Zlatan's Blog [MVP SharePoint]

SharePoint Podcast - Record Management with Zlatan Dzinic

Our Information Worker Community is now member of Culminis

For those of you that are wandering what Culimnis is, here is a short description from their website (http://www.culminis.com):

Culminis is an international not-for-profit organization devoted to the development and growth of the IT community.  After supporting and connecting professional user groups and associations, student organizations, and solution providers for more than two years we have come to understand the goals and needs of each group, as well as the resources they have to share.  With this knowledge we are developing programs that ensure a meaningful and equitable exchange of those resources, ultimately elevating the status of the IT Pro both in their industry and in the community.

IT Professionals and IT Students
Culminis is not a super user group and we have no membership for individual IT Professionals, we will accomplish our mission by working in cooperation with the IT Professional community.  We strongly encourage you to get involved.

You can see us now proudly showing off our associations on http://www.infromationworker.co.za front page, both ISPA and Culminis. 

SharePoint and SQL Best Practices Conference 2009 in Washington DC, USA

I have a great honour and pleasure in being invited to present two lectures at this year's SQL Server and SharePoint Best Practice Conference in Washington DC, USA. (http://www.bestpracticesconference.com/)

Our MVP Lead Ruari already blogged about it here:  http://ruariplint.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!4DC22E349714F30F!587.entry

You can check my cool new speaker badge on the side of my blog.

I will be delivering two lectures:

IW312, Taxonomy in SharePoint Enterprise Content Management and Enterprise Search

Large and even smaller enterprises require a standard and consistent way to understand and access the unstructured information that resides in their various repositories. Learn how to meet this business challenge with Microsoft SharePoint Server and Microsoft Enterprise Search so that your company can make faster business decisions that drive customer satisfaction and value.

ITP383, Records Management Best Practices in SharePoint

This session will cover best practices for using SharePoint platform in capture, classification, and ongoing management of records throughout their lifecycle.
We will also cover the following in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Records Management:

• Setting policies and standards.
• Assigning responsibilities and authorities.
• Establishing and promulgating procedures and guidelines.
• Providing a range of services relating to the management and use of records.
• Designing, implementing and administering specialized systems for managing records.
• Integrating records management into business systems and processes.

For each we will consider:

Electronic Records Management Best Practices
Physical Records Management Best Practices
Mixed Records Management Best practices
Common Issues in Records Management Solutions based on SharePoint

If you happen to be going and you want to meet up, chat, exchange ideas and experiences, please let me know.

Watch out for #bpc09 tag on twitter for updates!!

TechEd Africa 2009 sessions are coming up

Wow TechEd Africa is going to excellent, I look forward to seeing you all at my sessions and at the community lounge, here's the list of all the breakout and whiteboard sessions that I'll be presenting:

SharePoint Social Networking and User Profiles for Business (Breakout Session level 300)

• Necessary steps to prepare and implement user profiles and My Sites
• Using audiences to target content
• Writing custom controls that use profile information
• Taking action on profile changes
• What is a Personalization Site?

Developing and Consuming Web Services for Microsoft SharePoint (Breakout Session level 400)

We are increasingly living in a services-oriented world, and increasingly developers are wanting to integrate services of all kinds with SharePoint. This session provides an overview of how you can build and deploy custom services with SharePoint, specifically focusing on the development of ASP.NET and Windows Communication Foundation services for SharePoint and the consumption of these services from client applications including Microsoft Silverlight controls.

Microsoft Silverlight on SharePoint: Architectural and Development Patterns (Breakout Session level 400)

Silverlight 2.0 provides exciting opportunities that enable developers to build rich Internet applications (RIAs). SharePoint technologies provide a platform for business data and business processes. By integrating SharePoint and Silverlight, you can build rich, engaging, responsive user interfaces that consume and manipulate SharePoint data. However, as a developer or architect, you need to understand how data can be passed between SharePoint and the Silverlight runtime. This session delves into the four main architectural patterns for developing Silverlight-based user interfaces for SharePoint.

