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Springhouse Education and Consulting Services to Deliver Microsoft SharePoint Deployment Planning Services
By Jeff Tincher
8/15/2008 – Exton, PA: Springhouse Education and Consulting Services (http://www.springhouse.com), a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner for Learning Solutions, has announced that it has been certified by Microsoft to provide SharePoint Deployment Planning Services (SDPS) to its customers.
Springhouse’s SDPS accreditation means that it can help its customers to appreciate the benefits of this solution, running workshops on behalf of Microsoft to show users Best Practices on how they can maximize the collaborative technology to get the most from their staff and business. In addition to this, Springhouse can also assist with SharePoint deployment if required.
As a certified partner, Springhouse will deliver pre-packaged SDPS engagements to Microsoft customers. These engagements vary in length and services, ranging from 1 to 15 days depending upon the value of the enterprise agreement (Software Assurance Licensing) between Microsoft and the customer.
“Being a certified Microsoft partner for SDPS engagements strengthens our business and increases our value and offerings for our current customer base as well as any new customer,” said Neall Alcott, VP of Technology Services at Springhouse. “SDPS is structured in a way that benefits both Springhouse and our customers, allowing them to operate their business more effectively and efficiently through the collaboration of SharePoint.” Neall Alcott was a member of the SDPS beta team in Redmond, WA , he also has over 20 years of IT experience and is a MCT and MSCE.
Springhouse has completed one SDPS engagement with a global communications technology company and the client is currently using the SDPS deliverables as a roadmap for deployment of their SharePoint environment.
The Microsoft SDPS web page states: “As organizations of all sizes around the world deploy Microsoft® Office SharePoint Server, they are engaging with trusted partners to assist with the planning of this critical IT responsibility. SharePoint Deployment Planning Services (SDPS) is designed to help organizations plan an effective deployment of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server by partnering them with a qualified Microsoft SDPS provider and offering a broad range of planning tools and services that help optimize the effectiveness of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server’s core capabilities, lower the cost of deployment, and improve organizational productivity. Service areas include collaboration, portals, enterprise search, as well as web and portal content management.”
About Springhouse Education and Consulting Services
Springhouse Education and Consulting Services located in Exton, Pennsylvania, delivers Instructor-Led Training, E-Learning and Distance Learning to area businesses and individuals, as well as IT consulting services to the Greater Philadelphia market as well as Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. Visit our web site at www.springhouse.com or our blog at blog.springhouse.com.
Filed Under SharePoint |
Software Assurance Packaged Services
By Gerry V
In the “product off years” at Microsoft (no new OS, no new Office), internal focus often shifts to other components of Software Assurance that can add value to the investment since there is no compelling argument for upgrade rights. It is no surprise then that 2008 is bringing us new choices in what Microsoft calls “Packaged Service Offerings.”
In a nutshell, these are Microsoft-funded consulting packages provided to SA customers at no charge, with the goal of allowing those customers to explore new technologies for deployment at their Enterprise. The newest is SDPS – or –SharePoint Deployment Planning Services. SDPS provides the client with bundles of consulting days for anywhere from 1 to 15 days (length is driven by size of licensing agreement) where a certified Microsoft Partner will provide anything from Requirements Gathering for a SharePoint Deployment right up to a full-blown Pilot on site. Springhouse consultants are currently engaged in a number of these and the initial feedback has been outstanding. If SharePoint is anywhere on your radar, consider opening the discussion to see if your enterprise qualifies for SDPS.
Considering a migration to Office 2007? Springhouse is working with Value Prism and Microsoft to beta test Microsoft’s latest packaged Service, Office System Business Value Planning Services – or - OSBVPS. The idea of this bundle is to help customers identify, unlock, and capture the business value of Office System. This service will deliver a current state process analysis, future state process design, a high-level business case for the proposed solution, as well as a high-level adoption/implementation plan and a proposal for additional services to implement the solution. The Springhouse team will engage some candidate enterprises at no charge for this service in the coming months. Please reach out immediately to gvogler@springhouse.com if an Office 2007 migration/implementation is under consideration to learn more.
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Filed Under Microsoft, SA Benefits, SharePoint Designer, Software Licensing |
Check Out the Microsoft Certified Master Program
By Jeff Tincher
Microsoft is introducing a new level of certification called Microsoft Certified Master Program. Registration is scheduled to start in July 2008. Classes are scheduled to begin in the third quarter of 2008.
