Sharepoint Saturday – Denver

By | August 8, 2010

Yesterday morning I attended Sharepoint Saturday down in Denver.

From the Sharepoint Saturday website (http://sharepointsaturday.org):
SharePoint Saturday is an educational, informative & lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & MVPs, covering a wide variety of SharePoint-orientated topics.  SharePoint Saturday is FREE, open to the public and is your local chance to immerse yourself in SharePoint!

The first session I attended was “Upgrading Your Custom Developed Solution from Sharepoint 2007 to Sharepoint 2010” by Shai Petel (from KWizCom – http://kwizcom.blogspot.com/).
The biggest takeaway from this session were the new Sandboxing features of Sharepoint 2010. This allows you to deploy a solution in a sandbox and not bring down the entire Sharepoint collection if your solution has bugs/memory leaks (a problem with previous versions).

Next up was “Caching-In for SharePoint Performance” by Sean McDonough (http://sharepointinterface.com/). My takeaway here was with SharePoint caching the key element is balancing the type of users. The more unique the users the more things like page output caching for SharePoint might not work well for you. He also covered BLOB caching and Office web application caching. A very interesting and informative session.

Lunch – super excellent spread and tons of vendors were there. Lots of swag.

After lunch I attended “Covering your behind – SQL Server and high availability and SharePoint” with Art Laubach. This probably was the least informative as it covered Mirroring and Clustering (two topics which, being a SQL MCITP, I already am well versed in). However, it was good to know that SharePoint does perfectly fine for both which was something I have not researched up until this point.

“Introduction to Sharepoint applications using InfoPath and Forms Services 2010” with Darvish Shadravan (Microsoft) was an interesting look at the new features of InfoPath and Sharepoint 2010. However most of the cool features like integrating the Office web application features was Enterprise version specific. However these features would be nice as anytime we need a form we have to develop an ASP.NET solution. This isn’t so much of a problem but with SharePoint we could have the versioning built-in rather than resort to Subversion or other versioning system.

The last session of the day ended with “Best Practices for Content Lifecycle Management with Microsoft SharePoint” by the SharePoint guru Mary Leigh Mackie from AvePoint. This was an excellent walk-through of strategies to manage content and scale out your SharePoint installation covering topics such as Remote Blob Storage in SQL (this may be a future blog post), and training end-users.

All in all this was a great experience and well worth the Saturday. SharePoint MVPs were on hand to answer questions and Gary Lapointe (http://stsadm.blogspot.com) even donated two MSDN licenses at the final give-away.

Needless to say I am excited to get back to work with a new outlook on SharePoint and am already looking foward to next year.

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