Since I am doing a lot of work with SharePoint 2007 I thought it might be a good idea to start trialing Office 2007 as well.  I had heard fairly good reviews about the Office Beta 2, not too many bugs, fairly stable. that sort of thing, so I made the choice and loaded it up.  The great thing was that I had the suite of products loaded onto my Home PC within 20minutes.  The bad was that 1/2 an hour after I loaded up outlook all my incolming mail was coming in BLANK!  As such I beleive I lost about 2 days worth of mail.  Outlook 2007 wiped a lot of mail to which I am still apologizing to people and asking them to resend mail!

 

To solve the issue was as simple as a quick goole search and finding this Outlook 2007 help page runing through some of the bugs to fix the issues.  In my case the fix was as simple a disabling my anti-virus scanner across e-mail.  A potential security risk, mabye, but my normal system & memory scanner is still inplace. 

This month's Brisbane SharePoint User Group has been moved to the 3rd Wednesday in September and there are two great presentations happening

Session 1 - Groove 2007 by Christopher Walker

Session 2 - SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management by Aliestir Speirs

I have once again been very fortunate to be placed within a position where I am working with technology during it's beta phase.  Sometimes technology at this stage can be very cool to play with other times it can be very frustrating and SharePoint 2007 fits into both of these categories!  I am currently working on a showcase project using a number of different elements within SharePoint 2007 as well as some custom developed web parts a developer has been working on.

 

Over all I am finding the next version of SharePoint to have a lot of promise.  For end users the expereince will be much better then SharePoint 2003.  Developers still work like to develop items within SharePoint but I don't think they will complain about building web parts anywhere near as much as they did in SPS 2003 and architects and administrators like myself have a couple of hurdles to jump around how sites and pages are produced, the new IIS configurations and generally just changing our point of view on what SharePoint can and can't achieve.

 

SharePoint 2007 will be a great product when it's released, but I am not expecting it to have everything in place by the time it's released, I would expect a major service pack within 12 months of its release with not just bug fixes but some furhter bits of functionality.

I might be a little behind the curve of people on this one but I have to say I love the Wiki technology in SharePoint 2007.  Over the past couple of months I have slowly been playing wtih a few different areas of SHarePoint 2007 and I have to say that the Wiki technology is so easy to use and funky.  I love it!

 

TechEd2007 is on this week and I am sure there is also going to be some great content on SharePoint 2007 become available, so i'll be hanging out for that.  The only unfortunate thing is that I can't be there.  Being a contractor I can neither afford the time off or the $$$ for tickets and accom so I'ill forage the old fassioned way!

This Wednesday happens to be the Brisbane SharePoint Users Group.  If your interested in anything SharePoint and you live in Brisbane please drop me a line at bspug@scrumpa.net and we would love to have you along.  This month we're taking a look at SharePoint Designer 2007 and how it's better (and potentially worse) than Front Pgae 2003.

Unfortunately during my time on the ICMS project I did not have the luck of doing much work with SharePoint.  Coming back into my new contract and doing a lot of SharePoint Design and deployment work I was a little worried that I might not be able to do everything I was could.  But I am happy to say so far it's been great.  My expereince and the tools that I picked up while on the ICMS project are fitting together nicely and it looks like my first serious walk into SharePoint is going to go fairly smoothly (I know, famous last words), but I pray that all goes well!

Last week the Brisbane SharePoint Users Group held it's largest meeting yet.  With Over 40 people attending, Angus Logan talked about SharePoint 2007.  This was a great talk and I believe everyone picked up something!

 

If your interested in picking up the slides that we're shown you'll need a members login, but if you have one you can pick up the content here!

Had another great SharePoint Users Group today and I would like to thank all those who were in attendance.  Special thanks to Mike Fitz for his presentation.

 

Next month should be awesome with presnetations on the next version of SharePoint by Angus Logan (Microsoft)

Well morrow lunch is the next SharePoint User group for us people in the town of Brisbane and we've got a couple of interesting sessions happening.  First we have a session in impersanting within a webpart using single sign-on and second we have an open support forum for SharePoint issues and the like to be surfaced up to the group for discussion. 

 

The exciting thing is that next month we have our first look at SharePoint VNext, yay!

it has been one mega week,  Olivia and I bought a K-Jam this week (we've been planing this for a while) and they are fantastic.  However I just very quickly wanted to advertise the Brisbane SharePoint User Group that I am a part of.  If you have an interest in SharePoint and you happen to be in Brisbane on the 8th of Feb around lunch, shoot me an e-mail and come along to the group

I've been having a little bit of trouble getting speakers for the december user group, being that holidays are almost on us, and the group is currently only 1 meeting old. However we do have 2 presentations for next wednesday details are as follows

 

Date and Time: 14/12/05 12:00 - 1:30pm

Location: Microsoft Brisbane, lvl 9 Waterfront Place, Brisbane

Session 1: A Developers Overview to SharePoint - Craig Box

Session 2: An overview of using SharePoint and Project Server - Adam Clark

 

Of course Microsoft are puting on some Pizza and Coke for everyone before so be sure to email me at adam@scrumpa.net before the end of this week so we can have catering numbers.

