These are my session notes from the SharePoint Conference 2009:

• Presenter: Jessica Alspaugh, Program Manager, Enterprise Search Group, Microsoft
• Business problems: Hard to find the right person; People working on redundant work; Enterprise search doesn't adapt.
• Social search is about connecting people to people, as well as, adapting dynamically based on usage patterns and available metadata.
• People search supports phonetic and common nickname match.
• With OCS, SharePoint supports contact card mouse-over.
• View recent content option opens AJAX window containing links to the most recent documents created by the person.
• Knowledge Mining provides keyword suggestions from Exchange 2010. Uses phrases that the person uses often in email. Person has complete control over what items are added to their profile page.
• In SharePoint 2010 colleagues are indexed for ranking purposes.
• Encourage photos. It makes a big difference in enabling interaction. People are less likely to engage with someone who doesn't have a profile photo.
• Microsoft makes it easy to add custom properties to the profile.
• Use the Managed Metadata Service to ensure consistency of terms. Manages metadata fields support dynamic type-ahead suggestions.
• Check out the "Go behind the Search Box" slide for a list of social search features.
• Vanity Search helps users build a profile and create search terms that other people find them in a search.
• Default search order was changed from relevancy to social distance, though you can override.
• If you add a new column and index it, SharePoint Search will automatically create dynamic pivots on the left navigator of the results page.
• If search quality is good, people have more confidence, which leads to increased usage, which further increases search quality.
• Pre-Query Suggestions are built from high click-through queries, and appear dynamically before the search button is pressed.
• Post Query Suggestions appear on the right side of the result set page, under Related Searches.
• Social definitions - "what people are saying about..."
• Check out Social Tag slide - Social tagging will improve search quality.
  

These are my session notes from the SharePoint Conference 2009:

• Presenter: Sean Squires, Program Manager, Enterprise Content Management Group, Microsoft
• Lincoln DeMaris, Program Manager, Enterprise Content Management Group, Microsoft
• Microsoft Case Study: 1TB of knowledge data, ~100K documents. Used across Microsoft.
• "Microsoft isn't doing [their own] internal knowledge management very well."
• Need to balance two opposing forces: Discoverability and authority versus empowering users to contribute. (See KM on SharePoint 2010 Goals slide.)
• Microsoft's KM solution architecture: Publishing site + document center + shared services for content types, managed metadata, analytics, and social feedback. (See Key Elements of Our Solution slide.)
• An explicit page owner is critical. Microsoft assigns owners to specific topic areas.
• Use tagging/categories and the Content Query web part to automatically surface related pages.
• Anyone can edit a page. However, it is stamped "unapproved" until the owner approves.
• The owner receives a task when someone edits their page.
• Documents must be strictly managed, yet may come from anywhere.
• In SharePoint 2010 you can set policies (such as workflow, retention, and permissions) on a folder basis.
• Folders are available to meet business needs. They are no longer needed to get around scalability limitations.
• See the "Wrap Up" page for a good summary of features and takeaways.

Theses are my session notes from the SharePoint Conference 2009:

• Presenters: Gail Giacobbe, Principle Program Management Lead, Microsoft; Ted Pattison, SharePoint MVP, Critical Path Training
• People see wikis as yet another place to store information. They say, "Please don't give me another place!"
• Microsoft used a wiki to enable 400 people to create 15,000 pages of documentation in four months.
• The SharePoint Publishing powers the Enterprise Wiki.
• You can customize the enterprise wiki using SharePoint Designer.
• The relevant content within wikis comes to you through the social networking features of SharePoint's news feed.
• Enterprise wiki: Easy page editing, wiki-linking with auto-complete, cross-brower rich tect editor.
• Features: Page templates (content types & page layouts), Categories (managed metadata), Ratings (web analytics), Tagging and Comments
• Contrary to my earlier understanding, SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Wiki does not include an out of the box table of contents feature. It is something that Microsoft says can be easily customized. (Ugh!)
• The enterprise wiki is designed to be customized and scalable.
• Anything available within SharePoint is easily integrated into the enterprise wiki.
• Leverage SharePoint's compliance (policy, records management) and content management (workflow, approval) capabilities within the wiki.
• You can easily integrate web parts into a wiki page.
• Edit in place, live preview
• Support for "reusable content"
• Insert images and media files directly from your computer. You do not need to upload them to a SharePoint library first.
• When you start a link by typing "[[", a list of all the existing wiki links appear, so you can quickly select the one you want or create a new one.
• The My Site news feed is a critical part of the power of the enterprise wiki, since that is where you are notified of new relevant content and activity of the wikis you visit. (I wonder how you control being inundated with news feed items when you are associated with a very busy enterprise wiki.)
• Working with CSS is "much easier" than it was in SharePoint 2007.
  

