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!
Hi everyone!
Last week both me and Daniel Pereira went to Porto for the LRG Forum where the Microsoft Citizen Service Platform was launched.
On this event we did two presentations, one showing the Executive Portal for Porto Council and another demoing our contribution for the CSP, using a lite version of our solution.
The Porto Council Executive Portal is based on our solution for Council Meetings: CaveDigital Board Meeting 2007, Town Hall Edition, which has already beaten the initial estimated Return Of Investment - we initially estimated that 11 trees would be saved yearly.
Based on live data, we can now estimate, so far, that Porto Council will spare 30 trees per year by lowering drastically their paper consumption. These yearly 4 tons of wood, still had to be converted to paper. Since this isn't happening anymore, that's around 51 million Kw/year that don't get spent on doing so, 1.3 tons/year of solid waste that don't happen anymore, 3 tons/year of CO2 like gases that don't get generated and released to the atmosphere anymore and 91000 litres/year of water that don't get consumed anymore.
Another interesting fact is that prior to our solution, a staff of 4 people where needed, fulltime, to provision Council Meetings at Porto's (lots of photocopying had to happen). This staff of 4 would work for 2 weeks on average to prepare 1 Council Meeting (2 meetings happen regularly per month). Now, roughly, 1 person can do this work in 1 afternoon. That's around 7296 work hours freed yearly for more productive and value-adding tasks.
The cool thing is, summing on the national prize this project had already received, during the LRG Forum, the project got awarded another recognition, this time international: Sustainability Award - City of Porto and CaveDigital, Portugal.
To name a few, our solution is built on top of the following technologies:
- Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
- Microsoft Office 2007 Professional
- Windows Workflow Foundation
For more information on our solution, please visit: http://www.cavedigital.com/bm/
For more information on Microsoft Citizen Service Platform, please visit: http://www.citizenserviceplatform.com/
Paper calculations thanks to http://www.papercalculator.org/
Keeping up with the usual flow of information sharing in the hopeless effort of saving others the troubles and perils I go through, I'm documenting here my first trip to Redmond, Seattle 
Last week I had 2 full days of meetings at Microsoft campus in Redmond, regarding this project our company is participating on called Microsoft Citizen Service Platform (let's call it CSP ). It was really nice to meet all the folks and talk about über-geek stuff, with special kudos for the OCS guys, which won the «best meeting award»! 
For CSP we'll be delivering a Lite version of our solution for Board Meetings on its edition for the Local and Regional Government market, the CaveDigital Board Meeting 2007, Town Hall Edition and which is in use at Porto Town Hall Council (the second largest iconic Portuguese city (also known as Oporto)).
But let's get back to the reason why I'm writing here about, which is, how I got there, and that's where the fun begins.
It all started on the previous week - my flights were booked and the person in charge for making that happen emailed me my e-ticket.
Saturday I hopped on the first flight from Lisbon to Frankfurt...
At Frankfurt they flagged me for security check... so there I was waiting for 10 mins looking at a guy on the phone holding my passport and thinking «hey, this isn't my first trip to the US». Good thing from this was that on my next flight to San Francisco they moved my seat to Business Class.
At San Francisco I realized my luggage didn't fly there with me... Tried to fill in a bagage claim but they instructed me to do so on my final destination... so I hopped on my next flight to Redmond/Bend... «Bend?» I inquired myself... «just go with the flow».
When I landed at Redmond Municipal Airport, the first thought on my mind was «hummm... this seems a tad smaller than I expected».
I procceded to fill in a bagage claim and while giving the hotel address the lady behind the counter inquired «this address is Washington state... we're in Oregon». A sinapse storm occured instantly as my brain reached for the stored geographical represenation of North America. «Humm, Seattle isn't in Oregon ... what's going on here?»... So I procceded to explain that I was heading for the Microsoft campus at Redmond, Seattle, and that's when it hit me: «I'M ON THE WRONG REDMOND!»
