'Open Mike' - May 5th 2008

Sydney SharePoint User Group is pleased to bring back Mike Fitzmaurice to Australia– Monday May 5th 2008 Would you like to find out; How can you leverage Microsoft Office SharePoint technologies to provide a platform for collaboration, ECM, search, BI and social computing? The interoperability with MOSS and other line of business applications such as SAP? How SharePoint and Office can be the people friendly face of service oriented architecture? Well we’ve got just the man to answer those burning questions... Microsoft’s Mike Fitzmaurice, Enterprise Technology Strategist and former Technical Product manager for WSS/MOSS, has kindly agreed to hold a lunch time ‘Open Mike’ session when he visits Sydney in May. We look forward to seeing you there! Please click here to register for this event. Registration opens at 12:30pm and the Q&A session commence at 1:00pm. The May User Group will be held at the Microsoft’s office, 1 Epping Road, North Ryde, Sydney. Food & Refreshments will be provided. ‘Open Mike’ – Mike Fitzmaurice Q&A Date: Monday May 5th 2008 Time: 12:30-2:00pm

Visit http://www.sharepointusers.org.au/sydney for further information.

Mike Fitzmaurice is an Enterprise Technology Strategist at Microsoft, advising customers, partners, and Microsoft teams on portal, collaboration, and search technology. He spent the past five years as a Technical Product Manager for Windows® SharePoint® Services and Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server, focused on developer evangelism and interoperability issues. He joined Microsoft Corp. in December 1997 as a senior consultant for Microsoft Consulting Services, overseeing several development initiatives involving Exchange Server and SharePoint technology for a wide range of customers. Before joining Microsoft, Fitzmaurice served as Director of Research and Development at Advanced Paradigms Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based Microsoft Solution Provider Partner, as well as a five-year tenure as IT Director of the National Association of Broadcasters.

Sydney SharePoint User Group April

Emailing MOSS!

In this session, presented by SharePoint MVP Kathy Hughes, we’ll look at managing and integrating e-mails with MOSS sites, including Exchange 2007 managed folders (journaling feature), the latest Colligo Contributor (3.0) and e-mailing document libraries and lists directly. We’ll consider security, metadata, offline access, e-mail attachments and server and client considerations. We’ll also look at the pros and cons of different types of e-mail formats.

Date: Tuesday, 15th April 2008
Start time : 17.30
End time: 19.30
Venue: Unique World, Level 14, 24 Campbell St Sydney

For further details on the Sydney SharePoint User Group check out the website http://www.sharepointusers.org.au/Sydney/default.aspx

New WCM Site : http://www.agl.com.au

The company I work for, UniqueWorld, have recently deployed another WCM solution on MOSS.

Check it out @ http://www.agl.com.au I'm sure you'll agree its a pretty hot looking site ;-)

The design is courtesy of a 3rd Party design agency http://www.newgency.com.au/ so further proof of the ability to skin SharePoint Sites so that they don't look like SharePoint Sites!

Well done to all the guys on the implementation!

Sydney SharePoint User Group January

The first user group session for 2008 sees SharePoint MVP Ivan Wilson presenting on Site Collections and their Owners.

Ivan will cover many different aspects - from how to administer Site Collections, to deciding how many you should have.

Date: Tuesday, 15th January 2008
Start time : 17.30
End time: 19.30
Venue: Unique World, Level 14, 24 Campbell St Sydney

For further details on the Sydney SharePoint User Group check out the website http://www.sharepointusers.org.au/Sydney/default.aspx

MOSS SP1 Fix List

Avoiding the temptation to be the millionth blogger to say that SP1 has been released I thought id take a different tack and link to the list of issues that SP1 resolves. Also the WSS 3.0 SP1 Fix List can be found here

Hands up for volunteers to go through the lists and check them off ;-)

Sydney SharePoint User Group November

This months user group sees AvePoint present some considerations when implementing disaster recovery within your organisation and how their award winning backup and recovery solutions targeted at the Microsoft SharePoint Platform can help.

Date: Tuesday, 20th November 2007
Start time : 17.30
End time: 20.00
Venue: Unique World, Level 14, 24 Campbell St Sydney

Also a reminder that this is the final session for the year, as we dont hold a December session.

Sydney SharePoint User Group : New Site

We now have a new digital home for the Sydney SharePoint User group -http://www.sharepointusers.org.au/sydney

Making use of the SharePoint Community Kit we now have a WSS3.0 site up and running to bring our members all the neccessary information for user group events, presentations and other community news. This is the first stage of making the user group site a more interactive experience for our members so visit the Discussion Board and post your comments, feedback and suggestions.

Also be sure to visit the site and subscribe to the Events RSS Feed to have Event details drop into your favourite RSS Reader.

Tip: Customising Content Query Web Part XSL

There has been a plethora of articles on customising the XSL of a content query web part, some even from Microsoft ;)

I wont run over the step by step process but just add to this wealth of information a little tip on making the XSL a little easier to manage and support.

As we have learnt the XSL used to render the output is split into 3 files;
ContentQueryMain.xsl
ItemStyle.xsl
Header.xsl

All three of these files will exist in the '\Style Library\XSL Style Sheets\' library of a site created using the Publishing template.

Instead of modifying these files it is possible to create your own custom XSL style sheets for each and tell your CQWP to use these by specifying the properties as follows;

HeaderXslLink = "/Style Library/XSL Style Sheets/customHeader.xsl"
ItemXslLink = "/Style Library/XSL Style Sheets/customItem.xsl"
MainXslLink ="/Style Library/XSL Style Sheets/customMain.xsl"