Owen Allen - The MOSS Garden

SharePoint Saturday in Redmond

I’ve been watching the SharePoint Saturday phenomenon for a while now, and I think it’s amazing.  SharePoint has an amazing community of customers and partners and from time to time they come together to do something amazing.

The Puget Sound SharePoint Users Group is sponsoring a SharePoint Saturday in Redmond, on the Microsoft campus, this Saturday, November 7th.

To see the details about this event, click on http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/redmond/default.aspx!

If you’d like to attend, you can register here!

The sessions are going to be amazing.  Now that we’ve passed the disclosure date around SharePoint 2010, most of the sessions will be about SharePoint 2010. 

There will be sessions from the following SharePoint customers and partners:

• Microsoft
• 3Sharp
• Quest Software
• BlueThread Technologies
• K2
• AvePoint
• Mimosa Systems
• Allyis

Please join us – it will be held in the luxurious Microsoft Conference Center on the Microsoft campus, and it starts at 9AM!  Get the details from the link above.

I can’t wait!  I’m going to show up early…  to get a good seat?  well, no, not really, I’ll be there to help set things up, but hopefully there will be enough good seats!  Show up early!

See you there-

SharePoint Conference Thank You

What an amazing SharePoint Conference we had last week.  I wanted to take a minute to say, “THANK YOU,” to all of you.  The SharePoint Partner ecosystem is ROCKING, and notice was served last week in a big way. 

The energy that was in and around the partner exhibit hall on Sunday night was incredible.  The flow of folks never seemed to die down, throughout the entire 3 hours!  And the partners were ready to work!  I received so many comments from partners that they couldn’t believe how educated and qualified the attendees were, and how many real leads resulted from their booth at the conference. 

And, the ultimate closing hand was the fact that so many of the partners on the floor were already demoing their products on SharePoint 2010 beta 1.  That was very cool to see. 

Thank you so very much for the time and energy that you have invested in showing how strong the SharePoint partner ecosystem really is.  I feel that there is still a long way to go, in illustrating how much potential there is for partners in and around SharePoint, but it will happen. 

As always, please feel free to let me know how your experience went, what went well, and what could be improved on for the next time.  I’ve included some facts about the show and about two launched/updated SharePoint-related websites at the bottom of this email.

Key Statistics from the SharePoint Conference 2009

• 7400+ Attendees (94% growth over last SharePoint Conference!)
• Sold Out 2 weeks before the show
• 165 Partners Sponsoring and Exhibiting
• 18 Customers Presenting
• 279 Speakers
• 240 Sessions (300+ hours of content)
  • (For comparison, we usually create 30-40 hours of new content for the typical Tech-Ed conference.)
• 45 Hands-on Labs – 5,500 labs were executed during 3.5 days. 
  • (Tech-Ed usually sees about 3,000 labs executed)
• Largest Beach Party Ever at the Mandalay Bay (80’s theme, Huey Lewis and the News!)
• MySPC: 5000 profiles filled out, 1500 profile photos uploaded
• A SharePoint Marriage (SPJeff – http://www.spjeff.com to his wife Emily.)
• We had over 27,000 people watch the keynotes lives the morning of the conference and you can view the keynotes on-demand here –
  • http://www.mssharepointconference.com/pages/videohighlights.aspx#7

On top of all that, the SharePoint website was updated to include more SharePoint 2010 content and now runs on SharePoint 2010 Beta 1!  Check it out at SharePoint2010.Microsoft.com.  The top download on the SharePoint website is the Office and SharePoint Better Together whitepaper.

Another interesting website also went live – the “Because it’s Everybody’s Business” website.  Check it out.

The customers were amazing at the SharePoint Conference.  The Energy was ELECTRIC! 

The Presenters did such an incredible job.  So much SharePoint 2010 content to absorb and ingest…  it’s going to take a while!

But, I must say thank the most to the Partners.  What an incredible showing.  There is a lot of hard work being put in, all around the SharePoint universe, and partners are often the icebreakers that are carrying SharePoint into customers, industries, workloads and application types that SharePoint didnm’t used to be considered for. 

Thanks.

