The Amazing Adventures of Geek Girl : sharepoint

SharePoint Licensing Training Available for Partners

tara — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 19:07:10 GMT

Licensing for Microsoft products can be a complicated beast! To aid your understanding of SharePoint licensing, three licensing training sessions are now available – essential viewing for any SharePoint partner!

Selling’s Cool– Selling Microsoft Office SharePoint Server Solutions

Selling’s Cool – Advanced – Selling Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Solutions

Selling’s Cool – Licensing Microsoft SharePoint Technologies

Upcoming SharePoint Partner Readiness Live Meetings – Register NOW!

tara — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 18:59:04 GMT

The UK SharePoint partner team have worked long and hard to come up with a series of partner readiness sessions focused around SharePoint. Part of this is a series of sales readiness Live Meetings, known as the Live Series. Each meeting will be one hour long, and will focus on how to effectively sell a particular area of the SharePoint platform. Partners can register for these events now, using the links below.

Live Series – Portals and Collaboration

Live Series – Document Management and Records Management in SharePoint Server 2007

Live Series – E-forms in SharePoint

Live Series – Search in SharePoint Server 2007

Live Series – SharePoint Workflows

Are you using the UK SI Partner Toolkit?

tara — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 19:57:49 GMT

If not, why not?!

At the beginning of 2009, your intrepid team of Partner Technology Advisors worked night and day to create and collate all of the best resources for SharePoint, Enterprise Project Management, Unified Communications, Business Intelligence, Security and Management and Virtualisation.

We’ve included product positioning presentations, software demos, PowerPoint sales presentations, case studies, competitive insights, training and readiness, solutions and add-ons and much more into one rich media, interactive application.

Partners can use the SI Toolkit to aid in presales and consultative engagement. It’s available now for partners to download here.

Due to the sensitive nature of some of the content, a password is required to enable access and download the toolkit which can be requested via the download site.

We’re very interested to hear what you think of the SI Toolkit – do you find it useful? What should be changed/ improved? Send your feedback to uksipma@microsoft.com or directly to me.

Enterprise Search from Microsoft - Comparison

tara — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:41:33 GMT

Microsoft has three main offerings in the enterprise search space, from small scale search to solutions that are scalable to support extremely demanding search challenges. The table below, taken from the Microsoft Enterprise Search website, gives an overview of the three solutions.

Best-in-class enterprise search
for the most demanding applications

Learn more

The ability to enhance your content at the time of indexing—through content processing capabilities such as format conversion, language detection, and entity extraction—significantly increases the information's value to your users.
You need extreme scale—sub-second response time with the ability to handle millions to billions of documents.
Your user experience is critical to your business performance.
You need advanced linguistics support, such as support for Asian languages.
You want to integrate high-end enterprise search with Office SharePoint Server 2007 (optional).

Enterprise search tightly integrated
with a business productivity infrastructure

Learn more

You want an out-of-the-box solution that delivers the most frequently demanded search features.
Streamlined integration with your business productivity infrastructure is critical to your strategy and your return on investment (ROI).
You need the ability to handle millions of documents with quick response times for the average user.

Enterprise search available as a free download

Learn more

You need a quick and easy enterprise search solution that can be set up in minutes.
Speed and ease of implementation are more important than scale and sophistication of the solution.
You want a risk-free opportunity to experiment with enterprise search on a limited scale.

Internet Sites built on SharePoint Server 2007

tara — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 11:26:43 GMT

When they hear 'SharePoint', most people think intranet, but did you know some fantastic Internet sites are built on SharePoint Server 2007?

Below are some of my personal favourites:

Penguin Spinebreakers

Great use of embedded videos, search and all of the content is updated by teenagers - showing how straightforward SharePoint is to use and maintain!

Jamie Oliver's Fifteen

A very unique look (you'd never guess it was SharePoint!) plus browser based feedback forms for the restaurants.

Project Scotland

A charity website that makes fantastic use of the Forms service available in SharePoint. Click through the process of registering to become a volunteer and see the validation and conditional fields.

Ferrari

Still a relatively new site, but full of fantastic rich features, including the Maranello Experience, video tours and most importantly, the Ferrari dealer locator, using integrated Bing maps functionality.

There are many other fantastic websites built on SharePoint - have a look at the public website list available on WSS demo for more.

And finally, one quick tip for spotting SharePoint Internet sites - if you see /Pages/ in the URL, chances are it's SharePoint!

SharePoint Server 2007 - Customising the Look and Feel of Sites

tara — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 10:54:21 GMT

In this demo, recorded by Chris Parkes, a fellow PTS, we look at how the look and feel of SharePoint Server sites can be customised using the sample master pages, available to download here.

