Back in 2008, Woody Windischman, Bryan Phillips and I (Asif Rehmani) teamed up to write a book on SharePoint Designer 2007. The main reasons we wrote that book are because we really believe in SharePoint Designer and felt that there was just not enough ‘good’ information out there in the market about how to use it effectively. In fact, even till this day if you go to Amazon.com and read the reviews for the product, you will see that the prevailing viewpoint of reviewers is the complaint of not having a good user manual for it. In my humble opinion, […]

There are a bunch of SharePoint presentations that can be downloaded for free from the member’s area at Critical Path Training site. Check it out here: http://www.criticalpathtraining.com/Members/Pages/Presentations.aspx The presentations currently there are from me, Andrew Connell, Ted Pattison, and Scot Hillier. More will be added after each conference. I would suggest signing up for the member’s area (did I mention it was free :-)) and taking advantage of it.

I will be doing a SharePoint Designer 2010 eLearning Series which consists of three webcasts, including Q&A for each, on April 20th. This eLearning series is being produced by the folks at Windows IT Pro. Here are the three sessions: 11:00 am ET: Introduction to SharePoint Designer 2010: Top 5 Great Things to Know! 1:00 pm ET: Creating Workflows with SharePoint Designer 2010, InfoPath 2010, and Visio 2010 3:00 pm ET: Creating Data Centric Composite Applications using SharePoint Designer 2010   For more information about the sessions and to sign up, navigate to: http://elearning.left-brain.com/event/sharepoint-designer-2010-elearning-series.aspx. Hope to ‘see’ you there 🙂

Are you at the SharePoint Pro 2010 Summit this week? If yes, I would love to see at any of the 3 sessions that I’ll be doing tomorrow: HDEV04: Introduction to SharePoint Designer 2010: Top 5 Great Things to Know! HDEV05: Overview: Creating Workflows with SharePoint Designer 2010, InfoPath and Visio HDEV06: Generate and Publish Electronic Forms on Your Intranet Using InfoPath 2010… No Code Required! The abstracts for each session are listed here: http://www.devconnections.com/shows/sp2010sp/default.asp?c=1&s=147. Hope to see you there!

We will be holding the next Chicago SharePoint User Group meeting on March 18th from 1 to 4pm. The meeting location is the Downers Grove office of Microsoft (3025 Highland Parkway Suite 300, Downers Grove, IL). Following are the topics for the meeting: Records Retention and Litigation Preparedness: The Legal Side Jeff Davis Attorney Vedder Price Abstract: Effective records management and proactive eDiscovery practices can have an enormous impact on a company’s ability to successfully defend itself in litigation. Jeff will discuss the recent Pension Committee and other eDiscovery decisions, and will offer recommendations on how to develop legally compliant […]

This week I have the privilege of teaching the first ever SharePoint Designer 2010 course. As far as I know, this is the first SharePoint Designer 2010 course ever being taught by anyone in the world (please correct me if I’m wrong here). A lot of blood, sweat and tears have gone into creating this 5 day course and if I say so myself, it turned out pretty good ;-). Check out the Critical Path Training site for the next offerings of this course. The immediate next one is the webcast I’ll be teaching during the week of March 29th. […]

The long anticipated release of SharePoint 2010 is almost here now! Arpan Shah, director of SharePoint, announced the official date of launch to be May 12th. The RTM is going to be even earlier, April, so you should be able to download the bits directly from MSDN or TechNet at that time. At the same time, SharePoint Designer 2010 should become available as a free download from Microsoft’s site. My advice would be to download it right away to truly start taking advantage of the 2010 release. Please keep in mind that SharePoint Designer 2010 will not work without SharePoint […]

A few months back, I had written an article on using SharePoint Designer 2007 and InfoPath 2007 to automate business processes. The solution uses InfoPath to create a powerful electronic form, publishes it to a SharePoint form library, then routes that form through a workflow process using a workflow created in SharePoint Designer. Creating your business scenarios in this fashion will let you design true end to end solutions, without using any code, that will save you Tons of time! This article has finally made it onto MSDN. Check it out here in its entirety: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff355359.aspx. You can also check […]