Agenda

Types of Sessions

  
  • Keynote (all attendees): A session that will set the tone for the conference.
  • Breakout Sessions (125-150 attendees): More formal presentations about SharePoint best practices with opportunities for Q&A near the end of the presentation
  • Sponsor Cabana Session (30-50 attendees): These sessions allow sponsors to demonstrate their solutions in a highly interactive presentation

Schedule

 

Sunday, August 23rd, 2009 
Registration       6:00pm - 7:00pm 
Monday, August 24th, 2009 
Registration       7:00am - 8:30am
Continental Breakfast 7:00am - 8:30am
          Keynote Session 8:30am - 10:00am
          Sessions   10:15am - 11:25am 
Exhibit Hall Open  11:00am - 3:00pm 
          Lunch  11:30pm - 1:00pm 
          Sessions  1:00pm – 4:50pm  
Break  2:10pm – 2:55pm 
Sponsor Sessions 4:20pm – 4:50pm 
          Exhibitor Reception 5:00pm - 7:30pm 
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009
Continental Breakfast 7:30am - 8:30am
Sponsor Sessions  8:00 – 8:30am 
Sessions 8:45am - 11:20am 
Exhibit Hall Open  11:00am - 3:00pm 
Lunch  11:00pm - 1:00pm 
Sessions    1:00pm – 5:30pm  
Break  2:10pm – 2:55pm 
Ask the Experts night  5:30pm – 6:30pm 
Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 
Continental Breakfast 7:30am - 8:30am
Sessions  8:30am - 11:05am
Lunch  11:00pm - 12:30pm 
Sessions 12:30pm - 4:00pm 

 

 

 

Session Abstracts  

SQL Server Developer Track

SQL Server Business Intelligence Track

SQL Server Database Analyst Track

Project Manager/CIO/Business Track

SharePoint Developer Track

SharePoint Information Worker Track

SharePoint ITPro Track

SQL Server Developer Track

DEV301, Logical Query Processing, Itzik Ben-Gan

SQL is a language that is based on strong mathematical roots. Compared with other programming languages SQL is unique in many ways. As such, it requires you to adopt a certain state of mind when coding in SQL. This session covers a concept called logical query processing that explains the language design, how queries are processed logically to achieve the final result. Understanding logical query processing helps you understand the language design, adopt the right state of mind, and explain why certain things work the way they do.

DEV308, Best Practices for Working with Date and Time Data, Itzik Ben-Gan

Working with date and time involves many challenges, especially when developing applications for international users. If you don't follow some important best practices, your code can work incorrectly and perform poorly. This session introduces the challenges involved in working with date and time, provides best practices, and helps you develop robust and efficient applications.

DEV315, Code review best practices for SQL Server based applications, Jeremy Kadlec

Building and deploying high quality code is no mistake. One approach to start building high quality code, sharing knowledge and improving your team's development skills is with code reviews. The organization can benefit from code reviews by having a standard set of coding practices, fewer bugs meaning less time for code maintenance as well as less performance and security problems. Come check out this session to learn about why code reviews are beneficial for you, your department and your organization.  

DEV322, Sharepoint SQL Server Best Practices and Recommendations, Burzin Patel

Best practices of tuning and configuring SQL Server for Sharepoint deployments, we will present recommendations on server configuration, storage, database maintenance, high availability, upgrade, backup and recovery.

DEV329, T-SQL Performance Best Practices, Itzik Ben-Gan

This session provides best practices for SQL Server developers and DBAs that write T-SQL code, helping you achieve optimal performance from your code. The session introduces problematic coding practices, explains why they cause performance problems, and explains which best practices you can follow to have your code perform well. Examples for subjects that will be addressed include: working with temporary objects, user defined functions, lists and arrays, dynamic filtering, and more.

DEV336, SQL Server Consolidation and Virtualization Recommendations and best practices, Lindsey Allen

Learnings and recommendations of running SQL2008 under Hyper-V environment (Windows 2008 RTM and R2). In this session we will discuss the following: Consolidation considerations - when to consolidate with multiple SQL instances vs. when to consider Hyper-V. Best practices for running SQL Server workloads (OLTP, AS and RS) within Hyper-V Virtual Machines, monitoring Strategies, sample data points related to performance of SQL Server (relational engine, AS, and RS) running within Hyper-V Virtual Machines. 

DEV343, Architecting an n-tier application for the Azure Platform, Vishwas Lele

In this session we will take an existing n-tier .NET application and discuss how it can be re-architected to take advantage of the Azure platform. Through several demonstrations and code walkthroughs, we will take a deep look into the key mechanisms enabled by the Azure Platform including - Web and Worker Role, Azure Storage, .NET Services and SQL Data Services.

DEV350, Why SQL Server 2008 Spatial Support is so important, Greg Low

SQL Server 2008 introduced a set of spatial data types. Many DBAs and developers don't immediately see how this applies to their own applications. Spatial data has long been the province of the white-coat brigade in back rooms. In this session, Greg will show why most business applications should have a spatial component to them and show what has been provided in SQL Server 2008.

DEV357, Why SQL CLR Integration isn't scary, Greg Low

Today's Business Users expect more from their applications. They want the ability to enter freeform text i.e.: comments and description fields. Then they expect powerful search, filtering and grouping on any part of that string. AND they expect you to make it perform well. The full-text search capabilities in SQL Server 2008 provide the power to effectively deal with these requests. This session covers the full-text search system in SQL Server 2008, show why it's important, what can be done with it and what it involved in implementing and managing it. If you haven't looked into full-text search or found limitations in earlier versions, we'll show you exactly why you should be considering it now.

