The SharePoint Conference 2011 in Anaheim, CA, USA is over. 7500 IT professionals and users (approx. 1/3 of the participants had a business profile!) attended some 250 sessions in 3,5 days.
Here are my personal takeaways.
Project Server 2010
Brilliant product built on SharePoint 2010 (‘you can’t have one without the other’); includes portfolio management from request gathering over portfolio selection based on business objectives, all the way to planning and execution; integration with Team Foundation Server for progress follow-up, even in an Agile Development scenario; integrated Business Intelligence (one of the reasons why it requires the Enterprise Edition of SharePoint).
Here are the titles of some Project Server sessions:
– Microsoft Project and Project Server 2010 Overview
– Best Practices for Deploying Project Server 2010 on SharePoint Farm
– Leverage Project 2010 with Office 365 for Project Management Success
– SharePoint Lifecycle Management Solution with Project Server
– Solving Agile and PMO Problems by Integrating Project Server 2010 with Team Foundation Server 2010
SharePoint and Social Computing
Inspiring ideas on how to combine tagging of content on one hand, and search or content query web parts to display content in various contexts (who has contributed, to which services/products content applies, etc.) on the other. Aka: ‘Taxonomy based content targeting’.
Technical deep-dive in Claims-based authentication to use e.g. Facebook credentials to filter content on your SharePoint site. Very powerful.
In many sessions Microsoft demonstrated how they ‘eat their own dog food’.
Some session titles that should get you interested:
– More Than My: How Microsoft is driving social adoption and intranet change through shared services
– Integrating Social Networks into SharePoint Internet Sites
Content Management
Various sessions talked about how to analyze and structure content in SharePoint (no surprise). Some sessions were very business oriented (‘Document Management – Planning For Success’) and others very technical (‘The Nuts and Bolts of Managing Enterprise Content Types At Scale’ or ‘Creating an Easy To Use File Plan Builder for Your SharePoint Records Center’).
I personally appreciated very much the sessions presented by Susan Hanley,
co-author of the book ‘Essential SharePoint 2010’. in one session she talked about measuring the value of your SharePoint 2010 investments. And believe me, it was not a high-level, theoretical talk about ROI and alike: it was a very convincing talk about ‘serious anecdotes’ and users who say ‘”Don’t take it away”.
Her second presentation was all about ‘a practical approach to SharePoint Governance’. Again full of tips you can start using tomorrow (or today?). You can read it all in her book.
Check it out
All the content of the conference is available on the web site of the SharePoint Conference 2011.