I just got an email through from Nick Swan of the UK SharePoint user group on an interesting event in London at the end of the month. He says:

“many of you who are using twitter and reading blogs will have heard of Dux Raymond as he’s very involved in the SharePoint community over in the States. In August he is over here for a visit and has kindly agreed to come and present at a user group meeting. As he’s traveling such a long way we’ve decided to give him both sessions! (and the abstracts he sent were difficult to choose between! 🙂 )

Session 1:

7 Ways to Leverage SharePoint for Project Management Success ============================================

In this presentation, you acquire the practical knowledge of how SharePoint can address common project management challenges such as inefficient communication among stakeholders, poor document management practices and undefined project collaboration standards that can compromise project success. SharePoint provides a framework that can empower project managers to create a standards-based PMIS.

Session 2:

Best Practices in Gathering Requirements for SharePoint Projects ============================================

Poor requirements can be attributed to failed SharePoint implementations. The key to successful SharePoint implementation is properly developing requirements. A lot of people know that this is important, however, only a handful of folks truly understand what it takes to do this right.

The meeting will be held at the Microsoft offices in Victoria. For more details, and to sign up – please visit the following forum thread:

http://m1e.net/c?104260145-0WYjgfpG4mCng%404485729-jgS.0XUDvmRO%2e  “

I like what Steve Marx has done over on his blog with an intro to Windows Azure – go look, its only 4 minutes long to watch his video.

Run on over to the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog where they have posted an update to the expiration issue with SP2, it is a workaround fix and hopefully a corrected SP2 download will be around in the next 4-6 weeks.

Andrew Connell, one of the people to follow on SharePoint Web content management, and also the author of the best (ok the only) book on SharePoint Web Content Management, has just posted up a blog post to follow up his excellent presentations at Tech Ed EMEA in November 2008.

I’ve got to get a good dig around in it, but the promise was that it would be a reference site for architecture as well as demos. Go see what Andrew Connell says on Adventureworks.

I’ve been following @harbars on twitter and knew he was over in the ‘States doing the Microsoft Certified Master Program, but reading through the other list of attendees just goes to show what a unique experience that R2 session was – most of R2 (as was R1) of the Program were Microsoft folks.

So even more congratulations to Spence on the achievement.

Check out the MCM Blog posting on it, and the SharePoint team posting.

PS: Did I tell you that I used to work with Spence ? 😉

A shorter than normal week with SharePoint for me – I had Monday off in recuperative mode from my motocrossing, and I had a couple of days back in the office for the first time in weeks which meant the usual catching up with expenses and the other admin sort of stuff that happens.

Tuesday marked the completion of an exercise in productionising of a SharePoint pilot that has been running for several months on a small farm running on a couple of virtual machines. This had a few interesting attributes, due to budget we found ourselves going from Enterprise Edition to Standard Edition, and we also had the small interest of going to a medium farm – dedicated hardware for two Web Front Ends, an Index Server and SQL Server. We also had another physical server to use as a SQL Mirror. My job on Tuesday was picking up some snagging once the migrated site went live and setting up the SQL Mirror.

Generally the migration was ok, but we had some challenges around network infrastructure – I’ll be compiling a list of network prerequisites which will help future processes go more smoothly. This time it was more the change control around the infrastructure rather than anything to do with patches or the like.

It was a good opportunity to get some hands on work with Network Load Balancing – unicast with two network cards, but make sure you have them all patched in to your switches correctly.

Then I had a nice visit to a company to talk about Disaster Recovery and SQL Server 2005 Mirroring, so good for me from a consulting perspective as I had to be able to explain what happens with transactions so that we could set up server monitoring properly and also plan a suitably nasty and representative DR test with the application. I’d recommend that in the absence of a DBA that you get the right events coming through to a central monitor such as System Center Operations Manager but if you haven’t got there yet then SQL Server Agent alerts are very easy to set up to work with Mirroring Monitor.

And a great opportunity to remind myself how useful System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) is for looking after SQL Server if you don’t have one of those DBA types around – it gives you a very nice UI to hide you from the fun of Full Recovery Models and Log File Restoration. The tech is still there behind the scenes, but DPM uses it on your behalf.

And after I laid down my SQL Server 2005 hat on Friday, I helped out with a small deployment challenge to a website developed with SharePoint – approval workflows were making the deployment of new landing pages quite interesting. The workflows had been created quite correctly from a user perspective, with a nice decentralised page approval model. Unfortunately those little site navigation changes we were trying to deploy led to a little fight between the developer who was doing sterling work on Good Friday and approval workflows set up during the week before. It will all be good once the site moves in to production, but as a developer we have to take a little more time navigating the system.

Andrew Connell’s article has finally appeared on MSDN and I’d recommend that you pour over it to understand how to choose and use the appropriate containers for content in Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007.

Understanding Field Controls … on MSDN