Calgary SharePoint User Group

Welcome to the New Site

by Bil Simser on 19/05/10 at 12:30 pm

Howdy gang. I thought I would take a few minutes to talk about the website and some features available here.

We stood this site up as a potentially temporary replacement for the previous one. If you recall, the previous site was running on SharePoint 2007 with the Community Kit. It was good but there may have been some areas of confusion. After an infrastructure issue, we were left with a single page so we stood this site up as a replacement.

This site is built on WordPress, an open source PHP content management and blogging system very popular on the Internet. The reason why this was chosen over SharePoint 2010 was that we wanted to get something up and running quickly and value-add. We have been and will continue to work on a SharePoint 2010 based system and may roll that out as the platform to deliver content and information to you. This WordPress site was just easy to get up and running and offered a lot of out-of-the-box features such as polls, forums, membership, and events.

Here’s a quick tour of some of the things available on the site:

Membership

Membership is simple and you just register with a new account. Once the account is created you can associate it with a variety of 3rd party authentication providers like Twitter, Windows Live ID, Google, Yahoo, and Flickr. As a member you’ll be allowed to vote on polls, enter comments on postings (such as this one) and rate pages and features.

Forums

We have a set of forums available. The topics are initially setup but not fixed. They’re just some ideas around things we thought users like yourself might want to talk about here. If you have suggestions for new topics and forums please use the forums to suggest them!

Polls

From time to time we’ll post an interactive poll that you can vote on. This might be polls about venue information (pizza vs. sandwiches?) or speaker suggestions. Polls are archived and you can always view the past results of a poll.

RSS Feed

We have an RSS feed on the home page (right hand side, about half way down) if you’re interested in getting updates that way. Just click on it and subscribe using your browser, mail program, or any system that supports RSS feeds. All updates go to the feed when they’re posted including new pages, new events, and new features of the site and user group.

You

The most important thing about the user group and this site is YOU. Your input is important and going forward we want to deliver the information you need, make your experience with the group a good one, and help grow the community. Always feel free to contact us and help us continue the journey.

There are other features of the site to check out so just browse around. If you’re lost or need some help, feel free to call on us via email at calspug@gmail.com.