23 04 2010

What the hell? I actually ended up going after all, although only to day 3, with huge thanks to @einaros for donating me his place.

After getting up at 3am on Wednesday morning to leave York and arriving at the QEII Conference Centre in Westminster for 8am, I managed to get registered and join the show.

Straight off at 8.45am was the first session from Mark Macrae about installing SSRS SharePoint Integrated Mode, demonstrating some of the key things to remember and various hiccups that could come along the way. The demo gods were kind to Mark, only teasing him with some screen resolution problems and a slight delay in loading Report Builder at the very end of his session.

A quick break, and caught up with the guys from ID (@WorTony, @m_Macrae, @Sharepointalex, @sam_wainwright and @id_arby) before heading into Chris O’Brien’s talk (standing in for Andrew Connell who couldn’t make it due to Volcanic Ash[TM]) on What’s new with Web Content Management in SharePoint Server 2010. Lots of nifty features Out of the Box with 2010 that makes WCM far, far better for content authors.

An extended coffee break then off to Daniel McPherson’s rather animated presentation on Information Aggregation. Fascinating food for thought here about Real Time Information and it’s use for corporate social networking, including a look at how some of the new features in 2010 can harness and capture people’s activities into aggregated views, and ways to encourage user adoption by advertising levels of activity.

After a rather filling lunch and networking hour, it was off to see Andrew Woodward show off some of the content editing features of SharePoint 2010 make the site generally work like a Wiki, and how far the wiki editing features in SharePoint have come since 2007. Very much end-user oriented, but good to see some more of 2010 as I’ve yet to get my hands dirty with it!

Another break and finally to end the day’s session was the Developer Ask the Experts panel, led by Andrew Woodward and featuring some of the day’s speakers, including Spencer Harbar, Eric Shupps and others.

Ended the day with a SharePint with the ID lads, @DiegoTrashcan and @mikewat.

The effort that Steve Smith and the rest of the organising team put into making the conference happen was astounding, and with so many of the speakers who attended standing in for those who couldn’t, this year’s conference proved a testament to the community. They have proved that we are a community that gets things done whatever it takes.

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