Ryan Housley, one of the Atlanta community members that helped start and run MOSSmosis, a SharePoint user groups, is now going to help another great cause. He is helping HeroBox.org to send custom care packages to American soliders. Help support him in his cause.
You can find out more at their site:
www.herobox.org
http://heroboxblog.blogspot.com/
Register today and getVIRTUALnow.
Atlanta event November 17, 2008
https://www.getvirtualnow.com/usevents/CitySelect.aspx
Find out how Windows Server 2008® with Hyper-V™, Microsoft System Center--including Virtual Machine Manager 2008—and Microsoft Desktop and Application Virtualization can help you virtualize from the data center to the desktop.
Choose from the seminars, the labs, and the expo booths.
Get access to everything, from three seminar sessions to the all-day Solutions Pavilion featuring Microsoft experts, virtualization technology partners, and Hands-on Labs.
Take virtualization home.
Take home a free readiness kit** that includes product, training materials, product evaluations, and learning opportunities.
Pearson Education User Group Program
www.informit.com/usergroupwelcome
www.ciscopress.com/usergroup
It’ll only take a minute and helps us better serve your needs! Entrants could win five free books of their choice from InformIT.com!
Take it now!
http://www.informit.com/promotions/promotion.aspx?promo=136703
Sometimes we don't have a formal process for getting people involved in the user groups, but if you are interested we want you to participate.
There are a couple of areas you can always help with such as:
- Speaking at a user group
- Updating the Web Sites
- Getting a sponsor for a user group
- Planning the food
- Planning a place to go after the user group
- Organizing the meeting location
Even though we don't have a formal process for any of these if you are interested or even curious, just email me and let me know which user group you want to help out.
We even want Aaron to participate, maybe as a speaker.
Here is the information I received from AC.
I’m pleased to help announce that there will be a local (Atlanta) training class for SharePoint Server 2007 Web Content Management. The instructor for this class is Andrew Connell, who is one of the world’s leading trainers for MOSS 2007 Web Content Management & recently released the first and only book on the subject: Professional SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Development. Andrew was also a renowned specialist in the previous Microsoft Content Management Server 2001 and 2002 technologies.
This isn't like other classes that hire contractors to write their courses, this course was written and developed 100% by the instructor, Andrew Connell. The class covers virtually all development topics related to WCM / Publishing sites such as building master pages, page layouts, field types & controls, Web Parts and custom workflows. In addition, it also covers creating multilingual sites using variations, performance enhancing techniques required for Internet-facing SharePoint sites, extending the authoring experience and security.
While the course does demonstrate and teach you how to use tools such as Office SharePoint Designer 2007 in creating master pages, page layouts and custom workflows, but students are taken a step further in understanding SharePoint customization vs. development. Along this concept, students will learn how to create all these different things (master pages, page layouts, custom workflows) as well as site columns, content types, list templates & instances among other things using Features and solutions. This latter approach makes life much easier for developers and WCM site implementers to move their custom code and layout files to other members of their development team as well as from development to user acceptance to staging and ultimately onto production.
Here's a list of the modules in the course:
- WSS Development Primer
- Web Content Management Architecture
- Authentication & Authorization
- Master Pages & Navigation
- Creating Custom Page Layouts
- Extending the Out-Of-The-Box Authoring Experience
- Leveraging WCM & Custom Web Parts
- Custom Field Types & Field Controls
- Performance Tuning Publishing Sites
- Understanding WF (Workflow Foundation) & Creating Interactive Workflows
- Content Deployment
- Implementing Multilingual Sites Using Variations
This is a 4-Day class, and will be held on the Microsoft Technology Center in Alpharetta, GA. The price is $2,395. To register, please use the URL below.
More Class Information: http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/articles/MossWcmDeveloperClasses.aspx
To Register: http://www.tedpattison.net/register.aspx?OfferingID=117
If you want to have lists of items to track that you can make public and private check out
Remember The Milk
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/
It is funny they have a very similar logo to ours. The great part is that it is available from many different sources and all you have to is send it an email.
Anyone else have any good sites for keeping up with lists?
As one of the community leads for the International SharePoint Professionals Association (ISPA) I wanted to let you know that the group is now live! If you have any questions about the group and need help in the SouthEast send me an email and I will get you set up.
Here is the new web site http://www.sharepointpros.org
Check out the board members sites Bob Fox, Christopher Regan, Natalya Voskresenskaya, Darrin Bishop
Below is our official press release…
The International SharePoint Professionals Association, also known as ‘ISPA’, is an independent, not-for-profit, community-driven organization dedicated to support SharePoint professionals and groups all around the world. The primary mission of ISPA is to promote the global adoption of SharePoint Technologies by providing support and guidance to the SharePoint community as a whole – by establishing connections between SharePoint professionals, groups, resources, education and information. ISPA is led and supported by volunteers across the world, and will focus on bringing the entire SharePoint community closer together.