The following are session notes from SharePoint Conference 2009:

• Presenter: Daniel Kogan – Sr Program Manager, Microsoft
• Metadata and management content types are really about governance, management consistency and standardization: Is it the same, what is it? Where is it? What happens to it?
• Content types are no longer trapped in a site collection. In SP210, they can apply to the entire enterprise.
• Example: If all blog posts use the same content type, and there is a retention policy applied to the blog post content type, that retention policy will automatically apply to all blog posts across the enterprise.
• Any errors associated with site collection being unable to consume a published content site will be aggregated at the content type hub.
• The Enterprise Metadata Service publishes enterprise content types and the managed enterprise taxonomy.
• You can tag content through the browser, rich Office client, or through custom/3rd party applications.
• The Managed Keyword field dynamically checks existing terms, makes suggestions, and may allow for adding new terms.
• Example: You set a managed metadata field for months of the year, to ensure that the month format is consistent throughout the enterprise. The managed metadata field is created, and associated with the enterprise month default label. You can also associate "other potential labels." Now, when a user is filling out the Month field, they could enter "3" or "Mar" or "March." However, the managed metadata field will ensure that the value is consistent set to "March" across the enterprise. You can also enforce the sort order of metadata so that March is always listed before August.
• Microsoft provides an Excel-based schema that so you can easily import your term set into SharePoint.
• You may distribute ownership of portions of the enterprise taxonomy – term stores.
• The taxonomy hierarchy is available in the column filtering dialog.

Session notes from SharePoint Conference 2009:

• What do end-users care about? Personalization, easy access, ease of use, clear objectives, and management buy-in.
• Think about adoption strategies from the beginning and throughout a social computing initiative.
• Identify and leverage champions.
• Engage HR, legal, compliance, and security.
• Don't force people to use social computing. That will usually backfire.
• Brand and market your social computing solution. Get people excited. Use posters, multi-media, etc.
• Used a phased approach. Don't overwhelm users with too much. Introduce new tools one at a time.
• Take feedback into consideration and implement improvements.
• Social computing is not a fad; it is the evolution of collaboration.
• SharePoint will mine Exchange email messages propose additions to your profile (Interests or Ask Me About fields).
• You can declare blog and wikis items as business records.
• Deloitte: A name that appears in the enterprise is no longer just a name. It is linked to a profile, IM, and email. This creates a much richer sense of connectedness.
• Accenture: If someone views a profile that doesn't have a picture, an e-mail will be sent to the owner and let them know that someone checked their photo-less profile.
• Deloitte: 45% profile creation. Focus on first year was on profile creation. Goal for year 2 is 75%.
• Deloitte: Measure the number of colleagues per end-user. The goal is a minimum of four colleagues, and membership in at least two communities. They also measure the number of profiles views.
• Both Deloitte and Accenture have social computing advisory boards.

Session notes from SharePoint Conference 2009:

• Knowledge Management Issues within the enterprise are still looking for a solution, and social computing might be part of it: Rapid response to problems, capturing knowledge to ensure business continuity, and reducing transition costs. Although social computing may be part of the solution, it is not THE solution to knowledge management.
• If we manage by commitment, and employees meet their commitments, do we really care when, where, and how they do it?
• The evolution of Social Computing: Facilitated Knowledge Management, to collaborative workgroups, to social enterprise.
• We do social things regardless of whether we have social computing tools or not.
  If you're not measure ROI of social computing investments, you're not alone. No one else is either.
• See the "What's the ROI" slide for a great list of social computing benefits.
• Work life is very different than personal life. So, the way we use social media in work life is very different than in personal life. How work differs: Time constraints, negotiated priorities and commitments, processes, functional silos, physical and virtual spaces, regulatory and legal requirements, document centricity, legacy systems, performance evaluations, productivity, control, and knowledge retention.
• When all of your economics come from the industrial age, everything is measured like a factory.
• "Six Sigma almost killed 3M."
• Knowledge work is an iterative process.
• The reason you cannot calculate the ROI of social computing (or telephones, or e-mail), is that you have no idea how people are going to use them. You cannot know who will communicate with whom, what they will talk about, whether they will talk about business, or how much time they will spend communicating.
• Social computing increases the frequency of "knowledge accidents" within a company – which is a good thing.
• Take look at the "Future Vision" graphic slide.
• Plan for success: Create a organizational social media charter, understand how people are using or want to use social computing, determine how social computing can augment existing processes and systems, create awareness, document and share successes.
• Be strategic. Align the social computing goals with the business goals.
• Check out slide on measuring social computing effectiveness.
• Experiment – Monitor – Learn
• If you don't build it they will go somewhere else.
• Social computing is really just a shift in communication channels. It is not something to justify, but something to navigate through, embrace, and leverage as a new capability and manage as a new risk.
• "The anti-social organization is ultimately non-productive." – Chris Howard, Burton Group.

Session notes from SharePoint Conference 2009

• "Enhanced presence" goes beyond just availability. It encompasses location, skills, capabilities, and other attributes that help people and applications find the right person at the right time.
• Microsoft is not sharing anything about Office Communicator Server 14 yet.
• The contact card feature is a summary of a person's info. It appears when you hover over a presence enabled name. It is available throughput Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. However, it is dependent on OCS.
• From Microsoft Office Communicator (MOC), you can launch an HD video chat. (Cool, but I wonder how much bandwidth that uses.)
• Virtually any UCC functionality available in MOC, is available through an API for developer to embed communication capabilities into business applications (Communication-Enabled Business Processes - CEBP).
• Exchange 2010 voice mail is auto-transcribed into email message. Not perfect, but you get the gist.
• OCS is nicely integrated into Outlook. One click to join a meeting from the invitation.

Session notes from SharePoint Conference 2009:

• Key Tenants of Records Management in SharePoint 2010: Integrated governance across variety of SharePoint objects, familiar and easy to use, and flexible.
• Records Management feature Set: Recordization, eDiscovery and hold, auditing and recording, and retention and expiration. See feature set slide for detail of "what's new in 2010."
• Business problem #1: Preparing for Litigation and eDiscovery
• Recommendation: Use the same search technology for enterprise search and eDiscovery.
  The custodian approach to eDiscovery does not work well with collaborative content. You cannot assume that all relevant content will be created/edited by custodians.
• Create retention stage policies within SharePoint 2010 that govern end-to-end life cycle of documents within a library.
• New Hold and Discovery settings are available on any list/library.
• You can keep hold documents in their native store or move them to a special repository for documents with a hold.
• Audit reports provide clear and detailed history of who has accessed a document, and when.
• Microsoft doesn't claim to provide deep eDiscovery forensic analysis with SharePoint 2010.
• There are also retention and discovery features integrated within Exchange.
• Business Problem #2: Protecting the most important data in the enterprise.
• Visual queue signals documents within a library that have been marked as a record.
• Managed records provide a limited set of feature options to the user in the ribbon menu.
• Even pages in a wiki and posts in a blog can be marked as business records. They do not need to reside in Records Center.
• Create a workflow that automatically declares and classifies records. Requires SharePoint Designer.
• The home page of Records Center is a tool for records managers.
• The Content Organizer is a set of rules that the records manager sets up. It uses document metadata, including content types, to determine how to apply the file plan. Rule hand priorities to avoid conflicts.
• The Content Organizer rules can be used to mine SharePoint sites for documents that meet rule criteria, and mark and move the record, or a link to the record, to the Records Center.
• Site and document content types are a critical component to successful auto-classification.

