| Speaker: Michael Noel
Venue: Intergen
Approx Attendance: 30
Featured Features: Content Databases, Site Collections, Servers, SSP, Central Admin, STSADM
Summary: Having presented on this topic for a number of years and being in the middle of a national user group tour Michael delivered a polished session that covered a range of approaches and best practices. From single server virtual hosts to large farms, from 10 to 10,000 users, he talked about the pros and cons and realities of choices made when deploying SharePoint. | 15/04/2009 |
| Speaker: Lulu Pachuau, Mark Orange, Chandima Kulathilake
Venue: Microsoft
Approx Attendance: 45
Featured Features: Blank Site, Contacts List, Project Tasks List, Content Types, Document Library, Site Columns
Summary: Through a role play scenario Lulu, Mark and Chan went from a client requirements meeting through to a nealry complete site. Lulu captured the requirements and showed the documentation prepared to communicate the needs. mark and Chan then configured a SharePoint site to provide the solution needed. | 19/03/2009 |
| Speaker: Robert Stewart (Intergen)
Venue: Intergen
Approx Attendance: 40
Featured Features: Web Content Management, Publishing, Feature Packaging and Deployment, Site Definitions
Summary: Having presented this session at the Office Dev Conference in Sydney in November 2008 Rob was able to repeat a great session covering the basics of the MOSS publishing feature and how to develop and deploy custom WCM solutions. There was a 50/50 mix of technical and less technical people whom Rob was able to accomodate by tweaking the session to include more user and configuration content. Lots of good questions and a prize draw to finish the night. | 4/02/2009 |
| Speaker: Mark Orange (Intergen)
Venue: Intergen
Approx Attendance: 25
Featured Features: Office 2007 integration, document information panel, views, alerts, Word 2007 mail merge, slide library
Summary: Having co presented a similar session at New Zealand TechED 2008 Mark took the opportunity to share this content with the user group. The session focused on the culture of compliance and how Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Office 2007 provide an easy to use and integrated suite of tools that support user adoption. Compliance needs to focus on guidance and support rather than enforcement and control if it wants to succeed in truly adding value to the organisation. After setting the scene Mark went on to demonstrate some of the features that he felt illustrated the value of Office and SharePoint together including integrating a SharePoint Contact list with Outlook and using this to generate a Mail Merge through Word. Publishing and managing a Power Point presentation using the SharePoint Slide Library and using a Document Library to manage a site request process. | 25/09/2008 |
| Speaker: Eben Illingworth (Nintex)
Venue: Kiwibank
Approx Attendance: 60
Featured Features: Nintex Workflow and Reporting extensions products for SharePoint
Summary: Eben introduced the Nintex definition of workflow in SharePoint discussing some of the many challenges organisations face when modelling business processes. In particular he covered the staff induction workflow offered by Nintex that includes the automatic provisioning of user accounts within Active Directory. This was followed by an introduction to their soon to be released reporting extension product that provides more visibility to the report data that SharePoint collects using Mircosoft Silverlight to present the data to users. | 27/08/2008 |
| Speaker: Craig Carpenter (Combined Knowledge)
Venue: Intergen
Approx Attendance: 30
Featured Features: Application deployment
Summary: This session showcased best practices for deployment of SharePoint web applications. This was a great session for the range of SharePoint enthusiasts that came along. | 21/07/2008 |
| Speaker: Brendan Ford (Provoke)
Venue: Microsoft
Approx Attendance: 25
Featured Features: Blog, Wiki, Search
Summary: Nicely following on from Mike’s talk Brendan followed with a presentation about Social Computing and the role SharePoint can play in empowering social computing within the enterprise. Brendan presented some interesting ideas, some proven, some to be tested, about where social computing can achieve success within today’s changing organisations. | 25/06/2008 |
| Speaker: Mike Riversdale
Venue: Microsoft
Approx Attendance: 25
Featured Features: n/a
Summary: Mike kindly, or perhaps not so kindly, did an encore performance of his thought provoking session from the Web Stock 2008 on Enterprise 2.0. To emphasis his point of fear associated with new technologies and IT departments learning to let go he invoked fear into us all by the removal of almost all his clothing. All under fluorescent lights in a rather intimate small space! | 25/06/2008 |
| Speaker: Chandima Kulathilake (Knowledge Cue)
Venue: Microsoft
Approx Attendance: 20
Featured Features: Search, Scopes, Managed Properties, Faceted Search, Search Web Parts
