Conference Day 3 - April 14, 2010

One of the biggest challenges to successfully managing a SharePoint project is knowing what to manage. Do we use a Site Definition, a feature, a master page or a theme? What's the best approach for incorporating branding with a SharePoint site and when should that work finish? Are wireframes required and what's possible out-of-the-box (OOTB)?

During this session, Shawn Shell, founder of Consejo and lead analyst on CMS Watch's SharePoint Report 2009, will share project management best practices for SharePoint projects.

Attendees of this tutorial will learn:

• The anatomy of a SharePoint project
• Choosing OOTB features vs. custom development
• How to test SharePoint applications
• Deployment and management best practices
  

Traditionally, the tools for working with structured and unstructured data for the purpose of analysis were available only to people with several years of experience in business intelligence. Well No more! Come join us in this breakout session in which we will give you a tour of business intelligence in SharePoint 2010 and show you how SharePoint Server 2010 allows you to share, control and reuse business information using several new and enhanced business intelligence features.

One of the key factors determining adoption of developer tools is whether you can make the tool do what you want. When picking the right tool for the job you should at least consider three things. First of all the tool should generally follow development best practices, making it easy for you to 'get things right' without thinking about it.

Next, since you are unique (and yes, beautiful too, that's another story though) a tool should be configurable to a high enough degree so that you can adjust the tool to the work and not the other way around. Finally you should be wary of tools that only cover a small percentage of your needs. Otherwise you'll require multiple tools, which will most likely overlap and not integrate all that well.

One key ingredient to achieving great tooling is tool extensibility. For the SharePoint Tools found in Visual Studio 2010 this has been a clear message. All the awesome functionality delivered to SharePoint developers through this popular IDE is built upon an extensibility model that is also available for you to customize and extend if required. For SharePoint, this is especially important given the large number of complex things you can do with the product and the wide variety of needs resulting from these rich capabilities.

In this session you will learn about this extensibility model and how you can make use of it to adapt the tools to your specific needs. Come and take a look at how you can create new SharePoint Project Item templates, how to extend existing items and how to integrate with the SharePoint Explorer. Find out how to customize the F5 experience with custom build steps and deployment configurations. All in all a vital skill to have to achieve maximum SharePoint Developer productivity and we all know we could use a bit of that!

This 3 hour deep dive workshop will provide business owners, architects and administrators with the education and hands-on experience needed to drive consistency, accountability, and control over the data residing within their SharePoint environment.

The workshop will begin with an overview of the new Metadata Management service architecture exclusive to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. Business owners will learn how to plan their information taxonomy while architects and administrators receive education on proper approaches for scaling and implementing an information taxonomy throughout an organization.

The hands-on lab portion of the workshop will guide attendees through the process of correctly provision a Metadata Management Service Application, establishing a Content Type Publishing Hub, creating a Term Store, and participating in end-user approaches for managing content types and terms.

Coming soon...
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Learn about the importance of social networking in an organization and how to properly implement Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 as a social networking platform. It is important to design a solution that encompasses the inclusion of data into Office SharePoint Server as part of a user's profile. A strategy is required to ensure that data from these sources don't conflict, overlap, and cause inconsistencies in the social mining involved in creating colleague matches.

Internet brings people closer to each other. International companies can now easily share information with their customers or their employees across the world. Not everybody speaks the same language For this reason there are more companies that have a requirement to build multilingual SharePoint sites. In this session you will learn the new functionalities of SharePoint 2010 that will facilitate the creation of Multilingual sites for publishing and for collaboration.

The key aspect of any workflow is its capability to handle a large variety data. Traditionally SharePoint workflows were mostly focused on handling SharePoint data in the form of list items and documents.

However, it is not an uncommon need to deal with back-end systems, issuing tasks that may take days to complete. So what do you do? You put your workflow to sleep and get it to wake up when stuff has happened. The only difficulty is that in SharePoint 2007 you can only be notified of changes to SharePoint data.

