BIFocal LLC

Category: Speaking

  • DevConnections 2013 Recap

    DevConnections 2013 was an amazing conference, as it has in all years past. The attendees are always hyper-engaged and come with tons of questions. As a presenter, nothing makes me happier than helping people understand the concepts I am covering better than when they walked into my sessions.  Thanks to Scot Hillier for being an amazing track chair and moderating the panel on Tuesday afternoon.

    During DevConnections I did 3 sessions (2 of which were recorded) and a panel session (also recorded).  SharePoint Pro Magazine is selling access to all 60 hours of recorded content from the show.  You can find details about this at http://windowsitpro.com/itdev-connections

    I have been hearing from folks that my slides are not accessible on the site, so if you are looking for my content please look no further:

    PowerShell for the Anxious ITPro

    SharePoint Performance – Best Practices from the Field

    Business Intelligence in SharePoint 2013

    Time for the second half of my crazy SharePoint road trip… See you at SharePoint Fest Chicago!

  • A summer of fun & SharePoint

    I am sitting in the Toronto City Airport after speaking at #SPSToronto yesterday and realized that I hadn’t posted anything about my upcoming talks.

    Yesterday was a day of BI. I did Heavy Metal PowerPivot Remastered in the morning, followed by John White doing SharePoint for Business Intelligence, and then I did Business Intelligence in SharePoint 2013. The whole day built nicely and the attendees grew in numbers from session to session. All it all it was a great collaborative day of BI. I have to give a ton of credit to Eric Riz, Kanwal Khipple & Ruven Gotz for putting together a terrific day for the attendees. It was great to see the hall completely packed at the end of the day with people who really loved what they got.

    Next up for me is #SPSNYC this coming weekend (7/27) where I will be giving my SharePoint Performance: Best Practices from the Field talk.

    Following that I will be speaking at SharePoint Fest DC (8/5 – 8/7) & SPTechCon Boston (8/11 – 8/14).

    After those two I am taking a few weeks to rest up before we put on SharePoint Saturday New Hampshire, for which we have an open call for Speakers & Sponsors.

    4 conferences in 4 weeks… let the insanity commence!

  • Speaking at RISPUG on 4/3/2013

    If you are in the Southern Massachusetts/Rhode Island/Eastern Connecticut area Wednesday night (or even if you aren’t, it might still be worth the road trip… I’m doing it!) and are interested in learning about what’s new in SharePoint 2013 for ITPros, then come out to the Rhode Island SharePoint Users Group at Providence College.  In it’s seventh month RISPUG is alive and thriving, so come out and join us for a good old fashion geeky evening of SharePoint talk!

    I will be presenting my ITPro’s taking the SharePoint 2013 Red Pill deck which is available on my on my SlideShare site.

  • SharePoint Road Show Presentations

    For the last few weeks I have been lucky enough to speak at some amazing events, specifically SharePoint Saturday Philly, SharePoint Saturday Austin, SPTechCon & SharePoint Fest Denver.  Doing shows like this always remind me just how amazing the SharePoint Community is.  I get a chance to interact with people from all walks of life, all different experiences with technology, and all different levels of knowledge within the sphere.  Thank to everyone who attended my sessions at these events.  As promised, I have uploaded my decks to SlideShare. 

    I am excited to present for SPTechCon Boston & SharePoint Fest DC again, and on the East Coast this time, later this summer. 

  • SharePoint Saturday New Hampshire is upon us!

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    With only 3 days to the big event things are rapidly coming together.  The bags, speaker gifts, t-shirts, buttons, digital collateral, prizes and jump drives are all here and ready for Saturday.  I am excited for my presentation “ITPro’s taking the SharePoint 2013 “red pill” will be a ton of fun to present and should be informational as well. 

    More than anything I am excited that my co-organizers and I have been able to assemble an amazing cast of speakers to come out to New Hampshire and talk about SharePoint on their own time.  We have speakers coming from Texas, Iowa, Indiana, Washington DC, and all of the New England states to share their expertise with our attendees for free. Being a regular speaker at SharePoint Saturdays for the past year and a half I take for granted all of the hard work that goes into these events and all of the people who give freely of their weekends to come out and speak at these events; it could partly be, as my colleague Mike Gilronan likes to tell people, because “Wherever there are two or more people asking about SharePoint, Jason feels obligated to show up and talk”.

    I have really enjoyed helping to put this event together and am excited to see our efforts come to fruition.  If you are in the New England area and want to learn about SharePoint, please find your way up to Southern New Hampshire University on Saturday.  You won’t regret it!

    To learn more and register to attend this FREE SharePoint training please visit http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/NH

  • Presenting “SharePoint Logging & Debugging: The Troubleshooter’s Best Friend” tonight at NYCSPUG on 3/7/2012

    If you are in the greater NYC area and are looking for a way to put an exclamation point on a great day of geeking out during the Virtual SQL Server 2012 launch, find your way over to the Microsoft offices at the Avenue of the Americas and come hear all about SharePoint Logging & Debugging. 

    Here is the primer:

    Troubleshooting and debugging issues in Enterprise SharePoint farms is a daunting task at best. SharePoint 2010 provides the tools to tackle the task, but not the roadmap. Come and join us as we lift the veil on the new and exciting features in SharePoint 2010, providing the roadmap to save you a ton of time every time you troubleshoot or debug an issue in SharePoint. Reclaim your evenings and weekends once and for all by taming the SharePoint debugging beast!

