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Slides from the Social Networking session today at New Horizons are available on the MNSPUG site in the Resources section. 

Or, you can just click HERE. 

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. 

Just a quick re-post from the SharePoint Team: Check out the SharePoint Team Blog post for the latest cumulative update information: 

• Downloads for both WSS and MOSS
• Patch details (links may not be live yet)
• Installation instructions
• New version number after patch = 12.0.6520.5000

Have fun!

Minnesota SharePoint User Group members at the SharePoint Conference 2009 – A bunch of us were able to get together for a few minutes at the end of Day 1, take pictures and distribute our cool new MNSPUG shirts.    If you weren’t able to join us, try to find Raymond or I so we can get a shirt to you – we’ll try to keep a few on hand as we’re walking around.

At the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas: Lots of great information and networking yesterday and today – starting Day 2 with Social Computing with Microsoft.  But, before we get into that, a few things I came away with yesterday – specifically things that we should all dig deeper into in the coming days -  between conversations, keynotes and sessions:

• The public beta for SharePoint 2010 isn’t going to be available for at least a few weeks – sometime in November. 
• RTM for SharePoint 2010 is targeted at the 1st half of 2010
• SharePoint Designer 2010 will continue to be free – even though its going to have a LOT more functionality.
• The cloud concept is going to be a large and growing component of the SharePoint picture – understanding what is available and when to consider using it for part or all of your solutions will be key. 
• A new Media Player web part is available – its all the rage. 
• One of the questions asked of Steve Ballmer was about having a *single* page to come to for information about patching and versioning.  The stock answer was that you go to TechNet for this, but he genuinely seemed interested in revisiting that…  It would be nice to have a single page – 1 vote from me. 
• MS is intending to have more information available from the governance perspective due directly to their work with the cloud and having to answer a lot of these questions themselves – determining best practices along the way.  Looking forward to seeing this. 
• Look for a lot more interaction and tooling between SharePoint and Access.  No joke.  Check it out. 
• OWA.  Yep, it means something else now – not replacing Outlook Web Access – but also meaning Office Web Apps
• Wikis are going to play a MUCH bigger part of 2010.  There are both Standard and Enterprise wikis now.
• People Search now has phonetic helpers in case you don’t know how to spell someone’s name.
• Project Gemini is now PowerPivot. 
• IT Pros: There are already over 500 PowerShell commandlets available for SharePoint 2010.  Everyone told us it was coming.  It’s here. 

Remember: We’re still working from pre-Beta, so things are likely to change. 

We’re here!  The SharePoint Conference 2009 is off and running.  A few things you might want to follow :

1. Keynote address will be streamed live
The keynote address on Monday, Oct 19th featuring Steve Ballmer and Jeff Teper will live stream from the front page of http://www.mssharepointconference.com.

2. Follow Inetium’s attendees for the latest happenings:
http://www.inetium.com/aboutus/events/Pages/SharePoint-Conference-2009.aspx 

3. Keep an eye on http://www.endusersharepoint.com/ for live blogging

4. Follow the #SPC09 tag on Twitter

Lots more to come!!

I hadn’t heard of these guys until yesterday.  Looks like an interesting offering for the SharePoint 2007 farm administrator though. 

TrainSignal: SharePoint Server 2007 Training

They’ve currently got a ’sale’ on the package which looks like a decent price for an overview for IT Pros that need to install and configure SharePoint and get a high-level overview of the basic concepts. 

If I’m able to get a copy to test drive I’ll put together something more substantial for a review, but thought I’d at least let you know its another option that’s available.

The biggest SharePoint community event of the year is likely to be in a few weeks in Las Vegas for the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 where the curtain will finally be raised on the new SharePoint 2010 product line.  Are you going to be there? 

I’ll be there.  Learning, absorbing and sharing as much as we can during the week.  It’s going to be crazy.  There are a number of NDAs that will be lifted as soon as the conference opens and there’s likely to be a huge flood of information from folks that have been holding their tongues these last few months.  I can’t wait. 

So, will you be there?  Let me know – I’d love to connect.  There are local MS folks that will be there.  There are MNSPUG folks that will be there.  There are folks from Inetium that will be there.  There are already lots of Twitter and blog plans to be listening to, as well as other things that will likely develop in the next few weeks.  Check out what EndUserSharePoint.com is coordinating: 
http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2009/10/01/lets-get-this-party-started-sharepoint-conference-2009/

More to come, stay tuned…