elizabeth grigg - the other fourth meal

I think I wrote about this once before. Once a developer sent me a progress report entitled "saga of exhilarating progress.doc" Hmm, perhaps the words were separated with underscores. Anyway I think he was being a little facetious, don't you?

My own saga for yesterday was truly exhilarating. The first thing I did was borrow my officemate's phone to call the helpdesk with advice on sharepoint. That was painful. Yes, they do hosting. No, they don't provide any configuration advice. No, they don't support SPS. What does no support mean if they'll set it up for you and host it for you but then don't let you ask any questions? Yes, that appears to be the deal. Any referrals? No. It was like talking to jabba the hut. Provided a small overcaffienated undernourished kid on the phone can be described as jabba. Anyway, my officemate had a good laugh but I had to kick this thing into high gear.

My other dead lead was I had an open ended question posted to the sharepoint alias newsgroup thingy. Nobody answered. So I trolled through the postings and personally mailed anyone who had ever answered a question coherently on the forum. Then I started mailing folks who had asked similar questions before, to see what became of their project. While those answers were rolling in, I mailed folks from the credits section of the Bill English book I purchased. You know, the section where he thanks the following people at MS for their help? Apparently they still work here. So after sending out perhaps 30 specific and personal requests for information, even on a Friday I started to get answers.

Consensus: I should do my own hosting, since helpdesk will just give me vanilla config.
Consensus: I should opt for SPS because searching is king. I realize that searching will only be king if metadata is king too, so that will require custom web parts.
Consensus: I should use my current machine as a dev box, running XP and VS, then transfer over code to the server to see what worked. The server needs to run Windows Server 2000, SQL Server, and of course SPS.

This seemed to be a solid plan, and I found a server lying around the lab and commandeered it. On Monday I get to install stuff. It's almost like being a real developer, installing wacky stuff like OSs and server software.

I do need some serious advice on virus software and backup strategy though.