In the last two weeks, I attended the New Jersey SharePoint user group and the newly formed New York SharePoint Developers user group (as opposed to the more established New York SharePoint user group).

In New Jersey, the good people of NewsGator presented their product and covered a lot of very interesting social computing concepts.  If you’re looking to incorporate social computing into your organization in a system-assisted way and can’t get out-of-the-box SharePoint to do it for you, seriously check out NewsGator.  It’s very good stuff.  A lot of great social computing functionality and (in a demo environment at least) very well done.

I’m personally convinced that companies that begin to adopt social computing attitudes and systems will outperform those that do not.  It’s too useful to ignore or, at this point I think, to even delay.  It can make a tremendous difference in day-to-day operations if done correctly.  I’ll write some more about this later.

In New York last night, the NY SharePoint Developers group kicked off its inaugural meeting at the MSFT office on 52nd and 6th.  John Bender presented on how to create a custom stsadm extension.  I’ve read about it, but seeing it "live" clarifies things.  It’s much easier than I realized.  No need for features/solutions, just an XML file and a DLL.  He walked through a process for recursively finding and displaying security settings for sites and lists in a site collection.  He took it farther to describe how this could be part of an auditing process.  This group focuses purely on development and so doesn’t come into conflict with larger more established SharePoint user group which is frequently talking at a higher level.

There are groups all across the world.  Check them out.

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I’m speaking at the SharePoint Best Practices conference in November.

It’s sort of a funny story.  I was in Virginia presenting at the SUGDC conference and that Friday was the deadline to submit speaking proposals for the BP conference.  The organizers described how they would use a "blind selection" process and that every effort would be made to select presentation on the basis of its value, etc.  To maximize my chances of getting selected, I submitted two proposals.  The selection committee picked both.

My colleague (Natalya Voskresenskaya) and I will discuss a real-world governance model that we and our client put together for a substantial SharePoint rollout project last summer.  The objective here is to describe the details of the governance plan and why we believe it represents best practices in the context of Sharepoint, Governance and similar companies.

Second, I will present a process for obtaining great business requirements from End Users.  This goes back to one of my very early blog posts, inaptly titled "MOSS: Effective introduction to an Organization".

This conference looks to be crazily full of great information and I highly recommend tearing yourself away from your work for three days, joining in on these presentations and networking with both conference attendees and speakers.  It will be time and money well spent.

Hope to see you there 🙂

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My colleague (Natalya Voskresenskaya) and I will be speaking at the Fairfield/Westchester SharePoint User Group meeting at 6:00 PM on 07/16 (Wednesday).  We are talking about the content query web part.  This is the same (but improved version that we gave to New York in May).

Pre-register here: https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=129626&wa=wsignin1.0

Natalya and I hope to see you there!

Here’s the email Richard Martzelle just sent out on the subject:

Topic:  Using Content Query Web Part to Create Business Solutions

Speakers: Paul Galvin & Natalya Voskresenskaya

Date: July 16^th Welcome Time: (Eat & Network): 6:00PM   Time: 6:30 PM -8:00PM

Meeting Description

MOSS 2007’s Content Query Web Part (CQWP) enables users to create custom views of data queried from many sources, and present that data in one place. Despite its powerful query & content refinement options, CQWP is often an underrated and overlooked feature. CQWP is both a "data extraction engine" (find documents or list items anywhere in a site collection) and also a first-class presentation tool that enables users to control how content is presented by wrapping HTML and styles to format the display nearly any way you wish.

In this demo-heavy session, they will show how to use the CQWP to solve business problems by showing off core features

• use default CWQP features, including audience targeting

• use CWQP as a reporting tool anywhere in a site collection via filter criteria such as "all documents created today"

• change look & feel of query results to highlight business data, show additional columns of information, display information in a grid format, and others

• show how CQWP can aid in content type administration (i.e. find all documents of a particular content type so as to understand potential impact of changing a CT definition)

• describe some limitations of CQWP

• provide a list of resources for advanced CQWP techniques, including blogs, ECQWP Codeplex project & MSDN documentation

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