I've gotten a lot of questions about SharePoint limitations lately. SharePoint can scale to hundreds of millions of documents and items and host terabytes of data.

This article (Plan for software boundaries) provides recommendations for acceptable performance: http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/6a13cd9f-4b44-40d6-85aa-c70a8e5c34fe1033.mspx?mfr=true.

I'll be discussing the myth of the 50GB limit on content databases in my next post.

Ever wish you could get some help on SharePoint but don't know where to turn?  If so, be sure to check out the MSDN SharePoint Community Forums: http://mssharepointforums.com.

I will be monitoring the forums along with MVPs, SharePoint product team members, and the community at large.

I've gotten some questions about using Office SharePoint Server 2007 to crawl websites that use Forms-based Authentication (FBA) or Cookie-based Authentication (CBA). SharePoint Server 2007 supports this functionality with a hotfix. (If you don't have the hotfix installed, only the logon page will be crawled.)

You can download the hotfix here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=B3C932A5-B3C0-4473-8EA5-62AE44190878&displaylang=en

Before you install the hotfix, be sure to review this KB article:  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934577/en-us

I've gotten a lot of questions from customers who are moving to Office 2007. Most of the questions are around items like the value of the new Office UI, ease of deployment, and integration with MOSS 2007.  The best place to get information on these topics is the Forrester report: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/itanalyst/docs/07-17forrester2007office.aspx.  The report does a good job at providing an independent voice on Office 2007 and its benefits and limitations.

The word I'm hearing from customers who've moved to Office 2007 (and MOSS 2007) is that it's well worth it.

In Excel 2003, there was a feature that let you sync changes from an Excel 2003 spreadsheet to a SharePoint List and vice versa. In Excel 2007, this feature was deprecated.  I get asked about the lack of this feature all of the time.

Good news!  Back in June, we published an Excel 2007 add-in that puts this functionality back.  You can get it at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=25836e52-1892-4e17-ac08-5df13cfc5295&DisplayLang=en.

There's also a companion MSDN article entitled "Publishing and Synchronizing Excel 2007 Tables to SharePoint Lists": http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb462636(office.11).aspx

I've been busy this summer, but obviously not busy blogging!  I'm back from my bloggin hiatus. Stay tuned.

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.