Sharepoint Saturday was a hit

mwparks — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 11:38:00 +0000

On Saturday I attended a great event, Sharepoint Saturday, at Microsoft’s offices located in Alpharetta, Ga. The weather was perfect yet the event was packed which I think says something positive about the growing popularity of Sharepoint. The event was free of charge with a number of sponsors paying the costs and top notch speakers many of whom flew or drove from out of town on their own dime to present sessions. There were so many great sessions going on simultaneously I had a difficult time choosing which to attend. The first one I attended had a long title, “Building the next Generation of Sharepoint Web Parts – how to leverage JQuery and Silverlight” presented by Phil Wicklund. Phil gave an easy to understand overview of JQuery along with some great tips for getting started…and demonstrated how to easily include JQuery in sharepoint web parts. Phil stressed checking out existing plugins first at http://plugins.jquery.com before writing anything from scratch in JQuery….good tip.

I actually didn’t stay for the 2nd half of Phil’s presentation on Silverlight instead I moved over to Dux Raymond’s talk on “5 Ways to Enhance Sharepoing Site Usability” where I caught 3 out of the 5 ways. Sorry I didn’t write them down I’m waiting on the slide deck.

For the next set of sessions I split my time between Jason Storey “Building a Data Centric Portal in Sharepoint” where Jason demonstrated using the data view web part in Sharepoint Designer and “Integrating SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services with Sharepoint” where Chris Regan walked us through step by step the ardious task of installing and configuring reporting services and sharepoint to work together. Interesting that the reporting services configuration wizard sometimes “lies” to you and other times simply doesn’t work without manual intervention…whew…it’s going to be much tougher than I thought getting reporting services working with my sharepoint server but at least now I know.

A nice deli box lunch was provided by one of the sponsors and I made the mistake of finding a shady spot in the beautiful outdoors to enjoy it. Which started me thinking what a great day it is and how much I would like to attend the Atlanta Dogwood Festival. I resolve to attend one more session before heading home and to the festival.

For my last session I picked “Business Intelligence – Build a Dashboard with Excel Services and KPIs” by Jeremy Minich. In the past I’ve built a BI dashboard in Sharepoint without really understanding all of the steps and have struggled getting a couple of things to work so I thought I would benefit from seeing an expert walk through the process. And I was correct as Jeremy did an outstanding job explaining the various BI features in Sharepoint and demonstrated how to setup dashboards and KPI’s step by step exactly what I needed to see.

I missed a couple of sessions and the give-a-ways at the end of the day by leaving early but I still had a great time at Sharepoint Saturday and accomplished what I needed…a new burst of sharepoint inspiration as well as specific “how to” knowledge of new technologies and techniques.

Thanks to Microsoft and all the other sponsors, speakers, and volunteer’s who made Sharepoint Saturday a success. I’m looking forward to the next one….and hoping for bad weather on event day.

Web Master Jam Session 2008

mwparks — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 13:45:00 +0000

Had a great time at Web Master Jam Session - a two day conference held this year in Atlanta on Oct 3-4. This was my first time attending this conference and I would definitely repeat.

Speakers all seemed to be professional web developers and designers who were good at providing insights into issues and techniques for building world class professional web sites.

Some of the sessions I attended were

The Bigness of Smallness – John Moore

Universal by Design – James Craig

Going Social – Chris Perry

The Web Planning Process – Jason Ford

Design Lessons in Chess - Rob Weychert

Web Application Interface Design - Garrett Dimon

Striking a Balance – Nathan Smith

There was a general session “Web site smackdown” where a panel of experts criquited submitted websites. Another general session was really interesting as Mike Culver, web services evangelist at Amazon Web Services, spoke about Amazon Mechanical Turk.

The venue for the conference was pretty cool…a place I haven’t been in Atlanta called the Loudermilk Center located on Courtland near the Georgia State campus.

One of the best outcomes of the conference for me was starting to follow many of the speakers now on twitter so every day I’m picking up new tips and tricks from this group…kind of like the gift that keeps on giving.

Since the main sponsor, Coffee Cup Software, has moved their headquarters from Dallas to Atlanta the conference will probably be held in Atlanta next year I’m guessing. Hope I get to attend.

Michael W Parks » jquery

Sharepoint Saturday was a hit

Web Master Jam Session 2008