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