In the past year I made it my mission to speak at least once a month at either a Code Camp or User Group meeting to practice on my speaking, presentation and writing skills.  After squeezing in 18 events and 20 + session I can truthfully say that I’ve done the best I could this year.  All this practice this past year has given me some good experience and opened some doors for me in the coming year.  I’m really excited to say that I’ll be speaking this year at the SharePoint Technology Conference January 27^th thru 29^th and this is my first major event for 2009.  I’m doing 3 sessions at www.SPTechCon.com and I’m really excited about it.  Each session is 100 level and focused for individuals looking to get the basics about each subject.  I’ve done a variation of the SharePoint Security Management for the Business User session at the Roanoke Code Camp in the spring of this year and it was a really fun class because we talked and walked through the security screens for a Site Collection, Web (sub site), List, Folder and item.  The other 2 sessions are brand new for me but really interesting subjects.  Tuning Memory Management session is something that I think everyone should here about at least once if they are running WCM style sites, InfoPath Forms Services, Excel Calculation Services, Search or just a large SharePoint environment to be honest.  There are so many new pieces to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 that it’s really important to understand what is available to help tune your environment and where to find benchmarking information.  Last but not least is SharePoint Directory Management session that gives the basics that you need to know if you’re going to be doing incoming email and how it works with Active Directory if you decide to do it in advanced mode.  Just like everything else with SharePoint there is several different ways to tackle this feature but there is no one fit all approach if you ask me.  Everything depends on your situation you have and which approach would work best for you now and in the future.  Below is a list of my session titles and abstracts that I’ll be speaking on.

Tuning Memory Management in SharePoint

When I began working with SharePoint Portal Server 2001 andSharePoint Team Services there weren’t a lot of options available for tuning anything especially memory.  WhenSharePoint Portal Server 2003, Windows SharePoint Services, IIS 6 and SQL 2005 were available we started seeing more options for tuning SharePoint installation and it was really necessary because of the new capability of scaling out the farm and RAM limitation of Windows Server 2003 32 bit.  Now with MOSS and WSS v3 having more functionality and more screens/options for performance tuning memory management has become a necessary action to make the farm run as smoothly as possible.  This session shows and gets into those details on what can be done to make your farm memory management as efficient as possible.  

SharePoint Security Management for the Business User

With MOSS or WSS v3 the new site collection and sub site security capabilities are astonishing but there are so many new options available that it’s really hard to truly understand what is possible and how to effectively manage security.  The complexity of managing security even gets more complicated when working with sub sites because of how the screens display the security groups.   This session reviews all the different options that are available and then goes into detail on how to effectively use the options with and without inheritance at the site collection and sub site level.  List, Library, Folder, Item and Document level security is reviewed to finish up the session.  This session uses demo’s frequently to actually show what screens and options are being talked about so everyone canget a clear picture of what is really being talked about.

SharePoint Directory Management

When MOSS and WSS v3 came out I couldn’t believe all the new capabilities and after working with it for over 2 years I’m still learning new things and I truly don’t believe I’ll ever know every capability.  One of the new capabilities in this versionis SharePoint Directory Management Service on the Incoming email page in Central Administration and I found out how important this option is when doing incoming email for SharePoint List’s a few projects ago.  This session reviews SharePoint Directory Management Service purpose, capabilities and technical detail.  Once all the high level detail and how it works with Active Directory are out of the way then we can start into the demos.  The demo’s go into some detailand shows a lot of what was talked about earlier in the session.

Hope everyone has a great holiday season.

Cheers 

Just a quick note that I was suppose to get out 2 weeks ago (sorry Josh).  This Tuesday, October 7th I'll be in town and speaking at the TRINUG .Net User Group SharePoint Sig on InfoPath 2007 and InfoPath Forms Services.  For all the details please vist the http://www.sharepointdevelopersguild.com/default.aspx or http://trinug.org/ website.

Cheers 

Back in February I got asked by the N³UG to speak in September at their user group on InfoPath 2007 and Visual Studio2008.  I'm really excited about speaking there because I've got some great new material to share with them on building a framework with Visual Studio 2008 for InfoPath 2007 forms.  This material is brand new and I haven't had a chance to blog or speak about it so I’m hoping it will be helpful to someone.  Building a framework is nothing new because everyone usually does it when building custom applications but a lot of times there is a misunderstanding what can be done with InfoPath and SharePoint to make things a lot more user friendly.  The meeting is tomorrow night Sept. 9th at 6:30 pm at SetFocus' Parsippany facility.  The user group website is http://n3ug.org/ and directions to get there can be found at http://www.setfocus.com/headquarters.aspx

Hope to see you there. 

