We also had a great group of volunteers that really helped with all the logistics of the day including: Andy Bradley, Tuong Do, Keith Oswalt, Karyn Williams, John Boomershine, and Mike Ticker. The folks at our facility, the
Gene Glick Junior Achievement Center, were also great all day long!
I also heard from all the sponsors that they really felt appreciated by both the organizers and the attendees and were looking forward to future opportunities to be involved in similar community events in Indianapolis!
Support these folks because without them “free” events just can’t happen!
For my part, in addition to having a speaking slot (more on that below), I was put in charge of speaker management and service. This was certainly the most rewarding part of the entire experience for me as I got to meet and interact with a lot of great folks from the SharePoint community, both local and from other regions. In addition to the event on Saturday, we all had a great time out at
Scotty’s Brewhouse for the speaker dinner on Friday night. I have a
few pictures from that here.
All the speakers did an outstanding job, both inside the walls of their sessions, as well as outside in the hallways. I saw numerous side conversations going on as our expert community played good-will ambassadors to all. Please join me in thanking all the speakers including: Andy Hoffman, Chris Geier, Daniel Galant, Darrin Bishop, David Petersen, Enrique Lima, Fabian Williams, Hope Foley, James Curtis, Jeff Willinger, Jennifer Martinez, Jennifer Mason, Jim Grabinski, Joe Mack, John Ferringer, Kevin Dostalek, Marcy Kellar, Ram Gopinathan, Rob Wilson, Sean McDonough, Steve Pietrek, and Woody Windischman. If you want to follow all these fine SharePoint experts easily on Twitter, I’ve created a Twitter list that you can
follow here.
A few statistics that we have about the event:
- Registrations – 372
- Attendees - 250
- Sponsors – 10
- Speakers – 22
- Sessions – 20 (in 4 tracks of 5 each, then we also had a welcome and closing session)
My Session:
So I presented “Social Computing with SharePoint 2010”. Unlike my nSpin presentation from a few weeks ago which was developer focused, this presentation was in the “Business and End User Track” and so was a bit less technical. I had a pretty experienced SharePoint audience, however not very experienced when it came to “social” especially inside the enterprise. I love this topic because it virtually presents itself and demo’s very well. To add a little bit of fun to the demos I mocked up the Dunder Mifflin corporate organization, complete with about 30 of “The Office” profiles as employees (all under the Fair Use Copyright exemption for Educational use only of course :) This was pretty well appreciated by the audience, but it also made putting in all those status updates, social tags, and comments much more self-entertaining as well [that’s what she said].
Thank you to everyone that attended the session. For those that missed it, I’m doing a slightly altered version of it along with a customer on February 16th at the Microsoft offices.
Go here for more information. If you’d like a copy of my slides, you can download them by clicking on the thumbnail on the right- although about 50% of the presentation was demo.
Do you have a favorite memory from SPSIndy or any other feedback for the organizing committee? If so, please post it below!
Wow, what a great day we had on Saturday at the first ever SharePoint Saturday Indianapolis event. I was fortunate to be on the organizi...