Hi all,

Daniel Dias Pereira will be presenting our Board Meeting solution on a live webcast this afternoon.

His presentation will be in portuguese:

Webcast 26 - "The Best of Techdays 2008 ITPro" - Innovation Day - Administração Pública Electrónica: Gov 2.0

- CaveDigital (Daniel Pereira): Reuniões e Colaboração Digitais;

A solução CaveDigital Board Meeting 2007 vem potenciar a Modernização Administrativa ao nível dos Decisores de topo, permitindo que as suas reuniões passem a ocorrer no plano digital, contribuindo assim para a diminuição drástica do consumo de recursos naturais e do impacto ambiental, bem como para potenciar o aumento da agilidade nos processos de tomada de decisão. Na sua variante Town Hall Edition, esta solução dá resposta às Reuniões de Câmara, desmaterializando por completo o fluxo de trabalho, desde a elaboração das propostas até à sua deliberação em Reunião de Câmara e resultando também na criação automática de minuta de acta.

Será demonstrada a solução implementada na Câmara Municipal do Porto, onde a plataforma supracitada estima-se (baseado em dados recolhidos desde a entrada do sistema em funcionamento) permitir a poupança de até 30 àrvores por ano, para além dos ganhos na qualidade das propostas e tempo de preparação de cada Reunião de Câmara.

To subscribe to this webcast, go to: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032379345&Culture=pt-PT

Cheers!

Both me and Daniel Pereira just did 70-630. Instead of bragging about it, let's just say it's done, with style

SharePoint team posted on their blog about the newly released whitepaper: Microsoft Office Programs and SharePoint Products and Technologies Integration – Fair, Good, Better, Best.

Want to understand which levels of integration are available for each of the client and server versions of Office?

You can download it here.

A great new deal of books are reaching the market, which waits hungry for office & sharepoint 2007 knowledge!

Inside MOSS 2007 (Patrick's), which I'm waiting eagerly for

Designing Forms for Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 and Forms Services 2007 (Scott Roberts & Hagen Green), which I reviewed and find a good source for all that is InforPath and Forms Services 2007 (holds your hand from novice to intermediate).

Workflow in Office 2007 (David Mann), which I'm reading now and so far, so great

A few months ago, I've been approached by Addison-Wesley to technically review their soon to be released book on InfoPath 2007: Designing Forms with Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007. Last week I've submitted my last review on the materials.

I'm confident this book will be a great tool for people new to InfoPath, or those crossing the bridge over from InfoPath 2003 to the Office System 2007 (InfoPath 2007, Forms Server & Services, MOSS 2007, ...).

Stay tuned for this book's release.

As promised, I'm releasing some of our documentation, so here's the following white paper, in portuguese:

Microsoft Learning Gateway 2005
Arquitectura de Referência para Portais Educativos

Sumário Executivo
Portais são ferramentas de agregação e disponibilização de conteúdos e serviços online para as organizações. Um Portal ao serviço da Educação potencia uma melhor interacção entre os diversos intervenientes (Professores, Alunos, Encarregados de Educação, Funcionários Administrativos, etc.), uma ponte entre estes intervenientes e as organizações (Administração Pública e Local, Agrupamentos Escolares, Escolas, Fornecedores, etc.) e, quando associada uma forte componente colaborativa, podem potenciar a produtividade e agilizar o trabalho e as actividades do dia-a-dia destes intervenientes e organizações.

Este documento procura descrever uma arquitectura de referência para Câmaras Municipais, ou outras estruturas organizativas agregantes, para uma solução que permita a fácil disponibilização de conteúdos e ambientes colaborativos, simultaneamente potenciando uma plataforma sobre a qual seja possível desenvolver respostas a necessidades específicas das organizações, ao nível estratégico e ao nível operacional, bem como agilizar a integração dos seus diversos sistemas.

20051122192300 - MLG 2005 - Arquitectura de Referencia para Portais Educativos.zip (1,01 MB)

Hope it is useful to someone out there

Yes, I'm still alive! I know I haven't «been around» lately... but I promise I'll be posting back again Just have been terribly busy!
So to start, here's the powerpoints from the Microsoft Learning Gateway Technical Briefing presentation we did for Microsoft Partners.

