Blogging and SharePoint

One of my qualities/faults is that once I get passionate about something, I dive in with both feet. I did it with blogging. Now I'm doing it with SharePoint. I've made blogging my "sharepoint widow" (and also my wife, I think). Thanks in very large part to Amanda Murphy, (and with help from my co-worker Russel, and a few others along the way), I'm neck deep in webparts and sites and listings.

I've been spending every single waking minute either working on our division Intranet site, or thinking about it. We've made some significant progress, but still have a ways to go.

Once I get to the point where I'm not so under-the-gun, I'll step back a bit to write about my SharePoint adventures in Xbox Land.

My favorite things I've found out about SPS and WSS:
1) How to integrate WSS into SPS (best tip was using a WSS page as a "template" for an SPS area to fool the Portal site into linking to a WSS site).
2) Listings have gone from a thing I hated to a thing of beauty.
3) Amanda helped me crack the code on the News web part. Using the "Change Area" link to get listings to show up how I want them to.
4) Using FrontPage to edit SPS and WSS has saved me a TON of time.
5) I'm just experementing with Front Page's Data View web part, but it looks very, very promising.

Things I'm still a bit stuck on:
1) Now I have Listings figured out, I want them on a WSS site.
2) Still looking for a good RSS reader web part that can be customized quite a bit (filter content on the fly, etc.)
3) Still having trouble importing content from file shares, especially with being able to add non-existant metadata, but keeping current metadata.
4) I'm a bit rusty on security, I think I need to look more at Cross-site groups.
5) Haven't used Topic Assistant or Audiences as much as I could.

Along with Amanda's help, Bill English's book "SharePoint Products and Technologies" has helped immeasurably.

Anyway, thanks to all those that have stayed tuned, and especially those that have helped me technically. It's all a geeky marketing guy could want...

Comments

[Anita Rowland]

I'll ping you about this at work; I'm on a new contract and the Intranet site is on sharepoint. I think we could use a few tips (but I'm not in charge of the intranet site yet).

[Anne Stanton]

I also love to dive into everything with intensity. Good to see I am not the only one. I have not yet taken the sharepoint dive but mostly because I haven't rolled out MS SBS at home. Today I think I will tackle why my RSS feeds aren't quite working as this one didn't come through. Argh. I would rather play with new technology then fix old.

[Dustin Miller]

Check out http://www.sharepointblogs.com/ for other SharePoint bloggers, http://www.sharepointu.com/ for a great community site devoted to SharePoint Products and Technologies and http://www.sharepointexperts.com/ for some add-ins and training information. Okay, so the last one was self serving, but since you're knee-deep in SharePoint now, the other sites will be sure to provide some valuable knowledge!