Summary: Having recently worked on a specific SharePoint Search project Chandima shared his experiences and sdvice on using search. After a brief introduction and history of Web Search Technologies Chan illustrated the importance of planning for search and understanding the variety of information sources and users that exist within an organisation. Having wowed us with some fancy diagrams and a good dose of bullet points Chan jumped into a SharePoint demo showing how to configure a new search scope, how to epose it to users through the search center, and how to customise the search center. | 28/05/2008 |
| Speaker: Alex Dean (ACE Training)
Venue: Microsoft
Approx Attendance: 30
Featured Features: Excel Services, My Sites, Business Data Catalogue
Summary: In this session Alex Dean introduced three of the seven role templates for My Sites and showed how the different technologies come together to increase productivity within the organisation. The My Site for the admin assistant focuses on collaboration and time keeping, the template for the marketing manager concentrates on business analysis and reporting features while the site for the IT Manager uses business data catalogue features more heavily. | 30/04/2008 |
| Speaker: Mark Orange (Intergen)
Venue: Microsoft
Approx Attendance: 35
Featured Features: Content Types, Libraries and Lists
Summary: Content Types are a new and fundemental element within the SharePoint 2007 platform. Mark covered in detail how Content Types work, the role they play and how they can be configured through the browser interface. As an example of Content Types in action Mark configured a number of Content Types into a hierarchy to show how and why different Content Types can be used within a single library. | 26/03/2008 |
| Speaker: Zac Smith (Provoke)
Venue: Intergen
Approx Attendance: 25
Featured Features: Forms Based Authentication, Community Kit for Windows SharePoint Services, Codeplex community projects
Summary: Zac shared his involvement in the SharePoint community project called the "Community Kit for SharePoint" and his input into the forms based authentication model it provides. Zac also actively promoted the other community projects on CodePlex and highlighted a few of his favourites including "STSADM Custom Extensions" and "SuperBrand".
| 27/02/2008 |
| Speaker: Tamlyn Kemp (Intergen)
Venue: Intergen
Approx Attendance: 35
Featured Features: Workflow, K2 Integration
Summary: Using his eperience from recent workflow deployments using SharePoint and K2 Tamlyn was able to show the different styles and layers of workflow that can be achieved within SharePoint. From how workflows can be created to how user engage with workflows both using natice SharePoint functionality and also when integrating K2 as a sepcialist Business Process Management engine. | 13/12/2007 |
| Speaker: Jonathan Stucky (Microsoft), Mark Orange (Intergen)
Venue: Intergen
Approx Attendance: 25
Featured Features: Document and Records Management
Summary: The NZ Public Records Act is creating a lot of demand for answers around using SharePoint as a technology to support compliance in the Document and Records Management space. Jonathan Stucky from Microsoft presented what Microsoft New Zealand is providing under the New Zealand Microsoft Innovation Centre. Jonathan introduced the Kick Start Pack that combines guidelines from Information Leadership on using SharePoint to target PRA and also an example PRA Document Library developed by Intergen. Mark discussed how the PRA Document Library has been developed and what it provides. | 22/11/2007 |
| Speaker: Brendan Law (Intergen)
Venue: Microsoft
Approx Attendance: 30
Featured Features: Search
Summary: Having attended search training in Singapore Brendan Law was able to share his recent experiences with search within SharePoint. This session was followed by an open ask the experts session with questions being answered by Zac Smith, Chandima and Jonathan Stuckey. | 25/10/2007 |
| Speaker: Mark Orange (Intergen)
Venue: Fronde
Approx Attendance: 35
Featured Features: Document Management, Records Management, Content Types, Document Information Panel, Information Management Policies
Summary: Having presented this session at TechED 2007 in New Zealand it was a great opportunity to present the session to the User Group audience who had not been able to attend TechED. Mark was drugged up on cold medication to get through the presentation, but with some support from Chan managed to cover a demostration of building a content type, a Word template that integrated the metadata properties from SharePoint and an Information Management Policy for expiration of content. | 19/09/2007 |
| Speaker: Michael Sampson (Collaboration Success Advisors)
Venue: Intergen
Approx Attendance: 35
Featured Features: Business focused session, no specific features covered
Summary: Michael Sampson has been looking at SharePoint and the value it can add to an organisation in the collaboration and knowledge sharing space since the first version in 2001. With the release of SharePoint 2007 Michael has identified a significant maturing of the platform to a point where it really meets the expectations as a collaboration and knowledge management platform. We had to shift the session to a Monday night to accommodate Michael who lives in Christchurch so we think a few people who had RSVP missed the session because of the change of night, sorry if that was you.
