sharepoint_blog_1

October 16th - London meeting

nick_swan — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 18:10:00 GMT

The full session abstracts have now been posted up for the meeting on October 16th. The titles are:

Session1 : Web Content Management in MOSS, real life case study – Riaz Ahmed

Session 2 : Best practices/lessons learnt: building MOSS Content Management sites – Chris O’Brien

Full more info and to sign up visit the following forum post:

http://suguk.org/forums/ShowThread.aspx?PostID=13880

Session Vote!

nick_swan — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 11:03:00 GMT

Session ideas have been submitted, and you can now vote at the following link:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=jfApsEaMnLLTEspX3hIl0w_3d_3d

We'll keep the survey going until Friday 29th August.

If there's a topic missing you feel is important please mail me at nick@lightningtools.com

London Round Up

nick_swan — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 22:02:00 GMT

What a great meeting - 2 great presentations, and a record attendance. Apologies again for the lack of pizza...we'll make sure there is a sufficient supply for the next time :-)

Thanks to everyone who came along, and of course Matt and Eric for the presentations. You can pickup the slides/code/etc from their respective blogs:

http://www.binarywave.com/blogs/eshupps/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=144

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/mattg/archive/2008/08/15/suguk-14-aug-08.aspx

I also recorded an interview with Eric before the meeting where we cover some of the stuff he presented, the pod cast will be up soon at www.sharepointpodshow.com

Please keep your suggestions coming for future meetings also:

http://suguk.org/forums/thread/13000.aspx

SharePoint Pod Show

nick_swan — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 08:54:00 GMT

Just a quick entry to point you to something Rob Foster, Brett Lonsdale and I have been working on, a SharePoint related PodCast.

http://www.sharepointpodshow.com/

The first episode is just an intro to the show and what we hope to cover in the future. The next episode should be up by the end of this week!

London Meeting - Aug 14th

nick_swan — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 12:22:00 GMT

For those who aren't lucky enough to be on holiday we've got 2 great topics for the London Meeting. Eric - who has the record for longest distance traveled to attend a meeting, and Matt - who is only traveling from Coventry, will be your presenters. Arrive just after 6pm for a 630pm start:

Session 1 - Eric Shrupps - SharePoint MVP

Full Speed Ahead: Developing High Performance Applications for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Discover tips, techniques, tools and best practices for creating high performance MOSS 2007 applications using Visual Studio 2008, C#, the SharePoint object model, web services, and the latest features in the .NET 3.5 framework. Learn how to measure application performance, optimize code execution, and configure SharePoint to support data intensive, highly transactional line-of-business applications.

Session 2 - Matt Groves - SharePoint , Extranets and ISA, it's easier than you think.

The presentation will be on configuring SharePoint for Extranet access in the real world and also how to work with ISA server as a SharePoint publishing tool

As usual we are hosting this at the MS Victoria offices:
Microsoft London (Cardinal Place)
100 Victoria Street
London SW1E 5JL
Tel: 0870 60 10 100

http://www.microsoft.com/uk/about/map-london.mspx

If you'd like to attend please post your full name on this forum topic:

http://suguk.org/forums/1/12463/ShowThread.aspx

London SharePoint A&E Roundup

nick_swan — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 07:41:00 GMT

Many thanks to everyone who attended the first of our SharePoint Q+A sessions. Hopefully everyone enjoyed it and got some useful information from the discussions that took place. It was great not to run out of questions! :-)

A special thanks to Colin, Ben, Craig, Russel and Chris who let me bully them into sitting at the front.

The format of the evening seemed to work well, but we're always trying to improve things for you so if you have any feedback or comments feel free to post them here or email me at nick@lightningtools.com

Also I know a number of people were taking some notes. It would be great if you could perhaps share some of those notes and especially perhaps the companies, url's and white papers that were mentioned...feel free to post those notes here or perhaps a link to your own blog with them on...

Basingstoke meeting - March 27th

nick_swan — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 11:38:00 GMT

A meeting slightly west of London this time which is kindly being hosted by ICS. 3 sessions to get your teeth into!

1800 - arrive for tea and coffee

1830 - Architecting a Highly Available MOSS Farm - by Lewis Baldwin, ICS, Head of Infrastructure and Support
This 0.5 hour session will cover design considerations for architecting a highly available redundant MOSS environment.
Overview of MOSS server roles with regard to availability and in addition specifics on how to use SQL Server 2005 Database mirroring technology to secure remote data replication to deliver a MOSS Disaster Recovery site.

1900 - Governance: Protecting your SharePoint Investment - by Symon Garfield, ICS, SharePoint Practice Lead
This half hour session will present a framework that will help organisations ensure that SharePoint platforms grow in a controlled and managed manner, remain aligned with business objectives and continue to deliver genuine, measurable business value and Return on Investment.

1930 - break for food and drinks

2000 - Introducing Silverlight and SharePoint - by Colin Byrne, Flexnet Consultants
Silverlight is a major new technology from Microsoft and it's new entry into the Rich Internet Applications (RIA) space.
This presentation will explain what Silverlight is, what the benefits are over standard web development and how Silverlight can be hosted in and integrate with SharePoint.
With few slides and plenty of demos we'll walkthrough the creation of a Silverlight video browser application that uses data from SharePoint and then deploy it to SharePoint. We'll also show how a commercial Silverlight 2.0 product for SharePoint is put together.

