What's at SPTechCon for IT professionals? SharePoint is way more than a collaborative corporate portal. But now everyone wants to leverage it for their intranets and Web sites, document management, business process management and corporate compliance. At SPTechCon, you'll learn best practices for managing a SharePoint environment and integrating it with other systems to unleash the full power of the software ... and your company! What's at SPTechCon for business managers and analysts? Above all, SharePoint is a platform for business applications, and can bring great efficiencies to businesses through use of such things as new social media capabilities that make for richer collaboration. SPTechCon features a heavy slate of classes to teach you how to take full advantage of SharePoint, from managing your content,working with lists and libraries, creating intelligence reporting and much more.
What's at SPTechCon for developers? SharePoint 2010 brought powerful new capabilities to developers who need to customize the software to meet business goals. Features such as the Client ObjectModel, integration with Visual Studio 2010 and Business Connectivity Services can help developers create the applications your business needs to keep its competitve edge. You'll learn how to create applications for SharePoint that solve real business problems, and also see what kind of third-party applications have already been created to run on top of SharePoint.
Another SPTechCon Boston is in the books, and I’m happy to report that attendance more than doubled since last June! The bi-annual conference is held once in San Francisco and once in Boston, and it is certainly turning into one of the more popular SharePoint conferences on the circuit. The only downside to the large increase in attendees is the fact that the venue was overcrowded. That will be addressed next June as the conference will move to another hotel that can suit the bigger crowd. But I look at overcrowding as a good thing, as the show is gaining momentum!
So what about the overall vibe of the conference? And what about the quality of sessions provided and the overall experience as an attendee? This is a question that is always asked of me. And it’s honestly a very difficult one to answer. I personally would recommend several conferences, and they would probably be all for the same reasons. I am fortunate to have many friends in the community, whom I enjoy spending time with while I’m there. That’s a big factor for me, but it’s probably not for someone looking to learn about SharePoint. I also have the goal of meeting with vendors to see what new things they are doing, which may not be something that interests a newcomer either.
