SharePoint Saturday DC

There’s tons of posts flying around the blogosphere about SPSDC. Like most, I have to tip my hat to Dux (@meetdux), Jennifer (@jensterd), and the gang who put themselves through (what I’d imagine was) a logistical nightmare coordinating an event with over 90 speakers and what would turn out to be close to 1,000 attendees. From an attendee point of view everything went up without a hitch thanks to their great planning. For me this event was just as much about meeting my long lost Twitter friends in person as it was about the content. Ever since I joined the SharePoint community I’ve been amazed at how incredibly open, supportive and friendly the community is; though I imagine we’d all be out of a job if we failed at collaborating.

I attended some great sessions by Mark Anderson (@sympmarc), Christina Wheeler (@cwheeler76), Fabian Williams (@fabianwilliams) and Mike Oryszak (@next_connect), was finally able to put real life faces to the folks behind those avatars that oh-so-often show up in my Twitter feed, and meet loads of new people that now seem to be popping up in that same feed. This being my first SharePoint Saturday, I’m still taking it in to a certain extent. These events are a great place to share technical knowledge, learn practical skills to take back to your day-to-day work, and network with new people in this exciting field (that might have sounded a lot like a canned marketing line, but it’s true).

It may have been the sheer scope and record attendance of SPSDC that lead to such a mixed bag of sessions, but there was truly something for everyone. Some of the sessions were very technical, while others were more process oriented, and as with the sessions, I found the attendees to be quite a mix too. I spoke to people that were IT Pros and top shelf consultants, and I spoke to people that were brand new to SharePoint and didn’t really know much of anything. The only problem I had was picking which sessions to attend since there were so many going on at once. This clearly could have been a two-day event, though that would have defeated the “SharePoint Saturday” name wouldn’t it.

The last point I’ll make is the importance of Twitter. All of these people use Twitter (after all, we are in the business of collaboration) and it was Twitter that ultimately brought me to SPSDC. Twitter even brought me to people after I got to SPSDC; at one point I was browsing the #SPSDC hash tag and discovered that Janis Hall (@janishall) was in the same room, sitting behind me. If you’re a SharePoint person, you really can’t afford to not follow the people linked in this post! All in all, a great weekend with even greater people; now I just have to decide which event to attend next, though I’m starting to lean towards SPS Chicago at the end of July; we’ll have to see how the schedule pans out.