The purpose of the keynote address is to set the stage for the conference - and what an important stage it has become!  In the United States, Europe and other areas around the world, the ranks of information workers are at an all-time high.  The role that they play is critical in virtually every organization.  In many ways, the information worker is to our current age as the factory worker was to the Industrial Age.  Modern business simply cannot get done without the information worker!

The primary tools of the information worker are the systems and applications that help her efficiently march through her task list on a daily basis.  The good news is that the ease-of-use, power and level of integration of these systems and applications has increased dramatically in the last three years.  There is no question about it - much of the increase can be directly attributed to the ubiquitousness of Microsoft Office, paired with the outstanding design and features of SharePoint.

In the Keynote, you will hear about:

• Selected real-world information workers and the daily challenges they face to stay efficient, find information and communicate with co-workers, customers and others
• From a 10,000 ft. level, the technologies that are making the greatest impact on the day-to-day activities of information workers
• Highlights of the breakout sessions that will be presented during the conference and a quick introduction of the speakers to help you plan your schedule and attend the sessions that are most important to you

Empowering Public School Teachers: The KnowledgeWorks Foundation Network (Dr. Jillian Darwish and Brian Lee)

In February 2006, KnowledgeWorks Foundation, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, launched the beginning framework for Educator’s Knowledge Network (EKN), an online community of Ohio high school teachers based on SharePoint Portal Server 2003.  EKN creates a shared, practice-centered knowledge base for learning, innovating, and transforming education.   In this session we will discuss:

• Developing the dialogue for collaborative network design with users

• Creating network awareness and growing membership

• Driving content depth and breadth

• Establishing a user-friendly, personalized and responsive network

• Specific customizations made to SharePoint Portal Server to empower this unique community application

SharePoint 2003 is a great product and has allowed organizations to develop powerful portal and collaboration solutions in a cost effective way.  However, one shortcoming of it has been the lack of integrated tools to develop robust workflow solutions.  This all changes with SharePoint 2007 and the new Windows Workflow Foundation.  Come to this session to learn about:

• The types of workflow solutions that can be built with SharePoint 2003
• The new graphical Workflow Designer built-in to the new SharePoint Designer 2007 product
• The enterprise content management workflows that are included with MOSS 2007

Taxonomy Best Practices and Design Methodology (Zach Wahl)

Without a well devised taxonomy that serves the end user’s needs, entire portal and other knowledge management projects risk failure.  Organizations must design and build intuitive and sustainable taxonomies in which to manage and classify their content in order to ensure project success.  This session will discuss the challenges to implementing and maintaining a successful taxonomy and will present case studies and best practices used to successfully implement a myriad of enterprise taxonomies.  This presentation will also detail a Taxonomy Development Methodology that has been used successfully on hundreds of knowledge management efforts.  The presentation will also identify the major risks within such a project and will present mitigation strategies for those risks.

• Recognize the importance and purpose of a taxonomy within an enterprise portal or other knowledge management tool

• Learn the best practices for successful implementation and adoption

• Understand the various steps and potential risks involved within a taxonomy project.

• Gain insight on how to begin your organization's own taxonomy project

Governance Strategies for Business Content and Taxonomies (Zach Wahl)

As organizations attain greater experience with portals and other knowledge management tools, they are recognizing the need for easy-to-use taxonomies to make the organization’s key content more accessible to the end users.  To truly provide value, however, these efforts must be ongoing and include lifecycle governance to ensure the sustainable evolution of the tools and the content within them.  This session will discuss governance strategies specific to taxonomy design and content maintenance.  The session will discuss lifecycle taxonomy governance and present best practices and case studies on the successful maintenance and evolution of business content and taxonomies.

• Recognize the value of lifecycle governance

• Learn best practices for the successful management and governance of your taxonomy and the the content within it

• Hear case studies and understand the methodology to support the continued evolution of your organization's taxonomy and business content

Portal Deployments: Best Practices, Success Stories, and Risk Factors (Zach Wahl)

Portal technology has matured to the point where organizations have powerful opportunities to make all of their core business content and functionality available through a single interface.  However, as the technology provides greater capabilities, portal deployments as a whole are growing more complex due to the massive coordination and collaboration necessary to bring together such a great depth and breadth of information.  This session will discuss the major challenges to successful implementation and will offer best practices on the effective design and delivery of enterprise information portals.  Moreover, this session will detail organizations that have accomplished some of the most successful portal implementations to date.

