Collaborpedia

Written by: Shadeed Eleazer

View video here

The video is an in-depth discussion of the impact of microblogging platform Twitter.com within the SharePoint community. The presentation of the video is a back-and-forth discussion between Quest SharePoint Architect and author of uber-popular blog sharepointjoel, Joel Oleson and Principal Architect for Sogeti Consulting and Co-Founder of the Baltimore SharePoint User’s Group Eric Harlan.

Twitter is a mainstay within the SharePoint community. It has a great impact on conferences, most notably SharePoint Saturday events. It has introduced the community to a growing new crop of speakers that will become the future experts and MVPs of tomorrow.

Written by: Mr. Shadeed Eleazer

DimDim has announced the release of its new Webinar offering. Leveraging DimDim Webinar enables conference organizers to host sessions of up to 1,000 participants and monetize the experience.

How Does DimDim Webinar Differ from Competing Web Conferencing Apps?
DimDim Webinar allows 1,000 users to attend scheduled webinars through browser based accessibility.
Citrix’ GotoMeeting and WebEx require a software installation on each workstation that is accessing the web conference. DimDim Webinar promises an increase in speed and performance as opposed to its competitors by leveraging browser based conferencing.

Monetize Your Time Online
In a strategic coup, DimDim webinar has partenered with event ticketing service Eventbrite to enable Webinar users to sell tickets and track attendees.

Additional Promo Widget
DimDim Webinar is packaged with a widget that allows conference organizers to embed within any webpage and social networking profile. The widget now allows attendees to sign-up for webinars from locations that organizers specify.

For more information on DimDim web conferencing, log-on to DimDim.com

Baltimore SharePoint User’s Group August Meeting Recap
Written by: Shadeed Eleazer

Fresh off the overwhelming success of hosting the first SharePoint Saturday event to be held in the greater Baltimore region, the little engine that could aka Baltimore SharePoint User’s Group would resume our normal meetings on Thursday, August 20th, 2009.

There were a few burning questions that the organizational staff had for this meeting, one of which being:

What would be the meeting turnout due to at least 100 of the attendees of #spsbmore discovering BSPUG for the very first time?

For this meeting, SharePoint Author/Developer Jeff Webb was scheduled to deliver his presentation on Configuring Complex SharePoint Security.
Jeff is excellent with the dynamic nature of the SharePoint demo. He fielded each question successfully and stayed behind after the close of the meeting to field discussions in greater detail.

There were several new faces in the crowd, and after it was mentioned that they left with a good impression of the group. Most interesting new member is a Sous Chef, who is “curious to learn about technology”. During our audience introductions, there was sort of a stigma being attached to “not knowing a lot about SharePoint”. I felt it was necessary to re-inforce the concept that we ALL start somewhere. The best approach is to develop a lifetime learning approach to SharePoint in order to increase proficiency.
In addition to that, Columbia, MD based consulting firm Intellisae joined us for the meeting. Their top developers were in attendance alongside their Principal Lead so they were definitely well-represented by the group. They also are looking for top-notch .Net talent, so if interested in opportunities with the firm, please contact me.

This meeting couldn’t have gone on successfully without the aid of volunteers from our member community including hauling food and beverages to the 3rd floor and hanging up signs. Eric joined us for the intro of the meeting before hopping on a flight to London. He set up the livestream of the meeting which was very, very helpful.

Join the Baltimore SharePoint User’s Group for September’s meeting where we will welcome Linc Williams to deliver a great presentation.
Pics and footage of Jeff’s presentation are on the way.

Overall, I left with a good feeling on how this meeting turned out. This is what the SharePoint community is all about, a mix of seasoned professionals interacting with people totally new but curious about the platform. It is our goal as a User Group to provide an experience that is relevant to all skill levels that attend our meetings.

Special Thanks
Surfray and the UMBC Tech Center for sponsorship of food and location.

