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Technical Speaking

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Technical Speaking

Rob Bogue is certifiable . Microsoft. Novel. CompTIA. He’s got author credit on 25 books.  If you are looking for a dynamic speaker with experience and prowess, Rob Bogue fits the bill.  These  days if something doesn’t work you wipe the computer and restart. When your router starts acting up at home it’s a quick call and a replacement. Troubleshooting problems it seems is a lost art. We learned computers and networking from the metal up so that when something went wrong that we’d know how to troubleshoot the problem. Whether it’s pulling out a breakout box to watch the signals on a serial line (RS-232) or sniffing packets on the network to see an abnormal number of connection resets, or pulling out a voltmeter to ensure that the power is right, we’ve got the deep experience that brings character and realism to our talks.

Studio J Photo - Jay Kelly Photo - Jay Kelly SF CA 94107

 

Topics

  • SharePoint
    • Getting Around to Governance – Governance is always the thing that people think they need to get to someday.  With the pressures of managing day-to-day operations putting together a governance committee or plan may seem out of reach.  In this session, you’ll learn how to get a governance project started even if you can’t get to the end.  Governance is really about asking the right questions and having answers to them – or deciding you’re not ready to answer them.  We’ll provide the key questions that you want to ask about how your SharePoint will work and what you can and can’t do with it.
    • Convert an Email Culture into a SharePoint Culture – E-mail is pervasive. Despite the social media pundits claiming that e-mail is dead, it still overflows mailboxes and inundates everyone in the organization. In this session, we’ll illuminate a path from e-mail addiction to a healthy relationship with e-mail. Along the way, we’ll talk about what’s wrong with the obsession with e-mail, the tools that we have to move the organization down the path of recovery, and what gets in the way.
    • Adoption and Engagement- User adoption has always been a challenge with SharePoint.  Some users and some departments see the value and jump onboard while other groups seem to ignore the power of the platform and blindly carry on business as usual without it.  In this session you’ll learn how to get all of your users to understand the value and how to create a “home team” advantage when selling the upgrade to your organization.  We’ll explain what makes users hesitant and what you can do to help move them along.
    • Developer Meet Workflow 2013 – SharePoint 2010 made incremental improvements in workflow with the introduction of reusable SharePoint designer workflows.  In SharePoint 2013 we’re getting a brand new approach to workflows  that promises to deliver opportunities to create new solutions which integrate SharePoint into broader work streams.  In addition to support for Windows Workflow Foundation 4, the model shifts to the Azure Workflow Services/Server approach, so SharePoint is no longer the direct host for workflows. In this session you’ll learn how this change impacts your workflow design approach and how to implement workflows in your environment.
    • ECM Content and Records Management – SharePoint is a powerful enterprise content management system but how do you get the most out of it?  In this session we’ll talk about ways that you can leverage SharePoint’s ECM feature set to improve how you manage content in your organization.  We’ll also dispel the confusion about records and show how document retention is handled.
    • Generating HTML from Word Documents – Content authoring in today’s world is hard.  You can start by creating HTML but it’s much easier to use a word processor like Microsoft Word to create the content for a book and then use that content in multiple ways including to create Wiki’s.  In this session you’ll learn what is really done from a practical perspective to create a book and a Wiki.  Robert Bogue will quite literally show you the tooling created for the SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide – and talk through the challenges of transforming content.
    • Pilot to Production to Productive – Our end goal is to have productive users using SharePoint to get work done but how do we get there?  Whether you’ve already implemented SharePoint or are just considering it, come join us on the journey from piloting a new solution – whether that’s a single business solution or an entire SharePoint implementation – to productive users.  Along the way we’ll talk about how to get into production and what to do after.  The framework presented here helps you get through a successful pilot, a calm production go-live, and ultimately to having users productive on the platform.
    • Practical Information Architecture in SharePoint 2013 –  There will be no fancy words (that aren’t made fun of) and no complex mathematical models.  In this session you’ll learn to take content types, site columns, and navigation options and assemble them into an information architecture that your organization can actually use.  Learn how Managed Metadata Services can help you ensure consistency while location-based default metadata can help to drive metadata “entry”.  This session delivers information architecture you can do.
    • Project Management with SharePoint – You can use Project and Project Server to manage a project but what about all of the “miscellaneous” things that a good project manager has to keep track of and manage through completion or resolution?  In this discussion you’ll learn how there’s more to SharePoint than just storing documents.  SharePoint can be a platform for managing issues, risks, and the other information about a project.  We’ll show you some simple techniques for making SharePoint a more powerful tool in your tool belt.
