Build a better MOSSetrap… and the world will beat a path to your door

SharePoint is a decent platform in and of itself, but… now that you have been using it you see areas for improvement and being a .Net Developer you figure there has to be a way to do this...  Come to this presentation and find out how to get started in SP development.  See the must have tools of the trade, find out how to transfer a project from Visual Studio into SharePoint and learn how to debug a SharePoint Visual Studio Project and what to watch out for.

Jim Ferguson

Jim's knowledge spans the End-user, IT Professional, Database Administrator and Developer areas. He is New Horizon of Minnesota's Senior Instructor for SharePoint and has authored or co-authored the majority of the curriculum that New Horizons of Minnesota utilizes for SharePoint.  He holds multiple certifications in Networking, Data Base Administration, and Programming, but his list of certifications only begins to speak to his real skills.  He has been a technology instructor since 1998, but also has gained solid experience and knowledge through his work on design, migration and implementation projects.   When he isn't working, he is thinking about working.

 While Jim is thinking about working, he rides his 2003 100th anniversary Wide Glide Harley, is a PADI DiveMaster, Plays the Harp, Brews his own Beer, Wine, & Mead, with his Wife (Rebekah), two children (Jack and Claire), and Holland Lop Bunny (Autumn).

 

SharePoint Content Types: The Missing Link?

SharePoint document libraries have many features designed for file management while collaborating with other team members. In this session we will explore Content Types and how to effectively utilize Office 2007 to collaborate

Mark Slade

Mark Slade became a New Horizons of Minnesota instructor in June of 2005 and teaches a variety of Microsoft classes including Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Visio, OneNote, SharePoint, Project and Outlook. He also teaches Lotus Notes and SmartBoard. Mark recently became a Microsoft Certified Applications Specialist for Office 2007. He graduated from St. John's University with a degree in Education and taught in the Eden Prairie School District for 4 years. He enjoys carpentry, running, biking and camping. It is his goal to make learning an enjoyable, meaningful and approachable experience.

SharePoint Online/ Cloud Computing

Cloud computing? Software as a Service (SaaS)? Software Plus Services (S+S)? Microsoft SharePoint Online? Too many buzzwords but chances are you are still looking for details that matter to you – how does this impacts you, how do you determine a fit or even how can you go about actually using these buzzwords. If you have any such questions or more, please join us for an open discussion on Microsoft's vision of Software Plus Services (S+S), SharePoint Online Services & various strategic and operational considerations. As an added bonus, we will also take a quick peek at Microsoft SharePoint Online Services.

 

Shikhar Agarwal & Brent Stineman

Shikhar Agarwal has over 10 years of solution leadership and project management experience. He has worked in various industries (financial services, federal, non-profits, manufacturing, tribal and energy) and with various solutions (SaaS, Social Computing, CRM, Collaboration, Enterprise Search, ERP and BI). As Sogeti's Solutions Leader, he is also leading efforts to build a local team of SharePoint/CRM experts within Sogeti and involved in architecting end-to-end solutions. Recently, Shikhar was involved in visioning, implementing and supporting SharePoint Online Services at an enterprise client locally.

Brent Stineman comes from a diverse background that covers many technologies, platforms, and industries. Over the last 10 years he has spent significant time working with online community and collaboration tools. Brent Stineman has been with Sogeti for the last 3 years as a Senior Developer and focused on delivering customer applications using Microsoft Technologies.

 

Sogeti Client Case Study – Collaboration in a Global Organization

Implementing SharePoint in a complex business environment

Defining business objectives

Assessing the current technology environment

Define an implementation approach

Creating a realistic governance model

Evaluating SharePoint Online feasibility

Please join Sogeti and an Enterprise Client to learn how Microsoft customers and partners can work together to solve complex organizational challenges, deal with organizational change and deliver significant business value with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 solutions.

 

Shikhar Agarwal & Anibal Velarde

Shikhar Agarwal has over 10 years of solution leadership and project management experience. He has worked in various industries (financial services, federal, non-profits, manufacturing, tribal and energy) and with various solutions (SaaS, Social Computing, CRM, Collaboration, Enterprise Search, ERP and BI). As Sogeti's Solutions Leader, he is also leading efforts to build a local team of SharePoint/CRM experts within Sogeti and involved in architecting end-to-end solutions. Recently, Shikhar was involved in architecting and implementing collaboration and search solutions within a global enterprise.

Anibal Velarde is a native from Panama City, Panama. Anibal has worked with Aon Benfield, a Reinsurance intermediary, since 2000. Prior to that, he worked for Principal International (subsidiary of Principal Financial Group). He obtained a Master's of Business Administration from Drake University and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Nebraska at Kearney. He currently lives in the Twin Cities area.

 

Effectively Using Features and Solutions

Features provide the foundation for adding your customizations to SharePoint. Solutions form the package that can contain many features and files to deploy to your entire farm. Together, these two provide the ability for you to create redeployable packages for SharePoint, but you need to know how to use them effectively. Learn how to use them to manage change between your different environments and promote code and changes through a change control process.

Neil Iversen

Neil thrives on digging into business issues and (ab)using the specific technologies that solve a problem. As Lead Developer for Inetium, Neil gets to create solutions that span multiple technologies including SharePoint, CRM, Office and a variety of platforms. He is also a frequent speaker at the Minnesota SharePoint User Group (MNSPUG) and creator of the Minneapolis Office Developer Interest Group (MODIG).

SharePoint 3.5: Leveraging .NET 3.5 Language Features in SharePoint Development

The new versions of C# and VB add several tools to a SharePoint developer's toolkit to enable more reliable, readable and efficient Object Model code. This session will review these features and provide some specific examples of how they can help you write better SharePoint code. I will also discuss SPSite and SPWeb disposal, and one strategy to minimize the risk of memory leaks.

Keith Dahlby

Keith Dahlby is a SharePoint developer and language geek from Cedar Rapids, IA. He works as a consultant with Inetium and blogs about SharePoint and related topics at Solutionizing.NET

Building Dashboards with SharePoint Designer 2007

Learn how to extend the Web Part framework by using SharePoint Designer to create dynamic Dashboards.  We'll review how to create Web Part Pages, manage navigation, and connect to SharePoint and external data sources using the Data Form Web Part.  We'll also look at Web Part connections and how they can be used to make your Dashboards interactive!

Raymond Mitchell

Raymond Mitchell is a Senior Information Worker Consultant at Inetium and a frequent speaker at the Minnesota SharePoint User Group.  He also blogs under the alias IWKID on Information Worker technologies including SharePoint and Office development.

Windows Workflow Foundation for SharePoint Developers and Administrators: Automating Business Processes in your SharePoint Portal

This session will explore the capabilities of Microsoft's new Workflow platform in the context of automating business processes using Windows SharePoint Services and Office 2007. The session will demo using both SharePoint Designer 2007 and Visual Studio 2008 to create workflow templates that run in the SharePoint environment. The Visual Studio example will discuss tying an approval workflow to a Time off Request form, including manager approval and automatically updating an Out of Office calendar in SharePoint.

Greg Moser

Greg Moser is the SharePoint Practice Manager for Computer Integration Technologies in Woodbury, Minnesota, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. Since 2001 Greg has filled the roles of Developer/Analyst, Business Analyst, Trainer, SharePoint Architect, and his current Development Manager role. Greg advises CIT's customers on how they can best utilize the powerful SharePoint platform in their organizations, and leads the CIT SharePoint team in designing and implementing the resulting solutions.

Searching for a Better SharePoint experience

Matthew Obert

 

Using SharePoint to re-engineer your business processes and trim costs: A Best Buy case study

Interested in learning how Best Buy is using SharePoint as a "win-with-what-you-have" technology? This session will provide several real-world examples of how the dotcom division of Best Buy has integrated SharePoint into many of their routine work processes. In less than one year we've seen enhanced workflow management and process optimization resulting in more than $350,000 in annual cost savings.

