Slides MS Search Server 2008 from the BIWUG Session !

As promised, you can download here the MS Search Server 2008 slides from the BIWUG Session.

Thank you to all attendees!

Joris Poelmans also did an interesting session about "SharePoint as development platform - complaints/issues/rants ...and answers" He already made a blogpost about it!

Silverlight and SharePoint 2007 - 6 samples

Today i found 6 samples about Silverlight and Moss, the samples are with video, source code, documentation and setup:

• Hello World
• Silverlight navigation controls
• Silverlight social networking webpart
• Visual how-to center with webpart
• Picture viewer sample
• Silverlight custom field types

You can download the samples here:
http://www.ssblueprints.net/sharepoint/

Join my session about MS Search Server 2008 on BIWUG

On 20/03/2007 i will deliver a session about the search capabilities of MS Office SharePoint Server and the new product MS Search Server 2008 for BIWUG the "Belgian Information Worker User Group"

I will also demo the new federated search functionality!

20:15 - 21:30 Overview of Search in the Microsoft Platform and introduction to Search Server 2008 by Bart Vandenheede, Dolmen
In the first part of this session we will focus on the search capabilities in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. What’s in there out of the box and how can you extend the search functionality. The second part will focus on the soon to be released Search Server 2008.

There will also be a presentation about "Infonic SharePoint Geo-Replicator (formerly known as iOra) " about Server to Server and Offline Replication of Microsoft SharePoint 2003 & MOSS 2007

More information and registration on http://www.biwug.be/

See you there !

MS Search Server 2008 - When will it be available?

• At this moments you can download Release Candidate 1 on the Microsoft site (here)
• Q1 2008 : MS Search Server 2008 RTM will be released
• Q1 2008 : Af ther the RTM version is release, MS will bring an update patch for Moss 2007
• somewhere in 2008 : the update patch for Moss will be included in Moss 2007 SP 2

MS Search Server 2008 Part 4 - MS Search Server 2008 compared to MS Offiche SharePoint Server 2007

This matrix gives a good overview of the differences between Moss 2007 and MSS 2008:



In summary this matrix says:

• The search and crawl functions are almost the same
• MSS 2008 Express cannot be used for High availability solutions and load balancing
• MSS 2008 has NO people search, users profiles or My Sites
• MSS 2008 has no Business Data Catalog Search
• MSS 2008 does not have templates for a colaboration portal, records center, document center, ... and has no advanced publishing features.

So when to choose for Moss 2007 and when for MSS 2008 ?

If you do not need the more advance features of Moss 2007 like user profiles, mysites, people search, BDC, Froms Services, Excel Services, ... and you just need document management with good collaboration and good search functionality then MS Search Server 2008 is the right choice for you!

Programmaticaly checkin all documents in a document library

Today i wrote some small peace of code but it saved me a lot of (click) work. I uploaded 200 documents to a document library but all documents were checked out. I could do this boring job manualy but as a Sharepoint developer i wrote a quick console application to do the job.

This is the code (you can copy past it to you console application):

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using Microsoft.SharePoint;

namespace CheckinDocuments
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
Console.WriteLine("Please fill in the web url : ");
string webUrl = Console.ReadLine();

Console.WriteLine("Please fill in the name of the document library : ");
string documentLibraryName = Console.ReadLine();

if (webUrl != "")
{
using (SPSite site = new SPSite(webUrl))
{

SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb();
SPFile file = null;

//select the correct document library
foreach (SPList list in web.Lists)
{
if (list.Title.ToLower() == documentLibraryName.ToLower())
{
//loop all files and checkin if needed
foreach(SPListItem item in list.Items)
{
try
{

file = item.File;

if (file != null)
{
if (file.CheckOutStatus != SPFile.SPCheckOutStatus.None)
{
file.CheckIn("some comment");
file.Update();
Console.WriteLine("File checked-in = " + file.Name);
}
}
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
Console.WriteLine("Could not check-in file = " + file.Name + " - ERROR = " + ex.ToString());
}
}
}
}
}
}
Console.WriteLine("All documents are checked in, press enter to finish this program.");
Console.ReadLine();
}
}
}

MS Search Server 2008 Part 3 - Product Improvements

What are the product improvements?

Easy installation, you can install the search server in +/- 35 minutes depending on the type of installation. The installer installs automaticaly Windows Server 2003 SP1, .NET Framework 3.0 and configures your IIS to allow the ASP.NET Role as you can see in the screenshot below.










Better User Interface for management, SharePoint 2003 had, in my opinion, a bad interface for configuring search, the Moss 2007 is much better but the interface for the MS Search Server 2008 is even better! (see screenshot below)



The product has also some performance and stability enchancements for the search functionality.

The number of documents is UNLIMMITED! It now only depends on the performance of your hardware and server setup.

In my next post i will discuss when to use Moss 2007 and when to use MSS 2008 !