SharePoint Cincy 2018

Great time presenting this week at SharePoint Cincy 2018! Slides below:

SharePoint Cincy 2018 - Site Management - Notes from the Field from Ricardo Wilkins

DogFood 2016 presentation posted

Below is the link to my “SharePoint, PowerApps, Flow and Azure Functions” presentation from this year’s DogFood Conference. I had a room packed with attendees interested in trying to figure out what all this new stuff is all about. Look forward to future posts from me on these topics!

SharePoint, PowerApps, Flow and Azure Functions - What Does It All Mean? from Ricardo Wilkins

Up Up and Away at SPS Columbus 2015

As you might have guessed by now, this year’s SharePoint Saturday Columbus was super-hero themed! All the speakers were given capes, and asked to wear the T-Shirt of their favorite super hero. I decided to choose Dragon Fly Jones from the 90’s sitcom Martin. : )

In addition to the fun stuff, SPS Columbus was also packed full of great info. Notable talks included Mike Smith’s discussion regarding REST, Seb Matthews Taking Your Business to the Cloud, and Doug Hemminger with Visual Studio and the Office365 REST API.

In my session we had good conversation re: Office integration, OneNote+SharePoint, and Yammer governance. And thankfully my demo’s went very smoothly. : )

Check out the other speakers super-hero pics on the BuckeyeSPUG Facebook page. My slides can be found below, or on slideshare.

SharePoint to feature at DogFoodCon 2014

Once again, Columbus Ohio will host the 2-day Microsoft Dog Food Conference on Sept 29-30th 2014. Many technologies will feature, including of course SharePoint and its related technologies.

First, let’s get the important news out of the way:

• July 9th is the deadline for speaker’s to submit topics
• July 29th is when Registration opens
• Sept 29th is the beginning of your mind being blown by the tons of topics at #DogFoodCon being given by great speakers and experts!

Next, let’s take a look at some of the posts from last year’s conference from many of it’s participants, speakers and fans (click images to view the posts in their entirety):

And for a view of all the slide decks from last year, check it out here!

Looking forward to seeing you all at this year’s conference!

Speaking at DogFood Conference 2013

Once again, I’m honored to be speaking at the DogFood Conference in Columbus, Ohio on November 21-22.

Dogfooding is all about using the very tools that you produce, and this year Microsoft will show once again how they make use of many of the products and technologies that they sell to us. Whether it be Windows 8, SharePoint, Surface, Xbox, or the Cloud, the Dog Food Conference this year will showcase tons of topics presented over 2 days by community IT professionals.

This year I’ll be teaming up with SharePoint Ryan to give a new talk called:

SharePoint PowerShell for the Admin and Developer: A Venn Diagram Experience

As you may have guessed, this talk will be about the koolness of Powershell, and how it can be a powerful tool not just for the SharePoint Admin, but also for the SharePoint Developer, and with some kool scenarios in-between. In addition, I’ll be giving a refreshed version of my SharePoint 2013 Dev Features talk as well.

Also, be on the lookout for talks from my fellow Blue Chip colleagues, including:

Eric Grover:	Strategies for sharing code with Windows store & Windows phone apps
John Azzolina:	Get Into The (Data) Flow: Using SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) to Move Data Around Your Organization

The evite can be found here – remember, registration begins October 21!

SharePoint at AgileDotNet Conference

Today I’ll be talking about SharePoint with other Agilists at the AgileDotNet Conference, a 1-day event put together by Improving Enterprises and Microsoft that tries to ‘bring together the world of .NET development with the world of Agile methods’.

SharePoint can be a great tool for teams trying to incorporate Agile principles into their team development. I’m looking forward to talking with attendees about their experiences and use of SharePoint, and hearing about how it has contributed to their team’s success.

SharePoint Cincy 2012 Retrospective

Last week I attended the 2nd Annual all-day SharePoint Cincy event in [believe it or not] Cincinnati, Ohio. Once again, Ohio delivers more quality SharePoint content for the community. In addition to seeing a lot of familiar faces, here’s the lowdown on some of the things I got out of the sessions & speakers:

• The keynote was a panel of speakers from companies like Kroger, the Air Force, Fifth Third Bank, and Microsoft. Each were given a few minutes to share some of their insight on SharePoint, and how they’re using it in their organizations. I liked hearing how much Microsoft is eating their own dogfood thru their heavy internal use of SharePoint for their company portals. The other thing I took away from this is that there are many LARGE companies out there having HUGE success with SharePoint. I point this out because many times you only hear about the challenges of scaling SharePoint in the enterprise. For these folks, the internal adoption and demand for SharePoint among their user base is so successful that they’re having trouble keeping up!
• I checked out my buddy Tony Maddin and Clint Richardson for their talk on giving your SharePoint site a daily/weekly/monthly “checkup”. Got some good tips regarding what things to look at regularly to make sure your environment is still healthy. It got me thinking about the idea that SharePoint admins can actually help stakeholders with their SharePoint adoption efforts by providing timely stats on over- or under-use of SharePoint – over-use can be spotlighted (“Look at the great things this group is doing!”) and under-use can be questioned (“What is it about your SharePoint site that’s keeping you from using it?”)
• Stopped by fellow LOTR-lover Peter Serzo’s class and learned that the tabular data model is the new hotness, and is used in Denali (aka SQL Server 2012) – are Cubes on their way out??
• In Larry Riemann’s session, I got some more ideas about good ways to use Azure with SharePoint. I also like his use of Microsoft’s chart (below) to show the difference between Traditional, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS models:

All this and more! Plus I got a couple of books signed by their authors (thanx Brian and Mike).

Looking forward to next year – maybe then I’ll be able to present and introduce everyone to the Cowbell! : )

SharePoint spotted at Codemash

SharePoint made an appearance at Codemash this year!

This great event is normally light on SharePoint love, but this year I was able to present a 20-minute vendor session for Improving Enterprises that focused on the development features that a [non-SharePoint] developer should know about when contemplating SharePoint development. In my opinion, SharePoint as a dev platform can be a developer paradise because of large collection of tools, libraries, services & utilities at your disposal. And as I’m exploring the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview (more on that to come), I think many will see that it’s about to get even better.

You can find my slide deck here, and for more info on Codemash, check out the website, or view the very active twitter feed.

A Few More Happy SharePoint Developers in Washington, DC!

Yesterday marked the completion of a successful 3-day SharePoint Saturday conference in Washington, DC. If you missed it and want to get a taste of the experience, check out the activity in the different social media streams that attendees engaged in.

I was honored to be among the 195 SharePoint thought leaders who spoke at the conference (my slide deck can be found below). I spoke on SharePoint Development, and why SharePoint 2010 makes developers like myself so happy! :) I think my audience agreed with me. They also asked some very interesting questions, a few of which I’d like to comment on:

SharePoint Saturday India

I just finished presenting my SharePoint Dev presentation for SharePoint Saturday India. (my first presentation that I’ve had to deliver at 3:30AM EST – yes, I said AM)   This is a presentation I originally presented for a local conference back in February, so I’ve referenced my original slide deck posting above.

I think it’s very kool that I was able to participate in an international event like this one. In my session I know that at least a few countries (India, Australia, South Africa) were represented.

I hope the attendees were able to get value out of my content, and hopefully were also able to appreciate my use of Transformers in my slide deck (with $700 million in worldwide movie sales, I suspect India knows about Transformers as well).

Recordings of the sessions should be available in a few weeks – I’ll let you know how to get them once they’re published.  Kudos to the organizers like Alpesh Nakar, and kudos to Live Meeting for hanging in there and delivering my presentation live out to the world. : )

Heartland SharePoint Conference Redux

Ever since ICC presented the Microsoft Heartland Region SharePoint Conference 2011 in February, and even after a mini encore presentation via online webinar in March, I’ve had a few people ask me where they can get all the presentation slide decks from ICC’s SharePoint team in one convenient location.  Poof! Your wish is granted!:

		Make Your Developers Love You! (aka SharePoint 2010 ALM for Dev Managers) -Ricardo Wilkins
		Success with SharePoint 2010 – Over and over and over again! -Mario Fulan
		Getting SharePoint 2010 Deployments Right -Veenus Maximiuk
		Social Networking Features and Governance in SharePoint 2010 -Chris Rygielski

Best Practices Conference 2011

This past week I attended the Best Practices Conference (BPC) for SharePoint in La Jolla, California. This is a 3-day conference that discusses not only “how'” to do things in SharePoint, but also asks the question “should you”.

SharePoint Conference Mania!

