For a few months already, I have been busy playing around with WSS 3.0 (Windows Sharepoint Services) and MOSS 2007 (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server). Slowly but surely, the new features of both products are becoming clearer. I have not been busy fulltime with them so I am sure I only scratched the surface.

One of the more interesting new features is workflow. Recently, a whitepaper has been created that gives more information about workflows. The document describes how the workflows do their job and is an interesting read. Download it directly from here.

To play around with workflows, I suggest you install MOSS 2007 and check out the built-in workflows for document approval. As a next step, I recommend to use Sharepoint Designer and its workflow wizard to build a workflow using a few simple steps. Sharepoint Designer allows you to create quite powerful workflows without any development skills required. If you are a developer, you can of course create your workflows using Visual Studio .NET 2005 and the workflow extensions.

Be aware that workflows are in the base feature set of WSS 3.0. You do not need MOSS 2007 to be able to create workflows. I suggest you install MOSS 2007 because it adds some out-of-box workflows such as document approval on top of WSS 3.0.

We got a question from a customer today about disk expansion in combination with RDMs in ESX. The customer had a virtual machine that used a vmdk disk for the C: drive and a raw SAN LUN as a data disk (using RDM). The customer had expanded the LUN to add extra space. However, after booting the VM, the added free space was not visible in the Windows disk management snap-in.

This behavior is expected. What you need to do is to run vmkfstools -X <newsize> on the vmdk file that is used for mapping the disk to a SAN LUN. The free space will then be visible to Windows, allowing you to run diskpart to expand it.

The free Windows Live Writer is a tool to create, edit and manage blog posts with a rich client. If you have ever created blog posts using a web interface, you know that a "rich client" experience is a much better alternative.

There are other such tools available but Windows Live Writer is interesting because it is extensible with plugins. There are already a few plugins available. One of those is a syntax highlighter. You can download the syntax highlighter from the provided link and then unpack all files to the plugins directory of Windows Live Writer. To insert highlighted code, just open the Insert menu and select Syntax highlighted text...

A small example:

// create a datatable
DataTable dt=new DataTable("Profiles");

//add an ID column for the primary key
dt.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("ID",System.Type.GetType("System.String")));

//for each property name in the profileProperties array, create a DataColumn
foreach(string profileProperty in profileProperties)
{
dt.Columns.Add(new DataColumn(profileProperty,System.Type.GetType("System.String")));
}

The past few weeks I have been busy playing with Exchange 2007 beta 2. There are many new (and dropped) features but I am especially interested in the CCR feature. CCR stands for cluster continuous replication. It is a new type of cluster that does not require any shared storage. You do need MSCS (Microsoft Cluster Server) which is a part of Windows Server 2003 Enterprise.

To be able to install a CCR cluster, you first need to install a Windows Server 2003 cluster that uses the MNS quorum type. MNS stands for majority node set. The complete process to install a CCR cluster can be found here . Note that this document does not necessarily follow best practices. It just documents the steps I followed to install such a cluster.

While I was playing around with this, the guys from the Exchange team have posted a blogcast of the whole process as well.