SharePoint Administration ToolKit 2.0

The SharePoint Administration Toolkit 2.0 is available and provides some resources for administrators that want to run high-availability or geographically dispersed installations of SharePoint. More information can be found on the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog.

SharePoint Best Practices

I was pleasantly surprised to see today that Microsoft has created a central location for best practices for SharePoint development and administration. With a product as complicated as SharePoint it is hard to find exactly what is the best way to accomplish something. The Best Practices Resource Center for SharePoint Server 2007 is an excellent resource to get the information you need. It groups items into categories for Publishing Portals, Team Collaboration Sites, Search, My Sites, Developing Custom Applications, and more. Many of the things I have learned the hard way over the past year and a half are included in these resources.



If you are looking for tips on efficiency to writing custom code for SharePoint check out the Resource Center.

Workflows for Office Live

SharePoint Designer is not just for SharePoint! You can create workflows for Microsoft Office Live right inside of SharePoint Designer. All you have to do is use the open site menu option and pass it in your Office Live URL. The post from Rohit Puri goes into more detail.

Browser Compatability Part 2

Today I spent most of my day trying to figure out the intricacies in browser compatabilty (especially when it comes to adding Flash into the mix). For the longest time I have known that to add Flash to a page and try to have DHTML menus hover out on top of the Flash movie that you needed to set the Flash movie wmode to either opaque or transparent. This allows the menus to appear on top of the Flash movie in the DOM.



The issues I was running into today was a user that could not get the menus to work while using Firefox 2.0.0.16 while in Ubuntu Linux. This is definitely a small section of our users but I figured I would at least look into the issue and see what was happening. The first thing I noticed was that the menus were flying out below the Flash movie. I thought this weird since I had coded the HTML to allow for them to fly out above. I did some searching and found that Linux does not support the transparent or opaque modes for Flash movies. There is suppose to be support coming with Firefox 3 and Flash 10 that will finally allow for the same compatability for Linux users.



Second issue was users on Firefox on the Mac could not see the Flash movie load at all. The interesting thing with this one was that I needed to set the wmode to window in order for the movie to show up at all. Of course this caused some funky behavior with the menus and I did not want it to do that for Firefox on Windows so I hade to use a Javascript hack to determine the OS version through the navigator.appVersion property and parsing out Mac and setting the object and embed code for that to use the window wmode and for windows users to use the regular transparent wmode.



What gets me about this is how incompatible things really are between OS's and Browsers. The same browser version will act totally different on a different OS and different browsers on the same OS will render things completely different. For having standards for many years now, you would think that things would be a little more, well standard. Some of this promises to be improved through IE8 and Firefox 3 as well as Safari 3. Firefox 3 will bring Linux into line with the standards and seems to improve having to code around Firefox on the Mac.



As a side note, I also noticed that there can be issues with Firefox on an Intel Mac. Just something else to be aware of when trying to design your site to reach the maximum amount of people.



The easiest way for now to prevent most of these incompatabilities is to not mix DHTML meuns and Flash or Text fields with flash or DHTML menus. Those are the two areas that cause the most problems.