DEV364, Why Integrated Full Text Search should be part of your SQL Server 2008 based application, Greg Low

Today's Business Users expect more from their applications. They want the ability to enter freeform text i.e.: comments and description fields. Then they expect powerful search, filtering and grouping on any part of that string. AND they expect you to make it perform well. The full-text search capabilities in SQL Server 2008 provide the power to effectively deal with these requests. This session covers the full-text search system in SQL Server 2008, show why it's important, what can be done with it and what it involved in implementing and managing it. If you haven't looked into full-text search or found limitations in earlier versions, we'll show you exactly why you should be considering it now.

DEV371, Best Practices: SQL Server Stored Procedures, Bill Vaughn

This talk walks database developers through the process of designing, deploying and debugging stored procedures. We'll see how to design stored procedures to de-reference and protect underlying tables and views as well as how to build stored procedures that perform consistently-regardless of the parameters passed. We'll see how the query plan is built and what factors can make it perform well or abysmally. We'll talk about the data/procedure cache and how to optimize its use. We'll discuss how to tune stored procedures so the query optimizer can consistently build an efficient plan. We'll talk about invoking stored procedures from code and how to handle multiple resultsets.

DEV378, ADO.NET Performance Tips, Tricks, and Strategies, Bill Vaughn

Over the years, ADO.NET has matured into a data access technology that can do everything and anything, a comprehensive API and .NET namespace that can handle your every need. That's great marketing copy, but it also means that there is almost always many ways to accomplish a particular task, even when accessing just SQL Server rather than any other data stores. And 90% of those ways will destroy application performance. But ADO.NET has been around long enough that there is a healthy body of knowledge about how to make ADO.NET smoke when accessing and using data. This session will explore how to soup up ADO.NET performance when working with SQL Server data. The session will be interactive, so come prepared to share your experiences, both good and bad, and to learn from the group

SQL Server Business Intelligence Track

BI302, Beyond Just Pivot Tables - Excel Power Knowledge for the BI Developer, Andrew Karcher

All of your users know it and love it. It's Excel and it is the Information Worker tool of choice for all tasks related to BI. But why should your business users be the only ones to know how to take advantage of this great tool? As a BI Developer you should have the knowledge about everything that Excel is capable of in order to help your business users answer the important questions they have. Excel is not just for the Information Workers though. It is a powerful tool you can use to work with your own cubes and show off the power of cubes to your entire company. This session is going to take you beyond your basic Pivot Tables and show you how to take advantage of Excel to its fullest.

BI309, One Developers Journey into MDX, Andrew Karcher

"You are a database guy, how do I write a query in MDX?" This is a question that many of you are probably hearing right now as your companies' database experts. As the amount of data access being delivered cubes in increasing every day your company is looking to you to help unlock that stored potential. So now your users and your boss are asking you to deliver reports in MDX. You have used the query designers and profiler to build some really simple stuff, but now you need to really understand the language and figure how to do some more complex stuff. This session will help you take that journey from not understanding MDX to being an MDX Developer. This session will give you the core concepts of MDX and how to utilize them with clear concrete examples. We will also show you some of the tools you can use to help you along the journey to facilitate your knowledge.

BI316, Optimizing Your MDX Queries, Stacia Misner

Retrieving data from an Analysis Services cube is supposed to be fast, right? Then why are your queries running so slowly? Many factors can contribute to poor query performance. If you have applied best practices design principles to cube and dimension design, the next step is to evaluate the design of your MDX queries. In this session, you first learn how to know whether your query or the cube needs to be optimized. Then you learn the principles of optimal MDX query design in Analysis Services 2005 and Analysis Services 2008, and how to modify your queries to deliver data faster.

BI323, Best Practices for implementing and managing configurations in SQL Server Integration Services, Rushabh Mehta

This session provides a guided architecture for implementing configurations in SQL Server Integration Services with the goal of simplifying changes that can occur in a dependent environment. While using many of the built-in features of SSIS, this session provides a b blue-print that will work effectively with SQL Server 2005 and 2008 and support easy migration. Aside from implementation best-practices, we will also discuss deployment and management of these configurations.

BI430, SQL Server Integration Services Management Best Practices - Building a Robust Management Framework, Rushabh Mehta

Building upon the best-practices for managing configurations, this session looks at building a robust management framework for gaining greater visibility of the packages and processes that are supported by these various SSIS Packages that may be deployed on many servers across your organization. Advantages of this framework, include better management of processes, packages and errors and increased developer productivity through standardization. Attendees will walk away with a thorough understanding on the components of the framework and how each component works and can be implemented and customized to meet the unique needs of the organization. Prerequisite: Attendance to Best Practices for implementing and managing configurations in SQL Server Integration Services

BI337, Designing Analysis Services Cubes for Performance, Stacia Misner

Building a cube is simple. After all, you have a lot of wizards at your disposal to do the development work. But building a cube that delivers data quickly requires you to make additional changes to the database design. Come to this session to learn what steps you need to take in the development process to ensure the cube is designed for optimal performance, whether you're using Analysis Services 2005 or Analysis Services 2008. You learn not only how to properly design dimensions, aggregates, and partitions, but why these design principles improve performance.

BI44, Do It Right: Best Practices for Analysis Services 2005 and 2008, Craig Utley

Are you seeking practical, in-depth technical advice for building a BI solution using SSAS? Analysis Services changed tremendously with the advent of SQL Server 2005. It introduced a new way of building dimensions and cubes that required a new way of modeling the solution. This session examines the best practices for properly designing cubes for performance and usability. It discusses some high-level topics but also looks at advanced topics such as alternative approaches to many-to-many dimensions, SCOPE statements, aggregation design, scalability issues, processing techniques, server properties, and more. Craig Utley has been working with Microsoft's BI products for 11 years and is a former Program Manager with the SQL Server Customer Advisory Team (SQLCAT), where he worked with some of the largest Analysis Services installations worldwide. In this session he brings his real-world experience with large, complex SSAS projects and presents best practices uncovered as companies deploy and use Analysis Services.

