New Zealand Ministry of Transport Intranet "How We Did It"

A while ago I noticed a post by Chandima from Provoke in New Zealand where he talks about one of the projects that his company designed and delivered featuring in the best ten intranets on a Neisen Norman Group report.  The intranet was developed for the New Zealand Ministry of Transport and you can read his original post here.

Now the Microsoft SharePoint Product Group have posted a much more detailed article on how Provoke developed the Tag Driven Information Architecture which is used throughout the site.  This is a very useful read if you are thinking about setting up a MOSS Intranet, particularly if you want to see an example about how tagging content with metadata can add value.  Read it here.

Technorati tags: intranet, SharePoint 2007, metadata, navigation

Office Labs – Office 2007 Search Commands

On the Office Labs site you can download a little utility which adds a Search Commands ribbon to Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2007.  I’ve installed it and it works pretty well.  Note that it is a prototype though, so usual caveats apply.  You can download from here.

I noticed that the Office Labs site itself is powered by SharePoint Server 2007, and another useful looking project on there is Community Clips, where you can create and share “how-to” videos on office products.  The Community Clips site can be found here.

Technorati tags: office labs, office 2007 how to, community

WSS 3 and MOSS 2007 Version Differences

The question I am still asked most of all is “what are the differences in functionality between WSS 3.0, Sharepoint Server 2007 Standard and SharePoint 2007 Enterprise”.  There are numerous posts about this, particularly on the Microsoft Office site, but the best single-picture summary I have found is here on Mike Pallot’s blog – Mike has provided a download link here.

Technorati tags: sharepoint feature list

Free Euro 2008 Web Parts from Tam Tam

Via Mart Muller’s blog – The Tam Tam Information Worker team have released some nice looking web parts which let you participate in their Euro 2008 game. Download instructions in Dutch and English are available here.

Why Microsoft is Like Britney Spears

The CleverWorkArounds posts on Why SharePoint Projects Fail is now up to Part 3.  This part has the following comparison, which I just had to reproduce here

“Microsoft in some ways remind me of Britney Spears. Both crash things, both can be abusive, both get themselves into trouble with the law, both have ignored legal judgements, both have loyal fans who love them no matter what and detractors that will never accept they can do anything right, both get caught with their pants down on occasion, and both have produced some pretty ordinary crap in their time. Despite this, they sell squillions of copies and make a ton of money.”

Splendid stuff…