2010 Speaker List
Hear from IT leaders and industry experts in more than 100 sessions at the leading business technology event.
Tony Byrne
President, Real Story Group
Tony Byrne is the President of the Real Story Group and oversees all of the technology streams and properties, which include CMS Watch, Enterprise Information Watch, and SharePoint Watch. In 2001, Tony founded CMS Watch as a vendor-independent analyst firm that evaluates content technologies and publishes research comparing different solutions head-to-head. Over time, CMS Watch evolved into a multi-channel research and advisory organization, spinning off similar product evaluation research in various areas of Enterprise Content Management. As a result of this natural evolution, in 2010, The Real Story Group became the parent company of CMS Watch and its sister entities, EI Watch and SharePoint Watch. Tony is the original author of The Real Story Group's Web Content Management research, a former journalist, and a 20-year technology industry veteran. Prior to 2001, he managed an engineering team at a systems integration firm. He now focuses his own research on Enterprise Community and Collaboration software, SharePoint, and Web Content Management. During the last decade, Tony has advised clients such as the US Dept. of the Treasury, the American Association of Retired Persons, MBC Television of Dubai, The Canadian Cancer Society, and The Seattle Children's Hospital.
Sessions
Evaluating SharePoint for the Enterprise
Location: Room 1E12
Tuesday, October 19, 2010, 9:00 AM-4:30 PM
This intensive workshop offers a critical, independent evaluation of SharePoint, detailing the platform's strengths and weaknesses culled from customer experiences and hands-on testing. Through presentations and discussion, the workshop helps you figure out how, where, when, and why to use SharePoint -- and reviews how well SharePoint "fits" into different types and sizes of enterprises with different business objectives.
The workshop will also prepare you for developing a SharePoint strategy for your enterprise, empowering business and technology managers to reach a common assessment of what SharePoint can and can't do effectively for your enterprise. This course will enable you to confidently assess and plan any effort to extend SharePoint beyond a set of departmental installations into an enterprise-wide platform.
Course Outline
* What Is and Isn't SharePoint
* How SharePoint 2010 Changes the Picture
* SharePoint Architecture for Business Managers
* Evaluating SharePoint's Core Features and Functionality
* SharePoint as an Application Development Platform
* Enterprise Architecture and Operations
* Evaluating the SharePoint Ecosystem
* Best Practices and Looking Forward
Who Should Attend and What You Will Learn
* Business analysts -- to learn what SharePoint does and doesn't offer out of the box, and what are the likely costs
* Enterprise architects and IT managers -- to better guide business colleagues about choices and impacts before they try to dive into SharePoint, by understanding architectures, governance, critical 3rd-party modules employed at the enterprise level
* SharePoint project managers, senior architects, and lead developers -- to understand what you're about to get into, with respect to architectures, licensing, and functionality, as well as different approaches for customizing and extending SharePoint
* SharePoint evaluation teams -- to level-set understanding and terminology among the team, and make more informed choices about whether and where to employ SharePoint
* Information and Knowledge Managers -- to compare SharePoint against other information and knowledge management tools in your enterprise, as well as what key investments need to be made to up-size SharePoint for the enterprise
* Consultants -- to understand where SharePoint works well, and where it does not, as well as how to improve SharePoint implementations through better governance and 3rd-party tools
* Anyone who wants to understand the impact of SharePoint 2010 on any existing deployments
Social Software Tools: A Critical Evaluation
Location: Room 1E11
Wednesday, October 20, 2010, 10:30 AM-11:20 AM
To date, technology analysts have quite properly focused on the social and business aspects of social software. And yet, social software tools (including collaboration suites, pure-play blog / wiki / social-networking products, and revamped portal products from major vendors) differ quite substantially in maturity, approach, and support. This session will share customer research from noted evaluation firm CMS Watch on leading social software technologies, and provide a framework for customers to evaluate the marketplace based on their own needs.
