Friday 4 January 2008

Speaking at UK SharePoint user group on workflow

For anybody interested in workflow, I'll be speaking at the UK user group next week at Microsoft's London Victoria office on 10th Jan. There are two great sessions so I'd encourage UK SharePointers who can get to London to come down. Needless to say, I'll be posting my slides/sample code etc. for those further afield.

For those considering coming down, the meeting should be fun and it looks like a high turnout - we have over 100 people registered already. My fellow speaker is SharePoint MVP and all-round good guy Andrew Woodward.

The timetable and session abstracts are:

1800 - 1830 Arrive

1830 - 1930  Workflow: A deep dive into developing workflows for SharePoint using Visual Studio and Infopath - Chris O'Brien

Of the three types of workflow available to the SharePoint developer, only Visual Studio workflows provide complete flexibility and power. Without the right information however, the learning curve can be steep for the uninitiated. In this session we’ll start with initial decisions such as SharePoint Designer workflows vs. Visual Studio workflows, sequential vs. state-machine, and InfoPath vs ASP.Net for forms. From there we’ll cover the key steps to get a workflow up and running including retrieving data from an InfoPath form, configuring workflow activities, and deployment of the workflow. Over several demos, we’ll build a basic state-machine workflow, and show why workflow is a valuable addition to any SharePoint developer’s skillset.

1930 - 2000 Snacks and drinks

2000 - 2100 Search Server 2008 – What is it, how does it affect me and should I be testing it? - Andrew Woodward

A look at the recently announced Search Server 2008.  We will walk through an installation and demonstration of the new Federated Search capabilities, what’s provided out of the box, what you can get from free, how to leverage sites using Live.com and how to federate results from Google. We will discuss how this fits in with your existing WSS and MOSS deployments and the release timescales.


Registration/more info is at http://suguk.org/forums/thread/7300.aspx - please add to the thread leaving your full name

6 comments:

Arné Klopper said...

will you be publishing any webinars or vids of the sessions ?

Chris O'Brien said...

Hi Arné,

Unfortunately not, the venue doesn't have recording facilities. But lookout for my next article - it will have all my slides, sample code and much more.

Thanks,

Chris.

Anonymous said...

Hi Chris,

I didn't get a chance to ask this question at the session last night, but how easy is it to create a setup package of the VS Sharepoint Workflow project to deploy it to other Sharepoint servers ?

Thanks,
Ian.

Chris O'Brien said...

Hi Ian,

Damn good question! Actually it's incredibly easy, and most of it is handled for you. The PostBuildActions.bat script which MS provide is written to produce a Solution package (.wsp) if the project is built in release mode (rather than debug). So in summary:

- build in debug: creates Feature, deploys to local SharePoint instance
- build in release: creates Feature, packages into Solution for deployment anywhere

HTH,

Chris.

Unknown said...

Chris -

I am quite interested in this tool as it appears this could solve a very big headache for me. I trying to export a rather large site (about 40GB) and get an error that states "[6/19/2008 3:02:31 PM]: FatalError: There is not enough space on the disk.". The destincation of the .cmp file has about 85 GB so I don't understand the error. I also changes the TEMP and TMP variables to use the D: drive. Any ideas?

Chris O'Brien said...

Ckooz,

Assume you're referring to the Content Deployment Wizard but ended up posting your comment on this post.

Not 100% sure why you'd get this error I'm afraid. The TMP variable must point to a location which has sufficient disk space however, since the operation does generate temp files at this location. It could be though, that for a short while you need more than 2 times the actual data size (and that you are hitting that limit). I don't know this for sure though.

What about splitting the site into smaller chunks and importing that way?

HTH,

Chris.