I am pleased to announce I will be speaking at the upcoming inaugural Project Virtual Conference, a free global online conference that is dedicated to Microsoft Project, Project Server and Project Online that will be running for 24 hours. For those of you that may have missed it, the Project Virtual Conference is a completely free, virtual conference that has been organised by members of the Project community (Prasanna, Cindy, Treb, Ben, Rod, Paul, Julie and Vadim) in their spare time.

For the past few days I was lucky enough to attend the Microsoft Ignite conference in Chicago to hear about all the new stuff coming from Microsoft and I have to tell you, it’s pretty exciting. The conference itself was massive, over 23,000 attendees as a result of merging Tech Ed, Microsoft Management Summit, the SharePoint Conference, Project Conference, Exchange Conference and Lync Conferences together. If I had to think about it, I would say it was a little too big and Project looked to suffer for it, but their was some great content.

I’ve posted before about how fantastic the Microsoft Project & SharePoint Conferences are, well a couple of months ago Microsoft announced that they were merging those two conferences along with Exchange, Lync, Office 365 and pretty much everything in between into a new conference called Microsoft Ignite. The Microsoft Ignite team have been hard at it planning what the event will be and it looks to be a cracker, but in a break from usual conferences, the team at Ignite want to hear from the community at large as to what content they want to see in the conference and have put up a survey at http://ignite2015.

In case you missed the announcement, the sessions for the Microsoft Project Conference have been released with some stellar speakers and sessions planned. If you’ve not registered yet, head on over to msprojectconference.com now and do so immediately. 😉 Join over 1,200 Project Managers, Executives and Technology Professionals from different industries to learn about the powerful capabilities included in Microsoft Project and our project and portfolio management (PPM) solution, available on premises and in the cloud.

Tech Ed Australia is being held on the Gold Coast between the 3rd and 6th September this year. I am happy to announce I will be speaking at Tech Ed Australia this year with my partner in crime, Mr Brian Farnhill with an awesome session entitled…. The SharePoint 2013 App Playbook – Your Guide to Building and Publishing a Great App Office 2013 has brought an amazing new platform for developers to take advantage of, in the format of apps and the online app store.

I am excited to announce that I will once again be speaking at the Australian SharePoint Conference this time in Melbourne on the new Work Management capabilities of SharePoint & Project Server 2013. Hopefully this time the demo gods will be on my side and Project’ Sync to SharePoint will work. The abstract for the session is: If you have ever tried to track work in SharePoint, lists or even on pieces of paper, you are going to love the new Work Management capabilities of SharePoint 2013.

I am excited to announce that I will be speaking at the upcoming Australian SharePoint Conference in Sydney on the new Work Management capabilities of SharePoint & Project Server 2013. The abstract for the session is: If you have ever tried to track work in SharePoint, lists or even on pieces of paper, you are going to love the new Work Management capabilities of SharePoint 2013. With SharePoint 2013, your organisation has access to a task management solution that can start simply and scale up to the enterprise level at the click of a button.

SharePoint Saturday Sydney has come around again and I am pleased to announce that I have been given the opportunity to present on one of my favourite new features of 2013, Work Management. The session title and abstract are as follows: Work Management in SharePoint 2013: What it is and why you will love it If you have ever tried to track tasks in SharePoint, lists or pieces of paper, you are going to love the new Work Management capabilities of SharePoint 2013.

I am delighted to announce that I will be speaking at my first international SharePoint Saturday, the sell out SPSToronto on July 7th on one of my favourite topics ‘Leveraging Project Server 2010 for SharePoint Governance and Lifecycle Management’. “You’ve installed SharePoint and now everybody is using it, but how do you handle business requests for new sites, workflows, custom applications, web parts and dashboards? Come along to this session to see how you could implement a powerful request / workflow solution to assist your organization to view, analyze, prioritize and resource requests using the workflow and portfolio analytics capabilities of Project Server 2010.

Last week I was lucky enough to be interviewed by Dux Raymond Sy about my upcoming session at the Microsoft Project Conference which I will be presenting with Mark McDermott of Nintex. Mark and I have been busy putting the final touches to the presentation and demonstrations and have a really great session planned. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSY_cd1ZcTE&w=448&h=252&hd=1] Our session is on Thursday 22nd March at 10:30am in room North 222 C.

It’s time for the last MPUG Melbourne of 2011, being held at Microsoft Melbourne on Tuesday 6th December. In a change from previous events, this session is being held at 12:00pm, instead of the usual 5:30pm start, based on feedback from attendees. The topic for December is The low-down on Project 2010 and Project Server 2010 Service Pack 1 We will provide an overview of the recently released Microsoft Project & Project Server 2010 Service Pack 1.

SharePoint Saturday Melbourne is coming up again, being held on the 22nd October in Melbourne’s CBD. For those of you that don’t know , or haven’t heard about SharePoint Saturday here is a definition from the SharePointSatuday.org site: Join SharePoint architects, developers, business users and other professionals that work with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 for a ‘SharePoint Saturday’ event. SharePoint Saturday is an educational, informative & lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & MVPs, covering a wide variety of SharePoint-orientated topics.

