Apologies for not posting for so long. This is just a quick update of what I've been up to and what I'll be blogging about in 2008. First off, there have been two new additions to the family, as shown in the picture. We got Tripper (Tripper Grace, not to be confused with Tipper Gore) as a nine-week old puppy in Northern California and he is still being housetrained! The other addition was a Rory Gallagher 1961 Stratocaster, hand-made by Fender.

I'm in the process of setting up the new SharePoint Intranet for the County where I work. As part of the training, a team of us attended the DevConnections conference last month in Las Vegas. The most informative session for me was the "Structured Approach to Building MOSS 2007 Publishing Sites" given by Andrew Connell. My goal is to have a repeatable deployment model which lends itself to source control. In addition, I'm looking to have a comprehensive backup and restore process. By comprehensive, I mean one which takes into account such missing pieces as customization, Web Parts and the IIS metabase. This is an ongoing task for me right now. But Andrew's presentation brought me a lot closer. Chapter 4 of Real World SharePoint 2007 was penned by Andrew and gives a good insight into Feature-based deployment.

SharePoint is one big jigsaw with a couple of pieces missing. The real task is identifying these missing pieces and not blindly trusting the OOTB functionality. This is true whether you are creating a development environment or a backup and restore process. I will blog more about my experiences in the coming months.