SharePoint Saturday Boston and SharePoint Conference .ORG
I’ve had a wonderful time over the last four days as an attendee and speaker at two great SharePoint events.
The first one was SharePoint Saturday Boston, right in my own backyard at Microsoft’s offices in Waltham, MA. Helping Pradeepa Siva, Talbott Crowell (@talbott), and Geoff Varosky (@gvaro) with the organizing a bit certainly gave me a new perspective on the complexity of putting a SharePoint Saturday (or any event) together. All of the things that we as attendees take for granted (the coffee showing up at the right time, good pens for the name tags, trash bags) add up to an staggering array of details to manage.
At SharePoint Saturday Boston, I spoke about Flying in the Cloud: New Ways to Develop in SharePoint. To some degree, it’s the same sort of stuff (DVWPs, jQuery, SPServices, etc.) that I’ve been talking about for years now; moving to the Cloud simply makes it all even more useful. As you know if you attended, I didn’t use many slides (I never do), but here they are if you’d like them. See below for the demo sites.
Next was the SharePoint Conference .ORG in Reston, VA, put on by my friends at SusQTech. This is a wonderful conference focused on the public sector primarily, but with plenty of great content for anyone working with SharePoint. SusQTech is a somewhat unusual firm in the they combine world-class design talent with world class SharePoint development and admin talent. There aren’t that many shops that can handle things soup-to-nuts like they can. Plus, they are simply swell people to know.
On Sunday I taught an all day workshop with one of my design heroes, Kyle Schaeffer (@kylschaeffer) on SharePoint UI Essentials. If you haven’t checked out Kyle’s blog before, you definitely should, especially his work on responsive design and the v5 master page. The sold out workshop took the attendees through the gamut of thinking about SharePoint design, from the “What is HTML and CSS?” level to customizing master pages and adding jQuery into the mix to enhance the user experience. Kyle and I had a great time teaching together (let’s do it again soon, Kyle!) and the feedback was really positive.
On Monday, I did a jQuery-focused session called Working Magic with jQuery and SharePoint Web Services in which I showed how you can use jQuery to spice up the user interface and improve the interactions your users have with SharePoint. Of course, using the SOAP Web Services through SPServices and the value-added functions like SPCascadeDropdowns it contains played a role in the demos. As with most of my sessions, there were few slides, but here they are.
I used the same demo sites to talk about all of these topics to some degree, focusing on different bits and pieces within them as the topics shifted. If you’d like to look under the hood on those demos, here are the Middle Tier and Budgets sites saved as WSPs in a ZIP file. They come from Office365, and sometimes that may cause feature mismatches if you try to instantiate them in an on-premises environment. If you have issues, check my post on the problems I’ve had, along with the solutions, and ping me if that doesn’t work.