We are looking for topics and speakers. If you have a suggestion, please let us know. At each meeting, we typically have one non-technical / admin topic that would appeal to SharePoint users and administrators, and we have a technical presentation that would be aimed at the power users or developers.

We encourage you to share your experience with us because thoese presentations often have the most value for the other community members.

We are also looking for vendor presentations on products and services that are geared to the SharePoint community.

if you would like to make a presentation, please contact us at info@sugdc.org

For anyone that is interested in studying for a SharePoint Certification, we will be organizing a study group that will meet a couple times a month. Each of the members of the group will take a turn making a presentation to the other members on a selected topic relevant to the groups interest. There are several different certifications (http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/cert-sharepoint-server.aspx#tab2) and we will be asking anyone that participates which track they would be interested in. Please come to a meeting and let us know what you are interested in.

Las Vegas Pays off!

Nov 2009 -We Just got back from the SharePoint 2009 conference in Las Vegas where Microsoft demonstrated SharePoint 2010. It is a very nice improvement. No more size limits, runs faster, easy enough to connect to other applications/DB without code, and even more deeply integrated with all the office products, infopath forms & project so that it makes a very compelling environment. You can make it look very snazzy – good enough for any Fortune 100 company’s Internet site. Here are some of the highlights:

The FAST search engine MS acquired is turning into a nifty app layer _between_ business logic and presentation layer so that you it is easier to deploy an interface with user (customer) centric content based on past behavior and other factors you specify. 

Microsoft has relabeled Groove to SharePoint Workspace and it allows you to take SharePoint 2010 content off-line.

Microsoft has totally re-worked their metadata management layer to support enterprise governance demands and virtually everything can quickly be tagged using a intellisense driven wiki-like markup.

Microsoft has added more governance and RM capabilities, and if that is not enough for you, many vendors are providing nice add-on products for this market. We will be having some of the vendors make presentations to our group in the near future so stay tuned!

Microsoft added many new features to take advantage of integrating analytical and graphic components, such as Visio and Excel so that you can build an interface to any SP data inside the browser; You can draw your workflow using Visio and deploy it to SharePoint 2010.

They have created a new tool called PowerPivot for Excel (previously called Gemini) that allows users to work in a familiar Excel interface with an unlimited amount of data in SQL using an OLAP database. They demonstrated sorting and filtering 100M rows of sales data in less than  1 second. Then when you have created a useful analysis of some data, you can publish it as part of a dashboard in SharePoint so that it is dynamic as the data changes.

…and much more. The beta version should be available some time in November. We will be posting more information here about some of the vendors as soon as we can. if you have some thoughts you want to share, contact us.