Conference Day 2 - April 13, 2010

SharePoint 2010 includes some major advances for the developer across three primary pillars: tooling, platform services and deployment. This session provides an overview of the key advancements for SharePoint 2010 for the developer and will demo how a number of these features can be applied in a structured development environment. Specific coverage will include the new tooling advancements in Visual Studio 2010, data programmability advancements such as SP Linq, improved services support that include the new client object model and REST-based services support, deploying your solutions to the cloud with SharePoint Online and much more. If you're a developer and this is your first look at SharePoint 2010 then you shouldn't miss this session.

With over 20 years of experience in Enterprise Content Management, I have seen a plethora of technologies that focused on content. The market has evolved from a scattered and loosely dispersed offering which today can provide you with a single common platform, SharePoint, which allows you to build and deploy an Enterprise Content Management solution.

In my previous life I worked with Documentum, Livelink, hummingbird and Reddot just to name a few. When SharePoint 2007 was launched, many vendors claimed that best practices in Enterprise Content Management could not be applied. They were all wrong and I will demonstrate it!

This session will help you to better understand the following elements:

• What are the REAL content management requirements that businesses require?
• Which components of ECM are really critical for your organization?
• How can you add products, components or custom development to your missing features?
• What are the capabilities and limitations of SharePoint 2007 and WSS 3.0?

ECM is a key component in your SharePoint solution and this session will help you establish a common sense approach and provide you with a reality check.

Presentation on how to build multi-lingual webparts based on ASP.NET''s RESX files. I will present and demo how to build these webparts and why they are relevant to any organization that requires SharePoint sites in more than one language, such as government agencies and departments.

It is difficult to design and configure SharePoint solutions by asking business sponsors about their "requirements" it is far more appropriate to focus on business goals and objectives. There are many possible configuration choices for solutions built on the SharePoint 2007 platform, even if you only leverage those features that are "out of the box."

This presentation will show some of the things that make a SharePoint solution successful and leverage best practices for information architecture, user experience and business process to ensure that "if you build it, they will come." Featured topics will include:

• Site Structure Design (navigation and site layout)
• Information Architecture Best Practices (metadata for Site and Document Libraries
• Lessons Learned
  

Users soon realize that managing workflow in SharePoint often becomes difficult, if not impossible in many cases. Fortunately, there are some products that allow the different stages for workflow to be automated, beginning with the draft stage and all the way through the recording, publishing, archiving and distribution stage. Many organizations have created components or use products like Alcero to design, create and quickly deploy a workflow in SharePoint.

In this session, we will show you the capabilities and limitations of a Workflow content centric application and present different types of business applications where it could be used .

Information Architects (IA) working on SharePoint projects often have a difficult task ahead of them: They need to help their clients explain their requirements for a system that they often don’t fully understand. Therefore, obtaining these requirements is an interactive process that requires a constant back-and-forth flow of information between the IA and the client.
In this session we will talk about how to make this process smoother and more efficient through the use of tools that we have used in "real-world" engagements. These tools convert concepts into graphical visualizations that aid in the gathering and fleshing out of requirements.
The main focus of the presentation will be on the use of mind-mapping techniques that allow the IA to build taxonomies interactively, in-front of the client’s eyes. Changes can be made instantly and clients sign-off against artifacts that they can understand rapidly, rather than lengthy documents that may not even be read. The presentation will be interactive; showing you exactly how mind-mapping can be accomplished with MindManger from MindJet.

We cover the use of mind-mapping for:

• Scoping exercises: Customers are sometimes sold on SharePoint as a do-everything, solve-every-problem-now solution. Help them with brainstorming sessions to gather all ideas and pinpoint and then organize and prioritize the results.
• Document organization: Analyze the types of documents that currently exist and group them for the purposes of creating content types.
• Navigational Architecture: Work interactively with the team to experiment with, and then finalize, the site navigation.
• Site documentation: Show the site hierarchy with all libraries, lists and content types.
  

In addition to mind-mapping, we will be discussing the wire-framing of screen layouts. Wire framing is a way to give your stakeholders a rough idea of how the SharePoint pages will appear on the screen. In the past, this was often a tedious job with diagrams that were painful to update. We will demonstrate a new wire framing tool from Balsamiq that makes this process much faster, simpler and more useful. Its ease of use means it can be used interactively during brainstorming sessions, short-circuiting the design process.

SharePoint is an incredibly valuable platform - but what happens when applications are poorly designed?

We will identify the common issues, problems and their solutions to ensure that solutions not only scale as required, but are supportable and governable as well.

We will identify which architectural and design choices can be made to ensure that a custom SharePoint solution is "enterprise-ready".

Part case study and part real-world demo, this session explores the growing importance of social computing in SharePoint 2010. Starting with people search, we will first explore one of the big challenges of social computing -where is the people information? Learn firsthand how organizations like Canadian Tire and Heart and Stroke Foundation of Ontario pull together disparate HRIS and IT systems to build a profile of their people. See how the new My Sites, profiles pages and Silverlight organization tab lets you navigate an organization and surface that information.

