If you've ever had to move SharePoint content around, you know how painful it can be to locate and correct hyperlinks that have become invalid.  James Milne has a beta tool called SPStatus that is great for easing this task.  Check it out here:

http://james.milne.com/SPStatus/

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This workspace is very useful if you are using the SharePoint report pack.

http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/SPSReportPack

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1. Knowledge Network is "People" Search on steroids.  Knowledge Network adds an entire new dimension to Enterprise Search and collaboration that is going to help people connect with the "right" people much faster in the future.  This one is going to be huge in enterprises and in my opinion represents some serious thought leadership in the field of search.
2. The Knowledge Network has both a client and a server component.  The client component is installed on the user's PC and will then scan their email to generate a set of keywords.  The user is then presented with the keywords and they have the ability to decide which keywords, and even what level of availability of the keywords they wish to publish.  As an example, you can choose to publish the keyword to All, My Business Unit, My Team, My Manager, Only Me or None.  The great thing about the keywords is that KN unlike other people search solutions which rely on the user to add data to properties about themselves, does not require the user to do that.  By simply checking the the content of their correspondence, KN can determine what you are an expert in and what you work with most frequently.  The algorithms are pretty complex, but believe me, the functionality is simply awesome!
3. KN allows users to very quickly determine who knows what, who knows whom etc.
4. KN fully integrates with MOSS 2007 and My Sites.
5. KN results are ranked by social distance, expertise and relationship relevance such as frequency of communication with the person, the time since the last communication etc.
6. Exclusions are fully configurable on the server for KN.
7. SharePoint site memberships are also used in generating keywords in the profiles.
8. Active Directory properties and Distribution List memberships are also used in keyword generation.
9. KN also features On Demand Anonymous Brokering that allows users to make their knowledge available upon request.  A good example would be a sales guy who doesn't want to publish all his connections.  He could then opt in for the Anonymous Brokering option.  If someone is looking for a contact that he has, he can be sent an email with the request.  He will have the ability to accept and help in which case he becomes known to the requester or deny in which case the requester is notified that the anonymous person declined the request.
10. In the KN AB you can even set your level of participation by selecting the number of requests you're willing to receive in a week.
11. KN works with both Exchange 2003 and 2007.
12. Blog:  http://blogs.msdn.com/kn
13. Recycle Bin does not work for Sites, but works for all site content.  There is a Web Delete event that can be bound to and is fully extensible when a site is deleted.
14. SMIGRATE is no more.  We now use STSADM -o export and STSADM -o import.
15. Web UI based backup solution is now provided.  The option for both full land incremental backups is provided.
16. Search indexes can even be backed up.

