The following is an overview of the presentation Ari Bakker and I did at last user group event. Unfortunately we didn't have enough time to showcase some areas as the previous speaker went over the allocated time. So this post will cover the main items that I scheduled in the agenda. Intranet Solution Overview and Information Architecture The Ministry of Transport (MoT) New Zealand intranet was built using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. The project started in August of last year with a proof of concept built using the Beta 2 version of MOSS. The Intranet went live with Beta2TR in November last year! I believe unofficially this was the first MOSS production intranet in the world. The Intranet has been migrated to RTM and we are into Phase 2 development and enhancements of the MoT intranet. Initially we were engaged to re ...[Read More]

Our team at Provoke have started blogging. Ari and Zac have the following SharePoint developer related posts. If you are a developer starting out on SharePoint development then I recommend reading their blogs. Ari has the following posts about his experience with SharePoint development and a few tips. Locking down RichHtmlField styles in SharePoint How to lockdown html styles for the WISYWYG editor in MOSS http://blogs.provoke.co.nz/Ari/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=6 Date Formats in SharePoint To ensure that dates are formatted correctly across your WSS or MOSS site there are a couple of settings you may need to change. First of all the regional settings should reflect the current locale. This can be changed from Site Actions > Site Settings > Regional Settings and ensuring the locale is correct. This should ensure all ...[Read More]

The Wellington SharePoint User Group meeting will be held on 26th of April (Thursday) at 6PM. This month we will be featuring two real world New Zealand solutions using SharePoint. I will be presenting the following topic with Ari Bakker who is a member of our development team. Building a Real world Intranet with MOSS 2007 at the Ministry of Transport Come and see how the New Zealand Ministry of Transport (MOT) implemented their new Intranet "Discover" using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. This real world case study will show case how MOT adopted MOSS for Content Management and Search. Highlights of the session are:     Information architecture Use of content types for creating navigation Master pages and page layouts Search and Business Data Catalog Integration Development experience I will post more ...[Read More]

"AIIM Conference & Expo is the largest and most important annual gathering of information management professionals, featuring an educational program covering the breadth and depth of enterprise content and information management issues, while providing face-to-face access to nearly every major solution provider in the space." http://www.aiimexpo.com/aiimexpo2007/v42/index.cvn Microsoft and Meridio will show case the integration capabilities of both solutions for records management at this event. "At this year's AIIM, Meridio will demonstrate Meridio® integration with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 including email management, records management, and an exciting new Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) solution for MOSS 2007 content. Meridio solutions are based on Microsoft .NET technologies and ...[Read More]

Sisu software is the latest start up at Wellington's creative HQ technology Hub which hosts great start-ups like Zoomin. ( http://www.zoomin.co.nz ). Sisu specialises in SAP BC (Business Connector) to XI (SAP exchange Infrastructure) migrations. Basically SAP is discontinuing its BC component. This means that customers need to migrate to the new XI platform. The guys at Sisu (Kalle, Glen and Gavin) are experts in their field and with their unique approach to a business problem a lot customers are facing will give SAP customers and system Integrators an automated tool to ease the "pain" of the BC to XI migration. "If you are a SAP customer then the migration does not bring any, easily proven, business benefits to your organisations, which makes the return of investment (ROI) calculations for the migration more chall ...[Read More]

According to Zef I am on a rampage.. so we are on a growth sprout and we want to grow our PM team at the moment... We are looking for a polished and confident Project Manager to join our Professional Services team. You will be managing leading edge software design solutions. To be considered for this role you would need a pragmatic and disciplined approach to project management and ideally be Prince2 or PMP certified. You will be expected to be able to hit the ground running and be an innovative and inspirational member of the team. If you are certified ScrumMaster and know about Agile Project management then it's a bonus. Other things that may help you to work on our ultra cool projects that are on the pipeline are Web Content Mangement (MCMS and others) SharePoint baby!.. if you've used it and loooove we need you! Under ...[Read More]

If you didn't know some time ago me and my team built a proof of concept for providing a Forms Based Authentication (FBA) feature for WSS/MOSS. http://www.codeplex.com/MOSSFormsFeature This was done to demonstrate the development capability of SharePoint and how feature deployment makes it easy to provide solutions on top of SharePoint. Over the past few months we have had tremendous feedback for this project and over 1000 downloads. If you want to check out what Beta 1.0 does check out my previous blog posts or the CodePlex project site or download the release. http://www.codeplex.com/MOSSFormsFeature/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=1766 Lot of you have requested new enhancements and I have to apologise for the delay in getting our final release on CodePlex. Also one of the most common requests we have had is to provide the ...[Read More]

As some of you know the SharePoint Asia-Pacific Conference is scheduled to be held in Sydney on 15-16th May. This is the premier event for you if you want to learn about what SharePoint is capable of. So if you have not registered yet go and register as spaces are limited to 500. http://www.microsoftsharepoint.com/Pages/whyattend.aspx As a Microsoft Gold Certified partner from New Zealand I have the opportunity of presenting at the conference. I will be doing the following sessions. Topic: UX01 A Guided Tour through SharePoint HTML, CSS, and Master Page Resources Audience: UX Designer This session covers how to quickly customize the default styles, themes, and layouts for SharePoint Sites to achieve highly branded outcomes across team collaboration workspaces, corporate portals, and all sites in between. Both Windows SharePoint ...[Read More]