From there we'll explore the new blog and Wiki templates and show how the improved ribbon web content management is consistently leveraged across these areas. We'll discuss ways these can be customized or skinned, to reflect the branding of your organization. Finally we'll dive into the new tagging and note features in SharePoint 2010.

In this session you will learn how basic archiving and discovery benefit Microsoft SharePoint. As a 3rd-party application, archiving is a multi-purpose application that benefits SharePoint storage growth and enables legal discovery and retention. Using industry statistics the presenter will make a case that storage growth is the most significant challenge facing SharePoint administrators and is the driving force behind increasing management costs. You will learn how an archiving solution can reduce SharePoint storage by removing documents based on age, size and other related file properties. Legal discovery will be addressed next and the challenges you face for SharePoint will be discussed in the context of new legal laws and regulations. Archiving will be presented as a means to control legal costs by proactively preserving content, automatically managing document retention and enabling fast search and advanced legal workflow. The presenter is a Mimosa employee who is an expert in areas of archival and legal discovery.

In this session we will cover the A to Z possibilities for workflow development in 2010, with a specific focus on new features and capabilities. We will start with a workflow in Visio, transition the workflows into SharePoint Designer with the new ability to create site level workflow templates and finally move over to workflow development in Visual Studio 2010 using its templates and tools.

In Part 1 of this two-part presentation, we looked at powerful tools that help with the difficult job of gathering requirements for SharePoint projects. In Part 2, we will demonstrate how to apply these tools for efficient and effective requirements gathering.

This session will be very practically oriented, explaining the details of a series of well structured workshops including:

• Initial Discovery
• SharePoint Demonstration
• Designing Navigation
• Document Inventory/Initial Layout
• Content & Structure (Drill down)
• Site Layout
  

You will learn who should be invited to each of these workshops and how much time to allocate for each one. As we discuss each of these workshops, you will see how to apply the visual tools discussed in Part 1.

I will give you PowerPoint templates and spreadsheet-based tools that you can use in your own projects to ensure that you get what you need while using time (yours and your stakeholders’) efficiently.
At the end of this session, you will have learned how to elicit requirements and how to document your understanding of those requirements in a way that leads to a shared understanding between the SharePoint team and the business stakeholders
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SharePoint has BI tools built right in but knowing how to leverage them to meet customer requirements can be difficult to understand. Out of the box you can deliver wow‐inducing KPIs and dashboards. Have custom data?
Not a problem. The server formerly known as PerformancePoint is now built in and part of your Enterprise CAL license. Leverage this toolset to deliver visual business information to your users. Review the BI stack from a SharePoint administrator / developer standpoint and be prepared for the onslaught of customer requests that will shortly come your way on this subject. Know when and where to use SharePoint OOTB KPI’s & Dashboards, Excel Services or PerformancePoint to best meet these requirements.

Attendees will learn from this session:

• Attendees will learn to map business requirements to the MS BI solution stack including SharePoint features
• Attendees will learn how to define business requirements for display of BI information in SharePoint
• Attendees will receive some best practice suggestions for defining BI in your organization and selecting successful projects to begin the iterative process.
• Attendees will see a demonstration of the various BI tools integrated into SharePoint.

This session will cover new and updated enterprise content management features in SharePoint 2010, including: Metadata-based navigation, managed taxonomies, social tagging (folksonomies), Document Sets, Document IDs and Business Connectivity Services (BCS). We'll also briefly cover the changes in records management and new features provided for digital asset management.

Organizations are increasingly leveraging SharePoint as their enterprise-wide information content management platform, and a key component of this is the management of public-facing websites. For many organizations, however, investments already made in the design and coding of their existing internet sites are too significant to simply abandon. Complex site architectures and sophisticated HTML programming involving an array of templates, scripts and interdependent media are valuable assets and recreating them from scratch on a new platform is both daunting and cost-prohibitive.

In this session, we will discuss how organizations can migrate these valuable website assets into SharePoint efficiently and cost-effectively. We will review best practices and demonstrate tools that enable the comprehensive mapping and migration of any HTTP/HTTPS accessible content directly into SharePoint. We will discuss how proper planning and the right solutions can empower your organization to take full advantage of SharePoint’s singular internet site management and delivery capabilities without having to recreate or re-architect your existing internet assets.

Introducing Visio Services: a brand-new capability in SharePoint 2010! In this session we’ll review: Taking process mapping and diagramming to the next level, how to build process-centric data-connected dashboards in SharePoint, some realistic applications of the new Visio driven workflow publisher and discuss how this new feature set might be applied in business.

With the power of SharePoint Server 2010 platform, Forms Services 2010 represents even more significant improvement over its predecessor. Some of the improvement came from the core platform itself and some of them were made available in InfoPath 2010 and Forms Services 2010. In this session, we will explore new features in InfoPath and Forms Services 2010 from form authoring all the way to publishing your forms to SharePoint.

We know the excellent SharePoint developer tools support provided by SharePoint 2010, especially around the ease of packing and deploying your Customizations. In this Session, we go behind the scenes of the deployment model to build a solid understanding of the inner workings of solutions and features in 2010.

