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

Dear friend,

Welcome to my blog. I am the one in the right corner, couple of years younger … and probably wiser :). Brave visionary, determined to go on a hard, but fulfilling journey for creating success.
Here is a little information where I came from, where I am now and where I want to go!

The past
I have spent 3-4 years in one of the leading IT services company in Bulgaria, working on various projects for .NET, SharePoint and SQL Server. It has been a wild journey between project work, presales activities, consulting, trainings, presentations, team building events and everything.

Despite the fact that I enjoyed my work there and the strong friendships I built, I decided that it is time to move on. It is time for new beginning, it is time to make things the way I want them to be and the way I believe they should be.

The present
I found Abilitics, with lots of passion and belief that it will grow as one beautiful and healthy company.  So far things are going better than expected. Our clients believe and trust us, we respond with a quality work, dedication and great results.

The team is great, motivated and happy.  We have lots of fun and laugher, which is the way how we will make our way through the difficulties.  

I am happy that I managed to find the right people for all of the key roles necessary to deliver our services – we have the PM  & Business analysis girl, the developer guys, the infrastructure consultant and the QA.  Soon some of them will be blogging too. The dev guys are great professionals, though I am little jealous that they are getting better development experts than me. However, that is something that I expected and ready to give up for the sake of the company success.

The future
Unknown! Fortunately.

Stay with us, I am sure it will be a wild and very interesting ride.

I will share you our experience about various topics around architecture and development from our SharePoint and .NET projects, as well as Business Intelligence solutions and Data Mining.

I will give you some insights of our successful practices and the mistakes we made in Abilitics business, sales and the management.
Abilitics is launching lots of SharePoint-related products right now, some of them commercial, but some of them are free.  Stay tuned to see how we can make your life easier with delivering sharepoint projects. 

The end
Wish you all lots of good luck, interesting projects and a quality leisure time. Enjoy!

Sincerely,
Rossen Zhivkov
Founder and Solution Architect,
Abilitics Ltd.