Conference Day 1 - April 12, 2010

Since 1995, we have seen several types of content solutions evolve in the market place: Electronic Document Management, Search, Imaging, Workflow, Records Management, Web Content Management and Collaboration just to name a few.

Then starting in 2000, we saw how Enterprise Content Management combined most of these content solutions with an integrated approach. However, ECM still only focused on unstructured content and is limited to formal content items such as proposals, contracts etc…

SharePoint on its own is a revolutionary solution that provides organizations with Enterprise Content Management capabilities and also provides a plethora of other capabilities that organizations need in order to develop real business solutions at a reasonable cost.

This session is designed for people who want to better understand the various components included in SharePoint 2007 and also learn how to utilize these features within your organization. During the first 75 minutes of this introductory session, we will focus on the following topics:

• Understand the basic information architecture of SharePoint
• Obtain a SharePoint Solution overview and discover each component
• Understand the basic services provided by WSS 3.0 (free components)
• Discover the added value of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and what are the additional services that MOSS provides on top of WSS 3.0
• Understand the capabilities and limitations of each SharePoint Service:
  • Documents, Forms, Images and Picture Libraries
  • Workflow
  • Collaboration: RSS, Blog, Wiki, Alert, Discussion Board

How to make SharePoint "sing & dance" using just the tools available to the average "power-user".

• Built-in, little-used SharePoint functionality
• InfoPath, Excel applications
• BDC tricks & tips

Microsoft's SharePoint Services and Technologies has a robust security model. Every operation attempted within the SharePoint framework is subject to the security settings and policies that apply to any affected objects. This presentation discusses the classes and methods within the framework that developers can use to accomplish tasks that may otherwise be denied with the current security context. This will talk will cover both Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and SharePoint Foundation 2010.
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Portals, in their first version, are sometimes only used to disseminate information to members of a team or a department. To get the maximum out of the information and improve upon it, and improve the efficiency of team members or employees in general, it suffices to add a notion of flexible, ad hoc collaboration.

Discover how this SharePoint deployment has improved environmental monitoring for all ArcelorMittal Montréal’s locations. With Mr. Luc Chabot Eng., Environment Manager, we will present a concrete example of a SharePoint environment used for the dissemination of environmental standards that allows staff to report nonconformities and begin a process of corrective and/or preventative actions.

In this session, we will review the needs and requirements that motivated the establishment of the portal. We will then present the technological solution, the solution interfaces, the stages of implementation, the cost and duration of the implementation and, finally, we will discuss the impact the portal has had.

NOTE: The information in this session is useful for any SharePoint implementation, but is more focused on Intranet/Extranet/Portal scenarios rather than public facing web sites.

Using asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) to perform asynchronous calls can reduce the time to load your web site significantly compared to using dataview web parts. This presentation will show you how to consume lists and search web services using Ajax.

SharePoint 2010 boasts a new multilingual user interface and some multilingual metadata capabilities. Does this mean that you will be able to have multilingual collaboration without third-party add-ons? What does PointFire 2010 have in store? This session will explore what the new SharePoint 2010 MUI does and what it doesn't do.

SharePoint 2010 still requires Variations, which is essentially the same as the old Variations except sturdier and working on a schedule. SharePoint 2010's new Term Sets address multilingual metadata, but multilingual content and collaboration, and the management of translations require a new approach.

During this second 75 minutes session, we will create a specific solution for a business unit and teach you how to do the following:

• Create a document library and define specific configurations for best practices;
• Configure Search tools with metadata
• Create a custom view on various required content
• Configure a Workflow with out-of-the-box tools from SharePoint
• Create basic forms
• Using custom development we will show you how to create relationship between lists
  
  Both sessions are designed to help CTO, VP IT, Business Analyst, Information Architect and business people better understand the capabilities and limitations of SharePoint.

When it comes to defining the site columns and content types for a project, the first step is to help your stakeholders understand the concepts of metadata so that they can understand how they are going to organize their documents without using folders. Once this is accomplished, you can start to inventory the types of documents that are going to live in SharePoint and then explain the function of site columns and content types.

