This year’s SharePoint conference was the one in between major releases so I wasn’t expecting anything new and exciting. To get the most out of the conference I followed @marcykellar advice on 11 tips to get the most out of the conference and planned to attend sessions with speakers who I knew were good and build on/extend my existing personal network. I achieved all my goals for the conference, with a rocky start, so put keyboard to MSWord to summarise my experience.
Caught up with NZ community and other SharePoint people at the AirNZ lounge (Debbie, Bendon, Paul, Grant, Steve, Jullian) for a pre-conference chat and make new acquaintances. I didn’t get upgraded as everyone else had also applied to do the same thing and had higher membership than me, so I didn’t get much sleep.
Not booking transportation from LAX beforehand was a big mistake. We ended up on a Super Shuttle in the end but it took us 2 and half hours after landing to get to our hotels. After registering at the conference and catching up for lunch we made plans for evening and then it was into the conference at full tilt.
The key note summed up SharePoint 2010 in a phrase: “Productivity Delivered”, my feeling is this is definitely what Microsoft have done but businesses haven’t yet utilised all the productivity features; based on talking to people and watching sessions that covered some of the fundamentals that people didn’t seem to know. The demo of a TB farm failing over in 4 seconds or so under a load test using Denali was impressive. They also announced that BCS for web services would be available in the next update to Office 365.
The first few days sessions I went to were probably the wrong choice as I picked them around areas of SharePoint I thought I had good experience but not in-depth; unfortunately these sessions didn’t go any deeper than what already know which was disappointing although re-assuring around my own skill set.
I decided to take advantage of the free Microsoft certifications so booked a slot on Tuesday after lunch (turned out so did everyone else). I brought the exam book from one of the exhibitors and spent every moment between sessions reading it. I passed the configuration exam although was disappointed that I didn’t get 100% but I guess with only 4 hours revision and my experience it’s a reasonable achievement. These free exams were a great idea and hope it makes reappearance in Vegas.
The sessions on document composition were my biggest takeaway as this is an underused gem in SharePoint and Office integration that I don’t see regularly implemented but can have big returns. John Peltonen‘s session introduced the concepts and that Disneyland has an army of 200 cats they let out at night to keep down the mice. The basic concept is to use Content Controls in MSWord and then through code, populate these with content from SharePoint lists, External Lists, other documents, forms etc. One takeaway from this session is that the OOXML SDK has a tool to simplify the process of writing the code to make edits. John also showed a cool idea using the multi authoring to extract content from a document when someone places a particular tag on the fly; in this case a task to populate a task list. Generating business documents session by Scot Hillier also on this subject was great as it showed another real world example of document composition and some decomposition.
Rafal Lukawiecki’s session on using BI components, an area I’m fairly familiar with, I’d heard he was worth seeing and wasn’t disappointed as his humour had the whole room laughing; You need that with what could be a very boring subject, the highlight being when he showed his website with photographs he’d taken of a location in the US (totally of topic). He showed the new SQL Server dataconnector to BING maps which is a quick way to show your data graphically. He mentioned a new tool released on for showing SQL data in a PivotViewer which I’m going to investigate some more.
Monday night’s RED party was the place to be at the Heat Ultra Lounge. Chance to catch up with some of the speakers, people I’d connected to on Twitter like Erica Toelle and let off some steam on the dance floor. Getting in at 1am though does make the following day tiring but that was the earliest I got in from then on.
The new version of Duet was something I wanted to get a deep dive on although the sessions were all high level. One of the people on the Duet SAP stand went through a personal demo for me so I could bounce around ideas and see how solutions can be built. This solution now uses External Content Types heavily which is a great extraction layer compared to past versions therefore easily understood by the SharePoint professionals. The SAP integration includes a user mapping tool and an application that enables the SAP experts to build ETC definitions using a UI to identify and configure the SAP entities; this means the SAP expert does not need to understand SharePoint concepts.
Not having to queue for Disneyland rides, what can I say? Walking around with 3 other grown men and no kids also a bonus if not a little creepy. Got my spinning R2D2 and R2D2 Mickey Mouse ears that I’ve missed out on my other 5 visits to parks around the world including this one. Also picked up a “build your own car” for my sons Christmas present or is it mine?
The sessions on HTML 5 and Jquery were packed so thankfully I’d gathered a lot of information at Tech-Ed in NZ this year. Just a word of caution, don’t use these tools to customise the ribbon and sparingly elsewhere as required, otherwise you’ll spend a lot of time on cross browser compatibility.
