Today was the kickoff day for SharePoint Saturday-DC Conference. It was pretty good turn out. Several buildings at Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale Campus were packed with SharePoint peeps. I saw several people I used to work with at previous consulting gigs; it was great to see them and catch up with them. I’m glad that I decided to take a break from development and attend the SharePoint conference. What struck me about this conference is that it truly feelslike a conference. There were booths, networking, in addition to sessions. I’ve attended SharePoint Saturdays in the past and they ones I attended can be characterized more of a code-camp or “big meetup”. This SharePoint Saturday truly is a conference! There are many more sessions, some of them highly technical, for the next two days. So if you are in the DC-VA-MD area and you want to learn more about SharePoint, please attend!

If you can’t make it in person, you can follow on Twitter, hashtag #SPSTCDC.

 

SharePoint Saturday is coming up to the DC Metro area once more! It is scheduled for May 15 and it is going to be held at Northern VA Community College in Annandale. Here’s the link:

http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/dc/default.aspx

If you’re around DC area and you’re an IT professional using SharePoint, I recommend you attend. And you don’t want to miss this one. The last SP Saturday DC that I attended, they intentionally banned discussions of SharePoint 2010 in the official agenda (you can talk it on the hallways and breaks but wasn’t allowed at the session topic). Looking at the current lineup of the sessions, there are going to be a lot of SharePoint 2010 sessions! So attend!

SharePoint Saturdays typically have good sessions and it’s an opportunity to meet other SharePoint folks. If you’re not from the DC area, SharePoint Saturdays are all over the country and I would recommend checking  what the closest SharePoint Saturday is.

I attended the SharePoint Saturday event here in the DC Metro area on May 2nd. SharePoint Saturday is hosted at different cities in the US. We were fortunate enough that the event was located here in DC/VA/MD area. The conference was held at the Microsoft office in Reston, VA.

It was full day of sessions, networking, and bagels and pizza and coffee. It started with a General Session: The State of SharePoint session by Joel Oleson, NS Rana, Thomas Vander Wal, and Errin O’ Connor. From that point on, people branched to End User, Developer, Administration, or Special Interest sessions.

I’m primarily a solutions developer. A friend of mine who I bumped into at the conference asked me “so, are you headed over to the Developer sessions?” Initially, yes—my first session for the day was a developer session. But I mixed it up for the rest of the day since there were so many interesting topics and I like diversifying what I learn.

Here are the sessions that I attended this last Saturday:

• Building and deploying custom SharePoint Application pages (layouts) with Visual Studio 2008 by Michael Lotter
• Social Computing and Blogging with SharePoint by Dan Lewis
• Visually Developing Custom Web Parts by Becky Isserman
• SharePoint Admin Fundamentals by Joel Oleson
• Implementing a SharePoint Pilot: An IT Manager’s Perspective by Jonathan Distler
• Using the SharePoint Platform to Build Vertical Business Applications by Paul Galvin
• SmartCard Authentication: Considerations, Options and Pitfalls by Dan Usher and Joel Ward

I really enjoyed the SharePoint Saturday. I highly recommend that fellow tech professionals go to these events—they’re informational and you get the chance to network with other professionals (and gurus) in the industry. For me, the best thing I got out of SharePoint Saturday are product ideas that I may develop for Zenpo Software Innovations, LLC, my company.

I will follow up by writing individual entries for each session I attended.