November‘08 Newsletter

In this Newsletter

1. Editorial

2. November Meeting Agenda

3. PDC Sessions now available online

4. Office Dev Con

5. News from the Blogs in November

6. Office How-To’s

7. <= span style=3D'color:#31849B'> Join us on Linked In

Next Meeting

26nd November @ 5.30pm

—————————&#= 8212;——————————= ;———

Search & Office Sessions

Two Informative Sessions. Don’t miss it. - RSVP

Add Upcoming Dates to = your Calendar

<= span lang=3DEN-US style=3D'font-size:7.5pt;line-height:110%;mso-ansi-language= :EN-US'>- Monthly Meeting (26/11)

Editorial

Howdy MOSSIG Members,

Well here I sit at my new job with the Stargate Group, thinking about where this year has gone, it seems like just last = week I got back from the MVP summit all excited about what the next release of Office had in store. Now it’s nearly December, I’ve become a father and started a new role with an employer named after my favourite Sci-Fi TV show, life doesn’t get much better than this.

With my emergence from my self-imposed seclusion= from the world that come with the birth of a new child I have found that the technology world has gone through a huge change. Primarily due to PDC 20= 08 where Microsoft made numerous announcements about upcoming technology including The Azure Services Platform, and Windows 7 and fin= ally the public release of mobile access for Live Mesh.

While I’m still digesting a lot of this information, I’m getting the giddy feeling like a kid in a c= andy store, and while none of these announcements compare to the joy of a new child they do provide the icing on the cake :o)

November is SharePoint improvement month here at MOSSIG and with that in mind we have 2 great presentations from Adam Cog= an and Tim Wragg.

Adam will be looking at how to make a SharePoint= site publicly accessible including how to improve the visual appeal of your s= ite.

Following on from Adam’s presentations Tim Wragg will delve into a specific area of SharePoint sites which usually = gets left ‘out of the box’. I’m talking about the search ce= ntre and customising search results so they go from the standard search ‘spitout’ to intuitive search results with filtering options= .

Cheers,

Ben Walters

Stargate Global Consulting

h= ttp://msmvps.com/blogs/BenWalters

November Meeting Agenda<= /span>

26nd November, 5.30pm @ Microsoft’s Innovation Centre, Leve= l 5, 4 Freshwater place

SharePoint – Follow the yellow brick road to public websites

Adam Cogan, SSW

This month we are lucky enough to have Adam Cogan share his experience and le= ssons learnt while he worked to get the SharePoint based site for Worley and Parsons (w= ww.worleyparsons.com.au) up and running.

Adam will also take us through how to improve the visual appeal “Sexify” the look and feel of your SharePoint site, or as he calls it “de-SharePointing with style”

full details of what Adam will cover include;

· &nbs= p; Why companies want SharePoint’s Web Content Management

·&nb= sp; How to “Sexify” the look and feel (aka de-SarePointing with style)

·&nb= sp; Reducing the use of tables via ASP.NET control adapters

·&nb= sp; Cross-browser compatibility the easy way with JQuery

·&nb= sp; How to use the Custom Navigation Control Adapters – the golden pea= rl

·&nb= sp; Customizing SharePoint web parts

·&nb= sp; How to deploy (and how you can avoid 3 all-nighters)

·&nb= sp; Performance – targeting anonymous users

·&nb= sp; The lessons learned

Making those Search Sites Hum.

Tim Wragg , Profess= ional Advantage
Join Tim Wragg from Professional Advantage as he takes us through custom= ising the search from the way it indexes content right through to making those snappy result pages. Tim will use 2 common customer scenarios by customi= sing the people search and a structured document search with metadata.=

PDC 2008 Sessions Available Online

Missed out on PDC 2008, no problem you can check= out recordings of the PDC 2008 sessions at http://www.microsoftpdc.com

Office DevCon 2008 in Sydney

Office DevCon is only a week away and it’s looking to be a big 2 days with presentations on all aspects of the Office System including Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, Outlook, VSTO, SharePoint and InfoPath

If you haven’t registered yet get over to OfficeDevCon.= com.au as places are filling up

Both Ed Richard and I will be presenting this year so feel free to pull us aside= for a chat.

Azure SDK Available

Get start on your way to cloud= 9 by downloading Azure SDK, you can start developing Cloud based applications= now, not to mention you’ll be helping to fill the boots of one of our l= ocal Microsoft visionaries Dave Lemphers who heads the Cloud Services team in Redmond.

Head on over to = http://www.microsoft.com/azure/register.mspx to get the bits

You can also get hold of the A= zure Services training kit from here

News from the Blogs in November

Dave Lemphers Local Visionary

This is a great little piece from about how Dave Lemphers led the curve on the cloud services wave.

Silverlight toolkit released

Check out this post from Scott Barnes detailing the new Silverlight kit=

SharePoint Guidance Released

In an effort to upstage the US Election Microsoft has released their ShareP= oint Guidance, this details a range of aspects of SharePoint including how to= make architectural decisions as well as how to test your SharePoint deployment

Office How-To’s

Creating SharePoint Sequential Workflows with Visual Studio 2008

Customizing the 2007 Office Fluent Ribbon for Developers

Editing Business Data Using Business Data Catalog Actions and InfoPath Forms Ser= vices

3D"Adobe SharePoint Desig= ner Speak…

Silverlight to SharePoint, enrich your User Experience

Up until now, Silverlight and SharePoint have never really got along that well but as = we move forward to the release of a pure SharePoint/Silverlight environment, Microsoft have stepped it up a notch and released blueprints allowing Developers/Designer to insert Silverlight directly into their Web parts.=

Currently still in beta 2, this is the next step towards enriching the user experi= ence within SharePoint.

For more information about the Blueprints for SharePoint and how you can integrate Silverlight into your existing SharePoint site, head over to the website: http://www.ssblueprints.n= et/sharepoint/

The release step your through creating a basic Hello World to fully integrat= ing your SharePoint Services to Silverlight and enriching your user interfac= e.

SharePoint Designer Extra…<= /span>

Enhance your SharePoint experience with Rich Silverlight Controls

3D"Adobe Following on with the Silverlight Blueprints for SharePoint, = ; a new project over at Codeplex is now giving us designers the rich form co= ntrols, which were always not easily obtainable in a design world. Binding lists= in SharePoint to Silverlight controls with a much richer interface allows t= he designer/developer to come together in harmony providing a better experi= ence.

Head over to the guys at: <= span lang=3DEN-US style=3D'mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>http://www.codeplex.com/S= ilverlight for more informati= on.

By following the 1^st step of videos in the previous section, app= lying the toolkit themes to your SharePoint website should be straightforward,= and allow the designer/developer to create a better interface overall.
If you have any troubles implementing these new controls into your Share= Point project, drop me a line over at info@silverlightcoder.net and I’ll be more than happy to help you= out. – Steve Berry

Join us on Linked In

Following on from other user groups who’ve put their members online—we’ve started a MOSSIG group on Linked In to further = build our community & allow our members to network more effectively..

<= span lang=3DEN-US style=3D'mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>Jump on board here—= M= OSSIG Linked In Group

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