About Baltimore SharePoint User’s Group:
When: Every third Thursday of the month, doors open at 6pm
Where:UMBC Tech Center 1450 South Rolling Road, Halethorpe, MD 21223
Cost: Membership and meeting attendance is FREE
Info: www.baltimoresug.org
Updates: www.twitter.com/baltsharepoint

Learn the ropes at The Micropreneur Academy
Written by: Shadeed Eleazer
Rob Walling has developed what is billed as the first online academy for software entrepreneurs entitled The Micropreneur Academy (www.Micropreneur.com).

What Is It?
The Micropreneur Academy is both parts web based community and online training program geared towards practicing and potential software entrepreneurs. Through peer-to-peer advice and courses, the objective is to transform software startups from ground floor to launch in as little as 4 months.

The creator, Rob Walling (www.SoftwareByRob.com), is a full-time Serial Micropreneur based in Fresno, California. Rob is the main force behind the Academy, but guest contributors include Bob Walsh, author of “Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality”, and Ian Ozsvald of ProCasts.co.uk.

What will Members Learn?
Phase I begins with defining Micropreneur goals and progresses through product development followed by business development, accounting, and venture capital processes. Each module contains up to 10 individual lessons.

What Apps Have Been Developed from Micropreneur Academy members?
Products such as social photo sharing app Pixur.me, online mind mapping tool ThoughtMuse, web based proposal software BidSketch, domain name idea engine HotNameList, foreclosure listing site flip-start, and several others.

Breakdown of Modules
Module 1: Introduction to Micropreneurship
Exchanging software for cash is the revenue model most of us think of, but there are many models available for one-person companies. In this lesson we look at your options and discuss the best time to use each approach.

Module 2: Building the Right Product
Estimating demand is one thing, but watching real people visit your website and decide whether to buy is another. This lesson looks at how, for less than $100, you can test traffic, click through rates and conversions before you build your product.

Module 3: Taking the Risk Out of Buying a Product
In this lesson we’ll look at how three purchase transactions played out.

Module 4: Creating a Killer Sales Website
Privacy policies, terms of use, copyright.should you bother with any of these? How can you create the legal documents you need without forking over a month’s rent to your lawyer?

Module 5: Proven Methods for Traffic Generation
Viral marketing has arguably the highest ROI of any form of internet marketing. Add social applications to the mix and you have the potential to very quickly generate a substantial number of users for your application.

Module 6: Growing Profits through Analytics
A/B and multivariate testing are powerful, but how do you determine what to vary in these tests? This lesson takes an in-depth look at specific approaches to increasing conversion rates.

Module 7: Launch and Beyond
The day after launch you’re going to start receiving feature requests. How do you manage them, develop the product and provide support all at the same time? This lesson takes a detailed look at how to make it happen.

Module 8: Case Studies
I built and launched a product a few years ago that went viral and garnered several hundred links in a few days from high-profile sites. The success was great but I had no idea how to monetize it.

Module 9: More on Building the Right Product
It would be nice to say “Micropreneurs never give up,” but the real answer is that sometimes an idea just isn’t going to fly. This lesson looks at how and when to make that decision.

Module 10: More Proven Methods for Traffic Generation
If you choose your niche wisely you can often own many of the top search keywords through SEO alone. But often there are related keywords that don’t directly apply to your product website. That’s where Satellite websites come in.

Module 11: Your Business

Cost of Membership
The Academy is $97 per month

What is a Micropreneur?
A Micropreneur is a highly technical entrepreneur who values time, location and income independence; in other words, the ability to control when and where she works, and how much money she makes. Micropreneurs automate ruthlessly and use outsourcing extensively.

Micropreneurship is about building and marketing niche software products and web applications.
The goals of a Micropreneur are simple: retain the ability to write code (if you choose), support yourself financially with no employees, and work when and where you like.

Discovery Communications has announced the launch of the new Discovery Channel App available on the App Store.
Doug Craig, Senior VP, Digital and Home Entertainment offers, “Consumers are increasingly looking to enjoy their entertainment while mobile and our new Discovery Channel App offers the ultimate on-the-go fan experience for iPhone and iPod touch.

Other features to the app include photo galleries, updates, and schedules for programming and a link to the iTunes Store for access to additional episodes.

The Discovery Channel App is available for free at www.itunes.com/appstore/.

