MOSS 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 are the third generation of Microsoft's SharePoint Products and Technologies that are empowering Information Workers around the globe to take control of their jobs and become free of the shackles of slow application development cycles and poor integration between systems.

In this keynote address, Jeff Cate, the Founder and President of SharePoint Solutions and, Zach Wahl, Knowledge Management Practice Director of Project Performance Corporation, will examine the impact that SharePoint has had over the past five years on portals, knowledge management, collaboration and productivity.  They will also examine current trends, such as social networking and Web 2.0 technologies. Finally they will provide a glimpse of where SharePoint is headed that Information Workers can be excited about! 

New Tools for Content Re-use in MOSS 2007 (Ricky Spears)

Almost everyone has a need at some point to be able to store content in a central location in SharePoint and then re-use (or re-purpose) that content in many different ways and on many different sites or pages.  Common examples include news items, disclaimers, bios, calendars, copyright text, and slogans.  The idea is that the standard text (or HTML) for this type of content should be maintained in one place, but be usable in many places.

Previous versions of SharePoint have included basic tools such as Lists and Web Part that assist the designer in setting up ways to re-use content.  However, MOSS 2007 takes this concept to a new level by providing a number of new tools that designers can use for this purpose.   In this session we will explain and demonstrate the new content re-use features of MOSS 2007 including:

• Publishing Sites
• The Reusable Content List
• Page Layouts
• Page Controls
• The Content by Query Web Part

In today's portals and content management systems, business users are more active than ever in the publication and consumption of information. However, many organizations are struggling with the issue that concepts like taxonomy design and metadata strategy, historically used only by information science professionals, are now accessible for use by typical business users.

Many organizations have failed to adjust the design and strategy of taxonomies as the audience and uses have changed. As a result, many taxonomies currently found in front end systems are overly complex and far from intuitive for the end users. This issue is exacerbated by confusion concerning the uses and applications for taxonomies and metadata.

This presentation will provide an introduction to taxonomy and metadata benefits, design concepts and strategies. It will also provide recommendations on how best to proceed with such efforts in your own organization.

• Understand the distinction between traditional and business taxonomies
• Recognize the importance and purpose of taxonomy within an enterprise portal or other knowledge management tool
• Learn the best practices for successful implementation and adoption
• Gain insight on how to begin your organization's own taxonomy and metadata design projects

Guiding Users Toward Content Using MOSS Audiences (Wendy Henry)

In this session, you will learn to utilize Audience targeting on your MOSS sites to steer users toward specific content….even if those users are NOT Windows accounts.

In large SharePoint environments, it is common to have sites or lists with similar names…making it confusing for users to find the content appropriate for their specific need. Whether deploying web parts or simple links, Audience targeting provides a custom feel for each individual and increases productivity.

 Join Wendy to learn how to import non-Active Directory user accounts into SharePoint profiles and use them for content targeting!

Individual Document Management: Tracking Changes and Keeping It Safe (Wendy Henry)

We all know collaboration is great, but so is maintaining the integrity of your documents while they are available to others. Refining a document can require many drafts. Who is tracking each revision?

Also, who keeps your document safe from untoward advances by other document library editors? Windows SharePoint Services, that’s who!

Join Wendy for some eye-opening version control and individual item-level security in a multi-user environment simulated with Microsoft Virtual PC technology using multiple virtual machines.

Information rights management support in SharePoint 2007 (Russell Wright)

SharePoint 2007 includes a new feature that allows you to secure individual documents and list items, but what happens if a sensitive document is downloaded and emailed to unauthorized users?  The item-level security feature of SharePoint 2007 cannot help with this type of security need.

This is where support of Information Rights Management becomes important.  Through tight integration with Windows Rights Management, SharePoint administrators can now place restrictions on documents, document libraries and lists that govern downloading, emailing and printing of sensitive information.

In this session Russell will demonstrate the usage of Windows Rights Management in SharePoint libraries and lists and explain best practices for administration and usage. 

Real-world case study: Using SharePoint 2007 as a driver of change initiatives in a large organization (Ben Hutchins)

The LDS Church has over 70,000 full time service missionaries, 13 million members and translates content into 130 languages for people in 176 nations and territories. More than half of its members live outside of the United States and Canada.

After several years of managing the information architecture for HP's corporate portal, Ben Hutchins was hired by the LDS Church to improve internal operating efficiencies. SharePoint 2007 was selected as the primary Intranet platform to drive forward various change management initiatives.

