Wednesday was the pre-conference workshop at SPTechCon in San Francisco, featuring "SharePoint 101" training.  I only scored an Exhibit Hall badge, however, so I wasn't able to attend any of the workshops.  A handful of the scheduled workshop speakers were stranded on the East Coast as a result of the blizzard, but luckily the hotel was full of extremely knowledgeable stand-ins, and it sounds as if the workshops went off without a hitch.  Tomorrow we will move into the general SharePoint conference with keynotes by Tom Rizzo and Ted Pattison and technical classes by dozens of SharePoint MVPs and experts.  When I registered this afternoon, I was informed that attendance is expected to be an impressive 950+.  I haven't seen a crowd of that size yet, so my assumption is that most people will be filing in this evening and joining the general conference starting tomorrow. 

The Exhibit Hall opened up Wednesday afternoon at 2:30.  There were a lot of new SharePoint vendors that I hadn't seen before; yet another example of the expeditious growth of SharePoint and the opportunities ahead for products that add value and extend the platform (like Bamboo!).  I visited with Jennifer Mason, Randy Drisgill and John Ross at the SharePoint 911 booth, all of whom have the energy of the Energizer bunny.  In addition to the numerous sessions they are presenting, they keep going and going and going…

I also found out that the folks at Kodak are leveraging the SharePointOnVista functionality that Bamboo's Jonas Nilsson shared with the SharePoint developer community in 2008.  Bill Holley, Business Development Manager of Software Solutions is pictured at right.  I look forward to working with Jeff Shuey, one of the newest members of the team at Kodak, in helping them extend their SharePoint offerings. Congratulations to Jeff on his new role! 

Additionally, I spent some time with Bob Hazelton (pictured below) at ESRI discussing their MapIt product and all of the new features and functionality they will be adding to the 2010 version that's due out this summer.  I look forward to working with them to identify ways in which we can bring added value to our joint customers.

Tonight is the attendee reception in the Exhibit Hall. I left the conference to catch a quick dinner with one of my favorite people over at Mindsharp, Bill English.  Bill will be speaking tonight at the SharePoint User Group meeting and at a couple of SPTechCon sessions this week.  We talked about the Best Practices Conference which is returning to the Washington, D.C. area this August.  If you haven't had the opportunity to attend one of these, you're not going to want to miss this one!  Bill couldn't share all of the details yet, but rest assured, we will let the Bamboo Nation in on all of the details as soon as they become available.

After dinner, my Wednesday night at SPTechCon wrapped up with the SharePint at the Elephant Bar.