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Announcing: Availability of Infrastructure Updates

[IMPORTANT UPDATE 07/17: Please read the highlighted instructions below before starting your installation.]

This morning we released to web three new important updates that affect SharePoint Server 2007, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Project Server 2007, Search Server 2008, Search Server 2008 Express and Project Professional 2007.

The Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297) applies to:

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Microsoft Office Project Server 2007
Microsoft Search Server 2008
Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express

The Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB951695) applies to:

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

The Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Project 2007 (KB951547) applies to:

Microsoft Office Project Professional 2007

The Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers contains the new Enterprise Search features that were shipped in Search Server 2008 and Search Server 2008 Express that were are not already in SharePoint Server 2007; this includes Federated Search capability, a unified administration dashboard and several Search core platform performance updates. Read more about the new Search features here.

There are several Content Deployment updates included in both the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers and the Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. These updates address many of the top customer reported issues with Content Deployment. Read more about the Content Deployment updates here.

The Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297) and the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Project 2007 (KB951547) include several usability and performance updates for Project Server 2007 and Project Professional 2007 in addition to addressing the top customer reported issues. Read more about the Project Server and Project Professional updates here and in this White Paper.

All three updates contain fixes and product performance updates driven by customer feedback which have resulted in significant platform performance improvements in several areas. There has also been a focus on several core platform components, including improvements to upgrade, future patching and servicing, several targeted updates for workflow, the Business Data Catalog and inter-farm server authentication with Kerberos. For more detailed information please read the KB articles listed further on in this post.

We strongly recommend that you install the updates that apply to you as soon as your patching and maintenance schedules permit.

The updates can be downloaded from the links below:

Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297) - x86

Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297) - x64

Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB951695) - x86

Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB951695) - x64

Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Project 2007 (KB951547) - x86

* The updates are applicable to all shipping languages.

Installation Instructions are available from the links below:

Deploy Software Updates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Deploy Software Updates for Office SharePoint Server 2007 - This article also applies to Project Server 2007, SharePoint Server 2007, Search Server 2008 and Search Server 2008 Express.

Install the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (Office SharePoint Server 2007)

Install the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (Search Server 2008)

Related Knowledge Base Articles are available from the links below:

Description of the Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB951695)

Fixes Included in the Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB953749)

Description of the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297)

Fixes Included in the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB953750)

Description of the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Project 2007 (KB951547)

Fixes Included in the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Project 2007 (KB953751)

Please read and familiarize yourself with the installation instructions before you start.

For reference the following products require the following updates to be applied.

If you are running SharePoint Server 2007 you should:

Install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Service Pack 1 (SP1) if you haven’t already
Install 2007 Microsoft Office Servers Service Pack 1 (SP1) if you haven’t already.
Install the Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB951695).
Cancel out of the "SharePoint 3.0 Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard". (You CAN run the wizard if you want. It will just save you time if you run it once at the end.)
Install Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297)
Run the "SharePoint 3.0 Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard".

If you are running Project Server 2007 you should:

Install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Service Pack 1 (SP1) if you haven’t already
Install 2007 Microsoft Office Servers Service Pack 1 (SP1) if you haven’t already.
Install the Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB951695).
Cancel out of the "SharePoint 3.0 Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard". (You CAN run the wizard if you want. It will just save you time if you run it once at the end.)
Install Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297)
Run the "SharePoint 3.0 Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard".
You should also then install the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Project 2007 (KB951547) on all Project Professional 2007 client PC’s.

If you are running Search Server 2008 or Search Server 2008 Express you should:

Install the Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB951695).
Cancel out of the "SharePoint 3.0 Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard". (You CAN run the wizard if you want. It will just save you time if you run it once at the end.)
Install Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297)
Run the "SharePoint 3.0 Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard".

If you are running Project Professional 2007 you should Install the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Project 2007 (KB951547).

The installation process will incur server and farm downtime that you will need to plan for – updates should be installed on all servers in a farm.

