Microsoft has provided us pre-built Office 2007 virtual machines containing the Beta 1 technical refresh. It is 13 GBs uncompressed. See Ethan or Dave S. or myself for a copy. I found the labs associated with the VMs to be fantastic. I want to share with everyone my observations based on the first 4-5 labs.
MOSS is Microsoft’s acronym for the next version of SharePoint Portal called Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. WSS is still WSS. It is just called WSS v3. It appears that most of this functionality comes with WSS v3 which will be free to companies.
Content Types
From the lab script –
"A Content Type is really a collection of settings that define a particular object that can live on Office 12 servers. Most organizations have at least a few “core” documents that everyone creates. This can be training manuals, design documents, legal briefs, proposals, etc. For those types of documents, it is valuable to take advantage of Content Types because you can create rich template objects that can be reused across multiple libraries and sites. "
With a content type, you associate specific properties, DIPs (document information panel), workflow, document templates, and policies (retension, versioning). Really powerful. You assign properties from a column template. A column template is user defined columns or properties that can be used across document libraries. This eliminates duplicate creation of the same property or likeness of a property. Furthermore, each document library can have more than one content type.
Document Libraries
Some cool new observations about document libraries. You can mail enable a document library so when a user is assigned a task, they are sent an email. Columns can be selected from column templates. Column templates are placed in groups so they can be added to a document library all at once. Item level security is possible on both document libraries and list items. The RSS subscription not only creates a posting for a change to each listing, each shows you what property of that list item has changed. My first thought is what will be the impact on storage sizing if MOSS keeps track every minute detail that changed in a list library or document library. Security trimming is cool. Users only see what they have access to. This includes items and documents level security. If you aren’t allowed to view a single list entry like a task, it will be hidden from you. The recycle bin is available as well.
DIP
The DIP is a document information panel. It appears at the top of a Word document and includes metadata. This metadata represents the properties of your document library. What this means is that metadata now travels with the word document. Fantastic. To make entry easier, a DIP is displayed below the toolbars. The DIP is really an infopath form embedded. You can create templates. Since it is infopath, it can be more than just static fields. You can have buttons and hidden panels within the panels. You can even add code behind it to perform business logic such as go to a database and bring back numeric values and autopopulate some of your metadata properties. Now that is impressive folks.
Excel Web Services
Reading blogs and hearing people briefly talk about this Excel Server I was thinking there must be a new server role. Well, at least in WSS v3 it is not. All you have to do is define a team site or web location as a trusted site where your excel spreadsheet is published. Then it can be used to be published in team sites. With connected web parts provided out of the box, you can have end users manipulate the data and bring back graphs and the like. By using the connected web parts or filter web parts, you can control the choices the end user has in enter data to manipulate the output. This is cool for things like BI and KPIs. I think there is much more to this than what I’ve mentioned. I suggest trying this yourself.
Firefox
In SharePoint 2003, drop down menus didn’t work in Firefox. I think it had to do with ActiveX. Well, they have not fixed it in beta 1 refresh although I’ve heard it will be fixed. I did create an Infopath form and publish it to SharePoint. This allows users to complete my form using a web browser. Completing a new instance of the form in Firefox worked pretty well. I was able to save to a form library. However, when I opened it up from the form library, some of the system buttions (i.e. buttons I didn’t add to the form but are there for SharePoint) didn’t work. The close or save buttons didn’t work. Not sure why.
