I am now Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist ;)

Hi,

I am glad to share with you that I cleared both the MOSS Certification 2007 exams.I am now Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist.

I have cleared the MOSS certification.
1. TS:MS Office Sharepoint Server 2007- Application Development and
2. TS:MS Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 Application Development

I'll be posting the guidelines and reference material in my next post.

So keep checking.

Till then....Happy MOSS Programming ;)

Alternate Access Mappings

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/03/06/what-every-sharepoint-administrator-needs-to-know-about-alternate-access-mappings-part-1.aspx

Webparts Blogs

http://blogs.msdn.com/modonovan/archive/tags/default.aspx

White Paper: Building Custom Search WebParts with Integrated SAP Portal Search for MOSS

White Paper: Building Custom Search WebParts with Integrated SAP Portal Search for MOSS

http://www.sharepointbuzz.com/index.php/2007/02/25/white-paper-building-custom-search-webparts-with-integrated-sap-portal-search-for-moss/

MOSS 2007 Videos & Screencasts

MOSS 2007 Videos & Screencasts

http://betterecm.wordpress.com/2006/10/25/moss-2007-videos-screencasts/

Published October 25th, 2006 Microsoft SharePoint , ECM , Office2007
Here are some links to videos and screencasts for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 on MSDN that SharePoint developers will find useful:

Anonymous Access and Forms Authentication with WSS 3.0
Learn how to configure a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 site to use the ASP.NET 2.0 Forms Authentication Provider.
Configuring Security and Authorization with WSS 3.0
Learn the new WSS 3.0 model for configuring access to a WSS site collection.
Creating WSS 3.0 Workflows with Visual Studio 2005
Create a custom workflow with Visual Studio 2005 and configure it to run from within a WSS 3.0 site.
Introducing the Business Data Catalog (BDC)
Learn how to access back-end systems using the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) Business Data Catalog.
Retrieving Data Programmatically from the MOSS Business Data Catalog
Create a custom Web Part that performs custom queries against Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) Business Data Catalog applications.
Using MOSS to Create BI Dashboards and KPIs
Create a custom Report Center site with a MOSS dashboard using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
Web Content Management in MOSS 2007
Use the Web Content Management features of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to create a custom page layout for publishing content to the web.
SharePoint Products and Technologies 2007 Overview
3 group program managers (Jon Kauffman, PJ Hough, and Gerhard Schobbe) discuss the cool new features that in the Beta 2 release.
Creating Custom Workflows with SharePoint Designer 2007
Use the SharePoint Designer 2007 Workflow Designer to build a custom workflow on a SharePoint list.
SharePoint 2007 - Blogs, Wikis, RSS
Learn about the new SharePoint 2007 native support for RSS, Wikis and Blogs.
Rob Lefferts - SharePoint Services and Workflow
Rob Lefferts discusses SharePoint 2007 and workflow.
Creating and Customizing Site Pages with SharePoint Designer 2007
Understand the difference between page templates and page instances and learn how to customize your pages.
Accessing Server-side Workbooks and Excel Services through Web Services
Program standard Web Services from a Windows Forms Application to load Excel workbooks and perform server-side calculations.
Creating and Using Event Handlers in WSS v3
Create a list item receiver class to handle synchronous and asynchronous events.
Creating and Testing Features with WSS v3
Use Visual Studio 2005 to create and deploy a custom SharePoint 2007 feature.
Office SharePoint Server 2007: Knowledge Network
Knowledge Network is a new add-on for Office SharePoint Server 2007 that many people don’t know about yet. It automates the discovery and sharing of undocumented knowledge and relationships, enabling you to quickly locate who knows whom and who knows what within your constantly changing organization. In this interview John Hand and Glen Anderson from the KN team take us on a tour of Knowledge Network.

