SharePoint Best Practices - Another Great Year

We enjoyed another great year of Mindsharp's SharePoint Best Practices Conference in San Diego. Thanks to Mark Elgersma, Ben Curry, and Bill English as the chief organizers, although I know there are lots of other Mindsharp folks who worked hard to pull this off.

UPDATE: Just heard back from Ben - the primary conference organizers were Bill English, Paul Stork, Paul Schaeflein, Todd Bleeker, Steve Buchannan, Pamela James, Brian Alderman, Ben Curry, and Mark Elgersma. Thanks again guys!

Given the grim economy it was noticeable how many people showed up - over 350 attendees I believe in addition to all the vendors and organizers.

I attended with echoTechnology's Director of Sales, Sean O'Reilly. He's a real hoot - a bit of a legend on the conference circuit. We arrived on the Sunday. Since Sean and I are now using demo laptops and have the exhibit booth process nailed down after numerous conferences, it only took us about 15 minutes to setup the booth before we could unwind.

That night the BPC kicked off unofficially with a Super Bowl party in Ben Curry's suite. It was great to watch the game with various attendees and exhibitors.

Joel Oleson gave a funny keynote on Monday morning, talking about the 10 steps to success.  He argued that SharePoint is plastic and so just because you can do something with it, doesn't mean you should. Some of his analogies included Robot Barbie and headless chickens. Also there was a disapproving mother ("IT") and finger-painting baby who got paint all over the wall ("the business").

One quote he mentioned from Gartner says that by 2010 less than 35% of WSS sites will put effective governance in place!

Programming Best Practices

In between exhibit hours and meetings, I was able to attend only one seminar, given by Francis Cheung of Microsoft's Patterns and Practices Group. This was a really neat explanation of best practices for programming against SharePoint.

What was interesting was Francis showed how object oriented patterns like the Repository pattern could be used to abstract out SharePoint-specific resources like list names, loggers, and so on. Francis also pointed out the need to create strongly typed business entities for SharePoint, rather than straight calls against SP objects.

This provides an additional layer of abstraction that allows mocking and unit testing. The idea is that for code testing purposes you should be able to swap in mock interfaces without relying on SharePoint being available. For instance you should be able to run unit tests against SharePoint code without the SQL database even being available.

These entities also make it easier to work with presenters/controllers without worrying about looking up Site or List GUIDs, or provide an easy way to do CRUD operations.

Microsoft currently has a patterns and practices guidance available at www.microsoft.com/spg. From the guidance doc:

This guidance discusses the following:

• Architectural decisions about patterns, feature factoring, and packaging.
• Design tradeoffs for common decisions many developers encounter, such as when to use SharePoint lists or a database to store information.
• Implementation examples that are demonstrated in the Training Management application and in the QuickStarts.
• How to design for testability, create unit tests, and run continuous integration.
• How to set up different environments including the development, build, test, staging, and production environments.
• How to manage the application life cycle through development, test, deployment, and upgrading.
• Team-based intranet application development.

This approach is actually a standard approach to custom code development but SharePoint has tended to blur the lines a little bit. What is very interesting is that more and more of the BPC seminars were about programming and unit testing. People were even talking about Test Driven Development (TDD) against SharePoint!

What this indicates is that organizations are starting to treat SharePoint seriously as a development platform. This has always held potential but required a steep learning curve. For example, at the Best Practices Conference last year there was very little on these sorts of developer-centric practices. This year it was all about programming against SharePoint in the traditional way - using unit tests, mocking, web smoke tests, and OO patterns.

There hasn't been a killer app for SharePoint yet but it's coming.

Best Practices For Centrally Governing Your Portal and Governance

On Wednesday morning I gave a presentation on helpful tips for centrally managing a portal. I showed a governance site collection I have been working on and talked about how it can be used to make it intuitive and easy to run a portal.

I'm including my powerpoint presentation here.

There are no screenshots of the governance site collection yet although I am uploading a couple as part of this post.

 

Hope this helps!

Hello, New York!

Next week I'll be exhibiting echoTechnology's latest version of echo for SharePoint in New York City, at the SharePoint IMAGINE 2009 conference.

The conference is billed as "SharePoint in the Real World". Its focus is on how businesses use SharePoint to solve their specific real world needs, and how SharePoint impacts their bottom line.

