entering sharepoint land
It's like, the beginning of some video game where you're this little tyke decked out in a skirt with a backpack, and you start wandering around. Then, BLAM! Dragon! You should have gone to the village merchant first to get some weapons cause now you're toast.
You'd think after two days of studying AND the purchase of a $44 book I'd know the difference between sharepoint portal server and windows sharepoint services. Then there's sharepoint team services. The only think I know for sure, becuase all the documentation is quite firm on this, is that the similarities of the names is completely coincidental and do not begin to illustrate the vast differences between the products. Okay, so they're different. How about some useful info?
I will finish out my week happy if I can figure out how to install a simple RSS viewer on a sample sharepoint site. This is a window that would display some soft of dynamic content (yes, from a weblog even) on a team site internally here at MS. I got pretty far with feedreader, but DUH it doesn't contain an exe or any obvious next step. The readme points in a direction of some other executable that doesn't exist on my box (stsadm.exe) which leads me to believe a) I don't have the proper configuration to continue installing this, and b) I probably misunderstood the purpose of the tool in the first place. Oh well. I got my first inkling that this was possible from Scoble, so maybe there's hope.
I will list the sharepoint blogs I've found so far right here. But first, I have to mention: if you're an American and think like I do that all the Europeans do is wander around on some kind of extended leave from their jobs all the time, you owe yourself this read. Boy do folks have it rough in Finland. (tone deliberately ambiguous).
Also one other cute thing: what the heck is InfoPath? Could it possibly be true that an entire Office product exists just to make the sharepoint pill easier to swallow, or do I have a distorted view? For years I thought Access was a program that sat on top of Office to handle accessibility issues. This is the same: Oh, they've added InfoPath to office. Maybe it's a metadata tool? Maybe it's a successor to favorites? Who knows. I'll check it out and get back. Meanwhille, follow this link to see why "InfoPath's claim to fame is that it lets teams using SharePoint Portal Server 2003 easily create custom forms. Microsoft designed InfoPath to help address the fact that the creation of custom Web parts for SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is difficult." Wow.
Okay, potentially useful sharepoint blogs:
Westin's Technical Log
Sig Webers Playground
SharePoint Blogs
Mike Walsh's WSS, Finland and more
IPattern.com (Maxim V. Karpov)
FrontPoint
feedreader