Sarah Haase

Sarah Haase is an information architect and corporate librarian. During her tenure at Lawson Software, Sarah helped design, build, and maintain the company's first online knowledge base. Now at Best Buy, Sarah has worked in a variety of positions in BestBuy.com operations. From supporting BestBuy.com's content management systems to architecting and building a dotcom wiki knowledge base, Sarah has focused on using technology to enable efficient information retrieval. In her current role as dotcom's Collaboration Manager, Sarah relies on SharePoint and various Web 2.0 technologies to drive business process optimization. In the past 9 months, Sarah's team has used MOSS 2007 to optimize a wide range of business processes, resulting in more than $350,000 in annual cost savings.

IA what does it stand for and why do I need it in my SharePoint environment

This session centers around aspects of information architecture, from developing global taxonomies to the user experience.  Users should come away with an understanding of why a proper design of their environment aligns business and technology objectives,  while delivering optimization and overall company value.

Steve Tycast

Steve is the principal information architect for RBA Consulting and has over 9 years of experience in both the business and information technology arenas.  He has led multiple, enterprise-level engagements, and delivered innovative solutions to his business clients.  His use of Microsoft SharePoint technologies and information architecture curricula during these engagements has helped him cultivate an understanding of the toolset from a consultative standpoint. This understanding, coupled with his diverse background, allows Steve to craft SharePoint related solutions that enable the consumption of information in a highly organized and usable fashion.

Leveraging custom InfoPath forms within your Visual Studio SharePoint workflows.

Visual Studio workflows and InfoPath Forms Services are a powerful team for you company's business processes. Two examples of how you can leverage InfoPath within your custom Visual Studio workflows will be demonstrated. Firstly, how to deploy a workflow enabled form into a form library programmatically, and secondly, how to leverage an InfoPath form to collect custom workflow initiation data will be demonstrated.

Phil Wicklund

Phil Wicklund has years of experience architecting and administering corporate SharePoint environments. He taught Mindsharp's 2003 and 2007 SharePoint developer course from 2004 to 2007. Today Phil shares real-world insights and in-depth best practices with RBA clients of all varieties. 

Prior to joining Mindsharp, Phil was the SharePoint Architect and Technical Lead at RSM McGladrey, a Fortune 500 accounting and business consulting firm. Phil provided leadership over McGladrey's SharePoint environment including all application development, SharePoint administration, and server administration. He was a key player in introducing SharePoint into the firm, and led the effort to upgrade from V2 to V3. Additionally, while at McGladrey he architected numerous in-house applications that utilized and extended the SharePoint platform to meet business needs.

 

Building SharePoint Dashboards

Everything in SharePoint is a list.  This familiar statement works great when you are managing the sea of data that is needed for true team collaboration, but, how do you present this data in a format that provides project status to your sponsors?  This non-technical session will give Project Managers the tools needed to turn SharePoint data into a straightforward, accessible dashboard.  You will learn how to display Gantts, graphs, and usable data from SharePoint and other sources to enable your sponsors to make better-informed decisions by more easily viewing, analyzing and sharing data.  The capabilities outlined in this session are available in all Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 versions and does not require custom development or the use of SharePoint Designer.

Larry Christofaro

Larry Christofaro, PMP, MCITP

Larry Christofaro is a senior consultant for Digineer, with over 15 years of project management experience.  Larry has combined his strengths in EPM architecture and project management to successfully manage EPM and Microsoft Project deployments for clients ranging from 50 – 2000 users.

 

ASP.NET Charting Controls and the Silverlight Toolkit for the SharePoint Developer

Ryan will take a look at some the latest Data Visualization components to hit the marketplace; including Microsoft's ASP.NET Charting Controls as well as the Charting components within the Silverlight Toolkit.  We'll look at how these new components measure up in the existing marketplace of 3rd party controls and data visualization solutions as well as how SharePoint developers can leverage and seamlessly integrate these controls into both WSS and MOSS environments.  Ryan will walk you through the creation and implementation of solutions using these components as well as how they can help you quickly build great dashboards and/or decision support tools.

