THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS DIVA

Tim Barrett posted in the comment section a really kewl idea that I just had to pull up to the front blog.

Here's the idea. 

• You, the IT pro do a blog [blogger.com is free] of tips, tricks, announcements, happenings of interest to your customer.
• You set up a Sharepoint feed reader on your client's Sharepoint that suck in RSS feeds
• You subscribe your client to your feed
• Your client now gets announcments from you, not spam filtered, not stopped by email issues
• Your client now has a direct communication link from you

So what do you need to accomplish this?  Most of the ingredients you already have or are to be had for free

• Start a blog
• Free ones are at Blogger.com
• For pay ones are at Movabletype
• If you have SQL server you can do a .Text blog
• Radio Userland is a long time blog engine
• Sharepoint included in your SBS 2003
• Smilinggoat.net feed reader
• Drop a web part on that Sharepoint that displays your RSS feed
• Remember that Newsgator has a “post to blog“ feature so that you don't even need to go to the blog to post

Remember if the client is behind ISA you will need to add proxy info:

There are two ways you can use this web part within

your proxy server.  The first is to set your proxy

configuration in the Portal's web.config file:

<system.net>

    <defaultProxy>

      <proxy proxyaddress="server:port" bypassonlocal="true" />

    </defaultProxy>

  </system.net>

The second option is to configure the proxy server

settings on the web part.  In SHARED VIEW, the proxy

server/port settings are enabled for you to enter them.

And Nick found the command that adds the webpart to your sharepoint, but I also stuck the bat file here

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\BIN\STSADM.EXE" -o addwppack -filename "C:\Program Files\Smiling Goat\FeedReader\SmilingGoat.FeedReader.cab" -globalinstall -force

Nick also sent me his Front page part that can be used to easily import [and it still has his firm name on it :-).  I'll ping him to double check to see if I've forgotten anything.  I know he had to walk me through a few steps... the main one being that batch file he did for me. [still needs to be easier for us non coders/admin types in my opinion]

Anne also has a service where she sets up Business blogs for folks, gives the person a tutorial on how they work, etc. if you still aren't convinced that blogs are a business tool.  It's a realtively inexpensive way to get a leg up in how the process of “blogging” works. 

It's funny because for a while when Anne and I would go nutcase over blogs, some of our geek counterparts were rolling their eyes. There are some even saying that if you don't have RSS.. that they just don't listen to you. 

So check out adding RSS to your client's Sharepoint!