Eli Robillard's World of Blog.

Today we confirmed that Saturday, January 24th is the date of the 2nd Annual Toronto SharePoint Camp! For a second year, I'd like to thank Manulife Financial Corporation for generously providing the facilities that not only make this event possible, but also keep it free to all attendees.

Today Microsoft's Ramp Up program launched a new track: SharePoint for Developers, Part I. This is a free, online, community-based program that only requires a Live ID to sign up and dig in.

I worked through all the learning materials for the first module (creating Web Parts) and it looks good. The module includes a Word document that describes web parts, a narrated PowerPoint ("slide-cast", ~20 min), a web-cast style Visual Studio capture ("code-cast", also ~20 min), and a Virtual Lab (up to 90 min) where you can build on a remote control box. The only downside is that all assume you're creating a web part in an IDE where "SharePoint Web Part" is an available project type (so either VSeWSS for VS 2005, or Visual Studio 2008 is installed); while these templates make good demo-ware, they are not recommended for "real" development. STSDEV is one good alternative, though my old-school beliefs say you should build your first web part in Notepad, or at least start minimal with the VS "class" project. Once you get past that, all the core ideas are there (adding attributes, creating properties, connecting web parts for master-detail views, data-binding, etc.) so these are great learning tools even if your implementation will be a little different.

Microsoft Excel. 80% of the world's business logic, and the top 1% of it's rock.

After a few months this page has about 10,000 hits but the article just a 1,000. So skip this page and Go read the article! (This was just a summary) [Feb 3, 2009]

Successful deployment of SharePoint is no different than any other corporate strategy or project, only the moving pieces change. The goals remain consistency, scalability, and success by whatever measures you choose. It never fails to disappoint me to see "best practises" that restate project management principles without the salt or benefit of SharePoint experience (here's an example, though I don't recommend it). Give us the goods!

So to get it out of the way, here is every "Successful Strategies for Product X" article, presentation and book in a paragraph: You need shared vision, strong leadership as high up the food chain as possible, business-oriented goals and measures, clearly-defined scope, good communication, a crisp plan including risk mitigation and capacity to change, and effective delivery and support teams. During the build, you need to balance time, scope and available resources. Also like every other project (but perhaps not as common), an effective way to begin is to list the capabilities you need to simulate your business. Brainstorm on the common complaints or bottlenecks in your processes, and the capabilities or changes that would provide relief. You do not simply need "SharePoint," you need more effective teams, or bottom-up communication, or top-down communication, or document management, or records management, or alerting, or a corporate memory, or platform integration, or a place to collaborate with external partners, or some combination of these, or something else entirely. Declare these goals. Do a spell-check, hide the leftover red and green squigglies, and there you have it, go SharePoint!

Okay, time to get back to reality and be productive. The guidance below describes capabilities required to give good SharePoint.  Many are expanded to list the moving parts or the choices for providing the capability. Your plan is complete when every point below is accounted for.

Our next Toronto SharePoint User Group meeting will take place on Wednesday, October 22, 2008.  This month’s speaker Jeffrey Wolff, Technical Director, Infonic, will discuss the benefits of deploying a distributed SharePoint environment, factors to consider when planning your environment, and possible problems distributed organizations faces as they architect an enterprise-wide SharePoint infrastructure. He will also review third-party solutions that can address these problems as well as the pros and cons of each.

Jeffrey Wolff has been in the IT industry for the past 15 years and has spent the last three with Infonic. He mainly works with large enterprises primarily based in the US, such as the US Navy, in designing and implementing global and distributed SharePoint deployments.

When: 6:00 pm, Wednesday, October 22, 2008.
Where: Nexient Learning, 8th Floor, 2 Bloor Street West, Toronto, ON

When the Wall Street herd began to stumble over their own their mortgage inventory, there were signs of rockier times ahead. Now that several giants lay collapsed, people like our CEO Greg Brill are writing about what it was like to watch the race to self-destruction unfold, and how they read the signs that clearly said, "now is a good time to evolve."