Conference Day 1 - May 14, 2012

SharePoint is a development platform solution that provides organizations with Enterprise Content Management (ECM), collaboration, data management capabilities and also offers a plethora of other functionalities that organizations need in order to develop real business solutions at a reasonable cost.

This tutorial is designed to make you understand and discover the key components and capabilities of SharePoint 2010. You will get trained on the basic key aspects of SharePoint to enable you to understand the usage of it.

During this morning we will focus on the following topics:

• Learn the SharePoint Architecture
• Understand the Information Architecture foundation of SharePoint
• How to manage documents in SharePoint
• Document types, retention polices, and automatic content sorting
• Discover key features and tools to collaborate
• Learn the records management capabilities of SharePoint
• Find how to access to the information in databases, reports, and business applications
• Discover the product community to fulfill missing functionality

This session is about SharePoint strategy and tactics for the Information Architect (and Business Analyst), offering up practical advice, tips, techniques, tools and methodologies. At the end of this workshop, attendees will know the importance of SharePoint business issues and their consequences, will have improved their confidence in dealing with business and non-technical related challenges of SharePoint implementations, and will be familiarized with tools and techniques that make SharePoint implementations more successful.

Review of Workshop Agenda:

What Is SharePoint?

• Objective Definition, Solution Definition Objective and Solution Mapping
• Understanding SharePoint Governance
• How to Implement Effective SharePoint Governance
• Requirements Definition and Mapping
• How to Gather and Map Requirements to SharePoint Solutions
• Visualizing and Communicating SharePoint Concepts
• Understanding and Communicating Metadata Navigation Workshops
• Card Sorting Workshops
• Document Inventory Workshops
• Taxonomy Workshops and Wire-framing Workshops
• Improving Estimates and Timeline Visibility
• Making Information Architecture Decisions
• When To Use a Site Collection • One List or Multiple Lists?
• One Library Or Multiple Libraries?
• Folders Or Metadata?
• Folders Or Document Sets?
• Putting It All Together (a case study approach)
• Information Architecture Tips and Tricks

This tutorial will cover the following aspects:

• Leverage your Microsoft Suite for your recordkeeping needs
• Examples and case studies from 500-plus employee organizations
• Using Office to meet your IM requirements
• Preparing your organization for SharePoint
• Carry out a successful SharePoint implementation, irrespective of current enterprise content management system
• Summarizing content and recordkeeping capabilities
• Benchmarking your initiatives with your organizations
• Understanding e-discovery considerations

Do you have a taxonomy strategy for your business? Did your company setup SharePoint sites, lists, and libraries without metadata? Do you have a strategy but want to measure it against industry best practices? If your answer was “yes” to any of these questions - this is the session for you; one which helps define your taxonomy and information management strategy.

This session is designed to walk through effective quantification and qualification for creating the right taxonomy for your business, including ways to enhance social and Enterprise 2.0 technologies. We will discuss how to determine relationships amongst information and the incremental collective benefits from tagging documents with the right data. This is more than just a how-to; it’s a roadmap to defining corporate information and knowledge in your organization to ensure that your SharePoint content is well structured, in order to provide better access, improved productivity, and more reliable information.

Leveraging SharePoint 2010 and HTML5 integration, Lync, mobility technologies, Facebook, Twitter and Desktop Notification (Windows/Mac), SharePoint Crisis Lifecycle Management can bring responses, policy and teams together faster to increase effectiveness when disaster hits.

In this session we will look at:

• How to evaluate your current crisis lifecycle response processes and deliver them through an integrated SharePoint platform based on the end points you already own
• Case Study-based scenarios to review the outcomes of Crisis Lifecycle Management
• Live demonstrations of how the application works, was developed and deployed.
• Lessons Learned from the delivery field and considerations when planning for integration, interactions and management.

AUDIENCE: Developers - Business Managers - IT Management - IT Professionals - Project Managers

TOPICS: Business Solutions - Case Studies

More and more organizations are looking to improve productivity and effectiveness while at the same time green their operations. One of the biggest areas for improving both lies within the myriad of structured and unstructured inter and intra departmental meetings taking place daily across the organization.

Many studies and surveys have been done over the years with a number of consistent themes emerging.