    • Psychology of Engagement – According to Gallup the average organization has 49% of its employees not engaged – and another 18% of its employees actively disengaged.  Whether your organization is above or below normal, engaging employees is a difficult task.  We’re going to look at a variety of psychological models that can be taught to managers, discussed with employees, and implemented throughout your organization.  From assessment frameworks for employees to evaluation frameworks for your engagement work to foundational skills for management and leadership, we’ll explore how to wrap a package around your need to engender better engagement to get better bottom line results.
    • Records Management – More and more organizations are being forced to comply with regulatory compliance for record keeping.  Unfortunately organizations are being sued and, therefore, are subject to eDiscovery requirements.  In this session you’ll learn the basics of records management as well as how to use SharePoint as your records repository.
    • Requirements Gathering for SharePoint Developers – Getting good requirements may be the key to good development but that’s hard to do in a SharePoint environment where sometimes the platform will meet a requirement, sometimes you can configure out of the box components to meet the requirement, and sometimes you need to crack open Visual Studio and do your magic.  In this session you’ll get SharePoint specific requirements gathering tips as well as tools that you can use for any requirements project.  We’ll help you ask the questions to know whether out of the box will do it – or whether you’ll be developing something new.
    • SharePoint 2013 Installation Tips, Tricks, and Traps – SharePoint 2013 is dramatically more complex to set up and configure than previous versions of SharePoint.  Tighter integration with Exchange, the new application model, externalization of Office Web Applications, and external workflow services mean there are more integration points that must be set up than ever before.  Add to that the new topology options for SharePoint Search and you’ve got a list of things that can go wrong.  In this session you’ll hear tips and tricks to get your installation working correctly, and learn about the traps you’ll want to avoid.
    • SharePoint Knowledge Management – SharePoint is an ideal platform for Knowledge Management – but what is knowledge management and why does it matter for your organization? We’ll start with a brief review of why knowledge management is important and explore techniques to help  you  integrate knowledge capture into your processes.
    • SharePoint: Zero to Professional in a Day – You’re new – or newish – to SharePoint but you have to get up to speed and running quickly.  In this session we’ll move quickly through the basics of SharePoint including navigation and search through the skills to view and edit data quickly and easily.  We’ll end by teaching you how to create your own business solutions with SharePoint.  Along the way we’ll help you learn how to make tough decisions on what SharePoint features you should use and when.
    • Sharing for the Social Skeptic – There’s an absolute roar of excitement about Social in the enterprise.  Brought together by enhanced tools and lesser fears for how employees will use social technologies, Social is definitely the hot thing to have in your implementation plans.  But how does it deliver business value?  If you’re skeptical of how social technologies can be leveraged to drive business value, you’ll find the answers here.
    • Ten Non-SharePoint Technical Issues That Can Doom Your Implementation – You’ve heard that SharePoint implementations are technically challenging and complex because of all of the pieces. However the real truth is that much of what makes SharePoint difficult to implement correctly has nothing to do with SharePoint and everything to do with implementing the core technologies. In this session, we’ll tour the most common issues with the supporting technologies that cause frustration and performance issues. You will leave armed with a set of specific criteria and architecture principles to ensure a successful implementation.
    • Tricking Users into Entering Metadata –  The key problem in findability isn’t search.  The key problem is getting users to enter the metadata that the search system needs.  In this session, we’ll show you some sneaky tricks to get users to enter metadata without realizing it.  They get what they want and you get the metadata you need to improve their search results.  We’ll use SharePoint 2013 / Office 365 as our demonstration system — but the concepts apply to most content management systems as well.
  • Application Development
    • Lifecycle- SharePoint has always had a different software development lifecycle than traditional apps.  The fact that SharePoint solutions are composited from configuration of the site plus code has given us a different set of approaches to creating solutions based on SharePoint.  Apps create a new set of challenges with client secrets and fixed provider URLs.  In this session you’ll learn some practical approaches, techniques, and tools for building solutions built on SharePoint – whether you’re building SharePoint Solutions or SharePoint Apps.  Here we’ll talk about the approaches to development, QA, and production environments and how to make the process work.
    • Conflict Resolution – Technical professionals are predisposed to feelings of right and wrong.  We believe that there’s one right answer and it’s ours.  Every technical professional has encountered times of disagreement and conflict, but few have been trained on the causes.  This course teaches the conditions that create conflicts, the specific causes that trigger it, and the techniques for resolving conflict.
    • Developer Requirements Workshop – One of the weakest links in the software development process is getting good requirements.  How can you build a solution if you don’t understand the problem?  Whether you’re responsible for capturing requirements yourself and want to know how or you’re just helping the business analyst get requirements right – you need help.
