SharePoint Cincy 2012 Retrospective

Last week I attended the 2nd Annual all-day SharePoint Cincy event in [believe it or not] Cincinnati, Ohio. Once again, Ohio delivers more quality SharePoint content for the community. In addition to seeing a lot of familiar faces, here’s the lowdown on some of the things I got out of the sessions & speakers:

• The keynote was a panel of speakers from companies like Kroger, the Air Force, Fifth Third Bank, and Microsoft. Each were given a few minutes to share some of their insight on SharePoint, and how they’re using it in their organizations. I liked hearing how much Microsoft is eating their own dogfood thru their heavy internal use of SharePoint for their company portals. The other thing I took away from this is that there are many LARGE companies out there having HUGE success with SharePoint. I point this out because many times you only hear about the challenges of scaling SharePoint in the enterprise. For these folks, the internal adoption and demand for SharePoint among their user base is so successful that they’re having trouble keeping up!
• I checked out my buddy Tony Maddin and Clint Richardson for their talk on giving your SharePoint site a daily/weekly/monthly “checkup”. Got some good tips regarding what things to look at regularly to make sure your environment is still healthy. It got me thinking about the idea that SharePoint admins can actually help stakeholders with their SharePoint adoption efforts by providing timely stats on over- or under-use of SharePoint – over-use can be spotlighted (“Look at the great things this group is doing!”) and under-use can be questioned (“What is it about your SharePoint site that’s keeping you from using it?”)
• Stopped by fellow LOTR-lover Peter Serzo’s class and learned that the tabular data model is the new hotness, and is used in Denali (aka SQL Server 2012) – are Cubes on their way out??
• In Larry Riemann’s session, I got some more ideas about good ways to use Azure with SharePoint. I also like his use of Microsoft’s chart (below) to show the difference between Traditional, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS models:

All this and more! Plus I got a couple of books signed by their authors (thanx Brian and Mike).

Looking forward to next year – maybe then I’ll be able to present and introduce everyone to the Cowbell! : )