As SharePoint pro’s, we can generally meet almost any kind of requirement with the platform, but for some of them, we know in our hearts that:

The following MVPs will be sharing their time and expertise with the SharePoint community for our first of what we hope will be several chats: Andrew Connell, Becky Bertram, Brendon Schwartz, Dan Attis, Daniel Larson, Darrin Bishop, John Ross, Matthew McDermott, Mike Oryzak, Paul Galvin, Paul Schaeflein, Randy Drisgill, and Rob Foster.

I’m teaching on site all this week, so I’m trying to get a handle on who’s doing what when I come home each evening. Here’s the list of events I’ve got for this week. Please add more to the comments section and I’ll update each evening as they come in.

This is the fifth article in a multipart series that is intended to help you create mailing lists for your SharePoint sites or blogs without writing a single line of .NET Code. In the introductory article, I listed the project initiatives, requirements, and objectives. In Part 1, I created a secured backend where we will store the subscribers’ contacts. In Part 2, I configured the ‘Contact’ content type, created a subscription form for the mailing list and did some simple customizations to it. In Part 3, I utilized the thrilling DataFormWebPart to further extend and enhance the subscription form to meet the project requirements. In Part 4, I implemented requirement # 3 by creating a list that comprises the names of all the countries of the world and a lookup field that gets its values from this list.

This is the fourth article in a multipart series that is intended to help you create mailing lists for your SharePoint sites or blogs without writing a single line of .NET Code. In the introductory article, I listed the project initiatives, requirements, and objectives. In Part 1, I created a secured backend where we will store the subscribers’ contacts. In Part 2, I configured the ‘Contact’ content type, created a subscription form for the mailing list and did some simple customizations to it. In Part 3, I utilized the thrilling DataFormWebPart to further extend and enhance the subscription form to meet the project requirements.

Recently I’ve been involved in the development of a SharePoint 2007 solution using InfoPath and Forms Services. The purpose of the solution was collection of employee questionnaire data using one of several forms designed as a multi-page survey. 

This is yet another blog post on comparing dates in XSL in a data view web part.

I also reject the “it’s already been done” argument. So what if it was? The terrible consequence is that people who are looking up your topic via bing will now find two or five or a dozen articles. Who cares? I always prefer to find several articles on the same topic when I go searching the tubes for stuff. Different points of view, different writing styles, different approaches to the same problem – they all help me understand what I need. In my opinion, the community is no where close to reaching a saturation point on good quality blog articles on any topic in the SharePoint world.

I’m working on a project to develop a document tracking system for a client. After the initial interviews for discovery, I started sketching out a few ideas. After getting a mental image of what needed to be done, I called Pat Iovanella and Paul Galvin to ask for some input.

I’ve given this a lot of thought over the last year or so and I don’t see any easy answer. It really boils down to education and training. I think that SP 2010 is going to change the game a bit and it’s going to play out differently and in slow motion as companies roll out their SP 2010 solutions over 2010 and beyond. In order to succeed, End Users will need to transform themselves and get a little IT religion. They’ll need to learn a little bit about proper requirements analysis. They will need some design documentation that clearly identifies business process workflow, for instance. They need to understand fundamental concepts like CRUD (create, update and delete), dev/test/qa/prod environments and how to use that infrastructure to properly deploy solutions that live a nice long time and bend (not break) in response to changes in an organization.