1. Upgrade path does NOT exist from SharePoint 2001 to SharePoint 2007.  Is anyone still using 2001?
2. Upgrade path from WSS 2.0 to MOSS 2007 is WSS 2.0 to WSS 3.0 to MOSS 2007.  You can not directly upgrade WSS 2.0 to MOSS 2007.
3. Most custom site definitions and FrontPage edits are supported and honored.  There is a catch though.  Sites that are customized will upgrade, but they will maintain their look and feel and will not have any of the new features such as the Recycle Bin, the Security Trimmed UI or the V3 Navigation menus.
4. Three upgrade paths are In Place, Gradual and Content DB.
5. WSS and SPS SP2 are REQUIRED BEFORE the upgrade can be done.
6. WinWF and ASP.NET 2.0 are also prerequisites for the upgrade.
7. PRESCAN.EXE does an audit and will report all possible problems before the actual upgrade.
8. When custom site definitions are upgraded, they will work just fine but, no new sites can be provisioned from them once the upgrade was completed.
9. During a gradual upgrade, there will be two Search Crawls running, so it is important to remove sites from the v2 crawl as they are migrated.
10. Office clients do NOT honor the 302 redirect.  What does this mean?  Well, you won't be able to go directly from Word and open documents in a WSS library if it was not migrated yet.  The browser based UI will word just fine and can trigger editing from there, but not the other way around.
11. Site collection ownership, which in v2 was only changeable by central administrators, can now be changed by the site collection owner themselves.
12. Page re-ghosting will allow users that have modified just a single page on a site to the point where it no longer works, to revert just that page back to the original template version.  This does not have to be site wide, but is granular down to the page level.
13. It is recommended to increase your ASP.NET Run time Timeout values before running the upgrade.  The upgrade may timeout, but fortunately, if you forgot to do this, you can increase the value and just restart the upgrade process.
14. The ability to pre-test Crawl Rules given admins the ability to determine how a page/site would be crawled without having to rely on the trial and error method of 2003.
15. Crawler Impact Rules can be used to avoid site overload.
16. The Indexer can be Paused or Stopped when you are making changes.  It is recommended that you Pause it because if it is Stopped, the restart will cause a full crawl to be started whereas the Pause will simply pick up where it left off when restarted.
17. Local Site Search Scopes.  This one is going to be huge!  It allows site admins to define search scopes local to their site which makes customizing search even better since a site admin would better understand the scopes of the site than a central admin would.
18. Best Bet changes can be made and are live immediately.
19. The standard page size is down from 760 KB to between 320-350 KB.  This is still being optimized, but the smaller page size is great news for lower bandwidth users.
20. All topology restrictions that used to plague SPS has been removed as MOSS has adopted the WSS model for server scaling!  Think of it as MOSS being the tool that is used to "Light Up" all the awesome features on WSS!
21. Lots of numbers on scalability, but in general, scalability seems to be immensely better than in 2003.

Some interesting info about Microsoft's internal SharePoint deployment size is as follows:

• 8.1 TB of data
• 113,000 site collections
• 300,000 sites
• 1850 databases
• 520 Virtual Servers/Webs
• 325 "vanilla" Portals
• 25 Customized Portals
• 101 total servers

