SharePoint Conference - NZ
Thursday 17 March 2011 at 07:44 am. Just wrapped up day two of the SharePoint New Zealand Community Conference.Pretty good so far - Microsoft did a pretty awesome job with 2007 and now 2010. I think this is reflected in the rapid adoption of SharePoint as the de facto standard for Intranets worldwide.
The conference itself is good - the keynote was a little dull. Focussing on the building of global SharePoint user-groups and communities - it came across as a bit more of a travelogue rather than a 'SharePoint is awesome lets see how people do cool stuff with it'.
The second keynote to kick off day two was much better - Dux is quite the dynamo. Covers alot of ground in terms of a successful SharePoint platform deployment from a business perspective.
The other sessions were a bit hit or miss - but there were definitely good bits in every sessions to file away for future reference.
High-lights (there was lots of good stuff but being a pessimist at heart the Lows outwiegh the Highs)-
* Pingar Auto-Populating meta-data
* Who knew there was a SharePoint Developer Debugging Dashboard you could enable for every page ?
* WebParts360 demo - a bit over my head but building an order system without writing code in five minutes was cool
* Clear explanation of CRM/SharePoint strengths and weaknesses plus integration options
* Community Solution - helping a Not For Profit make the most of their SharePoint system through community aide
Low-Lights (note really bad its just from an Ops perspective its useful stuff I'd like to learn about) -
* Its interesting that a lot of SharePoint 'stuff' appears to be done by Government or Education - they get hefty discounts on SharePoint - for everyone else its painfully expensive (don't get me started on internet connector licenses !)
* People bandying around 'Document Management' for scanning solutions (you're not really going to tell me a Fuji Xerox Scan to SharePoint solution is in the same league as a FileNet or DocsFusion solution ?)
* People talking about sync and offline use while bagging Lotus Notes . . . Domino web-enabled all databases several years ago !
* No discussion about SharePoint working with Team Foundation Server for automated builds
* No discussion around packaging SharePoint solutions or best-practises for deployment between environments
* No discussion on DR, BCP or High Availability
* No discussion about forming a suitable support team
* No discussion about permissions, roles or security delegation
Definitely recommended - and as a community driven conference (rather than vendor) it was very well attended and professionally run. There would have been a thousand plus people and four simultaneous streams running over two days. Thats alot of organising and coordinating.
