Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011 Wrap-up

This year’s sold out Microsoft SharePoint Conference (#SPC11) was so busy for me that it caught me a little off guard. You know those blog posts about preparing for conferences that list things such as stocking up on business cards and organizing meetings ahead of time, well I ran out of cards and completely ran out of time to talk to all the people I had meant to chat with. That same craziness explains why this post is just a tad late.

This year’s conference was October 3-6 in Anaheim, CA at the Anaheim Convention Center. Right next to Disneyland, you could argue that this is the happiest convention center on Earth.

The show was a smashing success for Metalogix—one of the reasons it was so busy for me. We had our most popular booth ever, talked our throats dry about SharePoint and Office 365, hosted multiple parties and met with countless partners and customers. We also had a pretty popular Metalogix prize giveaway.

The Anaheim convention center is a great venue

A swarm of people at the Metalogix booth

After the exhibit hall closed, I managed a shot without people blocking the Metalogix booth

Microsoft rented Disneyland for the attendee party. The last time I went to Disneyland was in 2005 for the E3 conference. I was happy to be able to ride Splash Mountain this time around as it went down for maintenance while I was in line last time. And, no, I didn’t get wet; others from Metalogix came out soaked, but I basically got sprayed once.

The @NBSharePoint “I’m just here for SharePint” shirt (I’m holding Minnie Mouse ears for my daughter)

At this year’s show, I presented a session with Steve Marsh about considerations for creating SharePoint farms with terabytes of data. Our session was literally the last one in the guide. It was fun closing the conference, but I have to admit that I prefer to speak early and then have the rest of the event to meet with people; until I actually speak, I can’t help but tweak my presentation, so it’s always on my mind.

The rooms were darkly lit, so not a great speaker photo op

Metalogix also had great representation in other sessions. For example, the session about the Microsoft Search First Initiative, co-presented by our partners Microsoft and Arcovis.

I’ll finish with one more shot of the venue. Doesn’t this image just yell, “SharePoint in the cloud?”

All in all, SPC11 was a great event and I’m really psyched about the Microsoft SharePoint Conference (#SPC12) in Las Vegas in 2012.