• Understand how specific organizations have used portal technology successfully

• Learn portal development best practices and lessons learned

• Identify the major risks and potential mitigation strategies to ensure successful deployments

In 2006, Central Michigan University implemented SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to replace its existing in-house developed Intranet.  SPS 2003 serves as the gateway into the university's new SAP Campus Management application which handles student registrations, accounts, class schedules, grade reporting and much more.  CMU is very pleased with the new and easy-to-maintain functionality that SPS 2003 provides and has taken the project one step further by making SPS My Sites available to all 20,000 students.  Come to this session to learn about:

• Branding SPS 2003 to meet university-wide style guidelines
• Designing an approach to provide portal-wide fixed navigation in addition to the native SPS breadcrumb navigation
• Integrating SPS with SAP's Campus Management software
• Planning for a large number of My Sites and setting usage policies for an audience of college students

Search tools obviously play a valuable role, but they must be integrated into an overall search strategy for accessing and utilizing data across the enterprise. In this session, we will discuss an effective and efficient enterprise search strategy which includes capability for each of the following:
 

• Searching The User’s Desktop
• Searching The Intranet and Internet
• Searching Business Applications
• Searching for People
   

• Business Data Catalog for searching business application data repositories
• Knowledge Network for locating who knows whom and who knows what, both inside and outside the organization
• Extensibility and customization

Graphical, drill-down dashboards that even your boss can use! SharePoint 2007 incorporates significant enhancements in presenting Business Intelligence data to the end user allowing them to share, control, and reuse business information to make better decisions.

Microsoft Office Server Excel Services is utilized to enable information workers to publish spreadsheets to SharePoint sites, including spreadsheets that incorporate powerful new client capabilities such as data visualization and richer PivotTables and PivotCharts. This session will demonstrate how these Business Intelligence enhancements simplify sharing a central and up-to-date version of a spreadsheet while protecting any proprietary information embedded in the document.

Perhaps the most powerful addition to SharePoint 2007 is the suite of new workflow features. Virtually every organization has the need to incorporate workflow into document-related applications. SharePoint 2007 has been designed from the ground up to use the powerful workflow engine provided by the new Windows Workflow Foundation. In this session you will learn about:

• The types of workflow applications SharePoint 2007 is most suited for
• The pre-built content management workflows that come with MOSS 2007
• The new visual Workflow Designer that is part of SharePoint Designer 2007

OK... So you lost your persistent SharePoint 2003 portal navigation as soon as you hit a WSS site. You got used to it. And your WSS users had links hanging in front of them that they had no business clicking… Like “Site Settings” and “Create”. Maybe you never did get used to that.  And breadcrumbs? You always knew they should be available.

With SharePoint 2007, there is good news on all fronts. This session will examine the user interface improvements and walk you through modifying the main navigation menu and the "Quick Launch" menu so that you can:

• Have a consistent, persistent navigation structure regardless of the current site
• Set the context of the navigation to the current site only
• Expose Sub-sites, peer sites and other links in the menu

All from the browser and with no code!

The good news: SharePoint 2007 has a new look. The bad news: It still doesn't look like like it belongs to your organization. In this session we will look at:

• Best practices for branding SharePoint 2003
• New options for branding in SharePoint 2007
• How and where to scope your customization
• Branding tips and tricks
• What not to do in branding and customizations

With SharePoint 2007 you now have the tools to create impressive internet sites that are definitely ready for prime time. Here you will learn about:

• The publishing site template
• Approval workflow for content management
• Creating and applying custom master pages for maximum effect
• Case studies of SharePoint 2007 in action on the Internet

Thousands of organizations worldwide are turning to Microsoft's SharePoint Product and Technologies for sharing critical business data with partners, customers and suppliers over the Internet. To achieve business advantage by effectively collaborating with business partners, organizations need to provide access to proprietary content while still maintaining security, audit ability and accountability.

Along with security concerns, companies are facing the challenging process of working with IT resources to get collaborative extranet sites provisioned and accessible. Once online, the ongoing tasks for user management of these collaborative applications must be identified and assigned.

In this session, attendees will be hear about enhancements in SharePoint 2007 and third-party add-ons that open new doors in terms of the possibilities and feasibility of using SharePoint as an Extranet collaboration tool.

The Business Data Catalog (BDC) provides a means to surface business data from line-of-business (LOB) systems into SharePoint 2007 without the need to write custom code. The BDC bridges the gap between SharePoint 2007 and business applications by bringing in key data for use in SharePoint sites, lists, search, and user profiles.

