Over the past few years I have had the opportunity to speak at a few different events and conferences. Cincinnati and New York user groups, SharePoint Advisor, and the SharePoint Information Worker Conference are the ones I can think of. As a consultant you get to talk to tables full of people sharing your knowledge and of course being a trainer I get to talk to small groups almost weekly. So you would think speaking at another event wouldn’t be all that exciting. Yeah right! Speaking at TechEd was awesome. I think the largest session had 400 people or so. I would like to tell you that I was really nervous and I had to picture everyone naked but it wasn’t like that at all.

Joel Oleson and I decided to combine all of our sessions and co-present them. You can read his report here where Dustin is the hero but I am the Hiro. Anyway, it was totally cool. I don’t know if you know either one of us but we are total goof balls and that is exactly how we presented. We had lots of fun. I am pretty sure we are the first ones ever to work a Paris Hilton joke into a 400 level session. But anyway. So quickly I will do a rundown of all of our sessions and provide a link to a pdf version of the slides.

OFC304 Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Upgrade and Migration Yeah, we had some technical issues with this one but it still managed to be rated as a top 10 session for the day and number 5 in the Office track overall. Not bad for my first TechEd presentation. If you are into upgrades this session was worth the price of TechEd admission alone. (Ok, not really but it was cool) Joel and I brought out some details of the upgrade process not spoken aloud anywhere else. And we had the guts to demo a gradual upgrade in real time. We are also working on an upgrade white paper that will finally bring together all of this content together in one place. Hooray! Don’t forget to check out the SharePoint Upgrade site.

OFC207 SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture Guidance Ok so I didn’t present this session but I did sit in the audience and heckle. 😉 Good stuff came up in this session. Governance and Information Architecture has been considered a voodoo black art in the SharePoint space for a long time. Well not anymore. Joel and his co-presenter Jennifer Hefner did a great job of exposing some best practices and new tools to help you out. Check out the Governance Codeplex site for a site recovery tool and a site lifecycle management tool. Fun stuff. And if you need help managing the creation of sites check out the Site Provisioning Assistant from SharePoint Solutions.

OFC222 Microsoft SharePoint Products & Technologies 2007: Administrative Architecture and Planning for Deployment, Part 1 This is a session the has been presented at SharePoint products for a while now. So instead of spitting out the same stuff again Joel and I decided to tweak the presentation and get some new info into it. I think it turned out well. The value though was the real world spin that we put out there on these topics.

OFC418 Microsoft SharePoint Products & Technologies 2007: Deployment & Advanced Administration Topics, Part 2 Admin goes 400 level? Yikes! I think this presentation was rewritten 3 or 4 times up until an hour before we gave it. We really struggled to try and make this thing live up to its billing. Especially since a couple hundred people followed us the half mile between the 2 sessions. Talk about poor planning our Part 1 and 2 were scheduled back to back. Which was perfect except one was in the North end of the building the other in the South. Ouch! We were huffing and puffing to make the trek. Anyway, some more new stuff in the slides. Worth a download and read. 🙂

It was really cool meeting everyone and speaking was awesome. Now I just need to get on the list to speak at one of the international Tech Eds. I here Barcelona and Australia are very cool.

Shane SharePoint Help