This time last week, I was in Montreal, attending the highly recommended SharePoint Summit 2009.  I gave a 3.5 hour tutorial on installing and customizing SharePoint.  It was a scary subject on many levels.  I’m not really a SharePoint admin, but I know enough to give a tutorial on the subject. (Thankfully, Geoff Schaller from Software Objectives in Australia, among a few others, was in the crowd to answer some of the deeper questions [I don’t know what they put in the water down there, but we need some of it here in the U.S.]). 

But, back to many levels of scariness…  It had a lot of potential to be very boring.  I actually installed WSS and then upgraded it to MOSS.  In front of a room full of people.  Canadian poeple.  There were long 5 and 7 minute gaps where we were watching the installation process chug along.  I needed to fill that time with something useful and interesting.  I’m not sure I succeeded.

Finally, it was loooong.   Three and one half hours.  That’s a long presentation.   I made a little joke of it, saying “We have a long presentation ahead of us.  Three and one half hours.  That’s 210 minutes.  And I don’t even know how many minutes that is in Canadian.”

Everyone laughed and as a result, Montreal is officially on my Good Places list 🙂

Even if they hadn’t laughed at my joke, I would love Montreal.  I try very hard to be open minded and not take my cues from South Park, but I admit, to my chagrin, that I had no idea how great is the metropolis of Montreal.  I can’t wait to go back in a few months, when it’s a little warmer, to visit again.

On a sort of related note, I also sat through Erik Swenson’s first public presentation entitled “IA and Branding Process: Sketches to Wireframes to Hi-Fidelity Designs.” (Erik is my EMC colleague).  Check out the abstract here: http://www.sharepointsummit2009.com/conference_day2.htm.  I even recorded it for for him.  I tried several times for some “action shots” and zoomed in on him when he paused to drink some water.  I didn’t always succeed, but I tried 🙂

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