Video of the first viewed footage of PS3 Slim. Source: UltimatePlaystation.com

PS 3 Slim is set to hit the market at a reduced price of $299 while keeping the same features intact from its heavier models.

Tale of the Tape:

Hard Drive 120GB
Availability 1st week of September 2009
USB Ports: Two
Uses significantly less power than heavier models

Current Model PS3 is discounted to $299
160 GB PS3 is $399

Uber-social networking site Facebook has started beta testing a new page entitled Facebook Lite.

What is It?

Facebook Lite allows Facebook users to perform real-time searches on the status updates of other Facebook users.

How Does Facebook Lite Provide an Advantage for Facebook?

Facebook can begin to leverage sites outside of its network through leveraging Friendfeed, which is a social networking content aggregator that it recently agreed to purchase in August 2009.

Being that Friendfeed also integrates seamlessly with Twitter, Facebook could access Twitter search results and integrate within Facebook’s user interface, thus bringing content from all over the web into a single browser experience.

The race to search supremacy is full-steam ahead as Yahoo has outsourced search functionality to Microsoft and Bing’s search engine allows for prioritization of news events in association with inbound links to those events.

Written by: Shadeed Eleazer, Collaborpedia

Click image to view Madden 2010 trailer video

Today marks the release of Madden 2010 on PS2, PS3, Playstation Portable, Wii, iPhone, and XBOX systems. Few games cause a frenzy such as the Madden franchise, which has exploded in popularity due to the “culture” of online gaming, tournaments, and yearly releases of the product.

Madden NFL features new features that enables gamers to have more control over the final outcome of each play. Plays don’t end in 2010 until the whistle blow.
Other features include:
Improved TV broadcast look and camera angles.
New Highlight shows displaying action throughout the NFL
Improved online gameplay
Enhanced line-of-scrimmage play
Gang tackles and fighting for fumbles.

Note: Ex-Falcons QB Michael Vick will also be added as Eagles backup QB during the August Update.

Written by: Shadeed Eleazer, Collaborpedia

Soundcloud.com has added a new feature that enables users to publish Soundcloud event to MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter profiles. Events can trigger status updates based on track upload, creating a playlist, or favoriting a new track.

What is Soundcloud?

SoundCloud: The Tour from SoundCloud on Vimeo.

Soundcloud.com operates as the middle-man for music file sharing. The main component is a music dashboard that allows users to upload and play tracks and provide comments before sending them to other profiles. Other enhancements include a fully-brandable widget enabling websites to display a “Send Me Music” button. The following file formats are fully supported: AIFF, WAVE, FLAC, OGG, MP3, AAC files.

Unlimited File size on transfers | Individual URL for each track | Track Updates from “Friends”

Friendfeed, a startup founded in 2007 by former employees of Google, has been purchased by Facebook, after an agreement was made on Monday.

The company infrastructure will be absorbed by Facebook and Friendfeed’s 12 employees will move from its headquarters in Mountain View, California to Palo Alto.

There are several details to iron out, such as an integration plan for the future, but I foresee this decision as one of several to come that aids Facebook’s evolution into all-in-one portal resource complete with payment processor and real-time search and communication capabilities.

Written by: Shadeed Eleazer

On the aftermath of a great event such as SharePoint Saturday Baltimore, held on the weekend of July 24th at the UMBC Tech Center, the consensus was that:

A.) We will definitely do this again

B.) After attending several SharePoint Saturday events, certain aspects of the event have set new standards

C.) How we organized this event would definitely benefit other organizers of SharePoint Saturday events worldwide.

I’m embarking on this whitepaper journey and I will be leveraging the unique viewpoints of our organizational staff and event volunteers.

Twitter.com has re-designed their homepage to highlight its search feature and to include trending topics. It seems that Twitter finally understands that its main benefit is capitalizing on the moment.

Do you like the change that Twitter has made? Leave comments.

As the first SharePoint Saturday held outside of US borders, SharePoint Saturday Toronto signified the international expansion of the widely popular community event.

Attendance was counted at a whopping 300 participants. Held onsite at Microsoft Canada in Ontario, Canada the event definitely did not disappoint.

