Well, a fantastic first day at the conference. Steve Smith and the team at Combined Knowledge have done a sterling job of organising the event. A great line up of speakers and a plentiful supply of refreshments and delicious pastries to keep us awake during the day. There’s 20 or more sessions each day, I can’t yet clone myself so here’s a taste of the sessions I attended.
Keynote
Joel Oleson kicked the speaking off with a great Keynote giving us 10 steps to a successful deployment. He started out with the Killer bunnies from Monty Python, a very apt analogy for SharePoint. So many people rush in and deploy it without fully assessing the size of the task and planning it out. This led nicely into the first step being “overcome the denial to confront Reality”, and finishing with the one we are oft prone to forget “Keep it simple stupid”. Spencer Harbar kindly demonstrated how to suggest to the speaker that he has overrun by putting his stuff in place on the platform as Joel was still speaking.
There’s 4 tracks to choose from throughout the day, IT Pro, Developer, Information Worker and Business Adoption. Not deliberately, but just from choice of what was most interesting to me I managed to attend a session from each track today.
Collaboration vs. Publishing Sites. – IW Track
Interesting stuff from Mark Eichenberger on using Collaboration, Publishing or his suggestion of Hybrid Sites. He highlighted a number of differences between collaboration and publishing at page, site and site collection levels, and then ably demonstrated an alternative approach that gives us quick launch navigation on the web part pages and removes the web part page icon without tweaking the files in the 12 hive. Very nice solution.
A Case study in Governance, Business Adoption Track - Natalya Voskresenskaya. ( I hope that’s spelt right!)
Natalya took us through her Best Practice for Governance –
· Start with Thorough Discovery
· Implement a Governance Plan
· Define your growth strategy
She took us through the case study and gave us a really good understanding of Governance Plans and how to go about them. She took us clearly through all the parts she felt necessary to a governance plan, and the fact that it needs to be a living document not just 40 pages that sit there and no on e reads. My favourite quote from the session was “Do not engage with a company until it is ready forSharePoint”.
How can I kill my file servers? IT Pro Track, Joel Oleson
I thought the title for this session sounded great. Joel shared some great examples for approaches to moving data from file servers, not just to SharePoint but also to nearline or off-line storage. Is all that data on your file servers really necessary to be instantly available? Ask yourself how knows the data best? IT or the Business Users? And so therefore who is best placed to move the data?
Test Driven SharePoint Development, Dev Track, Andrew Woodward
Whilst I had come across this I still hadn’t really grasped how it would work in practice, and this is exactly what Andy showed us, not only TDD but how we can achieve this with SharePoint using Typemock Isolator to “fake” SharePoint. Few slides and lots of code, just the way I like a dev session to be.
Andy had been concerned that we wouldn’t be able to see the screen from the back of the room, but it was fine, nice and clear, I think a nice touch was that the mike picked up the keyboard tapping...
Anyhow great stuff, the fog has cleared and I now understand better what he’s been talking about, or should that be evangelising?
Vendor night
Roulette and Blackjack, with free chips... great fun, loads of vendor prizes in the draw, but sadly my name was not called out.
More tomorrow...