Last night I had the privelege at presenting at the Central Maryland Association of .NET Professionals (CMAP) in Columbia, MD. I was invited to speak on DotNetNuke, and it turns out that I was the presenter on the evening when they celebrated their 7th birthday.

CMAP is a wonderful user group. They are very active and have found lots of ways to support the developer community in Maryland. Their management team of Randy Hayes (no relation) and Chris Steen are well known and well respected in the DC Metro user group community. Unfortunately, both Chris and Randy were at the Microsoft MVP summit in Washington state. However, Ed Mullin, the president of BaltoMSDN, a developers user group in Baltimore, MD, deftly handled the mast of ceremonies role, while Randy Hayes' wife, Kryselin (??), assisted as hostess. I was warmly received by the group, and appreciate them inviting me to speak.

Here are my slides from the presentation.

Capital DotNetNuke User Group Meeting

Event Date: Wednesday, September 17th, 2008
Event Time: 7:00PM

Presented by: Antonio Chagoury

Location: AT&T Building, 1900 Gallows Rd, Vienna, VA22182  
(Directions: http://www.capitaldug.org/Directions.aspx)

Event Details

You probably already know that you can setup SharePoint to authenticate via Forms Based Authentication and better yet using the AspNet Membership and Role providers as its back-end. You probably also know that DotNetNuke also uses the AspNet Membership as its default provider. In theory, SharePoint and DotNetNuke could share *one* central membership store.

In this session, Antonio Chagoury will take you from theory to practice by setting up SharePoint to use DotNetNuke's database as the Membership Provider. Antonio will also go into some *gotchas* with the Role Provider, and provide tips and tricks for making it all work.

Kudos to Gary Blatt, and his staff, of the SharePoint User Group of Washington DC. He put on a great two-day SharePoint conference (Second Annual Regional SharePoint Conference). It was attended by over 180 practitioners, developers, managers, designers, implementers, speakers, and sponsors. The sponsor/vendor attendance was quite impressive.

I particularly enjoyed the presentations by (in no particular order) Sahil Malik, Melvin Brown and Kevin Hans, Vanessa Williams, Ed Hild, and Greg Galipeau. And, of course, Gary. He's the only speaker that did not need a microphone.

Besides the technical presentations, I was particularly interested in what speakers as Melvin Brown, the KSN Program Manager at FAA, which received Excellence.Gov awards for demonstrating excellence in leveraging technology to enhance collaboration.

Many SharePoint implementers and practioners commented on the fact that SharePoint is much more than a technology, it is an enabler for collaboration. Several tips were suggested for getting users to participate, some quite ingenious, such as:

• Not allowing users to attach documents to emails
• Not allowing users to use email (radical)
• Turning off the corporate shared drive

The conference was Not-For-Profit, and Gary used the proceeds to donate a sizeable check to the Children's Miracle Network! Good job Gary.