Brisbane SharePoint Users Group – Tuesday Night

When it comes to conferences and events around the SharePoint and Office space, the past few months have been very intense. Having been to a number of these events I can easily say that I have been conferenced out for the most part, and I am looking forward to a break over the next few months while we prepare for what I believe is going to be an even bigger year for technical conferences in 2010.

However one of the great benefits of having some many conferences that are taking SharePoint and Office concerns into account is that we can see a lot more content coming through to the users group. This Tuesday night (3/11/09) we will be having our regular Tuesday evening Brisbane SharePoint Users Group. This time we’re going to be taking a look at some of the content from the SharePoint Conference 2 weeks ago in Las Vegas, where Microsoft began to unveil publicly some of the new advances coming out in SharePoint 2010.

To know more about the conference goes to http://www.mssharepointconference.com and I hope to see you at the BSPUG on Tuesday night.

PS – #SharePint is on as usual after the BSPUG and make sure your there to celebrate your Melbourne Cup Wins!

The Social Networking Dilemma

This is something that has been on my mind for a while, however at the Brisbane SharePoint Users Group last night (#BSPUG) we where lucky enough to have Adam Cogan up from Sydney where the topic was discussed passionately with the group. At the core of the matter around social networking is the point that out on the net there are a Multitude of social networking tools and sites that facilitate the sharing of our status, information, documents, IP, photos and anything else you can imagine out to the greater community of people (99% of who we don’t even know). And while the readership is one issue that we will not discuss now, the question is which too do I use?

At the moment I have my blog page open, MSN with three conversations, Twittering my status, reading a face book page and syncing my Skype with my latest outlook contacts (well exaggerating that last one, but you get my gist). A big problem is that all of these tools take time and creative talent away and stifle my already stretched focus.

Since starting Sharing Minds, I have found most of my time goes there, posting blogs has become non-existent and replying to email and MSN gets tiresome, sometimes even reading a twitter is time stretching. The proliferation of these tools a lot of the time means that I have to follow on all of them to stay connected, but I don’t have the time to provide quality content, feedback and social connections on all of them. So what is the answer to stretching your time on social networking tools and quality input. I’ll be honest, I don’t know, I’m still attempting to figure out what it means to both me as a person and a business, however there are a number of thoughts that I am developing, solutions in the background I am working on, and once I have something i’ll be happy to post it!

Kicking off the Community

As January draws to a close so does my time off from ‘officialy’ working within the community.  Tonight will be the first V-LAN for the year, where I hope to have a number of people that havn’t been in a while.  Also next Tuesday the BSPUG kicks off with it’s first evening meeting for the year.

2009 is going to be busy!!!

New SQL User Group in Sydney

Last Friday I attended the Microsoft User Group Leader Symposium in Sydney.  It was an interesting day with topics discussed from MS Press and cross group presentations to the ever important topics of speakers and budget.

All in all I found it a great day to hang out and get to know my fellow User Group leaders around the country.  These are all great guys who give of their time and money for free, spend many hours talking online with people and who are just good people!

But also in following up from the user groups I met Victor Isakov (Sydney) who is starting a New SQL Users Group.  Below is a breif blub on his user group:

Victor Isakov (MCT, MCITP, MCM, SQL Ranger) is starting a new SQL Server User Group Meeting during lunchtimes in the Sydney CBD. It will run on the 1st Wednesday of every month, from 12:30 to 14:30, at Westpac Place.

 

This new user group will focus more on best practices, optimization, design and implementation – areas specifically geared towards the corporate sector. The meetings will be of high quality that you would typically see at conferences such as Microsoft Tech Ed, SQL PASS or SQL Connections. A number of industry experts and Microsoft personnel have committed to presenting at this new user group in 2009.

 

The meetings of this new user group will rotate through 3 core themes:

 

• Database Administrator (DBA) Focuses on the responsibilities of the Database Administrator, covering areas such as disaster recovery, management, performance tuning, security and operational excellence.
• Database Developer (DBD) Focuses on the responsibilities of the Database Developer, covering areas such as query writing, query tuning, indexing strategies, locking architecture and database design.
• Database Architect (ARC) Focuses on the responsibilities of the Database Architect, covering areas such as high-availability, storage, consolidation / virtualization and scalability.

The details for the new SQL Server User Group are as follows:

 

Time	12:30 to 14:30
Agenda	12:30 – 13:00: Registration / Networking 13:00 – 13:15: News / Case Studies 13:15 – 14:30: Presentation
Location	Westpac Place 275 Kent St, Sydney, NSW 2000‎
Dates	4th Feb, 4th Mar, 1st Apr, 6th May, 3rd Jun, 1st Jul, 5th Aug, 2nd Sep, 7th Oct, 4th Nov, 2nd Dec
Contact	victor@sqlserversolutions.com.au

So if your going to be in Syndey for Victor’s new SQL Server Group make sure you get along and support our UG Communities!

BSPUG Dates for 2009!

It’s been a little while coming, but at last we have dates for the Brisbane SharePoint Users Group in 2009!

Dates are a little different to last year but in 2009 I am happy to announce that each month we have both a Lunch Time BSPUG and evening BSPUG events.

The evening BSPUG events will be held on the 1st Tuesday of every month,  the focus of these events will be around provding information that will assist small orginisations and vendros with information arround collaboration,  this will include the regular presentations by community members and product demonstrations, however with the evening BSPUG we are looking to include some sponsors for the Food and Beverage!

The lunch time BSPUG events will be held on the 3rd Wednesday of every month and these events will focus on the general communities with regular presentations on solutions and the cool SharePoint stuff!

And in anticipation of supporting the user group community this year, Micorosoft has also taken the chance to bring all the user group leaders from the community together next Friday in Sydney.  As a user group leader this is a great chance for me to meet up with the other SharePoint UG leaders from arround Australia and meet a lot of new people who also look after these crutial community groups for free (and most of the time from their own pocket!).  So I in 2009 get into your local communities and come say hi at the Brisbane SharePoint Users Group and i’d be happy to buy you a drink and get to know you better!

Brisbane SharePoint Users Group – Wednesday

The Brisbane SharePoint Users Group is coming up this Wednesday. Details are:

BSPUG 11th October 2006

12:00pm – 1:30pm 

Level 9, Waterfront Place Brisbane

Session Details: Panel Discussion on SPS 2003 / 2007 issues