Cape Town - SharePoint Community Meeting - November 2011


Get in on the Captonian SharePoint action at the last Information Worker session for 2011. Come check out my opening talk about 2011 Year in Review and the year ahead for the Cape Town community and SharePoint :-)

We have two new speakers to the floor - Bradley Chetty and Mark Parker. Love seeing new community speakers joining in and speaking and sharing their experiences. Bradley will help us get to grips with upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to 2010 and Mark will take us through making SharePoint look cooler with Silverlight. Looking forward to it guys!

Check it out and register at http://www.informationworker.co.za/Pages/CapeTownEventRegistration.aspx. All community nights are free!

See you then!

author: Marc L | posted @ Saturday, November 19, 2011 5:07 PM

SharePoint Workflow Shootout


How does your organisation select a 3rd party workflow or BPM application for SharePoint?

Very cool Workflow Shootout video from the SharePoint European Conference 2011 featuring Nintex, K2 and Datapolis. All great 3rd party add ons. This area of the SharePoint universe just keeps getting better and more exciting.

SharePoint Workflow Shootout from Pawel Bujak on Vimeo.

 

author: Marc L | posted @ Wednesday, October 26, 2011 6:48 PM | Feedback (0)

AIIM Certified SharePoint Masters... Getting There...


I've been a SharePoint Consultant / Developer for a couple of years now and have typically gained my knowledge from events, people, books, communities, newsletters, web sites, twitter, facebook and just about any material available out there.  

I recenty had an opportunity to get started with the first AIIM Certified SharePoint Masters course in South Africa and half way there. Some of the most interesting aspects of the course for me was the User Adoption Strategies, Governance and seriously getting to grips with Business Cases and how to actually build an ROI. But most of all I was humbled when other business and technology people in the class spoke of their experiences of Change Management and disaster stories across South Africa and Internationally.

SharePoint isnt the product IT installs over a coffee break for the business to make use of and yet after awareness its often still the case. Like any major change to business, careful planning, governance and user interaction needs to take place before any solution is ever envisioned of in SharePoint. Take care of your initial steps and really think about your business solution before you dive into implementation, customizations or any development.

While the course covered ECM and ECRM methodologies and really how to make use of a product like SharePoint to meet your content management needs, it extended beyond expectation (from a developers perspective).

Now that I've completed the online exam the next part is the case study that is submitted for review before a certification is granted.

For those interested to read more about the course check it out at: http://www.aiim.org/Training/SharePoint-Course

author: Marc L | posted @ Friday, February 11, 2011 12:19 AM | Feedback (2)

Registration open for the February Information Worker Session in Cape Town!


Interested in Linq to SharePoint and Deployment Planning Services? Well Information Worker Cape Town team has an awesome lineup for February.

I'm looking forward to this event. Event topics are covered by Hilton Giesenow and Alistair Pugin. The event is absolutely free and for everyone who works with SharePoint!

Register at: http://www.informationworker.co.za/Pages/CapeTownEventRegistration.aspx

Looking forward to seeing you there.

 

author: Marc L | posted @ Thursday, February 10, 2011 11:49 PM | Feedback (0)

Is Blogging Dead?


Last week I had an absolutely awesome opportunity to join a community of Digital Marketers (I think they call themselves) at the Deloittes offices in the Cape Quarter as part of the HeavyChef Project community meeting.

Firstly, the spin on the concept "Is Blogging Dead" came across as an interesting topic to me. Mostly due to really poor contributions on my own “MarcL blog” and a few others I follow. Secondly, there are many enterprises approaching the thought process of an inter-connected workforce internally on the Internet. Knowledge Management, Enterprise Content Management and Intellectual Property can rapidly be wrapped up in organisations looking at bridging the corporate knowledge divide, or loss, by better utilizing platforms to support these elements. Rich Mulholland (Founder of Missing Link), showed how many SA firms are blogging on the web from leading store retailers to law firms. We're starting to see aspects like Blogging, Wikis and Enterprise Social Networking becoming hot topics for companies who have an outward attitude to harvesting the knowledge of their Information Workers in a structured system. There are some really incredible avenues to explore when allowing your enterprise to collaborate and retain that information in a usable structure. Use content created by all individuals in the business to assist in client, supplier, employee and product centricity and facets across all business units from the call-center, projects management office, executive communication, human resource issues, marketing and public relation releases to even the canteen menu – start gathering!

So whats the value? Well I find the common complaint over and over regarding silos of information stores across business. So by filing away your business knowledge across file shares, emails and human bodies over disparate systems is a sure way to lose ground against your competition. Exposing and leveraging team value to employees in your enterprise and better yet, rolling certain exposable information via marketing workflow to the WWW should be as much as business process as it is part of the job. It's simply a critical aspect for businesses looking to penetrate knowledge management and expose this to the blogosphere. Equipping your business with these tools and making it simple for the enterprise is the next big step and basically requires executive maturity to drive their business to the structured information age.

