We will start of the week by defining the requirements of the solution that we are going to build and by establishing the process that we will use during the week. We will also start getting hands-on by setting up the Visual Studio solution.

Business Processes and forms are everywhere. In your organization, there are always forms to be filled out, and these forms usually entail some initial requirements gathering and planning. Microsoft Office InfoPath is a powerful form-creation tool that lets you create highly customized and professional-looking business forms, without writing any code. When you use this product in conjunction with SharePoint and SharePoint Designer, you have all the tools you need to build a no-code automated business solution.  In this session, Laura and Jennifer will review the process of gathering requirements and designing the initial form.  We will cover the key common issues and pitfalls that happen during requirements gathering and review best practices to ensure quality requirements.  Once we review the requirements we will begin designing the Travel Request form, which will be the foundation for the remaining sessions for the Travel Request Solution.

Often people don’t realize or understand that content types are necessary component of a stable, usable SharePoint implementation. A critical aspect of any implementation is in understanding the value that the addition of well-planned and implemented content types will bring to your SharePoint farm. While understanding the nature of content types and how they work can be challenging putting together an effective plan for successfully implementing them can be even more challenging. During this session we will examine the different tools that can be used to plan content types. We will also begin planning out the content types that could be used to manage a product development lifecycle.

In this session, Heather and Penny will review the requirements gathering process, including  the importance of  taxonomy and the use of  tools, such as, wire frames and card sorting. They will discuss the design considerations for internet, intranet and extranet SharePoint site, as well as viewing your site on smart phones and tablets, as well as print considerations. You should attend this session if you  have never (successfully) branded a site before, but want to do so.

This session will explore best practices for making sure your file plans have enough information to support real-world SharePoint 2010 Records Center configuration and testing.  We’ll start by building a typical file plan from scratch using Microsoft Excel, and then walk through the process of using the file plan to configure and validate a Records Center site manually.
During the session, we’ll introduce several strategies and techniques that can be applied to effectively convert the information contained in the file plan into a well-structured SharePoint records repository that is tuned to the needs of your organization.  For example, we’ll consider the pros and cons of creating a separate SharePoint content type for each record series versus creating content types for each record category and then routing documents into separate folders.  We’ll look at the relative complexity of each approach and weigh its benefits against the technical requirements needed to support it in everyday practice.
Finally, we’ll look at available file planning tools, and examine the pros and cons of using desktop tools such as Microsoft Excel and InfoPath versus SharePoint- and cloud-based alternatives.

SharePoint 2010’s In-place records management features offer users great flexibility to declare records wherever they are without having to move or copy them to a separate Records Center site, but can create headaches for IT when it comes to managing record storage.  It can also be problematic for professional records managers who need finer control over record classification, security and e-discovery.  In this session, we’ll extend the out-of-the-box records management architecture to create a hybrid in-place records management solution that leverages declarative workflow to ensure proper classification and metadata accuracy for documents that are declared as records.

In this first part of 4 on workflow design this session will introduce you to the world that is workflow and all the challenges that it brings. One of the best ROI quick wins for the users and the business alike yet it requires the right approach and understanding to realise it's potential.

In SharePoint, people tend to use workflows with forms or when automating business processes.  Using  a real life assignment in this demo-rich session, Penny and Cathy will create a reusable workflow  with SharePoint Designer (SPD) 2010 that supports a Change Request  business process. They will explain the extra steps you need to consider when creating a re-usable workflow when compared to a list workflow  and the limitations of using SPD. During the session they’ll also discuss the issues that automating a business process raises and how customers have tried to over come them.

In this session, Penny will briefly introduce the differences between creating workflows  in  SharePoint Online when using Office 365 P and E plans. They will then take the reusable workflow created by Penny and Cathy in the previous session and import it into Office 365, highlighting any problems that  you might encounter when using an on-premise copy of SharePoint as your development environment, and when  it may be better to develop workflows  within the SharePoint Online  sites. Extending workflows in Office 365 using Visual Studio.

The more content you have, the more harder to find what you’re looking for.
The more content sources you have, the more harder to keep your metadata consistent. In this session I will demonstrate how to decide which properties display on the Search User Interface, and how to display them in a consistent and coherent way. A step back, you will see how to define those metadata fields in SharePoint and FAST Search, and what are your options to use them, what are the most important differences between SharePoint’s and FAST’s Search property management.

When the tools available in SharePoint 2010 are used appropriately, it can be phenomenally productive. In this session, we take a look at how it was possible to build a fully featured business application, using out-of-the-box SharePoint and Nintex Workflow, in a matter of days – and without writing any code. Using Document Control and Transmittals as our example, we review the business requirements and explain why SharePoint was chosen for the application, before getting hands on with some demos and looking at how SharePoint and Nintex capabilities were leveraged to quickly deliver the application at engineering company GBM. Co presented by Ian Woodgate and Joe Russell from GBM.

This is a real life case study spread over two sessions, covering a Business Intelligence project for SharePoint 2010 and the Microsoft BI stack from start to finish.  We will see raw data in the form of Excel Spread Sheets evolve into highly effective and informative dashboards in SharePoint.  This is a real project deployed to the health sector in 2012.