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1. Groove is great for cutting down on network traffic because it only propagates the changes and not the entire files.
2. Word can publish directly to blogs such as Spaces, Blogger etc.  I'm definitely going to try this one out with the Beta 2 bits.  Hopefully that will help me overcome some of the limitations of the Spaces UI.
3. Workflow for approval etc. can be tied to such blog posts so such publishing actions can be controlled and regulated.
4. Office Themes can be defined for branding.  These Themes are global to all Office apps so Excel, Word and PowerPoint results can be "branded" to have a universal look and feel.  This is really useful when branding becomes a concern.
5. The new Tri Pane Review panel for comparing two documents is great.  It makes the whole "what changed" evaluation a snap.
6. Open XML format, now handed over to Ecma for control, makes for smaller file sizes because the files are basically zip files so compression is built right in.
7. There will be a Compatibility Pack for Office 2003 and Office XP which makes it possible for those versions of Office to read and leverage the Open XML format documents.  THIS IS HUGE!!!
8. Document Inspector will help prevent documents from being published when they still contain Track Changes and/or Comments.
9. You have the ability to simply drag an email to your calendar and create a calendar entry.  This is really useful when you receive an email request to work on something and you need to set some time aside to do that.
10. Overlayed Calendars ROCK!!!  (Did I already say that?)  The ability to overlay a WSS Calendar with your Outlook calendar is really very useful.
11. Slide Libraries.  This one is really slick.  You have PowerPoint slides in the Slide Library.  Users can pull slides from the Slide Library into their presentations and they can choose to maintain the link.  Then, if any of the slides change, all presentations that are still linked are automatically updated.
12. InfoPath Server makes for a zero footprint client.  You no longer need InfoPath installed on the client to fill out forms as InfoPath Server will leverage AJAX to render.  This makes it possible for companies to actually deploy InfoPath forms as internet solutions.
13. A new administrator level was added.  In addition to Site Administrators and Central Administrators, there will now also be Shared Services Administrators.
14. Pluggable authentication.  Many people are going to love this one.  You are now no longer limited to AD authentication for SharePoint.  You can now leverage ASP.NET Forms authentication.  This is particularly useful for external partner authentication.  There is also Web SSO and ADFS is coming soon.
15. Though not the default, Kerebos authentication is encouraged because of the reduction in network traffic it brings.  Where NTLM will authenticate numerous times as the user navigates through the site, Kerebos will cache the credentials cutting down on traffic.
16. Pluggable authentication only works with web based apps because of the use of 302 redirects.
17. New cross site groups will be Owners (Administrators), Members (Contributors) and Visitors (Readers).
18. Site Collection Administrators can access and recover documents from the 2nd Level Recycle Bin.  This does not have to be done by a Central Admin.
19. There are some more granular permissions control that allows control of things like Edit User Info, Manage Alerts, User Remote Interface.  This last one is useful when you want to limit SOAP activity on your WSS content.
20. Security has been tightened by not allowing, under any circumstances, an anonymous user to either create new site or administer existing sites.
21. The ability to deny access to content is given to the central administrator.  If a user is denied access to a site collection, it is important to note that even creating a new sub site and granting that user rights to that site, will not provide access to the site for that user.  DENY always trumps any GRANT rights.
22. Timer Administration Services must always run as Local System in order to work properly.
23. The ability to change user ID's is now very easy with the migrateuser feature.  This is especially useful when a user gets married and changes their name.  Their AD ID would also change and it used to be a nightmare to get their permissions transferred in SharePoint.  Not any more.
24. There are no item level DENY permissions.  DENY is a very strong concept, so this was not put into the existing version and rather ensuring that item level permissions work in their basic form before adding the DENY concept.
25. Administrators can control the level of customizations users can do with SharePoint Designer.  This is good in a sense where users are still allowed to customize their sites, but control is maintained over branding type of settings.
26. A new "Site Template Report" tracks all customized pages making the management of customizations much easier.
27. Version history actually shows which fields changed on each version.  That makes it easy to see when something specific was changed, and by whom.
28. Now when opening a document, you are automatically prompted with the option to check out the document and open it in edit mode.  This will help avoid cases where someone is editing a document but don't have it checked out preventing anyone from know who has a lock on the document.  The checked out field will now show the current editor.
29. When saving the document from Word, you are automatically prompted with the option to check the document in.  In addition, you also have the option to decide if the new version of the document would be a minor (2.1) or a major (3.0) version.  Add to this the fact that document libraries can be configured to not show readers any minor versions and that version history trimming can be configured on both major and minor versions and it adds another powerful dimension to document management in WSS.
30. Joel Olesen shared with me the best way to set alerts.  Instead of setting alerts in general, you can define a view and subscribe to alerts when an item matches the view's filters.  Powerful stuff.
31. Two words for all the crackberry fans... SharePoint Mobile!
32. Site membership can be used to create distribution lists.  This is useful when collaborating and you need to email everyone in the collaboration space.  New members that are added to the site, are automatically added to the distribution list OR approval can be turned on to require admin approval before adding them to the DL.
33. When an email is sent to a Site Distribution List, the content of the email is firstly added to the site discussion board thread and secondly, if the email was a meeting invite, an automatic entry is made in the site calendar for the meeting.  This calendar entry is rolled up to all site members' My Sites together with other site calendars.  It can also be linked and overlaid directly into Outlook.

Wow, lots of good stuff...

