European Tour and Best Practices – Brief Part 1

First stop Paris. The press interviews and meeting up with Erol and the other MVPs was cool.  Exploring the city was great.  Unfortunately my free day, Monday the catacombs was closed.  Next time. I wanted to speak to the France MOSS Club, but didn’t work out.  Next time.

Cologne Germany– the “Joel Oleson Interview by Michael Greth” podcast was fun.  He’s got some great high tech gadgets.  If it’s not good, you can blame lack of sleep.

The User Group in Cologne was the first meeting for that group.  We had a great turnout of about 40.  You can download the presentation here: 10 Steps to Successful Deployment Presentation.

In Amsterdam the SharePoint Experts Day with Mike Watson, Robin Meure, Daniel McPherson, and myself plus Waldek and Matthias was loads of fun.  Plus that night we had a SharePint. The live twitter feed of #sp020 projected on the wall was a great effect.

Decks:

• 10 Steps to Successful Deployment – Joel
• Daniel McPherson’s SharePoint and Social Media – All demos (I think some of what he showed is on zevenseas.com blogs)
• SharePoint Fundamentals back to basics (Information Architecture and Physical Toplogies) – Joel and Robin
• SharePoint Backup Demystified (to be posted) – Mike Watson

In London, the Keynote kick off included the Monty Python and the Holy Grail sketch about the killer rabbit.  I likened the deployment approach of many companies to those that run into it because it looks so simple and essentially get their heads taken off.  Sure a bit drastic, but I think you get the point.

As well the "Stocks" were used in the analogy around the IT challenge of working with the business with your hands and head not free.

Also new to this particular session was a deeper approach to staged deployment and brief discussion around policies with SharePoint Designer being free.

The main points of the slides can be taken from 10 Steps to Successful Deployment Presentation, but the localized version with Mark of zevenseas in the stocks and Mike Watson and Robin Meure looking the wrong way in the cross walk also known as zebra crossing.  This deck will be added when I get a reliable connection. 🙂

It was a great event, and as I’ve said on Twitter.  Steve Smith pulled off an incredible event.  Maybe the best SharePoint conference ever in Europe (including the MS one) and definitely in the top handful world wide.  Very well organized and excellent speakers. Not to play down the San Diego one which was superb. (Ben you did great.)

I love the dynamics of twitter and how it plays into conferences these days.  Mark Miller’s live twitter feed on endusersharepoint.com of the event is sure to be something that will stick.  Was funny to see a row of SharePoint speakers all twittering during and between sessions.

Thursday nights user group session here in Cairo (125 registered!!!) for the Egypt SharePoint User Group in the MS office will include some local flavors as well, but the gist of the discussion will be around the 10 Steps to Successful deployment which I haven’t yet delivered in Egypt :).