SPC14: My Summary

Here is my summary of the SharePoint Conference 2014 in Las Vegas (3/3/2014 to 3/6/2014) – if you don’t want to ready everything: It was really good!

Highlights

The Main Keynote was perfectly delivered – I did not notice a single glitch. Even the talk of President Bill Clinton was quite good, even though that he did not mention SharePoint with a single word.

The introduction of Project OSLO – for me as a Search guy was a really pleasant surprise – in my opinion the end users will like it because of its simplicity and you will get the relevant documents, not just everything.

My “wow” moment was when the presenter showed the OSLO app and then switched back to the SharePoint document library containing a couple hundred of documents and folders – you don’t want everything, right?

Sessions

I always try to take notes and summarize every session for me on my blog – sometimes it’s a “fast publish” and contains not that much information, but I hope the gist is understandable. If not, feel free to comment or wait 30 days until the recordings are published on Channel 9.

I did not miss one single session – but the schedule was so full, sometime I had 5 sessions in parallel and had to choose just one of them. That’s the problem when you are interested in very broad area (ITPRO; DEV; Search). Additionally there was not that much room for me to explore the exhibit hall – but that’s not something I really miss.

In the case you want to read it – I created 19 posts for the conference:

1. Migrating traditional SharePoint Solutions to App Model (PreConference Part 1)
2. Refactoring Business Solutions into Apps for Office (PreConference Part 2)
3. Keynote (Main Keynote with President Bill Clinton)
4. What’s new for Office and SharePoint Developers (Developer Keynote)
5. Introducing Codename Oslo and the Office Graph (read this – good stuff!)
6. SharePoint 2013 hybrid end-to-end (Hybrid architecture is the new thing!)
7. Real-world SharePoint architecture decisions (Wictor Wilén – that’s a must)
8. Complex Problem Solving with the new HTML5 APIs (once my clients have new browsers I will profit from this session)
9. Search-driven publishing for Intranet Portals in SharePoint Online (new Search Features in O365)
10. Developing future-focused, on-premises solutions (Develop outside SharePoint than you are set for SP2013 / SP vNext / O365)
11. Best practices for Hybrid Search deployments (Hybrid for Search in all details)
12. Designing and applying information architecture for SharePoint and Office 365 (one of my not so technical sessions – liked it!)
13. Build your own REST service with WebAPI 2 (nice and simple – will use it in my next App)
14. Best practices for Information Architecture and Enterprise Search (Agnes again – good advice in this session)
15. Futuristic Search applications using Kinect and Yammer! (that was a fun one – you have to watch the recoding once its live)
16. Search architecture and sizing in SharePoint 2013 (that session was too short – I wanted this one to be for like 4 hours – high value for me)
17. Effective Search deployment and operations in SharePoint 2013 (neat little tricks and some insights in this session)
18. Managing Search Relevance in SharePoint 2013 and O365 (new Search Query Tool was announced in there – go get it!)

Additionally to the sessions, the concluding Q&A part was really worth to follow – the questions that were raised there were sometimes really challenging – and the responses of the speaker were good to know.

Ask the Experts was a great opportunity to meet the experts and members of the SharePoint product team – I asked some special questions and received some free advice – good stuff! I have never seen so many SharePoint Experts in one place - impressive!

Community

That was the part that was amazing for me – I met so many people I know only via Twitter, from SharePoint StackOverflow or from contributing to Open Source projects like SharePoint 2013 Search Query Tool. Connecting with others, facing the same problems challenges was really worth to attend – lets keep in touch!

But – there were too many of them – even on the last day I met “new” attendees, I could have promised that they were not at the conference at all.

The Venetian

Is the Venetian a hotel? That place was huge! The session rooms were great, friendly staff to help you where to find the rooms – and coffee, drinks, snacks the whole time – really a perfect managed event.

Pre-Conference room

Floor in the Venetian

Las Vegas

Pictures are worth a hundred words - Las Vegas was really special:

Water show in front of the Bellagio

Metalogix “Best of Breed” Party – that was a good one.

Fake daylight – this really affects your mood.

Las Vegas View

Wish List for SPC2015

There is not much to change for SPC2015 – basically it boils down to three things:

1. More options to charge my batteries – I really had problems creating my session notes after 4 hours because the session were so dense that there was not enough time to recharge my notebook.
2. The Level 300/400 sessions most of the time started with basic stuff – I wanted it to go deeper, but for this you need time. Spending 15-30 min on basics is not the way to go. Maybe an increased “deep dive” sessions with 2 hours would be something.
3. I want attend again – maybe as speaker, lets see how the next year goes.

Closing notes

I really liked the event – from crazy Las Vegas to sessions – it was the best SharePoint event I ever attended. That’s something!