Overview

Ironworks Consulting, a management and web consulting firm and Microsoft Gold Partner, recently launched a new global extranet for the Christian Children’s Fund (CCF), which is one of the most respected child development organizations in the world that has been a non-sectarian global force for children, working in 31 countries, assisting more than 13.2 million children regardless of race, creed or gender since its inception in 1938. CCF has provided more than $2.7 billion in services to children, with most of the funding coming from individual contributors in the form of child sponsorships.

As a leader in child development and protection issues, CCF’s programs provide practical assistance to impoverished communities and plant the seeds of self-sufficiency to create an environment of hope and respect for children in which they have opportunities to achieve their full potential and effect positive change in their communities. These comprehensive and sustainable programs incorporate health, education, nutrition and livelihood interventions that serve to protect, nurture and develop children. CCF employs a child-focused development approach that includes the voices of children, as well as their families and communities.

With a workforce geographically dispersed across over 33 countries worldwide, CCF faced significant challenges with usage and adoption of its existing intranet site and sought a more reliable and extensible solution to disseminate and share information across these offices, as well as to provide a platform for improving social networking and organizational connectivity.

The purpose of this project was to develop and implement a new CCF extranet, known as "The Hub", that would be used by all CCF employees worldwide as the single source for information, content and document storage, as well as a means for collaboration internally and externally.

Figure 1: Home page of CCF extranet.

Delivery Methodology

The project began with Assessment and Design phases, during which requirements were documented, site architecture was determined via the development of a site map and wire frames, and navigation, page layout and graphical designs were developed and approved to give the site a new look. During these initial phases the development of a prototype site was completed to help users better understand the new technology, as well as to provide interactive context to the requirements and design discussions. The chosen architecture was one that significantly leveraged MOSS 2007 technology, which was identified by CCF as the technology platform of choice for future business growth and team collaboration needs worldwide.

Ironworks was responsible for the installation and configuration of MOSS 2007 and SQL Server 2005 in the CCF production environment as well as the development and deployment of custom web parts, site templates, master pages, page layouts and custom HTML styles in support of a MOSS 2007 site collection consisting of over 75 sites. Once development began, Ironworks used an iterative development and deployment approach, which allowed CCF to gain access to the developing site much earlier to review and provide feedback as well as to begin the content migration process as soon as possible.

Lastly, Ironworks worked with CCF’s Interactive Communications and IT groups to provide training and documentation to prepare "The Hub" end-users, super users, and administrators for production deployment.

Governance Framework

Due to the strategic importance of CCF’s extranet initiative and the truly global presence of their personnel, Ironworks followed an aggressive approach to establishing a governance framework for The Hub prior to actual site implementation. Indeed, the extranet implementation necessitated a level of governance that was new to CCF’s dispersed organization. Ironworks worked with CCF to establish management policies and standards related to extranet content, sites, and objects managed within their MOSS based platform.

The heart of the governance framework was the definition and implementation of more than 100 custom content types. Standardizing document formats and metadata collection paved the way for improved retrieval, reuse, and ongoing information management. SharePoint's out-of-the-box approval workflows were associated with the various content types.

In conjunction with the definition of customized permission levels and security groups, the well defined taxonomy provided CCF with the tools for making and enforcing decisions related to the creation and management of content while at the same time enabling content development to be efficiently distributed to CCF subject matter experts. SharePoint’s extensibility also helped to reduce the dependency on IT processes and resources, creating an opportunity to smooth change acceptance and accelerate the transition to the new solution.

User Management

The view towards empowering business stakeholders extended to the creation and ongoing maintenance of new user accounts both in SharePoint and in Active Directory.

The functional requirements for the CCF Hub extranet site called for the creation of custom web parts that could be used by a select group of users to provision new and edit existing Active Directory accounts and SharePoint profiles. To meet this requirement, Ironworks built upon the membership controls included in the Solution Sharing Network (SSN) project that is part of the open source Community Kit for SharePoint as well as overriding and extending SharePoint's profile editing page.