BI -ReportCenter

Thats Business Intelligence (BI) issues by the way - SPS 2003, the Office 2003 Web Parts and Components Add-in, and Business Scorecard Manager all provided customers with important business intelligence (BI) features. Developers have used these BI technologies as a platform for building dashboard-style applications that provide upper-level management with up-to-date data that reflects the health of a business and flags potential problems in a timely matter.Based on their experience with these earlier BI components, the Office team designed MOSS 2007 to include a next-generation platform for building dashboards and integrating with other technologies such as Microsoft Excel 2007, SQL Server Reporting Services, and SQL Server Analysis Services. As with all other aspects of MOSS 2007, its BI platform builds on top of ASP.NET and WSS 3.0 and provides many opportunities for extending the default functionality.Consistent customer feedback indicated that a large percentage of corporations maintain a significant amount of business logic in Excel workbooks, and that this business logic has been hard to reuse across a large organization. This feedback led the Office team to create MOSS 2007 Excel Services, a server-side version of the traditional Excel calculation engine that has been rewritten from the ground up on top of WSS 3.0. Excel Services doesn’t suffer from the same types of scalability problems that occur when you run the desktop version of Excel on the server.Excel Services also provides a server-side rendering engine that can display worksheets in the browser as HTML. That means a company can store its Excel workbooks in a centralized document library and make them viewable by users who don’t even have Excel installed on their desktops. Furthermore, users can see the numbers displayed by a worksheet within the browser without having any access to the business logic behind it, thereby protecting a company’s intellectual property.The 2007 Microsoft Office system introduces a new paradigm, recognizing that companies maintain business logic within Excel just as they maintain business logic within compiled assemblies or SQL stored procedures. To support this new paradigm, the Office team added many new features to the 2007 Office system products designed to expose and update this business logic as well as to protect the intellectual property represented by this logic.The desktop version of Excel 2007 has been enhanced to allow information workers with Excel expertise to publish and update their workbooks in a document library within an MOSS 2007 portal site or a WSS team site. Users running Excel can view these workbooks through the familiar client experience while other users can rely on Excel Services to view the same workbook inside the browser. Note that this new workbook publishing metaphor allows a company to maintain a single master copy of its critical workbooks. It also allows the workbook author to post updates without the need to involve the development or IT staff.It’s important to note that the use of Excel Services isn’t restricted to the browser. You can create a Windows Forms application that uses the server-side Excel calculation engine but that doesn’t use the rendering engine. For example, a Windows Forms application can use Web services from Excel Services to load a workbook on the server, enter input data, perform calculations, and return a result as shown in Figure 10.You can see it’s not that hard to take advantage of formulas in Excel spreadsheets from across the network in a desktop application. This example furthers the analogy that Excel Services exposes the business logic defined in a workbook just as SQL Server exposes the business logic defined in a stored procedure.MOSS 2007 provides a special site template named Report Center for companies that want to build dashboard-style applications. Report Center was designed to make the new BI features of MOSS 2007 easy to discover and use. A Report Center site contains a document library named Reports Library that is tuned for storing and displaying BI reports such as Excel workbooks and reports built for SQL Reporting Services.Another important aspect of Report Center is the built-in support for creating and importing key performance indicators (KPIs), visual BI indicators that tell a manager how some aspect of the business is doing. For example, the KPI for a product inventory level might display a green light when there is enough inventory to supply all the orders for the coming week. However, the light might turn from green to yellow when the inventory level drops below some predefined threshold such as the amount of inventory required to supply orders for the next four days. The light then might change from yellow to red when the inventory level drops to a point where it will run out within the next 48 hours. The main idea is that a KPI flags business problems that require immediate attention.MOSS 2007 provides out-of-the-box support for several different KPI types. For example, you can create a KPI whose indicator changes automatically depending on data it reads dynamically from a WSS list or an Excel workbook. MOSS also provides integration support for KPIs in SQL Server 2005. That is, if you have already created KPIs with SQL Server Analysis Services, you can import and display them on a Report Center site alongside other supported KPIs.The last aspect of Report Center I want to discuss is the built-in framework for filtering data before it’s shown to the user. This is a key component of the MOSS 2007 dashboard framework because it makes dashboard pages more relevant to the user. When a manager visits a Report Center site, the experience is enriched if the dashboard views have been customized with data that is relevant for that particular manager. For example, a sales manager for the Eastern region can be presented with a different view of sales figures than the sales manager for the Western region. Furthermore, managers like to be able to see high-level data at first and then drill down into more specific categories on demand.

