After the long Tet holidays here in Vietnam to celebrate the new year, the momentous Year of the Dragon, SharePoint Saturday Vietnam
is back. As usual, Bamboo Solutions is proud to be the key sponsor of SharePoint Saturday Vietnam, and to send a speaker to the event as well.

Luckily, it was a nice sunny day for the event on Saturday, even though there was a tropical depression in Vietnam on Saturday, our first tropical depression of the year
. This continues the streak of good weather for SharePoint Saturday Vietnam, as it was also sunny for the three previous events.  I entered the event conference room early to setup the Bamboo desk (the organizing team provides sponsors a desk where attendees can find information about the sponsor), and everything looked great – we were ready for another SharePoint Saturday Vietnam.

At this event, there are three interesting topics being offered, based on the requests of Vietnamese SharePoint Developers and IT Pros. The first one is “SharePoint 2010 Farm Installing Best Practice” presented our Development Team Leader, Hai Tuan Nguyen
. Hai received many requests and questions from the SharePoint Vietnam forum about the SharePoint Server Farm installation for the development and production environment. His topic impressed audiences in showing how to setup the right SharePoint Server Farm, and selecting the right infrastructure based on Microsoft recommendations. He also provided SharePoint developers with information on the best way to setup the environment for SharePoint development. The most interesting part of his presentation was the list of setup accounts which we will be faced with when doing the SharePoint installation, such as SharePoint Farm Admin account, MS SQL Server Admin account, and the SharePoint Web App account.  The danger is messing these accounts up if they’re not handled correctly, in addition to the security issues we might face with if we’re on the wrong track. Some may think of these as being small problems, but they’re really not.

After Hai’s presentation, the second topic, “Building powerful Business Intelligence (BI) solution on SharePoint 2010,” was presented Mr. Pham Anh Vu
, Partner Technology Advisor from Microsoft Vietnam. His topic focused on Business Intelligence in SharePoint, and via his topic you will see the important level of SharePoint in the enterprise: how SharePoint helps the enterprise in Business Intelligence, providing the board with the information they need to make critical business decisions. Pham then shared with us BI trends, and why SharePoint 2010 is the best platform for BI including: the demand for self-service; the consumerization of IT; the sharing and collaboration features of BI in SharePoint, and accessing information anywhere at any time. I was very impressed with his answer to my question about the comparison between MS SQL Reporting Services in SharePoint versus Microsoft PerformancePoint Application Services in SharePoint 2010, and why we should choose PerformancePoint. He gave a visual example with his answer, involving wood, and Lego games. The Reporting Services is like the wood; once we carve it, we cannot change it. But PerformancePoint is like the Lego game; we can change, modify, and redesign the dashboard and charts using the flexible components provided PerformancePoint Service.

The third topic of the day was “SharePoint 2010 Service Application” presented Chung Van Tran, from KMS Technology
. This was another great topic for SharePoint developers, focusing on developing the Custom Service Application, a new feature in SharePoint 2010. During his presentation, he shared his experiences implementing a customized service application and some complications with SharePoint classes in particular. He gave us the details of developing the Custom Service Application, and his great demo session showed the simple way to develop the Custom Service Application in SharePoint 2010.

The last session was the “Discussion and Sharing” panel, led Hoang-Anh Phan
, of the SharePoint Saturday Vietnam Organization team.  During this session, we received feedback from the Vietnam SharePoint community and presented the plans for additional SharePoint Saturday Vietnam events this year – there are some great events ahead. Finally, I would like say thank you to all of the attendees for coming!

For the speakers’ slide decks, sample code, demo videos, and additional event photos, please visit the SharePoint Saturday Vietnam homepage
or the event’s Facebook page
.

See you at the next SharePoint Saturday Vietnam, our fifth event!