Monday 6 October 2008

Speaking at the UK SharePoint user group on WCM next week

Next week's UK user group is conveniently being hosted by LBi, my current employer for a Web Content Management (WCM) special. Now I could be biased here, given that the two presenters are me and my current boss, but I think we have some great sessions. In the first, we'll do a case study session partly based on the site I talked about previously in SharePoint WCM in the finance sector and Developer lessons learnt - SharePoint WCM in the finance sector, and in the second we'll talk about practical steps/best practices to consider when building such sites.

The date is Thursday 16th October, location is London (Brick Lane/Liverpool St), and we kick off at 6pm for a 6:30pm start - for folks who aren't local or can't make it down, slides etc. will be posted either here or on the SUGUK site. The link for full details and registration can be found at the end of this post - the full rundown on the sessions is:

Session 1 : Web Content Management in MOSS, real life case study – Riaz Ahmed
This session will showcase how SharePoint content management has helped the world’s most international bank, a top 25 FTSE 100 company, deliver an online digital solution for clients, analysts and employees.
See how SharePoint has helped empower analysts worldwide to create, publish and share research information. See how SharePoint has helped clients and investors get access to market information to help decide their next multi-million pound deal. See how flexible, extensible and customisable the SharePoint web content management platform can really be.

Session 2 : Best practices/lessons learnt: building MOSS Content Management sites – Chris O’Brien

This presentation explores key tips and developer techniques for building WCM sites, based on the experience of delivering sites such as that shown in the earlier session. As well as key topics such as security, optimisation and deployment, much of the presentation will cover practices which are not widely documented but which can shave time and make the difference on a very tight timescale. And, since the only certainties in life are death, taxes, and clients changing their minds, we’ll examine how to build a site which is as flexible as possible whilst not being substantially more difficult to implement. Finally, we’ll wrap up with a discussion on how developers can keep their sanity by being able to fix bugs quickly (especially when the boss is stood over their shoulder!) regardless of where they occur in the code, before going on to open Q & A.

For full location details and to register see http://suguk.org/forums/thread/13880.aspx.

As usual, we'll be going for a pint to continue the chat afterwards - all are welcome!

4 comments:

Robin Meuré said...

Good luck mate!

Would love to see you in action sometime! ;)

Anonymous said...

Hey Chris,

I enjoyed the user group last week, very informative!

One thing I forgot to ask you though, from Riaz's presentation I saw that the SharePoint web interface (when looking at lists) appeared to be using a different 'theme' to the out of the box. Was this a custom theme/css that you had created especially for the project or one that is widely available?

It looked much more pleasing to the eye that the horrible default one! Any chance you could make it available?

Thanks!

Rich.

Chris O'Brien said...

Hi Rich,

The 'admin center' you saw in Riaz's presentation is just a web part page with several ListViewWebParts used on it. The left-hand navigation links are also tailored to provide links to other back-end pages (e.g. lists). The actual 'theme' is the default theme though.

HTH,

Chris.

Anonymous said...

Great write up Chris :-)

WOW! What a great evening we had last week at the London SharePoint User Group meeting. Not only did we have record breaking attendance of just over 200 people, but the food/drink and presentations on SharePoint Web content Management went down very well indeed.

I would like to personally thank the WCM guru Chris O'Brien for presenting on MOSS WCM lessons learnt, Microsoft for paying for catering, the lovely staff at LBi (Derek, Natasha and Mona) for looking after the 204 folks during the evening and assisting me in organising it all and the LBi events team for letting us use the Truman Brewery, a magnificent venue for hosting this special evening.

Well folks, thanks for coming along, from the enormous amounts of feedback I've received, it looks like the evening was a great success and everyone had a great time.

Slides for the night are up here:

http://suguk.org/blogs/sharepoint_blog_1/archive/2008/10/22/14631.aspx


Until next time, see ya :-)

Riaz Ahmed
Head of Microsoft Solutions, LBi

http://www.linkedin.com/in/riazahmed

http://www.lbi.com