MOSSIG Meeting

The MOSSIG meeting on Wednesday evening was really interesting. Tim Wragg provided an informative rundown on the hi-lites and lo-lites of Tech Ed 2006 and Ben Walters re-presented one of his InfoPath presentations he gave at Tech Ed. The third presentation for the night was scheduled to be on Groove in the workplace but the presenter was unable to make it at short notice.

At this stage MOSSIG will not be having a meeting next month due to the relocation of Microsoft from Como to Southbank and the unavailability of a suitable venue.

The November meeting will be moved to the 15th to coincide with a special Vista / Office 2007 event at Crown. MOSSIG are planning on having a stand there during the day and will conduct the monthly meeting after the event (at Crown).

Also announced on Wednesday night was the MOSSIG team "MO-ssig" that will be entering into this years Mo-vember charity for prostate cancer. Anyone interested in joining the "MO-ssig" team should contact myself via email.

Enhance Office 2007 Installations

The Microsoft SharePoint product group have posted a great summary of community contributions around B2TR, especially the articles around enhancing the installation by slipstreaming the B2TR into the one installation meadia. This will save heaps of installation time for those numerous virtual server environment we all need to setup. http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2006/09/15/756692.aspx

Installing Beta 2 Technical Refresh (B2TR)

The SharePoint product team have just posted a very important blog about the steps required to install B2TR. Before you do anything with the Tech Refresh (due out very soon), you must read this article.

Variations in MOSS 2007

I have been involved in building Multilingual websites in MCMS since late 2002. This was achieved with considerable development effort and by using one of two design patterns in MCMS:

• Single Channel hierarchy; where each posting contained every language to be displayed in multiple placeholders.
• Multiple Channel hierarchies; where individual postings of matching content in the different languages where create.

To make life easier, MOSS 2007 has a feature called “Variations”. This feature allows you to create a page and set it as the source variation then automatically or manually make any changes flow to the target variations. The variation feature is integrated into the workflow mechanisms and also the content import/export which will enable hooking into third-party translation services. Angus and Arpan gave an excellent presentation on variations at this year’s Tech Ed.

Another example of why variations will be very useful is Mobile content delivery. This will allow you to create a source variation page then deploy a target variation for mobile phone delivery, hence target multiple audiences with one content authoring process.

Mapping MCMS terminology to MOSS

Those that currently develop MCMS 2002 sites and want to move over to MOSS 2007, will need to understand the equivalent terminology in the new platform. The information below provides a list of MCMS terms and their equivalent term in MOSS 2007.

MCMS 2002	MOSS 2007
Template definition	Content Type
Template page (.ASPX)	Page Layout
Content placeholder	List Column
Placeholder controls	Web controls
Posting	Page
Channel	Site
Resource gallery	Document library, picture library
Basic built-in workflow	Windows Workflow Framework (WF)

Other equivalences that you will need to become familiar with would be the namespace changes. A good article on the API differences is on the MSDN site.

MCMS 2002 vs MOSS 2007 Terms

Those that currently develop MCMS 2002 sites and want to move over to MOSS 2007, will need to understand the equivalent terminology in the new platform. The information below provides a list of MCMS terms and their equivalent term in MOSS 2007.

MCMS 2002	MOSS 2007
Template definition	Content Type
Template page (.ASPX)	Page Layout
Content placeholder	List Column
Placeholder controls	Web controls
Posting	Page
Channel	Site
Resource gallery	Document library, picture library
Basic built-in workflow	Windows Workflow Framework (WF)

Other equivalences that you will need to become familiar with would be the namespace changes. A good article on the API differences is on the MSDN site.

MOSSIG Meeting - September 2006

Next Meeting is at CITC, Level 1, 257 Collins Street on September 27th 2006 6:00pm.

It has been a very busy month. Tech Ed 2006 was run in Sydney and there were a substantial number of breakout sessions along the Office stream.

TechEd 2006 - Highlights
Tim Wragg, Professional Advantage

Tim will be presenting some quick highlights on Tech Ed 2006, what was good, what wasn’t so good.

Development, Deployment And Hosting For Rich And
Browser Forms (InfoPath)
Ben Walters (InfoPath MVP), Strategic Data Management

Ben was a presenter at this year’s Tech Ed and will be representing one of his presentations for the MOSSIG.

Groove in the workplace.
Marc Dimmick, Brightstar Corp

Discussion and presentation on how to use groove in a number of different areas. Document management, Issue Management, Help Desk, International Projects, HR just to name a couple.

Please note the venue change to CITC, Level 1, 257 Collins Street. Microsoft is moving from the Como to Southbank and we are unable to use the auditorium this month.

To register please email Ed Richard by COB Monday 25th September 2006.

Web Content Management Links and Resources

Andrew Connell an MCMS MVP has compiled a very comprehensive list of links and resource around Web Content Management in MOSS 2007 and MCMS 2002. Definitely one for bookmarking.

CMS Assessment Tool

For those who currently operate MCMS 2002 sites and are considering the move to MOSS 2007, it has never been easier. As I have stated previously, migration is a two step process, step one being the content and step two being the site code. Content is migrated to MOSS using the content migration tool. During this process the tool will perform several tests on your MCMS database. Although this will give a fairly comprehensive report on the state of the content, it doesn’t address issues that might arise during the manual code migration.

The CMS Assessment Tool is a tool that has been developed to perform the same tests that occur during the migration plus a review of the source code. Information on how to install, run and interpret the result can be found here.

The CMS Assessment Tool can be run over any current MCMS solution and you do not even need to have MOSS 2007 installed. I would encourage anyone thinking about migration to MOSS, to run the assessment tool to determine any road blocks or areas that will need to be worked on during migration.