Had the opportunity to go to this years SharePoint Camp http://bit.ly/tPqCcd held in Toronto at the Manulife building. Was great to see the excitement and buzz in all the people’s faces as well as learning all the great things about SharePoint. If any of you missed it, I really recommend you try to go to the next session next year! The ‘Camp’ is broken down into different streams; Business, IT PRO, Developer… So rest assured there will be a stream for you =) You can even jump between streams to get the customized information you need!
Here’s a quick overview of the sessions I attended.
- Business Process, Applications and SharePoint
- InfoPath Zero to Hero
- ECM/Document Management as a native SP App
- Effective Requirements Gathering / How to organize and run them
The first session I attended was the “Business Process, Applications and SharePoint”, presented by Eric Riz. In this session we learned about business processes and how they can be applied into SharePoint, concerns that the business typically have when implementing a new SharePoint environment, as well as a typical adoption method for SharePoint implementations. (Slides Here)
The InfoPath Zero to Hero session was a great overview of how to use Microsoft InfoPath 2010. Peter Newhook, the presenter, took us through the best practices in creating custom forms and publishing them to SharePoint forms libraries as well as editing list forms. One of the key pieces of information in his presentation was how to create localized forms (A single form with labels in different languages). His method was to use different views (switched through a button or dropdown list) and having controls duplicated on each view. As each control on each view can have different properties, the backend values of selections can be in a single language while the front end can display different labels. Awesome advice!
The ECM / Document Management as a native SP App session was a session on a product called Ecspand. It is an integrated service application that can be installed into a SharePoint environment and essentially ‘improves’ the ECM experience for the end user. You can find more information on the Ecspand website (http://bit.ly/ucd884).
Last session of the day, the How to Run Requirements Sessions for SharePoint Projects, run by Ruven Gotz (Also a Navantis Employee!). Ruven took us through a typical SharePoint requirements gathering session explaining the perfect size (4-12 people) and the types of people to include in the meetings (less managers, more front line users). The session was broken into different sections and in each section a tool was introduced to help aid the process of gathering requirements. Great tools like Mindjet MindManager and XMind for mind mapping, Balsamiq for wireframing and Visio and Bizagi for business process/flow diagramming. All great tools to explain different concepts like metadata, navigation/design and business process and workflow. The most important thing is to keep things simple and to do things little by little (Iterative Development).
All in all, the sessions were amazing and I want to thank all the sponsors as well as all the volunteers/speakers for such an amazing job!
