The strategy on the back of SharePoint Simple CMS (Part 2)

What we are learning is that the technological part matters mostly to us, I mean to B4Contact. Many of our customers doesn't really care on it.

Said that, we had to question ourselves who else cares about the technology. Of course the answer is obvious: the IT professional. Are they our target? well, yes. But no our principal target. Staying in touch with IT pros is very healthy for us and helps us to understand the industry trends. Some of them become our partners and participate on the development of Web sites based on SharePoint Simple CMS. That is good!

Now it is even more relevant because we are adding importance on the concept of developing with partners. We see much more innovation that way. B4Contact will generate ideas and concepts. Our partners will filter the ideas and transform some of them into usable functionality. That means that they aren't a main "sales target" but they are part of our long term strategy.

B4Contact is the organizer of the Slovenian SharePoint Conference and that helps us to get in touch with SharePoint MVPs and the Slovenian community of SharePoint administrators and developers. The past year was a success! and we plan to get more success this year. The event will take place sometime in November.

For concluding I can say that partnership is essential for SharePoint Simple CMS in the future. Currently we have 5 partners from US and EU. We will work hard during this year to get more!

The strategy on the back of SharePoint Simple CMS (Part 1)

When I'm talking about the SharePoint Simple CMS something that captures the attention is how we defined our product.

In this article I will also publish information about what we are finding out and what are we planning to do with our product.

1. Trying to modify the out of the Box Sharepoint is senseless. At least from the perspective of adopting new future versions of SharePoint. Any deep modification on the current SharePoint would be expensive when a migration to a new version would take place.
2. SharePoint by itself presents many limitations when thinking on Web design. Isn't it better to start with a blank canvas? Masterpages are synonym of freedom!
3. Many users doesn't care if they use SharePoint or whatever else... the important thing is that can be "used" and serves its purpose. That means that the interface is important.

Then we thought: "We need to make an easy to use CMS that limits advanced functionality to editors, that can look great and be compliant with standards, that doesn't touch any our of the box SharePoint page and of course that uses independent custom master pages". Therefore we made the SharePoint Simple CMS.

It is great because it lets users to have good looking public facing Web sites and edit them with ease. The SharePoint Simple CMS is delivered as a STP file and it is compatible with WSS and MOSS. Having a STP file out f a Web site is great! because you can create as many sites as you wish using that template.

After a year we havediscovered some things that need to be improved:

1. The code should be simplified and optimized.
2. We should include more code on the "server side" instead of the "Client side".
3. We need to include more capabilities to customize the layout of the pages.

So.. how are we thinking to cover the challenges? we are building a community of partners that can use SharePoint Simple CMS and build solutions on top of it.

Video 1: SharePoint Simple CMS

The SharePoint Simple CMS is a new product developed to enhance Windows SharePoint Services and Office SharePoint Server web sites. It is a CMS because it helps users to edit their contents.
How can you use it? Well there are many ways...

1. It lets you to have the Web design that you wish.
2. It lets you use Web design templates: www.pixelmill.com
3. Can be used within enterprises as departmental web sites or even internal Blogs or even team collaboration sites. The difference is that this sites look great!
4. For SMB or SME this is the right solution for easy to edit, browser editable, rights managed Web sites.
5. For Schools... there is a special template designed for schools.
6. Are you applying to Grants or Tenders? this can be a great way of having a site for your project.

It is not expensive.
Would you like to develop on top of SharePoint Simple CMS? just contact me.

Web designers Sharing Point

If you are a web designer or you know some person that runs a business related to Web design then my Blog "Web Designers Sharing Point" can be interesting.

Actually the main idea of that Blog is to start creating a community of professional designers interested in advertising their work and complement it with our experience with SharePoint and our own CMS.

We are looking for the sinergy between B4Contact's team and professionals of Web design. We have customers that need their work and we could add CMS functionality to their designs also improving their business. I think it is a win to win offer.

We are interested in supporting the open source community and we are willing to finance the creation of free CSS templates.

Like a sign of our interest in that community we are offering free hosting for the web site of the designers. Like that we presume that we can be saving some money to freelancers and professionals.

SharePoint Learning Kit

B4Contact, my company, is involved in the world of e-learning. But we are alos working strongly with a technology called Sharepoint that helps organizations to create collaboration web sites and portals.
Now is available for download the SharePoint Learning Kit that is exactly the way to use SharePoint technologies and E-learning contents. Lear more visiting the web site of Codeplex.

Windows SharePoint Services 3

WSS 3 is a great application but I have to say that the upgrade from the WSS3 technical refresh version to the RTM was very painful.
2 important web sites where running on the WSS TR before the upgrade and after it... were not working anymore. It took me many hours to solve the problem. So after all that I think I'm able to give some recommendations for any kind of upgrade to WSS.

1. If you are running WSS3 TR make a backup of the complete server farm using the SharePoint 3 Central Addministration site. Go to the Operations section and find the "perform backup" option.
2. Check that the backup was finsihed without errors.
3. Make a copy of all the content databases of your WSS sites and include also the log files related to them. Locate the copies in a different folder.
4. Using the SharePoint Designer (Latest version) make a backup of each one of your sites.
5. Install the WSS 3 RTM. If you are lucky all will go fine... If you have the same problem than me... you will find that you have any of your sites listed within the Web Applications list. If that's the case you will need to create a web application per each web site you had before. Then you will need to remove the content database of each one, restart the IIS and use the STSADMIN.EXE to add the old content databases. You must use the STSADMIN because it converts the databases to what WSS3 needs.

If all fails... you have the back ups and you can contact me using this post. Good luck!