Welcome to my Mindsharp blog site!
I am Brett Lonsdale, Co-Owner in Combined Knowledge with Steve Smith (MVP) and Craig Carpenter. I am delighted to be invited to blog with my good friends Todd Bleeker and Bill English whom i've known for a couple of years now and have since partnered to offer their courses in the UK. I have been teaching Todd's curriculum in the UK on a monthly basis for the past 18 months, and have now become a SharePoint developer/trainer! Yes, I can kiss my last 10 years Lotus Notes development experience goodbye, and make way for some blue. (Microsoft that is!).
In the last five years I have evolved from Lotusscript through VB.NET to C#.NET, relaxed my CLI and became MCT, dropped my PCLP and became MCSD.NET, Taught SQL! WOW relational databases are cool! and can even manage an IIS RESET instead of a HTTP RESTART!
So where now? Combined Knowledge purely specializes in SharePoint training, and I see a great future, especially after playing with the new features of SharePoint 2007 ;) Yes, I believe Features are the Future!
So, why my blog site? Well, every week I am training SharePoint, it may be developer orientated or even End User related, but this product is so vast that every week I learn something new. Just last week I was training the NHS on how to administer Team Sites, I met Ian Campbell (www.triplewood.com ), a SharePoint developer who is currently working for the NHS and has created SMOVE, a great tool for moving content between sites. This week has proved very interesting. I have taught a new startup company ELERTZ on how to plan and use SharePoint. Well, you have obviously heard of Alerts, but Elertz is something different, similar but different. Apparently Elertz will work for SharePoint, this has yet to be tested and until I have tried it I am staying neutral! but according to the MD, you can be notified via SMS, EMail or a flashing toolbar that something on a website has changed, and it can be conditional based on Metadata or it might be that a car for sale on a website has met my Elertz criteria and has notified me, So check out my next post to find out all about it.
Anyway, I am currently sat in my room at The Hilton Hotel, Edinburgh Airport and should really consider taking the opportunity to get some work done in peace and quiet.
BFN.
Brett