About Me

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I'm currently the CTO for Hedgehog Technology a business dedicated to delivering Cloud based productivity solutions in Logistics

Friday, December 17, 2010

Ups and downs with Excel Services

Recently I've been dabbling with using Excel Services and Power Pivot for some dashboard reports in SharePoint 2010. Cool technology, and when you start reading the Excel team blog you can't help but have respect for the detailed, valuable information posted there.
Just after reading, I quote "The thing worth calling out in this blog article is that the error messages in this space have gotten much better." this happened:



and I was just telling the Mossig user group this week how I felt software was starting to work, after all those years.....

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Speaking at Tech.Ed and Office Devcon 2010

I'll be presenting next at Tech.Ed, topics are Visio, Visio Services, SharePoint and automated document generation options.

In November we'll have the opportunity to attend the Office Developers Conference in Sydney. This is a FREE event organised by Graham Seach. Do check this unique opportunity out!

At Tech Ed I'm starting as a panel member in the AvePoint Theatre on Tuesday 18.30pm

Adam Clark, Dan Holme, Ed Richard, Ivan Wilson, Roger Carran
Do you have questions about how to implement SharePoint without creating a mess , want to ask how best to use search, when/how to use metadata or any other SharePoint questions? Come along and pose your questions to a Panel of SharePoint experts. All questions welcome !

Wednesday the 25th 3pm, I'm back in the Theatre to chat about generating documents;
Creating Word documents on the fly, using Client or Server, what are the options?

Automating generating business documents - invoices, letters, reports - is something many companies wrestle with. This interactive session will present an overview of all the options available on the Microsoft platform, from Office 2003 XML/XSD based template solutions, via OpenXML, to the highly flexible and scalable Word Services in SharePoint 2010. Ed will prepare demo's for all options, go through the pro's and con's and interactively explore the options of most interest to the audience. Ed will also have some examples of Office 2010 and VSTO Add-ins to demonstrate a more interactive approach a user might take.

An finally this is the abstract for the breakout session at Tech Ed on Thursday in meeting room 8 at 3.30pm:

End to end solution for business process management using out of the box Office and SharePoint 2010 features - “Visio and SharePoint, better together”

This session will start by looking at an operational solution for Business Process Management that is built using Visio, SharePoint 2010 and Silverlight. The client involved during the Early Adaption Program with Microsoft has been featured in a Case study and appeared on stage during the Office 2010 Press Launch. The client has gone on record stating “This is going to change the way we work”. After looking at the actual solution we will go through discussing the different technologies used and how they fit together with a focus on Visio 2010 and the new BPM templates and Visio services in SharePoint 2010. We’ll also look at enterprise taxonomies and document set as featured in SharePoint 2010. We will conclude the session with a discussion of some more advanced technical customization required to make this solution really user friendly with an emphasis on the client side script required to interact with the published diagrams in Visio Services.

Saturday, July 10, 2010

SharePoint 2010 certified

It's been quit on this blog, and with good reason, Office and SharePoint 2010 has kept me extremely busy over the past year or so and so has my employer with some exciting SharePoint 2010 projects.
The good news is I learned a lot and should now be in a better position to start sharing.

As MVP's we were given the opportunity to participate in the beta certification exams for SharePoint 2010, the exams will be publically available in July 2010.

I'm proud to say I passed the 70-576, Designing and developing SharePoint 2010 Applications.

http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/Exam.aspx?ID=70-576&locale=en-us#tab1 for more information.


Friday, March 05, 2010

Office Developer Pages on MSDN have a new look and feel

I just noticed today that the Office corner of MSDN has had a facelift, and for the better!


Check it out: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/default.aspx I'm very impressed with the level of documentation and detail about Office and SharePoint 2010 when the product isn;t even released yet, can't wait to see what it will look like towards the second half of 2010.


Obviously I need to point you in the Visio direction, those of you that know me have probably seen me present on a few occasions now and I am very keen to share the knowledge and power of Visio 2010 and Visio Services; http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-au/office/aa905478.aspx. I'm building some exciting solutions using Visio 2010 and SharePoint 210 and will be sharing all about that soon.
I have seen, and get the question about the Visio Mash-up API a lot, this is what you would use to implement great interactive solution with Visio Diagrams published to SharePoint. Which brings me to aim the spotlight on the Visio Team blog where they have been extremely busy posting all of the little nuggets you'll need when you want to get serious about using Visio in custom solutions.


Lastly I'd like to share the news that I have been invited to speak about SharePoint and Visio at the SharePoint Conference in Sydney, Australia.