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London International SharePoint Conference > Blog

One week to go

Published on 16/04/2012 12:16 by Steve Smith

 

Hi everyone one more week to go until the most ambitious SharePoint conference ever hosted. Final preparations are well underway and everyone is busy tweaking their Sessions and demoes. As I have pointed out in previous posts the Developers and IT Pro's are not only going to show how to build and deploy solutions and a farm environment but they will be building their 3 day solutions on live servers, We have now moved the servers into their brand new conference rack. So here is the rack ready to roll and the next time you see it will be live in the session room with the speakers working live on the environment for their demoes. This makes the conference so unique and will probably not be done again for a long time, I certainly have no plans to repeat this anytime soon so this really will be an amazing opportunity to see the best of the best in the IT Pro and Developer world of SharePoint show you exactly how it should be done in the real world.
 
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Not forgetting the Business Track too though as this is going to be amazing with us having our own company that we are working against in our business decisions for a SharePoint platform. What happens when you merge companies or need to deal with multiple locations and what decisions do you need to make for and against SharePoint. Lot's of interesting topics to take you on a real world journey of SharePoint planning, business alignment and ROI.
Finally let's not forget the IW tracks and the case study track. Real world sessions for end users on how to use SharePoint and make the most of it's features. Again we have taken a unique approach with sessions following on from each other to provide a complete story to enable you the attendee to go away confident in the knowledge to replicate in your own environment.
But what if you are torn between sessions, don't fear post conference you will be getting full DVD set that has all the session video recorded so with 113 sessions to watch you will not miss a thing and it makes an excellent training resource. Not bad for the cost of a conference ticket.
 
I should not finish without mentioning the evening entertainment, not only are you part of the best conference in the day but after the sessions have finished we wind you down with some great parties where you get to meet and chat with the speakers and other attendees. On Monday we have the exhibitor party with some great fun planned for this and SharePint follows straight afterwards just up the road where we have secured a whole London Pub for the evening. On Tuesday night is the conference party which I am very excited about and you should not plan on missing this it will be a great evening.
 
London is buzzing right now with the Olympics approaching and we cannot wait to make this SharePoint conference memorable as a key part of London in 2012. I look forward to welcoming all our visitors from around the world to London next Monday morning and I know you are all going to have a great conference. Have safe journeys and see you next Monday.
 
Steve

 


The Business Track in More overview

Published on 22/03/2012 11:04 by Steve Smith

​When I was planning the conference for this year I really wanted to ensure that this conference really was a conference for every area of the business involved in deploying SharePoint. Many conference claim to cover it all but the reality is they just do not and one area that really stood out for me was the business track as a missing piece of that total solution conference.

Running a business track was not just about having sessions that appealed to people who plan and architect SharePoint solutions but also to people who have to actually start the thought process as to why their company would even want to implement SharePoint in the first place. Therefore the target audience was not just going to be solution architects or business analysts but also CIO's and IT Directors, people who needed to understand the principles of the product and the process behind a successful design to the implementation model. This is not a technical track by any means and when you look at the sessions you will notice they are all geared to ensuring the business understands what SharePoint is and potentially what it is not.

In order to ensure you leave the conference with a complete picture we have therefore used the 3 days of the conference to build up a story, a fictitious company that has decided to look into using SharePoint and what are the real world discussions and decisions that need to take place before it ever gets deployed or goes live. We even have a boardroom session where we all discuss our findings so far and encourage the audience to participate with real world 'what if's'. This journey is one no other conference has ever attempted because it not only addresses a complete end to end story of how your business should approach SharePoint but the people telling the story are some of the most experienced SharePoint business architects out there with many of them working with the product since 2001 and working with companies for all sizes and all verticals. Andrew Woodward the Lead of the track with myself has summed up the track nicely in his recent blog post which can be found here http://www.21apps.com/sharepoint/isclondonbusinesstrack/

So who should attend this track ? Basically anyone who works on SharePoint projects with a focus on Business Analysts, Business Directors, Project Leads, Information Architects, Information Assurance offices and anyone who has to ensure that the business succeeds in deploying SharePoint. It is 3 days that could change your business approach to SharePoint for ever.

I look forward to seeing you all in just over a months time

Steve


The Developer Track in more detail

Published on 23/02/2012 12:37 by Steve Smith

​The 2 month countdown is on for arguably one of the most ambitious developer tracks at a SharePoint conference ever seen. In the this blog I am going to explain why and what you can expect when attending the conference as a developer.

Over the last 3 years we have hosted conferences in London that have dealt with new capabilities in SharePoint 2010 in the Evolutions conference and then on to the Best Practices conference last year where we saw our experience with the product emerge with new methods and reasoning behind why not just how you would work with the product. For me however there is always a side that we never truly addressed which is as a developer how do I go from the start of the process all the way through to the end of the process and deploy live to my users.

This is exactly what this conference is going to address for developers. The three days is a continuous journey starting with your requirements gathering and design through to final deployment and test. There are very important steps as well in between such as code life cycle and control plus build - test and deploy stages. How do you create all three of these stages correctly through your development process and how will that effect the way you develop your solution ? We aim to answers these questions and beyond and not just discuss them but take you through the steps throughout the 3 days. Every session will build on the previous session, the speakers will be using the same servers and hardware environment throughout so before the performance test session can even start the build sessions needs to work. This approach to the 3 day solution will benefit both new and experienced developers alike as there will always be something to learn from a true end to end process.