    • From Object Oriented Language to Object Oriented Development – Nearly everyone is working in an object oriented language these days but many struggle with how to build solutions in object oriented ways.  In this session we’ll review the principles of object oriented design and discuss the pitfalls that trap developers that snare developers and prevent them from writing better code.  Whether you feel like you’re not developing in an object oriented way or you are looking to coach others to develop better, come learn foundational principles that lead to better code.
    • Hack Proof: Software Design for a Hostile Internet -Software today is subjected to numerous vectors of attacks.  The Internet world is a hostile world and our apps need to be expecting to encounter digital terrorists who want to use our applications to get inside our organization.  In this session you’ll learn about some of the most common attack vectors for applications and what you can do about them.  We’ll discuss techniques for protecting from user input including injection and cross site scripting attacks.
    • Making Change in an Organization – More than Just Dollars and Cents – Organizations today are faced with more rapid changes than at any time in history.  Technological advances and social advances are changing the way that organizations operate at a rapid pace – or at least that’s the idea.  Every organization has mass – and therefore inertia.  Trying to break free from the inertia your organization has requires techniques and approaches that are proven to work.  Taking research from Harvard, MIT, and other top schools we’ll show you what you can do to start and maintain an organizational change project.  You’ll learn how to plan for the change, get people engaged, keep them engaged, and a few things about the psychology of how people work together.  Come join us for what promises to be an entertaining and informative look at helping your organization adapt to the ever changing environment that it lives in.
    • Radical Requirements: Tips for Delivering What They Want – Agile, Waterfall, or Agile-Fall understanding what the users want is key to a successful project.  Throw away the 100 page document and join us on a journey about how to elicit requirements out of customers who don’t know what they want.  In this session we’ll teach you some radical techniques to getting the requirements you need to deliver great software.  This isn’t another high tech tool for capturing requirements and tracing them.  This is about tools you already have and how you can use them to get the results you want.
    • Recording Technology for Outstanding Online Content – Your content may be stellar but you’re not an expert on recording technology. You are committed to creating effective online learning and probably have little budget to invest in the equipment you want. What microphone and what camera should you buy? What features do you absolutely need? Get straight talk about what you really need and what you really don’t when it comes to buying microphones and cameras to help you stretch that limited budget even farther. In this session we’ll give you the no-nonsense answers to your questions about how to get a good recording – and good online experience – on any budget. We cover getting good audio, including types of microphones and how to get rid of background noise.  We also cover what you need to know about video cameras, including how to do “green screening” (chromakeying) quickly and effectively, and we’ll give you tips for improving your environment.  The solutions are practical real-world solutions guaranteed to help you achieve better recordings and create a better online learning experience – every time.
    • Reduce the Friction on Your Knowledge Management – The very nature of Knowledge Management requires the cooperation and involvement of folks across the entire organization. You need a lot of input from a lot of people to achieve a successful project.  When there are a lot of people involved, a lot of things can go wrong.  In this session we’ll explore the forces that threaten to slow or stop your knowledge management initiative – and what you can do about them.  From silent dissent in your meetings to varied interpretation of the company mission, you’ll get insight into the root issues and learn practical methods for regaining control and momentum for your KM initiative.
    • Requirements Skills 101 – As developers we never have the benefit of perfect requirements.  There are always opportunities for improvement and ultimately the quality of our work depends upon how well we understand the requirements.  So whether requirements are officially in your scope of duties – or not – we all can use to learn some basic skills that will help us better understand the requirements of the system we’re building.  In this session you’ll learn some skills – and some tricks – to gathering requirements or shoring up the requirements you’ve been given.  Join us for an interactive session on how to better gather the requirements from your stakeholders.
    • Retain Your Business’ Knowledge- According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, voluntary employee turnover has been 20% less than the 10 year average for the last four years.  As the economy struggles to recover, the threat that your employees will voluntarily leave your organization is real.  When they leave, they’ll be taking with them knowledge that may simply hamper productivity or may have a substantial, critical impact on your business’ ability to deliver service to your customers.  (Who in your organization would be difficult to replace if they left?)  Now consider an aging workforce – the drain of knowledge resources from an organization is inescapable.
    • Taxonomy in an Hour: The Intranet – In this interactive session you’ll take a sample content inventory from a hypothetical manufacturing environment and work in teams to create a non-departmental taxonomy for the information.  There’s no death by PowerPoint here.  Following a brief introduction, we get straight to the work of creating a sample Intranet taxonomy that would actually be suitable for use in an organization.  Before the session is over you’ll see that you can create a taxonomy that isn’t aligned to departments.  You will be challenged to put what you know about organizational behavior and classification techniques to work.
