Today we launched the new site of the Bulgarian SQL & BI user group, available at address http://bgsqlgroup.com/.  Great thanks to Lubo, who has driven the development efforts and Teddy, the one responsible for design and information infrastructure.

Here I will give some insight in how we have built it.

SharePoint Services

The site is built in SharePoint services, users are authenticated using Forms Authentication, also with the Bulgarian language pack

Business and Technical sections

The technical section contains technical documents, useful SQL tools, technical news and links to sites.

The business section has document libraries for business documents and presentations, business news and links. Additionally, members can upload case studies, which are published after approval.

Protected documents upload

Workflow is run in the background to give contribute permissions to the person who uploads the document, and read-only permissions to everyone else.

Users are registered in aspnet membership database – storing the basic user registration information - username, email and password.

User profile is stored in SharePoint list.  User profile pictures are stored in separate picture library. The user profile edit form is changed to custom list form to incorporate additional user control for uploading user profile pictures.

The Forum

The forum is built using the open-source Yet Another .NET Forum. Authentication of both forum and sharepoint are done against the same ASP.NET Membership database, thus achieving single-sign on between the two applications.

Sincerely,
Rossen Zhivkov