Puget Sound SharePoint Users Group – Sept 2009 SPRINT Event

The Puget Sound SharePoint Users Group is holding their second SharePoint Sprint event this weekend, September 26, 2009.

The first event was a great success, as the working groups determined their scenarios and goals for the day and worked together to construct the infrastructure and functionality that they wanted in their solution.

This event will be very similar, with new scenarios designed to showcase user, administrator, and developer solutions.

The SharePoint Sprint will be held at the SQLSoft+ office in Bellevue, WA, on Saturday, September 26, 2009, from 8:30AM – 5:00PM.

Please register here if you’d like to attend. 

A big thank you to the sponsors of this event – K2, CorasWorks, SQLSoft+, O’Reilly Publishing, WROX Publishing, and Microsoft.

KMWorld Trend-Setting Products of 2009

KMWorld publishes a list of Trend-Setting Products each year, and I’d like to mention the award winners that are integrated to some degree with SharePoint. 

The full list is here:

I started listed the companies that had integrations with SharePoint, but the list became too long.  (Oh, Snap!)  So, I’ll just point you again to the great list of Trend-Setting products for 2009 from KMWorld.

PDC and the Business Intelligence Workshop

If you’ve tried to contact me over the past month or so, then you know that I am living and breathing preparations for the SharePoint Conference 2009. 

That’s the big October event this year.  So, you might ask – what’s the big November event? 

PDC 2009.  SharePoint is going to have a bit more of a presence at PDC 2009, which makes sense, seeing as how SharePoint is attracting more and more developers, and is now considered a platform choice for application development. 

Business Intelligence is a large piece of the SharePoint platform and a featured workload.  (Primarily in the Insights capability in the image below.)

One of the Pre-PDC 2009 workshops is “Developing Microsoft BI Applications – The How and The Why”.  This is a full-day workshop which will help developers understand how to build applications on the BI platform of SharePoint 2010 and SQL Server, as well as provide guidance about why leveraging a Business Intelligence-enabled platform such as this provides solutions that are less costly to build, support, and maintain.

Please join Andrew Brust and Don Demsak, the instructors for the workshop by Registering for PDC 2009 and the Business Intelligence workshop here. 

 

SharePoint Conference is going to sell out

Check out the update about SharePoint Conference 2009 today on the SharePoint team blog. 

There is a list of some new sessions, and the scuttlebutt is that the conference will be selling out in the next few weeks.  It’s going to be a packed house.  Please tell everyone who is interested to register now… 

There is going to be great information, great sessions, great fun - (Have we announced who the Rock and Roll band is going to be for the Concert night yet?) – great SharePint, great partners, great fun, etc. 

Join us in Las Vegas for the biggest SharePoint event … so far.

Use SharePoint Conference 2009 to Drive Your Business

We are approaching the last month and weeks before SharePoint Conference 2009.  This is going to be one of those “once-in-a-lifetime” events, and I’m looking forward to seeing all of the great partner solutions that have been in development on the private SharePoint beta for the past few months.  From the solutions that I have seen, there is going to be some amazing announcements and demonstrations in Las Vegas next month!

There are *still* a few remaining opportunities for SharePoint organizations to buy a sponsorship or to do some additional marketing at the SharePoint Conference.  Please review the description of remaining marketing opportunities at the conference, and let us know what you are interested in, and how we can help your business have an impact at the SharePoint Conference 2009! 

These opportunities continue to dwindle as they get sold, so the best selection is now!

KnowledgeLake is giving away a VIP trip to SPC09

You may already be going to Las Vegas this october for the SharePoint Conference 2009, but are you traveling IN STYLE?  

KnowledgeLake, a Gold Certified Microsoft partner, and one of the Platinum Sponsors of the SharePoint Conference 2009 is giving away a VIP Trip to the conference!

Visit the KnowledgeLake promotional site, complete a survey, and you’ll be registered for the promotion. 

Here’s your chance to do the SPC as a VIP!

Enterprise Governance Solutions

For those of you who are not aware of Gabor Fari, I’d like to introduce him.  Gabor is a Microsoft Solution Specialist for Enterprise Content Management in the Life Sciences industry.  Gabor has a rich background in content management and focuses on helping his customers find their way in today’s jungle that is enterprise content management.