The SUGDC Regional SharePoint Conference was this weekend (Friday and Saturday) and to my understanding from talking to people that attended both days it was a great SharePoint conference.  I didn’t get to attend both days but just Saturday when I was speaking but I had a great time on Saturday hanging out with Paul Galvin, Becky Isserman and Bob Fox during the afternoon.  This conference was a little different for me because it was the first event I ever spoke at that people actually paid money to attend.  I’m really curious what people thought and I’m hoping that I’ll get some evaluations from the people that attended my session.  I really want feedback from people good or bad so I can approve on things.  When attending some of the sessions with Paul and Becky one thing that I noticed was that I really need to spend a lot more time on getting my slides to look a lot nicer and probably slow down a little when I speaking.  One of the things that I keep catching myself doing is speeding through my sessions trying to get as much content in a session as possible instead of maybe spending little extra explaining things.  One of the things that I really enjoyed besides speaking on InfoPath was having the extra time talking with Paul and Becky and a few other people at the conference.  It is really nice to sit down and speak with people that do the same thing you do and listen to what they are saying and pickup new ideals and making new contacts.  It's too bad that I didn't have the chance to come on Friday so I could see Paul's session because I really think he has done a lot of cool things and I think it would have been a great session.

When preparing my presentation I did a lot of research qualifying everything I would be presenting and I was really impressed with all the detail information on the MSDN site.  I found so much information in the MOSS and WSS SDKs that I was really impressed.  I remember doing SharePoint 2003 it took forever for any good stuff to appear but that’s not the case for MOSS and WSS v3.  Anybody trying to learn SharePoint shouldn’t have any problem doing so anymore.

During the Roundtable session that Becky and I were doing on Ajax and InfoPath Paul asked some really good questions and I will be blogging about them over the coming days because I've had a little time to think about them and do some research.  I truly still can't believe how big InfoPath 2007 and InfoPath Form Services really is.

The conference was a blast and I would like to thank Bob Fox, Gary Blatt and Gary Vaughn for giving me a chance to talk at the conference and I hope they let me come back in the fall.

Cheers,
Michael

It's been almost a month since I spoke at either a code camp or user group meeting and I'm sort of having withdraws from not doing it because I enjoy it so much except my last one at the Nova Code Camp but that was because I had very little sleep and wasn't as prepared as I wanted to be (totally my fault).  So I am happy to mention that I'm doing two sessions at the SUGDC Summer Regional SharePoint Conference and both of them involve InfoPath.  The first session is Saturday morning on InfoPath and workflow and the second is a round table discussion at the end of the day.  You can get all the details from http://www.sugdc.org/index_conf1.cfm website.  This is a 2 day event and it's jammed packed with a lot of cool stuff.

Hope to see you there.

Cheers,
Michael

I'm happy to say that I'll be speaking at the Orland Code Camp on March 22^nd and the code camp is already at 92 percent capacity. I'm really excited about this code camp because I'll be doing my InfoPath 2007 and Visual Studio 2008 session but will be adding FBA (Forms Based Authentication) content into the mix. I'm really not sure if it will be a good idea to add the extra complexity to the session but I wanted to change it up a little because I've been doing the same presentation for the last 3 or 4 code camps. In this presentation I'll be writing code into the VS 2008 VSTO project and showing how to debug the InfoPath 2007 form after it has been deployed to InfoPath Forms Services. In the future I'll be building a new .NET Class for retrieving the FBA user information like I do for AD user information and show how the code will know which user data store to query. Below are a few links for the Orlando Code Camp and I hope to see you there.

Orlando Code Camp home page

http://www.orlandocodecamp.com

Registration Page

https://www.clicktoattend.com/register.aspx?eventid=124997

Cheers,
Michael

It's true, I'll be speaking at another code camp and I'm really excited about this code camp because I'll be featuring a new session.  My new session is called "SharePoint Security Management for the Business User" and it will have a lot of demos on how to setup and maintain SharePoint user security from the business user perspective.  I'll also be doing the InfoPath 2007/InfoPath Forms Services and Visual Studio 2008 session which is my bread and butter session.  You might be thinking that I'm losing my mind because I'm doing so many of these code camps but let me assure you that I'm really having a goodtime sharing my experiences and not losing my mind.

I'm also very proud to say that Nas will be doing his first code camp session at Roanoke and I'm really excited about attending his session on configuring FBA for MOSS.  His session goes into details on how to do the FBA for regular SharePoint sites but also My Sites.  He and I have already talked a lot about the session details during are 24 hour road trip to the South Florida Code Camp.  I also think he will be talking about setting up a custom ASP.NET application for creating user accounts.  This should be another good session.  He has got me so revved up about FBA and I'm already thinking about creating some InfoPath 2007 browser based forms for creating FBA accounts and roles and maybe doing a joint session with him.