BI51, Avoiding Common Analysis Services Mistakes, Craig Utley

Are you concerned that the cubes you are planning to build, or that you have already built, are not performing at peak speeds or don't give users the best analytic experience? As business intelligence (BI) grows in popularity and client tools become more powerful, more and more organizations are building data marts and data warehouses with SQL Server Analysis Services. Unfortunately, many companies new to BI with SSAS make the same mistakes over and over without realizing it. Craig Utley has seen Microsoft BI solutions at over 30 companies worldwide and has helped them overcome design and implementation issues. This session examines the common problems with the design of Analysis Services cubes and BI solutions on the Microsoft platform and gives practical advice on how to resolve these issues.

BI258, Data Warehouse Design and Modeling Best Practices, Erik Veerman

A successful data warehouse project begins with the right design. Why? Because a poor design leads to bad performance, limited scalability, and even user rejection. This session gets you started in the right direction and covers the design principles of data warehouse solutions focusing on dimensional modeling techniques. We will begin by looking at an overview of dimensional design theory and the core structures involved in data marts and data warehouses-dimension tables and fact tables. We will review the foundational aspects of dimension table-surrogate keys, attributes, and hierarchies. Also, we will dive into fact table types and consider the various kinds of columns, measures, aggregation.

BI365, Data Warehouse Architecture Best Practices, Erik Veerman 

Planning your data warehouse infrastructure and architecture is a critical up-front step to a successful solution. Do you ever wonder if you made the right server and processor choice? Or if you configured the drives correctly? Or if the hardware is optimized for your work load? Or if you optimized the indexing and partitioning correctly? This session will address these questions and dive into these best practices for your data warehouse architecture. We will also look at Microsoft's new Fast Track Architectures for SQL Server, which taken a lot the guess-work out of configuring a scale-up data warehouse.

BI372, Unit Testing SSIS Packages, John Welch

Unit testing is a widely accepted best practice, yet it is difficult to do well with SSIS packages. This session will focus on both the practice of test driven development as it applies to SSIS, and the tools for actually implementing it. It will cover in depth how to set up your development environment to support test driven development and what techniques can be used to make this practical for SSIS. You will also see how to automate the testing of SSIS packages, using the open source ssisUnit framework. The session will cover several of the common questions about automated unit testing, including how to handle test data, how to set up the environment for multiple developers, how to make tests flexible, and how to ensure that the tests remain valuable over time.

BI379, SQL Server BI in the Cloud, John Welch

These days, it seems like everything is moving to the cloud, and SQL Server is no exception. With SQL Data Services, we now have the option of hosting our relational databases in the cloud. What are the implications of this for business intelligence and data warehousing applications? During this session, we will look at the emerging patterns and practices around hosting relational BI information on SQL Data Services and integrating that data with Analysis Services and Reporting Services. We'll also investigate some of the challenges in moving data to and from the cloud, and what can be done to manage them.

SQL Server Database Analyst Track

DBA403, Automating Database, Gert Drapers 

Do you have a need to automate the deployment of your database schema? Learn how to leverage DBSCHEMA files in combination with the command line VSDBCMD.EXE deployment engine. The latest Visual Studio 2008 Team System Database Edition GDR release provides a redistributable deployment engine that allows you to create a database deployment unit, which you can integrate in to your own "database setup".

DBA410, Do you know where SQL Server is waiting on?, Gert Drapers 

SQL Server uses a cooperative scheduler, which waits on resources to become available and when SQL Server waits on a resource it will indicate so by setting a wait state. Wait states are a proven way of diagnosing and optimizing your SQL Server environment. In this session you will learn about to the underlying scheduling architecture in SQL Server and you will learn how to leverage this knowledge and the power of wait states and wait statistics to optimize and troubleshoot your own SQL Servers.

DBA317, Securing SQL Server: Best Practices of the security of SQL Server databases, Randy Dyess 

In this session, the presenter will discuss SQL Server security best practices and how the audience can implement these best practices in their environment while still being able to utilize their databases. This session will present security tasks that can be easily implemented in most database environments and security practices that may be phased in over time. The attendee of this session will understand the difference between security best practices that interfere with normal operations and those which work "behind" the scenes of the database environment.

DBA424, Managing the Very Large Database: Best practices for administrators managing 1TB or more, Randy Dyess

In this session you will learn tips, tricks, and best practices that are needed to manage a VLDB. The attendee will be shown methods learned from years of VLDB management and how they can implement those methods in their environment. Whether it be file layout, backup and restore strategy, or designing a database environment for large data loads, this session will take you through tricks and tips that can help you achieve a worry-free VLDB.

DBA331, Performance Monitoring Best Practices for SQL Server, Andrew Kelly

Knowing how well your SQL Server is performing at any given time is crucial to ensuring the stability and scalability of your database and applications that access it. We will discuss the best practices related to monitoring a SQL Server instance that will help you to minimize the time spent on this task while maximizing the results. Taking a little bit of time upfront to decide how to properly monitor will pay off big in the long run. These best practices will help you to decide what metrics and areas to monitor to suite your goals.

DBA338, Storage and I/O Best Practices for SQL Server, Andrew Kelly

SQL Server relies heavily on a well configured storage sub-system to perform at its peak but unfortunately this is one of the most neglected or mis-configured areas of a SQL Server instance. Here we will focus on the best practices related to how SQL Server works with the underlying storage subsystem and what you can do to maximize the relationship between the two. The core topics will include discussions on SANs vs. Direct Attached storage, Raid Groups, Caching, Types of I/O, Number of Files & their placement and more.

