The Myth of SharePoint Single Sign On

New blog post at Joe SharePoint: The Myth of SharePoint Single Sign On

WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 Retrospect

New Blog Post at Joe SharePoint: WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 Retrospect.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Online

Microsoft has announced their hosted services strategy recently, one of them being what looks like a hosted MOSS 2007 implementation. I signed up for the beta to check it out, but was relegated to the waiting list. There's not a lot of information out there yet, I'll post more here as I find it. Some things I'd like to know:

Pricing - What will be pricing versus a MOSS 2007 license? Are there different pricing schemes if you intend to have the hosted site internet-facing?

Integration - Can it integrate with your in-house Active Directory? Can you use BDC functionality with your own in-house data sources? These are certainly possible, but how will the security risks be mitigated?

Customization - What support is there for custom components like Workflow, Webcontrols, Custom Field Types, Event Handlers, etc? I've seen hosted SharePoint providers do this kind of thing, but am curious on how Microsoft plans to handle it.

Marketability - I would like to see what the major selling points of this will be. A MOSS 2007 implementation is relatively easy to install and maintain... what benefits could a hosted solution provide? SharePoint is unique (in the hosted application sense) in that some of the best features a business can take advantage of involve bringing disparate elements together into a single location. The offload of maintenance and performance will have to outweigh the pains of integrating a hosted solution with local resources, I would think. There is the trust factor as well. Of course, it is a Microsoft product hosted by Microsoft, and the hosted solution will have all best practices applied....I'm guessing the support will be pretty good too.

More information:

Microsoft Partner Program: Microsoft Office SharePoint Online

Microsoft Parner Program: Microsoft Online Services

MOSS 2007 SMTP and POP3

Recently I learned that document libraries can be enabled to receive emails and attachments. Each document library (and some types of lists) can have it's own email address, and within that library rules can be set so as to route the emails and attachments to different folders based on subject line or sender. The mind reels at he possibilities! So, I set out to see it for myself. I came across this excellent whitepaper here, outlining the configuration steps on the server and site.

Now, if you're like me, your environment is not a dedicated SharePoint server. Amongst the myriad of applications that are running, my server has been configured as a SMTP and POP3 server, which will cause conflict when it comes to enabling your SharePoint sites to receive email. The conflict occurs when the Windows SharePoint Services Timer service attempts to query the \mailroot\drop folder. There will never be an email there because the POP3 service grabs the .eml files as soon as they arrive. Attempting to copy these files back into the \mailroot\drop directory from their respective mailbox folders OR pointing your incoming email settings to one of the mailboxes instead of the \mailroot\drop folder, results in the following application event error to be written to your event log:

"A critical error occurred while processing the incoming e-mail file E:\Inetpub\mailroot\drop\P3_xxxxxxxxxxxxx. The error was: Bad senders or recipients.."

The reason for this is that the Document Library Email domain and the POP3 domain are the same, causing a conflict over who gets control of the messages.

Solution: Uninstall the POP3 service and add the Document Library Email domain to the SMTP server's domains, OR create a new, differently named domain in the SMTP server's domain, and set that in your Incoming Email configurations.

More Information:
Plan Incoming e-mail (Office SharePoint Server)

Peter's World - MOSS 2007 WSS V3 Incoming Email with Exchange

Various Other Issues with Configuring Incoming Email