I just finished up my "Wild West" governance presentation here at the SharePoint Best Practices conference and I was asked to post my slide deck to my blog, so here it is: http://cid-1cc1edb3daa9b8aa.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/SharePoint/Paul%20Galvin%20Wild%20West.zip
(Sorry for the viola joke!)
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I’ll be presenting at the New York SharePoint Developers group meeting in New York at the Microsoft Offices on 6th Ave on Tuesday, 01/27 at 6:00 PM (just over a week from now!).
It’s going to be a technical presentation where I walk through the process of creating a custom workflow action that can be packaged and installed into a SharePoint environment and used by SharePoint Designer to create declarative workflow solutions.
Think this: http://www.codeplex.com/spdactivities
I’ll do a little evangelizing as I go along, making the case that developers should really think hard about the benefits of this kind of effort. it goes something like this: Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, build him a custom workflow action and he can design and implement his own business process for finding fish (or any other food!) and leave the developers alone to do the heavy duty complex programming that developers are best at doing.
It’s obviously a developer oriented session, but I do encourage curious end users and admins to show up. Even though the specific process of creating a custom action is targeted directly at developers, the meta conversation about one is not.
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I’ll be doing two presentations at the SharePoint Best Practices Conference this February in San Diego.
I haven’t been doing this thing long enough to get jaded by it, so every conference I attend is a, frankly, awesome. However, I do think this conference is special. There is zero marketing focus and the whole thing is about offering real-world practical advice on how to untangle some of the thorniest issues we face dealing with SharePoint. It’s not gigantic, so all of the speakers are very accessible (at least when they are not putting out fires back home). This means that in addition to the great formal presentations, you can have some great conversations and debates with virtually every speaker at almost any time, starting with communal breakfast up to late night imbibing at the hotel bar.
Beyond the speakers, you’ll have great opportunities to build and cement networks of other SharePoint users in the community. By the end of the last session and conference wrap-up, you’ll be energized and full of good ideas to bring back to work to help improve your SharePoint environment.
It’s well worth the investment.
The web site is top notch. Check it out for dates, registration, topics and speakers.
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Bob Fox lets us know that Dave Mann, SharePoint workflow genius, is speaking at the NJ SharePoint user group meeting on Wednesday evening, 11/19/08. Don’t miss it. (Sadly, my corporate overlord has scheduled a big group meeting Wed night and I will miss it).
Click here to register and get more details.
Here are some session details:
Session Title “Deploying Workflows in a Large Scale SharePoint Environment”
Workflow in SharePoint is an exciting new capability. However, it is a capability that is often misunderstood when it comes to the impact it has on your environment. For small environments, the out-of-the-box settings, configurations and architectural approach are probably sufficient. But what about an environment that will be processing thousands of documents per day? How can you make sure that those environments will not falter under the load, but still meet SLA’s for performance and responsiveness? This session will explore why focusing on your workflow subsystem is important, and cover the needs of a large scale workflow environment from the farm level down to individual workflow design specifications. Learn why all workflows need to be looked at in light of performance and scalability as well as how to build workflows that scale in an environment that scales, monitor workflow processing and overcome common obstacles. This session will cover architectural guidance for your SharePoint environment as well as specific coding practices to ensure you get the most out of your SharePoint workflows.
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I’ve uploaded the PowerPoint for one of my sessions, "Get Great Business Requirements," right here (http://cid-1cc1edb3daa9b8aa.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/Paul%20Galvin%20Great%20Requirements.pptx).
Aside from a series of brilliant points, powerfully made, the deck includes extensive notes which supplement and enhance the afore-mentioned brilliant talking points.
For those of you that missed the Best Practices conference, I was lucky enough to present and discuss a process that works very well when trying to discover accurate end user business requirements for SharePoint projects. The PowerPoint plus notes describe this in pretty good detail. It supplements one of my earliest blog postings here: http://paulgalvin.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!1CC1EDB3DAA9B8AA!146.entry
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Tonight, 08/20/08, the Connecticut SharePoint user group meeting is broadcasting a webcast in lieu of a physical meeting this month.
