SPFoxhole Blog

Last week I had the privilege to head to the United Kingdom for the first time to attend the European SharePoint Best Practices Conference in London.  This event was run brilliantly by the crew at Combined Knowledge.  Special hats off to Steve Smith and especially Zoe Watson who did a fantastic job organizing this event and raising the bar for other BP Confs going forward.   Every detail was covered and it reminded me of a SPC event. In other words it was very professional.

I presented  2 sessions with my mate Spence Harbar on Kerberos.  Part one was an overview on how to set up your SPN’s (Service Principle Names) along with how to set up delegation and why sometimes its not really needed.  We also dispelled some myths such as a classic one where Kerberos is faster than NTLM.  Its just not true… truth be told due to its ticketing mechanism and longer sessions… meaning users are active on the portal for longer periods…. then yes you will see some performance increase with regards to the RPS (Requests Per Second)   Kerberos is also much more efficient with regards to making requests to a web application as it cuts down the amount of chatter  to the DC’s.

Part 2 dealt with Shared Service Providers and Excel Services and how Kerberos delegation ties in with this. The Decks can be found on Spence's Blog under the US Best Practices post.

I had the opportunity to also chair two ITPRO Ask the Experts Sessions with an incredible lineup of people.   Probably one of the best I have worked with to date.  Among the experts were Neil Hodgkinson, Brian Wilson, Spence Harbar, Martin Kearn, Mike Watson, Joel Oleson, and Steve Smith

As for the events and goings on outside of the event…. where do i start… It was my first time to London and really looked forward to seeing the city which i did every night.  It was amazing.   The only downside to the whole trip was the time that pubs close… 11:30 or so.  Lights come on… a bell rings and they start ushering folks out of the pub….. some of us were just getting started at that time.   We learned how to drink early and drink fast and drink alot so the 11:30 issue didnt affect us very much :)  Oh and i am a huge fan of Real Ales.  I did an occasional Guinness (for Irish Sanity) but man the beers i had over there just made me want to find some gigs in the UK so i can come over more.  Any companies out there in the UK looking for some help feel free to ping me  :)

After the event I moved over to the Paddington area with my buddy Eric Shupps and a few other folks and we played the role of tourist.  Special thanks to Eric for playing such a great tour guide…… he also got alot of looks when running round in his full cowboy outfit.

Met alot of great folks during the conference and alot of twitter followers  :)   All in all it was a lovely time and I cant wait to come over again