SouthEast Productivity

A few days ago I had two separate meetings with clients who had organizational needs around streaming audio and video content within their Enterprise organizations for communications, training, and more. In both cases the clients had existing SharePoint 2007 instances in place with plans to move to 2010. However, they also were considering additional media functionality beyond what SharePoint provides natively out of the box. In this Michael on the Go video I discuss what SharePoint offers media streaming wise out of the box as well as how that can be extended. I also discuss the rich media delivery possible with IIS Smooth Streaming. Finally, I discuss how both IIS Smooth Streaming and SharePoint can be integrated to provide the best of both worlds.

The other day I received a great question via Facebook around whether or not having a social interactive presence on a SharePoint instantiation would drive increased sight intuitiveness as navigational ease of use. While at a first glance this may seem to be the case it is not in fact necessarily so. In this Michael on the Go video I discuss sight intuitiveness, social interactions, and usability activities that can drive ease of use for your corporate SharePoint instance.

In this video Productivity Pundit Michael Gannotti tackles the problem of all day, unplugged, digital note taking. Using a Fujitsu Q550 Windows 7 Slate along with Microsoft OneNote 2010 Michael shows how mobile digital workers can easily create content that is compatible with existing systems and shareable with fellow colleagues.

In this video Productivity Pundit Michael Gannotti shows how using a Fujitsu Q550 Windows 7 Tablet running Word 2010 enables seamless productivity when publishing blog posts to a SharePoint 2010 site. All on the go.

In this special guest segment of Coffee Talk we take a look how you can get a holistic view or your organizations software and hardware using MAPs and then visualize it for manipulation using PowerPivot for Excel.

A Coffee Talk shout out from Carlos in Lisbon Portugal

A Coffee Talk shout out from Iowa

SharePoint is a great development platform as long you follow some golden rules right from the start. Being so huge as product, is hard for someone starting up on the SharePoint developing world, to achieve success without stumbling on "black-holes" issues with no  turning back. With this session learn some best practices in developing in SharePoint: Team Building, Environments, ALM, Frameworks and Do/Don'ts. 

In today’s economy human resource departments need to have compelling and cost-effective solutions to get things done. Join us for an overview how existing technologies and new products like SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft InfoPath can provide your HR department the tools necessary to streamline and manage operations with robust functionality. We will also review the complex process of onboarding a new employee, and how to leverage these technologies to create a process that will have a new employee completely ready to go before their first day on the job including automating tasks such as necessary account creation, document creation and collection and notifications.

In this session we will look at some basic out of the box ways to create powerful dashboards for managing teams and projects.  Our dashboards will be created using multiple connected web parts all configured from the browser.  This session will give you a good overview of lists, views, web part pages and web part connections.  This is a great session for those just getting started with SharePoint who want to push the limits of out of the box configuration.

Your organization hires smart people so, let's empower those people to drive more insight into your business and make better decisions by leveraging the tools they're already very confident and comfortable in already.... Excel!   Brent walks you through some of the new data analysis and visualization capabilities in Excel 2010 while also introducing you to PowerPivot, which allows you to pull Hundreds of Millions rows of data into Excel from multiple disparate Data sources... create relationships between the Data Sources, which allows you to drive insight ​like never before.   The icing on the cake is when Brent then publishes all of this insight to SharePoint, allowing the entire organization to gain value from the analysis he's created! 

Huh? Did I read that right? Apple and SharePoint - a perfect match?  The reality is today's business climate demands more. Organizations every day are creating innovative, mobile solutions that enhance employee productivity, drive revenue, and produce significant competitive advantage.  As a result of the consumerization of IT, the popularity of tablets, and the user experience of apps; for many organizations this means Apple iOS. In this session, we will discuss how to expose SharePoint content to iOS apps from a business and technology perspective. We will demonstrate how a device manufacturer used SharePoint in conjunction with an iPad application to introduce new products, enhance the field sales process, and drive sales.

In this session, we will discuss how to use Visio 2010 Premium to document, model, and simulate your business processes.   We will show you how to gain visibility into your business, so you can make better decisions – quickly!  Learn how to get the most from your people and processes without wasted time, money or productivity. Streamline business processes easily Understand the impact of decisions on your business – before you make them Optimize processes to reach your full potential Watch your business GROW!

