SharePoint Saturday Atlanta–Medley, Marketing, and… Murder???

This weekend I completed one of my two speaking commitments for this month by presenting at SharePoint Saturday Atlanta on the topic of SharePoint & Azure integration (slides below). Overall, I thought the event was great because it had a good combination of all the right ingredients – a medley of sessions to attend, a great marketing campaign, and… a mystery murder!

Medley of Sessions

SPS Atlanta packed 35 sessions into the Georgia State University Student Center. Topics ranged from level 100 to 300, and included all the areas you’d expect in a good SharePoint event. Lots of branding and design talks, as well as Business Intelligence and Infrastructure. And I also particularly liked seeing the inclusion of a real-world case study on how Duke Clinical Research Institute has leveraged SharePoint to automate their business processes. In my Azure presentation, I really enjoyed the audience participation, which included a group of us hanging around after my session to continue talking about practical ways that organizations can incorporate Azure into their environments.

 

Marketing Campaign

Sure, every SPS event has swag. Some even have shwarma. But SPS Atlanta took it a step further with a very active Twitter contest that continued throughout the day. Prizes included gift cards, a Kindle Fire, and even an Xbox Kinect. Participants had to mention a speaker or sponsor to qualify, and winners were selected based on how clever or interesting their tweet appeared to be. Pretty kool! 

 

Murder!

Relax – no one actually kicked the bucket at SPS Atlanta. But at the Speaker’s Dinner on Friday night, there was indeed a murder –by way of Agatha’s Murder Mystery Dinner Theater. While we dined on our vittles, we were entertained by an acting cast who performed a comical who-done-it performance in which both actors and audience participated. Kudos to the #SPSATL organizers for coming up with this imaginative twist on the typical SPS Speaker Dinner. And Oscar-nods to some of the SPS speakers who did a stellar performance acting out their parts. : )

All-in-all, another great SharePoint Saturday event for the books. By the way, here’s my slidedeck from my talk, or you can find it on Slideshare: