Andrew Gelina

It was the usual story: a short deadline and a tight budget. The client's internal staff said "No way" to build the Web-based application in fewer than six months, with any fewer than three full-time resources. The project needed to be completed in two months. It included custom authentication, collaboration, business rules, and forums. Therefore we chose SharePoint 2007 as the development platform and configured the solution to handle 80% of the functionality. Where SharePoint could not meet the requirements through configuration, we developed custom code to complete the other 20%. Herein we'll detail some best practices and lessons learned from our implementation. Project Background The client, a leading provider of information and technology solutions to the worldwide financial community, wanted to construct a social networking portal. They wanted to establish min... (more)

Day Two of the SharePoint Conference 2009 (SPC)

There were more in-depth info on SharePoint features and client stories, as well as analyst views on Day 2. Booz Allen Hamilton had a great story about their intranet’s social networking features, and how they drove adoption in a conservative environment where such ideas might normally be resisted. BAH used FAST Search, SharePoint, and some home grown solutions to provide a portal where people could post their availability for projects and managers in need of resources could find out about them, their reporting structure, and skills. They showed off a neat org chart tool that all... (more)

SPC 2009 Wrap-Up

Java Developer's Journal The last day of the SPC had some tech-laden sessions hosted by Andrew Connell. The first was about migrating from 2007 to 2010, and how you can add the nice 2010 development features (like the ribbon and the developer dashboard) back into your 2007 master pages when you migrate them. The theme seems to be that you invested in branding and customizing 2007, and Microsoft is making it straightforward to move that content to 2010. The idea is to not have to stop doing work in your 2007 instance waiting for 2010 to release. All in all, it looks like going fr... (more)

Microsoft SharePoint 2010

First let me apologize for the lack of blogging for a while.  We have been under the gun with a sizable SharePoint development project.  I have gown farther down into the innards of InfoPath then I ever thought possible.  To give you an idea, we worked over 140 hours in the 2 weeks prior to the conference.  I promise to be better, and now I have good reason to do so: We at Syrinx just got back from a long week loaded with sessions, booths, experts, and information all about SharePoint 2010.  All I can say is *WOW*.  I predict the trend of SharePoint adoption to continue to to clim... (more)

MS SharePoint Conference Day One

Syrinx is here in force at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas, NV. The Mandalay Bay is packed with over 6,000 people attending the conference from all over the world. The morning was spent in a keynote with Steve Ballmer and a demo of the new SharePoint 2010 capabilities. Highlights for those that cannot be here: SharePoint 2010 Beta release scheduled for next month (November 2009) Final release sometime in H1 2010 Windows 7 and Vista will be supported for developer platforms, and there is a developer dashboard built in that helps with profiling code. Downside... (more)