The Sikh Geek

The event on Tue was great and well attended with between 40-50 people coming along and good number of SBSC Partners. Andy has already blogged about it and as we travelled down together, what he didn’t say was the difficulty we had trying to find a Car Park around Victoria. Now, usually such a thing is pretty straightforward because of such new fangled devices called "Signs" but Central London seems to be bereft of them, of course it’s probably as a deterrent to coming in your car just in case you braved the congestion charge! Anyway, thanks to Andy’s GPS enabled phone we tracked down the NCP, hurray!

Craig Carpenter (co-owner of Combined Knowledge) did a presentation on Search Server Express 2008 and despite some technical hiccups, I was very impressed by the product as it’s essentially the same search as you get with MOSS 2007 but for FREE and if you install it, you get a default installation of WSS 3.0 anyway. It can also crawl federated services as well through connectors and other systems which may be part of your network. Sharepoint search works by crawling content on predefined schedule and building an index and the query is then executed against the index. Search Server Express 2008 is not scalable but hey it’s FREE and on small networks would be great and did I mention it’s FREE?

Steve Smith MVP (co-owner of Combined Knowledge) did a great talk on content types and doing some easy put really powerful out of the box stuff with them and by applying meta data (aka columns in Sharepoint lists) then these are searchable by Search Server Express.

It was great to see Bill English of Mindsharp there from the US and show us Deliverpoint which is a tool built by his software company, Barracuda, for managing Sharepoint Users. If you’ve done any serious stuff in Sharepoint around users, then you’ll know that once your users, groups and permissions grow and as these can be set on per item level in Sharepoint, then this is not easy task in maintaining them. For example across multiple Sharepoint Sites how do you know which users have access to what? Basically you don’t without going to each Site and checking manually …urrghhh!

The feedback has been really positive and Steve has again very kindly agreed to do more sessions across the Midlands and London, so stay tuned.