Author: Jan Van Belle

Quotes from SharePoint Best Practices

It is an amazing experience to attend the SharePoint Best Practices Conference in San Diego. MVP speakers, a beautiful location, and very interesting content.

It’s impossible to summarize what I learned until now in a blog post, but these quotes will give you an idea of what’s happening:

  • SharePoint is not about building software, it’s about building services.
  • The most difficult thing about SharePoint is the people thing.
  • Information that is hard to find, is hardly ever used.
  • Vista is Microsoft’s gift to Apple.

To avoid that some people lose their MVP status, I will not tell anybody who made the last statement.  🙂

SharePoint and Office 14 for web

I watched this video this afternoon, and there was one specific sentence that drew my attention (around 3:20″): “Customers can run these (web versions of Office) on the SharePoint servers in their enterprise”. 

Very interesting! So in the future, we won’t even talk about a tight integration between Office and SharePoint, it might just be the same thing. Client applications that today run on top of SharePoint to keep users away from the browser and on their familiar desktop will be useless. Offline use of SharePoint will be a non-issue, you need to be connected all the time. 

Have a look at the video yourself (requires Silverlight).

Watch out for metadata!

Metadata is a great feature for easy retrieval of files in any document management system, not only in SharePoint. But sometimes people forget that in some cases, the metadata is stored in the file itself, not only in the repository.

This can lead to painful situations, as Microsoft experienced recently with their new “I’m a PC” ads.

If you are storing Office files on SharePoint, the same thing happens: metadata such as SharePoint columns or content type info gets stored in the file itself.

If you are using Office 2007, you can use the Inspect Document function to search for hidden metadata, and strip this from the document. This screencast shows you how SharePoint metadata remains in a Word document, and how you can use Inspect Document to remove the metadata.