I am in Berlin this week for the European SharePoint Conference 2011. 

Bjorn Olstad (now Microsoft SharePoint team and formerly CTO Fast Search) and Matt Berg (SharePoint Redmond team) from Microsoft gave a very strong opening keynote on SharePoint 2010 today - and did two good demos - of real applications built using SharePoint, that focused on the building an application using "intelligent search".  One of the applications was an application running inside Microsoft.  Always nice to see inside the kitchen!  Bjorn and Matt used some of the videos and materials from the keynote of the Worldwide SharePoint Conference - which was good for the majority of folks here who did not make it to California a few weeks ago.  Nice to see the sharing of information across continents.

Michael Greth (a SharePoint MVP in Germany and a member of the European SharePoint Conference 2011 ) launched a really neat Windows Mobile Phone 7 and iPhone app for the European SharePoint conference and Michael tells us that the Avepoint party is downtown Berlin in a club near Checkpoint Charlie!  Michael tells us that there are delegates from 20 countries - so a truly European conference.

A packed room and a great session from Dan Holme (who is a strong communicator) - "Designing Governance - how Information Management and Security must Drive your Architecture" … consider the site collection as the typical required container for a Department - as 80% of the controls available are at this level. Office 365 gives each new customer a new site collection. Dan walked us on a tour from lists to sites to site collections to web applications (DNS name level) to farms (e.g. dev / test / staging / production) - from a Governance point of view. Nice quote - "if you say to me that you do not have a Test farm - then I say to you that you do not have a Production farm!" Great session - packed full of good content. I am sure these slides will be available on the European SharePoint Conference 2011 website - and would be worth getting and studying. 

Nice conference venue - the Estrel in Berlin - neatly laid out - very bright and airy. Initial impressions are of a very well organized conference. Relaxed atmosphere - easy to get access to coffee, sessions and exhibitors.

John from Question Mark in his session on Learning Today!

•70% learned on the job
•20% learned from others
•10% learned formally on courses
Why is this relevant to SharePoint? … obvious enough perhaps.  SharePoint facilitates this self learning and group sharing.  Take a quiz to slows the "forgetting curve"!   Nice HP example where they saved $7,500 per learner using SharePoint.

Matt Berg (from Microsoft) delivered a session on - Driving User Adoption of SharePoint - using internal Microsoft SharePoint sites as an example - using MSweb.  Matt also showed "OfficeTalk" - an internal app that Microsoft have built - a micro blogging app - built into My Site.

Jan Tielens (Microsoft) on Office 365 for IT Pro's and customizations - including the use of Powershell on Office 365.  Very good session also.  He dispelled 8 myths.  A very knowledgeable and confident presenter.

I have sat with Mike Fitzmaurice (ex-Microsoft) at many Microsoft Partner Advisory Council meetings - but have never seen him present live at a conference.  I made it to his session today.  Great presenter.  Even though Mike works for Nintex - he did not do a product pitch - which did not surprise me - as Mike is a pro.  Mike presented 7 recommendations to help avoid failure on workflow projects, starting with #1 - "Don't always use SharePoint Workflow!"  Very solid advice on workflow - and would save lots of time for a group trying to decide what type of workflow to build where.  Mike and Nintex will be in a "Workflow Vendor ShootOut" tomorrow - that should be fun!

Rafal Lukawiecki on "Attractive Business Intelligence".  Very visual BI - quite impressive.  Lots of demos - I think about 7 demos - very easy to understand.  PerfromancePoint. SQL Reporting Services. Scorecard. Powerpivot. Demystified.  I wish I could set this up for our company!  Very colourful and energetic speaker.   Rafal explains well.

Mirjam van Olst (SharePoint MVP and SharePoint Certified Master Architect) on "Office 365 - Delivering the Power of cloud Productivity".  Good run through of all the Office 365 options and a solid comparison of Office 365 SharePoint Online to SharePoint  On Premise.  Good demo of Office 365 "out of the box".  Neat second demo of Office 365 customized with SharePoint Designer.  Looked impressive for a cloud offering!

Expert Panel Session -  Joel Oleson (USA - who just about got here - bad flight delays); Mike Fitz (Seattle); Dan Holme (Hawaii); Agnes Molnar (Hungary); Michael Herman (Canada); Samuel Zuercher (Switzerland)

Knowledge Management - using Social Features in SharePoint 2010 - by Donald from Holland.

Keynote  Session - Joel Oleson (USA) - "The Rise of Social Intranets" - great session.