Things Learned at SPTechCon

[Striking a pose with the Hillbilly. Pre clog-off.]

1. The lack of readily available caffeine was kind of a problem,

2. A lot of the attendees we met were about to take the SharePoint plunge, and we salute your courage. But also, learning your way around won’t be that difficult – it only appears that way.

3. Dux was so right when he said we need to stop thinking about SharePoint as a solution and start thinking about it as a platform. (Upon which anything is possible. Almost.)

4. People are totally willing to fill out a survey if you ply them with SD cards

5. The SharePoint Hillbilly is just as nice in person as he seems on his blog. Actually, sometimes he seems cranky on his blog—but then again, when we met him, he’d just won an iPad.

6. Planking has nothing to do with SharePoint. But a lot to do with SharePints.

7. You don’t have to watch Jersey Shore to see a staged fight.

8. We should all use Kerberos authentication (per Todd Klindt and Shane Young’s session on Configuring SharePoint 2010 for Business Intelligence).

9. The key to making your company’s SharePoint successful is making people want to use it (per Richard Harbridge’s “The Seven Most Important SharePoint Success Factors”).

10. “Folksonomy” is our favorite SharePoint taxonomy (which we learned at Chris McNulty’s session on Managed Metadata and Taxonomies).

11. Governance still isn’t that much easier in SharePoint than it is in Washington. Zing! (per Scott Jamison’s “Governance Best Practices in SharePoint 2010”).

12. With BCS , you can expose external data as a native SharePoint list (per Fabian Williams’ “Building Business Applications Using BCS”).

13. If you want need a device-specific solution, or you want to make SharePoint look sexy (which is to say, not like SharePoint), you will need to develop. But, if you can modify your business requirements just a liiiiitle bit, you can often get by with the out-of-the-box functionality. (Per Liam Cleary’s “Are We Developing in SharePoint Just Because We Can?”)

14. jQuery makes it easier to add powerful client-side capabilities to a SharePoint application (per Phil Duffy’s session on SharePoint and jQuery).

15. When you’re customizing the branding on your SharePoint site, use Firebug (per Randy Drisgill and John Ross’ “SharePoint 2010  Branding for the Masses”).

16. SP Workspace is a boon to mobile workers (per Joshua Haebets’ “Accommodating the Mobile Workforce”).

17. The Custom Indexer is quite a beast (per Corey Roth’s “Advanced BCS: Business Data Connectivity Models and Custom Connections”).

18. Page components are not for the lily-livered (per Andrew Connell’s “SharePoint Ribbon Customization Deep Dive”).

19. jQuery lets you do some pretty slick manipulation to the Document Object Model (per Jim Bob Howard’s “Beyond HTML: Advanced Scripting for the SharePoint Power User.”

20. Using views with Business Connectivity Services and databases can ease the ETL process (per Paul Swider and Christina Wheeler’s “SharePoint 101: The Developer”).

21. Sadie’s SharePoint Maturity Model can, and should be applied to basically anything.

22. Everything is prettier (and managed code-free) in the Middle Tier (per Marc Anderson’s “Developing in SharePoint’s Middle Tier”).

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