Manchester SBS Meeting

Last night I went to my second Manchester SBS Meeting hosted by Ceri Thomas of 168Tech with Chris Parkes and Danny Ovens from Microsoft.  After getting a lot out of the last meeting back in April, I dragged my business partner Alex along to this one.  I assured him that it was a good mixture of technical content and marketing (his speciality) so he was happy to come.

Chris gave a quick demo of SBS 2008, which he’d only just installed himself earlier that day.  It was really good to see it running, rather than just the screen shots I’ve seen so far.  It did get a bit bogged down running in Hyper-V on a 64bit laptop, I’ll have to see how well it runs on our VMware ESX box.

By the end of that Alex was wondering what the hell I’d brought him to!  However, a combination of pizza and Ceri’s SharePoint presentation saved the day.  I’ve been wondering about SharePoint over the last few weeks and posted over at UKSBSG asking how people were using it.  It ships with every SBS server, so it’s been bugging me that I haven’t been making use of it.

Ceri showed off some great looking and very functional SharePoint v3.0 sites and really opened my eyes as to what can be done.  Chris then took the floor and extended on the technical side, I had no idea about most of what was presented.  Both Alex and I came away suitable impressed and determined to start testing it in our own environment with the view to presenting to customers ASAP.

Thanks to everyone involved in last night’s meeting, already looking forward to the next one.  If you haven’t been along, I’d highly recommend it, just drop me a line if you’re interested.