Request a SharePoint Design Time Session at SharePoint Conference 2011 in Anaheim

If you are a SharePoint Conference 2011 registered attendee, the Microsoft SharePoint documentation teams are offering a limited number of dedicated solution-design sessions for individual customers that are not currently engaged with Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS). These sessions are intended to help IT professionals envision and plan a solution based on the 2010 family of SharePoint products and technologies.

Sessions will last 60 minutes. If you are selected, you will meet with one or more product experts (Microsoft product team members, consultants, or MVPs) and one or more SharePoint documentation team members to discuss your solution goals, get advice on current challenges, and envision how to enhance your solution using SharePoint 2010 products. Design sessions are offered for the categories listed in the table below.

Proposed Focus Areas	Description
Automated Deployment and Updates	Are you implementing an environment for automating deployment and updates? We want to hear your challenges and work through design issues. Special consideration is given to environments that automate updates from a test environment to a production environment using Windows PowerShell and scripts.
Business Intelligence and Office Services in SharePoint	​Share how your organization currently uses or wants to use business intelligence (BI). Come to this session to discuss a BI solution that meets the needs of your entire organization, ranging from executives to teams and individuals.
Designing Virtual Architectures	Review your plans for deploying SharePoint in a virtual environment. Prerequisites for this session include virtual architecture design plans or a representation of your current SharePoint 2010 virtual environment.​
Enterprise Search	Share how your organization currently uses or wants to deploy or improve enterprise search to help your people be more productive. Let's discuss how you design a search solution that is optimized to help users and that meets your performance, scalability, and security requirements.
Geo-distributed Environments	Are you scaling across the globe? Share your business requirements and we’ll discuss recommendations for scaling beyond a single farm, including: optimizing the collaboration experience, deploying service applications, and optimizing farms for WAN connections.​
Mixed Deployments (On Premises and Cloud)	Do you want to move parts of your business infrastructure to the cloud and keep other parts in on-premises deployments. What new user scenarios are you trying to enable by doing this? How do you decide which parts stay on-premises and which go to the cloud? At what point does a standard cloud plan become insufficient and a private cloud becomes worth the additional investment? What are the main considerations driving all these decisions? This session aims to explore these sorts of questions.
Office Web Apps for SharePoint	Do you have a need for browser-based viewing and editing of Office documents from anywhere you have a connection to your organization’s SharePoint site? Do you have questions regarding PowerPoint Broadcast Slide Show. Come to this session to discuss Office Web Apps and deploying into your current environment.​
Social Computing at Scale	Are you planning or implementing social computing features, such as user profiles, profile synchronization, and My Sites, in your SharePoint environment? Do you have questions about implementing these features in a complex environment, such as cross farm or with multiple regional farms? Come to this session to review your plans and understand when to you should use multiple User Profile service applications and how to configure your environment to stay in sync as things scale out.​
Web Content Management - Internet Presence	Review your existing Web Content Management/Internet solution, or your plan for implementing a new Web Content Management/ Internet site. Get feedback on your solution design from the experts, as well as input about using WCM features in SharePoint Server 2010, such as content deployment and publishing.

Sessions will focus on your design and implementation choices. You will meet with product experts who specialize in your focus area.      

To be eligible to participate, you must meet the following criteria:

• Your organization must be planning or maintaining a solution that fits at least one focus area.
• Your organization must not be currently working with Microsoft Consulting Services.
• You must bring either a draft of your intended solution or a representation of your existing SharePoint solution. For example, your draft can include the proposed physical topology, logical farm architecture, hierarchy of sites, plan for database sizing and settings, search settings, plan for security and isolation, etc.

To nominate your company or organization for a design session, send e-mail to spcdesign@microsoft.com by September 9th, 2011 (EXTENDED!) September 16, 2011, and include the following information:

• Name of your company or organization
• Contact information: name and title or role in your organization
• One or two focus area(s) you are interested in and any specific questions you have about that area now
• Brief description of your solution goals and the challenges you’d like to discuss in the Design Time session

Information that you share with the product experts and documentation team either in e-mail or during a design session will be treated confidentially. If you are selected, we will contact you with the day and time of your session by September 26th, 2011.

We look forward to seeing you in October!

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  So pumped to be one of the subject matter experts in the Web Content Management sessions!

• Anonymous
  August 26, 2011
  We had a design time session at the Seattle conference and i cannot recommend it highly enough.