Accessibility Kit for SharePoint (AKS) 1.0

This is now available here and is a toolkit for developers to use with SharePoint Server 2007 or Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 for creation of sites and applications which advance the accessibility of people with disabilities, especially those who are vision impaired.  Several clients have asked about this in the past months – I haven’t had a chance to look at it myself yet, but it is worth noting this from the SharePoint Team Blog –

“To reiterate the approach that we’re taking with the AKS, it is being developed as a set of building blocks rather than an end-to-end solution. We expect many SharePoint partners to take various pieces of the kit and integrate them into their respective product or service offerings while some customers will integrate particular components of the kit into their SharePoint deployment processes”

So it won’t be a case of clicking on Setup and expecting everything to be compliant…

Technorati tags: SharePoint, Accessibility

Excellent Article on SharePoint User Management

Bamboo Solutions have posted an excellent article explaining how users and security are managed and configured within SharePoint.  You can read it online here or download a PDF version here.

Technorati tags: SharePoint, security, user management

Improving Excel Charts – Information Design Watch

Via Sam Batterman, a nice post from Information Design Watch on options for making an Excel chart more readable.  Lots more examples to look at over on Perceptual Edge  – Stephen Few has written loads on this topic and is well worth reading.

Technorati tags: Excel, Chart examples

Search Server and Federated Search

A US Company called IDV Solutions, who specialise in “Visual Composite Applications for the Enterprise” have put together a demo using Search Server 2008 and a Federated Search Connector that connects to Flickr.  Its a good example of how you could extend search to suit specific business requirements – you can look at their demo here.

I’m very interested in the developments going on around search services.  It kind of extends the way we might think about “Business Intelligence” if we are able to build applications where we could type in a search string (for example a customer name) and return back a profile which might contain results from our CRM system, financial results, what’s being said in MSN Money or Google News etc all in one results set.  I’m already looking at Search Server 2008 and plan to take a closer look at how it might fit into the BI space.

Technorati tags: Search Server, Federated Search

CopyTimer – Measure SharePoint Performance

Sean Kelley from the Microsoft SharePoint Online Services Group has created a little utility called CopyTimer.  This can be downloaded from CodePlex, and allows you to test file upload and download performance in SharePoint by configuring it to automatically upload and download test files and review timed results.  These results are stored in a SharePoint list which is created for you but could also be exported to Excel for further analysis.

I can see this coming in useful if you have SharePoint users connected at different speeds, for example if you have some locations coming in on a slower connection, or perhaps in different countries.  Sean shows how you might use CopyTimer here.

Technorati tags: SharePoint Performance