Gabor recently published a blog entry titled “Enterprise Content Governance”.  In this blog entry, he describes Vamosa’s integration with SchemaLogic, and further envisions and describes a possible integration with NextPage.

Read Gabor’s blog entry, and check out the video from Vamosa, and let me know what you think about this combination that Gabor is suggesting for Enterprise Content Governance. 

    Vamosa + SchemaLogic + NextPage + SharePoint. 

Contract Management on SharePoint

I ran into (and around) Dolphin Software this morning.  Dolphin software provides a seemingly very complete Contract Management solution on top of the SharePoint Server 2007 application platform. 

Capabilities include leveraging SharePoint’s workflow support, the ability to create workgroups and contract-specific collaboration sites quickly, some reporting and KPI capabilities, etc., in order to accelerate the ‘quote-to-cash’ business process.

Here are some interesting articles in support of Dolphin Software. 

• Dolphin Software – Dolphin Contract Manager 2009
  
• CMS Wire – Dolphin Releases Contract Management for SharePoint
  
• Dolphin Software Blog
• Discussing an Aberdeen Group survey that says that Contract Management is as important as Customer Relationship Management for organizations.  (My thought is that contracts almost always have real money associated with them, while your customers may not always be high value customers…)

What do you think about them?  Are they taking the right approach to integrating with SharePoint?  It seems to me that they are, but I’m just starting to learn about them. 

Deep in the forest of the Internet…

I can’t believe that I’m writing two blog entries in the same day for the same company… Usually, I’d wait at least another day to do that…  :-)

But Steve at Bamboo Solutions has managed to get the worst jingle ever built, and I can’t stop listening to it!

 

First, click watch the Song of the Day #225.

Second, click on Steve’s blog entry to read the background.

Steve's Blog Entry for the Background...

 

 

Third, if you’re still here, I loved his embedded link to the Bing jingle contest winner (same singer), so I’m putting it here again for old times sake.

Crush It!  :-)

Telligent and Community-Based Analytics

When you have a community that is functioning, and you’d like to improve it, or keep the fires stoked, you need to know what parts to encourage and what portions aren’t functioning well.  it’d also be useful to know which are your most effective community participants, and which community members are the most influential.

Telligent Analytics monitors, records, and reports on that information to help you drive more effective communities on top of the SharePoint platform.

Telligent is producing an online webcast to introduce their analytics product and related concepts TOMORROW, August 18th, at Noon Eastern Time.

Join Telligent for an online webcast – register here. 

NewsGator and Batelle – Online Communities with SharePoint

Online communities are a great idea, but after the launch party has concluded, how do we drive our employees to actually use the new communities?

NewsGator is hosting a SharePoint Customer webinar on August 27, 2009, to answer this question. 

The webinar will feature Battelle - a $5.2B research and development company that uses SharePoint and NewsGator Social Sites as their social computing platform. 

Battelle will share their story, experience, and best practices around online communities.  The webinar takes place on August 27, 2009 at 2pm ET.  

You may register for the webinar on NewsGator’s website.

 

Bamboo Web Parts – Best Sellers for 2009

Bamboo Solutions has posted an interesting article describing their observations about their Top Ten purchased web parts.

http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/bambooteamblog/archive/2009/08/13/top-selling-products-at-bamboo-what-are-other-people-buying.aspx

Very cool to see the variety of ways that Bamboo is augmenting SharePoint.  It seems that every time I speak with Steve and the folks at Bamboo that I am learning about new web parts that they are publishing.

What does your list of favorite web parts, or other SharePoint add-ons, look like?

The Demo Showcase Suite

Are you aware of the Demo Showcase Suite? This is a Microsoft Partner Network website where partners can host click-through demos of their products and solutions. This website launched at the Worldwide Partner Conference last month, and now it’s time to get our SharePoint partners to fill it!

You can login using a Windows Live ID, download the tool to create your simulation/demo, and then upload it. Over 15% of all the searches on this site are for SharePoint applications.

Check it out, upload a demo of your product/solution, and let me know how it works for you!

Remember, Happy Demoing leads to Happy Selling. (or, something like that).