Filtering support is built into MOSS 2007 dashboards at the page level using Web Part connections. MOSS supplies Web Parts that allow page designers and users alike to specify criteria such as the name of the current user, a date range, or a product category. There are also many supplied Web Parts that can be configured to consume the filtering criteria supplied by other Web Parts such as the standard WSS List View Web Part as well as the Web Parts designed for use with the BDC, Excel Services, SQL Reporting Service, and SQL Analysis Services.


Remember that BI is only one of the four key pillars or themes coming out of Office 2007 server capabilities, Enterprise Content Management, Enterprise Project management and Communication and Collaboration are the others which i’ll be blogging about in the coming weeks.

AD architecture limitation and how it affects SPS 2003 security architecture

AD architecture limitation and how it affects SPS 2003 security architecture

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/tbaginski/archive/2004/05/28/513.aspx

MOSS Architecture & Shared Services

MOSS Architecture & Shared Services

http://blogs.msdn.com/martinkearn/archive/2006/06/06/619251.aspx

Moving from design to reality - building HedKandi.com in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Team Blog
A blog about the ECM features in the 2007 Office system, with a focus on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, which includes document management, records management, and web content management capabilities. Enabling technologies such as workflow and information rights management, which are essential to ECM solutions, will also be covered.
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Moving from design to reality - building HedKandi.com in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

MOSS2007 – Look and Feel (Part 1 - The Beginning)

MOSS2007 – Look and Feel (Part 1 - The Beginning)
http://www.sharepointblogs.com/helloitsliam/archive/2006/08/26/11609.aspx

Check out Microsoft Presentations and Videos
http://www.sharepointblogs.com/mkruger/archive/2006/05/25/7570.aspx

Office 2007 Partner Technical Readiness Training Presentations (Via Chris Johnson)

( 1 ) Office 2007 New User Experience Part 1.wmv [ 10.1 MB ]
( 2 ) Office 2007 New User Experience Part 2.wmv [ 32.7 MB ]
( 3 ) Office 2007 Developing In Word 2007.wmv [ 29.0 MB ]
( 4 ) Office 2007 Core Excel Advances.wmv [ 19.9 MB ]
( 5 ) Office 2007 InfoPath Forms In Outlook.wmv [ 32.7 MB ]
( 6 ) Office 2007 New File Format Overview.wmv [ 14.6 MB ]
( 7 ) Office 2007 Servers Overview.wmv [ 36.1 MB ]
( 8 ) Office 2007 Windows SharePoint Services Collaboration.wmv [ 28.2 MB ]
( 9 ) Office 2007 ECM Part1 - Doc Mgmt.wmv [ 30.1 MB ]
( 10 ) Office 2007 ECM Part2 - WCM.wmv [ 24.9 MB ]
( 11 ) Office 2007 Knowledge Mgmt.wmv [ 25.5 MB ]
( 12 ) Office 2007 BI.wmv [ 15.0 MB ]
( 13 ) Office 2007 Server Develoment.wmv [ 25.1 MB ]

Workflow Whitepaper

Workflow Whitepaper

Quick note to say that the Workflow WP link has been updated - the whitepaper is available at Understanding Workflow in Windows SharePoint Services and the 2007 Microsoft Office System.

Backup and Recovery in MOSS 2007 white Paper

The first of this series, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 Backup and Recovery Strategies by James Joyce is now available and I will place a copy on my Reading Room page.
By the way, the PDF was created using the downloadable Office PDF add-in.
Here is the link to download the paper.
Let me know what you think.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Product Overview

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Product Overview
Updated: September 19, 2006
Related Links
•
SharePoint Server 2007 FAQ
•
SharePoint Server 2007 Demo
•
SharePoint Server 2007 Product Guide
On This Page