Figure 2: Create Account page.

The account request control created by Ironworks was a pared down version of the one that is included in the SSN Portal. It consisted of only 5 fields that had to be filled out to request an account. Upon submitting the request, an item is generated in a custom list, and a workflow is kicked off whereby ultimately the request is approved or rejected by the designated Approver for the Active Directory OU that the requestor is a part of.

When the request is approved, the information is then sent to Active Directory where an account is created, and the information is also sent to the SharePoint profile store, where a profile is created for the user. The user then receives an email stating that an account has been created for them.

For editing existing profiles, including fields mapped back to Active Directory properties (e.g. email address), Ironworks developed a second custom search and edit control. Using the control, authorized users can search by username, or first and last name. A simple query is done against Active Directory for matching users, and the results are returned in a grid. For each record, the username is a link that takes the user to the details page for that user.

Figure 3: Search and Edit page for user profiles.

The details editing page is a SharePoint page (ProfAdminEdit.aspx) that has been copied from the context of the SSP and hosted directly in the layouts directory with custom authentication and data storage. Upon saving the revised form, the information is sent to both Active Directory and to SharePoint, overriding the form’s original method of saving exclusively to SharePoint.

Content Migration Support

During the requirements gathering phase, Ironworks provided CCF content managers with planning worksheets to catalogue content sources for each of the various departments and business units. This provided CCF with an early understanding of the scope of their content migration effort and allowed them to plan accordingly.

Because the level of effort associated with content migration can be significant, Ironworks identified opportunities to engage CCF personnel responsible for content migration during the site development and configuration phase. CCF had a large image repository with extensive metadata that needed to be migrated to MOSS. Ironworks completed the styling and build out of custom photo library functionality in the first iteration of site development. With this done, the photo library was opened to CCF personnel during development in order for them to start populating content several weeks prior to the production launch.

Figure 4: Photo Library with captions and custom viewer and styling.

Information Architecture Challenge

The CCF extranet project presented a number of challenges and opportunities in terms of creating a more intuitive Information Architecture (IA) for the audience, starting with the high level structure and including sub-site and page layout considerations.

High Level Structure

Because of the collaborative nature and capabilities of SharePoint, Ironworks worked to understand not only how CCF was organized, but also how they were sharing information across the organization. To determine the organization’s needs, Ironworks held a number of requirements sessions with the different internal groups to help determine site columns, content types, and understand CCF’s internal taxonomies.

CCF’s previous intranet had been built around a 5 year plan, which became outdated and hampered "findability" especially for newer employees within the organization. For the new extranet, Ironworks built a more general structure that supports scalability over time. Using high level categories such as "Groups" and "Offices" enabled users to quickly identify relevant sub-sites and drill down to find the necessary information.

To further improve "findability", Ironworks created custom navigation controls to expand upon the number of visible site map nodes and enable fly out menus, giving users a glimpse of information within lower levels and allowing them to jump directly to it.

Pulling from alternate language titles specified for all of the site collection’s pages, the custom navigation controls also provided end users with navigation text targeted to them based upon a "Preferred Language" property specified in their profile settings (English, Spanish, French, or Portuguese). Given the user’s preferred language, a call is made to the appropriate PortalSiteMapProvider (there is an overridden version for each language). The called provider takes each site map node and converts the title for that node into the language-specific equivalent for the user’s selected language. The conversion is really a substitution process whereby the provider retrieves the ‘Spanish Title’, ‘French Title’, etc. within the page record applicable to the current site map node. For the left-hand navigation menu, there is a control adapter that is implemented that intercepts the rendering of the menu, and replaces the HTML with tags and class settings that allow the design team to manipulate the look and feel with cascading stylesheets (CSSs). The control adapter parses the nodes in the menu and writes the appropriate HTML, which can be customized as necessary. This gives the developer great flexibility and control of what is rendered.

Figure 5: The Groups page in the French language.

