Agile Sharepoint development by 21apps and Andrew Woodward MVP

Chris has posted his slides and code from the SUGUK meeting in Reading on 26th.

‘Customizing SharePoint the supported way’ – slides and sample code now available

Enjoy

This has got to be one of the best SUGUK line ups to date and it will be held in Microsoft’s new venue.

Space for 100 so sign up here to see if we can fill it.   Oh yes and I did promise to buy the first round,  gulp!

Event details – there will be 3 SharePoint MVPs presenting and more in the crowd to heckle

First Session: 6.30 – 7.30 – Presenter Steve Smith – SharePoint MVP

SharePoint 2007 Capacity Planning – In this session I will be discussing the design and planning for effective SharePoint servers,sites,lists and libraries. We will look at the cause and effect of various topologies and the considerations for resilience as well as well as performance such as list views and Web Application Web Gardens. This session is based on my Berlin SharePoint Conference session.

Second Session: 7.30 – 8.30 -Presenter Penny Coventry – SharePoint MVP

SharePoint Designer for All – During this session, you’ll see how SharePoint Designer can be used to customise SharePoint Team Sites, advanced data manipulation using the DataView Web Part, consume RSS feeds and how to complete administrative tasks, such as moving documents, including their metadata and limiting what users can do with SharePoint Designer.

Third Session: 8.30 – 9.15 – Presenter Stephen Cummins – SharePoint MVP

Managing the SharePoint 2007 platform presents a number of challenges to administrators and developers. Topics include :

How do you deploy changes to workflows, content types, design and security between a test environment and production?

How do you update already deployed web parts and workflows?

How do you maintain consistent metadata across all your site collections?

How do you migrate form the 2003 version to 2007?

How do you import content in bulk from other systems such as Windows File Shares, Exchange Public Folders or Lotus Notes Databases?

There was a good turn out at the SUGUK meeting in Reading on 28th June.  

First Session:
Groove: A powerful tool for collaboration, that is now part of Office 07

There was a guest presentation by the Groove User Group by Jim Moffat.   The groove user group is fairly new and I was lucky enough to attend the very first ever meeting anywhere in the world at the recent UK EVO Day in Reading.

The number of users is increasing we are trying to do some ‘dog fooding’ as we have a Groove workspace setup for the UK members.    Some of the key questions that came from the meeting

How will Groove do the sync if i’m in a locked down environment with no network access?  not even email.

Well it kinda makes collaboration difficult and I’m afraid groove won’t help you here – carrier pigeon was suggested!

Doesn’t Groove and SharePoint do the same thing?

Yes and No.   There was discussion on this and this posting helps explain it.   This is something that the user group will be taking up to try and help people explain and understand.

Second Session:
Customising MOSS the supported way – from end-user to admin interfaces

Chris O’Brien did an excellent demo on the supported ways of customising MOSS,  some really good tips on the use of the Delegate Control and where Microsoft themselves have missed a trick.

I recommend you read through Chris’ blog,  he even has a really good theme  which I am sure you will find familiar.

Down the Pub Session:
To the George 

A good turn out at the Down the Pub session,  if you haven’t stayed on after a SUGUK event I recommend you do.  This is the best opportunity to talk about things like the current market, meet potential customers or resources.  Oh and you get to have a few beers as well.

Looking forward to seeing you all at the next one,  which I think will be London in July (am I allowed to say that Nick?) – watch out for formal confirmation on the SUGUK site.

Today I received an email from Microsoft

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2007 Microsoft® MVP Award!

What can I say   – I feel like Lewis Hamilton!

Things have really changed for me in the past 6 months and I’m once again really enjoying my SharePoint’ing; taking an active role in the UK SharePoint User Group,  becoming a Community Kit for SharePoint Team Member and helping out the growing SharePoint community at large.

For those of you that don’t know what an MVP is  www.microsoft.com/mvp

Thank you too everyone who nominated me.

Lawrence has just announced the release of CKS:EBE Beta1.

I have only juts joined the CKS team who have been very busy creating an excellent first beta release. This is a fantastic community effort and now in Beta we need you all to try it and provide feedback;  the more we get the better each release will be!

In true “Dog Food” fashion Vince Rothwell (aka The.Kid) has been running the beta on his live blog for a couple of days on CKS:EBE (Enhanced Blog Edition) and it does look good.

Alpha of the SharePoint CKS:EWE is available

There is also an Enhanced Wiki Edition (CKS:EWE) which is a small step into the as yet not very well documented area of SharePoint Wiki customisation.  This release was made early in the alpha cycle to allow people to see what was happening.

ChatterBox AJAX Beta

Updated chatterbox control, this uses the ASP.NET AJAX which will be supported with the release of SP1 for WSS/MOSS.

And the production ready Tag Cloud which will be used in various parts of the CKS project.

What Next

Download it. 

Play with it.

Feedback to the community.

There is an issues list and I encourage people to have a look at this before reporting problems.

Enjoy!

This demo shows how to enable the InfoPath Form Viewer WebPart and configure it to show your InfoPath forms.

This is the second part of my presentation at the SharePoint User Group UK meeting in Telford.

The presentation covers

• Adding InfoPath form view as a safe control
• Enabling the web part in the site collection gallery
• Adding the web part
• Useful tip when it errors with a ‘Form Closed’ display
• Setting the web part properties, and an easy way to find the information

The safe control information referred to in the presentation.

<!– Info Path Demo –>
<SafeControl Assembly=”Microsoft.Office.InfoPath.Server, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c” Namespace=”Microsoft.Office.InfoPath.Server.Controls” TypeName=”XmlFormView” Safe=”True”/>

In keeping with 21apps philosophy

21apps a small consultancy with an emphasis on providing community support and expert consultancy around the expanding MOSS 2007 platform

I have been accepted as a member of the Community Kit for SharePoint on CodePlex!   I will specifically be looking at the Schools Edition CKS:SE.

This is my second CodePlex project and I am looking forward to taking part in what (after a few hours of reading) looks really exciting.

At the SharePoint User Group UK meeting in Telford on 12th June;  I presented InfoPath and InfoPath Forms Server to demonstrate how easy it is to create, post and manage forms using the administrative model (most demos take the straight to the document library approach).

I have posted a screen cast of the first part of the demo which covers:

• Making your form browser enabled
• Publishing the form for the administrators to use
• Mapping form content to list fields in the created content type
• Admin upload and activation to a site collection
• Creation of form library and activation of the content type
• Enabling entry via browser
• Customisation of the Submit event to automatically name the form

Video: InfoPath and Forms Services Demo – SUGUK.org

Andrew Florendine did a really great demo that took this a stage further and used InfoPath Forms to control data entry into a standard SharePoint contacts list.

I will follow up this with the second part of my presentation a short demo showing how easy it is to embed this form in a web part.

Telford and Wrekin Council are kindly hosting a user group meeting for us on Tuesday 12th June. In this session we’ll cover the following topics:

1, SharePoint 2007 and Access 2007
Brett Lonsdale will take us through how you can build online/offline applications using Access 2007 and SharePoint 2007 as a data store. We’ll get to see how you can use workflows, InfoPath Forms and much more from Access 2007.

2, InfoPath and Forms Services
Andrew Woodward (that me ) and Andrew Florendine will take us through how to easily collect information from your intranet users using InfoPath 2007 and Forms Services.

The session will start at 1830 sharp, so please arrange to arrive from 1800.

A link to a map is here

If you’d like to come along please add your name to the sign up list here…

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