SharePoint Conference Recap–Day 4
I started this post while sitting at the airport in Las Vegas, chatting with Christophe Fiessinger from Microsoft about some of the announcements this week around Yammer and Dynamics analytics and where that space is going, waiting to board our flight home to Seattle and close out what has been a very successful SharePoint Conference (#SPC14). I woke up a week ago today with a severe cold, but I’m now at about 95% and happy to see my wife and kids – and sleep in my own bed again (bought one of those Westin heavenly beds a few years back, which has spoiled me – can’t sleep on anything else).
As a quick recap of the last day of the conference, it can really be broken down into 3 activities: my session, the hybrid workshop, and the speaker party.
I kicked off the morning by getting some work done from the speaker room, saying some last goodbyes to a few friends who would be heading to the airport during my session at 10:30am, and adding to some of my notes (OneNotes, that is) for content to be completed next week when I am back off the road. My session went fine – always tough to cover what is essentially an Executive session within an IT Pro track – but I did have some good questions and feedback, and have a couple points to expand on when I give the same session for the Best Of SPC event in Boston later this month at Microsoft Cambridge. when Bill Baer from the product marketing team at Microsoft asked me to do the session and we discussed topics to cover, he wanted the session to answer some of the 
fundamentals about moving toward the cloud, and to help people understand the terminology and options available via software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, and infrastructure-as-a-service, as well as public-versus-private options. For those who attended my session, and especially those who had questions and feedback, thank you, and please let me know if you have any additional questions I can help answer. As I mentioned, I’ll be doing this topic again in Boston this month (March 26th), and at a few other events and SPUGs in the coming months.
Following my session and a quick lunch, I sat through the SharePoint Hybrid workshop led by Bill Baer, which was a blend of content, demos, and hands on lab. I had hoped that Microsoft would provide a bit more of what was promised a year ago at the MVP Summit – a walk through of the hybrid roadmap, outlining all known gaps, with direction from Microsoft on which gaps they would be filling and which gaps they would never fill, giving partners and ISVs a clearer runway for solving those gaps. While there was some very useful content shared, most of it was known material and scenarios, save some of the new Yammer and OneDrive topics, with the real goal of the session to walk folks through the necessary steps to enable an end-to-end hybrid solution. This will continue to be an area that vendors such as my company, Metalogix, will continue to push for clarification and solutions from Microsoft.
Wrapping up the day, I walked the strip with my good friend and fellow MVP Liam Cleary (@helloitsliam) to the speaker party and back, held at the MGM, where I had a great conversation with former-community-member-turned-Microsoft Partner Technology Advisor, Richard Harbridge (@rharbridge, aka #ShareBieber). For the folks who walked by and saw us engrossed in conversation, we were talking about machine learning, the futility of the browser, and the discovery limitations and need for auto-provisioning of the mobile app. Talking with Richard is always a drink from the fire hose, but thankfully, we operate on the same frequency, so its all good.
Happy to be home, but I need a weekend to catch up on sleep. I have a massive task list for next week based on #SPC14 actions, as I’m sure is true for many of you who attended – plus an idea for another funny video. Looking forward to next week!
