Australian SharePoint Conference

It’s less than SIX weeks now until the Australian SharePoint Conference, with a bunch of great presenters from Australia and overseas.

The KEYNOTE has now been announced – and will be Mike FitzMaurice from Nintex – as well as Chris Johnson from Provoke Solutions.   Both are ex-Microsoft SharePoint product team – and great presenters.   *I* am looking forward to the keynote – will be great !

Also – there are a bunch of MSPUG speakers on the roster – see the list here.

The full agenda is also available – to see the list of topics & speakers – see here.

AND – there are still some early bird tickets available – for only $725 (for a two-day conference).  

P.S.  TechEd is about $1595 – by comparison (full price)…

And – there’s a user group discount – if you enter the code MSPUG – you’ll get a discount – if you miss out on the Early Bird ticket prices.

Here’s the latest email/mailout – in case you missed it.

See you there !

Premier SharePoint Conference just gets better As with previous years, there is a dual focus on both the business and technical aspects of SharePoint, and the line-up of expert speakers and case study presentations is better than ever. This year there is additional focus on the key topics of “Cloud” and “Mobility”, and a new track on the post-GFC hot topic of Business Intelligence. SharePoint Transforms If you are a business leader who wants to know how SharePoint can transform your organisation, or a technical wizard who needs to understand how to make SharePoint hum, this is the key event for 2012. See world-renowned presenters:  SPC 2012 has the greatest concentration of SharePoint knowledge outside Microsoft HQ.  Come and learn from the best in the business. Hear real customer stories. Follow their journeys and learn from their experiences. Learn about the hot topics in SharePoint and related technologies. Participate in extra activities at the events, connect with people and get involved in our great selection of pre and post conference workshops. 75 Early Bird Discount Registrations left. $AUD725.00 for two full days. www.sharepointconference.com.au   Australian SharePoint Conference 2012 March 20 & 21 Hilton on the Park 192 Wellington Parake Melbourne Early Bird Discount $725 Group discount available RegularPrice $795 to our weekly newsletter updates. We will highlight specific topics, provide details on planned sessions and feature different speakers and products every week. STAY INFORMED LEADING UP TO THE EVENT! Read the EVENT BLOG HERE!   Events managed by Spevents, a division of envisionIT.(NZ) Ltd www.spevents.co.nz   Copyright © 2012 envisionIT NZ Ltd, All rights reserved.

Merry Christmas from MSPUG

Thanks everyone who came along for the Christmas Party at the Melbourne SharePoint User Group – was a good night…!

We kicked off with a truckload of pizza’s – really NICE pizza’s actually – thanks a lot to K2 for their generous support on the night – and throughout 2011.

As for the user group “sessions” – it was a little different this month.

We had a retrospective looking back at 2011 – amazing to see all that happened through the year – including floods, earthquakes, royal weddings – and Ricky Nixon – and Charlie Sheen !

Of course, it was a big year for our user group – splitting away from the business user stream – and the demise of MOSSIG – with the birth of MSPUG – and lots of great sessions – and SharePoint Saturday (in October).

But – the best part of the Christmas Party was actually the break-and-chat session – was great to talk around the room about each-and-everyone’s perspective on SharePoint – and interesting to hear that some folk are relatively new to the platform – lots more learning ahead !

And of course – we had a prize draw – wahoo ! 

We actually had a choice of prizes :

• Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition – 180 Day Trial
• Windows Vista Beta 2 Customer Preview
• Sony Bloggie HD video camera

   LOL !!

And of course – the winner chose the CAMERA !

Congrats to HELEN – hope you get some great Christmas video/pics.

Thanks also to KAREN from AvePoint – for all the support through the year – and providing the prize for our Christmas Party.

Thanks once again to all that came along – and for our sponsors throughout the year.

Hope all MSPUG members have a great Christmas – eat, drink and be merry !

And – a safe and prosperous New Year – see you again in 2012…

Cheers,

Chris, Elaine & Tim    [MSPUG board]

Christmas Party

The Christmas crazies are upon us – with parties, decorations, carols and Santa’s everywhere.  I’m sure everyone is busy (BUSY !) trying to finish off projects & work before the end-of-the-year.

The Melbourne SharePoint User Group normally has a meeting on the 4th Wednesday of each month – which would be between Christmas and New Year (!)

Suffice to say, we’ve had to re-schedule our usual meeting – and so the new date is Wednesday 14th December – next Wednesday !

In case you missed the newsletter, here’s a run-down of our meeting – will be a great ‘party’ session – don’t miss out.

** And, we’ll have food, beer – and door prizes – so make sure you RSVP – and we’ll see you there…!

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What happened to 2011 ???
Chris O’Connor will present a retrospective of the past year, and what we’ve seen within the SharePoint ecosystem – and our user group. We saw the demise of MOSSIG, and the birth of MSPUG – and continued to have some great sessions & speakers.

