SharePoint Kits

There's some cool pre-Christmas SharePoint gifts here or almost here:

First off, SharePoint Service Pack 1 is on the way. There are some new stsadm commands, a rollup of the various hotfixes that have come out, and support for creating custom web parts with the AJAX toolkit.

The SharePoint Team Blog dives into all the details at http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/11/29/preview-into-wss-3-0-sp1-and-sharepoint-server-2007-sp1.aspx.

Just released is the Accessibility Kit for SharePoint from HiSoftware and Microsoft. I've blogged about this in the past and it will be important to many organizations that have been unable or unwilling to consider MOSS for public portals due to accessibility requirements. It's available on CodePlex. The nice touch with this kit is that it is intended to incorporate community contributions (as you'd expect on CodePlex) so the kit will improve as people contribute to it. The full details are at http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/11/28/announcing-the-accessibility-kit-for-sharepoint-aks-1-0.aspx.

Finally, if you work with Business Objects, you'll be pleased to know they just released a free integration kit for SharePoint called the "BusinessObjects Enterprise XI R2 SharePoint 2007 Portal Integration Kit" (or BO E XI R2 SP 2007 PIK for short). You can download that here (5 mb zip file). The kit includes document and list view web parts to help create dashboards.

Each of these releases opens up worlds of development possibilities. The depth of SharePoint's integration capabilities continues to increase, and this is just Year One!