In between lying on the couch reading a dry-as-toast tome on SharePoint and bringing a team of SharePoint trainers to your site for a week, lies the vast middle ground of SharePoint learning: the SharePoint conference. One I'm looking forward to next week offers a veritable Las Vegas buffet of SharePoint learning. It's the SharePointPro Summit and Expo, which, coincidentally, or appropriately enough, is in Vegas at the Bellagio.
It's all SharePoint, just for SharePoint devs and admins. If you're already attending or if you'd still like to get registered, here's a preview of what you can expect between March 16 and March 19.
1. A SharePoint feast
These people live, breathe, and eat SharePoint, and for a few days, so will you. Some of them you might have heard of, like Dan Holme, Todd Klindt, and Andrew Connell. Others you will be glad you discovered.
2. Fill your admin plate
At the SharePointPro Summit, you can fill your plate with sessions on installing and deploying SharePoint 2010, document restore strategies, deploying Office Web Apps through SharePoint 2010, social networking features in SharePoint, creating and archiving sites, sandboxed solutions, and SQL Server maintenance tips-and go back for seconds and thirds.
3. Feed your dev brain
You can stuff your brain with sessions on creating custom Silverlight applications, developing advanced workflows with Visual Studio 2010, dive into the architecture, tools, and development practices that make Business Connectivity Services work, and learn about the new client-object model in SharePoint 2010 and what it can do for you-and that's just before lunch.
A few more tasty options that get to the marrow of SharePoint's bones include these sessions, which I'm looking forward to attending:
- Asif Rehmani's "Creating Workflows with SharePoint Designer 2010, InfoPath and Visio" where you'll learn how these tools can help you design powerful end-to-end solutions on your sites.
- Todd Klindt's and Shane Young's "Administration of SharePoint 2010 Using PowerShell, the New Coolness" offers a head start on Windows PowerShell, Microsoft's increasingly common answer to the question of "how do I manage this Microsoft technology?"
- Dan Holme's "Designing Governance: How Information Management and Security Must Drive Your Design," helps you get it right from the start.
- Scot Hillier's "Best Practices for Accessing SharePoint 2010 List Data," where you'll learn how to utilize list data in your applications.
And for dessert, a sweet dive into the practical and pragmatic side of SharePoint--how it's been used at one of the most unique IT efforts, the technical support of NBC's coverage of the Olympics. Dan Holme,a Microsoft Technologies Consultant for NBC, offers lessons learned from using SharePoint over the years he's worked behind the scenes at the Olympics.
The SharePointPro Summit offers over 40 sessions to choose from, on several subject tracks including admin and dev-specific topics in SharePoint. Plus the Expo gives you time to stroll among the SharePoint solution vendors and take a long, no-pressure look at their wares.
It's a SharePoint feast and all are welcome at the table. Pull up a chair!