SPCAPAC wrap up post

The SharePoint Asia Pacific conference is a wrap. J

The three days I was at the conference went so fast. Angus Logan and his team from Microsoft Australia did a remarkable job of co-ordinating the event. Here are some stats from the conference.

I had such a blast and met so many awesome people that have been true SharePoint evangelists from way back. Andrew Connell is an awesome presenter! We need you for TechEd New Zealand.

From the presentation side of things my solo presentation UX01 started with a minor hiccup. Basically my laptop refused to start up when I went to my session room and plugged it in. No power no nothing nada! Panic set in momentarily. Luckily I had Ari with me who was scheduled to co present with me later on. So I used his laptop and setup my external HDD VPC image demo via his laptop. It took a bit of fiddling to get the display sorted.

This was my first time presenting to an audience of over 100 people. Overall I felt that I started with my presentation very well up to the point of the second demo of showing the CSS options and how SharePoint designer can be used to customise a WSS site’s look and feel took a nasty turn. Basically SharePoint Designer went into a ‘hizzy fit’ and just did not respond at all. I was midpoint saving a style sheet and overriding the default site CSS control link and boom it crashed. It took about 5-7 mins for me to recover from that. I have to thank my audience very much for being so patient. Rest of the presentation went OK. I was able to show the Master Page and Page layout I created despite SharePoint Designer crashing again. I felt that I it was a bit rushed and I had very slow response from SharePoint Designer for the final part of the demo.

Next week I will be doing the same session at the Wellington SharePoint User Group event and hopefully I’ll have no issues with my demos. So please come along to Intergen if you are in town. More details here

Ari and I had our upgrading WSS sites and site templates to WSS v3 session at 2.25 the same day. We were able to run an in place upgrade while we did the presentation and even had about 5 mins left over. Go to Ari’s blog for more information.

As promised I will post my session resources next week for my session “UX 01 Customisation Guided Tour through HTML, CSS and Master Page resources”. I am creating a package file with a few extras for the attendees to download.

The Sydney SharePoint UG had a session on day 2 with Mike Fitz, Andrew Connell and Joel Oleson in attendance. There were about 70 people there. Head over to Ivan Wilson’s blog for more information. I have photos on Flickr.

Out of the partner pavilion the guys from Nintex had some very cool Workflow tools which was built on top of SharePoint. Check out Nintex Worklfow 2007 and the Nintex PodCast Server here. http://www.nintex.com/products.aspx

If you wanted ‘heavy’ enterprise workflow then K2 Blackpearl is what you are after. http://www.k2.net/bp/Default.aspx

So many cool things and a great time networking with a lot of partners and peers from all around APAC!

](https://www.flickr.com/photos/digitalmelon/502755663/)

Joel’s amazing creation

](https://www.flickr.com/photos/digitalmelon/502759221/)

Sydney User Group

](https://www.flickr.com/photos/digitalmelon/500304025/)

Conference Dashboard

The power of Imaging from Canon, Excel Services in SharePoint and the clever guys at SSW had a realtime dashboard of sessions. Very Cool!