BIWUG - april 2006 meeting - Tour of the conferences, WebObs and Business Intelligence/ ECM in 2007 Office System

We kicked of the meeting with a Tour of the Conferences - Patrick talked about SharePoint Advisor and SharePoint DevConnections ( mainly a lot of laying in the sun in Orlando and playing games in Vegas ;-)) and gave a nice demo about how to create an event handler in WSS v3. You can now implement event handlers on both lists and document libraries. Another new feature with the respect of event handlers is that you can now use them both synchronously and assynchronously. Afterwards I talked about the 2007 Office System sessions at Dev&IT Pro Days Belux - for people interested, you can download the presentations here:

Office System: Introduction to the Programmable Customization Model for the 2007 Office System User Experience

Office System: How SharePoint Services 2.0 developers today can take advantage of the new capabilities in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Office System: What'>s New for Developers in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007?

2007 Office System Overview

Office SharePoint Futures

In the second part we saw a demo of WebObs - WebObs is an usage analysis tool for SharePoint Portal Server 2003 - it is based on a tagging system and does not have to use the IIS logs - this also means that all data is available in real time. You will need to add a webpart to the pages you want to track - this can be done manually, directly into the SharePoint template pages or with a configuration tool. The reports are generated using SQL Reporting Services - so you can use the features available with Reporting services - such as export to excel. You get some custom webparts to track the usage information - WebObs report wizard webpart, fixed report webpart, my last search results webpart, top documents webpart, search suggestions webpart. There is also a site template available with the WebObs usage reporting dashboard of all types of content - search queries, documents, lists, sites, for specific users (or groups of users). Reports are shown in a user-friendly way - showing title instead of the url. Pricing for WebObs for SharePoint: 5000 for Server License + Client Access License - between 4 and 5 euro / users depending on number of users.

The last part was a demo of the new Business Intelligence functionality and ECM capability in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (or short MOSS ;-)) - here are some things we saw:

Excel services and Excel Web Access

Publish to Excel Services from within Excel 2007

The new Report Center site

A basic KPI list template

New policies framework (ECM)

... and lots more...

For people interested in attending one of the next sessions - check out the BIWUG site - www.biwug.be
sharepoint2007Office2007