Microsoft Office Visio 2010 makes it easy for IT and business professionals to visualize, explore, and communicate complex information. Go from complicated text and tables that are hard to understand to Visio diagrams that communicate information at a glance. Instead of static pictures, create data-connected Visio diagrams that display data, are easy to refresh, and dramatically increase your productivity. Use the wide variety of diagrams in Office Visio 2010 to understand, act on, and share information about organizational systems, resources, and processes throughout your enterprise.

IDC is forecasting that Windows Phone will surge to second place in global smartphone OSes by 2015.   Studies show how 93% of Windows Phone 7 owners would recommend it to their friends and family.   Come learn how your users can extend their productivity to this platform using the built in Office Hub, which allows them to connect to SharePoint (hosted or, on Premise) and Open, Edit, and Save their documents right there on the Phone!   Brent shows the Mobile experience with Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.

With ecspand for SharePoint, there is now a single repository for users to surface ANY corporate document. This simplifies their efforts and takes an already compelling ROI and turns it into a stunning productivity enhancement that safeguards critical corporate communications, while streamlining the user experience and returns the users focus to their business tasks.

Whether it's on-premise, in the cloud, or a hybrid, SharePoint is an enterprise ready platform that can help solve many business problems. This session will review the differences between SharePoint on-premise and SharePoint Online as well as the different workloads/scenarios where one or the other makes sense.

Organizations are increasingly looking to the cloud as a way of reducing operational expenses while increasing organizational nimbleness. As such the idea of a cloud hosted instance of SharePoint can be an attractive option. In this session Mark will cover the benefits of SharePoint online, the power it delivers to organizations, and cover the differences between self-hosted SharePoint and cloud hosted. Additionally, he will demonstrate the new features available in the Office 365 cloud hosted service.

Use the wisdom of crowds - your customers, employees and partners to drive revenue, cut costs and improve processes. ​SpigitEngage for SharePoint extends the capabilities of SharePoint by creating a comprehensive collaboration and idea management solution that focuses on inspired communities, agile innovation and measurable results.

In this presentation, you'll learn key techniques in: Gaining executive buy-in for SharePoint projects Identifying and prioritizing business benefits SharePoint provides Proper planning and appropriately managing expectations Engaging the business for better adoption Defining organizational SharePoint readiness.

This session will stress i) the business value of employee / manager self-service, ii) common challenges organizations encounter,  and iii) how these can be addressed through design best practices, SharePoint 2010 and a seamless user experience leveraging business connectivity services (BCS) or DUET Enterprise in the case of integration with SAP environments.

In this session, Derek Weeks will do a broad analysis of the SharePoint market based upon a SharePoint Community survey from August 2010 with results compared to the January 2011 responses.

Those attending the session are guaranteed to walk away with new ideas on how they can reform their companies with a vision towards the future.

This session will explore tactics and strategies to handle issues of low bandwidth, high latency, and unreliable connectivity. These will include the distribution of SharePoint services and the impact of client applications and cloud-based services such as Office 365

The speaker will take the audience through the Maturity Model and will discuss when, in the maturity process, companies should start considering a Business Process Management solution.  Templates for self-assessment will be provided.​

SharePoint 2010 plays a big role in integrating with line of business applications like SQL, Oracle, CRM, etc.. in this session, we will see the beauty SharePoint 2010 that gives when integrating with CRM 2011 as well as be able to use Fast Search to search in CRM 2011.

We will discuss methods that have been leveraged along with "Lessons Learned" and "Best Practices". We will also discuss techniques and the process for Application Rationalization. A discussion of tools and processes like Software Inventory and Application Compatibility and Software Deployment will also be covered

This IT Showcase will explore how we built Microsoft’s internal solution on SharePoint 2010 leveraging SharePoint 2010 Social, Search and managed meta data services to drive compelling solutions and content using social capabilities as the common fabric that connects.

This seminar focuses on how to turn organizational "baggage" into true assets that increase productivity, improve quality, and reduce time to market. The use of SharePoint as a collaboration platform can be leveraged to create a "step change" in your project performance.

In this session, we will discuss some methods that have proven to be successful for explaining these concepts and then organizing the taxonomy. You will see how to use tools that help users to inventory their documents and capture the metadata.