If the Mayans are wrong, here is what 2013 holds in store for me…

January 19 – SharePoint Saturday Utah.  The SharePoint Saturday brand is one of those amazing things that has taken on a life of its own.  I remember when it was a few of them in a year, and now there are SPS going on almost every week in a year.

February 4-7 – European SharePoint Conference, Copenhagen, Denmark.  The European SharePoint Conference takes place in wonderful Copenhagen, Denmark and is the first major conference of the New Year.  I am honored to have be chosen to speak at this event.

March 9 (tentative) – SharePoint Saturday Phoenix.  I’m organizing this one and enlisting the help of the SPUG and Microsoft.  More details to come!

April 10-12 – Fusion 2013, Nicosia, Cyprus.  Part of the DiveDeeper Events Family, this conference is like a mini-TechEd, in that multiple Microsoft technologies are presented.  I participated in an event some years ago in Reykjavik, Iceland and had a blast….except for the part when the country went bankrupt while being there and wondering if I would be able to return home. 

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and the Conference

I am an engineering technologist at Microsoft, for those who didn’t already know.  My job entails creating designs and testing those designs for Microsoft’s customers who choose to have Microsoft run their SharePoint infrastructures.  Two of our customers, Nokia and Coca-Cola Enterprises have pretty high expectations and have required us to do some incredible things to make their designs work.  Think of my job as being Scotty on the Starship Enterprise.  He integrates Romulan or Klingon technology into Federation technology and gets Warp Factor 10 or Cloaking ability.  That’s us.  Sometimes we get "Scotty, I need warp factor 11 in 10 minutes or we’re all dead!" And occasionally we shout back, "We canna change da laws of Physics Cap’n!!!"  Welcome to life as a Microsoft Architect/Engineer.

 

This coming week I will be participating in the Microsoft SharePoint Conference.  This is the first time I have ever known a Microsoft product conference to be SOLD OUT and to even reject requests from Microsoft employees on attending.  That underscores the impact that this product has had over its 7 year lifespan. 

Currently this product is closing in on 1 BILLION (that is a THOUSAND MILLION) dollars in revenue.  It is the fastest growing product in Microsoft history!  Even Microsoft Exchange (the email server) isn’t a billion dollar business yet.  Fiscal Year 2009 will be the finish line between the two.  I’m betting SharePoint wins.

 

I will be participating in an Ask the Experts (ATE) panel at the SharePoint Conference.  I like speaking at conferences as it gives me a chance to share my knowledge with peers.  I have been very fortunate that I have been asked to speak on numerous occasions.  Sometimes that causes some…’angst’ among my peers as it is generally desired to be "seen".  I do it because I like to present.  I don’t have the need to thump my chest and pontificate as some have.  I’d rather play music in the background, put on my shades and sit down and have a roundtable discussion.  Maybe its the perception of the title "Speaker" that is so coveted….I don’t know.

I’ll take pics at the conference and post them here; probably will be plenty with people.  These guys/gals wear that title like Hugo Chavez does military medals on his uniform.  Don’t mean anything negative about it–it’s just an observation.  It’s a cool club to belong to; knowledgeable, friendly, and look out for each other.  They’ve invited me to the SharePoint by Day, SharePoint by Night party.  I don’t drink, so it would be pointless to go–except I do enjoy their company.  Bob Fox is a hoot and Andrew Connell loves his drink.  If Lawrence Liu weren’t sick with a cold, he’d probably be there too!

 

On another note, there are only 30 days left before we finish 1/4th of 2008 and I need to get busy on my goals…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,Microsoft,engineer,architect,technologist

My budding TV career

Well, not TV exactly.  It’s a new segment for EDGE, a sister channel to the famous Channel9 from Microsoft.  My office mate and I were offered our own subchannel called the "RnB Show".  It’s a show targeted at ITPros who want to know more about SharePoint.  We’ll have plenty of content for Admins as well as Architects and Engineers.  There will even be content for ITPros who have nothing to do with SharePoint.  Our show will be different from the rest of the content you will find on that channel in that we will have "off the wall" humor and music and the like.  One of our shows will be filmed in the Caribbean as we take our show on the road.  We’ll also film in Portland, OR next week and in Berlin in January.

 

I’m excited about the opportunity and the potential to make a difference in how Microsoft Corp is perceived and helping the SharePoint Community at large.  We’re going to make a HUGE difference and I’m excited about it!!  Our first filming is this week where we will be talking about Forms Based Authentication in a hosted environment.

Clear as Mud

Looking up the definition of the Business Data Catalog gives me:

 

Business Data Catalog: A shared service that stores information about the data in business applications that exist outside Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. You can use the service to display business data on a SharePoint site.

 

Ok.  Sounds easy enough.  Now try to engineer a solution for your customers; giving them guidelines on what type of performance they can expect, under what conditions will it require them to buy more hardware, the credentials necessary to obtain the data they need, etc and you get something that isn’t so easy any more.

 

My PM wrote up a one page specification and we will go through a larger, richer, more comprehensive spec in the next few weeks.  The biggest, glaring issue, is the latency factor.  There are so many nuances that can affect it and trying to replicate it for the purposes of testing and developing a guideline will require much MUCH thought.

SharePoint DST fix

After I pointed some of my Microsoft buddies to my blog I get a link from Premier to the fix.

 

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/933738

 

 

DST messing with SharePoint

I got a call from a customer who reported

 

 "…a few of our meeting sites we noticed that there are several but not all meetings in March that are recurring meetings that are showing up twice yet the second link is not active."

 

I go to the site and sure enough, some (not all) of the dates were duplicated.  "Strange," thought I…

Then it hit me:  DST!  The duplicate entries started after 7 March and end with 28 March.

 

SharePoint responds to the change with double entries to cover both time zones because its not ready to change yet.  Since I knew that the patch had already been applied to the servers, SharePoint must have gotten confused somehow.

 

The good news/bad news is:  it’s only for three weeks.