Chris shows the 4 styles, each available in different colours, and demonstrates how the layout of a SharePoint site can be changed by using SharePoint Designer, now available as a free download.

SharePoint Server 2007 - People and Personalisation

tara — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 10:44:11 GMT

In this demo, recorded by Chris Parkes, a fellow PTS, we look at how SharePoint Server can be used to find information about people within an organisation, including what distribution list memberships and colleagues you have in common.

Chris demonstrates MySites in SharePoint, including the My Home and My Profile views and the different web parts available on each page. Chris talks us through MySite functionality and shows how users can edit information and control who has permission to view different attributes.

Chris then shows the My Site location when saving documents, and the option of adding a blog to a MySite.

SharePoint Server 2007 - Collaboration

tara — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 10:36:17 GMT

In this demo, recorded by Chris Parkes, a fellow PTS, we look at how SharePoint Server can be used as a collaboration tool.

Chris creates a new SharePoint site based on the team site template, using the site creation wizard within the SharePoint interface. He then discusses document libraries and highlights some of the settings within document libraries, such as versioning, check in and check out and metadata. Chris then associates the approval workflow (available out of the box with SharePoint Server) to the document library, and shows how this workflow automatically routes documents added to the library to the HR manager for approval.

SharePoint Server 2007 - Business Processes and Forms

tara — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:34:27 GMT

In this demo, recorded by Chris Parkes, a fellow PTS, we look at how SharePoint Server can make use of InfoPath forms and workflow to improve and simplify business processes.

Chris first creates a Forms Library on a SharePoint site, to store completed InfoPath forms. He then highlights some of the features of InfoPath, including repeating tables and conditional formatting, as well as demonstrating how to configure submitted forms to the SharePoint Forms Library. Chris also highlights the compatibility settings for checking the form is suitable to be completed and submitted from within a browser. Chris then demonstrates some of the settings within the Forms Library, such as rendering the form in the web page.

By using SharePoint Designer, now available as a free download, Chris demonstrates how to create a workflow linked to the Forms Library.

Chris then shows how the InfoPath can be completed within the browser, and how the completed form is stored in the Forms Library, created at the beginning of the demo.

Office and SharePoint; Better Together - Part 6: Slide Libraries

tara — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 14:47:25 GMT

In this series of blog posts, I will be highlighting some of the integration between Office 2007 and SharePoint Server 2007. If this topic interests you, I highly recommend reading the Microsoft Office Programs and SharePoint Products and Technologies Integration – Fair, Good, Better, Best whitepaper, available from microsoft.com/downloads.

The sixth aspect of integration featured is the ability to view and reuse PowerPoint slides stored in a SharePoint slide library from within PowerPoint 2007.

Office and SharePoint; Better Together - Part 5: Workflows on Documents

tara — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 14:29:54 GMT

The fifth aspect of integration featured is the ability to create and configure new workflows associated with a document, and to complete workflow tasks from within Word 2007.

Office and SharePoint; Better Together - Part 4: Document Versioning

tara — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 14:23:22 GMT

The fourth aspect of integration featured is the ability to review previous versions of a document, and create new major or minor versions of a document from within Word 2007.

Office and SharePoint; Better Together - Part 2: Document Check In/ Check Out

tara — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 13:55:43 GMT

The second aspect of integration featured is the ability to check in and check out documents from directly within Word 2007.

Office and SharePoint; Better Together - Part 1: Document Workspaces

tara — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 13:35:22 GMT

SharePoint is an amazing product - it acts as a collaboration, portal, search, content management and business intelligence tool. However, as with most Microsoft technologies., SharePoint's capability and functionality is significantly increased when it is integrated with other technologies in the Microsoft stack.

By combining the capabilities of SharePoint Server 2007 and Office 2007, companies can provide their employees with a feature-rich yet familiar user interface. Users can interact and edit documents stored on SharePoint Server from directly within the Office clients, without needing to open a web browser. Ultimately this means new SharePoint users can make use of advanced SharePoint collaboration and document management tools directly from programs they are already comfortable with, while advanced SharePoint users can choose to interact with documents and SharePoint site either directly from SharePoint or from the Office suite.

The first aspect of integration featured is the ability to create and modify document workspaces directly from within Word 2007.

SharePoint is the Answer!

tara — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 12:11:35 GMT

Some time ago, my colleague Jess Meats recorded a parody quiz show to highlight some of the key features of SharePoint. It's well worth watching if you have 3 minutes to spare and fancy a little light relief!