ShareCamp 2013 – Recap and session slides

ShareCamp 2013 took place at Microsoft’s office here in Munich last weekend (4/12/2013-4/14/2013) and it was a BLAST.

Sharecamp 2013 - before it began. Picture taken by Michael Greth

Saturday, 9:00am.

200 SharePointers voting for sessions

What I totally like was the open but still professional style of the barcamp – every attendee was allowed to suggest one or more presentation topic. After receiving more than 5 votes from the 200 attendees you got a session slot assigned (room and time). Meeting friends, colleagues, 5 MVPs (Michael Greth, Christian Glessner, Niki Borell, Daniel Wessels and Fabian Moritz) and other experts (from Microsoft, too) was really cool and I learned a lot, again!

No promotion in my company was needed, more than 10 colleagues attended  – Sebastian Huppmann gave a nice presentation on Saturday about Twitter’s Streaming API – and it was the first year that Alegri sponsored the event.

Session: “Search Architecture” by Rainer Asbach, Microsoft

Every time Rainer Asbach is speaking I try to attend. Very, very profound search-expertise – I attended 2 years ago - now again and it was very interesting again!

Key take aways:

• Search Index is now smaller, FIXML of FAST not stored anymore. Index should be noticeable smaller than with FAST for SharePoint 2010.
• Better understanding how search is scaled and how to utilize critical services – great video how the crawler/query component hits CPU/RAM and how that affects DB/Webfrontends/Index/Analytics etc.

Rainer Asbach - Search Architecture

Session: “Search-driven Apps with SharePoint 2013 – what’s possible with the new platform?”

Presented my favorite topic – Search – in front of roughly 50 people I showed what the new platform is capable of. From continuous crawling to content by search webpart I covered a lot of stuff and answered even more questions. Had fun!

Presenting at ShareCamp 2013 - I am the guy with the red shirt

Slides: available at slideshare

Session: SharePoint 2013 / Best Tools / Toolbox + automated SharePoint 2013 Installation

Again, 50 people attended my session about tools. This time I showed how to install SharePoint 2013 fully automated with PowerShell – the awesome AutoSPInstaller raised a lot of questions and kept the session very interactive. I was really surprised that only 20% of the audience knew it…

Apparently I could not show the final result, I will record a webcast for the SharePoint Toolbox and you can see the result there.

After showing how to configure the AutoSPInstaller (briefly) – I showed how to install other tools via chocolatey (8 SharePoint tools are available by now).

Then we discussed some tools but ran out of time because I talked too much! My bad. Here is the list of the tools we collected:

UlsViewer (two guys in the audience did not know this gem!)

Chocolatey

Caml Designer (see webcast )

CKSDEV (webcast, new version for 2012 available)

Sharepoint Manager (2007 / 2010 / 2013)

Health check rules (new one for me, will check it out!)

SPServices

Blob Cache Manager (SP2010 and SP2013)

SP2010 Batch Edit (want to batch edit list entries with managed Metadata in SP2010? This is a solution…)

SPWakeUp (a handy solution for the sleepy SharePoint)

Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection Manager (new for me, sounds great!)

Dynamic Forms for SharePoint (adjustable forms for SharePoint to save data to a list with rules and styles)

SPSin (inject JavaScript and CSS into selected SharePoint pages)

Slides: available at slideshare

Final notes

Thanks everyone for organizing this great, great event - I will attend next year, promised. Hopefully no relocation next year so I can attend both days and can join more sessions and discussions.