Although I’ve not been able to blog as frequently as I liked I've managed to be part of the ever growing NZ SharePoint community and the wider overseas SharePoint communities. The Wellington SharePoint user group is still going strong after all these years. Somewhat up and down in the experienced vs newbies recently but there is still interest and regular attendance by regular users of SharePoint. One of the main things that I have experienced is that there are more and more “new” users who are getting introduced to SharePoint and who are looking to learn the basics. Some of the feedback we’ve had also indicates that people are looking for beginning SharePoint content more and more! Anyways what I wanted to write about is the fact that I have been a MVP for the last five years! Today I received  a special ‘token’ for being a Microsoft ...[Read More]

Well where to start.. I’ve got a few questions from a few people on why I have totally abandoned the blog. To be quite honest I’d had way too much work and although I wanted to write some follow up posts with regards to SharePoint upgrading and also some general guidance for SharePoint 2010 with my full time job and everything else it just didn't happen. So I am going to try and make a fresh start on the blog front. To start this off here are some important local SharePoint announcements which I have been meaning to make for some time. Wellington – SharePoint User Group There are some great events lined up for Wellington in the coming months. As some of you may know fellow SharePoint MVP Mark Orange who was the co-leader of the group stepped down and  made way for Chaks Chandran to become the co-leader. Chaks has been involved in the ...[Read More]

We recently announced to all our registered delegates about the “Ask the Experts” Keynote panel that will be held at NZSPC on Friday, July 03, 2009 starting at 11:15 AM to 12:15 PM (New Zealand Time) in the Duxton Ballroom. You can now post your questions on the user group site. So far we have received the following questions. We’ll take the best one’s and answer these at the conference. I will also post answers on my blog for some of these. Questions so far.. User Adoption - There are lots of books about SharePoint on the market. If we customise our SharePoint user interface will these books still be useful to my users? Web Content Management - I know there is the reusable snippets library which is great for small pieces of content. But how can I reuse whole pages so they appear in different parts of my website without sending the ...[Read More]

As one of the official organisers of the New Zealand Community SharePoint conference it is my job to ensure that all conference related activities and events are posted online. If you are a speaker or a delegate you would have already received an email with some instructions. In case you haven’t go this email or want an easy online reference my blog will provide general information and sub events. For event updates please check my blog or follow the NZ SharePoint twitter channel.   General Information for Delegates and Speakers The conference is being held at the Duxton Hotel in Wellington at 170 Wakefield Street. Parking is available at James Smith Car Park next to the Hotel. Registration desk will be open from 5.30pm till 7.30pm on Wednesday 1st July at the Duxton. The registration desk will again open at 7.00am to 8.30am on Thu ...[Read More]

Just to warm your socks in this cold weather we are having two “hot” sessions coming up this month! We have Alex Dean SharePoint extraordinaire talking about SharePoint development and Internationally renowned speaker, writer and consultant Michael Sampson visiting Wellington for a session to talk about his latest book "Seamless Teamwork". Note that one session is for a developer audience and the second one is geared towards a business audience. Wednesday 27th of May 2009 - SharePoint Developer Session Using the AJAX Controls Toolbox in SharePoint – Wednesday 27th of May 2009 AJAX for SharePoint can seem quite a daunting task, especially when stumbling across endless blog posts which are completely out of date and are giving wrong or misleading advice. With SP1 for SharePoint Microsoft fixed a few internal glitches in r ...[Read More]

We are extremely happy to announce that we have now finalised the dates and details for the first ever New Zealand SharePoint Conference. Dates: 2nd and 3rd July 2009 Venue: Duxton - Hotel, Wellington (New Zealand's beautiful capital city!) Registrations are now open via the main conference web site which is at http://www.sharepointconference.co.nz Speaker Lineup International Speakers The amount of interest shown by International speakers have been tremendous and we are very happy to announce the following International renowned speakers who are among the best of the best. Joel Oleson (Key Note Speaker) - http://www.sharepointjoel.com - In the year 2000, Joel Oleson, a Sr. Web Engineer was brought in to Microsoft IT design the first Microsoft global deployment of SharePoint. Later he would design the extranet, and hosted ...[Read More]

New Zealand seems to be attracting the best of SharePoint talent lately and in April we are going to hit the road with a series of sessions by Michael Noel (MVP) from the United States. Michael Noel (MVP) is an internationally recognized technology expert, best selling author, and well known public speaker on a broad range of IT topics. He has authored several major best-selling industry books that have been translated into over a dozen languages. Significant titles include SharePoint 2007 Unleashed, Teach Yourself SharePoint 2007 in 10 Minutes, Windows Server 2008 Unleashed, ISA Server 2006 Unleashed, Exchange Server 2007 Unleashed, and many more. Currently a partner at Convergent Computing in the San Francisco Bay Area, Michael's writings and extensive public speaking experience across six continents leverage his real-world expertis ...[Read More]

Via My friend Brendon Ford of Provoke Solutions. If you are an IT Professional and want to know what's the new in Infrastructure and related topics come along to the inaugural Infrastructure User Group in Wellington. When: Monday 30th March,  Presentations start at 6pm Where: Microsoft Wellington offices, level 12, 157 Lambton Quay, Wellington (Midland park) Please RSVP to RSVP@infrastructureusergroup.com Session 1: Office Communications Server 2007 As part of the inaugural Infrastructure User Group, Terry Chapman from Fujitsu New Zealand will present on deploying Microsoft Enterprise Voice using Office Communications Server 2007 and Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging.  Microsoft's Unified Communications strategy has been steadily gaining momentum over the last 12 months and many organisations are now looking at technologies such ...[Read More]