Lucky me, NOT!, being a Municipal Airport, they closed at night, so I could only catch a flight to Seattle on next early morning. The people there were really nice though, and the lady behind the counter was kind enough to give me a ride to a nice dinner called Sharis (or something similar to that) where I sat for a few hours and got back to the airport. People at the «wrong» Redmond are actually really nice
After arriving at the airport and checking-in, guess what? They flagged me for security check again, yes, at municipal airport ... So there I waited for 10 minutes again, while they went through my backpack and laptop zzzz ...
Finally hopped on the flight to Seattle and there, got a cab to my final destination: Redmond, Seattle, Washington State
Bottom line, it took me more than 30 hours to get there, so... make sure they send you to the right Redmond.
Cheers!
Hi everybody!
Please vote for our solution - CaveDigital Board Meeting 2007, Town Hall Edition - for Council Meetings on the Clean Technology vertical for the Ingenuity Point contest.
Our solution renders Council Meetings paperless, thus saving a LOT of trees per year
Plenty of SharePoint, Windows Workflow Foundation and Office 2007
Thanks for your support!!
Both me and Daniel Pereira just did 70-630. Instead of bragging about it, let's just say it's done, with style
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CAN YOU CODE?
As our company continues evolving, we're opening more coding slots on our ranks.
This said, we're looking for ASP.NET 2.0 Web Developers for projects in Portugal (Lisbon) using:
- Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007,
- SQL Server 2005,
- ASP.NET 2.0,
- C#,
- XML and webservices,
- Office 2007,
- ...
Speaking, Reading and Writing Portuguese is a MUST HAVE.
Availability for travelling is a MUST HAVE.
For how long will you stay on the side-lines?
Send us your CV, past work screenshots and details we should know about, and let us know why (in your opinion) we should pick you to join our team 
Tired of being on the side-lines?
We're looking for ASP.NET 2.0 Web Developers for projects in Portugal (Lisbon) using:
- Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007,
- SQL Server 2005,
- ASP.NET 2.0,
- C#,
- XML and webservices,
- Office 2007,
- ...
Availability for travelling is a MUST HAVE.
For how long will you stay on the side-lines?
Send us your CV, past work screenshots and details we should know about, and let us know why (in your opinion) we should pick you to join our team
Great news!
Just got this by email (which I have negleted to read and reply to properly lately with all the fuss which is going on) from José Silva:
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This workaround helps us all to deal with the fact that the ability to update SharePoint lists from Office Excel 2007 is deprecated in favor of publishing and synchronizing lists using Office Access 2007, so now you can use the Excel 2007 SharePoint List Synchronizing Add-in to update SharePoint lists from Office Excel 2007.
I still think deprecating this feature was not a very happy decision. Being able to play from Access 2007 is great, but loosing Excel functionaly? ... C'mon guys!!
SPException ...
Pedro Santana just shared this with me ...
Now, who had the idea of translating the role ID for full control on MOSS 2007 pt-PT ?
... naughty you!
Patrick's been kind enough to share again more goodies and gems with the rest of us
Busy myself these days preparing a number of Visual How-Tos on different workflow topics (but of course SharePoint-related); I am happy to learn that Serge Luca was involved in a set of MSDN labs that are available for download. Workflow is an exciting subject and quite important in the world of SharePoint, so download them and try them out.»
Go get it lads!
Via Tasks and Time Management in Outlook blog,
«... the latest update for Outlook 2007. It has several performance improvements and should improve the general responsiveness of Outlook when reading, moving, deleting and downloading e-mail messages for users who have large mailbox files (.pst and .ost files) stored on their computers. It also has a fix for a delegate/manager calendar related privacy issue, where delegates to a user’s calendar could potentially view calendar items marked as “private” when searching for items in the manager’s calendar.