Ryan Oliveira

Ryan is a SharePoint Service Line Manager and evangelist at Solutia Consulting in Stillwater, MN. Ryan's current focus is building collaborative customer-focused communities on the MOSS/WSS platform for customers in the Twin Cities and Western Wisconsin. Ryan's background includes over 13 years of building solutions in technologies including VB, C#, and Java for companies in the US and Canada. When not at work, Ryan enjoys playing hockey and lives in Elk River, MN with his beautiful wife Julia and children Will(4) and Kate(2).

 

Building interactive dashboard using Microsoft Business Intelligence technologies: A Case Study

This presentation would be referencing a success story on the business intelligence (BI) challenge an healthcare provider organization was facing and the process they went through to implementing a successful interactive dashboard utilizing Microsoft BI technologies (PerformancePoint, SQL Server, and SharePoint) and their other existing BI technologies

Jin Cho

Jin Cho – Microsoft SharePoint/Business Intelligence Technology Specialist.  Prior to becoming a Microsoft employee, Jin spent 11 years at Allina Health System.  He managed the Business Intelligence/Data Warehouse team to lead an effort to provide clinical, financial, and operational BI solutions.  He was also responsible for implementing Allina's reporting and analytic environment for the Epic electronic medical record system.  Jin majored in Statistics at the University of Minnesota.  Jin lives in Blaine, Minnesota with his wife Kris.  He enjoys cheering for the Minnesota sports teams.  His other passions include camping, hiking, biking, and traveling to new places.  He and his wife Kris plan to visit all of the US national parks and camp at all of the Minnesota state parks in their lifetime.  He is also in the process of restoring a 1967 Dodge Cornet R/T and hopes to return to racing classic muscle cars.

Social computing in SharePoint, a Park Nicollet case study.

This topic will explore how SharePoint profiles can be leveraged to extend the business oriented out of the box features to be social computing capable. Leveraging those customized profiles in SharePoint Search and the person.aspx will also be discussed. Using the Content Query webpart to allow for non-admin updates of Master Page content will be discussed. Finally, using the Content Query along with the Publishing Page Layouts to present content to users, will be demonstrated.

Paul Grafelman

Paul Grafelman has seven years experience in information technology, administering SharePoint (2003 and MOSS 2007), Active Directory, SQL Server, and Windows-based servers and system.  Paul has utilized SharePoint technologies to create applications for clients in the health care, insurance, automotive, and software industries.  His focus is on using SharePoint out of the box functionality, using that functionality in different ways, and pushing the limits on what SharePoint can do without using custom code.

Advanced moves with SharePoint designer.

For those of you interested in customizing SharePoint and don't have the expertise of writing custom code this is a topic for you.  We will go into many different techniques that can be used to trick or get SharePoint to do things that may not be in the manual.  We will be pushing lists to the limit as well as leveraging the content editor web part to get SharePoint to do our bidding.  We will also touch on other topics such as data views and custom designer workflows.

Scott Yokiel

Scott Yokiel is a senior consultant at RBA Consulting. He has been delivering innovative solutions to his clients for over for 9 years, with the last 6 dedicated to Microsoft .NET. He has served in many rolls in his career from BA to senior developer.  He is currently focused on developing solutions for RBA clients using the SharePoint API.

Silverlight in SharePoint Technical Overview

Rich User Experience is getting easier to create with the release of Silverlight. In this session we show how Silverlight takes advantage of XAML and provides an easy way to build compelling user interfaces. We will show what's new in 2.0 that allows the developer and designer to collaborate to build exciting new applications. Then we look at what needs to be in place in order to deploy and run the application in a SharePoint environment.

