SPC14 Session Review

As I have done with previous SharePoint conference's, I have reviewed all the "available" PPTs for all the sessions and rated them for your time saving pleasure!  I can truely and honestly say…this years sessions and speakers were many many times better than the last conference!  My hats off to the PMG for doing such an amazing job with the content and selection! 

Here are some of my observations:

  • Not all of the session PPTs are available on Channel 9 (so even if you use Vlad's script here, you wont' get everything in terms of the PPTs, however, the videos seem to be there).  You may need to go to Yammer to get the missing ones. Most of the PMG is on vacation this week, so missing PPTs may not start to show up until next week.  Here's the sessions that don't seem to have a PPT anywhere:
    • SPC104 (amazingly Yammer Adam's session), SPC237, SPC289
  • The session content and speakers were *several* levels past last conference sessions.  I'll say it again, the sessions were simply amazing!  For last conference's reviews to make my point, check out my review post here
  • Although there was overlap, it wasn't quite as pronounced as last time.  This is due to Sonya, Bill and Mark, et all, doing a good job of filtering out "said" overlap.  That being stated, it is impossible for them to properly do their jobs when speakers don't submit their sessions in time and/or don't coordinate with others that have similar topics (a must at any conference and something I strived to do with anyone that had similar topics at Project Server and SPC).  Some examples of this wasteful overlap was the ever prevailing (three app types slides, REST/Odata was covered several times, some of the hybrid sessions could have been collapsed, in addition, there were four sessions on site creation, two would have been adequate, several sessions on how to make socialyammer successful that overlapped in content and theory).  For the social sessions, it would have been much more appropriate if customer success stories were focused on rather than having everyone and their dog that was not a customer present on "how to make social successful" it just made things more confused in the end.
  • I only gave one 2 out of 5, and to be fair, not because of the speakers (one is in my top sessions below) or the content directly, but because the content overlapped 100% with other sessions (slides and all), that is ridiculous to me and more value could have been derived by adding another customer success story (yammer or O365 focused)
  • The speaker that I didn't know and am going to follow closely now is Edin Kapic from Barcelona.  I *really* liked his session.  Fresh topics from a fresh perspective was…refreshing [:D]
  • Additionally, Richard Harbridge delivered, as always, his consistent, well thought out message…perfectly and deserves a shout out for that (and next time you see him congratulate him on his engagement!)…oh and how he always manages to get through 100+ slides is totally beyond me!

Here's the results:

CJG's Top Sessions:

  • SPC393-Edin Kapic – 7 Tenets of Highly Scalable SharePoint 2013 Apps – CJG Rank 5 of 5 (possible 6)
  • SPC379-Matthias Leibmann – Integrating Mail and Calendar experiences within Office 365 – CJG Rank 5 of 5 (possible 6)
  • SPC368-Brian Lyttle – Overview of configuring Yammer SSO & Directory Sync – CJG Rank 5 of 5 (possible 6)
  • SPC280-Chris Slemp – Microsoft- Our Enterprise Social Journey – CJG Rank 5 of 5 (possible 6)
  • SPC270-Richard Harbridge (aka ShareBeiber) – When should we use SharePoint out-of-the-box, add third-party apps or build custom solutions – CJG Rank 5 of 5 (possible 6)
  • SPC266-Virpi Oinonen – Driving enterprise social from the bottom up – CJG Rank 5 of 5 (possible 6)
  • SPC108-Dan Holme, The Cloud Navigating the benefits and challenges of this disruptive innovation – CJG Rank 5 of 5 (possible 6)

Session reviews:

  • SPC425-Best practices for maintaining and updating a SharePoint App – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Wow, if you have written an App, but have not yet had to update it…well, be ready to think about all the edge cases!  Must watch session!
  • SPC424-Stress testing and optimizing SharePoint 2013 shredded storage with traditional and RBS storage – CJG Rank x of 5
    • Lots of great data from the work that Chris has done over the years.  It's unfortunate that most of his really juicy slides had to be pulled for political reasons (basically parts of Dell are run under a shady tree).  I'll never buy Dell softwareservices or hardware ever again (not that I ever did mind you).
  • SPC423-Deep dive_ REST and CSOM comparison – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • I like the approach David took to this session, the knockout round scorecard was really creative, however, the metrics in some of the slides don't look right to me.  I'd have to see the way he tested and then suggest that some of the methods he took skewed the numbers a bit (specifically in the network traffic of REST).  The shout out for my SPREST tool (which I will start to finish after I'm done with this blog post was nice).
  • SPC422-Demystifying Kerberos in SP2013 and SQL 2012 for business intelligence – CJG Rank 3 of 5
    • I have seen better sessions on Kerberos, that is all.  Would have been nice to outline its impeding doom around OAuth, but that's ok, in due time.
  • SPC421-Federating applications with Office 365 using Windows Azure Active Directory – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Very nice coverage of WAAD!  Good job!
  • SPC419-Developing Cloud-Hosted Apps with MVC5 – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • Nice intro to MVC
  • SPC418-Subordinate integrity Certificates for SharePoint 2013 – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • To sum it up "Everything better be running SSL!"
  • SPC417-Thorsten Hans – Speed up your app development skills with API abstraction – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • ShareCoffee is new to me and the name is somewhat of a turnoff if you don't like coffee, but when you get what its trying to accomplish, it does have tremendous value to the JavaScript Programmer.
  • SPC416-Bill Baer, Chris Givens – SharePoint storage architecture, 2001-present inside and out – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Somewhat unfair to rate my own session, so you'll just have to check it out yourself.  This session announces the new "Fort Knox" architecture that is being considered for Shredded Storage in O365.  There is also a test your knowledge set of questions in the PPTs.  In addition you can look at the OneDrive for business to learn more about Fort Knox features.
  • SPC414-Brent Groom, Sreedhar Mallangi – Search content enrichment and extensibility in SharePoint 2013 – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Oh yeah!  Anything search related is my cup of "tea" (no coffee please).  The coverage of the features of the CEWS Pipeline Toolkit and the Search INdexing Toolkit is impressive!  I can't wait to get my hands on these!
  • SPC413-Scot Hillier – Complex problem solving with the new HTML5 APIs – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Dang!  Scot shows he is ahead of the curve when it comes to new tech in web application land.  So many cool tidbits of info in this prezo!
  • SPC411-Spencer Harbar – Office 365 identity federation using Windows Azure and Windows Azure Active Directory – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Spence hits alot of the really important parts from a business and 10% of the tech part.  This session is really important when looking into the future of the SharePoint and O365 auth landscape.  If you don't understand what's going on with these slides and his prezo, you better start catching up fast!
  • SPC410-Todd Klindt – The nuts and bolts of upgrading to SharePoint 2013 – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • Not sure why this was a 400 level session.  I'd put it more 200, maybe 300.  There are a lot of missing pieces to the upgrade story that could have been covered in the slides
  • SPC409-Ted Pattison – Deep dive- SharePoint and Office App Security Model (OAuth & S2S)  – CJG Rank 3 of 5
    • Ugg, so many misleading statements in these PowerPoints.  And several scenarios were left out (like low-trust and non-app auth).
  • SPC408-Jeremy Thake – SharePoint 2013 Apps with AngularJS – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • I have yet to use AngularJS in a project yet (but I have done MVVM patterns before).  Jeremy does a good job of presenting the "why" of Angular, backs it up with some stats, then reviews "what" it is, then shows how to use it in SharePoint.  Nicely done.
  • SPC407-John Kozell, Travis Falls – Deep dive into the SharePoint 2013 CSOM API's – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • The good stuff is on slides 23-25.  I would have liked to have seen more of this reviewed, but overall it did what it needed to do.  Not sure I'd call this a 400 level session.
  • SPC406-Spencer Harbar – Comprehensive User Profile Synchronization – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • As always full coverage of the UPS in 2013, Spence's "cup of tea", Earl grey I'd guess?
  • SPC405-Ben Lower, Chris Givens – Futuristic Search applications using Kinect and Yammer! – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • A full implementation of a BCS connector to index your Yammer data on-premises.  And then some cool videos of how Kinect can be used to build applications (including ones that interface with SHarePoint over the Search REST APIs).
  • SPC404-Scot Hillier – Build your own REST service with WebAPI 2 – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • I actually used this new feature of Visual Studio a week before Scot's prezo.  Turns out this stuff is very handy as the WCF Data Service implementation is so unfriendly, but WebAPI is much better!  Being that I didn't see much tie back to SharePoint, I had to give it a 4.
  • SPC403-Vesa Juvonen, Bert Jansen – Site provisioning techniques with SharePoint apps – CJG Rank 3 of 5
    • Not sure really how much of this was "SharePoint Apps" versus simply looking at provision using REST/CSOM.  Slides are difficult to follow and I think "Artifacts" is a better spelling.  But the session does bring up an important topics of site provisioning which was one of my major contributions back in 2011 with the eBay prezo, which then subsequently was rolled into MSIT deployments.
  • SPC402-Paul Summers, Daniel Benson – Develop Advanced Search-Driven SharePoint 2013 Apps – CJG Rank 3 of 5
    • This was more of a 200/300 level session.  Some of the slides are misleading.  Annoys me to see that people want to define App Types as some kind of physical thing when they are simply types for Visual Studio usage.  You will always have an app package and app principle no matter what the app "type" is.
  • SPC401-Paolo Pialorsi – Authentication and authorization infrastructure in Microsoft SharePoint 2013 – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • Should have dropped Ted's prezo and simply given the non-overlap content to Paolo.  Between the two there is 90% overlap.
  • SPC400-Scot Hillier – 3rd party JavaScript libraries you need to know – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • I suppose if you missed Andrew and Jeremy's prezo's and needed to catch up, Scot's would have done that for you.  But it was a summary overview of three separate sessions that you could have gone too.  None the less, still a great overview of some valuable 3rd party libraries you should use.
  • SPC399-Building a Modern Portal in 75 Minutes! – CJG Rank ? of 5
    • One slide, watch the video
  • SPC398-Faizan Khan, Robert Gullick – WCM in SharePoint 2013 for IT Pros from 0 to Infinity – CJG Rank 3 of 5
    • There is nothing in these slides, you'd have to watch the video to see if they present anything enlighting.
  • SPC397-Matt Masson, Majdi Badarin – Deep Dive on the Data Management Gateway in Power BI for connectivity to on premise and hybrid scenarios – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • I have already set this up on ACS servers and have labs for it in the new SP2013 BI course, but to many this is really new stuff.  And it is probably one of the hottest things to come along in a very long time.  The slides and I'm sure the prezo would have helped answer a lot of questions for people that are thinking about exploring Power BI.
  • SPC396-Quentin Christensen – End-to-end Microsoft eDiscovery in Office and Office 365 – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • This is V1 of this feature and as such it has many limitations (just ask anyone that has tried to do eDiscovery across 1000 my sites).  This prezo is a simple overview of the eDiscovery features, but doesn't discuss a lot of the limitations or future road map.
  • SPC394-Steve Lasker – Developing Office 365 Cloud Business Apps – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • This session tries to cover both Office Apps and SharePoint Apps, but doesn't really make a clear delineation in the slides of the transition.  Until you have actually built one of each of these (such as for project client), nothing I have seen has done a good job of breaking the two apart or describing the deployment differences (why does microsoft have so many app stores again)?  None the less, their are some good content slides here.
  • SPC393-Edin Kapic – 7 Tenets of Highly Scalable SharePoint 2013 Apps – CJG Rank 5 of 5 (possible a 6?)
    • WOW!!!  This is my favorite session and one of the ones I had wished I had time to go watch.  The slides are sooo funny, yet the content is amazing!  Best session of the conference!
  • SPC392-Measuring Business Value with Yammer – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • There are some real jewels around metrics and measurements in here, definitely check it out!
  • SPC391-Andrew Salamatov – Deep dive into Mail Compose Apps APIs – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • O365 will continue to open up more REST endpoints for Apps to call across a
      ll the services.  This is just a preview of what is coming!
  • SPC390-Todd Baginski, Michael Sherman – Creating Internet facing web sites with SharePoint on-premises or in the cloud – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • The slides are ok, some good tidbits, you'd really have to watch the video on this one for the demos.
  • SPC388-Waldek Mastykarz – SharePoint 2013 Powering Web Sites and Mobile Apps – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • Waldek is always working on cool projects.  He presented how they built a solution for Isala using SP2013.
  • SPC387-Barry Waldbaum, Frank Marasco – Azure IaaS and SharePoint 2013 WCM – better together! – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Very interesting perspectives on utilizing the "unlimited" scalability of Azure for your SharePoint architecture.  This is not O365 related, but hosting your VMs in Azure.
  • SPC386-Steve Novoselac – Trek Bikes- pedaling past complex collaboration problems in the enterprise – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Pretty sweet set of slides showing the progression of a customer from 2007 to 2013 with yammer and O365.  A must read and must watch!
  • SPC385-Kirk Evans – Building SharePoint Apps with Windows Azure Platform as a Service – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • As always, very concise and well thought out presentation by Kirk!  Flows perfectly!
  • SPC384-Liam Cleary – Multi-factor authentication for SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Sweet….both a cloud and on-premises demo of setting up multi-factor auth in SP2013.  Very nice!
  • SPC383-Mastering Office Web Apps 2013 deployment and operations – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • A very good session, but some items were missed (since the title had "mastering" in it) such as "Generating links to other documents" and the wildcard certificates issue that could have been discussed as wellAdditionally to specify the reason not to change the service account even if you wanted to show document previews in search.  Also, some coverage of SCOM management pack for OWA would have been a nice touch.
  • SPC382-Mikael Svenson, David Louis Hollembaek – Managing Search Relevance in SharePoint 2013 and O365 – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Everything they needed and wanted to cover was convered in terms of managing query intent, excellent!
  • SPC381-Todd Klindt – Load testing SharePoint 2013 using Visual Studio 2013 – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • Overall an ok session, I would have expected more around talking about the types of transaction mixes you should create and how you might go about creating those mixes.  From my standpoint, this was just a basic intro to Visual Studio Ultimate load testing features.
  • SPC380-Steve Peschka, Cam Askew – Integrating Yammer and SharePoint using .NET – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • A lot of people have done this already and I don't think you'll learn much past what you already know.  The scenarios were nice, but I don't think the Yammer APIs will be around much longer as they are.  And its no secret that the Yammer API documentation is horrible and seriously lacking.
  • SPC379-Matthias Leibmann – Integrating Mail and Calendar experiences within Office 365 – CJG Rank 5 of 5 (possibly 6)
    • Wow, this has soo much juicy info in it!  Again, some overlap with Ted's so we could have just dropped his.  But the intro to the new Office REST APIs and the auth screens was completely new to me, can't wait to try this out!!!
  • SPC378-Thomas Molbach, Runar Olsen – Make your SharePoint portal social in 1-2-3! – CJG Rank 3 of 5
    • Really didn't get anything from this session.  Make your own judgement.  Probably should have been a 200 level session.
  • SPC377-Shannon Bray – Implementing federated (cross-farm) services in SharePoint 2013 – CJG Rank 3 of 5
    • The slides really don't do Shannon's knowledge of the topics justice.  He did the cross-farm services chapter in the Architecture book and it is amazing.  His demo also died a horrible death, so overall this didn't go so well.  But he's a survivor!
  • SPC376-Jan Kalis – Implement, customize and extend Microsoft Project Portfolio Management solution, built on top of SharePoint – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Jan has to be one of the nicest, coolest people on the planet!  He used to be a Product Manager on the Project PMG group and helped run a very successful Project Server conference in Anahiem in Feb.  His knowledge of Project Server is second to only a few 😉  Being that he just did the PS conference, he has many links to the sessions that supported his slides.  Definitely check this session out if you are considering Project Server!
  • SPC375-Jon Waite, Brian Pendergrass – How to manage and troubleshoot Search- A practical guide – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • This has some juicy search content in it!  They went quite a bit further than the typical search architecture drawings and used some rarely used terms ("MARS").  They didn't spout out "Ceres" or "Flows", but thats getting really deep!  Good session!
  • SPC374-Nathan Miller, Israel Vega Jr – Authentication patterns for SharePoint 2013 and Office 365 – CJG Rank 3 of 5
    • The first part is a little disappointing (again slides that are misleading), the last part on the Windows 2012 R2 and ADFS was good stuff.  I just cringe whenever I see someone try to explain the App Auth flows.  Alot of overlap with other sessions.
  • SPC373-Josh Gavant – Build SharePoint Solutions for Mobile Devices – CJG Rank ? of 5
    • I don't have enough experience with the content to say if it was any good or not.  But the concept was pretty solid and easily understood.
  • SPC371-Chris Johnson – Developing socially connected apps with Yammer, SharePoint and OpenGraph – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • If your not familiar with how to program Yammer Apps and need a good intro, this is a good session for you.  There was only one slide on OpenGraph, but that's ok, because Facebook has made it famous anyway!
  • SPC370-John White – Operational reporting and dashboarding using Microsoft Business Intelligence Solutions – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • John knows his stuff and his slides have everything except a mention of PowerMap 😉  But he always gives good BI!
  • SPC369-Matt Masson – Power BI for the IT Pros – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • You have to watch the session as his only has 14 slides.  It looks to be complete coverage of the Power* tools
  • SPC368-Brian Lyttle – Overview of configuring Yammer SSO & Directory Sync – CJG Rank 5 of 5 (possible 6)
    • Excellent set of slides and presentation!  This clearly walks you through Yammer SSO!
  • SPC367-Shane Young – Using Windows PowerShell with SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online – CJG Rank 3 of 5
    • Hmm, not sure this was a 300 level session?  Seemed really basic to me.  I would have liked to have seen some things you "can't" do with SPO with some workarounds developed by the community.
  • SPC366-Sam Hassani – Understanding and maintaining SharePoint Apps for IT Professionals – CJG Rank 3 of 5
    • Basic coverage o
      f Apps from an IT Pro standpoint (how to setup).  I would have liked to have seen some more items around governance such as how to prevent apps to be installed, how to allocate apps to specific webs, etc.
  • SPC365-Sean Squires, Carrie Doring – Governing & configuring divisional sites in an enterprise environment – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • I know this session has been done before.  None the less, hope you have the devs to build this for you, or you buy a tool from a 3rd party like AvePoint.  This topic stemmed from the eBay demo back in 2010 days.
  • SPC364-Zach Rosenfield – Give users all the storage they want without going broke – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • OMG…someone that knows what they are talking about!  Woohoo!  Awesome set of slides on OneDrive architecture!
  • SPC363-Zerelina Mukherjee – Get up and running fast with OneDrive for Business- planning guidance and best practices – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Excellent review of the changes in OneDrive and the updates with integration in SP1 for on-prem
  • SPC362-Shannon Bray – Gathering requirements- asking the right questions before building out a SharePoint 2013 environment – CJG Rank 3 of 5
    • I love Shannon like a brother, but the slides leave you asking more questions than having answers?  You'll need to match the slides with the video for the answers to the questions in the slides. Would have been good to have prescriptive guidance to all the Q's asked.
  • SPC361-Todd Baginski, Michael Sherman – Creating Cloud Hosted Line Of Business Applications with Apps for Office, O365, Azure, and WP8 – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • This session will pump you up for building Office Apps!
  • SPC360-Mert Sangar, Kristopher Loranger – Effective Search deployment and operations in SharePoint 2013 – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Excellent coverage of the search architecture and concepts!  Very proud!
  • SPC359-Meera Mahabala, Balaji Balasubramanian – E-commerce solutions with Dynamics for Retail & SharePoint 2013 – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • The slides just don't do this technology and integration justice.  Zlatan started this whole line of prezos and its unfortunately he wasn't able to deliver it.  He got me really pumped up about the cross-site publishing (which wasn't mentioned in these slides) of the e-commerce product catalog to SharePoint 2013.  If you haven't seen this in action, you are missing out!
  • SPC358-Bob German – Developing future-focused, on-premises solutions – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • What an easy going, simple, smooth take on the new App Model.  This was a pleasure to read and look at versus other methods of "Just Go APP".  Excellent!  PMG…take note 😉
  • SPC357-Eric Shupps – Developing an intranet on Office 365 – CJG Rank 3 of 5
    • This was a little, or a lot, un-Shupps like (he killed it last SPC…top speaker by far).  It was more of a intro to SP2013 WCM features than building an intranet.  Not sure the story behind this session.
  • SPC356-Spencer Harbar – Designing, deploying, and managing Workflow Manager farms – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • This was a much more indepth session that others have attempted (as to be expected with Spence and Wictor).  I would have liked to see things go a little deeper into EAI concepts though in the DR portion.  You can't simply restore a workflow farm and except the workflows to fire again on data that has changed.  Guidance needs to be provided to cancel workflows that may cause serious harm to the environment if you restore from an old backup.
  • SPC353-Gil Canare, Katie Bowman, Michael Mielke, Bruce Weatherford – AMD- 13 Million Users. 54 Million page views. www.AMD.com on SharePoint 2013. Done. – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • LOVE IT…outlines features used and un-used (and its the same ole answer we see everyday).  I had the change to meet Michael at the speaker party, awesome people!
  • SPC351-Rolando Jimenez – Office Power Hour – new developer APIs and features for Apps for Office – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Good review of all the upcoming API updates for Office Apps
  • SPC348-Sonya Koptyev, Greg Lindhorst – Update on InfoPath and SharePoint Forms – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • A nice resource for who you need to go to for your future form needs given that InfoPath development has ceased.
  • SPC347-Rob Howard – OneDrive for Business extensibility- building great apps and solutions – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • This session's name was waayyy off.  It should have been…"Here's all the cool new shit coming for v1.5 of SP Apps".  There were some things in here that I didn't know about!  Exciting!
  • SPC346-Nishan Desilva, Alex O'Donnell, Roberto Yglesias – SharePoint for large scale records management – hundreds of millions of documents and beyond! – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Dang…can you say "EXTREMELY LARGE FARM"…you can after you review this session!  Amazing stuff!
  • SPC345-Rita Zhang, Eric Overfield – SharePoint for any screen size- an in-depth look into building responsive web design – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Eric has been doing this for a while (well…at least as long as RWD has been around anyway), he has some great tips in his session
  • SPC344-Liam Cleary – SharePoint data security and compliance – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • I can watch Liam's session over and over and over again…his content never gets old…why?  Because he is always changing it and providing fresh examples.  He always nails this session and scared the heck out of you when he does…do you know who has access to your sharepoint data?  I will say the opening part is covered in about 5 other sessions, so he could have skipped to the juicy part right away!
  • SPC343-Wayne Ewington, Neil Hodgkinson – SharePoint Business Continuity Management with SQL Server Always On – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Neil is going to solve the speed of light problem, I just know it….in the meantime, he keeps working on really cool stuff and dumping out great content to the community!
  • SPC342-SharePoint 2013 Work Management Service deep dive – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Very nice look at Work Management!  I'll add one thing about the My Site Tasks page, it only updates every 15 mins
  • SPC340-Thorsten Hans, Nicki Borell – SharePoint 2013 Search Analytics – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • THorsten and Nicki explored some not so well known endpoints to show how to get search analytics data out of the database, and even presented ways to use SSIS to get data out that you may want to do more advanced reports on.  Great job guys!
  • SPC339-Sam Hassani – SharePoint 2013 hybrid end-to-end – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • A nice set of step by step slides on the Hybrid setup.  Sam makes it look simple, but it is anything but!
  • SPC338-Kevin Bell, Bob Piper – The 'how to' guide for selling and managing SharePoint Apps built using Access – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • Access Apps are now possible for deployment into the SharePoint Store.  This session outlines some of the things you should consider if you are going to build an access app (which would be prefered over storing your data in a SP List on the App web).  I haven't spent enough time with this to figure
      out all the ways I can hack this type of App, I'm sure their are some things I can do that were not intended…
  • SPC337-Helge Grenager Solheim, Alex Pope – Search-driven publishing for Intranet Portals in SharePoint Online – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Excellent guidance on the Search architecture in O365 and how to use search driven publishing and the content search web parts
  • SPC336-Thomas Molbach, Barry Waldbaum – Search architecture and sizing in SharePoint 2013 – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Check out slide 30…"HD XL Topology"….enough said…
  • SPC335-Gary Devendorf, Arjun Raja – Rich extensions to SharePoint Apps using Microsoft Access – CJG Rank 3 of 5
    • This session was over lapping >95% with other sessions.  It could have been dropped.
  • SPC334-Real-world SharePoint architecture decisions – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • This was a very well thought out and flowing prezo!  Very easy to understand and follow.  Hats off to Wictor!
  • SPC333-Chris Johnson – Mobilize your workforce- publish SharePoint to your users beyond the firewall with Windows Server 2012 R2 Web App Proxy – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • I have been sooo waiting for a UAG replacement.  I'm probably going to get this setup this weekend on my own network!
  • SPC332-Brian Lyttle – Overview of Yammer app development – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • Again, alot of overlap with other session, however, there is one golden nugget in here…check out slide 28 (Yammer .NET API coming soon).  Great…let's see how close they get to the one I already built 😉
  • SPC331-Brian Alderman – Optimizing SQL Server 2012 for SharePoint 2013 – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • I'm not sure this was a 300 level session (maybe 200), it was more of an overview of things you should do.  Not alot of prescriptive guidance on things like the databases that can be simple vs full, what that might cause later on with DR, etc.  In addition to the basics, I think a few more advanced items would have been good to add.
  • SPC330-Fabian Williams – Optimizing external data consumption through Business Connectivity Services (BCS) and OData Services – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • A good review of OData and how to consume it using BCS.  I'm not sure the "optimizing" part was used anywhere though, but maybe in the video it was.
  • SPC329-Kimmo Forss, Phil Cohen – Migrate your data and documents efficiently to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • I get the jist of this, but "stsadm"?  Really?  And going to a site collection level is the first step, you may want to take it one or more levels further.
  • SPC328-Matt Masson – Deep dive on self-service data retrieval With Power Query – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • PowerQuery is just plain AWESOME, no one can mess that up!  If you haven't played with it yet…DO IT!
  • SPC327-Data modeling and governance with business intelligence – CJG Rank ? of 5
    • Yei…one slide…bloody brilliant!  Watch the video…
  • SPC326-Lionel Robinson, Jonathan Keslin – Customizing your SharePoint sites using the SharePoint Theming Engine – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Woah….I didn't even realize you could do this!  Color me stoked!
  • SPC325-Vesa Juvonen, Steve Walker – Real-world examples of FTC to CAM transformations – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • A real world experience of moving from Full Trust code to the App Model.  Tough decisions were made…
  • SPC324-Ari Schorr, Michael Wilmot – Geospatial business intelligence with Power Map, Power View, and SQL Server reporting services – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • Again…you really can't mess this up…the tech is cool no matter who presents it!
  • SPC323-Ted Pattison – SharePoint App best practices using OData and the SharePoint REST API – CJG Rank 3 of 5
    • I guess the "best practices" part is in another session?  This is simply an overview of the REST api and some OData parts.
  • SPC322-Matthew McDermott – SharePoint 2013 Search display templates and query rules – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • Nice overview of display templates and query rules in SP2013.
  • SPC321-Johannes Lemmerer, Timo Heidschuster, Rainer Asbach – Customizing Search experiences with Azure Hosted Data and Bing Maps – CJG Rank 3 of 5
    • Hmm, I covered this entire session in my session's demo.  You can add user profile properties or other managed properties that then can be used to make Bing map API calls.  This was covered in the last SPC so not sure of the value especially with ESRI having some of the most advance mapping tools and integration with SharePoint I have ever seen.
  • SPC320-Neil Hodgkinson, Manas Biswas – Configuring Hybrid Search with SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • Having set this up a couple of times now, it amazes me at how long and complex a process this is for the average person.  This needs to get more simple (and should be) in the future.  The content and Neil was awesome, the demo…not so much 🙁
  • SPC319-Fabian Williams – Configuring Hybrid Business Connectivity Services with SharePoint 2013 – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Fabian spent a TON of time on this.  And the lovely people at Rackspace hooked him up with some servers to do everything with.  This was Fabian's best session!
  • SPC318-Wes Preston – Client-Side Rendering (CSR) demystified – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Dang…talk about FULL coverage of CSR!  Perfectly done!
  • SPC317-Alex Randall – Extend business processes with Workflow Manager – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • Alex has a pretty slick demo of approving a twitter feed post using Workflow…check it out!
  • SPC313-Fabian Williams, Chris Givens – Apps, BCS, OData, Search and O365…Oh My – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • There were a few things Fabian and I could have done better, but from a content standpoint, if you are curious about external list events, this is a session for you!
  • SPC312-Luca Bandinelli, Sanjay Narang – Deploying highly available SharePoint Internet Sites on Windows Azure Virtual Machines – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Geez…its almost a step by step of how to setup SP2013 in Azure, then configure DR using Traffic Manager.  I don't even want to think of what the Azure bill will look like between the two farm data centers.
  • SPC311-Nationwide Building a World-Renowned Intranet with SharePoint 2013 and Yammer – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • AWESOME…MUST WATCH!
  • SPC309-Shoshanna Budzianowski, Yuval Anafi – The Power of Two- Bringing Microsoft and SAP Closer Together – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • I'm sure every SAP vendor in the ExpoHall went to this session.  Next conference we will have tons of SAP based SP and Office Apps…yeah…
  • SPC306-Brent Groom, Norm Lambert – Best practices for Hybrid Search deployments – CJG Rank 3 of 5
    • The first slide of a hybrid car is really funny and creative…but that's where it ended…the non-overlapping slides from this session should have been put in Neil's session, then we co
      uld have added some other new and cool content session.
  • SPC305-Mirjam Van Olst – SharePoint Web Templates for on-premises and the Cloud – CJG Rank x of 5
    • At first I wasn't sure why the basic intro to web templates, then we got in to the App provision aspect and it clicked.  I can see Mirijam got Part II of provisioning and Vesa and Bert got Part II.  Might have been good to delineate that in the session names.
  • SPC304-Dan Holme – Automating SharePoint operations and governance- site provisioning and group management – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • The 4th of 4 sessions on site creationgovernance.  Dan takes it from a higher level of why you want to have site creation governance.  We might have to leave out his powershell and just say ref Mirijam, Vesa and Bert's sessions 🙂
  • SPC303-Ryan Campbell – Advanced Performance Analysis for SharePoint – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Wow…one of the more complete and succinct takes on performance analysis I have seen in a while!  Wonderful!
  • SPC302-Richard diZerega, Nathan Miller – Advanced development patterns for SharePoint Apps – CJG Rank 3 of 5
    • Not what I was expecting.  I didn't feel like I learned any dev patterns other than to "use the chrome control" for navigation.
  • SPC301-Radi Atanassov – Access is back! High-value, 'no code', functional & flexible business apps with the new Access services – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • Quite possibly one of the best Access Services session I have seen.
  • SPC300-Eric Riz – A strategic and pragmatic conversation on governance – CJG Rank 3 of 5
    • I don't even know what to say about this one…slides are full of so much businessy text…I'm so confused…
  • SPC299-Tony Wegewijs – Heineken- driving KM performance via a global knowledge management solution – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • I always love hearing customer stories.  This one didn't have a mention of 2013?
  • SPC298-Kirk Evans – Introduction to SharePoint and Windows Azure IaaS  – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Kirk has made a name for himself in anything Azure and SHarePoint, great overview of what is offered.
  • SPC297-Daniel Harris – General Motors- managing 130,000 users- documents and records – making it easy, while maintaining control – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Ohhh…check out slides 23 and 24….did this at General Atomics as well to make people aware of ITAR requirements.  Very nice!
  • SPC296-Best Buy_ The rise of the ninjas—a SharePoint 2013 user adoption story – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Putting levels to your end users and rewards at each level – very cool!
  • SPC295-Melanie Hohertz – Cargill- Real-world challenges and value in introducing enterprise social – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • Slide 12, funny.  You should watch the video on this one to get any real value, slides probably don't do it justice.  Watch session SPC266…much better!
  • SPC294-Jason Himmelstein – Achieving better business productivity through Apps for Office – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • Although it overlaps with the session above, it is one of the better review of Apps for Office
  • SPC293-SharePoint on-premises, in the cloud, and everything in between – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • This is one of two slide decks on the benefits and inevitability of moving to the cloudO365.  Both decks present the argument in different ways.
  • SPC291-Joel Oleson – The strategy behind building a successful social intranet – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • Joel uses some very interesting images to get the points across.  Overall, I think the message came across in the end, you should supplement with the video.  You should watch SPC266, I think the message is much more clear there.
  • SPC290-John Ross, Randy Drisgill – Branding Internet facing web sites with SharePoint in the cloud – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Randy and John yet again prove they are the masters at anything branding related!  Some good tidbits of SPO hosted internet sites.
  • SPC288-Matt Bremer – TypeScript for SharePoint 2013 Developers – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • I have never used TypeScript, likely won't, but some people swear by it.  Matt does a good job of proving TypeScript is something to look at in the future.
  • SPC286-Vasu Rangaswami – The Ins and Outs of SharePoint Licensing – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • I guess that's a simple as Microsoft licensing gets…well done!
  • SPC285-Asif Rehmani, Mark Gillis – No-code SharePoint 2013 Solutions for power users – CJG Rank ? of 5
    • Slides probably don't do this session justice.  You have to watch the video…
  • SPC284-Girish Raja – Harnessing social technologies with Microsoft Dynamics CRM – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Wow, talk about going all in with cross platform integration!  Dynamics CRM is using SharePoint and Yammer very heavily!  CHeck it out!
  • SPC283-Jim Nakashima, Saurabh Bhatia – Get started developing Apps for Office & SharePoint 2013 – CJG Rank 3 of 5
    • Grr…huge overlap with this session and other app sessions.  Total candidate for dropping in leiu of another cool session.
  • SPC282-Christophe Fiessinger, Juliet Wei – Microsoft's roadmap for Enterprise Social – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • The phrase "Work like a network" started here…check it out and watch the video!
  • SPC281-Jason Bullock – Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online – better together – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Very cool session on how to integrate your Office 365 and Yammer with CRM Online!  Awesome!
  • SPC280-Chris Slemp – Microsoft- Our Enterprise Social Journey – CJG Rank 5 of 5 (possible 6)
    • Oh baby…this is a MUST review and watch session!!!
  • SPC279-Ben Canning – Secure, Reliable and Evergreen Service at Massive Scale- Lessons learned from Running SharePoint Online – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Want to know how to run a REAL online service and continually exceed expectations?  Check out this session!  Amazing!
  • SPC278-Ed Dale, Pat Velderman – EY- making enterprise search successful – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Awesome…it's like a slide deck made from my search chapters!  Combine this with Mikael's session on relevance and you have everything you need to do a successful search deployment!
  • SPC277-Eric Harlan – Lessons learned from a support engineer- where there was no planning, there was no adoption – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • I was losing hope in the first few slides, then slide 22 hit me….AWESOME…don't keep your DR plan in SharePoint…LOL!
  • SPC275-Allison Michels – How to become a Yammer Power User in 75 minutes – CJG Rank 3 of 5
    • A good review of some basic things you should do with Yammer.  Thing is though, you would need Yammer to do these steps, which probably means you already did everything Allison showed, and if you don't have Yammer, well, then you wouldn't be able to do it until you setup your freemium service.
  • SPC273-Eric Charran – Application lifecycle management in Office and SharePoint – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • Probably could have dropped all the intro App Model stuff and just ju
      mped straight to the meat.  I think this is actually a 300 level session!  ALM for Apps…interesting…
  • SPC272-Rafal Lukawiecki – Advanced-and Easy!-BI with Excel and SQL Server Data Mining – CJG Rank 3 of 5
    • Don't get it, where's the tie in with SHarePoint and Power* or Power BI?  And why 200 level?  This is 300 level.
  • SPC271-Michael Atalla – Work with anyone, anywhere, on any device – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • More of a marketing set of slides on why O365 with a focus on cross device support.  Watch the video for the demo.
  • SPC270-Richard Harbridge – When should we use SharePoint out-of-the-box, add third-party apps or build custom solutions – CJG Rank 5 of 5 (possible 6)
    • Wow X10….Richard has the most amazing slides of anyone I have EVER seen.  And he is an amazing speaker.  So talented and a great person!  Watch this session!!!!
  • SPC269-Whats new for the Office & SharePoint developer – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • Slide 30 is the best…
  • SPC268-What's new and what's coming for OneDrive for Business – CJG Rank 3 of 5
    • Intro to OneDrive, more marketing than anything else, some mentions of the SP1 feature enhancements for on-prem
  • SPC267-Astrid McClean – What's new with Document Retention in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business – CJG Rank 3 of 5
    • Hmm, another eDiscovery prezo.  I guess Document Deletion Policies are new.  Yet wasn't that something we could do anyway, just not with a UI to it?  Unfortunately, the focus should not be on new features, but making current features scalable in examples such as 40,000 my sites.  This one could have been cut in lieu of SPC233.
  • SPC266-Virpi Oinonen – Driving enterprise social from the bottom up – CJG Rank 5 of 5 (possible 6)
    • This session made me go back and re-evaluate all the previous socialyammerjourney stories.  This one is by far the BEST!
  • SPC265-Paul Olenick – 6 Proven Steps to Get the Best Out of Search in SharePoint 2013 – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • I love Paul, but I think his session fell into overlap with several others…not his fault, but in case you wanted a different view of search features, this is another one.
  • SPC264-Allison Michels, Steve Nguyen – Best practices for breaking down organizational barriers using Yammer – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • Some good tips on deploying yammersocial
  • SPC263-Angus Florance – Giving voice to frontline workers via enterprise social – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • Another deploy yammer and all your problems will go away session…
  • SPC262-Doug Welsby, Yahya Haque – Efficient planning, reporting and decision making with Project Pro for Office 365 – CJG Rank 3 of 5
    • A session more adequately done at Project Server conference
  • SPC261-Sean Laberee – Developing and Debugging Apps for SharePoint with Visual Studio 2013 – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • Wait…how is this a level 200 again?  Not much in the slides, the demosvideo is where the meat is…
  • SPC251-Mary David, Sarat Subramaniam – Sharing content internally and externally with OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • You should watch and make sure you understand what is going on here, it is actually really important…
  • SPC250-The tipping point between on-premises and the Cloud – CJG Rank ? of 5
    • One slide, gotta watch the session
  • SPC248-Rich Wood – Yammer External Networks- Engaging Customers and Partners – CJG Rank 3 of 5
    • Another Yammer session…
  • SPC247-Angus Florance, Chad Slipka – Successful team collaboration with Yammer & SharePoint – CJG Rank 2 of 5
    • This session was not needed (overlaps 100% with other sessions) and should have been dumped…
  • SPC246-Jan Skjoy – Knowledge Management with SharePoint and Yammer – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • Ok, this one was not bad at all,  you should take a look!
  • SPC245-Kieran Gupta, Kate Dramstad – OneDrive for Business and Mobility-  Access your files while on the go from any device or platform – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • A very thorough review of OneDrive for Business platform support…very well done!
  • SPC244-Bill Baer – IT Pro audience keynote  SharePoint on-premises, in the cloud, and everything in between – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Oh damn..I totally missed the JSON Light support in SP1!!!  Tons of cool announcements in this session!  Check it out!
  • SPC243-Dan Holme – SharePoint 2013 and Office 365 upgrade and migration- strategy and tactics – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Tons of prescriptive walkthrough guidance on strategy for upgrading.
  • SPC242-Sajan Parihar – Project and Portfolio Management in the Cloud – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • "The man with the plan" so they say…if you watch any project server session, this is the one!
  • SPC241-Pankaj Lohumi, Ayushi Garg – Professional Manufacturing Dashboards with SharePoint Online and Visio Pro for Office 365 – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • Everything you wanted to know about data driven Visio diagrams
  • SPC240-Adam Jung – Office 365 Partner tools  – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Ohh…cool UIs for partners to help assist customer with O365!
  • SPC239-Steve Nguyen, Peter Walke – Real-world, best practices for making enterprise social successful – CJG Rank 3 of 5
    • Another social session…shoot me now…overlap!
  • SPC238-Ian Hameroff – Office 365 service communications to customers – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • Interesting session, cool to see the O365 team being more open!
  • SPC236-Scott Jamison – Leverage what you already know about SharePoint as you move into 2013 – CJG Rank ? of 5
    • Not sure what to say or think about this one…guess you should make your own judgement…
  • SPC235-Joe Banks, EJ Bastien – Showcase- How Microsoft Legal does eDiscovery – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • Not many slides here, have to watch the prezo, would have been awesome to be there to ask some of the harder questions!
  • SPC233-John Gargiulo, Astrid McClean, Quentin Christensen – Overview of Compliance in SharePoint and Office 365 – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Another eDiscovery session, however, this one is one of the best in terms of features comingavailable!
  • SPC232-Dene Cleaver – Everything you need to know about the Office Store – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • Dene is on the SP PMG and owns the Office Store.  He delivers a nice overview of the store, and although there aren't any specific "we have heard from you" points in the slides, you should check out the video.
  • SPC231-Going beyond the browser  deploying native Office desktop apps in 60 seconds or less – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Ohh, did not realize that Office Pro 365 was AppV based!  Interesting…lots of architectural details of Office Pro 365.
  • SPC230-Seayoung Rhee, Michael Tejedor, Miguel Martinez – Overview of Power BI for Office 365 – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • Overview of Power BI.
  • SPC229-Agnes Molnar, Israel Vega Jr – Designing and ap
    plying information architecture for SharePoint and Office 365 – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    •  A fresh take on IA.
  • SPC228-Ryan Sockalosky – Deliver adaptive and personalized experiences for your SharePoint 2013 sites – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • An interesting take on cross site publishing.
  • SPC226-Lori Gowin – Content Types, Managed Metadata, and You – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • A nice intro to content types.  Would have been better if a discussion of the Content Type Hub and all the things that could go wrong and how to fix them was added.
  • SPC224-Cem Aykan, Jeff Seacrist, Robert van Son, Olaf Hubel – The SharePointConference.com Site- From Sketch to Launch to Live! – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • A cool look at how they built the www portion of the sharepoint conference site.  Now if only someone would do the "What the hell we did wrong" session of MySPC…
  • SPC223-Pankaj Jain, Himani Arora – Developing Facilities Management Solutions using SharePoint Online and Visio Pro for Office 365 – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • A second session on data-drive Visio diagrams.  Not bad…
  • SPC221-Greg Frick, David Norton – UW- students and teachers store, sync and share – OneDrive for Business in EDU – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • WOW…Greg and his manager David delivered a VERY infromative session on their migration journey and where they are today with all the limits they are hitting in O365!  You MUST check this one out!
  • SPC217-Scott Jamison – Making SharePoint Collaboration Rock by Increasing Discoverability – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Scott has a totally different style than the typical speaker.  Although the topics he discusses are covered in other sessions, he did a good job of making it easier to digest and in 75 mins…
  • SPC216-SharePoint Online_ Built for the Enterprise – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • This was a rollup of a lot of the things you'll see in the other sessions.  I guess if this was on day one, it makes sense to have this session as an intro to point you to others.
  • SPC215-Laura rogers, Jennifer Ann Mason – Tips & Tricks to make the most out of your SharePoint site and maximize adoption – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • These two are very passionate about what they do, and they can take even the most complex things and describe them perfectly to business analysts.  Good session
  • SPC214-Vijay Kumar – Office 365 Trust – Security, Privacy and Compliance – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • I met Vijay during a series of interviews in Redmond a few months back.  Very smart guy.  He has the tough job of making sure people know that O365 is secure (including government agencies around the world).  Truth is…O365 is VERY secure.  There is no security reason that you should not look at O365.  Vijay presents all the security mechanisms that have been put in place to make you sleep at night.
  • SPC213-Amanda Lefebvre, Mike Morton – Collaborate with Office and Office Web Apps – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Ohh…a cool look through screen shots of how OWA has changed over the years!
  • SPC212-Chris Teer – Stanley Black & Decker- rolling out OneDrive for Business in Office 365 connected to SharePoint 2013 on-premises – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Oh wow…if you are a consultant, you MUST watch this session!
  • SPC209-Showcase_ Winning User Adoption Strategies from Best Buy, Nationwide Insurance & Trek Bikes – CJG Rank ? of 5
    • One slide – watch the session
  • SPC208-Quin Nikel, Jeff Medford – Enhance your messaging and communication solutions with Office 365 – CJG Rank 3 of 5
    • 7 slides?  really?  Come on Avanade, you are better than that.  Can't imagine the video is any better…
  • SPC207-Agnes Molnar – Best practices for Information Architecture and Enterprise Search – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • A good overview.  Would have liked to see some items on setting up managed properties properly across multiple crawl properties covered (naming schemes, etc).
  • SPC206-Tom Wisnowski, Alex Lee, Srikanth Gutha – Automated SharePoint 2013 disaster recovery with Windows Azure and Cloud Packs – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Woah…didn't even realize they had SPRaas implemented!  If you do anything with Azure, you HAVE to watch this session.
  • SPC205-Kevin Schroer, Nicholas Thiel, Roberto Yglesias – The Seattle Art Museum- art meets function with SharePoint 2013 – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • How SAM went SharePoint
  • SPC204-Jeff Conrad, Chris Usher – Anyone can build a SharePoint App with Microsoft Access – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • Two of these sessions, this is probably the better one.
  • SPC203-Cathy Dew – Adjust the perspective with responsive designs for SharePoint – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • A second responsive design session, but this had different content than Eric's.  Together they are a great take on responsive design!
  • SPC202-Alistair Speirs, Jeff Medford – A behind the scenes look at Office 365 for IT Pros – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • A look at behind the black box of O365.
  • SPC201-Dan Holme – SharePoint 2013 demystified – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • Dan's IT Pro intro track, with some cool screen shots from Sochi!
  • SPC200-Mark Rackley, Eric Harlan – 10 Steps to a happier cloud app migration – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • A nice overview of some of the differences between on-prem and O365 and what you should be thinking. 
  • SPC124-Bernd Hennicke, John Fiske – SAP- Should You ‘SharePoint-enrich’ SAP or ‘SAP-enable’ SharePoint – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • All about SAP, Microsoft and OpenText…if that sorta thing is for you, then watch this session.
  • SPC123-John Defrees, Jimi Ibbett – HP- HP Reference Architecture for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 data protection with HP Storage and Veeam – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • I have several customers that have started using Veeam and they LOVE IT.  Good session to watch!
  • SPC122-Office 365 and Yammer The Winds of Change – CJG Rank ? of 5
    • One slide, watch the video
  • SPC121-Working Smarter – Automating your communications – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • Wow, watch the video!  THe slides are interesting and different from any other prezos you will see.  Some impressive work done by the MS Sales team around productivity
  • SPC120-Executive Track Keynote The Dynamic Future of Work – CJG Rank 5 of 5
    • A very high level look at the overarching goals of the Office Division's products
  • SPC119-John Mancini – Tackling the Challenges of Information Management & Governance – insights from AIIM president, John Mancini – CJG Rank 4 of 5
    • Ooohhh…some juicy data points for your presentations to management or as a speaker at other conferences!
  • SPC113-Jeff Fried, Oleg Kofman, Chris Skinner, Katie Larson – Generate Enterprise-Wide Impact with Business-Critical SharePoint Solutions – CJG Rank ? of 5
    • You'd have to watch the video, PPTs don't do it justice.
    • < /ul>

    • SPC112-Work like a network_ The power of Enterprise Social  – CJG Rank 4 of 5
      • Listen, Adapt, Grow = Social
    • SPC108-Dan Holme, The Cloud Navigating the benefits and challenges of this disruptive innovation  – CJG Rank 5 of 5 (possible 6)
      • By far…one of Dan's best presentations EVER…the best of all the "what does the cloud mean and what options do I have" sessions.
    • SPC107-Overcoming barriers to achieve social business success and adoption – CJG Rank 4 of 5
      • A good presentation, but a feel others did a better job in simplifying things into an more easily digestible format (take your pick from 5 sessions on this topic)
    • SPC106-A comprehensive strategy to drive business value with SharePoint – CJG Rank 3 of 5
      • This session was more focused on driving business value but not so much with SharePoint in mind
    • SPC105-Beyond Business Critical SharePoint for Hybrid Deployments – CJG Rank ? of 5
      • One slide, watch video
    • SPC100-Beyond Deployment How IT Can Inspire, Motivate And Drive Sustainable Adoption – CJG Rank 4 of 5
      • Dux always puts a fun spin on things. 

SP24 – The FREE 24-hour SP Conference!

This will be a fun event, make sure you watch some of the great presenters deliver some killer content (including myself)!

​SP24 – The Free 24-hour SharePoint ​Conference

SP24
is a SharePoint Conference with a difference and if you are interested
in SharePoint you are going love it, and here's why :
  1. It's entirely on-line – so you won't need to leave the office or home!  
  2. Free for all attendees.
  3. Takes place on 16th April 10pm GMT.  
  4. In the first 4 weeks of registration over 2400 attendees signed up.
  5. Lasts for 24 hours.  
  6. World famous speakers from all over the world. 
  7. Keynote from Bill Baer (Senior Product Manager, Microsoft). 
  8. Comprises of 2 tracks, (business and technical).  
  9. 48 Live sessions + on-demand sessions. 

WORLD CLASS SESSIONS​​

There will be 48 FREE hour long online sessions for 24 hours and the keynote speech is by Bill Baer,
who is the Microsoft Senior Product Manager for SharePoint. I will find
out where the industry is heading, the direction of SharePoint and
associated products, the best practices and news about upcoming
integration across technologies for no cost whatsoever. I will learn
about the comprehensive scope of features, functionalities and solutions
that SharePoint can offer, and I will bring this information back.

2 'LIVE' TRACKS – 1 BUSINE​​SS AND 1 TECHNICAL 

There are over 50 speakers and over 2500
(and rising) delegates, Microsoft engineers, Microsoft Certified
Masters and MVPs will be speaking and viewing the sessions from around
the world. On top of having exclusive access to the experts, I will
have the opportunity to chat online with speakers and other conference
attendees, and get our questions answered while learning how SharePoint
can provide solutions for us.

WANT TO REGISTER?

I am already signed up to attend SP24 and I strongly suggest you book your place early by visiting : https://www.sp24conf.com

WHEN IS IT​​?

The Keynote starts on 16th April 2014 10pm GMT and will last for 24 hours.

SPC14 Conference Review

My SPC14 Conference Review:

This is my fourth SharePoint Conference.  Every conference has been a completely different experience for us.  Two of them I have spoken at, two I have simply been an observer.  SPC14 was a unique one in the fact that the Project Server conference (my first) was 4 weeks before.  In each conference I had three sessions.  That's six sessions in 4 weeks!  I spent almost three months prepping for those six sessions.  In the end, I managed to etch out 4.4 or higher in all of them and am currently in the running for one of the top sessions of SPC14!  My sessions included:

However, this will be the last time I do more than one session!  The work and expectations for each session are incredible, and given there are so many cool and awesome people in the Product Marketing Groups (PMG), you don't want to disappoint any of them!  However, doing that many sessions is not advisable.  You lose out on time to spend with friends and potential clients, and you don't get to watch many of your fellow speakers give it their all!  That being said, I will look to do sessions in the future, but won't be so over zealous for the sake of the pocket book (ie missing opportunities).

Keynotes:

I was a little disappointed about the PMG spending all that money on having Bill Clinton come out and speak.  I felt it would have been a better use of the funds if they had gotten Satya, Microsoft CEO, to come and give a speech that gave us a rallying cry for why Microsoft is about to become the coolest company on the planet.  It would have been free and much more exciting in my opinion.  Not to mention we could have had some kind of cool artist at the attendee party (and then maybe we would have gone).  In terms of the demos, awesome.  Just plain awesome.  The behind the scenes details of how those came about is pretty funny, and I was crossing my fingers when Julia and others got up to do them that everything would work out ok.  And for the most part, they did!  Now that all the marketing ideas have been dropped on the table (and yes folks, those things you saw last week are not yet fully baked, and its possible you may not ever see them again), its time to start the execution phase, good luck Building 17, and get SharePoint Server 2015 out the door!

Friends:

None the less, this was a great conference as Lidiya and I got to see some of our favorite people again such as

But in addition we made some great new friends:

Oh yeah…and this guy too:

Sessions:

In terms of sessions I didn't get to see any [:(], but I will be downloading all the PPTs and doing a review as I have done in the past. In its place, I did manage to get several mentions and mention #SPC14 a lot on twitter!

Exhibitors:

Also, I didn't make it all the way around the Exhibit hall this year.  I only made it about halfway, but did find some jewels during that period:

  • WalkMe
    Can you say "COOL"?!?  I will be exploring these guys thoroughly over
    the next few weeks.  I see a lot of potential for value add with the ACS
    courseware moving forward!
  • Formotus
    I guess, and this is purely from the sales guy that was manning the
    booth, the CEO is an old Microsoft Engineering guy that knew Infopath
    was going to be dead even before the PMG knew it.  The solution looks
    solid, but I'd have to take it for a serious test run before I'd
    recommend it to clients.  Also think they could have come up with a better name?
  • Sada Systems – A competitor to Qumu in the video streaming space.  Their model is like Yammer in that all your content is hosted in their cloud solution
  • HarePoint – An http module based approach at on-premise SharePoint analytics.  Pretty awesome stuff!  I don't think there is anything they missed from the data they collect! (Russian Developers)
  • Datapolis – A competitor to Nintex and K2.  They do have some pretty unique features that are worth checking out!

Parties:

When there wasn't something major going on (or we choose to skip them because they were going to suck), we spent a lot of time in the V Bar in the Venetian.  The door men got to know us really well and were so nice! And they had great music!  The one cool thing about the ClubSPC was the DJ, he had an awesome DJ setup and is super well know around the Microsoft and tech community for his great DJ skills.  If you want to contact him for parties, his name is Derek Mazzone (derek@kexp.org).  He left from SharePoint Conference and headed to SXSW to do some partying (horrible life right?).

In terms of the cool parties, as always, AvePoint did a killer job keeping us close to our hotel rooms, yet still getting us on the dance floor and providing wonderful refreshments at Tao nightclub!  In terms of travel and cool factor, the Metalogix et all party was pretty sweet too.  I can only imagine what happens if you have a cabana with your own hottub at the Marquee dance club, hope they clean the water daily and no one fell in!  In addition, the K2 guys were nice enough to let us crash in their massive table area on the dance floor!

 

In the end, the club at Hakkasan was by far the best experience we had all week!  This club had the BEST digital light display and dance floor effects I have seen in a very long time!  If you ever get a chance to go to this club before its "not cool and too old", DO IT!

Oh and @SPCPartyPatrol was off the hook!  They win the prize for most outgoing and partied out individuals of SPC14 by light years!

Other Reviews:

 Here are some other conference reviews you can check out:

Summary:

Overall, the conference was a blast, and although not everything went to plan (such as the MySPC site having major fails – and nothing to do with my wonderful amazing friends at FpWeb, and several other things you won't be privy too nor can I say anything about), the speakers, attendees and Las Vegas made up for it!