Waking up is not so easy after all! In the real world this means that you relay communication through hidden lists. In SharePoint 2010 this is going to change in a profound way. You will be able to extend the workflow runtime with custom External Data Exchange Services, allowing you to relay information and communicate with the workflow using standard Workflow Foundation patterns. Learn how to create these EDEs and the rich features they provide such as operation batching. Expect to see lots of code and demos in this technical session.

This case study will tell the story of how the Department of Family Medicine had an idea to revolutionize how Physicians (Residents) are trained in the field. As residents accumulated several hundred FieldNotes over their program, an efficient way to manage and organize FieldNotes was required. Initially a paper-based method of folders and stacking FieldNotes was developed however, this was not ideal. The paper process made it difficult for the learner to reflect on and even find historical observations given.

With a refined paper based approach to build a body of evidence around Physician competencies the Department of Family Medicine engaged Collaboration Consulting Inc. to build an electronic solution for this process in SharePoint. The goals of the project were to a) Develop tools and processes to improve formative assessment and evaluation of residents; and b) create better supports for preceptors to improve teaching skills in formative assessment and in evaluation efficacy. Until eCBAS the Department of Family had never even seen SharePoint.

The resulting SharePoint Process Portal allows Residents to use eCBAS to organize and review their feedback and guide them in reflecting on their experiences and future learning needs. Advisors and preceptors (teachers) now use SharePoint to record, monitor, guide and verify the learning progress and attained competencies of their residents. The use of SharePoint has eliminated the need to carry and/or physically store hundreds of paper FieldNotes and most importantly makes it much easier for advisors to review resident progress.

Are you considering migrating your current SharePoint environment to SharePoint 2010? Worried about what's involved and how to manage it? Don't let it become a headache! This session will discuss some common sense business and technical approaches to take away the pain, and help you deliver your SharePoint 2010 migration project on time and on budget.

Topics discussed include:

• A little history: The SharePoint 2003 to 2007 Migration experience
• Common migration pains and how to solve them
• Technical changes in SharePoint 2010
• Governance Recommendations
• Preparing to migrate
• Migration tools and utilities
• The Migration Process
• Post-Migration Vacation

Given the increasing popularity of SharePoint as a platform over the last two years, we have seen the rise of several communities and social networks built around SharePoint. This presentation will provide you with an overview to of some of these communities, their goals and it will show you how they can help you wether you are interested in the development, Web-Content Management, Enterprise Content Management, or just basic end-user experience. At the end of this presentation, you will have a set of resources and references to help you in you daily usage of SharePoint and MOSS.

Getting employees to put content in SharePoint is only half the battle. To really take advantage of the knowledge collected in SharePoint, you need to make it easy for people to find the "right" content. That's where search comes in. Unfortunately, some think search is a "plug and play" component of SharePoint. This session will show you why this is not true and how working toward improved "findability" within SharePoint search, using FAST technology, takes effort but will show measurable business value for all that use it. This session will include best practices, lessons learned and a detailed action plan for making content more "findable" in your organization.

SharePoint 2010 has evolved incredibly over previous versions and now offers native support for Silverlight. In turn, Silverlight can create a very powerful experience for your end user, creating vastly dynamic and compelling business applications or media-rich Internet solutions. The convergence of SharePoint and Silverlight is growing and is extremely powerful. This session will provide a set of patterns for the developer that show how you can take these two technologies and take the SharePoint experience to the next level. If you're a SharePoint developer and are looking to incorporate Silverlight into your solution design, you can't miss this session.

Coming soon...

From network files, desktop files, e-mail, scanned images, transactions and paper - the number of documents your organization produces and receives is staggering. Find out how you can bring order to unstructured information and simplify information sharing across your organization.

