SPFoxhole Blog

Wow! so much to report back so while its somewhat fresh in my mind let me get to it.

Sunday:  Arrived early Sunday afternoon and immediately met up with Dan Attis and Brendon Schwartz and then as Im walking through I run into the entire MindSharp crew led by Bill English and Todd Bleeker.  Off to the Crown Plaza (which i will stay at never again) I find the place amazingly empty.  I was sure I would be greeted by the UK contingent but they decided on doing a round of Golf to kick off there week.  Some notable people i finally met from this group were Chris O'Brian (great guy) Benn Robb and Andrew Woodward.

Monday:  Opening Keynote by Bill Gates..... ok i missed it..... it was just too crowded and i have issues in large crowds so i figured i would just read about it elsewhere or watch the video when it becomes available.  Some good sessions followed this and I had one with Lawrence Lui, Brian Gough and other MSFT personel dealing with the SharePoint community and UserGroups in particular.  Ok, so those that know me know im a huge advocate of bringing people together in close UG clusters to allow for sharing of knowledge and networking with your fellow SharePointers.  This session discussed many of these aspects and more importantly allowed me to announce that I am providing free UG sites for "SharePoint UserGroups".   In the audience was a good friend and my partner in crime for pushing these groups out to the community, Natalya Voskresenskaya, I can only promise good things to come from our efforts together on this project.  Also attending were Darrin Bishop and Chris Regan whom along with myself and Natalya are forming a Professional SharePoint Organization.  We are all familiar with both Ineta and Culminus who have both been out in the wild doing great things for quite some time.  They each have there own types of users... Developers or IT Pros.   The idea we have for this organization is to bring both groups ( Dev and ITPRO) together.  This is a model we at NYCSPUG have successfully seen work for a while and SUGUK and Toronto SPUG's have also done something similar and it simply works.  By no means are we trying to take away from the other Organizations and we will all be working closely together on this.   More information to come.

Monday evening was our MVP dinner and to be quite honest i dont remember much from this besides it was nice having everyone together again.  I will never sit with Eric Shupps at dinner again as he was counting and ordering me beer the entire time (20 pints i believe was the final count)  We are like a big family.

Tuesday:  If you refer back to my last statement on Monday night you can probably guess that Tuesday was a blur.   The one thing i do remember was being a prop for Andrew Connell's session "ECMS302: Structured Approach to Building MOSS 2007 Publishing Sites"   For those that looked at me as being some kind of arrogant prick here...... Andrew and myself are very close friends and this whole thing was staged.. no im not an angry Admin  :).  Some other notable things that for me made the trip worth it were finally meeting Ian Morrish , Emer McKenna (Brilliant Woman), Mike Watson and Dan Winter. 

One other mention deserves its own section... About a year ago a very popular blogger from MSFT decided a change in life was in order.... he met and married an Dutch girl and moved to Holland... his last blog post simply stated  THE END....This is it, the end.   And away he went.  As i was walking the halls between sessions i turned around and looked into the crowd and to my amazement there he was Daniel McPherson himself and im happy to say.... re emerging into the SharePoint world.  When i get Daniel's new blog site i will link it to my blogrole.

Tuesday night was a light night for me... we went to Ruth Christ's Steakhouse for dinner and then i attempted to fine tune my demo's for the next day...... yes sans alcohol.  The only problem was that I accidentally left my power supply on the stage as I had to go for a TechCheck Tuesday evening.....   :)  Nervousness is setting in.

Wednesday:   Ok the big day.   Im presenting with Joel for the first time and although excited I was also very very nervous.  This was my first (and last) presentation in front of an audience this size and although we were prepared the nervousness won out in the end and made for a somewhat poorly received presentation (at least on my end)  To the person who thought I was arrogant you can .... well take a guess at the comment I would make here.  To the person that commented that we were both drunk.... same guessed comment.   I am not someone that takes this lightly and being someone that does have a bit of a speech impediment it took alot of balls on my part to even say yes to this.   In the real world I am a solid Architect / Implementer and am fairly well known for this.  I am also a UserGroup Evangelist and I am quite happy staying within those realms. 

Wednesday NIGHT:  Wow!!!  Who knew that two simple blog posts would cause such a big turnout.  Kells Irish pub was a great event and the turn out was so nice..... Andrew and I will make our best efforts to make this happen at any conference we are attending together.

Thursday:  Ok this was a very very rough day, I got up and attended a session and then called it a life.   Flight leaving at 10PM and me with no where to stay or go I ended up doing something odd.... Sightseeing in Seattle.   I would never do this alone as my sense of direction is horrible so my buddy Natalya and her husband George took me in and we had a great time walking the Market area.  A quick dinner and off to the airport for the RedEye back to Jersey.  

In closing I just want to say that these conferences are not only places to pick up information but they are also social gatherings.  To the two I singled out for Wednesday... you know the opinions statement (how every one has one)  You liked it or you didnt like it.   It was still great to see all my old friends and meet some new ones.