We are in the midst of a “Big Data” revolution. According to IDC, data is expected to grow by as much as 44X over the next year to a staggering 35.2 zettabytes globally. While Big Data is a big problem, the real issue is making sense of Big Data and finding patterns in it that help organizations make better business decisions. Whether it is social media data posted on Facebook about your product, customer service records, or the enterprise applications of a newly acquired company, your ability to harness this information bears directly on your bottom line. That is where content intelligence comes into play as it adds consistent metadata. The metadata is either based on taxonomies/ontologies or through sentiment analysis and fact extraction to improve the quality and depth of content, making Big Data much more amenable to analysis, and hence allowing organizations to better understand customers and competitors, to identify impactful market trends, or simply to automate the process of answering common customer questions.

Microsoft is expected to be close to completing work on the “Office 15” wave of products by late this year. One of those main products is SharePoint 2013, the next version of SharePoint Server. There’s lots we know now about SharePoint 2013 and its online complement, SharePoint Online. But there’s still lots we don’t. Come to this session to hear a unique, insider’s perspective on 2013.

As an organization matures, the platform must mature and grow along with it to ensure it can continue to meet/exceed the needs of the business. If the SharePoint implementation is unhealthy or has problems, these will compound over time and may lead to solution, project, and potentially even platform failure. A “SharePoint Health Check” helps identify how “healthy” your SharePoint implementation is in the following areas: Infrastructure, Performance, Security, Integration, Search, Taxonomy, Governance, User Adoption, Usability, and Development. Through a “SharePoint Prescription,” learn about many SharePoint best practices that can help make your SharePoint environment healthier based on the above-mentioned areas.

For those of you unfamiliar with this format, the concept is simple: Bring your toughest, thorniest, most intractable SharePoint conundrum or challenge and a team of experienced consultants will compete to offer you the best advice in 2 minutes or less. But there’s a twist … We use noise-canceling headphones to make sure the consultants can’t hear the answers that the other consultants give. Come and get insightful, likely controversial, and sometimes entertaining answers to your most pressing questions.

This keynote panel, interviewed by Patrick Lambe, explores the idea through military, healthcare and emergency response contexts, that KM is not just a backroom support function but can have significant impact on people's lives and organizational performance. The panel shares how lessons from KM practices in these contexts can raise the stakes for, and impact of KM in other organizational contexts.

Microsoft released its updated cloud offering for productivity tools in June of last year. Since that time, adoption has taken off. However, there’s still confusion among end users regarding what’s included, how it works, and what opportunities (especially in the case of SharePoint) organizations have to customize the basic experience. In this session, internationally renowned expert on SharePoint, Shawn Shell, gives you an overview of “what’s in the box” with Office365 and shows the highs and lows of the SharePoint experience in the cloud.

SharePoint is a complex and broad-reaching technology that is extremely effective for managing projects and fostering collaborative efforts, but implementing it intentionally and with a view to ensuring that the implementation addresses the issues of each department in your organization is critical to a successful implementation. It’s easy to be tempted to skip crucial aspects of an implementation to get a solution off the ground more quickly, and these temptations can lead to several “deadly sins” that will hurt your implementation. Join Dux Raymond Sy as he explains the pitfalls and describes how to avoid them to maximize success with your SharePoint implementation.