It's organized by Impact Management and is taking place at the Microsoft NY Center at 1290 Avenue of the Americas on Wednesday Jan 21 from 9 to 4. Attendance is free so if you are in the area you should definitely sign up...you can do that here.

I'll be in NYC from Tuesday evening to Thursday afternoon, attending the conference and meeting with a variety of echoTechnology partners - so my itinerary is very tight. Still, it's a great opportunity to return to NYC, where I lived for a short while.

Good Times...

I moved home right after the awful 9/11 and the Dot Com bubble burst, and this is my first chance to go back. Although I was only living in New York for a year, it left an indelible impression on me - as it would on anyone.

My first professional programming job was in 2000/2001 as a Java programmer. I took New Jersey-based IT training company SetFocus' intense but great 3-month Java Master Track, and was then placed with an online education company in New York City.

We were developing a web-based learning system using JSP and servlets, in a cramped little office downtown on the corner of Church and Warren.

At first I lived in West Orange New Jersey with a small gang of roommates, and then we all moved to a small building in Astoria Queens. This was inhabited by a porn star, an aspiring model, an unkillable cockroach (we learned to live and let live), and a foul-mouthed talking parrot named Sammy (not necessarily in the same apartment).

Some of my favourite memories are: exploring the parks and trails on the edge of Battery Park City; bar crawling with my roommates and friends; celebrity spotting; conniving my way into an amazing hidden club called Light, marked only by bouncers and a lit white window and way too cool for me; eating lunches on the steps of Federal Hall in Wall Street and exploring Manhattan on foot during lunch hours; and wandering the streets of Brooklyn Heights.

...Followed By Taxes

Living there was also an exercise in paperwork. Due to my particular circumstances I paid 7 levels of taxes at various times that year:

1. New Jersey state income tax
2. New York state income tax
3. Connecticut state income tax
4. New York city sales tax (anytime I bought something)
5. US Federal income tax
6. Canadian Federal income tax (although I was out of country, as a Canadian even death can't cut short your obligation to pay taxes); and
7. Ontario provincial income tax

To this day the state of Connecticut faithfully sends me an annual update on my pension plan, which currently sits at 13 cents a year. I'm sure just mailing me costs more than that! Luckily they report that they are investing great time and attention to increase the yield, so when I retire in 30 years, my pension will be at 14 cents and I can finally buy that tropical island.

Anyway, if you're in the area and want to say hi, drop me a line!

Next Stop, SharePoint Best Practices Conference!

Turns out I will be attending the SharePoint Best Practices Conference in Washington in a couple of weeks. echoTechnology is one of the Gold Sponsors, so I will be helping to man the booth.

Better yet, I get to do a 1-hour demo on how echo helps manage SharePoint using best practices. Details are still being worked out, but I'm hoping to demonstrate the Centralized Metadata best practices I've been working on.

So if you're at the conference and can spare an hour, please drop by to my presentation - Wednesday at  2:20 to 3:30. Even if you can't make it - you can stop by the booth any time and say hi!

Hope to see you there,

Nick

SharePoint World Record Dash!

In honour of the Beijing Olympic Games I thought I would create a new event, the SharePoint World Record Dash. The goal is to update a blank Team Site to include a whole new look, layout, and content, in the shortest possible time.

I'm using a preset echo for SharePoint batch to run the series of changes on one site, and Adobe Captivate to film the results - I awarded myself the broadcast rights :)

The changes are:

1. Apply a new theme for the site (Obsidian)
2. Remove the existing WSS Image Web Part
3. Add an RSS Feed Viewer web part pointing to the BBC Sports news
4. Add a custom link to the BBC website on the Links list
5. Add a Content Editor web part with Wikipedia information

echo will use the SharePoint object model to make these changes, just as if I'd done them all by hand via the browser.

In this video I'm only updating one site but in my weekly webinars I show how easy it is to make identical changes in development, testing, production environments, on local or remote farms, and to multiple site collections and subsites.

Without further ado, here's the SharePoint World Record Dash video.

If you want to see the batches in more detail, feel free to sign up for one of our weekly webinars, every Thursday at 1 pm PST. You can sign up at http://www.echotechnology.com/registration/Events.aspx?PID=8&EVTID=1

Hope you like this!

echo for SharePoint 2007 - Weekly Webinars

Every week, as part of my work with echoTechnology, I deliver a one hour online demonstration of some of echo for SharePoint's capabilities. It's very high-level and accessible and revolves around creating some tasks and showing how SharePoint can be updated easily and frequently.

