vSharePoint - October 2013 at CRD (Downtown Victoria)

Hey folks,

The trees are turning, or will be soon, and that must mean it's time for more vSharePoint. :) Please check out the October meeting details below, as well as the meetup site at https://www.meetup.com/vsharepoint and our new (Office 365) website at http://www.vsharepoint.com/ .

We hope to see you at yet another new location, CRD. It's fun to change things up and CRD was very kind in sharing their room with us.

Colin

New Location Details Important (including parking)

The CRD office is at 625 Fisgard St (midway between Government and Douglas). Anyone attending should sign the visitor log at the front desk (say they are attending the VSUG meeting and put that as the “contact”) and get a visitor badge; then take the elevator to the 6th floor, turning right out of it.

There is a bike lockup at the front of the building, a parking lot opposite (UPark $2 per hour, usually pretty full) and one up the street (City of Victoria Centennial Square Parkade, 2.5 to 3 hours is $5.50); on street metered parking is limited to 90 minutes.

Agenda

• 11:30 to 12:00 – Meet and Greet

• 12:00 to 1:00 – Colin Phillips - SharePoint BI for the Common Man

-- Lunch Break --

• 1:00 to 2:00 – Tom Benjamin - CRD SharePoint – How We Got Here and Where We’re Going

Prizes

Yes, as always!

About the Presentations and Speakers

Colin Phillips, SharePoint MVP, itgroove (http://www.itgroove.net) (Blog http://mmman.itgroove.net )

Title: SharePoint BI for the Common Man

Overview: Everyone knows that BI is going to help get you answers that you wouldn't otherwise have at your fingertips, but not a lot of people know how to get those answers, let alone how easy it can really be (with SharePoint). In this session, we'll go over some of the simple ways of giving users (and yourself) what they deserve - the information they need, accurately, and timely.

Bio: Colin is a SharePoint MVP and Consultant with itgroove. He is a graduate of UVic and has over 14 years’ experience in both software development and IT infrastructure. His background working at both small and large companies (including 5 years working with BI at Cognos - now IBM) has given him a wealth of knowledge. Among Colin’s areas of experience include SharePoint, business intelligence, workflow, VMware, JavaScript, and many more. Check out Colin's blog at http://mmman.itgroove.net

Tom Benjamin, SharePoint Systems Officer, CRD

Title: CRD SharePoint – How We Got Here and Where We’re Going

Overview: CRD implemented SharePoint 2010 Enterprise in October 2010 with the goal of using it for document management. The roll out faced significant challenges around user adoption for the first 6 to 9 months, but an ongoing process of training power users (site champions) and regular users on how to get the most out of SharePoint has improved the situation significantly. That said there are still users who are confused by SharePoint and therefore continue to store documents on networked drives.

SharePoint has largely replaced the previous SAP Portal intranet site, and is used more and more as a tool for communicating with staff, and for helping users in the many different CRD offices (from Sooke to Salt Spring) collaborate and manage their work. Staff in IT have developed some specialized SharePoint solutions and SharePoint Designer workflows and these really help with user buy-in as they can deliver effective tools to meet business needs at a very reasonable cost.

Tom will show us around CRD’s SharePoint with examples of how SharePoint add-ons are used: KnowledgeLake Capture for scanning documents to SharePoint, Equilibrium’s MediaRich for managing image and video files, and harmon.ie for integrating Outlook and SharePoint.

Bio: Tom is the SharePoint Systems Officer at the CRD, the one person whose full-time job is managing the SharePoint environment and supporting the users. Tom has worked in IT for close to 30 years, mostly as a web developer with extensive experience in information architecture, solution development, user interface design and the effective use of technology for communication.