As of this morning, members of the SharePoint communities in Beijing, Manila, and Ho Chi Minh City may now register to attend the free half-day Sharing the Point events taking place in each city next month. In the tradition of community events such as SharePoint Saturday, the mission of Sharing the Point (STP) is to promote SharePoint and galvanize the local communities in the participating cities. STP speakers include renowned SharePoint professionals Joel Oleson, Dux Raymond Sy, Michael Noel, Paul Swider, Mark Miller, and Rob LaMear, and your humble correspondent will also be joining the team as an “embedded journalist” so you can expect plenty of blog coverage throughout the barnstorming three-city tour.
The first stop on this inaugural STP tour takes place exactly two weeks from today on Thursday, March 10 in Beijing. While at SPTechCon San Francisco earlier this month, Jared Spataro, SharePoint Product Management Team Lead at Microsoft and a fluent speaker of Chinese, was generous enough to record an invitation to the inaugural STP event which you can see here:
From China, the STP tour moves on to the Philippines where the STP event will take place in Manila on March 12. STP speaker Dux Raymond Sy was born and raised in Manila, so he’s our inside man for that job, and he writes about how much he’s looking forward to that tour stop in his “I’m the SharePoint Man from Manila” blog post on the STP site.
We head from Manila to the final stop of the tour, and it’s the one that’s most near and dear to my own heart in that Ho Chi Minh City is where Bamboo’s Technology Center is based, and I’ll be able to visit our Vietnam HQ for the first time. I’m especially proud to note that while Microsoft is hosting the STP events in Beijing and Manila, my Vietnam-based Bamboo colleagues are hosting the tour stop in Ho Chi Minh City, and for months now have been quietly laying the groundwork for what promises to be a fantastic STP tour-ending event in Vietnam.
As of today, all of my visas are now in hand, and I’m officially counting down the days until I set out for a historic week of SharePoint-related world travel.
If you’re reading this and you live in (or know a member of the SharePoint community who lives in) one of the participating cities, please help spread the word that STP is coming soon and that registration for the free SharePoint community events is open now!