Are you at the SharePoint Pro 2010 Summit this week? If yes, I would love to see at any of the 3 sessions that I’ll be doing tomorrow:

HDEV04: Introduction to SharePoint Designer 2010: Top 5 Great Things to Know!

HDEV05: Overview: Creating Workflows with SharePoint Designer 2010, InfoPath and Visio

HDEV06: Generate and Publish Electronic Forms on Your Intranet Using InfoPath 2010… No Code Required!

The abstracts for each session are listed here: http://www.devconnections.com/shows/sp2010sp/default.asp?c=1&s=147. Hope to see you there!

We will be holding the next Chicago SharePoint User Group meeting on March 18th from 1 to 4pm. The meeting location is the Downers Grove office of Microsoft (3025 Highland Parkway Suite 300, Downers Grove, IL). Following are the topics for the meeting:

Records Retention and Litigation Preparedness: The Legal Side

Jeff Davis

Attorney

Vedder Price

Abstract: Effective records management and proactive eDiscovery practices can have an enormous impact on a company’s ability to successfully defend itself in litigation. Jeff will discuss the recent Pension Committee and other eDiscovery decisions, and will offer recommendations on how to develop legally compliant records management and legal hold programs. He also will discuss how those policies and procedures, coupled with leveraging SharePoint and Microsoft’s Connected E-Discovery Framework, can mitigate the legal risks and reduce the costs associated with eDiscovery.

Jeff Davis is a shareholder at Vedder Price. He concentrates his practice on representing corporations, financial institutions, public bodies and individuals in technology licensing, records retention, eDiscovery, electronic commerce, data privacy, mergers and acquisitions and regulatory matters. He has served as principal counsel for both vendors and users of information technology products and services.

Performance Tuning Must-Haves to Get your SharePoint 2007 Farm Through to SharePoint 2010

Mark Vogt

Manager/Enterprise Architect

Grant Thornton LLP

Abstract: With SharePoint 2010 RTM on the horizon, it’s likely your current SharePoint 2007 farm is now “mature”, and operating at the performance boundaries of its original design. Mark will address some of the must-have techniques for improving performance without adding more hardware or re-architecting. With these tunings in place, you should be able to run your current farm long and well enough to enable smooth transition into SharePoint 2010.

Mark Vogt has been consulting in knowledge management and portal technologies since 1995. His roles include developer, project manager, architect and manager while working with SharePoint technologies since 2000. He is a long time CSPUG member who holds a Master’s degree in Robotics and another Master’s degree in Computer Science. Mark runs blogs and YouTube videos focused on SharePoint, Consulting and “The Big Picture.”

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’ll be teaching during the week of March 29th. Hope to ‘virtually’ see you there!

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 release. Please keep in mind that SharePoint Designer 2010 will not work without SharePoint 2010 so you cannot use it to attach to a SharePoint 2007 site.

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 has finally made it onto MSDN. Check it out here in its entirety: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff355359.aspx. You can also check out the video/screencast for this whole process here: http://www.sharepoint-videos.com/automate-business-processes-using-infopath-forms-and-sharepoint-designer-workflows/

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.

When connecting to the database, there are a couple of options for authentication. The first one (and the one that’s shown in most of the demonstrations ) is by supplying it database credentials. Making the connection this way assures that only these credentials would be used by this web part… always! Meaning, no matter who is viewing this web part (reader, administrator or someone in the middle), they will all get the same experience. More often than not, this is not the user experience that organizations want. They want the user experience to be dependent on the user’s access level. For example, a sales person in the organization should be able to view the sales revenue data while an IT analyst should not. To make that happen, you need to configure the Single Sign On functionality which comes built into SharePoint Server. Single Sign On in SharePoint simply means that once the user logs on to their machine, SharePoint will take care of supplying their credentials to the backend applications or databases that the user needs access to. The image below shows how the Data View web part can utilize single sign on to access a database.

Want to see how the process works from end to end – configuring SSO and utilizing it in the Data View web part? Check out our free video of the week on Configuring Single Sign On. Enjoy!

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 subscription price - originally $199.50. You will get 12 months of access for only $159.50. Here is the link to the subscription page: http://www.sharepoint-videos.com/subscribe/. Click on the button for Yearly Option to get started.

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 thousands of people who will be reading this content. For this scenario, a Publishing Site template is best utilized.  

A publishing site is a feature of SharePoint Server Standard or above. This concept was integrated into SharePoint Server when Content Management Server (no longer a product by itself) was rolled into SharePoint in the 2007 release. A publishing site has publishing pages which contain field controls in addition to web part zones and web parts. These pages reside in a very special library called Pages. The pages in the Pages library all derive from pre-defined page layouts which tell the page how to position its content on the page. For example, a page layout can have a placeholder on the top right of the page to hold a picture while another page layout can have a picture placeholder at the top left of the page, but the same content regions as the other page layouts. 

Watch this video to see the differences being pointed out in a Team Site and a Publishing Site: Publishing Sites vs Team Sites.

Lots more of the videos have been made available for you to preview for free on the site for this week. If you are interested in any of the topics below, check the videos out at: http://www.sharepoint-videos.com/all-free-videos/

• Publishing Pages with Workflow in Publishing Sites 
• Control Content Approval and Publishing on a Library with Approval Workflow 
• Attach a SharePoint Designer Workflow to a Data View web part 
• Create a Powerful SharePoint Designer Workflow – Part 2 
• Initial Configuration of a new SharePoint Installation
• Use Content Query and Site Aggregator web parts to roll up your data
• Create a Master Detail relationship using web part connections
• Configure Single Sign On
• Create a Custom Search site
• Customize List View Web Parts using SharePoint Designer

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 Formatting to present your data
• Access Data from Databases and Web Services
• Create External Content Types to expose your Line of Business Data
• Create Page Layouts in Publishing Sites
• Working with Master Pages
• Create processes using InfoPath 2010 Forms, Visio 2010 Workflow Models and SPD 2010 Workflows
• Create Custom Actions on Lists
• and more…

To celebrate the release of this DVD, we are offering a $25 discount to the first 50 people who purchase the Single User license DVD. Once at the checkout page, enter the coupon code SPD2010DVD (please remember to click the Apply button to apply the discount to the price).

The complete list of all videos and purchase information are available on the site: http://www.sharepoint-videos.com/sharepoint-designer-2010-training-dvd/

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 2007 Training