Toronto SharePoint Camp

InfoPath 2007 has many limitations and doesn’t scale very well with complex forms. Using a custom solution built on SharePoint, we’ve extended InfoPath to support very complicated form functionality. In this session, we will describe to you how we overcame several InfoPath limitations, including multilingual support, pre-populating form data, field validation, and support a flow between several forms.

About a third of all Enterprise Content Management (ECM) projects fail, the core reason being that the implementation fails to accurately model and therefore support the business. By learning the techniques to translate business entities and processes into their appropriate implementation in SharePoint you can  deliver successful SharePoint projects every time. In this session you will learn what every planner needs to know about the limitations of both people and SharePoint in order to build a successful model. Learn the secrets of taxonomy design, navigation, corporate anthropology, Cynefin analysis, and how to apply these within the hard limits of SharePoint.

SharePoint implementation presents many challenges to development teams with deployment often viewed as an area of the primary complexity and importance.

Over time we have accumulated a rich set of utilities which allow deploying SharePoint sites in a fully unattended fashion or close to it, by using custom logic interacting with SharePoint API.

Efficiency of deployment has a dramatic impact on practical aspects of agile and team development using SharePoint, which makes us invest in building comprehensive tools for SharePoint deployment.

Analyst: What would you like SharePoint to do?
Customer: Well, what can it do?
Analyst: Tons! Let me show you…

All too often, this is how conversations between analysts and customers/stakeholders begin, and it isn’t helpful to anyone. SharePoint has a vast array of capabilities, but if you start by describing or demonstrating what SharePoint can do and how the technology works, you will end up with customers who are confused and don’t know where to begin, or who have massively overblown expectations.

In this session, you will learn how to set up and conduct workshops with various stakeholders that will allow you to understand their real needs. You will then learn how to document and organize this information so that it is useful to the stakeholders and that will allow you to guide them through prioritization and planning.

You will learn when NOT to do demonstrations of SharePoint, and when and how to do demos that are powerful and effective.

NOTE: The information in this session is useful for any SharePoint implementation, but is more focused on Intranet/Extranet/Portal scenarios rather than public facing web sites.

It is one thing to plan for a SharePoint migration but it’s another thing entirely too actually perform the tasks at hand. 

In this session we will walk through the entire lifecycle of content discovery, content mapping, and content migration of an existing environment comprising of a typical file share, a small SPS portal, and a Notes environment with the use of some nifty utilities, best practices and some migration products such as Quest’s Migration Tools.

As part of the overall session we will also see some of the other SharePoint management products Quest Software have brought to the table and briefly how they can benefit administrators and developers currently using or soon to be using the platform.

How do you work with stakeholders to ensure that you have gathered the information required and then organize that information and communicate it back to the rest of the team? Mind-mapping tools that help with visualization and that are flexible and easy to use can be extremely helpful in this process.

In this session, we will discuss how to use a mind-mapping tool called MindManager for your SharePoint projects. We have discovered ways to use MindManager to gather information, present it back to the stakeholders and document the SharePoint architecture. While MindManager is a flexible tool, there are some places where it is not appropriate, and we explain when alternatives are more suitable.

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 pain points 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 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.

 

Your organization’s users need the freedom to collaborate and share their ideas without frustrating roadblocks – and that’s just the way SharePoint is designed. However, as many companies have found to their chagrin, any SharePoint farm must have a plan and a set of rules for governance, or it will grow out of control like a summer brush fire. But how can any organization find that control without stifling users’ creativity and flow, sending them back to email? This session presents real-world answers to that question, including field tips on setting flexible roles and responsibilities, pitfalls to avoid, and useful tools, worksheets and other resources.

SharePoint is an awesome tool. It allows you to build web sites, manage lists of data, collaborate on documents, and so much more – all done through a simple, easy to use, web interface. When you need to go beyond the built in capabilities of the product, SharePoint also provides a rich set of APIs to code against. This session explores the most commonly used features in the Windows SharePoint Services developer APIs, as well as the types of components and applications in which they can be utilized. Topics covered include the WSS object model, WSS web services, creating simple web parts, and adding event handlers to lists.

SharePoint Branding is not impossible. Why deploy a SharePoint site that looks like every other SharePoint site. Applying your corporate brand to your SharePoint site does not have to complex.  In this introductory session, we'll look at some generic SharePoint branding options that are available as well master pages and page layouts. 

Once you have an understanding of why SharePoint needs to be branded, what can be branded and how SharePoint can branded, you will be able to successful brand your SharePoint site.

See how PowerShell, the Microsoft command prompt for the .NET generation, can greatly impact administrative and development scenarios within SharePoint. In this session, through demos, we'll take a look how you can interact with sites, lists and automate processes using PowerShell scripts along with the SharePoint Object model.

We will be creating a RIA solution leveraging SharePoint social computing features such as user profiles, colleagues, wikis, blogs and search and displaying it in a rich way using Silverlight. In this session we’ll demonstrating how to create webparts that can expose Silverlight content and how to integrate with back-end web services to retrieve user profiles and activity information. We will also talk about limitations and “gotchas” in creating these solutions.

Social Computing is deemed by many as the next big thing in the Enterprise 2.0 world and leveraging existing SharePoint implementations with a new way to display and aggregate the Enterprise social information using Silverlight definitely will make this session the next place to be.

With SharePoint 2007 taking on widespread adoption, many enterprises are starting to take advantage of the new and improved features of the new platform; but what about administrators and developers that are still supporting a growing business critical SharePoint 2003 environment and have been assigned the daunting task of upgrading? There seems to be an endless list of things to take into account before taking the plunge and upgrading.

In this session, I will walk through how to assess your system to make an educated migration path decision, draw up the high level upgrade steps, and then dig in on some specific snags you'll likely encounter (including custom web parts, FrontPage and unghosted pages, broken permissions, site themes, and legacy templates)

Silverlight can vastly improve the quality of interaction with SharePoint. In this simple demonstration we’ll use build a simple web part that adds a lot of cool functionality using existing Silverlight components and SharePoint web services.

I will be walking you, a beginning developer, through a custom SharePoint 2007 workflow solution.  A few pieces of information before we get into the solution.  This scenario has been developed to assist developers (beginners) who are starting out in custom workflow development and to feel comfortable developing workflow solutions.  These techniques are not meant to be the only way to approach this solution but rather have been pieced together to give you an understanding of some of the different approaches of workflow development.  This sessions is for the novice developer who is interested in workflow development and integration of InfoPath web based forms.