Sometimes my blog takes a back seat. A back seat to: my wife and kids, running a company, vacation, 350 emails due to vacation... Need any more excuses? :) Well, let me just take a moment an catch you up on what's been going on.
Kentucky Day of .NET
We're planning for the Kentucky Day of .NET event for Sept 6, 2008. Last year, I put together a SharePoint site to manage the registration process. This year, we're doing the same, but it's going to be much better. I'm going to let people signup, choose their courses and be able to cancel/change registration later. All of this is going to be done using SharePoint Designer on a WSS environment. Users will first create an FBA account and then be able to register.
My First Article: InfoPath vs. SharePoint Designer Forms
I published my first article this month. It compares browser-based forms of two technologies: InfoPath with InfoPath Form Services and forms created from SharePoint Designer. This was something I wish someone had blogged about a long time ago. It should give you some good info on deciding between the two approaches to forms. The article is here.
Three Days, Three User Groups
The past couple of years, I've done a "tour" of several Ohio user groups, presenting on various topics such as Enterprise Library and SharePoint. This past month, I managed to do three groups in a row for my 2008 Ohio tour. My first meeting was with with the Findlay Area .NET User Group, which is where I talked about data access options for SharePoint. I call it the "BDC's of Data Access in SharePoint." I covered everything from accessing data through SharePoint designer as well as using the enterprise feature of the Business Data Catalog (BDC). My second stop was in Cleveland at the second meeting of the Cleveland SharePoint User Group. Here, I spoke on the huge topic of SharePoint Workflows. This covered the basics of Workflow, building them in SharePoint Designer and building them in Visual Studio. My last stop was in Columbus, Ohio where I spoke again on SharePoint data access at the Central Ohio .NET User Group.
ISPA
The International SharePoint Professionals Association (ISPA) started up this month. This is a non-profit organization that is designed to support the needs of SharePoint User Groups all around the world. Thanks to the efforts of Bob Fox, fellow SharePoint MVP, and many others, this site will provide numerous resources to new and existing groups. As a leader for the Kentucky SharePoint User Group, we're definitely going to take advantage of what this group has to offer.
New FANUG.org
This past month I helped Gary Shank setup a new SharePoint-based site for the Findlay Area .NET User Group (FANUG), which is a group I helped start up in Findlay, Ohio about 4 years ago. This was moved from an existing site that was based on .NET Nuke. The solution now enables Gary to manage the content with much more ease than before.