The tasks I currently demonstrate include: loading content from a SharePoint 2003 portal and a file share, applying content type metadata, changing the master page and theme, adding some custom web parts, and enabling a custom workflow. All of these changes are deployed to several sites in two different SharePoint farms at the same time.

From the invite:

At the online demonstration you will discover how echo for SharePoint 2007:

• Easily replicates changes to SharePoint in bulk
• Automates change management procedures
• Tests and deploys changes portal wide
• Replicates to remote portals
• Rapidly loads and tags documents
• Delivers cost effective maintenance of SharePoint
• Provides a longer lasting more relevant portal for your business

The webinars are every Thursday at 1pm PST. Sign up online at the echo website: http://www.echotechnology.com/registration/Events.aspx?PID=8&EVTID=1&TimeZone=240

If you're a SharePoint Administrator you should definitely check it out. Hope to see you there!

Virtual SharePoint Conference

Last Wednesday I had a chance to participate in a Virtual Trade Show for several SharePoint vendors. This was a nifty little vehicle to demonstrate our products to people all over the world.

The event was organized and hosted by DynTek, a consulting firm, using Live Meeting. They handled all the marketing and arranged for a representative of each vendor to present for up to 15 minutes on the product's capabilities and the value it adds to SharePoint. At the end of each presentation a live poll allowed the attendees to vote on how much a particular tool had captured their interest and notify us if they wanted a follow up demonstration or evaluation.

I ran the echo for SharePoint presentation. The other three vendors were Nintex (presented by Mike Fitzmaurice), ScriptLogic (presenter: Mike Perrault), and BA-Insight (Mark Aschemeyer). As the DynTek invitation put it:

Enhance Workflow & Reporting
Nintex will discuss how you can build complex workflow processes quickly and easily using a web browser interface and provide unprecedented insight into workplace usage, trends and behaviors.
Enhance Permissions
ScriptLogic will discuss how administrators can now backup and restore permissions as well as control the security of SharePoint environments the exact same, clear, intuitive way they would manage the security file servers - all from the same, intuitive console.
BA-Insight Software will discuss how to extend the search capabilities of SharePoint to deliver the most comprehensive and flexible Information Access Platform available in the marketplace today.

Enhance Management
Echo Technology will discuss how to easily migrate and manage change on your SharePoint platform through its entire lifecycle.
Enhance Search

It was a real challenge sticking to the 15 minutes time spot. It meant showing a few slides and setting the scene for why our products added value to SharePoint, and then (if time allowed) running a little demo.

I had a batch of echo Tasks setup ahead of time, so although the time was tight I was able to present live on how we could:

• Deploy 3 custom web parts from one site to another;
• Apply a new Theme and Master Page;
• Migrate files from a file share, apply content type metadata, and insert into a document library;
• Migrate files from a SharePoint 2003 portal into the same document library, again applying metadata as I went;
• Activate a Nintex workflow feature to a site collection; and
• Deploy a Nintex custom approval workflow to a document library

All of these changes were done from a local Development portal to a remote Production portal to demonstrate how easy echo makes that.

Kudos to DynTek for the cool concept and especially to Linda Ford, Julie Trautwein, and Dave Chennault who fronted the event. Well over 100 companies attended, and feedback has been very positive. Everyone seemed to enjoy the virtual format, which is so convenient. Hopefully DynTek will invite us to the next one!

Tech.Ed Orlando 2008

I just spent the week in Orlando attending the sessions and helping to staff the echoTechnology booth. It was an excellent networking opportunity (as these things always are) and a great way to talk to people about their SharePoint implementations and pain points.

Garry Smith and RK Bommini

By now many organizations have had a chance to evaluate SharePoint 2007 and have either implemented a farm or are about to. One complaint that came up again and again from early adopters is that the portals "ran away" from them and had become a real mess to manage. Another is that it was becoming so hard to maintain the portal that administrators were starting to push back at the business requirements, with the result that the SharePoint implementation was not evolving as well as predicted.

In some ways SharePoint is a victim of its own success - it looks like a wizard-driven software suite and it appears that after a couple of clicks a portal is up and running and ready for the business to use. This is not true!

SharePoint is most interesting and worthwhile when it is helping an organization solve its enterprise problems - tackling big challenges like document management, information-worker collaboration, and enterprise search. These challenges are far more that just technical; addressing them requires a great deal of communication, focus, and effort on the part of the business. SharePoint isn't a silver bullet, or a shortcut to avoid those hard yards.