The first phase (LDS Teams - collaboration portal) was implemented in August of 2007 and more than 700 distinct site collections (top level SharePoint sites) were created by almost 500 customers in the first two months. Phase two (My Sites - for each employee) and phase three (LDS Web - corporate portal) are scheduled to be released in first half 2008.

This is a two-part presentation.  The first session will cover:

• How to design a solution that empowers customers and culture to change
• How to establish a change driven governance model
• How to harness the power of marketing
• How to train for change

The second session will cover:

• How to create a distributed model in SharePoint to improve efficiencies in:
  • Communications
  • Information architecture/Taxonomy Management
  • Departmental/Organizational Web Site development/management
• How to leverage My Sites to improve employee productivity
• How to measure the success of change initiatives using:
  • SharePoint metrics
  • SQL Reporting
  • Ominture Site Catalyst (3rd party tool)

Warp Speed Ahead with SharePoint Workflows and InfoPath (Shiraz Cupala)

MOSS 2007 includes powerful workflow capabilities to help streamline your business processes. Starting with out-of-box workflows and ending with a fully customized solution, this talk shows how to leverage InfoPath and SharePoint workflows to automate your business processes without writing any code. Start with filling out forms and end with a decentralized data process that reduces the time it takes to get approvals, resolve support calls, close sales, etc. Break the bottleneck to faster results for your business.

This session walks through the basics of enabling workflow for an InfoPath form representing a common business process. Kicking it up a notch, we show how to customize the form and SharePoint workflow to create an end-to-end workflow triggering off data inside your forms. 

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.

Real-world case study: Customizing SharePoint's Wiki capabilities for use in implementing a robust knowledgebase (Rachel Sondag and Jeff Cate)

The ability to create a Wiki in SharePoint 2007 is one of the exciting new Web 2.0 features.  Due to the quick and easy nature of Wikis, they are a natural development platform for knowledgebase applications.

In this session, Rachel and Jeff will demonstrate SharePoint Solutions' customized SharePoint Wiki that has been used and contributed to by the SharePoint Solutions instructors and students since January 2007.

SharePoint Designer: When should you use it and how? (Rob Bogue)

SharePoint Designer serves three core needs: HTML design, workflow development, and data viewing. Learn how and when to use SharePoint Designer for these tasks. Also learn what tasks SharePoint Designer is not well-suited for.

Whether you’re an organization of one or one hundred thousand you’ll learn how you can use SharePoint Designer to develop solutions to the problems you face and what to do in order to allow your hard work to be reused.

De-mystifying the MOSS 2007 Single sign-on feature (Ricky Spears)

One of the primary benefits of implementing portal software is the capability to bring together important business information that exists in business applications outside of the portal application.  SharePoint provides a number of tools, such as the Data Form Web Part, the Business Data Catalog and Excel Services, that can be used to expose business information in the portal from business databases, ERP systems, CRM systems, etc.

However, a key pre-requisite for displaying non-SharePoint business data in a portal is establishing an approach to providing authentication credentials to the back-end system.  This is where the MOSS 2007 Single Sign-on feature comes to the rescue.

Come join Ricky as he conducts an easy-to-follow, functional walkthrough of the MOSS 2007 Single Sign-On feature - one of the least understood and utilized features of the product. 

Social Networking for the Enterprise with SharePoint (Dino Dato-on)

Recently, CIOInsight magazine published an article entitled “Will Microsoft Become Facebook for the Enterprise” . With the recent growth phenomenon of Facebook, this session will discuss what social networking can do for the enterprise and how employees can garner information by networking with other people with like skills or interests.

Dino Dato-on has co-authored an MSDN article on “Managing Social Networking with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007” and discusses how SharePoint can be the next Facebook for the enterprise.

SharePoint Search for the Enterprise (Dino Dato-on)

Enterprise Search has become a priority goal by most companies. With documents increasingly proliferated across file shares and workstations, companies struggle in keeping up in finding the information that is there.

This session, presented by Microsoft SharePoint Architect, Dino Dato-on, will talk about SharePoint and Desktop Search and how to leverage its search engine to make documents more searchable and more relevant.

Business Intelligence and Dashboards with Excel 2007 Server (Asif Rehmani)

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.

List Improvements, Access 2007 and Tracking Applications (Russell Wright)

In this session, we will cover the enhancements to Lists in SharePoint 2007 that increase the usefulness of the product for database-type 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.

