Last year the SharePoint community in New Zealand hosted the very successful SharePoint community conference in Wellington.  This year they are doing it again. 

This is the New Zealand conference to learn about both SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 with expert local and international speakers presenting on topics that will help you understand and succeed with your SharePoint implementations and add real value to your organisation and businesses.

In addition to the session content you'll have ample opportunities to network with your peers in the community and technical and industry experts including local and international Microsoft Most Valued Professionals and New Zealand's top Certified Partners.

Don’t miss out on New Zealand's biggest SharePoint event of the year
Wellington June 9 and 10!

The unique thing about this conference is that it is for both business and technical communities.  Both were very well catered for last year and many business users who attended enjoyed seeing how others were using SharePoint and talking with each other about how to do things with SharePoint that they hadn’t thought about in the past.

If you are a SharePoint expert or if you’ve used SharePoint to drive business change in your organization, there is an opportunity to share your knowledge with the rest of the community.  The convenors of the conference is looking for speakers, so get your suggestion in by emailing them at info@sharepointconference.co.nz.

The registration fee is $600 per person, group bookings are available, and they expect to sell out, so get your registration in today.

We’re looking forward to being there and sponsoring the event, so I look forward to seeing you there!

Full details including registration are available at www.sharepointconference.co.nz.

If you are in Australia, the same organizers are working with the Australian community to do the same in Australia.  Details of the Australian conference are here.

Just a quick note in case you missed it, that SQL Server 2008 R2 will be hitting the pricelist (i.e. available for purchase) in May.

Full details here.

I’ve been a little remiss not posting an update to the ignite training earlier.  The Ignite training originally scheduled for January (as detailed in my last post) has been rescheduled for the following dates.

• March 8-12 – Ignite Developer – Wellington
• March 15-19 – Ignite Infrastructure – Auckland

With Ian Morrish changing roles, we’ve needed to get another infrastructure trainer, so we have got Patrick Harkin from Intergen who will be doing the training.  Patrick has plenty of experience and credentials in SharePoint having passed the SharePoint Elite Infrastructure exam on the first attempt back in August (the first person to pass this exam).  He has also been working with SharePoint 2010 for some time and has recently been to Singapore to go through the Ignite training there.

We’ve managed to retain Wayne Ewington from Microsoft Consulting to do the Development training in Wellington.  Wayne has been working on SharePoint for some time and was in India recently doing the SharePoint Ignite Training.

The pricing remains at $1650.  There are limited seats, so get in quick.

SharePoint 2010 offers enhancements to drive productivity, a scalable unified infrastructure, and flexible deployment. We are enabling partners to get trained early on SharePoint 2010 and learn about these new features and enhancements through SharePoint 2010 Ignite.

SharePoint 2010 Ignite is technical training for SharePoint 2007 professionals who are looking to upgrade their skills to SharePoint 2010.

There are two Ignite offerings, Ignite for the IT Pro and Ignite for the Developer. Each track will cover 5 days/40 hours of technical training and content:

SharePoint 2010 Ignite for Developers

For developers: SharePoint 2010 provides the business collaboration platform to rapidly build solutions and respond to business needs. The training will show partners how to build custom applications with SharePoint 2010.

Trainer: Wayne Ewington (Microsoft Consulting)
Dates: March 8-12 (Auldhouse, Wellington)

SharePoint 2010 Ignite for IT Professionals

For IT professionals: SharePoint 2010 offers enhancements to drive productivity, a scalable unified infrastructure, and flexible deployment. The audience for the SharePoint Ignite IT Pro includes SharePoint 2007 professionals who are experienced in deploying and supporting SharePoint 2007 implementations. This training is designed to assist SharePoint 2007 professionals in their preparation to implement SharePoint 2010 projects.

Trainer: Patrick Harkin (Microsoft Consulting)
Dates: March 15-19 (Cliftons, Auckland)

Cost: $1650 ex GST per person

Register by calling Avenues on 0800 832 433 or emailing microsoftevents@avenues.co.nz or register online.

I’m pleased to be able to announce the availability of SharePoint 2010 Ignite training. This is the first training opportunity we have in New Zealand to give SharePoint people a good hands on overview of SharePoint 2010 and what it will mean to their day to day workload.

I expect these places to fill up, so make sure you register quickly.

SharePoint 2010 offers enhancements to drive productivity, a scalable unified infrastructure, and flexible deployment. We are enabling partners to get trained early on SharePoint 2010 and learn about these new features and enhancements through SharePoint 2010 Ignite.

SharePoint 2010 Ignite is technical training for SharePoint 2007 professionals who are looking to upgrade their skills to SharePoint 2010.