• Meetings dominate workers' and managers' time and yet are considered to be costly, unproductive and dissatisfying.
• Meetings while costly are fundamentally essential to an organization, and that the number of meetings and their duration has been steadily increasing over the past 10 years.
• Managers and increasingly “knowledge” workers spend between 25%-80% of their time in meetings many with poorly defined objectives and outcomes.
• While consolidated figures are hard to find, estimates of meeting productivity by managers across a number of different functional areas range from only 33%-47%.

In this session participants will learn how eSCRIBE’s robust user configurable meeting management engine and award winning SharePoint integration allow organizations to evolve their meetings, set clear meeting goals and effectively manage outcomes, standardize the process for all stakeholders whether internal or external, and all levels including board, management and staff. Beyond the compliance benefits and productivity benefits for participants, this presentation will also focus on direct benefits for meeting administrators in migrating to an automated system for the preparation and distribution of meeting information, to any device be it a desktop, laptop or tablet PC, while at the same time reducing wasteful paper and consumables.

eSCRIBE will be of particular interest to senior management, department heads and leaders who are responsible for overall performance and team effectiveness, in addition to corporate counsel and board administrators managing governance and compliance for their organizations.

Do you know what a Search Based Application is and how to provide them to your organization? These targeted, business applications provide clear value for people in a wide variety of roles: research, operations, sales, consulting, etc. While there are many great examples of search-based applications, they have traditionally been expensive and complex to build. SharePoint 2010 and FAST Search for SharePoint have changed the equation, so you can now field powerful applications at a much lower cost than ever before. The session will provide examples of applications as well as practical tools and tips. We'll highlight three use cases and discuss how you can apply these examples to quickly and cost-effectively build your own role-based applications.

In this tutorial, we will help you to better understand the required basic configuration needed for SharePoint 2010.

Then we will present you a step-by-step approach to a specific solution for a business unit within an Intranet application and teach you how to do the following:

• Foundation for an Intranet application
• Create a collaborative space for a department
• How to add basic services for my department: Announcement, document library, collaboration, task, etc…
• Create a document library and define specific configurations for best practices;
• Configure Search tools with metadata and full text
• Create a custom view on various required content
• Configure a Workflow with out-of-the-box tools from SharePoint
• Create basic forms.

This tutorial is a practical approach to get the basic understanding of SharePoint capabilities and limitations.

This session is about SharePoint strategy and tactics for the Information Architect (and Business Analyst), offering up practical advice, tips, techniques, tools and methodologies. At the end of this workshop, attendees will know the importance of SharePoint business issues and their consequences, will have improved their confidence in dealing with business and non-technical related challenges of SharePoint implementations, and will be familiarized with tools and techniques that make SharePoint implementations more successful.

Review of Workshop Agenda:

What Is SharePoint?

• Objective Definition, Solution Definition Objective and Solution Mapping
• Understanding SharePoint Governance
• How to Implement Effective SharePoint Governance
• Requirements Definition and Mapping
• How to Gather and Map Requirements to SharePoint Solutions
• Visualizing and Communicating SharePoint Concepts
• Understanding and Communicating Metadata Navigation Workshops
• Card Sorting Workshops
• Document Inventory Workshops
• Taxonomy Workshops and Wire-framing Workshops
• Improving Estimates and Timeline Visibility
• Making Information Architecture Decisions
• When To Use a Site Collection • One List or Multiple Lists?
• One Library Or Multiple Libraries?
• Folders Or Metadata?
• Folders Or Document Sets?
• Putting It All Together (a case study approach)
• Information Architecture Tips and Tricks

Do you have a search box that no one uses? Are you tired of hearing “why can’t it just work like Google”? Today, more than ever, quickly locating relevant content is critical to business success and the efficiency of its employees. Users demand a great experience. Are you delivering?

In this fast paced and informative session, we will take you from zero to search hero by presenting what others have accomplished with the technology with real-world scenarios to help you understand what it takes to make search first class.

This session is targeted at both a business and technical audience, and looks at both internal search and pubic scenarios.