Michael has written a white paper on this topic and this presentation lead us through the core messages of that whitepaper that are 6 steps in the evolution of a SharePoint implementation with a business. From developing a Vision and identifying the business reasons through to cultivating the practices of collaboration this session presented some great ideas and provoked some good discussions and questions about how we can be successful with SharePoint. You can find out more about this white paper and purchase the full paper from the site dedicated to it - http://www.sharepointforbusiness.com/
| 16/07/2007 |
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Speaker: Ben Lauchlan and Mark Pascall (3months.com)
Venue: 3Months.com
Approx Attendance: 40
Featured Features: WSS, masterpages, custom CSS, workflow
Summary: Ben and Mark showed us a great case study of an WSSv3 extranet site built for a European pharmaceuticals company. This site was initially developed on the Beta of WSS and later moved to the release version of the product so it was great to see how 3Months had been pushing the boundaries of WSS so early. They explained some of the challenges and lessons learned from the project and explained the work that had been done to make the site look basically nothing like a SharePoint site. 3Months wrapped up their session with a great overview of workflow within the SharePoint platform and what the strengths and weaknesses of the 3 approaches to workflow are, being out of the box workflows, SharePoint Designer Workflow Wizard workflows and custom workflows built in visual studio for SharePoint.
Resources:
| 27/06/2007 |
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Speaker: Brendan Law (Intergen)
Venue: 3Months.com
Approx Attendance: 40
Featured Features: Central Administration, Share Service Providers, general installation and core configuration
Summary: Brendan has a lot of experience installing and implementing the new SharePoint platform and was able to walk us through the core process and considerations for setting up a new SharePoint environment. Rather than trying to do live demonstrations he wisely took series of screen shots to show the interface at the different steps, important because an install takes about 4 hours all going to plan! He offered some great tips and tricks and generated some great questions and discussions about how to plan an environment and what the server infrastructure might look like for New Zealand sized organisations.
Resources: Microsoft TechNet -
| 27/06/2007 |
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Speaker: Chandima Kulathilake (Provoke)
Venue: Intergen
Approx Attendance: 45
Featured Features: Themes, Master pages, Content Types, Page Layouts, SharePoint Designer, Cascading Style Sheets, User Interface configuration settings
Summary: Fresh back from presenting at the SharePoint 2007 Asia Pacific Area Conference Chan delivered one of his sessions from the conference on how to make SharePoint sites look how you want them to. Chan worked through the simple configuration settings that can used to populate simple logos and themes to tweak the brand of a site to the full custom look and feel of a MOSS web site using the publishing web content management features. There was time spent explaining the difference between the role of the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) versus the Masterpages versus the page layouts and how you can replace the default resources with your own custom designs. But then if it all goes sour you can now simply revert back to default resources or using the version history to an earlier version of your custom elements. We had people travel from as far afield as Auckland and New Plymouth to get access to some live content about SharePoint and we finally had some great give a ways (Book and 3 travel mugs) care of Ryan Duguid who collected them from Joel Oleson who is part of the SharePoint product team back at the Microsoft mothership in Redmond.