In this session, we will discuss some methods that have proven to be successful for explaining these concepts and then organizing the taxonomy.

You will see how to use tools (e.g. spreadsheets) that help users to inventory their documents and capture the metadata. You will see how to conduct workshops that help you and your clients to organize this information and then document the taxonomy in a form that can be shared, reviewed and modified.

At the final stages, you will see how the required document libraries begin to emerge as part of this process.

NOTE: The information in this session is useful for any SharePoint implementation, but is more focused on Intranet/Extranet/Portal scenarios rather than public facing web sites..

Building great rich internet applications using Silverlight and the rich collaboration platform of SharePoint 2010. SharePoint 2010 features new tools that make it easier to build with Silverlight, including a new Silverlight object model and REST services. In this session, you will see how to combine the capabilities of SharePoint and Silverlight together to enhance user experience.

The session will cover a few basic scenarios and move to more full-feature line-of-business and social applications that leverage the best of these platforms.

One of the challenges in deploying an Enterprise 2.0 platform like SharePoint is first figuring out how to get approval for funding such an initiative. I've read a few articles on ROI of Collaboration and the bottom line is that the bottom line of collaboration is often hard to quantify. So how do you sell the value of collaboration to those individuals who make decisions within your organization? It's often difficult to wrap your arms around concepts like blogs, wikis, or communities and even harder to quantify those in some type of hard ROI. However, there is a methodology to the madness of establishing value of these collaboration tools. And that methodology can be broken down into 7 key steps.

• Introduction: the problem in SharePoint 2007 and the solution in SharePoint 2010
• The Managed Client Object Model: architecture, possibilities and impossibilities, programming - Silverlight: a new technique to build User Interfaces; using the SharePoint 2010 Silverlight Object Model
• ECMAScript: generating JavaScript using the Client Object Model
• REST: a new method to interact with SharePoint objects; the REST-svc service and the Excel-rest pages

Increasingly organizations are looking to leverage their valuable information authored in Microsoft Word as well as Excel and PowerPoint and managed in SharePoint to improve sharing and reuse. Because of a limited ability to understand SharePoint cannot fully unlock this information. Enterprises are turning to Mark Logic and combining MarkLogic Server to add dynamic discovery and delivery functionality to their SharePoint and Office deployments. This session will feature customer case studies, demos and an overview of this high-impact solution.

SharePoint is best when it looks nothing like SharePoint. To that end I would like to show the possibilities of unique designs that can be built around SharePoint 2010. I want to cover the new CSS hierarchy for SP 2010 as well as master page structure and feature deployment based around UI. I would like to show how to work with the new site templates for Business Intelligence, Enterprise Wiki''s and Team Sites as well as touching on custom template creation and deploying layouts with the new one click layout functionality.

SQL Server Reporting Services is a great authoring and deployment tool for business reports, with its integration with SharePoint it provides a fantastic platform for business intelligence. In this presentation we will look at the how SSRS integrates with SharePoint 2010, contrast the difference with the previous version of SP, discuss security, architecture and real life implementations. The attendees will see how they can leverage SSRS and SharePoint to build business intelligence portals that will have all their business information in on location.

The changes in My Sites are staggering in SharePoint 2010. With the huge increase in the amount of attention to social networking, My Sites are more important to your company than ever before. We will cover the new features and how to configure them. Some of these features are social feedback, activity feed, expert tagging and organizational charts. We will also cover some of the political and social repercussions of implementing these features, especially in environments that don't embrace social networking.

Faced with addressing the resourcing complexities of a potential pandemic, the Human Resources department of Bell Aliant required a solution that would allow them to identify, plan and track availability of critical service delivery resources within the organization.

