Peter Gilbert

There will be a meeting of the SharePoint User Group UK on the 27th January 2010 at 6.30pm at HP Labs in Bristol. I have been a member of this august institution for at least three if not four years, but have never attended a single meeting, my usual excuse is that as I dont have a car it's difficult to get to places like Reading and London in the evening, when these meetings are usually held.

This time, however, I have no excuse, as the meeting is to be held in our very own backyard as it were, in the HP Labs behind the staff restaurant (for us UWE people anyway). Anyway its a stone throw away from UWE (literally) so it will be easy for me to get to. No excuses then, so it looks like I'm going along.

On the agenda:
6:30pm Welcome

6:40 - 7:20 Andy Ginn: An overview of HP white papers and tools organisations can use when adopting SharePoint. Andy introduces some useful tools for sizing and configuration of SharePoint environments, and reviews research from HP labs looking at the performance of SharePoint on Windows Server 03/SQL Server 05 versus Windows Server 08/SQL Server 08 – come along and see if the results are as you would expect! Best practice guidance on the use of virtualised solutions is also reviewed.

7:20 - 7:35pm New Speaker Slot - Lee Fedder
Integrating SharePoint with insurance claims management applications via web services. Issues and lessons learned.

7:35 - 8pm Break, pizzas

8 - 9pm Mark Macrae: Utilising SQL Reporting Services in Integrated Mode for SharePoint and Empowering Information Managers with Report Builder. In this session Mark will be focussing on Reporting Services - a ‘free’ but often forgotten Business Intelligence tool which has much improved with SQL 2008. Mark will discuss the steps required to install and configure SSRS in SharePoint Integrated Mode, complete with the much improved Report Builder 2.0. He will then demonstrate how Report Builder can be used by Power Users to quickly build reports, manage and version them in SharePoint, approve and publish to an audience. Finally, Mark will examine the improvements which SharePoint 2010, SQL 2008 R2 and Report Builder 3 will offer when they are released.

To sign up go to The SharePoint User Group UK meeting thread and add your name by the 25th Jan. See you there!