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Hi, this is David Wier.  Welcome back to my SetFocus SharePoint video diary.  This week, we went even further with SharePoint developer, learning more about workflows, creating custom lists, forms, and applications and using much of the same techniques I was already familiar with in my many years of ASP.NET experience.  It was also interesting to learn that I can leverage some of my older knowledge in this way.

Next we hit the highlights of InfoPath.  Learning to create forms and then learning how to make these forms available in SharePoint, followed up by learning about additional features of InfoPath that we can also use.  After that, we got into the second business processes book, learning how to work with workflows using Visual Studio and learning how to code the workflows, as well as learning the different types of workflows available.  Well, that’s all for now.  So I’ll see you next week, pretty much the same time, pretty much the same place with my next entry in my SetFocus SharePoint video diary.

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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.

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

This week we finished up book two of the web content management section.  And we completed our project for the section.  We learned more about the content query editor web part along with usage analysis reporting, presenting data in different ways, using sorting and filtering and aggregating information on the sites that we’ve developed.  This project, this time, even included a section which applied to our current section but it required research on how to get it working.  Along with that, the requirements we were given were much less exact so it required more in-depth project management thinking on all our parts.

All in all, this section actually stretched us further than before and instead of just learning details and reciting the facts back on the test as many test required in high school and college.  Well, that’s pretty much for now.  I’ll see you next week at pretty much the same time and pretty much the same place with my next entry in my SetFocus SharePoint video diary.

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

We’re really getting into the core of MOSS 2007 finally.  This section gets into the navigation and the search area of MOSS which is very interesting.  We’re learning how to effect the navigation of a publishing site in multiple ways,  like having groups and ways to access the newly added links from different places within the site itself.  This allows us to do customization of any tabbed areas at the site including the quick launch area.  Along with that, we’re also getting into the search administration area.  We’re learning how to modify the search behavior in a publishing site.  How to add a search center and customize it.  This allows us to set up a custom search results page and adding a tab to get to the page and even customize the look and feel of the results.  I’m really looking forward to all the possibilities in this area.

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

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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.

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

This has been a very busy week.  Not only did we finish up our project and have a test on our development section, but we started a new section, web content management using MOSS.  In my previous encounters with SharePoint, I really wasn’t made aware that this kind of thing was even available.  I’ve heard the word branding but I never heard it in reference to SharePoint.  Every other site I used or was familiar with in SharePoint looked pretty much the same.  It looked like a SharePoint site.  With as much as we’ve learned already, now I’m starting to see a much bigger picture of what SharePoint is and what it’s capable of.

Before I had such a small idea of what SharePoint was, but now I’m starting to find out that it’s a whole lot bigger than I even imagined.  Even if you’ve seen the basic SharePoint look and feel in your internet and you want to see all that it can do are some of what it can do, go to the Library of Congress website or the Government of Australia website.  This will show you a little bit of what’s possible over and above of what you’ve already been exposed to.  So I’ll see you next week at pretty much the same place, the same time and it will be my next video diary entry.

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

This last week was a good week.   I felt like I actually reached the good point.  We learned how to create ASP.NET pages and actually install them in the site with actual ASP.NET code.  I know for a lot of you ASP.NET developers out there, this may not sound like a lot, but a couple of years ago, I was working for a company and I became the administrator of our department’s site on that SharePoint internet.  We had a contractor who showed me the basic ropes of how to get around in SharePoint and post some of the out of the box stuff.   Well, I ended up needing something new that wasn’t quite out of the box from SharePoint and it was to post an ASP.NET page with code behind it.  Well, he was getting paid really good money as a contractor,  but he couldn’t tell me how to do it.  He didn’t know.  But at this point, now I know how to do it.  And I’m not even half way through the course.

There are other things we learn last week like creating basic web parts, having our own user controls in them.  Like I’ve said, all in all, this was a good week.

Well, I’ll see you next week, pretty much the same place, pretty much the same time with my next video diary entry.

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

Features and solutions and customization, oh my.  Taking a little bit from the Wizard of Oz there, of course.  But this was a week that really showed me a lot.  It not only showed me the basics of features and solutions, but it told me that I was just now scratching the surface of what was to come.  And in Saturday, during my all-day class, I got a FedEx delivery of four more books on MOSS which we really haven’t started learning specifically yet.  We’ve handed it out.  We’ve said this is available but we haven’t started learning specifics there.  When I was first learning HTML on ASP, I coded everything by hand with notepad.  That way, I actually learned what was going on before using a code generator.  We did the same thing when starting SharePoint development and the environment, though, was totally different from the early days of HTML on ASP with XML being so case-sensitive and so forth.  And it was really a big chore.

That being said, I am glad that we did it because it gives us a better understanding of what’s really going on under the covers and I know it’s going to help me in the future based on my past experience.  Thank goodness, though, that there are tools that make the development much easier 

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

 For those of you who haven’t been keeping up with my diary, I’m doing this to comment on my experiences with the SharePoint class I’m taking through SetFocus.com.  In case you don’t know also, I opted for the night time class, it was better for my schedule which is Tuesday and Thursday night along with every other Saturday we do a full day. 

Last week, we actually started on the development part of the course.  So having gone through the administration course previously or part of the course, our teacher started laying out the basic framework of what we’re going to be learning including the architecture of the SharePoint site.  SharePoint is built on top of ASP.NET, so in the architecture portion, we learned how the SharePoint website get intercepted, if you will, from the normal ASP.NET DLLs that get set up through IIS for ASP.NET.

I know this isn’t the actual correct terminology here.  It’s just a way to highlight what we’ve been doing.  I know that some people probably wouldn’t be too interested in this part, but to me, along the way it helps me make a lot more sense of the way SharePoint works.  So once again, I’m really looking forward to my next class and I’ll see you again on my video diary.

Having come from an ASP.Net development background, development is what I really enjoy, so I’m really looking forward to this part of our training.

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Hi, this is David Wier.  Welcome to my video diary once again. 

 Wow, it’s only been a few weeks.  There has been so much coverage, so far.  And this week, we’re finally getting to the development section of SharePoint.  A few things were a little of a re-hash,  a few things were expanded on, but more, like workflows, were brand new and just took a little bit to get over my head around it.  It’s new stuff and I understand technically what a workflow is, but how to do it?  That’s something totally different.  But boy, SharePoint does have some neat stuff built in.  But this is just where I want to be and apparently, this is just where I need to be.  All I can say is now, I can’t wait for my next class.