Mossig and SharePoint certification and training

Last Wednesday night we had another good user group meeting hosted by Microsoft and Mossig.
Topics covered where an interesting Office Add-in by one of the group members, Kevin Ramsey who demonstrated how the Custom Task Pane in various Office application can be utilised to show Line of Business Data and provide users with customised actions. For example quickly creating Outlook tasks relating to specific Business Data. Marc Dimmick gave us some good reasons to consider using Groove from a business perspective and Elaine van Bergen presented the low-down on WSS and Office Server developer exams.

Mentioned was the fact that MS just released a new Developer portal on MSDN for Groove so here's a link in case you are looking for it.

I would like to add to Elaine's information that there is now a great offer for e-Learning for WSS available (6 courses for under 200 $US) which will be of good value if you are preparing for the WSS-development exam.

Some more news from the Office Development front:

Maybe a bit late, last week the release version of Visual Studio 2005 extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 was made avalable for download.

Also of interest to MOSS-developers will be the VSTA SDK that Paul Stubbs bLogs about.

BTW, I'm reading VSTO for Mere Mortals at the at the moment and it is very refreshing to see that there is now an entry-level book available for those of you who just get started looking at VSTO or want to move from VBA-programming into VSTO. My compliments to Kathleen and Paul on releasing this great resource, I like it a lot.

Note that we have decided to move the next Mossig meeting to the 2nd of May because of a publi holiday on our regular meeting date.