Hero and Hiro - Day 2-4 at TechED Orlando
Dustin Miller is my hero.
About 3 months ago I was with Dustin Miller, Nikola Young, and Heather Solomon at SharePoint Connections in Orlando and we're enjoying ourselves at Disney MGM studios at the Fantasmic Mickey Mouse Show. The crowd was huge and we were on one end of a massive group waiting for the show to begin. We couldn't wait for Mikey and the cool pyro technics. Messing around I was thinking how cool it would be to get this massive crowd doing the wave. I tried and got Dustin to join me. Without many converts my failed attempt made me think about how cool it would be to get the crowd at a large session doing the wave. Looking for witnesses? Ask Andrew Connell or Heather Solomon.
Dustin is one of those guys who likes to take chances. He's a strategic risk taker. He took my challenge and said, if I do it... you'll post a blog stating I'm your hero. Sure... Why not? You would be my hero.
Dustin lived up to the challenge. He blew away the challenge by getting his crowd of ~400 to do the wave from front to back, back to front, and side to side! Not only did it look cool. It paid off. His session is currently in the top 3 and his presentation skills score is sitting at #1. He really made SharePoint Designer sing and dance. His Q/A was even impressive. Rather than answering the questions with a quick quip. He demo-ed each answer like showing how to add multiple lists or web services into the same dataview. He also showed off using Live.com news. The presentation was demo rich, but his parody of Steven Colbert from the Colbert Report feature of "The Word" on "FrontPage" was hilarious and a MUST SEE. The crowd was rolling. His few jabs at where FrontPage has been and how perceptions are often misconceived was brilliant and well done.
This week Dustin has been incognito at night till last night when he joined our group in my cool 2007 mustang rental. It was cool for about 1 day, until every night this week we've been craming 4 or 5 people into it. Maybe I should have got the Hummer. :) He's been on the low down recovering his web properties. The vendor who manages his hosted hardware and backups sprung some really bad news. He has been doing superhero things and pulling late nights getting things patched up and pulling off stunts where raid sets and backups were corrupt. Lesson learned, *don't trust your backups*. Even the disk to disk backup set was corrupt! The property that may be a bit patchy is www.sharepointblogs.com. Most of the others are safe and sound.
Last night was the attendee party at Universal Studios Islands of Adventure, but right before that Shane Young and I topped off our 3rd presentation. The Upgrade session on Wed rocked! I really mean rocked. We really both loved the topic, our crowd was there to learn and was PUMPED! Our session score was in the mid 8's of 9. Something we can thank our crowd for and our passion. Shane is a rock star. Now's the time to get his autograph... before he goes really big. He's been a sleeper. The key lesson in our upgrade session... 1) don't use in place upgrade in production (you can do it in a virtual environment or dev/test, etc...) 2) Spend time with prescan, it is your friend, use it early and often. 3) Think outside the box. There are more than 3 options for upgrade. 4) You don't need to re-create your site definitions except in extreme circumstances. Use features and solution deployments instead when at all possible. Not everything I said was covered in my blogs, but I'm sure you see a lot of connections if you've followed my posts on upgrade.
Our Admin sessions back to back with one on the North side of the worlds largest meeting room to the South Side was great excersize... or so I explained to the attendees. We did amazingly retain a strong following from the first session. Shane the rock star did most of the demos while I pontificated about tips and tricks, lessons learned, with best practices shared across the planning and deployment space. Shane thought my "It's Hot" reminded him of Paris Hilton, so we had some good fun with that. He left the stage at one point when I was explaining how IT should "give the hand" (a deny) to the developers trying to give you code that wasn't packaged in a solution. All in good fun. I did get a note from one of the attendees asking me not to interrupt. So, Joel and Shane aka Pen and Teller had a good act and our scores have helped bring up the average for the Office Track. Our upgrade session was a top 10 session of the day and our Admin/Deployment sessions were strong.
Shane is my Hiro... and I'm his side kick, the guy in NBC's Heros, I'm the guy that doesn't have the secret powers but it's afraid of an adventure when something fun is involved.
Today at 1 PM is my talk on Governance and Information Architecture. I've been working hard on that story. If you can't find information on Governance now, you aren't looking in the right place. The Governance landing page with information on Governance and Information Architecture on TechNet is sure to be a hit.
