The Best Practices Conference, Washington, D.C. in August has a track just for SharePoint Information Workers. Check out the sessions and speakers. This thing’s fully loaded.

IW105, Welcome to PerformancePoint Services for SharePoint, Peter Serzo

PerformancePoint Server has now merged with SharePoint Server Enterprise edition to become PerformancePoint Services. This is now a free component to licensed SharePoint Enterprise users. This is the Microsofts BI delivery tool that contains scorecards, dashboards, and analytic capabilities within SharePoint. Otherwise known as BI for the masses.

Giving users unprecedented power to create rich views of data can only be harnessed with a set of best practices. This session reduces the dashboard clutter and discusses best practices for when to set up a scorecard, pros and cons of setting up dashboards, and general proper use of this technology. Everything that will be shown will be out of the box.

IW312, Taxonomy in SharePoint Enterprise Content Management and Enterprise Search, Zlatan Dzinic

Large and even smaller enterprises require a standard and consistent way to understand and access the unstructured information that resides in their various repositories. Learn how to meet this business challenge with Microsoft SharePoint Server and Microsoft Enterprise Search so that your company can make faster business decisions that drive customer satisfaction and value.

IW219, – Can a business person handle the responsibility (and can IT trust them)?, Jennifer Martinez

The Site Collection Administrator role in the SharePoint product is often misunderstood and even more often inappropriately assigned. Companies either don’t respect that this is a combination of business and technical roles which comes with an incredible amount of power and access or they assume that IT will have time to manage the server and perform this duty as well.

Most organizations focus on their support responsibilities which include restoring documents and permissions (Site Owners have been known to remove themselves from a site on rare occasion). However, SCA’s have the potential to greatly influence the success or failure of a SharePoint implementation. Their creation of search scopes and Best Bets go a long way in supporting a successful search strategy. And don’t forget about their key role in ensuring the appropriate use of SharePoint Designer on sites (heard of Contributor Groups?).

This session looks at (1) the SCA role in the product as well as (2) carefully weighing the risk and the rewards of turning the ‘keys of the kingdom’ over to a business person and (3) how to pick an SCA and set them up for success.

IW126, SharePoint and SQL Reporting Services 2008 for the really really really good looking, Peter Serzo & Paul Culmsee

Charts are sexy, charts are so “hot” right now and everyone wants them in a snap. Whether it’s a bar chart, pie chart, scatter plot or even a humble table, your computer illiterate boss’s eyes will light up when presented with a pretty, personalized chart, displaying timely corporate data. Information presented succinctly and lucidly drives best practices within your organization and prevents user walk-offs.

SQL Reporting Services 2008 is a surprisingly underutilized bolt-on to SharePoint that many organizations have available today. It has the ability to empower Information Workers to transform a humble SharePoint site into a dynamic and interactive source for relevant, personalized corporate data. This results in user evangelism and ultimately buy-in and adoption of SharePoint as a platform.

This session will introduce SQL Reporting Services 2008, best practices for architecture and integration with SharePoint. We will present a “real world” case study that illustrates how the “Derek Zoolander school for the really really good looking” leverages SharePoint and Reporting Services to stop the walk-offs and create sexy, powerful and dynamic reports with out of the box SharePoint web part and no custom code.

IW240, SharePoint Information Worker and SQL Server BI Experts Pannel

Come to this pannel and get all the answers to your toughest questions!

IW261, Blogs and Wikis -The non-social use of great business tools, Jennifer Martinez

Wikis and Blogs have been getting increased attention in the ‘Social Networking’ arena of SharePoint. While that works for some companies, others are scared away by the inherent freedom and lack of structure of the wiki and the unchecked soap box capability of the Blog (see the “…and gossip” statement in the default Blog entry on all new Blog sites).

This session looks at putting the business back into Wikis and Blogs (W/B). Learn how to best use W/B for SharePoint education and increased user adoption within your organization. W/B can be as open or as restricted as your company decides. Learn the best practice for configuring W/B including security, advanced permissions, content approval, and required metadata.

Left unmonitored W/B can leave a business open for misinformation, compliance concerns, and noise pollution. Strike a balance between collaborative social networking and good solid business use.

IW275, Why use the Business Data Catalog to present SQL data in SharePoint, Brett Lonsdale

This session will demonstrate the benefits of the Business Data Catalog. Being presented is Line of Business (LOB) data using Business Data Web Parts, Search LOB data using BDC, Use the BDC field Type, and introduce the BDC API.

IW282, SharePoint, jQuery, and the Content Editor Web Part, Peter Serzo

jQuery is the newly supported compact, open source JavaScript framework in the Microsoft ecosystem. It can now be utilized by SharePoint sites to do things such as branding and add new Web 2.0 functionality without creating web parts that must be compiled and live on the server. This session is an introduction to the jQuery framework and best practices as it applies to SharePoint.

Included will be a review of how to integrate the content editor web part (CEWP) with jQuery. In the past it has been stuffed with HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and other content until it is bursting at the seams. Bloated and unreadable this web part needs jQuery and best. Finally, jQuery plugins such as lytebox and image cycling and several others will be covered to show how to give your sites Web 2.0 functionality. The end result is 10 best practices which enables, empowers, and drastically reduces the amount of code needed to create impressive sites.