Rob Gillen's WebLog

The third session I attended was a lunch session sponsored by K2 (http://www.k2.com). I was looking forward to this presentation as I've heard quite a bit about K2, and they've been doing workflow in SharePoint long before MSFT was.

The section session I attended was entitled "People-Read Processes with SharePoint Workflows and Forms Services" and was presented by Christian Stark, a Senior Product Manager for Microsoft.

Today started out with the keynote for the conference and it was certainly not disappointing. The following is basically a brain dump of the information presented along with some commentary.

I'm in Redmond this week attending Microsoft's fifth annual SOA and BPM conference. It's pretty interesting so far, and I'm intending on writing a number of different posts (one per session that I attend). For the last nine months I've been working in the federal IT arena stationed working with a reasonably large organization. One of our current objectives is to evaluate means of improving the governance of our processes both at the definition as well as the execution level. The means, that I'm interested in this conference specifically from the aspect of understanding where MSFT is going in the SOA space but also where the various partners play in the space, and working to understand how the various tools work together to affect a workable solution.

I'm posting this more for my own benefit (able to find it later) than anything, but while working on a master page customization for a client I stumbled across a posting on MSDN on how to create a minimal master page (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa660698.aspx).

Chalk it up to being a newbie at Sharepoint v3/MOSS 2007 development, but I expected that since I was a site "owner" of both a sub-site as well as the site collection that I should be able to create a master page using SPD and save it to the site collection's master page gallery... silly me.

If you track the Microsoft or ASP.NET weblogs you've surely noticed that roughly two weeks ago now Microsoft released SSCE or SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition. Rather than simply saying "they released it, go download it because it's cool" I want to openly thank the SQL team for providing a very interesting product. As luck would have it, I was working on a POC for a customer in the later part of December into early January, and they actually RTM'd the day prior to my final demo (thanks guys!) and allowed me to provide a rather interesting demo using an approach very different than I had planned. While I'm on the topic, I'd like to give a shout-out to Jim Wilson who helped me diagnose a rather esoteric problem I was having with the CTP.

As part of my "not-my-real-job" time, I do a little website hosting - basically to keep my hands dirty with the problem space and to increase my visibility into the windows hosting space. One of the sites we host updated their site this past week with a new CMS platform and the site failed to work. On the site owners development machine the site worked fine... on my dev/test machine the site worked fine but on the production server it failed every time.