My Blog is moving!

After almost 4 years of blogging on BlogSpot I am moving my blog over to MSDN:

My new blog can be found here: http://blogs.msdn.com/AaronSaikovski

I wont be updating any links on my old site.

MCS Australia services offerings

Here is a list of the service offerings that Microsoft services provdes:

http://www.microsoft.com/australia/services/microsoftservices/default.mspx

MOSS/WSS content deployment rollup packages availability

Found an article on Joel Oleson's blog (Aka Sharepoint Joel) that the content deployment hotfixes are out.

Here are links to the KB articles for the content deployment rollups.

WSS: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952698

MOSS: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952704/

Joel also recommends "that EVERY SharePoint customer read the KBs, because some of the listed issues that are fixed are even broader than content deployment".

You can request the downloads for the hotfixes from the following links:

WSS - http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=952698&kbln=en-us

MOSS - http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=952704&kbln=en-us

Remember you need to install the WSS hotfix first then the MOSS fix. Rebooting between installing the fixes might be a good idea.

Mindsharp Training in Australia

I recently got an email from Fellow MVP Kathy Hughes about some exciting Mindsharp training that is coming to our shores.
Here are the details:

Combined Knowledge Asia Pacific are proud to announce the upcoming SharePoint Summit week, during this exclusive event we will welcome SharePoint Experts and MVP’s Ben Curry and Todd Bleeker of Mindsharp US , Steve Smith MVP from the UK and Kathy Hughes MVP from Australia to deliver our SharePoint 2007 Administrator, Developer Tracks, Search and Designer classes.
These courses will be delivered at our Sydney venue on the week of August 25th 2008 and will be a great opportunity for you to learn from some of the world’s leading SharePoint experts.
Places are limited, to secure yours please contact Sales e-mail: sales@combined-knowledge.com or
go to: http://www.combined-knowledge.com.au/ for more details

Its official - I am joining Microsoft Services Australia!

The time has come for me to leave the normal SharePoint world behind, surrender my Groove MVP and accept my much coveted Microsoft blue badge.

I am grabbing my kit and moving to Microsoft Australia, more specifically Microsoft Consulting Services Australia (MCS) as a Senior Consultant, specialising in all things SharePoint. (Of Course ;-) )

This is a MASSIVE career jump for me as I get to work on large projects both here in Australia and overseas. I will also be able to participate in the MCS SharePoint Ranger program as well. Sweet! On top of that I can tap into the Global MCS community and bug the product teams when needed.

Having access to a global brand and being able to reach out to people all over the globe to solve customer problems is something that I have been missing for a while.

This is definitely a major step up for my career and allows me to focus on much larger/global scale projects while improving on my people & partner management skills. I will be taking a step back somewhat and doing less hands on development work (hey that's what gold partners are for) and working on more architecture, pre-sales work and of course troubleshooting.

I also need to select a secondary technical skill (non-SharePoint related) and am somewhat undecided what this should be at this stage. I am thinking of pursuing Unified Communications - Office communicator or even Exchange 2007. But I need to put a bit more thought into this.

As part of joining MCS, I get to go to Redmond for three weeks to attend MSU (Microsoft University) to learn the Microsoft way and get trained up in all MCS goodness. I feel like Kane from Kung Fu embarking on the enlightened path to kung fu greatness.

I also get to attend the cool events like TechReady and see all the really cool stuff.

This is going to be very exciting. I am looking forward to meeting my fellow 'softies and my new local colleagues.

I hopefully will be allowed to blog and take photos about my adventures in Redmond and share my experiences with you all.

I also will be moving this blog, but for now it will stay where it is. So watch this space!

MOSS 2007/WSS 3.0 - Solution Development

Technorati Tags: WSS 3,MOSS 2007,Solution development

Lately http://www.ozmoss.com/ as been alive with chatter about solution development and packaging. Jeremy Thake has a great blog post in regards to addressing some of the biggest questions around this. His article can be found here

The key takeaway is that all your custom development should be done through solution packages and activated/deactivated through features regardless of which tool you use to build them. My preference is WSP Builder, but its ok to use other tools as well.

When uninstalling the solution should also clean up after itself, similar to an .MSI in windows. This should be the case in SharePoint also.

The big challenge is moving between environments (Dev, QA, Prod), but using tools like Echo for SharePoint and packaging your code/resources into .WSP files is best practice in my mind.

Any comments?

Presenting at the SBTUG this Wednesday 28th May

I will be presenting my always popular "Introduction to Groove 2007" presentation at the Sydney Business Technology User Group (SBTUG) this Wednesday night at 6:30pm.

Hope to see you there!!

Where: Microsoft, North Ryde, Sydney

Time: 6:00pm

Web site: http://www.sbtug.com/