Readings to prepare for the SharePoint 2010 IT Pro exams

A couple of weeks ago, I passed the beta version of the two SharePoint 2010 IT Pro exams:

  • Exam 70-668: PRO: Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Administrator
  • Exam 70-667: MCTS: Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Configuring

Of course, I can’t tell you much about the actual content of the exam (NDA, you know…) but as long as there are no official “exam preparation guides”, I would recommend you to prepare for the exam by reading the Planning, Upgrade and Deployment guides for SharePoint 2010. The Technet site has a good overview of the downloadable content for SharePoint 2010.

Duplicate categories when creating new blog post from Word 2007 in SharePoint blog

Our marketing department is using Word 2007 to post articles on a SharePoint 2007 blog. Today, a weird issue came up: when you select a category from the drop-down list, that category was created on the SharePoint blog every time, no matter if it existed already or not. This results in duplicate categories in the SharePoint blog.

The solution to this problem is very simple: on the SharePoint site, check the Categories list for items that have a space at the end. If an item in the category list has a space, it gets recreated again when you select the category in Word.

Microsoft LCDS version 2.5

Microsoft released a new version of its Learning Content Development System, the free content authoring tool. The release notes show the following changes:
  • E-learning created is compatible with Firefox 3.5.9 and Firefox 3.6.3.
  • Microsoft Silverlight 4 Media Player for animations that include closed captioning.
  • Enhanced keyboard accessibility for the sort and tile games, adventure interactivity, and Voice of the Expert element.
  • LCDS authoring and e-learning created are completely compatible with Microsoft Silverlight 4.0.
An interesting new feature is the possibility to create content on the “lesson” level. Previous versions did not allow this, which sometimes resulted in blank pages in the course structure when you imported the SCORM package in an LMS. When you open a course in the new version, you will notice an option to enable the content at the lesson level:
Tip: if you don’t know which version of LCDS you are running, open LCDS and press Shift+F1.

Co-authoring with Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010

I have been playing with the co-authoring function in Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 and the Office Web Apps. Co-authoring allows simultaneous editing of the same document by multiple users. It took me some time to figure out which apps actually support this functionality, because not all of them do.

The following site gives a good overview: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/document-collaboration-and-co-authoring-HA101812148.aspx

The table below (taken from the article) is a good summary:

Application Server Requirements Common Scenarios
Word 2010 SharePoint Foundation 2010 Any document including proposals, plans, vision statements, minutes, newsletters, and reports
PowerPoint 2010 SharePoint Foundation 2010 Any presentation including training, conferences, post-mortems, product overviews, handbooks, and project status reports
Excel Web App SharePoint Foundation 2010
and Office Web Apps		 Any spreadsheet, including team financial modeling, business-to business product line update on a web page, and real-time trading spreadsheet trackers
OneNote 2010 SharePoint Foundation 2010 Any notebook, including recurring meeting minutes, project brainstorming (“group-think”), shared research and reference material, and shared training courses
OneNote Web App SharePoint Foundation 2010 and Office Web Apps