SUNDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2011 (Pre Conference Training)

Enable Better Decision Making with Microsoft Business Intelligence

Time: 9:00am – 5:00pm
Location: Anaheim Marriott Hotel
Maximum Attendance: 200
Cost: $399
Audience: IT Professionals, Architects and Developers from SharePoint Silver and Gold competent partners
Speaker: Rafal Lukawiecki, Strategic Consultant, Project Botticelli

This full-day seminar presented by Rafal Lukawiecki, Strategic Consultant at Project Botticelli, will give you the tools to enable better decision making for your organization. It will go over all aspects of the BI platform, including Microsoft Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, and SQL Server 2008 R2. We will start with a discussion of the strategies and the issues facing today's BI landscape and then present a number of real-world BI case studies. Over the course of the day you will see more than 20 product demonstrations, each solving a different business need, using Microsoft BI. You will see self-service analytics, dashboards, scorecards, report galleries, and many ways to enable collaborative BI. After those sessions, we will close the day with a full-length chalk-talk session, making sure your questions have been answered.

The agenda includes 23 demos, and introduces the topic in Session one with 4 Microsoft Approved Customer Case Studies (Yahoo, Mediterranean Shipping Company...):

• Session 1: Microsoft Business Intelligence: Strategy and the Platform - This introductory session will overview the current state of BI and of its goals, and it will focus on what makes Microsoft BI uniquely suited towards solving present day business challenges. Once you have seen the broad, existing technology perspective, and once we have shared with you a vision for the future directions, you should be able to better judge the relevance and value of this platform to your organizational needs.
  
  
• Session 2: Self-Service Business Intelligence - This presentation will give you a full introduction to Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel 2010 and SharePoint 2010, focusing on the newest ways of self-service data acquisition, mash-up, and analysis. We will also outline the future directions for the development of self-service analysis on the Microsoft platform, as well as the relevance of data in the cloud to analytics.
  
  
• Session 3: Collaborative Business Intelligence: Dashboarding with SharePoint 2010 - In this session you will get a detailed overview of the process used to create a BI dashboard, scorecard, analytical report and a KPI using SharePoint 2010 PerformancePoint Services and a SQL Server 2008 R2 cube. We will also briefly outline other dashboarding options available to you.
  
  
• Session 4: Reporting and Dashboards - In this presentation we focus on the reporting functionality of SQL Server 2008 R2 and SharePoint 2010. We will overview the wider landscape of report-focused dashboards before discussing the self-service nature of the Report Builder. We will also look at other reporting options, before briefly reviewing the exciting plans for the upcoming generations of reporting tools.
  
  
• Session 5: Interactive Chalk-talk - In this closing presentation we give you a chance to discuss any issues related to Microsoft Business Intelligence, and to have all of your questions answered. If a demo is the best way to explain a point, you will be offered one, making this more of a chalk-and-demo-talk session.

Project 2010 Technical drill-down for SharePoint Partners

Time: 8:00am – 5:00pm
Location: Anaheim Marriott Hotel
Registration Price: $249
Audience: IT Professionals, Architects and Developers from SharePoint Silver and Gold competent partners
Keynote Speaker: Arpan Shah, Director of Project, Microsoft Corporation
MVP Speakers: Dux Raymond Sy - SharePoint MVP, PMP and Scott Jamison, SharePoint MVP and Certified Master
Microsoft Speakers: Christophe Fiessinger and Jan Kalis, Senior Technical Product Managers; Steven Haden, Microsoft Consulting Services Senior Consultant

Come to this session to learn about the Project & Portfolio Management technical drill-down and best practices from industry recognized experts.

Microsoft Project and Portfolio Management solution is built on top of SharePoint Server 2010 - bringing together powerful business collaboration platform services with structured execution capabilities to provide flexible work management solutions. Project Server 2010 unifies project and portfolio management to help organizations align resources and investments with business priorities, gain control across all types of work, and visualize performance using powerful dashboards.

We have been monitoring technical questions from the SharePoint community over the past year; we will cover the following topics:

• How to plan for Project Server deployments
• Best practices implementing and administering Project Server 2010
• Similarities and differences in extending, configuring and customizing Microsoft Project Server 2010 and Project Professional 2010

In addition to a heavy technical focus, Arpan Shah during his keynote will highlight answers to business questions, such as how to:

• Extend SharePoint business cases?
• Unlock advanced workload on SharePoint?
• Grow your services business?
• Build on the robust and integrated platform?

… with Microsoft Project Server 2010!

Deeper business discussions will be available during the actual SharePoint Conference in following sessions (make sure your business development colleagues add them to their SPC agenda):

• Leveraging Project 2010 with Office 365 for Project Management Success – by Dux Raymond Sy, PMP, MVP
• Project 2010 and SharePoint 2010 Better Together - by Tad Haas, Microsoft

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2011 (Post Conference Training)

SharePoint 2010 Administrators Deep Dive

Time: 8:00am – 5:00pm
Location: Anaheim Convention Center, HOL Room, Hall E
Maximum Attendance: 300
Cost: $400
Audience: Developers and IT Professionals
Speaker: Shane Young, Principal SharePoint Consultant, SharePoint 911

In this all day SharePoint 2010 extravaganza Shane Young will take you on the SharePoint Administrator’s journey to help you see the light. Shane and his team has upgraded, installed, or supported over 100 SharePoint 2010 farms and he is going to share that experience with you exposing the key lessons learned and best practices he has developed along the way. The key is this session will be presented 100% from their real world experience.

• Install and Configure: No matter what you want to do with SharePoint you cannot be successful until you have a solid farm built. In this section Shane will go through with you how he actually does customer installs, hitting on the key terminology and decision points. Have you noticed your farm is full of database GUIDs? He can help. Need to know what pieces to get off the C: drive? Got it. Want to better understand the different pieces you may install and when, like Office Web Apps and Service Packs/Hot Fixes? You are covered.
  
  
• User Profiles: Depending on your farm and Active Directory configuration getting profiles to sync into SharePoint can be quite the challenge. In this section he will explain the different moving parts of the sync process and what you need to get them syncing like clockwork. He will also cover some troubleshooting techniques you can take home and use if your User Profile Service is acting up.
  
  
• Windows PowerShell: Or in SharePoint terms the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell. Whatever you call it this tool is critical to you the SharePoint Administrator. In this section you will learn the key cmdlets that will aid you in learning PowerShell, you will also look at some SharePoint 2010 scripts that Shane uses in his daily job and how he built the scripts. The focus here will be that old proverb about teaching a man to fish except this time it teaching and administrator how to use PowerShell. Not only will he provide you with several usable PowerShell scripts, he’ll also show you the methodology he used to write them, so you’ll be able to create new PowerShell scripts of your own.
  
  
• SharePoint, BI, and Kerberos: As an Administrator you may not understand all of those fancy numbers or dashboards but what you do need to understand is how to configure your farm to support those capabilities and the basics of what those capabilities are. For this section you will learn the different BI tools you may be asked to deploy, why Kerberos is a factor, and what Kerberos things need to be configured for these scenarios. And of course keeping with real world feel the guys will give you some pointers on where the stumbling blocks are and what are the little “gotchas” you need to look for.