<Disclaimer>This is personal notes of what I retained during the session. This can be incomplete, partially right or wrong. It is just  part of the notes I took and what retained my attention. Nothing prevents the user to get more information on their favorite web site.</Disclaimer>

Customer experience at Cotecna : Intranet Setup with SharePoint 2007
As the company grew quite well from its beginning, the need for an intranet became stronger with the years. Today, Cotecna has now more than 1500 users spread in 100 offices looking for an intranet.
The initiative started by a survey in order to understand what the users were needing and two main topics came out : an intranet and having a standardization of the corporate brand in the intranet. From this, a wish list has been established.
Once the management had agreed of the project, and the functional architecture drawn, it is the IT team that decided to use SharePoint 2007. The problem was, at that time, that there was very few knowledge of SharePoint 2007 internally.
The first phase of the project, focused on the corporate intranet portal, was also to have a network performance assessment to be sure that the infrastructure was in place to welcome such intranet.
Then, a first version of the look and feel was designed
This led to a communication portal using publishing and a set of useful tools : quick links available on all the pages, a who’s who using the user profiles of SharePoint to look for colleagues by office or department and some basic online training for using the intranet.
After more or less 6 months, the corporate intranet portal was in place.
In a second phase, the goal was to develop the business sites and to improve the look and feel to apply on the blogs, forums and wikis as well.
Because of the few internal resources skilled with SharePoint, a lot of consultants were hired to speed-up the progress of the project.
To drive the project implementation, workshops and scoping sessions were organized to get a wish list on which people worked on for 3 years.
An important thing is to have a governance plan in order to measure if the intranet fits the needs of the users (“where we are”) and also to enforce the use of the out-of-the-box features rather than doing development being using Visual Studio or SharePoint Designer.
A strong management buy-in is also important.
Another key to success is a close collaboration with the IT.
In terms of permission rules, Cotecna is using two schemes : AD groups and SharePoint groups. The former is used for corporate sites, the latter for private sites.
The acceptance of the users were got by many “awareness trainings” to teach how to use SharePoint, how to store and update files and also saying and repeating that putting files in SharePoint is a lot more secure than in e-mails.
Since the launch of the intranet, a strong demand from the users has been raised and in such situation, several advices are given :
Not too much selling the SharePoint features. The risk is to say “yes” to everybody and then facing an implementation issue because in fact the feature cannot be implemented without potentially heavy customization (development)
Many requests from local offices were coming and even if the first answer would have been “yes”, at the end, in order to avoid the proliferation of unmanaged sites, “no” was answered
No my sites

Several difficulties encountered during the project :
The company does not have Office 2007
No SLA was set between the IT and the users
Trainings were given online rather than on-site (for cost reason)
IT governance must be established, but was not present at the time of implementation.
A technical team with the required SharePoint skills is being built internally.
The need to industrialize the provisioning of the sites is raising.
One of the conclusion is that the look and feel does really help users to adopt the intranet.
Currently, the intranet is only supporting English, but the corporate news are published in 3 languages (English, French and Spanish).

Product Overview by Ventek International : Enterprise Search with FAST ESP Sharepoint 2010
With the buying of FAST by Microsoft, Microsoft moved from the challengers to the leaders Gartner quadrant in terms of search solutions.
With the explosion of content on the internet and intranet, it appears that more tha 80% of the content is unstructured. It means that it is documents like word, excel or others.
And today, not finding the right information at the right time has a cost. Also because decisions made on inaccurate data can be problematic.
FAST comes in two flavors :
   FAST Search for Internet Business that has a release cycle of 12 to 18 months
   FAST Search for SharePoint that has the same release cycle as SharePoint (36 months).
But both have the same underlying search platform.
The SharePoint search uses the content and the profiles, but when installing FAST, all the content is sent directly to FAST for indexing.
FAST has the same APIs as SharePoint 2010.
In the index building process, several steps are added, compared to the SharePoint 2010 search :
   Language detection
   Lemmatizer, enabling translating plurals to singular
   Date and time normalizer
   Tokenizer
   Vectorizer for similarity search
Some of the advantages of FAST :
   Visual Best Bets
   Similar search
   The standard search refinement done by SharePoint 2010 is made from the first 50 documents resulting the search. FAST goes beyond this limit
   The web parts are open and public
   Supports a lot of different data sources, being for structured or unstructured content. Each source has its own security model.

