I heard that one of Steve's best practices was to come up with four or so new sessions at the new year, and fully develop them out, so when anyone asked for him to submit sessions he would send them his four. He'd also essentially make sure those were rock solid and had all the right stories and details flushed out to ensure awesome scores. Each time he'd present them he'd add new jokes and new material. Ok so I added that last detail, but I'm sure that's what happens. So I'm adopting this practice. Here are my four sessions for the year. The demos, jokes, and even slides and diagrams will evolve as the year goes on, but this is what I expect to present on at the various SharePoint Conferences, Tech Eds, Connections, Roadshows, Best Practices, and any SharePoint or .NET User groups or code camps I visit. If you can't tell, I'm actually open to going to the coolest biggest shows.
Please don't steal my ideas, but how about taking a similar approach that doesn't overlap. I am interested in feedback on the sessions, titles, and definitely interested in evolving these to nail the topics and help them be audience pleasers.
Other pictures for promotional purposes
Profile, High Res, Fun.
Bio:
In the year 2000, Joel Oleson, a Sr. Web Engineer was brought in to Microsoft IT design the first Microsoft global deployment of SharePoint. Later he would design the extranet, and hosted SharePoint deployments at Microsoft. Not less than a year later he was sharing these experiences at internal MGB, TechReady, and later to customers at Microsoft Tech Ed and IT Forum conferences globally. On the SharePoint team as Sr. Technical Product Manager for IT Professionals, leading up to and at the release of SharePoint Server 2007, he helped various customers to get the critical governance information, upgrade, achieve scale, and get the essential best practices that they needed. After managing the critical SP1 and Windows Server 2008 launches, Joel started an external SharePoint blog where he would share his decks, best practices, lessons, and joined the field to share his experiences. As trainer, blogger, evangelist, sr. consultant and architect, he continues to gain valuable experience and share it with the SharePoint community on his blog, at major technical conferences, and local SharePoint user groups around the globe. Check out his blog at: http://www.sharepointjoel.com
Session Title: What the SharePoint Owners Manual Won’t Tell You: Avoiding Failed Deployments and Chaos
Session Abstract: Why do SharePoint Deployments fail? What is wrong with default settings? Why do I have to treat my SharePoint deployment different than my other .NET apps or my Exchange Servers? Answers to these questions and more with SharePoint Governance, Best Practices, *Real* lessons learned from failed deployments.
Session Level (100-400): 200-300
Session Audience: IT Pro/Architect/IT Manager/IT Leadership
What three things will the attendee learn from your session?
1. Common mistakes in deployments which lead to chaos and failure
2. Configuration Management techniques, staged deployment, and development lifecycle in SharePoint topologies and architectures
3. Best practices and samples for designing a service with sample information architectures, hosting scenarios, and policies
Optional Third party management tool demo.
Session Title: The Secrets of SharePoint Supportability and Custom Coding: Best Practices the Devs Don’t Want You to Know
Session Abstract: Site Definitions, Site Templates, Features, and Solutions there are so many different ways to code something. Learn the common IT Admin rookie mistakes, and what you can do to help your company be prepared for supportability through service packs and even best practices that will help you prepare for the next version. Discuss lessons learned from V2 to V3 that will apply to O12 to O14 upgrades.
Session Level (100-400): 300
Session Audience: IT Pro / Architect (Good for Devs too!)
What three things will the attendee learn from your session?
1. Strengths and weaknesses of packed solutions vs. site templates vs. site definitions
2. Learn common rookie mistakes around deployment, common assumptions around code deployment
3. Best practices for supportability, including detail on walking through the custom code checklist
Demo break open inspect and deploy solution (wsp).
(Optional Co-present with Dev where we start out battling it out and end up on common ground at the end)
Session Title: Mission Impossible? Help me Kill my File Servers, Notes, Front Page Servers, and Public Folder Servers and Move to SharePoint
Session Abstract: A comparative analysis of File Servers, Public Folders, SharePoint as an email archived and a look at the future. CIOs want to kill these legacy apps, in this session we’ll give you what you need to know to justify them or kill them. You may not like these answers, but they will be honest.
Session Level (100-400): 200
Session Audience: IT Pro/IT Manager
What three things will the attendee learn from your session?
1. Side by Side analysis of strengths and weaknesses, pros and cons
2. Best practices for migration plans
3. Detail of gaps that will make people cry if they don’t have their file servers, public folders, or legacy web apps (with a third party mapping).
4. Slide provided on Information on third party migration tools - Optional Migration demo.
Session Title: Real and Hidden SharePoint Capacity Boundaries – Mindmeld with SharePoint Architect(s)
Session Abstract: If all you do is look at the TechNet content to plan your farm, you will have scale issues. Real world experiences from many enterprise deployments reveal many of the numbers for design and planning are too high and a few don’t even matter. Much of the real world data is buried in blogs and in the heads of SharePoint Architects and Consultants. Some data is just now becoming available. With hundreds of blogs, articles, and various competing details, we’ll just to the chase and give you the data with the stories. I’ll help you cut through the mess to reveal the real boundaries. Thirty minutes of this session will be in the crowd discussing real world issues and scenarios. Focus will be primarily on things that become deployment blockers, scalability issues, including lists, sites and security and other common performance bottlenecks.
Audience Participation encouraged.
Session Level (100-400): 300
Session Audience: IT Pro/Architect
What three things will the attendee learn from your session?
1. Containment hierarchy, Information Architecture and scaling key SharePoint objects
2. Charts, numbers, and figures with real world scale data to walk away with
3. Optional Demo of SharePoint Capacity Planner or Visual Studio Test Tools with an assistant.
Alternate sessions from past conferences:
- SharePoint Global Deployment
- STSADM Scripted Deployment (Prefer to do this with Todd Klindt)
- SharePoint Upgrade (Prefer to do this with Shane Young)
- SharePoint Storage and SQL (Prefer to do this with Mike Watson)
- SharePoint Administration Fundamentals
- SharePoint Advanced Administration and Topologies - Prefer to do this with Shane Young or Mike Watson
Speaking Experience:
Tech Ed US 2003-2008
Tech Ed ITForum Europe 2003-2007
Tech Ed EDC Japan 2005
Tech Ed South East Asia 2005-2008
Tech Ed Australia 2008
Tech Ed New Zealand 2008
SharePoint Conference US 2006, 2008
SharePoint Conference AUS 2007
SharePoint Conference Dubai and Istanbul 2008
Information Worker Airlift 2005
C Level Conferences
CIO Summit 2006-2007
CSO Summit 2008
Non Microsoft Conferences:
SharePoint Advisor 2005-2006
SharePoint Dev Connections 2006-2008 Fall, Spring, Fall etc...
Non SharePoint Conferences
Windows 2003 Airlift
Project Server Conference 2007
Special Offsite Presentations
SharePoint "v2" planning offsite
Windows Server Storage Summit (SAN vs. DAS)
Internal Sales and Consulting Conferences
TechReady 1-7 (Global in Redmond)
MGB 2002-2005 (US)
IT 2002 (Europe)
Best Scores
Top #1 and #2 Scoring Session, SharePoint Conference
Windows Airlift Best of Conference (Windows Server 2003 Shadow Copy session)