SharePoint Best Practices Conference – Day 1 Recap

I am in beautiful, sunny San Diego this week for the 2009 US SharePoint Best Practices Conference. Yesterday the festivities were kicked off by an introduction to the conference by Bill English of Mindsharp, and then Joel Oleson started things off on the right foot with a short version of his session to be held later in the day “What the SharePoint Owners Manual Won’t Tell You… Avoiding Failed Deployments and Chaos”. It was a great start to the conference.

Following the keynote and introduction to the conference, I attended Mark Schneider’s session – “How to Develop a Taxonomy Plan”. Mark’s session was highly informative, and a great introduction to taxonomy.

I took the time around lunch to mingle with some of the exhibitors at the conference, and to get a read of what hot new products are being offered for SharePoint, and to meet some great people. There are some great 3rd party tools out there that I had no idea existed, and hope to leverage some of those in the future to fill some gaps that are inherently within the product.

I then attended Mike Watson (The SharePoint Mad Scientist) and Ben Curry’s session regarding Capacity Planning and Performance. These guys definitely know their stuff, and I took away quite a bit from the session.

To end the sessions for the day, I went to two back-to-back sessions by Bob Mixon regarding Taxonomy, and how to relate and apply taxonomy to SharePoint – “Learn Why Taxonomies are the Most Important Part of any Document or Information Asset Management System”. Once again, as seems to be the theme, I learned a lot from one of the masters, and enjoyed the sessions.

All of the presenters here definitely know their material inside and out, and are the best in their respective sections of the “SharePoint Pie”

I am part of the way through day 2 of the conference, and am excited for the rest of the sessions I will be attending today and tomorrow.