In this session, the presenter will demonstrate the use of Business Data web parts and show how these web parts are used to display business data within a SharePoint application. Attendees will also learn about leveraging the Business Data field type to display business data in any SharePoint list and see how SharePoint's Search Center can gather and index data from BDC applications to provide full-text search ability.

This talk describes three case studies that exemplify how businesses are leveraging InfoPath to improve business processes. Each case study will highlight different InfoPath features:

• Medical Clinic solution: multiple forms (Patient Visit Forms, Doctor Synopses, and Lab Requests), database integration, etc.
• Approval Process: workflow, digital signatures, dashboards and reporting
• Project Tracker: end-to-end consulting solution using multiple forms to automate the entire process from statement of work, weekly priorities and timesheets, to actual invoicing

All attendees will receive a sample CD with a full working version of the Project Tracker solution.
 

Microsoft InfoPath plays a key role in bridging the data gap between Office client and SharePoint server. By streamlining data entry and routing, InfoPath removes the data bottlenecks in your organization and creates decentralized data collection and routing to enable dashboards and reporting. Anyone can quickly whip-up an InfoPath form, but to create an end-to-end business solution you’ll want to learn about the following:

• Deployment patterns for InfoPath in your intranet and/or extranet environment
• Workflow using e-mail and promoted properties
• Codeless integration with SQL database
• Digital signatures and archiving
• Browser-based forms and mobile clients

While providing advice on solution architecture, this talk will also discuss the following trends in InfoPath solution development:

• InfoPath provides lower development cost compared to Smart Documents, Webforms, Winforms, etc.
• Codeless solutions further reduce cost by simplifying deployment and security
• Database integration enables reporting, permissions, and provides greater performance
• Relational forms – solutions comprising multiple forms that interact with one another and are stored in a relational database

Expanding SharePoint from a collaborative tool to an Enterprise Business Environment (Ronald Simmons)

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) started using SharePoint as a tool in late 1999. Since that time the FAA recognized that SharePoint was much more than just a tool and expanded the use to become the FAA’s Virtual Work Environment (VWE) which accommodates over 22,000 users, 6,400 business suites, 200 business units, and 1,500 teams. This environment has been branded Knowledge Services Network (KSN) and has received four awards to include the 2006 Gartner, Inc., High-Performance Workplace Excellence award.

This session will describe the infrastructure that has made KSN so successful as an Enterprise Business Environment. Come to this session to learn:

• How to effective use SharePoint to build your own Virtual Work Environment to improve business efficiencies.

• What are the infrastructure implications to implement SharePoint for a large Enterprise solution.

• How to identify the risks and alternatives to mitigate these risks.

• What is the Return on Investment (ROI) and how to present the business case for management to recognize the business value of SharePoint-based VWE.

Training considerations to attain successful adoption of SharePoint - The FAA approach (Ronald Simmons)

This is the companion session to "Expanding SharePoint from a collaborative tool to an Enterprise Business Environment.". This session will focus on studying more in-depth the key components of the Federal Aviation Administration’s use of SharePoint to develop their Enterprise Virtual Work Environment (VWE). The session will include the results of studies that identified two key elements for success – the use of Adoption rather than Deployment; and, building the correct training/learning infrastructure.  Come to this session to learn:

• The key elements of an Adoption approach to rolling-out SharePoint as an Enterprise solution.

• Building an inexpensive but effective training infrastructure to assure the success of using SharePoint to build a Corporate VWE.

• Tips and Tricks in SharePoint site designs to support VWE adoption.

Make the most of your document libraries - importing and managing large volumes of documents and data in SharePoint (Julie Auletta)

SharePoint is a great tool for managing documents and other electronic files. As a single point for information access, it provides tools such as check in/check out for version control, document library archiving, search capabilities, etc. that are features of very expensive document management systems. But, uploading large volumes of data into SharePoint can be time consuming.

In this session we’ll discuss tools that will not only help you with the task of importing large volumes of documents and data, but also help to map information from an old system into SharePoint and to minimize errors during upload. We’ll also discuss how you can control access to uploaded documents once they are in your portal.  This session is ideally suited for users who have large volumes of information in various locations and who need to provide “read only” access to some groups of users.
 