 

Mike Benkovich

Energy, laughter and a contagious passion for coding Mike brings it all to the podium. His career has taken him from minion to business owner, and hes been programming since the late 70s, when a friend brought a Commodore CPM home for the summer. He wrote his first software in Basic (including a math game that was shown at the University of Wisconsin in 1982) and later completed a degree in aerospace engineering. In 1994 he started a consulting firm with his brother, focusing on the effective use of relational technologies for scalable, high performance and mission critical applications. Mike has worked in a variety of roles including architect, project manager, developer and technical writer. The coolest part of his job? Running into people who are still using (and liking) his software applications. Mike is a published author with WROX Press and APress Books, writing primarily about getting the most from your SQL Server database. Since appearing in Microsofts DevCast in 1994, Mike has presented technical information at seminars, conferences and corporate boardrooms across America. This music buff also plays piano, guitar and saxophone - but not at his MSDN Events. For more information visit Mikes website at http://www.benkotips.com.

Making SharePoint Work for You

Join Joel Baglien and Jason McKinney for a hands-on demonstration to show how any organization can improve information availability, productivity and processes, and communication via a SharePoint based Intranet. This session is almost 100% real-time demonstration. Joel and Jason will demonstrate what SharePoint can deliver out of the box using built in configuration tools. We will also look at customized examples of what you can develop using SharePoint Designer. Joel and Jason will share with you some of High Monkey's best practices for how we use SharePoint to manage projects and information. Come prepared to learn and to ask a lot of questions.

 

Overview of SharePoint (2007)

$ Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS) capabilities

$ Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) capabilities

$ Some limitations of WSS

$ When do you really need MOSS?

$ Migrating from WSS to MOSS

Utilizing Tools for Document Libraries and Lists:

$ Document Libraries and SharePoint List Overviews

$ Check – in / out features

$ Document Approvals

$ Versioning

$ Utilizing Metadata for documents

$ Creating views to assist with organization and understanding of information

$ Setting up Content Types

o What is a content type

o Advantages

o How can they be used

$ Datasheet Bulk Edit

SharePoint Security

$ Security Trimming of information

$ Displaying only what users need to see

$ How security trimming affects document management and versioning

$ Security adjustments to protect information

$ Utilizing Groups to make mass security adjustments

Microsoft Office & SharePoint Interaction

$ Which office products are compatible with SharePoint

$ Setting up Outlook synchronization with SharePoint

 Joel and Jason will spend about 75 minutes demonstrating the SharePoint topics listed above.  Come prepared with your questions and share your own best practices!

 

Joel Baglien & Jason McKinney

Jason McKinney began with High Monkey Consulting in 2007 and moved into the role of Collaborative Consultant after completing his business degree in Management Information Systems at the University of Northern Iowa.  Jason is High Monkey's 'go to guy' for SharePoint configurations, setups, workflows, and customizations.  Jason aggressively learns new technologies and expands his areas of expertise in SharePoint and other collaboration technologies.  His understanding of business issues and challenges regularly puts him on the front line with clients who need solid technology solutions that are both cost effective and intuitively easy to use.

 

Jason grew up in central Iowa working for a variety of family businesses, which fed his entrepreneurial view and enhanced his understanding of a wide range of industries.  Being from Iowa, a few fun things he enjoys are golfing, canoeing, and exploring the countryside.  Although it is often difficult to be on the leading-edge, Jason loves to adopt the latest and greatest tech gadgets, gizmos, and internet technologies. He always wants to be just one step ahead.

Joel Baglien is the Practice Manager for High Monkey Consulting. Joel has 25+ years of business and management experience. His first experience with web technologies happened in 1995 when he was tasked to, 'figure out a business model for the Internet' for a technology manufacturing company. In addition to running his own independent consulting practice for 8 years, Joel has managed web development teams, project teams, and managed projects for small and medium businesses and Fortune 500 companies.

Joel spent his formative years in the former American Canal Zone in Panama. It gave him a global perspective on people, business, politics, government, and the many oddities of the human experience. From mountain climbing to jungle motorcycling, it was quite a place to grow up. After high school, there was an interesting path from Georgia Tech to Auburn University, to the US Navy in Rhode Island, and finally to Minnesota. The Midwest feels like home most of the time. Co-parenting three teenagers is a good challenge for Joel and his wife Jodi. It's not exactly 'Zen-like' but most days things seem to go pretty well. Along the way, Joel has improved his sense of humor and developed a sense of irony. Go figure.

