The 3rd of the "SharePoint Best Practices" conferences (1st in Europe) took place in London earlier this week and I was one of the many "SharePointers" who were lucky enough to attend.
The "European SharePoint Best Practices Conference" consisted of 57 ‘expert' sessions, 7 ‘exhibitor' lunch-time sessions and 8 (Open Mic) ‘Ask The Experts' sessions, all packed into 3 fun-filled days brimming with invaluable information covering a variety of aspects relating to SharePoint ....
Combined Knowledge did an outstanding job organising the event (...personal thanks to Zoe Watson @ CK), whilst sponsors and exhibitors provided plenty to do during "session breaks" (..not to mention loads of opportunities to win various prizes - from 'rc tanks' to 'ipods' and 'bikes' to 'flights')... and the "SharePint" evening rounded off the experience superbly - with thanks going to Syntergy, who I heard (..although not officially) were kind enough to put up the ‘Tab' behind the bar ...
Some of my personal highlights included:
Now you may think that's a reasonable amount of ‘highlights', but I assure you that was the just the ‘tip of the ice-berg' when taking into account there were up to x4 sessions running simultaneously at any one time.
I chose a mix of sessions over the 3 days, mainly attending "IT Pro" and "Dev/Des" sessions with couple of 'Info Worker' sessions thrown in for good measure (...Nick Swan and Robert Foster's 'BDC in theory and practice' and Penny Coventry's 'SP Designer: Best Practices' were too tempting to miss and didn't disappoint).
Day 1 KeyNote10 Steps to SharePoint Success - (AKA 'Killer Bunnies') Joel Oleson
DE201 Best Practices for Developing Web Parts Todd Bleeker
IT106 SharePoint, SQL, and Storage: Best practices for a winning combination Mike Watson
IT103 Legacy Stuff: Help me Kill my File Servers, Front Page Servers, and Public Folders Joel Oleson
DE204 Test Driven SharePoint Development Andrew Woodward
Day 2
DE205 Designing and Deploying Enterprise Branding Solutions using Custom Site Definitions Eric Shupps
DE206 Best Practice for Customizing the Search UI in SharePoint 2007 Ben Robb
Lunchtime Session Replication Best Practices: ...Server to Server Replication Solution. Syntergy
DE210 Best Practices for Creating Custom Field Types Todd Bleeker
IW308 Business Data Catalog in theory and practise Nick Swan Robert Foster
DE209 Developer Ask the Experts Panel - Part 1 Open Mic for delegates to try and stump the panel of Top developers
Day 3
DE207 Best Practices for Creating, Deploying, and Managing List and Item Events Maurice Prather
IW311 SharePoint Designer – Best Practices & Hints and Tips Penny Coventry Lunchtime SessionSharePoint in Education. SharePoint User Group
DE212 Approaches and best practices for deploying SharePoint sites through multiple environments (dev, QA, UAT, production) Chris O’Brien
IT113 Best Practices for implementing a virtualized SharePoint Production Farm Brian Wilson
DE214 Developers Ask the experts panel part 2 Open Mic for delegates to ask lots of Developer questions to the panel.
Hopefully I'll get to add some further posts on the event over the coming days (once I've had time to digest everything that is)... if not, then I can't wait for "European SharePoint Best Practices Conference 2010'