SharePoint MVP for the 5th Year!

Last weekend was really exciting for two reasons. First, because my eldest daughter got married on Saturday. We were so busy getting ready for the wedding that I almost forgot about my MVP award date on July 1st. But soon enough the wedding was over and things started to get back to normal on Sunday and there was my the email announcing my MVP award again this year for SharePoint. This is my fifth year and I get more EXCITED about the program every year. Every year I make more friends and contacts through the program. Their help and support is invaluable when it comes to learning all the nooks and crannies in this product. I often wonder how I learned as much as I did before I gained access to the resources and contacts available to me as an MVP. And every year brings more opportunities for learning and sharing that knowledge with others in the community.

But the bottom line is still that I wouldn’t be an MVP if it weren’t for all of you out there in the community. In the last year I’ve begun to run into a number of people who recognize my name from the MSDN Forums. Its been great to meet all of you in person and thanks for all the questions that you’ve asked. Some of them provide an easy outlet for sharing what I already know. But others provide challenges to learn new things so I can help answer questions. Without your stimulating questions I wouldn’t be receiving this award. I hope to continue to live up to the honor and hope that I never get complacent about what its really about: Helping to support the SharePoint community.

Last Day at Sharesquared

Yesterday was my last day working for Sharesquared. I’ve really enjoyed working with a wonderful group of consultants and clients for the last couple of years but it was time for a change. Sharesquared is a virtual company that hires the best talent they can find wherever you happen to live. The result is a virtual company where most of the work is done through “Telecommuting”. The result is a company with some really talented people who are a pleasure to work with, but who you only have contact with electronically. Although I enjoyed working from home it can lose its appeal after a while when all but one of your colleagues lives 2 to 3 time zones away and you only see people face to face at the annual company meeting. So when an opportunity came up recently to work for a growing consulting firm headquartered here in Cleveland I decided it was time to make the move. That company is the BlueChip Consulting Group.

Unlike Sharesquared, who focus completely on SharePoint, BlueChip views itself as an “Infrastructure Optimization Consulting Firm”. They have several successful practices including a growing SharePoint practice. My role at BlueChip will be similar to the role I had at Sharesquared. I’ll be a Senior Solutions Architect serving as the chief technical architect within the Portals and Collaboration team at Blue Chip. In that role it will be my job to help design new SharePoint implementations and provide technical mentoring to the other members of the team. The difference is that I’ll see the other members of the team face to face on a regular basis. I’m looking forward to getting to know the members of the team and starting work on some new projects. I start work at BlueChip next Monday.

So to all my friends at Sharesquared, the best of luck and continued success. And to all my future friends at BlueChip, I can’t wait to get started. My new contact info is listed below. If my email is in your address book please change it to:

paul.stork@bluechip-llc.com

Best Practices for SharePoint 2010 Upgrade & Configuration

Please join Dave Milner and me for the webinar entitled Best Practices for SharePoint 2010 Upgrade & Configuration, where we will outline various critical considerations and best practice strategies for the planning and conducting an upgrade from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010.

The webinar will include live demonstrations and discussion of the following points:

Who should upgrade, why & when
How to assess existing SharePoint deployments and identify upgrade risks and opportunities
Specific tasks that need to be done to prepare for SharePoint 2010
How to identify and upgrade existing 2007 customizations
Best Practices for supporting parallel environments, migration & preserving the investment in your existing SharePoint deployment
Avoiding Upgrade & Migration Pitfalls

If you are considering upgrading to SharePoint 2010 from a previous version, you will gain an understanding of how to effectively upgrade SharePoint 2010 in accordance with best practices and gain insights into approaches, techniques, and tools that mitigate the effort and risk associated with upgrades.

Sign-Up for the Seminar here:

https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=156123

SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1 Released

The SharePoint product team released Service Pack 1 for SharePoint 2010 yesterday, along with service packs for a lot of related Office products. In the past its been a good idea to patch SharePoint and your client applications at the same time to maintain the highest level of integration between SharePoint and the desktop. I would recommend continuing to follow that procedure.

But this SP1 is more than just a bug fix. It includes some new features and functionality for SharePoint, including:

A Site Recycle Bin – Recover accidentally deleted SharePoint Sites and Site Collections.
Shallow Copy – The ability to move site collections containing Remote Blob Storage (RBS) elements from one content database to another without having to physically move the RBS Blobs.
StorMan.aspx – The return of a Storage Allocation page where you can see how much storage is being used by major portions of your farm.

You can find links to the all the Office related service packs, including SharePoint here:

http://tinyurl.com/SharePointSP1

You can find a shorter list of just the service packs related to SharePoint here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2510766

Make sure you remember to apply SP1 for all the products you have installed!

June SharePoint Q&A with MVP Experts

Do you have tough technical questions regarding SharePoint for which you’re seeking answers? Do you want to tap into the deep knowledge of the talented Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals? Then join me and other SharePoint MVPs for answers to your questions in a live forum. So please join us and bring on the questions! These chats will cover WSS, MOSS and SharePoint 2010. Topics include setup and administration, design, development and general questions. This month there is only one time slot for the chat. I’ll be there so bring your questions to the chat on Wednesday June 22nd. Other MVPs who will also be attending include:

Alex Pearce
Corey Roth
Darrin Bishop
Ivan Sanders
John Timney
Kanwal Khipple
Kris Wagner

Laura Rogers
Liam Cleary
Paul Galvin
Randy Drisgill
Rob Foster
Serge Tremblay
Woody Windischman

Wed, June 22nd, 2011

Noon EDT (9am PDT)

Join the chat room on the day of the chat:

URL: http://www.microsoft.com/communities/chats/chatrooms/msdn.aspx

Twitter hastag: #spmvpchat

SharePoint Team Blog post: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mvpawardprogram/archive/2011/06/14/special-live-sharepoint-chat-announcement.aspx