This has been an eye opening experience to say the least.  In the last mini project, we covered the Search API,  Search Administration, the Document and Records Center and Information Management Policies. This was a lot to go over in a short bit of time, but we did get it done.

If this course had been longer, I don’t know what I would have done. It was totally worthwhile, but it certainly was a lot of information to cover. I was finally glad to get it done, so that we could do our Final Project.  Right now, we’re almost finished.  Next week, we will finish up and make our presentation to the staff.  The Final Project is a team project.  This is good because it more replicates working in a real team environment. You find your strong points and even more important, you find your shortcomings.  Just a hint for those coming into this program – when you find your shortcomings, that’s the thing for which you volunteer in the project creation. That way,  you can brush up on the things you might have forgotten.

The Final Project does present its own challenges. We’re not in the same physical building, we’re all over the country (or world, as our class is) so organization and sharing files sometimes becomes difficult,  but as I’ve seen,  it can be done.

At first, when I saw the specs for the final project,  I was a little blown away and frightened.  I wondered how we could actually do this.  But now that we’re a couple of days from the end,  not only did I find out it can be done,  but it’s added new strengths, skills and capabilities to my repertoire which I wasn’t expecting at all.

Like I said earlier, this has definitely been an eye-opening experience, but it’s one that I would not trade.  It’s landed me in a place where there is nothing but an open future, adding to my .Net knowledge and creating a whole new world of possibilities.

My Sites are pretty neat, as it is a way to add social networking into Sharepoint, adding User Profiles, and allows the users to create their own personal sites. It is an extremly useful feature which allows people within the Sharepoint environment to collaborate with one another based on common experience.

BDC is a very big and important feature of MOSS. It allows Sharepoint to accesss and work with all kinds of data whether it’s inside or outside of Sharepoint. It’s even possible to add this data without even using code! It works with external databases, as well as Web Services.

Cool stuff!

We learned all about the different terminology and the Portal site definitions, along with all the possibilities that came along with it, like the approval, and collecting signatures workflows.

It also comes with new navigation tools out of the box, like a Site Directory (page layout feature) and Table of Contents web part, in able to advertise the navigation to the users.

It’s starting to look very interesting.

We started with Sharepoint Designer workflows all the way through creating workflows in Visual Studio. We found out that with SPD, you can do things as simple as sending an email to certain people when an item is added to a library, to Digital Signature retrieval, collecting feedback, Approval and multi-step conditional workflows, or even moving files from one list to another.

We also included creating workflows in Visual Studio, with a Sequential Workflow.

This certainly wasn’t our hardest project, but it wasn’t our easiest that we’ve had, either.

All in all, it was a good experience, enabling us to use what we’ve learned in the preceding weeks, to create something tangible for our project.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hi, this is David Wier.  Welcome back to my SetFocus SharePoint video diary. 

This last week has been really interesting since we’ve been learning about workflows.  In my past,  I pretty much knew what the word meant but I certainly didn’t know what it meant as a term within SharePoint.  The section we started last week is called business processes and once again, we have two full books on the subject.  Workflow seems to be an integral part of this section.  And I know that earlier, I thought a SharePoint designer as just a kind of a free version of expression web.  Now I’m learning exactly why it’s called SharePoint designer.

When working with a SharePoint site, you can connect directly to that site and change or create things like CSS files and master pages and just regular pages for that matter.  Now we’re finding out that we can also do workflows on lists and libraries in certain sites.  You can do many things with SharePoint designer workflows as simple as sending an e-mail to certain people when an item is added to the library, to digital signature retrieval, collecting feedback, approval and multi-step conditional workflows or even moving files from one list to another after approval.  These workflows kind of scratch the surface of the built-in SPD workflows, but it can get fairly intricate within each workflow created.  And when we leave SPD workflows, we’re going to get into creating visual studio workflows, giving its even more control over the process itself.

Well, that’s all for now.  I’ll see you next week at pretty much the same time, pretty much the same place with my next entry in SetFocus SharePoint video diary.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hi, this is David Wier.  Welcome back to my SetFocus SharePoint video diary. 

Last week, we got into the web content management section of the curriculum, finishing out the first of two SetFocus books on the subject.  This Master course has a lot of books for the different sections.  We’re expanding our learning on creating custom site definitions by adding branding items like CSS and master pages to a publishing site.  Basically, branding is just the customization of the sites so that the look and the feel of your site fits the look and feel of the brand of your company.  This is available in MOSS 2007 which is Microsoft Office SharePoint Services.  You create the look and feel through a solution and deploy the solution so it’s there whenever any new sub sites or pages get created looking the same as the rest of it.

The extent of which you can actually change the look and feel of the site using MOSS greatly exceeds that which is basic to Windows SharePoint services.  This gets pretty complicated or at least it can get pretty complicated, but at this point, we’ve already covered the basics of creating custom site definitions and templates for a SharePoint site in the past.  This section was just adding more possibility using MOSS 2007 publishing features.

Well, that’s all for now.  But I’ll see you next week at pretty much the same time, at pretty much the same place, my next video diary entry.