Consistent Section Templates

Ironworks wanted to maintain an intuitive structure at the lower levels of the site, specifically within the "Units", "Groups", and "Offices" areas where the majority of the content exists. To achieve this, Ironworks created site templates with a consistent structure for the sites within these sections. The templates are general enough to support the different areas of the organization and provide the users with a consistent structure so that they know where to look for information.

Even as the sub-sites were standardized to a common look and feel, a unique visual branding was achieved through a custom header image control that was included in the site collection’s master page. The control pulled a distinctive header image for each sub-site based upon "Header Image Url" column stored in the site collection’s Sites listing.

Creating site templates for the different sub-sites had the additional effects of speeding the initial build-out of the site collection and easing site future site maintenance by allowing administrators to easily and quickly create new sites.

As a means of better organizing the presentation of information within each site, Ironworks developed a custom "Tabstrip" web part to allow designers to create a tabbed web part zone interface. The web part reads configuration information out of an XML configuration file stored within a document library in the site collection. It uses this information to determine the number and order of tabs to display, what names to display on the tabs, and what method to use to render the contents of the tab (iframe or div). When used in div mode, the Tabstrip works in conjunction with specialized SharePoint page layouts that include multiple div elements all appropriately named. When used in iframe mode, the Tabstrip can be added to any page layout given that the iframe element is added via the code in the Tabstrip solution. The Tabstrip web part supports audience targeting of tabs as needed based upon the inclusion of an "audiences" property in the XML configuration file.

Figure 6: Document Library rendered by Tabstrip web part.

Social Networking and Communication

By nature, CCF’s business requires that it be spread out across many regions, countries, and time zones. In many cases, employees who have never met face to face are required to communicate and collaborate on a daily basis. Additionally, as needs arise in different regions, new CCF staff assume responsibilities and communicating those changes can sometimes be a challenge.

To help accommodate these needs, Ironworks implemented and expanded on the social networking capabilities built into SharePoint. In addition to providing each user with a profile and profile photo, configuring People search, implementing an employee message board, and creating a wiki site for documenting organization-specific terminology, Ironworks also implemented several custom components to help acquaint users with their colleagues around the globe. These included:

AA OrgChart Web Part: An expandable/collapsible organization chart with employee photos and reporting structure at the company, region, country, group and unit levels.
Meet Your Colleagues Web Part: A custom-styled Content Query web part that highlights a selected "Meet Your Colleagues" article page from the "Community" portion of the extranet.
World Time Zones Web Part: A custom web part that uses UTC offset information and an image URL stored in a SharePoint list to display the current time and a map applicable to a particular locale. The web part can be configured to display information for a single region or it can be connected to a filter web part that allows users to select a country from a pick list.
HotSites Web Part: Based upon the web part of the same name that is a part of the SSN.WebControls.General of the Solution Sharing Network project, this web part provides a ranked listing of the most popular sites in the site collection based on user hits. The Ironworks version of the control is optimized for performance, offloading the crawl of the site collection’s audit logs to a nightly process that caches the results for display.
Outlook Inbox Control: Integrated into the site collection’s master page is control that displays a link to the user’s Outlook Inbox and indicates the current number of unread messages. The web control does a WebDav query that both checks if an inbox exists for a particular user and gets the number of unread messages. The output is then rendered as straight HTML with a Javascript call that opens a new window for Outlook Web Access.

The Importance of Search

As a final comment on the CCF case study, it should be noted that SharePoint’s Enterprise Search capabilities deserve a fair amount of credit for the successful adoption of The Hub. MOSS Search, augmented by the implementation of the Ontolica Search product, played a tremendous role in demonstrating the power of SharePoint to improve information sharing across a large and diverse organization.

Within the site collection’s search center, Advanced Search pages that were extended to include mapped metadata properties yielded tangible benefits to the business users that had invested so much time in defining custom content types. Likewise, the same metadata was put to good use through the implementation of Ontolica’s Search Summary Web Part, an easily configured tool for the display of faceted search results.