You can register and view the schedule for the Roanoke Code Camp at the below link.  Hope to see you there.

http://www.rvnug.org/codecamp.aspx

Cheers

For most of the people that read my blog don't know that I live in a small town outside of Raleigh, NC and unfortunately I'm not that involved in the local SharePoint or .NET community because I travel so much but I'm going to get the great pleasure to speak at the Raleigh Code Camp this weekend.  This is a big surprise for me because I missed the call for speakers for the Raleigh Code Camp (don't know how but I did) and I didn't think I had a chance to get in but I figured I would try and pull some strings and see if I could sneak in and to great surprise I was able to pull it off with help from Josh Carlisle.  Josh and I used to work together at a past company called TAKE Solutions but since we both departed we haven't seen much of each other unless we bump into each other at a conference or code camp.  The funny thing is that Josh's company (Viewfusion Solutions) and B&R Business Solutions do a lot of business together but he works almost a 100% remotely so we sort of stay in contact but not really (if that makes since).  Enough of my rambling and to the point, so I sent Josh an email several weeks ago about the code camp and asked him to see if he could get me squeezed in since he knew Chris Love from the Triangle .NET User Group.  Well weeks went by without hearing anything and I figured things didn't work out and I wasn't going to have the chance to speak but thankfully I was wrong because I got an email from Josh while I was in NYC.

For this code camp I'll be doing the same two sessions that I did for the South Florida Code Camp but the STSADM session will be a little bit longer because when I presented last time it was to short by 10 or 15 minutes.  I think I'm going to add a custom command that does something with InfoPath Form Services.  I'm pretty excited about adding the new example because it's going to give me a chance to work with the InfoPath Forms Services API.  The titles and descriptions of each session is listed below and if anybody wants more details please fill free to leave a comment or  send me a email through my blog.

Session 1 - Creating custom commands for STSADM Utility

The session walks through creating a Visual Studio 2008 C# Class Project for writing code to extend STSADM Utility and what needs to be done to deploy and have STSADM Utility recognize the new custom command.  Additional time will be spent on how the code is structured and what the debug parameter is used for.

Session 2 - InfoPath 2007 and Visual Studio 2008

The session walks through building a new InfoPath 2007 form, Web Service, .NET Class, Workflow and LDAP query with Visual Studio 2008.  The form will call web service on opening and retrieve the current user Active Directory information and State list from SQL 2005 database to populate an InfoPath form drop down list.   A simple workflow will be created and deployed with Visual Studio 2008 for sending an email.

If you're in driving distance please attend because to my understanding this code camp is going to be slammed full with great content and speakers just like all the other code camps I've attended.  You can register for the code camp at the http://www.codecamp.org/ website.

Cheers

Just wanted to let everybody know that I am now doing 2 sessions at the South Florida code camp and my second session title is "Creating custom commands for STSADM with C#".  The session goes into the details of extending the STSADM utility and how to debug the code.  The code being reviewed is currently being used in the real world.  I'm pretty excited about doing this session because it's something totally different from my normal subject.  Please come out to the code camp on February 2^nd but remember you need to register first.   You can check out the agenda and register from the http://codecamp08.fladotnet.com/ website.

Cheers

That's right it's time for the South Florida Code Camp and I'll be down there giving a new session on InfoPath 2007 and Visual Studio 2008.  For this session I'm thinking about changing a couple of things around and doing some really new stuff that includes C# code for updating AD and XMLFormView control for displaying an InfoPath 2007 form.  I'm thinking that the InfoPath 2007 form will be a data entry form that allows users to update their AD information.  I've been thinking about this new presentation for a while and since Visual Studio 2008 was officially released I figured that I should also change up the InfoPath part.  I'm really excited about building the new code and presenting it and after the code camp is over I'll post it on my Code Camp and User Group page.

All the information about the South Florida Code Camp can be found on the http://codecamp08.fladotnet.com/ website.  From what I heard while at Philly Code Camp from other speakers this code camp is suppose to be as big as or bigger than the Philly Code Camp one.  To see what sessions are currently on tap checkout the agenda page http://codecamp08.fladotnet.com/agenda.aspx.  The code camp is going to have 12 different tracks and that means tons of sessions.  The "SharePoint/ Office" track already has my "InfoPath 2007 and Visual Studio 2008" session and "Utilizing Visual Studio 2008 capabilities for better SharePoint Development Part 1 and Part 2" sessions on tap.  In my opinion this track is already shaping up to be a killer track.

I'm really excited about this code camp and I'm glad to have the chance to speak at it and I hope to meet some new SharePoint colleagues there to.  Well I'm about all posted out for the night.  Hope to see some of you there.

Cheers