In honor of the first manned Moon landing, which took place on July 20, 1969, we’ve added some NASA imagery to the Google Maps interface to help you pay your own visit to our celestial neighbor. Happy lunar surfing. More about Google Moon.

http://moon.google.com/

 

This article made me laugh out loud:

"In fact, hockey has been fixed, in that veterinarian sort way."

"But since this lockout was all about the 10 or so hard-line owners and their unleashed commissioner getting what they wanted at all costs, hats off to them. Preferably with their heads inside, true, but you get what you can at times like this."

Ray Ratto - ESPN.com

The lastest article in my SharePoint series is available on IntranetJournal.com

Customizing the Quick Launch in a WSS Team Site
This month, Paul provides a solution to automate the linking of documents in a Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) document library to the Quick Launch navigation feature.

The article discusses a custom web part. The web part and its source code are available for download.

"The purpose of the SharePoint Utility Suite is to provide a packaged collection of Tools and Utilities showcasing the rich Object Model that is delivered with the SharePoint Product and Technologies SDK (which includes Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003). This package includes code and tool examples that SharePoint Developers and SharePoint Administrators might find useful."
http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/downloads/components/detail.asp?a=724

Thanks to Jessica Gruber

This post is mostly a duplicate and is provided as a reference for others who stop by later.  Thank you to all who participated!

Andrew Connell started us off with good comments (re-posted on his blog).

Arpan Shah found the article entertaining, rather than informative.

Bil Simser would like Mr. Drips to call reality.

Robert Scoble has some ideas.

Maurice Prather has "Five things worth mentioning"

JOPX on SharePoint

The SharingPoint

Ed Brill (IBM)

Daniel McPherson: Only Five Things Wrong with SharePoint

Amanda Murphy discusses the vision

Bil Simser gets us turned around and discusses some positive features of SharePoint.

"Wish List" post by Larry Borsato

Thoughts about the community and the team from Patrick Tisseghem.

Eli Robillard: response to article and discussion of weaknesses.

In response to a post in the ASP.Net forums, here is a routine to upload a file to a document library.

Sub ProcessPostedFile(ByVal fileUpload As HtmlControls.HtmlInputFile)
    Try
    ' get the filename and stream
    Dim fn As String = System.IO.Path.GetFileName(fileUpload.PostedFile.FileName)
    Dim stm As System.IO.Stream = fileUpload.PostedFile.InputStream
    Dim contents(CInt(stm.Length)) As Byte

    stm.Read(contents, 0, CInt(stm.Length))
    stm.Close()

    ' get the library path
    Dim docLibPath As String = Configuration.ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings("DocUploadPath")
    ' first, get the site containing the library
    Dim site As SPSite = New SPSite(docLibPath)
    Dim web As SPWeb = site.OpenWeb
    ' then get the folder
    Dim docFolder As SPFolder = web.GetFolder(docLibPath)

    ' delete the file if it exists
    Dim docFile As SPFile
    Try
        docFile = docFolder.Files(fn)
    Catch ex As Exception
    End Try

    If Not docFile Is Nothing Then
        docFolder.Files.Delete(fn)
    End If

    ' save the file
    docFile = docFolder.Files.Add(fn, contents)

    Catch ex As Exception
        Context.Trace.Warn(ex.ToString)
    End Try
End Sub

File containing the web part described in my Intranet Journal article series.

DocLibQuickLaunch.zip (13.4 KB)

Only Five Things Wrong with SharePoint

Well, thats what I think the headline should have been. <sly grin>

Thanks to all who have joined in! I'm sure that the net result will be a better product!

[UPDATE: This post is being continuously updated as I become aware of other comments.]

Andrew Connell started us off with good comments (re-posted on his blog).

Arpan Shah found the article entertaining, rather than informative.

Bil Simser would like Mr. Drips to call reality.

Robert Scoble has some ideas.

Maurice Prather has "Five things worth mentioning"

JOPX on SharePoint

The SharingPoint

Ed Brill (IBM)

Daniel McPherson: Only Five Things Wrong with SharePoint

Bil Simser gets us turned around and discusses some positive features of SharePoint.

"Wish List" post by Larry Borsato

Thoughts about the community and the team from Patrick Tisseghem.

Eli Robillard

George Tsiokos put together a creative solution for displaying RSS/ATOM feeds in a web part page. His SharePoint RSS/ATOM reader service will create a .DWP for a Data View Web Part. No assembly to install; no editing of web.config; no programmer involvement; I LOVE IT!!!

There is also a downloadable version for the technically advanced. Thank you George!

Mike Drips published an article today on Informit.com titled "Five Things Wrong With SharePoint." I have a few issues with his points. Please read his article and then my comments below. (The numbered items apply to the five things in Mr. Drips' article.) Feedback is encouraged!

Things Wrong in "Five Things Wrong With SharePoint"

#1. It's a crappy mish-mash of multiple technologies

"...you find a great many of the core files are written in JavaScript."

My definition of "a great many" would be somewhere between one-third and one-half. I looked in the "60" directory on my server. It contains 408 folders and 6,324 files. The number of JavaScript (.js) files: 39!! That is .6%.

While Microsoft training does not offer a class on JavaScript, there is no lack of training providers.

Mr. Drips complains that professional programming SharePoint requires knowledge of many technologies. Let's look at this list:

By the way, the same list of technologies applies to the blogging tool used for to write this post: dasBlog.

#2. The development team is playing the Longhorn card

While "four years of no product improvement" is likely, how many enterprise-wide applications are upgraded by customers every year? The required investment in migrating and testing makes it hard to justify repeated upgrades. (I have seen many organizations with Windows 2000 servers still running because the applications they support are working fine.)

#3.  There are two SharePoint products, which is confusing

• How many Office products are there? (http://www.microsoft.com/office/editions/howtobuy/compare.mspx)
  
• How many Visual Studio products are there? (http://msdn.microsoft.com/howtobuy/vs2005/)
  
• How many Windows XP products are there? (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/default.mspx)

I don't think this should be "tagged" on SharePoint when it applies to a lot of the Microsoft product line.

#4. Support for SharePoint is lacking.

In my experience, blogs that are written about a product are usually focused on solving problems, not being critical. Maybe it is just the echo chamber effect...

I think it is wrong to categorize "nearly all" the bloggers as apologists for Microsoft. I don't apologize for Microsoft. I am trying to help others.

Things Right in "Five Things Wrong With SharePoint"

#3. There are two SharePoint products, which is confusing

As I mentioned before, this applies to a lot of the Microsoft product line.

#4. Support for SharePoint is lacking.

Is it time for Microsoft to close down the microsoft.public.sharepoint.teamservices newsgroup?

In my biased opinion, there are other good community resources not mentioned: SharePoint Blogs and SharePoint University forums.

5. Microsoft has not stated a strategic direction for SharePoint

Sad, but true. There is a lot of "customer evidence," but I can't find a roadmap.

Mr. Drips' conclusion, however, is somewhat positive:

Despite its lack of support and direction from Microsoft, SharePoint Portal Server still remains a viable product for an Intranet portal, document library, and company forum. To make all of those pieces work takes a tremendous amount of effort and education that — unfortunately — is not readily available to the end user community.

I am doing my best!! The Intranet Portal aspect is covered on IntranetJournal.com.