Category Archives: Best Practices Conference

New SharePoint Blogger!

Lookout SharePoint world – Sarah Haase (locally of Best Buy fame) has entered the blogosphere.  Sarah has been a presenter at the Minnesota SharePoint User Group, SharePoint Saturday – Twin Cities and the Best Practices Conferences and always has great information, especially when it comes to measuring the ROI of SharePoint solutions. 

Well, she finally started up a blog here:  http://sarahlhaase.wordpress.com/

Go check it out!

SharePoint Pod Show

While attending the Best Practices Conference this week, Sarah Haase and I were interviewed by Brett Lonsdale for a SharePoint Pod Show on SharePoint lists.  Sounds like it might be about 2 weeks until ours is posted, but take a look at the site in the meantime – LOTS of great content out there. 

Our ‘episode’ was a result of the two sessions that Sarah and I are presenting this week:

  • Sarah’s “You could need a list if…”
  • My “SharePoint Lists: Used, Abused and Underappreciated”

Pretty fun – was only interrupted once by a screaming baby that was being carted by…  Smile 

I’ll update the post once our episode is online. 

SharePoint Lists – Follow up

A few things that were brought up in my session on lists the other day at the Best Practices Conference:

Inline Editing – SharePoint 2010 introduces the concept of inline editing within views.  This allows users to add/update fields within the view without having to open the add or edit forms.  This feature is not turned on by default.  Jennifer Mason of SharePoint 911 has a nice post about this feature. 

Alerts by View – We mentioned alerts and we mentioned views, but I didn’t have anything about the ability to create alerts on views.  Great comment from the session attendees on that one.  After looking at this again, I realized that this is NOT as intuitive as it should be.  You can create alerts on views, but not all views and there are some criteria for it.  Check out the following post for more information:
http://sharepointalert.info/2009/09/alert-me-tricks-fo-power-users/

Metadata Navigation – Another attendee asked about metadata navigation.  I don’t remember all the context to the question, but metadata navigation is available, but only at the list view level.  It’s not something that can be used on the main page or other web part pages.  It does, however, work with which ever view is currently being displayed – which is what I think the question was about. 

Fun session.  We had 45+ people in (and outside) a room set up for 30.  Thanks to the folks that were packed in and spilling into the hallway.  Smile

Best Practices Conference 2011

We’re back for another Best Practices Conference – this time in La Jolla, CA (just North of San Diego).  This is the only domestic Best Practices conference this year as the Microsoft SharePoint Conference will be held this fall and is the primary event in the SharePoint community.  There is, however a UK version happening in a few weeks as well.   

If you’ve never heard of this conference, or don’t know what makes this one different from the myriad of other SharePoint conferences, user groups and SharePoint Saturdays out there – here’s what it is.  At the Best Practices Conference we focus on the WHY.  Most other conferences focus on the ‘what’ (features) and the ‘how do you do…’, which is fine – just different.  Here, we get to tell attendees what some of the best practices are regarding many aspects of SharePoint – and then describe WHY it is a best practice as opposed to all of the other options that are available. 

I’ve got three sessions this time around – two repeats from the fall 2010 event and one new session. 

Lists: Used, Abused and Underappreciated
Lists are used as the core of many things SharePoint but they are rarely used as well as they can be. Learn the top tips and tricks for getting the most of your lists: How to build them smarter, how to display them more clearly, and how to use them in your environment for effectively. Also see how these practices evolve from 2007 to 2010.

SharePoint: The Day After
You’ve deployed your farm, built your customizations and integrated your external systems… now what? How do you make sure your users are informed, educated, trained and supported? How do you measure success? How are you insuring the stability of the platform going forward? And why are answering these questions so important to your success.

SharePoint Implementation: When to Crawl, Walk or Run
Many of us have seen SharePoint 101 presentations describing features and functionality of SharePoint 2010. What we’re missing are the best practices and recommendations for what to implement and when. What are the benefits/risks of choosing to crawl first and then walk or run later? What effort is required to jump ahead and implement the utopia? This presentation will break down key functionality areas within SharePoint and outline the crawl, walk or run maturity models. Once you have an understanding of what it takes to implement and manage these models, you’ll be able to develop your platform strategy and make critical choices about where to focus your efforts.​

Now, if the sun would just come out for a little bit… 

Best Practices Conference 2010

I’m currently at the 2010 Best Practices Conference in Reston, VA (Washington D.C.) and will be presenting a couple of topics this week in addition to sitting in on an Ask the Experts panel. 

