Or should I continue to push them out of their comfort zones into a brighter, bolder SharePoint world?

But, did you know you also have the ability to access the URL address of the document located in SharePoint from the Office application? This gives you the ability to send a link to the document in SharePoint to others without having to go into SharePoint to get the address.

Actually, it explains a lot about why SharePoint can be a tricky product to get right. To see why, let’s take a memetic view of organisational life.

SharePoint consists of several elements that provide for the creation, management, presentation, and disposition of information involved in an organization’s operations. One such element, the SharePoint List, is oh-so-simple, yet so incredibly important and powerful. Here are a quick set of best practices for the creation and management of lists that will provide for the definition, capture, and sharing of your desired groupings of information.

Sometimes with SharePoint you will find yourself in a Chicken and Egg situation! Many SharePoint specialists consider it a best practice to use many site collections in there environments than to have one big site collection. Each site collection can be assigned its own content database and therefore makes backup and restoration of SharePoint data more efficient than try to back up one huge database. This can however cause you other problems such as isolated content types, and difficulty to roll up data from lists and libraries that are distributed through multiple site collections.

Todd Bleeker gave an extended presentation at Best Practices Conference this week on “Best Practices for Developing SharePoint Web Parts”. I slapped together a quick down and dirty web cam recording with UStream, embedded below.
Todd was kind enough to send me the entire slidedeck along with the resources from his presentation. Crank up the recording [...]

The content from the streams are archived so that you can review the sessions and the notes taken in each. If you followed the live stream, I’d appreciate comments to the authors who participated so that they know what they provided is of value to people who couldn’t attend the event.

We’re going to stick a web cam in a couple of the sessions and stream them live, so you won’t feel so left out.

The live streams are setup. There are a couple ways to view them. Go to the Live Media Streams page. There are four panels. You can activate all panels, or choose only the ones you’d like to view. Here’s how they are setup.

There are 3 more real world lessons learned that should be mentioned here. These problems are not limited simply to web parts and related files. Items as simple as images and as complex site definitions (the blueprints that detail the creation of SharePoint sites) are all effected by improper non-WSP deployment. Site definitions, field types, event receivers, workflow, features all must be deployed via WSP. In addition CSS files, ASPX pages, and Master Pages will need to be deployed via WSP if they are to be used farm wide. As a general rule, if the item in question will affect the entire farm it will likely need to be deployed via WSP.