DBA345, SQL Server Configuration Best Practices, Andrew Kelly

There is simply no substitute for proper planning when it comes to deploying and configuring a SQL Server instance. Do you know what options you should change or set when installing or configuring a SQL Server instance? If not you are certainly not alone. This session will cover the best practices for the key areas regarding the configuration of the SQL Server instance and the underlying server. Keeping these best practices mind will give you a head start on ensuring your database will be scalable and perform at its best.

DBA352, Data compression and backup compression lessons learned from customer deployments, Lindsey Allen

Lessons learned and best practices on data compression and backup compression from customer deployments. You will learn benefit of impact of data compression and backup compression of various workloads and scenarios, and performance tuning techniques.  

DBA359, Tips and Tricks for Successful Database Mirroring Deployments with Microsoft SQL Server, Allan Hirt

It's been four years since database mirroring was been introduced with SQL Server 2005. Whether you're still using SQL Server 2005 or plan on using new SQL Server 2008 deployments to mirror databases, this session covers all of the latest tips, tricks, and best practices including how to use PowerShell to configure database mirroring, recommended architectures and usage scenarios for deployment, and guidance on how many databases can be mirrored per instance of SQL Server.

DBA366, Planning a SQL Server 2005 or 2008 Failover Cluster with Windows Server 2008, Allan Hirt

Clustering SQL Server cannot be an afterthought; there is a lot that has to happen before you even think about running SQL Server's Setup. With the rewrite of the underlying Windows clustering in Windows Server 2008, there are many changes you may not be aware of that relate to SQL Server clustered deployments. This session will cover all of the things you need to think about, plan for, and do which will impact the performance, reliability, stability, and availability of your failover cluster implementation.

DBA173, Managing a technical team, Kevin Kline

Considering a promotion into management? This session will teach you the fundamental skills needed to effectively lead an IT team. Topics include motivational skills, conflict resolution skills, communication skills and project/job tracking skills. Attendees will also learn:

1. How to launch a team and keep the members of that team focused and motivated
2. How to resolve conflicts, address performance problems, and handle project/job missteps
3. How to gain support for your ideas, earn upper management support, and communicate with top management

DBA380, End-to-End Troubleshooting for SQL Server 2005, Kevin Kline

Learning how to detect, diagnose and resolve performance problems in SQL Server can be very difficult. It often takes years of on-the-job experience to learn how to use the tools and techniques that help you detect when a problem is occurring, diagnose the root-cause of the problem, and then resolve the problem. This hands-on session will take you from the very start of a problem situation on SQL Server, showing you how to use the native tools that help you keep SQL Server at top performance. This session will detail and demonstrate:

- Performance Monitor (PerfMon)
- SQL Profiler/Server-side Trace
- Correlating PerfMon and Profiler results
- Graphic Explain Plan and Transact-SQL Showplan
- SQL Server 2005 and 2008 DMVs
- When to use Trace Flags

These tools and techniques can make your long days shorter and make difficult troubleshooting activities much faster and easier. Every DBA needs to know how to keep their SQL Server in tip-top condition, and you'll need these skills to do it.

Project Manager/CIO/Business Track

BUS104, SharePoint Governance - The other 90 percent of it, Paul Culmsee and Ruven Gotz

"governance, governance and more governance"

SharePoint projects live and die around "governance". Yet if you ask your team to define governance, you will get many varied and equally correct answers.

The bulk of SharePoint governance material available is currently dominated by looking through an "IT service delivery" centric lens. This is unsurprising since IT is after all a service based division in most organizations and therefore IT governance will concentrate on what it knows.

But SharePoint project failure is more often rooted in much less tangible "people" issues that IT less skilled to address. This session dissects the broader challenges of SharePoint governance, far beyond service delivery and assurance. It demystifies the grey fog of "people" issues and highlights the real factors that will make or break a SharePoint project.

BUS211, 7 Ways to Leverage SharePoint for Project Management Success, Dux Raymond Sy

In this presentation, you acquire the practical knowledge of how SharePoint can address common project management challenges such as: Inefficient communication among stakeholders, poor document management practices and undefined project collaboration standards that can compromise project success. SharePoint provides a framework that can empower project managers to create a standards-based Project management Information System (PMIS).

BUS118, SharePoint Planning: A Labyrinth of choices, David J Pileggi Jr.

Share18Point Philosophy 101: Throughout the Best Practice Conference there are multiple areas that are being taught. Some of them at the surface seems to conflict with each other. Can they all be practices for me? How do I use what I found? Do I have the answers to why I am looking at this solution? This is a high level session that will try to help you put things into the appropriate perspective. Help you find the questions you need to answer so that you are able to pull the information you have gathered into something that is valuable and tangible. A dive into whom you should bring into the planning stages. The potential pitfalls you may find waiting for you back home.

BUS325, The Discipline of SuperCharged Findability: Understanding why Findability should be an Organizing Principle in your SharePoint Deployment - Part I, Bill English

In this first session, SharePoint MVP Bill English will discuss what Findability is and go over the latest research on Findability. He'll outline the core problems with findability, including a lack of understanding of what Findability is, how Findability is confused with search technology platforms and how most corporations want to find their information quickly and easily, but yet they can't seem to achieve this goal in spite of their best efforts and intentions. Bill will also outline the costs of a poor findability solution. If you've been working on ways to use SharePoint to make your information more findable, this session will help you understand the hidden problems which you must overcome in order to be successful in implementing a robust Findability solution. 

BUS332, The Discipline of SuperCharged Findability: Best Practices on Organizing Information in SharePoint Server 2007 - Part II, Bill English

In this second session on Findability, SharePoint MVP Bill English will outline a sample Findability Architecture for a fictitious company and illustrate how to use out-of-the-box tools to organize information in SharePoint Server 2007. Bill will also "connect the dots" between the concepts presented in the first presentation and their practical application in the second presentation.

