Google Sites != MOSS Killer (yet)

Just previewed the new Google Sites functionality that was released (http://sites.google.com) recently. It is supposedly their attempt to capture some of the collaboration market that MOSS plays in. To be fair, it's early in the lifecycle of Google Sites, but at this point I think it would only be a viable alternative for shops that need a minimal collaborative environment. The UI is very slick however, Microsoft could take a few cues from them in that department (especially the nice cross browser Ajax interfaces, and deadly simple usage patterns).

To try it out, at least for now, you need to have your own domain name to push up some files to verify that you are your own "company". Once you do that, you will be able to create sites, invite contributors, pick from some style templates, share files and documents, create web pages, create announcements, create very rudimentary lists, and create dashboards (which consist of small widgets for other Google apps).

I think given enough time, Google could have a pretty solid product for small business collaboration, but as it stands now, I don't think Enterprise customers will use it. If they come out with a version that companies could install on their own servers behind firewalls, only then could it come close to competing with MOSS.

Favicon's in a SharePoint Master Page

My buddy John Ross had asked me if I knew anything about adding Favicons to SharePoint branding, so this post is for him. He pointed me to this post on MindSharp Blogs. This method didn't work for him when he tried it so was wondering how I did one for a project we worked on. I think the method in that post technically should work as IIS will pickup favicons that are in your IIS root, but I think SharePoint may be blocking access in some instances. For me, in traditional html, I have always preferred to call out favicons specifically with a <link> tag in the html <head> this way I ensure that my code, not the server, is handling the file. So now, how do you do this in SharePoint? Here are my steps

Drag a favicon.ico file to the Images directory of your MOSS site with SharePoint designer.

Add the following line to your Master Page at the bottom of the head section right before the </head> tag:

  • <link rel="shortcut icon" href="/images/favicon.ico" />

Check-in, publish, and approve your Master Page so that anonymous folks can see the change.

Refresh the site, and you should see the favicon.

If you have problems seeing the icon, IE could be caching it, try Firefox and it should show eventually in IE.

More info on Favicons

Info on clearing IE's Favicon cache

Mossman's Weather Web Part

I recently created a simple weather web part to enter into Iain Munro's content editor web part contest. Actually, I created two, one using the US National Weather service feeds which don't seem to have restrictions on usage, and one that worked with Yahoo weather which has some restrictions on for-profit usage. Iain wanted the Yahoo one because it supports other countries other than the US, but there seems to be some stability issues with the Yahoo Weather RSS feed, where sometimes it doesn't send the full data (has anyone else experienced this?). So for now, I will just post the National Weather service one. To use it, add the web part to your page and to change the city listed, just modify the shared web part and edit the XML Link to reflect one of the XML URLs listed at this url: http://www.weather.gov/data/current_obs/seek.php?state=fl&Find=Find

Download the Web Part here: CurrentWeather_WebPart.zip