Jason Medro Brain Dumapge from TechEd 2006

Recovered from TechED 2006- Here comes my brain dump!

All I have to say is WOW what a great week!!  Not only did I learn an awful lot about the upcoming technologies (MOSS 2007, WSS v3, Office 2007) I got to meet a bunch of awesome people who are all for the same cause SharePoint!!  One year ago I attended this event and failed at doing one thingâ€�  Meeting and networking with a lot of intelligent individuals.  I firmly believe that these events are truly great for:  learning, networking (making new friends), eating, and of course you can’t forget about those late night parties J.

Again it was great to meet and hang with the best of the best:  Andrew Connell, Heather Solomon, Bob Mixon, Spencer Harbar , Shane Perran, Amanda Murphy, Shane Young (and Nicole who knows SharePoint!), April (MVP Lead boy is she popular J) and last but not least Joel Oleson in the fleshâ€� cool stuff!  

Anyways other than going to Fenway for the attendee party and stuffing my face full of hot dogs and pretzels I did learn some things throughout the week.  Today is going to be from a session labeled:

SharePoint Designer Workflow and Customizing Sites by Alex Malek

 

I took some notes from his presentation and these are some of the key points I took out of the presentation.  SharePoint designer looks to be much improved over its predecessor Frontpage 2003.  One of my favorite little feature is the built in CSS pane that is built in so no more searching for STYLES!! 

• SharePoint Applications
  
  
  
  • Use SharePoint Designer to buld "no code" composite apps
    
  • Ideal for tracking and reporting apps, information portals
    
  • Integrate external data into SharePoint solutions
    
  • Application glue using workflow

• Leverage platform to quickly build apps
  
  
  
  • Lists and libraries to store data
    
  • Read and write data with data views
    
  • SharePoint right/roles presence, search, notification

• No Code Solutions
  
  
  
  • SharePoint Designer "no code" features mean solutions creators don't have to be dev to:
    
    
    
    • Create custom list views and forms
      
    • Integrate external data into SharePoint solutions 
      
      
  
  
• Collaboratoin Development
  
  
  
  • Create lists and doclibs
    
  • Design Web pages
    
  • No-code data view/forms
    
  • No-code workflows
    
  • Web part hookup 
    
  
  
• SharePoint team working on 40+ new templates for V3 
  
• Improve DV WYSIWYG design experience




• Conditional formatting
  
• Static and ad-hoc sort and group
  
• New Ajax support for filer
  
• New Design view and code view is now in synch to work with XSL 
  


• DV Access to Data
  
  
  
  • Improved OOB suport for lists, SQL, OLEDB ,XML ,SOAP services 
    
  
  
• SP designer no code workflow solution
  
  
  
  • Workflows are attached to lists and run for a specific item within a list 
  
  
• Use custom Master pages for application chrome
  
  
  
  • Quick global changes
  
  
• CSS tools for customizing SharePoint syles
  
  
  
  • Core.CSS automatically copied to each local site
  
  
• Users can "revert to template page" aka reghost the page
  
• Contributor Mode for fine grained restrictions on what users can edit in SharePoint designer 

Types of InfoPath forms OOTB Workflows 

• Association Form
  
  
  
  • User adds workflow to a list
    
  • For setting options on WF
  
  
• Initiation Form
  
  
  
  • For manual workflow start
    
  • Collects workflow parameters
  
  
• Task completion form 
  
• Modification form 

Just a couple cool things that we (IT PROS) have to look forward too J

Stay tuned tomorrow for another compilation of notes that I took from the presentations I attended.  I am also in the process of putting together some great notes from what was IMHO the best presentation I attended Bill English’s Upgrade and Migration.  Was not stop taking notes now just have to summarize my chicken scratch into someone readable!

Cheers!