BUS233, SharePoint Security: Through the Looking Glass, David J Pileggi Jr.

A broad look at SharePoint security from multiple angles. SharePoint security if planned right can be a beautiful thing, similar to standing in front of the mirror just before prom. The image you see before you is from all the parts as a whole working together. Be careful, the same mirror can show the ugly side of things as well. An Active Directory in desperate need for remediation, an internal IT department trying to throttle and hold the environment in a grip of iron, or an Ad hoc nightmare causing everyone to shudder at the thought of a new hire being brought on board. 

BUS239, Realizing ROI for Business Intelligence Projects, Douglas McDowell 

Business Intelligence (BI) is IT that IT should never pay for; it should always be aligned and driven by the business. Statistics for failed data warehousing and BI projects are discouraging, but you can prevent this in your organization. In this session we cover how to assess and agree on realistic return on investment (ROI) calculations before, during and after a BI project in addition to other critical considerations that will assure your BI project remains focused on the needs for all stakeholders.

BUS346, How I learned to stop worrying and love SOA, Bradley Smith

This session will review the best practices for implementing an enterprise SOA strategy on a SharePoint platform. We will cover the services oriented methodology and the requirements that drive most organizations towards implementing a SOA strategy, and the steps that must be taken to implement your services-oriented enterprise using SharePoint technologies. A real-world case study of these best practices will be presented. This session is targeted towards system and information architects, technology advisors, and decision makers.

BUS253, Content Types and Site Columns - Working with stakeholders to build the taxonomy, Ruven Gotz

When it comes to defining the site columns and content types for a project, the first step is to help your stakeholders understand the concepts of metadata so that they can understand how they are going to organize their documents without using folders. This can be very tricky and is a process that is iterative in nature.

Once this concept is understood (even partially), you can help the client inventory the types of documents that are going to live in SharePoint, and then explain the function of site columns and content types.

In this session, we will discuss some tools and methods (including Excel based simulations) that have proven to be successful for explaining these concepts and then organizing the taxonomy.

You will see how to use tools that help users to inventory their documents and capture the metadata. You will see how to conduct workshops that help you and your clients to organize this information and then document the taxonomy in a form that can be shared, reviewed and modified.

At the final stages, you will see how the required document libraries begin to emerge as part of this process.

BUS260, 10 things you wish they told you about SharePoint 2007, Sahil Malik

So you've landed into a SharePoint project. Good. Now listen up! This isn't your daddy's .NET project. It isn't even your grand daddy's COM project. This is .. well .. different! In this (humorous) session Sahil shares a few things he learnt the hard way in various SharePoint projects. Some of these tips are for the manager, some are for the CIO, and some are for the poor developer who has to realize all those crazy promises everyone made.

BUS267, Experts Pannel for Project Managers, CIO, and Business

Still haven't found the answer to your question?  Come bring your question to the experts, and recieve the direct answers you came for!

BUS174, Mind Mapping for the Information Architect, Ruven Gotz

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.

BUS181, Wicked problems and SharePoint - "The one best practice to rule them all", Paul Culmsee

Wicked problems are a particular class of problems - that often defy traditional thinking, tools, and methods that are useful only for simpler ("tame") problems. Most projects today have a significant wicked component and SharePoint is especially susceptible to falling victim.

SharePoint project failure more often than not a result of problem wickedness. In fact, wicked problems are so commonplace that the chaos and futility that usually attend them are accepted as inevitable. Failing to recognize the "wicked dynamics" in problems, we persist in applying inappropriate methods and tools to them.

This session introduces the concept and characteristics of wicked problems, why SharePoint projects are predisposed to falling foul of them and why traditional project management approaches can in fact make the situation far worse. Finally, this session will reveal the *one* best-practice that should be adopted before any other best-practice, with a simple, yet practical method to do so"

SharePoint Developer Track

SPDEV307, Practices for building enterprise quality SharePoint Applications, Chris Keyser

What are some of the development techniques for making your application more manageable, flexible, and higher quality for critical business applications? While many techniques can be carried forward from ASP.NET, there are often special nuances or additions when working in SharePoint. For example, managing application configuration has richer options at various scopes and the use of web.config is minimized. We will explore techniques for managing app configuration, logging and exception handling, and caching. We will also dig into nuances on developing web tests and conducting scale testing of custom SharePoint applications.

SPDEV314, Using Open XML for document generation scenarios in SharePoint, Ed Hild

Incorporate document generation into your business processes! This session will highlight several techniques of extending SharePoint with custom features that manipulate documents using the Office Open XML file format. The demonstrations and code walkthroughs will highlight several best practices, design patterns, and more importantly what not to do. I will show you how to merge list data into Word documents, split documents into sections, build presentations server-side using site content and more. I will cover the common techniques for extending SharePoint with customizations such as custom actions, application pages, and webparts. I will also introduce you to the new Office file format and tools such as the Open XML SDK and the Word Content Control toolkit which ease developer ramp-up time for these solutions.

SPDEV221, Agile SharePoint Development with Scrum , Andrew Woodward

This session will provide an introduction to Scrum and discuss how the iterative approach to development helps the customer to get the solution they want.

Look at how this approach works when applied to SharePoint projects, how it helps leverage more of the core platform and focuses effort on the biggest value areas. We will look at the challenges this brings to your development team by doing early integration, dealing with upgrades and changes and understand how addressing the hard things early is the right approach.

We also discuss how Scrum gives visibility of the project and brings both good and bad news. How getting customer engagement is the primary challenge and how the flexible approach is often at odds with the way work is contracted.