 

Taking the Government out of Governance

When you hear the word governance, one often thinks only about control...controlling the way we think, the way we work and what we can and cannot do. From an IT perspective, governance planning and implementation is a much needed piece to maintain control around a SharePoint collaborative environment. From an end-user perspective, governance is often perceived as excessive control and limitations. In this session we will explore how to plan out the controls, checks and balances we need to put in place while not forgetting that the main ingredient in any good system is the end user that wants to use it. We will look at how to plan, control and monitor the growth of our systems to ‘facilitate' the end user experience and increase the overall success of our SharePoint implementation.

Virgil Carroll

High Monkey Consulting began in 1997 when one technologically-gifted man envisioned a consulting company that would join business expertise and technological savvy–with a touch of humor thrown in for good measure. Virgil grew up as an Alaskan fisherman, so he knows that life, like business, can be smooth sailing one minute and stormy seas the next. His ability to stay calm and clear-headed through the storms of business has been a valuable asset to many companies and individuals throughout the years. After graduating from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks with a degree in Sports Medicine and then attaining a Masters in Instructional Design from the University of Alabama, Birmingham, Virgil decided to put his myriad talents to good use and formed High Monkey Consulting.

Social Networking in SharePoint - Getting Started the Right Way

Many organizations have been slow to adopt SharePoint's My Site functionality, but with the growing popularity of social networking in the enterprise, SharePoint is getting a second look.  Learn what you need to know before deploying My Sites and configuring your profile import and profile pages.

Wes Preston

Wes is a Senior Consultant with Inetium as a SharePoint product specialist and IT Pro.  Wes has been a developer, consultant, and technology evangelist for over 10 yrs.  He is one of the organizers and a frequent speaker at the Minnesota SharePoint User Group.  Wes maintains a blog at www.idubbs.com/blog.

SharePoint + OBA: Deeper integration between WSS 3.0 and Microsoft Office 2007

Office Business Applications (OBA) development is a hidden gem of the Microsoft Office platform.  Combining Visual Studio 2008 templates and SharePoint web services, developers can create robust applications using familiar Microsoft Office applications and Windows SharePoint Services.  This session will give a brief introduction to development on the Office platform and walk through common development scenarios including adding custom task panes, customizing the Office menu and ribbon, and moving data between Office and SharePoint.  Attendees should have knowledge of general .NET development and the SharePoint object model.  (Level 300)

Eric Kraus

Eric is a consultant with Microsoft Enterprise Services focusing primarily on SharePoint Products and Technologies.  He has over 10 years of IT-related experience ranging from infrastructure/network administration to SharePoint architecture and .NET development.  Eric is an active member of the SharePoint community and was recently added to Joel Oleson's 'Top 100 SharePoint people to follow on Twitter'.  More on Eric's SharePoint work can be found at his blog:  http://blogs.msdn.com/ekraus or by following him on Twitter:  @erickraus

 

MOSS/SharePoint, Like Cereal, Good Out-of-the-Box, Better with Add-On's

MOSS/SharePoint, like cereal, is great out-of-the-box.  But, also like cereal, MOSS/SharePoint can be enhanced with extras and add-ons.  One can do that through development tools like Visual Studio and SharePoint Designer.  And/or, one can enhance MOSS/SharePoint using commercial and community add-on tool sets.  In this session, Pete Hohenhaus provides an overview of the kinds of commercial and community add-ons available.  He will also present overviews and/or demos of select toolsets, both from commercial Microsoft Vendor Partners and community sites such as CodePlex.  Some examples include admin/reporting tools (Quest, Nintex, et al.), backup tools (Quest, AvePoint, CommVault, et al.), workflow tools (Nintex, et al.), and special purpose tools (e.g., List Roll-Up Web Parts).

