On Tuesday I presented, “Getting the Most Out of SharePoint” at the Web Technologies Conference in Spanish Fort, AL, which was co-sponsored by Microsoft, The Gulf Coast Technology Conference, and Bit-Wizards.

Despite a few technical glitches and last minutes emergencies, the entire day went very well. I received a ton of very positive feedback about how the presentation had a good balance between technical and ‘C’ business type level content, which is great because that was the tightrope I was trying to walk. If you’ve never given a technical presentation, you can’t appreciate how difficult it can be to find the right balance.

During intermissions I had a great time mingling and telling old war, IT horror, and Cincinnati/Dayton stories with attendees. I hope we get to do more of these because SharePoint adoption is growing by leaps and bounds, but in the haste to implement too many people (IT and Business teams) are painting themselves in a corner or not getting the ROI they could, thus it becomes SharePoint’s fault.

I don’t think we’ve published our slide deck yet so below are highlights of my presentation:

SharePoint should become the hub of your business activity-

• The built-in resources/features should be leveraged for all future Intranet applications.
• Imagine productivity gains by not having to start from scratch security/reporting/search/workflow/forms when developing Line of Business (LOB) applications
• If you dream it… it can be done.

Have A Plan -

• It is not just an application you install and run with - that is the recipe for failure Business and IT Stake Holders should be involved Develop and communicate the following:
  • Governance Document
  • Business Requirements
  • Project Plan
  • Project Design
  • Branding Design
  • Training Plan

Integrate it with Existing Applications and Data Extend ROI by keeping existing business systems - 

• Any line of business (LOB) application that .NET technologies can communicate with can be integrated with SharePoint
• You can integrate existing web applications or use the underlying data in SharePoint
• Let SharePoint be the ecosystem for your Intranet applications

Brand Your SharePoint - It’s not a question of Fashion or Function – you can have both

• Out of the box SharePoint 2007 looks dated and plain
• Branding will help ‘sell’ SharePoint up and down the organization chart
• For extranets you can extend your corporate brand to vendors and outside companies alike

Microsofts’ SharePoint is the 800lbs gorilla and will continue to get better.

• Fastest growing server product
• 100+ million licenses sold
• 1 billion in revenue in FY08
• Growth of 35% over FY07

Note: I’m less sleepy and much more patient today, so now I’m correcting this blog entry.

This evening I was setting up a new instance of MOSS (Microsoft Office Share Point Server 2007) and ran into a error during installation. The installer would almost immediately display the following message and show a simple ‘Close’ button. Obviously this would be a bit better user experience (UX) if there was some way to determine what the particular error was that caused the installer to quit. (I have faith that the MS SharePoint team is working on this as we speak) After checking a few blogs and TechNet, I found the solution at David Longnecker’s blog which, ironically, is named Ramblings of the Sleepy.

“Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 encountered an error during setup.”

The fix was to install and run a tool from Microsoft called the, “Windows Installer Clean Up Utility“, and then reboot the machine.