The word that kept coming up during the SharePoint sessions and on the show floor was "governance". It's a catch-all phrase that really means making the appropriate and ongoing investments of time, thought, skills, and money in addition to the upfront investment of SharePoint licenses and servers. Without that additional commitment, there is little point attempting a SharePoint implementation - it will be doomed to failure.

So what are some of the practical tasks that need to be undertaken as part of governance? Much more on this in the next few days...

I'm baaaaaack! Back from Oceania and freshly installed in my native city of Ottawa, Canada. The last couple of years have been a happy blur. I'll definitely miss Oz and the great people at Dimension Data Australia but it's nice to be in the same time zone as most of my friends and family.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am working on some new projects.
One of these is collaborating with echoTechnology as their new Technical Product Manager to help develop and promote their tool, echo for SharePoint. This is like a Swiss-army knife utility suite that makes changing SharePoint easy. It's a product I've had my eye on for over a year, ever since I first interviewed the echo guys in these posts: echo demo and interview.

The reason I'm so keen on the tool, and why I agreed to work with them, is that after two years of SharePoint consulting I have yet to find a suite of tools that makes it so easy to manage SharePoint configurations and settings. Trying to migrate my solutions from Dev to Test to Prod has been an exercise in frustration. Keeping the state of a farm consistent when multiple team mates worked in parallel, pushing out changes to more than one site, or sharing the deltas with colleagues who are working in their own virtual machines has required a relentless search for scripts, code snippets, and any means possible to gain a little development consistency and control.

Part of my brief with echoTechnology is to work with the community to help develop best practices on SharePoint governance and change management. This is an area dear to my heart, and the focus of many of my workshops and engagements over the last few years. I've devoted a fair bit of space on this blog to those kinds of issues and that will continue.

Whenever possible I plan to release white papers, site templates, and snippets of code on this blog. I hope they will be useful to anyone planning to govern their SharePoint implementation - which should be EVERYONE!

After Wednesday's live echo for SharePoint 2007 demonstration, I spoke with Stephen Cummins to ask him more about it. In addition to being echoTechnology's Technical Evangelist, he's a SharePoint MVP and blogs at SPSFAQ and echoTechnology Support Blog.

Question: What are the most important design considerations you follow when planning, implementing, and managing a SharePoint portal?
Stephen:Not really understanding the SharePoint architecture leads to examples like trying to recreate file shares in document libraries, creating deep navigational structures, or one giant document library with hundreds of folders.It's best to be prepared - it makes more sense to have multiple smaller document libraries, so you can have an easier time assigning access to these libraries, applying different workflows and metadata. A poorly planned architecture can make it hard to grant access, and maintaining it is a manual and time consuming process. Another important consideration is capacity planning for the size of the content that you are uploading, which affects the size of the database and the search index. When you are planning, realize that this is something that the organization needs and will use for years to come.

Question: What are the difficulties in achieving a good design?
Stephen: It's hard to make sweeping changes once you've deployed the portal...you have to live with your mistakes. Without the proper tools you can change site hierarchies and taxonomy but it becomes time- and labour-intensive.

Question: How would you describe your product?
Stephen: echo 2007 allows administrators to manage and migrate to the SharePoint 2007 platform. This means rapid changes, testing and deployments. The core focus is on migration and management. By automating change on SharePoint echo2007 enables administrators to:
a. Shorten migration from 2003 to 2007;
b. Migrate plus deploy new 2007 features simultaneously;
c. Maintain a more dynamic portal;
d. Dramatically Increase responsiveness to change requests;
e. Deploy a more powerful search by keeping control of meta tags;
f. Lower administration costs;
g. Lower the risk of changing the platform;
h. Significantly reduce consulting budgets;
i. Reduce deployment and piloting schedules;
j. Meet corporate risk mandates;
k. Redeploy resources to focus on solution development.

Question: What are the principal scenarios you see echo being used for?
Stephen: It's a tool for shortening migration path, managing the software life cycle in development, testing, and production. It's useful for batching and scheduling changes and updating the portal quickly. It helps managing Features, Content Types, and workflows, all of which are easy to deploy but difficult to change.