Tonight’s topic: "Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 – Extranet deployment methodologies"
Microsoft’s own Chris Lavista will lead the discussion. I’ve worked with Chris before and he really knows his stuff. If you have any interest in this subject, check it out. Here are the details:
SharePoint User Group Webcast: https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=130299
Topic: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 – Extranet deployment methodologies
Speaker: Chris Lavista of Microsoft
Date: August 20th Welcome Time: 6:15 PM Time: 6:30 PM -8:00PM
Description: SharePoint allows for multiple deployment options. The discussion will be centered on how a secure extranet on the SharePoint platform could be deployed. Discuss best practices and scenarios involving the integration of Forefront technologies, ISA Server 2006 and IAG 2007. Optionally, talk to supported single sign on use cases.
About Chris: Chris Lavista is a Technical Architect at recently opened Microsoft Technology Center in New York. His focus is on SharePoint, Collaboration, and Unified Communications. He has worked in the financial services industry (Chase, Citigroup) prior to joining Microsoft for 8 years. He started at Microsoft in 2000 as part of their consulting services practice before joining the MTC team in early 2006.
Registration & More Info: https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=130299
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In the last two weeks, I attended the New Jersey SharePoint user group and the newly formed New York SharePoint Developers user group (as opposed to the more established New York SharePoint user group).
In New Jersey, the good people of NewsGator presented their product and covered a lot of very interesting social computing concepts. If you’re looking to incorporate social computing into your organization in a system-assisted way and can’t get out-of-the-box SharePoint to do it for you, seriously check out NewsGator. It’s very good stuff. A lot of great social computing functionality and (in a demo environment at least) very well done.
I’m personally convinced that companies that begin to adopt social computing attitudes and systems will outperform those that do not. It’s too useful to ignore or, at this point I think, to even delay. It can make a tremendous difference in day-to-day operations if done correctly. I’ll write some more about this later.
In New York last night, the NY SharePoint Developers group kicked off its inaugural meeting at the MSFT office on 52nd and 6th. John Bender presented on how to create a custom stsadm extension. I’ve read about it, but seeing it "live" clarifies things. It’s much easier than I realized. No need for features/solutions, just an XML file and a DLL. He walked through a process for recursively finding and displaying security settings for sites and lists in a site collection. He took it farther to describe how this could be part of an auditing process. This group focuses purely on development and so doesn’t come into conflict with larger more established SharePoint user group which is frequently talking at a higher level.
There are groups all across the world. Check them out.
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I’m speaking at the SharePoint Best Practices conference in November.
It’s sort of a funny story. I was in Virginia presenting at the SUGDC conference and that Friday was the deadline to submit speaking proposals for the BP conference. The organizers described how they would use a "blind selection" process and that every effort would be made to select presentation on the basis of its value, etc. To maximize my chances of getting selected, I submitted two proposals. The selection committee picked both.
My colleague (Natalya Voskresenskaya) and I will discuss a real-world governance model that we and our client put together for a substantial SharePoint rollout project last summer. The objective here is to describe the details of the governance plan and why we believe it represents best practices in the context of Sharepoint, Governance and similar companies.
Second, I will present a process for obtaining great business requirements from End Users. This goes back to one of my very early blog posts, inaptly titled "MOSS: Effective introduction to an Organization".
This conference looks to be crazily full of great information and I highly recommend tearing yourself away from your work for three days, joining in on these presentations and networking with both conference attendees and speakers. It will be time and money well spent.
Hope to see you there 🙂
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My colleague (Natalya Voskresenskaya) and I will be speaking at the Fairfield/Westchester SharePoint User Group meeting at 6:00 PM on 07/16 (Wednesday). We are talking about the content query web part. This is the same (but improved version that we gave to New York in May).
Pre-register here: https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=129626&wa=wsignin1.0
Natalya and I hope to see you there!
Here’s the email Richard Martzelle just sent out on the subject:
Topic: Using Content Query Web Part to Create Business Solutions
Speakers: Paul Galvin & Natalya Voskresenskaya
Date: July 16th Welcome Time: (Eat & Network): 6:00PM Time: 6:30 PM -8:00PM
Meeting Description
MOSS 2007’s Content Query Web Part (CQWP) enables users to create custom views of data queried from many sources, and present that data in one place. Despite its powerful query & content refinement options, CQWP is often an underrated and overlooked feature. CQWP is both a "data extraction engine" (find documents or list items anywhere in a site collection) and also a first-class presentation tool that enables users to control how content is presented by wrapping HTML and styles to format the display nearly any way you wish.
