With many customers and partners migrating to SharePoint 2010, one of the topics I get asked about regularly is making “safe” customizations to SharePoint and thinking about upgrades and migrations – both now and in the future. While the answer is often “it depends” there are some general guidelines...

Cross posting the event details that Jim O’Neil recently announced on his blog. The Boston launch event for Visual Studio, SharePoint and Office 2010 will take place on Thursday, April 29th, at the Westin Copley Place , with two tracks.  One, focused on developers, will cover application lifecycle...

One of the topics that I speak frequently about is using SharePoint as an application development platform. Often building solutions on top of SharePoint requires integration with external systems, people, data and processes. Microsoft is running a series of events targeted at Enterprise Architects and...

Todd Mancini has posted the presentations from our “Realizing SharePoint as a Development Platform” event here on his blog . Please stop by Todd’s blog to check these slides out. If you’re going to be in Rochester, NY on December 9 please register and attend the event there.

Yesterday, Channel 9 launched two new training courses for SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 created by developers for developers. Channel 9 has always been about giving direct access to the engineers and future technologies from Microsoft, and now we’re extending this successful formula to bring you training...

While preparing to present my 2 sessions at the “Maximize Your SharePoint Investment: Leverage It as a Development Platform!” events that we’re doing for Northeast enterprise customers in Waltham, MA (November 19) and Rochester, NY (December 9) I continue to be amazed at how rich and robust SharePoint...

Many of my customers are evaluating business intelligence (BI) solutions. There are often many business drivers behind this trend including the need for analysis, reporting, planning and forecasting. Prior to the release of Excel 2007 many customers would purchase a variety of different BI tools each...

Prior to joining Microsoft last year, I worked for more than 14 years as a Microsoft customer primarily in IT architect, development and technical management roles for large companies. Most of my recent work was related to building custom applications and forms on top of ASP.NET One area that I did...

When I meet with customers to discuss how they can use the Microsoft Office 2007 System to have a real impact on their business, I am frequently asked for proof and examples of other customers that are doing this in the real world. Having spent 14 years as a Microsoft enterprise customer myself (working...

The E2E Sales Forecast OBA walks you through a salesperson creating and submitting a quarterly sales forecast. Using a customized Excel template (built using VS 2008/VSTO), our salesperson has the ability to navigate to the team Sales Forecast portal (SharePoint portal), invoke a custom Excel sales forecast...

Jim O’Neil will be presenting at events this week during which he’ll be doing some presentations on Office Business Applications (OBAs) geared towards IT developers. Here’s a link to his blog with the details and information on how to register: http://blogs.msdn.com/jimoneil/archive/2008/09/26...

I just returned from the Microsoft Global Exchange (MGX) sessions in Atlanta and was blown away by all of the great things that Microsoft is doing. More news on that soon ... I will be going to TechReady soon to get a deeper dive on some of the technologies, including Office Business Applications...

I'm still recovering this morning from watching and celebrating the Boston Celtics winning their 17th NBA World Championship last night. It's hard to believe that just last year they were at the bottom of the league. Before the trades and work to assemble the new "Big 3" (Pierce, Garnett and Allen) people...