The hardware design is a very important part of the solution and for the 3 days there will be an 8 server Infrastructure including Active Directory, SQL Server, TFS and SharePoint servers for Build - Test and Deploy, plus we have the IT Pro Infrastructure to hand over the solution to if we want them to do some real world capacity testing across the larger SharePoint farm model. The server hardware will be running live on stage and has 96GB of memory with 24 cores and runs on VMware ESX Server.

It is going to be a very exciting conference and for the Developers I am sure you are going to gain an immense amount of knowledge from attending that will not only benefit you now but also in the years to come developing on the SharePoint platform. I look forward to welcoming you in 2 months time.

Steve Smith


The IT Pro Track in more detail

Published on 21/02/2012 11:07 by Steve Smith

​With only two months to go for the conference we are now well on the way to getting the final pieces of the tracks ready so I thought I would take this time to do a blog post on each track to give you a little bit more of an insight into what we have been doing to make the tracks so special this year.

In this post it is the IT Pro Track, obviously one close to my own heart being from an Infrastructure background for the last 20 years although it is known that I do dabble in Visual Studio publically every now and then.

The IT Pro track for the 2012 conference is very unique in fact I first started working on the concept 2 years ago after the Evolutions conference and to my knowledge no conference has ever attempted this type of solution approach over the complete duration of the conference. So what is this solution approach ?

The concept is simple, over the last two years we have gone from the Evolutions conference where we looked at the new features and components of SharePoint 2010, then on to the Best Practices Conference where we looked further into these components and discussing lessons learned and approaches to take based on experience with the product. Which leads us on to the final part of the equation, what about those topics often discussed in sessions but the speakers never have enough time to show you in detail or build it. Often these topics are much more complex to discuss and demo often taking 2 hours or more to show in a detailed demo. Furthermore many of these advanced areas require other areas in your SharePoint farm to be configured first. Therefore this is exactly what we are going to be doing, starting from session 1 for example where we will build our SharePoint farm across multiple servers using PowerShell Scripts, explaining the architecture and logic behind the design and how the scripts are actually created and deployed. These scripts will be running live on our Server Infrastructure brought on to the stage for the duration of the conference. After the Installation has finished which will include all necessary databases, Web Applications and Site Collections each session onwards will build upon the previous sessions configurations to build by day 3 the final Farm design.

Yes that is correct I hear you wondering, every session continues from the previous one on the same servers and hardware. Wow !! Think of it as building your own SharePoint farm at the office live on stage over 3 days. The speakers do not bring their own laptops to this track it is all running from a fixed set of servers running on the stage that are designed and built on real world hardware. So when we do the capacity planning session we can actually show results as they we would expect in the real world from that server hardware and when we build a full claims and Kerberos model from client to backend we will build it as you would expect to do so in the real world.

The servers and hardware design has now been finished and is currently being tested and tested some more. We are using server racks with 96GB of memory, 24 cores and 48 disks across two disk shelves running from a VMware ESX Virtual environment. In Total we have 15 Servers in our Infrastructure including a full SQL Mirror with Witness, 6 SharePoint Servers, ADFS and other infrastructure components such as Exchange, Domain controllers and clients. So as you can see this is going to be something very unique for this years conference and to my knowledge never attempted before by any SharePoint conference.

So lots to get excited about and also why this years conference is one not to miss for the IT Pro's and Infrastructure people out there. The full agenda is posted here http://www.internationalsharepointconference.com/Pages/Agenda.aspx and I look forward to seeing everyone in 2 months time in London.

Steve


The Agenda is now Live

Published on 11/01/2012 10:41 by Steve Smith

​Happy new year everyone and I have started the new year by releasing the full agenda for the conference.

As you can see it is very exciting and different unlike any other agenda attempted by a SharePoint conference.

For example: A total of 10 solutions over the three Information Worker tracks based on different real world scenario's with one solution alone covering 7 sessions to completion and speakers working together over the sessions to build the solution.

A lot of people have asked me how I have been able to build such an agenda. The answer is pretty straight forward. unlike most SharePoint conferences that are run by conference events companies Combined Knowledge actually understands SharePoint and we know the people out there who are specialists in those subject areas to come and talk on it, we have been working with SharePoint for 10 years and over those years I have had the privilege to meet some very smart people in the SharePoint world and therefore I personally build the agenda and along with some specialist from each track we are working with the speakers to make it happen.

I also look at the current maturity model of the product and what type of content people are searching for and then finding the best way to deliver that content in a format that people will enjoy watching and listening to as well as learn from it. In my opinion that is the only way you can truly deliver a conference that provides the attendees with the knowledge needed to take away and use in the real world.

Over the next few weeks I will be releasing some further blogs and webcasts which will dive into each track in more detail so you can get a feel for what we are going to be covering during each track and why this conference will be the most real world you ever attended.

Steve Smith


 

 Steve Smith

 
About this blog
This blog is where I shall post updates and information on the conference over the next few months leading up to the start of the conference so please keep checking back on the websites for updates.