Resources: Chan's Blog -
| 23/05/2007 |
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Speaker: Chandima Kulathilake and Ari Bakker (Provoke Solutions)
Venue: Fujitsu
Approx Attendance: 40
Featured Features: Content Types, Lookup Lists, Page Layouts, Master Pages, SharePoint Designer
Summary: This was the second of two short presentations of real world case studies using the SharePoint platform. Chan and Ari introduced us to the Ministry of Transport Intranet that had first started life using the Office SharePoint Server 2007 Beta 2 and then gone into production on the Beta 2 Technical Rrefresh! (Don’t worry it has recently been migrated to the RTM version of Office SharePoint Server 2007.) Chan passed around an example of some of the documentation produced for the Intranet project that included some user interface wire frames and some of the content types analysis that forms a critical part of the solution. Ari then walked us all through how the content types are configured and used within the intranet for both documents and web page content. Chan and Ari then broke out SharePoint Designer 2007 and illustrated how the master page and page layouts were setup showing how these can be easily managed through this tool.
Resources:
| 26/04/2007 |
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Speaker: Rakesh Kapoor (Fujitsu New Zealand)
Venue: Fujitsu
Approx Attendance: 40
Featured Features: Microsoft ISV Partner Product integration of Meridio with SharePoint Portal Server 2003
Summary: This was the first of two short presentations of real world case studies using the SharePoint platform. Rakesh introduced the work that has been done at Ministry of Fisheries around Electronic Document and Records Management using Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Meridio. One of the strengths of Microsoft products and platforms is the range of ISV Partner products that compliment or extend the core Microsoft offering. SharePoint is certainly no different and Meridio is a great example of a Records Management product that extends the out of the box offering of the Office SharePoint Server Records Management functionality. Rakesh covered how the Business Classification Scheme forms the foundation of the solution and then showed how this was utilized within the solution. There was some thorough discussion of email management and the tight integration of the solution with Microsoft Outlook 2007 and Microsoft Word 2007.
Resources: Archives NZ Continuum Site -
| 26/04/2007 |
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Speaker: Chris Johnson (Microsoft)
Venue: Microsoft
Approx Attendance: 45
Featured Features: InfoPath 2007, Design Once, Form Services, Business Data Catalog, SharePoint KPI lists and webparts, Excel 2007, Excel Services
Summary: We were lucky enough to secure Chris Johnson for one of his last presentations in New Zealand before taking up his new position on the Windows SharePoint Services product team up at Microsoft’s Redmond Campus in the United States. Chris started with the creation of business forms in InfoPath 2007 showing Design Once features and ability to publish InfoPath forms to an Office SharePoint Server site and either consume the form through the InfoPath client or through a web browser when Forms Services is available as one of the enterprise features. The second part of the session looked at some of the cool improvements within Excel 2007 and again showed how easily this content can be published to an Office SharePoint Server site. Chris then pieced together a number of elements including some Excel content, some Graphs and some KPI content to create a Business Intelligence Dashboard. Finally Chris showed off his favorite feature – the Business Data Catalog and showed and discussed some of the ways this can be leveraged to consolidate information from other sources within the enterprise
Resources: Introduction to Business Intelligence features
| 28/03/2007 |
| Speaker: Mark Orange (Intergen)
Venue: Infinity Solutions
Approx Attendance: 40
Featured Features: Document Management, Records Management, Web Content Management, Forms Management, Workflow, Content Types, Information Management Policies, Document Information Panel, Word 2007 Integration
Summary: Enterprise Content Management is another topic that needs to be broken down into specific session on the different areas to start doing them justice, but we can explore some major current themes of ECM and relate them to the core functional areas provided by the new 2007 SharePoint platform. The talk was based around the ECM white paper published by Microsoft (link below in resources) and related 4 goals to 4 solutions.