SharePoint Architecture Panel Discussion with Joel, Eric and Zlatan (Whiteboard Session level 300)

Joel Oleson (http://www.sharepointjoel.com/), Eric Harlan (http://www.ericharlan.com/) and Zlatan Dzinic (http://dotnet.org.za/zlatan/) will lead and open discussion around SharePoint Architecture best practises and real world scenarios. Got questions or issues around governance, planning, physical architecture or information architecture? If so, bring them along with your open mind.

PowerShell for Developer (Whiteboard Session level 200)

This session will cover the basics of PowerShell as well as covering development specific topics such as how to use PowerShell inside C# as well as how to leverage managed code INSIDE PowerShell with an example of using PowerShell with the SharePoint API.

Windows 7 Fish Joke

Everybody is buzzing about Windows 7 and its cool new features, so I thought I'll just share something that a friend and fellow MVP Andrew Connell (http://www.andrewconnell.com/) pointed out on twitter couple of days ago.

The fish found on the wallpaper (below) is better known as Siamese Fighting Fish, you know the one that you can't put in with others of the same kind otherwise they'll have a deathmatch (I'm not talking about Quake here) .

This fish is also known as BETTA fish (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siamese_fighting_fish) which is pronounced same as BETA, so basically the wallpaper is there for all distributions of the Windows 7 Beta version.

PowerShell for Developers - Microsoft Cape Town 27-05-2009 - slide deck is up

Thank you all for making this event truly great, thank you for a great feedback and complements. I would like to thank my co-presenters Nicolas Blank and Daniel Van Wyk for a great presentation.

Wow lots of thanks......

Many of you have requested that we post a slide after the event, and some have reminded me, well you can download it here: http://dotnet.org.za/blogs/zlatan/PowerShell%20For%20Developers.zip

It seems that Nic and I will be taking this to TechEd (http://www.teched.co.za/agenda.aspx) as a Whiteboard session (that's what we call Chalk and Talk sessions nowdays).

PowerShell talk at SADeveloper - Microsoft Cape Town today (27-05-2009)

If you have some time and don't know about this yet, please join us at Microsoft in Cape Town at 6:00 PM where Nicolas Blank (http://blankmanblog.spaces.live.com/), our Exchange MVP will be talking about Powershell.

I will be joining him on stage togther with Daniel Van Wyk. I will chat about how you can use C# in Powershell and how you can extend Powershell to work with SharePoint. Rock on!!

Important Information on SharePoint Service Pack 2

If you downloaded it and installed it (and if you haven't realised yet) please note that SP2 resets your licensing information and (to quote further) product expiration date is improperly activated. This means SharePoint will expire as though it was a trial installation 180 days after SP2 is deployed. The activation of the expiration date will not affect the normal function of SharePoint up until the expiration date passes. Furthermore, product expiration 180 days after SP2 installation will not affect customer's data, configuration or application code but will render SharePoint inaccessible for end-users.

Check for more info: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/21/attention-important-information-on-service-pack-2.aspx

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 Available Today to MSDN Subscribers

Yup, thats right, today the long awaited beta of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Fx 4 will appear on the MSDN Subscribers site.

http://blogs.msdn.com/mikeormond/archive/2009/05/18/visual-studio-2010-beta-1-available-today-to-msdn-subscribers.aspx

TechEd Africa 2009 is coming soon........

As some of you already know the TecheEd Africa 2009 site went live couple of days ago.

http://www.teched.co.za/

Although it still doesn't have an updated list of sessions and more info about the agenda, this info will come in quicker than you think, so stay tuned.

On a SharePoint front we have preliminary confirmation that one of the great SharePoint celebrities Joel Oleson (http://www.sharepointjoel.com/) is coming as a guest speaker! To most of you who work with SharePoint he needs no introduction.

Since he's a good friend and this is a very rare opportunity, we (as Information Worker Community) will organise some local user group events to bring Joel (and some other guest speakers) to all you that won't be able to attend TechEd. Keep an eye on my blog and informationworker.co.za site for more info on this.

