Liam Cleary [SharePoint MVP]

This week has been great, spending the past two days presenting and chatting SharePoint at www.sharepointconference.org which was held in Reston, Virginia this year.

It is always good to attend a conference to present and discuss how SharePoint has helped or can help a business. I had the opportunity to present on the following:

Who's Afraid of 508? Form Data Collection

One of the core business requirements SharePoint professionals have to frequently address is the use of forms for data collection. Not only is it important to effectively collect vital information through SharePoint, there are several key challenges – such as Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act -- that require additional planning with regard to form design and development.

This session looks at using SharePoint Designer, InfoPath Form Services, Custom Code and several 3rd Party components that are available and discusses the pros and cons of each approach compared against real world requirements. We will also discuss critical factors such as security, data storage, data access, and accessibility

You Say Customize, I Say Configure

Too often we develop components or complete solutions in SharePoint because it is easier for us, it is what we have always done, or we just don't know what the capabilities are of SharePoint out of the box.

In this session, we will look at where we do need to do custom development, why we would need to, and where we can use either out-of-the-box tools or SharePoint Designer as an alternative. We will use real-world business requirements to architect and design solutions. After this session, you should be able to know if and when you should develop for SharePoint, as well as the best approach to take when architecting solutions

For the Record: Document and Records Management

Every business has a requirement to store documents and records. SharePoint
does not just solve these requirements; too many companies implement SharePoint for this and expect it to fix the world's problems. In this session we will look at best practice document management and whether SharePoint can actually help you as a business with document lifecycle as well as how you can implement records management policies to govern your users.

I also got to joint present the second day's keynote with a colleague of mine Justin (@sitwalkstand) on Migration to SharePoint 2010.

The Great Migration: Content Migration Made Easy

With the release of SharePoint 2010 and with vNext on the horizon, migrating from old to new is now a reality. SharePoint can be complicated, awkward and really not helpful when you are planning to move your intranet, extranet or even your public facing site to SharePoint. Planning how you migrate is one of the key tasks that need to be performed but is often missed or done with little or no thought at the end of the project. In this session we will take you through live migrations from SharePoint 2007 to 2010. We will demonstrate the process to take, the issues you may see and ultimately give you secrets to a successful migration as well as hopefully impart some knowledge to help in your own migrations.