I encourage you to register on the HeavyChef Project website  for the next event. - both in JHB and CPT I believe. I'm simply amped for the next one. Well done to the organisers and speakers for the passion, energy, knowledge and a great event.

MarcL

author: Marc L | posted @ Monday, November 01, 2010 2:43 PM | Feedback (0)

Information Worker Cape Town - SharePoint Lab Saturday


This weekend (Saturday 28 August 2010), the Cape Town Information Worker Community will be hosting a FREE SharePoint LABS day.

So register and attend a day with SharePoint 2010 Labs - for Free!

http://www.informationworker.co.za/Pages/SLABSRegistration.aspx

See you there.

Marc

author: Marc L | posted @ Tuesday, August 24, 2010 11:38 AM | Feedback (0)

1st 2010 Information Worker User Group - 13 Jan 2010


Information Worker User Group welcomes in 2010 with its first awesome instalment session on 13 January. We'll have a jam packed session on SharePoint 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 betas. Some really cool stuff on the horizon!

Check the agenda and register yourself online at:

http://www.informationworker.co.za/pages/jhbeventregistration.aspx

I'll be there hosting the Custom Workflow Dev and Visual Web Part sessions.

Catch you there.

author: Marc L | posted @ Tuesday, January 05, 2010 11:52 PM | Feedback (0)

Get Started with Developer Documentation


The SharePoint 2010 Technical Preview SDK and Developer documentation is ready for download. Neat!

I must commend the release of SP2010 Beta. Even though we had to endure painful NDAs all the way to the official beta release the current documentation and overall quality release of this beta far outweighs the release of SharePoint 2007. Back then TechNet and MSDN articles and documents were released weeks post the product release. This release is much better!

So download the SDK from Microsoft's site. Here's some brief on what to expect from the SDK:

  • White paper: Customizing the Ribbon in Windows SharePoint Services “14”: The Ribbon is now included in the user interface for Windows SharePoint Services “14” and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. This white paper describes how developers extend it using a combination of XML and ECMAScript (JavaScript, JScript). Customizations to the Ribbon in the included example are created using the Feature infrastructure, and can be deployed using a solution package (.wsp file). This white paper is provided in both PDF and XPS format.
  • SDK: SharePoint Products and Technologies 2010 Managed Reference SDK (Technical Preview): This compiled help (.chm) file contains reference topics focusing on types and members that are called by other Microsoft applications. This reference does not reflect the entirety of the SharePoint Products and Technologies 2010 managed object model.

    The full SharePoint Products and Technologies 2010 SDK will accompany the public release of SharePoint 2010.

 

author: Marc L | posted @ Friday, December 11, 2009 7:19 PM | Feedback (1)

Creating a SharePoint 2010 Beta Virtual Machine


So getting SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 installed is quite a process - but well worth it. It's mostly due to the pre-requisites and hardware requirements, a number of the latest hotfixes and series of installations and configurations.

For those of you attempting to get SharePoint 2010 installed here are a few steps I learnt along the way.

1)      Firstly, make your choice to run SharePoint 2010 on your Windows 7 x64 desktop (with some work around) or in a virtualised environment on Windows Server 2008 R2 x 64.

2)      I chose the latter.

3)      My notebook hardware is x64 and BIOS Virtualisation is active. This is the host machine.

4)      My choice of running SharePoint 2010 is in a Windows Server 2008 Enterprise R2 x64 Virtual Machine

5)      My choice of Virtual Machine is VMWare Server (Free) or VMWare Workstation (License Required). Why? Because I’m able to run my guest VM Windows Server 2008 in x64 CPU mode. I can’t do that with Windows 7 VPC because it doesn’t support guest VM in x64 bit mode.

6)      Its really important you follow the right steps to get this right. There is an excellent document published by CriticalPathTraining at www.criticalpathtraining.com. Andrew Connell has an excellent blog post of this process.

7)      Get registered on the Members site (that’s for free) and download the SharePoint 2010 Virtual Machine Setup document. Its excellent in helping you get your Windows Server 2008 R2 x64, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 x64 and all the hotfixes configured correctly. It guides you in the installation of SharePoint 2010 Beta x64

8)      Get Visual Studio 2010 installed and you’re ready for business.

Happy SharePointing

 

author: Marc L | posted @ Friday, December 11, 2009 12:12 AM | Feedback (2)

Download SharePoint 2010 Beta


The wait is over! SharePoint 2010 Beta download is available along with Office 2010, Project 2010, Visio 2010 Betas.

Check out the Info:

http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com/try-it/Pages/Trial.aspx

Read it officially at:

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/11/18/sharepoint-2010-public-beta-is-now-available-for-download.aspx

Get it at:

http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com/try-it/Pages/Trial.aspx

 

 

author: Marc L | posted @ Thursday, November 19, 2009 12:21 AM | Feedback (0)