SPDEV228, InfoPath - Best Practices for Deeply Integrating Forms in to Your SharePoint sites, Darvish Shadravan

This session is intended to illustrate best practices for integrating InfoPath forms into your SharePoint sites in a deeper way. We will use examples to show how to leverage all the power of SharePoint to extend your forms, and make them more valuable to your users. The examples will demonstrate best practices for integration with workflows, SharePoint list data, KPI's, SharePoint Designer Dataviews, etc.

SPDEV335, Mastering the SharePoint Site Definition Provisioning Framework and Other Techniques for Deploying Large Hierarchies of SharePoint Web Sites, Michael Herman

Are there times when you'd like SharePoint to create an entire hierarchy of web sites instead of a single web site? Would you like to make this an easily repeatable process? The SharePoint Site Definition Provisioning Framework is an in-the-box SharePoint capability that makes it easy to implement this without writing custom code. Other approaches and their trade-offs are also discussed. A case study is included.

SPDEV484, Better SharePoint Development through SOA, Eugene Rosenfeld

The focus of this presentation is to show how writing code that can be split into a presentation layer and a service layer can significantly improve an organization's SharePoint infrastructure. The goal is to install the minimal amount of code onto the web front ends. Reducing the amount of code installed onto the web front ends reduces the complexity of the web front end servers, reduces potential software conflicts, and reduces the chance that newly deployed code will require scaling out the farm. In addition to covering the concepts of SOA development, we will look at a case study of how a traditionally architected application was converted using SOA tenets and the benefits that conversion brought about.

SPDEV442, More Patterns on SharePoint, Chris Keyser

Are you interested in applying patterns to SharePoint? In the first version of SharePoint guidance we introduced a set of common patterns to SharePoint development (MVP, ServiceLocator, and Repository). We've refactored these patterns in version 2, and have also moved into application level patterns for sub-site creation. Explore the details of design pattern usage in SharePoint by patterns and practices, and how it helped patterns and practices build more testable code. Review the application patterns we implemented for creating subsites on a partner portal based upon business events. Explore the three application patterns implemented for resolving partner sites, creating and wiring a subsite based upon business event, and coordinating simple asynchronous status changes. Applying application patterns can help open up new opportunities to more rapidly build richer business scenarios in SharePoint. 

SPDEV349, SharePoint Workflow: Tradeoffs, Tools, & Recommendations, David Mann

Building workflows in SharePoint? Easy. Building supportable, reliable workflows in SharePoint? Not so much. Like many other things in SharePoint, workflow is steeped in tradeoffs. How can you know at the outset of a project which paths to take to make sure you are successful? This session will walk through many options for tools and approaches to building, deploying and managing workflows in SharePoint. While many "recommendations" in SharePoint are highly dependent upon your exact situation, there are some best practices for workflow that apply across the board, or can easily be adapted to nearly any situation. Come learn how to navigate the options to a successful implementation.  

SPDEV256, SharePoint Developer and SQL Server Developer Experts Pannel

Bring your toughest questions for the experts to answer.

SPDEV263, Platform Extension Model for SharePoint Products and Technologies, Michael Herman

The goal of the Platform Extension Model for SharePoint Products and Technologies is to help application architects and project planners understand how best to map their solution requirements with the in-the-box features of the SharePoint platform to minimize the amount of custom coding and maximize the amount of solution development through configuration (solution composability).

SPDEV268, Agile SharePoint Development - Is it Wicked? , Andrew Woodward

This session is Part III in a series of sessions looking at why traditional approaches to SharePoint projects often result in failures or delivery of solutions that attain only a fraction of what is possible.

This session looks at how adoption of agile development techniques helps deal with the wicked problems present in SharePoint projects. We look at the thinking behind and trends in agile development and at the challenges companies face in when adopting agile development.

Using Scrum as an example we look at the how the techniques used in agile development match those needed in business to solve the wicked problems and how the same principles and processes applied throughout the organization can ensure success.

SPDEV370, Best Practices for Developing Web Parts, Todd Bleeker

SPDEV477, Using WCF in SharePoint, Sahil Malik

In this session, Sahil walks you through setting up and using WCF in SharePoint. In the process he demonstrates the benefits, the right way of using WCF in SharePoint, and some of the common pitfalls he learnt the hard way. Yes, there will be a bad practice .. a really bad one!

SPDEV484, Better SharePoint Development through SOA, Eugene Rosenfeld

The focus of this presentation is to show how writing code that can be split into a presentation layer and a service layer can significantly improve an organization's SharePoint infrastructure. The goal is to install the minimal amount of code onto the web front ends. Reducing the amount of code installed onto the web front ends reduces the complexity of the web front end servers, reduces potential software conflicts, and reduces the chance that newly deployed code will require scaling out the farm. In addition to covering the concepts of SOA development, we will look at a case study of how a traditionally architected application was converted using SOA tenets and the benefits that conversion brought about.  

SharePoint Information Worker Track 

IW105, Welcome to PerformancePoint Services for SharePoint, Peter Serzo 

PerformancePoint Server has now merged with SharePoint Server Enterprise edition to become PerformancePoint Services. This is now a free component to licensed SharePoint Enterprise users. This is the Microsofts BI delivery tool that contains scorecards, dashboards, and analytic capabilities within SharePoint. Otherwise known as BI for the masses.

Giving users unprecedented power to create rich views of data can only be harnessed with a set of best practices. This session reduces the dashboard clutter and discusses best practices for when to set up a scorecard, pros and cons of setting up dashboards, and general proper use of this technology. Everything that will be shown will be out of the box.

IW312, Taxonomy in SharePoint Enterprise Content Management and Enterprise Search, Zlatan Dzinic

Large and even smaller enterprises require a standard and consistent way to understand and access the unstructured information that resides in their various repositories. Learn how to meet this business challenge with Microsoft SharePoint Server and Microsoft Enterprise Search so that your company can make faster business decisions that drive customer satisfaction and value.

