Category Archives: SharePoint Events

SharePoint Saturday Twin Cities–October 29th, 2011

The next SharePoint Saturday event in the Twin Cities will be taking place in just over a week on Saturday, October 29th at Normandale College in Bloomington, MN.  If you haven’t already registered – do it now.  We’ve already got over 400 people registered to attend a day of fun with the SharePoint Community in Minnesota and surrounding areas.  Come and learn about SharePoint and Office 365 in sessions for for users, developers, administrators and people new to SharePoint and SharePoint Online. 

We’ve got 25 speakers giving 27 sessions in 7 tracks through out the day.  This includes two new tracks that we’re excited about.  We have a SharePoint 101 track featuring several national speakers as well as a Hands-on Lab track being managed by Mindsharp.  Be sure to come and visit all of the sponsors that make the event possible. 

I’ll be kicking off the SharePoint 101 track with a “What is this thing called ‘SharePoint’” session that’s been described as a SharePoint session you could send your mom to.  Smile   (and one attendee did)

Check out the schedule and tell us which track you’re likely to attend most of the day. 

Also, check out GuideBook as an app for your iPhone or Android device or m.guidebookapp.com on other devices as we’ll soon have our event information available there as a tool to use during the event. 

Register Now!

SharePoint Saturday – Columbus, OH

(FINALLY posted…)

SharePoint Saturday Columbus (OH) was held a few weeks back on August 20th.  The organizers did a wonderful job organizing the event and pulling everything together at a nice venue and pulled together about  130 or so attendees. 

I presented my Lists: Used, Abused and Underappreciated session in the first time slot of the day, had decent attendance (25 or so) and fantastic participation throughout the session.

If you weren’t able to stick around until the last timeslot of the day, Jennifer Mason did a session on simple dashboards which was an excellent follow-up to the content introduced in my session.  Check her slides out – HERE.  

My apologies for the delay in getting the slides out there – I had a slight detour on my way home and was off the grid for 5 days or so – only now getting back up to speed.  My slides can be found on SlideShare – HERE. 

Please let me know if you have any questions!

SharePoint Saturday Chicago – SharePoint 101

Saturday June 11th was the suburban edition of SharePoint Saturday Chicago.  Raymond (@iwkid), Phil (@pjirsa) and I made the trip with a handful of others from Minnesota.

The organizers did a wonderful job and the weather turned out great as well.  Lots of great sessions and speakers.  They also tried some new things, which was cool.  We had a 101 track and a deep dive room in addition to some of the more traditional IT Pro and Developer tracks.  Also in the mix, and well timed – was an Office 365 track.

I was lucky enough to kick off the 101 track.  We started the day aimed at folks who don’t know much, if anything, about SharePoint.  Hopefully this was useful and enough information to get folks started for the rest of the day.  The track was as follows:

Before getting started, my session was also dubbed “the SharePoint session you should send your mom to…”  and someone did.  Smile

The track seemed to go over well.  We had 20-30 people in each session throughout the day.  The intro topic is a little tough for SharePoint Saturday’s because generally the only people that know about SPS events are those that are already in tune with the SharePoint community.  I think there is a LOT more potential for this track/area, but it might require different or additional marketing to get the audience that it’s really targeted at.  Hopefully we can repeat and expand on the 101 track in other events as well.

My slides are available on Slideshare HERE.

SharePoint MVP Chat – Wednesday June 22, 11am CDT

In case you don’t already have it on your schedule, the next MVP chat will be next week.  These are helpful and crazy events where folks pepper the MVP panel with questions for an hour with MVPs responding as quickly as they can.  Having seen both sides of the event, it’s crazy, impressive and helpful.  So, if you haven’t participated, give it a shot.  Transcripts are also made available after the event so you can take a breath and go back to see what you may have missed in the dialogue. 

Wednesday June 22nd at 9am PDT / 11am CDT. Visit the MSDN event page:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/events/aa497438.aspx

Twitter: #spmvpchat

Facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=218219718208348

Enjoy!

SharePoint Saturday St. Louis

This past weekend (4/30) was the SharePoint Saturday event in St. Louis.  The folks in charge did a wonderful job organizing and bringing in attendees.  We had a beautiful day in St. Louis.  While great weather usually translates into lower attendance, we still had over 170 folks signed in.  Campus was beautiful and the logistics were well organized.  Thanks to all the organizers, which included, but were not limited to: Matt Bremer (@mattbremer), Becky Bertram (@BeckyBertram), JD Wade (@JDWade) and others.

I delivered my SharePoint Lists: Used, Abused and Underappreciated session.  It’s a 100 level session talking about list best practices and constructed around the Best Practices Conference approach. 

