The SharePoint Farmer's Almanac : SharePoint Downloads

Downloads of my SPTechCon Boston Sessions

Shane — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 04:01:59 GMT

Last week I had the privilege of speaking at the SharePoint Technology Conference in Boston. Too cool. Got to meet several new people from the Twitterverse (I am @ShanesCows in case you were wondering). I would list the people but I never know if that is appropriate or not. Anyway.

I promised a download PDF of all of the sessions I did so here they are.

Todd Klindt and I did a whole day workshop on being a SharePoint administrator. For that session I have two decks. The SharePoint Admin deck is old faithful. It is all of the core Admin stuff we have delivered around the world brought back to glory once again. Good stuff. The other deck is stolen straight from my SharePoint Administrator's Class and it all of the dev things we admins need to know, like Features, Solution Packages, and Code Access Security (EEK!). You can get that deck here. Dealing with developers is fun. ;)

The following day I had to do my search session all by myself. Very sad. You can grab that deck here.

Shane

SharePoint Consulting

SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool - Beta

Shane — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 15:50:29 GMT

Be the first kid on your block to try it out. https://connect.microsoft.com/programdetails.aspx?ProgramDetailsID=1602

This handy little tool will allow you to input your number of users, number of locations, bandwidth, preferred hardware, and even usage profiles and then have it spit back a suggested farm topology and suggested hardware. Pretty cool stuff.

A couple of warnings. The tool is still beta so be sure you verify what it is telling you. I have seen some crazy scenarios where you get back the need for 25 servers because you messed up the storage space. J So be smart. Also, you will have to sign up for a Microsoft Connect account. But that is a good thing. Lots of fun betas our there you can apply for.

If you do try the tool out do give your feedback. That is the only way it gets better. Those of us in the real world have to help.

Shane – SharePoint Help

My TechEd Sessions With Downloads

Shane — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 00:21:58 GMT

Over the past few years I have had the opportunity to speak at a few different events and conferences. Cincinnati and New York user groups, SharePoint Advisor, and the SharePoint Information Worker Conference are the ones I can think of. As a consultant you get to talk to tables full of people sharing your knowledge and of course being a trainer I get to talk to small groups almost weekly. So you would think speaking at another event wouldn't be all that exciting. Yeah right! Speaking at TechEd was awesome. I think the largest session had 400 people or so. I would like to tell you that I was really nervous and I had to picture everyone naked but it wasn't like that at all.

Joel Oleson and I decided to combine all of our sessions and co-present them. You can read his report here where Dustin is the hero but I am the Hiro. Anyway, it was totally cool. I don't know if you know either one of us but we are total goof balls and that is exactly how we presented. We had lots of fun. I am pretty sure we are the first ones ever to work a Paris Hilton joke into a 400 level session. But anyway. So quickly I will do a rundown of all of our sessions and provide a link to a pdf version of the slides.

OFC304 Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Upgrade and Migration Yeah, we had some technical issues with this one but it still managed to be rated as a top 10 session for the day and number 5 in the Office track overall. Not bad for my first TechEd presentation. If you are into upgrades this session was worth the price of TechEd admission alone. (Ok, not really but it was cool) Joel and I brought out some details of the upgrade process not spoken aloud anywhere else. And we had the guts to demo a gradual upgrade in real time. We are also working on an upgrade white paper that will finally bring together all of this content together in one place. Hooray! Don't forget to check out the SharePoint Upgrade site.

OFC207 SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture Guidance Ok so I didn't present this session but I did sit in the audience and heckle. ;) Good stuff came up in this session. Governance and Information Architecture has been considered a voodoo black art in the SharePoint space for a long time. Well not anymore. Joel and his co-presenter Jennifer Hefner did a great job of exposing some best practices and new tools to help you out. Check out the Governance Codeplex site for a site recovery tool and a site lifecycle management tool. Fun stuff. And if you need help managing the creation of sites check out the Site Provisioning Assistant from SharePoint Solutions.

OFC222 Microsoft SharePoint Products & Technologies 2007: Administrative Architecture and Planning for Deployment, Part 1 This is a session the has been presented at SharePoint products for a while now. So instead of spitting out the same stuff again Joel and I decided to tweak the presentation and get some new info into it. I think it turned out well. The value though was the real world spin that we put out there on these topics.

