SharePoint Fest Chicago 2014

SharePoint Fest is returning to Chicago this December and this time it’s going to be at McCormick Place!  As someone who lives in the Chicago suburbs, I’m very happy to have a SharePoint conference locally that is of the same quality as other national SharePoint conferences such as SharePoint Connections (Las Vegas and Orlando) and SP Tech Con (Boston and San Fran) and Microsoft’s SharePoint Conference (historically, Las Vegas, but in 2015 it will be in Chicago in May!). So if you want to hear from internationally recognized SharePoint experts and SharePoint experts in your own back yard, and you want to learn from them THIS YEAR, there is no better place than SharePoint Fest Chicago.

There’s several other reasons I’m “super excited” (to copy a phrase I’ve heard too often at Microsoft conferences in the past – forgive me) about SharePoint Fest Chicago 2014:

    1. PSC is a title sponsor.  It’s important for us to be involved in our local SharePoint community, and this is one of the ways we do that.
    2. Several of my coworkers and I will be speaking:
      1. John Head and Christopher N Johnson will be speaking on using SharePoint as a platform for mobile applications.
        1. John has a multi-platform perspective you don’t hear much at Microsoft events. His background is as a Lotus Notes developer and an IBM Champion, so he brings with him a broader perspective that what you usually find.
        2. Chris, besides having deep technical expertise in SharePoint and the implementation of Responsive Design, is also one of our experts in using the Managed Metadata Service in novel ways.
      2. I’ll be speaking about building a public facing site on SharePoint 2013 for a leader in the transportation industry, RoadRunner Transportation Systems.
      3. Mark Wroblewski and Jeff Crowell will be speaking on SharePoint Governance.
    3. I’ll also be co-presenting with my friend Jack Fruh a half-day workshop we are calling “An Advanced Introduction to PowerShell Scripting for SharePoint”.  It’s for both SharePoint Developers and SharePoint Administrators. As we say on the SharePoint Fest Pre-Con agenda page:

“This 100-200 level half day workshop will introduce you to PowerShell in a way that you can use the very next day at work. We’ll quickly cover the basics of PowerShell, then demonstrate some real world scripts used to solve day to day problems in the life of a SharePoint Administrator indipill.com. We then deconstruct a script- and show you “how we figured it out” – showing the process of starting a script from scratch, and the explorative process used to figure out what to put in a script when you have no idea how at the beginning (and without using Google!) Along the way we explain and demonstrate the features of PowerShell that make things fun! There is something for everyone – new PowerShell users will be on the fast-track to using PS in day to day work. more experienced PS users benefit from seeing real-world scripts and hearing how others go about solving problems. We even have a few tricks that will save time for developers!”

Register now! The longer you wait, the more expensive it gets.  We have a very, very limited number of VIP passes for our clients, so if you want to make a case for one of those, email me at work or contact me on Linked In, and I’ll discuss it with my boss.

  1. The first night of SharePoint Fest, CSPUG – the Chicago SharePoint Users Group run by Leo Doyle, Jamie Story, and myself (not to be confused with other SharePoint user groups in the area, and yes, there are several) – will be holding its December special event, featuring a discussion panel of many of the SharePoint Fest speakers.  Although SharePoint Fest itself is a paid event, the CSPUG meeting, as always, is free!

Again, register now for SharePoint Fest Chicago!  I’ll post again when we have the registration link ready for the Speaker Discussion Panel CSPUG special event.

–Michael