Microsoft SBS Community Group

August’s meeting welcomes Gary Duffield of QA to present on using Office 2010 followed by Andy Parkes of IBIT Solutions to present on using SharePoint to develop an IT Helpdesk in 45 minutes.

Gary Duffield on Office 2010

Gary Duffield has been attending Microsoft’s s worldwide partner conference (WPC) since 1999 and continues to follow the new strategies and products issued from Redmond with interest. In this session, Gary Duffield will review WPC 2010 and discuss what Windows 7, Office 2010 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are doing for QAs customers, how Microsoft expects those solutions to grow and, what Microsoft sees happening in the future - which might just involve "The Cloud".

Microsoft realise that the success of Office 2010 will not be down to embedding YouTube videos in PowerPoint or the ability to manipulate an unfathomable number of rows in Excel. There is a bigger picture here, and it’s partly fluffy and cloud shaped. I’m going on record here as predicting that in a few years we’ll be remembering the H:> drive with the same nostalgia as floppy disks and RS232 ports. You did read my recent cloud blog didn’t you? The new Office suite for example can save documents to your Skydrive, no not something from Captain Scarlet, but your online home directory in the cloud. Plus Office finally goes online with some Office editing capabilities available via SharePoint 2010 or hosted.

Office may well move to the centre of our collaborative, data rich, social media enabled world. It’s this loosely coupled collaboration that will be the driver for Office, where multiple people can work on the same bid, where we can contact them from within that document using the telephone, VoIP or instant messaging. Of course to achieve this state of blissful connectivity, we need a bit of Office, a splash of SharePoint, a healthy measure of Communications Server topped with a slice of cloud.

Microsoft will win all the way if this takes off. It gets to sell client access licenses and subscriptions. I’ll claim to have spotted this coming back in 2008 in Houston. Microsoft get two sales for the price of one, we get workflow enabled, collaborative solutions, but I’ll bet we still carry a copy of our sales presentation around on a USB stick, you know, just in case there isn’t a cloud in sight.

Andy Parkes on SharePoint

Andy Parkes from IBIT Solutions and AMITPRO group leader, speaks about a usage case for SharePoint that most IT companies can understand: the helpdesk.

By focusing on this specific area, partners who haven’t yet discovered how SharePoint can be utilised should be able get an understanding of how quickly and easily SharePoint solutions can be put together. Andy will then show how Windows SharePoint Services can be used (with some clever modifications) as a fully-functioning IT helpdesk.

Starting from scratch with the default SBS Companyweb site, Andy will gradually build-up the individual elements of his helpdesk solution, including an Inbound E-mail Support Queue, Client/Contact Lists, and a Ticketing Tracking System. Once the basics are in place, he will show how to link the parts together using various lookup fields and custom workflow (using SharePoint Designer).

By the time he finishes, he’ll have built a semi-automated system which allows inbound support e-mails to be converted to helpdesk tickets, assigned to engineers, tracked for billing purposes, and managed by various filtering options. This should be completed in about 45 minutes.

If time permits, he’ll touch on other topics such as creating views for mobile devices, managing alerts using Outlook and how to use site columns to avoid duplication of data. By focusing on this specific area, partners who haven’t yet discovered how SharePoint can be utilised should be able get an understanding of how quickly and easily SharePoint solutions can be put together.

Agenda Timings:

18:30 – 18:40 Brief intros and airing of recent/current technical challenges

18:40 – 19:40 Gary Duffield of QA

19:40 – 19:50 Pizzas and break to discuss technical challenges

19:50 – 20:50 Andy Parkes of IBIT Solutions

20:50 – 21:00 Wash-up period to bottom out technical challenges