Yesterday was the kickoff of the Brisbane SharePoint Users Group, we had a round about a dozen people which was really great for the first group. While we didn't have any formal presentations for the first group we had a really good discussion forum on what everyone would like to see going forward.  Some of the topics included:

 

- SharePoint UI Customization

- Configuration of Site Definitions

- Day to Day Administration of SharePoint

- SharePoint and MCMS

- SharePoint and BizTalk

- SharePoint and Reporting Services

- General SharePoint Implimentation Guide

- Business Continuity Planing / DR Planing

- Working SharePoint and Team System Together

- SharePoint and ISA working together

- SharePoint Identity Management

 

I have also had email's from a couple of people who have seen Angus Logan's and Christopher Walker's Blog entries on the group indicating that they would love to attend the next meeting, fantastic!!!

 

Currently I am looking for some space to host the user group web site but I am hoping to find something in the next week or so, if anyone knows somewhere that would be willing to host a WSS site for free please let me know (adam@scrumpa.net).

 

Our next meeting will be on the 14th of December, 12pm - 1:30pm at Microsoft, we will have formal presentations this time and the topics I am attemtping to find presenters for at the moment are:

 

- SharePoint Developers Overview

- SharePoint UI Customisation

    or

- Working SharePoint with FrontPage (a few tips and tricks)

 

If your looking to attend please send me an email (adam@scrumpa.net) and I will make sure to send an invite to you.

As I have been posting for a little while we are holding the first SharePoint Users Group here in Brisbane on Wednesday.  After a brief e-mail discussion with my Micorsoft Sponsor we have agreed that the first group will be a forum for people to voice what topics they would like to cover.  So please e-mail me at adam@scrumpa.net if your going to attend so that I can ensure we cater for the right amount of people!

After a couple of months of working to try and get the group going it looks like we have booked our first session for the Brisbane SharePoint Users Group. 

 

While I am still attempting to lock down the exact presentors for next week I can give you the basic details:

 

Date: Wednesday 9th November

Time: 12:00pm - 1:30pm

Where: Microsoft, Level 9, Waterfront Place, Brisbane

Session 1 - Project Server and SharePoint Technologies (TBC)

Session 2 - K2.NET 2003 and SharePoint Technologies (TBC)

 

I am also attempting get a microsoft event ID for registration (hopefully today or tommorw) and i'll post the full details for the sessions when I have them.

 

 

For those of you who are not aware Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server Service Pack 2 is now available (has been for a few weeks actually) and you can download it here!

 

This should not be confused with Microsoft SharePoint Services Service Pack 2 which was also released a few weeks ago and can be downloaded here!

 

Hope I got that one right

How good is this, The Microsoft Web Contnet Management group (WCM) have started a blog to discuss the next version and features coming with the next version of Content Management Server (which at this point looks to be within the next version of SharePoint!)  Thanks the Stefan for this!

For everyone who has been trying to make heads or tails of the information coming out about the next version of Office and SharePoint Angus Logan has made a great little summary of the video's that came out of PDC on the topic:

 

"

Videos are up here.

I think the best one's are Ryan's one on WCM and Dustin's one.

If you watch these presentations you will know what everyone will be tabling about during Beta 2 (when ever that is :) )

Just a quick update on the Brisbane SharePoint User Group that I am currently attempting to set-up.  We have been having some issues attempting to get an evening a month at Microsoft Brisbane, so what we are currently looking at is holding it during a lunch time during the week.  I am interested to know anyones comments on what you would think about holding the user group at lunch?

Got a great response from a few people on yesterday's post about the Brisbane SharePoint Users Group that I am currently setting up with Microsoft.  In particualr I'd like to mention the response that I got from Angus Logan who I am really hoping is willing to do some sessions on MCMS/SharePoint applications and the like. 

 

If everyone can keep sending me your interest to adam@scrumpa.net so that I can get an idea of numbers that would be fantastic.

For some time now I have been talking to a few different people about putting together a SharePoint users group for Brisbane.  I've now gotten together with a couple of the guys at Microsoft including Christopher Walker and we have at last begun the process of getting the group set up.  Currently I am waiting for Microsoft Brisbane to get me some dates for when we can launch so I can arrange the inital speakers,  once we have these dates i'll be approaching some of the great SharePoint people we have in this town and hopefully we can take the community to the next level.

 

Currently we (myself and Christopher) have been looking at getting ideas for presentations on the following topics:

 

- Digital Portfolio Management (an untaped area of SharePoint)

- Mobile SharePoint Solutions

- Application tie-in's (BizTalk, CRM, MCMS, etc)

- ISV's spotlights

- SharePoint and the 2.0 framework

 

You'll notice that I have not mentioned the v'next release of SharePoint some of the inital topics we are hoping to cover, this is due to the fact that we hope to focus on the current release (2003) and although we have seen some very interesting demo's and information come from this years PDC we would like to see some more details (or demos) before we host an offical topic on SharePoint v'next.

 

Lastly if you are interested in being a part of the Brisbane SharePoint Users Group please send me (adam@scrumpa.net) an e-mail stating that you would like to be a part of the group.