We will focus on the following topics:

• What is the business value of search?
• What are the key capabilities in your toolbox to make search great? From content types to relevancy tuning.
• Would someone please explain when I should use FAST, and what it adds?
• What is the role of business and IT when it comes to search?
• Case studies: what are others doing with the technology and how has it helped them?
• How flexible is the User Experience?
• Beyond the search box: how can search power search driven solutions?
• Key search best practices

AUDIENCE: Business Managers - Information Architects - Project Managers

TOPICS: Information Architecture

The continued evolution and growth of your SharePoint 2010 Intranet and Document Management System (DMS) requires your user base to trust and adopt it. Simply implementing such a solution and releasing it to your organization rarely works. You will need to create and manage a strategic plan for incrementally rolling out your solution, promoting trust and adoption. In this session, we will cover techniques, strategic plans and roadmaps that promote trust and aid with adoption.

Areas we will cover include:

1. Understanding what it is you are building; strategic planning and communication.
2. The value of information assets.
3. Improving trust and adoption of SharePoint
   1. Governing the implementation and use of SharePoint.
   2. Aligning your implementation with Corporate Strategic Initiatives.
   3. Education.
   4. The value of automating operational business process.
   5. Integrating Microsoft Tools and Office Applications.
   6. Integrating business applications.
   7. Integrating 3rd party tools

Are you prepared to change the way you look at availability? Have you thought about how SharePoint works with Hyper-V Live Migration or vMWare's vMotion? As you architect your SharePoint farm virtually, knowing how to structure it correctly and leverage both physical and virtual elements effectively is a must. In this session, we’ll cover how and when to use virtualization availability features, Windows Failover Clustering and SQL Server technologies and the impact of combining them. We’ll also discuss how you can combine SharePoint, SQL Server and Windows Server features to help you ensure your SharePoint environment is available 24x7 365 days a year.

AUDIENCE: Developers

TOPICS: Administration - Business Solutions

In a company, a migration from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 is an excellent opportunity to take on better SharePoint information management practices. After using the platform for a few years, companies are now familiar with its functionalities and capacities. Therefore, the migration is a good opportunity to update the ways of working with this tool, structure the information and put in place a good governance plan for the future sites and applications.

This presentation will cover the three key steps of a migration using a scenario done with a major Montreal-based company. The following points will be covered:

• Preparation
  • Governance plan
  • Information architecture
  • Infrastructure
• Migration
  • Migration strategy
  • Migration methods
  • Migration tools
• Post-migration
  • Follow-up on the governance (tools, process, etc.)
  • Site creation process
  • Archiving process
  • Taxonomy and folksonomy

Even though SharePoint has become a critical platform for many businesses, supporting user access and application availability can remain an unwieldy challenge. With global businesses relying more on SharePoint for intranet and/or internet applications for core business functions, insuring that SharePoint is just as fast as a custom ASP.NET website is critical to a company’s success. Whether you are using Microsoft SharePoint for intranets, extranets, or public-facing websites, enhanced performance and enabled enterprise-wide consolidation and business continuity planning is vital. So what's the best way to accelerate access to SharePoint across the WAN while reducing bandwidth utilization? And how can you optimize SharePoint to improve accessibility and lower costs? Join this session to hear how to measure, analyze and conduct real world tests using free tools readily available for internet and intranet websites (Google Labs, Webpagetest.org, Fiddler, SharePoint Developer Dashboard). We will go over what techniques you can use to improve your websites test results. Join Riverbed us to learn how to:

• Speed up SharePoint: The benefits of a faster SharePoint site – showing the ROI
• Backend or Frontend Performance
• Measuring and analyzing your website with the latest industry tools
• Reduce hardware and management costs by consolidating SharePoint infrastructure
• Accelerate your corporate intranet or public website

Attend this session and you'll discover why thousands of customers, including the Forbes Global 100, trust Riverbed to accelerate applications and bring the world closer!

Microsoft PowerPivot is an innovative data analysis technology that redefines how organizations of all kinds deliver and succeed with business intelligence (BI). The focus shifts from IT delivering corporate BI solutions to a managed BI collaboration environment that gives users the power to get timely and reliable information to make more relevant decisions. PowerPivot does not replace corporate BI, but complements it with managed, self-service solutions. This presentation describes the considerations you need to take into account to derive the best business value from PowerPivot and SharePoint 2010.

