Workshops

April 1 & 2, 2008
Boston, Massachusetts at the Four Seasons Boston
Each workshop will run from 8:30am – 5:00pm

Day One

Understanding Microsoft SharePoint v3/2007 in Context

Description: This workshop provides a strategic, enterprise-level assessment of SharePoint’s capabilities and implications. It is designed for organizations seeking to determine if, when, and to what extent SharePoint should play a role in their collaboration and content infrastructure. To help organizations determine if SharePoint is likely to be an opportunity or challenge for their needs, the workshop establishes a framework for assessing SharePoint and its implications.

This in-depth one-day workshop covers topics including:

• An introduction to SharePoint v3/2007 including a demonstration slides of capabilities and what is potentially not to like
• An overview of the enterprise context for collaboration and information sharing
• A detailed review of SharePoint capabilities including objective and independent analysis of SharePoint maturity, issues, and implications, including weaknesses in SharePoint v3/2007 and overall competitive landscape projections
• What’s next for SharePoint and Office
• Competitive landscape projections including likely impacts of IBM, Oracle, Novell, Adobe, Cisco, and Google

What You Will Learn:

Attendees will learn the answers to key questions for organizations evaluating, planning, implementing, or migrating to Windows SharePoint Services v3 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007:

• How does SharePoint technology fit into a larger enterprise strategy for fostering communication and collaboration and encouraging end user content creation?
• What is the state of usefulness/maturity of SharePoint technology such as content management, portal, collaboration, and business intelligence?
• Where does SharePoint fall short and how can it go wrong?
• How will the rest of the vendors in the industry respond?
• Is SharePoint the right answer for your organization for everything that it does or should it be deployed piecemeal?

SOA Assessment and Planning

Description: Are you ready for SOA? Where should you start? How will you specify actionable steps that will move your organization away from project silos and towards a service-oriented mindset? What projects will bring you the most benefit? What areas of your organization, architecture, infrastructure, or development practices need the most work? This workshop provides guidance and practical advice to help an organization conduct a successful SOA initiative. Every SOA initiative should start with a self-assessment to gauge the organization’s readiness for SOA and to recognize areas that need improvement, identify opportunities, and establish priorities. Once you know where you are, you can then plan a course to get to where you want to go. The workshop will describe the following tools that can be used to define and guide your SOA initiative:

This in-depth one-day workshop covers topics including:

• SOA maturity model framework
• Assessment surveys
• Recommendation templates
• Sample initiative roadmaps

What You Will Learn:

Every SOA initiative should start with a readiness assessment. This workshop will give you the tools you need to do so:

• What aspects of the organization should be evaluated?
• How do you measure readiness?
• How do you establish priorities?
• How do you increase organizational maturity?
• How do you measure maturity and demonstrate business value?

Day Two

Microsoft SharePoint Infrastructure Planning and Governance

Description: The 2007 release of SharePoint offers an important opportunity for implementers of earlier SharePoint releases to re-evaluate their often tactical, disorganized, and organic SharePoint environments, and to approach collaboration and content management design, governance, and deployment from a strategic, enterprise point of view. Failure to take advantage of this transitional opportunity may lead current SharePoint customer organizations down a long, expensive, and strategically counterproductive path. This workshop addresses infrastructure planning and governance issues with these modules:

This in-depth one-day workshop covers topics including:

• SharePoint as an enterprise solution
• SharePoint governance
• SharePoint security
• Customizations and design management
• Deployment pre-work
• Adoption of SharePoint in the enterprise

What You Will Learn:

Attendees will learn the answers to key questions from architects, and infrastructure planners about implementation and deployment of Windows SharePoint Services v3 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007:

• What does it mean to treat SharePoint as an enterprise solution rather than a departmental information sharing mechanism?
• How should organizations approach securing SharePoint for internal or extranet use?
• What pre-work is necessary for planning a SharePoint deployment?
• What governance models work for SharePoint?
• What infrastructure do we need to have in place for SharePoint to work?
• How can SharePoint be customized?

SOA Infrastructure Reference Architecture

Description: You’ve been tasked with designing a SOA infrastructure. Where do you start? What infrastructure technology components must be procured? How will you host services? How will you control access to them? How will you manage them and ensure that service-level agreements are met? How will you ensure that services are properly secured and instrumented? This workshop will examine the requirements of a SOA infrastructure from a functional perspective and will discuss the various alternatives available to address those functional requirements. It will provide candid feature/benefit analysis of the various types of products, and discuss methods for upgrading your existing middleware environment.

This in-depth one-day workshop covers topics including:

• Is an ESB a prerequisite for SOA?
• What value does a BPEL engine provide?
• How do you support both SOAP and REST?
• What mechanisms are available to track SLAs and pinpoint failures in the system?
• When is it appropriate to use an XML gateway?
• Is a registry really necessary?
• What aspects of governance aren’t optional?

What You Will Learn:

This workshop will examine the requirements of a SOA infrastructure from a functional perspective and will describe product alternatives to support the following capabilities:

• Service platforms
• Service mediation
• Service management
• Registry and repository
• Policy management
• Contract management
• Quality management