Aug14

New Product - BDC Alert Manager

Categories: SharePoint

Phill at Lightning Tools has been working away at a new product that we've released in beta yesterday - the Lightning Tools BDC Alert Manager.

We've had quite a few people asking for functionality like this - you can kinda setup BDC alerts using lists and the Business Data Column - but of course with the BDC Data Column not being a live lookup to your LOB System the alerts are only ever going to be fired once you click the little refresh button.

The BDC Alert Manager will poll your LOB system with whatever frequency you set. You can also customize the emails to include dynamic business data. Take a look at a screencast of the solution here:

http://support.lightningtools.com/bdcalertmanager.wmv

This is beta 1.0 of the product - so please feel free to download it and give it a whirl. We're looking for feedback and ideas on what you may want included functionality wise.

This is also a good example of customers giving us a problem that we can solve for them. If you have a problem or bug bear with SharePoint let us know and we'll see if we can build you a tool or web part to get things working the way you'd like.

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Jul7

Midlands SUGUK meeting on Thursday

Categories: SharePoint

This week Bill English and Todd Bleeker are over to teach the administrator and developer course for Combined Knowledge so we thought it would be a good opportunity to hold another meeting in Ullesthorpe. Six sessions in total have been organized covering topics like workflow, SharePoint Designer, configuring SSL, scaling out a SharePoint farm, agile development in SharePoint and best practices for Search.

For more information and to sign up check out this link:

http://suguk.org/forums/1/11964/ShowThread.aspx

This is of course all taking place after the SUGUK golf day (which I'm afraid is now fully booked). I've been practicing hard but I think there are a few bandits among the suguk crowd and so expect some 28 handicappers shooting very low scores!

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Jun16

suguk meetings this week

Categories: SharePoint

A bit short notice I know, but we’ve two SharePoint User Group UK meetings this week. On Wednesday we’re in London. Usually we have 2 presentations separated by some pizza but this time we’re trying something a bit different. We’ve titled it ‘SharePoint A&E clinic’

The ideas is that you bring your SharePoint questions and problems and as a group we can sit down and discuss them, and hopefully come up with a solution that you are happy with. We might not be able to answer absolutely everything but its some free consultancy! J

The meeting will start around 6:30pm and you can register here:

http://suguk.org/forums/thread/11164.aspx

Also on Thursday we’ve got a user group all the way up in Edinburgh (I can even spell it now!). Spencer is going to cover running SharePoint on Windows Server 2008, and Steve will show you how to stress test SharePoint with VS 2008. For more info and to register see here:

http://suguk.org/forums/thread/10832.aspx 

Hopefully see you on Wednesday!

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May8

SUGUK golf day

Categories: SharePoint

The most important event of the year has been announced.

No not TechEd US or PDC, but the first (probably annual) SUGUK golf day!

It's on 10th July in Leicestershire and will sure be a lot of fun. For more info please see the link below:

http://suguk.org/blogs/combined_knowledge/archive/2008/05/07/10496.aspx

Dust off your clubs and get practicing!

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May6

Lightning Tools Blog

Categories: .NET Stuff, SharePoint

We've finally setup a new blog on the Lightning Tools site. We wanted a way to let you know about new products, releases and ideas we have and a blog is the obvious best way to do this! As a lot of our work is focused around the Business Data Catalog we're also going to be publishing a lot of info and how to's focussed on that.

http://www.lightningtools.com/blog

Get yourself over, get subscribed, and leave us some feedback on what we're up to! Brett is going to post about the BDC CRUD web part we've been working on - we're keen to know what you think.

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Apr28

London SUGUK vendor night this Wednesday

Categories: SharePoint

We've got another SUGUK vendor night this Wednesday. Each company gets 30 mins to give you the technical low down on their product and how it can help your SharePoint deployment. Sales people aren't allowed! So you know it's gonna be useful technical stuff! The vendors we have presenting this time are:

Bill English - Demonstrating DeliverPoint

AvePoint - Demonstrating their backup and migration tools

NSE - Demonstrating eSENSE

Nsynergy - Demonstrating their latest mail integration tool

Datawatch - Demonstrating their ETL solution for Moss

 

Spaces still left, if you want to come along please see this forum post and add your name.

http://suguk.org/forums/thread/9832.aspx

Drinks at the pub afterwards are of course optional (but always encouraged!)

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Apr9

Manchester SUGUK meeting 24th April

Categories: SharePoint

Whenever we organize a suguk meeting down south members from up north ask if we are repeating the sessions a bit closer to them, and vice versa for northern meetings. Well this time we are, Manchester is getting two very popular topics that us Southerners have had the pleasure of seeing!

1st Session : An introduction to the Silverlight blueprint for SharePoint - Andrew Woodward

2nd Session : Kerberos and SharePoint: no ticket touting here. Does SharePoint add another head? - Spencer Harbar

 

I'll be traveling up also for the beer afterwards! If you fancy coming along or want more information please see the following post on the suguk site:

http://suguk.org/forums/thread/9594.aspx

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Apr8

BDC Meta Man and MySQL

Categories: SharePoint

Version 3.0.0.3 of BDC Meta Man has been out a while now, but one thing I wanted to tell you about that was new in this release was MySQL integration. You can now easily connect to MySQL and drag and drop your tables onto the design surface to create your BDC entities and application definition file.

My SQL:

image

BDC Meta Man:

image

 

We're integrating data sources as they are requested so if you've got something you want covered drop us an email at support@lightningtools.com. So far we have covered + supported MS SQL Server, Access, Oracle, DB2, My SQL, Web Services.

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Mar26

LCWP - Cross Site Collection roll up

Categories: SharePoint

Very pleased to announce a new web part today, the Lightning Conductor Web Part. Brett is to blame for the name, but it's quite catchy once you get used to it! :-)

We're always getting asked on consultancy and training gigs about the limitations of the Content by Query Web Part and its limitations in that it can only roll up content within the same site collection. Well we've decided to do something about it! The LCWP can aggregate your content from sites within the same site collection, but also sites across site collections!

Obviously another limitation of the Content by Query Web Part is that it is only available for MOSS 2007, but with the Lightning Conductor Web Part you can get list and library aggregation for WSS 3.0 as well.

For more details, a screencast, and a trial download check out this link:

http://www.lightningtools.com/pages/lightning-conductor-web-part.aspx

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Mar25

BDC Meta Man - important update

Categories: SharePoint

We've just released version 3.0.0.3 of BDC Meta Man. This release is important if you are running Vista SP1, Windows Server 2008 or a 64 bit OS.

The tool we were using to obfuscate our code stopped BDC Meta Man from working on these operating systems. We now have the situation sorted, so if you are on any of the above make sure you get the latest version from our downloads page:

http://www.lightningtools.com/pages/service/customerdownloads.aspx

I'm loving Windows Server 2008 by the way, very cool.

We've also got a few other updates in this version of BDC Meta Man I'll point out to you over the next few days!

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