There is a new International SharePoint Professionals Association. Bob Fox has the information in his announcement post. I am a regional evangelist for this association, which means I will be working with user groups in the midwest to build their communities.

Also announced today is the online SharePoint Magazine, edited by Arno Nel.

I want to thank Dave and Brad and everyone who attended the IndyNDA meeting last night.

You need to know that this is no ordinary user group. They average 100 attendees each month (130+ for my SharePoint talk); they host and sell-out an annual weekend conference (Indy Tech Fest - October 4th) and most importantly they give back. The housekeeping items before I started were:

• Bring a friend giveaway -- a prize for the member who brings a friend for the first time. This month, the prize was a control suite worth >$1,000
  
• IndyGiveCamp -- developers creating solutions for charities. Paul Hacker of Radio TFS is behind this effort.
  
• Food Drive -- At the August meeting, bring $10 worth of canned or dried goods and get entered in a drawing for an MSDN Premium subscription. WOW!!!

Indianapolis is not a large market, so they don't get a lot of press. Show some love next time you're there. I guarantee you will be impressed.

I will be presenting SharePoint for ASP.NET Developers tonight a the Indianapolis .Net Developers Association. If you're in the area, we're starting at 6:00pm.

The website for the SharePoint Best Practices conference is now up. Visit the site to see the agenda and register.

Occasionally, I see a question about determining if a given installation is MOSS or simply WSS. I am unaware of any Object Model method or property that indicates this, but I did find a different way. The User Profile service is a web service that is included in MOSS and not WSS. So, if the asmx file exists, then MOSS is installed.

Here is a code snippet:

Daniel Larson has been sending smoke signals for the last week about using the RunWithElevatedPrivilege (RWEP) method. He finally goes into further detail today with his cautionary tale and a recommended SPUserToken work-around.

I have seen several programs that use RWEP to accomplish updates on behalf of a user. (In fact, I use the method in the Image Upload Web Part.) In this circumstance Daniel is advocating using impersonation via the SPUserToken for the "System Account." I believe this to be sound advice and will be updating my code accordingly.

We released an update to our product today. DeliverPoint :Permissions v3 includes a limited-functionality license for free. All the details can be found on http://www.deliverpoint.com.

All of us at Barracuda are excited about this product. And we've hit our groove with quarterly releases, which means you can expect much more going forward!

The governance of SharePoint has been a hot topic lately, championed by Joel and the SharePoint product team. And many are discussing the best practices in deploying SharePoint. The MVPs who wrote the book (literally) are hosting a conference to discuss these topics.

I will be part of the developer roundtable at the Regional SharePoint Conference being held by the SharePoint User Group of DC (SUGDC). Hope to see you there!  

Windows Network Load Balancing error:

Starting update...
Going to bind NLB...
Bind operation failed.
Update failed with status code 0x80041002

Turns out that the Network Load Balancing service must be installed before attempting to configure the cluster.