Sessions were broken down into Developer, Administrator, and Special Interest learning tracks.

Topics included but were not limited to:  Leveraging InfoPath Forms in SharePoint by: Ed Musters, Delegate Controls: What, Where and How by Shai Patel, How to Improve the SharePoint Search Experience by: Serge Tremblay and many more.

With Copenhagen on tap for August, SharePoint Saturday is officially a worldwide event.

View Ruven’s photo album hosted on Picaso: http://picasaweb.google.ca/ruveng/20090712SharePointSaturdayToronto?authkey=Gv1sRgCNGiyoaDhuuVFg&feat=directlink#

Photo credit: by @ricknology

Box.net is putting their money where their mouth is in the battle for enterprise 2.0 supremacy.

Box.net, the collaboration service has launched the “Box.net vs. SharePoint challenge”

Enterprises who sign up with Box.net for the free 14 day trial business edition. If businesses are not satisfied with the trial, then they get SharePoint paid for three months paid for.

Read more about the story originally reported by Read Write Web.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_gloves_come_off_in_the_boxnet_vs_sharepoint.php

The registration for the first SharePoint Saturday to hit Baltimore has opened today. At the time of this post, only 9 tickets remain, which is an excellent first day turnout. SharePoint Saturday events tend to have quicker registration than most events due to the abundance of quality speakers and free price tag, which is a boost for companies running low on training dollars at the end of the year.

For more information on SharePoint Saturday Baltimore, logon to http://sharepointsaturday.org/baltimore

Event Watch:

Saturday July 25th, 2009

Where: UMBC Tech Center 1450 S. Rolling Road, Halethorpe, MD 21223

The interesting aspect of SharePoint Saturday Charlotte, NC was that the bulk of the
speakers came in from outside of the Charlotte area. Event organizer, Senior consultant Dan Lewis
did an outstanding job of building awareness for the event, which was the first SharePoint
Saturday to be held in the Carolina region.

SP Saturday Charlotte featured very interesting sessions overall of speakers and a rising
group of SharePoint professionals that honed their presentation skills through
including Doug Ware, J Dan Attis, Laura Rogers, Becky Isserman, Dan Usher, Michael Lotter,

In the Speaker’s Lounge, Doug Ware previewed some early functionality add-ons for his product
Skinner 2, which is the second release of the design tool geared toward SharePoint branding.
Skinner allows visual editing of SharePoint sites through step-by-step preview mode and exports
the changes into a file which can then be deployed to SharePoint.

My topic was centered around Transitioning into SharePoint Careers, which was a session devoted to
outlining the roadmap from a beginning SharePoint professional to a Senior professional.
The issue that most professionals face is they are given a task to deploy SharePoint and there is
a learning curve associated with that.

I think the move to have some of the heavier hitters with heavy influence in the Microsoft community close out the event such as Microsoft’s Michael Ganotti, was a great decision in terms of keeping attendees
enthused and present for the entire event. Ganotti delivered a great presentation on SharePoint and Web 2.0 and outlined some enhancements that exist for customizing SharePoint

What makes SharePoint Saturday so special is the viral nature of the event Overall, great job done by the organizational team.

Thanks to everyone that made it out to the DC SharePoint Saturday there were something to the effect of 230 + people in attendance, and I saw a lot of BSPUG faces! Sorry if we didn’t get a chance to catch up or if it was very quick, it was a crazy day! Remember July 25th will be the Baltimore SharePoint Saturday. The BSPUG will have first notice for sign ups!

For the May 21st session, we will be welcoming Dan Usher to come and talk to us about “Designing Effective Logical Architectures and Site Taxonomies”. Dan has spoke at numerous SharePoint Saturday events and will be speaking in Boston at SPTechCon. Anyone who has or will need to create sites, web zones, web applications, multiple authentication methods, and more will want to see this session.

…Stepping into contextual thinking, the design, the functional requirements, the technical requirements and limitations of the environment in which your working within. Defining the basis and working on it, occasionally climbing out of it for the whiz bang capability…..

So again, Thursday May 21st at UMBC training centers (directions available here). Room 3.013 in the main UMBC building.