With limited available capital, Bell Aliant developed a SharePoint solution integrated to the company ERP system to plan and prepare for a potential pandemic. The planning solution was then integrated to IVR technology to facilitate tracking and monitoring. This customer experience will focus on the business problem and the lessons learned in the evolution of the solution
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In this session I will show you how you can enable your mobile users become much more productive!

While we are out of the office, we certainly do not need to see our SharePoint portal “squeezed” into our smartphone’s display. What we do need is a smart, task-oriented solution that enables us to complete our tasks in the fastest and most convenient way possible.

This session will include an overview of the main differences between the "Traditional" SharePoint solutions (collaboration, portals etc.), and the daily requirements of mobile users. I will also show a live demo of step-by-step creation of a mobile, custom-tailored task-oriented solution without any development at all!

Can't find content inside of SharePoint? Many organizations struggle to organize their content and don't understand the options for creating good information architecture. Find out how you can leverage taxonomy and metadata to improve navigation and search in your SharePoint portal. You'll hear about techniques for implementing taxonomy and metadata using native functionality in both SharePoint 2007 and 2010. We will also cover the limitations and potential solutions for complex taxonomic structures, including custom development and third party add-ons.

Key takeaways:

• Building effective content structure and metadata
• Integrating taxonomy (flat and hierarchical)
• Leveraging taxonomy & metadata in search and navigation
• 3rd party add-ons for tagging, taxonomy management and search

In this technical session, SharePoint Administrators and SharePoint Architects will be introduced to the new Services Application Architecture within SharePoint 2010. You will begin by reviewing the history of service deployment within SharePoint. Next, you'll examine the existing set of Service Applications offered within SharePoint 2010. You will then obtain insight into the proper configuration and deployment of Service Applications, and learn from real-world experience as to how these concepts must be evaluated and applied in order to plan and deploy a proper site architecture and information taxonomy for your SharePoint 2010 implementation.

How often have you sworn profusely at your list view because you cannot control the width of columns, meaningful column captions or provide nicely formatted output for printing or PDF? The lists are OK but when it comes to controlled output or variable output based on row values, it is all just too hard and very plain. MS Reporting Services comes to our rescue.

This session will show you how to access the raw SQL data behind your lists and libraries so that you can offer professional reports with filtering and other options just like in regular CRM reporting. The take away for this session is the ability to provide professional reporting outcomes and dashboards from SharePoint list data. We will also learn something of SharePoint Integrated Mode for Reporting Services and how to offer these fully formatted reports as web parts or pages on your SharePoint site.

A lot of change occurred in the working culture the past 20 years. Most of the organisations are now less hierarchical; a business thinks less in tasks and more in processes.

Since 1985 coreprocesses have been automated or structured using computernetworks and workflow. Most of these coreprocesses have a more or less clear flow, are mostly well documented and can be supported with ERP, EPM, CRM, SAP etc.

But a lot of secondary processes are flexible - they are influenced by negotiations, interpretations, politics or meetings. Think of processes like job-interviews; social-sciences research; development of a new product in the area of personal services. These processes are less well-structured.

Sharepoint is very well suited to support processes like these with metadata and workflow but there is little systematic approach for structuring the approach. This leads to frustration among less technically inclined users.

How can they go about the organising and implementing in Sharepoint? There is some structuring necessary as it usually didn't exist That is what the presentation is about - a systematic approach for using Sharepoint in flexible workprocesses. We have cases in social research, local government and insurance to underpin our ideas.

SharePoint is a platform that allows you to do much more, more quickly. However, to ensure that the solution will be scalable and provide tangible benefits, certain steps are essential.

In this session we will present classic pitfalls and how to avoid them. Without going into detail in every aspect of SharePoint, we present important issues concerning collaborative ergonomics, the inter-system integration, performance indicators and use of metadata.

Finally, we will present the desirable qualifications and ideal composition of a SharePoint implementation team, whether the team is entirely internal or accompanied by a specialist partner.

NOTE: The information in this session is useful for any SharePoint implementation, but is more focused on Intranet/Extranet/Portal scenarios rather than public facing web sites.