Registration open for Boston Area SharePoint Users Group on 11/10/10

October 28, 2010 Leave a comment

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Registration is now open for the November 10th, 2010 meeting of the Boston Area SharePoint Users Group, back again on our home turf at the Microsoft NERD center in Cambridge, MA.

PRESENTERS

Our presenters for our next meeting are Richard Harbridge, a Senior SharePoint Evangelist at Allin Consulting, and Mark Bramhall, CTO at Allin Consulting. They will be presenting "SharePoint 2010 Integration and Interoperability: What you need to know".

Session Abstract

There are countless challenges when dealing with business data. A few of note are:

  • Higher Overhead for IT to Service User Requests
  • Multiple Places to Search Results in Reduced Applicable Contexts
  • Multiple Places to Administer, Manage, and Maintain
  • High Data Integration Costs (100% Custom and Often One Offs)
  • Silos or Islands of Business Data Lead to Redundant Data or Processes
  • Multiple Interfaces Creates User Dissatisfaction and Increased Training Costs

Microsoft SharePoint is a platform than can help significantly reduce the challenges mentioned above by using an interoperable platform of connected services. In our session we will explore SharePoint’s new Interoperability underpinnings as well as the BCS to determine how they can be leveraged effectively in real world scenarios.

What we will be talking about:

  • SharePoint’s Important Interoperability
  • What is the BCS?
    • External Content Types
    • External Columns
    • External Lists
    • Extensibility and Tooling
  • Other Ways SharePoint Leverages the BCS
  • Demonstration of BCS
  • The Limitations of BCS

About Richard

Over the past 7 years I have had the pleasure of working extensively with SharePoint as an end user, developer, administrator, architect, business analyst, and consultant. In this time I defined, architected, developed, and implemented well over a hundred SharePoint solutions from small implementations of WSS on a single server, to 80,000+ user implementations in international organizations.
About Mark

Mark has over 40 years’ experience in Information Technology. As Chief Technology Officer, Mark is responsible for the evaluation and implementation of new technologies as well as being a core member of development teams that build client systems.  He has helped client’s assemble and deploy large, distributed application systems in the fields of healthcare, finance, distance learning, and entertainment.


MEETING SPONSOR
TBA

SUSTENANCE
Food and beverages will be provided at the event.

 

RAFFLE PRIZES
We will be handing out raffle tickets at the BASPUG meetings.

Black Blade Associates will be raffling off a license, valued at $2000 for their SharePoint Zip product, at each and every meeting of the BASPUG!

Lightning Tools will also be raffling off a license for their BCS MetaMan product. Lighning Tools has also stepped up to provide this as a raffle item at each of our meetings!

We also have books, XBOX Games, T-Shirts, and more!

 

LOCATION
We will be meeting at the Microsoft New England Research and Development Center, located in Cambridge, MA. For more information on the facility, as well as directions, please visit here: http://www.microsoftcambridge.com

 

LINKED IN
Join our group on LinkedIn today to connect with the rest of the BASPUG members, and spread the word!

 

FACEBOOK

We are also on facebook! http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Boston-Area-SharePoint-User-Group/113652405354617

 

TWITTER
Follow news about the Boston Area SharePoint Users Group on twitter by following us @BASPUG, and by using the hashtag #BASPUG

 

WEB

Visit the Boston Area SharePoint Users Group website at http://www.bostonsharepointug.org

 

ORGANIZERS

Event meetings are organized by Geoff Varosky of Grace-Hunt, Eugene Rosenfeld of Black Blade Associates, Ryan Tacy of HP, and Talbott Crowell of Third Millenium.

Filed under BASPUG, SharePoint Tagged with , ,

SPTechCon & October 21st BASPUG re-cap and materials

October 28, 2010 Leave a comment

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I know, I know… I still need to publish my post on this past SharePoint Saturday Boston… however, since SPTechCon is slightly more fresh in my mind, and, because I promised materials to one of the lucky folks who attended my sessions by the end of the day, SPTechCon has taken the driver’s seat.

All I can say is what a great conference! Unfortunately, I was meeting people and companies, and talking to session-goers, catching up with friends, and meeting new ones, for the entire event, that the only sessions I was able to make it to, were my own!