Focus Groups
In a totally different direction for MSPUG, we’re ditching the main presentation room and splitting into TWO meeting rooms – for some presenter-led discussion forum sessions.
The idea is to have some open-forum Q&A, about the two specific topics – so bring your questions, and thoughts and ideas – and join us for a chat.

Focus Group 1 : What’s next for Office 365
Ben Walters (Microsoft) and Elaine van Bergen (OBS) will lead some discussion around the bits & pieces that have transpired for Office 365 during the year, including the beta, and launch – and the MOSSIG cloud party – as well as what’s next for the platform – looking into 2012.

Focus Group 2 : What’s next for SharePoint
Tim Wragg and Chris O’Connor will lead some discussion about the SharePoint platform, now that “2010” has matured, and many (most?) people are using it – and we’ve also seen the release of Service Pack 1. We can chat about what’s to come in 2012 – what do you expect to be doing this time next year?

Business Intelligence is high on the agenda these days, with the imminent release of Denali (SQL 2012), and PowerPivot – as well as newer web technologies such as HTML5, and jQuery – and the vNext SharePoint platform likely to arrive sometime in 2012. What do you want to see in vNext? What features are you looking forward to? Come along for an open beer-and-chat session.

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We’ll also talk through some plans and ideas for 2012 – for MSPUG – including the Australian SharePoint Conference – which will be in MELBOURNE this year !

See you at the Christmas party – make sure you RSVP !

November MSPUG – Show Me The Data !

Following on from the very successful SharePoint Saturday in Melbourne (with close to 100 ppl in attendance) – we’re resuming normal service again this month for MSPUG.

Date/Time : Wed. November 23rd – from 5.30pm   (6pm sessions commence)

With pretty much ANY computing system, it’s all about DATA, right ?  

• What data do you need to capture & use ?
• How do you get it in there ?
• How to do you find it ?
• How you use it, etc ?

With that thought in mind, we have a great topic for this month – Data In / Data Out.

We have two great presenters – with a different perspective on the topic for the night – covering some very deep-technical SharePoint subject matter – including Business Connectivity Services (BCS), SQL Azure – and SharePoint Search + FAST.

Here’s the run-down of the sessions.

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Building Hybrid Cloud Solutions with Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint 2010

Nalaka Withanange, Readify

Business Connectivity Services (BCS) in SharePoint 2010 provides new ways to connect and integrate with external data such as your on premise and SQL Azure databases.

BCS enhances the SharePoint platform’s capabilities with out-of-box features in the key areas of presentation, connectivity, tooling and lifecycle management that streamline the development of solutions with deep integration of external data and services.

Learn what’s available out of the box and how to bring your .NET skills to seamlessly integrate and surface business data from your cloud workloads through SharePoint 2010.

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Optimising Enterprise Search with SharePoint & Fast

Anthony Butcher & Tucker Hall, BA Insight

Search is often one of the easiest ways to achieve immediate ROI from SharePoint.

Although both SharePoint and FAST search work well out of the box, the key to unlocking the potential of search starts with understanding how it works.

In this session, we’ll discuss the role of SharePoint and FAST search, how to determine which is best for your organization, and how to ensure that end users are finding the content that they need when they need it .

This session is designed for all who want to get a better understanding of Microsoft enterprise search, learn about the differences between standard SharePoint Search and FAST Search for SharePoint, and to learn techniques to create a better search experience for their organization.

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As always – PLEASE – make sure you RSVP if you’re planning to attend MSPUG.   Otherwise, we have no hope in estimating the attendee’s – and thus catering.

Click HERE to register your name – it’s free – and will only takes a quick minute :

http://mspug112011.eventbrite.com/

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P.S.  December is approaching – and the MSPUG Christmas is shaping up to be a great one.   Make sure you’re on our mailing list – and we’ll send the details shortly.

To register, just click on the purple button on the home page.

See you at MSPUG on the 23rd…!

No October Meeting – SPSMEL instead

This month, the regular Wednesday night meeting for MSPUG is being skipped (would normally have been on 26th Oct).  Sorry ‘bout that – you can have the night off !

Instead, we’re having a FULL DAY of top-quality presentations.

This coming Saturday (Oct 22nd) is “SharePoint Saturday Melbourne”.

SharePoint Saturday has become an institution around the globe, with the community very strong and active – and always a meeting happened somewhere.

In fact – there are meetings this Saturday in far-off places, not just Melbourne – Manila, Belarus (near Russia), and Minnesota.

Instead of the normal 1-2 sessions at MSPUG – SharePoint Saturday Melbourne has 15 sessions – and the best bit, is that it’s FREE to attend (including lunch !)

