I am presenting a session about SharePoint Planning and Governance at the 8th Annual Strategic Intranet Summit held on 21st and 22nd of August 2008 in Wellington, New Zealand. For details and agenda visit the Summit web site. My session is on the second day 22nd of August 2008. From Chaos to Corporate Governance with SharePoint 2007 Find out what comes out of the box with SharePoint 2007 and what you’ll need to create a successful deployment. In addition to architecture, this session will explore the roles, responsibilities, and what you need for a successful consolidated managed SharePoint deployment in your organisation. The major changes of the 2007 edition How to overcome common deployment issues with this version and the pitfalls to avoid Exploring the potential of SharePoint as an application platform Real world exampl ...[Read More]

UPDATE [29 July 2008]: Infratsructure Update Known Issues Please note that there are some issues with regards to this update and I highly recommend this update to be thoroughly tested prior to being deployed Please notice that the Infrastructure Update [ http://support.microsoft.com/kb/951695 ] has been updated to include the following information with regards to AAM: Known issues discovered after release of this update Installing the Infrastructure Update in a SharePoint farm that uses Alternate Access Mapping with a reverse proxy or a network load balancer, such as in an extranet deployment, may cause some public URLs to become unresponsive. Microsoft is aware of this issue and is developing a solution. Before installing the Infrastructure Update, customers who use this configuration should use a test environment to verify ...[Read More]

Big Kudos to Matt Smith for organising the upcoming SharePoint developer tour in New Zealand by SharePoint developer whiz kid Gavin Barron ! Tour dates and venues Auckland: Wednesday, 23 July 2008 Time: Drinks + Snacks from 5:15PM, Talk from 5:30PM to 6:30PM Location: Level 7 Fronde House, 131 Queen Street Join and RSVP: http://www.sharepointusergroup.net.nz/Auckland/ Tauranga: Thursday, 24 July 2008 Time: Drinks + Snacks from 5:30PM, Talk from 6:00PM to 7:00PM Location: EnvisionIT, Level 5 Westpac Building, 2 Devonport Road, Tauranga Join and RSVP:  http://www.sharepointusergroup.net.nz/BayOfPlenty/ Christchurch: Monday, 28 July 2008 Time: Drinks + Snacks from 5:30PM, Talk from 6:00PM to 7:00PM Location: Canterbury Innovation Incubator (CII), 200 Armagh Street (opposite Centennial Leisure Centre) Join and RSVP:  http://www.sharep ...[Read More]

Via the ECM Team and SharePoint Team Blog SharePoint related Infrastructure updates are now available for download. To understand the issues fixed in these releases please read the following blog posts. Content Deployment and Infrastructure Update - ECM Team Blog It is strongly recommended that you install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Service Pack 1 and Office Servers Service Pack 1 before installing the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297) and the Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB951695). The installation process will incur server and farm downtime that you will need to plan for – updates should be installed on all servers in a farm. Please refer to the TechNet SharePoint Service Pack 1 deployment article.   The Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB95 ...[Read More]

This month we have Craig Carpenter (MCSA, MCSE, MCT) visiting speaker from the UK presenting at the user group. Craig is here in Wellington this week training a SharePoint Administrator class as part of Combined Knowledge Asia Pacific and MindSharp training now offered in New Zealand. Developer training for SharePoint and WCM development will be coming up soon! This months session topic: Best Practices for SharePoint Web Applications. In this session Craig will showcase best practices for deployment of SharePoint web applications. This session is targeted towards all levels of SharePoint enthusiasts. As one of the founders of Combined Knowledge, Craig Carpenter (MCSA, MCSE, MCT) has over ten years experience of training and consulting on Microsoft platforms. Craig started his IT career within the education arena, a start that provid ...[Read More]

The concept of My Sites in SharePoint is often ignored in deployments due to the lack of understanding of the value that My Sites add when an organisation is considering a SharePoint deployment. One of the compelling reasons that I see for organisations for allowing My Sites to be enabled in a deployment is that it allows your users to explore and also learn on their own without being restricted to a "corporate rule". Recently Michael posted 10 tips of establishing "your" profile with My sites, which I must say is along more than enough reason that you should seriously consider opening My sites in your SharePoint deployment since it provides an instant findability and contactability solution for connecting with people in a large organisation. From an IT and architecture point of view My Sites can be resource inten ...[Read More]

As per my previous post about content deployment and the recently released post SP 1 updates the following articles are now online. You can request the Hotfix via the following links. WSS V3.0 > http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952698 MOSS > http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952704 Technorati Tags: MOSS,WCM,SharePoint,WSS,Content Deployment,Administration,Deployment ...[Read More]

When using SharePoint for creating and maintaining content rich web sites the content deployment API provides a way of moving content from a source server to a destination server. For example if you have a team developing a content heavy Internet site or an Intranet site you are able to setup content deployment between servers. (Assuming you are using multiple servers in Dev > Stg > Prd). See my previous post about  Multiple development servers and managing code. First you need to understand that in a SharePoint deployment "content" can be hard to define. Say for example you are creating a dynamic rotating image gallery feature with an image and a description about the image and an URL link. In this scenario there are multiple roles involved in the design and build phases of this piece. These roled are developers, design ...[Read More]