There were more in-depth info on SharePoint features and client stories, as well as analyst views on Day 2. Booz Allen Hamilton had a great story about their intranet’s social networking features, and how they drove adoption in a conservative environment where such ideas might normally be resisted. BAH used FAST Search, SharePoint, and some home grown solutions to provide a portal where people could post their availability for projects and managers in need of resources could find out about them, their reporting structure, and skills. They showed off a neat org chart tool that allowed you to dynamically browse groups and reporting relationships. Most of their organization was from tagging, and they let people show a little character in the portal in interests (like gardening, reading, golf, etc). They believe that this helps add a more rounded, human side to the profiles, and also helps suggest groups to form within the organization.

Bamboo Solutions showcased the new project management features in 2010 and in their product Project Management Central, with the help of Dax Sy and Julie Auletta. The combined feature set coupled with SharePoint 2010’s extensibility begs the question – is there anything that full-blown MS Project Server can provide that this solution does not? Portfolio management at the top, tasks, dependencies, updating percent complete on tasks, integration with desktop MS Project, creating dashboards, and alert emails you can format for milestones. I’m going to investigate this more, as many of our clients are interested in solutions like this and have shied away from full-blown MS Project Server thus far.

The session with Forrester on custom development in SharePoint was interesting. Their basic thesis – decide how much you want to get involved in SharePoint and go in with your eyes open. Do you consider SharePoint an application? An app plus “it runs our intranet”? Or do you consider SharePoint an enterprise application and integration platform? If you want to get into advanced projects, realize they are advanced and require a full-strength commitment of resources for development, testing, QA, deployment, and maintenance as any other enterprise application would. Many cases where people were unhappy with SharePoint seemed to stem from starting out with treating it as an application, then wanting to use it for more advanced projects while still wanting to treat it as “just an application” and not a development platform.

Other important ideas:

SharePoint is being extended in 2010 to allow you to leave current systems in place and have a “single source of truth” (SSOT) that you can surface through the portal, with optional read/write capability. This is a small refinement to the existing BDC but an important idea in that you can leave the data where it lives (PeopleSoft, SAP, SQL Server, etc) and not have to replicate it to SharePoint to expose it. This allows you to make SharePoint the “one stop shopping” portal for information in the company without a lot of expensive integration.

SSOT is expanded further with the REST-ful implementation of items like charts in SharePoint 2010. Common use case: There is a chart showing sales for the past four quarters, and a projection of the next two quarters. This chart lives in Excel, gets emailed around the company, and is copied into dashboards, PowerPoint, etc. What happens when the data in the Excel spreadsheet is updated and the chart changes? There is no way to know how many other places the chart has been copied, so stale data is inevitable. In 2010, you can move the data online and publish the chart in SharePoint to a known URL, and link the other items to this URL. Any changes will be picked up by the downstream consumers when the chart changes. The usual alerts and notifications can also be enabled to know when the chart changes.

Speed and Usability – don’t forget about them! In the session with Electronic Arts, they talked about the importance of responsive systems that share information efficiently. They advocated using Firebug and ySlow on your web apps to help figure out where performance can be improved. Their SharePoint implementation removed much of the default JS/CSS in pages in favor of a lightweight style definition (just 32 lines of CSS and 12 images to create a “skin”). They also cited Jakob Nielson’s “F-Theory”, that people scan and read things in a pattern similar to the capital letter F. The implication for SharePoint page layout is to create your web parts and then try a two or three column layout approach putting the most important items in the top left, top right, and middle left.

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