 

Pete Hohenhaus

Pete Hohenhaus has spent 13 years consulting and systems engineering in the areas of SharePoint and business intelligence.  He currently is a senior consultant at Meritide, Inc., in the Twin Cities.  He consults on business uses of SharePoint, PerformancePoint, Reporting Services, and Analysis Services, with a particular focus on infrastructure issues.  Immediately prior to that, he spent 3 years as Tech Lead for MOSS/SharePoint and Reporting Services at SuperValu/Albertsons, creating and building out SuperValu's MOSS/SharePoint Server Farm systems and services, as well as the Reporting Services and related BI server farms and systems.  During his time at SuperValu/Albertsons, Pete was the founding user member of the joint Microsoft – Users Greater Idaho SharePoint Users Group.  He  introduced and deployed Analysis Services, ProClarity, and SharePoint at Capital One Auto Finance in San Diego as Data Delivery Team Lead, designed the SharePoint site organization for Micron's main chip fabrication facility, designed the Analysis Services cubes and ProClarity reporting structures for an early phase of the Idaho State Department of Education assessment project, etc.  Pete holds double BA's in economics and political science from the University of Minnesota, an MBA from St. Thomas, and taught applied managerial economics and information resource management classes at St. Thomas, as an adjunct instructor in the MBA program, from 1991 to 1996.  From 1975 through 1989, Pete was active in business merger, costing, demand, pricing, and forecasting activities at Union Pacific Railroad Company and U S WEST Communications (Qwest Communications).   From 1990 through 1994, Pete was an author, database designer, and search systems coordinator at West Publishing, now Thomson/West.

 

A Modular Approach to MOSS/SharePoint Server Farm Organization and Capacity Planning

Setting up a multi-server MOSS/SharePoint Server Farm, and different server roles, can be pretty modular.  Deciding how to manage/plan your servers, content databases, and the like, with a view to understanding organization, structure, and capacity, can be pretty modular, too.  In this session, Pete Hohenhaus provides an overview and some operations engineering ideas and perspectives on at least some ways to think and structure MOSS/SharePoint Server Farms.  Some ideas on initial planning and structuring of server farms will be presented, as will thoughts on content databases, load balancing, SQL Server, etc.  Along the way, experiences, both as to good planning practices and what we might do if, along the way, our existing SharePoint Farms' structures pose some problems.

 

Pete Hohenhaus

Pete Hohenhaus has spent 13 years consulting and systems engineering in the areas of SharePoint and business intelligence.  He currently is a senior consultant at Meritide, Inc., in the Twin Cities.  He consults on business uses of SharePoint, PerformancePoint, Reporting Services, and Analysis Services, with a particular focus on infrastructure issues.  Immediately prior to that, he spent 3 years as Tech Lead for MOSS/SharePoint and Reporting Services at SuperValu/Albertsons, creating and building out SuperValu's MOSS/SharePoint Server Farm systems and services, as well as the Reporting Services and related BI server farms and systems.  During his time at SuperValu/Albertsons, Pete was the founding user member of the joint Microsoft – Users Greater Idaho SharePoint Users Group.  He  introduced and deployed Analysis Services, ProClarity, and SharePoint at Capital One Auto Finance in San Diego as Data Delivery Team Lead, designed the SharePoint site organization for Micron's main chip fabrication facility, designed the Analysis Services cubes and ProClarity reporting structures for an early phase of the Idaho State Department of Education assessment project, etc.  Pete holds double BA's in economics and political science from the University of Minnesota, an MBA from St. Thomas, and taught applied managerial economics and information resource management classes at St. Thomas, as an adjunct instructor in the MBA program, from 1991 to 1996.  From 1975 through 1989, Pete was active in business merger, costing, demand, pricing, and forecasting activities at Union Pacific Railroad Company and U S WEST Communications (Qwest Communications).   From 1990 through 1994, Pete was an author, database designer, and search systems coordinator at West Publishing, now Thomson/West.

 

SharePoint Pro Panel: Ask the Experts…

Here is your chance to learn the answers to those pesky SharePoint questions that trouble you so… Come prepared with questions for this Experts panel.

Experts Panel