We will also be live twittering the event, just follow @baltsharepoint or @ericharlan

Please RSVP on the Events page so we can accurately determine how much food to order! Thanks See you all then!

The Baltimore SharePoint User Group meets every third Thursday of the month unless specifically
noted. If you have any questions about our meeting dates and times, www.baltimoresug.org is the most accurate source of info regarding the group.

For more information on BSPUG, please log-on to www.baltimoresug.org.

For our new members, we will be meeting at UMBC Tech Center, 1450 Rolling Road, Halethorpe, MD 21228. Doors open at 6pm for food and refreshments.
As always please go to www.baltimoresug.org/events and respond to the RSVP survey to RSVP your spot.

Getting Started - March 4 at 4 pm ET (-05:00 GMT)

Getting Started Webinars

MailChimp offers help creating your first email campaign with a 45-minute “Getting Started” webinar every Wednesday. The webinars are designed for first-time MailChimp subscribers with helpful advice on how to get started.

The program will cover:

• Setting up your email list
• Creating your design
• Adding your content
• Scheduling your email send time
• Review tracking results

What’s MailChimp?

MailChimp is a do-it-yourself email marketing service for “the Google generation.” The service makes it easy to send email newsletters to your customers, manage your subscriber lists, and track campaign performance.

The Mailchimp platform uses an open API for smooth integration of internal systems and web apps (like Magento and Drupal) with Mailchimp’s email marketing engine.

Mailchimp boasts over 60,000 users.

Where: Microsoft Office - Reston
2004, 2006, 2008
12012 Sunset Hills Road
Reston Virginia 20190
United States

When: Tuesday, February 24, 2009 9:00 AM - Tuesday, February 24, 2009 4:00 PM Eastern Time (US & Canada)

Doors Open: 8:30AM

Agenda

8:45-9:00 am Welcome

9:00-10:15 am Around the World (of Windows Client Technologies) in 75 minutes

10:15-10:30 am Morning Break

10:30-11:45 am Create Rich User Experiences w (WPF)

11:45 am-12:30 pm Lunch Break

12:30-1:45 pm Re-use Your Skills and Code to Expand the Reach of Your Apps with Silverlight

1:45-2:00 pm Afternoon Break

2:00-3:15 pm Developing Windows Mobile Applications w. Visual Studio 2008

3:15-3:30 pm Wrap Up

Around the World (of Windows Client Technologies) in 75 minutes

In this session, we’ll take a high-level view of the many technologies available for developing client applications on the Windows platform, from Windows Forms and WPF for desktop applications, Silverlight for browser-based (and Mesh-based) rich clients, to desktop/sidebar gadgets and Windows Mobile, including demos of each. This session will set the stage for the rest of the day, when we’ll go deeper into many of these client technologies.

Create Rich User Experiences with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)

Windows Presentation Foundation empowers you to build the next-generation of Windows user experiences. WPF supports UI, media, documents, hardware acceleration, vector graphics, scalability to different form factors, interactive data visualization, and superior content readability. In this session we will look into the fundamentals of WPF, its architecture and how you can leverage WPF to create rich applications that will WOW your application users.

Re-use Your Skills and Code to Expand the Reach of Your Apps with Silverlight

WPF supports creating rich windows client applications for the desktop, but sometimes you need to run your application in the browser. In this session we will discuss how you can quickly web-ify WPF applications by leveraging technologies like XBAP (XAML Browser Application). To further expand the reach of your application, we’ll show how you can take advantage of Silverlight, which is a subset of WPF and shares the XAML markup model of development, but is optimized for a lightweight, cross-platform runtime for the browser which runs not just on Windows, but also on the Mac.

Developing Windows Mobile Applications with Visual Studio 2008

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 provides many improvements for mobile application development. With the Windows Mobile 6 SDK (or the latest 6.1 SDK) and emulators available in the SDK, developers can quickly and easily create, debug and deploy mobile applications. In this session, we review what is new in the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 3.5, and through several demos and samples discuss how to develop Windows Mobile client applications, including Silverlight for Mobile applications, effectively.

Event ID:
1032403302

Register by Phone
1-877-673-8368
Meal: Yes