I had the great pleasure at speaking at the inaugural SharePoint Saturday Jersey in the channel islands this past weekend. Gus and Mark picked an excellent venue and whilst attendance was lower than expected thanks to the glorious weather, we still had a good bunch of SharePoint people with a thirst for knowledge!
I was at the airport on the Friday, travelling out when Gus contacted me and asked if I’d mind filling in for one of the speakers who had to drop out due to illness. Having never done more than one session in a day before I figured it was worth a go and duly agreed to help out.
As a result I was presenting sessions back to back in the first two slots of the day. My first session was the latest rendition of my Display Templates for ITPros session with the addition of some new HighCharts maps functionality and more details about the new name pain issue (which I blogged about here..) in SharePoint 2013. I really enjoy giving this session and it’s nice to be able to answer peoples questions on an aspect of SharePoint that doesn’t get a lot of coverage on the net.
As usual, I’ve uploaded this variation of the slides to SlideShare.
My second session was the “FAQ, An evolution of an idea” that I presented at a few locations on the Evolution Bus tour earlier this year. This session looks at taking a basic FAQ, building it in a basic format in a single site, and then evolving that idea into a fully enterprise solution with integrated search, people search and an improved user experience.
Again, the slides are available on SlideShare and I hope to get the demos recorded on the blog soon.. I had intended to do that after the Evolutions tour, but had a few issues with my main PC at home..
As I said, Mark and Gus did a great job organising a most excellent event and I for one will be ensuring that I submit to speak if they run another one next year! The catering was excellent and overall the venue was perfect for a SharePoint Saturday event.
Of course there’s not just the SharePoint fun to be had at these events, with every SharePoint, there must be a SharePint and we had a great group at both the speaker dinner on the Friday evening and the post-conference fun on the Saturday night, culminating in drinking from a treasure chest in one of Jerseys rather nice clubs.
Following the partying, I was also able to partake in a little bit of a history lesson at the Jersey museum on the Sunday morning with a couple of my fellow speakers, where we learned that up until fairly modern times, Jersey has pretty much been invaded (or attempted to be) every other year in history! (So much for a peaceful island!)
The museum also hosts the horde of Jersey coins found in 2012. These Celtic coins were buried on the island along with some jewellery in a bid to hide them from the Romans. Over time the copper in the coins caused the entire horde to fuse into a single lump and the science team at the museum is 2 years into a 7 year project to extract the pieces one by one (all ~70,000 of them) and clean them up. You can watch the technicians at work which was absolutely fascinating!
Overall an excellent weekend and certainly a place I’ll be visiting again in the not too distant future. If I were you, I’d keep an eye on www.spsevents.org for the next SharePoint Saturday Jersey and make sure you register!
Paul.
