Catch me at the SharePoint Best Practices Conference in San Diego, California. The conference will be held February 2-4, 2009. I’ll be presenting two topics, both currently scheduled for the last day, Wednesday:

IA260, Using Content Types to Improve Discoverability

Content Types are one of the great new features included with SharePoint 2007 and they can be used to serve many different needs. In this session we will discuss some best practices and lessons learned when trying to use Content Types to make information more discoverable to users with different navigational needs. We will discuss some simple approaches to help determine which Content Types are needed and how to utilize those Content Types to address the specific goal of helping users find information more easily. We will also discuss various page design, taxonomy, and search capabilities that can be utilized as well as the lessons learned from real-world implementations.

IW265, Sub-site or Site Collection ? Best Practice Approaches, Considerations, and Lessons Learned

One of the more difficult tasks planners face when designing a WSS or MOSS environment is whether to use sub-sites or site collections and in what combination. This is a critical process to get right from the beginning as it could have extreme ramifications on the overall success of the implementation. This session will cover the pros and cons of using site collections and the best practices that affect the decisions to use them. We will look at the various ways in which a logical, hierarchical, taxonomy can be met using site collections and how to keep various assets synchronized between related site collections. Also, because sometimes even the best laid plans can’t account for the unforeseen we will delve into the various approaches available to change the site collection architecture post implementation (how and why you might need to convert sub-sites to site collections and site collections to sub-sites).

This will be my first conference talk so I’m real excited (and admittedly a little nervous) so please stop by and give me your support! If you’re not currently registered you can do so from here: http://www.sharepointbestpractices.com/ – it’s sure to be a great conference!