So I’m sitting at San Francisco airport, terrible international area by the way *sigh*. Anyways, thought I would start to write my thoughts on #SPC09.

The Keynote

It was very exciting to see Steve Ballmer start the keynote off with so much energy and knowledge of the platform, but it slowly went from him being very business focused to the other guys coming on and jumping directly into a technical extravaganza.

Internet Facing Sites

Steve managed to shock me by stating that “MOSS2007 was never built for Internet Facing sites”…even though MCMS2003 was migrated into that product which was for Internet Facing sites. It was as if they were throwing out their garbage and stating not to use MOSS2007 for WCM and to wait for SP2010. I feel sorry for integrators currently rolling one out and having to explain themselves.

Sneak Peek

To be completely honest I was a bit disappointed that there didn’t seem to be that much more than what was shown in the Sneak Peek videos and site in the keynote. There was plenty of new content in other sessions that dived deep into what was there.
I will spend more time on “what’s new”/”what’s changed” shortly on my blog and the SharePointDevWiki.com.

The Sessions

I wasn’t that happy with some of the sessions, the presenters clearly didn’t prepare their demos very well as there were a lot that just didn’t work. I appreciate that Beta 2 was fairly new, but they had had it at least a week before and should have run through them at least five times each to ensure smooth live presentations. I didn’t spend $1400 and travel half way around the world to watch people who were under prepared…there would’ve been plenty of others who would have happily took their place! Including me!

Some of the levels for the sessions weren’t exactly spot on with 101 talks on Silverlight consuming 30 minutes of a 75 minute presentation on Silverlight and SharePoint. Or others not delving into Visual Studio 2010 until around 45 minutes in.

Networking

Personally I had a great time, it was awesome to meet so many of the people that I either watch their contributions on SharePointDevWiki.com, read their blogs, read their tweets, listen to their podcasts, vote for their answers in forums or admire their products.

Having the personal meeting makes such a big difference no matter how much you connect by other mediums. I met my SharePoint Developer hero @waldekm which was awesome:

The SharePointDevWiki.com T-Shirts

The SharePointDevWiki.com t-shirts went down an absolute treat and I managed to hand out pretty much all of them before the keynote at the registration event on Sunday night.

This was a great way for people to recognise tweeps from the community and certainly made me stand out in the crowd. It was great to have people running up to me and saying how much they love what I do in the community on Twitter, on my blog and facilitating the SharePointDevWiki.com. A big thanks to Vizit SP (Atalasoft) and SharePoint Delivery for sponsoring this batch of t-shirts, more info on the sponsorship here.

Twitter

During this conference I wondered how it used to work before Twitter. It was a great medium to track other peoples thought in real-time during a session as they sat listening to the presenter. The session code hash tags that I published on SharePointDevWiki.com really helped everyone to scope their tweets based on where they were. This allowed me to have search columns set up to filter just to that sessions discussions.

It was a shame that the conference guys weren’t that switched on with this like at Australia Tech Ed where presenters promoted the Twitter hash tags before each session to encourage it.

Time difference

I really never got used to the time difference and that was probably the worst thing about the week as I felt tired the whole time and my body never really felt settled. Las Vegas is an interesting place and I can’t wait to be in the fresh air of Perth on the beach and out of the air conditioned conference centre and casinos that I have spent the last week in!

Nightlife

Las Vegas is different, very different…unique! I had some great nights out with the SharePoint community and have definitely made some friends for life out of the experience!

Would I come back to Vegas for a holiday? No. It’s not my cup of tea at all…I like being outdoors on the beach with a more relaxed laid back speed of leisure. It was a great venue for a conference and some of the night life was excellent like Pure at Caesars palace (thanks @givenscj). I’m not much of a gambler and was disappointed that I hardly saw any ice hockey games being played AT ALL, Vegas is a football town.

Conference Party

The party at the Mandalay Beach on Tuesday night was amazing, 7000+ people all fanatical about SharePoint was awesome! It was great to see everyone let their hair down and enjoy themselves! Huey Lewis and the News were ok, but they weren’t on stage for that long. I really don’t remember being interviewed by Dux either!

Did I stick to my rules?

Midnight curfew

Well I did better than Australia Tech Ed where I was out every night until at least 3am. This time I went out Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday night and was home mostly by 2am. I would have probably gone out every night if it hadn’t been for jet lag ;-)

Networking

I had a list of 50 people I wanted to meet and I managed to get round and introduce myself to all of them and more! Which was great! I’m sure I missed a few people, but I was more prepared this time.

Photos

I took lots of photos of Vegas on the combination of iPhone 3GS and my Canon IXUS. But Peter Sullivan (also from Readify) has taken some awesome photos of me with guys in SPDevWiki shirts etc. They’re all over the place…Facebook, Flickr, Blogs and more! I’m going to try and consolidate them all on Flickr.
I still don’t think I got enough pictures and never got one of a big group in SPDevWiki shirts *sigh* next time!

Lessons Learnt

Focus even more on networking

I think Rob Bogue’s approach to conferences was great, he said that you can consume the sessions whenever you like but you can’t connect to vendors, the community, to Microsoft people and everyone else who eats, breaths, sleeps SharePoint any other time. So, next time I’ll definitely concentrate on networking more with Vendors and Microsoft and pick a few sessions of people I’d like to see present. Andrew Connell was certainly the best session in my opinion on Application Services which was the last session of the conference.

Take more t-shirts!

The t-shirts were a big hit and next time I plan to have a lot more t-shirts to give out as 80 went very very quickly and I spent the whole week apologising to people for not having any left.

Data Roaming

So being from Australia caused some issues with having access to the Internet which proved difficult as all the Americans were communicating and organising social events via Twitter! So the best thing to do was to tag along! There was free wifi at the conference, but the hotel internet was USD$15 a day which was an expense I could have done without!

International Phone Calls

After the first day I ended up by Skype Out credit to call back to Australia via the Internet. I had Skype on my iPhone and laptop which gave me the ability to call international numbers extremely cheaply!