IW219, - Can a business person handle the responsibility (and can IT trust them)?, Jennifer Martinez 

The Site Collection Administrator role in the SharePoint product is often misunderstood and even more often inappropriately assigned. Companies either don't respect that this is a combination of business and technical roles which comes with an incredible amount of power and access or they assume that IT will have time to manage the server and perform this duty as well.

Most organizations focus on their support responsibilities which include restoring documents and permissions (Site Owners have been known to remove themselves from a site on rare occasion). However, SCA's have the potential to greatly influence the success or failure of a SharePoint implementation. Their creation of search scopes and Best Bets go a long way in supporting a successful search strategy. And don't forget about their key role in ensuring the appropriate use of SharePoint Designer on sites (heard of Contributor Groups?).

This session looks at (1) the SCA role in the product as well as (2) carefully weighing the risk and the rewards of turning the ‘keys of the kingdom' over to a business person and (3) how to pick an SCA and set them up for success.

IW126, SharePoint and SQL Reporting Services 2008 for the really really really good looking, Peter Serzo & Paul Culmsee 

Charts are sexy, charts are so "hot" right now and everyone wants them in a snap. Whether it's a bar chart, pie chart, scatter plot or even a humble table, your computer illiterate boss's eyes will light up when presented with a pretty, personalized chart, displaying timely corporate data. Information presented succinctly and lucidly drives best practices within your organization and prevents user walk-offs.

SQL Reporting Services 2008 is a surprisingly underutilized bolt-on to SharePoint that many organizations have available today. It has the ability to empower Information Workers to transform a humble SharePoint site into a dynamic and interactive source for relevant, personalized corporate data. This results in user evangelism and ultimately buy-in and adoption of SharePoint as a platform.

This session will introduce SQL Reporting Services 2008, best practices for architecture and integration with SharePoint. We will present a "real world" case study that illustrates how the "Derek Zoolander school for the really really good looking" leverages SharePoint and Reporting Services to stop the walk-offs and create sexy, powerful and dynamic reports with out of the box SharePoint web part and no custom code.

IW240, SharePoint Information Worker and SQL Server BI Experts Pannel

Come to this pannel and get all the answers to your toughest questions!

IW254, Why SharePoint Security really depends on you, Virgil Carroll

Planning security can be on the most frustrating things in a good SharePoint implementation. Figuring who does what, who can see what and how to keep it from getting out of control are issues that affect any size organization. This session will explore the issues we run into when trying to plan out an effective security structure and offer best practices around the planning and implementation process. Since effective strategy can also depend on numerous variable such as organization size, compliance needs or corporate culture, we will explore many best practices and discuss alternatives for different situations

This session will be very discussion oriented, so bring your questions and scenarios along.

IW261, Blogs and Wikis -The non-social use of great business tools, Jennifer Martinez

Wikis and Blogs have been getting increased attention in the ‘Social Networking' arena of SharePoint. While that works for some companies, others are scared away by the inherent freedom and lack of structure of the wiki and the unchecked soap box capability of the Blog (see the "...and gossip" statement in the default Blog entry on all new Blog sites).

This session looks at putting the business back into Wikis and Blogs (W/B). Learn how to best use W/B for SharePoint education and increased user adoption within your organization. W/B can be as open or as restricted as your company decides. Learn the best practice for configuring W/B including security, advanced permissions, content approval, and required metadata.

Left unmonitored W/B can leave a business open for misinformation, compliance concerns, and noise pollution. Strike a balance between collaborative social networking and good solid business use.

IW275, Why use the Business Data Catalog to present SQL data in SharePoint, Brett Lonsdale

This session will demonstrate the benefits of the Business Data Catalog. Being presented is Line of Business (LOB) data using Business Data Web Parts, Search LOB data using BDC, Use the BDC field Type, and introduce the BDC API.

IW282, SharePoint, jQuery, and the Content Editor Web Part, Peter Serzo

jQuery is the newly supported compact, open source JavaScript framework in the Microsoft ecosystem. It can now be utilized by SharePoint sites to do things such as branding and add new Web 2.0 functionality without creating web parts that must be compiled and live on the server. This session is an introduction to the jQuery framework and best practices as it applies to SharePoint.

Included will be a review of how to integrate the content editor web part (CEWP) with jQuery. In the past it has been stuffed with HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and other content until it is bursting at the seams. Bloated and unreadable this web part needs jQuery and best. Finally, jQuery plugins such as lytebox and image cycling and several others will be covered to show how to give your sites Web 2.0 functionality. The end result is 10 best practices which enables, empowers, and drastically reduces the amount of code needed to create impressive sites.

SharePoint ITPro Track

ITP206, Users, Profiles, and MySites: Best Practices for Managing a Changing SharePoint User population, Paul Stork

Every company has some level of employee change and turnover. The question is how do I manage the graceful removal or modification of user information from SharePoint? If everything is perfectly aligned SharePoint will automatically process and delete the user account, permissions, profile, and MySite for users that are deleted from Active Directory. Updates to user information is also automatic in many. But most SharePoint installations don't have all the necessary components aligned for automated removal of old users and some profile properties refuse to update. Even when everything works as designed you are still left with a problem of orphaned metadata references for documents and items created or modified by the deleted user. How can I manage a user base and still maintain historical metadata? In this session we will examine the underlying processes for automated removal of user accounts, permissions, profiles and MySites. We'll also look at how SharePoint updates user information. Along the way we'll recommend Best Practices for managing users, their profiles, and MySites in a SharePoint environment.

