Our first SharePoint Saturday held on 8th of August 2009 was a great success.

http://dotnet.org.za/zlatan/archive/2009/07/27/cape-town-sharepoint-saturday-on-8th-of-august-2009.aspx

Thank you to all that came and above all for your enthusiasm regarding this initiative, big thank you goes to our presenters Joel and Eric who presented the following sessions:

SharePoint Twitter No Code Integration and Crash Course- Joel Oleson

                                                                       
Twitter is becoming the defacto way to keep up on blogs, announcements, and information for the community.  Discuss clients.  Learn out how to search, filter, and integrate the best into SharePoint.


Preparing to Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 Today- Joel Oleson

A non NDA discussion about preparing to upgrade with the latest and greatest from Service Pack 2 PreUpgradeCheck tool, and system discussion based on the SharePoint Team blog.  (Approved by the SharePoint team)

InfoPath and InfoPath Forms Services tip and tricks- Eric Harlan

"InfoPath forms can automate your entire back office. The 80/20 rule certainly applies in the enterprise however.  With these tips and tricks for using and implementing InfoPath in your organization, you can help close that acceptance gap.  From injecting InfoPath forms into web parts on branded pages to compiling totals in repeating fields. These hints will will save you time and headaches!

SharePoint List Mashup's using SharePoint Designer- Eric Harlan

Mashups can cover just about any combination of data or design elements with in SharePoint specifically.  In this session we will go over how to mashup DHTML, XSLT and SharePoint lists into clean news rotation web parts.  This method will allow administrators to make simple changes in a list view that they are already comfortable with to make a news rotation change.  This session will also focus on the infamous DataView web part and some of the cool data presentation and integration tips used to show your users different editable views of list data.

SharePoint's Federated Search and Social Networking- Eric Harlan

With so much focus on SharePoint 2010 and some of the new search aspects related to the new release, its important to understand some of the features that got us to this point. This session will include a very quick overview on upgrading SharePoint to Server Pack 1 and upgrading with the infrastructure update. Then a main focus on incorporating the web parts and pulling structured data into SharePoint search results from various internal and external sources. Then taking it a step further, how to use those incoming data sources from social networking and Web 2.0 sites to  integrate data into SharePoint.

Twitter and the SharePoint Community- Joel Oleson & Eric Harlan

Twitter is changing our community SharePoint dynamics!  In this discussion we'll talk about the path of social software and twitter's influence on the SharePoint community.

Last but not least I would like to thank the following people from the community for their invaluable contribution and without whom this event would've ever happened:

Alistair Pugin (BCX) - for helping me organise many aspects of the event (and recover some serious issues in the last second)

Claire Nel (BCX) - For organising food.

Wayne Sylvester (BCX) - For organising drinks and snacks.

Hilton Giesenow (3fifteen) - For organising and sending out additional invites and helping me register Cape Town SharePoint Saturday as an official SharePoint Saturday (http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/)