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 Organising Principle for Your SharePoint Server 2007 Deployment"

Mindsharp and Combined Knowledge Asia Pacific now offer a wide range of SharePoint courses for New Zealand. Check out the upcoming class schedule.

If you haven't already got the following books then I highly recommend that you consider these titles

If you are a .net developer and want to up skill on developing with SharePoint talk to Todd Bleeker who will be doing a session titled "Creating Solutions with the Business Data Catalog" with Steven Letford of Microsoft NZ. Todd has written several books for developers  about SharePoint and is also one of the trainers and course writers with Mindsharp.

Publications by Todd include the following titles

• Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Step by Step, Microsoft Press, ISBN 0735623635, April 2007
• Developer's Guide to the Windows SharePoint Services v3 Platform, Charles River Media, ISNB 1584505001, December 2006
• Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Step by Step, Microsoft Press, ISBN 073562075X, February 2005

That's not all we have Mark Orange doing a session on ECM titled "Best Practice ECM with SharePoint 2007" with Michael Noel. (Last year at TechEd NZ Mark's session on Documents and Records management attracted a large audience) Also Zac Smith and Matt Smith (not twins or brothers) will show case what you can achieve when using SharePoint as a development platform. Developers should definitely go to their session titled "Tools and techniques for productive and effective SharePoint development".

And if Web Content Management (WCM) with SharePoint is your thing then you'll learn a lot about how to use SharePoint as a WCM solution by going the session titled "Creating Content Centric Publishing Sites with MOSS 2007" by Mark and Zac. Also if you are wondering how you would be able to build a site like the Loyalty Fly Buys web site with SharePoint then you should get the following book by Andrew Connell titled "SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Development" by Wrox press. This is a great book to get your thinking about Publishing sites and SharePoint in the right track and highly recommended for developers. In fact we'll be giving away a signed copy of Andrew's book to one of the attendees at our next Wellington SharePoint User Group meeting thanks to Ryan Duguid and Andrew.

Other SharePoint sessions include a session by Ian Morrish titled "MOSS: SharePoint Anatomy and architectural considerations" for System Architects and IT Professionals.

Full session line up as follows.

• MOSS: SharePoint Anatomy and architectural considerations - Ian Morrish
• Microsoft Search All Up session including FAST introduction - David Ford; Steven Letford
• Developing Your First Office Business Application: From the Client to SharePoint and Beyond - Reed Shaffner
• Creating Content Centric Publishing Sites with MOSS 2007 - Mark Orange; Zac Smith
• Tools and techniques for productive and effective SharePoint development - Matt Smith; Zac Smith
• Best Practice ECM with SharePoint 2007 - Mark Orange; Michael Noel
• Why Findability Should Be an Organising Principle for Your SharePoint Server 2007 Deployment - Ben Curry; Chandima Kulathilake
• Project and Application Portfolio Management; What, Why, How - Youssef Mourra
• Microsoft Office Groove 2007: An Enabler for Secure and Dynamic Collaboration - Bryan Gallagher
• Planning and Implementing Regional and Global Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Deployment - Ben Curry; Joel Oleson
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Governance: From Chaos to Success in Ten Steps - Chandima Kulathilake; Joel Oleson
• Open XML Development Turning SharePoint Data into Microsoft Office Documents: A Deep Dive into SharePoint Document Assembly Using Open XML - Reed Shaffner
• Creating Solutions with the Business Data Catalog - Steven Letford; Todd Bleeker

Looking forward to meeting some of you there.