ITP313, Building SharePoint CmdLets, - Tips and Best Practices, Darrin Bishop 

PowerShell is Microsoft's go to scripting and command line interface. Unfortunately it was too late in the product t cycle to include SharePoint-specific integration with PowerShell. PowerShell is an extensible .NET application and we can leverage the application to create powerful Cmdlets and scripts for SharePoint. In this session we will look at developing PowerShell Cmdlets and best practices around building reusable Cmdlets to create a very powerful and reusable scripting environment for SharePoint.

ITP220, Top 10 Administrative Bad Practices, Ben Curry

Come see the latest Top 10 administrative bad practices. If you want your server farm to be slow, updates to fail, upgrades to be all but impossible, you want your management to loath you, then this is the session for you! Ok, seriously... Ben will present the top 10 Bad Practices he's seen in working with clients. If you want to reduce your downtime, gain performance, get a raise, and solve world peace - then this is the session for you! We'll discuss proper farm architectures planning, custom code deployment, server modifications and updates, documentation, bare metal performance mistakes, and more! We'll answer questions such as:

  • Install, next, next, Finished! What? The software doesn't align with my corporate strategy?
  • Governance is for management, right?
  • End users need what?
  • Documentation? I'm a developer/administrator/other! I don't do documentation.
  • What's a Solution again?
  • Antivirus and logging are good, yes?
  • What hardware should we be using?

And be sure to come with questions. Oh, don't laugh when you're probably doing one or more of the bad practices. This session is real world, focusing on common mistakes made in SharePoint/SQL implementations.

ITP227, Designing a SharePoint Infrastructure for The Cloud "Windows Azure", Rick Taylor 

Software as a Service has long been a buzz word coming out of Redmond as well as the term "Cloud Computing". SharePoint Online launched last year and now boasts one of the most robust SharePoint offerings worldwide. What is Windows Azure and how do you prepare for it? Microsoft isn't the only one hosting SharePoint out of their datacenters, how do ISVs prepare for it? Come to this session to understand the Best Practices on how to architect and design for Windows Azure and cloud computing

ITP334, Configuring and Managing My Sites in the Enterprise, Mark Eichenberger 

My Sites are a popular and important feature of SharePoint. But many times the out of the box configuration does not the needs of enterprises. Find out what you should do before you enable My Sites and how to properly configure, customize and maintain those sites going forward.

ITP341, Supporting Users - How Technologists can help "mere mortals" get the most out of SharePoint, David Mann 

Often, the biggest problem with a SharePoint implementation isn't the technology. As technologists, we can make sure that the technical details are as close to perfect as it is possible to be. Often, the problem is one of adoption by people who don't live, breathe, eat and sleep SharePoint (yes, those people do exist!). The question, then, is how can we, as technical resources, help people get the most out of this product? This session will explore various technical decisions we can make and demonstrate several options for making SharePoint approachable, understandable and manageable for end users. Attendees are encouraged to share their own stories for what worked and what didn't. A focus will be kept on technology, but not from a detailed implementation point of view; this session is all about ideas and decisions for making end users lives easier.

ITP248, Storage Best Practices for SharePoint Server - Part 1, Dennis Martin 

In this part one of a two-part session, we will examine why storage is critical for SQL Server and SharePoint server. A good storage configuration can make SQL Server run smoothly, a bad storage configuration provides no end to problems. In this session, we will explore some of the basics of storage devices, the advantages and disadvantages of SATA, SAS, iSCSI, Fibre Channel and several other storage technologies. Then we'll dive into storage best practices.

ITP255, Storage Best Practices for SharePoint Server - Part 2, Dennis Martin

In this part two of a two-part session, we will examine the results of applying the storage best practices discussed in part one. Based on lab tests conducted in the Demartek lab, we will show the effects of different types and configurations of storage on SharePoint Servers. We will also discuss 32-bit and 64-bit memory, different versions of Windows Server and other factors that affect performance of SharePoint Servers.

ITP362, When PerformancePoint Fails to Perform, Darrin Bishop

Increasingly, large scale deployments of MOSS include business intelligence content. PerformancePoint's Monitoring and Analytic Server is Microsoft's platform for developing and deploying dashboards to MOSS, and can create many dashboards with drag-and -drop ease. Unfortunately we discovered performance sometimes was less than expected by dashboard end users. This session describes the lesson we have learned and the practices we have employed to improve the performance and scalability of PerformancePoint dashboards on MOSS. In this session we will explore the architecture of PerformancePoint Monitoring and Analytic server, how to measure benchmarks and monitor ongoing performance as well as techniques that improve performance and scalability.  

ITP269, InfoPath Forms Services - Best Practices, Darvish Shadravan

This session is targeted at technical professionals who are planning to design InfoPath forms that will be hosted and published on SharePoint Forms Services. We will dive into InfoPath forms design specifically for browser-based clients. We'll look at the most common issues and the real-world workarounds. Forms Services architecture, web service integration, monitoring tools, development tools/techniques, and design best practices will be discussed.

ITP276, SQL Server DBA and SharePoint ITPro Experts Pannel

Your company sent you here for one really tough question, and it hasn't been answered yet?  Bring it here.  Direct Questions. Direct Answers. Direct Results.

ITP383, Records Management Best Practices in SharePoint, Zlatan Dzinic 

This session will cover best practices for using SharePoint platform in capture, classification, and ongoing management of records throughout their lifecycle.
We will also cover the following in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Records Management:

• Setting policies and standards.
• Assigning responsibilities and authorities.
• Establishing and promulgating procedures and guidelines.
• Providing a range of services relating to the management and use of records.
• Designing, implementing and administering specialized systems for managing records.
• Integrating records management into business systems and processes.

For each we will consider:

Electronic Records Management Best Practices
Physical Records Management Best Practices
Mixed Records Management Best practices
Common Issues in Records Management Solutions based on SharePoint