SharePoint Conference Seattle, Day 2

Update is a little slow, lots of things to do here, the rest of the days will probably be when i’m back at home :S

AG300 – Your data is in SharePoint, Now What?

This session was presented by Adam Buenz, he works at the US Navy and had a talk about compliance, records management and audit trails. The session was future extended by another speaker who explained something about IRM in sharepoint.

Adam Beunz was really happy with the Record Center from SharePoint. At first I didn’t understand this. The OOTB functionality isn’t all that great. An overlooked possibility is to extend the Routing facility which basicly opens up lots of options. Another thing that passed was that you could (via code) get the ‘hold’ documents and move them to physical storage. Like the Custom Route, this is non OOTB functionality but it does provide extensions to use the Record Center which helps user experience.

For the custom route you need to inherit from the IRouter interface, this gives you one method (OnSubmitFile). This can all be deployed as a feature.

The talk then went on the SharePoint auditing and the conclusion only is that it’s reporting/statistic facilities aren’t enough. Custom tooling can be created for that which allows the right reports and statistics. This also showed some nice VSTO integration, showing the audit trail of the document on a side pane of the document itself.

BAS400 – Building an automated expense reimbursement rocess using InfoPath and SharePoint

This session showed a no-code solution in InfoPath and SharePoint designer which is nice to see, it did show some less nice stuff about InfoPath (click ok, ok, ok, ok, ok, ok, ok, ok, ok, annnndd.. ok). That development experience isn’t very nice, but its nice functionality and it showed that SharePoint Designer is quite powerful for workflow. One site picked up on this session was sharepoint-elearning.com.

BAS301 – Leveraging the Power of Excel Services to Build Rich SharePoint Applications

This session was presented by Dan Parish and showed a demo of Excel services. In general in showed the overall things you can do with Excel Services. I didn’t know much about this so it was a good starting point for me. It showed a nice case with a User Defined Function (UDF) that can be used inside the Excel sheet. UDF’s are created using a normal Class Library which has some extra properties to enable it for use as UDF. After that it needs to be deployed via the Shared Services Administration Center.

After this session my colleagues and I had some discussion how, when and if you can use Excel services. I’m quite positive but some colleagues where negative about this. Guess we just have to try.

ECMS311 – How Microsoft IT Designs and Creates Enterprice Portals on MOSS2007

This showed how to create enterprice portals withing MOSS2007. There where loads of tips and tricks and a shorter version of the CQWP presentation I had the day before.

Here are the tips I wrote down:

• Use as less master pages as possible, use more page layouts
• Start with the BlueBand masterpage of use the empty master page that’s out on the net
• Content Types are very powerful, use them if you can
• Never edit core.css, override the CSS in a separate file
• Use the CSS Link Server Control to include your own CSS files
• Cache is powerful, learn how to work with it and be aware of what its doing (for debugging)
• If you enable debug in web.conf, the view source will show how the cache settings are set
• Only go to production with Solution files, this is extra work, but pays of in the end (for testing etc etc)
• If you use Solution files, also make batch files to install them, this makes installation as easy as possible
• Master pages and Page Layouts CAN be deployed via features
• If you use code and have errors, use PortalLog and/or SPException
• SharePoint lists can be big, just remind that you only want to show 2000 items at once. So, more items in a list are fine (150k is OK) but make sure the user only sees <2000 items per view (for performance)
• If you use the BDC, always do a full crawl

The tips itself aren’t that great, you probably want some reasons for it. Then you should have been here in Seattle :)

Gala Evening – Museum of Flight

In the evening there was a nice Gala diner at the Museum of Flight. Nearly every Dutch attendy had a nice orange shirt they got from Microsoft The Netherlands. We got loads of reactions to the shirts and had a very nice time at the diner.

SharePoint Conference Seattle, Day 1

KeyNote 1 – Bill Gates

Today was the first real day of sessions at the SharePoint Conference. It started of with two keynotes, first one was Bill Gates who had the amusing movie about his last day at Microsoft. After that he announced the Microsoft Online Services which you probably have already heard of. You can try the beta too. After that all it was some vision on the future. The 2008 wave is coming and what that will bring. I expected a little more vision.

There was a Q&A after the keynote and it was really nice to see that Bill Gates could actually answer technical questions. Didn’t expect him to know that much detail about SharePoint.

KeyNote 2 – Kurt DelBene

The second keynote showed some implementation examples of SharePoint, including nice SilverLight integration which had people talking about it in the lunch after it. There was discussion if the flash UI is actually what users want and what should be customizable or not. It’s good to see some new interfaces and new ideas tried. We also saw some implementation of the 2008 wave and the failover that SQL 2008 is capable of. The demo was exiting, they ripped a blade out of a HP blade server and smacked it on the table.

We also saw some nice tools to try. The Solution Accelerator, SharePoint Asset Inventory, Capacity planner and Extranet Collaboration Toolkit. I also learned that VS2008 is much better for SharePoint development.

ECMS313 – Strong Security for SharePoint: Active Directory Right Management Services (AD RMS)

This session was about RMS and SharePoint. The session was quite technical and it had a lot of questions but was interesting. I always assumed (shame on me) that IRM and RMS of Microsoft would be proprietary. Although it’s not an full open platform, other ISV’s are able to write software extensions to get the same integration as Office does.

There was also some confusion about Permissions and RMS. I see RMS as content permissions and not file authorization.

ECMS310 – Content Query Web Part

This session was about the Content Query Web Part which is very capable of showing/styling content of SharePoint sites or other sources. The styling is done with XSLT and can be centrally manager. The session took quite long and had lots of tips in it, which came at the end after hearing what the CQWP could do for tree times. So could session on the Tips and Tricks, just a bit too long.

AG304 – Enforce Governance by Provisioning sites with Workflow

This session showed 3 ways of automating site provision aside from the standard methods that are available. One showed SharePoint designer used, which is very nice. The session was presented by Ed Hild, he mention that lots of stuff can be found on his blog.

Conclusion

A nice first day. Always hard to pick the correct sessions, for now. It’s downtown for a meeting with the K2 Underground guys :)

[UPDATE]Added some links in the text + Photo :)

SharePoint Conference Seattle, Day 0

A small update from Seattle. Today was a very nice day with weather. We went to the space needle and went to the Olympic Statue Park. We also did some shopping and enjoyed the sun even more :)

We went shopping with the group and at 18.00hours we checked into the SharePoint conference. There were a lot of people already there. They had check-in lines based on first letter of surname. The a-c queue went very fast. The others weren’t so fast. Nevertheless we went along to the conference, did a quick round. Grabbed some food from the buffed and took a drink. After that we had a great dinner with some Microsoft employees from the Netherlands. I believe the Chris Ruth Steak was the best i ever had!