Service Pack 1 for SharePoint 2010 Products is Now Available for Download.

Service Pack 1 includes stability, performance, and security enhancements that are a direct result of customer/ partner feedback. Read more about installing Service Pack 1 for SharePoint Foundation 2010, SharePoint Server 2010 and Language Packs from the SharePoint Team Blog.

SharePoint Team Blog: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blog/Pages/BlogPost.aspx?pID=984

Download Service Pack 1: http://technet.microsoft.com/office/ee748587.aspx

SEA SharePoint Conference 2011

I just received the good news about the SEA SharePoint Conference 2011. Plans are underway for SEA SharePoint Conference and I’m very excited to go this year as well.

If you were there last year, I assume you have already decided to come this year and let me help you to book your calendar. Go ahead and book 08^th – 09^th November for the greatest SharePoint Conference in the region. If you didn’t get the chance to be there last year, here you have got another great opportunity. In nutshell, SEA SharePoint Conference is the largest gathering focused for SharePoint Products & Technologies which runs over 02 days to provide great technical/ business sessions delivered by reputed speakers.

Come and join us to know more about what you can do with SharePoint.

Keep your eye on http://www.sharepointconference.asia/ for more details.

SharePoint Saturday Sri Lanka

I was in Singapore last year for presenting at SEA SharePoint Conference and I met Michael Noel & Alpesh Nakar and few other members who are part of SharePoint Saturday. We discussed the possibility of having a SharePoint Saturday in Sri Lanka and Michael liked it to have during Mango season.

Finaly we are having our first SharePoint Saturday in Sri Lanka and it’s happening on 11th June. I’m delighted to present a session there even with the very tight schedule I’m having right now. More importantly, I’m delighted to present while my employer – Virtusa Pvt. Ltd. also sponsoring for the event.

What is SharePoint Saturday SL?

SharePoint Saturday SL is an educational, informative & lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & MVPs, covering a wide variety of SharePoint-orientated topics. SharePoint Saturday is FREE, open to the public and is your local chance to immerse yourself in SharePoint!

When is SharePoint Saturday SL?

June 11, 2011 Saturday

Where is SharePoint Saturday SL?

Informatics Institute of Technology,
57, Ramakrishna Road,
Colombo 06,
Sri Lanka.

You can find more information about the event from the official site: http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/srilanka/default.aspx also don’t forget to check on the schedule: http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/srilanka/Pages/schedule.aspx and the speakers who are presenting: http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/srilanka/Pages/speakers.aspx

Tech-Ed India 2011

Tech-Ed is an international annual technical conference organized by Microsoft Corporation in every continent to deliver high-quality technical content for the software professionals around the world. Microsoft India hosts Tech-Ed India every year and captures more than 2500 attendees and delivers more than 200 in-depth technical sessions over period of 03 days. Tech-Ed India delivered by more than 30 international speakers and they contribute to the success of this event by bringing their real-world industry experience to software professionals in India.

This 03-day event will focus on technical education, product evaluation and community. The event will include: Keynotes by Senior Microsoft Executives, Breakout Sessions, Hands-on-Labs, Instructor-led Labs, Product Team Tents, Free Microsoft Certification, Community Programs, Solution Expo, and many more social gatherings and opportunities for networking everywhere you look.

Tech-Ed-India 2011 for the 18th time will feature 200+ Deep-Dive Breakout Sessions, 20 Technology Tracks, 20 + Instructor-led Hands-on-Labs from 23rd March to 25th March, 2011. More information about the conferences is available here: http://www.microsoftteched.in

I will be speaking at the Tech-Ed India for the 2^nd time and I’m very happy to share my experience in the SharePoint Development track. Below is the information about my session if you are planning to attend:

Session Title: Developing real-life business process automation application with SharePoint 2010 and Visual Studio 2010

Session Abstract: SharePoint is considered as one of the best workflow hosting environments within Microsoft technology stack. Latest release of SharePoint product has been enhanced with lot of new features to make SharePoint is the ideal platform for building real-life business processes. While tools such as Browser, Visio 2010 and SharePoint Designer 2010 have improved a lot there is always big room for Visual Studio to play when building powerful workflows. Let’s build a powerful workflow with Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010.

