Month: October 2012

Planning a SharePoint Saturday: A recap of #SPSNH

We are now almost a month removed from SPSNH and it has been just enough time for the glow to start to fade and for life to start getting back to normal. The event was wildly successful and somehow managed to receive nothing but positive reviews. There were a few things that I noted that are worth mentioning:

1.) Drop off between registration and attendance was between 30-40%.

2.) Doing 6 keynotes instead of 1 made the day interesting, but did not draw people in for the early sessions the way that a big name keynote might have.

3.) Planning 3 tracks (ITPro, Dev, End User) at 2 different skill levels (Beginner & Advanced) and keeping the tracks consistent in the same room so that people weren’t hunting for their next session was a BIG hit.

4.) Todd Klindt is a freaking rock star. This isn’t something that we learned, but it was certainly reinforced. The dude stepped up to deliver a session he had never seen until 5 minutes before when someone called in sick for the first timeslot & then presented to a standing room only group later in the day. Todd’s heroic efforts win the booby prize with Chris McNulty coming in a close second for taking on an extra session with only a day’s notice. The edge went to Todd because he had less prep time.

5.) Bags and paper collateral are passé. Give people a jump drive with digital collateral.

6.) Varying things up between 2010 & 2013 was very positive. The people who came to hear about 2013 wanted some 2010 as well & the folks who wanted to hear about 2010 were interested in some about 2013 too.

7.) Hot coffee available all day is a MUST.

8.) Speaker gifts instead of speaker shirts. We gave a nice warm jacket with the SPSNH & NHSPUG logos on them and I am still getting twitter comments about how much the speakers enjoy them. Plus, SPSRED “borrowed” our idea and their speakers loved them too

All in all, I am happy to say that SPSNH was a great success and we are looking forward to doing it again next year. There are things that we will look to do differently, but with a second SPSNH under our belt I think that we have a pretty good thing going up here in the “Live Free or Die” state.

My presentation from SPSNH can be found here. The slides that Todd presented on 5 minutes notice can be found here. (I had done a webinar the week before, so this was my deck from that)

My pictures from the weekend can be found here on my SkyDrive.

October 16, 2012
Office 2013 has reached RTM… SharePoint, Lync & Exchange as well.

The big news of the [yester]day (after presenting at NHSPUG & then doing other work this post won’t actually go up until morning) is that Office 2013 has reached RTM. Big excitement for those of us who are already huge fans, but especially exciting is the announcement that Office, SharePoint, Exchange and Lync will all be dropping at the same time. The MSDN & TechNet availability is stated to be “mid-November” (can’t imagine what event that might coincide with) and Volume License with SA customers will have availability by December 1. General Availability is expected in Q1 of 2013. For a feature overview please refer back to my post SharePoint 2013 Unveiled!

While Office, SharePoint, Lync and Exchange are all completely separate products with different product teams within Microsoft and their own processes and development methodologies it is very impressive that everything has come together for this release and was announced by Kirk Koenigsbauer, the Corporate VP of the Microsoft Office Division. It was a unified message that was echoed by the rest of the products. We know the tight integration across this version of the stacks, but this seems like a pretty big shift to a unified stance within Microsoft.

The biggest statement in the post from my perspective is: “We will begin rolling out new capabilities to Office 365 Enterprise customers in our next service update, starting in November through general availability.” This suggests that the shift that many of us have been predicting is coming to pass and that true availability of this version of SharePoint is going to be in Office 365 first.

The announcement coming from Kirk seems to signal that Microsoft is pushing these 4 very distinct products together and that, ready or not, Office 365 is THE future. It seems like a question of when, not if we are going to see Microsoft abandon the on premises model for these products. I hope that I am reading the tea leaves wrong, but that is certainly what it is looking like after today. </prognostication>

Read the entire post on the Office News Blog site here, The SharePoint Team Blog announcement can be found here, the Exchange Team Blog announcement can be found here, and the Lync Team Blog announcement can be found here.

October 12, 2012
Hooray, it’s a book!: “Developing Business Intelligence Apps for SharePoint”
Over the past year I have been spending my night’s & weekends working on a book with my co-author, Dave Feldman, and I am proud to say that we have completed our draft of “Developing Business Intelligence Apps for SharePoint”.

Through the book you will learn to create dynamic Business Intelligence solutions for SharePoint, using Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch, SQL Server 2012, and other tools and technologies. This hands-on book shows you how to create data-rich BI applications with SharePoint faster and with more capabilities than previously possible. You’ll learn the entire process, from high-level concepts, to low-code development and deployment, to setup and configuration.
- Quickly build a robust schema and applications with Visual Studio LightSwitch
- Leverage PowerPivot v2 to build a business intelligence semantic model
- Create reports with Excel Services, Report Builder, and Power View
The happy thing about our book is that we saw the CSOM model of SharePoint 2013 coming down the road and architected our solutions in the book so that they are relevant to both the 2010 & 2013 platforms (and hopefully many versions of SharePoint to come).

The book is available for pre-order on Amazon now and will be available via O’Reilly Early Release. Dave & I will be at the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas where O’Reilly will have a form of the book available (not quite sure if it will be a few chapters or what at that point, but there will be something!).

I will say that Dave & I were warned by Andrew Connell & Scot Hillier when we started talking about writing this book that taking on a book project is much like having a child. 9+ months of long uncomfortable sleepless nights to give birth to something that you hope goes on to do good things in this world (I am paraphrasing a bit here… basically they both said it was going to suck something awful, but we would be happy when it was all over). Well gents, you were right on all counts. The fun part is that while I have 2 kids and sort of had an idea of what something like that was going to be like, Dave’s wife is pregnant with their first child and is due this SUNDAY. Needless to say, we are glad to be done before Baby “Cookie Monster” Feldman arrives.
October 11, 2012