The Bay of Plenty SharePoint User Group in New Zealand was kicked off yesterday at the Envision IT offices. I was invited to present at this inaugural User Group event. Thanks to everyone who came to the presentation. The Search Presentation (Format:PDF Size:3MB) is available for download. Some Photos from the event.   Technorati Tags: BOPSPUG,SharePoint,Search,MOSS,User Group,Community,New Zealand,WSS ...[Read More]

So we are almost one month into the new year and already Darryl and Co are almost ready for the great big New Zealand road trip.  From the sneak previews I have seen so far this Road Trip is going to be one not to miss. So if you happen to be in New Zealand and in the following locations you should sign up today! The tour will include the following dates and locations: Auckland – Feb 4 Tauranga – Feb 5 Hamilton – Feb 7 New Plymouth – Feb 8 Hawkes Bay – Feb 11 Palmerston North – Feb 12 Wellington – Feb 13 Nelson – Feb 14 Christchurch – Feb 15 Dunedin – Feb 18 Invercargill - Feb 19 Following this in March MS NZ has the "Launchwave 08" technical event planned. [ More information ] Also if you are ready to test out SharePoint and Windows Server 2008 check out the following resources. Deploying WSS ...[Read More]

Ari has blogged about the Fly Buys web site we designed and developed for Loyalty New Zealand using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). His post outlines the development approach and how our team was able to use MOSS within an Intranet Publishing content to a separate server farm using MOSS content deployment capabilities. From a development perspective we used MOSS/SQL Express on local developer desktops to speed up development time and integrated the builds in a build server. Incidentally CJ from the WSS team has a great post about MOSS development using Visual Studio extensions for WSS on his blog. For our deployment we came up with a deployment model so that we could easily deploy and maintain our solution in the future. The following diagram is an example of the deployment model we used. In most cases you can use vir ...[Read More]

Season’s Greetings to everyone and best wishes for the new year. It has been a fantastic year for SharePoint in New Zealand and rest of the world. If you are a newbie to SharePoint technologies I suggest you read this post from Joel Oleson (Senior Product Manager, SharePoint Technologies) titled 7 Years of SharePoint – a History Lesson. From a local community perspective we really appreciate the support from all of you during last year and attending the local user groups. Currently we have 4 active user groups based in Wellington, Auckland, Christchurch and Bay of Plenty!. For event details and information please visit the Wellington site: http://www.sharepointusergroup.net.nz/wellington/default.aspx We are currently looking at planning this year’s user group activities and would really like to get your feedback on topics of ...[Read More]

One of the projects that we designed and delivered has been just announced as one of the best ten Intranets on the Nielsen Norman Group's "Intranet Design Annual 2008: Year's Ten Best Intranets". The report can be downloaded from Nielsen Norman group web site. The 10 winning intranets featured in the report are: Bank of America, United States Bankinter S.A., Spain Barnes & Noble, United States British Airways, United Kingdom Campbell Soup Company, United States Coldwell Banker Real Estate Corporation, United States IKEA North America Service, LLC, United States Ministry of Transport, New Zealand (Built with MOSS!!)New South Wales, Department of Primary Industries, Australia SAP AG, Germany Last April at the Wellington SharePoint User Group I did a session with Ari showcasing this Intranet solution in Phase 1 and hi ...[Read More]