Agile Sharepoint development by 21apps and Andrew Woodward MVP

The SUGUK meetings are getting really popular. The latest will be in Bracknell on 15th May. Register your interest here, it’s free.

“Exchange 2007 and SharePoint 2007 – Living Happily Ever After?” – this highlights all the integration points between E2K7 and MOSS and question how robust they are in real life

Kevin Laahs: Senior member of the Technology Leadership Group within HP’s Consulting and Integration practice.

“A User Centred Approach to Designing Web Portals” – Given the CMS integration in MOSS, introduction of blogs, wikis, workflow and a whole host of user interaction within MOSS, designing web applications from a user perspective is essential. This talk will provide a view of techniques that can be used to design web portals (applicable to all web based apps – not specific to MOSS necessarily) with usability in mind:

Hina Keval: Usability Research Student, PhD at UCL Computer Sciences

“HP MOSS Sizing and Configuration Utility” – the HP utility for calculating MOSS server / farm architecture sizing and configuration of servers.

Andy Ginn: Senior HP Solution Architect

Venue: HP Bracknell: Amen Corner, Cain Road, Bracknell, Berks RG12 1HN
Times: 6.00 arrival for 6.30 start. End 9.00.

I am really excited to be working with some recent but very deserving Microsoft MVPs in the form of Ishai Sagi and Liam Cleary on the SharePoint Nested Tasks project.

Ishai has confirmed that Lawrence Liu has asked that the solution is merged with the SharePoint Community Kit, which will help to spread the good work being planned.

This will also be the first project I have worked on with true round the clock coding oppotunities with Ishai in Australia, Liam and I in the UK and others around the globe (sorry project just starting so haven’t had chance to talk to the other team members yet). Hope to meet up with Liam in person as he is presenting at the SUGUK meeting tomorrow night in Manchester.

Having recently completed my first public speaking engagement for the SUGUK I had the misfortune to experience some of the ‘live demo’ demons. I think I managed to recover, and even received a round of applause when the Excel sheet was rendered in the browser, but it did hit home to me that I need to update my toolkit to help cope with future presentations. Darren Strange (Office Rocker) has posted a really good post ‘Death by PowerPoint – Giving better presentations‘. It was also very reassuring to see that even seasoned professionals have off days

Whilst looking for ways to improve my presenting I came across the following that may be useful.

Jeffery Veen – Seven Steps to better presentations
Apple -v- Microsoft – the different presenting styles
How to get a standing ovation – Point 4. Know your audience would have really helped me as I was planning to do a demo coding against the Excel Web Services. I did not know the audience was mostly admins until I had to offer them a preference. Had I found this out up front I could have tweaked the presentation but kept it slick.

What next:- Learn some stories, practice, practice and practice more. Be confident and talk from the heart about things I am passionate about – like MOSS 2007

I have the honour of presenting on the same stage as Bill English and Todd Bleeker at the Sharepoint Usergroup meeting – Ullesthorpe – March 7th.

Agenda :

6.15 – 7.00pm – Andrew Woodward – Under The Hood with Excel Services

7.00 – 8.00pm – Bill English – Decision Points for achieving a great Deployment

break

8.15 – 9.15pm – Todd Bleeker – Customizing Sites

Refreshments and hosting of the event will be courtesy of Combined Knowledge.

Start Time will be 6.15pm and Finish around 9.15 – 9.30pm with drinks in the bar after.

Please do come along if only to take the rare opportunity of seeing Bill and Todd present.

I attended my first SUGUK meeting on Thursday 8th Feb. Full details of the meeting can be found on the UK SharePoint user group site.

Lawrence Liu did a very frank and open discussion on MOSS, the Pain Points (it’s a much better story than 2003) and a look at the incremental changes planned for Office 14.

People are posting their feedback at
this suguk post.

The points I have taken from this are
- SharePoint v.Next will be an incremental change and will be released in 2-3 years
- Microsoft are committed to the community – http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/sharepoint and are now hosting a global MOSS site for the community (True dog fooding)
- Microsoft expect (and encourage) Partners to fill the gaps
- Do not delay in implementing MOSS/WSS v3 – There will be lots more information and best practice samples on route
- Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for WSS V3 – http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=19f21e5e-b715-4f0c-b959-8c6dcbdc1057&DisplayLang=en
- Re-engineering of WSS V3 sites – This will make SharePoint Designer a really value add tool as any changes should be possible to be extracted into a true site definition.
- Microsoft are moving away from supporting the newsgroups and instead will concentrate effort on the forums

Generally I think SharePoint is a fantastic product/platform, with 2007 it has grown and with vNext it will mature further still.