AUDIENCE: Developers - Business Managers - Information Architects

TOPICS: Architecture - Information Architecture - Business Solutions - Best Practices

As SharePoint adoption and usage expands, administrators are under pressure to accommodate various business requirements. In this session we will review how users can use the SharePoint Marketing Suite to enhance their intranet ROI, and engage and convert their SharePoint website audience. Improve your portal by learning who is using the portal, what are the most popular areas of the portal (or least popular), what are people searching for, how they are navigating through the site, and many more usage reports you can benefit from. Also, learn more about advanced features such as interactive survey tools to ask the questions you need answered by users, personalization – to provide specific content to different users (authenticated and anonymous), track campaigns (internal and marketing newsletters), A/B testing, SEO tools, visitor recording, CRM integration, and more.

In this session you’ll learn how to use these tools to:

• Empower IT and business user
• Engage your audience
• Know your users and customers
• Generate increased demand
• Expand your SharePoint community
• Establish brand loyalty
• Gain centralized control
• Synergize all services in one solution
• Integrate key third party tools

With the announcement of Microsoft's social media strategy for SharePoint, The Community Engagement Project was created for evaluating a company, department or team’s social media and community efforts, with specific criteria for determining ROI from those strategies.

In this session, Mark Miller from EndUserSharePoint, will cover The Community Engagement Project, making it available as a way to gauge the progress of your community and social media efforts. Research and feedback from some of the industries most knowledgeable sources, including input from Sadie van Buren, author of the SharePoint Maturity Model, Michael Wu from Lithium Technologies and Rob Howard from Telligent Software will be included as part of the presentation.

The five competencies of the roadmap include:

1. Content Management
2. Community Engagement
3. Social Engagement
4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
5. Return on Investment (ROI)

Each competency is set within a stand-alone, graduated matrix for positioning your company within a community through social media efforts. At the conclusion of the session, you will receive a link for download of the roadmap, an editorial calendar worksheet and a list of resources used for creating the model.

This session will help you focus on what is needed to create visibility through a structured marketing message built around social media. The people who will benefit most are project managers, community managers, marketing managers and community evangelists.

AUDIENCE: Business Managers - Information Architects - Project Managers

TOPICS: Best Practices - Case Studies

You may have already implemented SharePoint in your organization and you are now wondering what is next. Over the years, Microsoft has observed a clear pattern in how many successful organizations adopt SharePoint to get the most out of their investment. This SharePoint adoption journey typically begins with an initial deployment of collaboration sites, progressing to a broader adoption of more advanced capabilities of SharePoint and a final stage where organizations build business applications with SharePoint.

Attend this session to learn more about this SharePoint adoption journey, and how you can advance your organization's use of SharePoint to get the most out of its investment. You will learn: how to approach each of these stages to get optimal value from your SharePoint implementation, best practices to help move from an initial deployment to broad adoption, and real world examples of solutions you can build on SharePoint to help drive value across your organization.

Matt will be joined by 3 other co-speakers, Ron Larock, the Vice President & Chief Technology Officer, Cadillac Fairview; and Charles Davis, Acting Director, Applications Management and Marc Dupras, Team Leader, Business Process Platform; at Library and Archives Canada.

AUDIENCE: Business Managers - IT Management - Information Architects - Project Managers

TOPICS: Best Practices

“Are my nightly SQL Server backups good enough?” “Do I need an off-site disaster recovery facility?” “How do I even start the process of disaster recovery planning?” These are just a few of the more common questions that arise when the topic of SharePoint disaster recovery comes up. As with most things SharePoint, the real answer to each question is oftentimes “it depends.” In this business and process-centric session, we will be taking a look at the topic of SharePoint disaster recovery from multiple perspectives: business continuity planner, technical architect, platform owner, and others. Critical concepts and terms will be explained and defined, and an effective process for analyzing and formulating a disaster recovery plan will be discussed. We’ll also highlight some common mistakes that take place when working to build a disaster recovery strategy and how you can avoid them. By the end of this session, you will be armed with the knowledge needed to plan or review a disaster recovery strategy for your SharePoint environment.

AUDIENCE: Business Continuity Planners - Platform Architects

TOPICS: Best Practices

This session will introduce application networking technologies designed to optimize the availability, scalability, security, and performance of SharePoint deployments. Topics that will be covered include: SharePoint server load balancing, SSL offload, content compression, dynamic caching, and secure access.