Question: What steps would you follow to migrate a SP2003 site to 2007 using echo?
Stephen: First install and provision your site hierarchy in SharePoint 2007. Do this based on lessons learned from 2003 - make a clean setup, remember that a lot of things from SharePoint 2003 won't apply, like Areas. Next create a 2007 template as a blueprint. Use echo to migrate the libraries, lists, and webparts over using the blueprint. Then migrate the content, being careful to map the metadata to your new taxonomy and content types. If you need to make modifications, you can rerun the migration as often as you like to migrate more web parts, lists, and libraries.

Question: Can you script and run echo functionality automatically, or on a scheduled basis?
Stephen: You can run the tool immediately, save it for later, or schedule it for a particular time.

Question: Can you use this tool for migrating changes from one environment to another?
Stephen: Definitely, it is very useful for that. We are even working on combining echo with a full bi-directional georeplication capability thanks to our partnership with Syntergy!

Question: How would someone use echo to manage changes in development and push them out to a testing and then production environment?
Stephen: We think end users will drive this need - they will ask for web parts or tasks lists or new workflows, and IT will have to have some way to rapidly and reliably deliver these items. As an example, a developer will develop in SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio, use echo to push the changes to Testing, make modifications on Dev as a result of the testing results, incrementally modify their work, and keep pushing the changes out until they are ready for production. As part of a change management strategy they can create the tasks to do this, run them automatically at say 8pm when users have gone home, and in the morning get a log result of how the deployment went.

We consider this to be a "real world product". In fact the reason I joined echoTechnology is because I like offering a solution to potentially everyone who needs a problem fixed, rather than going in to one client at a time and trying to improve the SharePoint management situation.

Question: Can you migrate SharePoint Features using echo?
Stephen: You can activate and deactivate features as tasks in echo 2007.

Question: echo can replicate Ninetex workflows - can it do this for other workflow engines or for Workflow Foundation itself?
Stephen: echo 2007 can manage any Windows Foundation (WF) workflow that is hosted in SharePoint.

Question: Is echo 2007 a tool only developers will be using, or do you envisage other groups using it?
Stephen: I envisage lots of different people using it: A Solutions Architect; the developer who works on the platform; infrastructure staff who might not let the developer near the production farm; the SharePoint Administrator. Also consultants could use it to quickly and reliably resolve issues and deploy solutions when they visit client sites.

Question: What have been the biggest technical challenges you faced in developing echo for SharePoint 2007?
Stephen: There's been so much work to do - we spent years working on this while SharePoint 2007 was being developed and released. We made tons of proof of concepts. Challenges included making sure Content Types were consistent across all environments, trying to handle incremental versioning when doing deployments....

Question: You've also released a new tool, SharePoint Spy - what can you say about that?
Stephen: It's a great tool - we actually developed it for our echo work. It lets you dig under
the hood and view all the properties of a column or list. It's partly for troubleshooting, partly for analysis, partly for educational purposes.

Question: What sort of pricing structure are you looking at?

Stephen: We're probably looking at a rising scale based on number of sites; essentially we would like to license it on a usage model because the number of people who use it in an organization might be small, but they may need it for lots of different things.

Question: When will your product be released to market?

Stephen: We are targeting end of July.

Thank you Stephen for your replies!

Yesterday evening I saw a live demo of echoTechnology's echo for SharePoint 2007 product, which is a tool for handling SharePoint migration and management. The presentation was
given by CEO Garry Smith, Technical Director Sergio Otoya, and Technical Evangelist Stephen Cummins. The company is positioning echo as the tool that "allows administrators to
effectively manage and migrate onto the SharePoint 2007 platform". The demo was an hour long and was really impressive. Following that I spoke with Stephen to get a little more
information about how they feel the product can be used. I'll be publishing that within a few days.

Last night's demo gave a clear indication of echo's design philosophy, which is to make replication and change management as easy and granular as possible. This is important
because it's actually really hard to roll changes across different SharePoint versions, sites, and environments. I've mentioned before on this blog how complicated I find it to
properly manage the customizations that I make. Echo aims to solve that.

The two core concepts or "streams" that echo specializes in handling are migration and management. Migration might include migrating content from SharePoint 2003, Domino,
Exchange, or file shares. Management includes managing workflows, features, web parts, content types or site hierarchies. By creating discrete "tasks" for each of these, echo
gives you very granular control, allowing you to do one or more tasks handling simple or complicated scenarios.

The first part of the demo was a migration from SharePoint 2003 to SharePoint 2007. Out of the box SharePoint provides options such as in-place, gradual, and content migration.
The steps required to do these, and the pros and cons of each, are well documented elsewhere on the net so I won't go in to them here.

