Workshop overview

This one day workshop has been developed for all public sector personnel who have responsibility or interest in SharePoint. It's primarily aimed at organisations who are thinking about using SharePoint or have as yet simple implementations. The workshop is focused on describing essential SharePoint concepts and how these are manifested. Public sector specific issues, such as compliance, and more general issues of management and cost-effectiveness are described as they occur throughout the day.

The workshop presenters have considerable experience of designing, configuring and the ongoing management of SharePoint within public sector organisations. The day has been designed to be interactive and will focus on real-world experiences and practical techniques. Live SharePoint demonstrations will be used to illustrate and cement abstract topics throughout.

Workshop Content

1. Overview
General background on the SharePoint product and why it is currently so popular. A summary of what Microsoft claims the product is and what experienced practitioners believe it is. An overview of the SharePoint functionality “pie”.

2. Concepts
The understanding of a number of SharePoint concepts is key to understanding its functionality and maximising its use. These concepts include: Site collections, sites, libraries, web parts, folders, lists, content types, view and columns. Practical examples of each concept are shown, and where appropriate analogies with non-SharePoint concepts described.

3. Functionality
The main functional areas of SharePoint are described and illustrated with live SharePoint examples. The areas covered will be:

• Collaboration: Team sites, workspaces, blogs, wikis, and other collaboration facilities.
• Portals: Using SharePoint for intranets, extranets and internet sites. Also the MySite feature.
• Search: Basics, how SharePoint’s search ranking works, advanced search, people search and issues around external search engines.
• Enterprise Content Management: Web content management, document management, records management and knowledge management.
• Business Process and Forms: Workflows and using InfoPath.
• Business Intelligence: Excel services, dashboards, KPIs and integration features.
• Platform Services: Permission structures, storage and basic configuration.

4. Pointers to a successful implementation.
Guidance to improve the procurement and planning of your SharePoint implementation, including resourcing and skill requirements.

2. Conclusion
Summing up of the workshop and some thoughts on SharePoint’s future. Detailed Q&A session as required.

Throughout the workshop a number of cross-cutting themes are also described. These include: SharePoint’s role in effective information management, the capabilities and deficiencies of SharePoint, and recommendations to unlock its potential. Questions will be welcome throughout the day, although any lengthy answers may be deferred until the end of the day. Breakout sessions may take place depending on the progress of the group and whenever particular issues are revealed.

Workshop timings

Registration starts at 09h00 and the workshop will begin at 09h30 and finish at 16h30.

About the workshop leaders:

Marc Stephenson, Director, Metataxis

Marc has worked in both public and private sectors, with recent clients including the CBI, Bank of Scotland, United Utilities and London Borough of Hackney.His earlier career included working for a number of publishing and online media companies such as Proquest, Macmillan Publishers, multimap.com and The Stationery Office.

Marc has an Honours degree in Computer Science and Masters degree in Cognitive Science. He has spent twenty years in a number of technical and information management based roles, encompassing post-graduate research and development, software engineering, programme management, business analysis and information architecture. He has extensive technical experience in many platforms including detailed knowledge of SharePoint information architectures and configuration.

Cerys Hearsey, SharePoint Consultant, Metataxis

Cerys’ working experiences to date have included a wide range of information-centric projects including taxonomy redesign, metadata management, training, EDRM implementation, online help authoring and more recently has led into business process improvement and benefits realisation.

In addition to experience in the public sector, Cerys also has a background in librarianship specialising in enquiries management, end user training (especially in search strategies), eLibrary and website design, cataloguing and indexing.

Areas of particular interest are organisation, classification and retrieval of information across disparate corporate information systems with little or no provision for corporate information management strategies.