This week I have the privilege of teaching the first ever SharePoint Designer 2010 course. As far as I know, this is the first SharePoint Designer 2010 course ever being taught by anyone in the world (please correct me if I’m wrong here). A lot of blood, sweat and tears have gone into creating this 5 day course and if I say so myself, it turned out pretty good . Check out the Critical Path Training site for the next offerings of this course. The immediate next one is the webcast I’l...

The long anticipated release of SharePoint 2010 is almost here now! Arpan Shah, director of SharePoint, announced the official date of launch to be May 12th. The RTM is going to be even earlier, April, so you should be able to download the bits directly from MSDN or TechNet at that time. At the same time, SharePoint Designer 2010 should become available as a free download from Microsoft’s site. My advice would be to download it right away to truly start taking advantage of the 2010 releas...

A few months back, I had written an article on using SharePoint Designer 2007 and InfoPath 2007 to automate business processes. The solution uses InfoPath to create a powerful electronic form, publishes it to a SharePoint form library, then routes that form through a workflow process using a workflow created in SharePoint Designer. Creating your business scenarios in this fashion will let you design true end to end solutions, without using any code, that will save you Tons of time! This article...

If you have worked with the XSLT Data View web part before, you know how much power it has. You can point to virtually any repository of data (web services, databases, xml files, SharePoint lists and libraries etc) and bring it into SharePoint. The data gets retrieved as standard XML and you can modify it to look however you like using SharePoint Designer 2007 without having to do any coding whatsoever! Here is a snapshot of a Data View web part showing information from a database table. Whe...

For the first time ever, we are offering a Huge discount on our Annual Site Membership. With an annual membership, you can watch all of our current videos on the site in addition to all of the ones we will be creating throughout the course of the year (New video updates are posted to the site every week).  From now until Friday, Feb 26th, you can use the coupon code ANSPFEB (please remember to click on Apply button after putting in the code to activate it) to take $40 off the yearly subscript...

The most popular type of site template used in most SharePoint 2007 deployments is the Team Site template. The Team Site template provides a great platform to facilitate collaboration among peers in a team or department. However, there is another type of site template which is best utilized in large Intranet and Internet sites. In both of these scenarios, you will want only a few people to control the content that’s being published. On the other hand, there is usually hundreds if not t...

The SharePoint Designer 2010 Training DVD-ROM containing 4+ hours of video tutorials was released for sale yesterday. This DVD contains demonstrations showing you exactly how you can build solutions on top of SharePoint 2010 using SharePoint Designer 2010… without using any code! Here are some of the topics you will learn by watching the videos on this DVD: Create Powerful List, Reusable and Site Workflows Create Sites and Site Components Use the XSLT Web Parts and Conditional Formatti...

Would you like to own a copy of our SharePoint 2007 or SharePoint Designer 2007 videos to watch offline? Well, this is the best week to make that happen. We are offering a 20% discount on the single user licenses of both of our DVDs. When going through checkout, simply apply the coupon code SPDVD to take 20% off the price. This coupon code is only valid till end of day on Feb 12th. Here are direct links to both of the DVDs: SharePoint 2007 Site Admin and End User Training SharePoint Designer ...

We have decided to auction off one copy each of our SharePoint DVDs to help raise funds for relief and development in Haiti. There is no set price (reserve) for the listings. The total amount of the raised funds will go directly to the American Red Cross’ efforts for Haiti. You will find the listings on eBay here: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=270522078930&ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=270522084967&ssPag...

In my line of work, I’m constantly demonstrating SharePoint functionality to people. Having a good working virtual machine is critical to make that happen (and I have several ). However, if you don’t want to create one from scratch, you can go ahead and download the virtual machine (vhd) that Microsoft recently put on their site right here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0c51819b-3d40-435c-a103-a5481fe0a0d2&displaylang=en Don’t forget the fact ...