I’ve logged a fair number of travel miles on behalf of Bamboo Nation over the past three years, but nothing compares to the events I’m covering this week, beginning today at the second Australia SharePoint Conference in Sydney. I was already booked to join the Sharing the Point Asian Tour when I was asked my manager in December to extend my trip to the other side of the world kicking it off with the Australian SharePoint Conference. Needless to say, having never been to Australia before, I was quick to accept.
If you clicked the link for the Australian SharePoint Conference above, you’ll have probably noticed, as I did when I first visited the site back in December, that the official conference site is running on SharePoint 2010. I mention this particular fact because, although it’s something that one wouldn’t think to be necessarily noteworthy in the SharePoint space (especially in March of 2011, as we approach the one-year anniversary of the release of SharePoint 2010), such Internet-facing SharePoint 2010 sites are still a relatively uncommon enough occurrence that it strikes me as noteworthy all the same.
Prior to this morning’s keynote Mark Miller and Joel Oleson, conference organizer Debbie Ireland provided some introductory remarks. Debbie explained that, in response to suggestions from attendees of last year’s inaugural Australian SharePoint Conference, the theme of this year’s event would be “very much about something for everyone.” As such, Debbie explained that the four conference tracks would include Business, Voice of a Customer case studies, Technical IT Pro, and Technical Developer. I can’t promise that I’ll end up covering representative sessions from all four tracks over the next two days, but I should certainly be able to cover at least three of the four. Debbie also mentioned a number of “special offerings” available at the conference in addition to the breakout sessions, and these offerings include: a Customer Immersion Experience consisting of hands-on labs to familiarize oneself with SharePoint 2010; SharePoint Idol events each day, in which participating vendors each have five minutes to demonstrate what you can do to add value to SharePoint with third-party add-ons; a Community Challenge, of which there will be three audience participation sessions taking place throughout out the conference and are intended for attendees of all skill levels; and Ask the Experts, which includes a booth in the exhibit area to be staffed experts throughout the conference, as well as providing an opportunity to submit questions for the conference-closing Ask the Experts session on Wednesday afternoon.
In my next post, I’ll bring you a report of Mark and Joel’s keynote, but right now I’m going to try and get this post published before attending the first Community Challenge event … beginning in 20 minutes as I type.
Read our complete coverage of the Australia SharePoint Conference 2011:
- Greetings from the 2011 Australian SharePoint Conference
- Keynote: Joel Oleson & Mark Miller Present ‘The History & Future of the SharePoint Community’
- Paul Culmsee Presents ‘Community Challenge – Define & Design’ SharePoint Intranet Requirements
- Daniel McPherson on ‘Social Computing Meets the Enterprise’ in SharePoint
- Keynote: Paul Culmsee on ‘SharePoint Governance Home Truths’
- Gayan Peiris Shows ‘How Microsoft Use SharePoint’
