Conference/Tech Event

SharePoint Saturday Indianapolis 2010 Recap

Brian T. Jackett Conference/Tech Event, SharePoint

This past Saturday I spent the better part of my day at SharePoint Saturday Indianapolis (or SPSIndy for the “cool” geeks.)  For those unfamiliar, SharePoint Saturday is a community driven event where various speakers gather to present at a FREE conference on all topics related to SharePoint.  This amazing community event marked my second SharePoint Saturday attended (read my recap of SPSCleveland) and my first SharePoint Saturday as a regular attendee (not presenting.)  From the stats side I heard that over 370 people registered with around 250 attendees the day of.  That is definitely a great turn out for Indy’s first SharePoint Saturday.  I know that many others like myself drove in (3 hrs each way for me) from far away to attend.  So here’s a little recap of my day and the event.

My Saturday morning started off very early leaving Columbus, OH around 5:30am.  I was driving with Jennifer Mason (President of COSPUG and one of the SPSIndy presenters) and since she was speaking during first session we couldn’t be late.  We arrived with plenty of time so I was able to enjoy some of the wonderful hot breakfast food and drink provided.  If you haven’t been to too many conferences, you may not know that hot breakfasts are a rarity so I took full advantage in this case.  I also got to meet some local SharePoint developers during breakfast who I ended up talking to quite a bit throughout the day.

The actual conference kicked off very well with an introduction by Rob Bogue (head of the local SharePoint user group and all around great guy) and the rest of the steering committee.  For sessions, I attended a variety of topics mostly focused on the development or administrator side.  These included:

  • Woody “Windy” Windischman (@WoodyWindy) – “Intro to SharePoint Designer 2010”
  • Steve Pietrek (@SPietrek) – “Developing Silverlight for SharePoint”
  • Darrin Bishop (@bishopd) – “Goodbye STSADM, Hello PowerShell”
  • Fabian Williams (@FabianWilliams) – “Business Connectivity Services…<long title>”
  • James Curtis (@piercove) – “Intro to Client Object Model”
  • (Caught tail end of session) John Ferringer (@ferringer) & Sean McDonough (@spmcdonough) – “SharePoint Disaster Recovery”

Overall I learned a great deal, met a bunch of great speakers and attendees, and even won a SharePoint Reporting book in Darrin Bishop’s session (hooray for my PowerShell knowledge being useful!)  It was especially nice getting to hang out with some new friendships I’ve developed through the SharePoint community.  Below is my album of pictures I snapped throughout the day.  Feel free to take a look through them.  The next SharePoint Saturday I’m planning on attending will be SharePoint Satuday Michigan on March 13th.  Mark your calendars and register for it if you’ll be around the area that date.  Hopefully I’ll see you there.

Ohh, one last note.  A big thanks goes out to all of the organizers, speakers, sponsors, and attendees of SPSIndy.  Without all of you this event couldn’t have been possible.  Please continue to support the SharePoint community.  It has a lot to offer and it’s all made possible because of these people, companies, and events that continue to amaze me every time I get involved.  Thanks so much.

-Frog Out

SharePoint Saturday Cleveland 2009 Recap

Brian T. Jackett Conference/Tech Event, PowerShell, Presentation, SharePoint

As noted in my previous post I attended and spoke at the SharePoint Saturday Cleveland 2009 conference.  For those unfamiliar, SharePoint Saturday is a community driven event where various speakers gather to present at a FREE conference on all topics related to SharePoint.  This was my first SharePoint Saturday and it was a great community event to attend.  Over the past 6 months or so I’ve been following various Twitter users talking about SharePoint Saturdays in their region so I was excited to see what all the buzz was about.

Friday night I arrived in Cleveland for the speaker (nerd) dinner at Fahrenheit in Tremont.  I was finally able to put a face (real, not just their picture online) to various names like Eric Harlan (@ericharlan) and Jesse Murray (@lackscreativity) from the Baltimore and Detroit Sogeti offices, Rick Black (@ricknology), and also see some familiar faces again like John Ferringer (@ferringer), Sean McDonough (@spmcdonough), Callahan (@cacallahan) and Melissa Lucarelli (@smartyskirt).  Can you sense that I know too many people by their Twitter names?

Saturday started off early as I was scheduled to speak during the first session.  I gave my “The Power of PowerShell + SharePoint” presentation to about 20 people.  As most of the crowd was still waking up I threw in some jokes and funny slides to keep things lively.  They had a number of great questions as we went along and hopefully learned a good introduction to PowerShell and how to use it with SharePoint.

After my session I tried to attend talks on other topics that I hadn’t heard much about such as PerformancePoint, InfoPath Forms, SharePoint branding, and the new Metadata Manager.  I wish I could have attended more sessions, but only so much time in the day and I can only be in one place at a time.  Overall the level of content was good and I appreciate all the time and hard work each speaker put into the day.

