A new beginning for AMP
The Atlanta Microsoft Professionals group has been through more than one change in its history. It started life as the Atlanta.NET Mobility group, but was probably before its time. Next came the AMP name and the SharePoint 1, 2, 3! training sessions. The 18 hours worth of presentations and hands on labs were incredibly well receivied, but the creation of that material took a huge effort from those involved and we're probably not going to repeat that for free. It really was a lot of work.
However, we still believe that we can fill a need in the Atlanta .NET community with our original charter - a group focusing on professional Microsoft toolkits. This allows us to explore beyond development topics. To that end, our new focus is SharePoint and the Information Worker's toolkit. This will certainly include the various flavors of SharePoint 2007 (WSS, OSS Standard and Enterprise, Search, etc) as well as Office 2007 and even some third party products.
Last night was the first of these meetings and we split the meeting in half along the developer/information worker line. The first part of the meeting was a developer focused topic and Dan Attis presented Feature development to the group. At the highest level, a feature is a wrapper around a set of functionality which can be individually enabled or disabled inside of a SharePoint installation. Features can include other features and can be scoped at various points along the Web farm to Site heirarchy. Features are composed of at least an XML file and can include resource files and expanded XML definitions. For more information, check out Dan's presentation which will be online at DevCow.com sometime in the near future. If you're dealing with features on a regular basis, you might find Todd Baginski's little Feature Manager tool a helpful friend.
The second presentation of the evening was given by yours truly (that's Matt Ranlett for those of you who aren't paying attention). I took the power user/information worker slant and presented task management to the group. I started off by showing the out of the box templates available for tracking tasks, issues, and project tasks (Gantt view). We looked at the available KPIs for monitoring the task lists and the out of the box Three-State Workflow for automating the task. 
My intention was to follow up this out of the box presentation with a demonstration of Ascentn's AgilePoint but I couldn't remember the password on the virtual PC image and had to simply explain about Business Process Management and AgilePoint's super slick Visio UI. I plan to come back to this tool at some point in the future as I believe that this kind of tool will become an invaluable part of streamlining business processes in the future.
The presentations were both well received by the audience, bringing out a lot of questions and general comments from the group. One thing we heard over and over from the audience was that there appears to be a gap in the available online and printed information about SharePoint. There is plenty of high level out of the box types of discussions around and there are plenty of deep dives into the development of a particular niche of SharePoint, but there is no business value overview. What people seem to be asking for is the 10 minute or less pitch that they can take to their management teams and say, "We should buy SharePoint 2007 because...". This is not necessarily an easy space to fill, but we're going to work together to identify and fill the gaps a little bit at a time. To that end, we're hosting an open forum where anyone who is interested can post their thoughts. This is where you can help steer the presentation topics toward what you'd like to see, post general comments, and give feedback to the group's leaders.
The Information Worker and SharePoint 2007 are broad topic areas and we can easily spend over a year covering this material. If you have particular areas you'd like to see, or if you would like to present some of the material yourself, please get in touch with us either via the forum or by e-mail. We would really love feedback from you. Please let us know if there is anything we can do to help you learn more. However, having said that, please keep in mind that this is a volunteer effort and that asking us every detail of how to implement a technology will likely come with a bill! ;-)
If you are interested in presenting material on SharePoint 2007, Office 2007, or any Information Worker toolkit, please let us know. If you do not volunteer to give a presentation, you will have no choice but to listen to us give the presentations.
If you are looking to sponsor the user group, here is what we can offer you. In exchange for approximately $150 worth of pizza, you get 15 minutes on stage to present your company's product and marketing message. You also get your logo on our event's web page and mention in the DevCow blog covering the meeting. Finally, we will provide all of the attendees with any printed material you wish to hand out. Thank you for your interest in the group and it is my genuine hope that your sponsorship pays off for you in real dollars as well as general goodwill.
