danielwoolston.com

In 2 weeks, I’ll be covering Silverlight and Sharepoint at the West Michigan Sharepoint Users Group.
Once again, Bruce (http://blog.bruceabernethy.com) and I will be tag teaming this presentation. We’ll be covering Silverlights role in Sharepoint applications, building a demo application and deploying it to a Sharepoint site. We’ll also discuss a few of the setup issues, security considerations and deployment practices.
Details on this event:
June 2, 2009
6:00pm - 8:00pm
New Horizons
5315 28th St Ct. SE Suite B
Grand Rapids, MI  49546

O.k. I’ll admit it. In the past I have been known to bad mouth SharePoint sites for their sheer lack of style and web 2.0ishness. But seriously people..this product is coming around. Many devs/analysts out there still picture a SharePoint site as being your stock intranet MSFT blue portal:

 While its functional and great for intranet, the stock portal is not a good fit for a public facing website. And the cool thing about Sharepoint is that you not only have the integration and content management points of the API, but with a little talent and patience, a skilled designer can really deliver a top notch product:

So if your SharePoint site is ugly…its your own fault.
Thanks to Lawrence Liu (www.twitter.com/LLiu) for posting these awesome examples of what SharePoint can do when approached with an open mind!

I’d love to see more examples of outstanding SharePoint implementations, so email me or drop a comment!

-dan

Just finished the 1st of 4 videos on Sharepoint 2007 For Developers, available for free at www.dotnet-u.com.
This first hour was an overview of sp topology and security by Joshua Carlisle and it went pretty well. It was a pretty fast paced webcast that was seriously drinking from the firehose. I did come away from the video with more questions to investigate and some tasks that I’d like to accomplish on my own with Sharepoint. I have a Win2k8 vpc with MOSS2k7 ready and configured (basic config) that I’ll be using in the next few days to follow along with the various resources that I’ll be diving into. I really wish that I had a virtual environment to reproduce a small enterprise setting. A dedicated sql ’server’, a sharepoint web ui server, a dedicated sp services server and even some BizTalk for good measure. Its been my experience that 90% of the headaches are in configuration and I’d really like to start nailing down a variety of configured installations at home. Any ideas?
Tomorrow I’ll be moving on to the ‘Whats New’ Video as well as the ‘Core Concepts’ webcast. I’ll then return to my Microsoft Learning path to begin .doc and clinic expedition.