Who should apply?
Qualified program candidates are highly skilled technical experts in their discipline with several years of experience designing, deploying, and managing solutions by using Microsoft technology. To be eligible for Master certification, the candidate must be a current Microsoft Certified Professional (with a Microsoft Certification ID) or an eligible Microsoft employee. Specific technology requirements vary by platform.
Microsoft offers three Master-level technical certifications, all of which deepen and broaden the technical skills of experienced IT professionals.
The first three specialization areas will be:
- Microsoft Certified Master: Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
- Microsoft Certified Master: Microsoft SQL Server 2008
- Microsoft Certified Master: Windows Server 2008, Active Directory
The following specialization will be coming soon:
- Microsoft Certified Master: Office Communications Server 2007
- Microsoft Certified Master: SharePoint Server 2007
To learn more about this program there is a Live Meeting event on July 30 with the program owners.
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Filed Under Certifications |
If you are a SharePoint Developer you’ve might have run into an issue where SharePoint Designer workflows don’t have enough uumph to allow you to fully build out the workflow to meet business requirements. Over on Codeplex.com is an add-on that gives a developer a handful of additional tools to use in SPD.
Not that this plugin is all that new, but maybe you are new to SharePoint and Designer and running into this issue. I found this set of Workflow activities earlier this year and have installed them at two client sites to improve the functionality of SPD Workflows. The name of the add-on is Useful Sharepoint Designer Custom Workflow Activities. Click to view more and Download.
How does the SPDActivities help you? Well for starters if you need to send an email from a workflow, your only option out of the box is to have the SharePoint system account send the message. This is ok if you don’t require the recipient to have to respond to the email or have the response sent to a mailbox that someone is checking regularly. With the new Send Email Extended activity you will now have the ability to send an email from another account/person by filling in the information for display this address as sender. See below image.
When you click on the display this address as sender link a window will appear where you can manually enter in the email address you would like the workflow to send from or you can click Add Lookup and select a field from a list or workflow data. This comes in very handy like I said before, like when you need the recipient to email back to a specific person or mailbox. I used this feature at one of our clients so the workflow would meet all of the business requirments.
You also get to choose if you want to send the email “non-urgent” or “urgent”. I haven’t had to really use this feature but could see where this might come in handy. So I suggest if you haven’t done so already that you download and install these additional features for SPD. There are a lot of other additional features in the package, not only for email, but improvements to copying list items and more!
Some other cool plugins from Codeplex are:
Podcasting Kit for SharePoint (PKS) is an accelerator for social media, using podcasting and social networks to deliver the next generation knowledge management experience to Microsoft Customers.
A SharePoint Solution Package (WSP) creation tool for WSS 3.0 & MOSS 2007 No more manually creating the manifest.xml file. No more manually specifying the DDF file.
The Community Kit for SharePoint is a set of best practices, templates, Web Parts, tools, and source code that enables practically anyone to create a community website based on SharePoint technology for practically any group of people with a common interest.
Filed Under SharePoint Designer |
I just received word that the SharePoint team has announced a new program called SharePoint Deployment Planning Services today. I quickly jumped over to that post on blogs.msdn.com to learn more about this new and exciting service:
If you’re involved with SharePoint in some way, either as a customer or partner, I think that you’ll be excited to learn about a new program we’re announcing today called SharePoint Deployment Planning Services (SDPS). SDPS is a partner and Microsoft Consulting Services delivered offering designed to help our Software Assurance (SA) customers successfully plan and deploy SharePoint. Using field proven business and technical guidance, the program provides best practices and well defined results through 1, 3, 5, 10 or 15 day deployment planning sessions. The number of Packaged Service days that a customer can receive is determined by a combination of the number of qualifying Office licenses and the number of Core CAL (Client Access License) Suites and Enterprise CAL Suites. So, no additional investment is needed by the customer to take advantage of this tremendous program.
