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.

I recently had an interesting challenge surrounding the installation of some SharePoint features. It’s no secret that you can cook up a pretty simple little batch script to execute repetitive tasks such as a WSP deployment and activation, but until I started using this method I didn’t realize it aligns nicely with change management.

If you’re one of those organizations with a really rigid change management process you may be happy to learn that it’s incredibly simple to add some event logging to your feature installer to record that activity in the Windows Event Viewer. This has a few prerequisites, like having admin access to the box in order to write to the event log; but if you’re the sysadmin of the environment that shouldn’t be an issue. You can always opt to install your features as the resource pool account also, which may or may not mitigate that issue depending on your environment.

Here’s a little example installation script with some logging:

echo off
SET STSADM= "c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\bin\stsadm.exe"
SET /p WSPPKG=Enter Feature/Package Name (without .wsp / must be stored in c:\):
SET /p SVRURL=Enter Deployment URL:
Echo Adding Solution
%STSADM% -o addsolution -filename c:\%WSPPKG%.wsp

Echo Deploying Solution
%STSADM% -o deploysolution -name %WSPPKG%.wsp -local -allowGacDeployment

Echo Installing Feature
%STSADM% -o installfeature -name %WSPPKG% -force
EVENTCREATE /L System /T Success /SO "SharePoint" /ID 3 /D "%WSPPKG% Installed"

Echo Activating Feature
%STSADM% -o activatefeature -name %WSPPKG% -url %SVRURL%
EVENTCREATE /L System /T Success /SO "SharePoint" /ID 4 /D "%WSPPKG% Activated"

Echo INSTALLATION COMPLETE

Those of you who frequently check my blog may have noticed that I used a new method for embedding tweets in my recent post Facebook Privacy & You. Previously I’ve used the copy/paste method, or resorted to screenshots of someone’s tweet if I wanted to include it in a post, but all of that has changed now thanks to Embed Tweet.

There’s a few different methods to using Embed Tweet. If you’re using WordPress there’s a plugin available, or you can manually include the code. Embed Tweet allows you to load the Javascript right from their server, although I went ahead and copied the code right into my site so I could make some minor tweaks to it. Embed Tweet works by finding links to individual tweets throughout the site or page where the Javascript is deployed. Obviously it would wreak havoc on my “recent tweets” widget on the right, so I went ahead and set the “automaticEmbedding” value to false. This tells the script to only embed tweets if a link has a class of “EmbedTweet”.

Once you’ve included the necessary Javascript, all you have to do is make a link directly to the tweet with the “EmbedTweet” class, and your link will be replaced with the tweet itself. It’s not necessary to specify text for the link, as the link will be replaced anyway, though I always do just to keep track of where the tweets are in my post and which one it is.

As an example:

<a href="http://twitter.com/sympmarc/status/13459046853" class="EmbedTweet">Tweet; Marc Anderson</a>

Tweet; Marc Anderson

Pretty slick, eh?

Today I continue the Entrepreneur Video Series with an installment from Simon Sinek titled “How Great Leaders Inspire Action”. Simon uses historical examples to illustrate that “people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it”, and show how grounded leadership leads to success and innovation.