For location information and to sign up please visit here:

http://suguk.org/forums/thread/8918.aspx

Feb London meeting roundup

nick_swan — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 11:38:00 GMT

Many thanks to Ben, Spencer and everyone who attended Wednesdays meeting. It was great to see so many people down the pub afterwards as well. All the mentions of going to the pub during presentations etc people looking in to the session might think all SharePoint people are alcoholics! Or perhaps it is just that SharePoint drives you to drink! :-)

Anyway, here's a link to Spencers slides:

http://www.harbar.net/archive/2008/02/29/London-SUGUK-meeting-Kerberos-and-what-not.aspx

Bens are also on the way.

London User Group Meeting - 27th Feb 2008

nick_swan — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 02:33:00 GMT

back in London for another user group meeting with two more fantastic topics with SharePoint MVPs Spencer Harbar and Ben Robb...

Session 1
Kerberos and SharePoint: no ticket touting here. Does SharePoint add another head?

·         Overview of Kerberos and the benefits it offers in a SharePoint 2007 deployment.
·         Discussion of whether your SharePoint deployment needs Kerberos.
·         Tour of the required pre-requisites and configuration settings.
·         Approaches to automating configuration in a SharePoint Farm.
·         Preview of the SharePoint Farm Kerberos Configuration Utility.
·         Q&A/Discussion.

Session2
Dealing with Change: How to Manage Deployment for Multi-Project MOSS Solutions

If you are planning on using SharePoint to run a large intranet or public-facing website that has ongoing maintenance and multiple projects with different release cycles, you will be faced with challenges around how to successfully manage this in a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server environment. Learn how to leverage industry-standard processes for continuous integration and automated builds to streamline your deployment process between different environments, using MSBuild, Team Foundation Server and the SharePoint Solution, Feature and Content Deployment frameworks.

To attend please post your full name on the following forum topic:

http://suguk.org/forums/thread/8229.aspx

Slides from Coventry meeting

nick_swan — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 02:19:00 GMT

Many thanks to everyone who attended, Matt for presenting and Trinity for hosting and providing the food. You can get the slides from Matts presentation at his blog:

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/mattg/archive/2008/02/14/suguk-session.aspx

London meeting roundup

nick_swan — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 14:45:00 GMT

Many thanks to everyone who attended the meeting last night and of course to Chris and Andrew for presenting two great sessions. Here are the links to the resources available from last night:

Chris's workflow links
http://sharepointnutsandbolts.blogspot.com/2008/01/resources-from-my-workflow-deep-dive.html

Andrews links for Search Server 2008
http://www.21apps.com/2008/01/suguk-jan-10th-2007-meeting-write-up.html

http://www.21apps.com/2008/01/search-server-2008-federated-sites-that.html

If anybody has any feedback on the evening feel free to leave a comment here or send me an email.

London meeting - January 10th

admin — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 14:05:00 GMT

hope everybody has had an enjoyable break over Christmas and New Year. We're back to meetings again quickly with an event in London on January 10th. Two great topics... Workflow: A deep dive into developing workflows for SharePoint using Visual Studio and Infopath - Chris O'Brien Of the three types of workflow available to the SharePoint developer, only Visual Studio workflows provide complete flexibility and power. Without the right information however, the learning curve can be steep for the uninitiated. In this session we’ll start with initial decisions such as SharePoint Designer workflows vs. Visual Studio workflows, sequential vs. state-machine, and InfoPath vs ASP.Net for forms. From there we’ll cover the key steps to get a workflow up and running including retrieving data from an InfoPath form, configuring workflow activities, and deployment of the workflow. Over several demos, we’ll build a basic state-machine workflow, and show why workflow is a valuable addition to any SharePoint developer’s skillset. Search Server 2008 – What is it, how does it affect me and should I be testing it? - Andrew Woodward A look at the recently announced Search Server 2008. We will walk through an installation and demonstration of the new Federated Search capabilities, what’s provided out of the box, what you can get from free, how to leverage sites using Live.com and how to federate results from Google. We will discuss how this fits in with your existing WSS and MOSS deployments and the release timescales. To signup please post your fullname at the following forum topic: http://suguk.org/forums/thread/7300.aspx

Newcastle Meeting Cancelled

nick_swan — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 09:43:00 GMT

Unfortunately due to illness we're going to have to cancel tonights meeting in Newcastle. Sorry for the very short notice.
We'll re-schedule it for very early next year.

Cancelled : User Group Meeting 29th October - Coventry - Extranets / SharePoint & ISA

nick_swan — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 21:18:00 GMT

Due to unforseen circumstances we've had to cancel this meeting.

Thanks for bearing with us.

Nick

First Special Interest Group : Education

nick_swan — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 11:33:00 GMT

To support the growing use of SharePoint in Education we have created a Special Interest forum on the UK SharePoint User Group site specifically targeted at Education.

This forum aims to cover all areas of SharePoint in Education from the Microsoft Learning Gateway, SharePoint Learning Kit, Community Kit for SharePoint : Schools Edition to 3rd Party VLE integration, best practice, general support and user wish lists.

Andrew Woodward is the driving force behind this SIG as he's done a lot of work in the area and is keen to spread the word and SharePoint goodness in Education.

We're sure that there are other Special Interest Groups that can be formed and led by people who are focussed in these areas. If anyone has any further suggestions please leave a comment here or send me an email : nick.swan@sword-uk.com