F. Bitencourt-Emilio did a great article which included consuming SharePoint Lists in Excel Services – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb267252.aspx. Excel Services can then be used to create charts of the data in SharePoint list. Very flexible but could take some time to setup, configure, etc. as required.

Data View Web Part
You can do quite a bit with XSLT in a Data View web part – see for example http://paulgalvin.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!1CC1EDB3DAA9B8AA!447.entry. However, developing custom XSLT can be quite involved.

DIY
Of course, if you have time, resources and the necessary skills available, one can always take the DIY approach and develop your own charting solution. Silverlight opens up a whole new world of possibilities in this approach. For inspiration, have a look at http://weblogs.asp.net/jan/archive/2008/12/04/3d-silverlight-charts-in-sharepoint-smarttools-charts.aspx

If we’ve missed out on any other noteworthy options, please feel free to let us know.

* Prices correct at time of writing but subject to change.

On a recent MOSS 2007 project, our client wanted to index WordPerfect documents stored both in SharePoint and a file share. After some searching on the web, no official solution/approach for this seemed to be available from either Microsoft or Corel!

Further searching yielded these blog posts which appeared to offer the best hope of a solution:

• Shane Young http://msmvps.com/blogs/shane/archive/2005/11/29/77181.aspx
• Dwight Bragdon http://blogs.pointbridge.com/Blogs/bragdon_dwight/Pages/Post.aspx?_ID=8 (update: link broken but cached snapshot available on Google)

We tried out both approaches but unfortunately couldn’t get either to work for us and so it was back to the drawing board! We then stumbled across this WordPerfect iFilter from Corel – http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/en/Content/1153321224268?pid=1216666073390. The Corel website is light on information about the iFilter but it seemed to be worth a shot and I’m glad to report that it worked a treat!

Here is an overview of the installation method used:

1. Download the PDF IFilter from the Corel website

• Corel WPF IFilter http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/en/Content/1153321224268?pid=1216666073390
• wpd icon (here is a link to one)

2. Stop IIS on all WFE and Index servers

• Start> Run> Services.msc and stop the IIS Admin service

3.    Install the IFilter on the Index server. By the way, we noticed that this iFilter installation automatically makes the Registry key modification referred to in one of the above posts.

4.    Copy the wpd icon file to Drive:/Program Files\Common files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\Template\Images on front-end servers

5.    Edit the Docicon.xml file on front-end servers to include the .wpd extension

• Browse to Drive:/Program Files\Common files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\Template\Xml
• Open the Docicon.xml file and add an entry for the .wpd extension <Mapping Key=”wpd” Value=”NameofIconFile.gif”/>

6.    Restart all servers

7.    Browse to Central Administration > SharedServices > Search Settings > File Types. Click on New File Type, enter wpd as the file extension and click ok.

8.    Run a full crawl of the Content Source where the WordPerfect documents are stored.

Hopefully, this alternative approach might be of use to someone if either of the above mentioned methods don’t work out. If so, please post a comment to let us know.

One of the terrific list features in SharePoint v3 (i.e. WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007) is the Gantt View.

It’s available by default in a Project Tasks list or you can add a Gantt view to an existing list.

For further information, have a look at Microsoft Office Online: Create and manage a project task list

While this feature is not intended as an alternative to project scheduling tools such as MS-Project, for many projects/project teams, it provides a more than adequate means of defining/presenting/sharing/managing the project plan.

However, out-of-the-box it does have a couple of limitations including:

• it doesn’t support task dependencies or linking
• grouping of tasks (i.e. as sub-tasks) isn’t available
• the timescale isn’t adjustable (by either user or administrator) and the default view is in weeks. For projects spanning months, this can be a nuisance.

On a recent project, I was looking for a means to adjust the project timescale. After much searching and for the most part being told that it couldn’t be done (at least not without significant coding effort), I found this blog post by Christophe at Path to SharePoint How to scale down the SharePoint Gantt view. It’s a simple, quick and flexible solution and only requires you to:

1. Edit the page with the Gantt View and insert a Content Editor Web Part
2. Modify the Content Editor Web Part and using the Source Editor, insert the CSS code provided.
3. Hide the Content Editor Web Part and Save the page.

Of course, hopefully Microsoft will see fit to provide this out-of-the-box in the next release?