The Fresh from the oven (FFTO) debut in Wellington is a wrap. The main event in the morning attracted about 50 people. Mason and Ian started off the morning sessions by introducing the audience to the BPI maturity model and how the model can be realised using a phased approach. Michael who was at the event has the following write up about the morning sessions. Thanks Michael. http://www.michaelsampson.net/2007/03/notes_from_prov.html The afternoon sessions kicked off around 1PM after we got our slight technical difficulties sorted. Basically the new 64Bit 4GB PC we were using as our main presentation desktop had a few video card issues. So once we got that sorted I introduced myself and the team who was presenting in the afternoon. My presentation was to deliver how SharePoint Office Server can deliver a complete ECM (Enterpr ...[Read More]

Thanks to CJ we (Wellington SharePoint User Group) have successfully concluded our overview presentations on the 6 slices of the MOSS pie. CJ (Chris Johnson) did an excellent presentation on the Business Intelligence and Business Forms parts to a packed audience at the Wellington Microsoft office. We had about 40-50 people in attendance.. wow! Currently we have over 80 people in our mailing list and it's growing. When we started out our first meeting with Mike Fitz as a guest speaker at TechEd we had about 10 people and today when I looked around the room we had 50. J Here are some photos from the evening: Mark doing the intro. Michael is on his Mac blogging away! :-) And he has the whole presentation covered here. http://www.michaelsampson.net/2007/03/notes_from_the__1.html An old Microsoft Word broucher that CJ hande ...[Read More]

Knowledge Network is a Technical Preview add-on to Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) enhancing enterprise search for people by automating the discovery of the business relationships and subject matter expertise of everyone in the network. For a complete rundown of KN read the Microsoft site. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA101687241033.aspx The KN team (http://blogs.msdn.com/kn ) has an early KN build available for download here. https://connect.microsoft.com/knbeta You'll need to have a live (hotmail) sign in to get to the download page. There are a few clicks to get through until finally you can get hold of the download which is about 30MB in size. This release features the following enhancements and promises to be a stable build: - Back-off functionality to improve your experience when you are p ...[Read More]

Very BIG shout out to my team at Provoke for passing the SharePoint exams. Ari and Zac has passed the core developer exams for SharePoint and are now certified.   Well done guys you guys rock!     Come along to our free seminar series to see our work we have done across our client portfolio. I will be showcasing some of the solutions that our team has been working on since Beta 2 and now are in production on my blog in the coming weeks.   ...[Read More]

It is only a few days for the local Fresh from the oven seminar series. We (Provoke) are now ready to deliver our two half day sessions. The morning session will be of interest to businesses to understand the vision and strategy behind implementing solutions across UCC, ECM and BI. The afternoon is going to be all about how these can be realised with a core solution and feature set. More updates on sessions and agenda will be posted soon. J There are still some places left so if you are thinking of attending please register here. The date is 29th March (Thursday).  This is a free event. http://www.freshfromtheoven.co.nz And the BIG EVENT which is the Asia Pacific conference is also just around the corner (15-16 May in Sydney). Check out the web site for the conference. http://www.microsoftsharepoint.com/Pages/whyattend.aspx ...[Read More]

AIIM has the following survey report available for download. AIIM - The Enterprise Content Management Association has been a neutral and unbiased source for helping individuals and organizations understand the challenges associated with managing documents, content, records, and business processes. AIIM is international in scope, independent, implementation-focused, and, as the representative of the entire ECM industry - including users, suppliers, and the channel - acts as the industry's intermediary. http://www.aiim.org About the Survey conducted by AIIM This survey was delivered via an on-line survey instrument (www.zoomerang.com) during the 4th quarter of 2006. A total of 821 end users participated in the survey. The participants reflect a broad sample of organizations in terms of size, with 17% drawn from small organization ...[Read More]

The following providers provide hosting solutions for SharePoint. Plans start from US$ 29.95 a month with 1 GB of storage. Detailed Pricing http://www.sharepointhosting.com/sharepoint-pricing.html Hosting plan features include -Unlimited users-SmartPhone accessibility-E-mail enabled sites-Daily backup-Exclusive tutorials-Migration assistance-99.5% uptime SLA http://www.sharepointhosting.com/sharepoint-features.html Free Trial offer! http://www.sharepointhosting.com/free-sharepoint-trial.html And for MOSS hosting you can have a server with 3GB ram starting from US$995 Per Month. http://www.mosshosting.com/about/about.htm MOSS Express MOSS Turbo Single Server with 3GB RAM  Dual Servers with 3GB RAM each 100GB RAID Storage 200GB RAID Storage SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition ...[Read More]

This is a common question that I get asked quite a bit from developers who are now starting to use SharePoint. I am currently involved in informing and advising developers on how to use SharePoint as a development platform. The most common thing I hear from most developers is that SharePoint development is not easy. I would like to argue otherwise. Whilst I agree in principal that it's not the best experience in terms of available tools, things are now heading in the right direction. Let me tell you why you should start using SharePoint as a developer SharePoint is built using ASP.Net 2.0 you already know how to build applications in .Net There is a very well documented SDK and Visual Studio Tools made available and a great community of developers and experts It is the core platform that Microsoft is using in most of the ...[Read More]