    • The Circle of Site Lifecycle – The lifeblood of a SharePoint environment is the sites that get created.  Just as for effective plant growth you must trim them so too must you appropriately archive and delete your SharePoint sites.  In this session you’ll learn how to manage site deletion – beyond what SharePoint offers out of the box.  On the other side, you have to make the process of getting a site created easy too.
    • TypeScript Development in SharePoint –  SharePoint 2013 brings a radical shift towards HTML5 and JavaScript development, however, JavaScript was never designed for large scale development efforts.  TypeScript is a language that is designed to address the large-project concerns of JavaScript.  TypeScript compiles down to JavaScript and therefore can be used in any development process that uses TypeScript.  In this session you’ll see how to leverage TypeScript to create large-scale client applications.
    • What’s the Problem?!?: How to Resolve Conflict – Conflict is everywhere.  With your users you’re fighting for reasonable requirements.  With your infrastructure team you’re fighting about deployments and what you can do.  You’re even in disagreement with your fellow developers about the right way to implement the latest feature.  Most of us would admit that we don’t always resolve conflicts as easily as we would like.  Come learn the skills to quickly and easily navigate the difficult waters of conflict.  Learn how to keep your cool while stating your needs and how to get others to listen to you.  Prepare for a different experience as you’ll do exercises to teach you the skills you need to be an expert conflict negotiator.
  • Networking
    • Card Sorting Away Departmental Structures –  Most taxonomies and navigation still reflect the traditional corporate hierarchies — and sometimes for good reason.  However, consumers often have trouble finding content because they don’t know who owns what they need.  In this session we’ll do an open card sort with a sample content inventory to demonstrate how you can nudge yourself into a more consumer friendly structure.
    • Cultural Barriers to Knowledge Management – and What to Do About Them – All knowledge management initiatives rely at least to some extent on out-of-stream activities and those activities ultimately are altruistic in nature.  Most employees in most organizations are not oriented to altruistic ways of thinking.  However, there are ways that you can get the out-of-stream knowledge management activities you want and need — even in a culture that doesn’t value or support them.
    • Innovating with the Knowledge You Have – Organizations are struggling to be more competitive through innovation, however, how does an organization become more innovative?  The answer to this question is rooted in what innovation is.  Being innovative is often misunderstood as being inventive. Organizations today have to learn how to use the inventions that they already have and implement them as innovations. And implementation necessitates change which we all know is a challenge for organizations of all sizes. Join us to learn how you can help your organization achieve success innovating with the knowledge it already has.
    • Integrating Identity with Office 365 – DirSync and ADFS –  Identity integration options allow you to leverage your active directory for the accounts on Office 365.  Though generally an easy process, you’ll learn what problems may come up and what to do about them as well as how to decide whether to use DirSync with password synchronization or if you should be using ADFS to authenticate users yourself.  In this session we’ll also talk about the tools that you can use to resolve account synchronization problems and how to diagnose, troubleshoot, and resolve authentication issues.
    • New Hire: the Process – Onboarding a new employee is a complicated process for any organization.  One part of the onboarding process is the technical – the creation of user accounts and getting the security setup.  Another part is getting all of the supplies and equipment the user needs, from a desk to business cards and computers.  The process involves so many different people and so many different tasks it’s difficult to keep track of everything.  In this session you’ll learn how to turn SharePoint into an onboarding system with workflows, tasks, and automation.
    • No Governance as Usual – Governance is a struggle that many organizations face.  Getting the business to take ownership for the governance, figuring out what part of the governance is most needed, and figuring out how to get buy-in are all common problems.  In this session you’ll get practical advice for moving your governance forward – even without 100% buy-in.  Join us for a session about what you CAN do with governance (instead of what you can’t).
    • The Art and Practice of Information Architecture – Information architecture is an elusive thing. You know that finding information is hard in your organization even in the age of search, so how do you combat the flood of meaningless information that seems to be spread everywhere? We’ve got the answer. In this interactive tutorial, you’ll get to understand precisely what information architecture is and what the barriers are to information architecture. You’ll learn about the tools inside of SharePoint that allow you to do good information architectures, how to transform organizations to better organizational strategies, and techniques you can use to both develop and validate your information architecture.

 

“Very forthright with his perspective, covered a wide range of questions, good actionable suggestions” – from SPTechCon DevDays

“Excellent presenter with many opportunities to engage/ask questions” – SPTechCon Austin

“Great speaker, superb insights, many aha moments, exceeded expectations!” – SPTechCon San Francisco

“Really useful content with real world examples” – SPTechCon Boston

If you want Robert to speak to your group contact us.

 

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