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.

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.