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1. I had already blogged earlier today my opinion that Microsoft is positioning SharePoint as the defacto development base/platform for all business application development.  It is significant to note the size of Microsoft's investment in SharePoint.  I would say they pretty much are betting the farm here, similar to how they bet the farm on Windows back in 1995.  Given their track record, I would not be hedging any bets against SharePoint!
2. Again, one of those things you knew was coming, but the ability to take WSS site content offline, that's right, I said OFFLINE, using Outlook 2007 (without the need for Groove) is HUGE!  I am more sensitive to the topic given my environment, but this is a very big need and the fact that it can be filled out of the box without having to license any third party (or recently acquired Microsoft) software is great news.
3. I like the way that kicking off a Windows Workflow Foundation action anywhere in SharePoint will automatically add the given workflow to your Outlook Tasks list.
4. Of course everyone knows that everything in SharePoint is RSS enabled... all lists, all libraries etc.  Combine that with the fact that Outlook will support RSS feeds out of the box and you have yet another win.  Alerts are still there, but RSS feeds are much better because you can even customize the field and properties of the list/library that you wish to have included in the RSS feed.
5. The improvements to the My Site now makes it a viable option for users to really use as their start page.  The aggregation of site memberships and task lists to the My Site will definitely help drive adoption.
6. I like the meta data pane in all the Office applications.  Now we might finally get users to update meta data.  If you want them to update it, it must be easy to access and with the meta data pane, it now is.
7. I absolutely LOVE staged deployment with deployment paths and jobs.  This is going to make staging so much easier.
8. MOSS is supposed to ship with SAP and Siebel data connectors.  I'm sure there will be others, but nobody has mentioned any others yet, so we can only assume these two for now.  Of course there will be Dynamics connectors which basically includes everything Microsoft has from Great Plains to CRM etc.
9. A feature called "Links just work" is really nice.  Picture being outside your corporate firewall and accessing your email via OWA.  You get a link to a SharePoint site and click on it but it fails to render because it's behind the firewall.  Now with OWA, you'll be able to tunnel through to SharePoint sites as OWA uses your credentials for SharePoint access.
10. Managed folders in Outlook are positioned to replace PST's.  This is good news for corporate compliance and liability because even though you may be enforcing automated destruction of email via Exchange, users would copy their messages to PST's where they could remain forever causing potential liability issues.  The managed folders gives users the ability to classify their content and through the use of WSS libraries for archived storage and the OWA tunneling described in 9 above, it will give users access to their messages from anywhere they have a browser and an internet connection.  No more having to cart the laptop with you just to get to your email in the PST.
11. SharePoint Search now has explicit AND as apposed to explicit OR.  So what does that mean?  Well, remember how you would enter John Doe into the search box instead of "John Doe" and you'd get documents that contained either John or Doe instead of John and Doe?  No more.  The explicit AND solves that.
12. You can now also use the plus (+) and minus (-) signs with your search query so you could do something like John Doe -"Jane Doe" to get documents containing John Doe but not Jane Doe.
13. Spelling correction.  So everyone loves when you type your search into Google and you miss spell a word and it asks you if you meant the corrected spelling right?  SharePoint now features the same thing.
14. Duplicate elimination.  Not quite sure how this works just yet, but basically, search will eliminate duplicate documents from your results set.  You have an option to view all the duplicates, but basically, you only see one link to a given documents instead of potentially dozens.
15. People search is great especially the fact that it will index any LDAP 3 directory.  That's right, you heard me... ANY LDAP 3 directory.
16. Lotus Notes can be indexed as a content source.  I know this is old news, but it is so important to me that I needed to list it again.
17. No more different type of searches for MOSS and WSS sites.  If you have MOSS, you can select to have the WSS sites simply subscribe to the MOSS search services.  No more user confusion.  No more multiple steps to get to the search page.
18. Security freaks will love this one... the index account no longer need full read/write permissions to the content that it is indexing.  As long as the account has full read rights, indexing will work.  Sleep easy oh security admins!
19. Search logging & analysis helps you figure out what it is your users are looking for and keeping track of click troughs allows you to figure out what it is they associate as the content they were looking for.  This will help find tune search relevancy and best bets over time as the system can "learn" and adapt to user behavior.
20. Continuous propagation allows for content to be indexed and the indexed items to be available for searching long before the indexing of a massive content source has been completed.  Think shared drives with tons of data.
21. Change log crawls for SharePoint content will allow the indexing service to know when something has changed and to only index it at that point of change.  This makes for massively improved indexing performance.

No numbers were officially given, but it was said that a single indexer would be able to support 10's of millions of documents.  Official numbers is expected later this month.

We'll see what tomorrow brings!

Later
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I've arrived in Seattle for the conference.
I love the mellow attitude drivers have over here... most stay within the speed limit.

I just wish the roads, like interstate highways, would have a few more signs posted to inform me which road I'm on.  Driving around these highways, though very easy, takes a little "faith".  You don't really know if you're on the right road until you see the exit you want!

I'm super excited and can't wait to get started!

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