Figure 7: Advanced Search page.

Figure 8: Search Results page with configured facets provided by Ontolica Search.

Search Result web parts were used outside of the Search Center as well as a means of efficiently rolling up content across sub-sites based upon canned search queries. Ontolica's Search Results Web Part provided an easy to use interface for generating custom formatted lists of various content types including Announcements, Contacts, and News Stories.

Conclusion

For Ironworks, the implementation of the CCF extranet highlighted SharePoint’s role as a powerful platform and framework for robust application development. The Hub’s success came as the result of the union of SharePoint’s core strengths (Content Management, Search, Collaboration), key third party tools (AA OrgChart and Ontolica Search), and custom development by a Microsoft Certified Partner.

Blog Authors from the Project Team

Mark Gallagher - Project Manager, Ironworks Consulting
Sean Kesler - Business Analyst, Ironworks Consulting
David Perkinson - Lead Architect, Ironworks Consulting
Marissa Johnston - Information Architect, Ironworks Consulting
Bill Cavender - Assistant Director, Interactive Communications, Christian Children’s Fund

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Announcing open source Podcasting Kit for SharePoint - the power of social media for the enterprise

Overview

About 8 months ago, we posted a "How We Did It" guest blog entry here about Microsoft Academy Mobile, a community driven videocast/podcast solution that had been built on the SharePoint platform and continues to be used internally at Microsoft. We received a lot of feedback from customers, mostly in the form of "Hey, that's very cool, but how can I implement it for my own organization?" as well as many inquiries from partners in terms of "Can I get the source code, so I can leverage it as a building block for my enterprise social media solution offering?"

Well, we are very pleased to say, "Yes!" and "Yes!" to both questions by announcing the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint (PKS), available as an open source project at http://www.CodePlex.com/PKS. The PKS is an accelerator for social media, using podcasting and social networks to deliver the next generation knowledge management solution. Built on top of SharePoint Server 2007 and using Silverlight 2, the PKS delivers an integrated experience with a wide variety of devices including iPod, Zune, Windows Mobile phones, and other podcast capable devices. The PKS follows the same model and approach to open source community contributions and support as the Community Kit for SharePoint.

While the PKS is being implemented as a major upgrade to Academy Mobile within Microsoft, the following partners are ready to implement PKS-based commercially supported social media solutions for our customers.

3Sharp, as the primary developer of the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint, has very deep technical knowledge of the Kit and can effectively leverage it to quickly implement custom social media applications for the enterprise. 3Sharp's specialty is to build and implement business solutions that help customers get more out SharePoint and Office.
Accenture, the global management consulting, technology services, and outsourcing company, participated in the PKS pilot program along with several of our clients including British Telecom. Accenture is leveraging and extending SharePoint and the PKS to offer Enterprise 2.0 style learning and collaboration solutions to its clients. In addition to technology implementation, Accenture helps its clients drive measurable business value by addressing the strategy, people, and process components that are necessary to achieve high performance. For more info, contact thomas.w.hoglund [at] accenture.com.
Nintex is an innovative provider of SharePoint value added tools and solutions. Nintex will leverage the PKS as the foundation for their next generation Podcast Server product.

Customer and Partner Excitement

Peter Butler is the Head of Learning at British Telecom Group and chairs BT’s Learning Council, whose primary purpose is to maximize the ability of individuals, teams, and the organization as a whole to grow and transform in pursuit of the company’s strategic goals and objectives, has this to say about the PKS:

"British Telecom is very excited to be an early adopter of the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint. With Accenture’s help, we are launching a pilot project to help 4,500 program and project managers collaborate and share information. We believe these new technologies will be an important enabler to sharing knowledge, experience, and ideas across our business units and in helping our employees reach an even higher level of performance."

