Just want to thank ASP.NET and the following experts:
Scott Mitchell, Ted Pattison, Errin O'Conner, Andrew Connell, and last but not least, Bob Tabor and his team @ Learn Visual Studio.NET

A blog, contraction of the term "weblog" website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

LET THE BLOGGING BEGIN!

Everything SHAREPOINT WSS3.0, M0SS2007, AND SHAREPOINT2010 (64-bit Version Only!)

Now, I know what you’re thinking, and you want to say "this is the cookie cutter blog site you so fondly spoke about on a previous post", and I would only ask that you reserve judgment and allow me to explain what this really is and the benefits of using this particular solution. I believe that I have finally found what I've been looking for, an open source, ready to go out-of-the-box web blog, that is totally customizable and very powerful and surprisingly very easy to use and implement.

I have tested many of the other free blog solutions and even the ones provided by the big companies and they all fall short and pale in comparison to this powerful solution. This solution is so simple to deploy, I had it up and running in minutes and didn’t have to setup a MS SQL data store. The ability to brand is very simple and only requires a theme of your own. It already comes equipped with several themes out-of-the-box that are created under the themes folder. You simply copy one of those folders and then give it another name and you can start modifying the look and feel.  This blog solution is done with ASP.NET 2.0 using C# and is exactly what I had in mind for using on my next web project. The themes can be changed by logging in as administrator then making the change on the settings page.

After uploading all of the solution files to the web server all that was left for me to do was grant write permissions to some of the folders that required it. Another aspect to this solution was the choice of different data sources. It’s already pre-configured to store data using XML and that’s why it works immediately right out-of-box on your hosted web server. If you want to change to My SQL or MS SQL no problem, it’s equipped with stored procedures ready to use and setup. What else do you want? Now I can focus on the look and feel and start adding other component when I feel like doing so.

For now, this is just a start. I will be making changes and adding content daily. So stay tuned and keep checking back. There will be lots of information added to this site in the days and months to come and I will try to get as much as I can up on the site before I start my new job. Speaking of which,

I've been offered the role of Application Integration Specialist / SharePoint Administrator and contact point for Errin O'Conner. This is a full-time position with a great company and I'll be starting next week. I was very impressed with the team and their backgrounds and I get to work alongside Errin O'Conner. They will be implementing all the latest Microsoft software and they have a state-of-art facillity.  I can’t wait to start working with SharePoint 2010, K2, and Exchange 2010. Thank God! I hated IBM’s Domino email solution. What a dinosaur and what a waste of money, especially when used with SharePoint. The new K2 blackpearl is very promising and I’m looking forward to the new K2 BCS functionality and the customization options that will be available within Exchange 2010. Hopefully they will eventually finish with the R&D work on the backstage view for monitoring workflows on word documents. What I've seen so far is very cool.....

Well, this is just a start. There is way more content on its way and I will eventually start migrating all of my content from my old site soon and then start adding branding elements and developing additional components for future use. Stayed tuned and keep checking back. Now you can add a comment for a particular topic and share your thoughts. Let’s learn together!

Error: The application is unable to accept further updates because the last attempt to persist the state failed. See the event log for more details. Click on "Services on Server" link and Stop the "Office Sharepoint Server Search". Then start the "Office Sharepoint Server Search". Next, Go to SSP & Search Settings and try another full crawl....

Yeah, I always forget but honestly though, how often do we set the index folder on the query server? Done only once at the time of install and configuration because everytime it's done it resets the indexes and you have to run another full crawl.

I recently had a request to show a movie on a page for a end-user that just happened to be a .mov Quick Time player movie. Of course I wanted to embed the movie in a Content Editor Web Part but when I tried to do that it would not work and would actually freeze up my computer. I tried just about everything I could think of but nothing worked. I thought maybe it was either the movie itself or the script object in the web part. So I tried to test it in a regular .html page that I created in SharePoint Designer with the object and it still didn't work. Then, the light bulb came on. Why am I spending so much time on this when I can just convert/encode it to another format. Then I went to look for a free utillity that does that and I guess what? I couldn't find anything that wasn't free and I wasn't about to pay for that. I then found the Expression Encoder 4 free download and that did the trick. I was able to encode from .mov to .wmv and with the java object I was able to make it work.

How do I have my farm setup for search? OK, I have three servers, Front-end, Back-end, and an Index Server. The index server does all of the crawling of the front-end and then propagates the indexes over to the front-end that is setup as the query server. Pretty simple!