The big news of the day was that the public beta of SharePoint 2010 would begin in November. There's a lot to look forward to. The new SharePoint is a significant move in the right direction.

In the spirit of sharing information quickly, I'm posting my unedited personal notes from each of today's sessions. I apoligize for the length.

Keynote - Steve Ballmer

• Open beta of Office and SharePoint 2010 to begin in November. No specific date offered.
• Microsoft market SharePoint to the consumer market someday.
• SharePoint vision is to eliminate the need for dedicated search, ECM, BI, and social computing solutions.
• Key strategy changes for SharePoint: From end-user application to composite applications and Rapid Application Development; from on premise solutions to cloud-based computing; and from internal intranet sites to public Internet sites.
• New developer dashboard makes it easier to troubleshoot SharePoint sites.
  Deploy "sandbox solutions" to isolate developer coding.
• Over a million users are signed up for SharePoint Online.
• Glaxo-Smith-Kline and Ingersoll Rand were mentioned as SharePoint Online references.
• SharePoint Online supports "almost" all of the end-user functionality as the on-premise version.
• Use cases that may justify the cloud: Not wanting to build new infrastructure; needing to collaborate with an external partner.
• Pfizer, Ferrari, Kroger, Kraft, Volvo all use SharePoint for their public Internet sites.
• The new SharePoint Server for Internet Sites is licensed to make it cost effective to deploy public Internet sites.
• Cut and paste formatting fidelity between SharePoint and Office.
• Skinable, Sliverlight media player web part.
• Built-in link and spell checking.
• Query-less search leverages FAST Search Server 2010.

SharePoint 2010 Drilldown - Jeff Teper

• What makes SharePoint unique? Tight office integration, web based site design.
• SharePoint balances the developer, end-user, and administrator experiences.
• Big focus on improving usability: Ribbon UI, edit in place, AJAX, fewer page refreshes.
• Integrate Office online components with SharePoint.
• Richer blogs and wikis.
• Social tagging, folksonomy support.
• "We think of ourselves as pioneering enterprise social computing."
• SharePoint 2007 showed up on Gartner Magic Quadrant for first time, and “did well.” Expect that SharePoint 2010 will do even better.
• Support for millions of items in lists and libraries.
• Controls for managing taxonomy, both top-down and bottom-up. Define and enforce consistent content types and taxonomy across all SharePoint sites.
• Built in media streaming.
• Search improvements: Federation, relevancy, wildcards, thumnailing, inferences from people profiles and mailboxes.
• Powerful new data visualization features.
• Support for [[wiki link]] syntax outside of wiki.
• Upload images directly into the SharePoint editor. No need to upload to image library first.
• Ability to multi-select items.
• Create and manage document sets, which are groups of documents consolidated into a single work product.
• Note board is like the Facebook wall.
• Microsoft did usability testing of SharePoint Central Administration UI for first time ever.
• Rich PowerShell support. Over 500 commands will be shipped with public beta of SP2010.
• Improved admin reporting and analytics.
• New, streamlined upgrade model should protect existing sites, while allow control to enable new functionality when it makes sense.
• Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) is now called SharePoint Foundation Server 2010.
  

SharePoint 2010 Overview

• All SharePoint pages are now like wiki pages. They live in their own page library and can be edited in place.
• Edit list and library settings from ribbon menu.
• Apply PowerPoint themes to SharePoint sites. (Looks like the admin might have to add the theme file to sever before it shows up on the list of available themes.)
• SharePoint Communities are what Microsoft is labeling their social and collaboration tools.
• The "enterprise" wiki is built to resemble Wikipedia, and is more feature rich than their "standard" wiki. Includes table of contents, rating, templates, sections, categories, tagging.
• Tag, rate, and add notes to any item in SharePoint, when enabled.
• Any list/library may contain a managed keywords column that integrates with managed taxonomy service.
• My sites include "status", like the Facebook status. Other colleagues’ status messages will appear in the news feed on the My Network tab, if enabled.
• Tabbed My Site user interface.
• Access everything you have tagged, noted, commented, or rated from your My Site. All of these items also show up on the news feed.
• My Network tab displays the activities of your colleagues.
• Every site supports document routing now, not just Records Center.
• Create rules to route content based on tags. Users simply save to "drop off library." Pop-up provides URL to final location.
• Insert web parts within content, in line.
• Media streaming supports look-ahead and bit throttling. You can create an internal YouTube with out of the box functionality.
• Enhanced people search can mine email (Exchange only). Supports phonetic and wildcard search.
• Insert a tag cloud anywhere, even outside the site collection where the content is stored.
• SharePoint Insights refers to the SharePoint Business Intelligence features.
• Publish Access data to SharePoint, in other words, webify Access.
• Business Data Services (BDS) replaces the Business Data Catalog (BDC). Supports read/write.
• The data in SharePoint "external lists" live in backend data sources.
• SharePoint 210 Scalability: Terabytes of data with multi-million item lists.
• Microsoft.com/SharePoint is running SharePoint 2010.
  