Tom Hoglund is a Partner in Accenture’s Talent & Organization Performance service line, which focuses on helping employees of client organization perform at a higher level through leveraging the tools of knowledge management, employee portals, collaboration, and learning. He has a global leadership role for Accenture’s practice in these areas and more than 25 years of consulting experience in leading numerous projects that have delivered millions of dollars of benefits to clients and touched hundreds of thousands of people. We're very excited that someone like Tom is so excited about the potential of the PKS and has this to say about it:

"Corporate and public sector learning organizations have traditionally only addressed 20% of how employees learn. The PKS, combined with Accenture’s learning and collaboration experience, enables our clients to facilitate and accelerate learning, exactly when and where it is needed, independent of location or device. That’s a huge advantage."

Solution Scenarios

Communications

Corporate Communications: Stay in touch with your executives
Multimedia Newsletters: Stay in touch with your colleagues

Training / eLearning 2.0

Give your employees the freedom to learn relevant information on-demand- anytime, anywhere
Allow your employees to share and learn from others

Partner Relationships

Advertise and drive awareness about your partner relationships internally

Innovation

Ask your most innovative people to find creative ways to share great ideas through audio and video podcasting

Digital Marketing / Advertisement

Directly reach out to your customers and create a social networking community that will generate interest

Lectures / Courses

Easily share, consume and publish lectures and training sessions in one centralized location
Create a virtual classroom discussion via commenting and instant messaging

Community Building

Stay connected with what’s new in the community to keep up-to-date
Generate a team oriented environment

Feature Highlights

PKS Home Page

PKS Podcast Page

PKS Podcaster Page

Open Source Community Excitement

The following open source projects have already been spawned from the PKS project:

EDEN Mobile RSS Client - Windows Mobile RSS client with podcast download queuing and resume.
MTC VBG Application - MTG VBG stands for "Microsoft Technology Center Virtual Bubblegum Application." This Windows Vista application provides a rich 3D UI for the PKS.
Nintex Podcast Client 2008 - Podcast client for the PKS that enables podcast recording directly from your web browser.

To ensure that there will be even more PKS sub-projects in the near future, we have put aside some funding to subsidize turning the most compelling PKS feature ideas into actual functionality. Take a look at the PKS Discussions List for the current list of feature ideas and vote for your favorite(s), or you can add your own feature idea(s) to the list.

We Welcome Your Feedback!

We are very proud to be able to share the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint as an open source project with our customers and partners. We deeply believe in the potential of social media within the enterprise. At Microsoft, we've witnessed the following stats for the Academy Mobile application:

2,100+ total podcasts and growing every day
3,100+ registered podcaster accounts
3,700+ unique visitors in May, 2008
1,800 page views average per day
80,000+ downloads since July, 2007

We would love to hear about your enterprise social media success stories as well as any feedback on how we can work with the open source community to improve the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint. Please leave your comments under this blog entry or in the PKS discussion board.

Phil Morel, Director, Microsoft Academy, and sponsor of the PKS initiative
Ludovic Fourrage, Group Program Manager, Microsoft Academy and the PKS initiative
Paolo Tosolini, New Media Business Manager, Microsoft Academy and the PKS initiative
Lawrence Liu, Senior Technical Product Manager, SharePoint Product Group liaison to the PKS initiative

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More ISV Partners Betting on SharePoint Server 2007 as the de facto Enterprise Social Computing Platform

We are very excited to highlight our ISV partners listed below, all of whom are leading providers of enterprise social software, and they have placed significant bets on SharePoint Server 2007 as the Enterprise Social Computing Platform of choice. See them at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference this week and expect to hear much more from them about their SharePoint integration and value added features in the coming weeks!

Atlassian, the maker of Confluence, a leading enterprise wiki, announced the beta of their SharePoint Connector for Confluence about six months ago, and it's now available for production usage. With the SharePoint Connector, Confluence and SharePoint Server are integrated to provide single sign-on, cross-product search, and bidirectional content embedding and linking.