Next stop will hopefully be the Chicago SharePoint Saturday event on June 11, though I’ll also be in attendance at the Minnesota SharePoint User Group meetings between now and then. 

Great job guys!  Thanks for the invite and hospitality!

SharePoint ShopTalk

SharePoint ShopTalk is yet another (free) community resource out there that I don’t think is getting as much press or exposure as it should.  It happens every Thursday at 11:30 AM Central Time. 

Sponsored and hosted by Arcovis out of New York, the ShopTalk is a Live meeting and Voice-conference call where a panel of experts are available to respond to questions submitted to the group prior to the meeting, and live as time allows. 

Sometimes there is a presentation or demo, other times we’re just taking questions and having conversation. 

For more information, check out the blog site:  http://sharepointshoptalk.blogspot.com

You can also follow and submit questions via the Twitter tag: @spshoptalk

There are a lot of great folks online on a regular basis including, but not limited to:

See you there…

SharePoint Community Events… Busy Days

There are a handful of things happening in the next day or so that might be interesting to folks in the SharePoint space:

  • Wednesday 4/20 8:00 AM – Michael Gannotti’s Coffee Talk will be taking place. His talks include:
    • Microsoft Productivity News
    • Productivity Customer Onsite Experience
    • Special Guests
    • Tips and Tricks
    • Gadget of the week
    • Live Audience Q&A
  • Wednesday 4/20 11:00 AM – Q&A with the SharePoint MVP Experts.  Access the event by checking out the MSDN Events and Webcasts page.
  • Wednesday 4/20 6:00 PM – Microsoft Store at the Mall of America.  From 6:00 – 8;00 there is a Special Event for Business solutions.  They’ll be covering Microsoft Signature Pro and Microsoft Office 365 – Cloud versions of Microsoft’s communications and collaboration (yep – SharePoint) products.  Oh, and did I mention a 15% store discount during the event?
  • Thursday 4/21 11:25 AM – SharePoint ShopTalk
    Register for this week’s event.

Hope to see you there!

SharePoint Saturday Twin Cities – 4/9 Recap

The latest SharePoint Saturday event in the Twin Cities was a huge success!  Some of the numbers:

The new location worked out very well – holding everyone without too much crowding (other than a few really popular sessions), with free parking and wireless access available.  A nice upgrade from our previous digs.  We also had a Kinect play area during the day.  Smile 

Presentations are now available on the site for download. 

Keep an eye on the official site for updates and news about the fall “ScarePoint Saturday” event – tentatively scheduled for October 29th.

A big thanks to Sarah Haase for overseeing the organization of the event, as well as to all the sponsors, volunteers, and attendees. 

See you in the fall!

SharePoint Saturday Twin Cities–4/9

Yep, it’s here again.  This Saturday is the latest SharePoint Saturday – Twin Cities event.  This is a FREE one-day Microsoft SharePoint product seminar/conference event.  We’ve got over 400 people registered to attend at our new location – Normandale Community College in Bloomington.  So if you haven’t already registered, do it soon. 

See the list of sessions and speakers and register here. 

We also just launched a facebook page for the event and ongoing events.  

Also keep an eye on the Twitter hashtag #SPSTC

For those of you new to SharePoint, I’ll be doing a morning Intro to SharePoint session talking about the features and implementation efforts. 

Please let other folks new to the platform know about the event and my session as well – it’s a great (and free) opportunity to learn and share.    

See you Saturday!

SharePoint Lists – Follow up

A few things that were brought up in my session on lists the other day at the Best Practices Conference:

Inline Editing – SharePoint 2010 introduces the concept of inline editing within views.  This allows users to add/update fields within the view without having to open the add or edit forms.  This feature is not turned on by default.  Jennifer Mason of SharePoint 911 has a nice post about this feature. 

Alerts by View – We mentioned alerts and we mentioned views, but I didn’t have anything about the ability to create alerts on views.  Great comment from the session attendees on that one.  After looking at this again, I realized that this is NOT as intuitive as it should be.  You can create alerts on views, but not all views and there are some criteria for it.  Check out the following post for more information:
http://sharepointalert.info/2009/09/alert-me-tricks-fo-power-users/

Metadata Navigation – Another attendee asked about metadata navigation.  I don’t remember all the context to the question, but metadata navigation is available, but only at the list view level.  It’s not something that can be used on the main page or other web part pages.  It does, however, work with which ever view is currently being displayed – which is what I think the question was about. 

Fun session.  We had 45+ people in (and outside) a room set up for 30.  Thanks to the folks that were packed in and spilling into the hallway.  Smile