Manage diverse content = Document management
Satisfy compliance and legal requirements = Records management
Effciently manage multiple web sites = Web content management
Streamline business processes = Forms management and workflow
| 28/02/2007 |
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Speaker: Ryan Duguid (Microsoft)
Venue: Microsoft
Featured Features: Search, Search Centre, Search Scopes, Business Data Search, People Search, Best Bets, Synonyms, Search Web Parts, and Security filtered results.
Summary: The Wellington SharePoint User Group kicked of the year with a great session on search by Ryan Duguid. We are still working our way through the overview of the primary solution areas of Office SharePoint Server and this search session gets us half way with Collaboration, Portal and Search complete. That leaves Enterprise Content Management, Forms Management and Business Intelligence for the next 3 sessions.
Ryan showed us through the core search experiences showing how users can search over content from many sources and also search specifically for people. We spent some time focusing on the Business Data Catalogue (BDC) and how through this we are able to search across and view data from other line of business applications. Ryan then went under the hood a little showing some of the search administration and how the new search web parts work together and allow you to easily customise their look and feel. To finish it we looked at the desktop search and live search integration with different content sources including SharePoint content.
Resources: Search specific blog
| 24/01/2007 |
| Speaker: Mark Orange (Intergen)
Venue: Intergen
Featured Features: My Sites, User Profiles, People Search, Audiences, Content Targeting, Web Part Targeting
Summary: Without even a hint of Christmas for our final session for 2006 we had an overview of the second solution area in the investment pie which is Portals. Mark focused the session on people and how SharePoint allows us to profiles ourselves, connect ourselves with our colleagues, search for people and also have content targeted to our areas or interest. We started with My Sites and looked at how people can manage their profiles, what is enforced from their Active Directory profile and how some profile properties can be shared or hidden. Following Mark showed the great new colleagues feature that shows peoples relationships to each other within the enterprise and we saw how these concept is leveraged within the people search by listing results based on 3 degrees of separation – My Colleagues, My Colleagues Colleagues and Other People. We then spent some time looking at how user profiles can be leveraged to create Audiences and how audiences can then be used to filter and target content to specific users and also target whole web parts to only members of an audience.
Resources: | 6/12/2006 |
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Speaker: Chandima Kulathilake (Provoke)
Venue: Synergy
Featured Features: Document Libraries, Content Types, Workflow. Workflow in SharePoint designer. How to build and deploy a custom workflow. Outlook and SharePoint integration.
Task lists, Custom lists. Collaboration features.
Summary: Ian Thompson from Synergy International (aka: Fronde Systems) gave a 20 minute overview of their SharePoint Portal Server 2003 deployment.
The main presentation focused around new features of WSS and the Workflow capabilities. A demonstration of how to build a workflow using SharePoint designer was a popular section at this meeting. Blogs and Wiki functionality of WSS was also presented and how businesses can use these new features to encourage knowledge sharing among teams.
Resources:
How to create a Calendar event in a WSS team site Shared Calendar from Outlook 2007 (Relates to WSS and MOSS)
| 22/11/2006 |
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Speaker: Ryan Duguid (Microsoft)
Venue: Microsoft
Featured Features: Outlook Integration, Calendar and tasks management, My Site, Knowledge Network, Search, Blog, Word Integration, InfoPath, Forms Services, Slide Library
Summary: In one hour how do you give a demonstration based overview of something as big as Office SharePoint Server 2007? Well first you ask someone else to do it, enter Ryan Duguid stage left. Then he does a day in the life of a person in an organisation that is actually using the new SharePoint, being himself at Microsoft. Ryan set the scene with a task list in his My Site that he synchronized into Outlook 2007 and then worked his through the list of tasks simulating a day of activities (compressed into 40 minutes). He published a blog entry from Word 2007, he searched for some people to collaborate with, he published some Power Point 2007 slides to a slide library and he even created a new web form in InfoPath 2007 and published using Forms Services to a SharePoint Forms Library. It was an excellent style of presentation to cover a lot of features, get a good overview of the SharePoint features breadth and put it all in the context of an actual day in the life.
Resources: SharePoint Product Team blog
| 18/10/2006 |