Awareness is announcing integration with SharePoint Server, which enables SharePoint users to seamlessly engage with Internet facing communities powered by Awareness's SaaS-based application without having to leave the SharePoint environment.

blueKiwi Software is announcing SharePoint Connector and OfficeAssistant, which integrates blueKiwi’s enterprise social software suite with SharePoint Server and Microsoft Office. blueWiki provides dynamic expertise identification, social network visualization, and an aggregated view of all conversations happening across the entire enterprise.

Connectbeam is announcing Spotlight Connect for SharePoint, a social bookmarking and tagging add-on module for SharePoint Server that integrates with Connectbeam's enterprise social search and discovery application.

Leverage Software is announcing integration with SharePoint Server, which enables SharePoint users to seamlessly interact with Internet facing communities of customers, partners, and corporate alumni that are powered by Leverage Software's SaaS-based application.

NewsGator is announcing Social Sites 2.0, which provides seamlessly integrated community, expertise discovery, social network visualization, social tagging, and feed reading capabilities on top of SharePoint Server.

Telligent is announcing Community Server Evolution, which through its REST API, mail gateway, and shared authentication capabilities, provides deep integration and interoperability with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Exchange Server, Active Directory and Telligent Community Server, an industry leading social computing and online community platform.

Tomoye is announcing a SharePoint Server-ready offering, which enables organizations to successfully deploy communities of practice using Tomoye's industry proven process and technology.

WorkLight is announcing WorkLight for SharePoint, which enables SharePoint users to securely view and update information in SharePoint through Web 2.0 tools such as Windows Vista gadgets and Facebook applications.

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How We Did It: Connectbeam Spotlight Connect for SharePoint

Overview

Connectbeam, founded in December, 2005, is a leading provider of enterprise social software applications and the first company to integrate concepts of social bookmarking and tagging with those of social networking. Connectbeam’s new Spotlight Connect for SharePoint provides SharePoint users with a single destination for discovering and sharing rich enterprise social bookmarking and tagging information. Spotlight Connect for SharePoint also extends and enhances the native collaboration and discovery capabilities of SharePoint Server 2007.

Spotlight Connect for SharePoint is implemented as a series of Web Parts and is enabled via Connectbeam’s REST-based APIs. Further information about the Connectbeam APIs is available at http://www.connectbeam.com/support/cbeam_api.

This blog entry describes how Spotlight Connect for SharePoint enhances SharePoint’s Enterprise Search and My Site capabilities by augmenting these native SharePoint features with enterprise social content from Connectbeam. This results in SharePoint users having a greater reach of “social discovery.” For example, SharePoint's Enterprise Search results can now be associated with Connectbeam’s Related Tags or Bookmarks, immediately revealing new and hitherto “hidden dimensions” of information discovery.

Additionally, SharePoint users can also interact directly with the core Connectbeam Spotlight social networking application to provide even richer social networking metadata and social discovery capabilities. This interaction is initiated simply by clicking on exposed Connectbeam data, such as Tags, in SharePoint.

The core Connectbeam Spotlight application is implemented as a secure “drop-in” hardware appliance that resides behind the corporate firewall. Connectbeam Spotlight interaction with SharePoint is performed via Web Parts and supports a Microsoft single sign-on infrastructure based on Active Directory.

Connectbeam Tags and Bookmarks

At the heart of the Connectbeam Spotlight application is the ability to apply and manage Bookmark and Tag information. This Bookmark and Tag information can be associated with any web content that has a URL. One convenient way of making this association is by using the Connectbeam “Bookmarklet”, which can be launched from the Connectbeam web browser toolbar. An example screenshot displaying the Connectbeam Toolbar is shown below:

Figure 1: Connectbeam Toolbar – Bookmarklet Launch Button is outlined in red

Clicking on the Connectbeam Bookmarklet button results in the actual Connectbeam Bookmarklet panel being displayed, and from here, any web content can be bookmarked and associated with any number of tags. This data is then centrally stored and managed by the Connectbeam Spotlight application. An example of the Connectbeam Bookmarklet is shown below.

