SUGUK Meeting in Bracknell on May 15th – Review
Another well attended SharePoint User Group meeting at Bracknell, there must have been about 45 people. Thanks to HP for hosting, the food was great and there was free swag galore 
Kevin Laahs did a great presentation on the integration between Exchange, Outlook and SharePoint (all 2007 versions), these products are really starting to work together nicely.
SharePoint now enables emailing to lists (easily), you can create distribution lists on the fly from SharePoint (and even update AD directly! with Directory Service Managment DSM enabled).
Outlook and Outlook Web Access now have very good integration with sharepoint lists enabling you to take information offline. It also understands the concept of MySite and automatically makes this information available (you need ISA 2006 for some of this). Also with ISA Server 2006 it will now automatically understand how to deal with those Intranet based links http://myintranetserver/sites/.. and enable viewing of this content outside of the intranet – really cool.
Exchange now has some cool web services. I hope to be exploring these in the near future but they are starting to open up the world of exchange to becoming a fully integrated part of your enterprise architecture stack.
One of the key things to take from this is that the all you SharePoint people will have to start talking to the AD and Exchange guys and vice-versa!
Hina Keval did a presentation on the theory of Usability, it covered all of the good engineering practices that we should consider but would have been even more valuable if we could have got some real world experience. Andy Ginn did promise to take this question off-line to see what the HP labs were doing with Microsoft, I am keen to see some more information here.
Andy Ginn ran through the HP white paper on MOSS Scalability which gives a lot of really useful information on how MOSS scales, they are producing a tool which should be released in the next few weeks to make this easier. For now use Excel . One key point to take from this is if you are doing an upgrade you can expect to get about 60% of the throughput compared to SPS 2003. This is mainly due to the security trimming.
What I would like to see is for HP Labs and Microsoft to start to produce some metrics around the more complex scenarios, InfoPath, Excel Services, BDC, network utilisation between servers etc. Andy did indicate some of this was in the pipeline.
Socialising It was good to meet up with some regular attendees and top SharePointers including Steve Smith, Penny Coventry,Spender Harber (I think making his first real meeting!, and many others, I have your business cards and I’m not afraid to use them!
I think Edinburgh was mentioned for a future meeting, looking forward to it
