SharePoint Saturday Austin Texas

 

What a great time in Austin!  The organizers Bruce Weatherford, Jim Bob Howard, Justin Ong, Matthew Lathrop, and Richard Calderon did an amazing job.

I spoke on Developing Provider Hosted SharePoint apps.  You can download my slides at:

• SlideShare
• SkyDrive

I got to sit on a couple of talks, Becky Isserman’s “iOS Development with SharePoint 2013” and Liam Cleary’s “Think you can hack SharePoint” (pictured to the right).  Both great talks.  If you want to learn how to secure SharePoint, you must see Liam speak.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Also great to meet the SharePoint Giant (Shaun Nichols) who lives up to his twitter handle when standing next to Richard Calderon, the amazing chief organizer of SharePoint Saturday Austin.

 

 

 

I’ll be presenting my talk again at the March 13th Boston Area SharePoint User Group, so hope to see you there.

Happy SharePointing!

SharePoint Saturday New York City

Just returned today from NYC where I presented “PowerShell and SharePoint”. I was also honored to be a member of a four person panel called “Jumpstart Your SharePoint Community Efforts” including SharePoint Saturday cofounder Susan Lennon, SharePoint Saturday Los Angeles organizer Nedra Allmond, and Sharing the Point founder Paul Swider who travels the edges of the world spreading his SharePoint knowledge.  The panel was moderated by none other than Christian Buckley, SharePoint Saturday world traveler, Microsoft SharePoint MVP and Director of Product Evangelism at Axceler.

 

JumpStart Your SharePoint Community Efforts

This panel was quite fun.  I tried to focus on the difference between commercial trade shows like SPTechCon and free community events like SharePoint Saturday.  One of the views I expressed is that it is important for SharePoint Saturday organizers to be cognizant of the role of SharePoint Saturday, which is not to compete with commercial trade shows, but to compliment them.  For example if you are organizing a SharePoint Saturday, try to plan it so it does not fall near the date of a commercial trade show.  Otherwise it will hurt their business.  Also, professional conferences are designed to make money, so it is their responsibility to there paying customers to bring in the best and most experienced speakers.  While the opposite is true with SharePoint Saturday and other community events, which are responsible for building the community by giving inexperienced speakers and local experts the opportunity to present on SharePoint.  As the co-founder of SharePoint Saturday Boston and SharePoint Saturday Hartford, I feel it is our responsibility to provide a mix of experienced globe trotters with first timers and people who are trying to break into the speaking circuit.  SharePoint Saturday is about community and offering a free place for like minded people to share there experiences with each other during non-business hours for those who can’t afford to miss work.

One of the things that we at the Boston Area SharePoint User Group (BASPUG) do to provide a synergy with commercial tradeshows like SPTechCon is to work with them to have our monthly meeting at the trade show.  This brings in more people into the conference vendor area where they can browse the booths, but in return, we get a change of venue and some wonderful speakers to form an “Experts Panel”.  So if you are starting a SharePoint Saturday or SPUG, work with other tradeshows and vendors in the area to create a win-win scenario to help build the community.  Geoff Varosky, spearheaded this effort, and it has become a tradition for us at BAPSUG.

Another thing that is important successful community groups is leadership.  I am fortunate to be on a team of incredible community leaders at BASPUG, including my other co-founders Geoff Varsoky and Eugene Rosenfeld, and our new co-organizer Dan Diachenko.  It is really a team effort and these guys are fantastic.

I have worked very closely with Michael Lotter, the other founder of SharePoint Saturday, who helped me launch SharePoint Saturday Boston.  But until this weekend, I haven’t had the opportunity to spend much time with Susan Lennon, the other founder of SharePoint Saturday, who now works for Microsoft.  So it was quite a privilege to be on the panel with her and hear her views on SharePoint Saturday, the original goals of SharePoint Saturday, and her advice regarding organizing community events.

Nedra Allmond spoke about her efforts organizing SharePoint Saturday Los Angeles and dealing with the challenges of a SharePoint user group in San Fernando Valley SharePoint Professionals User Group which is very spread out.  So if you are in the Los Angeles area, check out their meetup and provide her with feedback on what topics you would like to see presented, locations and times that are convenient.

 Paul Swider talked about Sharing the Point Africa 2012, which although is sponsored, requires many of the speakers to pay out of their pocket to bring SharePoint to places that don’t have the luxuries of SPUG’s (SharePoint User Groups) and huge conferences that USA and Europe afford.  So big up to Paul Swider, Jim Bob Howard, Michael Noel, Mark Miller, and all the other Sharing the Point presenters.

 

 

PowerShell and SharePoint

I have been presenting on this topic for a while, and while I usually like to present on something different every time I speak, it requires a ton of effort and is not always perfect the first time.  So I have had a lot of time to practice this talk and it paid off, the reviews were all 5 of 5 (except for one who gave me a couple of 3’s).  I have included my slides below on SlideShare, and you can download the source code from Box:

Download "PowerShell and SharePoint" Demo Source Code here.