What am I going to cover: I will be covering mainly what are the workflow changes in SharePoint 2010. I will be spending less time with the slides and more time with my Demos. I will be doing 02 demos, 1^st one will demonstrate the new reusable workflow development feature building to SharePoint Designer 2010 and Visual Studio 2010. Second demo will cover developing a workflow using Visual Studio 2010 including InfoPath Forms to capture user data, Custom Association Form developed with InfoPath to capture configuration data, Custom ASP.NET-based Initiation Form to capture workflow initiation data and a Custom Task Form developed with InfoPath to help continuity of the process flow.

Session Timing: 25^th March, 02 PM – 03 PM

March/ April are the MCT renewal cycle. Though I didn’t do much Microsoft Official Curriculum trainings during the last year, I enjoy being a both MVP and MCT since I was the 1^st be in my country.

After I came back to Sri Lanka, I started delivering MOCs again and I renewed my MCT for the 7^th consecutive time without any hesitation.

I need to mention that their new online payment and renewal process is a very big improvement.

Hoping to deliver lots and lots of MOCs for our Sri Lankan students/ employees.

Microsoft accounted Visual Studio Service Pack 1 today and it will be available for MSDN subscribers from tomorrow – 8^th March. General availability will be from 10^th March and we are still waiting to get the complete list of bug fixed and enhancements.

If you are a MSDN subscriber you can download the Visual Studio Service Pack 1 from https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/securedownloads/default.aspx

Stay tuned for the complete list of bug fixes and enhancements.

You can see the complete list of new features/ bug fixes part of Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 here : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/983509

SQL Server is the No 1 focus within SolidQ and we have done a number of great things alone and partnering with Microsoft in the area of SQL Server. This is another achievement for SolidQ guys – getting a good quality online journal. I was dreaming for a long time to have my own good quality online journal for SharePoint and this is a great example for me.

There are plenty of online journals today and how SQJ differentiate from others is …… oh why don’t you download it and find it yourself. Be the 1400+ person to download it. Go and check http://www.solidq.com/sqj/Pages/Home.aspx 

SolidQ Journal - July

With the release of SolidQ Journal, our SolidQ Site started getting more than 1000 user hits per day and that shows how people recognize SolidQ Mentors all over the world. If you need to read content FREE from the people who wrote books for Wrox, Apress, Microsoft, etc… then this is what you should be checking every month.

SolidQ Journal

MUGH – Microsoft User Group Hyderabad did Office 2010 Community Launch yesterday in Microsoft Campus. This was my 1^st community involvement after relocating to India and I was just an attendee.

It’s always good to be inside Microsoft Campus and we had 108 attendees inside that big MPR. We had good session lineup which covered Word, PowerPoint, Excel and SharePoint 2010. I didn’t know that people will turn-up for a full day event on a Saturday for Office launch. But this shows how well Office product is becoming most popular product around the world.

I’m writing this post with great pleasure to announce that our corporate site (http://www.solidq.com) went online today with SharePoint Server 2010. I’m really happy with that and this is going to be a very good example for other Microsoft Partners as well.

We see lot of organizations who do consulting on SharePoint, they have their web site running on either open source or any other technology. But we decided to set an example to our customers and partners by hosting our site with the technology we promote. We have our global site running on top of SharePoint Server 2010 and this exercise was started when the product was in beta.

I’m glad that now I have a real-life example to show to all my students apart from Microsoft SharePoint site. My salute to our IT Support team for their great effort.

Microsoft Tech-Ed India 2010 is considered as the major Technology event of the year for various IT Professionals and Developers. This year Tech-Ed is very important and remarkable because we are going to launch Visual Studio 2010 during the event. This event will feature a comprehensive forum in order to learn, connect, explore, and evolve the current technologies we have today.