Figure 2: Connectbeam Bookmarklet – specified tags are outlined in red

In the above example Bookmarklet, the Microsoft SharePoint Server web site home page is being bookmarked with the Tags: “Microsoft”, “SharePoint”, and “MOSS 2007”. Bookmark and Tag information like this (and other stored Connectbeam Spotlight social networking information, such as Users, Expert Communities, etc.) can now be visualized and leveraged in SharePoint via Connectbeam’s integration.

Connectbeam Integration Overview

This section of the blog entry discusses at a high level how some of the main features of Connectbeam’s integration with SharePoint have been enabled from both the user interface and software development perspectives. Technical details of the development of the Connectbeam integration Web Parts are described in the next section of the blog entry. Overall, the integration work was carried out by one developer and took approximately two weeks to complete. We were very pleased by the ease with which we can integrate with SharePoint.

A Web Part is a user interface component similar to the familiar controls that we see on ordinary web pages. However, in addition to providing “canned” UI functionality, Web Parts can also participate in SharePoint’s personalization infrastructure. That is, individual users can add, remove, and configure their own custom view of a SharePoint site by manipulating the Web Parts available to them. Connectbeam displays Web Part data in the Home and Profile areas of the SharePoint user’s My Site.

The My Home Web Part performs a SharePoint enterprise search for a given keyword and augments the standard SharePoint search results with Related Tags, Related Bookmarks, and Related Users social data from Connectbeam. An example of this is shown in the screenshot below. The SharePoint enterprise search results for the search term “java” are shown in the “Intranet search results” section of the Web Part. These SharePoint search results are supplemented by Connectbeam's “Related Tags”, “Related Users”, and “Related Bookmarks” social information. Clicking on any of this Connectbeam data will reveal further insight about this social data - either directly in a browser (for Bookmarks) or within the Connectbeam Spotlight application for other information.

Figure 3: My Home Enterprise Search Web Part

The My Profile Web Part shows user profile data from the SharePoint User Profiles Store and also displays the user’s social network Tags, Bookmarks, and Expert Communities data from Connectbeam Spotlight. By default, the standard SharePoint user profile data is displayed in the "About Me" tab. The Connectbeam Spotlight social content data is displayed by clicking on the “Social Content” tab.

Figure 4: My Profile Web Part showing the user's default SharePoint User Profile data

Upon clicking on the “Social Content” tab, Connectbeam Spotlight social content data (i.e. Bookmarks, Tag Cloud, Expert Communities) can be displayed. All of this social content is clickable and their content and relevance can then be explored more deeply within the Connectbeam Spotlight application.

Figure 5: My Profile Web Part showing the user’s Social Content from Connectbeam Spotlight

Technical Details for Connectbeam Integration Web Parts

The Web Parts described above were developed using the following implementations and sample code snippets:

· Create the Web Part class

1. Create a new class library project.

2. Inherit the class from Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.WebPart

· Create child controls

1. Override the CreateChildControls method of the Web Part base class

protected override void CreateChildControls()

{

base.CreateChildControls();

_tbxText = new TextBox();

_tbxText.Text = "java";

this.Controls.Add(_tbxText);

btnSubmit = new Button();

btnSubmit.Text = "Search";

btnSubmit.Click += new EventHandler(Search_Click);

this.Controls.Add(btnSubmit);

//Create label to show SharePoint search results

labelSrchRes = new Label();

labelSrchRes.Text = "Search Results";

labelSrchRes.Visible = false;

this.Controls.Add(labelSrchRes);

//Create label to show Related Bookmarks

labelRelBookmarks = new Label();

labelRelBookmarks.Text = "Related Bookmarks";

labelRelBookmarks.Visible = false;

this.Controls.Add(labelRelBookmarks);

//Create label to show Related Tags – similar to Bookmarks above

…