ISPA’s first offering to the community is support to user groups around the world through free WSS v3 web sites for any group that becomes ISPA-affiliated. In addition, one of the goals of ISPA is to facilitate an exchange of ideas between user group leaders that helps increase the likelihood of their group’s success. Therefore, ISPA is providing leaders of user groups with access to collaborative spaces where they can interact with other user group leaders, sharing ideas, resources, best practices, guidance, and most importantly – support for one another.
ISPA has also established Regional Evangelists – existing community leaders who have previously exhibited a strong commitment to the promotion of the SharePoint community, and who have pledged to carry the ISPA message throughout their particular region. These evangelists are key local contacts who are available to work with local SharePoint professionals and user groups throughout their region to help promote the community and SharePoint. If you are interested in starting a user group, have an existing one, or need guidance – the ISPA Regional Evangelists are great resources who are available immediately to assist you.
Finally, as everyone knows, no community is complete without a web site, and ISPA is proud to announce the launch of its official site, http://www.sharepointpros.org. While the web site is still in the early stages of development, plans for multilingual support and exciting functionality that will assist anyone involved with SharePoint are on the horizon.
If you have ideas for ISPA, would like to start a user group, or are looking for assistance, visit the new ISPA web site or contact ISPA at contactus@sharepointpros.org. Together, the community can achieve what was impossible as individuals – becomes a part of ISPA today!
If you have Windows Vista SP1 and would like Free Support until 18 March 2009 check this out.
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Background
Free, unlimited installation and compatibility support is now available for all worldwide customers using Windows Vista SP1, until March 18, 2009. Telephone support is available worldwide. Chat and Email support in US and Canada only.
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Effective dates
From now until 18 March 2009.
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Find out more and access the service at http://support.microsoft.com/common/international.aspx?rdpath=1&prid=11274&gprid=500921
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.NET University http://www.dotnet-u.com/ is the event series that gives you a practical overview of the latest .NET technologies that is not only great to learn from, but also freely available for you to share and present to your peers. The first course introduced the .NET Framework 3.0, and other courses covered BizTalk and SharePoint.
The newest course is ASP.NET University, a 4 part set that dives into ASP.NET web development. Learn about the ASP.NET framework, the page and controls structure, and even some advanced topics like caching and HttpModules. We’ll also look at ASP.NET AJAX and getting the most out of your applications. We’ll take a lap around the new MVC framework to show you some alternative ways to build applications around the model-view-controller design pattern. We’ll talk about IIS7 and why it’s great for ASP.NET developers. And finally, we’ll dive into some of our live services with some content around Virtual Earth, Gadgets, and other services in the cloud you can take advantage of.
Here’s a rundown of the day:
1. ASP.NET Overview: We’ll talk about the project setup and options, and have a brief discussion about Webforms and the page lifecycle and where user controls, server controls, and master pages fit in. We’ll also talk about some of the security options available, and we’ll stick our feet in a bit deeper and discuss some of the more advanced topics like custom HttpModules and effective caching strategies.
2. ASP.NET AJAX: Learn how to leverage ASP.NET AJAX in your applications. We’ll look at getting started with some straightforward examples, and we’ll look at troubleshooting and profiling AJAX code to get the best performance possible. We’ll also look at consuming web services and WCF services straight from AAJX.
3. ASP.NET MVC: Looking for more design abstraction? MVC may be for you. Based on the model-view-controller design pattern, ASP.NET MVC allows clear and clean abstractions of data, logic, and presentation tiers.
4. Servers and services: First we’ll take a look at what’s new in IIS7 for web developers. After a brief tour, we’ll check out some cloud-hosted services from live.com – like how to integrate Virtual Earth, use the Live Search API, gadgets, and more. A fun way to end the day!
Did you know that if you start the DNS client service on a Windows Server 2003 box, that it will ignore entries in a hosts file and proceed out to the Internet to resolve the name? THAT was fun during a demo. http://publishing.sample.com takes you to Viagra sales!
Nice.
Doug Ware at Elumenotion is writing a series of blog posts about how he is building an E-Commerce site based on SharePoint. The sample project will be a live e-commerce site where you can support the author's quest to keep food on his family's table by purchasing humorous welcome mats. Said that wrong. The author is not purchasing funny rugs. You can support the author by purchasing the rug. The author's quest to keep food blah blah blah... he's selling the rugs. You get the idea. Read the blog posts. Buy a rug.
