Florida is Green and Flat

It seems like every time I make it to Florida I find myself alone in my preference for hills and mountains and trees over the ocean front. Really? Nobody but me?

Michael Hinckley and I were speculating that this was my 4th SharePoint Saturday in the state of Florida, but honestly, I’m not sure. SharePoint Saturday Tampa was my 13th SPS event of the year, with Twin Cities (Minneapolis), South Florida (Ft. Lauderdale) and UK (Nottingham) still ahead of me. That’s why I take the pictures, people – so that I can document where I have been. I’m always glad to be able to spend time in Florida hanging out with Michael Hinckley (@michaelhinckley) and David Griffiths (@dsm_SharePoint) from DSM.net, as well as John Ross (@johnrossjr) and Randy Drisgill (@drisgill) from Rackspace/SharePoint911 (or is that SharePoint911/Rackspace? Don’t want to walk into a political mess there…). As with any successful SPS event, they’ve found a team that works well together, and they put on a great event.

I have raved a few times about Tampa being one of my favorite speaker dinner locations – Donatello’s offers some authentic Italian cuisine with a piano and drums lounge act that creates a good vibe all evening. Hinckley and team delivered again.

Joining me on the road in Tampa from Axceler’s Boston office were Ali Dickson (@alidixiecup) and Amira Hemani (@AxcelerAmira, who is from the area) who both, as those of you who have met them know, do a fantastic job of working the room and getting to know people.

While I usually try to catch a couple of the sessions, the conversations were flowing today, with some great chats with John and Randy about what is happening over at Rackspace, with Michael about the growth of the SharePoint community in Florida, and with Kyle Davis, Bill English, and some of the other speakers about various SharePoint topics (go figure). I was bummed to miss Kyle’s session on content rollups – a HUGE new feature in SharePoint 2013 that is going to be one of the standout features of this release, I believe.

For my session, I presented a slightly updated version of my Mastering SharePoint Migration Planning, which was merged with my old 11 Strategic Considerations presentation. It was basically project management 101 class for those embarking on a SharePoint migration effort, with most of the attendees either about to kick off a migration, or with a migration already underway. You can find my slides here:

Thank you to Michael, David, John and Randy for once again inviting me to participate. Happy to do it again, so watch for my abstracts. New topics coming as I migrate my sessions to 2013 topics.

Ok, time to go catch the first leg of my trip to Dubai. More content once I reach distant shores…