Office DevCon 2007. Sydney, Australia 3rd-4th Nov 2007. Will you be there?

How about a free two day Office Developer Conference?

Check out the details quickly and register before they run out of space.

Another MOSS Site goes public

I know, it's just an out of the box site, but that's the point. With MOSS you can have a good looking fully content managed site up within a day or two. Obviously most of the time getting the content right takes a bit longer ;-) so we are still working on that.

Check out www.SoftwareObjectives.com.au .

Mossig September meeting: Enterprise Search Extravaganza

26th Sept 2007 at 5:30pm
To register for this meeting please email register@mossig.net by COB Tuesday 25th September 2007.

This month MOSSIG will be presenting a series of Enterprise Search related topics, so come along and find out how Enterprise Search can help you unlock your businesses data and improve productivity.

Show and Tell Session
Contact Selector Control in InfoPath (Ben Walters)
• Microsoft Office InfoPath

Ben Walters from Strategic Data Management will be providing a brief overview of the Contact Selector control available in InfoPath 2007.

Business Session
Search possibilities in your Enterprise (Tim Wragg)
• Windows SharePoint Services • Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

According to IDC (Content Technologies Study 2004-2005), workers spend 9.5 hours per week searching. Join Tim Wragg from Professional Advantage as he discusses the Enterprise Searching capabilities of SharePoint 2007 and what it means for business.
The presentation will include,
· positioning of the current search landscape from desktop to the web and where its going,
· search features including documents, people, business data and other sources,
· tips and tricks for an effective implementation , and
· the gotcha’s in features and licensing.

Technical Session
How to access and search business data (Matthew Cosier)

• Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 • Windows SharePoint Services
• Microsoft Business Data Catalog Definition Tool

In this half-hour session Matthew Cosier from Readify will step you through the means of integrating external data with the Business Data Catalog, and exposing it via search. In particular he will take you through the process of writing a BDC web service, generating the application definition using the new Microsoft Business Data Catalog Definition Editor tool, and finally exposing the data to SharePoint search.

Are you into VSTO 2005 Development?

If you are you may want to update your VSTOR. As I understand it has been updated with support for Office 2003 and 2007 under Vista but there isn't much detail on what was added and fixed "This version is a July 2007 update that contains enhancements and bug fixes to the original VSTO 2005 SE runtime; for example, it contains fixes related to add-in support for Microsoft Office Outlook." is all the doc that comes with it.

Note that there are two different updates, one for design time (adds support for VS 2008!) and the VSTOR itself.

Design time update

Runtime update

Also updated are the instructions for deployment of VSTO Solutions on MSDN:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb332051.aspx

While you are in VSTO mode you may also want to watch this video of Steve Fox and Paul Stubbs on OBA and VSTO they made at Tech-Ed 2007.

Office Development News

I'm normally not posting about other Blog posts but these are hot and very important to those of use in the realm of Office Business Applications. So here I go:

The first one is about the release of both a new MOSS SDK as well as a WSS SDK.

"The latest and greatest MOSS SDK release just went LIVE with an exciting new tool: The BDC Application Definition Editor! This tool abstracts the way you create entities in the Application Definition File by giving you an easy to use UI. "

Read more here. And make sure you scroll down to read everything.

The second one is by one of my favorite MS-Bloggers Erika Erhli, she's got a great post on my favorite subject, creating documents programmatically.
Excellent stuff, thanks Erika!

Lasty, make sure you are subscribed to the OBA team Blog as they continue to produce high level documentation and case studies about how Office System is and can be used.

MOSSIG Agenda for next week

We have some very cool sessions scheduled for next week.

Show and Tell Session
Using mapping in to assist productivity (Daniel Colarossi)
• Microsoft Virtual Earth • Windows SharePoint Services • Microsoft Office Outlook

Daniel has been developing some cool Virtual Earth based solutions and this month he will be showing us how to get Virtual Earth inside Outlook and SharePoint and hopefully how to behave itself while in there.

Business Session
Successful SharePoint Adoption (Brian Cook)
• Windows SharePoint Services • Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

Brian will talk about the issues affecting SharePoint adoption and provide strategies that can be used to increase usage and ROI.

Technical Session
Deploying InfoPath forms using Outlook 2007 (Ben Walters)
• Microsoft Office InfoPath • Microsoft Office Outlook

Ben will be showing us how to deploy InfoPath 2007 forms using Outlook 2007.

27th June 2007 at 5:30pm To register for this meeting please email register@mossig.net by COB Tuesday 26th June 2007.

Interactive Office Developer Map

Here's a little gem I picked up from the Office Business Applications Team bLog a nice WPF based application that gives you a nice way to drill down in to features and tools that are available for Office Developers. Get it here and spend a few minutes discovering WPF or should I say Silverlight?, One Click deployment and the Office Developer Eco-system. BTW I would not mind reading the article explaining how they built the map!