The Australian SharePoint conference has just finished which concludes two great weeks with two great conferences (New Zealand last week)and I’m about to take the long trip back to Sweden. They guys and girls that have put together these conferences deserve all the cred they can get and of course a big thank you! It has been a pleasure being here!

By judging on the feedback from the two quite crowded sessions I held (one together with Niklas Goude) it seemed like they were appreciated which makes the long flight all worth it. The first session was about managing SharePoint 2010 using PowerShell and was much like the one we held on TechDays Sweden a couple of months back. The second session was quite different as it was not technical at all and was part of the “voice of the customer” track. The focus was on lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid when implementing SharePoint in global organizations. I referenced a large customer I have worked a lot with and compared two different environments, one quite standard and out of the box with huge amount of data and one very heavy customized. I then described the different challenges you might face on each and one of them.

After the New Zealand session I had a good talk around governance and things to consider when upgrading to a new version of SharePoint with Michael Sampson who’s clearly one of the experts on the topic. Michael has written a couple of books on the topic but I have not earlier been able to read any of them, until now. I got two of his books and have now completed the “SharePoint Roadmap for collaboration” and I can recommend it, it has a couple of good things in it even if it’s a bit out of date now when SharePoint 2010 is available.

There are usually a lot of preparations before your sessions which often means that you can’t attend all sessions even if you want. I did however get the chance to listen to a few of them and found Todd Bleeker’s REST and LINQ together with Steve Smith’s Service Application session in NZ very good.

Here in Sydney I got the chance to see Michael Noel & Aaron Saikovski two sessions; Virtualisation of SharePoint 2010 Farm Architecture, and SharePoint 2010 – In Depth Architecture and Design Planning.
What also was interesting to see was that since the conferences had two non-technical tracks (business and voice of the customer) it draws people from the business and if I’m not mistaken there were almost a 50-50 ratio which is really good. I think that the concept of community driven SharePoint conferences is really something that people want and need. In fact the Australian SharePoint conference for 2011 is already announced so keep up to date with the latest information on: http://www.sharepointconference.com.au and http://www.sharepointconference.co.nz