SUGUK meetings for January 2010
The early signs are good that the new regional organisational structure of the SharePoint User Group UK (SUGUK) is working in terms of getting more members involved in regular meetings.
This month there are four meetings confirmed:
Thursday 14th January 2010 – Nottingham
The next Nottingham event will be a Designer/Branding special! Penny Coventry will be joining us to do a SharePoint Designer 2007/2010 session, covering what’s possible in 07, and what’s new in 2010!! We will then have some ‘tales from the trenches’ where a few individuals will be showing off their real project examples of SharePoint branding/theming with discussion around what’s possible, and the trials and tribulations along the way!
The usual fayre of pizzas, drinks and of course SharePint in the Broad Oak pub, Strelley Village. Everyone welcome, whatever your background or experience. For further details and sign up, check out the meeting post.
Wednesday 27th January 2010 – Bristol
The south user group will be meeting in Bristol at 6:30pm on 27th Jan 2010. HP Labs have kindly allowed us to use their auditorium and are going to be providing pizzas! To attend please post a response to the meeting post giving names of attendees by Monday 25th January. Directions to the venue can be found here, and there is plenty of free parking.
The agenda is below and there is still a 15 minute "new speaker" slot available so if you would like to take this please get in touch with Ian Woodgate – this is a great chance for you to tell us all about some cool stuff you have been doing in SharePoint!
6:30pm Welcome
6:40 – 7:20pm Andy Ginn: An overview of HP white papers and tools organisations can use when adopting SharePoint Andy introduces some useful tools for sizing and configuration of SharePoint environments, and reviews research from HP labs looking at the performance of SharePoint on Windows Server 2003/SQL Server 2005 versus Windows Server 2008/SQL Server 2008 – come along and see if the results are as you would expect! Best practice guidance on the use of virtualised solutions is also reviewed.
7:20 – 7:35pm New Speaker Slot
Contact Ian Woodgate if you’re interested!
7:35 – 8pm Break, pizzas
8 – 9pm Mark Macrae: Utilising SQL Reporting Services in Integrated Mode for SharePoint and Empowering Information Managers with Report Builder In this session Mark will be focussing on Reporting Services – a ‘free’ but often forgotten Business Intelligence tool which has much improved with SQL 2008. Mark will discuss the steps required to install and configure SSRS in SharePoint Integrated Mode, complete with the much improved Report Builder 2.0. He will then demonstrate how Report Builder can be used by Power Users to quickly build reports, manage and version them in SharePoint, approve and publish to an audience. Finally, Mark will examine the improvements which SharePoint 2010, SQL 2008 R2 and Report Builder 3 will offer when they are released.
Thursday 28th January 2010 – Newcastle
We kick off the new year with a very informative session from Steve Smith MVP on some of the new highlights and features of SharePoint 2010, co-hosted by John Timney. Steve will add his own insight to a well balanced presentation on the replacement for the product we have all come to know, specifically highlighting the new metadata management model and the new records management and records routing features of 2010, the Ribbon, Office integration, migration options, architecture and new facets of the product likely to keep you employed well into the next few years. The session will be an open forum to allow participants to ask questions as the session progresses
Everyone welcome, whatever your background or experience. For further details and sign up, check out the meeting post.
Thursday 28th January 2010 – London
Kicking off the new year with a meeting hosted by Microsoft at their Cardinal Place, Victoria offices.
Session 1 – An Introduction to SharePoint Designer 2010: Top Ten Great Things to Know – Ben Robb (SharePoint MVP)
SharePoint Designer 2010 is the tool to design powerful no-code solutions and applications in SharePoint 2010. In this session get a broad overview of some of the new capabilities of the tool, from site customisations such as modifying Site Metadata, managing Site Security, or creating Site Content, to building List or Site-based Workflows and connecting to a variety of Data Sources.
Session 2 – Ask the Experts: How and Why Should I Migrate to 2010?
The early signs are that Microsoft have put even more thought and planning into migrating and upgrading to SharePoint 2010 but the reality is it’s an enterprise level platform and a non-trivial undertaking. So what are the benefits to the business? Why would you upgrade (or why wouldn’t you)? What can you be doing now to minimise the impact? We have assembled a panel of technical and non-technical SharePoint experts who have all had good exposure to the beta products and are all looking forward to discussing and debating your questions.
Microsoft will very kindly be providing refreshments and half time pizza. For further details and to sign up check out the meeting post. Plan to arrive from 18:00 for a 18:30 sharp start and SharePint at a local watering hole from 21:00.
I’m planning to get along to 3 of these events so if you can make it along to one or more then why not show your support, learn something new and even go for SharePint. See you there.
