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.
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