I've seen a lot of discussion lately about IT Maturity and its impact on a business. Microsoft is helping customers evaluate their IT maturity through something called Infrastructure Optimization.  Regardless of specific products or technologies, it helps determine whether IT is a cost center or a strategic asset (or somewhere in between).

For more information, check out this article: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/itshowcase/content/iotsb.mspx.

I also presented a Business Productivity specific presentation at our last Quarterly Partner Briefing. You can get that deck here: http://essentialsharepoint2007.com/Documents/QPB%20BPIO%20Jamison%205-7-07.zip.

Enabling employees to work with greater agility and with better collaboration tools is a huge theme I'm seeing these days. Many companies are jumping on the Enterprise 2.0 bandwagon, which is taking Web 2.0 and social computing tools and putting them inside of large companies.  What do those tools look like?  In short, they include search, wikis, blogs, experise location, RSS feeds, shared calendars, and real-time communication.

MOSS 2007 hits on all of these (with RTC driven in conjunction with Office Communications Server). I've seen a huge uptake in MOSS 2007 for enabling Enterprise 2.0.

According to this Information Week article (http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=199905440), 45% of companies have workers blogging, 43% use RSS feeds, and 35% of companies have employees using wikis. 

How does your company compare?

Need a MOSS VPC?  Here's a MOSS 2007 VPC (Including the 2007 clients).  The VPC includes the MOSS Product Evaluation Guide (on the desktop) and is configured so the walk through at the end of the guide works with the image.  The catch: it expires after 30 days.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=67f93dcb-ada8-4db5-a47b-df17e14b2c74&DisplayLang=en

Thinking about a MOSS 2007 upgrade?  Here's a great checklist: http://blogs.devhorizon.com/blogs/reza_on_blogging/archive/2007/05/10/465.aspx.

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.

I get a lot of questions about how Office 2003 will integrate with SharePoint 2007.  Your best source for this kind of information is the Microsoft Office Programs and SharePoint Products and Technologies Integration – Fair, Good, Better, Best whitepaper.  You can get it here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E0D05A69-F67B-4D37-961E-2DB3C4065CB9&displaylang=en

Office 2007 is by far the best client to use with SharePoint 2007.  I plan to blog with some additional information that isn't in the whitepaper.  Stay tuned.

Whew!  Just five days after the official June 15 release date, Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, Borders.com, and Bookpool.com have all sold out of our new SharePoint book! 

The good news: they'll all be getting more in shortly.

I've gotten a number of questions recently about adding tag clouds to SharePoint. Tag clouds are handy for visualizing content tags in sites, wikis, and blogs.

The Community Kit for SharePoint contains a great Tag Cloud web part...available here: http://www.codeplex.com/CKS/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=4820

Check out the entire Community Kit for SharePoint here: http://www.codeplex.com/CKS/. It's a set of best practices, templates, Web Parts, tools, and source code that enables the creation of a community website based on SharePoint technology.

I just read the first review I've seen for Essential SharePoint 2007.  I was blown away.

http://www.chapmanconsulting.ca/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=144

I'm glad to see that the non-traditional approach we took for this book did not go unnoticed. Thanks for the great review, Chris!

If you are at TechEd this week, be sure to stop by the bookstore between 11:30 and noon. Immediately after my session, I will be signing copies of my book Essential SharePoint 2007: Delivering High-Impact Collaboration at the conference bookstore.

If you're not at TechEd, you can get a great deal on the book here:  http://www.bookpool.com/sm/0321421744

If you're in Orlando for TechEd, be sure to attend my session entitled Composite Application Architectures: Using the 2007 Microsoft Office System.  

We'll discuss how the 2007 Office System isn't just a great set of products; it's an application platform that supports industry standards and provides key application and integration services via composite application architectures. I'll show some features in Office Enterprise 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 that enable great solutions as part of an overall composite application architecture. This session covers common architectural patterns and the core services provided by Office and SharePoint with two fun examples.

It's all happening tomorrow (6/7) at 9:45AM in Room N310 A.

One of the most-requested features of SharePoint for the current release was the addition of the recycle bin. This is great for users who accidentally delete a file. But what if the user deletes a site?  SharePoint still does not have a native recycle bin for sites.

One option is the Microsoft IT Site Delete Capture 1.0 tool available at codeplex.com, which captures sites that are deleted by end users and backs them up to disk using the event model. The restore would take place by an administrator.