Ask anyone, and they’ll tell you that SharePoint Saturday Columbus 2011 was a great success. A great list of speakers and topics, and oh, yeah – great food too! 
And oh yeah – in case you’re wondering, the SharePoint Cowbell was on display!
(Ricardo Wilkins speaking on SharePoint 2010 Dev at SharePoint Saturday Columbus 2011; photo credit – Brian Jackett)
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:
For me, August is a busy SharePoint month due to the three speaking engagements I’ve got lined up. Check out the details here:
 I just got back from Chicago where I spoke at the National BDPA Conference 2011 on the topic of SharePoint as a game-changer for business. In addition to giving an overview of SharePoint’s features, I spent some time discussing the value of Office365 and SharePoint Online as well. In addition to my talk, Microsoft reps also gave their own SharePoint presentation at the conference, discussing SharePoint as the collaboration platform for the Enterprise. This event was also particularly exciting for me, as I watched the high school students that I’ve been coaching the past few months win 3rd Place in the national computer competition, earning each of them a scholarship stipend! SharePoint and Scholarships – it doesn’t get much better than that. : )
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 This will be my second consecutive year speaking at SharePoint Saturday Columbus. Last year I spoke on Document Management to more of an End-User crowd. This year my talk will be Developer/Dev Manager focused. This event is already sold out (way to go, Columbus!), but I’d advise you sign up anyway if interested, in case they kick in the waiting list. |
So, we’ve got plenty of SharePoint goodness going on this month. Be sure to look me up if you attend any of these events – I’ll be the one carrying the cowbell! 
Presentation from BDPA National Conference 2011
Out-of-the-box, a digital signature
{my article originally posted at IT Martini}
On June 28th, Microsoft launches its long-awaited upgrade to its traditional cloud services. What was known as Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) now becomes Office 365, which brings a suite of powerful SaaS tools to your fingertips, including:
-Exchange Online (e-mail)
-Lync Online (instant messenger)
-Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote)
-SharePoint Online (web-based collaboration)
Office 365 is a big deal for business owners and SMB's in that it provides access to enterprise-class solutions at an economical price. As a SharePoint consultant, I'm particularly excited about this offering due to the inclusion of SharePoint Online (SPO), and the opportunities that this powerful collaboration tool brings to the entrepreneur who has started, or is looking to start, their own business. In this short article, I'll just mention a few of the features that I think are pretty exciting:
From On-Premise to the Cloud
Some of you may have given SharePoint a try already, by installing the free version of the server product within your office. Unless your organization has good IT resources, you might have discovered that maintaining a server product like SharePoint is not the easiest task. Thankfully, Office 365 puts those days behind you. As a cloud offering, you can rest comfortably, knowing that trained Microsoft professionals are caring for your intranet data, instead of your colleague's nephew who took a few Comp Sci classes last semester.
Long Live the List
Many of us are used to storing and sharing our tabular data in spreadsheets. With SPO, we can now begin to embrace the concepts of Lists (or as I like to call them, spreadsheets on steroids). Imagine having all the basic power of a spreadsheet, as well as the additional benefits of customized Views, simultaneous collaboration of the data within your team, and the ever-important value of having one version of "the truth" - all available from any Internet-enabled browser or smartphone.
Office Web Apps
You don’t have to sell many people on the value of using one of the most familiar and widely-used office applications suites of all time. SPO provides an excellent place to store, search for, and collaborate on Office documents. But in addition, it also now allows you to view, edit and share these documents via your browser, with more fidelity and feature-parity than you might expect. In addition to the flexibility of this feature, it provides a great opportunity for the SMB to manage the costs of buying full software packages for themselves or their employees.
Say Goodbye to the Yellow Puppy
What if I told you that you could put all your files into one big filing cabinet without worrying about how to categorize them, and still find exactly what you need when you need it? If you're an office worker from the days of 10-levels-deep file system folder organization, you'd say I was crazy. But today we've got to realize that indexing search engines are extremely powerful. SharePoint Search can find your file in an instant, regardless of its location in the site, and can also search through the contents of your files, including PDFs. So, gone are the days of watching the WindowsXP yellow search puppy for 5 minutes while you scan thru your C: drive for a single document.
Make Your Developers Happy
One major difference between BPOS and Office 365 that should please any company making use of custom solutions (like Web Parts) in their SharePoint site is the new ability to deploy sandboxed-solutions - easily deployable custom-code solutions specifically designed to be safe for the stability of your SharePoint installation. This has great implications for those companies with in-house developers who want to take full advantage of the customization options of SPO, but could also provide value in terms of standardization and configuration management for the company that wants to outsource their development.
Business Process Automation
Workflows provide the ability to automate your real-world manual processes, providing better governance, insight, and auditing of your company's activity. In the full-version of SharePoint, workflows are a major feature, and many well-developed workflows come right out of the box, including document Approval, Feedback, and Review workflows. SPO currently only provides a simple three-state workflow, but even this can be used effectively. Perhaps you need to track your Sales Opportunity activity - a three-state workflow can manage the flow of that process by assigning persons to each state of the process - e.g. 'Potential Lead', 'Lead Contacted', and 'Business Acquired'. Now there's less of a need to call everyone on your sales team to figure out what's going on with all your clients - you can check the status and history of the workflows and see for yourself!
SPO has many great advantages over on-premise installations for the small company, and together with the full feature set of Office 365, promises to be a game-changer for many entrepreneurs.
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) 
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. : )
One of my articles has just been published over at NothingButSharePoint.com (a very useful site for SharePoint info of all kinds). I’m happy to join an impressive list of writers over at NBSP, and I plan to add more articles in the future. Take a look and lemme know what you think!
