Getting Started

Events

Click on the event you are interested in for details:

• Business Analytics Seminar Series - Transform Your Business
• Microsoft Enterprise Search Webcast
• SharePoint Saturday in Charlotte

Business Analytics Seminar Series

Transform your business using the information you already have.

Date	Time	Location	Register
April 13, 2010 (Tuesday)	9:00 a.m.  – 11:30 a.m. EST*	Philadelphia, PA Philadelphia Marriott West 111 Crawford Avenue West Conshohocken, PA 19428	Register
April 14, 2010 (Wednesday)	9:00 a.m.  – 11:30 a.m. EST*	Reston, VA Microsoft Corporation 12012 Sunset Hills Rd. Reston, VA 20190	Register
May 4, 2010 (Tuesday)	9:00 a.m.  – 11:30 a.m. EST*	Baltimore, MD Hyatt Place 4730 Painters Mill Road Owings Mills, MD 21117	Register
May 11, 2010 (Tuesday)	9:00 a.m.  – 11:30 a.m. EST*	Charlotte, NC Microsoft Conference Center 8050 Microsoft Way Charlotte, NC  28273	Register
May 20, 2010 (Thursday)	9:00 a.m.  – 11:30 a.m. EST*	Atlanta, GA Microsoft Corporation 1125 Sanctuary Parkway Suite 300 Alpharetta, GA  30009	Register
May 25, 2010 (Tuesday)	9:00 a.m.  – 11:30 a.m. EST*	Washington, D.C. Microsoft Corporation 5404 Wisconsin Ave. Chevy Chase, MD  20815	Register

 

*Registration begins at 9:00 with the program starting at 9:30. There will be a continental breakfast served.

Description:

You have the data and the processes.  But are you using them to impact your decisions?

Learn how you can deliver the right information to the right people at the right time to drive speed, accuracy and quality into your critical business decisions.

See how other companies have successfully implemented business analytics to decrease their sales cycles, increase their revenue, and predict project costs more accurately.

Join us for a complimentary breakfast seminar that includes:

• Real-world success stories and specific scenarios
• A roadmap for enhancing your business analytics capabilities
• Overview of key concepts and implementation details

Presenters:

Ray Barley

Principal Architect, RDA Corporation

(Baltimore, Atlanta, DC)

Ray Barley has been a Microsoft technology specialist for 15+ years designing and developing custom business applications, data warehouses and business intelligence solutions.  He has played a key role in helping organizations understand the Microsoft platform and how to best leverage it.  He has the MCSD, MCSE and MCDBA Microsoft certifications.

John Repko

Project Manager, RDA Corporation

(Philadelphia, Reston, Charlotte)

John Repko is a Senior Project Manager with significant management and technical experience.  He aggressively implements solutions that increase productivity, cut costs, and boost revenues.  He is an experienced lead strategist in managing the business functions of an organization as well as all phases of enterprise-wide technology rollouts. John has over 24 years of experience as an architect and developer of enterprise solutions. Coupled with extensive project and team management skills, he has a long and successful track record of delivering solutions on time and under budget.

 

Agenda:

9:00 a.m. 9:30 a.m. 11:00 a.m.

Registration Presentation Q&A

 

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Webcast: Microsoft Enterprise Search

Turn Information Into Outcomes!

Date	Time	Format	Register
March 25, 2010 (Thursday)	1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. EST	webcast	Register

 

This webcast will help you understand how Microsoft Enterprise Search can help your company improve business decisions, enable information discovery, turn online visits into revenue, boost employee productivity, and decrease complexity and cost!

 

Presenter: Greg Robinson

Senior Software Engineer, RDA Corporation

Greg Robinson is a Senior Software Engineer with RDA Corporation and has over nine years of application development experience.  During the past five years, Greg has been focused on Microsoft solutions development, specifically in the areas of custom application development with .NET and SharePoint-based solutions.  Greg has experience at all stages of the application development lifecycle as well as different development processes and methodologies.  He is also a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist.

 

Benefits of Enterprise Search

People need information to act. Customers need to find a product before they can purchase it. Employees need facts to make decisions. Enterprise search connects people to information so they can take action and effectively drive business outcomes.

 

Improve Business Decisions

In today’s information economy, the source of companies’ competitive advantage stems from their ability to manage and use information effectively. Companies can dramatically improve decision-making at all levels by empowering their knowledge workers with fast, easy access to accurate information. With FAST enterprise search, your users can uncover latent information quickly, accelerating their ability to make informed choices.

 

Enable Information Discovery

Even more important than search’s role in locating specific pieces of data is its ability to uncover relationships between pieces of information. Search is a connecting service: it relates concepts, facts, and ideas to others and it teases out relevant relationships in the data. FAST enables true information discovery by creating a “conversation” with the user. Dynamic navigation on rich fields, concept extraction, and other smart search capabilities support the user in exploring relationships in the information, leading to better context and greater depth of insight.

 

Turn Online Visits Into Revenue

Attract new consumers with search experiences that stand out in a crowd. Retain them with better discovery and compelling content. Help monetize their visits through higher conversion, more page views, and new revenue streams.

 

Boost Employee Productivity

Give your employees better answers–faster–through conversational and intuitive search experiences. Enable collaboration and sharing of expertise. Help cut costs with improved business productivity.

 

Decrease Complexity and Cost

FAST is a robust, secure, and flexible enterprise search platform capable of supporting all your organization’s search needs, both inside and outside the firewall. By leveraging a single search platform across the enterprise, you can better manage your solutions, leading to both lower risk and less complexity.

 

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SharePoint Saturday in Charlotte

Join architects, developers, and other professionals who work with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the new SharePoint 2010 for SharePoint Saturday on Saturday, April 10, 2010 at Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte, NC. Several RDA technology experts will be speaking at the event. You can find more information at http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/charlotte/default.aspx. A summary of the RDA presentations is included below:

 

FAST Search in SharePoint 2010

Presenter: RDA Project Manager Dan Gilroy

The inclusion of FAST search in the SharePoint 2010 product has greatly increased the capability to provide an intuitive search based interface for your end users.  This session will highlight some of the basics of using FAST and the benefits the platform can bring to a portal solution.

 

Architect: SharePoint in the Cloud: SharePoint Online Best Practices

Presenter: RDA Senior Software Engineer Ken Price

Ken's session will provide an overview of the typical online SharePoint environment and how to successfully navigate the service provided, what types of customizations are generally allowed, managing expectations, and Service Level Agreements you should know before your organization moves to a “cloud”-based service.

The session will also outline some of the pros and cons of adopting a “Services + Software” strategy and we will review some of the differences that exist in the current Microsoft Online Services offering versus how a typical IT department would provide the same service. We will review security and other concerns that typically are addressed prior to adopting a hosted-service for large enterprises and federal/military organizations.

Finally, Ken will provide insights to some published cases studies related to Enterprise and Federal /Military deployments and direct feedback about the process from my first-hand experience.

 

New Features of Token-Based Authentication

Presenter: RDA Software Engineer Joe Loftus

SharePoint 2010 now has the capability to leverage token based authentication provided by the .NET platform.  This capability removes some of the challenges of sharing content across delivery zones found in previous versions of SharePoint.