Manage Content and Processes

Improve Business Insight

Simplify Internal and External Collaboration

Empower IT to Make a Strategic Impact

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search
Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides enterprise-scale capabilities to meet business-critical needs like managing content and business processes, simplifying how people find and share information across boundaries, and enabling better informed decisions. Office SharePoint Server 2007 supports all of the intranets, extranets, and Web applications across an enterprise within one integrated platform, instead of relying on separate fragmented systems.
Manage Content and Processes
Simplify compliance efforts and keep business information secure through a comprehensive set of tools to manage and control electronic content. Streamline the everyday business processes that are a drain on organizational productivity by using electronic forms and out-of-the-box workflow processes that users can initiate, track, and participate in through familiar Microsoft Office applications, e-mail, or browsers.
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Control documents through detailed, extensible policy management. Define customized document management policies to control access rights at a per-item level, specify retention period and expiration actions, and track content through document-auditing settings. Policy integration with familiar client applications makes compliance transparent and easy for employees. Integration with Information Rights Management ensures that proprietary and confidential information is effectively protected even if it is not connected to a server.
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Centrally store, manage, and access documents across the enterprise. Organizations can store and organize all business documents and content in one central location, and users have a consistent mechanism to navigate and find relevant information. Default repository settings can be modified to add workflow, define retention policies, and add new templates and content types.
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Simplify Web content management. Provide easy-to-use functionality to create, approve, and publish Web content. Master Pages and Page Layouts provide reusable templates for a consistent look and feel. New functionality enables enterprises to publish content from one area to another (for example, from a collaborative sites to a portal), or cost effectively manage multilingual delivery of content on multiple intranet, extranet and Internet sites.
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Extend business processes across the organization. Forms Services-driven solutions make it possible to securely and accurately collect information both inside and outside the organization without coding any custom applications. This information can then be integrated easily into line-of-business systems, stored in document libraries, used to start workflow processes, or submitted to Web services, thus avoiding duplicate effort and costly errors resulting from manual data entry.
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Streamline everyday business activities. Take advantage of workflows to automate and gain more visibility into common business activities such as document review and approval, issue tracking, and signature collection. Integration with familiar Microsoft Office client applications, e-mail, and Web browsers simplifies the user experience. Organizations can easily modify the out-of-the-box processes or define their own processes using familiar Microsoft tools such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 (the next generation Microsoft Office FrontPage) or Microsoft Visual Studio development system.
Top of page
Improve Business Insight
Effectively monitor business drivers, empower better informed decisions throughout the organization, and proactively respond to important business events.
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Present business-critical information in one central location. Create live, interactive business intelligence (BI) portals that assemble and display business information from disparate sources by using integrated BI capabilities such as dashboards, Web Parts, key performance indicators (KPIs), and business data connectivity technologies. Centralized Report Center sites give users a single place to find the latest spreadsheets, reports, or KPIs.
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Instantly connect people with information. SharePoint Enterprise Search incorporates people and business data along with documents and Web pages to provide more comprehensive results. The Search Center provides a single integrated location for employees to find content, processes, people, and business data relevant to their specific needs. This enables people and organizations to make decisions more quickly, based on the latest information and facts.
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Share business data broadly while helping to protect sensitive information. Excel Services running on Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides access to data and analytics in real time, interactive Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets from a Web browser. Use these spreadsheets to maintain and efficiently share one centralized and up-to-date version while helping to protect any sensitive or proprietary information embedded in documents (such as financial models).
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Leverage your unstructured business networks to drive better decisions. Employees can use new knowledge management tools to get the most from their powerful unstructured business networks, both inside and outside their organizations, thereby connecting with people more quickly and efficiently. By exploring these undocumented business relationships and finding subject matter experts, individuals are able to make better decisions more quickly.
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Unlock business data. Out-of-the-box connectors provide accessibility to data in SAP and Siebel systems. The Business Data Catalog allows structured data from line-of-business applications to be integrated into SharePoint in multiple ways through Web Parts, lists, people profiles, and search. Centrally managed connections to back-end systems can be defined once and then reused by end users to access back-end data without writing any code—easily making business data part of portal content. The Business Data Catalog also provides the ability for SharePoint Enterprise Search to integrate back-end business data into the search experience, without having to write any protocol handlers, iFilters, or custom code.
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Simplify Internal and External Collaboration