I would first like to extend my thanks, yet again, to David Rubinstein, Stacy Burris, Kathy Bruin, and the rest of the BZ Media team, for not only taking me on as a speaker, but, for also graciously hosting the October meeting of the Boston Area SharePoint Users Group! With the conference in town, and by David’s suggestion months earlier, we managed to put together a fantastic panel of speakers from some of the SharePoint rock stars that were on hand at SPTechCon. We wanted to put together a focused panel on the new hotness, SharePoint 2010. While the conversations drifted a bit, we had a very energetic crowd, and very energetic panel. The free drinks at the attendee exhibit hall exception MAY have had something to do with that…

The panel consisted of none other than Bill English of Mindsharp, Andrew Connell of Critical Path Training, Joel Oleson of Quest, Heather Solomon of SharePoint Experts, Dux Raymond Sy of Innovative-e, and Mark Miller of EndUserSharePoint.com. (I’ll get the video posted soon enough!).

My next set of thanks is going to the BASPUG attendees and speakers – thank you all so much for making yet another highly successful meeting of the BASPUG! We had over 70 in attendance, and there was barely a seat available! To each and every one of our speakers, you are always welcome back in Boston to the users group!

Some of the comments from the BASPUG I’d like to share.. a few images below – LOTS of talk about the #BASPUG. Thank you all!

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To close out the BASPUG @ SPTechCon, here is the slide deck from that night. Video, as mentioned above, still to come!

Next, I’d like to thank all of those who attended my two sessions at SPTechCon. The first session, bright and early before Steve Fox’s keynote, was “Just Freakin’ Work! Overcoming Hurdles and Avoiding Pain” with Mark Rackley. We had almost a full room, even with the change in time, as well as for being quite early at 8:15am.

Below is our slide deck from that presentation.

My next session closed off the conference at 4:00 on Friday, and I delivered to a great crowd, “Creating Custom Actions in SharePoint 2010”. Thank you again for all who attended, and let me know if you have any questions here in the comments, so I can share them with the rest of the world, or rather, the small portion of people that view my blog 🙂 Below is my deck from that session.

Thank you again everyone at the conference. I have to say, in all honesty, that this was one of the best conferences I have ever had the privilege to attend!

Looking to see these sessions again? Join me in February next year at SPTechCon San Francisco!

Filed under BASPUG, Events, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010, SharePoint User Groups, SPTechCon, SPTechCon Tagged with , ,

Clippy Jr.

October 27, 2010 Leave a comment

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Just a short post on the offspring of Clippy – Clippy Jr. You know him well, even if you do not think so. He exists within SharePoint. Don’t believe me? He’s been hiding in plain sight the whole time! Just look at the images taken by a private detective below. I promise, these are not doctored (except for the arrows… those definitely were not in the original images.)

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See? There he is! Right in the title bar below the toolbar within this list view!

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There he is again, on your new list item form!

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And again, hanging out next to your list items! Always trying to let you know something. However, Clippy Jr. has definitely learned a few things from this mistakes of his father, Clippy Sr.

Ok, now to get onto the meat and potatoes of this post. No, this is not to let you know that there is an attachments for icons, but, a simple little piece of XSL that can be used in your dataview web parts to denote if there are attachments on a list item or not, and then, show Clippy Jr., happily telling you that there is an attachment on the item.

   1: <xsl:if test="@Attachments!='0'">

   2:     <center><img src="/_layouts/images/attach.gif" /></center>

   3: </xsl:if>

And that is all there is to it! @Attachments returns a boolean value that will either be a value of 0, if there are NOT attachments on the list item, or, 1 if there are.

Simple, straight-forward, and extremely handy. Thank you Clippy Jr.!

Filed under SharePoint, SharePoint Designer Tagged with , , ,

Calculating Site Collection Usage via SQL

October 25, 2010 Leave a comment

I have been slow on the informational posts lately, sorry about that! Have had lots happening in the work world over the past few months, and have not been able to get much done in that arena, between SharePoint Saturday Boston, The SharePoint Technology Conference, Best Practices Conference, business development, the SharePoint Saturday Boston Webinar Series, the Boston Area SharePoint Users Group, writing chapters for a book, as well as client work (last, but certainly not least), my blog entries have become few and far between.

I also need to get my feedburner redirected from live spaces, and oh so much more…

However, I thought I would write a quick post! I use this quick SQL statement from time to time, and used it again today, and wanted to share it quickly with the few souls that actually read this blog 🙂

   1: SELECT FullUrl AS URL,(DiskUsed/1024) AS SiteCollectionUsedKB from Sites

 

Simple, but, it gets the job done. From your content database, running this query will return the URL of the site collection, as well as its storage allocation. Handy, and useful!

Filed under SharePoint, SQL Tagged with , , , ,

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