There are two Ignite offerings, Ignite for the IT Pro and Ignite for the Developer. Each track will cover 5 days/40 hours of technical training and content:

SharePoint 2010 Ignite for IT Professionals

For IT professionals: SharePoint 2010 offers enhancements to drive productivity, a scalable unified infrastructure, and flexible deployment. The audience for the SharePoint Ignite IT Pro includes SharePoint 2007 professionals who are experienced in deploying and supporting SharePoint 2007 implementations. This training is designed to assist SharePoint 2007 professionals in their preparation to implement SharePoint 2010 projects.

Trainer: Ian Morrish (Microsoft Consulting)
Dates: Jan 25-29 (Auckland only)

SharePoint 2010 Ignite for Developers

For developers: SharePoint 2010 provides the business collaboration platform to rapidly build solutions and respond to business needs. The training will show partners how to build custom applications with SharePoint 2010.

Trainer: Wayne Ewington (Microsoft Consulting)
Dates: Jan 18-22 (Auckland), Jan 25-29 (Wellington)

Cost: $1650 ex GST per person

Register by calling Avenues on 0800 832 433 or emailing microsoftevents@avenues.co.nz or register online.

Last week the Office 2010 beta was released.  This includes both the office client as well as SharePoint 2010 (see my previous post for download links).

So, given this, I thought I’d sit down with Jonathan Stuckey, Solution Specialist for Office and spend some time exploring what is new in Office 2010 and why  its worth downloading and planning for.

This podcast is a little longer than normal at 30 minutes. Once you’ve listened, if you haven’t already, download the Beta from here.

Just a quick heads up.  If you are involved in SharePoint today, and want to go to the SharePoint 2010 Ignite training we are planning for January – you’ll need to be certified.  That’s right – you’ll need to have your exams done and dusted before you can register for the training.

The exams are easy (no – really they are), so if you’ve been working with SharePoint extensively for over a year, just book a date and go sit them. If you haven’t been working with SharePoint that long or extensively, you might want to do some study first, but you shouldn’t have too much trouble preparing.

The exams you’ll want to cover are as follows:

For developers:

- Exam 70-541: TS: Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 - Application Development

- Exam 70-542 TS: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 - Application Development

For Infrastructure or IT Pros:

- Exam 70-631: TS: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Configuring

- Exam 70-630: TS: Office SharePoint Server 2007, Configuring

Just thought you’d want to know.  Oh, and yes there will be a fee to go on the Ignite training, but it will be reasonable – just enough to cover costs.

This morning we officially released the Beta for SharePoint 2010 (although MSDN and TechNet subscribers have access for a few days) and Office 2010.

What’s new in SharePoint 2010?  A few weeks ago I sat down with Chris Johnson from the SharePoint team and recorded a podcast that explores some of the new features in SharePoint 2010 – have a listen to see what is new.

In Office 2010, there are also a bunch of new features, but here are just a few worth watching out for:

1. Revamped Outlook client – full ribbon support, and a heap of new features including user experience, one click mail management, ignore entire conversation threads, inline voice mail and voicemail to text previews
2. Excel Business intelligence – pull massive amounts of data into Excel and mix it up with other data sources – Trade Me (for example) are looking to use this to analyze every trade ever done on Trade Me – with a standard desktop machine and Excel.
3. Collaboration – this is a sleeper.  Multiple people can now work on the same document/sheet/etc at the same time in different locations.
4. SharePoint Workspace – take SharePoint sites offline and sync them automatically – very cool

Look for more on Office 2010 in next week’s podcast.

For the moment, go and get the bits from the links below:

• Office 2010 Beta
• SharePoint 2010 Beta

In addition to SharePoint and Office, we have also shipped a bunch of other goodies too:

• SQL Server 2008 R2 November CTP
• SQL Server 2008 R2 - PowerPivot for Excel 2010 November CTP
• Exchange 2010 RTM Trial
• Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM Trail
• Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2
• Silverlight 4
• Forefront Security

Plenty to tinker with if you have the time and inclination – get into it!

Since Ray Ozzie came on board there has been a stream of work in progress at Microsoft that is designed to allow Microsoft to build and deliver cloud based solutions to customers big and small around the world.

Part of this vision for the cloud includes turn-key enterprise applications such as Exchange Online and SharePoint online and the rest of the BPOS suite, but in addition, we have been hard at work to produce a cloud offering that allows ordinary .Net developers (as well as the anything but ordinary New Zealand .Net community) to write code for and deploy solutions.

In this podcast, Scott Wylie gives us a brief overview of Microsoft Azure – including how to pronounce it!