Technology Overview by McNext : Migration path(es) from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010
Proposed migration lifecycle :
   Learn, read the documentation, be sure that everything is documented
   Prepare, plan the migration, make a list of the solutions to deploy, establish the in which order the farms will be upgraded. Plan hardware upgrade. Identify the customizations. Make the items upgradeable, into solutions. The worst case is when a customization has been done in SharePoint Designer.
   Test, first on content database similar to the final content to migrate. An example with several site collections and several GB of data. It will give timings and errors that may come later
   Implement, do the migration according to the plan
   Validate, check the logs and reports. See if there are orphaned items
Some common problems :
   Missing dependencies between web parts
   Lack of disk space

Only two upgrade methods available : In-place upgrade or database attach.
During the migration, the database should be in read-only and when the content is huge, a parallel migration can be done.
If there is a lot of development done using the SharePoint API, it will be more difficult to migrate.
There is no direct migration from SharePoint 2003 to SharePoint 2010. This will probably provided by 3rd parties. Moreover, the ServicePack 2 has to be deployed in order to enable the migration.
With the SP2 comes the stsadm –o preupgradecheck command that generates a html report giving the potential issues to the migration.
It is not mandatory to upgrade the look and feel to the SharePoint 2010 upgrade, but once migrated, it is possible to see how it looks like before switching to SP2010. Nevertheless, once switched, no roll-back is possible.
Now, with SharePoint 2010, all the master pages are using <div> positioning and no more relying on <table>.
As the Shared Services Provider has disappeared with SP2010, there is a lot of changes in Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration namespace of the APIs.
Ad finally, XSL is used everywhere for the list views, rather than CAML.

Customer experience at HEIG-Vd : SharePoint Online, Master thesis initiatives – SharePoint Competency Center
The competency center has started in 2007 at HEIG-Vd and involves around 10 people.
Currently, two courses at the IICT department are given on SharePoint : “Introduction” and “Using and administration of SharePoint”
The infrastructure is composed of about 40 web applications (20 of them are plain out-of-the-box) for around 3000 users
The challenges are : fast growing organization and availability of the people is best-effort basis. Also, the accumulation of experience is one of the challenges.
In terms of technology, the different projects are using a mix of other technology than SharePoint : Typo 3, Dot Net Nuke, etc.
A Bachelor thesis on SharePoint online is running and one of the objectives was to estimate the cost of several content management infrastructure :
   MOSS 2007 => 537.— CHF / month + setup
   Alfresco => 395.— CHF / month + setup
   SharePoint Online => 152.--  CHF / month for 15 users

Product Overview by SQLi : SharePoint workflows with Nintex
Some advanced activities of Nintex :
   Delegation / Escalation
   Scheduled Workflows
   Enterprise Integration (LDAP, Web Services, BizTalk Server)
Nintex also offers the possibility of approving and rejecting a task just by putting keywords in the e-mail answer. Particularly useful when on the field and using a mobile.
Then, a little presentation of the different activities available in the Nintex toolbox and of Nintex Reporting 2008.

The next Swiss SharePoint Club event will take place in Zurich the 15th of June and will contain : SharePoint development with the Microsoft tools, a presentation on the newsletter creation, an eGov project at the Canton de Zurich and how to build business critical solutions with SharePoint.

A recurrent request with SharePoint 2007 was how to assign metadata to documents or list items. In fact, apart from using lists of keywords as custom columns in content types, there was no out-of-the-box way to manage taxonomy at the enterprise level. Therefore, the keywords list had to be duplicated and even worse, synchronized to assure the consistence of the taxonomy. Moreover, there was no way to send Content Types across site collections.

With SharePoint 2010 comes the Managed Metadata Service Application that you can connect to your web application. Thus, it offers a central mean to manage your enterprise keywords and their hierarchy (taxonomy). Also note that the same service can be used to push or publish a content type to other site collection or even other farm, which is a great feature, but that will not be described in this blog post.

This first article about Managed Metadata Service will lead you through the steps to manage your enterprise taxonomy.

But, before we start, some glossary :

• Term store : the location where the taxonomy resides or are stored. There is only one term store per Managed Metadata Service.
• Term group : a group containing common purpose term sets. It is also a security container, meaning that, like site collections, you can set the permissions at that level.
• Term set : a taxonomy
• Term : a keyword
• Tag : in opposition to a term that is taken from a closed list of keywords, a tag can be freely defined by any user.

Now, start by defining our taxonomy. In the Central Administration (CA), under the Application Management section, go into Manage Service Applications. Click on the Managed Metadata Service proxy representing a connection or an instance of your Managed Metadata Service to open the term store.

On the left pane, the term store is displayed and it is under the name of your connection (or proxy) that you will create the term group. The Search box allows searching a specific term in case you don’t remember where or in which taxonomy a term is filed.

