@WonderLaura

Finally writing my wrap-up of the big SharePoint Conference last week. There’s just SO much to say, the task of doing a wrap-up has been a bit daunting. So, I’ll just (try to) keep it brief. Ha.

Table of Contents:

• Work
• Conference
• Social

Work

This conference was my first time working in the SharePoint 911 booth, as a new employee. The very first night of the conference was huge for all the exhibitors! My co-workers gave me booth training. Here are some photos of us. Note that I didn’t take any of these pictures myself, and didn’t even bring my camera. These are friends’ pictures.

I love my co-workers! This is a picture that Randy Drisgill took of Jennifer Mason and I, hiding behind a giant box of cows! This was on Sunday, when we were setting up our booth.

Jump shot by Marcy Kellar! Randy, Jennifer, John, Shane, Me and Todd (behind Fabian). Nicola is hiding in there somewhere. Oh, and by the way, Todd Klindt is the newest SharePoint911 employee!!

Me, Randy and Jennifer (by Marcy Kellar).

That night, we all gathered at the Mandalay Bay’s Eye Candy Lounge, and wore our Twitter shirts for identification purposes. Hmmm, I can’t seem to find any actual photographic evidence of that night. It was a lot of fun getting to meet so many friends in person for the first time. Definitely a highlight.

I had booth duty every morning at 8AM, and then I was a proctor in the hands on labs for a couple of hours each afternoon. The hands on labs thing was quite an interesting experience, and I enjoyed getting to know a lot of the Microsoft people who were fellow proctors. There were about fifty labs, so guess what question I was asked the most. “Are these labs going to be available to us after the conference?”. The answer was that yes, they (Microsoft) were planning on posting the lab manuals at least. HERE are the ones for developers, but I’m not sure if the rest are up yet, or where they would be. Regarding the labs themselves, Microsoft stated that they would love to put them up and make them publicly available, but the pre-beta release that they were created in isn’t exactly ready for that. So, I guess that answer is “later”.

Conference

Besides the booth and the proctoring, I went to about two and two half other sessions during the week. That’s fine, I’ll just watch the others on the website. We had this whole live blogging thing going on, organized by Mark Miller of EndUsersharepoint.com. Here are the sessions and partial sessions that I went to (and live blogged in):

Adoption Strategies for Social Computing, by Alina Fu

Went to half of this session, and what made it so perfect was that I sat next to the social media guru, Michael Gannotti! Mark took that picture of us. This was a good one because we learned about the business application of social computing, and how in SharePoint 2010, all of the social computing will be highly integrated with information workers’ day to day tasks and workflow.

SharePoint 2010 Administration Part 1, by Todd Klindt and Shane Young

Went to about 15 minutes of this session. This was a good introduction to all of the new capabilities that exist for SharePoint server administrators in SharePoint 2010. There’s so much! Shane and Todd did four or five sessions at the conference, and even a post-conference full-day workshop on SharePoint 2010 installation and upgrade.

Building Applications with InfoPath and SharePoint Designer 2010, by Darvish Shadravan and Roberto Taboada

Went to this one with co-workers Jennifer Mason and Larry Riemann. This was mostly a big long demo, and we got to learn all of the new capabilities with the two products and their integration. I’m such a geek, I loved this one! Can’t wait to dig in and really learn this stuff.

Creating Data-Centric Composite Applications using SharePoint Designer 2010, by Dustin Miller

Data view web parts! List view web parts are now GONE in SharePoint 2010, and have all now been replaced with data view web parts. This session was a series of demos (which seem much more useful to me than slides, anyway).

Okay, so those were all the sessions I went to. Again, the other great thing about the conference was getting to see all the people of this great SharePoint community that we have. The other day, Mike Watson, Mark Miller, Mike Gannotti, Joel Oleson and I had a little chat, and they agreed about how wonderful it was meeting everyone.

Social

Monday night was the Synteractive party in their suite. My friend Heather Waterman has a new job there, and I’m so happy for her! Co-workers were all there, and even my BFF, Mike Gannotti was there, too.

Tuesday night? What? The 80’s beach party with Huey Lewis and the News! This was, like, totally awesome and rad. I know, I’m a ham. This was so much fun, though, getting to dress up! The girls and I even primped together in my room, and bonded over hair curlers and eye shadow. (Sara, Lori, Yvonne). Marcy Kellar also took a lot of great pictures that night.

On Wednesday night, SharePoint911 and AvePoint sponsored an Education Mixer. Since a lot of our clients are in the education sector, we decided to have a party for all education people, so that they may meet each other and share ideas. Jennifer Mason and Nicola Young were the main organizers of this, and we had a LOT of people show up. After that, some of us tweeps got together and played a little Texas Hold ‘Em (@mrackley). Joel took this picture, but unfortunately he went all in on the very first hand and lost. L

Thursday night was Cathy Dew’s birthday, so a bunch of us went out to eat Italian for dinner.

Group pic: @EUSP @WonderLaura @thekicker @catpaint1 @ruveng @ToniFrankola @gvarro @rharbridge @MOSSLover

Later that evening, we ran into a whole other crowd of SharePoint friends, such as my new BFF, @Karuana (sorry, Mike G). She and I bonded over stories of fashion accessories, hair styles, and shoes. (I’m being sarcastic… well maybe except for the part about the shoes)

Other than that, Friday was the full day SharePoint admin session by Todd and Shane, that Cathy and I went to. Here’s the twitpic of that event. See you all later, and now I’m going to get back to all that technical blogging, especially about SharePoint 2010.