Post 1 - The project envisioned
Post 2 - The project roadmap
Post 3 - The tools
Looks like this will be fun to watch
No one told me about this before having a kid, but apparently it's a common issue that kids (lots of them, worldwide) get fussy between about 7pm and 11pm. This unexplainable phenomenon is known as the "witching hour". Parker's time seems to be between 9pm and 1am. 11pm is one of his feeding times but where he'd normally be content he screams through the feeding. What sucks is that my shift normally is between 8pm through the 11pm feeding. He gets so fussy and I'm reluctant to just turn him back over to the always exhausted Kim while he's crying that I end up staying up with him to 1 or 1:30. Last night Kim stayed with me through the 11pm feeding to see what I was talking about. She was astonished at how angry he was!
Oh well - this too shall pass. The biggest problem is that it cuts into my writing time. Deadlines are going to be pressured...
New photos of Parker are on Flickr if you've not seen him recently. He's gained nearly 3 pounds since his birth a month ago!
Here is a photo I've been playing with using Paint.Net as a free alternative to Photoshop.
If anyone doesn't know, the DevCow calendar is actually manually updated every month. I have been updating the calendar for about 3-4 years now every month. The process I take is to go directly to the websites of the user groups that we list on the site and make sure they are having a meeting for the month. Sometimes if the web site is not updated but I know the user group leader personally I will update the calendar based on what they tell me.
Recently I have been busy and the calendar has been one of those things to get behind. I have always wanted to automate some of the calendar, but that would still require a person to enter information at some point in time so it can only be as up to date as the knowledge or the group.
The reason I am letting you know this is because many of the groups have mailing list you can subscribe to. This will allow you to make sure from the user group leader the exact details of the meeting. I will get the calendar back on track now and hopefully we won't get behind again. Sorry for the delay.
It has been a rough week or so for Kim and I recently. It started a week or so back with Kim's car. I took it in to get the oil changed and found that the car needed a bunch of expensive fluid changes. I spent a bunch of money on that, took the car home, and the next day it wouldn't start. We called AAA to come out and jump the car in the garage and I drove it back to the mechanic where we determined that the battery was completely dead. A new battery later and this morning the car wouldn't start again. This time AAA came out and got the car started. The problem now appears to be something to do with the fuel line. Who knows what that repair will eventually cost me, although it appears not to be an emergency as Kim now knows how to get the car to start if it's being stubborn again.
Last Friday a terrible storm blew through the area and for 30 minutes or so we had what felt like gale force wind gusts blowing rain sideways. During the storm we had a significant water leak through one of the window frames in the kitchen, a minor leak through another window frame in the kitchen, and at least two and perhaps up to four leaks in the roof. Part of the roof is under warranty and will be fixed for free, but the roofing company was so busy they couldn't even estimate the costs to repair the rest of the roof. The roof is covered with cedar shake shingles and is going to be expensive to repair. I went into the attic and found and "fixed" one of the leaks but it had already damaged the ceiling drywall, which had actually just been repaired and repainted. Now there is a nice little hole which needs to be patched in the kitchen and I think that the ceiling in our master bathroom is about to need to be replaced.
Monday, Memorial Day, I went outside and did five hours of yard work - mowing and trimming all things green. When I came back in, I noticed that the A/C was making funny noises. Downstairs in the basement, I noticed ice on some of the lines coming out of the furnace and the motor running the blower in the furnace was not able to start, although it kept trying. I managed to get a repair guy to come out and look at the unit. He declared the blower motor dead and in need of replacement. Of course, he didn't have a part to fit and getting a replacement would be hundreds of dollars. Kim and I knew when we bought the house that the furnace was over 30 years old and the air compressor outside was over 20 years old. It didn't make a lot of sense to cobble it back together so we just bit the bullet and replaced the entire set. Now we have a nice new Lennox furnace inside and quiet new air conditioner outside, both of which should be WAY more energy efficient. Even so, the cost was enough that I could have purchased a Toyota Yaris.
Kim and I have decided that my mother is the jinx and she's probably not going to be allowed back! She's been staying with us for these past few weeks and has been helping us with the baby. The baby who is now sitting comfortably in efficiently conditioned and cooled air. When he turns 16 I'm sure he'll wish we'd bought him a Yaris instead...
If you do know your Microsoft Evangelists you have probably attended events in your area, but if you don't, make sure to read up on the Microsoft support teams in your area.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/events/bb905078.aspx
I am sure they would love to hear from you as much as you would like to talk with them.
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