Alexander’s Blog

My students are always asking me where to get the evaluation copies of various Microsoft products. I’ve put together a list of some of the latest software evaluation downloads. My goal is to try and keep this list updated but frankly it is going to be challenging because Microsoft is known for changing the URLs without any redirection.

1. Exchange Server 2010 (120-Day Trial)
2. Forefront Server Security Management Console
3. Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010
4. Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (180-Day Trial)
5. Office Professional Plus 2010 (60-day Trial)
6. Project Professional 2010 (60-day trial)
7. SharePoint Server 2010 (180-day Trail)
8. Small Business Server 2008 (60-day trial)
9. SQL Server 2008 (180-day Trial)
10. System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 (180-day Trial)
11. System Center Essentials 2010 Beta
12. System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2
13. Visio Premium 2010 (60-day trial)
14. Windows 7 Enterprise (90-day Trial)
15. Windows Home Server (30-day Trial)
16. Windows HPC Server 2008
17. Windows Server 2008 R2 Trial Software

WARNING! I should warn you that sometimes when you download a trial software you may think that you are opting out of receiving phone calls and e-mails from Microsoft but you are not. For more information read my blog post: When Microsoft Says No, It May Mean Yes.

Microsoft offers more free products to consumers than any software manufacturer I know. And I am not talking about free evaluation software, I am talking about free tools, utilities and various products and services. Besides software, Microsoft offers these free TechNet and MSDN labs. These are a series of guided, hands-on labs which can be completed in 90 minutes or less.

If you are new to Microsoft SharePoint technologies you might want to check out these demos. They are also a good resource to show in your class if you are an MCT.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 demo

Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 demo

A lot of people, especially those who are relatively new to managing and editing Web sites, use Microsoft FrontPage. More experienced people prefer other tools, such as Dreamweaver or Microsoft SharePoint Designer, or even Expression Web because they do a much better job of editing HTML pages than FrontPage. This blog post is for those individuals or Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who are using FrontPage Server Extensions (FPSE).

Once you’ve upgraded your Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008 (WS08) you may realize that the IIS 7.0 in WS08 no longer supports FrontPage Server Extensions (FPSE). Same is true for IIS 7.0 in Windows Vista. Because there are tons of Web hosting providers who rely on FPSE, Microsoft and Ready-to-Run Software offer a special version of FPSE. This new version is called FPSE 2002 and will work on IIS 7.0 running on 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows Vista and WS08 computers. You can download FPSE 2002 here.

To install FPSE on your WS08 server, login as an administrator account, or start the command prompt using “Run As Administrator” and type the following command.

msiexec /i <path to FPSE 2002 file>\fpse02_win2008_vista_rtm_ENG.msi

Installing FPSE 2002 on WS08 requires that you install several additional services and features. If you don’t want these services installed then you can’t install FPSE 2002. These include the following:

Web Server (IIS) Role Services

Web Server
- Common HTTP Features (Static Content, Default Document, Directory Browsing, HTTP Errors)
- Application Development (ISAPI Extensions, ISAPI Filters)
- Security (Windows Authentication, Request Filtering)
- Health and Diagnostics (HTTP Logging, Request Monitor)
- Performance (Static Content Compression)

Management Tools (Role Services)
- IIS 6 Management Compatibility (IIS 6 Metabase Compatibility)
- IIS Management Console

Features

Windows Process Activation Service
- Process Model

I should point out that Microsoft’s FrontPage Server Extensions have a history of known issues so be very careful. Backup your server before installing FPSE 2002. Make sure you read the note at the end of installation, as shown below.

I saw an interesting news on Sharee’s blog this morning and had to share with you. Microsoft is offering SharePoint Designer 2007 to consumers at no cost. Yes, that’s right. The SharePoint Designer 2007 is now FREE.

If you are not already familiar with Office SharePoint Designer 2007, it is a powerful tool to build and manage SharePoint sites. You can also quickly build workflow-enabled applications and reporting tools using SharePoint Designer 2007. It’s great that now you can take advantage of this useful tool at no charge.

You can download SharePoint Designer 2007 here. For more information on SharePoint Designer, click the image below.

Here is an example that shows in detail how you can import an Excel spreadsheet into a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 List. I used my Windows Networking User Group Web site as an example because I have easy access to it. I am using Excel 2007 in my example.

First create an Excel document with column headings and data that needs to be imported, if one doesn’t exist already. If you are a trainer and would like to use the file I’ve created for demo to your students, you can download this Excel Sample File. The file is in Excel 2007 format.

To import an Excel file into SharePoint, you don’t have to first create a List and all the columns because when you import an Excel spreadsheet, SharePoint will create all the columns and will also create the list based on the name you provide. If you use column names that already exist (e.g. Name), SharePoint will create a column with a number appended to it, e.g. Name1. Here are all the steps.

1. Go to Site Actions, View All Site Content.

2. Click Create.

3. In the Custom Lists section click Import Spreadsheet.

4. Enter the Name, Description and File location, where:

Name: This will be the name of the new SharePoint List
Description: An appropriate description of the SharePoint List
File location: The path to your Excel file

Click the Import button.

5. You will see the Excel spreadsheet open up. In the Range Type section, click the drop-down button and select Range of Cells. Click anywhere in the Select Range box. This will allow you to select the text that you want to import into SharePoint List.

6. Highlight the headers and all the cells with your mouse (click and drag) and then click on the icon on the right-hand side in the minimized Import to Windows SharePoint Services list. This will allow you to get back to the mode where you will be able to click the Import button.

7. Go ahead and click the Import button to start the import process.

NOTE: Whether you are using Excel 2003  or Excel 2007 there is a chance that you may see the following error:

Method ‘Post’ of object ‘IOWSPostData’ failed

If you get this error, don’t panic. Just read my blog post Error: “Method ‘Post’ of object ‘IOWSPostData’ failed” in SharePoint on how to work around this error.

8. If you are prompted for logon credentials, provide the account name a password that has permissions to add to the SharePoint List.

9. You will see your Excel spreadsheet imported into SharePoint with the name of the list that you provided in step 4.

NOTE:

If you used a name for the column that already exists in SharePoint, e.g. Name. SharePoint will append a number 1 to the column title, e.g. Name1. Next time it will use Name2, and so on.

Conclusion

As you can see, adding data from Excel spreadsheet into SharePoint is relatively straight forward. You should check out this blog post from my colleague Sharee English Excel and SharePoint: Part 2 because she prefers the Named Range as the Range Type and shows a slightly different method to import data from Excel into SharePoint. With Excel 2003, or even Excel 2007, you may run into the Method ‘Post’ error that I mentioned earlier. The solution I posted in another blog post seem to work for just about everyone. I’ve run into this error on several computes both Windows XP computers running Office 2003 and Windows Vista running Office 2007 and was able to fix the problem with this solution.