In the right pane, it is possible to select the Managed Metadata Service connection you want to modify. You can also delegate the administration of the term store to others by declaring them in the Term Store Administrators box. If you have installed language packs on the server, you have the possibility to define which of the language the default one is. Just below the Default Language drop-down, you can select in which languages the Term Store will be available, knowing that if a term is not translated, the default language will be used.

On the Term Store in the left pane, click on New Group and name it Geo. At that level, it is possible to delegate the management of the group to other people that will be responsible for managing the contributors and the group itself. A contributor is therefore able to add, change or remove terms in a group. Of course, that newly created group can be deleted by clicking on Delete Group.

At this level, there are two choices. The first one is to import the taxonomy directly from a comma delimited file. Thus, when you click on the term store, the right pane has a section named Sample Import in which a link to a sample is provided. Opening that file, you will see that the format is really not difficult to understand and that there is no need to go in the SDK or on the web to discover and understand an obscure format. Indeed, at each line of the file the complete hierarchy of the term is described. So, when you click on a Term Group, you can import such file. If for reason or another, the same term appear at the same level of the taxonomy, a warning will be displayed, but the file will be imported anyway, importing only once that term.

The second choice to define the taxonomy is the one that is described now. Here, there is probably a question that is popping-up in your mind. How to export a taxonomy ? At the time of writing this post, the feature is not present in the UI and will probably not be implemented in the final release as well. For this, there is no other choice than using the API to get the terms from the store. This will be described in another post.

On the newly created term group, click New Term Set and name it Political. Groups or users can be set as term set administrators. An important setting is the Submission Policy that tells if users can add terms when tagging items or documents. In other words, if terms can automatically be added if a user types a keyword not present in the taxonomy.

On the Term Set, the following actions can be done :

• Create Term : To create terms or term nodes. This will be used to create the whole hierarchy of the taxonomy.
• Copy Term Set : Copying a term set will create a new term set with terms that will be reused, keeping the original terms in the source term set.
• Reuse Terms : Allows to take another term (or term node) to reuse in the selected term set. Typically, reusing a term is used when a keyword can describe something that can be part of more than one hierarchy. For example, in a industrial company, an engine can be a product, but can also be a project. It means that it will be present in both product and project metadata hierarchy.
• Move Term Set : Moves the term set from a term group to another one.
• Delete Term Set : Self-explanatory, this will delete the entire Term Set.

In the right pane, you can see that another tab is present, named Custom Sort. By default, the terms will be sorted as they have been entered or as they appear in the tree. The problem is that sometimes, you prefer to change the order to promote some terms. Clicking on Custom Sort will propose two choices, the default one being the Use default sort order according to current language. The second option, Use custom sort order allows you define yourself the order in which the terms should appear.

From here, the goal is to enter several terms.

To make a term available for tagging items or document, the Available for Tagging must be checked. When language packs have been installed, it is possible to select the language you want to edit. In Other Labels, it is possible to add one synonym per line that will be associated to the term. It means a user can select a synonym in the list that will automatically translated into the base term. At the bottom of the right pane, the list of term store where the term is available is listed.

On a term, the following actions can be done :

• Create Term : Same as for a term set, creates a new term
• Copy Term : Creates a copy of the term and, contrary to the same term set action, this will not reuse the term, but really will copy it.
• Reuse Term : Allows to select a source term to reuse under the selected term.
• Merge Terms : Once a term is selected it merges it with the target term selected in the pop-up window. In other words, the term selected will be a synonym of the target term.
• Deprecate Term : Makes the term no-longer available when tagging an item or a document. It is still there in the store, but, from a user point of view, it is like if it was deleted.
• Move Term : Moves a term into another term
• Delete Term : Completely deletes a term from the store
• Copy Term with Children : Available only on node terms and creates a complete copy of the term with all the children and their hierarchy.

This closes this first blog post on the Managed Metadata Service. The next one will focus on how to use the taxonomy we defined in a web application or a site collection. But, before closing this blog post, there is another question that we should ask. How to use external data as metadata ? Currently, nothing is done for this, but we can guess that ISVs will make tools and connectors to allow this functionality in SharePoint 2010.

The next Swiss SharePoint Club event will take place at the HEIG-Vd in Yverdon.

In the agenda, some customer experience at Cotecna, a presentation of the FAST ESP SharePoint 2010 and also a presentation on the migration from SP2007 to SP2010.

The complete agenda is available on the club sps web site.

The launch date is known, it is going to be the 12th of May at 11am EST that Stephen Elop, from the Microsoft Business Division, will announce the launch of the 2010 version Office and SharePoint suite : http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/businessproductivity/proof/pages/2010-launch-events.aspx#fbid=D25IVliERtZ

So, 66 remaining days to wait....