Mimi walihudhuria kwanza wangu milele SharePoint mkutano this past weekend and it was a blast.

Mchana Alhamisi, Mimi alimfukuza chini ya Virginia, kuongozwa na wapya yangu kununuliwa $50 GPS appliance plug-in thing to my phone. The device was flawless. After the five hour drive, Mimi nilikuwa na nishati ya kufanya kukimbia nzuri kwenye kinu kutembea na kisha, hata zaidi ya kushangaza, 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 dakika ya 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, Nami kufunga habari hii katika mfululizo wangu zaidi ya saa EUSP.com for End Users trying to get the most use out of that tool. I blew through my slides and demo in 35 dakika, to my dismay at the time. Kwa bahati, Q&ilikuwa ya kusisimua, no doubt helped by the fact that it was early morning before lunch. Q&A is my favorite part of any presentation.

Kulikuwa na watu wengi masomo ya kuvutia na mimi matumaini ya blog juu yao kwa undani zaidi ya wiki hii (wakati kuruhusu, kama siku zote). 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) kwa 3 au 4 masaa (na kwamba, baada ya mimi kumaliza kunywa kwa usiku). I don’t often get to talk about Farscape au Babeli 5 na Kansas City wakazi.

Bob Fox alikuwa hapo na kama kawaida, ni kimbunga cha intros, chats and just plain frenetic energy. He invited me to Saturday breakfast with Sahil Malik and that was great.

Jumamosi (siku 2), Mike Lotter dragged mwenyewe kwa mkutano wa kuzungumza kuhusu InfoPath na kisha alijiunga na Becky mwisho wa siku ya kufanya aina ya ujumla Q&kikao kwa kuhusu 30 kwa 45 dakika hasa kulenga InfoPath (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" kwenda mbele.

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. Hatimaye, Nataka hadharani kuwashukuru Gary BLATT, Gary Vaughn and Bob Fox for alerting me to and allowing me to speak at the conference. Bila shaka, 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, ni kali kwa mkutano juu na wale haiba yote online umefanya kujulikana kupitia blogs, Twitter, vikao, nk.

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