SLA Tech Zone Blogs, Wikis, RSS, and Other Cool Stuff Within SharePoint 2007

At last week's SLA conference, Dow Jones sponsored and conducted a couple of Tech Zone sessions covering topics like Podcasting, the use of Captivate to create eLearning tools and sold-out sessions on Blogs, Wikis, RSS, and Other Cool Stuff Within SharePoint 2007.


One of the sessions i attended was the SharePoint 2007 session that Mike Fry and Thomas Dopko from Dow Jones conducted. After the session, Christy Conley from Sedna services was kind enough to talk to me about her company's current use of SharePoint for collaboration and new product development. One of the new features of SharePoint 07 that she was the most excited about was the KPI functionality (Key Performance Indicators).

Click To Play

Tech Zone session SharePoint 2007- Slide Deck is also available at SlideShare:



here are some of my notes from the session:

During the session i attended, half the room was already using SP03 and the other half of the room didn't have any version of SP in production at their companies- but most attendees were already 'playing' with SP 2007 .

With SP 2007 Microsoft is now describing SP as an ECM (Enterprise Content Management) system – which includes:
Document Management Services (DMS)
Record Management Services (RMS)
Forms Management (FM)
Web Content Management (WCM) – example: Ford.com is managed through SharePoint- that is how they do their web content posting


What’s new – Highlights for SP 2007
**Wikis-
**Blogs
***Mobile Access (with the correct rights to go through)-Example - meeting take aways from their meeting can be submitted to their site via mobile and then if others on the team are assigned that will get alerted.
Translation Management Library
Report Library –
Slide Library
Survey- with conditional survey (if this then go to that)
Project Task- gnat views of charts
**KPI Lists- Key Performance Indicators a lot of out-of-the box web parts that will make visual graphs out of the data.
Excel Services
Records Management
Forms Server
Knowledge/Networking – finding SMEs- expert locator
Audiences- can create a group and then publish content to the group- so the web part get pushed to anyone that has that profile. Previous version was more one user assignment at a time. Audiences simply that for not only administrators but for site owners

Workflows – help 2007 be a CMS systems- can be applied to docs, libraries etc.. Can use SharePoint Designer to create custom ones.
***RSS- every list or library is RSS enabled- also a RSS reader that is built into SP 2007
***E-mail integration- tied to email distribution lists and you can post from e-mail.
Business Intelligence-
Recycle Bin- can recover docs, sites, etc.
Navigation can now be fixed through web interface where before it had to be created via Front Page.

Permissions can be managed even at the document level.
Assign workflows at the document level as well.

anything that gets away from a secondary click to open a document is good and SP 07 seems to encourage the use the web interface as much as possible.

There were a couple of these SharePoint sessions and some i hear went better then others (technology issues with keeping the class together etc.) but overall everyone i spoke to that attended any of the Tech Zones not only enjoyed themselves but also learned a bit about how to leverage technology in the library/information center. Good job to Mike and Thomas!