Jan Tielens' Bloggings

One of the big new things (among tons of others of course) in SharePoint 2007 (both WSS v3 and MOSS 2007) is the fact that SharePoint now uses the authentication provider model of ASP.NET 2.0. This means that you have store the user accounts and passwords in another data source than Active Directory (the only option in SharePoint 2003), for example a SQL Server database. The good news is that SharePoint is relying on ASP.NET 2.0 for this, so if you know how to enable Forms Based Authentication in ASP.NET 2.0 sites, you also know how to enable it in SharePoint 2007! Enabling it is one thing, adding users to the database that stores the user accounts is another thing. Techies probably know lots of ways to create user accounts: stored procedures, sql statements, Visual Studio's Administration Site, ... But out-of-the-box there is no UI available to actually do that in ASP.NET 2.0/SharePoint 2007.

Mister "SharePoint Administration" himself, Joel Oleson, has written a nice post about Site Collection sizing in SharePoint 2007.

[Via Angus Logan] Nintex, famous for their workflow solutions for SharePoint 2003, announced Nintex Workflow 2007. If the screenshots are for real: very impressive!

Every once in a while you bump into a new feature in the 2007 Microsoft Office System and you think "hey! this is really cool!". This happened to me last week when I was playing around with InfoPath 2007. To be able to share with you my little aha erlibnis (credit for this term goes to my former math teacher), let's assume you've got following InfoPath form: the U2U Course Order form. A very basic form with Customer, Email, Course and Date fields, and a repeating table with student name and email fields.

ASP.NET AJAX has just RTM-ed, cool! Even cooler: Daniel Larson has released the SharePoint AJAX Toolkit on CodePlex, which uses the ASP.NET AJAX framework. This sounds very promising!

[Via Bill Simser] Required for every SharePoint developer:

[Via Thomas Hawk, Techcrunch] (Why do photo sharing sites need to have weird names: Flickr, SmugMug, Zooomr?) People who know me a little bit probably know that I love to take photographs, lots of photographs. My inner geek of course wants to do geeky stuff with all those pictures, so every picture gets: a) tagged and described (metadata stored in the picture itself so you never ever have to type descriptions, tags again) b) geo-tagged (store the coordinates where the picture was taken in the metadata) c) stored for eternity (I have a pro Flickr account, allowing unlimited upload and storage, it's my off-site backup). Why do I use Flickr, instead of other photo sharing/storing sites? Well when I started (a little over one year ago), Flickr was the only big one that exposed an API. So as a developer I could see my Flickr account as my "picture data store", accessible via a Services Interface; this means you are never "locked in", if a feature is not available you can write your own solution (eg batch download). Flickr has a very large community in general, but also a very large developer community: their API even has a .NET wrapper (kudos to the people who maintain this!) and the amount of tools is incredible.

(It's all over the Belgian blogosphere, but I wanted to mention it as well!) If you want to see one of the "big shots" in the Microsoft .NET team, who happens to be an excellent speaker, you should come and visit the next VISUG meeting with Scott Guthrie! Visit the VISUG site for full details and registration (it's free!). Scott will present two sessions: