A roving we will go…

Hi all

I am finding it increasingly difficult to find the time to post at the moment. Too many projects, too many initiatives and too many evil plans coming to fruition. It’s like every seed I planted last year suddenly sprouted this year and I can barely keep up. Whilst this is a good thing for a growing business, it is not a good thing when it comes to writing blog posts.

In April I’ll be jumping on a very long flight to London, to attend and speak at the SharePoint Evolutions conference, held at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre.

This conference represents the evolution of the Best Practice conferences held over the last three years or so. It is one of the most unique and important SharePoint conferences of the year. SharePoint 2010 will be a key focus, yet unlike say a Tech-Ed, many of the topics have a heavy focus on the strategic side of the SharePoint challenge, in areas like Information Architecture, User Engagement and Planning and Deployment. There are five tracks in all, and over seventy speakers from all over the world.

• For the techie geeks who like to hang in datacenters and like to get paged late at night to fix things that have died, the IT Pro track (ITP) will push their buttons. ITP sessions will focus on topics such as Document Management, Database Sizing, SharePoint and SQL optimization or server farm deployments scenarios.
• For the developers and designers of the world, the DEV track is for you. DEV sessions will focus on topics in the areas of customization, development, and deployment best practices.
• For all of the cool people, we have the information worker track where I speak (IW). In fact the IW track is so damn cool that there are two IW tracks! Sessions here will focus around business strategy and adoption, information architecture, training your organization or developing a culture of collaboration.
• For the tech geeks who can code, who are therefore more elite than regular tech geeks and devs (looking at you Spence), there is a deep dive track to make you happy called level 400. In this track there will be IT Pro and Developer sessions that will be deep diving into the product and code. There will be very few slides, lots of source code and demonstrations.
• Finally, there is a community track. This track has sessions for all verticals and will include speakers from all types of companies who have implemented SharePoint and what they learnt by doing so. All speakers are actively engaged in the SharePoint community and user group and have a wealth of knowledge to share.

This conference is organised by Steve Smith of Combined Knowledge, who is renowned for putting together something special for all participants. The speaker list is pretty much a who’s-who of the SharePoint world, and I am very much looking forward to catching up with (Paul takes deep breath) Andrew Woodward, Ben Curry, Brett Lonsdale, Chandima Kulathilake, Dux Sy, Joel Oleson, Laura Rogers, Michel Noel, Mike Watson and Zlatan Dzinic to name a few.

Bob Fox will also be there, so we finally have that beer that apparently I am supposed to buy – according to Bob anyway :-).

So if you are going to attend a SharePoint conference this year, then my strong suggestion is to make it this one.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au