In this demo-heavy session, they will show how to use the CQWP to solve business problems by showing off core features
• use default CWQP features, including audience targeting
• use CWQP as a reporting tool anywhere in a site collection via filter criteria such as "all documents created today"
• change look & feel of query results to highlight business data, show additional columns of information, display information in a grid format, and others
• show how CQWP can aid in content type administration (i.e. find all documents of a particular content type so as to understand potential impact of changing a CT definition)
• describe some limitations of CQWP
• provide a list of resources for advanced CQWP techniques, including blogs, ECQWP Codeplex project & MSDN documentation
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I attended my first ever SharePoint conference this past weekend and it was a blast.
Thursday afternoon, I drove down to Virginia, guided by my newly purchased $50 GPS appliance plug-in thing to my phone. The device was flawless. After the five hour drive, I had the energy to do a nice run on the tread mill and then, even more surprisingly, had the energy to head to the lobby for an advertised speaker’s cocktail hour. Conference n00b that I am, it turned out that the cocktail hour was really a ruse to get speakers to show up and help stuff papers and swag into shoulder bags for conference attendees 🙂
Had a hard time sleeping because I was speaking first thing Friday AM. Nervousness, a nagging feeling that I needed to add a slide to my presentation and a very disturbing cat show on Animal Planet kept me up late. Since I went to sleep late, I naturally got up early. I did add a fairly detailed technical architecture slide. It was well worth the effort because the 25 minutes of Q&A would have been very awkward without it. I was lucky to get the first slot in the technical track. Sahil Malik was originally going to speak Friday AM and I was going to speak Saturday but he needed to swap times. This allowed me to do my presentation and then sit back and enjoy everything going forward Friday and Saturday.
The presentation went OK. I definitely have room to improve it. I spoke about how we can access and use web services from a SharePoint Designer workflow using a custom action. Over time, I will tie this information into my series over at EUSP.com for End Users trying to get the most use out of that tool. I blew through my slides and demo in 35 minutes, to my dismay at the time. Luckily, Q&A was lively, no doubt helped by the fact that it was early morning before lunch. Q&A is my favorite part of any presentation.
There were many interesting subjects and I hope to blog about them in greater detail this week (time permitting, as always). A fellow from CMS Watch provided a highly critical yet very hopeful review of SharePoint’s position in the market. A different discussion focused on the paucity of SharePoint resources and the difficulty that recruiters have finding good talent that is also "affordable" in this very tight market. The CMS Watch guy referred to the SharePoint human resources pool as being like a "guild." I’m mainly familiar with that term in MMORPG terms and it gave me a little thrill, to be honest 🙂
The highlight of the conference was just meeting and catching up with people I’ve "known" online for a while. The best was sitting at the bar with Becky Isserman (MossLover) for 3 or 4 hours (and that, after I had finished drinking for the night). I don’t often get to talk about Farscape or Babylon 5 with Kansas City residents.
Bob Fox was there and as usual, is a whirlwind of intros, chats and just plain frenetic energy. He invited me to Saturday breakfast with Sahil Malik and that was great.
Saturday (day 2), Mike Lotter dragged himself to the conference to speak about InfoPath and then he joined Becky at the end of the day to do a sort of general Q&A session for about 30 to 45 minutes mainly focused on InfoPath (Mike) and AJAX (Becky). I wish Becky had been able to go through her full/formal presentation but I’m sure I’ll get a chance to see that one of these days. I have a feeling she’ll be "hitting the circuit" going forward.
I could go on and on. Two last points — the financial purpose of the conference was to raise money for the Children’s Miracle Network and it raised $5,000. That was awesome. Finally, I want to publicly thank Gary Blatt, Gary Vaughn and Bob Fox for alerting me to and allowing me to speak at the conference. Of course, the two Gary’s had a team of people supporting and organizing and all of you were awesome. I had high expectations before I went and it was better than I had hoped for.
Keep on the alert for the next conference scheduled for November 7th and 8th. Aside from some great content, it’s terrific for meeting up with all those online personalities you’ve known through blogs, twitter, forums, etc.
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