So it’s been a while since I’ve gotten a new blog up. It’s most certainly not for a lack of topics, new and exciting happenings or anything like that. It’s primarly been for a lack of extra time to get all these topics and conversations into a presentable form instead of one just long rambling run on sentence.
Well, I think I’ve finally found some time due to me getting a little break from the office to fly out to my first Technical conference ever, the SPTechCon 2012 Conference in San Francisco. It’s been a huge blast so far. Well most of it.
I don’t think it’s a secret that I haven’t been watching the twinkies the way I probably should have been for the past few years. Combine that with the rarity of me taking commercial flights and the tendency to completely forgot how small airplane seats are. I absolutely realize this is NOT the fault of the airline, the seat manufacturer, the engineer who designed the internal layout of the plane, bad sharepoint data on jet liner comfort ratings or anything with me being missed during the last Gallup poll on do I prefer being squished or squishing others. Anyway’s the first flight was okay, I wasn’t in the middle and there happened to be an entire empty row, where it appeared a family of three overslept, and maybe they purchased the ticket cancellation insurance? I really don’t know, but thank you. The second flight I didn’t get so lucky or really its more fair to say the person riding on my row didn’t get so lucky. I can only apologize to the extremely friendly gentleman in row 4 seat A, and hope you don’t happen to have a return flight with me.
So back to SPTechCon 2012. I was able to get in on the first days workshops with Shane Young (@ShanesCows) and Todd Klindt (@ToddKlindt), formally of Sharepoint 911, recently purchased by Rackspace. The workshop was an IT Pro/Sharepoint Admin class, focusing on how to be better administrator of the Sharepoint 2010 platform. There were lots of actual field war stories on things they’d seen, tried, what worked and what didn’t. it was a great class especially for someone like myself who works in what I call a very large multi farm environment that was lovingly handed down from one generation of IT resources to another as the previous architects, admins, and engineers have answered the call to new and larger assignments and opportunities. I certainly miss them all, but there were a lot of things I just wasn’t sure why we did. kinda like that story of the daughter who cooks a ham, but always cuts off an end of it. When asked why she’s does that she says “Well that’s how my mom always did it, so its what I learned.” Of course after inquiring of the mother why she cut the off the ham before cooking it, the mother says, “It’s because my pot was too small, and the entire ham couldn’t fit into it.” So alot of the things we learned were knowledge that this previous person said do, and as long as we followed it nothing bad happened. well usually nothing bad happened. Anyways this workshop was incredibly helpful in learning why we were cutting the end off the ham…err well why were we following certain operating procedures in our environments. Not just the why, but also helped me to know how to validate that the new and every changing policies we were presently implementing were in line with the things Todd and Shane had seen in the real world already. So this overall was a very helpful session. I have lots of notes that I’ll be taking back home with me and hopefully will be able to pass new knowledge down to my team members.
Thats my take on day 1, or really I guess it was the prequel, or pre game, however you want to call it. Sundays Sessions were well worth it. I hope to write and publish more on the sessions on the other days. So stay tuned.
@TechRevMarrell
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