SharePoint Saturday DC May 2010

Just yesterday was the stupendous SharePoint Saturday DC 2010, held at the Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale, Virginia. This time there were almost 1000 attendees (929 officially) and over 80 presentations. Kudos to the team of coordinators: Dux Raymond Sy, Dan Usher, Gino Degregori, Jenn Davis, and all of the helpers throughout the day.

This time around I did a presentation titled Bringing Zest to SharePoint Sites Using Out-of-the-Box Technology alongside Ed Wells and Bethany Kaplan. We had a classroom of about 40+ chairs and ended up with about 50+ people packed in for the 9am session. Thank you to everyone who came out for our talk!

View slides on docs.com

View Slides on Slideshare

Presentation description

We're presenting at SharePoint Saturday DC - May 15, 2010

SharePoint Saturday DC is right around the corner. The next one will be held on Saturday, May 15th at the Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale, Virginia. The venue can hold upwards of 1000 attendees. This will be the biggest SharePoint Saturday ever! And it's all free!

I will be presenting a session along with my esteemed colleagues Edward Wells and Bethany Kaplan. Our session is titled Bringing Zest to SharePoint Sites Using Out of the box Technology. Here's a description of what we'll be covering:

This session will discuss ways to create enhanced solutions for SharePoint 2007 sites without always needing to create complex programming code or deploy solutions to the server. The audience for this session is SharePoint Power Users and Developers in scenarios where they do not have access or control to fully customize the instance of SharePoint they are using. We see this often while working for various government and commercial clients.

All too often, you are thrown into a situation where you have access to a SharePoint site collection or even just a single site and the only way to edit and enhance the site is through the browser interface. SharePoint Designer access is disabled or otherwise unavailable. Access to a programmer or the IT folks is limited or non-existent, so a compiled solution is out of the question or would take a very, very long time. But your users need functionality now. Your client wants the site to be useful now.

So what do you do?

There are quite a few ways to tackle the problem. We will discuss solutions in tiers:

• First and foremost, SharePoint can do quite a bit out-of-the-box. Why not start there and see if you can accomplish what you need?
• If it’s just not possible, the second tier includes solutions using JavaScript, jQuery, and other client site-code that can be deployed in places like the Content Editor Web Part.
• The next tier up may be a mix of client site (jQuery) and/or server side (Solutions/Features) code.
• The top tier, for the really complex scenarios, may include an extensively designed application that runs on top of or next to the SharePoint site.

We will cover a handful of specific scenarios we have encountered that can be tackled from tier 1 to tier 3 or 4, depending on the level of access and expertise that you have at your disposal. The focus of the demonstrations will be the first two tiers, with shout outs to tier 3 and 4 solutions where applicable.

We hope to see you there!

Results Show: SharePoint Saturday DC

The most recent iteration of the SharePoint Saturday franchise, SharePoint Saturday DC, was held yesterday at the Microsoft Technology Center in Reston, Virginia. The day went very well, thanks to Dux Raymond Sy and his team of event coordinators, volunteers, and sponsors! Over 200 people were there and most of the sessions were packed and a few were standing room only!

There were a variety of session topics, including Dan Lewis's Social Computing talk, Tom Resing's Business Data Catalog presentation, and Jonathan Distler's overview of Arlington County, Virginia's SharePoint pilot. All-in-all, there were twenty-eight sessions plus an open "Ask the Expert" discussion in the lobby.

Dan Usher and I presented our talk SmartCard Authentication: Considerations, Options, and Pitfalls with SharePoint during the last session of the day, 4:45-5:45. Surprisingly, we still had the energy in us to have a lively discussion about security, SmartCards, and how they fit into a SharePoint implementation.

View the slides on SlideShare or download the PowerPoint file (PPT or PPTX) which includes the slides plus notes and resource links.

View Online (slides only)
SlideShare

View PowerPoint (slides + notes/resources)
PowerPoint 2003 (PPT)
PowerPoint 2007 (PPTX)

A video of our talk may be made available at some point, and I'll post it here if it does.

Speaking at SharePoint Saturday DC

In recent months there has been a series of interesting free weekend events called SharePoint Saturdays centered around the topic of--what else--SharePoint! Well, SharePoint Saturday is coming to the Washington, DC, area!

Dan Usher and I are scheduled to present together on the topic of smart card authentication with SharePoint 2007. The talk is entitled SmartCard authentication: Considerations, options and pitfalls. Oh my!

With the ever present risks of data integrity and non-repudiation, several organizations have begun to utilize smartcards for authentication to systems. With the greater number of SharePoint instances being stood up within organizations, ensuring the smartcards can be used to access data is key. In this session, we'll discuss smartcard authentication, considerations when determining the appropriate architecture, options for integration with different authentication providers and implementation pitfalls.

There are a few different ways you can integrate smart cards (or other two factor authentication) into a SharePoint instance. We'll talk about the various methods, including the option of using a custom membership provider.

There is a special food drive going along with the event. Check out Dux Raymond Sy's explanation on the SharePoint Saturday DC website.