OFC418 Microsoft SharePoint Products & Technologies 2007: Deployment & Advanced Administration Topics, Part 2 Admin goes 400 level? Yikes! I think this presentation was rewritten 3 or 4 times up until an hour before we gave it. We really struggled to try and make this thing live up to its billing. Especially since a couple hundred people followed us the half mile between the 2 sessions. Talk about poor planning our Part 1 and 2 were scheduled back to back. Which was perfect except one was in the North end of the building the other in the South. Ouch! We were huffing and puffing to make the trek. Anyway, some more new stuff in the slides. Worth a download and read. :)

It was really cool meeting everyone and speaking was awesome. Now I just need to get on the list to speak at one of the international Tech Eds. I here Barcelona and Australia are very cool.

Shane SharePoint Help

My SharePoint must have FREE add ons

Shane — Sat, 19 May 2007 15:21:10 GMT

So I get this question a lot from people who are new to WSS v3 or MOSS 2007. What stuff should I be putting on my server? I am guessing they aren't the only ones that want to know. Odds are you found this post by searching the web. Well if you are looking for my recommendations on things you should install when you first deploy SharePoint you are in luck. The list is below with some real world details to go with it. And don't forget all of these are FREE!!!

In no particular order they are:

Microsoft IT's site recycle bin feature
Smiling Goat's RSS Feed Reader web part
Mondosoft's Wildcard search feature
Tony Bierman's Central Admin link feature

Microsoft IT's site recycle bin feature

You can download this from CodePlex here. This is just to cool. One of the most common reasons that administrators end up doing restores is someone trying to delete an item or a list accidently deletes their whole site. While SharePoint out of the box has a great two stage recycle bin this does NOT capture deleted sites. In comes Microsoft IT. Thanks to the work of Bill Baer and Joel Oleson they have made available for public download the site recycle bin feature.

This tool, after a bit of a cumbersome install, adds a configurable feature to SharePoint that once activated watches for a site to be deleted. Before a site is deleted a backup of the site is made and stored on the file system in the location of your choice. Now if you get that frantic phone call needing the site back you can just go to your folder, find the bak file, and do the necessary restore. This makes for happy users! Also, this feature can send emails notifying the administrator of the site that it has been deleted successfully. Sometimes this helps to raise the red flag they did something wrong.

Smiling Goat's RSS feed reader web part

This is old faithful. I used this back in v2 of SharePoint and loved the product. Many thought after the inclusion of an RSS reader out of the box in MOSS this part wouldn't be necessary. Nope. The out of the box reader leaves something to be desired. My biggest complaint? It can only read its own SharePoint RSS feeds if you are using Kerberos authentication. Since 90% of my customer do not use Kerberos this kind of sucks (for a lack of a nicer way to put it).

With a quick download from CodePlex here you can deploy and be up and running with this web part in minutes. Once you are up you can start consuming those RSS feeds without the fear of authentication methods. Remember that adding simple RSS feeds for company relevant news or other information is a great way to keep your site dynamic giving your users a reason to come back.

Mondosoft's Wildcard search feature

I had my doubts about this one. MOSS search is pretty darn cool and flexible out of the box. I didn't think installing another tool would do anything but add confusion. Was I wrong. This tool is amazing for something they are just giving away. Sometimes I wonder if the posted the wrong bits for download. ;) The most important thing to remember about this web part? It is leveraging SharePoint's own search engine, it is not replacing it or changing it.

I am going to do a nice long article of this one soon. Just trust me and get these bits running on a test server and be amazed.

Tony Bierman's Central Admin link feature

I love Tony. I mentioned to him that I really missed the fact that MOSS did not have a link straight to central admin for administrators like SPS 2003 did. So he took a break from writing commercial software for SharePoint Solutions and wrote me this handy little feature. You can download it here. Thanks again Tony!

So this is my list, what is your list? Let me know in the comments section about any must have FREE install for SharePoint. I have a couple others but they are commercial so I will leave them out for now. I just want to know what awesome FREE tools you think the whole world should know about?

Shane – SharePoint Help

Download Prescan.exe

Shane — Fri, 04 May 2007 00:33:00 GMT

I was catching up on my blog reading today and saw Joel's great article on Your Friend Prescan.exe - How to Get it & What it Does - Part 2 and reminded how annoying it is trying to get your hands on prescan.exe. So what the heck. You can now download prescan.exe from that link. The Microsoft documentation has said since August that you could download it so I thought I would help them out.

Enjoy!

Shane – SharePoint Help