Life, the universe and whatever

More excellent community content

I saw Eric Shupps present at the European SharePoint Best Practices Conference this week and he has that rarest of combinations – a deep knowledge of and experience in the product together with a confident and competent delivery.  Eric has posted an article titled Debunking SharePoint Performance Myths and anyone working in any capacity within the SharePoint space will find this type of information invaluable.  I believe that it is shared insights like this that make the product stronger as we can all only do and experience so much ourselves.

Other highlights of the conference for me this week were Andrew Connell with a talk entitled ‘Building High Performance Solutions on MOSS’, Daniel McPherson discussing ‘SharePoint, the Social Computing Platform’ and the whirlwind that is Todd Bleeker giving us more information than could possibly fit into just one head on ‘Best Practices for Creating Custom Field Types’.

Whoever had the idea of a casino night after day 1 should be given a big pat on the back – excellent idea that had exactly the desired effect (I suspect).  I met several new people that evening and we ended up discussing SharePoint, Tamil Tigers, kilts and the north south divide (amongst other things) in a Westminster pub until late.

Overall, I wish the content had been slightly more in favour of excellent insights from the frontline such as Eric’s blog post but I know the organisers have a tough job getting the balance of content just right and I’m looking forward to reviewing the delegate DVD containing recordings and the slide decks from all the sessions.

European SharePoint Best Practices Conference

By virtue of the fact that I have worked for a succession of the world’s tightest employers and am now in the employ of probably the tightest of them all (i.e. myself), I have never been to single fee based conference.  However, after much persuasion my aforementioned current employer agreed that the first European based SharePoint Best Practices Conference was too good an opportunity to miss.  I am therefore happy to report that for the next 3 days my only concern is exactly how I arrange my time to hit all the sessions I really want to see delivered live (although I have already established that is actually impossible as several sessions I really want to see clash).  That said, one of the many benefits is a post conference DVD of all the sessions which for me will be almost worth the registration fee alone.  Of course, the opportunity to catch up with and talk to many of the SharePoint world’s leading lights and so many MVPs in one place will be invaluable.

It looks as though the guys have arranged after hours social gatherings every day culminating in a SharePoint by Day, SharePint by Night evening after the conference closes down on Wednesday.