Rix Bits

Lately I’ve been looking over the XML code contained in the Application Definition File for some SharePoint Business Data Catalog work I’ve been doing. As I normally do, I used Visual Studio as my XML viewer of choice. But I had to pause for a second to sit back and appreciate how Visual Studio 2010 makes looking at all that XML code a lot nicer. : )

Saturday’s SharePoint event here in Columbus, Ohio was great.  I give kudos to the folks that worked hard to put it together, and who pulled off bringing together such a great lineup of speakers.  If you’re a SharePoint junkie in Central Ohio and you missed the event, I now shed a tear for you. (wiping away fake tear)  The only consolation I can give you is that you can scroll down a little to see the slides from my presentation.  Although it doesn’t include the live demos I ran during my talk, it at least gives you a peek at what I think are some of the main points of interest as it relates to document management in SharePoint 2007 and 2010.

There – don’t you feel better now? :)

On August 14th 2010 I’ll be joining an all-star lineup of SharePoint speakers at Columbus’ SharePoint Saturday, an all-day event filled with sessions on a large range of different SharePoint topics.  These Saturday events happen all over the country, but I believe this is Columbus’ first one.  The firm I work for happens to be one of the sponsors.

My topic will be Document Management in SharePoint.  So of course my challenge is now to condense all the kool stuff that SharePoint can do as it relates to enterprise content management into a 75-minute talk.  Of course, I know from experience it’s much better to have too much content to work with for a presentation than not enough.  :-)  

I also want to try to make sure I don’t get caught up into too many of the super-kool SharePoint 2010 DM features like the Content Router, taxonomy tagging, the Document ID service, or Office Web apps, and try to spend more time on the SharePoint 2007 feature set.  I know many of us are excited about our future plans to move to SharePoint 2010, but for now, when the Saturday sessions are finished, the reality is that on Monday most of will go to work needing to be able to put our new knowledge to work in a 2007 environment.

Planning on coming out this Saturday?  (my presentation occurs around 3pm according to the schedule)  Got a DM topic you want to make sure I cover?  Let me know – I’ll slip a slide into my presentation just for you! :- )

The results are in – the BDPA Columbus team scored 12th out of 22 teams in the 25th Annual BDPA High School Computer Competition! Congratulations team!

Here’s a few key facts to put this achievement in perspective:

The high school students are currently wrapping up the final part of their computer competition.  Kudos to all of them for hanging in there. Today was an 8am – 4pm all day marathon for them, as they work together throughout the day to finish a challenge programming assignment.  This year’s assignment centered around a fictional construction company, and involved many aspects, including the design of a login interface, a Requests for Proposal submission form, and a system to generate estimates based on construction costs.  I anxiously await hearing back from the students to see how they think they did.

The High School Computer Competition is an important part of the BDPA conference, whose focus is on highlighting and developing the African-American presence in the IT industry.  I also find it interesting that this same week there are a couple more conferences of similar perspective going on.  The National Association of Black Journalists Conference is happening this week in San Diego (10TV’s Jerry Revish told me about that one as we both waited to board the plane leaving Columbus), and this week also marks the 100th anniversary and conference of the National Urban League.

So, lots of history going on this week.  Let’s see if our BDPA Columbus team can also make history in their competition today.  Go Team Go! :-)

This week I will be traveling to Philadelphia with a group of talented high school students as we all attend the 2010 Black Data Processors Association (BDPA) National Conference.  These high school students have spent almost every Saturday morning with me for the past few months learning ASP.NET web development skills in order to compete in this year’s BDPA High School Computer Competition (HSCC) at the Conference.  I’ve been teaching concepts such as object-oriented programming, master page development, and page event handling.  And I believe their Saturday commitments will pay off, as I’ve seen them make great progress in their understanding of the concepts.

It should be a great event for all of us.  In addition to the Competition, the Conference includes a Youth Technology Camp, Career Fair, Technology Expo, and great workshops on topics like ‘IT Workforce Development’, ‘Business Process Management’, and ‘Cloud Computing’.  And of course there’s the National BDPA Golf Classic, which I would attend if I had any golf skillz whatsoever. :- )

Expect to see a retrospective post from me once I return, and feel free to follow my real-time Tweets live from the conference using the hashtag #BDPA.

Maybe I’ll see you there! :- )

Every blogger hopes that their blog is useful and interesting to their readers.  I’m going to try to add some value to my blog very soon by posting some info regarding solutions I’ve recently discovered for a couple of SharePoint and InfoPath quirks I’ve bumped my head against recently.  When I scour the Googleverse/Bingiverse and don’t find a solution to my issues, I figure that might be a good sign that it’s time for me to add a new Rix Bit. :)

If you happen to like reading my blog, you might be interested in some of the other blogs from my talented peers at ICC, like our SharePoint Infrastructure guru Veenus (MCP/MVTS).  More ICC bloggers will be added to this list in the future, so stay tuned.