DevConnections, Orlando, Florida

Just a heads up for any that are interested, I'm headed to DevConnections next week. I'm exicited about the possibilities and things that I'll be exploring while there. Here are a few of the sessions that I'm planning to attend: Design Powerful Workflows with SharePoint Designer Workflows are essential to business processes. The ability to route a document through multiple stages, gathering feedback, and getting approval from multiple people is a routine procedure in many companies. Now you can take advantage of SharePoint’s built-in support for workflows to design powerful multi-step workflows. You will learn how to make use of the built-in workflows directly through SharePoint’s interface. Then you will see how to develop powerful workflows—without any code—using Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer. Intelligent Dashboards Made Simple Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) incorporates significant enhancements in presenting Business Intelligence data to the end user allowing them to share, control, and reuse business information to make better decisions. MOSS is utilized to enable information workers to build business intelligence (BI) dashboards in any SharePoint site. The dashboard can provide a bird’s eye view to easily and quickly analyze data or to measure progress of any organizational metrics or goals. This session will show how easy it is to build a powerful BI dashboard using information from various data sources. Even data from Excel spreadsheets, hosted in SharePoint document libraries, will be used along with other data sources. The end result will show a visualization of Key Performance Indicators, graphs, and charts of the data that’s easy to understand and analyze. Quick Integration from SharePoint to Your Application Do you need a quick way to add search to your application? Do you want to add document management including version control and check in/out? In this session, you’ll learn how you can use SharePoint to add more robust features to your application—and how you can use SharePoint to provide a central framework around your existing individual applications. The Hidden Architect—Building Solutions for Smaller Organizations Large enterprises and governments with large projects can justify and afford formal system architecture and design and can afford the loss when a project self-destructs (as they so often do). But what about smaller businesses and their Web applications? These organizations fall victim daily to poorly designed solutions that aren't what they needed in the first place. They need help figuring out what they really need—help they often don't realize they need and are reluctant to pay for. It's not enough to be a Web or application developer when it comes to this kind of client or project—you have to be a system architect as well, even though you don't wear the title and may not be able to charge for the service. So how do you become a system architect? This session might be a good start. You’ll cover requirements, economics, client management, creative and flexible design strategies, and how to look beyond "best practices" design patterns to find solutions that fit the client, instead of trying to fit the client to the solution. P.S. Bring your favorite horror stories for show and tell! If you're planning on attending this event, I'd love to meet you. I'm always interested in meeting those entrenched in the SharePoint world! It amazes me the number of tricks and tips I learn from each individual I've had the opportunity to meet!