In this session you will learn how we can help you extend SharePoint’s enterprise content management (ECM) capabilities that transform SharePoint into a production imaging system capable of meeting low – to high-volume needs. Technical synergies offered by Fusepoint and KnowledgeLake offer the tools to reliably capture, index, manage, store, extract and access all of your high value documents. Whether scanning paper documents or capturing e-documents from Desktop or Outlook, information is annotated and indexed directly into SharePoint.

jQuery is an extremely powerful scripting library for any serious client-side developer of SharePoint. Within the past year, it has become the de facto standard for many SharePoint interface developers because of its ability to apply non-destructive solutions to SharePoint pages. Client-side developers such as Christophe Humbert, Paul Grenier, Peter Allen and Jan Tielens have provided the community with numerous jQuery solutions to common interface enhancements that would normally have to be done through access to the server.

In this presentation, Enhancing the SharePoint Interface with jQuery Solutions, Mark Miller will examine free cut-and-paste jQuery scripts from the various jQuery solutions provided by the authors of EndUserSharePoint.com. He will cover how to create a SharePoint Scripting Resource Center and the advantage of having scripting resources reside within SharePoint. The jQuery solutions presented will include web parts that:

• Manage a calendar interface to take advantage of the entire browser window
• Expose information across multiple site collections through LyteBox
• Display deep metadata of objects exposed in a web part without drilling into a list or library
• Dynamically read list data to expose charts, graphs and colored analysis dashboards
  

This presentation will give you ideas and methods for creating interfaces in SharePoint 2007 and 2010 that not only look good, but provide key functionality enhancements for your site’s End Users.

One of the most common, tedious tasks is workspace or site creation around a series of documents and objects. The process involves creating a new site (probably from a template), populating relevant items, collecting a URL to the site and then placing the URL back in the originating document library. And then we want to automate the upload of various documents into our new site and maybe a logo and some images?

This session will show you how to design, build, test and install a feature that offers a right-click option in the document library to show you how to fully automate this process. Naturally we use the SharePoint object model and we use a small amount of C# code and Visual Studio to deploy the feature. Next we will extend this to a button on a data input form. The purpose of the session is to demonstrate how easy it is to provide these convenient automations to your users.

O.K., you successfully used a "Visual Web Part" project template to create and deploy a web part that encapsulates user control. Now what? Take your web part to the next level by learning how to incorporate the professional suite of AJAX enabled ASP.NET controls of Telerik.

Discover a real world application of the Model View Presenter design pattern Telerik User Control / Web part development, enabling Unit Testing of your application with Visual Studio Team System. We will examine the UML modeling underlying the application in the Sparx Enterprise Architect tool. Interact with a real business layer (validation logic) and data layer (persistence/CRUD) as generated by the Telerik Object Relational Modeling tool.

We will discuss how to manage the source code in Team Foundation Server with continuous integration enabled. These best practices and lessons learned will take you to the "professional" level as a SharePoint web part developer! As a special bonus, we will create a SharePoint web application scoped "Feature" - to automatically enhance the SharePoint web.config file with the required changes necessary to support the the Telerik Web UI controls.

The Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA) is a federal agency that works with business and communities to stimulate Atlantic Canada's economy. ACOA developed a successful ASP.NET solution for program delivery that was recognized government wide. However, the introduction of the Economic Action Plan posed serious challenges to the existing development environment. The need to implement a new program in a matter of weeks led to a more agile development strategy using SharePoint and Office. The new solution was delivered on time and resulted in a new evolutionary development process that is even more responsive to the changing needs of business owners: the use of SharePoint as a Business Process Platform (BPP). Gartner will publish a case study shortly.