Overview of Office 2010

• Striving for a consistent experience across PC, phone, and browser.
• Outlook: Mail thread mgmt (cleanup and ignore), Reply with meeting, "Backstage"
• Excel: Show little trend charts for each row of data. High fidelity between app and web published spreadsheet. Real-time co-authoring within web app embedded in SharePoint.
• The Note Board is like a wiki or discussion. Any document or list item can have an associated Note Board.
• "Backstage" is a feature available within each of the Office suite applications. It is accessible from the file menu. It contains all the information about the document, and is programmatically extensible to meet specific business needs.
• Open Word documents within SharePoint using the embedded Online Word applicatino. It is a rich editor, not just a reader.
• The rich Word application indicates who else is co-editing with you. Paragraph-level locking prevents save conflicts. Changes are queued up in the Upload Center. An indicator show when changes are pending and can be applied. Co-authoring eliminates the need to check-in/out.
• In-line image editing within Word, such as background removal.
• Word and PowerPoint support client-based co-authoring. Excel is browser-based co-authoring.
• OneNote supports both web and browser co-authoring. All co-authoring is enabled through SP2010.
• Awesome new PowerPoint transitions.
• Video editing within PowerPoint, for example color correction, trim, bookmark, special effects (reflection, frames).
• Embed internet video into PowerPoint.
• Ability to compress embedded media files in PowerPoint.
• Office is available in both 32- and 64-bit clients.
• Unless you're creating very large Excel files, there is probably no need for 64-bit version of Office, yet.

Overview of Social Computing in SharePoint

• Social computing lowers the cost of sharing and collaborating. It surfaces knowledge and networks, and increases employee engagement.
• SharePoint let you control the speed and breadth of your social computing deployment.
• Company demographics, hierarchy, policies, and culture skews the normal social computing patterns we observe on the Internet.
• The My Home tab is replaced by the My Content tab.
• New My Network tab shows you the blended news feed of your colleagues’ activities. This replaces the Colleague Tracker web part. It tracks for a lot more activities than SharePoint 2007. Appears to be more granular.
• Subscribe to a tag so that you get an update to your network news feed every time someone else in the company uses that tag.
• New "Ask me about" field on profile, which has higher relevance than tags in other profile fields.
• New organizational structure browser graphically illustrates employee, team members, manager, and direct reports. Requires Silverlight. There is an HTML version too.
• Store content on My Sites that doesn't fit in any team site. It is intuitive for people to look for documents in My Site. They seem to easily associate work products with their respective author.
• There is no evidence that memberships work differently or better than SP2007.
• Eliminated most ActiveX within SharePoint, and replaced it with AJAX, making the UI operations much smoother.
• It is really easy to add graphics to a blog.
• A SharePoint web page is a basic wiki; they just don't call it a wiki. They just want people to think of it as simply an easy way to edit a web page.
• The enterprise wiki is based on the publishing portal template. Embed web parts, such as libraries or video player within an enterprise wiki page.
• Apply records management and legal hold policies within social computing tools to content.
  Showed a custom developed "Join" button for a community site that adds a user to the list of site members.
• Showed custom thumbs up, thumbs down voting web part.
• Let me know if you need me to elaborate on any of these items.