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There’s been some chatter lately regarding SharePoint Designer and some sort of change or announcement from MS, but nothing official from MS yet that I’m aware of.  So while we’re all waiting, it’s a good time to review a few things that might be useful:  

We had a wonderful turn out on 3/17 for the TechFuse conference put on by New Horizons of Minnesota.  I wasn’t sure how things were going for attendance (with the economy and all), but we had a nice crowd - reported at over 400 attendees.  Way to go Brandy and team with all the advertising!!  

I did a little session on SharePoint and governance, specifically talking about the importance of what I’m referring to as a SharePoint Platform Site.  We had between 50 to 60 folks in the room for one of two collaboration tracks for the day.  

Without getting into too many details about the session here, I wanted to make the slide deck available: Slide Deck

*Note: I did add 2 slides after the presentation: One slide with a screen shot of the site homepage and another deck discussing advertising the site in your environment - both things that we talked about in the session.  :)  

I’ll be doing another post in the next few days with v.1 of the template we talked about and more details about the approach and why it’s important.  

Thanks to all that attended!

Log on and listen in to Raymond’s webcast today on:
MSDN Webcast: BenkoTips Live and On Demand: Working with the Data Form Web Part and SharePoint Designer with Raymond Mitchell (Level 100) 

Just a last minute reminder…

The 2009 SharePoint Conference was announced today and will be held in Las Vegas, NV on Oct. 19-22.  Check out the info page today - http://www.mssharepointconference.com/Pages/spc2009.aspx

There are early bird discounts for the first 500 attendees.  

This is likely to be the first chance for a lot of folks to get information on SharePoint ‘14′.  

Woo Hoo!!

We had a great turnout for the 2nd Twin Cities SharePoint Camp and had a bunch of wonderful speakers.  I did a short presentation on Social Networking in SharePoint - Getting Started the Right Way.  The gist of the presentation was getting folks to deploy My Sites in their environments and to understand some of the basic concepts behind their deployment.  My Sites are a good thing.  But like most things in SharePoint - they require proper planning and preparation.  We covered the ‘why’s and the ‘how’s.  A copy of my slides can be found here on the camp site: Link.   

One presentation I particularly enjoyed was by Sarah Haase.  She’s doing some wonderful things with SharePoint and walked us through some case studies.  We hope to have her present soon at the MNSPUG.  One point she made that stuck with me was that the SharePoint sites that are still being used after 6 months after deployment were (a large part of the time - I don’t remember the exact statistic) the ones where an actual plan and design were put together.  A plan developed by sitting the potential users of a site down with the SharePoint pros.  Sites not planned, generally were no longer being used within 6 mo.  Interesting numbers.  They’re also doing a really nice job showing actuals to prove out ROI for business units, which is refreshing.     

Next up: February MN SharePoint User Group and then TechFuse in March.  

See you then! 

Thanks to everyone who attended the January MNSPUG presentation: Back to Basics: WSS.  Between the cold and bad traffic, I thought we were in for a light crowd, but still managed to get over 100 folks in the room.  :)  We tried something new this month and recorded the session.  Keep an eye on http://www.sharepointmn.com .  We’ll be posting a link to the recording soon.  

Twin Cities SharePoint Camp - January 24
Social Networking in SharePoint - Get Started the Right Way 

Minnesota SharePoint User Group - February 11
Back to Basics: MOSS 

TechFuse - March 17
Building a SharePoint platform site - Governance in Action 

Hope to see you there!  

2009 came in with a bang on January 1st with an e-mail from Microsoft that I was named a Microsoft SharePoint MVP!  What a wonderful honor and great way to start the new year.  

For anyone not familiar with the MVP program, please read this excellent post by Mikhail - he sums up the description pretty well:  http://www.mikhaildikov.com/2009/01/starting-new-year-with-renewed-mvp.html 

A huge thanks goes out to the SharePoint community that I’ve been blessed to be a part of.  I hope we can continue to learn, share and grow in the coming year.  See you at the MNSPUG!  ( http://www.sharepointmn.com )

The following update apparently slipped under my radar a few weeks ago:

October Cumulative Update:

To learn about the issues that are fixed in this update, see
Description of the SharePoint Server 2007 hotfix package (Coreserver.msp): October 28, 2008 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=133374&clcid=0×409) and
Description of the SharePoint Server 2007 hotfix package (Coreservermui.msp): October 28, 2008 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=133376&clcid=0×409).

Microsoft.SharePoint.portal.dll version number: 12.0.6331.5000

I usually rely on the SharePoint Team Blog for updates like this, but didn’t see one come across this time. 

A few notes from the hotfix description pages:

• “When you search for more than 9 digits but less than 40 digits, you may not receive the expected search results”.  Hmm.  That seems like kind of a sweet spot in SharePoint’s search functionality.  I haven’t seen this anywhere in the wild - anyone? 
• I had several people at the MNSPUG yesterday mention issues they were seeing with the spell-checker in SharePoint.  The coreservermui.msp version of the October Updates contains a few spell-check related fixes that might be relevant.   

Just a quick note while playing with the My Profile page this evening…

I’ve been bringing up the My Sites and Profile pages for some time now with clients, trying to get more folks to start using them in their environments when appropriate because in general these pages are very useful, but underused.  When I do show them what is available there are varied reactions to seeing what can be done on these pages, but inevitably someone doesn’t like something or other and wants to remove web parts from the page.  I distinctly remember a few folks not liking the Memberships web part showing the distribution groups they were in because of sensitivity within their staffs regarding to who’s being included and who’s not - that lovely politics game.  :)  Anyhow, what I hadn’t realized at the time was that managing the Membership web part is REALLY EASY.  You simply click on the web part header or click the ‘Manage Memberships’ link (who would have guessed…) below the listing and you are able to set the privacy setting for each item as needed.  Pretty slick, though a little different from what many SharePoint users are used to with day to day permissions and lists. 

See.  Nice and easy… Now back to work.