In this case study you will learn:

• How ACOA is using SharePoint to build agile business solutions while dramatically cutting development costs and delivery times compared to traditional .NET development
• How SharePoint, InfoPath and other Office applications are combined into an innovative Business Process Platform (BPP) using practical enterprise architecture, business models, service-oriented architecture, and web services
• How new recordkeeping strategies are being developed in conjunction with Library and Archives Canada to support this new direction
  

Discover what’s new with SharePoint 2010 workflow and how it will help you automate rule based business processes with little or no code. New workflow capabilities and workflow related products will be introduced including SharePoint Designer 2010, Visio 2010, and InfoPath 2010

The workshop will provide an opportunity to create a practical SharePoint 2010 solution from begin to end using out of the box SharePoint 2010 workflow capabilities and Office 2010 products. Attendees will create a workflows with Visio and SharePoint Designer using many of the new key features including the new activities and workflow events. You will also create custom workflow forms with InfoPath 2010 and view the results in process workflows using Visio Services 2010.

Coming soon...

SharePoint is quickly becoming the world’s most popular platform for enterprise collaboration and information management. As a result, a steady stream of third-party software solutions are now being built atop SharePoint Products and Technologies. To date, however, there have been no standards or guidelines governing how software solutions should interact with SharePoint, or with each other…making application interoperability and stability a growing concern. This concern was what drove a group of leading SharePoint experts to form the SharePoint Interoperability and Solutions Architecture Association (SISAA) in October 2009.

The mission of SISAA is to provide organizations using SharePoint with a measurable level of assurance that the third-party SharePoint solution the organization has purchased will not conflict with other products and shall integrate optimally into their existing SharePoint infrastructure. To do this, a primary objective of SISAA is to provide the SharePoint community with an authoritative standards architecture by which to design new software-based SharePoint tools. In support of this effort, SISSA has been working with the greater SharePoint community to compile, maintain and evangelize a set of standards by which SharePoint applications are designed and deployed.

During this session, the SISAA Technical Committee will share with the audience an outline of proposed standards, and field opinions, comments and suggestions from attendees. Please join us for this important session, provide your input and help craft the standards by which the next generation of SharePoint successes will be built.

Virtualization and server consolidation are hot topics in the industry today for the efficiencies they can provide and the potential cost savings. How do you ensure that when taking a SharePoint-based workload virtual, you won`t be introducing any bottlenecks that can impact performance and the user experience. In this session you will learn some recommendations as how to architect your deployment of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 to ensure that your SharePoint topology will still be scalable.

You will find out how virtualization of your SharePoint-based infrastructure impacts your SharePoint-based farm design and which roles are better suited for virtualization. You will also learn about the differences between physical and virtual hardware and the various configuration changes that should be made from the default Hyper-V settings in order to maximize performance in your SharePoint-based farm. We will cover some specific data points comparing the impact of these changes, as well as the different roles in a SharePoint-based farm and their applicability to being virtualized
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In this seminar we will demonstrate some of the new WCM features of SharePoint 2010 and how these could benefit your organization. See how we upgraded a client Intranet Portal for the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Ontario and a public web site for Envision IT, previously built on MOSS 2007, to SharePoint 2010.

We will show how new features such as the new ribbon interface, built-in support for rich media and New Web content management features can empower organizations to easily create and manage their own web solutions.

Come and see how SharePoint 2010 can benefit your organization and learn about:

• Top new features
• Why you should upgrade sooner
• Web Content Management and Image Management Rich Internet Applications and Silverlight Web analytics
  

Findability, as defined by Peter Morville (2005), is a new concept and approach that addresses the challenges of finding content to discover and retrieve relevant information within an organization. However, like many other concept, not everybody does agree on what Findability should be or not be. We have selected some of the best subject matter expert to debate and exchange on the Findability concept. This session is designed to make you think and get a better understanding on how Findability can help your organization.

Don't miss the action!

In this session, we’ll identify five different ways to amplify the value of your SharePoint enterprise social computing experience. These include: online communities, microblogging/activity streams, innovation management, expertise discovery, and mobile social clients. Within the context of each of these features, we’ll identify the specific business benefits these features can produce, including, but not limited to, increased collaboration and communication among employees and with customers and partners, better knowledge capture and management, and increased business innovation and productivity. After attending this session, viewers will have a newfound understanding for how to make the most out of SharePoint 2010 and NewsGator Social Sites.