If you look at the new TechEd site you'll notice that now you can join the TechEd Facebook group and even follow TechEd Africa announcements on Twitter... well done I say...

You can also download some cool badges like the ones I just pasted on the side of my blog, check it out......

Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals in South Africa

On April the 1^st I was once again awarded Microsoft MVP Award for SharePoint. It is a privilege to remain among the ranks of SharePoint Most Valuable Professionals worldwide and I'm even more proud to be part of South African MVPs.

Most of us will be at TechEd so catch us there, some of us as your regular speakers as well :)

If you don't know who current South African MVPs are here's the list so far:

MVP Name/Technical Expertise

Ernst Hermann Kuschke/Visual C#

Paul Somers/BizTalk

Almero Steyn/Identity Lifecycle Manager

Pieter Germishuys/XNA/DirectX

Hilton Giesenow/Visual C#

Nicolas Blank/Exchange Server

Peter Willmot/SQL

Craig Nicholson/Xbox

Bruce Nicholson/Dynamics CRM

Zlatan Dzinic/SharePoint

Ockert Johannes du Preez/Visual Basic

Gail Shaw/SQL

Rudi Grobler/Windows Desktop Experience

Honourable mention goes to Willy-Peter Schaub (ex Team System MVP) who unfortunately left us to join Team System Rangers @ Microsoft.

First Microsoft Certified SharePoint Masters

I've been meaning to post this for quite some time now:

Congratulations to the first Microsoft Certified SharePoint Masters, this is an awesome achievement that required a lot of time, passion, dedication, hard work (and money).

It is not a surprise at all that both Non-Microsoft achievers of this awesome certification come from the ranks of SharePoint MVPs.

Check out their blogs:

Maurice Prather (http://www.bluedoglimited.com/SharePointThoughts/default.aspx): Maurice is an enterprise architect, SharePoint MVP, and serves as the Lead Architect for ShareSquared, Inc. (http://www.sharesquared.com/)

Spencer Harbar (http://harbar.net/): Spencer is an independent SharePoint consultant, trainer, and SharePoint MVP based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

I would like to extend my congratulations to all SharePoint Certified Masters from Microsoft as well.

See a complete list of new SharePoint Masters here: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/04/29/congratulations-to-the-first-microsoft-certified-sharepoint-masters.aspx  

SharePoint Cumulative Update Packages (April 09)

If you haven't deployed SP2 (also even if oyu have) already please consider putting through (before you submit your change control) April Cumilative Update Package as it contains some very useful updates and fixes.

Find the links and up-to-date sequence for installing here: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/13/april-cumulative-update-packages-ready-for-download.aspx

 If you're a SharePoint Admin you'll find a very useful timeline for all the past and upcoming updates.

Please note: Start from April Cumulative Update, the packages will no longer install on a farm without a service pack installed. You must have installed either Service Pack 1 (SP1) or SP2 prior to the installation of the cumulative updates.

Version 1.5 SharePoint Server and WSS SDK Released April 2009

Time to update your dev envrionment!!

SharePoint and Office 2007 SP2 available but watch out for some things

I guess I haven't blogged in ages, mostly thanks to work, which has been great, so I'm not sure whether I should complain about it.  

Most of you probably know about the newly released SharePoint and Office 2007 SP2:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b444bf18-79ea-46c6-8a81-9db49b4ab6e5 (Office 2007)

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=b7816d90-5fc6-4347-89b0-a80deb27a082 (SharePoint Server 2007)
 
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=79bada82-c13f-44c1-bdc1-d0447337051b (WSS 3.0)

Keep an eye on Updates Resource Center for SharePoint Products and Technologies: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepointserver/bb735839.aspx for all the updates.

Please make sure to update both all your Office clients as well as the Server/Services, you might have issues otherwise also if you're using Nintex Worflow to build workflows in your environment Nintex have identified compatibility issues between Nintex Workflow 2007 and SharePoint Service Pack 2, so don't instal it just yet.