Collabshow.com

PARIS

Club MOSS March 31st

http://clubmoss2007.org/default.aspx

Details to follow (Erol will be providing me a link)

COLOGNE/KOELN/Köln, GERMANY

<Register and more details here>

User Group site and further details

1. Regionaltreffen: SharePoint User Group Köln

1. April 2009 – 1. SharePoint UserGroup Treffen in Köln

o Beginn: 18:00 Uhr

o Ort: Quest Software GmbH, Im Media Park 4e. 50670 Köln

Ein besonderes Higlight an diesem Abend ist der Gastredner:

Joel Oleson, früher Senior Technical Product Manager für SharePoint bei Microsoft in Redmond (er hat u.a. das erste globale SharePoint Deployment bei Microsoft geleitet), heute bei Quest als SharePoint Evangelist tätig und einer der bekanntest SharePoint Blogger (sharepointjoel.com ) weltweit. 

mit einem Vortrag zum Thema:

10 Steps to Successful SharePoint Deployments

Scope creep and newbie mistakes result in failed deployments.  Gartner has said that 35% of companies will not implement proper governance for their SharePoint deployments over the next 2 years.  In 10 simple steps, real stories and guidance is shared to help both new and experienced with best practices to successful SharePoint Deployments.

Wir freuen uns auf Ihren Besuch

AMSTERDAM

SharePoint Day with the Experts: Amsterdam

<To Register for Details and to Register>

Join international and local SharePoint experts in Amsterdam and learn how to master your SharePoint environment. Sponsored by Quest Software and Microsoft.

Date: Friday, April 3rd, 2009
Time: 10.30 – 16.30 (Registration begins at 10.00)
Cost: Free (Lunch is included)

**NEW LOCATION**
Congrescentrum Amstelveen
Sandbergplein 24
1181 ZX Amstelveen
(map)

Agenda:

10:00 Registration

10:30 Welcome and Introductions

10:40 SharePoint Successful Deployments in 10 Steps
Joel Oleson, Quest Software

11:30 SharePoint, the Social Computing Platform (Business Strategy and Adoption)
Daniel McPherson, zevenseas

12:30 Lunch

1:30  SharePoint Logical and Physical Infrastructure Fundamentals 
Joel Oleson, Quest Software & Robin Meure, zevenseas

2:30   Backup Demystified
Mike Watson, Quest Software

3:30 Experts Panel and Q&A

4:30 Wrap Up

LONDON, England, UK

SharePoint Best Practices Europe in London

Speakers

Agenda (JUST PUBLISHED!)

<Register here>

Joel Oleson

9:30AM on April 6 Keynote – Don’t miss it!

April 6 at 2:45PM – IT103  Legacy Stuff: Help me Kill my File Servers, Front Page Servers, and Public Folders

CAIRO, EGYPT

<more Details>

9th April meeting

Joel Oleson

SharePoint Expert Speaker & Blogger, 8 year SharePoint veteran Microsoft IT Architect.

Session: 10 Steps to Successful Deployments

Description: Without a service definition, scope creep can ruin a deployment.  Come spend time to hear the insights of SharePoint Joel on the 10 Steps to successful deployment from governance and building solid teams, to designing scalable information architectures.

Q&A Panel Ask the expert (Free discussion)

Date/Time: 9th April – 6:30 PM till 9 PM

Transportation: to be announced later

Location:

Microsoft Egypt
Smart Village – KM 28 Cairo/Alex desert road
Ground Floor, Room Explorer 1 & 2

Registration Required here (Attendance is free) Any updates will be sent to registered users and on Group twitter

For Egypt SharePoint User Group updates follow Follow EGYSUG on Twitter

At Tech Ed last year I spent a lot of time talking with the SharePoint vendor booths trying to help provide feedback and understand the solutions so as an architect I would know who to recommend when.  The biggest problem for a good SharePoint solution is awareness.  No one knows all of the solutions or even of the top solutions, their is so many solutions it’s tough to know what’s good.  One thing I really noticed was how open and willing they were to work with me for $$ and really wanted to share their solutions.  With thousands of SharePoint vendors SharePointReviews.com made a HUGE leap in our ability to understand SharePoint independent software vendors and their SharePoint solutions and in an unbiased way. 

One conversation I had with Inna Gordin, the master mind behind SharePointReviews and it’s huge success in the community turned into one where I said, how can we get the bloggers and the ISVs together?  ISVs have money and bloggers have visitors.  How amazing would it be if we could bring these communities together? 

Reading the state of blogging on Technoriati (day 4 was blogging for profit, very eye opening) earlier in the year I had learned that more than 40% of bloggers were making money on their blogs.  I learned it was completely accepted by the community and as long as the ads weren’t invasive people were happy to help support your sponsors.  From the State of the Blogosphere… “Among bloggers who have advertising on their blogs, two in three have contextual ads (such as Google AdSense). One-third of bloggers have affiliate advertising on their blog. One in five negotiate directly with advertisers and one in ten sell advertising through a blog ad network.”