Powerpoint file, in Portuguese: you can download the file here.

Some screenshots from the demo platform

Via Patrick,

«I think a lot of bloggers have been waiting for this. It seems that we can finally start sharing our experiences with the beta 1 of Office 12, although it is limited to the Office 12 client products. This is what Josh writes: 'According to company officials you are now allowed to blog about the Office 12 client suite of applications including: Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, Access, Publisher, Visio, Project, OneNote and InfoPath'. So no O12 server components yet! But enough for me to start with!

I also checked it out with Fitz. He had not heard about it but nodded that the news seems ok. This is what Ed has to say about it.»

Anyone confirms this?

Via Patrick,

«We expect the beta 2 of Office '12' to be released end of February. Time for everybody who likes to get their hands on the bits to register themselves. Having worked for months now on O12, I think it is the best release ever with endless possibilities for partners to start building solutions on top of it or integrated with it. So, quickly go here and register. Tx Marc for the link.»

Today will be the last day of this training workshop on Development with SharePoint and K2.net I'm giving - hope it has been helpful to my trainees and that they will succeed and make me proud with every project they do with these technologies.

Here's something I would like to share with everyone

Erika Ehrli published a few days ago some tips on how to ident xml files or documents

«Office has a deeper integration with XML technology and developers are always looking for tips and tricks to work with XML documents. Office provides support to work with XML and you might be one of those developers that is programmatically generating Word documents (using WordprocessingML) , Excel spreadsheets (using SpreadsheetML), PowerPoint slides (using PresentationML), or Visio diagrams using (DataDiagrammingML). I think it always comes handy to have a list of tips and tricks to work with XML, and today I will share with you three simple ways of indenting an XML file/document.»

Today, as I did some work on re-organizing my OneNote's 500Mb notes, I found this post from Maxim Tarassenko, done on his blog, back in August.

Maxim did some nice work on integrating his web part with our CaveDigital XML Form WebPreviewer Web Part and InfoPath forms on a SharePoint Form Library.

On this scenario, Maxim used his Resource Tracking web part to create an application where you can track meeting room reservations and manage these using InfoPath forms and CaveDigital XML Form WebPreviewer Web Part. The great thing is that, because his web part used the context menu from SharePoint for each item, the web parts instantly integrated seamlessly when used on the same page.

Great work Maxim!

To stimulate the imagination of the rest of you, if you pick from this example and follow on you can actually address your organizations needs:

• if you require simple approval of Resources usage, you can just enable Content Approval on this Form Library,
• if you require more elaborate approval workflows for Resources usage, you can use a workflow engine, like K2.NET, for having several approvers and escalation rules.

These past weeks, as you might have already guessed, have been really busy - which as kept me from writting here.

In the meantime, some of you might want to read this article I just found on MSDN Office website:

«Improve the Performance of InfoPath 2003 Forms
Avoid performance issues when designing an InfoPath 2003 form template and troubleshoot existing form templates that display poor performance.»

Also interesting is this new thing called Office Live, which will go Beta in early 2006:

«Microsoft Office Live will provide your company with its own domain name, Web site, and e-mail accounts for free.
Additionally, Microsoft Office Live will offer you and your employees expert business management applications, such as customer, project, and document management tools, and a security-enhanced private Web site—affordably managed and maintained by Microsoft—where you can work together and share information with your employees, customers, suppliers, and contractors.»

Erika Ehrli also wrote about this, in more detail, so if you're curious, be sure to read it.

As to me... been working on a lot of neat stuff, which I hope to write about as soon I get a little more ... time... span

The InfoPath 2003 Toolkit for Vistual Studio 2005 Beta 2 is now available

Via InfoPath Team Blog,

«The InfoPath 2003 Toolkit for Visual Studio .NET 2003 has been updated for Visual Studio 2005 and is included as a separate install in Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 Beta 2. It will automatically upgrade Visual Studio .NET 2003 projects so you can leverage your existing work.»

Fancy InfoPath development? Get it now

From the Microsoft Office Developer Center website:

«New Resources for InfoPath Developers
Read the blog, meet the team, and check out the redesigned portal. Then use the Information Center pages to learn more about a particular subject, such as Web services, databases, and XML.»

You can find a lot of useful stuff on the InfoPath Developer Portal.