Jelle Druyts

Great news if you're hosting a website with Webhost4Life: you can enable Windows Sharepoint Services for free (or as we say in Dutch: "gratisch ende voor niks")! Now I've been wanting to set up Sharepoint Services for a while but my own little server doesn't run Windows 2003 yet so that was impossible - needless to say this free service is way cool. So thanks a lot for the tip, Jan!

Technical plug: if you want to enable it, just issue a ticket through the (renewed) support site with the domain or subdomain on which you want to have your Sharepoint installed and they'll put it up for you. Their support is really good, by the way: I logged a few tickets and got actual responses in only a few hours (and not the "we got your request and we'll try to reply sometime before the Vulcans land on Machu Picchu" type of response (Vulcans aren't real, people, get over it)). As soon as I gave them a subdomain, Sharepoint was up and running in a few minutes.

Now I've seen Sharepoint Services in action before of course, but I haven't really done much with it myself yet. If you haven't either: I urge you to give it a spin, it's really impressive! A little overwhelming at first, maybe, but once you get the hang of it, it's quite something! Some scenarios I have in mind...

I've been looking for a way to have certain documents always available online, while still being able to edit them easily. Uploading some Word files to a Document Library does the trick quickly and easily. And you get checkin/checkout functionality and file versioning for free! Too bad you can't edit plain text document directly, though; you'd think if they get integration with Word right, it shouldn't be too hard to put up a simple text box, right?

I've also been postponing writing yet another little app to manage my contacts centrally, and I'm glad I did: importing a table from my crappy little Access database into a nifty Sharepoint List was easy as taking candy from a baby (well, a baby without teeth anyway).

And if you want to put an aggregated feed on your portal somewhere, it's also pretty easy: just use the XML Web Part to take the RSS source in and apply an XSL transform to have it render (e.g. an RSS 2.0 XSL). Cool? I think so!

Anyway, that's just a few of the things in there of course, I'm sure I'll get surprised more and more as I use the product.