The Age of the Devs approaches… thanks to Office 365!

Well, if you’ve been keeping up with the latest Microsoft news, you might have heard that MS has been pretty excited about their upcoming release of Office in the Cloud – Office 365. In a nutshell:

• we’re talking Microsoft Office suite, Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync (instant messaging and presence) being offered ‘online’ with pay-as-you-go pricing
• we’re talking no more server patching, updating, or upgrading
• we’re talking a subscription-based option for businesses that want to purchase Office
• we’re talking about cloud services being offered to public schools as a no-cost or low-cost hosted service
• we’re talking access to all your productivity tools and enterprise data wherever you go, across PC, phone, and browser

Putting a Cool Glow on your XML code

Lately I’ve been looking over the XML code contained in the Application Definition File for some SharePoint Business Data Catalog work I’ve been doing. As I normally do, I used Visual Studio as my XML viewer of choice. But I had to pause for a second to sit back and appreciate how Visual Studio 2010 makes looking at all that XML code a lot nicer. : )

Document Management Using SharePoint – SharePoint Saturday slides posted

Saturday’s SharePoint event here in Columbus, Ohio was great.  I give kudos to the folks that worked hard to put it together, and who pulled off bringing together such a great lineup of speakers.  If you’re a SharePoint junkie in Central Ohio and you missed the event, I now shed a tear for you. (wiping away fake tear) 

The only consolation I can give you is that you can scroll down a little to see the slides from my presentation.  Although it doesn’t include the live demos I ran during my talk, it at least gives you a peek at what I think are some of the main points of interest as it relates to document management in SharePoint 2007 and 2010.
There – don’t you feel better now? :)

Video Post: 10-minute Lightning Talk–The Challenges of Real-World SharePoint

Since it’s only 10-minutes, I thought I’d go ahead and post my slides with live narration, in case you weren’t able to attend last night’s COSPUG meeting (that means you, Brian!)    I’m also interested to hear any feedback or comments on the topic – what has your own experience been trying to use SharePoint outside the office environment?  Post a comment below.  Thanx.

Real-world Challenges of SharePoint

Today I’ll be presenting a Lightning Talk on SharePoint at the Central Ohio SharePoint User Group meeting.  That means I’ve got no more than 10-minutes to dazzle the crowd with my thoughts about the challenges of using SharePoint outside of a controlled office environment, specifically as it relates to:

• Access
• Installation
• Device integration
• Learning Curve
• Choice of tools

This is a free event, but if you show up please don’t heckle me. :)
UPDATE: I posted a video of this presentation with live narration.

Document Management & SharePoint: Forms vs Documents

I’ve spent the last couple of months developing a customized document management system in SharePoint 2007 for a client.  Many interesting challenges have surfaced as a result of working thru the different requirements for this solution, and I thought it might be useful to write about them.  Check back from time to time to read the ongoing saga.  Now, of course, it would be a miracle if I were able to discuss them here in any kind of logical order, so I’m going to settle for random thoughts instead. :)

Columbus 2010 Launch Event – Office/SharePoint

Last week I presented along with Steve Caravajal at the Columbus region Microsoft SharePoint/Office 2010 Launch Event, sponsored by ICC.  There are exciting features coming from the new 2010 suite, and it looks like the product teams put some good thought & work into these new versions of Office & SharePoint.

My slide deck is below, and the other slide decks from the event should soon be posted to the ICC website.  Stay tuned.

Office 2010 Launch Event - May 2010

View more presentations from Ricardo Wilkins.

My SharePoint Consultant toolbox

So, it’s been about 6 weeks since I’ve stepped into the role of full-time SharePoint consulting. In that short time I’ve already worked with several clients, and I’m definitely enjoying the variety. But juggling different clients also means that I need to keep my self organized, and to do that I use kool tech! :) So I thought I’d share some of the tools I’ve come to rely on over the past few weeks to keep this SharePoint train running like a well-oiled machine:

SharePoint 2010, Architects, VM’s and all that good stuff

Last month I took a new step in my career, and began a journey into full-time SharePoint consulting.  I’m now a SharePoint Solutions Architect for ICC, an IT services firm and Microsoft Certified Partner here in Columbus, Ohio.

So far, it looks like my timing was pretty good, as the excitement among our customers seems to be continuously building as we near the launch of SharePoint 2010.  One of my primary tasks at ICC is to help us prepare to be effective in the delivery of SharePoint 2010 services, specifically in the area of application development.  That means I’ve had to spend a lot of time recently getting acquainted with all this SP2010 goodness. :) And as I’ve started diving deep into its many offerings and improvements, I can say that the excitement seems well worth it.