We'll demonstrate that the Features and Solutions no longer have to be mapped "one to one" - through the use pf the visual designer tool ,developers have granular control over solution structure and activation dependencies. We will compare and contrast the deployment of a web part as both a Site Collection scoped feature as well as a Sandboxed solution - so that you clearly understand the benefits and limitations that the new Sandboxing capabilities bring to 2010.

With the advent of the infopath web part and the ability for forms to receive inputs from via web connection, building applications has never been easier. We will cover how to build a Infopath based application inside of SharePoint 2010. The data driven applications are endless and with forms services you can push the applications to the intranet and be able to visualize the customer input in real time.

No need to fret over your SharePoint 2007 custom branding as you look ahead to migrating to SharePoint 2010. Everything you have already learned and created can be used in the next version. In this three hour deep dive workshop, Heather Solomon will show you how to prepare for SharePoint 2010 branding migration as we take a hard look at the changes not only in the SharePoint user interface, but the back end branding files such as the master pages, CSS files and WCM page layouts.

There is a big shift to CSS based layout with SharePoint 2010 and we will review techniques for using these methods in your code, CSS tips and tricks for your sites, and how best to utilize the new SharePoint 2010 themes. The hands on lab portion of the class will give you an opportunity to get your hands dirty with the new master pages and CSS files and check out a sample migration from SharePoint 2007.

Learn the best ways to stay on top of your total cost of ownership associated with managing SharePoint environments today. Secure a smooth transition to SharePoint 2010 and control your environment before, during and after your move.

• Before your move: learn how to significantly clean up your SharePoint 2007 environment, saving resources and ensuring tight security during the entire process.
• During your move: learn the best ways to manage your environment as you move to SharePoint 2010.
• After your move: learn the best practices on how to keep your SharePoint 2010 environment in peak operating condition.

This joint session from Techtra and Axceler will also include:

• An outline of how to best address the SharePoint deployment and administration pains challenging organizations right now
• An overview of the award-winning SharePoint management product, ControlPoint - the most powerful and comprehensive product available today to administer a Microsoft SharePoint environment
• A presentation of ReadyPoint, Axceler's new SharePoint 2010 upgrade assessment tool.

As an extra bonus, all attendees will get a free copy of Axceler's white paper entitle, "The Insider's Guide to Upgrading to SharePoint 2010".

Time is money and finding the required document at the right time is more and more important. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server offers an enterprise search engine that will help your users to find the right information. In this session you will learn tips and tricks on how to configure your search server and to improve the search experience of your end users.

Effective Governance Planning is one of the most important and critical factors for the ongoing success of SharePoint solutions - as much if not more than technology. A good Governance Plan is "necessary but not sufficient" to ensure success. You still have to ensure that the Governance Plan is applied. Successful SharePoint 2010 solutions will be designed and developed with governance in mind so all SharePoint solution architects should understand governance concepts and best practices.

Governance planning is even more important in SharePoint 2010 because the increased emphasis and availability of social computing features means there are more types of content to govern.
SharePoint 2010 offers users a far more participatory role in the solution information architecture through the use of "social data" such as tags, bookmarks and ratings. Users need to understand and internalize the value proposition for leveraging these features. Solution designers will likely need to provide both guidance and encouragement for their use.

In this example-filled presentation, Governance expert, consultant, and author Susan Hanley will provide detailed, practical recommendations for your SharePoint 2010 Governance Plan. Attendees will take away specific ideas that they can apply to create a sustainable governance plan for their SharePoint 2010 solutions.

Dashboards, key performance indicators, graphs, charts and scorecards provide valuable insight into your business. PerformancePoint Services 2010 is the service that will expose your business information for better business decisions. PerformancePoint Services 2010 now is fully integrated into Microsoft SharePoint 2010. This session will cover the basics of creating, deploying and securing your dashboard.

Set out as a Desjardin's Card Services case study, this session will demonstrate various aspects and activities that were undertaken to promote the adoption of a flexible governance program based on the business' culture.

Businesses are very inclined to use Web 2.0 and Enterprise Content Management. However, a strong Intranet governance program is a pre-requisite if we want to ensure information sharing and proper dissemination. With the advent of tools such as SharePoint, challenges are no longer on the technology side but on the users’ side. This presentation will focus on information architecture, the functional Intranet network and various activities carried out in order to promote adoption as well as the continuous improvement process that will make governance a living element within your business.

How can you remain agile while adopting SharePoint technologies? Even though the platform provides incredible value out of the box for businesses, many still rely on custom development to complement the built-in features. The path to successful SharePoint development is filled with traps, and typical projects can stretch on for months without any value being provided to the stakeholders.

Don't this steer you towards a monolithic, linear development process. Despite these issues, you can embrace agile methodologies and gain a competitive advantage by decreasing your turnaround time in implementing new and changing requirements. With techniques such as Scrum and XP, your clients become more involved in the project, the transfer of knowledge (a particular important point in SharePoint governance) happens seamlessly and, most importantly, your client see results they want fast.

Sebastien will share with you the lessons learned from applying agile methods to a mid-scale SharePoint portal project. He will present what tools enable faster development, unit testing, continuous integration and deployment, in a SharePoint context.