Web Content Management in SharePoint 2007 (Bob Mixon)

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 has incorporated a new set of features that allow the publishing of content to be pushed out to the owner.  In the past, line of business managers and content authors had to wait for IT to publish information to your Intranet or website.  This delay caused your information to become out of date.

The new Web Content Management features found in SharePoint 2007 allows you, as the content owner, to determine when and how information is published.  Corporate branding and user interface consistencies are maintained, eliminating you from having to be concerned about them.

In this session you will see how quickly a Job Posting solution can be created by IT and delivered to a Human Resources department.  You will then see how quick and simple it is to create new job postings, manage the approval of and deliver to employees.

Planning for SharePoint 2007 Backup and Disaster Recovery (Nick Carr)

With the growing popularity and increased use of SharePoint for critical business processes and documents, it has moved to the forefront of mission critical applications. Unfortunately, very few organizations have well documented SharePoint backup and recovery plans. Those that do tend to focus on full disaster scenarios that involve the loss of an entire environment, despite the fact that item-level problems are significantly more commonplace and can also be devastating.

In this session, Nick will focus on the numerous disaster scenarios that can occur in MOSS 2007, from loss of an entire farm down to item-level corruption of critical documents. He will also discuss other major problems that can resemble or cause a disaster for your SharePoint deployment. He will highlight how DocAve 4.0 from AvePoint is designed to address all of these scenarios and give SharePoint users and administrators the peace-of-mind that comes from having everything covered.

Using the New Records Management Functionality in SharePoint 2007 (Ricky Spears) 

Regulatory compliance has become increasingly more important for organizations.  Most software requires that Information Workers do more than they are already doing in order to help the company remain in compliance. However, information workers don’t want to think about compliance—they just want to do their jobs. The extra hurdles of compliance make the workers inefficient, or the workers choose to just ignore the compliance policies altogether. 

Microsoft has built Records Management features into Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 that will allow your organization to easily set compliance policies at the server level which are automatically executed without extra work and thought from the information worker. 

In this session we will:

• Explain the out-of-the-box capabilities of the new Records Management functionality

• Explain content types for organizing documents

• Configure a central records repository

• Set up records management policies for automation

Faceted Browsing: The Nirvana of Content Navigation (Jeff Cate)

With the volume of documents and information on the Intranet and Internet exploding, the problem of finding what you are looking for seems to get worse every day.  In the last few years, the development of new and better search technologies has received the most press as the primary solution to this category of problems.  However, behind the scenes, researchers and software developers have been working on another approach known as "facet-based" browsing.

Faceted browsing offers the user a "guided" way to find important information.  It recognizes the fact that any document (or information object) probably has multiple "facets", and that different users might select different facets in their quest to find the object.

In this session, we will cover the following:

• The basic theory and research behind faceted browsing
• Some examples of faceted browsing technology on the Internet
• An approach to pseudo-faceted browsing in SPS 2003
• One current project that is going on to bring a robust faceted browsing capability to SharePoint 2007

In SharePoint 2003, Lists are the foundation for storing and manipulating data.  Many organizations have gone beyond the built-in List types such as Contacts, Tasks, Issues, etc. and have used the Custom List capability to create departmental database applications.  Inevitably, however, some SharePoint List applications reach the point where the 2003 product is no longer suitable for the application.

In this session, we will cover the enhancements to Lists in SharePoint 2007 that increase the usefulness of the product for database applications.  Some of the new features covered will include:

• New field types, such as multi-value fields
• Append-only fields
• Speed improvements using list indexing

Also covered in this session will be the significant enhancements to Access 2007 to more tightly integrate it with SharePoint 2007.  Access 2007 comes with many new pre-built tracking applications that can easily be "upsized" to use SharePoint 2007 as the data store.  Also, forms, reports and queries created in Access can now be easily accessed from a SharePoint web page.

Using SharePoint to Manage and Mobilize Content (David Carpenter)

Companies spend up to 25% of their marketing budget to create sales and marketing collateral.  Many are now turning to SharePoint as a means of storing and managing that content.  This session features real-world demonstrations of how companies like Cisco Systems, Tektronix, Option One Mortgage and Corbis use SharePoint to: 

• Organize marketing collateral for quick access by the front-line sales force

• Index content to sync up with customer information requests

• Allow external audiences to access content while maintaining proper security

• Enable delivery of SharePoint content from mobile devices (Blackberry, Palm Treo, Windows Mobile), call center applications, CRM applications like SalesForce.com and other workflows

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