Summary of SharePoint Saturday UK 2011

Well, this was actually my first SharePoint Saturday experience and I have to say I was massively impressed! The whole day was very well organised and felt like other SharePoint conferences I have been to in the past (with a great variety of the sessions available and excellent quality and depth of the content being presented).

I actually brought a friend with me to SPSUK and he is mostly looking at Office 365 and Windows Phone technologies so that ended up being one of my main focuses as well. I also spent some time prepping (and packing away) from my session, as well as some time in the "Ask the Experts" room (where I met @MossLover and @SharePointBuzz for the first time :)) so I didn't get round to as many sessions as I would have otherwise liked.

Configuring Kerberos in a SharePoint 2010 Farm (#SPSUK06)
I was up first presenting this session and I was very pleased with how it went. We had a great turnout, some really good questions and (to my relief) all of the demos worked really well first time! :) This was a re-run of my SUGUK session in August on the same subject and I'm quite pleased with how the session shaped up.

It was very nice getting people coming up to me during the breaks, in the Ask the Experts session or even on twitter and email afterwards (asking questions, or just telling me how much they enjoyed the session) .. these kind of touch points really make the whole thing worth while :)

If you are looking for my slide decks then you can find them here:
They are branded for SUGUK but the content is the same so you should find everything you need :)

Download PowerPoint Slide Deck (PPTX) (zip)

View online using PowerPoint Web App

(PS - The PowerPoint Web App is powered by Office 365, so hope it works well for you. Feedback welcome!)

Extending SharePoint 2010 LOB Apps to Windows Phone 7 (#SPSUK23)
This was a good presentation by Chris Forbes (@chris_e_forbes) on Windows Phone 7 development and SharePoint 2010 integration. This is an area I am getting very interested in for two major reasons:

1. Office 365 now supports BCS in SharePoint Online, so you can write "no-code" methods of calling WCF web services (which potentially allows the Windows Phone 7 "push notification" services which Microsoft host)
2. The new "Mango" (Windows Phone 7.5) release includes back-ground tasks, which may allow a background application to respond to push notifications and execute custom code.

This really opens up the doors in terms of having a very powerful zero-infrastructure solution leveraging both Office 365 and Windows Phone 7!

Sort your processes with easy, effective InfoPath Forms and SharePoint Workflows (#SPSUK15)
My final session of the day was with Ian Woodgate (@ianwoodgate) and ran through some cool InfoPath techniques (easy cascading drop-downs) and especially the InfoPath "Approval" mechanism which is being championed by Laura Rogers (@WonderLaura).

Everytime I look at InfoPath I get more and more impressed, and with Office 365 it really does open up a lot of doors in terms of process automation, workflow and external communications without having to write any custom code (which is ideal when, in SharePoint Online, your development is limited to the SharePoint 2010 Sandbox which restricts a lot of methods).

Steve Fox - “SharePoint and the Cloud: Crash or Convergence?”
The end of the day was spent with Steve Fox (@redmondhockey) from Microsoft giving us some live demos of the new Windows Azure platform and some SharePoint 2010 integration (both on-premise and using SharePoint Online) as well as Windows Phone 7.

Wrap Up
This was a really good day. I was quite surprised at the number of people there (for a free event, all day on a Saturday) and everyone had a very relaxed non-commercial attitude to the day which was refreshing for a "conference" type event.

I will definately be going to the next one .. and I seriously recommend that you do too!

To sum up the day I'll quote from my friend (@Denyerec)

Back from #spsuk, or by its other name #WhyGoogleAppsIsIrrelevantForBusinesses. Very worthwhile day out.