Scoring with Sharepoint - Speaker Dan Holme MVP
Last week I had the pleasure of attending the ‘Scoring with Sharepoint’ event at the Manchester United stadium, with keynote speaker Dan Holme (MVP Sharepoint). This event was very worthwhile.
Dan proved to be an excellent speaker. His keynote speech covered a brief history of Sharepoint, where we are now, and its likely future. There were plenty of people at the session who are considering adoption of Sharepoint who probably found this useful. For us old Sharepoint dogs I was most interested in the likely future developments. Improvements to Accessibility, easier Silverlight integration, and enhanced Social Networking features are the best things for me so far. Some talk of moving Sharepoint into the clouds via Windows Azure et al had my ears pricked up too – that’s likely to change my working life sometime soon!
During the coffee break, I pitched a question to Dan about displaying Powerpoint presentations in Sharepoint. This question pops up often on user forums, and I wondered what his preferred solution would be. He offered three alternatives which covered the three possibilities I know myself – however I’ve researched answers to the question whereas he was answering a random question without preparation. Proof if any were needed that Dan Holmes Sharepoint knowledge is extensive and deep!
The remaining presentations were ‘Intranet Admin, Security, and Governance’, then a great session titled ‘21st Century File Sharing: Configuring &Managing Document Libraries’, and finally, ‘Building Code Free Sharepoint Applications and Business Intelligence Lite’.
There was a bias towards code-free solutions to Sharepoint problems. As I mentioned in a recent post this is most clients’ greatest wish! Dan demonstrated several ways of getting data in and out of Sharepoint using the tight integration features of Office 2007. He actually went a little further than I’ve seen demonstrated before and I found it useful.
Instead of me summarising the whole session, you’d probably like to know that the presentation foils have been posted at; http://www.regonline.co.uk/builder/site/Default.aspx?eventid=667987
I also notice they currently have a banner for ‘Scoring with Sharepoint’ in Dubai for 9th/10th December 2008. If you are in the area you should try to make that! As I say, it’s a good session, and if your boss gives you hassle you can also point out the session is free! ;)
I have a feeling that the foils may be posted at that address temporarily so you may be interested to know that some of the foils (and other foils from presentations I haven’t even seen) are available from a section in Dan’s company website;
http://share.intelliem.com