The way echo does it is to use a fresh install of SharePoint 2007 as a clean environment in which to push the 2003 migration. You first create a template site in MOSS 2007 (they
called it the "Blueprint site") which has all the webparts, lists, and views you would like to migrate your 2003 stuff to. Next, you select the 2003 sites you would like to
migrate. The lists of migration candidate sites get added to what looks like an Excel plugin - this allows you to save the list to Excel and give it to your business users so
they can make any changes they want pre-migration. This ensures that someone can clean up metadata, illegal characters, or make any other changes before you do the site
migration. You can run the job right away, or schedule it to run automatically at a later time. You can also save it to use for other batches. Once the batch ran, we saw how the
sites from 2003 were all copied over to the 2007 portal. A log gives complete details on each step of the migration.

After the run, the web parts and lists were migrated, but not any of their content. This led to the second demo, which was about content migration or "content loading" as it is
called. Having migrated the 2003 sites over, we were shown how the Content Loader Task allowed an administrator to map existing 2003 content, including its related metadata,
over to content types created on the 2007 portal. The mechanism to do this is very granular, so content settings, fields, views, permissions, version history and the like can
all be migrated across in whatever way you want.

There is even a choice to truncate the version histories, so that if you wanted you could migrate only the last couple of versions of content to the new 2007 portal. Once again
all of this can be saved to an Excel "control file", which allows customers to modify the migration settings if they want. This allows a deep level of control over the process,
and the Excel format is very user-friendly. In fact if I understood correctly formulas could even be run over the control files to do quick formatting.

The echo team say that one of the primary goals of the Content Loader Task is to help manage content types and support a central taxonomy. They feel that this is a key
requirement to really gain value from a MOSS portal with targeted searches. They have seen that many organizations don't bother doing this in a systematic way due to the adhoc
and unstructured way SharePoint 2003 allowed metadata columns to be added. Since an out-of-the-box migration will just try to copy existing metadata columns across without any
adjustments, and since the administrators doing the migration don't have any knowledge of what metadata should be placed on the content, the tendency is just to port all of
it over to the 2007 portal without applying any lessons learned or disciplined taxonomy. By using the Excel control file, the burden of applying appropriate metadata is removed
from the shoulders of the administrators handling the migration, and placed in the hands of content authors where it belongs. The Excel format seems like a logical way and
friendly to get content authors to plan and manage their metadata before a migration.

Having demonstrated the ease with which metadata can be changed in the Excel control file, it was reloaded into the echo interface, the batch was run, and all the content
migrated over to the 2007 sites and mapped to Content Types as planned.

The next demonstration was a quick example of loading content from file shares - in this case images kept in a series of folders. What was neat here was that there were four
folders with only two duplicated images in each - basically an example of versioning as it is usually done on a file system. The content loader provided a mechanism to
"collapse" these files together so that upon import, there were only two images but they each had the complete version history of their four versions taken from the folders.

At this point we were shown the concept of batching, which facilitates scheduling and change management for SharePoint. Any number of tasks could be added and configured,
providing complete flexibility for whatever scenario was required. The batches could be saved for future use, and scheduled to run at a particular time (such as after business hours). Batching is also an effective mechanism for migrating changes between environments.

Things I found noteworthy:

• The Excel plugin approach is a very good idea. Garry suggested this was driven directly from customer feedback.
• The granular level of tasks is useful because no-one is second-guessing how you want to do a migration or management - you are free to chain the tasks together in whichever
  order or process you like.
• The ability to migrate workflows is pretty key as one of the drawbacks of using SharePoint Designer is that it links a workflow to a particular list - and echo would remove that
  problem.

I'm sure that some organizations will value this tool for the help it can give migrating from SharePoint 2003 to 2007, especially with more complicated sites. It may help such
organizations "jump the gap" if they are hesitating due to the complexity of managing the transition. I haven't had to do many upgrades and those have been straightforward
"content migrations" so this is less important to me. Personally I'm most interested in the potential it has for migrating SharePoint customizations from development to testing
to production. This is a requirement in any organization that supports SharePoint and very hard to address without such a tool, and it's an ongoing need.

Echo for SharePoint 2007 is scheduled for release at the end of July. If you're interested you can find out more information and download a trial at echoTechnology's website
(http://www.echotechnology.com/).