SharePoint Hosting and Development : General

I'm back.

Michael Watson — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 10:24:00 GMT

I have resurfaced from the underground. My new blog is at http://www.sharepointmadscientist.com...(read more)

Done with Training for Now.

Michael Watson — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

I'm back in the office now after being out for a couple of weeks in a SQL Ranger rotation . The training was great, but I was pulled out 2 weeks early to focus on our newest product for MOSS supportability. More on that later. I'll try to get the blog...(read more)

SharePoint by Day, SharePoint by Night @ SharePoint Connections in Vegas!

Michael Watson — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 21:57:34 GMT

My buddy Andrew Connell has put together an informal SharePoint chat session. Coral Reef Bar in Mandalay Bay from 6-8p . Talking about intellectual horsepower! 16 of the brightest minds in SharePoint will be there. I wouldn't miss this for the world and...(read more)

Heading to Vegas for SharePoint Connections Nov 5th-8th. See you there!

Michael Watson — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 07:05:52 GMT

I'll be co-presenting 3 sessions at connections and have a lot of stuff to talk about and I can't wait to hear your stories from the real world. James Petrosky and I will be giving a session on disaster recovery in SharePoint and one on capacity planning. Shane Young and I will give a session on governance. These definitely won't be your grandpa's sessions on SharePoint so you better be there.

BTW... High Availability/Disaster Recovery and SQL Licensing

Michael Watson — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 02:07:00 GMT

If like me you are looking to eak (sp) every dollar of costs savings out of your deployments take a look at the SQL Server Pricing and Licensing paper at http://www.microsoft.com/sql/howtobuy/sqlserverlicensing.mspx. I'm not sure this is common knowledge or not, (Is it? Please comment) but your passive servers do not need licenses provide that they do not process queries. I will not interpret this in any way as to avoid the wrath of the man. :-) Refer to the paper or your licensing representative for more information.

Inside SharePoint - Tales from Microsoft IT

Michael Watson — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 10:30:00 GMT

The team and I have decided to start blogging collectively. http://blogs.msdn.com/insidesharepoint

No content yet, but this should be treasure trove of information in the future.

Extra-Strength SharePoint Developer Training

Michael Watson — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 07:13:00 GMT

I just got back from Silicon Valley where I attended the SP401 class given by Gorilla Training. My instructor was none other than Scot Hillier. This was a great class and I would recommend it to anyone needing to get up to speed on MOSS development and who has a basic understanding of dotNet programming. The class is 4 days long which is barely enough to cover the basics of each MOSS feature, but you still come away with a very complete picture of MOSS. It was good to see so many people taking the class. I think we had 17 or more people which leads me to believe companies are excited about MOSS and are serious about using it. (and using it right) There are so many new features in MOSS that companies will need to rethink their information architecture to get all of the value out of the product. The good news is that for current users of SharePoint V2, you can upgrade to MOSS without much fuss. Yes, there's lot of new stuff there, but users will still find the same functionality they expect after upgrade and things will mostly work the same. Upgraders should still think about how to use the new features in their organization.