Looking for answers on SharePoint and WSS

The first place that I go when I have a WSS problem or question is the WSS FAQ, which has a ton of great information. This site is a joint effort of Mike Walsh, Jim Duncan and Larry Strange, and represents the majority of the most frequently asked questions from the WSS newsgroup. It's presented in SharePoint, and I've had great luck with using the site search to find information.

If I can't find my answer there, the second place I go is to the online newsgroups. If you're not familiar with them, an easy way to get there is to navigate from this TechNet page -- it has links to both SPS groups, along with the WSS group, and you can launch the groups either in your newsreader or in a brand new web-based interface. One of the cool things about the new web interface is that authenticated users can mark posts as Questions, as well as rate posts as helpful or not. MVPs can mark posts as Answers.  

Here's an example of a post that the user submitted as a Question, I responded to the post with an answer, the user marked my response helpful, and an MVP marked it as an answer. So when you look at the thread, you can see the icon that indicates an answered question. This means that when I use the new web interface to search, I can easily identify which threads have posts that have been marked as answers by a knowledgable person! As we build up more Answers, this should be really helpful, allowing users to quickly scan for answers when they've searched on keywords. But no matter how you access the newsgroups, there's always good information to be found there.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 22, 2004
    Yup.. when I don't get my SharePoint answers at WSS-FAQ or Newsgroups, I come to LauraJ's weblog.
    :-)

    Thanks for your postings.
  • Anonymous
    June 23, 2004
    A lot of items show up in the web interface which don't show up in the newsgroup, or at least not in Outlook Express. I bet more questions would be answered if the messages made it onto the news server.
  • Anonymous
    June 23, 2004
    To: Matthew
    I have four different machines running different copies of OE. I find that one of them consistently shows less messages than the others (and it's not just the settings - these are fairly new messages it is missing).

    To: Laura
    Thanks for the WSS FAQ comment and especially for the web interface page's address. It's hard to keep up with the addresses and even harder to find one for the WSS newsgroup.

    I only use OE so all the new features are no use to me. (I must know which messages I have and haven't read so a newsreader interface is a must)
  • Anonymous
    June 23, 2004
    So much for that theory. On this machine I thought I was seeing all messages in OE but none of the four messages (all of which are in the past week) in the thread Laura talks about is visible there.

    And I'm fairly sure that I haven't seen this thread on any of the other three machines either (all of which I have looked at since the thread started).

    Usually I see at least one message of a thread if others are missing (and presume they were replying to an ancient message).

    It seems OE does exactly what Matthew says it does.
  • Anonymous
    June 24, 2004
    I'm make sure the WebNews team is aware of these issues... Thanks!
  • Anonymous
    June 28, 2004
    Microsoft Community web based newsgroups reader ...
  • Anonymous
    July 21, 2004
    how to use listview webpart with form web part
  • Anonymous
    June 09, 2009
    PingBack from http://jointpainreliefs.info/story.php?id=1510