Share knowledge, find information, and collaborate more easily and securely both within and across organizational boundaries. Leverage your partners and customers and utilize your personal people-networks to connect to other people effectively.
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Enhance customer and partner relationships. With smart, standards-based, electronic-forms-driven solutions, you can collect business information from customers and partners through a Web browser. Lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) integration and support for other pluggable authentication providers makes it easier to work with non-Active Directory directory service sources, thereby simplifying extranet setups and facilitating tighter connectivity with customers, partners, and suppliers.
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Ubiquitous Enterprise Search. Enterprise Search in Office SharePoint Server 2007 has great relevance and incorporates enterprise content such as people and business data, along with documents and Web pages, to provide more comprehensive results. Search is ubiquitous in Office SharePoint Server 2007, with tight integration into SharePoint sites, Web Parts, SharePoint lists, people profiles, and more. This enables people to look for the information they need wherever they navigate to within the portal. Enterprise Search has the capability to search through business data and the search results can be highly customized, for example, surfacing specific metadata elements of back-end records.
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Work when and where you want. With offline access to Office SharePoint Server 2007 lists and document libraries, you can free yourself from limitations of corporate network connectivity. Tight integration with Microsoft Office Groove Server 2007 further enhances the offline experience for users.
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Connect and share knowledge. New knowledge management tools empower employees to create and leverage people networks, both inside and outside their organizations, so they can connect and share knowledge more quickly and efficiently with other people.
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Personalize operations. My Sites provide a totally personalized experience for users, with a dedicated site for each user. Each site can be used to store, present, view, and manage content, information, and applications in a controlled fashion. Each site can also be used to present information about the user such as skills and roles, colleagues and managers, groups and distribution lists the user belongs to, and documents the user is working on. And each site contains stringent privacy control and security mechanisms, so that each user can choose how much information to present, and to whom. My Sites can also be fully customized to suit individual requirements.
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Empower IT to Make a Strategic Impact
Increase responsiveness of IT to business needs and reduce the number of platforms to maintain by supporting all intranets, extranets, and Web applications across the enterprise with one integrated platform.
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Get enhanced interoperability support. Office SharePoint Server 2007 is built on a scalable architecture, with support for Web services and interoperability standards including XML and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). Office SharePoint Server 2007 also has rich, open application programming interfaces (APIs) and event handlers for lists and documents. This enables integration with existing systems and provides the flexibility to incorporate new non-Microsoft IT investments. LDAP integration support for other pluggable authentication providers makes it easier to work with non-Active Directory sources. Out-of-the-box WSRP Consumer Web Part enables integration with other WSRP-compliant portal solutions. Out-of-the-box connectors and Web parts for common line-of-business systems such as SAP and Siebel simplify how business users can access data from these systems directly from within portal-based solutions.
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Enable IT to focus on more strategic tasks. Users can now create sites, initiate workflows, self-provision applications, access back-end data, define security at a per-item level, restore deleted items, and complete other tasks without involving IT. This reduced user dependence on IT improves productivity and also allows the IT department to focus on providing real value-added services to the organization. The Business Data Catalog provides the ability to define and deploy a Business Information Library of connections to back-end systems. This feature can be reused by business users to create personalized views of business data without having to develop any custom code.
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Simplify deployment, management, and system administration. Managing a Web server farm, deploying new pieces of content, and managing synchronization across those sites is now much simpler. Deployment can be done in “top-down” or “bottom-up” fashion. Simplify site staging through out-of-the-box Site-starter Templates for common Web sites, with Area and Page layout templates and pre-configured navigation. And enhanced capabilities to backup and restore content helps IT professionals schedule backups, back up multiple site collections, and then restore each one individually.
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Robust system monitoring, usage tracking, and monitoring tools. These tools help isolate and solve problems faster and improve the operational efficiency of the system infrastructure.
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Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search
The new Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search gives customers the ability to quickly and easily deploy an enterprise-grade search solution today and upgrade to the full complement of Office SharePoint Server 2007 functionalities in the future. A security-enhanced, scalable, extensible, and manageable search solution, Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search meets the core search needs of enterprises while offering the simplicity and ease of use desired by small and medium businesses; helping to increase productivity and alleviate information overload. Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search searches content in common data repositories including file shares, Web sites, SharePoint sites, Microsoft Exchange Server Public Folders, and Lotus Notes databases. It can be extended to search other repositories using third-party or customer-built connectors, and is upgradeable to the full Office SharePoint Server 2007 offering. Connect people to relevant business information with Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search. To try Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search, get the 2007 Microsoft Office system Beta 2.