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I’m currently at the 2010 Best Practices Conference in Reston, VA (Washington D.C.) and will be presenting a couple of topics this week in addition to sitting in on an Ask the Experts panel. 

I LOVE the idea behind this conference – talking through the *why* we do things instead of only the *how*.  Don’t get me wrong, understanding how to do things with SharePoint is pretty important.  It’s a big platform that keeps getting bigger. 

One challenge that many decision makers, implementers and users run into with SharePoint is that there are often more ways than one to get things done.  While options are sometimes a good thing, it can also be confusing to know which solution is the best for a particular scenario.  The answer to this is understanding *why* a decision is made.  So, that’s what we’re tackling this week. 

There are a lot of experts here and a lot of topics being covered.  It’s going to be a good week.  My topics include:

Lists: Used, Abused and Underappreciated
Lists are used as the core of many things SharePoint but they are rarely used as well as they can be. Learn the top tips and tricks for getting the most of your lists: How to build them smarter, how to display them more clearly, and how to use them in your environment for effectively. Also see how these practices evolve from 2007 to 2010.

SharePoint: The Day After
You’ve deployed your farm, built your customizations and integrated your external systems… now what? How do you make sure your users are informed, educated, trained and supported? How do you measure success? How are you insuring the stability of the platform going forward? And why are answering these questions so important to your success.

I hope everyone has a great week!

The second topic I presented on at the Best Practices SharePoint Conference was MUCH larger than could be accomplished in the time allotted – even when demo environments work perfectly.    As Mr. Murphy would have it, my demo environment unfortunately did not.  So we went ahead with a session on “Aligning Business Needs and Processes” and discussed a number of scenarios that can be reviewed in the slide deck:  Download PowerPoint

As I mentioned during the session, I’ll be following up this post with more details on the topics discussed to make up for the lack of demos.  Please check back in the next week or so. 

Thank you to all to attended and stuck around.  I hope the information was useful. 

My first session at the Best Practices SharePoint Conference was Re-architecting Search Solutions with SharePoint’s New Federation Features.  The slide deck for the presentation can be found here:  Download PowerPoint

Daniel Webster made an excellent point after the session regarding one type of scenario where federated features would be valuable to an organization:  when dealing with HIPAA or other regulatory guidelines that specifically require the isolation of data.  SharePoint already allows for data and security isolation.  Federation allows administrators to follow isolation requirements while also allowing for findability within those requirements in both isolated and integrated farm environments.   

I hope the session was useful for those that attended.

The first Best Practices SharePoint Conference opened last week in Washington D.C. with a keynote by Microsoft’s Tom Rizzo.  All indications so far are that the sessions and presentations went well and were very well received.

I got into town late on Saturday and spent Sunday finishing up some of my presentation materials.  For a little break I stopped down to see how the Mindsharp folks were doing with the logistics and getting things set up.  I got a little workout in by assisting Ben and Bill with the book signing (I was just moving books around – they were signing them all).  It was pretty entertaining to watch and listen to the banter while they signed a few hundred books.   

    Really guys?   

I presented a session Tuesday afternoon and another on Wednesday afternoon and will follow up with posts about them then.  I need to look back at the legal stuff to see if I can post copies or links to my presentations here or not…  Check back!  Meanwhile I’ll just be happy that I’m able to present a few sessions.  Yea!!  (I’m very excited)

   My first speaker’s badge!

And as part of some sort of odd ritual surrounding conferences, people seem to be interested in the bag…  so here’s a picture of the conference attendee bag:

I was VERY excited to find out that I’ll be presenting a couple of sessions at the first Best Practices SharePoint Conference coming up this September 15-17 in Washington DC.  The session titles are listed here – more information will be available as we get closer. 

• Re-architecting Search Solutions with SharePoint’s new Federation Features
• Aligning Business Needs, Processes, and more within the SharePoint platform