Here are the slides from PowerShell and SharePoint presented at SharePoint Saturday New York City:

PowerShell and SharePoint @spsnyc July 2012 from Talbott Crowell

 

Rhode Island SharePoint User Group

If you missed the presentation and you are in the Rhode Island area, I will be presenting it again on this Wednesday, August 1st, at the inaugural meeting of the new Rhode Island SharePoint User Group (RISPUG) founded by Joshua Cliff.  It will be held at Providence College.  For more information check out the meetup site.  Hope to see you there!

SharePoint Saturday Boston

We had a great SharePoint Saturday Boston over the weekend with a record turnout of 300+ and a sold out event.  Big thank you to all the speakers, volunteers, and sponsors for making it all possible!

I presented on “PowerShell and SharePoint”.  If you missed it, or you want to download the slides or sample code here are a couple of links:

• Download PowerShell sample code here
• View or download slides here

If you would like to download slides from other speakers, check out the SharePoint Saturday Boston Twitter feed @SPSBoston.

MEF and Silverlight

I presented an intro talk on MEF at Code Camp 14 in Waltham last Saturday.  This talk goes through a simple example of creating a plug in framework using .NET 4.o and then making some minor changes to move that framework to Silverlight 4.  Also in this talk we demonstrated a more sophisticated example created by Gill Cleeren called Building a App Marketplace with MEF.

Download slides and code samples:

• “MEF and Silverlight” PowerPoint Slides
• Simple MEF with .NET 4 code sample
• Simple MEF with Silverlight 4 code sample

Automating SharePoint with PowerShell

At SharePoint Saturday Boston, I gave a talk on Automating SharePoint with PowerShell.  Here is the description:

PowerShell is a powerful scripting environment and language for developers and administrators.  SharePoint 2010 has built in PowerShell administration commandlets, but you can use this powerful scripting language with any version of SharePoint.  Using PowerShell, Talbott will demonstrate how you can build and deploy SharePoint sites for development, testing, proof of concepts, and production.  Using an agile methodology, you will learn how to leverage PowerShell scripts for your planning and development process.

The slides are available on the SharePoint Saturday Boston site.

For those of you who were interested in the code samples, here you go: http://www.box.net/shared/u1hvgff2s7

Enjoy.

Silverlight and Excel Services at SharePoint Saturday NYC

I’ll be presenting at the NYC Microsoft office at the SharePoint Saturday event on using Silverlight as a front end to Excel Services this Saturday, Feb 21. 

 

 

Code Camp in near Hartford, CT

I will be speaking at Code Camp at CTDOTNET (Connecticut .Net Developers Group) today on the topic Silverlight as a front end to Excel Services.

My slides are available for download here:
http://cid-a6e0da836d488ca6.skydrive.live.com/embedrowdetail.aspx/Public/SilverlightfrontendtoExcelServices.pptx

Excel Services and Silverlight, a dynamic duo

Excel Services is a component of MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007) that brings the capabilities of Excel to the server side.  In the past, customers and programmers that wished to add Excel calculation logic to the server needed to use ActiveX and COM to instantiate Excel’s Application object.  This unfortunately was not an ideal model for a scalable server-side enterprise application and required a few tricks to make it perform and scale well.   With Excel Services, much of the functionality of Excel’s client application is brought to the server and can run in the context of MOSS which is highly scalable.  Some Excel features like macros and VBA code are not supported on Excel Services (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms496823.aspx).  But many of these limitations can be overcome using Excel Services User-Defined Functions which can be written in VB.NET or C#.

 

My company, ThirdM.com, was enlisted to build a demonstration of the power and flexibility of Excel Services by Elliott Ichimura and Bob Daniels of Microsoft.  In this scenario, Litware, a professional services company, needs a project planning application built on Excel to work with their customers to decide on those three important factors in every project: duration, deliverables, and fees (also known as schedule, scope, and resources).   Litware, like many companies use Excel to do many business calculations and ad-hoc analysis.  This is Litware’s what-if scenario for project planning:

 

   

To see the full spreadsheet click here. Litware has all of the project planning logic in Excel and does not want to reproduce this logic in C# or some other programming language, since it may change.  Also, the people who need to change the business logic are not programmers. 

 

In order to be more agile, Litware has chosen to leverage Excel Services to host the business logic.  Programmers were brought in to build a flashy UI on top of the Excel logic using Silverlight 2.0 and Web Services.  The Excel spreadsheet is exposed though Excel Web Services which allows the business users to update their logic without the need to change the UI.   

 

 

Click here to view the full Silverlight and Excel Services demo.  Click on the deliverables bar to change the deliverables.  Drag on the Duration bar to change the duration of the project (make it longer and shorter).  Drag the fee bar to the left to change the fee scaling which will deselect deliverables based on an prioritization logic expressing in Excel.  Toggle between Extranet and Intranet view to see what Litware will see for profit and use the Rates button to offer a discounted rate which will reduce the fees but also reduce the profit. 

 

This Silverlight demo uses Excel Services as a backend to recalculate the logic.  A copy of the spreadsheet is kept alive in a session for each user.  When the user clicks "Save" the session copy saves back to the SharePoint document library that hosts the business logic.