The February 2005 issue of MSDN Magazine has an article titled Add a Recycle Bin To Windows SharePoint Services (no link to the article yet).

Written by Maxim Karpov and Eric Schoonover

Patrick Cauldwell reports about configuring Firefox to authenticate with NTLM to improve the SharePoint experience.

He states that Firefox works fine with SP. This is different from my Firefox/SharePoint report, but mine was based on a linux installation. I was a bit hesitant to debug the problems that I was having -- but it would appear the problems are related to the differences between linux and Windows, not between FF and IE. Maybe I'll make some time to research this...

I received a very geeky Christmas present this year - Ubuntu! Ubuntu is a linux distribution (Debian I believe) that includes the Gnome desktop, Evolution Groupware and the OpenOffice suite. (I bet my brother would have loved the math formula editor back in the day when he was teaching physics.)

The package has two CDs. The first is a “live cd” that sets up a RAM disk (remember those?) and then boots into linux with touching your hard drive! Very creative! This is a great way to show non-technical execs what linux can bring to the table.

The second CD is a bootable install disk, with a character-based installer. I loaded into a Virtual PC machine (refer to this How To from the Ubuntu site) and have been working in the corporate environment for a few days. WSS sites are mostly usable. There is a Citrix client for Linux, so all of the “corporate” apps are available.

Being a .Net guy now, there is probably not much more to do. If I had time, then perhaps Mono would be fun to try...

I had the opportunity to play around with Firefox the past few days. For the most part, WSS sites look just fine. That is most likely because WSS sites use table for their layout instead of using CSS.

The only problem that I've run across is with lists have collapsible groups. The javascript to expand/collapse the groups does not work.

Maurice Prather has joined the conversation about SharePoint development.

Maurice asks if the developer community is too small. Compared to what we see on ASP.Net, it is. But I have been seeing more SharePoint related posts and pages almost daily. So I going to try and do something about it.

I know there are several SP community sites already (see the list on the left), but I want to build a developer-centric community. So, I've registered SharePointDevelopers.org. (There's nothing there yet!)

Watch this space for more news. And, if you have ideas, please post comments here.

An update to the SharePoint User Manager program I mentioned a few weeks back has been released. With a new name: SPUM2003.

Not sure I like the name, but the tool is very nice.

Mads Nissen has a very good post about the SmartPart and its effect on the SharePoint community. He also includes a great graphic showing the various customization methods. You must read it!

Mads also points out that Steve Ballmer stated SharePoint is the number one growing product, yet the developer support is certainly less that other areas of Microsoft's business. I second his call for more content.

Amanda, your virtual SPS user group might help in this area. Any news on that?

Renaud COMTE has released a “Christmas Gift” to the SharePoint community -- Document Library Browser 1.0!

The screen shots in the article show a web page that looks very much like Windows Explorer: a list of directories on the left and the contents of the directory on the right. This just might be the view that get's my users more comfortable with the document library.

Thank you Renaud! And Merry Christmas!

This download includes a preview of the reference documentation for Microsoft® SharePointPSSearch, the SQL Syntax used for Microsoft SharePointPSSearch Full Text Search.

Future Tense has a great podcast that discusses how bad these things really are. Computer geeks are probably saavy enough to avoid these, but are your family & friends?