SPTechCon San Francisco 2011 Preview

SPTechCon San Francisco logoThis year’s San Francisco edition of SPTechCon kicks off a week from today, and I, for one, am pleased that there are no blizzards in the forecast.  Which is to say that, unlike last year, I’m looking forward to actually getting to fly out of D.C. to attend (and cover) my first-ever SPTechCon San Francisco.  Bamboo Nation is a proud sponsor of the conference again this year and, with just a week remaining, I think it’s time for me to start narrowing down my TechCon schedule.

As is customary with SPTechCon, Monday is a pre-conference day of workshops, consisting of six full-day workshops (with content for developers, administrators, end  users, and project managers) and another seven half-day workshops taking place over morning and afternoon sessions.  If I elect a full-day session, I’m eyeing Dux Raymond Sy’s How to Effectively Plan, Manage and Control  SharePoint Projects.  Half-day sessions that are calling out to me include Paul Swider’s Document Management from A to Z, and Laura Rogers’s InfoPath Immersion.

Tuesday will kick off with the keynote Jared Spataro, Director of SharePoint at Microsoft, followed a day of technical sessions and (for me anyway) blogging. Narrowing down one’s SPTechCon schedule isn’t made any easier given that there are nine sessions competing for the attention of attendees in each timeslot.  Leading contenders for me on Tuesday include: Christian Buckley’s 11 Strategic Considerations for SharePoint Migration; Chris Beckett’s Content Aggregation Strategies; Robert Bogue’s How Workflow Works… and How it Breaks; Owen Allen’s SharePoint as a Platform for Business Applications; and Michael Noel’s Building the Perfect SharePoint 2010 Farm: Real World Best Practices from the Field.

Wednesday’s keynote will be delivered Joel Oleson, Senior Product Manager at Quest Software, and will again be followed a full day of attending and blogging technical sessions.  Wednesday sessions that I’m considering include: Todd Klindt and Shane Young’s Taming the User Profile Service Beast; Mark Rackley and John Ferringer’s enticingly titled Busted! Debunking the Urban Myths Surrounding SharePoint; Joel Oleson’s SharePoint 2010 Service Architecture Drill-down; Ruven Gotz’s Explaining Metadata to Your Stakeholders; Todd Klindt and Shane Young’s PowerShell: An Admin’s Best Friend; Eamonn McGuinness’s Using SharePoint 2010 to Collaboratively Manage Projects; Scott Jamison’s Social Computing Best Practices in SharePoint 2010; Mark Miller’s The Missing Link Between You and Your Business; and Mark Rackley’s SharePoint & jQuery: What’s the Real Story?

Needless to say, many of the above sessions compete with each other in the same timeslot, so I reckon I’ve got a (little less than a) week to make final decisions as to which sessions to attend and cover.  Check back starting on Monday and you’ll be the first to learn which ones I opted for, as I’ll be providing detailed coverage of each session I attend in San Francisco.  Note: Depending on the nature of the session, conference coverage may appear either right here in the Bamboo Team Blog or over in the SharePoint 2010 blog.

As a final note, I should mention that it’s not too late to register to attend SPTechCon San Francisco yourself, as there are still some seats still available.  If history is any guide, however, the show will sell out (and the official conference hotel already has), so you’d be wise to act fast if you’re leaning towards attending.

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