When I was independent last year, my wife was like… why are you blogging and why don’t you make money on your blog?  I was like… I do it because I like it.  I love helping people.  She replied.  Couldn’t you do a google ads or something?  I figured I’d look into a Microsoft friendly solution.  GOOSE EGGS.  I came up with nothing…

“Blogs are an increasingly attractive platform for advertisers. The majority of bloggers we surveyed have advertising on their blogs. Marketers realize that bloggers are creating high quality content and attracting growing, loyal audiences.” State of the Blogospere

After Teched I had a few connections with partners like Nintex, Colligo, and Bamboo.  So I approached them individually and they each were willing to pay referral fees, but ultimately the tracking was all on their side and despite all the traffic I was sending their way, I wasn’t able to send them an invoice.  Ultimately I couldn’t keep track of all that.  It was too much.  Amazon and showing reviews for books and getting gift cards was the short term solution… but it wasn’t serving those friends I had made in the SharePoint community who could make better solutions by selling their solutions.  It really is a WIN/WIN situation.  The better the solution and getting the customers to find out about them is a winning proposition…

Announcing SharePointAds.com!

A paid per click solution for both the bloggers (publishers) AND the ISVs.  Inna a very passionate and master mind in marketing made this idea a reality.  Now In beta SharePointads.com is live.  What an exciting proposition. That will definitely change the way we look at SharePoint and ads. 

For the Blogger/Publisher

Not only is it better than Googleads which uses a keyword and then puts up random junk not of my choosing good or bad, SharePointAds is solutions and products that you can feel good about.  You can sleep at night.  If you want to not promote a category of products or only promote events… that type of functionality is what SharePointAds strives to provide.  Now while sleeping you can be making money at the same time. 

For the SharePoint Advertiser

A targetted audience that you couldn’t get anywhere else.  You want to reach SharePoint people.  They live on blogs.  They are looking for information.

Don’t limit your thinking to software vendors… think about Events, Conferences, Magazines, Training, Webcasts, Whitepapers even other bloggers looking to promote their content.

Why would I be so excited about something so simple?  Making money on blogs allow those who wouldn’t be willing to spend time, to spend more time, on quality content to get views and their rank up.  As well it will bring the entire community up a level.  I’d love to see Google ads get moved off SharePoint blogs.  How cool would that be?

In full disclosure, I am part of the network and you’ll see this going up on my blog!  You’ll see Google Ads going away on my blog(s).

Love to hear your feedback!

The webcast deck and recording

Simplified SharePoint Application Development By Joel Oleson, Dustin Miller, Curtis Kelly, and DELL: Dan Zainea and Brian LaSitis

(If you’ve already registered, click through on the register button and login on the right.)

Tiered Development – Use the Right Tool

One message I was really trying to get across on the webcast yesterday was the three tiers of tools for doing development.  The Web UI the broad first tier that nearly all environments support from commodity on up.  The SharePoint Designer tier which itself could be broken down into three tiers of workflow, design, and app dev, and lastly visual studio which is where the buck stops.  SharePoint designer becomes both a customization tool, but also a rapid deployment and application prototyping tool.

The piece that most miss is the strict requirement of really doing full development life cycle management with application development.  Many think you need to do all development in production.  While it is true that most elements designed with SharePoint designer with workflows are not portable, a number of things are… such as master pages, and many web parts.  Even many that integrate with external data can be exported from the page and reimported.  The key is understanding the dependencies and avoiding the hardcoded GUIDs.  I don’t have time to go into that rich detail, but this diagram attempts to simplify the common SharePoint development lifecycle where development assets begin in some development environment where the dev team introduce their changes from some TFS or source control system to be introduced for coexistence and validation.  Then on to a test or QA environment, where there may be multiple stages prior to a production environment.  Oddly enough many customizations are introduced directly into production.

TEAM Based Development

The understanding of dev assets vs. customizations is best explained in the Team Based SharePoint Development article on MSDN.  I HIGHLY recommend understanding what is being convedyed and come up with your own practicies.  From SCRUM to MSF and MOF, there will be slight differences, but the principles are the same… There are HUGE differences from .NET development and it is KEY to understand these differences.  This article is one of the few to explain and get it right.

Flow

Note how the dev assets flow out, and the content flows in.  As well content databases or even server images can be used to simplify the complex process of establishing consistency across tiers.  As well, the tool that Mike Watson has been furiously working on is sure to help this problem as well.  I hope to be able to talk more openly about this one over the next couple of months.

Deployment and application development can be complex, but with the right processes in place this can be streamlined and extremely empowering for both the business and the biz dev team.

Q&A

There were a couple of questions on ghosting/customization

During upgrade there was some conversation around unghosting of pages and ultimately the decision is most commonly these days…. yes, please reghost (inherit from site definition).  In the future we can only expect that these lines will continue to blur as the pages are no longer SharePoint looking pages and are more WCM focused pages with custom UI and custom navigation.  Looking at resources I was surprised to not find much as I expected to on this topic.  Sounds like there is need for more information on this topic.

I have been working with a number of people over the last few months to put together a plan that would really work for a company.  It essentially takes a number of classic examples, plus some best practices and runs through what I (and Paul Culmsee) like to call the choose your own adventure of SharePoint.

This Collaboration Governance plan is the essentials of coming up with a service offering that’s focused on the idea of an SharePoint as collaboration.  Now of course there are a ton of scenarios in which you CAN deploy SharePoint, and this plan takes one in a single direction.  It takes that adventure book and actually chooses a bunch of things from global deployment choices, to quotas, templates and so on.

Kudos to John Ross and Jennifer Mason who helped me see the sections that I was missing, and Paul Culmsee who has a knack for seeing how things should be organized.

If you enjoyed the Sample Governance Plan, you should really like the….

Just published to TechNet:

1. SharePoint Collaboration Governance Plan (22 Page Word Document)

What’s Next????

2. SharePoint Intranet Portal Governance Plan

3 SharePoint Hosting Plan (IT as a 3 tiered service)

I’m interested in your feedback!