You can jump to the full post here > Microsoft SharePoint Proucts and Technologies Team Blog : Announcing SharePoint Deployment Planning Services SDPS
Catch up on some other SharePoint posts on our blog:
SharePoint Designer Governance - Robert Bogue (MVP)
Benchmark SharePoint Performace
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Filed Under SharePoint | 2 Comments
SharePoint Designer Governance - Robert Bogue (MVP)
By Jeff Tincher
Here is a great post I ran across on Robert Bogue, a SharePoint MVP, blog site. Robert discusses the need for governance with SharePoint Designer, a great tool for certain users, a dangerous weapon for others. Robert goes on to write:
I talked about what good users for SPD are and what bad uses for SPD are – but I never came right out and made any recommendations for how to put a governance framework around SPD in your organization.
….
The primary challenge when looking at SPD roll outs and governance, in my experience, has been a misunderstanding of what the tool does. It’s a data view web part creator, a workflow creator, and an HTML/CSS editor.
The full article can be read here on ThorProjects.com
Filed Under SharePoint |
Ontolica Solves Wildcard Search in MOSS 2007
By Jeff Tincher
Source: FotoliaOk, how many of you out there have created a MOSS Search Center Site to find out that when you are done you AND your users cannot search using wildcards or partial names? I know I was one of them! I am working on a solution right now with one of our customers to migrate their old Company Phone Directory and use SharePoint Search features to find the employees information. The original phone directory was difficult to manage and update, the new solution was to build Custom SharePoint Lists for each department and populate those lists with required information such as, first name, last name, email, work phone, mobile phone, department, title, and a few others.
Take One
The first take on this project I set up a Search Center and had everything working, someone would search for an employee by name, title or department and BANG up comes the information. Well….sort of. The downside was what is the user searching for someone didn’t know how to fully spell a last name, like Koeningsberg for example. If they tried to do, ‘Koen’ nothing showed in the results. Hmm, why is that? Well there is no out-of-the-box wildcard search for MOSS. Not good.
Of course I searched on different solutions for searching on partial names in the search field. One potential solution was to create our own custom webpart that would interact with the internals of SharePoint. Nope. Not going to mess with that, especially after all the blog articles said, “It’s best not to mess with your own webpart and screw up your MOSS install”.
Filed Under SharePoint, search |
For those of you using SharePoint, here is a link over to what I find very interesting and could be helpful for some organizations. With social web sites become more popular and people looking at user ratings and tags this solution created by two interns at Tam Tam has great potential in your SharePoint environment. Sure, SharePoint can tag posts, documents and what else you want, but here is the perks of Tam Tam’s new solution…
This solution however offers a rich user experience of those mechanisms, personalized (this is very cool) and full integration with SharePoint search and Ontolica search!
Here are a couple of screenshots from the original blog post.
As of this post, there is no release of this add-on. Please check back on our blog and I’ll report any news about this solution.
Filed Under SharePoint, search |
Springhouse Partners with CorasWorks
By Jeff Tincher
We are happy to announce our new partnership with CorasWorks®.
CorasWorks® is the leading worldwide provider of workplace application software on the Microsoft® SharePoint® platform. CorasWorks products are used every day by more than 1,000 customers and 700,000 users. Our customers include corporations, government agencies, academic institutions, and small-and mid-sized businesses in more than 20 countries worldwide.
With this partnership we plan to grow our consulting services in the SharePoint market and allow for MOSS customization projects for current and new clients.
For more information about CorasWorks and the CorasWorks Suite please go to their web site at www.corasworks.net
Filed Under General, SharePoint |
SharePoint 2007 Executive Briefings at Springhouse
By Jeff Tincher
Learn how SharePoint 2007 can help your organization increase efficiency and productivity!
Springhouse will be running four SharePoint events this December. SharePoint 2007 is very powerful. However, in order to fulfill your organization’s unique business needs, it requires configuration and customization as well as training for your end users, administrators, and developers.
During this session, our SharePoint Architects will demonstrate the following SharePoint features and functions:
- Business Process / Workflow
- Enterprise Content Management
- Search
- Records Management
- Team Collaboration
See Microsoft SharePoint 2007 in action.
Springhouse SharePoint Architects will be on hand, as well as SharePoint Trainers to address specific business and technical questions. We will also discuss recommended training paths that will maximize the business value of SharePoint within your organization.
See how Springhouse can help you!
To register for one of our upcoming events please visit our Events page at www.springhouse.com/events
Filed Under General, SharePoint |
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