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Microsoft announced today that SharePoint 2010 has reached RTM status.  Read about it on the SharePoint Team Blog – HERE. 

Sounds like the earliest availability for downloading bits will be on April 27th for Volume License and Software Assurance Customers. 

The official (virtual) launch will be on May 12th – which also happens to be our next MNSPUG meeting.  We’ll be streaming the launch live and working on adding some more fun as well – check the MNSPUG site for more information as we have it. 

This month’s MNSPUG will be covering Social Networking with SharePoint 2007 and 2010.  We’re also going to be having a Lunch and Learn session with BlueThread. 

Please join us on Wednesday, March 10, as we take a look at Social Networking with SharePoint 2007 and 2010. In this session we will cover the social networking features that were introduced in SharePoint 2007 and how the new features of SharePoint 2010 take social networking within an organization to the next level.

Topics to be discussed include:

• Core features for social networking in SharePoint 2007
• New features in SharePoint 2010 for social networking
• Extending SharePoint Social features

Sign up for the MNSPUG event or the Live Meeting:
Click to attend
Click to attend via LiveMeeting

Sign up for the Lunch and Learn event:
Click to attend

Oh, and BlueThread will also be giving away a Dell Netbook! 

See you there!

Brian Caauwe will be presenting tomorrow on Migrating to SharePoint 2010.  Join us either in person or on Live Meeting.  More details are available on the Minnesota SharePoint User Group (MNSPUG) site.  The presentation will be available after the event. 

2010 was welcomed in with a SharePoint Server Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award renewal message from Microsoft for the new year.  What a wonderful honor and great way to start the new year – this is my second year being awarded.  Thanks to everyone who helped make this happen. 

To be included with the SharePoint MVP community is really cool – everyone I’ve met has been incredibly gracious – eager to help and to share.  As with the greater SharePoint community, they are a community themselves – a lot more cohesive than some of the other MVP product groupings out there.  They are amazing technical resources and provide so much energy to the community at large, making the products we support and the people we work with so much better and more fun to work with.

2009 was an interesting year for the MVP community.  Maybe this happens every year and I wasn’t aware of it, but being a part of the MVP community this past year has made me more aware of it.  There were changes driven by the economy as well as conversation and criticism regarding who is awarded and how awardees are chosen – amongst other topics.  There are still plenty of things I’m not privy to, but I do know that regardless of who receives the MVP awards, there are a lot of people in the SharePoint community and other technical communities that are amazing contributors out there – people that love to learn and to share – people that will continue to advance our communities through their efforts – people that should be recognized and thanked.  Kudos go out to them as well.

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 Minnesota SharePoint User Group (MNSPUG), other SharePoint user groups, SharePoint Saturdays, SharePoint Camps, conferences and other events online and in person. 

God Bless.

Well we had a little hiccup with this months meeting – between some double-booking of the room and enough snow to seriously impact travel efforts on Wednesday – but we still worked through it.  We didn’t have our usual on-site meeting, but all of our experience with Live Meetings this year and the ongoing support of Microsoft (Thank you Nick Stillings!) we did pull of a pretty successful online-ONLY meeting.  We peaked out a little over 100 folks visiting. 

Thank you everyone for your participation!

This month’s meeting was about SharePoint 2010 and Enterprise Content Management.  This broke down to the major areas of document management, records management and web content management.   

The slide deck is available now – the meeting recording will be available soon.  (I’ll update this post once it’s available)

We had our first 2010 SharePoint Overview presentation today as part of the series of presentations we do at New Horizons Minnesota.  This is still early information, so keep in mind that the content in this deck will continue to evolve as we get closer to RTM and we keep refining the content and presentation.  I’ve posted the slide deck on the Minnesota SharePoint User Group site (MNSPUG) – HERE. 

Oh, and it sounds like ‘New Horizons’ is reverting back to ‘Benchmark Learning’ soon…  so links, etc will likely be changing. 

November’s Minnesota SharePoint User Group meeting on Wednesday, November 11 will be a special, ALL DAY session!  This super-sized user group will be chock full of information on SharePoint 2010 as well as highlights from the SharePoint conference in Las Vegas. 

The first part of the day will be an overview of SharePoint 2010: A Walk Around the Wheel.  Stick around for lunch, and listen in on "Preparing for 2010: The Top Things to Do Now."

In the afternoon, we will be offering four different breakout sessions, each taking a deeper look into various aspects of SharePoint 2010. We’ll have 2 different "tracks," a Business Track and a Technical Track.  We will split the room in half and these breakout sessions will be going on simultaneously.

On top of this day full of new content, we’re going to have our first MNSPUG-associated "SharePint"!  Yes, after Raymond and I heard about all the other SPUGs out there and how critical the socializing/drinking component of their user groups are – we thought you’d want that opportunity too.  We’ve been missing out with our morning meetings.  So, this month we’ll be over at Major’s in Bloomington and will reserve some space, please come to socialize over a pint and hear more stories from Las Vegas!

We hope you can join us for at least part of if not the whole day! There will be lots of new information and demos, as well as time for Q&As. 

For more details on sessions, schedule and registration, see the MNSPUG site. 

FYI – Recordings made of the Minnesota SharePoint User Group are now available on the “Find a Presentation” page.  We’ve done a few since the beginning of the year, including a WSS 101 and MOSS 101 session.  The more recent sessions even include video.   

Great session this past week with the Minnesota SharePoint User Group.  Our panel this month consisted of Bill English from Mindsharp, Sarah Haase (Twitter: @sarahhaase) from Best Buy, as well as Raymond Mitchell (Twitter: @iwkid), Neil Iversen (Twitter: @romangeeko) and myself from Inetium.  Lots of great questions from the group – both in the room and online. 

We only had 70 or so folks in the room, but had OVER 50 on the Live Meeting, which was very exciting – that offering is definitely growing quickly.  Thanks to Nick Stillings from Microsoft handling the tech details during the meeting so we could concentrate on the conversations. 

The session recording is available HERE – and yea, it includes video – yikes! 

The Minnesota SharePoint User Group (MNSPUG) is this week.  We’ve got another open forum session this month with a couple of very special guests: Bill English from Mindsharp and Sarah Haase from Best Buy.  Come and join us on Wednesday July 8th and bring your questions! 

Don’t forget to follow @MNSPUG and the #MNSPUG tag on Twitter for the latest and greatest.