Sharepoint Saturday Recap

Wow what an amazing day in Charlotte! There were so many great sessions to choose from. Some time blocks had 3 sessions of interest so picking 1 was very difficult. If you have not been to a Sharepoint Saturday in your area, I highly encourage you to participate in one. Lots of great, free, information divided between various topics.

Check out the Sharepoint Saturday website for upcoming events in your area. You can also view all the slide decks from the presenters.

The added bonus of this Sharepoint Saturday was making the personal connections of the social network that’s been evolving on Twitter and Facebook. A lot of great Sharepoint talent in the Carolinas. I’d start to list off everyone but that’d be a long list. I also did a video piece on the Employee Training template with Michael Gannotti so look for that in the upcoming days.

Also a great announcement from Avepoint about a Press release coming about product information. I won’t say what it is, but trust me, you’ll want to visit their site to grab it. Check their web site for the upcoming press release.

Plurk This Post Buzz This Post Delicious Digg This Post Stumble This Post

Sharepoint Saturday Recap

Wow what a great day of events Saturday at Microsoft for Sharepoint Saturday. Great job organizing this event Dux, @meetdux, it was awesome and smooth. A bit of a recap of the sessions I attended.

After a killer Keynote with Joel Oleson, NS Rana, Thomas Vander Wal, and Errin O’Connor, the event broke out into End User, Developer, Admin and Special Interest sessions. The first session I attended was Eric Harlan’s, @ericharlan, presentation on Federated Search. Wow, is this easy to configure and get running. This will be of great benefit to pull search results from external sources and not have to index that on the farm, good stuff. This is going to be of benefit once we get the infrastructure updates in place.

Dan Lewis, @danlewisnet, put on a good demo of the Sharepoint blog and how it can be accessed with Word (my favorite, do this every week) and Live Writer, which I need to try. He also made mention of Lee Reed’s series on endusersharepoint.com on how to pimp your blog. Also check out PixelMill for Sharepoint skins for your blog. Good stuff by @hwaterman.

Joel, @joeloleson, put on a great demo of Twitter and Sharepoint administration. The room was packed, and the live feed was dropping people. There were over 50 people watching his presentation via the web cam that was set up. Joel lived up to his Sharepoint rockstar persona.

I had high hopes for the calendaring in Sharepoint sessions put on by Julie and Daisy from Bamboo Solutions. It unfortunately took a sales pitch approach for a few of their web parts. This isn’t necessarily bad, as they were a sponsor, but I had hoped that they’d show some more detailed uses of the calendar in Sharepoint, similar to Mark’s creating a master calendar.

Paul Galvin, @paulgalvin, shared experiences in creating vertical applications within Sharepoint. His point of using Sharepoint as a platform to solving business needs is spot on. Lead and development time is significantly shorter than in the standard ASP.Net Visual Studio cases. I can’t wait to do more business process application solutions in our environment.

The last session of the day was Content Types with Kenneth Lo, @kenneth_lo. This was a great refresher session for me. I struggle at times using content types. They are definitely powerful in resolving the typical network folder structure.

All in all this was a great day. Lots of great people and prizes, won a raffle for Sharepoint 2007 Unleashed. I had thought I ordered this from Amazon in the past but snafu-ed and got the Project Server version, oops. I’m excited to go through it. I got to meet Mark, @EUSP, in person. We didn’t get much time to chat unfortunately. Also I met Ruth, @rlilly, who is trying to get a user group started in eastern NC for Sharepoint. I’m looking forward to hearing something on that front. There are like no user groups east of Raleigh, except for the Tweet ups in Greenville. Definitely looking forward to the next Sharepoint Saturday in DC and/or Charlotte.

If you hadn’t noticed, there were a lot of Twitter folks there. If you aren’t using it, start, it’s a great tool.

Plurk This Post Buzz This Post Delicious Digg This Post Stumble This Post

Sharepoint Saturday DC

Sharepoint Saturday in Washington DC is rapidly approaching and I can’t wait! I just saw on Twitter today that Paul Galvin is going to be presenting. I’m also looking forward to meeting Mark Miller, founder and editor of EndUserSharepoint.com. I’ve had a guest article posted there and have been helping on the Stump the Panel forums, which is a great resource for end users.

Registration for Sharepoint Saturday opens April 16th. You can see all the details at Sharepoint Saturday. I look forward to seeing everyone there and the Sharepint session!

P.S. I’m staying at the Regency.

Plurk This Post Buzz This Post Delicious Digg This Post Stumble This Post