Communication 2.0: Getting Beyond Email and the Telephone (Bryan Huddleston)

Almost every information worker is feeling the weight of the multiple forms of communication and email, voicemail, work phones and cell phones. Although email is a very effective means of communication, there have been advances in software and telephony to improve communications.

In this session Bryan will describe SharePoint Blogs and Wikis as communication tools to complement email in the corporate world. He will then explore streamlining communications using software communication tools such as Presence, Instant Messaging, Voice Calls and Conferencing all launched directly from SharePoint.

You will walk away with new ideas about how to communicate more effectively internally in your organization and how to more effectively attract and retain customers. The effectiveness of this technology may even make you rethink some of your operations models.

Products that will be highlighted and discussed include:

• Office SharePoint Server
• Windows SharePoint Services
• Office Communication Server
• Office Communicator

Connecting Metadata in Office and SharePoint (Rob Bogue)

Most organizations have critical business processes that are executed from Office client applications.  For example, Word is a familiar tool for developing quick form templates for later use. In this session, learn how some simple changes to the construction of Word templates can make the data being captured on these forms more useful in SharePoint.

SharePoint will automatically connect data in your Office documents and the columns in a SharePoint document library if you set things up correctly. Learn how this works and see a working example.

Real-world case study: Transforming Government with SharePoint and Office 2007 - Illinois DCEO (Terry Lutes)

During the past four years the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity (DCEO) has technologically transformed from a multi-vendor, disconnected set of island technologies, to a completely integrated single-vendor infrastructure using the Microsoft Family of Server and Desktop products.

DCEO developed composite business applications based upon the Microsoft Office Business Platform with a combination Intranet/Extranet/Internet portal using SharePoint 2007. They created a unique, single user interface to all agency programs, documents and data. They utilized a customized version of MS Outlook 2007 as the central client interface for all agency users, regardless of their physical location.

The full implementation of Office 2007 and SharePoint 2007 brings information management and access, collaboration and people-driven processes into the familiar Microsoft Office interface where the agency users do their work every day, day after day. Agency users benefit from the familiarity and consistency of a single interface for all their information and collaboration. This interface is easy to learn, use, and personalize.

Come hear about this success story from Terry Lutes, Chief Information Officer, Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity.

Real-world case study: Collaborating with Customers on the Extranet with SharePoint (Jeff Cate, Tony Bierman, Jeremy Luerkens)

In January, 2007, SharePoint Solutions began using SharePoint 2007 to collaborate on the Extranet with every customer that attends one of its training classes.  Each training class that is held receives its own WSS site that students can access during and after class to collaborate with fellow students and their instructors.

The class extranet collaboration application has been a huge success with over 100 extranet sites created and being accessed securely over the Internet by over 1,500 customers.

Come hear about the features of this solution, the approach that has been taken to ensure security, and the processes that have been established to quickly generate user accounts and uniform class sites.  SharePoint Solutions' award-winning Extranet Collaboration Manager add-on, a big part of this solution, will also be highlighted by its designers, Tony Bierman and Jeremy Luerkens.

The Odd Couple: Integrating SharePoint and Access in the Real World (Peter Serzo)

Microsoft Access is one of the venerable technologies in the Microsoft stack. It is prevalent in many organizations as users love the ability to create a relational database that has screens, reports, and exports information into their Excel spreadsheets. IT struggles with managing these databases as the solutions include security, rolling out updates to desktops, version incompatibilities and database size limitations.

In this session we will look at a live Worldwide Manufacturing ISO Training application that integrates the two technologies. Issues that will be covered are:

• Security between the two applications
• Which application handles what roles
• Update Metadata from Access into SharePoint and why
• Offline Access
• Utilizing workflow to handle relational database concepts

Also covered, are best practices and lessons learned.

Case Study: Building a Data-centric Extranet with SharePoint and eSense Visualizers (Mike Cox and Tom Pennington)

Stratix, a leading provider of enterprise mobility solutions, needed an extranet system that captured and graphically displayed information from multiple application sources including their CRM, Financial and ERP systems. This information needed to be securely displayed in context to both the standard SharePoint content and the user communities including customers, partners and employees.

To address these challenges without custom coding, Stratix used SharePoint and NSE’s eSENSE Visualizers to provide a unified, smart client interface to configure all aspects of data access, selection, and display within their SharePoint sites.