Well, it looks like March is turning out to be a very big month for SharePoint in terms of conferences.  Seems like other geeks like myself just can’t get enough of that SharePoint goodness. :)  Here are the March conferences I’m aware of:

Slides from Microsoft Heartland SharePoint Conference 2011

Conference Theme: Transforming Your Business with SharePoint 2010
Disclaimer: The pictures that reference SharePoint 2007 are for effect only – SharePoint is still awesome no matter what the version!  (well… maybe not version 2003) : )

Countdown to the Conference: The Show Must Go On

Although the dreaded snow storm is approaching, I’m told the Microsoft Heartland Conference here in Columbus, Ohio is still scheduled to continue tomorrow.  So, you still have a chance to hear from the likes of SharePoint Evangelist Joel Oleson, SharePoint Master-Certified Mario Fulan… and even me! :)  It’ll take more than a few snowflakes and some ominous-looking clouds to keep us from geeking out on SharePoint.

Speaking of clouds, I wrote in a previous post about the impact that I think Microsoft’s cloud-based offering, Office365, will have on SharePoint developers.  I’ll be talking more about this topic during my presentation, and mentioning how certain aspects of developing for SharePoint Online present both advantages as well as challenges.

Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow – be sure to tell ‘em that Rix Bits the SharePoint Cowbell sent ya! :)

Countdown to the Conference: Buy vs Build in SharePoint

In my talk next week, one of my topics will be related to the question:

…do I build my solution from scratch, or do I buy something off-the-shelf?

Hopefully I will help people to see that one of the main reasons why we invested in SharePoint to begin with is because of its “out-of-the-box” value.  There are so many solutions that can be created using features already included with SharePoint, that many times we can avoid custom development altogether. (which sometimes makes poor Visual Studio 2010 feel very lonely and neglected) 

Also, even if out-of-the-box features don’t quite cut the mustard, we must also remember that there are some great 3rd party tools out there as well, especially for things like workflow and web part development.

There will be several well-known vendors at next week’s Microsoft Heartland SharePoint conference, including Nintex (workflow) and Quest (web parts).  Don’t miss it – register today!

Countdown to the Conference–Team Foundation Server

Many moons ago I did a webinar about application lifecycle management using Team Foundation Server.  Since that time, TFS has been upgraded to version 2010, and with it comes some exciting new enhancements.  This is also good news for SharePoint developers, as the 2010 suite of Microsoft products helps push SharePoint development into 1st-class citizenship.  In fact, it’s even easier now to use TFS as part of your tool set thanks to your MSDN subscription.
I’ll be talking about this topic a little more during my presentation at the Heartland Conference next week.  I think it’ll be somewhere around slide #15.  :)  See you there!

Countdown to the Conference – Sneak Peek: Sandboxed Solutions

Next week, I’ll be speaking at the Microsoft Heartland SharePoint Conference 2011 in Lewis Center, Ohio. My topic will be:

Make Your Developers Love You! (aka SharePoint ALM for Dev Managers)

As we countdown to conference day, I thought I’d give you a sneak peek at some of the subjects I’ll be covering during my talk.  One point of interest in SharePoint 2010 that I’ll be speaking on is the concept of sandboxed solutions – custom code solutions that operate within a subset of the Microsoft.SharePoint namespace, and that can be easily deployed and monitored with minimal impact to the stability of your farm.

Register today to check out my presentation and see why sandboxed solutions are one of the enhancements in SharePoint 2010 that will help make SharePoint Devs and Admins a happy family once again. :)

Columbus 2010 Launch Event – Office/SharePoint

Last week I presented along with Steve Caravajal at the Columbus region Microsoft SharePoint/Office 2010 Launch Event, sponsored by ICC.  There are exciting features coming from the new 2010 suite, and it looks like the product teams put some good thought & work into these new versions of Office & SharePoint.

My slide deck is below, and the other slide decks from the event should soon be posted to the ICC website.  Stay tuned.

Office 2010 Launch Event - May 2010

View more presentations from Ricardo Wilkins.

Sharepoint Conference via COSPUG

Today I attended a local Sharepoint Conference sponsored by our User Group. Kudos for a job well done! Topics included:

• Governance
• InfoPath
• Troubleshooting Environment Issues
• Custom Branding
• Content Types 101
• Search – Keywords, Best Bets, and Property Mappings
• Content & Infrastructure Deployment Challenges

Interestingly enough, I think I learned the most not so much from all the expert presentations, but rather from the Local Spotlight track, where local folks gave presentations on how they are using Sharepoint in a real-world environment in their own organization. Sometimes all the APress books and Level 200 demos in the world just can’t beat good ole fashion real-world scenarios! ;-)