WSS questions

As requested a few WSS questions:

How do I use Frontpage to customise WSS for my clients? How do I integrate lists (and preferably data from CRM) into linked lists so that whne one item changes any linked lists also change?

What is un-ghosting? Why should I try to avoid it and how can I avoid creating unghosted pages when I customise a page with Frontpage?

How do I backup the WSS sites on an SBS2003 box? I have a lot of custom data held in a WSS site on my server. How do I ensure I can restore that data when I am using a) WMSDE b) SQL Server?

Thanks.

Ian Watkins

Ian,

Thanks for these questions, I will answer them in detail over the next couple of weeks, baby permitting.

As a quick one - open a page in IE that you want to customise, then click on the edit in from page icon in IE.  This is the quickest way.  Some options can only be set in the browser itself (especially when using the Office web parts - which can be loaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=38be67a5-2056-46a1-84b1-337ffb549c5c&displaylang=en). There is a whole host of materials on this subject at http://www.sharepointcustomization.com/wss/articles.htm.

On the ghosting area, it is a bit of a personal choice, but I would look at http://geekswithblogs.net/shartzog/archive/2006/04/12/www.bluedoglimited.com/SharePointThoughts/ViewPost.aspx?ID=4 and http://mindsharpblogs.com/todd/archive/2005/07/21/626.aspx and http://geekswithblogs.net/shartzog/archive/2006/04/12/74971.aspx

Finally, on the backup - WSS is backed upwhen you do a full system backup.  If you want to enable restoring outside this, then you might want to look at http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/support/articles/backup_restore_sbs2003.mspx#EPDAE as well as the recycle bin support at http://seanda.blogspot.com/2006/05/how-to-setup-recycle-bin-for-windows.html

There is also a great tool that will help move spreadsheets into WSS - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=dc3d8474-d960-4d14-a9df-9024e39f5463&DisplayLang=en 

I will post more detailed instructions later.  Great questions - thank-you

ttfn

David