Come hear about the Stratix project and how eSENSE Visualizers helped them address the SharePoint challenges they faced by providing a comprehensive and secure portal framework to easily access and display any business data to any type and number of SharePoint sites and roles… without custom coding.

A Business Perspective to Technology Projects: The PricewaterhouseCoopers Canada SharePoint Portal (Marc Milgrom and Steve Lugarini)

This session will focus on the business side of a successful technology project - the project  to develop the award-winning PricewaterhouseCoopers Canada SharePoint Portal.

The PricewaterhouseCoopers Canada SharePoint portal is the recipient of the 2007 Portals, Collaboration and Content Network Excellence award which has been awarded for the past seven years to the best example of an enterprise portal represented at the annual PCC conference.  

Key topics covered in this session will include business buy-in, budget approval, stakeholder management and implementation. Both technology and business issues will be discussed, with an emphasis on managing and delivering business value.

Using K2 to Create Enterprise Workflow and BPM Solutions for the Real World! (Parind Doctor and Brett Kovatch)

K2 enables anyone, regardless of technical ability, to design and build processes and applications. And when the business needs change, modifying those processes and applications is simple. Attend this session to see how easy it is to develop solutions that allow all aspects of the business to work together more effectively.  This session will be presented by a K2 customer, Penson Financial Services of Dallas, TX

With K2, developers and business users can use information that already exists and processes that have already been built to create flexible, scalable applications that span employees, departments, organizations and line-of-business systems. K2 extends and enhances the entire Microsoft product stack – this session will highlight Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS), InfoPath, and Visio. If you use, or are thinking of using, any of these technologies you should attend this session.

No Experience Required: How a Non-Developer Developed a Public Web Site Using MOSS 2007 and Sharepoint Designer (Becky Seitel and Kevin Pine)

CSS, HTML, XML, XSLT, CAML....enough to strike fear in the heart of a non-developer challenged with developing a corporate public-facing web site. This is the story of how the marketing department at Sterne Agee, a Birmingham, AL-based investments and brokerage firm, created a new web presence for the firm using the new MOSS web content management and publishing features.

Come hear Becky Seitel, V.P. Marketing (and MOSS novice!), talk about the steps she took to create the new Sterne Agee web site published at www.sterneagee.com.

Boldly Go Beyond SharePoint Form Libraries: Advanced InfoPath Solution Architecture (Shiraz Cupala)

As business solutions based on out-of-the-box MOSS and InfoPath grow, reaching escape velocity while maintaining maximum warp means performing some after-market modifications to the MOSS space vehicle. Libraries containing more than 2000 forms create inefficient solar drag, especially if many users simultaneously render complex views on the data. It’s too easy to flood the hyper drive of your SharePoint cruiser.

This talk provides the after-market SQL modifications to make your craft into a MOSS Millennium Falcon. We also include the HUD (heads-up dashboard) mods so you can see the key pivots for the data inside your business process. Need to lock down permissions? No sweat. We offer a hacker proof cloaking service that dynamically controls permissions based on in-form assignment.

To test drive our mods, we walk through a Project Tracking application built entirely on InfoPath 2007 forms connected through Web services to a SQL data store with SQL Analysis Services providing data cubes to Excel 2007 pivot tables. This is an end-to-end Office solutions bonanza! All attendees will receive a free copy of Qdabra Database Accelerator Suite 2.2 with a Project Tracker bundle. Start your SharePoint engines…

Tunneling Through InfoPath Form Services – Wormholes, Parallel Universes, and Higher Dimension Views (David Airapetyan)

The single biggest complaint about InfoPath v1 was that users had to have the InfoPath product installed to fill out forms. Office Forms Server is Microsoft’s answer to ubiquitous reach for the powerful InfoPath forms platform. Finally the power of InfoPath is available in a web browser. The next best thing since notepad? Well, not quite.

Many limitations exist, including no task pane support, poor rich text support, deployment headaches, ad infinitum. This lecture focuses on the form physics you will need to bend the fabric of Form Services to accept the real-world solutions that your users are building.

Learn about InfoPath Form Services on MOSS 2007 from one of the former Microsoft InfoPath senior developers for Form Services, David Airapetyan. David will be discussing:

• Basic browser form deployment
• Admin form deployment (for forms with code)
• Creating browser-specific views for hybrid solutions
• Gotchas in working with browser-enabled forms
• UDCs - write once, use often to connect your forms to popular web services

In addition, in the first public unveiling of the new Qdabra Task Pane Framework, David will show you how to tunnel through the task pane limitation. This framework enables the use of task panes in the rich and browser clients while retaining the design-once paradigm. This session is a must-see for InfoPath/MOSS developers. All attendees will receive a free IPFS task pane framework platform cd including a special UDC editor.

