Tips and best practices for SharePoint end users

In the past few days, several of you have reported that they were not able to access www.pathtosharepoint.com . Let me explain the situation, and the steps I have taken to address the current issues.

There are actually several platforms behind the PathToSharePoint.com domain:

blog.pathtosharepoint.com is my blog, and has been hosted by WordPress.com for 2 years. WordPress.com is a great platform, and I plan to continue using it. I find it a perfect solution, for myself (anti-spam, SEO, tagging, dashboard) and my readers (RSS, subscription to posts and post comments).

www.pathtosharepoint.com and pathtosharepoint.com point to a SharePoint 2007 (wss v3) site. This site is hosted by WebHost4Life.
In 2009, this site worked perfectly. Things changed this year as their service went down and they migrated to a new platform. My site has been experiencing multiple outages in the past month, and has been consistently down in the past 4 days. I still have a tiny hope to get my site back up, despite the lack of dedication from the support (not even a status update in four days).

sp2010.pathtosharepoint.com is my new SharePoint 2010 (Foundation) site, sponsored by fpweb.net. I only started using it recently, but it’s been a great experience so far. The guys behind it, like Chris Schwab and Andrew Milsark, are active members of the SharePoint community, and this means a lot to me.

As WebHost4Life’ s service was deteriorating, this prompted me to accelerate the migration of my content to SP 2010. Since last week, all my solutions have been replicated in the new platform:
- New location for the SharePoint User’s Toolkit (announced in my previous post):
http://sp2010.pathtosharepoint.com/SharePoint-User-Toolkit/
This includes the Easy Tabs, the Image Rotator, the Color Coded Calendar, etc.

- New location for the downloads:
http://sp2010.pathtosharepoint.com/SharePoint-User-Toolkit/Downloads/
This includes the HTML Calculated Column, the Color Coded Gantt, etc.

I have also started updating my blog posts, to make them point to the healthy location.

My SharePoint 2010 site is still under construction, and will eventually become the location www.pathtosharepoint.com points to.

As for my mailbox, it is also hosted by WebHost4Life. It was down for a couple days, and I also lost a couple e-mails in the recovery. If you sent me an e-mail in the past couple weeks and haven’t heard back from me, please resend it (and sorry for the disruption).