Highlights from the day

Steve Walker and Joe Indelicato (of Chevron, Joe formerly of the Houston Texans) put on a good presentation about using BI in both cases to improve the business. At the Texans, Joe pioneered using Microsoft technologies to data mine and exploit weakness in other teams. Joe discovered statistical trends in which plays were most likely to be called, and tendencies of players that had the lowest aptitude test scores in Combine (run plays with motion straight at them – they’re more likely to get confused and falter). At Chevron, they are using BI and geospatial dashboards to surface information about the performance of wells and actions that need to be taken on them.

Kraft detailed their migration of 270+ consumer-facing web sites to SharePoint. The case study available on Microsoft.com was detailed – a $2.2M cost savings by moving the sites to SharePoint, while providing a flexible architecture to support unique branding and creative control of each product’s web page. The combined sites have 100M page views per month, with several billion and 100M dollar brands to support, and 98,000 employees as well as external ad agencies who want control. The migration plan demanded that creative efforts were separated from data processing. An architecture leveraging XML, XSL, CSS, Web Parts, and a clever automated packaging and promotion scheme fit the bill. Rollback capability was provided by checking current pages into a document library before promoting new pages. Case study: Available at microsoft.com

Two folks from Microsoft detailed their migration of an internal application for “After the fact Purchase Order” (ATFPO) approval from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010. Many of the items they had to roll by hand to create a security trimmed view of ATFPO’s for users in 2007 were now available off the shelf in 2010 using BCS. They were able to remove many of the “moving parts” from their solution, shrinking development time from 480 to 80 hours, and lines of code from 2763 to 446! As we saw clients leveraging SharePoint 2007 to speed up development cycles for LOB applications over traditional ASP.NET, I believe we’ll see the trend increase exponentially with SharePoint 2010.

Jones Lang Lasalle has bet on SharePoint in a big way, using the platform to support their rapidly-growing company. Leveraging MOSS 2007, they were able to capture web leads for the first time (0 – 5000 in the first year), increase the usage of their research downloads four times, and invert their development/maintenance resource allocation from 30%/70% to 70%/30% respectively. Their array of hundreds of sites and several different languages to support (as well as metric/English measurement and other localization considerations) made MOSS the obvious choice. They are currently looking at upgrading to SharePoint 2010, and as one of the larger SharePoint 2007 installations, they provided some interesting data on their pre-upgrade check. Almost all of their current features migrated with little to no intervention, which bodes well for companies considering the move to 2010. Case study: Available at microsoft.com

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