SharePoint Conference

Lightning Tools at SPTechCon

Lightning Tools — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 23:28:54 GMT

Brett Lonsdale from Lightning Tools hosted the booth at this years SPTechCon. SPTechCon was a great success and everyone who attended commented on the quality of all the speakers and the sessions.

Brett Lonsdale presented a class on Business Connectivity Services demonstrating the External Lists, EnterPrise Content Types, and how to build ECT's within SharePoint Designer 2010. The class lead into a presentation on Linq by Steven Fowler.

Following that Brett Lonsdale presented Building Business Data Catalog solutions. We explored building solutions with Visual Studio Tools for Office while utilizing the Business Data Catalog Object Model, Building custom BDC web parts, and building WCF web services to host Line of Business Data.

The Lightning Tools booth was very busy within the exhibitor hall. We presented our solutions on an overhead projector and got good feedback on DeliverPoint, The Lightning Conductor Web Part, BDC Meta Man and BCS Meta Man. There was also huge interest in the BDC Alert Manager which allows you to configure alerts on your Line of Business data as well as SharePoint Lists and Libraries.

This was the first time Lightning Tools had sponsored SPTechCon, and is looking forward to the Boston SPTechCon in October 2010.

SPTechCon Feb 10th-12th

Lightning Tools — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 03:46:40 GMT

Lightning Tools is proud to be a sponsor early next year of SPTechCon in San Francisco. If you haven't seen SharePoint 2010 yet, SPTechCon will certainly provide you with excellent SP2010 technical content. Lightning Tools is a silver sponsor at SPTechCon and will be able to demonstrate both the current SharePoint 2007 product range as well as some of our new SP2010 products including BCS Meta Man.

Brett Lonsdale will be presenting a session on The Business Data Catalog and Office Business Applications which will demonstrate some of the things you can do with the BDC that you perhaps hadn't considered such as populating content controls in Word, Outlook forms, and customizing the ribbon to lookup line of business data.

You can sign up for SPTechCon at the following site: www.sptechcon.com and follow sptechcon on twitter: www.twitter.com/sptechcon

New Product - DeliverPoint

Lightning Tools — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:09:00 GMT

Lightning Tools has always designed its tools and web parts to provide solutions to its customers whilst ultimately saving them valuable time. This was the case with our very first product ‘BDC Meta Man’ as well as more recent products such as the Lightning Conductor Web Part. Our suite of products save you time by providing solutions that do not require you to learn or develop in languages such as XSL or XML.

Lightning Tools has a new offering known as DeliverPoint which has been a well-known product within the SharePoint community since SharePoint 2003. Hours of time is spent by IT Professionals and Support staff every day troubleshooting issues within SharePoint that could simply be a permissions issue. Time is spent manually trolling List Items, Lists and Site Permissions throughout very extensive Site Collections or Web Applications. Unfortunately this is a very manual task which is why it is so time consuming.

DeliverPoint provides Permission reporting across your Site Collections so that you can see exactly what permissions a specific user, SharePoint group, or domain group might have on a particular item. It doesn’t just stop there, common tasks IT Professional are issued involve cloning permissions from one user to another, transferring permissions or deleting users. Again, in large deployments this manual task can take hours or if not days.

DeliverPoint was developed originally by SharePoint MVP’s and well known developers Todd Bleeker and Paul Schaeflein. Lightning Tools acquired this product to compliment the tools we already provide and to further develop DeliverPoint for SharePoint 2010.

Bill English and Brett Lonsdale discussed the sale at the Best Practice conference in Washington DC in August this year.

A demonstration of the product can played from the following location: http://www.deliverpoint.com/Portals/0/CBTs/QuickStartGuide/player.html

Click here to download a Trial Version.

Lightning Tools will also be demonstrating the product on booth 1102 at the SharePoint Conference on the 19th October 2009 in Las Vegas. Please follow us on twitter @lightningtools for the demonstration start times. We are also providing a webinar on the third Wednesday of every month at 11am Eastern 4pm GMT.

For more information please email sales@lightningtools.com

Best Practice Conference Washington 09

Lightning Tools — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 18:45:11 GMT

Lightning Tools was again a sponsor of the Best Practice conference this year which was held in Washington DC on the 24th August. Lightning Tools has sponsored every Best Practice conference so far both in the US and the UK.

This event as always was excellent offering a wide variety of Best Practices to consider when using SharePoint. Speakers such as Paul Culmsee, Ben Curry, Todd Bleeker and Andrew Woodward amongst many others provided excellent presentations and information when trying to get the best out of SharePoint. Lightning Tools co-owner Brett Lonsdale also provided a presentation on The Business Data Catalog and the best practices that you should consider when implementing the BDC.

These conferences from a vendors perspective are always very busy, but hopefully our team managed to speak and provide information to everyone that stopped by the Lightning Tools booth. If you were one of the few who perhaps we did not get a chance to speak with, please get in touch with us via sales@lightningtools.com

This time we had 50 copies of the new SharePoint 2007 developers guide to Business Data Catalog books to give away as the book launch. 50 copies were given to first come first served and we were delighted to give those to everyone who is considering using the BDC or trying to get the best out of it. You can order the book by following the link on our home page. Below you can see one of the lucky people to get their hands on the book 2 weeks early.

Lightning Tools also ran a competition to win one of two High Definition Flip Camera's. To win one of these prizes you needed to be spotted wearing a Lightning Tools sticker somewhere around the conference. Mark Elgersma from Mindsharp was happy to choose the winners by chasing after anyone displaying the Lightning Tools sticker. Below you can see one of the lucky winners.

So, now we are looking forward to the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas where you will be able to find Lightning Tools again. If you are there, please stop by to chat or see a demonstration of our newest products.