WooHoo!  It’s a boy! Updates and this week in SharePoint…

A number of significant things have happened in my life recently.  #1 being the birth of my son Dean Kyle Oleson.  My wife didn’t agree to SharePoint as his middle name, unlike Avi “MOSS is my middle name” from Israel.  He’s been consuming my thoughts rightly so.  Dean was born on May 22 at 3:20am.  I did some twittering around his birth.  The hundred or so that commented with congrats on both facebook and twitter, let me personally thank you 🙂  Was great to see the community come together like that. 

I can now talk about “My Three Sons” an old school TV show.  It’s great to be a dad again and you can bet he’ll be the best travelled baby as soon as he can get his passport.

SP2 issue

The other big announcement clogging the twitter pipes was an issue in SharePoint Server SP2 (Standard or Enterprise) were it doesn’t properly activate the license key and actually affects all SharePoint Server installations.  Not to worry, the product team is working on a hotfix, and it would take 180 days for your environment to expire.  Even less to worry there is a very easy workaround of simply activating the product again.  Jeff Teper gives an announcement on the SharePoint Team blog with a bit of a Q & A and the KB article: 971620 with the work around has been published.

Your Starting Point to the SharePoint Community

There is also a new SharePoint Marketing site http://sharepoint.microsoft.com based on SharePoint and Silverlight, congrats to the SharePoint team.  Nice to see information on the various upcoming SharePoint conferences, and the case studies are nice and easy to access, I see that as a big plus.  I almost thought the MTV guy and Jamba Juice guy must be twins.   I hope this means more of a consolidation of content or not just “another portal.”  The site explains this site is “your starting point for the worldwide SharePoint community.”   The goal is definitely portal and leveraging this platform as an agile publishing mechanism that the SharePoint team owns.

This week in SharePoint feature

In the name of consolidation, I’ve started a new feature called “This week in SharePoint by Joel Oleson” over on EndUserSharePoint.com.  Partnering up with Mark Miller, someone I’d call the key in bringing the business audience to the SharePoint community and visa versa.  His efforts on EndUserSharePoint and his panel of experts have brought a great and unique service which brings SharePoint community to the power user, and SharePoint business analyst, SharePoint project manager and SharePoint data guru.  I wonder what we’ll call this person in the future…  End user or client just doesn’t give them justice, and the amazing things they can do when combining Infopath, Excel, Designer etc… with SharePoint are simply unimaginable.  Back to the new feature… I’ve seen it become overwhelming not just for the developers and IT audience that are more dedicated, but all audiences in the SharePoint community trying to keep up with the announcements, conferences, and bits and pieces of PR around the new SharePoint Server 2010.  Everyone can’t stay plugged in all of the time.  My attempt is to give a quick 15 minute update on what happened in the past week.  I’m sure I’ll miss things, and that’s what the comments are for.  This 15 minutes is an audio MP3, WMV and accessible as a podcast on iTunes and soon to be Zune.  Love to hear your feedback on this new feature.  Right now I’m looking for positive feedback, don’t tell me you don’t like my voice.  If you want me to add a joke, let me know I could use that kind of feedback.