It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

Wow – we’re into December already, with Christmas carols at the train station, and tinsel everywhere – all we need is some hot & sunny days (summer ?!?), and it’ll be the end of 2011.

To celebrate an amazing year, the Melbourne SharePoint User Group is having a Christmas party – tis the season to be jolly, eh ?
As our regular 4th Wednesday meeting would fall on the 28th December, we’ve moved the date to be a few weeks early.
For this month only, the meeting will be two weeks earlier – on Wed. 14th December.

 
NB. We won’t be having a January meeting – first meeting for 2012 will be Feb.22nd.
Come along and join the MSPUG gang for a different style of sessions, and some great Christmas “beers & cheers” – and – Christmas PRESENTS – yes, we have door prizes – and no, it won’t simply be a “mouse” or another copy of “Office 2010”…! We have some great gear lined up thanks to our sponsors.
So the deal is You MUST be in attendance to win – and be on the RSVP list.

 
Sessions – we’re having a break from the usual ‘presentation’ sessions – into some more interactive user group conversations – hopefully this format will be interesting, informative and some great discussion.

See you there ! (and if you can’t make it – have a safe & cheerful Christmas – and see you in 2012)
Make sure to RSVP – to assist with catering for food & drinks – and to be eligible for the door prizes.

Cheers,

Chris & the MSPUG team.

Sessions

What happened to 2011 ???
Chris O’Connor will present a retrospective of the past year, and what we’ve seen within the SharePoint ecosystem – and our user group. We saw the demise of MOSSIG, and the birth of MSPUG – and continued to have some great sessions & speakers.
It’s amazing to see what’s happened over the last 12 months – 2011 has been a good 'SPYear', that’s for sure.

Focus Groups
In a totally different direction for MSPUG, we’re ditching the main presentation room and splitting into TWO meeting rooms – for some presenter-led discussion forum sessions.
The idea is to have some open-forum Q&A, about the two specific topics – so bring your questions, and thoughts and ideas – and join us for a chat.

Focus Group 1 : What’s next for Office 365
Ben Walters (Microsoft) and Elaine van Bergen (OBS) will lead some discussion around the bits & pieces that have transpired for Office 365 during the year, including the beta, and launch – and the MOSSIG cloud party – as well as what’s next for the platform – looking into 2012.
If you’re using Office 365, or looking to start, or just wondering what it’s all about – grab a beer – and sit down for an open chat with some experts in the field.

Focus Group 2 : What’s next for SharePoint
•Tim Wragg and Chris O’Connor will lead some discussion about the SharePoint platform, now that “2010” has matured, and many (most?) people are using it – and we’ve also seen the release of Service Pack 1. We can chat about what’s to come in 2012 – what do you expect to be doing this time next year?
Business Intelligence is high on the agenda these days, with the imminent release of Denali (SQL 2012), and PowerPivot – as well as newer web technologies such as HTML5, and jQuery – and the vNext SharePoint platform likely to arrive sometime in 2012. What do you want to see in vNext? What features are you looking forward to? Come along for an open beer-and-chat session.

PowerPivot for SharePoint
The PivotViewer control is a great way to visualise data, using a Silverlight control, and the ability to zoom, and filter data. See it in action here http://www.wssdemo.com/livepivot/

Chris O’Connor will do a show-n-tell of a recent project to implement the SPPivotViewer – using SharePoint as a source of data for the Pivot Viewer. This is a freely available CodePlex solution (http://pivotviewersp.codeplex.com/) that has been customised and extended to include ‘Search’ functionality.

Close-out : PRIZES – and SharePint !
Tim will then close-out 2011 for MSPUG – and draw the lucky door prize winners – before we head off for a “SharePint” session – for some more Christmas cheer.


Hope you can make it along to MSPUG – it will be a great night – see you there !