Here are the links:
It does work
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
 
Following another idea, I sent an email to Doug in hope for the right direction to follow:
«I'm trying to store a file inside the zip file (.docx), but when I open the .docx on word 2007 I get the following error message: «the office open xml file test.docx cannot be opened because there are problems with the contents.» I want to store some files inside the .docx (zip file) for use by other applications without affecting how it is used by word 2007.»
Doug did more than that, and wrote a hole post on how to do it:
«Arbitrary content in an OPC package
Basic Concepts: Parts, Relationships, and Content Types
First, a few basic concepts. Open XML documents are packages based on the OPC (Open Packaging Convention) specification. XPS documents are also OPC packages, and you can create OPC packages of your own that have nothing to do with Open XML or XPS if you'd like. If you do that, you can use the .NET 3.0 packaging API to work with your documents, which means the same programming techniques you'll use for Open XML apply to your own custom package.
...»
Thanks Doug! You have just unleashed a demon
I was working with Marcos on setting Microsoft Office 2007 on his system when we were baffled with the following error message:
«Setup is unable to proceed due to the following error(s): The 2007 Microsoft Office system does not support upgrading from a prerelease version of the 2007 Microsoft Office system. You must first uninstall any prerelease versions of the 2007 Microsoft Office system products and associated technologies. Correct the issue(s) listed above and re-run setup.»
We had already unninstalled his Beta 2TR, so, guess we were in trouble... After a few web searches we found this Microsoft tool, the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility. Downloaded this tool and used it to remove the Office (Beta) still hanging in there. Afterwards, everything installed fine.
Hope this helps someone out there
Also, don't forget to install the 2007 Microsoft Office Add-in: Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS.
Last month we produced a video on Paperless Meetings, also in context of an event by Microsoft Portugal called «The New World for Public Administration Work».
You can view it here.
Also, check out the unofficial making of.
Naming some of the technologies used: Tablet PC, Windows Vista, MOSS 2007, LCS 2005, Office 2007, Office Communicator, ...
Via Mart & Michiel,
«Microsoft confirms they're working on a Records Center Add-on Pack for Office SharePoint Server which will provide the additional functionality to meet the DoD 5015.2 criteria. The add-on pack will be freely available to all customers with Office SharePoint Server 2007.
Microsoft is slotted to take the DoD 5015.2 certification test on May 14, 2007 and they plan to release the add-on pack shortly after the certification process is complete.»
Via Mart,
«Finally it is there!
This Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services contains the following tools to aid developers in building SharePoint applications:
Visual Studio 2005 Project Templates
- Web Part
- Team Site Definition
- Blank Site Definition
- List Definition
Visual Studio 2005 Item Templates (items that can be added into an existing project)
- Web Part
- Custom Field
- List Definition (with optional Event Receiver)
- Content Type (with optional Event Receiver)
- Module
SharePoint Solution Generator
- This stand-alone program generates a Site Definition project from an existing SharePoint site. The program enables developers to use the browser and Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer to customize the content of their sites before creating code by using Visual Studio.
Download here»
Via Bart,
«Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services Add-in for Microsoft SharePoint Technologies - Community Technology Preview (CTP) November 2006
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services Add-in for SharePoint Technologies (Reporting Services Add-in) allows you to take advantage of SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 (SP2) report processing and management capabilities within Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. The download provides the following functionality:
- A Report Viewer Web Part that provides report viewing capability, export to other rendering formats, page navigation, search, print, and zoom.
- Web application pages so that you can create subscriptions and schedules, and manage reports, models, and data sources.
- Support for using standard Windows SharePoint Services features including document management, collaboration, security, and deployment with report server content types.»
Also, pay special attention to:
«Warning: No automatic upgrade support
Pre-release versions of the Reporting Services Add-in cannot be upgraded to a future version. Also, it is possible that you might not be able to upgrade the report server database that you create in this release. If this occurs, you will have to republish all data files and redefine subscriptions, schedules, report history.»
Get it here
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