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!

I am heading out to Denver first thing Sunday morning for the annual SLA (Special Library Association) Conference . Dow Jones/Factiva is a huge sponsor of the conference and i always enjoy attending because a lot of the clients i work with have librarians that attend. I am also looking forward to seeing some of my east coast clients that i miss!

I have a MLIS (Master of Library & Information Science) and although i do not consider myself a 'librarian' i do align my professional self with the profession especially in the corporate space since much of the work i have done in the last 8 years revolves around information delivery in the enterprise.

I monitor a good handful of librarian blogs (see list below) and have always thought that librarians make great bloggers. I posted the Hugh MacLeod**** drawing above because i thinks that librarians do have the passion and authority to be great bloggers!

For the last few years the conference has been very well covered by attending bloggers. I will do what i can to help the situation this year.

The Official Conference Blog:
http://slablogger.typepad.com/sla_blog/

Information Today is covering the conference on their blog: http://www.infotodayblog.com/2007/05/21/information-today-bloggers-head-for-sla/

There is a blogger get together (unfortunately i won't be able to attend- urgh):
http://sla-divisions.typepad.com/itbloggingsection/2007/05/reminder_blogge.html

Some of the conference sessions that look interesting (aside from the Al Gore keynote-yeah!):

• Giving Meaning to the Term “Customer Engagement


• New Tools for Handling Reputation and Risk


• Turning the Pages: Bringing our "Treasures" to Life Through Technology


• SLA Tech Zone: Blogs, Wikis, RSS, and other Cool Stuff within Share Point 2007


• New Tools Help Organizations Build Effective Competitive Intelligence and Knowledge Management Teams


• The Mobility of Business Information


• Best Practices: How to Implement Audience-centric Taxonomies for the Semantic Web


• Learning to Unleash the Full Power of RSS Information Feeds


• Science of Beer (not making this on up!)


• 20 Tips For Searching the New Web, Web 2.0


• XBRL: Extensible Business Reporting Language


• Finding the Concept: Using Ontologies and Semantics

****If you a Hugh MacLeod fan and a blogging librarian and you happen to read this post, i have an extra signed calendar from when i recently met Hugh at a Blogging Dinner. Be the first to find me in the booth and it is yours to frame. Here is when i am scheduled to be at the Dow Jones Booth: Sunday 11am-1pm, Monday 3-5pm, Tuesday 10-12:30pm and this is what i look like.

Some other 'library' blogs i monitor include (feel free to add more in the comments):

• http://carlnit.blogspot.com/
• http://www.blogginglibrarian.com/
• http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/
• http://jdupuis.blogspot.com/
• http://www.ia-blog.com/
• Librarians' Internet Index: New This Week
• http://dbl.lishost.org/blog/feed/
• http://librarianinblack.typepad.com/
• http://librariancentral.blogspot.com/ (Google's librarian blog)