1. Aligning Business Needs, Processes and more within the SharePoint platform ITP116, CIO116, PM116, IA116

2.  Wes Preston MCTS  Inetium  www.inetium.com  wes@idubbs.com  Wes is a SharePoint consultant and organizes the Minnesota SharePoint User Group (~150 attendees/month)  http://www.idubbs.com/blog

3. Abstract  SharePoint offers a broad range of features and functionality that business users and administrators can use to solve problems and inefficiencies. Learn how SharePoint features align with business challenges and why SharePoint should be considered as both a solution and platform.

4. Perspectives  1. What SharePoint features are available for information workers to construct reliable and robust solutions.  2. What reasons are there for using SharePoint instead of traditional business solutions, software and processes.  3. Why are SharePoint solutions more effective than commonly used standards?

5. Foundations for success  Work with a resource that knows the boundaries of the SharePoint platform  OOB functionality  Custom solutions and 3 rd party add-ons  Governance: Provide a stable and supported environment for your users  Governance: Train your users so they understand what you are providing them

6. A few user requests…  How do I find employee information  How do I find the data I’m looking for with all the other information out there?  How can we better coordinate work requests?

7. Best Practice #1 - People Search  In MOSS, enable People Search  Most companies list an employee directory, people search or some variation among their top needs  Why:  The ROI for the ability for users to be able to find each other is high

8. Best Practice #1 - People Search  Examples:  Want to quickly find contact information for someone in the organization  Need to know who to escalate to

9. Search results…

10. Profile page

11. Best Practice #1 - People Search  Trade-offs:  Generally requires AD to contain data and be up to date in order to be useful  Custom or 3 rd party solutions for employee search may already be in place – SharePoint will need to meet the expectations already set by these solutions

12. Best Practice #1 - People Search  Additional thoughts:  It is a common misconception that you need to enable My Sites before People Search is effective.  If AD is already being populated (and imported), users get immediate value with very little additional effort

13. Best Practice #1 - People Search  Additional thoughts:  Once the profile db is populated, the same content can be used for other features –Audiences –Laying the foundation for future social networking functionality

14. Best Practice #1 - People Search  Governance:  Which fields in the profile db should users be allowed to edit. Select choices from a list, or allow free form, etc…  Worst Practices:  Allowing users to edit fields

15. Best Practice #2 – Lists and Views  SharePoint adopters are quick to jump on list functionality, but frequently miss out on the benefits of creating role or task- specific views that would make users more effective  Why:  Again, findability is key. The quicker the user can find their data, the faster they can act on it.

16. Best Practice #2 – Lists and Views  Examples  Edit current view  Grouped by vs. Filtered web parts These are the components being used to build dashboard types of pages for specific roles and tasks…

17. LISTS AND VIEWS Demonstrate a few examples of view usage

18. Best Practice #2 – Lists and Views  Trade-offs:  May take a little more effort to set up  Additional thoughts:  Shared views vs web part specific views (Edit current view) and when to use them  Using multiple web parts, filtered by group or category instead of using the Group functionality – different look, same links

19. Best Practice #2 – Lists and Views  Worst Practices:  Don’t create tons of shared views and clutter up the drop downs

20. Best Practice #3 – Work Queues  There are a number of robust and mature use cases for certain solutions: Help Desk, etc – but these typically aren’t extended to other use cases that could benefit from similar tools

21. Best Practice #3 – Work Queues  Task lists, alerts, workflows all play a part in a solution  Dashboard page / views for various roles

22. Other Best Practices  Communication  Use News and Announcements lists for distributing information rather than e-mail. –Users can still receive e-mail if they want with alerts or RSS feeds  Document Distribution  Don’t attach documents if they can be linked –Send a link to a document rather than another copy of the document

23. Other Worst Practices  Document Libraries  Do NOT just dump whole directories from a file share into a library.  Don’t have screen shots in anticipation of your demo environments breaking

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