This month we have Eben Illingworth from Nintex presenting an informative session at the Wellington user group. Session Topic: SharePoint Insight for Everyone SharePoint is fast becoming a central repository of corporate knowledge and information throughout organisations globally. This has lead to a high level of content and activity occurring within Microsoft SharePoint team sites and portals, and for many organisations they have no way of monitoring and auditing this. This informative session will specifically address the issues that are important to you, such: SharePoint adoption Providing customers with a broader understanding of SharePoint ROI The need and value of auditing and compliance monitoring Communicating the value of SharePoint to BDMs Eben will be demonstrating Nintex Reporting 2008 which provides unprecedented ...[Read More]

This page contains a list of guidance and best practice topics for planning and architecture for the deployment of SharePoint. I will update this list and make changes and add new information and links to articles when I come across them. MOSS 2007 Planning and Guidance for IT Pros Plan for server farms  (determining # of farms, org requirements and licensing) Plan for availability (Office SharePoint Server) & Database Mirroring Plan for performance and capacity (Office SharePoint Server) About performance and capacity planning (Office SharePoint Server) Additional performance and capacity planning factors (Office SharePoint Server) Tools for performance and capacity planning (Office SharePoint Server) Performance Test Scripts and Data population for VSTT: SPDataPop WSSDW.exe Logical architecture model: Corporate ...[Read More]

A friend of mine asked me this the other day.. and I was glad that I was asked this question. (Let's just say my friend was relatively new to SharePoint but have had years of managing typical software development projects). From a pure Project manager's view it can be seen that SharePoint projects are not different to any old IT project. BUT let me tell you that to successfully complete a SharePoint project you'll need to think and plan a lot more outside of a standard software development Project. If you are a Project Manager who is "New" to SharePoint and want to apply your traditional PM methodology to deliver a SharePoint project then please take a timeout and head over to Paul Culmsee's blog and read the series of posts on "Why SharePoint projects fail". Paul points out all the reasons why sometimes the best e ...[Read More]

When you create a site collection in SharePoint based on the OOTB starter template "Collaboration Portal Template" you get a series of sub sites such as "Document Center", "News", "Reports", "Search" and "Sites". Typically if your organisations has just installed SharePoint or are evaluating SharePoint this "Collaboration Portal Template" is the first place an end user will start their interaction with SharePoint.   One main point to note is that the slight variation of the available templates under the "Publishing" tab in Central Administration and on an existing SharePoint site which has been based on the  "Collaboration Portal Template" which is available the first time you create your starter site collection in the Central Administration ...[Read More]

A few days ago Darryl posted on his blog about the Office System Track being finalised. Essentially the SharePoint tracks get slotted under Office. This year we have some great overseas speakers from the US and Australia as well as some of the best SharePoint experts. Among these is my good buddy and prolific SharePoint blogger Joel Oleson. Joel and I will co-present a session about SharePoint planning and governance. The session is titled "Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Governance: From Chaos to Success in Ten Steps" Ben Curry from Mindsharp will also be in New Zealand. Ben is very highly regarded in the SharePoint technical community and he has been part of three of the must read SharePoint books on best practice and administration. Ben and I will be doing a session titled "Why Findability Should Be an Organ ...[Read More]