Ek het my eerste keer ooit SharePoint konferensie this past weekend and it was a blast.

Donderdagmiddag, Ek het toe af na Virginia, gelei deur my nuut gekoop $50 GPS appliance plug-in thing to my phone. The device was flawless. After the five hour drive, Ek het die energie wat 'n lekker run te doen op die loopvlak meul en dan, selfs meer verbasend, had the energy to head to the lobby for an advertised speaker’s cocktail hour. Conference n00b that I am, it turned out that the cocktail hour was really a ruse to get speakers to show up and help stuff papers and swag into shoulder bags for conference attendees 🙂

Had a hard time sleeping because I was speaking first thing Friday AM. Nervousness, a nagging feeling that I needed to add a slide to my presentation and a very disturbing cat show on Animal Planet kept me up late. Since I went to sleep late, I naturally got up early. I did add a fairly detailed technical architecture slide. It was well worth the effort because the 25 minute van Q&A would have been very awkward without it. I was lucky to get the first slot in the technical track. Sahil Malik was originally going to speak Friday AM and I was going to speak Saturday but he needed to swap times. This allowed me to do my presentation and then sit back and enjoy everything going forward Friday and Saturday.

The presentation went OK. I definitely have room to improve it. I spoke about how we can access and use web services from a SharePoint Designer workflow using a custom action. Over time, Ek sal bind hierdie inligting in my reeks oor by EUSP.com for End Users trying to get the most use out of that tool. I blew through my slides and demo in 35 minute, to my dismay at the time. Luckily, V&A was lewendige, no doubt helped by the fact that it was early morning before lunch. V&A is my favorite part of any presentation.

Daar was baie interessante onderwerpe en ek hoop om te blog oor hulle in groter detail hierdie week (tyd dit toelaat, soos altyd). A fellow from CMS Watch provided a highly critical yet very hopeful review of SharePoint’s position in the market. A different discussion focused on the paucity of SharePoint resources and the difficulty that recruiters have finding good talent that is also "affordable" in this very tight market. The CMS Watch guy referred to the SharePoint human resources pool as being like a "guild." I’m mainly familiar with that term in MMORPG terms and it gave me a little thrill, to be honest 🙂

The highlight of the conference was just meeting and catching up with people I’ve "known" online for a while. The best was sitting at the bar with Becky Isserman (MossLover) vir 3 of 4 uur (en dat, nadat ek klaar drink vir die nag). I don’t often get to talk about Farscape of Babilon 5 met Kansas City inwoners.

Bob Fox was daar en soos gewoonlik, is 'n storm van die intro, chats and just plain frenetic energy. He invited me to Saturday breakfast with Sahil Malik and that was great.

Saterdag (dag 2), Mike Lotter gesleep hom na die konferensie te praat oor Path en dan het hy by Becky aan die einde van die dag het 'n soort van algemene Q te doen&'N sessie vir ongeveer 30 aan 45 minute hoofsaaklik gefokus op Path (Mike) and AJAX (Becky). I wish Becky had been able to go through her full/formal presentation but I’m sure I’ll get a chance to see that one of these days. I have a feeling she’ll be "hitting the circuit" vorentoe.

I could go on and on. Two last points — the financial purpose of the conference was to raise money for the Children’s Miracle Network and it raised $5,000. That was awesome. Ten slotte, Ek wil in die openbaar te bedank Gary Blatt, Gary Vaughn and Bob Fox for alerting me to and allowing me to speak at the conference. Natuurlik, the two Gary’s had a team of people supporting and organizing and all of you were awesome. I had high expectations before I went and it was better than I had hoped for.

Keep on the alert for the next conference scheduled for November 7th and 8th. Aside from some great content, dit is geweldig vir die vergadering met al die aanlyn persoonlikhede wat jy deur middel van blogs het bekend, Twitter, forums, ens..

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