I've had several customers upgrade from SPS 2003 to MOSS 2007. A popular question is "Where did the Listings functionality go?"

In short, Portal Listings are gone in MOSS. Since listings were just an SPS-centric way of creating a link to something, it didn't make sense to have a non-standard way of doing this.  In an upgrade, they are converted into a List and Content Type called "Listing". The Portal Listings Web Part is replaced with a Content Query Web Part, which is much more flexible.  So no functionality is lost; it's actually more functionality than SPS.

Likewise, Areas are also gone...everything is simply a site.  They have been replaced by various publishing templates.

These two items (listings and areas) were SPS-centric and didn't make sense to carry forward.

One of the recommendations I often give for SharePoint content databases is to create several of them right from the get-go. This provides partitioning to keep the databases at a reasonable size (you should keep them under 50GB). If you are approaching the limit, you can always create a new database. But what about splitting already existing databases into several smaller ones?

Here's a tool on GotDotNet that helps with this process. The tool "write locks, backups and restores Site Collections in a given input file to a new SharePoint Content Database." 

Does anyone have feedback on this tool or seen any other solutions?

A customer recently asked me what the best way was to create a web part (quickly) that showed the contents of a remote file share. Well, the answer is quite simple.  Simply drop a Page Viewer web part on your page, select Folder as the source, and then enter the UNC path to the file share (for example, \\servername\fileshare).

You'll get a very slick web part on your page.  It has a couple of limitations, but it's great for a quick “file viewer“ web part.

I got a chance to review some of the SharePoint sessions that were given last week at SharePoint Connections.

Here are a couple of my favorites:

• Robert Ginsburg's Extreme Scalability for SharePoint (these are his slides from last year's TechEd)

• Mauro Cardarelli's Disaster Recovery Best Practices for SharePoint

I'll keep posting great resources like this as I find them.