There are 15 sessions – across BUSINESS, DEVELOPMENT and IT PRO tracks – as well as an ASK-THE-EXPERTS panel – and then a prize draw (and THEN SharePint !)

Here’s the schedule (PDF) – make sure to have a look and ‘plan your day’.

Many thanks to Brian Farnhill (Canberra) – and our own Elaine van Bergen for organising the speakers, venue, sponsors, catering – and all the other bits that will make it a great day.

It’s looking like it will be a great day – so make sure you RSVP – don’t miss out.

There are ~30 tickets remaining (as of right now) – so click here to register.

See you there !

P.S.  Service will return as normal next month – with MSPUG on WED. 23rd November.

MSPUG September

Last night, Melbourne had a torrent coming down rather quickly (no, not BitTorrent – RAIN) – and so we had a less-than-normal turnout for the regular meeting.

We had 15 people in total – who came along to see Roger Noble from LobsterPot – who is actually a “SQL guy” – bringing some interest concepts about SharePoint.

His session was about taxonomy and folksonomy – and he covered these concepts in brief – talking about Managed MetaData – and Term Sets, etc – and a quick demo.

Then – he opened up Visual Studio – and opened an SSIS package project – WTF !?

SQL Server Integration Services – and SharePoint ??

This is where all the SharePoint folk sat up and took notice :

• Create a package (SSIS) – pointing to a folder on disk (C:\DOCUMENTS)
• Process each DOCX file – using OpenXML
• Extract out the NOUNS and NOUN PHRASES – and score (count of terms)
• Save these into a database (SQL)
• For the top items, create MMS TermSet entries – using some SSIS .NET code (C#)
• Upload the documents – and tag accordingly – from the terms within the document

This is a brilliant solution – using a SQL Server concept of “Extract, Transform & Load” – but instead :

• Extract terms – metadata from within DOCX files
• Transform these into Managed MetaData term sets
• Load the DOCX files to a SharePoint document library

Thanks Roger for the session – was great to see a different perspective on SharePoint – from the SQL Server direction.

Click here to see details about his session – from when he presented at SharePoint Saturday Adelaide.

Hopefully, we’ll see him back at MSPUG sometime soon – thanks again, Roger !

MSPUG September – ECM

Has been a busy month for those in the SharePoint community – with the recent TechEd Australia event on the Gold Coast – with a bunch of MSPUG members presenting.

If you want to check out the videos from TechEd – including Elaine van Bergen, Chris O’Connor, Alex Burton, Shyam Narayan, Will Cornwill, Ben Walters and other interstate guests to MSPUG like Brian Farnhill & Mark Rhodes, click here.

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/Australia/Tech-Ed-Australia-2011

And NEXT month is looking busy too – for some lucky folk – planning flights, hotels & cars for the SharePoint Conference in Anaheim (Los Angeles).

I’m sure we’ll all be watching Twitter & Blogs to see what is shown/revealed at the biggest SharePoint Conference for the year – good luck to those presenting – and have a great time.

Closer to home, the Melbourne SharePoint User Group had a great kick-off meeting last month – with a design theme presentation – and a panel discussion.

For our September meeting (Wed. 28th), we’re looking into ECM – Enterprise Content Management, with another interstate presenter – from LobsterPot Solutions :

Jumpstart your folksonomy with text mining

Roger Noble, LobsterPot Solutions

SharePoint 2010 is great at storing documents but organising and tagging them can be a big job.

This session will show you how you can leverage the tools you already have in SQL Server to quickly and easily tag your documents, plus it will demonstrate the benefits of SharePoint’s Managed Metadata service for managing your terms.

As SharePoint uses SQL Server behind the scenes, the power of Text Mining is easily within your reach.

This hands-on session is aimed at Architects and Developers who want to discover how to get started classifying the hundreds or thousands of documents they already own

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With the success of the panel discussion last month (Gruen-Transfer style) – we’re doing another session.   Again – along the same lines – relating to ECM.

Scaling ECM Challenges – Open discussion

Service pack one has introduced changes in the recommended sizing for content databases. We will open this session with a quick presentation on the new sizing recommendations and then open the floor for a discussion on challenges in scaling an ECM solution.  Bring along any issues you’d like to discuss whether they relate to infrastructure, configuration, customisation or governance.

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Hope you can make it along – make sure to RSVP – we were a little LOW on numbers for catering last month – and many people missed out. 

So – PLEASE, register your attendance – thanks !

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Last to note, the October meeting for MSPUG will be the annual ‘SharePoint Saturday’ in Melbourne.   These events just keep getting bigger and better every year – with close to 100 people last year – and 15 sessions across three topic tracks.

The date for SPSMelb is Sat. October 22nd – mark your calendar now.

You can RSVP now – as well as register a speaker submission – if you want to present.

More details here.    http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/melbourne/

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That’s all for now – see you at MSPUG on Sept 28th !