Last week I was lucky enough to present at Tech Ed Australia twice, once on an Ask the Experts panel for AvePoint and again presenting a full on breakout session along with Brian Farnhill called The SharePoint Developers Guide to Project Server 2010. The official slide deck for the breakout session, and video / screencast will be available to view at (once processed): http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/Australia/Tech-Ed-Australia-2011/OFS310. I have also uploaded the original slide deck, to SlideShare which is embedded below, which includes all the notes and can be downloaded to make the most of those all important resource slide links.

It’s less than two weeks until TechEd Australia, and I have been hard at work with Brian Farnhill putting the finishing touches to the presentation and demonstrations. For those of you coming along, I will be taking part in two sessions: OFS310 The SharePoint Developers Guide to Project Server 2010 Friday 2nd September – 9:45am – 11:00am It’s just meant to be – Project Server and SharePoint server are better together, and this is the session that will show you why.

I am pleased to announce that I will be spreading the Project Server Love at the forthcoming SharePoint Saturday Sydney with a session entitled ‘Leveraging Project Server 2010 for SharePoint Governance and Lifecycle Management’. The session will showcase the new SharePoint Lifecycle Management solution recently released by Microsoft and provide a glimpse of how this can be leveraged to improve governance and lifecycle management in your organisation. As like all SharePoint Saturday’s attendance is free and the content top notch.

I am absolutely thrilled to announce I will be presenting alongside SharePoint MVP Brian Farnhill at Tech.Ed Australia 2011 a session entitled: ‘A SharePoint Developers Guide to Project Server 2010’ It’s just meant to be – Project Server and SharePoint server are better together, and this is the session that will show you why. Come and join us as we take you on a tour showing how the two products work together, and how you can deliver better solutions by integrating the two.

It’s that time again, after a break over the summer, I am pleased to announce that the next Microsoft Project User Group (MPUG) Melbourne chapter meeting is scheduled for Tuesday 24th May 2011 at Microsoft Melbourne. The topic of this meeting is demand management, covering the theory behind it, how it can benefit your organisation and Project Server 2010’s approach to implementing this exciting new capability. This is a free event, so save the date and make sure you register via EventBrite now!

Earlier today I was lucky enough to present at Melbourne’s 2nd SharePoint Saturday event, with a session entitled ‘Ten reasons why your organisation should consider Project Server 2010’. The audience was a good mix of seasoned Project Server users and people just interested in the general capabilities. In a attempt to leverage some of the excellent social media tools out there, the presentation was linked to Twitter with automatic tweets of further information being sent out at the same time on my twitter account with the #spsmelbourne-proj hash tag.

Melbourne’s second SharePoint Saturday is coming up on the 30th October and looks to be the best one yet. As well as a stack of great content on SharePoint from Australian presenters such as Chris O’Connor, Mark Rhodes and Nalaka Withanage. I will be presenting a fantastic session on Project Server entitled ‘Ten reasons why you should consider Project Server 2010 for your organisation’ Project Server 2010 is a landmark release, providing a wealth of functionality that can be leveraged to execute projects more effectively.

I am really excited to announce I will be speaking at Tech Ed Australia, presenting an interactive session entitled ‘Leveraging SharePoint 2010 for Project Management’ in the AvePoint Interactive Theatre. The session outline may sound familiar, but I have made some changes and pimped out a few of the demo’s.. Today it is more important than ever to ensure every project your organizations undertakes is delivered effectively. To accomplish this, it is essential that there is clear communication and effective tools to facilitate your project management process.

This morning, I presented with William Cornwill a session at the Australian SharePoint Conference entitled ‘SharePoint 2010 and Managing Projects – A Match made in heaven’. The idea behind the session was to give people an idea of how SharePoint 2010 can be leveraged to assist in managing your next project using some of the out of box features. The slide deck is available here for your viewing pleasure 🙂

Just a reminder for those Australian readers, tickets are still available for the upcoming Australian SharePoint Conference, which is less than six weeks away. The conference has something for everyone, covering both technical and business topics, with: 20 sessions of end user/power user/business content including some great case studies including Telstra, Volvo and a number of Industry verticals such as finance, insurance, legal and engineering 20 sessions of pure technical content for IT Pro, Administrators, Developers and Analysts Content is relevant to those using WSS, MOSS 2007, and new 2010 products.

Just a reminder, it’s not too late to register.. The Melbourne chapter of MPUG will be holding it’s next bi-monthly session on the 27th April 2010 at the Microsoft offices in Freshwater Place. This month there will be two presentations: Martin Vaughan, a Director and Senior PMO Consultant with Core Consulting Group will present the first half of this session covering Project, Program and Portfolio resource management. Starting with the basics of the schedule model, this presentation will consider potential and practical tips relating to modelling resource needs on individual projects through to full EPM environments.

Just a reminder, it’s not too late to register.. Are you ready for Microsoft Project 2010? Microsoft EPM Specialists Darren Deason and Alex Burton will take you on a journey around the new enhanced features of the Microsoft Project 2010 product line-up. Some of the topics discussed will be as follows: · Project Timeline and Resource Planner · Project to WSS Synchronisation · Integrated Portfolio Management · Enterprise Project Templates