Debbie Ireland carried out an awesome session yesterday, her tips are as follows :

1. Encourage Collaboration – Use SharePoint for wikis and discussions.
2. Organise you data – External Lists, Metadata, Views.
3. Display Key Information – Web Parts – use external web parts (for things like FB, Twitter, weather, etc).
4. Use Visualisation – Dashboards for high level, integrate with other systems, use Visio web parts to visualise.
5. Improve Processes – Use Workflow, Get rid of paper forms and use InfoPath. Use DocRead to get your users to acknowledge they have read a document (shameless plug) 😉
6. Control File Chaos – Reduce time, use metadata. use Content Types and use Office to allow users to work at the same time. use templates with your content types. Create custom Views for your content types. Associate workflows to content types. Use Content Types! Co-Author documents. Document Info Panels.
7. Use Familiar Tools – Use Outlook for task management, sync calendars and contacts. Use Discussion forums. One that really suprised me is the ability to show social contacts inside Outlook too. Awesome!
8. Bring in Social – Use Org Browser, Tags and Notes, bring what we love about Facebook to SharePoint. Get Blogs going.
9. Provide support and training – Self Help (FAQ’s, wikis), Solutions (Continuous Improvement), Support. Use the Productivity Hub which is site collection of training material that can be installed on your portal. http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=7122
10. Make Search simple – Use managed metadata & best bets.