Do all stakeholders in your organization ‘know the score’? In this tough economic climate, it is more important than ever to have visibility into the key metrics that determine organizational survival. Excel Services provides a powerful and flexible tool for increasing visibility of key metrics throughout the organization. Through examples, this session will show attendees the most useful capabilities of Excel Services for collaboration, including Excel-based KPI’s, dashboards and charting. Learn how to leverage Excel experience to rapidly create SharePoint sites to securely share actionable information.

You have trained your organization to use document libraries, tasks lists, calendars, etc. and have implemented best practices. The implementation went well and acceptance of the platform within the organization was phenomenal but now you have a new problem with “Information Overload”. We will examine the some of the best ways to find and consolidate information. The primary focus will be utilizing content query web part and Enterprise search to bring some sanity to the barrage of information within your organization.

How to use Content Editor Web Parts and your copy and paste skills to turn a boring team page into a dynamic dashboard.

Turn information from lists into dynamic pie /bar chartsMake clickable menus that dynamically show any view of a web partColor code overdue items on a listA small, attractive web part calenderAn easy way to hide unwanted elements on the page such as the left navigation, global bread crumb.

Simple HTML and CSS skills are useful but not necessary

This is the real deal! How to create a master list, calendar or library that can be used on multiple sites. You add or upload new items on one list and anyone with permissions will be able to view and access the list or library from any site in the site collection as if the list was on their site. No copying files or saving lists and their content as templates required.

Requires only SharePoint Designer and one small favor from your SharePoint Administrator.

SharePoint is a great platform on which to build and deliver solutions. The question, however, quickly becomes what to build, how to build it, and most importantly, how to ensure that what I build is successful. In this presentation, we discuss the SharePoint “Solution Quadrant,” which addresses the many types of solutions you can build on SharePoint. We explore how to build your solution, keeping in mind the concepts of modularity and reusability. And finally, we address end user adoption challenges and how to overcome these by providing the information people need right to their fingertips. In short, how to get the most value out of you.

This talk will look at the powerful Microsoft Office tool InfoPath for creating your electronic forms. We’ll show how the tool is capable of delivering validated data (schema validated XML) to your SharePoint environment. Having developed your form, we will then look at publishing your form to a Forms Library or Document Library in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 to demonstrate all of the basic capabilities if the InfoPath client application is available to your users. The InfoPath Forms Services available in the Enterprise Edition of MOSS can provide the ability for anyone to submit your electronic forms as rendered in a browser. We’ll look carefully at the best practices for this scenario, and look at key InfoPath form settings for developing forms intended for the browser environment. You will be shown how to centrally deploy and manage your form templates on the server, and how to leverage content types to deliver a consistent form creation experience. Finally we’ll examine the most common scenario of coupling the electronic forms with out of the box workflows.

In this session we will take a data driven focus on SharePoint 2010. We will first look at the significant enhancements at SharePoint lists as a viable means of data storage – now with referential integrity possible between lists. Then we will look at accessing list data simply and effectively using both LINQ to SharePoint as well as ADO.NET Data Services. Finally we will have a look at the new Business Connectivity Services (BCS) as the long awaited successor to the Business Data Catalog – which now offers 2 way communication to external data sources.

I cannot promise at this time we’ll have a live demonstration! But will have screen shots and code samples. We are all waiting for Beta 2 of SP 2010 to be released “later in November”, and will have it configured for you if at all possible!

Learn the tricks and best practices for developing web parts with User Controls that preserve the designer experience and code behind, and utilize the MVP design pattern. We will incorporate the use of Telerik controls and a professional ORM tool. We will look at UML modelling in Enterprise Architect, Unit Testing, and deploying the solution using WSPBuilder via TFS. Although using SP 2007 / VS2008, we will also look at what the changes are for SP 2010 / VS2010. These best practices and lessons learned will take you to the “professional” level as a SharePoint web part developer!

In this session, Errin O’Connor will discuss how you can examine your organization’s current SharePoint state as well as items you should start to consider around SharePoint 2010’s release.

Errin will discuss how organizations should examine their current SharePoint roadmap \ situation and provide guidance in helping to plan for the future. Errin is under a Microsoft NDA for SharePoint 2010, but will still be able cover the publicly available items that can be shared around SharePoint 2010 and will give insight into how organizations can avoid the SP2003 to SP2007 upgrade pitfalls when planning for future upgrades from SP2007 to SP2010.

A general overview of the new SharePoint 2010 features.

Joe will discuss migration of Legacy Enterprise Content Management systems to SharePoint. Topics will include: Why should you migrate your Legacy ECM to SharePoint? What are the benefits? What are the challenges you will face? Overview of the migration process and some recommendations to consider.

Organizations everywhere are implementing SharePoint. But with the benefits of SharePoint also comes a new list of concerns. Many SharePoint administrators are unaware of some of the legal and management impacts SharePoint brings to an organization. Benefit from the mistakes of others, and learn what you need to do—and what you need to avoid.

An overview of the most important feature enhancements and changes lined up for SharePoint 2010 Developers.

One of the biggest challenges companies have with SharePoint is its adoption within the corporate environment. SharePoint will die on the vine if it’s not fed and cared for. A steady diet of SharePoint education, interactive solution building and the metered rollout of its capabilities will help to drive the successful use SharePoint to solve your business’ challenges. During this presentation, we will discuss the 6 things you must do to increase SharePoint’s adoption in your user community. This is an interactive presentation so bring your questions so that we can all learn from one another!

PowerPivot is Microsoft's latest tool for Self Service Business Intelligence. See how PowerPivot fits into the landscape of SQL Server 2008 R2, SharePoint 2010, and Excel 2010.

SharePoint 2010 is poised to revolutionize how organizations connect their people, processes, and information. It will mark SharePoint’s evolution from a server application to a full-fledged platform…the world’s first “enterprise eco-system.” In this session we will discuss how the changes coming in SharePoint 2010 will affect your platform deployment, administration, and performance optimization strategies. We will outline approaches for efficient management of both application lifecycles and multi-farm, geographically-dispersed environments, review best practices for optimizing storage resources, and conclude with an evaluation of options.

A general overview covering tools, tips, and best practices for branding SharePoint.

How do we really find information? This question has challenged good information architecture for ages. This session will look at information concepts and considerations when developing a new SharePoint environment or restructuring an old. We will look at: what does good good supporting metadata really look like, what are the common information seeking models and how do we use them to find information, and how to engage the end user in planning an information architecture model for SharePoint. We will also look at some of the new opportunities and challenges that the 2010 interface offers in our information seeking world.

When you hear the word governance, one often thinks only about control…controlling the way we think, the way we work and what we can and cannot do. From an IT perspective, governance planning and implementation is a needed tool to maintain control around an ever expanding SharePoint environment. From an end-user perspective, governance is often perceived as excessive control and limitations. In this session we will explore how to plan the controls, checks and balances we need while not forgetting that the main ingredient in any good system is satisfied users who want to use it.