Following the conference wrap-up session a dozen or so attendees and speakers met at The Blind Pig in downtown Cleveland for a ritual SharePint.  The Blind Pig was nice enough to host us and provide drinks and appetizers while us conference folks got to unwind from the day.  It was good to hear positive feedback from the conference and get to share SharePoint and personal stories.

As all good things must come to an end, so did my time at SharePoint Saturday Cleveland.  I was able to snap a few pictures which I’ve posted a link to below.  I’ve heard there will be a SharePoint Saturday Indianapolis early in 2010 as well as ones being planned for Pittsburgh and Columbus not far after.  If you’ve never been to a SharePoint Saturday I would highly encourage you to attend (did I mention it’s FREE!)  A final thanks to everyone who helped put on the event, spoke, sponsored, or had any hand in making this event happen.  Without you this never would have been possible.  I look forward to attending more such events and keeping the SharePoint community growing.

-Frog Out

Windows 7, SharePoint 2010, and Events I’m Speaking At Coming Up

Brian T. Jackett Conference/Tech Event, PowerShell, Presentation, SharePoint, Technology

As most of the technology world knows (and even the general public thanks to commercials like the one below… who doesn’t love unicorns, kittens and rainbows) Windows 7 is releasing to the public on Oct 22, 2009.  Normally this would get me very excited except that I’ve been running Windows 7 RTM as the primary boot on my home desktop and as the secondary boot on my work laptop for a few months now.  I didn’t get much chance to use Vista over the past few years (client workstations with XP, working more with servers, etc) so I’m taking a more concerted effort to jump into Windows 7 early on.  So far the experience has been great with only one major issue I had with IE8 (crashing due to plug-ins) which I’m writing another post about.

Despite the Windows 7 release this week, what really has me excited is the start of the SharePoint Conference 2009 today.  Sadly I am unable to attend the conference this year so I’ve been trying to follow news coming out of the conference through live blogging from EndUserSharePoint.com and Twitter tweeps.  One of the best pieces of news I heard confirmed one of my long held beliefs: STSADM is essentially being replaced by PowerShell (reference).  Now this isn’t to say that you can’t use STSADM going forward with SharePoint 2010.  STSADM will still be around for backwards compatibility, but you really do want to learn PowerShell if you’ll be working in any sort of developer or administrative role with SharePoint.

Speaking of SharePoint and PowerShell, I just received word today that I was accepted to speak at SharePoint Saturday Cleveland coming up on Nov. 14th, 2009.  My presentation is titled “The Power of PowerShell + SharePoint” and it will be half introduction to PowerShell and half overview of how admins/developers can use PowerShell to maintain and develop against their farm.  I’ve been using PowerShell to help me with SharePoint for over a year now and I’m very happy to see that PowerShell is taking such a prominent place amongst tools for SharePoint.  So if you’re free on the Sat Nov 14th and can make it to the Cleveland area come see me talk, the event is free.  Registration and schedules should be posted shortly to the link above.  I’ll post my slides and code samples to my blog for those unable to attend or wishing to try out samples as well.

 

-Frog Out

Attended CINNUG ORM FireStarter event

Brian T. Jackett Conference/Tech Event

Been a little while since my last blog post.  For awhile I was busy preparing my presentation for the COSPUG Show-N-Tell event and then recently working extra hours for some releases to testing and UAT at my client.  That aside I’m ready to get back to some more regular posts.

Yesterday myself and a coworker Peter travelled down to Mason, OH for the CINNUG (Cincinnati .Net User Group) ORM FireStarter event.  This was a full day event talking about various ORMs (object relational mapping) frameworks including NHibernate, FLUENT NBibernate, Castle ActiveRecord, LINQ to SQL, and LINQ to Entities.  Thanks to the below speakers for presenting, especially Phil and the rest of the CINNUG members who put on the event.  All of the sessions gave me some ideas on how to improve the process for persisting data for some current applications I’m building.  I look forward to attending more events like these as they come up, hopefully you will too.  Check out my photos from the event below as well.

ORM Architectural Overview – Phil Japikse
NHibernate 101 – Scott White
Fluent NHibernate – Brian Sherwin
Castle Active Record – Michael Eaton
LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework 101 – Bill Steele
Applied Entity Framework – Jody Morgan

Presenting at COSPUG Show and Tell Event

Brian T. Jackett Conference/Tech Event, PowerShell, Presentation, SharePoint

On Friday, May 22nd the Central Ohio SharePoint User Group (COSPUG) is hosting a Show and Tell Event at the Microsoft office in Columbus.  I’ll be presenting on combining PowerShell and SharePoint.  This will be an introductory style presentation for those who have limited to medium experience with PowerShell and a few “laser show” type finale scripts to hopefully wow the crowd.  With the current schedule I’ll be presenting during the last technical track session of the day.  Shane Young from SharePoint911 will be the keynote speaker and as with almost all talks he gives I’m sure it will be energetic and informative.  On top of all those great reasons why you should attend, the event is FREE.  Hard to beat that.  Registration can be found at the following link: click here.  Hope to see you there.

    -Frog out