In Part 1, we examine the requirements of the project and discuss the thought process behind how and what we need to deliver. We will discuss the considerations for such a project including project methodology, skills, authentication, infrastructure, licenses, and BI features.  We will look at the raw data which is essentially a series of Excel Spread Sheets and CSV files (very common scenario) and design and build the data model and OLAP Cubes required.  We will then see a live demo of how Excel can be used immediately as a tool for analysts.

This is a real life case study spread over two sessions, covering a Business Intelligence project for SharePoint 2010 and the Microsoft BI stack from start to finish. We will see raw data in the form of Excel Spread Sheets evolve into highly effective and informative dashboards in SharePoint.  This is a real project deployed to the health sector in 2012.

In Part 2, we will focus on the development of a series of SharePoint dashboards using Excel Services and PerformancePoint to render the various charts and scorecards required.  We will look at live demos to demonstrate how some of this development was achieved.  We will discuss some of the pros and cons of these tools, the reasoning behind when to use which, and also discuss whether other tools such as PowerPivot and SSRS may have been useful. We will see how important the data model is, and how powerful Excel becomes in its new role.  Finally we will review lessons learned and look towards the new features in SQL 2012 which could enrich the solution. 

This session will discuss the implementation of multi-tenancy for both organisations wishing to host SharePoint and the challenges and considerations for using multi-tenancy in an on-premise deployment:

• identifying the problem space
• what is multi-tenancy and when not to use it
• service application partitioning
• subscriptions, features packs and tenant administration
• comparisons to Office 365
• bringing it all together

Correctly identifying when, where or even if to use multi-tenancy is a key architectural decision for any large scale deployment of SharePoint. Understanding the control multi-tenancy provides, along with some of the burdens it brings will ensure that many of the pitfalls of choosing the wrong multi-tenancy strategy can be avoided.
 
This session will discuss the choices required to be made when implementing multi-tenancy and the considerations to be undertaken. We’ll look at what works out of the box with multi-tenancy and what needs ‘massaging’ to make multi-tenancy a practical choice in the real world. Finally we’ll see a walk through of a live multi-tenancy solution that is used to provide hosted SharePoint solutions to hundreds of users.

In this session you will see how Kellogg's applied a Information Architecture to a large scale, international project consisting of around 200 people and 70ish sub projects. We will look at using columns, content types, content query webparts, search scopes and more to show how you can really liberate your content, not just within individual teams but across the entire organisation. We will also look at some advanced content aggregation techniques based around shared content types and search.

The Information Workplace Programme is the UK Government Department for Educations 2010 e-Government excellence award winning flagship SharePoint programme.  Its benefit return for the Department of Education has been substantial, supporting a hugely successful change programme across the department for thousands of users with substantial and on-going cost savings, on an ever changing client landscape.

As part of its evolution, the service is now being migrated from a large scale SharePoint 2007 fully in-house governed service to a dedicated private cloud IL3 secure hosted service with third party governance and support.  As a case study example, this session will touch on many of the issues and decisions any organisation need to consider when making the transition to any form of cloud hosting, like ensuring you have a firm foundation to work from, why understanding virtualisation is critical, the SLA minefield, risks and considerations, evolving the technology concepts within the department, rationalizing a move to Cloud, Mind Shifting the Platform Design and conceptual DR.

Skills Minister John Hayes laid out his plans for the first ‘all age’ careers service in England in September 2010, the online presence for this service will be delivered in SharePoint 2010!
See: http://nds.coi.gov.uk/content/detail.aspx?NewsAreaId=2&ReleaseID=416365&SubjectId=15&DepartmentMode=true
The site will allow users to create career action plans, access funding and training and provide an online community (please note: requirements subject to change!!)

We have now finished building our solution, but we have to make sure that our application doesn’t only run on our development environment, but that it can also run on our production environment. For that we will do load tests to make sure that our application can scale to a reasonable size without impacting server performance. 

Storing large volumes of SharePoint content creates significant performance, cost and manageability issues (something that Microsoft acknowledges with its newly released storage guidelines). The Microsoft defined method for addressing these issues is binary large object (BLOB) offloading from SharePoint content databases. Despite being generally accepted by the SharePoint community, there are still a number of misconceptions. Questions remain regarding what BLOB offloading actually delivers for SharePoint and how it should best be used.
It is time to sort fact from fiction and learn the truth about SharePoint and Remote BLOB Storage (RBS).
Dr. Steve Marsh from Metalogix will dissect what RBS really offers by answering these key questions:
1) Do the new Microsoft SharePoint storage guidelines remove the need for BLOB offloading?
2) Does SharePoint have native RBS capabilities?
3) How does BLOB offloading impact SharePoint performance?
4) By using RBS, does it make a disaster recovery strategy more complex?
5) Is the Microsoft RBS FILESTREAM Provider an enterprise-class solution for BLOB offloading?

Presented by Steve Marsh

Come to an all-demo, PowerPoint-free zone and watch a workflow solution be built before your eyes using the latest Nintex technology.  It will feature modeling complex behavior, creating desktop- and mobile-friendly forms, connecting to enterprise data, utilizing cloud services, interacting with Office 365, examining usage patterns, and improving the process iteratively. You will see an environment and an approach that’s easy to use, easy to manage, and easy to understand – without compromising power or governance.  The result will be a workable solution with SharePoint at its core.
Speaker Name: Mike Fitzmaurice