Survey of Public-facing MOSS Websites and Branding Best Practices (Kevin Pine)

SharePoint is not just for the intranet anymore. More and more, companies are using MOSS for their public facing web sites as well. This session will take a look at some of these sites and focus on how organizations are making the most of MOSS.

Whether you are using MOSS for your public site or your intranet, branding is one of the first things most organizations think about. Branding SharePoint is a complicated endeavor but a good understanding of some basic concepts will take you a long way toward success. You will learn how to create the files necessary to create the look and feel you want as well as how best to apply them across your site.

Migrating an Intranet to MOSS 2007 the Right Way - Society for Human Resources Management (Jill Tabuchi and Frank Scanlan)

Migrating a traditional Intranet to a new Knowledge Management tool like MOSS 2007 may include a great deal of complexity and uncertainty. To be completely successful in graduating to a tool like MOSS, an organization must consider a myriad of issues, including business taxonomy design, content migration, governance, change management, content manager on-boarding, feedback mechanisms, and communications.

This presentation will detail these and other considerations, and place them in the context of the Society for Human Resource Management’s (SHRM) intranet portal project. SHRM successfully navigated through the uncertainty of an intranet migration from a traditional website to MOSS.

Recognizing the myriad issues that could have threatened the project success, SHRM focused on the true business needs of their end users and chose an iterative approach that continues to yield dividends. This presentation will present the methodology used to promote usability for business contributors and end users, the strategy to promote and release a valuable product, and the deployment risks SHRM faced.

Improving the Power of Search in SharePoint 2007 (Peter Roth)

Ontolica improves and enhances the SharePoint search function, providing powerful, configurable and intuitive rich search capability.  Learn best practices and tips on how to improve users’ search experience with Ontolica and SharePoint Search.

In this workshop we will discuss a search improvement strategy and learn:

• How to better use basic functions, improve and scale SharePoint Search
• Best ways to radically increase search accuracy and relevancy
• Methods to configure the search interface for optimal use based on users’ needs
• How your business can benefit from analytics and search intelligence

In addition, we will demonstrate Ontolica Reporting, a powerful new search analytics module for MOSS 2007,that provides reports to help understand users’ behavior on the site.   Across your SharePoint installation, Ontolica Reporting provides information on what users are looking for and what they find, resulting detailed reports on Search, Usage and Storage.

Manage the Data in Your Database with the Data View Web Part - No Code Needed! (Asif Rehmani)

Managing content in the enterprise is one of the most crucial needs of a business. Until now, if you wanted to edit your data in the database through a web front end, it usually meant developing a solution using some sort of programming language.

Not any more! Now if you are a power user who has access to Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007, you can tap into your data by implementing the Data View web part. This session will focus on how a knowledge worker can be empowered to create data management solutions using the Data View web part.

Bringing the Back End to the Front End:  How MOSS can Put You Into Your Back End Systems Through the Business Data Catalog with No Code! (Paul Vaughn)

This session will focus on the business solutions available to anyone who uses MOSS where the BDC (Business Data Catalog) is configured and available.

Previously in the un-enlightened world of data systems, a business analyst would have to leave the safety and comfort of the MOSS environment and launch an entirely separate business application to work with the data in that system when it was needed. Now thanks to the feature rich Business Data Catalog all that information can be integrated into their MOSS environment from the beginning and the analyst can build complete custom solutions with that data.

This session will focus on solving business needs with the functionality of the Business Data Catalog, by building solutions using the BDC Web Parts, the custom BDC list application, and the BDC Search functionality.

Intelligent Documents: How Open XML Can Change the Role of Everyday Business Documents (Owen Allen)

What is the Ecma Office Open XML file format and how will it affect the way business approaches solutions to their problems?  Can it really be useful in my business world of different file formats?  I seem to remember what happened the last time file formats changed… J  

What does the international standards process have to do with all of this, and what other companies are already shipping products that leverage this new file format?  Will this session really allow me to go home with some great ideas that could change the way my company works?

Yes!  If you haven’t found enough items for your trip report, visit this session and you’ll get the ideas that you need!

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