SharePoint Center or Excellence (via Paul Beck)

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Overview: What is a SharePoint Centre of excellence (CoE)? I suppose that all CoE's share the maxim of "Realizing the potential of SharePoint". There are a lot of consulting firms and large organizations claiming to have CoE's. I have come across a lot of different meaning for a SP CoE, ranging from the group CoE being developers that are assigned out on projects; to CoE's providing guidance on development, customizations, infrastructure, processes and IT pro tasks. I'm far more in the advisory/governance camp for a CoE adding the most value.

Sonny Main describes a SharePoint CoE as "In its simplest form a SharePoint CoE is a team of SharePoint experts which promotes collaboration and best practices around SharePoint in order to assist business adoption of SharePoint solutions by establishing and governing information architecture, defining platform strategy, addressing challenges and evolving SharePoint practice/development to economize delivery of SharePoint solutions while mitigating ever increasing security, privacy, regulatory and compliance risks.
The purpose of a successful SharePoint CoE is then to ensure that it remains closely aligned with business strategy by managing Cost, Risk and Adoption of SharePoint."

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The SharePoint 2010 Handbook (Via Paul)

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I have been busy lately, setting up a Centre of Expertise for a large organisation for both their SharePoint 365 and there SharePoint 2010 on prem. environment. In my free time I've been putting together a community book (The SharePoint 2010 Handbook) for the last 5 months.

I have learnt a lot from the other 12 authors and personally I have been exposed to concise chapters that I would not normally look at. I have found a lot of useful pointers and it's helped me gather my thoughts on SharePoint more clearly.

Order of Chapters
1. Structuring a SharePoint 2010 Practice - John Timney

2. SharePoint Test Environments - Justin Meadows

3. SharePoint Adoption - Veronique Palmer

4. Social SharePoint - Jasper Oosterveld

5. The Art of SharePoint Success - Symon Garfield

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Adding\Updating\Retriving\SPquery Lookup fields in Sharepoint (via Ramesh)

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Adding a Lookup Item -

SPListItem listItem = myList.Items[0];
listItem["Departments"] = new SPFieldLookupValue(10, “Operations”); // Adding Operations as text and 10 as ID
listItem.Update();

Retrieving Lookup field for an item-

SPListItem listItem = myList.Items[0];
SPFieldLookupValue lookupFieldText = new SPFieldLookupValue(listItem["Departments"].ToString());
string lookUpValue = lookupFieldText .LookupValue;

Updating Lookup field for an item -

SPListItem listItem = myList.Items[0];
SPFieldLookupValue lookupFieldText = new SPFieldLookupValue(listItem ["Departments"].ToString());
lookupFieldText .LookupValue = 11; -> updates the value of the Lookup field for listItem

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InfoPath Training

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Need InfoPath training? We've got just what you're looking for!

SharePoint Solutions offers quality hands-on classroom-based InfoPath training.

Learn the ins and outs of creating digital forms that your users won’t mind using.

Four days is all it takes to master digital form creation in InfoPath 2010, and to learn the basics of routing those forms through common business processes using SharePoint 2010 workflow, through our new course, InfoPath 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 No-Code Workflow Deep Dive (Intermediate).

In this instructor-led 4-day “deep dive” course, you’ll learn:

· To understand forms as a primary driver of business processes

· To design digital forms that work – asking the right questions the right way

· To understand the varied audiences for your forms and the data they need

· A framework for determining what questions your form needs

· Form layout and design best practices

· What controls are available for InfoPath forms and how they work

· How to create data connections to receive data from external sources

and much, much more.

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The Top Fortune 500 SharePoint Users (via Whitney Grace)

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Oh boy! Our content wranglers found another great list and we are excited about it. Once moreTopSharePoint.com pools its sources to gather twenty-five “Fortune 500 Companies Using SharePoint.”

Microsoft is still claiming SharePoint Server as the fastest growing product in company history, which is very impressive coming from such a diversified software maker powerhouse. According to Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) one in two corporations are now using SharePoint Server and in 22 percent of the companies, every employee uses this popular Microsoft collaboration tool. SharePoint usage is widely spread due to its complex collaboration structure and its flexibility.

Microsoft has the right to brag about this client list. Among the top SharePoint users are Kroger, Viacom, Kraft, Procter and Gamble (Tampax, Pantenem, and Pringles), Dell, and Dollar General. Each company takes advantage of the many services that SharePoint offers such as enterprise content management, business intelligence, archiving, file sharing, and public web sites.

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October 2011 Cumulative Update For SharePoint

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Microsoft just released new Cumulative Update for SharePoint 2010- October 2011 Cumulative Update.

As with previous cumulative updates, it is built upon SP1 bits so you should apply SP1 if you don’t already have it and then install October 2011 Cumulative Update.

Remember that it’s fresh, which means you shouldn’t install it on ANY production environment before you test it.

The new build number for October 2011 Cumulative Update is: 14.0.6112.5000.

You can download October 2011 Cumulative Update here:

SharePoint Foundation 2010 October 2011 CumulativeUpdate

SharePoint Server 2010 October 2011 Cumulative Update

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One month and two new products: introducing Aspose.Imaging for .NET and Aspose.Pdf for SharePoint (via Caroline von Schmalensee )

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Texas, USA – 31 October, 2011 - In October 2011 Aspose released two new products,Aspose.Imaging for .NET and Aspose.Pdf for SharePoint. Both were developed to answer particular needs expressed by our users.

Aspose.Imaging for .NET gives developers a way to process and draw images in .NET applications.

Aspose.Pdf for SharePoint allows users to save Wiki pages, lists and list items to PDF from withing SharePoint.

Aspose delivered a number of new products in 2011:

April saw the launch of Aspose.Diagram for .NET, a class library for working with Microsoft Visio files.

July saw the launch of Aspose.OCR for .NET, a class library that adds character recognition to ASP.NET, Windows applications and web services.

September saw the first release of Aspose.Email for .NET, a renamed and re-focused version of Aspose.Network for .NET.

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