SPS Philly 2013 Review

Well, another wonderful SharePoint Saturday event is in the books. I had a great time, watching my coworkers rock their presentations as well as meeting and learning from so many others. It's especially fun going to an event outside of NYC, with a better networking aspect, since I already know most of the active NYC-area community members from user groups and other events. There were certainly a few familiar faces yesterday but by and large I was meeting and interacting with a new group of wonderfully talented people.

My presentation didn't go as well as I had envisioned but I was still pleased overall considering that it was my longest presentation to date and my first time presenting the particular content of my session. I had a terrific audience which seemed very well-engaged, so thank you SO much to all who attended. I received some positive and some "actionable" feedback afterwards which was (and still is!) very much appreciated.

The main feedback I got was on the lack of balance between slides and demo. I'm not usually one to linger in PowerPoint for very long but that unfortunately turned out to be the case yesterday. It didn't help that my virtual machine environments weren't fully cooperating, but I suppose I needed to be better prepared for that. Lesson learned and I'm looking forward to reworking the content and hopefully presenting it again in the future.

You can view my presentation below. In lieu of the demo portion, I've uploaded two screenshots comparing an out-of-the-box SharePoint 2010 Team Site to another team site I setup in less than ten minutes. Which home page do you think provides more useful, easy-to-find information to the user?!

Lastly, during my session yesterday we somehow got to talking about security concerns at one point, and so I promised to provide a link to Liam Cleary's blog for all the SharePoint security craziness anyone could ever possibly desire. He writes some great content and I encourage everyone to check it out!

I've got a Microsoft exam coming up in less than two weeks now, so with SPS over with it's time to focus on getting ready for that. It should generate a few more blog posts but could also eat into my blogging time, so we'll see what happens. I already had a backlog of blog ideas and came up with a few others while talking to folks yesterday, so there's plenty of content to create and I'm excited to continue to post more often. Stay tuned!