I LOVE the idea behind this conference – talking through the *why* we do things instead of only the *how*.  Don’t get me wrong, understanding how to do things with SharePoint is pretty important.  It’s a big platform that keeps getting bigger. 

One challenge that many decision makers, implementers and users run into with SharePoint is that there are often more ways than one to get things done.  While options are sometimes a good thing, it can also be confusing to know which solution is the best for a particular scenario.  The answer to this is understanding *why* a decision is made.  So, that’s what we’re tackling this week. 

There are a lot of experts here and a lot of topics being covered.  It’s going to be a good week.  My topics include:

Lists: Used, Abused and Underappreciated
Lists are used as the core of many things SharePoint but they are rarely used as well as they can be. Learn the top tips and tricks for getting the most of your lists: How to build them smarter, how to display them more clearly, and how to use them in your environment for effectively. Also see how these practices evolve from 2007 to 2010.

SharePoint: The Day After
You’ve deployed your farm, built your customizations and integrated your external systems… now what? How do you make sure your users are informed, educated, trained and supported? How do you measure success? How are you insuring the stability of the platform going forward? And why are answering these questions so important to your success.

I hope everyone has a great week!

Best Practices SharePoint Conference – Session 2

The second topic I presented on at the Best Practices SharePoint Conference was MUCH larger than could be accomplished in the time allotted – even when demo environments work perfectly.  🙂  As Mr. Murphy would have it, my demo environment unfortunately did not.  So we went ahead with a session on “Aligning Business Needs and Processes” and discussed a number of scenarios that can be reviewed in the slide deck:  Download PowerPoint

As I mentioned during the session, I’ll be following up this post with more details on the topics discussed to make up for the lack of demos.  Please check back in the next week or so. 

Thank you to all to attended and stuck around.  I hope the information was useful. 

Best Practices SharePoint Conference – Session 1

My first session at the Best Practices SharePoint Conference was Re-architecting Search Solutions with SharePoint’s New Federation Features.  The slide deck for the presentation can be found here:  Download PowerPoint

Daniel Webster made an excellent point after the session regarding one type of scenario where federated features would be valuable to an organization:  when dealing with HIPAA or other regulatory guidelines that specifically require the isolation of data.  SharePoint already allows for data and security isolation.  Federation allows administrators to follow isolation requirements while also allowing for findability within those requirements in both isolated and integrated farm environments.   

I hope the session was useful for those that attended.

Best Practices SharePoint Conference – September 15-17

The first Best Practices SharePoint Conference opened last week in Washington D.C. with a keynote by Microsoft’s Tom Rizzo.  All indications so far are that the sessions and presentations went well and were very well received.

I got into town late on Saturday and spent Sunday finishing up some of my presentation materials.  For a little break I stopped down to see how the Mindsharp folks were doing with the logistics and getting things set up.  I got a little workout in by assisting Ben and Bill with the book signing (I was just moving books around – they were signing them all).  It was pretty entertaining to watch and listen to the banter while they signed a few hundred books.  🙂 

    Really guys?  🙂 

I presented a session Tuesday afternoon and another on Wednesday afternoon and will follow up with posts about them then.  I need to look back at the legal stuff to see if I can post copies or links to my presentations here or not…  Check back!  Meanwhile I’ll just be happy that I’m able to present a few sessions.  Yea!!  (I’m very excited)

   My first speaker’s badge!

And as part of some sort of odd ritual surrounding conferences, people seem to be interested in the bag…  so here’s a picture of the conference attendee bag:

Best Practices SharePoint Conference

I was VERY excited to find out that I’ll be presenting a couple of sessions at the first Best Practices SharePoint Conference coming up this September 15-17 in Washington DC.  The session titles are listed here – more information will be available as we get closer.  🙂

  • Re-architecting Search Solutions with SharePoint’s new Federation Features
  • Aligning Business Needs, Processes, and more within the SharePoint platform