Get ready for the Australia SharePoint Conference

This great conference will be even better and bigger this year.

Energise your whole SharePoint Team by attending the Australian SharePoint conference. With great content, great speakers, great exhibitions, and great networking, everyone is sure to go away with something worthwhile from the SharePoint event of 2011.

Gain insightful knowledge from SharePoint experts, including SharePoint MVPs, well known and respected local and international SharePoint community representatives, Microsoft attendees and many others. Have your SharePoint questions answered by the best to help maximise your own SharePoint experience.

You will find greatly improved structure around how to find the right sessions for you. All sessions fall into four main tracks, as listed below. They are also categorised by Specialty Area, Audience and Level. Click on the relevant link below to see the related sessions and special activities, or view the full agenda.

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.....

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.

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.

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.

Day 3&4 @SPC2009

It was a bit tough getting started Wednesday morning in Las Vegas after the Beach Party Microsoft threw us at the Mandelay Bay Hotel but after a slow start it was all about my favorite topics. I concentrated on OBA's and the really cool BCS features they are introducing for 2010. First of all there is the good news that we longer have to wrestle with XML or complex tools to define our Business Entities. This is now all the domain of SharePoint Designer 2010 and all done through a mature UI and Wizards. Just create External lists and configure things like the crud options and off you go. This is all extremely powerful and allows for far more rapid development of OBA's. Great news is that the basic infrastructure and functionality is part of the SharePoint Foundation (formally known as WSS) so there's nothing stopping us from making full use of these possibilities. We'll also see some demo's and articles around IBF like scenario's now available through using SPD and XML (I'll endeavor to post on this as well). What is probably the highlight of SPC2009 for me is a much better understanding how things like 'Connect to Outlook' or 'Sync with SharePoint Workspace' works, it made me realize that there a full data cache sitting in the local user store and again, more good news, Office comes with documented API's to make full use of that for OBA's. There are different assemblies for use with WPF, Silverlight or Java script, for those interested, when the beta comes out, check out the Microsoft.Office.Businessdata Namespace.

Day 4 started with some useful guidance on how to approach Load testing and it's good to see Microsoft is now sharing best practices that were developed based on their internal load testing processes and results. Next Mike Ammerlaan presented on Architecture best practices for 2010 based on what's new or has changed as a result of better insight on how organizations have been using SharePoint and the road blocks they ran into. Obviously this is one of the 'you should have been there' type of sessions, one thing I'd like to point to especially because of my enthusiasm about BCS and External lists is to keep in mind that the new REST interfaces and SPLinq do not work on External lists, certainly something to keep in mind when architecting solutions. Lastly I attended a session on SSIS and SharePoint and the important take away there was that there is a connector for SharePoint lists available on Codeplex.

That's it from Las Vegas, now going for some shopping before wasting the weekend travelling back home ;-)

Day 2 @SPC2009

Today we got into lots of details, no more generic overviews, it was all down to the juicy code samples. I selected mostly Developer oriented sessions today. I knew the potential of Visio Services, by having looked at it during the early visits to Redmond this year, but now that the bits are pretty much backed, we got to see some of the finished very impressive demos. I have to say Visio 2010 and Visio Services in SharePoint 2010 continues to amaze me. The Dynamic Data Driven scenarios we can start implementing in 2010 are mindboggling. I urge the interested readers to make their way over to the Visio Team blog to get as excited as I am!

Another interesting session today presented by Zeyad Rajabi was around the new Word Automation Services announced here at SPC 2009. No longer do we need to rely on running lengthy processes through (illegally) installing Word on the server. We can now simply write an event handler or workflow action that performs a range of typically operations, like save as PDF or XPS, at lightning speed. Combine that with the power of the Open XML SDK 2.0 and it opens up so many scenarios for updating and generating documents. I'll throw in another plug for a blog here, so you can go and read all about that on MSDN.

Those of you that know me, know how passionate I am about both these topics, so expect some posts and presentations from me before the year's over.

After lunch time things got slightly more technical (makes you wonder if we'll survive the Wednesday, and keep in mind the beach party is tonight :-) ), the first afternoon session by Paul Stubbs was focused on the new Client Object Model, you heard it right, in 2010 you no longer have to resort to Web Services to access SharePoint Data. From WPF, JavaScript or Silverlight you now have Client Side libraries available that give you 'direct' access to your lists and libraries. There are some things you need to be aware of, like when you actually call to the server to do the work, and that JavaScript and Silverlight do things asynchronously but still this delivers a very powerful model for Client side programming. The next session I attended was by Eric Shupps around the improved Business Connectivity Services (BCS, formally known as BDC), Eric delivered a great session that provide a lot of confidence for me when it comes to using SharePoint as the Application Delivery and Development platform. The day ended on a high when the Patterns and Practices guys gave us the insight around Development best practices in 2007 and how they apply to 2010 as well as what the new testing capabilities in VS 2010 combined with TFS can deliver to provide a good end to end Application Lifecycle Management process.