    There will be food and drinks provided, and a SharePint following the event that promises to be a great time.  I have even heard that there will be some other out-of-towners making an appearance.

    If all of that isn’t enough to rope you in, I will be giving away a Lync certified Plantronics Voyager PRO UC.

    You can also check out my deck here: http://slidesha.re/wxIvNe

    Hope to see you there!

    spflogging_32

  • Holy time gap in posting!

    It has been almost 6 weeks since my last post and it is time to bring to light what has been going on in my world during that time. 

    While I am not someone who discusses my employer regularly on my blog, I joined Sentri 6 months ago and couldn’t be happier.  Especially in light of recent developments.  Some of you may have noticed the press release, twitter storms, webcasts, etc about Sentri’s acquisition of the KMA SharePoint Practice.  Over night my small practice grew to more than 4 times its size and was endowed with even more dynamic, and highly talented people. 

    Anyone who has ever lived through the M&A process can tell you that it is a nail biting & hair raising process as you never know if things are going to move forward or if Murphy is going to stick his head up and yell “GOTCHA!”

    In the weeks since my last posting life has been extremely interesting and exciting preparing for and then finally working through the details of integrating two different SharePoint Practices into one.

    Needless to say since I am writing this post, we are in the lucky 17% that went into the M&A process and came out the other side smiling.  I am sincerely thrilled to be working closely with Mike Gilronan (check out his take on this here), Derek Cash-Peterson, and the entire Sentri SharePoint team.

    As for my commitment to the SharePoint community, it remains as strong as ever.  I have added a Speaking Engagements section to my blog so that you can find out where and when I will be speaking next.  This week I will be speaking at the NYC SPUG on Wednesday March 7th, 2012 at 6pm.

    And now back to posting content…. smile

  • Putting a bow on an amazing year of SharePoint

    Last week I had the honor of presenting “Heavy Metal PowerPivot Redux” to the San Antonio SharePoint Users Group.  My slide deck from that session can be found here: http://www.slideshare.net/SentriInc/sentris-saspug-deck-heavy-metal-power-pivot-redux

    The SASUGers were a great group of folks to present to and the location was tremendous.  We were hosted by Jeff Deverter at the RackSpace facility in Eastern San Antonio.  They purchased the Windsor Park Mall and have converted it into their offices.  It was completely wild experience touring a mall that I had shopped at previously and finding that it was now a state of the art office facility, complete with slide.

    Here are a few pictures from the evening:

    From the presentation, & you have to love an SPUG that provides beer at the meeting!

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    Touring the RackSpace Facility

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    Time to ride the slide!

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    Yes, I got stuck…

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    A post-slide group photo with the early birds

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    Needless to say it was a terrific evening and I can’t wait to come back and speak again at SASUG.  Thanks to Tom Resing, Jessica Saucedo, and Jeff Deverter for all they did to make it possible.

  • #SPSDenver Wrap-up

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    I was honored to be a two-day speaker at SPSDenver this past weekend and had a marvelous time doing so.  The conference was well organized, properly planned, and extremely well attended.  Credit to Clayton Cobb and his team for putting on such a great event.  From the care of ensuring that they understood every issue that an attendee had to making sure that the fragile egos of the speakers were well cared for to making sure that every sponsor got the most out of the event, they really had their act together.  That was all before we even got to ShareSki!

    Every time I travel for SharePoint I meet new, interesting people and it reinforces my opinion that the SharePoint Community is the greatest group of people with a common technology interest anywhere.  It is always fun to get to know more people in our world and I am humbled to be a part of it.

    Needless to say, I was impressed by SPSDenver and am looking forward to returning next year if they are kind enough to have me back.

    For those who are looking for the SPSDenver slide decks please find them below:

    SharePoint Logging and Debugging

    SharePoint Performance Best Practices from the Field

  • SharePoint Connections Las Vegas 2011 Wrap up

    I just completed my 5 sessions, 3 of which I presented with my great friend Cornelius J. van Dyk, here at SharePoint Connections Las Vegas.  While here we received several pieces of great news:

    1.) O’Reilly has green lit our book “SharePoint for Business Intelligence” which will be coming out in 2012 and will revolve around how you can solve business problems using SharePoint 2010, SQL Server 2012, & Visual Studio LightSwitch technologies for Business Intelligence.

    2.) We will be doing our “SharePoint Disaster Avoidance for Large Scale Enterprises” post conference  and several other sessions for the SharePoint Connections Las Vegas show in March 2012

    3.) Power was finally restored to my house in Nashua after more than 6 days!

    I had almost 450 attendees across my 5 sessions and I sincerely hope that you all enjoyed the conference as my as I did.  As promised, here are links to my final decks:

    SharePoint Logging & Debugging: The Troubleshooter’s Best Friend

    SharePoint Performance: Best Practices from the Field

    Battle Scarred But Still Standing: A SharePoint Administrator’s Tell All

    Heavy Metal PowerPivot Redux

    Human Workflow with Visio 2010 and SharePoint Designer 2010

    Heading home tonight and then back to the SharePoint Road Trip on Thursday to hit SharePoint Saturday Denver!