Rating: 4.5 out of 5 Stars, Reviewed by Bjørn Furuknap

"ESPC in 2013 was well organized, professional, and handled any incidents with grace"

I had the chance to attend the European SharePoint Conference in Copenhagen this February, having been invited by SharePointReviews.com. The three-day conference is the largest European SharePoint conference, offering some of the brightest stars on the SharePoint sky, both as presenters and attendees.

  Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars, Reviewed by Bjørn Furuknap at the European SharePoint Conference

Sonja Madsen wants us to use apps immediately and extensively. In this session, she shows us a rather complex App consisting of a range of App features. This was clearly a developer and programmer oriented session, as evident by most of the demonstrations showing the underlying code.

I haven’t seen Sonja before, but the session went quite smoothly. The normal performance issues caused some initial problems, but Sonja recovered expertly. Audio worked very well, and her assistant Mads Nissen was helpful during the question section at the end, a section that Sonja handled very well.

  Rating: 5 out of 5 Stars, Reviewed by Bjørn Furuknap at the European SharePoint Conference

Reviewing Mike Fitzmaurice’s sessions is always extremely boring. The TLDR version is: Boringly perfect.

Mike has been presenting for many years all over the world and is one of the most experienced presenters on the scene. In addition, he’s presenting on a topic that is his job, full-time, namely SharePoint workflows.

In his traditional and casual style, Mike makes the room feel very included and relaxed. He executes his demonstrations perfectly (although he did make a couple of minor and largely irrelevant mistakes) and it feels like someone is demonstrating something extremely easy like Angry Birds.

  Rating: 3 out of 5 Stars, Reviewed by Bjørn Furuknap at the European SharePoint Conference

Mai presented a session on what’s new in SharePoint Designer 2013. The bulk of content, however, was focused around workflows.

The problem with Mai’s presentation was that she seemed very nervous. She experienced several and major issues with her demonstrations and got caught off guard. This caused her to fall a bit apart and left long breaks in the presentation that she should have handled much better.

  Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars, Reviewed by Bjørn Furuknap at the European SharePoint Conference

I’m normally not particularly fond of attending business user oriented sessions. The topic doesn’t interest me too much and it’s usually too much death-by-PowerPoint. I made an exception, though, because it’s the first chance I’ve had to watch Erica present.

Erica did have PowerPoint only, but she managed to make them interesting and informative by having a clear pattern to how she organized her slides and making it very clear what the various concepts were right from the start. Further, rather than simply reading the slides, she explained their meaning and gave practical examples of how to implement the practices taught.

  Rating: 5 out of 5 Stars, Reviewed by Bjørn Furuknap at the European SharePoint Conference

Sahil is a seasoned presenter and trainer and showed what that can do for a full-day presentation on the first day of the European SharePoint Conference. Sahil’s quirky approach to presenting thaws up any room, and it didn’t take long before his characteristic humor had the room laughing.

You can’t learn SharePoint by laughing, though, but Sahil doesn’t disappoint in the knowledge department either. Don’t let him know this, but I believe Sahil is one of the most knowledgeable people on the SharePoint 2013 scene.

  Rating: 3 out of 5 Stars, Reviewed by Bjørn Furuknap at the European SharePoint Conference

Jeremy Thake teamed with Randy Williams to talk about a set of problems that many developers and projects face related to application lifecycle management (ALM).

Jeremy is a very charismatic presenter who can enthrall a room with his childlike charm and soothing voice. I’ve seen him present several times and I’m always impressed with his ability to present a topic in a way that makes it easy to understand.

In the part of the workshop where I attended, the attention was solely focused on Visual Studio 2012 and apparently, how Jeremy’s employer uses the ALM features of VS2012.

We, at SharePoint Reviews, are proud to have one full conference pass for SharePoint Summit 2013 in Toronto to giveaway to our readers. With more than 70 sessions, a keynote by Andrew Connell, and a beautiful location that is perfect for Mid-May (May 13th to 15th), you will enjoy the learning, networking, and a break from work.

This is the 7th SharePoint Summit conference, and the 2013 edition promises to be the most exciting yet. It features a very special new event – SharePoint Excellence Gala – that will bring even more status to SharePoint industry, its companies and people across Canada by recognizing their expertise in the development of SharePoint solutions.

  Rating: 4.5 out of 5 Stars, Reviewed by Behzad Kashefipour

Being a software developer since 1998, in 2006 I joined a software consulting firm in southern California which introduced me to Microsoft SharePoint. I had to learn a great deal of development technics in SharePoint 2007, all in a very short amount of time. Back in those days, the online resources were almost non-existing, and the books were offering limited step-by-step, out-of-the-box how-to technics that would be good only for extremely simple environments. Therefore, I depended on SharePoint Conferences to get in touch with other fellow developers and to attend sessions to learn new technics that can actually be applied to the bleeding-edge technology I was working on.

With less than a month to go until SPTechCon San Francisco 2013, we’re proud to have one full conference pass in our possession to giveaway as part of our new SharePoint Reviews v2.0 site launch. SPTechCon’s team organizes industry's most effective events, listens to feedback, and delivers valuable content via a group of truly excellent expert speakers. If you’re not convinced, check out the list of speakers you’ll have the opportunity to learn from in San Francisco.