Dave is not only a skilled and accomplished developer and architect, he is also a well-traveled public speaker, appearing at developer conferences throughout the region. He is also president of the Great Lakes Area .NET User Group. Dave is also a prolific podcaster and blogger.

Way to go Dave!

Capgemini and Sogeti have been honored today with Microsoft’s coveted Enterprise Partner of the Year award. This outstanding achievement reflects Sogeti’s vast expertise and commitment to excellence on the Microsoft stack. A press release issued today by Sogeti reads,

“Cap Gemini S.A., with its subsidiary Sogeti, is one of the world’s foremost global providers of consulting, professional technology and outsourcing services, and Microsoft is pleased to recognize Capgemini and Sogeti as a Microsoft Enterprise Partner of the Year,” said Mark Hill, Vice President, Enterprise Partner Group, Microsoft Corp. “As one of Microsoft’s top worldwide partners on Window 7 as well as a strong partner in ERP and SharePoint solutions, Capgemini and Sogeti help customers transform their businesses through the innovative use of Microsoft technology. In addition, Capgemini and Sogeti offer solutions based on Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite for communications and collaboration thereby helping our customers realize the benefits of Cloud technology.”

Read the full press release here.

The meeting will be held at 6pm at the Microsoft Office at 1000 Town Center Dr., Southfield Town Center, Suite 1930 in Southfield. For more details visit the user group’s web site.

This is a great opportunity for users in SharePoint community to have their tough SharePoint questions answered by some of the best in the business.

Dave’s blog offers Grok Talks, interviews with software development experts, and even a TV show called Technology and Friends. You can catch it all here.

Congratulations Jonathan!

A Grok Talk is an informal presentation meant to illuminate a technical topic. Sogeti’s Michigan Unit hosts occasional Grok Talks so consultants can educate one another on the numerous technical challenges and solutions they encounter in the field. These talks benefit our consultants in two ways: they expose a new technology we are likely to encounter, and they offer opportunities for us to refine our presentation skills.

The talk will be made available remotely. For details contact Dave Giard.

SharePoint 2007 had some powerful Enterprise Content Management features, but it had some weaknesses that often had users wishing for more. For example, Content Types could not span site collections. In an environment with multiple site collections or web applications, these Content Types would have to be recreated many times. Worse, updates to the Content Types meant replicating those updates across the farm, leading to overly complex and error-prone situations.

SharePoint 2010 eliminates many of those concerns with its new Managed Metadata Service. Part of the new Shared Services architecture in SharePoint 2010, the Managed Metadata Service is managed by a farm administrator and provides metadata services that can be consumed across the farm. Farms can also have multiple Managed Metadata Service applications and expose different sets of metadata to different groups within the farm.

Key concepts within this architecture include the Term Store and the Managed Keywords. The Term Store is a collection of terms that can be linked to items in SharePoint. It is defined by an administrator and represents a managed taxonomy. The Managed Keywords collection consists of the tags created by users to label SharePoint content, creating a “folksonomy”. Both the Term Store and Managed Keywords can be leveraged to create more meaningful search results for users.

Another way SharePoint 2010 simplifies enterprise-wide content management is through Content Types. A Content Type Syndication Hub is a site collection that has been configured to host Content Types for the entire farm. Other site collections can then receive Content Types from the Hub. Now any changes made to the Content Types in the Hub will be extended to all site collections.

Mark Grimes from the Detroit unit and Dan Parker from the Houston unit will present a session at the South East Michigan SharePoint User’s Group on May 11^th. The presentation will focus on what’s new with InfoPath 2010 and how it integrates with SharePoint 2010.  For more information please visit: https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=148264

• Fri Jan 15 at 3PM, David will be delivering a vendor session at CodeMash in Sandusky, OH.
• Tue Jan 26 at Noon, David will deliver a presentation to Financial Corp in Cincinnati, OH.
• Tue Jan 26 at 6PM, David will present at the Cincinnati .Net User Group in Mason, OH
• Wed Jan 27 at 6PM, David will present at the Dayton .Net User Group in Dayton, OH

In addition, he will deliver two presentations Fri Jan 22 at the State of MI Developer Briefing in Lansing, MI.

• At 1PM, David will deliver the MEF presentation.
• At 2:30PM, David will present on "Speeding your application with Microsoft Velocity".