What I heard during the 2^nd week of March that they had more than 2500 registrations and they closed the registration in the last week of March. It shows how people are looking forward for this event and above all this is happening in the IT Hub in India-Bangalore.

I’m very much pleased to announce that I’m presenting at the Tech-Ed and I encourage attending both the sessions. Following are the sessions I have aligned for you:

Session 1: Deploying web apps at the speed of your thinking
Date: 12^th April                  Time: 05.00pm – 06.00pm

Visual Studio 2010 offers web deployment as an easy walk-through. With its one click deployment model, deploying your applications becomes a seamless experience. Walk into this session where we will take a pretty big application and get it deployed with all the dependent stuff easily, using Visual Studio 2010.

Session 2: SharePoint 2010 Workflows
Date: 14^th April                  Time: 12.30pm – 01.30pm

Workflow in SharePoint 2010 has been revamped with a new designer for building both reusable workflows and list based workflows. Forms and Workflows are important for automating business processes. Organizations usually rely on software developers to create these workflows using code. Not anymore! With SharePoint Designer 2010, you can create powerful data driven form composite solutions on your SharePoint sites. SharePoint Designer’s workflows let you design powerful multi-step workflows centered around the form collected data, building upon the out-of-the-box reusable workflows and even import workflow designs from Visio! In this presentation, you will see how these tools come together to design workflows and route forms across your organization for task assignment and approval, and also how you can reuse your workflows in other lists and libraries on your site and how to prototype workflows in SharePoint Designer for further development in Visual Studio 2010.

Come and join with me for this big, challenging event and let’s Learn, Connect, Explore what’s going to come in this year 2010.

This is my 2nd Tech-Ed speaking engagement in year 2010.

March/ April are the months of MCT renewal.

I have successfully renewed my Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) credentials for year 2010.

As you remember last year i blogged about the new experience of MCT renewal and even this year they have done the same thing. We now have option to pay by credit card and renew. Hope MCT team will improve it a lot by year 2011.

It’s been a very very long time (3+ years) that we had a TechEd Sri Lanka due to various reasons. Our guys missed a lot of stuffs and it’s time to have one. For those who are not capable of flying out of country and attend any other TechEd events, it’s time to have a TechEd locally.

Guys, get ready and stay tuned…

TechEd 2010 Sri Lanka

Microsoft launches Business Intelligence Developer Network (BIDN) Beta site today. BIDN is a FREE ocean of information starting from novice BI guys to experienced BI guys.

Come and join : http://www.bidn.com/

Guys, long awaiting SharePoint 2010 Beta 1 was released to public last night. If you are a MSDN Subscriber or TechNet Subscriber why wait anymore?

I have already started downloading and its 3% completed.

Guys, Microsoft made available Office 2010 Beta 1 last night for MSDN and TechNet Subscribers to download.

Check it out and I’m already on my way.

How many of you like stsadm command? How many operation you have used from the huge list of operations comes with stsadm?

Here is a Silverlight interactive application for you to get familiar with all the stsadm operations and this a very productive application for SharePoint engineers.

It will show you all the stsadm operations and you can click on an operation to get the description, and a link to the full article in TechNet. And you will be able to use the full-text search to search for an operation and locate the required information very easily.

stsadm Technical Reference for WSS 3.0

stsadm Technical Reference for SharePoint Server 2007

With the key note by Steve Ballmer today (19th) at SharePoint Conference, Microsoft unveiled SharePoint 2010 and they will be releasing 1st public Beta in November.

I’m waiting to see some exiting events happening locally and getting ready for few sessions. I would recommend all those who love to see what’s there in the new version of SharePoint, here is the best starting place:

http://blogs.msdn.com/arpans/archive/2009/10/19/welcome-to-sharepoint-2010.aspx

I always like to read Arpan’s posts and here yet another useful post.